[Mediaeval Mystery 06] - Cast the First Stone

by C. B. Hanley

  ‘But …’

  She looked at him, and he saw the pain in her eyes. ‘I thought the world was going to stop, but it didn’t. And so life must go on, and there’s work to do.’ She turned to Alys. ‘Will you come with me?’

  Edwin caught the slight wobble in her voice and was glad when Alys agreed. He watched them leave and surveyed the graveyard. Other than the two men shovelling, there remained only himself and one other.

  He walked over to join Sir Roger, who was pacing up and down between older mounds.

  The knight saw him. ‘Remind me again where his family lies?’

  Edwin didn’t need to be told who ‘he’ was. He took a moment to orient himself and then moved a few paces nearer to the church. ‘Here.’ He indicated four graves in a row, almost flat now as they’d been there for years. ‘His brother and sister,’ he said, pointing at the two smaller humps. ‘And these are his mother and father, though I don’t know which is which.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sir Roger knelt and drew his dagger; he began to dig a small hole between the two adult graves.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The knight took something out from his purse and held it up for inspection. Edwin saw that it was a lock of hair.

  ‘I couldn’t bring him back, but I took this before we buried him so I could put it with his family.’ Edwin watched as he placed the hair in the hole and then covered it up. Then he stood.

  ‘You asked me where I’d been going, when I left here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you still want to know?’

  ‘If you want to tell me.’

  ‘I have been riding to Roche Abbey, to consult with the abbot and to try to get first wind of the news I was waiting for – you know tidings travel fast between monasteries.’

  ‘Tidings about what?’

  ‘Now that Sir Geoffrey has returned to take up his position here again, I will be going on crusade.’

  Somehow, Edwin wasn’t as shocked as he could have been. With such religious zeal as Sir Roger had always displayed, something like this had always been likely. Indeed, rumours about it had been floating around for some time. ‘On your own? Isn’t that dangerous?’

  ‘No. That’s the news I’ve been waiting for – now that the war is over here, the Earl of Chester is gathering a force to travel to the Holy Land, and I will be part of it.’

  ‘But my lord earl …’

  ‘This is something I discussed with Abbot Reginald, and also with the good Father here. Our hope is that the lord earl will approve of my going, as I can represent his interests in the affair, but even if not, he cannot stop me. The expedition has the blessing of the Holy Church, and that is a higher authority.’

  Edwin said nothing.

  Sir Roger obviously interpreted his silence as doubt. ‘But don’t you see? It’s the best way. Here, everything is complicated, and it’s difficult to see what the Lord’s plan is. Out there it will be different, simpler. We’re right and the heathens are wrong, and we must fight to drive them out of the holy places. I will be secure in the knowledge that I am doing God’s work.’

  The day was dull and grey, but the light of Sir Roger’s enthusiasm was almost enough to illuminate it. ‘Then I wish you well.’ Edwin held out his hand.

  Sir Roger shook it. ‘It’s time to move on.’ He nodded at Edwin and walked away.

  Edwin stood for a few moments, and then moved to his father’s grave and said a prayer. And then he looked over to the part of the churchyard that he hadn’t felt able to approach for the last half a year. There were two mounds there that dated from the same week as Father’s; one larger than the other.

  He crossed himself as he passed the small one, but it was next to the other that he knelt. He drew out the dagger that Everard had returned to him that morning, and, guessing approximately where the place was that would be over the heart, he scraped out a small hole. Then he took the thong from around his neck, took a last look at what it held, and placed it in the earth. He covered it up and gazed at it for a long moment.

  Edwin stood up. He looked around him at the graves and the church, at the village, and then up at the castle that had loomed over him for the whole of his life.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to himself. ‘It’s time to move on.’

  Historical Note

  The war was over by November 1217, but the ramifications were still being felt across England. The chaos of the latter stages of King John’s reign, followed by the French invasion, meant that established systems of law and order had in many places broken down. There was (or at least there had been) a national system of justice for serious crimes such as murder, with each county having a sheriff and a coroner to whom all violent deaths should be reported. However, Yorkshire suffered not just from the confusion of the conflict – there really were six sheriffs in the five years between 1212 and 1217 – but also from being one of the largest counties in England, meaning that distances and travel times could be an issue. The combination of these factors is why Edwin has not met a sheriff of Yorkshire up until now.

  The sheriff in November 1217 was called Geoffrey de Neville, so I have used his name but created the rest of his character from scratch: unsurprisingly, we know nothing about his personality or what he looked like. Every other individual featured in Cast the First Stone is fictional, although, as in previous books in this series, they all represent people or professions who would have been easily recognisable to contemporaries. Most of the men in a village such as Conisbrough would have been labourers (either free men or serfs tied to the estate), who divided their time between working in their own fields and those of the lord according to a strict annual schedule of ploughing, sowing, harvesting and so on. However, more specialist jobs were held by individuals who would work on behalf of the whole village: the swineherd, for example, took everyone’s pigs off to the woods as it would be impractical for each family to do the same just for a couple of animals each.

  Village life was thus communal in some respects, and this was particularly true for the female inhabitants, who took it in turns to brew ale for all (it was not economical to make ale in anything other than large batches, but it went stale quickly) and who shared a communal well and bread oven. Women led extremely busy lives, organising and labouring from dawn to dusk in house and garden as they grew vegetables, raised animals, cooked, cleaned, washed, span, sewed or ran small businesses – all without the benefit of any labour-saving devices and often while pregnant and/or caring for small children.

  Hawise, the late wife of Robin the carpenter, is portrayed as having given birth to fourteen children, something that was not all that uncommon in the thirteenth century, and having all of them survive, which certainly was. This would be a scenario worthy of comment among the neighbours, but with some luck it would not be impossible, and in fact I took the example from an ancestor of my own: she lived in the eighteenth century (obviously much later than our story here, but as the wife of an agricultural labourer in a rural village the conditions in which she lived were not actually much better) and, according to a well-preserved parish record, she married at sixteen, spent the next twenty-two years having fourteen children, and then died giving birth to the last. The story of the three Berts is also an aside to my family tree: I have recently been cataloguing my great-grandmother’s extensive postcard collection, a task made considerably more difficult by the fact that two of her brothers and her fiancé were all known as Bert.

  A prominent lord such as the earl would have a number of officers in each of his domains to whom responsibilities would be delegated. Inside the castle the military lead was the castellan, while the senior administrative officer was the steward; the wider estate came under the bailiff and the local day-to-day management under the reeve. One of the major differences between the two latter figures was that the bailiff of an estate was chosen by the lord, while the reeve was elected by the villagers themselves, so he was their representative. Both would feature at the manor court, an eve
nt that was held regularly to deal with minor infractions, with every man or boy over twelve serving on the jury.

  The question of local laws and customs was an all-important one to many ordinary people. Life was precarious, and the fee that had to be paid in order for grain to be ground into flour at the lord’s mill could make a significant impact on family finances, as could matters such as the right to pick up fallen wood or to catch small birds and rabbits. Even the tension depicted in this book over the proposed relocation of the fair is entirely plausible: margins were so tight that something as simple as the extra dung on the fields might make a crucial difference to harvest yield, which in turn could be a matter of life or death over the course of the year.

  Some of the Conisbrough court rolls from the Middle Ages survive and have been made available online (www.dhi.ac.uk/conisbrough/). The earliest, alas, dates only from 1324, over a century after the events of Cast the First Stone, but in it we can find villagers being fined for cutting wood, for brewing weak ale and for the damage caused by escaped pigs; and one unfortunate individual in that year was sentenced to hang for theft. In the thirteenth century there was no presumption of innocence in legal proceedings (the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is not recorded in print until the early nineteenth century, according to a research article in The Jurist), so defendants could be found guilty if sufficient jurymen found against them, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

  Masons were specialist craftsmen, itinerant and often foreign, and France was a particular centre of architectural development at this time. The keep at Conisbrough is based on the design of that at Mortemer in Normandy, both being built by Hamelin de Warenne (the father of the earl who appears in our books), so it is not unlikely that some of the same men, or their apprentices or sons, worked on both projects. Masons formed their own community at each place they worked, centred around their lodge, so they would not have been fully integrated into the life of the village – local people may well have seen them as ‘outsiders’ even when they had been working there several years.

  The stone keep and curtain walls at Conisbrough had been complete for some years by 1217, and William de Warenne, Edwin’s earl, continued the work by overseeing the demolition of the old wooden buildings inside the bailey and the construction of a kitchen, hall and residential accommodation in stone. The layout of the castle as described in Cast the First Stone is based on the real plan, except that (as in previous books) I have moved the chapel in the keep from the third floor – off the private bedroom – down to the second, so it is accessible from the council chamber.

  Sir Roger’s desire to head to the Holy Land on crusade was mirrored by many thirteenth-century contemporaries. The new king of England, Henry III, was not in a position to travel east himself – he had just inherited a broken kingdom and was only nine years old – so the English contingent (including Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, whom Edwin met in The Bloody City) joined up with a group of French noblemen when they set off in 1218 for what became known as the Fifth Crusade, against Damietta in Egypt. This alliance might seem odd in the context of the recent war in England, but what contemporaries saw as the fight for Christendom cut across national boundaries.

  Finally, Denis and Edwin’s survival of their ordeal is based on a number of real accounts from the Middle Ages and later. Hangings at this time were generally carried out by hauling the victims up, not by dropping them down from a height, and this meant that – unless the knot of the noose was very specifically placed and the pull on the rope very sudden – death occurred as a result of slow strangulation rather than a broken neck. Relatives and friends of the victim were sometimes, as a mercy, permitted to pull down on their legs to hasten their ends, but if they did not then death might take anything up to half an hour (this was later used as a specific feature of the method of execution known as hanging, drawing and quartering, where victims were deliberately cut down while still alive). Stopping a hanging part-way through could therefore result in survival, and there are documented instances of people living after being strangled for much longer than Denis and Edwin. Whether or not Edwin will end up thanking his rescuers, of course, remains to be seen.

  Further Reading

  Bennett, H.S., Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions 1150–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938) Coldstream, Nicola, Medieval Craftsmen: Masons and Sculptors (London: British Museum Press, 2004) Dyer, Christopher, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000) Gies, Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Village (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991) Given, James B., Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977) Homans, George C., English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975) Titow, J.Z., English Rural Society 1200–1350 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969)