The Lost Prophecies

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘Come on! Freezing or not, it’s hanging day,’ he said brusquely. ‘We have three fellows to see off. In weather like this, they may be quite glad to go!’

  They collected their horses from the lean-to stables against the wall of the inner ward and left the castle, their steeds treading cautiously on the icy surface of the steep slope down to the East Gate. With the coroner on his old warhorse Odin and Gwyn on his big brown mare, Thomas looked a poor third as he rode awkwardly on his thin nag behind them. It was not that long since he had been persuaded to give up riding side-saddle like a woman.

  They went around outside the walls via Southernhay to join Magdalen Street and rode away from the city towards the village of Heavitree, near where the gallows was situated, a long high crossbar supported at each end by tree-trunks. Usually, there was a crowd of spectators, with hawkers selling pasties and sweetmeats, but today the icy weather had limited the onlookers to a handful of wailing relatives.

  The coroner had to attend to record the names and property of those executed, as any land or possessions of felons was forfeit to the king. Today there would be thin pickings, thought John cynically, as one of the men was a captured outlaw owning nothing but the ragged clothes he wore and the other two were little more than lads, caught stealing items worth more than twelve pence, the lower limit for the death sentence.

  De Wolfe and Gwyn sat on their horses to watch, glad of even the slight body warmth that came off the large animals, while Thomas shivered as he sat on a tree-stump at the edge of the road, his parchment roll and writing materials resting on a box.

  The three condemned men did their own shivering in the back of an ox-cart, their wrists bound to the rail behind the driver as he drove it under the three ropes hanging from the high crossbar.

  One of the half-dozen men-at-arms who had escorted the cart down from the castle shouted out the names to Thomas, as he untied the men and made them stand on a plank across the sides of the wagon while the hangman, who was a local butcher, placed the nooses around their necks.

  A smack on the rump of the patient ox sent the cart lumbering forward, and in a trice the three victims were kicking spasmodically in the air. The relatives of the two younger ones dashed forward and dragged down on their thrashing legs, to shorten the agony of strangulation, but the lonely outlaw had to suffer the dance of death for several more minutes.

  The sensitive Thomas always averted his gaze and concentrated on his writing, but John and Gwyn watched impassively, having seen far worse deaths a thousand times over, in battles and massacres from Ireland to Palestine. When the performance was over, they left the gallows and returned to town for their dinners, for it was approaching noon. The coroner went back to his house in Martin’s Lane, one of the many entrances to the cathedral Close, and sat at table in his gloomy hall with his equally gloomy wife Matilda. In spite of a large fire burning in the hearth, the high chamber, which stretched up to the roof beams, was almost as cold as the lane outside, and his stocky wife wore a fur-lined pelisse over her woollen gown and linen surcoat.

  Conversation was always difficult, as Matilda rarely spoke except to nag him about his drinking, womanizing and frequent absences from home, although it was she who had persuaded him to take on the coroner’s appointment as a step up in the hierarchy of Devon’s important people. He knew that his description of today’s hangings would be of no interest to her, but he thought he might divert her with the news of another find of treasure. Matilda’s main concerns were food, drink, fine clothes and, above all, the worship of the Almighty, but money was also acceptable as a topic of interest. Like the others, she remarked on the frequency of the discoveries in recent months.

  ‘These are all part of the ill-gotten gains of those Saxons, I suppose,’ she said loftily.

  Although she had been born in Devon and had only once visited distant relatives across the Channel, she considered herself a full-blooded Norman lady and looked down on the conquered natives with disdain. One of her major regrets was being married to a man who, although a Norman knight and former Crusader, had a mother who was half-Welsh, half-Cornish.

  ‘I hear that a number of priests have been searching the cathedral archives, hoping to find another parchment leading to a hoard like that found in Alphington churchyard,’ said John, carefully avoiding the fact that it was Thomas who had told him. Even more than her dislike of Saxons, Matilda detested his clerk for being a perverted priest, even though his unfrocking had been reversed when the allegations that he had indecently assaulted a girl pupil in the cathedral school in Winchester were proved to be false.

  ‘Good luck to them,’ she declared firmly. ‘The Church should benefit as much as possible from the riches of those heathens!’

  Her husband forbore to point out that the Saxons had been Christians for centuries before the pagan Viking fathers of the Normans ever set foot in Normandy.

  Mary, their cook and maid-of-all-work, came in from her kitchen-shed in the back yard to clear their wooden bowls of mutton stew and to place trenchers before each of them on the scrubbed oak boards of the table. These were stale slabs of yesterday’s barley bread on to which Mary slid thick slices of fat bacon with a heap of fried onions alongside. In these winter months, the range of available vegetables and meat was very limited, and most were stored or preserved from the previous autumn, as were the wrinkled apples that were offered as dessert, supplemented by dried figs and raisins imported from southern Aquitaine.

  Eating was a serious business, and de Wolfe did not attempt to reopen the conversation until they had finished and were sitting on each side of the fire with a pewter cup of Anjou wine apiece.

  ‘This treasure today will certainly go to the king, as it was found inside Rougemont,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘The bloody bishop won’t get his hands on this lot!’

  Matilda scowled at him from under the fur rim of the velvet cap she wore against the cold. ‘It would do far more good in the coffers of the cathedral,’ she snapped. ‘It will be wasted on more troops and arms for Richard to fight that futile war against France. Better if he came back to England and tended to his own dominions!’

  John headed her off by mentioning the Chief Justiciar, as he knew Matilda revered the archbishop almost as much as the Pope. ‘Hubert Walter does an excellent job in Richard’s stead. He has been a good friend to us over the years.’

  He knew this would mollify his wife, who loved to think that she was close to the high and mighty. Hubert Walter had been the Lionheart’s second-in-command in the Holy Land, and de Wolfe had earned his friendship and respect there during the Crusade. Having adroitly warmed up his wife’s mood, if not her body, he finished his wine and rose to his feet. ‘I must go back to Rougemont now. There is an inquest to be held on that treasure.’

  ‘And I will be at my devotions in St Olave’s Church for much of today, John,’ declared Matilda as he left.

  ‘And after the inquest I will be down at the Bush Inn visiting my mistress!’ said John – though he said it under his breath after he had shut the door behind him.

  Unsurprisingly, the jury at the short inquest decided that the finds from the new well were treasure-trove, as the original owner must have buried them deliberately in the expectation that he would one day recover them – as opposed to an accidental loss from a hole in a man’s purse or pocket. In that case, the booty would belong to the actual finder, but obviously this could not apply to a sackful of coins and jewellery. Thomas de Peyne had recorded the findings on his rolls, to be presented to the king’s justices when they eventually arrived in Exeter to hold the next Eyre of Assize. When the proceedings were finished, he went back to the cathedral to get on with his other work. The archives and library were also the scriptorium and exchequer of the cathedral, where clerks laboriously wrote out all manner of documents, from orders of services to the financial accounts of the diocese.

  The library formed the upper floor of the Chapter House, a wooden building adjacent to the huge c
hurch, where the daily meetings of the Chapter were held. This was the controlling body of the cathedral, consisting of the twenty-four canons, who included the four archdeacons, as it would be some years before Exeter followed other cathedrals in appointing a dean.

  The benches for the members were on the ground floor, below the lectern from which a ‘chapter’ of either the Gospels or the Rule of St Benedict was read, giving the meeting its name.

  In the corner was a steep stairway up which Thomas de Peyne now climbed to the large chamber that contained the mass of documents which he had the task of organizing. A dozen high desks filled the centre of the room, around a charcoal brazier which stood on a slab of slate on the wooden floor. Its heat barely warmed the atmosphere, as the shutters on the un-glazed window openings were wide open to admit light to the handful of shivering clerks who were working at the desks. Around the walls were sloping shelves on which to rest the heavy books, the more valuable of which were chained to the wall, such as the Exon version of King William’s Domesday Book. Other shelves and pigeonholes contained a mass of parchment rolls, and a number of boxes and chests on the floor were filled with more documents.

  Thomas stood and stared at the collection with a mixture of pride and exasperation. An intelligent man, he had been schooled in Winchester and was unusually well informed about all manner of topics, from history to theology, from geography to the classics. He was delighted to be given a free run of all these literary treasures, but the task of putting them all in order was a daunting prospect. Many of the smaller tracts and loose parchments had never been listed, and Thomas suspected that some of the boxes below the shelves had not been opened in decades.

  He had appropriated a corner desk to himself, where he had begun the marathon job of cataloguing each item before putting them in order on the upper shelves. One of his problems was that he could never resist reading through anything that seemed interesting, which slowed down his progress considerably, even though it added to his already compendious knowledge. Now he settled himself on the high stool at his desk and began sorting through the pile of documents that he had selected the previous day, working steadily for the next hour.

  ‘How are your labours going, Thomas?’ A deep voice dragged him from his efforts to read the crabbed Latin script of a long-dead priest who had listed the donations for the building of a shrine in the cathedral some sixty years before. The speaker was Jordan le Brent, the canon who acted as archivist and master of the scriptorium. He was an amiable, elderly man with a devotion to learning and history similar to that of the coroner’s clerk.

  ‘Well enough, sir, though slowly,’ replied Thomas. ‘At least we seem to have at last been spared all those who came searching for maps to buried treasure!’

  The older man shook his tonsured head ruefully. ‘Perhaps not, my son. This new find we heard about today might well fire up even more interest in hidden silver.’

  Thomas crossed himself fervently. ‘Dear God, I hope not! They have disturbed enough of my papers already, scrabbling through all this.’ He waved a hand at the dusty shelves and the mouldering parchments.

  ‘The lust for silver and gold seems ingrained in mankind,’ pondered the old canon. ‘No wonder greed is classed as one of the seven deadly sins. Even my own brethren are not immune, for I found one of my fellow canons rooting through the shelves yesterday, when you were away on coroner’s business.’

  He avoided naming the person, but Thomas knew that many of the canons were fond of an expensive lifestyle, far removed from the austere rules laid down by St Benedict and St Chrodegang.

  ‘We should limit those who can have access to our archives, canon,’ said Thomas earnestly. ‘Some of these old parchments are brittle and faded. They could be damaged beyond repair and much information about olden days be lost for ever.’

  Jordan le Brent nodded slowly. ‘I agree that we should keep out the clerks of burgesses and merchants, but we cannot bar clergy in the upper orders. But I will ask the proctors to keep an eye on the place at night and make sure the door is locked.’

  He wandered away and Thomas went back to his pleasant labours.

  Meanwhile, down in the Bush Inn in Idle Lane, where the city sloped steeply down towards the river, John de Wolfe was enjoying a quart of best ale and the company of his mistress Nesta, the pretty Welsh redhead who owned the tavern.

  He sat at his usual table near the firepit, where the cold weather was being defeated by a large heap of crackling logs, spitting sparks on to the floor rushes which had frequently to be stamped out by old Edwin, the one-eyed potman. Nesta was taking a few minutes off from harrying her two maids, who were cooking in the kitchen-shed at the back of the inn. John told her all the details of the find of treasure that morning, and inevitably she also brought up the curious fact that so many finds had been made in recent weeks. He explained about the Saxon panic of a century or more ago, when much of their wealth had hurriedly been hidden in the hope of saving it from the invaders.

  ‘But why is it being found now, for it’s been lying there for long enough, God knows!’ she said.

  They spoke in Welsh, her native language and one that John had learned at his mother’s knee. In fact, Gwyn’s native Cornish was close enough for all three to converse in the Celtic tongue, as did a sizeable proportion of the country people in both Devon and Cornwall, who spoke Western Welsh.

  ‘Such hoards have been turning up regularly for many years, Nesta,’ he said. ‘The one just before Christ Mass was a chance find, but then this note being found in the cathedral that led to the discovery in Alphington has started a kind of madness amongst the population. A number of mounds have been dug into around the city, but all they found were ancient pots and a few bones.’

  ‘Thomas tells me that many people have been hampering his work in the cathedral by demanding to search the books there,’ she said rather indignantly, for the little priest was a favourite of hers.

  ‘Thank God so few can read!’ said John fervently. ‘Otherwise half the population of Exeter would be rooting through the archives.’

  Only about one in a hundred were literate, this being confined to those in holy orders, both ordained priests and deacons, as well as those in the lower clerical orders, who also provided the clerks to merchants and the authorities.

  De Wolfe dallied at the tavern for as long as he could, enjoying the company of his vivacious lover, but as early dusk fell he had to tear himself away to go home, where he would be expected for supper, a newfangled idea of Matilda’s, who always wished to be abreast of new fashions. The noon dinner was most people’s main meal of the day, but she insisted on eating again in the early evening, as did the nobility.

  As he left, he eyed the ladder at the back of the taproom which went up to the loft, where Nesta had a small bedroom.

  ‘I’ll try to get back later this evening,’ he said hopefully. ‘I’m sure Brutus will be ready for a walk by then!’

  At about the eighth hour, Matilda went up as usual to her solar at the back of the house, to be prepared for bed by her snivelling French maid Lucille. This was the signal for John to snap his fingers for his old hound Brutus, who was his invariable alibi for nocturnal expeditions down to the Bush. They left through the heavy front door, which opened directly on to the lane, and the dog ambled off to visit his favourite smells and mark them with a cocked leg.

  The coroner’s house in Martin’s Lane was a mere twenty paces from one of the entrances to the cathedral Close, the wide space around the huge church. The narrow passage connected the Close to High Street, and John’s was one of the only two dwellings on the west side, a farrier’s stables lying opposite. John had on his heaviest cloak and pulled a broad-brimmed pilgrim’s hat low over his black hair, as there was a keen east wind. Though there was a curfew after dark, this ‘couvre-feu’ applied mainly to damping down domestic fires for the night, as in a city where most of the buildings were wooden, a severe conflagration was an ever-present danger. People still went abo
ut the streets, though tonight few ventured out into the icy conditions and the almost total darkness, as heavy cloud covered the moon.

  As he entered the Close, the only light came from a flickering pitch brand stuck in an iron ring over the distant Bear Gate. However, de Wolfe was familiar with every step of the way and set off down the diagonal path that threaded through the grave mounds, open burial pits and piles of rubbish that disfigured the area. He could hear Brutus scrabbling after something a few yards away, where a rat was probably rooting in a pile of discarded offal. The only other light John ever saw here on his nocturnal adventures was the dim lantern of a cathedral proctor doing his rounds. These were men in the lower clerical orders who patrolled the precinct and tried to keep order, as the Close was ecclesiastical territory, a ‘city within a city’ where the writ of the sheriff and burgesses did not run, the ultimate authority being the bishop.

  Tonight he saw no one and was past the great West Front of the cathedral and halfway to the Bear Gate when he heard a cry from somewhere on his left. Immediately, his dog gave a sharp bark, then a deep growl. John was familiar with every nuance of Brutus’s voice and knew that something was seriously amiss.

  Then he saw a faint flicker of yellow light from the direction of the South Tower and a crash as if something had flung a door back against a wall. He began walking as fast as he could in the darkness, being careful of obstacles as this was not one of his usual paths. Brutus had no such problem and bounded ahead, still growling. Suddenly, the growl turned into a yelp, and, somewhere in the gloom ahead, pounding footsteps hammered on the flagstones. They rapidly receded towards the far exit into Southgate Street, and all John could see was a momentary glimpse of a figure as it passed beneath the flaming torch and vanished from sight. Pursuit was pointless and instead he hurried as fast as he could towards the light, using it as a marker. With only a few stumbles, he reached it to find a horn lantern on its side, but the candle still lit within. Picking it up, he found himself at the door of the Chapter House, which was wide open.