'All right." I agreed, 'here goes.' But I remained mute for some minutes as we rambled on through acorns and beechmast beneath a canopy of layered green until, inspired by his brief absence behind a holly bush where he performed a natural function, I began.
'The first life…' Then I corrected myself. "The first animal life must have begun with the simplest, most basic form, from which all the others developed.'
'And that is?'
'A sack. No. A tube! A tube that maintains itself by sucking in food at one end, absorbing what it needs, and expelling what it does not need at the other. When you think about it, all animal life, including men and women, are at bottom just that. The rest is added to make the basic tube work better. So I'd guess the very first animals were just that and nothing else.'
'So how did they change? Become so varied and different. And so many different types. Species. What,' he added, 'in terms of cause and effect, of action and reaction makes a new thing? What is the origin of species?'
I gave that a little thought. 'Look,' I said eventually, 'I have travelled a great deal, I have seen animals like wild dogs and rodents thriving in deserts; in Muscovy I have seen an elephant, frozen inside a block of ice, with long, long hair, while in Vijayanagara they have almost no hair at all. I have seen monkeys that climb trees and monkeys like the ones on the rock of Jebel Tariq that live in caves and run about on the ground and have a different stance and use their legs in a different way from that employed by the tree-dwellers. And so on. The world is different from outplace to another. There are mountains and plains, valleys and peaks, hot places and cold, wet and dry, rocky deserts and luxuriant forests. And in each place the differences between the animals help them to suit the place where they live.'
'Ah. I see where you're going.' Peter could hardly contain his excitement. 'The first simple tubes would have to change as soon as their surroundings changed, as soon as the food they sucked in and shitted out was different… But how did these changes happen? What was the machinery? Why did they not simply die?'
We trudged on, in a melancholy mood now, fearing perhaps that we might, after all, have to return to that bearded old monster working like a potter for seven days and breathing life into the clay creatures he had created.
Presently, on that day, the heat began to bother us, Peter anyway, who was less used to it than I. We had come into a small glade where a storm had uprooted one of the forest giants and left a space open to the sky on which short green grass already grew. We sat with our backs to the trunk of the fallen hero and looked up into the beechen green above us.
A hundred tiny worms were visible, though they, too, were green, suspended on threads of gossamer from the leaves, and through them flitted a pair of the small red-breasted birds with sharp black beaks. They caught the little worms, which were yet more than a mouthful for them, and carried them away. In the short space that we watched each must have taken at least ten.
'What are they doing with them?' I asked. 'They cannot be eating them all themselves.'
And then I laughed, for one of these robins let go and limed my friend's bald pate.
'Bugger,' he said, and groping around beneath the tree-trunk found a dock-leaf with which he cleaned himself up, leaving a green smear where he could not see it. 'So, up there we have simple tubes that chew up leaves or blossom and pass tiny green droppings, and larger, more complicated ones that fly about, eat the smaller ones, and shit what they do not need having transformed the detritus into a black and white mess. Incidentally, their appetite is apparently ravenous because they are feeding the chicks nested in that hole where the tree has shed a branch. Is there a lesson to be learnt here? basically they are the same, tubular shit-makers, but in accidents so different. Why?'
'The simple ones have only to chew leaves, and when a leaf is nearly gone they spin a thread to get to the next. But the birds need to fly if they are to catch the worms, so they have grown wings and so forth to carry them from worm to worm. At some time in the past they, too, were worms, no doubt, but perhaps their food supply became inadequate, so they changed.'
'So. What you are saying is that we are all, all the animals there are and fishes and birds, just tubular shit-makers who…' he searched for the word '… adopted to changing circumstances so they could continue their main function of shit-production?"
'And staying alive… at least long enough to reproduce their kind.'
'The whole process took more than seven days.' 'I'd say so.'
'So. Those worms, and you and I. each adapted to his surroundings, are simply destined to feed, shit and, once we have reproduced, die.'
'Yes,' I asserted. And I felt a strange excitement well up in me, as might afflict a man who stood silent upon a mountain-top and surveyed a whole new ocean of knowledge, shrouded as yet in impenetrable mist.
'A destiny that lacks the dignity of being made in God's own image.'
'What's dignity got to do with it?'
Peter stood up, gave me a hand, and we set off again, both of us ruminating like a couple of cows.
'If,' I brought forth after a time, 'there were no robins, then the worms would eat all the leaves and there would be no more trees. If there were no more trees there would be no more worms, and soon no possibility even of robins… There is a sort of balance here, an equipoise.'
'Ah, but if there were no worms then I grant you there would be no robins. But there would still be trees. Lots of them.'
Chapter Thirty-Five
After a week or so of gentle walking, sometimes in widening t- circles (at one point we reached the eastern bank of the river called Severn, but then turned back as we were now in what Peter called the Welsh Marches, and the Welsh on the other side spoke a language as barbarous as their behaviour), much talking and some preaching we came at last to Burford, which was a place of some interest. But first the approaches signalled a change. We had moved from the river plain into an undulating country, the hills not high but frequent and occasionally steep. Many brooks and rivulets ran through them. There was much forest, but also, especially in the valleys, water-meadows where huge mushroom-coloured kine lay and endlessly chewed on lush grass and king-cups. In the uplands it became more and more the case that commons and what had once been ploughed were enclosed in wicker fences and harboured sheep. The villages we passed through, and occasionally stayed in. were prosperous, many of the buildings, even those of the poorest, of a pleasant warm grey stone. When it wasn't raining women sat in the doorways spinning wool from distaffs on to spindles, gossiping in the sunshine, while indoors or in lean-to sheds their menfolk wove the yarn into cloth on primitive looms. At any rate they looked primitive compared to the ones the Arab nation uses, whether for cotton and silk in Moorish Spain or tine wools in Asia. Many of these people spoke not Inglysshe but a tongue Peter said
was Flemish, from the Lowlands across the Channel. They had the art of weaving and spinning better than the Angles and Saxons, and had been encouraged to settle in Ingerlond.
'With sheep and cattle in the fields, what do these people do for bread, which is the staple of life?' I asked.
'They buy the raw wool from the lords and landowners, who enclosed the land and brought in these people-'
'Wait,' I interrupted. 'What of the peasants who lived here first? The Angles and Saxons?'
'Three things,' he replied, as we toiled up a hill steeper than most on a track hedged with a thorny shrub with bright green leaves sprouting; pinched off between thumb and forefinger they made a delightful savoury salad, which we nibbled at as we walked along. Hawthorn, it was called. 'First, the plague carried off most of them a hundred years ago. This left the lords with a problem – too much land, not enough labourers. Wages rose. Second, those who survived married into the families of the Flemish people, each happily absorbed into the other. Third, those who were dispossessed by enclosure, and would not marry to become spinners and weavers, took to lawlessness and the forests, which they call the Green Wood. There they live
off the lords' venison, rabbits, hares and so forth, or hire themselves out to the lords as soldiers in these wars. I'm surprised we have not met any. In many ways they practise what I preach.'
But I was more interested in how the spinners and weavers worked.
'They buy the wool,' Peter replied, 'then spin and weave it. They take it to market where they sell it to merchants. There is a difference, a surplus, between what they pay for it and what they sell it for, and with this difference they buy the necessaries of life, including flour from other parts.'
But by now we had breasted the crest of the hill and were able to look down into a wide lush valley where there nestled a small town or large village. My curiosity about the wool trade was forgotten for a time.
'Burford,' said Peter.
On the way down we passed a small pit in the hillside from which two men were cutting a bluish-grey caked but powdery clay and loading it into a cart.
"Fuller's earth,' said Peter. 'With abundant running water one ol the necessaries for a flourishing wool trade. The others are good pasture for sheep, and skilled craftsmen. The fuller's earth is used for cleaning the grease and fats out of the wool, which help keep the sheep waterproof and well.'
'They certainly need it.' I supplied, for it had come on to rain again. 'Why do they cultivate giant thistles? Surely they are no use to anyone except donkeys.'
Just below the fuller's earth pit there was a small plot filled with the tall spiky plants, as yet only in bud.
'They are not thistles but teasels. Once they have flowered they form hard, brittle seed-cases with bent almost barbed bristles. The weavers use these to tease up the nap on their cloth, which they then shear off leaving a fine almost silky finish, which is much valued by the richer sort.'
'It seems there is a conspiracy between man and…'
'And… God?'
'Nature. To make this a region in which cloth manufacture can flourish.'
'Not forgetting history, the past. Remember the plague.'
Burford was indeed a prosperous place, and newly so. A main street of commodious new houses, timber-framed and brick, leads down from the Oxenford road, which we crossed to a small river on whose bank stood a curious church. Curious, because though three hundred years old it was undergoing substantial refurbishment and rebuilding. A new and graceful steeple had already been erected on top of the massive square tower, while the nave and aisles were being laboriously raised to new galleries with new piers supporting the new roof. Yet most of the lower structure, the side-chapels and so forth, remained unaltered.
I put these anomalies to Peter. 'Surely,' I said, 'it would have made more sense to start afresh. That way they would have-produced a building in a uniform style, harmonious and properly proportioned, instead of this mish-mash. I suspect, too, it would have been cheaper.'
In answer he took me by the elbow, always his practice when something conspiratorial, confidential or requiring persuasion was in the air. and led me into the nave. He pointed up to a niche crowning one of the older arches. There was a statuette, a crude and primitive representation of a woman riding a horse. He then conducted me round the capitals of the older side piers and pointed at equally crude representations of the act of procreation and so forth. Finally in the churchyard he construed what we had seen.
'This,' he said, 'is a temple, not a church. It is a temple not to God hut to the goddess, the white lady who throughout these parts rode on a white horse, naked but for her golden hair and garlands of flowers, at the midsummer solstice. There are signs of her and of the cult that still worships her, all over the place if you know where to look. At Banbury she has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. In Coventry she is Godgifu. The rulers of the Church may try to hide all this by building over it, but they dare not wipe it out.'
'So why,' I asked, 'is this temple, disguised as a church, dedicated to a man. the prophet John the Baptist. I mean, why not to Mary, the mother of the prophet Jesus, whom your people call God and whose mother must therefore be a goddess?'
He looked at me with solemn but expressionless eyes. 'You probably do not know this,' he said, 'but the day on which St John is remembered, and his death especially, is the twenty-fifth of June, the summer solstice. But you will be aware that he was beheaded as the result of the dancing of a beautiful naked woman, was indeed a sacrifice to her. In a few weeks' time you will believe me when the solstice conies and we see the bonfires that will be lit throughout the land."
He preached that evening and, as usual, carefully pitched his sermon to the small group who had turned out by the bridge across the river. Most were buxom, pink-cheeked women, done out in some finery for the occasion, though not ostentatious like the nobility but rather neat and clean in whites, greys, browns and blacks, all with starched caps sometimes tilted up like sails above their not inconsiderable gold necklaces and brooches.
He spoke of the virtues of hard work, of prosperity as a sign not only of hard work but of godly living, not only of godly living but of God having chosen them to be his handmaids. He went on to say how a person was not saved and numbered amongst the elect by good works, or by the sacraments, which were but toys for the simple-minded, but – and this is what 'elect' means – by being chosen. And how does one know one is chosen? First, by an inner certainty that it is so, and second, by the outer signs, the prosperity brought about by good works and hard-won skills. In all this he used as support and example the words, in Inglysshe, of St Paul, also from the Wycliffe Bible. This Paul seemed something of a philosopher in the way he teased at the problem of faith, the chosen, and the efficacy or irrelevance of good works.
This they all loved. The women smirked and smoothed down their aprons, the men puffed out their chests, cleared their throats, ahem!, and nodded meaningfully at their companions.
'What need have we of priests and Latin,' cried Peter, coming to his peroration, 'when we have the Holy Scriptures set forth for us in plain good Inglysshe to guide us? What need of churches when two or three gathered together in His Name have been promised that He will be with them? What need of confession and absolution when we have our own consciences to guide us?'
Finally he produced a story that he said he took from the Gospel of St Matthew, chapter twenty-five, in Wycliffe's version, the story of the talents, and how the master praised the men who made best use of these weighty pieces of gold he had left them with and condemned the man who merely buried his and gave it back.
One weaver, a tall, thin old man, dressed in some splendour in velvet and with a gold chain round his neck, was especially pleased with this and invited us to take supper in his home and bed there too. So prosperous was he that he even had a spare room. His establishment put me in mind of Alderman Roger Dawtrey's in London, though it was not on the same scale. Still, he and his large fair wife, who had a big bony nose and huge breasts, together with his three daughters and his two sons-in-law, gave us excellent entertainment and a royal meal.
Later, as the maidservant of the household climbed the stair ahead of us with a beeswax candle to light us to bed, I asked Peter, 'And what of our lady? Our white lady on her white horse?'
And he replied, 'Oh, I love her madly, but would she get us to a table laden with roast goose, plum duff and cream? She dwells with the shepherds and the few ploughmen left, in the Green Wood, and with the gypsies.'
That night, as Peter lay snoring on the other side of the big bolster that lay between us I got to thinking. These people are prosperous. They make money. But they are frugal with it. They live well, but without ostentatious display or wild extravagance. Yet they are not misers. What do they do with their talents, their surplus gold?
A nobleman whose peasants have produced a surplus of food sells it for cash to artisans and merchants who do not have land. With this spare cash he indulges in conspicuous display, for that is what he values above all else, his self-esteem and the esteem of others. He will buy labour and materials to build ever larger castles and palaces, finer c
lothes, furniture, gargantuan* feasts, and, if, as so often happens, he is threatened by another nobleman, or he himself covets another nobleman's land, he will buy those most expensive items of all, arms, armour and men, and go to war.
And what will a peasant do who earns, either by hire or by selling his produce, more gold than he needs? Why, he will frugally save it up, bury it beneath the floors of his hut or hovel, against a day when the harvest will fail or his master turns him off his land.
But these weavers and spinners? And likewise merchants and artisans? Well, as a trader for others I have seen it with my own eyes, and I was seeing it again here in Burford. They buy another loom, more distaffs and spindles, and more wool. But they have no time of their own to operate them, so they buy the time of others. But just as they made more money from their own spinning and weaving than they needed, so they will sell their cloth for more than the cost of the extra looms and spinning tools and the time they had to buy, all added together, for there would be no point in doing it if they didn't. And that results in even more gold than they need. What to do with it? Why, the same again. Until one man would own hundreds, maybe thousands of looms, buy time from thousands of workers… and so on, and so on?
* Allow me one footnote as a warning to would-be pedants. OK, Rabelais came a hundred years later, but Gargantua and Pantagmel were popular names for giants throughout the middle ages – Enc Brit, 1911. J. R,
There'd be an end of it, of course. There would soon be more cloth in the land, in the world, than people needed, and once even-man had three coats, one for best, one for daily use, and one in case, there'd be an end of it. But would there? Would not the enterprising man not now look around for other things to make and sell?
My mind began to swim, I felt mentally dizzy, as I tried to formulate examples in my head of how it might work, inventing figures, multiplying them, forgetting the number I'd first thought of. Soon I began to sweat and moan at the enormity of it all. Peter woke up and, grumbling, prodded me into telling him what was bothering me.
Kings of Albion Page 26
