by Ian Morson
As Simon told his story of unearthly screams, sinister Jews, and bodies being dragged bloodily indoors, the prior began to calculate the benefits to himself and his church if he personally was to uncover evil in the town. It was scarce fifteen years since poor Hugh of Lincoln had been discovered, and they were already calling him Little Saint Hugh. Lincoln Cathedral was profiting mightily from the incident, so the sacrifice of children in Oxford could create a similarly lucrative opportunity for a pilgrimage. Especially if he could obtain the child’s body. Brassyngton narrowed his eyes.
‘Have you told anyone else of this matter, Simon?’
‘No, prior. I thought first of you.’
‘Good. Now, do not reveal your concerns to anyone. And I will overlook the simple matter of your.., er... difficulties with the words of the Mass.’
‘Yes, Prior Thomas.’ Simon breathed a sigh of relief. His living was safe thanks to what he had seen, and his judicious choice of confessor.
Nine
30 August, 1271
The morning did not begin well for Falconer. He had slept badly, his mind churning over the discovery of the body of the man buried in the walls of the house in Little Jewry Lane. Something was very amiss with what he had seen, but he could not recollect what it was that nibbled at the corners of his mind. A megrim then started to burgeon, causing his head to pound and making thinking an impossibility. He had lain awake stating out of the window of his solar as the moon became gradually obscured by scudding clouds. Lately, he had experienced regular headaches, and once as a result had completely forgotten his train of thought in the midst of a lecture. The subject - Aristotle’s Prior Analytics - was as familiar to him as his own palm, and he had intoned the tenets a thousand times.
‘First then take a universal negative with the terms A and B. If no B is A, neither can any A be B. For if some As - we will call them C - were B, it would not be true that.., not true that...’
Suddenly, the sequence that he had rattled off to hundreds of students refused to emerge from his brain. And a sudden shaft of a headache arrowed through his left eye. He had covered the moment by brusquely harassing one of the more recalcitrant of his students.
‘Finish the premise, Tom Youlden.’
At least he had remembered the boy’s name, if not the principle he had been instilling into unwilling brains for years.
The boy had trembled, but had fumbled his way through that which had completely escaped his domine. The thought that he might be losing his memory petrified Falconer.
It had been the early morning before he had drifted into a disturbed slumber. And now, the sound of heavy rain awoke him. If it had not, he might have slept on fitfully past the time be should have been attending to his lessons in the schools along from St Mary’s Church. He sat up, and groaned as his befuddled brain reeled. Outside his window, the sky was pewter grey, and the day barely lighter than the night that had preceded it. The rain steepled down inexorably, and Falconer knew that many students would avoid his morning lectures rather than sit cold, wet and shivering in the chilly warren of rooms that made up the university schools. He thought of Dame Elia Bassett’s memorial to her dead husband. Perhaps a collegium where clerks lived and studied together in one place was not such a bad idea after all. At least they would not have to brave the persistent rains that regularly swept along the Thames valley.
He pulled on his plain black gown, not bothering to change his undershirt. It felt cold and clammy, and he shivered.
Poking his head out of the door of his solar, he saw that one of the students who lodged at Aristotle’s Hall had carried out his duties, and left a wooden bowl outside. It contained water drawn from the cistern that stood in the narrow rear yard. It was his principle to wash every day, and set an example to the students under his charge. As well as the five shillings a year for each student he taught, he derived a few pence weekly from each of the clerks sharing the Hall. It was a living far from the riches he had imagined as a young man following the merchants’ routes across the countries of Europe, selling his services as a mercenary soldier, but it suited him. He lifted the bowl, and bore it carefully over to the table in the centre of his room, only slopping the contents once on the rush-strewn floor. He paused, held his breath and dunked his head in the water. It was freezing, and took his breath away. He gasped, and raked his wet fingers through his grizzled hair. To his chagrin, this was getting thinner by the day.
Blindly groping for a rag to dry his face, he knocked Some papers to the floor. Once he had found the rag, and dried off, he bent down to pick them up. He groaned, seeing that the splashes of water had smeared the lettering. It was a copy of a recent work by Albertus Magnus that had been brought to him from Austria. Called Speculum Astronomiae, it was a treatise on astronomy. Falconer, who, like his friend Roger Bacon, admired Albertus for his incisive mind, had expected a critical work. But the master, apparently mired down in ecclesiastical disputes, extolled the art as showing the celestial influence on man coming from God. Albertus had even been reported as preaching the latest crusade to the Holy Lands that was to have been led by King Louis.
Though Louis had died, the crusade was to go ahead. It would be funded in part by England, and would be joined by Henry’s son, Prince Edward. Albertus had thus moved to a position that Falconer could not agree with intellectually. But even though the treatise disappointed him, he hadn’t wished it to be destroyed. Every book was a precious item, and he laid the papers on his bed to dry, hoping the words would still be legible.
He stared disconsolately out of the window at the persistent rain, and decided that lectures would be cancelled for the day.
He would send Tom Youlden on an errand to inform any students who braved the weather that Master Falconer was indisposed, and that they should study the writings of Boethius.
That would keep them occupied. As for the afternoon, his cursory lectures could be given by Thomas Symon, who was his favourite pupil and already a bachelor of the university. It was about time he took some responsibility. Falconer estimated this would leave him free to pursue the matter of the headless corpse all day long. He just hoped the chancellor and his minions would not get to hear of his dereliction of duty. He had already been censured by Thomas Bek for an extended journey to Canterbury earlier in the year that ignored the rules of the university. He had made the trip for his friend Friar Roger Bacon, who was virtually incarcerated in Oxford by his Franciscan order.
It had been in pursuit of information about the Elixir, and the theory of radiating forces. Predictably, it had been a failure, and Falconer’s only consolation had been an encounter at Bermondsey Abbey on the return journey. He had met a Jewess, whose hunt for a missing son he had aided. She still intrigued him, though he imagined she and her son would by now have returned to Bordeaux whence they had come.
He sighed, stared out into the lowering sky, and began to recall his arrival in Oxford as a new regent master.
The day after Pentecost, May 1250
It was morning when William Falconer at last arrived in Oxford to take up his new post. He recalled from his previous brief sojourn a town divided - part a bustling market, part pervaded with a deep sense of scholarship. That had been a number of years earlier when, no more than a youth, he had come to the university to gain new knowledge. He had soon become frustrated by the stultifying boredom of the system of rote learning.
The only man to give him any encouragement had been a Franciscan friar called Bacon, whose attitude to life had seemed refreshing. Friar Roger Bacon’s prescription for keeping young had stuck in his mind ever since, and he remembered the scene. There had stood the quiet, self-contained Franciscan in the university schools after a lesson with some ragged students. William had hung behind when everyone else had hastily exited. Friar Bacon’s freethinking fascinated him, and he wished to know more than the lesson had provided.
They had been talking about how to live life. And Bacon had come up with a startling set of rules.
A youthful William had preferred the last element of the prescription most, but even that and Bacon’s other advice had not been enough to hold him to his studies.
‘Friar Roger, there is much happening in the world, and I would see it before I am too old to travel.’
Bacon smiled wisely at the young student who squirmed on the bench before him.
‘And the world will still be there when you have completed your studies.’
‘But that is seven years!’ To the youth it was an eternity, and he wanted to grasp the growing world by the scruff of the neck now. ‘You yourself say that we should not rely on what we are told or what we read alone. We should experience for ourselves.’
The Friar ruefully saw that his own encouragement for William to apply the principle of experimentum to the accumulation of knowledge had been turned back on him. He sighed in defeat.
‘Then what do you intend to do, William Falconer?’ The young man edged forward on the bench, his blue eyes gleaming. He thrust the unruly thatch of black curly hair out of his ,eyes with a big bony hand.
‘I propose to travel the merchant routes throughout Europe, maybe, as far as east as Cracow, down to Naples and south to Marseilles. I have a strong arm, and can work to earn money for food and lodging. I am tired of disputing whether many angels can be in the same place at the same time.’ Bacon had thrown his hands up in a sort of despairing blessing, and Falconer had left Oxford. Now he rued the fact that Friar Bacon was not present to see his prodigal student return. It would have pleased the Franciscan. The intervening years had matured William rapidly, and filled his scrawny frame out too. Especially when he found he had a facility at arms, and hired himself out as a bodyguard and mercenary.
It was not how he had originally envisaged his travels, but William was if nothing else a pragmatist. He had seen much of the known world, more than if he had followed his original plans.
But one day, caught up in one of the interminable spats between Genoa and Venice, he realized he was not sure why he was doing what he was doing, nor even whose side he was on. He suddenly wearied of the fighting and the killing. His mind strayed back to Roger Bacon, and he abandoned his errant path. Instead, he wormed his way into the famous University of Bologna. Soon scholarship gripped him again, and under the guidance of such as William of Saliceto he became a master of the university. But it was England and Oxford that inevitably called him back.
Now he had finally returned. It was the morning after Pentecost, and he was walking over Grandpont and in through South Gate. But where he would have expected bustle, the streets were unusually quiet. Falconer thought at first that perhaps too many traders had celebrated the festival in a more profane way than their priests would have liked, and were recovering from a sore head. But as he made his way up Great Jewry, he sensed tension in the air. His years as a mercenary soldier had not entirely slipped off his shoulders. He was still sensitive to the atmosphere of impending battle. He just hadn’t expected it walking along a street in an English market town devoted to the study of the Seven Liberal Arts and the Three philosophies. It didn’t feel like the Oxford he had known. It felt more like being in the town of Pest far to the east on the day it learned the fearsome Tartars were on the doorstep. He turned back to the watchman, who hovered nervously at the door set in the archway of South Gate.
‘What goes on, friend?’
The old man’s face took on a sour expression.
‘You would do best to stay off the streets today, master. The filthy Jews are in for a thrashing, and the mob won’t ask questions of anyone they see abroad in Jewry.’ On another day Falconer might have challenged this spiteful invective. He had encountered many Jews in various parts of the world he had explored in his travels, and though it was true to say they could be equally as charming or as vindictive as men of any other race, he had always found them generous with their hospitality. And so profoundly fond of scholarship that William had struggled to learn enough Hebrew to understand some of their texts. But today was not the day to set the watchman right.
‘Why? What has happened?’
The watchman cast a fearful glance over Falconer’s shoulder, almost as if he was afraid some Jew might hear his vicious complaints and lay an awful curse on him. He lowered his voice, and whispered in conspiratorial tones in Falconer’s ear.
‘There was a child found somewhere beyond St Michael’s churchyard. Horribly tortured, and crucified too, they say.’
‘And what has this to do with the Jews?’ Falconer had heard these tales too often before, and they never convinced him of any foul deed other than uncaring parents or an owner thrashing his young labourer a little too vigorously. But the old man had more invective to spew out.
‘There were marks on his legs and arms, and on his chest, they do say. Hebrew letters carved on him.’
‘How were they identified as Hebrew?’
‘The constable brought out the wretch who lives in the Converts’ House. John they call him now, but once a Jew always a Jew, says I. The constable told him that as he feared for his life and limbs he should read the letters on the boy, and tell them what they said in Hebrew. This John said he couldn’t read them, as they were so distorted by the stretching of the boy’s skin. But after the constable gave him a good thrashing, he made them out aright. They told a tale of boy being sold to the Jews for sacrifice. By whom it is not known.’
Falconer grimaced, and could imagine the fear and shame that had forced whoever this poor John was to make up such a story. He had saved his own skin, but had called down fierce revenge on his quondam fellows. He wondered if there was anything he could do stop this potential carnage.
‘Where is the boy’s body now?’
The watchman pointed towards St Frideswide’s Church.
‘He lies in the side chapel there. The priests say his death is such at the hands of the Jews that the Lord may wreak miracles in his favour. They plan to bury him near the great altar.’
Ten
30 August, 1271
Peter Pawlyn’s head throbbed unmercifully, and the hammering of the rain on the wooden coveting over the masons’ heads was like a drumbeat prior to battle. He had woken up that morning to find himself sprawled amongst the grubby rushes strewn on the floor of the chamber he shared with John Trewoon and the other apprentice workers. He didn’t recall how he had got there, but assumed the big ox had something to do with it. The last he remembered was standing outside the brothel in Grope Lane. He wondered if he had managed to lie with a whore. He hoped not, because if he had, he would have spent some money, and he would want to remember it in all its lascivious glory. As it was, his mind was a blank. Trewoon had been snoring still, when their foreman had banged on the door to get them up. The sound had echoed round Pawlyn’s skull as if it was an empty cupola.
He had cursed Wilfrid Southo then. Maybe he would jack in the job, now that he had two weeks’ wages filling his purse.
But then he would never be a master mason, or even a journeyman - the next stage of masonry open to him. Groaning he had shaken John Trewoon’s arm, and grabbed his tools.
Now they both sat in a huddle with their comrades sheltering from the rain, and unable to work anyway. Southo was away over in Thorpe’s lodge, nice and dry, poring over the details of the building that was going to go up. Once they had cleared the debris of the houses they had knocked down yesterday.
‘Who do you think that was, Peter?’
Pawlyn shrugged his shoulders at John Trewoon’s question.
He knew the big man was talking about the discovery of the skeleton.
‘How should I know? He must have died years ago to end up in the wall in-fill.’ He grinned evilly, knowing he could scare the big ox out of his wits. ‘Maybe he was a builder like you, John, who just fell in, and got covered over. Imagine being
buried alive like that, calling for help as the sand and stones fill your gullet.’
He gurgled horribly as though his mouth was filling with rubble. Trewoon shivered, and punched Pawlyn’s shoulder.
‘Don’t say that, Peter. That could happen to any one of us.’ Pawlyn repented his jibe, and patted the big man’s muscular arm.
‘No it couldn’t, John. We would be spotted soon enough, and pulled out. No, that poor devil must have been buried there deliberately, and probably killed before he was even shoved down between the walls. Mark my words, it was murder, John Trewoon, and I think I know who was involved in it.’
Trewoon’s eyes were as round as two bowls, stating at his wiry little companion in wonderment.
‘Who, Peter? Who killed him?’
‘Who killed who, Trewoon?’
Pawlyn looked up at the sound of another man’s voice. He hadn’t realized that Southo had crept up on them as they gabbed. He wondered how long the foreman had been standing there. Had he heard him speculate on the murder? He hoped not, or he could imagine the suntanned man with the big bushy beard hearing of it, and coming after him with a very sharp sword. After all, it could have been no one but the murderer who was so quickly on to the discovery.
‘Nothing, Wilfrid. Just talking about the body.’ Southo grunted suspiciously, and aimed a kick at Pawlyn’s leg.
‘Well, you can forget about that. It’s time to get off your arse and do some work.’
Now it was Trewoon who protested. ‘But it’s still raining, sir.’
‘Nonsense. It’s just a drizzle. Besides, we need those houses down and the rubble cleared by the end of the day. So get on with it.’
