by Ian Mortimer
As William goes off to relieve himself I walk back to the packhorses. I look up to the sky above the moor, roiling with dark-grey clouds. It is growing cold – cold enough to snow.
We start back on the road up to the high moor. The road narrows, and we see we are approaching a sharp descent. The foreman stops the packhorses and unties them from one another, and almost loses his cap in the wind. We then lead the horses and ponies down the steep slope individually, lest one should fall or slip on the loose stones and send the whole team hurtling into the valley below. When all are safely down, they are roped together and resume plodding along the rocky path back up the next hillside of wind-tugged heather, gorse, grass and dead bracken.
I try to speak to George Beddoes but he is as taciturn with me as he was with William, and so I give up and speak to a man called Stephen Waller, who comes from the east of the county. I ask him why he wants to be working for the Periams.
‘I’ve no choice,’ he replies, ‘not since the lord of the manor took my land.’
‘What did he do that for?’
‘In my grandfather’s day we held eighteen acres in the great fields – all well-drained strips. In addition, we had ten acres of pasture and ten of meadow, and my grandfather had the rights to graze three cows and twenty sheep upon the common. Then the price of wool rose, and the lord took the common rights away, paying a pittance to all of us commoners in compensation.’
‘Why did you agree to sell them?’ I ask.
‘If we’d not given up the common rights, would the lord’s steward have granted us new leases on our acres in the great fields?’ he says over the gusts of the wind. ‘No. So I had to let them go. But still I had my eighteen acres, and we got by, did my wife and I. Until the lord’s steward said he was buying the whole of both fields in which my land lay. “No,” I told him, “we countryfolk have a need to look after our acres. We’ve already manured them for the forthcoming year. Besides, it is unlawful to run a tenant off the land.” Two days later, as I came home from market, I saw all my tools, table, benches, kitchen stuff and bedding in the lane, and straw from the thatch of our house strewn in piles, and the lord’s men pulling our house down with ropes and horses. They said that, if we are no longer resident, the lord can take our land away at will. The steward gave me six shillings and eightpence compensation for the house and told us to clear off. My wife and children were in tears, and I was precious close to crying myself, but that was what we had to do. So we made our way to Exeter, and I came out here with the Periams.’
‘It seems to me that ordinary people are paying a heavy price for all the wealth in the country.’
A gust of wind blows us back, battering our ears with its force. Stephen Waller pauses until it subsides and he can be heard. ‘Speak to any of these men and they’ll tell you the same thing. We’re all banished from life in some way or other.’
We walk in silence across the stony path beneath the vast dominion of the weather, in which all we see is the light brown of the clumps of marsh grasses, the dark brown of the peaty mud and the hard grey of the rock. I notice we are still following the line of the River Teign, although it is little more than a stream at this point. The wind here is deafening while only a mile or so downstream, at the blowhouse, it was hardly noticeable. Yet down there, this little stream is so mighty it powers those huge hammers. The elements seem to be vying for power, each showing how it can reign supreme in the right place.
I speak to no one for the last mile up to Watern Tor. The men’s faces are sullen. And well they might be, for when we finally make it up to the works, I realise the full meaning of Alderman Periam’s words. These men are truly digging for tin – straight through the rock of the hill. There is a great grey-brown gash running through the green ridge ahead of us, where half a dozen men are wielding pickaxes and three others are breaking up large pieces of rock with heavy lump hammers, making them small enough to be put in a wheelbarrow and transported over the crest of the hill.
Once I was a mason, delicately shaping stone into beautiful forms for the glory of God. Now I find myself on a windswept ridge, expected to smash stone for feeding into a stone-breaking machine, for the profit of Alderman Periam. I have more than half a wish to return to the stones we saw at Scorhill and ask to go back to my own time and die there, where people knew and respected me. But then I think of Lazarus, and Richard the blacksmith and his daughter. It seems to me that I might have been brought here for a reason.
The horses and ponies are led up to the top of the ridge, where the wind is so strong we can barely stand. There is another blowing house down in the valley on the far side, and the thunderous crashes from its hammers can be heard ringing out from up here, despite the wind. I look over the barren moor. Apart from the blowing house below us, and another stone building near it, there are no other houses to be seen. It is desolate waste land, good for nothing but rough grazing. William was right: it is a leveller. But it does not raise people to a level, it brings them all down.
We lead the pack animals down the slope to the blowing house where we unpack their bundles and let them graze for a while on the rough grass of the moor. The second building is a house in which the men live when they are not working, and it is here we stack the provisions. Our next task is to load the tin ingots that have been cast at the blowing house: these slabs each weigh just over a hundredweight and we carry them singlehandedly. It is heavy work. When it is done, the crew who were smashing stone on our arrival depart; they have the job of guiding the ponies back to Chagford, where the ingots will be weighed and assayed. From now until dark we have the task of digging ore and smashing it, and wheeling it in wooden barrows down to the thunderous hammers and smelting furnace.
We speak to one another only occasionally, because of the heavy work and the wind in our ears. When I do snatch some conversation at the blowing house or when working alongside another man in the lee of the wind, I realise how desperate some of them are. Edward Bowden is a religious outcast from his parish because he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the king as Head of the Church. But this is not because he maintains the supremacy of the Pope: he is one of those zealots they call a Protestant. He believes that anything that is not in the Bible is not the true faith but merely an aberration – man’s false interpretation of faith. Men and women of his belief suffer terribly. One, called Anne Askew, was tortured in the Tower of London just six months earlier by having her arms and legs pulled from their sockets on a machine called a rack. After that, she was burned at the stake. The crime which merited this terrible punishment was reading from the Bible and not accepting that any man had the right to tell her its true meaning. Clearly, the importance of women’s understanding of words goes far beyond William’s prediction that no cleaning would get done if women could read.
As the daylight fades, we light torches soaked in pitch and try to smash stones by their guttering light, but the wind is too strong and they burn too quickly, so the foreman calls off the work for the day. The crashing hammers are lifted and jammed in place with wedges; the leat to the waterwheel is diverted to let the water splash down the stream freely; the furnace is raked out ready for the morning’s fire and ore. Those of us who remain go to the house – which is little more than a long stone hut – and eat a supper of bread, cold beef and cheese by the light of rushlights on brackets in the walls. We drink a strange sort of drink that the men call ‘beer’ – like the ale of our own time but cleaner and stronger. As the wind whistles around the house and under the eaves, men start telling tales of fortunes made and lost from tin. They remain cautious of one another, however. There is a mutual distrust in the air. When anyone mentions a great find, he is careful not to disclose its location.
Listening to their voices and the wind whistling through the eaves and rattling the door, I think to myself how much worse things would be if this were not a house but a ship out at sea. And that reminds me of the mariner whose shipmates died for despair that they would ever see dry
land again. In a way, these men are out at sea, washed far from the society to which they once belonged. Do they believe they will ever return? I look at the faces. The man thrown off his land, and the man who is fleeing for his religion – they are still clinging on, they still have faith. The man who has lost his land hopes to build a new home for his children. The Protestant believer trusts that God is only temporarily putting him to the test. Others believe that tinning will make them rich, and that all they have to do is earn enough to start their own team and they will be like Alderman Periam and his son. I see in their various hopes something that starkly contrasts with the society I knew in my youth. We were far more united and accepting of God’s will. In this new century, people are all divided and unsatisfied, hoping that God will smile on them personally.
I sit on the earthen floor near to the door, and have to move every time a man gets up to answer a call of nature. When the door opens a blast of cold air hits me until it is latched again; once or twice the latch does not fasten and the door swings open, and I have to get up to secure it.
‘This was a mistake,’ whispers William, sitting beside me, as the large figure of Richard Townsend steps over to the door and leaves the house. ‘I should’ve known better.’
‘There’s penance in undertaking the work,’ I reply.
‘But we both know there are better forms of redemption.’
‘Perhaps,’ I say, as George Beddoes makes his way past us and opens the door, letting in another icy blast of air.
‘There are more comfortable places to sleep too. I wonder how the current king’s palace appears at Westminster?’
‘Much the same as any fine palace,’ I reply. ‘With tapestries and chests filled with gold and silver, and huge kitchens with cooks and clerks and serving boys, and a chapel with coloured glass and walls, and a chamber with a great curtained bed and feather mattress.’
‘Then life is changing only for the poor, not for the king and his court.’
‘Maybe the king has a clock that chimes the hour,’ I suggest, at a loss to think how the rich have seen their lives change. ‘A king’s ambitions must change all the time: to attack this kingdom, support this crusade, arrest this renegade lord and so on. But in how he lives his life, there is no variation. He wears a crown, he sits on a throne, he eats roast meat and drinks wine. Time stands still in the palaces of kings. But for these tinners, everything has changed.’
We fall silent, listening to the wind whistling about the house. A rushlight splutters and goes out, so the foreman lights another from a still-burning one on the other side of the room. There are indistinct murmurs of private conversations among the men there. And then someone says aloud, for all to hear, ‘Who of us has travelled the furthest? He who has travelled furthest, he must tell his tale.’
Everyone turns to us. ‘The men in kirtles – they’ve been to Cathay,’ says a tall man who has not spoken to me.
I look at William questioningly. He nods to me, confirming that that is what he told him.
‘Speak, speak, speak,’ one man starts chanting, and soon a number of them have joined in.
William holds up his hand. ‘Very well. But I tell you, you’ll not believe half of what we’ve seen.’
‘With whom did you sail?’ said one man.
William shakes his head. ‘Friends, we didn’t sail to Cathay. Sailing is for the soft-limbed sorts. No. We set off from Dover and crossed to Calais in the nineteenth year of the reign of our monarch, and I sold a goodly pile of wool-fells at the market there. It was our full intention to return to English shores forthwith but, as luck would have it, we fell in with a Lombard merchant called Niccolinus who told us that, if we were to venture eastward with him, and invest our money in Chinese spices and silks, we would be rich beyond our wildest dreams. So that changed our minds.
‘All the way to Venice we bartered and sold cloth, and so by the time we were in Lombardy, we were richer than ever before. When we arrived in Venice I was feeling like a prince in a fur-trimmed robe, and John here was making lavish donations to the holy bones in every church. Niccolinus entertained us in his fine house, which was by the water’s edge, overshadowed by the mountains, and the parkland all round was filled with running deer. And there we met his beautiful wife, Fiesca, who had dark hair and brown eyes and a smile on her lips. She poured wine for us into silver goblets as we dined in his hall, with his servants watching. And there Niccolinus had a great chessboard of ivory, ebony and gold. He challenged me to a game and I, not wanting to disappoint him, agreed. He suggested a wager, and I, again, not wishing to disappoint him, said, “Name your stake.” He replied, “All the wealth you’ve brought with you from France.” I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t withdraw my offer and so I agreed. But I said to him, “You must bet a similar treasure, of like value, and since you named my stake, I should name yours.” “Say it, and I will match your stake happily,” quoth he. So I replied, “A night in bed with your wife.” I said this in her hearing. And I added, “For she is truly the most beautiful woman I’ve seen. Outside Devon, that is.” ’
Several laughs greet his quip. William has the attention of the whole house now. So I stay silent.
‘Niccolinus proudly said he had nothing to fear for he had the wit both to win my money and to save his wife’s virtue. But he did not know women. Ah! He didn’t even know his own wife! I saw how she received the message that he cared so little about her honour that he was happy to chance it. And she saw me prize her so highly that I deemed a night with her equal in value to all my wealth. At the game of chess, he was a master – it was not long before he had taken four of my pieces – but at the game of life, I already had his queen in check. When she poured our wine again, she poured him some dark, strong liquor that he loved, and he complimented her on producing it. Into my glass, however, she poured drink from a similar-looking pitcher – and it was nothing but water. She was a cunning one, that Fiesca. I took a long time over every move. Often I would drain my goblet and say, “Niccolinus, this is the most excellent wine, I do thank you for being so liberal with it.” Sure enough, Niccolinus was soon drinking as freely as me, and in no time he was as drunk as a monastery butler. He made a mistake that made him angry, and he shouted at me for being so slow, but by then the damage was done. I took even more time over my moves. His eyelids were starting to droop, and he fell asleep with his head and arms on the table, in a sprawled manner, scattering the pieces. When that happened, Fiesca took up his wine goblet and drained it herself. Then she refilled it and said to the servants watching, “You all are witnesses. I am honour-bound to be this man’s prize for tonight. And the reason is that my husband has a scandalous lack of care for my matronly honour, in his sloppy drunkenness.” So she and I went to bed. And, by God’s boots, she was a bonny wench under the sheets, I’ll tell you. We didn’t sleep at all that night, and she gave me such pleasure that I said to her that I’d happily have given all the money I’d made in France for such a night of passion. But she laughed and said that that was not the wager, and that I had rewarded her by shaming her too-proud husband in front of his servants. In the morning she urged me to be up and gone early, before he awoke, and as I departed she pressed into my hands a purse with ducats in it, to speed me on my way. And if you do not believe me . . .’ William gives me a nudge and holds his hand out for me to pass my travelling sack. He opens it and takes out the purse. ‘Here are the last of those ducats,’ he declares, holding out a few gold coins for all the tinners to see.
Several men lean forward to view the coins, as if they were proof of his story. Others simply laugh.
‘Where are Richard Townsend and the quiet man?’ asks Edward Bowden. ‘They’ve been gone a long time.’
We are silent. There is just the wind in the thatch and the rattle of the door.
The foreman points to three of us, myself and two men I don’t know. ‘John, Robert, Richard, you all come with me. We’ll check the blowing house.’
We light the torch-head
s of pitch-soaked cloth, and threads of black smoke wend their way across the room before we unlatch the door. When it opens, a gust of wind rips at our torches. I hang back as the others head down to the blowing house, guessing that Beddoes and Townsend will not have gone far. I look further along the side of the building: the ground is uneven here, with piles of dropped and discarded rocks and tufts of grass between slippery turns of mud and damp soil. Such is the harshness of the gale that my light flickers too much to be able to see any part of the ground for more than a moment. But then I see a hand. I bend down and put my torch close to the man’s face. It is Richard Townsend. His brown hair is being tugged like grass in the wind. There is no pulse, his wrist is barely warm. The ground around him is bloodstained. His mouth is open. So are his eyes, staring upwards, as if his last thought was astonishment.
I stand up, and look further with my torch, sweeping over the ground nearby. There is no sign of anyone else. Beddoes must have run.
I call to those at the blowing house but they cannot hear me. So I pick my way back across the slippery ground to the path that leads down there, and call again. Then I see the light of a torch as they leave the building.
‘Richard Townsend’s dead. Up by the house,’ I shout to them as their lights approach mine.
‘Richard dead?’ shouts the foreman.
‘The quiet one hardly seemed big enough,’ says another man.
‘He was stabbed from behind,’ I explain. ‘In this wind he’d not have heard anyone.’
We climb back up to where the corpse lies. The foreman shuts Richard’s eyes and straightens his legs, and crosses his arms. Several of us make the sign of the cross over him before we return to the house.
Back inside, the foreman stands in the centre of the room and looks about. ‘Richard’s been murdered. Is there anything anyone wants to say?’
‘God rest his soul,’ one man says.
