Pistoleer: HellBurner

by Smith, Skye

  Robert was silent, thinking about what old Cleff had just said. Cleff was illiterate, but one of the wisest and most knowledgeable men he had ever met. He ignored Edward and looked towards Oliver in hopes of a comment, but the man was sitting still, lost in thought, as if stunned or dazed by the elder's wisdom.

  Since no one else spoke, Robert continued. "Even if there was theft, what is the value of those apples? The market value of unpolished apples in season. What, perhaps a ha'penny a pound. Certainly she had picked less than eight pence worth, so even under the King's law the theft was petty and no harsh punishment is due by that law."

  "I caught her hand-haebbende on my land. As the lord I can exact a punishment immediately,” argued Edward.

  "You are lord of nothing,” Oliver hissed, now drawn out of his own thoughts by the thoughts of his enemy, "until your bastard father dies. And the hand-having ruling only forgives violence done to stop the criminal from escaping. You were using it to terrorize this lass into spreading her legs for you. And she - a girl underage. You should be horsewhipped."

  Before Edward's anger could be vented, Robert spoke. "Do you deny it, Edward? Do you deny trying to trick a minor into servicing your lust? Choose your words carefully, for there are other witnesses."

  Edward shrugged. "She was asking for it. Look how she is dressed. Bare arms, showing ankles, nothing under her shift, and she is comely enough to seduce a bishop."

  "Don't blame her,” Daniel interrupted and pointed to Oliver’s somber clothes. "Blame the Puritans. They demand that women be covered head to toe like, like ... nuns. Teesa's ankles only looked so good because men never see women's ankles anymore." He turned to Edward and hissed, "And don't you dare tell us that it is your right as a noble to sample the flesh of peasants. Say that and this crew will carve you up."

  Teesa was suddenly very aware of how her breasts pushed her shift out, so she crossed her arms over them to hide them from all of these men. "May I go home know?" she asked.

  Robert stared at Edward and then Oliver, and then at the two very nervous drainers. "I see much misbehavior and bad judgement here, but no crime. Luckily, no crime. Do you all forgive each other for the misbehavior? Will you all swear not to make trouble for each other with the courts for what has just happened here?"

  The two drainers were quick to speak and to swear. Then so did Oliver. Robert stared at Teesa and cocked his head to hurry her answer. She swore it and nudged Peter so he would also. That confirmed, he turned to look at Edward.

  Edward stared back with contempt. "But she awmost bit off my tongue,” he complained.

  "Self defense,” Robert told him. "I would be most interested to hear how you would explain to a court how a child came to bite your tongue." He grinned at Heath. "Is that what you want; for this to be heard in court by everyone?"

  Edward looked over at Oliver with an expression of pure hatred, but then relented and shrugged. "I so swear. Where is my pistol? I hope it isn't ruined." He motioned to Tom to fetch his pistol.

  "Peter,” Cleff called out, "take Teesa home and tell the women of Wellenhay that the Freisburn is home for the winter. That is, after we sell our cargo in Cambridge." Teesa needed no encouragement. She turned towards her punt, but then had a second thought and instead turned toward the apple tree.

  "If I am forgiven, then the apples are mine,” she told everyone. In her present state of dishevelment, and with the crew and these gents looking on, the last thing Cleff wanted was for her to lift her skirts to cradle apples. He told his crew to pick them for her. The tall men made short work of it.

  With the floor of her punt now covered with the best of the apples, she stepped onto the rear platform and loosened her pole and waited impatiently for Peter to say his fare thee wells to all of the tall men now munching apples underneath the nearly bare tree. Oliver called out to her to wait for a moment.

  Oliver turned to Cleff and asked, "Do you mind if I travel on your ship to Cambridge?" The elder nodded, so he called to Peter and asked him to take his punt back to the dock at Ely. He was careful not to look at Edward Heath, the man who had been his downfall in Huntingdon a decade ago. The man whose father had beggared him with one ruling from the Privy Council for speaking out against the King's misuse of the enclosure laws to privatize common land. They had stolen his grandfather's inn from him to pay the bond of good behaviour. He did not look back as he scrambled aboard the sturdy little ship.

  Oliver had no real reason to go to Cambridge, but his mind was still racing and his ears were still ringing with Cleff's words of wisdom. Suddenly he felt like the gloom of the past decade was lifting from his mind and a weight was lifting from his shoulders. He needed to talk further with this elder about Frisian customary law. Just as the ancient Frisian language was the mother of English, so would the ancient traditions of Frisian law be the mother of English laws.

  Daniel stood by the shoreside gunnels and called a warning to the Dutch engineer in his own tongue, "Keep a leash on that lord of yours, or better yet, send him back to London. This crew is home for the winter, and now they know the faces of those behind the local enclosures."

  Cornelius nodded as he watched the Fen Frisians clamber aboard the ship and push off from the bank. Heath was an idiot. What he did today out of sinful lust could have cost all of them their lives. These clansmen were not poor cottagers living from crop to crop. They were tough-looking men, men of the sea, men of the world, and well-armed. Though they claimed they were traders taking cargo to the markets of Cambridge, who was to say that they did not pirate or smuggle that cargo?

  He must find out where Wellenhay actually was, and make sure that no trenching was done anywhere near it. These men would not just play football to save their common pastures from enclosure. They would do violence, secret violence, deadly violence.

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  THE PISTOLEER - HellBurner by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14

  Chapter 2 - A visit to Cambridge in November 1638

  Standing at the gunnels of the Freisburn alongside the tall oarsmen, Oliver felt as if he were a child standing amongst adults. Not only were these men fit and fair, but they had arms and shoulders like wrestlers. Years of pulling on oars would do that to a man. They were all taller than he, though he was not a small man. The only man on the ship shorter than himself was Robert Blake, who was perhaps a hand shy of six feet. Though Robert was well-accepted by these men, he was not of their blood.

  Robert did not feel like a child amongst adults. Since there was nothing he could do about his short stature, he had long ago accepted and come to terms with it. He pushed through the tall crew with an easy gait and grinned at their praise of how he had defused the issue with Heath. During his years in Holland with Daniel he had traveled, and supped, and drank with each of these men at one time or another. When he reached Oliver's side he stopped and stood beside him and muttered, "Using football matches to defy the king's men. Was that your idea?"

  It was a question that Oliver did not want to answer. Helping the Fen folk resist the drainers and the privatizations had already landed him in front of the King's Star Chamber, and they had forced a bond-of-good-behaviour onto him which had cost him his worth. The justices had warned him that any further involvement on his part would cost him more than wealth. With a large family to keep safe, silence was the only prudent answer to such a question posed by a stranger.

  "I mean, it's brilliant,” Robert continued. "Football. How else can you lawfully assemble a crowd that includes entire villages of folk? And of course it would be expected that both sides of the match would pitch in and level the common before it was used for the match. By right they could pull down dikes to fill in trenches, so long as the common was not yet claimed through enclosure. Brilliant."

  Oliver kept his silence.

  "And what could a magistrate or a sheriff do about it? It would be a lawful assembly on public land with no legal reason to read the riot act against them. Besides, they would loo
k like fools if they tried to stop a football match. Worse, the footballers might have dragged them into the 'friendly' game and pummeled them. If the sheriff complained to the courts, then the knowledge of this football strategy would spread like wildfire across the kingdom and the king's privatizations would be blocked in every village. Even the king would have no recourse. Banning football and footballers would be the end of him."

  "It was my son Richard's idea,” Oliver finally spoke. "He is twelve now and loves the game. Whenever a villager needs a lot of free labour, like for raising a shed, or moving a family, .... well, Richard and the other lads organize a match to bring the folk out. All I did was to suggest a bigger match with bigger footballers for a bigger job. Filling in trenches is a lot of work, and to do it in an afternoon takes a lot of strong backs. In truth, it only caught on because the local men would rather spend a Sunday on a football pitch than in a church."

  "Brilliant,” Robert repeated his praise. "Now that I know of it, it seems so obvious. What better way to assemble a mob on short notice?"

  Once the ship was under oar again, Oliver pulled the elder Cleff to one side and they sat together on the steps to the small stern castle and talked. Daniel went and stood with the bow watch to memorize the bars and inlets of the river, since he was expected to become the ship's master once Cleff retired. On the trip over from Holland, Robert, who had once been the master of a ship, had been awed by Cleff's knowledge of ships and the sea. Now he sat with Oliver and Cleff and listened to the elder's explanation of how the Fen villages were governed before the Normans had arrived and messed everything up.

  "In each village the folk elected twelve eldermen to rule,” Cleff explained. "The eldermen would then elect one of them to be the village spokesman, who nowadays would be called the mayor. In a separate election the warriors elected the village warlord, who would lead them if there was any fighting to be done, and the elder women would elect a woman as their spokeswoman.

  Beyond the village, the warlords of many villages would gather and elect one of them to be the warlord of the shire, the shire reeve. These shire reeves would gather and elect one of them to be the jarl, who nowadays would be called an earl. The jarls would gather to elect one of them to be the king."

  "So,” Oliver said thoughtfully, "it was a kind of democracy. Was the king elected for life?"

  "Certainly not. None of the elected men were,” the elder told him. "Their role lasted only until those who elected them lost confidence in them. In theory anyway, for usually that would lead to bloody arguements."

  "Were the positions hereditary?" asked Oliver.

  "If you mean did the elected man's family still control the role if the elected man was wounded or died, then no and yes. By tradition no, by force of arms or wealth, yes. But it was all different back in those days, because the elected men were just the trustees of the land, not the owners of the land."

  "I don't understand."

  "Take the king. He sat on the throne, and wore a crown, but that crown was just a symbol of the true crown. The true crown was the God-given wealth of all of the land in the kingdom. He didn't own that land like the king owns land today. He was just the chief trustee and the chief magistrate in the highest court. It was the same with the reeves and mayors. They did not own the land of the village. The land was held in-common except for the land that an occupied home stood upon."

  "I still don't understand."

  The elder sighed. The two men listening to his words were both educated men, university men. Oliver from the colleges of Cambridge and Robert from those of Oxford. He feared that eventually he would say something that would open him up to their ridicule.

  He chose his words carefully and tried to explain it again. "Take this ship. I am the captain but I do not own the ship. The clan owns the ship and the crew elected me captain. The crew have families and animals and planted fields at home, but the fields are owned by the clan.

  If a man is lost overboard, then what becomes of the fields he worked? His family has the right to keep working them. If no one works them, then it would again become in-common and some other clansman could petition to work them."

  "Ah, now I understand,” Oliver said softly, "and that explains what you said to Heath about the orchard. The orchard was on common land, and was not being worked. The apple tree was a gift from God, and so a gift to all. The fruit therefore belongs to them that laboured for it."

  "Aye, close enough." The old man smiled and hoped he could now stop talking. This curious man was the Abbey's tithe collector and Cleff had a widowed sister who leased a farm from the Abbey and was behind in her rent. He noticed that Oliver had gone very quiet and now had a beaming smile on his face as if he were a village idiot touched by the goddess.

  Oops, he was glad he hadn't said that out loud. These two men by their words and dress were Puritans. They would not approve of folk that did not accept the Puritan teachings about the desert gods of the Holy Lands as read from their version of Holy Scriptures. He looked around at the endless wetlands and shrugged. What good were the teachings of a desert god to folk who lived in a marsh?

  "What are you thinking, Oliver?" Robert asked. "You have a look on your face like you just invented the wheel."

  "Oh, just that a lot of my old beliefs just clicked into place," Oliver replied. "I have always thought that our laws have become unbalanced over the centuries and the result is that a few people own everything, while the rest of us work like dogs and cannot get ahead. Cleff has just pointed out that private ownership of productive land was not normal in Britain before the kings knelt to the Pope and adopted his Roman way of land ownership.

  It makes me think that perhaps the kings, the aristocracy, the nobles, the bishops, the abbots, all of them, are nothing more than land thieves in fancy clothing with well-paid lawyers. The lawyers twisted the traditional common laws, so that shared in-common land could be privatized into great estates owned by the few.

  My mind is racing through what I learned at college and I see it all so clearly now. The Conqueror removed the distinction between king and crown and then methodically claimed the common-crown land as his own. Oh my, of course ... his Forest Law. It was the outright theft of in-common land on a massive scale.

  The aristocracy followed his lead and their lawyers perverted the spirit of the traditional enclosure law. Originally the enclosure law was meant to allow young families to claim enough land from the common to build a home upon. Instead, the same law has been stretched and twisted in order to claim vast stretches of common land for the rich. It was all theft. Theft by legal trickery."

  "Aye,” Cleff agreed, "and hereabouts the lords are now waving pieces of paper at the courts so that they can claim the very land that the our clans have worked for countless generations. And they win in court because the clans' rights to the land are by oral tradition, so they don't have any pieces of paper to wave back at the court."

  "These papers that the lawyers wave, would they be deeds of title?" asked Oliver.

  "Aye, they wave deeds, but they are actually misdeeds. Written deeds are just proof that someone has stolen in-common land from the rest of us,” the old man muttered, looking around nervously to see who was listening. "If I were king, anyone who waved a deed at a court would be hung as a thief."

  They were all silent for a while until Robert told Oliver, "Stealing a little bit at a time from the many is the way to become rich without being hung as a thief. In Amsterdam the bankers have perfected theft from the masses in the way that they charge interest and commissions for trading shares on the stock market. Think about it. When a banker takes a tiny cut of a coin spent on a share, then neither the buyer nor the seller of the share complains. But there are thousands of shares traded every day by thousands of folk. It doesn't matter how tiny is the cut, eventually they add up to full coins. Eventually the bankers become rich in the coins of the folk without ever being accused of theft.

  And what court would listen to any one person who
charged a banker with theft? Can you imagine one person taking a merchant bank to court for the theft of say, a tenth of a penny? Yet if the banker does it a thousand thousand times, they have actually thieved thousands of pounds from thousands of folk, and yet none of the folk have a claim worthy of making a case in court."

  "When you think about it,” Oliver replied thoughtfully, "the Normans did the same thing in Britain, but with land. The land they thieved did not belong to any one person but to all people. How could any one person make a case in court, especially against an aristocracy so willing to butcher any troublemakers?"

  These were sobering thoughts that depressed Robert, but Oliver laughed with glee at his new-found way of viewing them. When scolded about his misplaced laughter, Oliver quietened and said, "I have this grand idea in my head, but I have not yet thought it through or phrased it, and yet I know it will work and it will be grand."

  "What is this grand idea, then?" Robert asked. "A way to make as much money as the Dutch bankers? Count me in."

  "No, a way to collar King Charles,” Oliver laughed nervously.

  "I'll have no treason spoken on this ship,” Cleff told him. "The crew all swear to speak like republicans in the Netherlands and like royalists in England, and to never mix the two."

  Oliver, however, had an urgent need to speak his thoughts, just so he could hear if they rang true. "Parliament must again separate the crown from the king, like it was before the Conqueror. Hmm, that sounds too simplistic. I don't mean the crown on his head, I mean the crown that was, er ... is the common wealth of the kingdom. Parliament should be the trustee of the common wealth so that no king can never again assume that he is the owner."

  "Hah!" Robert laughed aloud. "I don't trust Parliament any more than I trust the king. What we need is to elect an honest protector of the common wealth. One whose only function is to make sure that the common wealth is used wisely to benefit the kingdom and all of its folk. A protector who is not a politician, nor an aristocrat. Someone that everyone trusts, and who will refuse to make the role hereditary."