Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  But across the Channel, the papal legate waited – for whatever the parliament might agree, his position remained unchanged. Montfort, the defier of the pope, must be rooted out of England. And on the Welsh borders, the friends of Prince Edward, though they had sworn oaths of loyalty to Simon and the new government, were waiting too.

  Back in the relative calm of Sarum however, Peter Shockley watched these great events unfolding with detachment. When, that summer, Prince Edward escaped to his friends in the west, and led them against Montfort, he hoped that Montfort would prevail. But when, on August 4, the great man was trapped and killed at the battle of Evesham, he was not downhearted.

  “These are quarrels between the magnates now,” he said to Alicia. “The burgesses have been allowed into the king’s council: that is all that matters.” And although his wife smiled at his naïvety, the merchant felt sure that events one day would prove him right.

  For the next two years, a great and majestic series of feudal events took place. The friends of Montfort great and small were formally deprived of their lands. Fortunately however, since his own loyalty was well known, old Godefroi was forgiven his son’s rebellion, and left in peace; Simon’s son fought on but had to flee the island and his last followers, after holding out in the eastern isle of Ely, finally surrendered. The papal legate Ottobuono with all the pomp of his position came to England and, as great churchmen had done before, arranged in his Dictum of Kenilworth a lasting settlement which would allow the rebels, on payment of stiff penalties, to regain their lands; and in the great Statute of Marlborough he not only reconfirmed the liberties in Magna Carta but added most of the Provisions of Simon de Montfort as well. The net result of all these high feudal politics was accurately summed up by the provincial merchant.

  “Montfort’s gone,” Peter said to Alicia, “but they haven’t destroyed his work.”

  He had more cause for satisfaction than just the political settlement. For in June 1265 Alicia bore him their first child: a chubby, healthy girl with blonde hair and the most beautiful violet blue eyes. They called her Mary.

  “She shall have the farm,” Peter promised his wife, adding cheerfully: “All we need now is a son who shall have the house and the mill.”

  Alicia smiled.

  But all these great events, it seemed to Osmund the Mason, passed away and dwindled into insignificance in the quiet presence of the huge building of grey stone on the valley floor.

  For in the year of Our Lord 1265, the main central body of the new cathedral was almost completed.

  The church, with its simple cruciform design, its long nave, and its light and airy transepts, stood peacefully in the silence of the close – eighty-seven feet tall, nearly five hundred in length, its long lead roof only broken by the single low square tower that rose a few feet above it at the intersection of the transepts – serenely unaffected by all such temporal events. As though by an afterthought, a free-standing tower containing the massive bells to summon the church’s faithful to prayer, had been constructed near the north walk of the close, about forty yards from the main church, and in order that the tolling bells should be heard all over the valley, this stout stone belfry had been made two hundred feet high.

  In the year of Our Lord 1265 Osmund the Mason was to begin his greatest work, and it was to be the year, also, when he fell under the spell of the deadly sin that almost destroyed him.

  It was on a cold, dry day in March that he led his little family proudly into the cathedral close to see the work that he had done. This visit had become a yearly ritual ever since, ten years before, his son Edward had been born; he liked to feel that the boy, who was surely destined to be a mason too, was growing up consciously with the great church his father was building and on which he would one day work himself.

  Accordingly he had escorted them down the valley from Avonsford, past the old castle hill and through the busy streets to the close. The party consisted of his wife Ann, his two daughters and the boy.

  They were a strange little group. The mason, squat, short-legged with his big solemn head and a face which his veins made rather red, walked with a certain sense of his own dignity. He was, after all, a master mason now. In the city, he was a man of importance as he moved about in his heavy leather apron, and a figure of awe to the junior masons with whom he was fair, but stern. In the village of Avonsford however, he was best known as the kindly though respected figure who would often of an evening, surrounded by his family in their cottage, carve a wooden model in his wonderful craftsman’s hands for some village child while the child waited. The three women of the family all closely resembled each other: Ann was a thin, sallow woman, neither good-looking nor ugly, but about whom there always hung a faint sense of unspoken resentment. She liked to remain at her house at Avonsford with its four modest rooms and thatched roof: she had little interest in the town except when, occasionally, her two daughters took her to the market and made her buy some brightly coloured cloth or trinket after which she could be induced to smile unwillingly. She was a little taller than the mason.

  Last of all came the little boy often, walking contentedly behind the women, with his chubby body and large head, unconsciously so closely imitating his father’s stolid walk that people grinned as the family passed.

  It was to him, while the three women admired the great building, that Osmund addressed his remarks.

  He showed him the splendid west front, the last part of the main building to be completed, that rose like an enormous stage set with tiers of empty niches flanking the door and a huge window in its centre.

  “See, there are statues in some of the niches already,” he explained. “And we are making more. One day every niche will have its statue.”

  “Statues of whom?” Edward asked.

  “Kings, bishops, saints,” Osmund replied. For in the cathedral at least, if not in the world outside, the perfect medieval marriage of the spiritual and the temporal worlds was celebrated at every opportunity.

  This was the one wall of the cathedral that rose, sheer, to its apex at the top of the roof, nearly a hundred feet above. Edward gazed at the wall, across at the high belfry tower in admiration, and then started back instinctively as a veil of cloud passed overhead and made the great wall seem to move towards him.

  Osmund laughed.

  “When the clouds pass over,” he said, “it always looks as if the west front is going to topple. Come inside.”

  If the outside of the building was impressive, the inside was astonishing. It was not only the huge spacious nave and side aisles which seemed, like huge tunnels, to disappear into the distance, not only the airy transepts, flooding the centre of the church with light: it was the fact that the whole of the inside was painted. For the gothic cathedral of the medieval world was a riot of colour. The vaults, the pillars, the carvings and the tombs that lay in the chantry chapels were all painted in brilliant blues, reds and greens. The effect was as bright and vivid as the market place; its carved and painted foliage seemed as lush as the Avon valley from which they had come. As the little boy gazed enraptured down the lines of graceful pillars he cried: “It’s like a forest.” And so it was.

  “Now I will show you the carvings,” his father said.

  There were many to see. There were the carvings on the great stone screen that separated the nave from the long choir beyond, where the services were sung: set in the choirscreen in a line across the church stood the solemn figures of the kings of England splendidly painted in red, blue and gold, from Saxon Egbert to the present King Henry III.

  “There is the great King Alfred, ancestor of them all, who ruled first Wessex and then all England,” Osmund showed him. “And Edward the Confessor, the pious; then William of Normandy; and there, Richard Coeur de Lion, the crusader. Our greatest kings.” For the centuries had done their work, and to Osmund it was an article of faith that all these figures, though the blood line that linked them was only a very tenuous one in reality, formed a single family of
island kings. In the cathedral, the world became God’s world, as it ought to be.

  He pointed up to the brightly painted bosses in the roof of the choir, and led the boy to the east end of the nave where, on a high scaffolding, the painters were busy on the final section of the ceiling.

  Then he showed him the great stout pillars, one tiered above the other, that supported the three rows of arches that led to the vaults. He led him to the central crossing of the transepts where the eye travelled up the huge pillars that stretched, not in three tiers but in a single, sheer, unbroken line right up to the crossing of the vaults.

  “Feel the stone,” he ordered his son, and Edward felt the smooth, hard stone of the massive nest of pillars.

  “That’s solid Purbeck marble,” he explained. “It came all the way from Corfe, round by the sea and up the river. It’s stronger than any other stone so it takes the central tower. And we never paint it.”

  Edward could see why. The stone’s polished, blue-grey surface was a delight to the eye.

  He took him up to the upper level next, and showed him the cathedral’s construction.

  “See how the vaults are made,” he explained. “When they used to build them before, a vault was just a half circle across from side to side – like cutting a barrel in half from top to bottom. But that way, you had to support every stone of the roof while you were building it – great wooden boards on scaffolding, thousands of them. But now – look from here.” From the clerestory level he pointed across the nave, and now Edward saw clearly that the pointed Gothic vaults he had seen from below were achieved by crossing pairs of arches diagonally across the nave instead of from one side straight to the other.

  “They cross north east to south west, south east to north west, over the nave that runs from west to east,” Osmund summarised. “They divide each section into four quarters.”

  “Why do you do it?” the boy asked.

  “Simple,” the mason replied proudly. “First, once we have got the basic cross arches up – these we call the ribs – we have the bones of our building. Its flesh, the vaulting between, we call the cells.” Now he took his son up into the space above the vaults. “We fill the cells with these,” he explained, and the boy saw a collection of differently shaped stones, all wedge-shaped, but some much broader than others. “They’re voutains,” Osmund told him. “Being wedges, we drop them in from above, like a peg into a hole – so once the ribs are up we can fill in the rest of the vaults from up here.”

  “And the different sizes?”

  “Simple again. As you go higher, the vaults open out wider, so we use bigger stones.” And he showed him an adjustable wooden mould that was used by the stone cutters.

  “Now come down again,” he ordered, and led the boy back to the floor of the church. “The most important thing,” he pointed up at the soaring arches, “is that instead of all the weight of the roof falling evenly on the walls, now it’s the ribs that hold it all up, and they rest on the pillars. So the walls don’t have to be so thick any more and we can build these fine big windows.”

  When Edward remembered the heavy old Norman cathedral he had seen, still standing but nearly unused, on the castle hill and compared it with this airy new building, he understood what Osmund meant.

  But it was another feature, less important perhaps, and less easy to see, which was for the mason the church’s best feature. This was the series of carved heads in which he himself had specialised ever since the day he made the figure of Bartholomew twenty years before. They were everywhere, brightly and naturally coloured; peeping from the screen, from the aisles and the clerestory arches; but the finest of all were the highest up, at the end of the shafts where the broad vaulting ribs spread out to form the ceiling, so high that one had to peer carefully to see them at all.

  “Yet they are the best,” the mason told him enthusiastically. “There are fifty-seven of them up there in the vaults,” he explained. “We’ve been adding them ever since the building first started.”

  “And how many did you make,” the boy said.

  “Eight,” Osmund said proudly. “No one has made more.”

  Set just in the cleft of the V that begins the vaulting the heads were arranged in perfect symmetry: king opposite king, bishop matched with bishop, staring at each other or down into the softly echoing spaces below. They were of many kinds, by many hands: a few in Purbeck marble, most in the softer Chilmark stone.

  It had taken him many years of study to perfect his technique. He had even travelled to Winchester where, the century before, King Stephen’s brother the bishop had collected pagan statues from Rome. But the stylised classical heads, and the wooden staring faces produced by many of his fellow masons had never caught his imagination. He searched always, as he had from the first, for a more natural, lively form, as though he was carving in wood; and in several of his heads he had achieved this wonderfully.

  “See up there,” he pointed to Edward: and far above the boy suddenly saw the face of Canon Portehors, his deeply lined, frowning and disembodied face staring bleakly at them from its great height.

  Afterwards he took the boy to where he had been working in the masons’ lodge. Masons like Osmund were known as bench-masons, so called because unlike the lesser stone cutters and labourers, they did their work at a bench. Here the mason showed him another head he had been working on, this time of a former bishop, and on the underneath, where it could never be seen unless the head was one day dislodged from its place, he showed Edward the small mark he had chiselled in the surface. It consisted of a capital M, in the centre of which was incised the letter O.

  “Osmund Mason,” he explained. “My mark goes on each piece I do.” This was not only a signature, but it also ensured that he would be correctly paid for each work he contributed to the cathedral. “And one day, you too will have a mason’s mark,” he told him. “Like this,” and with a piece of chalk he drew his own mark again, but this time he added an E below it for the boy’s name. “It’s our family mark,” he said with satisfaction, before taking his son back to rejoin the others.

  “But will I work here?” the boy asked anxiously. “The church is nearly finished.”

  Osmund smiled.

  “There’s more to come,” he assured him. And he took him through a side door to where, running along the south of the nave, on the other side of the masons’ lodge, a spacious cloister had been laid out. Leading off this, the walls of a new octagonal building were almost complete.

  “This will be the chapter house,” Osmund said, “where the canons and the deacons will hold their meetings. They say it will be a fine building, with many carvings. And after that we may extend the tower as well.” He beamed with the thought of it. “There’ll be colleges, more houses for the canons, hospitals . . .” He spread his little hands expansively: “There’s work for generations of masons in Salisbury.”

  And indeed, as the boy walked around the close afterwards, it was plain that what his father said was true. Along the west walk that backed on to the river, fine new houses were still rising: not perhaps quite as splendid as the sumptuous hall with its leaded roof that old Elias de Dereham had built for himself – and whose colossal mortgage, twenty years after his death, was still being paid off – but handsome buildings all the same. Near the river, just before the little hospital, the new college of St Nicholas de Valle had just been built for scholars who were now coming to the new centre from Oxford. At St Ann’s Gate, near the little house of the Franciscans, a new grammar school had been founded; and on the south side of the cathedral, separated from the rest of the close in its own gracious grounds, the bishop’s impressive palace was constantly being enlarged.

  “There’s no better place for a mason to be in England,” Osmund declared.

  He could have added, for a priest to be, or a scholar. For under the patronage of the distinguished local scholar Walter de la Wyle, its present bishop, the new school by the river was already becoming a small but distinguis
hed centre of learning, where not only theology but civil law, mathematics, classical literature and the elaborately precise logic of Aristotle were studied. This interest in science and the humanities, which had been stimulated by the crusaders’ discovery of the Arab scholars in the Middle East, was to be found in many scholarly communities; and the transfer of scholars from Oxford, which had been unsettled recently by several disputes with the townspeople and the papal legate, was not unusual either: a similar emigration a little before had already caused the setting up of another small college in the little East Anglian town of Cambridge.

  In fact, only one thing at Sarum was lacking.

  “If only the Pope in Rome would make our Bishop Osmund a saint,” the mason cried.

  For a long time, the diocese of Salisbury had tried to have its saintly bishop canonised: partly, to be sure, on account of his undoubted piety but also, it could not be denied, because the existence of a shrine to the saint in the new city would bring with it, in those times when pilgrimage was so popular, a huge influx of visitors from whom the diocese and its new market town would profit enormously. So far they had not prevailed at Rome. But the campaign went on.

  “One day,” declared the mason, who had himself been piously named after the great man, “we’ll have our shrine, and you,” he told Edward, “shall build it if I don’t.”

  It was as he was returning to his workbench that afternoon that Osmund saw the girl.

  At first, she did not particularly attract his notice. He was aware of a small blonde girl of about fourteen moving quietly through the nave towards the cloisters, but he thought nothing more about it until, half an hour later, he saw her returning, and on enquiring who she was, a mason told him: “That’s Bartholomew’s daughter. She and her mother just moved into the town from Bemerton.”