The Lost Prophecies

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘Do you understand what is said in the words you wrote, Brân?’ persisted the old bishop.

  ‘It is no concern of mine. These events will come to pass far in the future. Maybe I will be there to see some of them.’ He said this in an uncaring fashion, as if it was of no consequence.

  ‘Who gave you these prophecies, brother? Or are they of your own invention?’

  Brân, his dirty red hair embedded with bits of fern and straw, turned a face like a tired angel to the old priest. ‘I know that you wish to discover whether it is God or Satan. But I cannot tell you, for I do not know.’

  ‘Where did you come from, Brân?’ persisted Conan.

  ‘Again, I know not! My first memories are of the good people who cared for me as a child. My last memories will be of the inside of this mean dwelling!’

  Suddenly, his eyes rolled up so that the whites showed, and he fell back against the wall, lolling inertly with his jaw slack.

  ‘This is the prelude to a seizure,’ said the abbot. ‘He will be like this for a few minutes, then the spasms will begin. Maybe someone is speaking to him now, inside that head.’

  Conan made a sudden decision. ‘It would be kinder to get it over with now, when he is unaware.’

  Pushing Alither aside, he went out of the hut to speak to the two warriors who waited outside. The abbot hurried after him in time to hear his commands.

  ‘Release that chain, but leave the band around his belly – it will help to weigh him down! Bind his wrists in case he recovers, then carry him to the river and throw him well out from the bank.’

  He turned to Alither, who was standing aghast and trembling. ‘Must this be, bishop? Is there no other way?’

  Conan shook his head as the two guards moved towards the doorway. ‘From the waters he came and to the waters he must return!’

  As the words left his lips, an ear-splitting clap of thunder crashed overhead though the sky was clear. On the river, a single high wave rolled smoothly up between the banks, splashing up on to the grass and sending birds squawking into the air. It passed as quickly as it had appeared, but now there were shouts from within the hut. Conan and the abbot pushed aside the leather flap and stared as the two soldiers pointed to the corner.

  A metal band lay on the bracken, still chained to the post. Inside it was a brown habit, the coarse cloth crumpled into a small heap in the centre. On the table, Brân’s black book lay as it was left.

  Alither picked it up and, crossing himself, stared at the bishop, his eyes wide with fear. ‘A miracle, Conan! But is it for good or evil?’

  ACT ONE

  Exeter, February 1196

  When three golden beasts did reign by bishop’s rule,

  A bearded champion fought oppression’s realm,

  His secret horde defied the edicts cruel,

  But all was lost beneath the budding elm.

  It was an unusual case for coroner Sir John de Wolfe – not so much because it was a find of treasure-trove but that it occurred not a hundred paces from his dismal chamber in Rougemont Castle. He was more used to ranging the length and breadth of the county of Devon to view some corpse, sometimes riding for three days on a journey to the more remote parts.

  His clerk brought the news to him on a winter morning when the frost lay hard on the ground and even the sewage lying in the city streets was frozen solid. Thomas de Peyne, his thin cassock swathed in a threadbare cloak of grey serge, pushed his way through the curtain of sacking on the doorway at the top of the winding stairs cut into the walls of the tall gatehouse. The little priest’s narrow face, with pointed nose and receding chin, was blue with cold, but he managed to control the chattering of his teeth to blurt out the exciting news.

  ‘Crowner, they have found money in the outer ward!’

  De Wolfe, sitting behind his rough trestle table, almost the only furniture in that spartan chamber, looked up irritably. ‘What, has some man-at-arms dropped a penny?’ he asked cynically.

  ‘No, there are many coins, hundreds of them – and some gold too!’ squeaked Thomas, rubbing an almost frozen dewdrop from the end of his nose. ‘Ralph Morin is there. He asked that you come and look, for it will be coroner’s business.’

  There was a voice from the other side of the room, where Gwyn of Polruan, de Wolfe’s officer and squire, was sitting in his usual place on the cold stone of a window embrasure, apparently impervious to the icy wind that whistled through the slit.

  ‘What’s going on, Crowner?’ he rumbled in his deep Cornish accent. ‘This is the fourth such find since Christmas!’

  John rose to his feet and pulled his grey wolf-skin cloak closer about his long, stooped body. As tall as Gwyn, but much leaner, he looked like a great crow, with his jet-black hair, hooked nose and dark stubble on his leathery cheeks.

  ‘After the first two hoards that were found, folk seem to have caught gold fever,’ he growled. ‘Half the town has found shovels and are digging into every mound they come across.’

  As the three men moved to the doorway, Thomas added: ‘This wasn’t a mound. They were digging a new well for the garrison families living in the outer bailey. It seems they had not gone down more than an arm’s length when they found it.’

  At the bottom of the stairs, which came out in the guardroom at the side of the entrance arch, they were joined by Gabriel, the sergeant of the men-at-arms who formed the garrison of Rougemont. The castle was so called from the red colour of the local sandstone from which it had been built by William the Bastard a mere two years after the Battle of Hastings. Gabriel was a grizzled veteran of some of the same wars in which John and Gwyn had fought, and they were old friends.

  As they walked down the drawbridge over the dry moat that separated the inner from the outer wards of the castle, they saw a small crowd clustering around a wooden tripod, fifty paces off the steep track that led to the outer gate. Most of them were soldiers, huddled in thick jerkins against the cold, but a few hardy wives were peering from behind them, and a brace of children, apparently oblivious to the winter chill, were racing around and shouting. The outer ward, meant to be the first line of defence for the castle, was where most of the families of the garrison lived, their huts forming a small village inside the city walls.

  Striding over the sparse grass and frozen mud, de Wolfe and his companions reached the excavation, where the circle of onlookers opened up to let them through. Here, another large man was issuing orders to the soldiers who were digging the well. He was Ralph Morin, the castle constable, responsible to the king for the defence and maintenance of Rougemont, for it was a royal possession, not the fief of a baron or manor lord. A tall, erect man, he had a forked beard that gave him the look of a Viking warrior.

  ‘Another box of money, Crowner! How many more?’ he said, echoing Gwyn’s words.

  De Wolfe stooped to peer into the hole that had been dug, about five feet wide. The wooden tripod reached a few feet above his head, supporting a pulley and a rope to lift buckets of soil and rock as the well was deepened. However, it had had little use as yet, as only a small pile of waste lay nearby. The hole was barely three feet deep, and in the bottom he could see the broken lid of a wooden chest, with some coins glinting beneath the smashed boards.

  ‘Have any been taken out?’ he demanded, his first concern being to prevent any pilfering.

  ‘Show Sir John what you found,’ ordered the constable, prodding a burly soldier who was leaning on a pickaxe.

  The man bent down and picked up a crumpled woollen cap, which he handed to the coroner. ‘I put a few in there after my pick went through the box, sir,’ he grunted. ‘Bloody hard work it was, cracking through that frozen ground!’ he added, eyeing the coins in his hat hopefully.

  John ignored the hint and tipped the dozen coins into his hand for a closer look. All were silver pennies, with the exception of one larger gold coin.

  ‘These are Saxon, I’m sure,’ he said, but then held them out towards Thomas de Peyne, who seemed to have a wide kn
owledge of almost everything.

  The clerk peered at them short-sightedly and poked them around with a spindly finger. ‘Indeed they are, Crowner. From different mints and different monarchs – there’s Ethelred and Athelstan.’

  ‘What about the gold one?’ growled Gwyn. ‘That’s a bezant, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s certainly a foreign coin, but I’m not sure from where,’ admitted Thomas. Always keen to show off his learning, he added: ‘Bezants are named after Byzantium, where lots of gold solidi came from many years ago.’

  ‘Right, let’s get that box up,’ commanded de Wolfe, handing the empty cap back to the disappointed soldier. He pulled it on his head, spat on his hands and lifted the pick.

  ‘Easy with that! Get it out in one piece if you can!’ snapped the constable.

  Together with another man, the soldier lowered himself into the shallow excavation, and between them they levered up the metal-bound box and in a few minutes had it on the ground at the coroner’s feet. It had no lid or lock, being a sealed case bound with iron straps, which had rusted so badly that they could easily be snapped with the point of the pick. The elm boards had softened after more than a century in the wet soil, and once the bands were broken the smashed top could be pulled apart to reveal the contents.

  ‘Must be a good few hundred in there,’ muttered Ralph Morin.

  The box was full of silver coins, many stuck together by the damp tarnish that covered them. When John dug his fingers into the mass, he saw a few more gold bezants and, at the bottom, some gold brooches and buckles. The onlookers gaped and drooled at the sight of such riches, which for most of them would equal several lifetimes of their daily wages.

  ‘What do we do with it – the same as the others?’ asked the constable.

  The previous hoards had all been taken to the sheriff for safekeeping until an inquest could decide what was to be done with the finds. He had the only secure place for valuables, in his back chamber in the keep of the castle. One of the sheriff’s main functions was to collect the taxes from the county and deliver them in person every six months to the Exchequer in Winchester, so several massive strongboxes were stored in his quarters under constant guard.

  On the constable’s orders, two men carried the box up to the keep, with Morin marching close behind them to make sure that it reached the sheriff intact – though like de Wolfe, he wondered if an odd coin or two had already found its way into the pouches of the men digging the well.

  The coroner and his two assistants followed them to the sheriff’s chamber, which was off the large main hall in the two-storeyed keep at the further side of the inner ward. Henry de Furnellis, an elderly knight with a face like a bloodhound, had been appointed sheriff the previous year as a stopgap when the former sheriff, John’s brother-in-law, had been dismissed in disgrace. Now Henry looked with a pained expression at the muddy box lying on a table in his room. ‘Another bloody burden to carry to Winchester and to explain to those arrogant Chancery clerks,’ he complained to his elderly clerk, Elphin.

  Together, the coroner and the constable sorted out the coins into piles and placed the bezants and the five gold ornaments alongside them. Thomas, who always carried his writing materials in a shapeless shoulder bag, sat with parchment, ink and quill and recorded the exact details of the treasure. ‘Nine hundred and forty pennies, twenty-eight gold coins, three gold brooches and two gold cloak-rings,’ he intoned when he had finished.

  ‘A nice little collection, and not much doubt that it now belongs to King Richard,’ declared Ralph Morin.

  De Furnellis nodded his old head wisely. ‘No, as it was found within his own castle! Can’t very well belong to anyone else, can it, John?’

  De Wolfe cleared his throat, his usual response when he had some doubts. ‘I suppose not, but I’ll still have to hold my inquest for a jury to decide if it was accidentally lost or whether the owner intended reclaiming it at some future date.’

  The sheriff cackled. ‘He’ll have a hell of a job doing that now, John. He’s probably been dead for a century!’

  Gwyn pulled on his drooping ginger moustaches as an aid to thought. ‘Why are we getting all these finds in and around Exeter?’ he rumbled. ‘Especially this one inside the castle itself?’

  John de Wolfe managed to beat the know-all clerk to the answer. ‘It wasn’t a castle then, that’s why. Almost all these hoards were hidden by the Saxons when they knew that Harold had lost at Hastings and realized that our Norman forefathers would soon be marching towards them. Many of them buried their money and valuables, hoping to retrieve them later.’

  As he paused to draw breath, Thomas jumped in. ‘King William put down the rebellion in Exeter two years after Hastings – then, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, he knocked down fifty houses to make room for this very castle.’

  Gwyn nodded slowly. ‘So these things today were probably buried in what would have then been someone’s back yard!’

  ‘A rich someone’s back yard, by the looks of it,’ added the sheriff. ‘I wonder what happened to him?’

  There was silence for a moment, as although the despoliation of Saxon England had been carried out by their grandfathers or even great-grandfathers, there was still some unease at the memory that a few thousand Normans had slain or dispossessed almost all the Saxon nobility and wealthy landowners. Even though well over a century of intermarriage had diluted the blood, all of them except Gwyn considered themselves Normans.

  ‘As I said, he certainly won’t be coming back to claim them,’ grunted the sheriff.

  After his clerk Elphin had added his signature to the bottom of Thomas’s list as a witness to the exact value of the hoard, the coins were placed in a large leather bag, together with the ornaments carefully wrapped in a cloth. The whole lot was then locked away in one of the massive treasure chests, which carried clumsy but effective locks on the iron bands riveted around them.

  ‘I’ll hold my inquest this afternoon,’ promised John. ‘Gwyn, round up all those soldiers who were digging the well and get a few more to make up a score for a jury. We’ll hold the proceedings in the Shire Hall – and I’ll have to have that sack to show them, to make it legal.’

  The coroner’s trio left the keep and went back to the gatehouse, this time hovering over a charcoal brazier that Gabriel had burning in the guardroom, which slightly warmed the chilly air. A pitcher of ale was produced, and one of the men-at-arms stuck a red-hot poker in it and passed around some mugs of the warm but still sour liquid. Thomas declined his, as ale was not to his taste, preferring cider, even at freezing point.

  ‘At least this last hoard was found by sheer chance, not from a message from beyond the grave like the first one!’ said Gwyn.

  The previous month, a few hundred silver pennies and some bezants had been found after the cathedral archivist had come across a sheet of parchment tucked between the pages of an old volume of chants. This bore a brief message from someone called Egbert to his son, indicating that, fearing the imminent arrival of the Norman invaders, he had buried the family wealth at the foot of a preaching cross in the churchyard of Alphington, a village just outside Exeter. The archivist, Canon Jordan le Brent, had reported this to his bishop, and a search soon revealed the truth of the claim.

  Unfortunately, Bishop Henry Marshal immediately confiscated the hoard on the grounds that it had been found on Church property and even forbade the coroner to hold an inquest upon it. Unsure of the legal position – as few people, including the king’s ministers, had any clear idea of the extent of a coroner’s powers – de Wolfe had had to submit, though he intended complaining to the Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, when he had the chance. Unfortunately, the Justiciar, who now virtually ruled England since the king was permanently absent fighting the French, was also the Archbishop of Canterbury, so it would be difficult for the Primate of the English Church to overrule one of his bishops.

  ‘Ever since that scrap of vellum came to light, we have been plagued by people wan
ting to search the library at the cathedral,’ complained Thomas. He had a particular interest in the matter, since he worked part time in the archives above the Chapter House just outside the cathedral’s South Tower.

  When he had been restored to the priesthood the previous year, his uncle, Archdeacon John de Alençon, had arranged for him to be given a stipend for saying daily Masses for the souls of certain rich men who had left bequests for the purpose. Another task, which was dear to Thomas’s heart, was to sort and catalogue the disorderly mass of material in the library, in anticipation of a move to a new Chapter House, for which the bishop had already donated a part of the garden of his palace.

  ‘Do people come in off the street to search the records?’ asked Gabriel, unused to the ways of the ecclesiastical community.

  ‘They probably would if they could read!’ replied the little clerk. ‘No, it’s the priests who seem to have caught this gold fever, especially since that hoard was found in a churchyard. We’ve had a few literate clerks sent by their merchant masters to snoop around, but they don’t get admitted. Unfortunately, we can’t stop the parish priests coming into the library.’

  ‘I presume no one has found anything more since that one scrap of parchment?’ asked the coroner.

  His scribe shook his head. ‘No, even though they’ve been through almost all the books and rolls now, often not reading anything, just looking between the pages or shaking them to see if anything drops out!’

  Thomas shook his scrawny head in disgust, though it was not clear to his master if this was at the greed of his fellow priests or their failure to benefit from the wealth of scholarship that passed through their hands.

  Just as the ale was finished, they heard the distant cathedral bell calling for Terce, signalling the tenth hour at that time of year. John de Wolfe reluctantly rose from near the brazier and pulled his cloak tightly around him, fixing the upper corner to his opposite shoulder with a large silver pin and clasp. He pulled on a felt coif, a close-fitting helmet that covered his ears and tied under the chin.