Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  He stared at her.

  “Pregnant?”

  She nodded.

  “We’ll do what we can for him.”

  She looked up. Her face seemed to wear a kind of scorn, though it was hard to tell.

  “He’s killed a deer, hasn’t he? So he’ll behung.” Her voice was flat, but bitter.

  He could not remember what he had replied before he had ridden on, but he knew that she was probably right.

  Nor as the day approached did there seem to be any more hope. News came that the rebels now had taken not only Worcester and Hereford, but two more castles in the south west as well.

  “Perhaps the forest justices will not come,” he suggested to the warden: but Waleran shook his head:

  “The king holds all the country except the west. They’ll come.”

  It was only on the night before the swanimote that Nicholas came to him with a last proposal. He arrived at the manor at dusk; his round face seemed thinner than usual, drawn with worry; his short, thick fingers were clasped round a small leather pouch which he handed solemnly to the knight and asked him to open it. Godefroi counted the contents out on the table. The bag contained nine marks: six pounds: a sum that it must have taken him years to collect. Nicholas stood awkwardly, afraid to look at Godefroi, but obviously determined.

  “What’s this, Masoun?” the knight asked.

  “For the agister,” Nicholas replied solemnly.

  “Nine marks.”

  “It’s all I have my lord.”

  Godefroi frowned.

  “You mean you wish me to bribe him?” He thought of the stiff, humourless agister, always so precise with every detail of his accounts.

  Nicholas reddened, but nodded.

  The knight of Avonsford was half angry and half amused.

  “You really think he’d take it?”

  “Men say he does,” the stoneworker mumbled.

  Godefroi was astounded. He had known Nicholas all his life and he knew he would not lie. Obviously there were underhand dealings at Sarum that he did not know about.

  “And you dare to ask me to do this?” he thundered.

  Nicholas looked at the floor. His stubby hands trembled, but he did not move.

  “I am only a poor villein, my lord. The agister would not speak to me.”

  But he’d take the fellow’s money, Godefroi thought.

  “Get out!” he roared.

  Nicholas left hastily. But the nine marks remained on the table.

  The following morning, moved by curiosity as much as anything else, Godefroi went early to the agister’s house. Without a word, he tossed him the little bag; and was astonished by the response. With exactly the same blank stare and fixed smile with which he did everything else, Le Portier carefully counted the money.

  “You want the boy to get off?” he asked.

  “Obviously,” the knight replied drily.

  The agister’s expression was serene.

  “Nine marks is not enough.”

  “It’s all there is.”

  Le Portier shook his head. Scarcely able to believe his ears, Godefroi demanded:

  “How much then?”

  “For Godric Body? Twelve marks.”

  With a gesture of contempt the knight gave him three more marks. The agister bowed politely.

  “How will you get him off?”

  Le Portier considered carefully before speaking.

  “The deer was a raskell, you know,” he said thoughtfully. The meant that it was not fit enough for the king’s hunting. “The crime would still be serious, but the court would be less interested. Fewer questions asked.” He paused. “Then,” he pursed his thin lips, “I saw an identical snare set the other day, and a man running away from it. Godric Body was locked up by them, so it probably wasn’t him that set the original snare at all.”

  Godefroi listened carefully.

  “As for his slitting the deer’s thoat,” Le Portier went on, “I shall say I told him to, seeing her leg was broken. I assumed he had set the snare you see, so in that sense he was caught bloody-handed. Of course, if he didn’t, he wasn’t.” He appeared satisfied. “Of course, the dog will have to be lawed. He’ll pay a fine for that.”

  Godefroi could not help admiring the fellow’s cleverness.

  “You should have been a priest,” he muttered darkly, and strode away. It was well known that the forest officers often made a profitable business out of their offices, usually by making illegal charges – a mild if reprehensible form of extortion. But the agister’s calm game with the boy’s life appalled him.

  “I hope I see you hang one day,” he called back to him; at which Le Portier only stared and gave his tight-lipped smile.

  A strange fellow, the knight concluded. He knew nothing of Le Portier’s distant ancestry, and the idea that the agister’s Porteus ancestors had fought with the real King Arthur would have astonished him indeed. And so it was with a flash of insight that he murmured:

  “As stiff and exact as an ancient Roman: but his only point of honour is the precision with which he takes money – anyone’s.”

  As he rode to the castle of Sarisberie, his anger gradually subsided.

  At least, he thought, he had saved the boy.

  The meeting of the swanimote took most of the morning, but at last the court was convened.

  It was held in a hall in the castle: Waleran presided. All the forest officers were present: the inspecting knights, the verderers, foresters, woodwards and agisters. Each wore on their tunic the badge of their office – a bow for the warden, a horn for the foresters. A jury of twelve was selected from those present and then the court was in session. Though it was strictly a private court, the doors were left open and a small crowd pushed their way inside. Godefroi stood at the front; Nicholas a few paces from him. Out of the corner of his eye, the knight saw both the girl Mary and William atte Brigge working their way through the throng as the proceedings began.

  The warden lost no time. As Godric was brought in, he turned sharply to the agister.

  “Make your statement, Le Portier,” he ordered.

  Godefroi watched intently as the agister rose. His face was calm, and the knight thought he allowed the hint of a smile to cross his face as he glanced in his direction.

  “The accusation is not quite as previously stated,” he began smoothly.

  But he got no further.

  For the court was interrupted by a shout.

  On the morning before the trial, Mary knew very well that Godric Body was about to be hung; and as she considered her new situation, the future was bleak.

  She was poor; she was ill-favoured, and soon she would have a child. If she had not secured Godric, perhaps she might have found another man, though it had always been doubtful; but who would marry her now? She knew the answer very well. And she was only fourteen.

  Once again, she had to ask herself the questions she had pondered the midsummer before. Would her life be long? She thought she could see it. She might work in the manor dairy for another forty years if she was lucky; or she might work in the fields and probably die sooner. Meanwhile, there would be the child to support.

  “I wish it would die,” she thought.

  But she was sure the child within her was healthy.

  Her situation was made all the plainer for her by the behaviour of the people in the village. Nicholas was too preoccupied with his own plans to have given the girl much more than a passing thought; most of the other villeins and their families, though they sympathised, instinctively avoided her, and even her parents were cool, fearing that she might be a liability to them.

  “We can’t afford to keep you and the child,” her mother told her bluntly. “You’d have to keep yourselves.”

  She had been allowed to see Godric two days before. He asked her to bring him some pieces of wood from his cottage so that he could fashion another shepherd’s crook to pass the time. But when she had brought them to him, he had been withdrawn: not because
he had wished to hurt her, but from a feeling of helplessness.

  “Is there a chance for you?” she had asked.

  He had shaken his head; and soon afterwards she had gone.

  On the morning of the trial, knowing nothing of Le Portier’s bribe, she went into Sarisberie; and as she had expected, William atte Brigge was in the little market place with the other men. When she asked if he were still offering the reward for information about the pig she had learned that he was. And so she told him all she knew, because, after all, she reasoned perfectly, it must be done soon so that Godric could testify to the truth of it and tell them where the pig was buried. William atte Brigge roared with exultation, and better still, he gave her the money on the spot, took her by the arm and dragged her towards the court, just as the crowd was going in.

  It had seemed the sensible thing to do.

  While the buzz of excitement and surprise continued, the warden considered the interruption carefully.

  “You accuse Godric Body of killing a second animal in the forest?”

  “I do.” There was triumph in the tanner’s eye.

  “If the slaying occurred within the forest bounds,” the warden said, “then it falls within the consideration of this court.” He glanced around and down at Godric. He was conscious that time was passing. “Very well. We’ll hear both charges together. You have witnesses?”

  The tanner grinned. And when he pointed at Mary, the face of Godric Body fell in disbelief.

  While the tanner took his place before the warden, and all eyes were upon the squinting girl, Le Portier moved quietly to where Godefroi was standing. Unobserved, he removed the small bag of coins from his belt and dropped it into the knight’s hand. Shaking his head he murmured:

  “No hope.”

  The trial of Godric Body before the justices of the Forest Eyre did not take long.

  On the first day of December, as a light rain was falling, he was led out to the gallows erected the day before in the market place in the castle. Godefroi and Nicholas were in the crowd who were watching; so was Mary. But as he stood on the platform under the gallows and the rope was slipped over his head, it was not at her, but at his dog Harold, now duly lawed and brought there at his special request by his uncle, that he sadly gazed.

  There was no sound from the crowd – neither the cry of triumph which it reserved for a villain, nor the moan it gave for a popular man – as the gallowsman gave him the shove that sent him off the platform to drop and dangle in the air. His small, hunched body jerked helplessly as the noose did its work; and as his pale, pinched face grew purple, his desperate eyes, even as they started from their sockets, never once left the dog.

  It was soon over.

  Just after he had gone, Harold suddenly slipped his collar and lurched across the cobbles to where his master’s body hung, so that Nicholas had to drag him away.

  In the month of December 1139, several events of significance took place in the castle of Sarisberie.

  On December 10, as he was visiting the market, Godefroi heard terrible cries coming from the bishop’s house, as though a madman were raging through the place. After a few moments, a servant ran out and the knight asked him what was amiss.

  “The bishop, sir. The quartan fever has grown worse. I think it is a crisis. Four men are trying to hold him down and he’s quite delirious.”

  It was now a month since Roger had been seen outside his house, and the whole town knew that the sickness had taken control of his massive frame.

  “What is he shouting about?”

  The servant grimaced.

  “His castles and his treasure, sir. It’s the loss of them that caused the fever I think.”

  Godefroi stared up at the house sadly. Its thick stone walls, decorated so beautifully in the zig-zag patterns Roger particularly favoured, were a tribute to his taste and wealth.

  “Does the thought of God and his Church give his mind no relief?”

  “No, sir.”

  There was a crash from within.

  “Dear God I think he’s broken loose again,” the man exclaimed, and hurried away.

  On December 11, Bishop Roger died.

  The next event, which followed soon afterwards, was the visit of the king. A truce had been arranged for the holy season and in his customary easy-going way, Stephen treated it as though it were a lasting peace.

  He rode into the castle in high good humour, inspected its solid walls, the bishop’s fine house and the stout tower. The treasure he found there astonished him.

  “I think the bishop was richer than I!” he cried. And he took it all.

  Nor was this all. The canons of the cathedral had decided to buy an exemption from the ancient geld tax levied on their lands, and offered him the princely sum of two thousand pounds for this privilege. This was another windfall which pleased the monarch still more, and as a token of his gratitude he donated forty marks towards the completion of the cathedral roof.

  “I like your Sarisberie,” he remarked to Godefroi when the knight came to pay his respects. “Before he rebelled its bishop served me well; and now the diocese has made me rich.”

  He admired the cathedral enormously, and told the canons:

  “Whatever we say about Roger now he is dead, he certainly knew how to build.”

  It was a few days before Christmas, when he was holding an open court in the castle hall in the presence of a group of magnates and knights which included Godefroi, that the king was surprised to see a curious party approaching. It consisted of William atte Brigge, John of Shockley, their wives, both walking demurely behind them and a little gaggle of witnesses. William, still flushed with his triumph in the matter of Godric Body and the pig, looked hard and confident; the farmer on the other hand was very pale and his mild blue eyes wore a startled, pained expression.

  When they were asked what their business was, it was William who cried out:

  “The king promised me justice here, when he camped before Devizes.”

  As Stephen stared at the tanner, he dimly remembered, and he grinned.

  “The fellow’s right, I did.” And turning to the knights he cried. “Let’s hear what he wants.”

  As William explained his complaint, the king listened carefully. It was long and involved and after a time, he cut him short.

  “You say this matter dates from the time of your wife’s grandfather?” William agreed. “That’s fifty years ago?” It was.

  Stephen gazed around the hall. For all his faults, he was a clever man. He had already sized up the respective characters not only of William, but of the stolid, blue-eyed farmer who stood silent and woebegone throughout the tanner’s litany of complaint.

  “We’ll grant you your wish,” he said finally. “Your case shall be tried.” He paused. “But not by jury.”

  William’s face fell. Although the system was not yet in regular use, he had assumed quite reasonably that if he requested it, the king – who was well known to dislike violence – would grant him a trial by jury. For months the cunning farmer had been carefully preparing his evidence and, more important, coaching his chosen witnesses.

  The king gazed at him imperturbably.

  “This is an ancient quarrel, William atte Brigge. It shall be settled by the ancient and time-honoured means that applied in our predecessor’s reigns for all property disputes. I order a trial by battle.”

  He leaned back in order to watch the reaction. The tanner’s brow had clouded. He was thinking furiously.

  But a still more extraordinary change had come over John of Shockley. It was as though a huge weight had been lifted from his mind. For years he had dreaded the complex process of swearing and evidence, the intricate business of courts where, though he was by no means a fool, he felt trapped and helpless against the clever tanner. But now his brow cleared; his blue eyes lost their troubled look and suddenly gazed out with a clear, bold stare. The descendant of the family of Aelfwald the thane and Aelfgifu had no fear of fighting for his l
ands, if God was on his side. And he believed that He was.

  The king, glancing from one to the other, smiled.

  But William had not come so far for nothing.

  “I have the right to choose a champion,” he stated.

  Stephen frowned. The surly fellow was right, unfortunately. And no doubt he had the money to hire a thug who would kill this honest farmer. He wished he could deny it.

  “Do you also wish to choose a champion to fight for you?” he asked John of Shockley hopefully.

  But John of Shockley, if he was aware of his danger, seemed content to fight for himself.

  There was an awkward pause.

  And then Godefroi saw what he should do. Coolly, to the astonishment of the two parties, and the delighted grin of the king, he stepped forward.

  “I am John of Shockley’s champion,” he announced.

  He had found a way to repay the farmer for his kindness.

  William was silent. No champion that he could ever hope to purchase would last for a minute before the trained skill of a knight like Godefroi, even if he dared to fight him at all. The swift blade of the Norman would slice any bold rustic or even a man-at-arms to pieces before he could get close. He looked from side to side, baffled.

  “Well,” said the king with a show of impatience, “do you wish to proceed or not?”

  The tanner scowled and hung his head.

  “No, your Majesty,” he finally muttered.

  “Case dismissed,” the king cried, with a wink to Godefroi; and to William’s fury, the entire court burst out laughing.

  He was defeated – all his work for nothing, and mocked into the bargain. But as the tanner left, he turned to his wife and swore:

  “One day, our family will have revenge.”

  Christmas came, and in the castle of Sarisberie, King Stephen in the ancient and symbolic manner of the Norman king, summoned the local magnates to him and ceremonially wore his crown. But despite the king’s presence, the knight of Avonsford still did not summon his family from London.

  “Let’s wait and see,” he said to John of Shockley.