Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “How dare you waste the king’s time and make accusations against the king’s loyal servants!” he thundered. “You shall be punished for this. Call the guard.”

  In a moment John Wilson found himself surrounded by men at arms.

  “Hold him under lock and key until I return,” the king ordered. And when they pointed to Cristina he added: “And her too.”

  It took several hours spent in hunting before his temper improved: not only because of the way his time had been wasted, but because, despite Osmund’s defences, he could not throw off the nagging suspicion that a part of Wilson’s accusations might be true. Should he investigate the matter to find out the whole truth? What for – to discover a long-forgotten betrayal? He decided to put it out of his mind: the matter was in the past. He had no wish to know.

  “Godefroi is my friend,” he muttered. But the seed of distrust had been sown.

  The fate of John Wilson and his wife was decided by circumstances that had nothing to do with the Shockley farm.

  It was a thoughtful young courtier who had been involved in the Scottish negotiations who decided the issue. He had studied the pair carefully that morning; while King Edward was sitting at his meal in the evening he came to the king’s side and quietly made the ingenious suggestion as a result of which, a little later, John and Cristina found themselves led into the room.

  They had spent an anxious and unpleasant day. The bare hut in which they had been kept had a leaking roof. It had been used as a kennels some time before and it smelt musty. By evening the place had become cold, and by nightfall their teeth were chattering. They had been given no food. Now, suddenly, they were blinking in the bright light of the king’s sumptuous apartments, faced by Edward and his companions, and listening to the remarkable proposition that the young courtier was putting to them so coolly.

  His logic was impeccable. The Scottish negotiations had been progressing well, but in the last week the final completion had dragged unnecessarily over some minor details, and the cause, he had discovered, was the secretary to one of the commissioners, who was against the business and had influence with his master.

  “The only way to keep him happy is to amuse him,” the young man explained to the king. “Then he lets things go along, even if he doesn’t really approve. If he isn’t amused, he just invents trivial obstacles all the time.”

  “How do you amuse him?”

  “Women, Your Majesty. His appetite’s insatiable. We’ve given him three local wenches already, but he got bored with them.” He grinned. “But did you notice the merchant’s wife this morning? She’s extraordinary.”

  Edward gazed at the young fellow with a mixture of admiration for his cunning, and contempt for his methods. His devotion to his own Spanish wife was well known. He even used to take the queen with him on campaign.

  “You want to send her to the Scot – as a price for their release?” He shook his head in disgust. “I won’t do it.”

  “No sire, there’s no need,” the courtier responded. “They’ll both do it of their free will.” And briefly he outlined his simple plan. “Have I your permission?”

  Edward grimaced.

  “I suppose so.”

  When John Wilson heard the smiling young man make his proposal, he recapitulated it carefully:

  “You’re going to set me free with no trial?”

  The courtier nodded:

  “The king is considering it, despite your impertinent fraud.”

  “And when I’m free, you’ll grant me a farm?”

  “Precisely. Your own farm.”

  “But my wife has to lie for a week with the Scot?”

  “If you want the farm, yes. You will be doing the king a useful service,” he added with a smile.

  John Wilson paused, without looking at his wife.

  “If the Scot wants her for longer,” he said thoughtfully, “do I get more?”

  Even the courtier’s bland smile faltered for an instant at the coolness of the question; but he recovered quickly.

  “Perhaps.”

  Only then did John turn to Cristina. Neither spoke, but between them there passed a look of perfect complicity.

  “She’ll do it,” he said cheerfully.

  The young courtier smiled; the king, with his drooping eyelid, watched unblinking. And an hour later a small charter granting John Wilson and his heirs tenancy of a farmstead consisting of one virgate of land with a messuage thereon was dropped contemptuously into his hands. The messuage in question was a small cottage; the land was mediocre. But it was enough to satisfy his modest aspirations. It lay next door to the Shockley farm.

  The agreement between the Scots and English commissioners for the government of Scotland during the minority of its child queen, and the recommendation that the king’s son should be married in due course to the Maid of Norway, was presented to King Edward at Salisbury on November 6, 1289.

  After this, the king hunted in the New Forest, travelling as far south as Christchurch and the shallow harbour by the sea. He stayed in the region for a month before returning to London for Christmas, after which he held a parliament there until the end of February. During Lent, Edward was in the upper Thames valley and at Easter he stayed at his park at Woodstock. He then returned to the Sarum area when he visited the convent at Amesbury, that lay two miles from the old henge and where his mother was now a nun, for a family conference. After this, the busy monarch returned once again to London for one of the most important parliaments of his reign.

  The summer Parliament of 1290 was remarkable in England’s history for many reasons. The reforming legalist king had never been more active: creating order out of the creaking feudal administration, looking for ways to raise revenue from his increasingly wealthy kingdom; the settlement with Scotland was discussed, and substantial subsidies were granted by the church from its vast possessions.

  He also issued some of his most famous laws. One of these was the great statute Quo Warranto by which he attempted to regulate, even if he could not completely cut back, the undisciplined power of some of the feudal magnates. The statute challenged any magnate who claimed a jurisdiction, or liberty, over an area to show by what charter he held this right. If no clear right could be demonstrated, then the jurisdiction should revert to the king. These actions were not always successful, however. One of the liberties he challenged was of the Abbey of Wilton over the nearby hundred of Chalke. But even Edward was defeated by the nuns.

  And another milestone in history was passed during these proceedings when, on July 18, 1290, the King decided one further matter of great importance.

  For on that day, Edward I of England in his Council at Westminster, expelled the Jews from his kingdom.

  As it happened, this day was also the Fast of the Ninth of Ab in the Jewish calendar: the anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem and many disasters thereafter.

  The entire community was given until the feast of All Saints, the day after Hallowe’en, to be gone. They were to be allowed to leave under the king’s protection, unmolested.

  It was not a complete surprise: their position had long been untenable, and as they had been ruined, they were no longer a source of profit to the crown. It was generally believed that his mother had urged the king to expel them when he visited Amesbury. The church subsidy that immediately followed was, in part, a thanks offering to Edward for this pious act.

  Two days before Hallowe’en, Aaron of Wilton was placed once again in the Shockley cart. He had decided, rather than travel to London, to embark with half a dozen others from the remnants of the Wilton community on a small ship that would leave from the port of Christchurch and cross to France. It was Peter Shockley who had insisted that his cart should be used to convey his old friend, and since he and Christopher were detained on business, he had abruptly ordered Mary, despite her protests, to accompany Aaron and see to it that he was safely put aboard his ship.

  There were three carts to carry the little party and their fe
w remaining possessions slowly down the rutted lane that paralleled the lazy Avon river south through the villages of Fordingbridge and Ringwood, and along the western edge of the New Forest to Christchurch. Though the journey was only twenty-five miles, it took two days, and it was the night of Hallowe’en when they rattled on to the cobblestones of the little town of Christchurch with its fine Norman priory and its dark little castle on a hump of turf beside the harbour.

  Aaron was remarkably serene. The rest at Avonsford had restored him to something approaching his former self. Besides insisting that he accept a small pouch of silver coins, old Jocelin had seen to it that his clothes were new and his grey beard was shaved to a crisp, chiselled end; his blue eyes were bright and clear again, and he sat up, calm but alert, watching the countryside as they went along. Although he was being banished from the country that had always been his home, as he told the knight of Avonsford, he was too old to be anything but philosophical about it.

  “It seems God wishes me to see more of the world before I die,” he said wryly, and took his leave of the Godefrois and the Shockleys with surprising cheerfulness.

  It was during this final journey from Sarum to the coast that Mary Shockley tried to convert him.

  All day before the journey, Mary had pondered. Since her father had ordered her to take Aaron in the cart, she supposed that she must, and since she was taking him to banishment, it seemed to her that she was doing God’s work. But she was not happy with the task. She was a bluff, good-hearted girl, perfectly formed to farm and fight like her Saxon ancestors before her. She knew that the Jews would suffer hellfire if they did not convert, and the question of how to deal with them had always seemed simple to her. “Why doesn’t the king just order them to convert and kill them if they don’t?” she had once asked as a child. It was how Roman had converted Saxon and Saxon Dane, in better, simpler times. But now she was to be forced to sit for two days in the cart with an old infidel close to death; and the more she considered it, the more she realised that it must be her duty to convert him if she could. So as soon as they rattled over the Ayleswade bridge and set off on the road south, she told Aaron that this was her intention.

  To his amusement, the elderly, sophisticated Jew sat in the creaking cart beside the almost illiterate and forthright young woman who had earnestly told him to repent even before they reached Britford or the cathedral tower was out of sight. She pleaded with him all the way to Fordingbridge, explaining the folly of Judaism and the greater authority of her church.

  He did not argue much, but she could see that she was making little headway. She was not discouraged, though.

  “Don’t worry old Jew; we’ll save your soul yet,” she told him cheerfully.

  After they had crossed the river at Fordingbridge, she warned him of the danger of hellfire; she told him he must do penance for the crime of the Jews in sending Christ to the cross; she explained to him that those who, like him, saw the Saviour but closed their eyes would not be forgiven on the Day of Judgement. The old man answered her patiently, more amused than irritated by her persistence, as he explained that he had no wish to desert the God who had made His covenant with his ancestors.

  They stopped at Ringwood for the night.

  The second day, sensing that she had been defeated on the main issue, Mary changed her line of attack.

  “Why do your practise usury,” she demanded, “when the Bible and the Church say usury is a sin?”

  “I do not practise usury,” he replied.

  She frowned.

  “You lend money at interest.”

  “Yes, but what the Bible calls usury is excessive interest, which is different,” he responded calmly. “All money must carry some interest, otherwise no one has any reason to lend.”

  She shook her head. How ignorant the old man was.

  “You’re not supposed to charge any interest,” she corrected. “The priests say so.”

  Aaron sighed. The profound ignorance of simple finance that this invented doctrine showed was something he could only grieve over.

  “Do you deny it?” she insisted.

  He gazed at her and thought what a splendid creature she was, with her frank, violet eyes, her mass of long, yellow hair and her athletic figure. He bore her no ill will and wished now that she would stop arguing with him since he was tired. But his passion for accuracy made him reply:

  “I do deny that it is wrong whatever the priests say. Excessive interest is a crime, and a destructive one, but there must be some interest.”

  She could see he was sincere, and her face puckered in puzzlement as the old man, tired of the argument though he was, tried for the last time to set right the fundamental prejudice that dogged all financial transactions through the Middle Ages.

  “When your grandfather invested in the mill, Mary, he could only do so if his investment yielded a return. It’s just the same if a man gets a farm and works it. You have to show a return or you give it up. When you sell your goods at the market, you exchange them for money. What if, now, you wish to finance someone else to build a mill or buy a farm with your money? Don’t you look for some return, just as you would if it was the mill or farm you were working yourself? The return on that money is your interest rate, that’s all.”

  She considered. It sounded logical, but she did not like it. She was silent for several minutes as they rumbled along the lane. Then her face cleared.

  “But I work on the land, and it raises crops; and my brother works in the mill to full cloth. That’s how we get money.”

  “Of course,” he smiled. “But there’s no difference really. When you work, the money in the farm is working, and earning its return.”

  Now she knew he was wrong!

  “Money doesn’t work, Jew!” she cried, thumping the side of the cart with her fist. “I work!”

  The simple abstract principle behind almost all economic activity and human civilisation offended her practical mind to its core. “You should have been made to work with your hands,” she said sternly.

  For this was a solution to the Jewish problem that had been suggested many times before, not only by well-meaning landowners but even by such otherwise subtle intellects as the churchman Grosseteste and the great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas.

  The prejudice of otherwise intelligent people against the rules of finance upon which their lives depended was too deep, Aaron reminded himself, to be argued with. But perhaps, he considered, as he felt the winter sun on his head, they will be wiser in another generation.

  “Truly,” Mary thought to herself at the same time, “the old Jew is so steeped in sin that he cannot even see the difference between honest work and theft.”

  And so, tolerating each other on their final journey together, they went on in silence towards the port.

  On the morning of Hallowe’en, that most magical of days, when all men knew that the dead rose from their graves, a small, squat wooden ship, broad in the beam, with a single square-rigged sail, lurched away with a creak from Christchurch quay. In the hull of the boat, just able to see over its side, stood Aaron, three adults and four children from Wilton, for each of whom the captain had been paid a shilling in advance of the crossing.

  The captain of this modest vessel was a stooped, narrow-faced man, one of the countless generations of river folk who had fished and traded along the rivers and the coast since long before the Romans came; he shoved his passengers roughly into a space near the mast where they would be no trouble to him. His crew consisted only of his two sons.

  From the stout little boat, Aaron could see Mary Shockley as she waved a curt goodbye before turning her cart and clattering up past Christchurch Priory on to the Sarum road; and as the crew pushed off and made their way slowly into the calm, shallow harbour, he held on to the mast and strained to see all he could during his last hour in England. Hungrily, his eyes took in the long reeds that grew along the bank, and the flat, marshy area on the northern side of the harbour, where the s
wans nested and wild horses still roamed; to his right lay the remains of the two earthwork walls and the long, low headland that silently protected the harbour from the sea. The boat carried them past the sand bar that enclosed the harbour and through the narrow channel that led into the open sea. A few fishermen were standing on the sand bar with their boats and they silently watched the little vessel go by. Bobbing on the light swell, it pushed its blunt nose out, away from the headland, towards the Solent and the high chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight.

  Twenty minutes passed. The sail was up but they made slow progress. He turned and looked back.

  There, across the brown waters, under a grey sky, lay the headland.

  “The isle in the sea,” he sighed. For centuries this was the name that the Jews of Europe had given to the island of Britain, hidden by its narrow Channel and shrouded in its soft, northern mists. The low, matter-of-fact headland lying quietly behind him on this cold, dull day, was so infinitely touching to him, such a sudden and poignant reminder that he was never to see England again, that, still holding onto the thick mast, he suddenly broke into tears.

  The tide was very low, and the captain, chatting to his sons, seemed to be taking little notice of where they were going. It was thanks to his carelessness that suddenly, when it was a mile out from the headland, the little boat crunched aground on a sandbank in the bay. The passengers groaned and the captain cursed his own folly loudly.

  There was nothing to do but for passengers and crew alike to clamber out in order to lighten the boat, and stand on the sandbank with the cold salt water coming up to their knees while the captain and his sons heaved and cursed as they rocked the boat to shift it. The process took several minutes, but finally they managed to get the little vessel free, and in order not to make the same mistake again, the captain and his sons waded several yards out to keep the boat off the sands while ordering the passengers to stay where they were. Only when it was well clear did the crew clamber on, while the captain tried to hold the bow.