Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “You talk of Parliament.” He spat a raisin seed from his mouth. “Parliament is useless. It only exists to vote taxes for the king, who should live off the revenues of his own estates. I’ve no interest in the king, his Council, or his Parliament.” At these words Godfrey was speechless. Still Wilson went on, in little more than a whisper now. “As for the Bishop of Sarum,” he remarked contemptuously, “all I know is that his servants start riots in the town and kill chickens.” Two years before, it was true, one of the bishop’s rent collectors had apparently had a fit of insanity and run through the townspeople’s gardens killing some poultry with a sword. It was an isolated incident, but Wilson went on with scorn: “The bishop’s servants are vipers and the bishop himself is a nuisance. I wish he’d get out. We don’t want him.”

  It was the longest speech the merchant had taken the trouble to make for years. It exactly expressed the attitude of John Halle and many other merchants in the city, but it shocked Eustace Godfrey profoundly to hear the words so savagely spoken to his face.

  Still Wilson had not finished. More than Godfrey realised, he himself represented long memories of feudal power and oppression that the Wilsons had resented for centuries and now, finding Eustace in his own power, the merchant could give vent to feelings he had brooded over all his life.

  “I am a merchant; my grandfather was born a villein. I have no interest in your bishop, your magnate or your king. I hope they all kill each other in their wars – like they did last year at St Albans. Let them fight some more and die many more. As for your daughter, she’s got no money and we don’t want her.”

  Having finished, he grabbed the plate with both hands, pulled it back towards him and without looking up again, continued to eat the remainder of the salted tongues. Robert did not move or speak, but looked at Godfrey with what might have been mild curiosity.

  Shaking with fury, but utterly impotent, Eustace slowly rose and walked out of the room. He hoped his exit was dignified, but he was not sure.

  It was a tribute to his remarkable persistence that after only half an hour, he was ready to try again.

  His call this time was on Curtis the butcher. For Lizzie would certainly make an excellent bride for Oliver.

  “She’s an heiress and she’s good-looking,” he had explained to Oliver, “and she isn’t spoken for yet.”

  He arrived at nine o’clock at the butcher’s house and this time, chastened by the last meeting, stated his case more simply, though dwelling generously on his son’s attainments and prospects.

  To his relief, he received a polite welcome. Indeed, the heavy-set butcher was attracted by the thought of marrying his daughter to a gentleman who, if fallen in the world, could still boast noble blood.

  “He’s very little money,” Godfrey stated frankly.

  “Wouldn’t matter. I’ve plenty,” Curtis replied. “The trouble is,” he confessed sadly, “you’ve come two hours too late. I promised her to Wilson’s boy this evening.”

  Godfrey’s face fell. While he had been walking round the town waiting for him, the merchant dressed in black had been quietly stealing all his hopes away.

  “I’d change my mind, even though he’s rich,” Curtis went on. “But,” he grimaced, “I daren’t annoy the spider.”

  And so Eustace Godfrey returned to his house near the close, still empty-handed.

  After Godfrey had left them, John Wilson and his son had not shifted their respective positions for some minutes.

  The merchant had quietly finished his meal, his son silently watching him.

  Only then did John Wilson speak.

  “That man’s a fool.”

  Something in Robert’s impassive face suggested that he agreed.

  John Wilson took a raisin and chewed it thoughtfully.

  “That girl, Lizzie Curtis, I got for you. She’s not stupid.” He glanced up. “Might be a bit of a handful though.”

  And now Robert spoke.

  “I’ll know how to handle her.” The words were said very quietly.

  John Wilson looked at his son curiously.

  “Think so?”

  “Oh yes.” And for the first time that evening, his lips formed into a thin smile.

  Wilson shrugged.

  “Do what you like,” he remarked, and got up from the table.

  The procession of keeping the Midsummer Watch, on St John’s Eve, was a magnificent affair. The houses were decorated, some with dozens of lamps hanging over their doorways, others with bundles of birch, or wreaths of lilies and St John’s wort.

  At the head of the procession, riding on splendid horses, came the mayor and the council members magnificently dressed in long gowns of scarlet-coloured Salisbury ray. With them came the symbols of their Fraternity, a figure of St George followed by his dragon. It was only two centuries since St George had become a popular saint, but since then numerous societies had adopted him and he had even become the patron saint of England itself. There were cheers as the men carrying the figure shook it until the armour in which he was dressed clanked loudly.

  Behind them came the members of the guilds: the butchers, saddlers, smiths, carpenters, barber surgeons, fullers, weavers, shoemakers: there were nearly forty guilds in all, each with its sign and its particular livery. At the head of the smiths two archers with their longbows proudly marched: Benedict Mason was one of them.

  But the greatest sight of all was the rich and powerful Tailors’ Guild: for with them they brought the finest figure in the carnival: the Giant and his companion Hob-Nob.

  The giant was huge – over twelve feet high and dressed in the magnificent robes of a proud merchant. His headgear was the height of fashion – a huge turban over a wide circular brim, with the free end of the cloth draped around his neck and hanging down his back. Below it, his big broad face gazed benevolently over the crowd. This handsome figure – pagan as he certainly was – represented the Tailors’ Patron, St Christopher. In front of him, bobbing wildly from one side of the street to the other, went the hobby horse, Hob-Nob. In the form of a small horse and carried by a single man, this comic figure not only cleared a path for the giant but made frequent attacks upon the crowd, snapping at any one within his reach, to the delight of the children. The giant was a treasure of the town: in storage he was carefully preserved from the attention of rats by bags of arsenic and, in perfect condition, he was brought out in all his towering splendour on the great feast days of the year.

  As he saw the procession go round the town, Godfrey’s heart was heavy. His wife, his children too, were happy in the city, but he was not. He belonged to no guild; he would never be asked to join the seventy-two, nor did he wish to. It seemed to him he had no place in Sarum’s busy life he could call his own. Slowly he started to walk along the street while the procession stamped past. The minstrels, the pie-sellers, the boisterous apprentices and solemn seniors of the guild, all dressed – as the laws insisted – to suit their station: he walked silently past the rich pageant of the city that could not include him. At the corner of Blue Boar chequer he saw Michael Shockley and his family. The merchant was dressed in a tunic of dazzling green and red, his chest puffed out like a turkey cock. He had even donned a pair of magnificent shoes with toes so long that they had to be curved up and fastened to garters round his knees with golden chains. The following day, no doubt, he would be chosen to join the forty-eight; next year he would ride with the Council in a scarlet cloak. Godfrey avoided him.

  It was just after he had passed the George Inn that the figure of the bellfounder came puffing up beside him. His whole face was now as red as his pointed nose usually was, and the nose itself had taken on a deep magenta hue.

  “Will you be seeing the bishop soon, sir, about the bell?” he panted.

  He had forgotten the bell; even that failed to raise his spirits now.

  “Soon, soon,” he promised, and continued on his way.

  It was more in order to escape that he walked disconsolately through the gate into t
he quiet of the close. Even there, the sounds of the festivities of the summer solstice followed after him.

  It was just before nine o’clock the next morning, as the members of the Tailors’ Guild, carrying their lighted tapers, were solemnly passing into St Thomas’s Church that William Swayne met Michael Shockley at the edge of the churchyard. The great merchant’s face was dark with anger.

  “We’ve been cheated,” he exploded, “that cursed John Halle.”

  Shockley stared at him in confusion.

  “You mean the forty-eight?”

  “I mean John Halle has another candidate no one knew about and he’s already got enough of his henchmen to support him. I can’t get you into the forty-eight.”

  Shockley was silent for a moment.

  “Who?” he asked finally.

  “John Wilson – the one they call the spider.” Swayne grimaced in disgust. “God knows what he paid Halle for that.”

  For, as usual, Wilson had moved quietly, but effectively. There was a great feast in the guildhall after the service. There were baked duck, roasted pheasants, hedgehog, peacock, hogs – all the delicacies of the splendid medieval cuisine. There were minstrels with harps, gitterns and trumpets. There was ale and mead.

  And in the midst of these festivities, John Wilson, still dressed in black, led his son to the place where Curtis the butcher sat, and Lizzie looked up at the young man who was to be her husband. It was their first meeting in some years.

  He smiled politely, but his eyes were cold.

  Something told her that she might not be happy.

  In the year of Our Lord 1457, the canonisation of St Osmund of Salisbury was made absolute. It had cost the dean and chapter the astounding sum of seven hundred and thirty-one pounds – as much as the yearly revenue of some bishoprics.

  There is no record that any bell was made in his honour, although the guilds made his day, July 15, an occasion for another yearly procession through the town.

  In 1465 a great dispute began between the citizens of Salisbury and Bishop Beauchamp. It was sparked off by a dispute between the two great rival merchants John Halle and William Swayne over who had the right to use a plot of land in the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr. The bishop as feudal overlord had granted Swayne the right to build a house for a chantry priest there, but Halle declared that the plot belonged to the town corporation. Swayne began to build. Halle and his men tore part of the building down. But the origin of this dispute was soon forgotten, for the real quarrel lay between the citizens, led by Halle, and their overlord the bishop. They were determined to end his feudal rule and Halle was summoned to appear before the king himself and his council, where he spoke so intemperately that even Henry VI decided to put him in gaol, where he remained for some time. The dispute dragged on for nine years before the King’s Council finally decided for the bishop.

  “The charter is clear,” Godfrey told his family. “The city belongs to the bishop and there’s nothing the merchants can do about it.” The final triumph of the bishop was one of his few consolations, as his own fortune continued gradually but inevitably to decline. He paid Bishop Beauchamp a personal visit to congratulate him, and was delighted that he was received.

  It was strange that when even those citizens who were Halle’s enemies, like Shockley, supported him in his fight against the bishop, John and Robert Wilson, to whom Halle had acted as a patron, remained completely silent during this time. No word of either condemnation or agreement came from the handsome house in the New Street chequer.

  But then John Wilson already had other plans.

  A JOURNEY FROM SARUM

  1480

  Young William Wilson did not move. He watched.

  The damp, cold April morning mist had formed a fine coat over him; tiny droplets of which he was not even aware hung from the hairs of his thin eyebrows and his nose.

  He had not eaten the day before.

  But though he was cold, damp and hungry, he forgot those facts, and on his narrow sixteen-year-old face, there appeared a smile.

  He could not see the river, though he knew it was there, a hundred yards in front of him; nor could he see the top of the ridges which were also enveloped in the mist. But he was beginning to see the outlines of the ground: a tree here and there, a hint of the track leading up to the high ground, for the sun was rising over the ridges now and starting to warm the hamlet and the manor of Avonsford.

  He watched in the silence as slowly the yellow morning sun appeared and the mists began to dissolve. It was a moment he knew well and that he loved: for then the mists would slowly part, the upper layer drawing softly back like a veil up the valley slope before dissolving in the morning sunlight, leaving only the lower layer resting over the ground.

  As he watched, two things happened.

  Suddenly, from within the mist that covered the river water, he heard a beating of wings and then, out of its wreaths, came six swans. Their powerful wings whirred and moaned as they rose from the silent, invisible stream and swept down the valley.

  At the same moment, the veil lifted off the foot of the slope behind the river and revealed the house.

  How beautiful it was. Its long grey, uneven line with its gabled ends seemed to hover over the mist below, floating like a boat. Despite himself, he smiled.

  He stayed quite still for whole minutes, wrapt in the beauty of it, almost forgetting that it was this house and its occupant who had destroyed everything he had. For this morning he had come to take his final leave.

  “I will go,” he murmured sadly, “as soon as the swans return.”

  The new manor house at Avonsford was certainly a fine affair – finer even than young Will could know, since he had never been inside.

  It occupied the same site as the old building that had belonged to the Godefrois. But their crumbling house had been so neglected for fifty years that only bits of it had been incorporated into the new structure. Built of the same grey stone it was now a splendid residence.

  “Fit for a gentleman to live in,” the owner had remarked with truth.

  The owner of this gentleman’s house was Robert Forest.

  It was ten years since John Wilson and his son Robert, merchants of Salisbury, had moved out of the city; and to mark this change in their social status from merchant to gentleman, they had taken a new surname, Forest, which seemed to them to suggest an ancient connection with the land.

  For some years after that, John Wilson had continued his spider-like existence in the house in New Street chequer, seldom seen outside, but still becoming secretly richer each year, while Robert and his family had lived at Avonsford Manor. The manor was leased from its new overlord the Bishop of Salisbury for a term of three lives, but it was a lease which could be extended by future generations and the Forests had immediately set to work to make improvements that would make the house worthy of their newfound gentility.

  It consisted of a spacious central hall, on each side of which was a large chamber with a handsome bay window. One of these, the larger, was a fine solar not unlike the original hall of the Godefroi knights. It had a high arched ceiling displaying dark oak beams and a bay window at one end with glass almost to the floor, which flooded the room with light. But it was the smaller room on the other side of the hall that was Robert Forest’s particular pride: for this was called the winter parlour. It had a fine window, too, though smaller, and a huge fireplace in front of which he and his family could sit; but its glory was the splendid wooden panelling round its walls, so perfect that once inside, the visitor felt as though he had entered an intricate wooden box, and every panel of this was carved in the new and elegant linenfold design.

  When old John had seen it and queried the choice, Robert told him: “It’s the latest thing. All the gentry are doing it – those that can afford to.” And the old man had offered no further comment.

  It was in the winter parlour, in a heavy oak display cupboard, that he also kept the small collection of books that belonged in a
gentleman’s house. There were several books on heraldry and gentility; there was an illustrated manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and also a new prose version of the tales of King Arthur. It was compiled by an obscure knight who had served at least one term in gaol for theft, called Thomas Malory, but since Robert Forest had heard a nobleman recommend it, he had purchased the book at once.

  There was one other item of which he was proud.

  “I saw it in London,” he told his father. “A man named Caxton, who was governor of the mercer’s guild, has started to make these things with a machine.” And he showed old John a handsomely bound book – a collection of philosophical sayings – that was of interest not because of its contents but because the letters had been made by a printing machine rather than by hand.

  “With this printing machine he can turn out books by the yard,” Robert explained, and old John agreed that the new invention was remarkable. But he frowned nonetheless as he inspected the page.

  “Why, these words are written in different dialects,” he complained. It was true. Caxton had, as most men did, his own views about how English words were to be pronounced and had chosen to spell them accordingly. The result on the newly printed page was a curious mixture of dialects from several different parts of the island.

  “See – he writes ‘plough’ like a northerner,” the merchant-turned-gentleman complained: for as written, the word would have sounded more like ‘pluff’, or ‘rough’. “This won’t do.”

  Robert said nothing. He was not interested. But his father was right, and the confused and illogical spelling chosen by Caxton’s whim was to be the hallmark of written English from then on.

  Upstairs, above the parlour, were bedrooms with scented rushes on the floors, and behind the house was a courtyard with kitchens and storerooms grouped around.

  Indeed, it was a remarkable fact, of which the present occupants could have no idea, that the newly laid out manor house fitted almost exactly over another, deeply buried floorplan – that of a Roman villa, that a family named Porteus had built on that site, with roughly the same degree of sophistication, more than a thousand years before.