The Witch Hunter

by Bernard Knight

  It was midday now and John announced that he was seeking his dinner at the Bush, as Matilda was spending the day with her sickly cousin in Fore Street. It was an opportunity for him to sneak away to his mistress without suffering the abrasive recriminations of his wife. Thomas decided to stay in the chamber and dry off, claiming he had some cases to copy on to the parchment rolls that must be presented to the justices when they came to the Assize of Gaol Delivery in a couple of months’ time. John privately thought that the clerk relished the chance of his own company and the opportunity to read in peace from his precious Vulgate. He lived on sufferance in one of the canons’ houses in the Close, sleeping on a straw mattress in the passageway of the servants’ quarters, where there was no privacy at all.

  Gwyn went off to eat, drink and play dice with the off-duty men-at-arms in the guardroom below and the coroner strode off towards Idle Lane. It was raining steadily, but not the drenching downpour that had soaked Thomas. He had borrowed Gwyn’s tattered shoulder-cape with the pointed hood, the worn leather keeping most of the rain off, though the skirt of his long grey tunic and his boots were soon wet and muddied.

  At the tavern, he found that Edwin the potman had just lit a fire in the stone hearth, as a number of other patrons were in varying stages of dampness and needed to dry off, even though the summer afternoon was still warm, in spite of the change in the weather.

  John stretched out his legs to the blazing logs and watched as steam began to wreathe up from his clothing. Almost immediately, Nesta appeared with a jug of ale and sat down on the bench alongside him. ‘Your boots will split if you dry them too quickly!’ she warned, giving him a quick kiss on his stubbled cheek.

  ‘It’s a waste of time anyway, they’ll be wet again soon enough.’

  He explained about the journey to Cadbury that afternoon, to examine an alleged find of coins. After assuring him that his dinner was on its way, she asked him to explain about treasure trove. Nesta was an intelligent woman, with a healthy curiosity about a whole range of matters and John delighted in pandering to her inquisitiveness.

  ‘Why should a coroner be involved?’ she asked. ‘I thought your task was to investigate deaths and evil things like that.’

  He took a pull at his ale and shook his head. ‘It’s mainly about money, good woman. Though it’s true that death and injury is a big part of the work, that’s because there’s silver to be gained out of it for the King.’

  He explained again that Richard the Lionheart was always short of money, especially since Henry of Germany had demanded the vast ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for Richard’s release from capture. John still felt guilty about this, as he had been one of the small bodyguard that had travelled with the King through Austria, when their ship had been wrecked on the shores of Dalmatia, coming back from the Holy Land. They had been ambushed at an inn in Erdberg and John had never forgiven himself for having been absent, looking for fresh horses, when the Mayor of Vienna had burst in with his men and captured Richard.

  ‘So the Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, was given the job of raising the money – and he has to keep on finding it, now that the King wages these incessant campaigns against Philip of France. One of the ways he invented – apart from taxing the barons, the Church and everyone else – was to bring back the old Saxon office of coroner, to drive more cases into the royal courts, instead of them going to the county courts, the manor courts and the rest. And as you well know, any fault in the process of dealing with the legal process leads to fines, all of which goes into the King’s treasury.’

  Nesta had heard most of this before, but still wanted to know more about treasure trove. Just then, one of her maids arrived at the trestle with a wooden board on which was a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread supporting a slab of boiled bacon, with two fried eggs on top. A wooden bowl contained cooked beans and peas, which John heaped on to slices of the meat which he cut off with his dagger. Between chewing and swallowing ale to wash it down, he explained about finds of treasure.

  ‘There’s a great deal of valuable metal hidden about the countryside, especially since the Battle of Hastings. Very many Saxons hid their wealth to keep it from us Normans – then they were either killed or died before they could recover it.’

  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth to remove the bacon fat.

  ‘I have heard of much older coinage being found, even going back to the Romans. But whatever it is, it has to be either gold or silver to be reckoned as treasure trove. Jewel stones don’t count, unless they are set in precious metal.’

  ‘But who does it belong to?’ persisted Nesta, her big eyes round as she looked up at her dark and angular lover.

  ‘That’s why there must be an inquest on the finds, to decide if the finder or the owner of the land or the King gets the value. There are rules, but I rely on Thomas to put me right on the details. You know what a mine of information he is, I’d be lost without him when it comes to fiddling details.’

  Some ripe plums and an apple rounded off the meal and as there was no time to climb the ladder for a dalliance in the loft, he had to be satisfied with another quart of ale and a relaxed gossip with his mistress – though she was constantly interrupted by either Edwin or the maids to settle some dispute in the kitchen or a problem among the patrons.

  He asked her whether she had heard anything about the strange arrest of Alice Ailward by the cathedral proctors, but Nesta had no more information than himself. ‘It will be a dismal day if any good-wife who gives a potion or a poultice to a neighbour, gets herself locked up for it.’

  She sounded worried, and John wondered whether her own activities in that direction were more extensive than she had admitted to him. Nesta was a tender-hearted soul and he knew that she often went out of her way to help those less fortunate than herself. Beggars were often to be found around the back gate, where she unfailingly let them have the old trenchers and scraps of food left over from the kitchen. He suspected that the families in nearby Smythen Street and the upper part of Priest Street were quite familiar with her Welsh folk cures for a wide range of illnesses.

  ‘You be careful yourself,’ he admonished her. ‘Lay low with your cunning-woman activities, until this stupidity has blown over.’

  He left the alehouse before the vesper bell and was helping Andrew the farrier to saddle up his great horse Odin when it finally pealed out from the cathedral tower. The rain was now an intermittent drizzle and there were gaps in the cloud where scraps of blue sky suggested that maybe it would clear up towards evening.

  When he reached the North Gate, Gwyn was waiting on his big brown mare and, just outside, Thomas was perched side-saddle on a small cob, all Gwyn’s efforts to get him to ride like a man having failed. Alongside him was Henry Stork, the reeve from Cadbury, a leathery, taciturn man of about fifty, who spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. He had said little about the discovery, other than it was on the land of Robert Hereward and had been found in a mound by one of Robert’s villeins.

  The four set off northwards along the road to Crediton, the rain causing little problem to men used to travelling in all weathers. The main problem was the surface of the track, which after a couple of weeks of drought, had now been converted into a sticky red paste by the recent downpour. The mud was not yet deep but was slippery and occasionally one of the horses would slide and lose its footing in the rutted surface. Even at a cautious trot, the eight miles did not take long to cover. They left the Crediton road soon after leaving the city and followed narrow tracks to the village of Thorveton, then on through mixed forest and cultivated land to Cadbury, a small hamlet in deeply undulating country just west of the River Exe.

  The rain had stopped by the time they arrived and broken cloud allowed shafts of sunlight to draw steaming wreaths of vapour from the pasture land around the village.

  ‘It’s but a small place, Crowner,’ grunted Henry Stork, as they walked their horses into the grassy area in the middle of the haml
et, where the track divided into two, the right-hand one going on to Tiverton, a few miles farther on.

  ‘You say the manor is held by Robert Hereward?’ asked de Wolfe, as he slid from Odin’s high back.

  ‘Indeed, but he doesn’t own the land. He has Saxon blood on his grandmother’s side, they used to hold it. But they became Norman when William de Pouilly’s son married into the family a century ago.’

  ‘So who owns the freehold?’ persisted the coroner. This was not just idle curiosity; the resolution of a find of treasure trove needed all the information available. His black eyebrows went up sharply when the reeve told him that the ultimate landlord was Sir Richard de Revelle, sheriff of the county and a substantial landowner around Tiverton. His wife, the glacial Lady Eleanor, lived in his main manor near there, refusing to stay with her husband in the grim and draughty castle of Rougemont.

  ‘Does the sheriff know of this find?’ he asked curtly.

  Henry shook his head. ‘I was charged by Sir Robert’s bailiff to give him a message, but at Rougemont I was told that he had just left Exeter for Revelstoke and will be away for at least four days.’

  Revelstoke was one of Richard’s manors near Plympton, on the coast in the far west of Devon.

  They had stopped outside a small alehouse, a hut of wattle and daub with a ragged thatched roof, slightly larger than the dozen tofts clustered around the centre of the village. A steep hill rose behind, with some ancient walls hidden in the turf at the top. On each side, strip fields ran up the sloping sides of the valley, the oats and rye beginning to brown up after a week of hot sun, though still not ripened sufficiently for harvesting. Strips of green alternated with the grain, where beans and peas were looking healthier. As John stretched his aching back, his gaze travelled around the horizon, where dark forest began beyond the waste ground that surrounded the cultivated areas. About a quarter of a mile to his left, he saw a hump in the pasture, just before the trees began. It was about the height of a cottage, smooth and covered in grass.

  ‘Is that the mound?

  The reeve bobbed his head. ‘It is, Crowner. Maybe you’d like a drink and a bite to eat while you talk to the man who found the valuables?’

  Gwyn was through the door of the tavern before John could answer and with a wry grin, the coroner beckoned to Thomas and followed the Cornishman inside. Already a few curious villeins had gathered around the door and the reeve directed a few of them to take the horses to water. In the single room of the alehouse they sat on benches around the dead fire-pit while a young girl in a ragged smock fetched them pots of indifferent ale from a shed at the back.

  Henry Stork came back inside and in the dim light of the windowless room they saw he was followed by a muscular youth of about sixteen, who had a disfiguring purple birthmark covering one side of his face. He seemed a bright, intelligent lad, his eyes flitting from one to the other of these strangers in his village.

  ‘Simon, this is,’ said the reeve. ‘He found the stuff yesterday, when he was digging out a badger sett.’

  John caught Gwyn’s eye and he grinned. It was an unlikely tale, as mound digging was a common but illegal activity, invariably undertaken in the hope of finding treasure. De Wolfe wondered why this village had reported it, rather than keeping quiet, but maybe the surprise of actually finding treasure had unnerved the digger. He decided to bait the young man a little.

  ‘Why dig for a badger in the middle of an open pasture, boy?’

  Simon looked back innocently. ‘We’ve had our turnips dug up at night – some with claw marks on them. I saw a hole, so I thought maybe I could raise a badger if I made it a bit bigger and sent the dog down there.’

  John believed this as much as he believed that the moon was made of cheese, but decided to give the youth the benefit of the doubt. Just then, the silent girl padded barefoot into the room with a grubby board on which was a loaf cut into half a dozen chunks, together with a heap of sliced mutton. She wiped her running nose with her fingers, then handed out the bread to each of the visitors, leaving the meat board on the ring of stones around the fireplace.

  ‘So what did you find instead of your badger?’ demanded de Wolfe.

  The young man hawked in his throat and spat on the floor before replying. ‘The turf had fallen in, because there was a hollow underneath. All that bloody rain had made holes everywhere, washing out the soil below. I stuck my spade in and straightway it hit something hard.’

  ‘An old box, it was,’ broke in Henry. ‘A bit rotten, but it was oak with some iron bands, so it kept together, just about.’

  ‘Where is it now?’ asked Gwyn.

  ‘In the church, only safe place we’ve got. The parson is guarding it himself.’

  The coroner had less faith than the reeve in the honesty of parish priests, but recognised that there were few secure places in a remote hamlet like Cadbury. He drank down the rest of his ale and put the remnants of his crust down, together with the mutton, conscious that the little girl was eyeing it hungrily, waiting for them to go in the hope that something would be left for her.

  He rose and jerked his head at Thomas and the still-champing Gwyn. ‘Let’s go and look this great treasure, then.’

  Across the village green, the little Saxon church stood forlornly within its ring of old yews. It was stone built, but hardly more than a large room, with a small arched belfry perched on one end of the roof, which was made of overlapping flat stones. The inside was almost bare, a hard-packed earth floor leading up to a small apse where a table covered with a cloth did service as an altar, supporting a bronze cross and a pair of wooden candlesticks. The walls were whitewashed and some crude coloured paintings of biblical scenes were placed between the slit windows. More recent coatings of white lime had blurred the edges of some of the pictures, where the brush of a careless painter had slipped.

  Squatting on the edge of the wooden platform that supported the altar was a thin figure dressed in a rough hessian smock, belted around his waist so that the hem came above his bandy knees. Wooden-soled working shoes were on the ends of his spindly legs and the only indication that this was the parish priest and not another villein from the fields was his shaven tonsure. A long-handled shovel, its wooden blade edged with an iron strip, leaned against the wall near by, increasing the impression that this was just a bald-headed labourer.

  He climbed to his feet as the coroner’s party entered. Thomas was in the rear, crossing himself as he genuflected to the altar.

  ‘This is Michael, priest of St Mary’s, Crowner,’ said the reeve. ‘He has cared for this box since it was found.’ The priest was a slender man of about thirty, who to John’s eyes looked chronically ill, his eyes sunken in deep sockets above a wasted face where the cheekbones stuck as if in a skull.

  ‘Forgive my appearance, sir,’ he said in a surprisingly deep and firm voice. ‘But my pastoral duties in a place like this are light and I must work in the fields with my flock if we are to avoid starvation next winter, after this terrible year.’

  De Wolfe was well aware that many priests, especially in tiny parishes with a scanty living, had to work hard to feed themselves, but this man seemed to be killing himself with toil. However, this was none of his business, although he determined to ask John de Alençon when he returned to Exeter, why the inordinately rich Church seemed indifferent to the poverty of many of its servants.

  ‘You will want to see the thing that young Simon discovered. I have placed it in the aumbry for safe-keeping. It is the only place in the village that possesses a lock!’

  He led them to the north side of the semicircular apse where there was a large chest, made of blackened planks secured with large iron nails. He fished a large key from a pouch on his belt and opened the crude lock, pushing back the lid with a creak to reveal what was inside. A chalice, paten and cruet of a poor-quality mix of tin and silver were stored there between celebrations of the Mass, along with a breviary and a manual, the only sacred books the priest possessed. These had bee
n pushed to one end of the chest and de Wolfe saw that most of the space was taken up with a battered box, with crumbly soil still adhering to its rough sides.

  He motioned to the brawny Gwyn, who lifted it out with a grunt and dropped it on the edge of the dais.

  ‘Bloody heavy, that!’ he said, getting a poisonous glance from Thomas for using such language in the house of God.

  He squatted alongside the box, almost nose to nose with the coroner on the other side. Usually they adopted this pose across a corpse, so this made a novel change.

  ‘It’s just a box, not a proper chest,’ observed the Cornishman.

  The object that the lad had dug from the side of the mound was about four hands-spread long and three wide and deep. It seemed to be made of thick boards, now brittle and split, but was held together by two bands of thin beaten iron, almost completely rusted through. The remnants of a few nails were visible at the edges, where the boards had originally been butted together to make a rough box.

  The reeve stooped above them, pointing at one end. ‘We saw silver coins through that broken part, so we didn’t go any farther.’

  John again thought that the honesty of the Cadbury inhabitants was remarkable, but the next words of Michael the priest tempered his opinion a little.

  ‘I was up at the top of the fields when Simon came running from the mound. I stopped him and he took me back to show me what he had found. When we walked back to the road, we found that Robert Hereward was drinking ale after visiting his mill to collect the dues. He was the one who first saw the treasure through that crack and told us to report it straightway to you, Crowner.’