Pilgrimage of Death

by Sally Spencer

  There are men I find that I instinctively trust at our first meeting - and men who I would not trust were I to have known them their whole lives. This reeve was of the latter group. I had no doubt that he did not permit any of his lord’s workers to cheat on their obligations – but that is a long way from saying that the lord himself ever received his full due.

  ‘Nothing has changed but that we admit it has,’ this reeve continued. ‘The peasants were perfectly content before the Great Plague. Why should they not be content now?’

  Because the Plague had changed the very nature of authority and obedience, I said - though only to myself. Before the Plague, no serf doubted that his position in life was fixed and unchangeable. He worked for his lord when he was told to, and tilled his own tiny strips of land when he could spare the time. After the Plague, when he saw for himself that there was more work to do than there were men to do it - and not only in countryside, but also in towns - he wanted more than he had brought up to expect. More, certainly, than most lords were prepared to give him.

  ‘They should all have learned their lesson from the way in which we treated the men of Kent and Essex who dared to question God’s divine order,’ the lath-like reeve said.

  I have often noted the way that lesser men use the word ‘we’ when referring to the actions of their betters, but I let the matter pass.

  The franklin, however, did not. ‘Were you one of the advisors to the king during the Peasants’ Revolt?’ he asked with obvious sarcasm - for I suspect that he considered that even by seeking to converse with us on equal terms, the reeve was being impertinent.

  The reeve’s hot face grew redder. ‘No, not I, myself,’ he said, ‘but still, I gave my full support...’

  ‘And you, Sir Geoffrey, were you in London when the peasant army marched on it?’ the franklin asked me, more to show his disdain for the reeve, I think, than because he wished an answer.

  ‘Yes, I was there,’ I replied.

  ‘And was it as terrible as men say?’

  It was terrible enough, of that I was certain. Incensed by the new poll tax, the men of Kent had first sacked Canterbury, then marched on London. There had been over a hundred thousand of them, invading a city with scarcely forty thousand inhabitants. And sensing a power they had never expected to realise, they went wild. They burnt down my patron’s palace at the Savoy. They took control of the prisons at Newgate and Fleet. And when they had gone so far with no one seeming able to stop them, they went even further and captured that symbol of England itself, the Tower of London.

  King Richard, a mere boy at the time, rode out to meet the rioters himself – his one courageous act in what has turned out to be a far from distinguished reign - and promised to meet their demands for an end to serfdom if they would only go home. And home they went, these foolish men who relinquished their power at the merest hint of a possible improvement in their lives.

  Retribution began almost as soon as they had reached their towns and villages. It was savage, as retribution always is when conducted by frightened men. Hundreds were rounded up and hanged – and left hanging, from gibbets and trees, as a warning to others. It was a mistake to treat them so harshly, I had thought back then – and still think now. The king and his advisors should have recognised that times had changed, and have given the peasants at least a small part of what they wanted. But they had not learned – have yet to learn – that while fear is a powerful emotion, so is resentment. It is not, however, a lesson which has escaped me. If the peasant masses ever do storm London again, they will not threaten me – because I have sold my house in Thames Street and moved to somewhere much quieter.

  *

  When we reached St Thomas’ watering place, a spring not so far beyond the bounds of Southwark, Harry Bailey called a halt and bade the company to assemble around him.

  ‘It is time to begin the contest,’ he said. And reaching into the pocket of his jerkin, he produced a handful of straws. ‘Each of you will take one of these, and he who plucks the shortest shall begin.’

  We drew our straws, and it so happened that it was the knight who drew the shortest.

  ‘What a fine thing is chance,’ our host said enthusiastically. ‘See how Dame Fortune smiles on our enterprise and chooses the noblest of our company to begin the competition. Delay no longer, good sir. Our ears are hungry for your words.’

  The knight cleared his throat.

  ‘Stories of old have made it known to us

  That there was once a Duke called Theseus

  Ruler of Athens, Lord and Governor...’ he began.

  *

  The nature of the knight’s tale turned out to be much as I would have expected. It told of romantic love, of honour – and of death. Those who wish to hear the whole of it in his own words – or, at least, in his words as crafted and shaped by my poetic imagination – may read the Tales, but for our purpose here I had much better use my time by giving an account of the first indication I had that this was not to be an ordinary pilgrimage.

  The indication was this: some time before we had reached the spring, I had glanced over my shoulder, as one is wont to do, and noticed two riders – young men on fine strong horses – some distance behind us. Turning again now, as we set off on the road again, I saw that they had not gained so much as an inch on us in the intervening period.

  Which was strange.

  Passing strange.

  For a cavalcade such as ours was forced to move at the speed of its slowest member, you must understand, and thus we kept pace with the clerk of Oxford on his thin, gasping nag.

  So why, I wondered, had the men behind us made up no ground?

  Why were they content merely to continue to follow us – to eat the dust which our horses’ hooves threw up?

  It was a question worthy of speculation, and I would discover myself speculating on it a number of times before our journey was finally done.

  *

  It took us more than half a league along the road to Dartford before the knight reached the conclusion of his worthy and chivalrous tale which, as I could have predicted from the beginning, involved a funeral which was quickly followed by a wedding.

  Once, when I was Chaucer the romantic poet, I might have told such a tale myself, but I was advancing beyond the realms of courtly love now, and merely found it quaint. Yet it seemed to please the other pilgrims – especially our host – well enough.

  ‘It is going well, is it not, good friends?’ Harry Bailey said. ‘Now that the good knight’s tale is done, I must choose another to follow him. Let me see. Let me consider. Who shall I call on to tell the next tale?’

  He cast his gaze slowly around the assembled company, as if he were weighing up which of us would be best able to maintain the admirable standard the knight had set.

  His eye settled on the monk. ‘You, good sir cleric, repay the knight for his tale with one of your own,’ he suggested.

  But the miller, now even drunker than he had been at the start of our journey, was having none of that.

  ‘To hell with listening to monks and other holy men,’ he said, swaying perilously on his horse. ‘Do you want to keep the company entertained, sir host? Do you?’

  ‘That was my intention, and…’ Harry Bailey began.

  ‘Then give me a chance to tell my tale,’ the miller interrupted. ‘For I assure you there will be far more life about it than anything we could expect to hear from a pale cloisterer - a man who wears out his eyes by reading of the lives of saintly souls.’

  A man who wears out his eyes by reading of the lives of saintly souls, I repeated silently to myself.

  That was not how I would have chosen to describe the monk. Indeed, it is not how I did describe him in my Tales.

  For there was nothing of the wan scholar about this particular cleric. His skin was as brown as a berry, well-tanned by both the wind and the sun. He sat astride his horse like the skilled hunter that he was, his powerful hands gripping his reins. By any standards, he coul
d not have been called other than a manly man.

  Then why did the miller choose to describe him as he did? you may ask.

  Partly, I think, it was the result of the drink, which clouds both the eyes and the brain. Yet even sober (if he ever attained such a blessed state), the miller might have seen no more, for he was of that manner of man who looked no further than the monk’s habit.

  Nor is he alone in this fault. We are all guilty – even writers like myself – of failing to look beyond the outward trappings of others. And though it is not my intention to lecture here, yet I must make this point now, because if my account is to believed – if it is ever to seem more than the invention of a fevered mind – then my readers must learn to see the naked man (in all senses of the word) who lies below the outer garments.

  But I ride ahead of myself as I grapple to control the flow of this new form of writing, and that haste will serve to confuse rather than illuminate. Let us, then, quickly return to the scene which was being played out before us between the miller and our host.

  The miller’s plea to be allowed to tell the next tale – if plea is the word for it – was quickly rejected by our host.

  ‘Nay, Robin, it is not meet that you should speak now,’ Harry Bailey said gravely. ‘Save your tale for another time, when you have a little more control over yourself.’

  ‘I may be pissy-arsed drunk, but I am still as good as any man here,’ the miller said angrily.

  ‘I would not doubt that, but...’ our host began.

  ‘And if I am not to be allowed to tell my tale – if some cleric is given precedence over me - then I’ll find some other band to ride with, one which will respect me for my worth.’

  I read the indecision on our host’s face. We were still but a short distance from his home in Southwark, and if the party were to break up then – if others among the pilgrims were to follow the miller in his defection – he would have no excuse to continue with his journey himself. He would, in other words, be compelled to return to his dragon of a wife, who, I had no doubt, would see that he had returned with his tail between his legs and thus let him feel the sharpest edge of her tongue.

  And, though I did not know it then, of course, he would also have failed those who had hired him, and thus run the risk of being paid out in quite another kind of coin.

  ‘Well?’ the miller demanded. ‘What’s it to be?’

  ‘Blast you! Tell your accursed tale, if you feel you must,’ the host replied impotently.

  The miller smirked. ‘My tale is one of an old carpenter and his young wife, and how a student set his mind to having her...’ he began.

  ‘Shut your mouth, Robin!’ said the thin reeve with the rusty sword. ‘Shut it now!’

  ‘And pray, why should I do that?’ the miller asked.

  ‘Because no one wants to hear your tales of drunken harlotry!’

  ‘Do they not?’ the miller asked. Then he shook his head and carried on as if the reeve had never spoken. ‘This carpenter of which I speak was an ancient man who now used the organ the Good Lord gave him for no other purpose than to rid his body of excess fluid...’

  ‘You think because a man works with wood, he must be a cuckold?’ the reeve interrupted. ‘I was once a carpenter myself.’

  ‘I did not know that,’ the miller said, though his sly smile showed that he was lying – that the very reason he had chosen this particular tale was because the reeve had been a carpenter.

  ‘Yes, I was a carpenter,’ the reeve said.

  ‘Even so, you should not take it so personally,’ the miller assured him. ‘I dare say that not all carpenters are cuckolds, nor all old skinny men, either. Perhaps your wife sees in you qualities which are not evident to the rest of us, and keeps her knees firmly together whenever a handsome young buck appears.’

  It was obvious to me – and to the rest of the company - that even though they had known each other but a short time, the miller and the reeve had developed a strong mutual dislike, and that, whatever else happened, the miller was intent on telling his tale.

  And so he did. And so will I outline it here. For those who have read my Tales and know what the miller was about to say, I can only offer the same advice which I offered to the more genteel readers of the tales themselves – turn the page now. For those whose interest lies more in murder than in literature, I promise to give only a brief summary of the story which it took that rogue of a miller more than half an hour to recount.

  The central character of the tale – the figure on whom most of the ridicule would be heaped – was a carpenter, but, as I have already intimated, this choice of occupation was more a sign of the miller’s malevolence than anything else.

  ‘It seemed this decrepit carpenter had recently taken a young bride, and also taken in a lodger, a student called Nicholas,’ the miller said.

  Several of the pilgrims exchanged knowing looks, for they could see the way the tale would develop. One of those pilgrims, a middle-aged widow from Bath – a woman with gap-teeth and a knowing look - laughed out loud in anticipation. And the reeve scowled for quite the same reason.

  The tale progressed. Had the knight been recounting it, he might have talked about the pure passion which the student began to feel for Alison, the wife. The miller, in contrast, presented it thus –

  ‘He made a grab and caught her by the quim, and said, ‘Unless I have my will of you, I’ll die of secret love’.’

  The woman with the gap-teeth laughed even louder, and the reeve’s frown deepened.

  The miller outlined the scheme which the student devises to satisfy his lust. Nicholas tells the carpenter that his astrological studies have shown him that a second Noah’s flood is coming. There is just one way they can survive it, he continues. They must suspend large washtubs from the ceiling with ropes, and climb into these tubs themselves. Then, when the floodwater rises, they can cut the ropes and float safely away. The carpenter falls for the story and spends a long night in his tub while his wife and the student sneak off and have their way with each other.

  It is as Nicholas and Alison are making the beast with two backs together that Absalon, the parish clerk, comes to the window of the room and begs Alison for one sweet kiss.

  ‘One sweet kiss!’ the wife of Bath chortled. ‘We all know where that leads, don’t we? By God’s wounds, we do.’

  It is dark, so Absalon cannot see that instead of her thrusting her head through the open window, Alison chooses to thrust out her arse. (These are the miller’s words, not mine).

  Absalon kisses what he thinks is Alison’s face. He is surprised by what he finds. ‘I did not know you had a beard,’ he says.

  ‘A beard!’ roared the young squire out loud. ‘He did not know she had a beard!’

  Then, noting the look of disapproval of the knight’s face, he reddened and turned away.

  Absalon soon understands how he has been tricked, the miller continued, and eager for revenge he goes straight to the blacksmith’s forge, from where he borrows a red-hot strip of iron. He returns the carpenter’s house, and asks Alison for another kiss. This time it is Nicholas who sticks his backside of the window, and, to add insult to injury, the student farts (the miller’s words again) into the clerk’s face. But it is Absalon who is to have the last laugh, for he thrusts the glowing piece of metal into Nicholas’ backside.

  The pilgrims roared at this, but at the same time several of men shifted uncomfortably in their saddles.

  ‘Water!’ Nicolas screams, needing to soothe his burning arse.

  And the carpenter, thinking this means the flood has begun, cuts the rope which tethers his tub to the ceiling and goes crashing to the ground. The neighbours come rushing to see what has happened, and finding him sitting in a tub in the middle of the room, assume that he has gone mad.

  ‘And thus ends my tale with the carpenter declared insane by his neighbours, the wife with a smile on her face that will not go away, and Nicholas with a brand on his bum which he will carry for the
rest of his days,’ the miller finished, grinning like a monkey will as it exposes its private parts.

  The reeve, on hearing the conclusion to the story, demanded that he should tell the next tale, and just as our host had found it impossible to refuse the miller, so he was forced to let the reeve have his way.

  It was only to be expected that the reeve’s tale would be one in which he took his revenge, and he did not disappoint us in that expectation. He told of a miller who tried to cheat two students who brought him corn to be ground, and of how the students slept with his wife and his daughter as a means of paying him back.

  When he had finished his tale, the miller looked no more pleased than the reeve himself had done with the conclusion to the earlier story.

  There was one more tale that day, and it was told by the five guildsmen’s cook. It was a poor effort by any standards - bawdy without being witty – and though I once started to transcribe it into my Tales, I could never summon the necessary enthusiasm to finish it - and now I probably never will. Suffice it to say then, that the cook’s tale did no more than fill in the time until we arrived at Dartford, where we planned to spend the first night of our pilgrimage.

  Day the Second

  Afternoon

  As we sat on our horses, looking across the river at Dartford, I found myself thinking that even were its reputation to rest solely on the Holy Trinity Church it would be a splendid town - for though it is only a parish church, it is magnificent enough to be a cathedral, and gazing at its solid square tower and side chapels, I could not but be filled with awe at this monument to the love and fear which God inspires in his people.

  Yet there is more to Dartford than just the church. It has a large and prosperous priory which houses the only order of Dominican nuns to be found in the whole of England. It has a leprosy hospital (located, of course, at the very edge of the town) to rival any in the country. There is a busy wool-fulling mill, and thriving wharves at which Thames-bound boats are loaded. Though it is not to be compared, of course, to the grandeur of London, it is still as impressive a city of a thousand souls as I ever laid eyes on.