Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  He loved the long, peaceful days, especially in the summer when the masons would rise at dawn and work till sunset, only stopping for their breakfast and dinner, and once more in the quiet of the evening for a drink, when the first bell sounded, summoning the priests to vespers.

  He still spent time at Avonsford; but he lived for his work in the cathedral and scarcely took notice of what was passing in the world outside.

  It was in September of his fourth year that one of the master masons came to Osmund with astonishing news:

  “We’re going to make an exception and admit you to the masons’ guild later this year.” This was an extraordinary honour and one that Osmund had never dreamt of. There were still three years to go to make up the seven years he had expected to serve. Even Bartholomew was not due to be admitted until the following year.

  “But first,” the mason told him, “you must prepare a piece of work to present to the guild, to show that you are worthy.”

  He knew at once what he would choose.

  There were many decorative features of the great gothic cathedral that he admired. There were the perfectly turned bases of the pillars, the elegant capitals with their designs of animals and foliage, the mask-like faces that peeped out from nooks and corners, the magnificent low reliefs of the former bishops on the tombs which were being moved down from the old cathedral on the castle hill. But the most intricate of all, the apogee of the sculptor’s art, were the great round bosses that were fitted, like enormous studs, into the vaulting.

  They depicted all kind of objects, but the most splendid and elaborate were those which took a pattern of plants as their design. The long leaves, stems and flowers wove together, crossing and recrossing each other in a lavish, magnificent display of the carver’s cunning art. To accomplish one of these, the mason had not only to shape the delicate leaves with his chisel, but to work his way under them, carving the stone into layer upon layer of tracery, like a huge open knot.

  “I will make a roof boss,” he said, suddenly confident in his ambition.

  The design he chose was splendid. In the centre of the boss was a double rose, like those he had seen near the door of Godefroi’s manor. Around the edge was a ring of beech leaves; and inside this was a riot of vegetation that curled around the central flower: oak leaves, acorns, rushes, ivy, a tangled profusion that perfectly expressed the rich foliage of the lush Avon valley he knew so well. It was only twelve inches across, but it contained everything. He worked on it at dawn each day, and again by candlelight in the evening. And as the time approached for him to present it he knew that, at his first attempt, he had accomplished a triumph of the mason’s art.

  As Christmas approached, there was to be a meeting of the guild at which he was to present himself with his work. Two days before, it was finally completed, and placed in the box under his little bed in the mason’s quarters where he kept his tools.

  The next day, when he came in from his work and opened the box to put his tools away, it was gone.

  It was then that Osmund the Mason suffered the third of the deadly sins. The sin of anger which now afflicted him was unlike any emotion he had known before. His little body began to shake; for a moment he could not see, as a red mist came up before his eyes, and his little hands clasped the mallet and chisel so tightly that his knuckles became white. He wanted to strike the empty box in front of him, but he was so angry that he could not even move. He knew, with absolute certainty, who had done it.

  “It must be Bartholomew,” he muttered.

  But what could be done? In thirty-six hours he was to present his work to the guild. And now he had nothing. The rules of the guild could not be altered on this point – he must present his work or be denied admission until the following year.

  Bartholomew appeared at dusk and sat down on his own bed as though nothing had happened. Osmund said nothing. A confrontation with him now was useless since he would deny all knowledge of the matter, and there was no proof.

  He watched the young man stretch out on his bed. His sore seemed better than usual. His face in the candlelight had a look of calm satisfaction on it.

  All that night Osmund lay awake. He knew that he must do something about the meeting the day after, but he could only think of Bartholomew. His anger was hard now, and unyielding.

  A little before dawn he decided to kill him.

  He felt for his chisel. He knew what to do: a single blow with the chisel – tapped with his mallet, just as if he were attacking a block of stone – on his windpipe. And after that? He considered. He could run, perhaps. But where would he go? He shook his head in perplexity and rage.

  Then he had his idea; it was a long shot, but there might still just be time. As the first light appeared, leaving Bartholomew unharmed, he rose from his bed and crept out of the hut. The cold, clear air was refreshing; the cathedral was silent. Picking up a small piece of Chilmark stone, he walked out of the close and headed towards Avonsford. It seemed to him that his anger had given him inspiration.

  The evening of the next day, in the large upper room of the inn, the master mason stared at young Osmund thoughtfully. The boy looked pale. It was not surprising, since it was now two days since he had slept. The master mason was also aware that he had gone missing from his work the day before, and Bartholomew had put it about that he was unable to face the guild. But here he was and so he must receive the consideration as a candidate for masonry that he had been promised. The other masons who sat at the long tables round three sides of the room looked at young Osmund expectantly.

  “You have work to show us?” the master mason asked.

  Osmund nodded. He held it in a small bag.

  “A fine roof boss I believe?”

  “No sir.”

  The master mason frowned.

  “That is what we were promised.”

  “It disappeared, sir. But I have something else.”

  This did not augur well. Perhaps they had, after all, allowed the young man to proceed too fast.

  “Show us your work,” he commanded.

  Osmund drew a small object from his bag. It was a little torso, about twelve inches high, like those that stared out from some of the cathedral’s capitals. He stood it on the table and stepped back without a word.

  And when the master mason inspected it, his eyes opened wide in surprise.

  It was a figure of Bartholomew. It was Bartholomew to the life, from the mean but stupid look in his long face, to the persistent running sore on his neck. He was in the act of running away from something, but his head was thrust forward in an attitude of triumph, as though he were winning a race. His lips were parted in a malicious grin. And in his two outstretched hands he held a large round boss in the centre of which was depicted a tiny rose.

  Silently the sculpture was passed around the tables. No word was said about the subject of the carving: the message was clear.

  “How long did you take to do this work?” the master mason asked him.

  “A day sir. And a night,” he added truthfully.

  The master glanced round the table at his colleagues. Several of them were now grinning broadly. As his look fell on each one, he nodded approvingly.

  “Welcome to our company, Osmund the Mason,” the chairman intoned.

  And with those words, as suddenly as it had come, the deadly sin of anger left Osmund the Mason. It did not attack him with such terrible force again.

  That night Osmund looked up at the huge unfinished cathedral and murmured:

  “I think I shall work in the cathedral all my life.”

  1264

  If anyone had told Peter Shockley that parliamentary democracy was to be born that year he could have had no idea what was meant by those terms; and if they had been explained to him, he would have laughed out loud. The idea was preposterous.

  Few men in Sarum were more respected for their solid judgement than Peter. The mill which he and his father had founded had been a great success, and the rhythmic poundin
g of its huge oak hammers had brought them considerable wealth. It was not the only such mill in the area. There was the mill at the busy town of Marlborough, twenty-five miles to the north, and the one at Downton, six miles to the south. But at Sarum itself only the bishop’s mill outside the town and the new Shockley mill were at that moment in operation, and the business was brisk.

  He was a member of the merchant guild; he grew powerful in the town; he even grew a little stout. His blue eyes missed nothing concerning the mill or the weaving business and it was clear that the fortunes of the family were in good hands. There was only one problem: he did not marry.

  “It isn’t as if he didn’t like women,” old Edward complained sadly. On more than one occasion he had been obliged discreetly to pacify the fathers of girls in the town with whom his son had had relations; and with one it had been necessary to make a considerable payment to an outraged husband.

  But whenever he broached the question with his son, Peter just laughed and told him: “I’ll get married, father, when I’m ready. I’m not so old yet.”

  Indeed, it seemed that Peter might continue indefinitely in his single life in the thriving new city.

  But in 1264, everything was changed.

  The stage for the extraordinary events of that year was set some time before, and again, it was King Henry’s foreign entanglements that led to the trouble. On this occasion it was the pope who lured him into an extravagant disaster.

  The prize this time was the rich southern kingdom of Sicily which the pope, in one of the many shifting alliances of the time, had offered Henry for his son Edmund if he would lead a holy war there. Sicily was far away and the Hohenstaufen dynasty whom the pope was trying to oust by this means, was well entrenched. Henry’s own brother Richard of Cornwall, who was a far wiser statesman than the king, warned that the scheme was preposterous. But Henry, as usual, was dazzled, and when soon afterwards Richard of Cornwall himself was offered the throne of Germany, Henry began to dream of a magnificent new alliance between himself, the equally pious King Louis of France and the new German monarch his brother – a Christian confederacy unlike anything that Europe had seen in centuries. With the same enthusiasm with which he might have planned a splendid new court ceremony, he plunged into a fantastic series of diplomatic manoeuvres. He made a peace with Louis by which he finally renounced all the claims he had been making for so many years in France; he even, for good measure, married the daughter of the crusading King of Castile; and he made extravagant promises to the pope to help in the Sicilian affair – promises involving sums of money he could never hope to pay.

  It was typical of his schemes. It was everything that any sensible English magnate or gentleman most dreaded – a foreign entanglement with an almost unlimited budget, and absolutely no prospect of success.

  “Another lunatic venture,” Godefroi stormed to his family. “The Welsh are making trouble; the kingdom’s badly administered, the king’s already head over heels in debt – God knows there’s enough for him to do here.”

  The situation soon got worse. For Henry had now made such tremendous promises to the pope to conduct this holy war, that if he did not keep his word, the pope had threatened to excommunicate him and place the whole country under an interdict again.

  It had long been clear to the magnates that poor Henry was unfit to reign. Lesser men like Godefroi would not have disagreed. But this last venture was the last straw. The king’s hopeless position also gave them their opportunity; and so in 1258 they produced the Provisions of Oxford – a new charter of liberties which was a huge extension of the Magna Carta of the reign before. And they told Henry that if he wanted their support in the Sicilian venture, in which he was now ensnared as in a net, he must agree to its terms. The terms were humiliating. There was to be a standing council which must include English magnates as well as his own close friends, most of whom were the suspected foreigners from his mother’s Lusignan connections. This council would appoint the chief officers of state – in effect, it would govern the realm in his name. And Henry was now in such a financial mess that he had to give way.

  The leader of this movement was one of the strangest and most controversial figures in English history: Simon de Montfort.

  The founder of the Mother of Parliaments was not English at all: he was French, from one of the most notable families in the Isle de France. Nor had he the slightest interest in democratic government. He was a magnate. Twenty years before he had caused a scandal by marrying Henry’s newly widowed sister when she had already been promised to a convent – according to the king, he had seduced her. And he was more concerned with the endless lawsuit to secure her dowry – which Henry had still not paid – than he ever was with the Parliament of England.

  He did not even like the English: he openly despised them and agreed with the stern Grosseteste that the nation’s morals needed reforming, by compulsion if necessary. He was a strict military disciplinarian who despised Henry’s footling campaigns and told him so in pointed language which made the King of England wince. He was intellectual, tactless and high-handed: a European grand seigneur who saw that Henry did not know how to govern his kingdom and could not resist doing it for him.

  But Montfort had energy; he had ability and charisma, and unlike poor Henry, he knew what he wanted. He crossed the sky of England’s history like a meteor.

  During a few months in 1258 he overhauled the entire system of government. In the king’s name parliaments of barons and knights were to be called three times a year; the king’s sheriffs were to be local men who would be kept in check by serving only a year at a time; a massive programme of local reforms was begun. And all this, not because he was devoted to any principle, but because he saw that for the independent-minded folk in their northern island, this was the system which would work best.

  In October 1258 a proclamation was read in Latin, French and English, in every shire court; and in the name of the king and the community of the realm, not only each baron and knight, but every free man in the kingdom had to swear an oath of loyalty to the new government.

  On this occasion Peter Shockley was with Godefroi and his son and took the oath immediately after them.

  “Now we’ll get some good government for our money,” Godefroi’s son told him with an encouraging grin.

  “And Montfort? What’s he like?” the merchant asked. The elder Godefroi smiled.

  “An arrogant bastard,” he murmured confidentially. “But he gets things done.”

  The irony of the situation only appeared a little while afterwards when the pope changed his mind and decided to give Sicily to someone else. Perhaps no one in England, except Henry himself, was surprised. He had given his kingdom to Simon de Montfort and his council for nothing at all.

  But the oath had been taken.

  “The king must live by the Provisions now,” Godefroi declared. “It’s too late to go back. The issue’s settled.”

  He was wrong. Greater forces, the currents that bore along and finally tore apart the elaborate society of the middle ages, were deep at work.

  The events that followed in the next four years, like a complex ritual dance, were conducted according to the best traditions of a feudal society.

  First it seemed that Henry’s son, aided by Simon de Montfort, would rebel and seize the throne. Then father and son were reconciled, and Henry appealed to the pope to declare that the hateful Provisions which bound him were invalid. The pope obliged and Montfort, disgusted, went into exile. Henry immediately reverted to his previous ways, filled his court with foreigners and ignored the magnates. Predictably the barons summoned Montfort again and rebelled. The situation changed almost monthly, the king’s party in the ascendant one month, the rebels humiliating him the next; it was near to civil war: but still no blood was shed.

  Important though these great events were in the national context, they did not greatly disturb the peace of Sarum. The local magnates, men like Basset and the Longspées, were either mode
rates or for the king. And when the sheriff in 1261 seemed likely to veer towards the Montfort party he was speedily replaced by Ralph Russell, the king’s man, who was also given the castle to garrison. For the first time for many years, the people of Sarum were conscious again of the old castle’s frowning presence above them. The new town was anxious, but subdued.

  Godefroi echoed the sentiments of most men when he said firmly: “No one wants war with the king. But we must find a settlement.” The problem was how to find one.

  It was in 1263 that a method was agreed upon. Both sides would go to arbitration.

  The man they chose to arbitrate was the saintly King Louis IX of France.

  No choice, it appeared, could have been more perfect: a pious crusader king, the perfect image of everything a feudal monarch should be; a lover of peace who was now bound by treaties of friendship to England; and, since Henry did homage to him, technically, for the last French province left him – the rich wine producing region of Gascony in the south west – he was in one respect the English king’s feudal overlord.

  And so at Christmas 1263, King Louis of France prepared to hear the case between the King of England and a large party of his subjects.

  For Peter Shockley, the crisis of 1264 that changed his own life completely and nearly broke up the family of his friends the Godefrois, began at the mill, on the last day of January.

  The spring had begun very early in Sarum that year and the river swept past the mill race in full spate.

  It was in the middle of the morning that young Hugh de Godefroi had come to the mill to discuss the sale of the coming year’s wool with Peter, and the two men were standing outside in the cold damp air, deep in conversation when Jocelin rode by.

  The knight of Avonsford was growing old, but he was still a fine, even a daunting figure who sat on his horse as proud and erect as though he was about to enter the lists. His hawklike face was now surrounded by iron grey hair, its long, sardonic lines deeply incised; but as he looked down at his son and Peter Shockley, it softened into a smile. Jocelin was proud of his son.