In which the people get some of their own back.
Chapter 16
The empty church echoed
with the absence of the daily round of psalms and prayers. The summer sun still
shone low from the east and cast bits of warmth through the colored glass of
the Lady Chapel, so named for the Virgin Mary, all the way through to the
shrine of Saint Alban, where Thomas knelt. The image of Saint Thomas Becket,
martyr of Canterbury, fell into his mind. That other Thomas had been at the
altar of his church when the murderers broke in.
Thomas of Walsingham
had been given a duty. Father Abbot had commanded that he delay the delegation
everyone expected from the commons.
“Blessed Alban,” Thomas
of Walsingham prayed, “on this spot the townfolk killed you.” He crossed
himself, fearful of every creak and groan the great church made as it warmed in
the summer sun. Outside, shouts and jeers and cheers sounded. Within the
monastery’s walls, no monk nor servant raised his voice, for fear of drawing
the attention of the mob. Only Thomas, of all the monks, had been able to walk
outside, and he only because Cob trusted him.
Thomas was a man of
words, but the words would not form into prayer. He could only kneel on the
stone before the shrine.
Alban’s bones rested in
a reliquary of silver and gold, encrusted with precious jewels. Enclosing it
was an elaborate stone pedestal, a sort of coffin, surrounded by gilded
columns, like miniature flying buttresses, which in turn supported a crimson
and gold roof. At one end of the shrine, the martyrdom of Alban was carved into
the stone, surrounded by angels swinging censers of incense. The whole
structure reminded Thomas of a sedan chair belonging to a pope or oriental
potentate.
It was the wealth,
perhaps. The gold and silver and precious stones drew the commons’ wrath as
dung drew flies. They could not see that the value of the contents immeasurably
overshadowed the value of the covering. The gold and silver and gems pointed to
the even greater treasure within, the relics of the saint, the man who had
gained the favor of Christ himself.
The monks guarded the
saint, depended on him, made a home for his remains on earth as they hoped he
would prepare a place for them in heaven. All that belonged to the abbey,
though nominally the property of the abbot as far as the law was concerned,
truly belonged to the martyr. He connected the people to the act of faith that
had sainted him. The present was corrupt. God was hard to see. Miracles were
few. But Alban was the proof the past had left for the men of the present, the
evidence that heroic virtue was possible, and Thomas was the keeper of the
books, of memory.
Already, he had found
time in the midst of the troubles to write a few notes on what he had seen. At
some future time men would need to understand the events of these days, no
matter what the outcome.
Thomas wondered what
those people of the future would think. Order might die; the commons might
overthrow church and crown and all. There was no imagining what might take
their places.
The church doors
crashed open. Thomas started, half-rose from his meditation, then let his knees
again down on the stone that marked the place where Alban himself had knelt for
his death. There were worse places to await the sword.
“Where is everyone?” a
voice whispered. A trick of the stones magnified the sound in the nearly empty
church. All the monks, save Thomas, waited in the chapter house.
Thomas listened to the
progress of the men. They walked up the long nave, and he knew, without seeing past
the high altar that kept him from their sight, that they passed the shrines of
Our Lady, Saints Catherine, Thomas, Benedict; and the paintings of the
crucifixion on the columns. Three sets of footsteps paused before the great
altar in the nave, as if nervous enough to fear the majesty around them.
It was not to be. The
stones garbled their voices; Thomas could not make out the sense of what they
said. Again, he made the sign of the cross on his chest. The footfalls gathered
strength, came past the altar in two directions. They were searching now,
looking for a monk. One man made his way to the south transept, two into the
north. Hinges creaked, then doors crashed open. Tapestries and curtains scraped
against stone with soft urgency.
Thomas found himself on
his feet, found anger in his breast. “Stop, in the name of Christ!” His shout
filled the whole church and echoed back at him.
Silence punctuated his
cry. Then Cob’s voice picked up the dialogue.
“Jesus, Thomas, you
scared me. Where are you?”
“Here, you blasphemous
pup, in the feretory,” Thomas answered.
“What’s that, Dickon?”
Eccleshall called across the space that separated the three laymen. “What’s he
mean, feretory? A place to keep
ferrets? Sounds like a monk to me.”
Thomas denied himself
the pleasure of correcting the man’s ignorance. Eccleshall was a ribald, who
only came into the church because he must, and not worth the attention of a man
of God. Richard of Wallingford, however, was an important citizen, a merchant
who brought much wealth to the town, and even to the monastery. Thomas sighed.
He supposed he must hear them, and give Father Abbot time to finish putting
heart into the rest of the monks.
“By the shrine,” Thomas
said. He straightened his knees, which creaked from his long kneeling, and
listened as the three men approached, each from a different direction. He took
position in front of Alban’s reliquary, the burning tapers behind him
representing the prayers of the faithful.
The three men arrived
simultaneously. “What do you want?” the monk asked.
None of them spoke for
a moment. Cob looked with expectation to Dickon of Wallingford. “The abbot,”
the merchant finally answered.
“And what do you want
of the abbot?”
“We have certain
demands.”
“And those are?”
Thomas’s patience wore thin, but his job was to delay, to gather intelligence,
a quality absent from the arguments that took place within the abbey’s walls,
and, he thought, without those walls as well.
“We will treat only
with the abbot.” Dickon spoke with a new, nearly regal, assurance. “I have the
King’s warrant.” He brandished a parchment with the royal seal.
Thomas reached for it,
but Dickon snatched it away.
“It is not for your
eyes, master monk.” Eccleshall stepped in front of the merchant. His rank
breath pushed Thomas to retreat a step in turn. Eccleshall put a hand to the
sword at his waist.
“You bring a weapon
into God’s holy church,” Thomas accused. “Do you presume to use it?” He spoke
more bravely than he felt. Thus far, the rebels had made no attack on the body of
a monk.
“No,” Cob said. “For we
have both the King and right with us in this.” He glanced at Eccleshall, who
let his hand fall to his side.
“Let the abbot come
forth,” Dickon said.
Behind them, Thomas saw
a flicker of movement, a black robe against the stone walls. They must have
seen his eyes move, for all three men turned.
“What do you want?”
Father Abbot asked. His voice was soft and tired, although it was only
midmorning. No one had slept. Thomas felt his own judgment weak, and hoped
exhaustion would not mean that unworthy thoughts would break into deeds.
Dickon of Wallingford
held up the parchment.
“I have come from King
Richard himself, my lord. He bids you return to us the charters and the rights
usurped by your predecessors, and that you restore to the commons the lives
they had under old King Henry.”
Father Abbot sighed.
Thomas read in him the long arguments the monks had had through the night and
long past breakfast. The house was divided. Some wanted to flee the rebels and
go, like the prior, to some faraway dependent cell. Others argued that they
would never make it past the guards the rebels had set up on all the approaches
to the town. Still others wanted to remain and delay, and this was the approach
of the abbot himself. No one argued that they should simply give in. If Father
Abbot found a way through this maze of confusion—
“For example,” Dickon
said, “there are charters at Westminster taken from the abbot under old King
Henry, giving all the rights and privileges of burgesses to the people of Saint
Alban’s. What are they doing at Westminster? Who can read them there?”
A thrill of fear ran
through Thomas. As the keeper of the scriptorium, he knew what was in the old
charters; a copy was in the monastery’s records in the muniment room. Only Cob
might know that.
“You speak of the law,
my son.” The abbot was on his own ground now. He had won any number of
lawsuits, and knew all the ins and outs of legal talk. “All your chatter of
charters, from a time no one can now remember, goes against all the law and
custom of the land. Your argument lacks force.”
But Dickon of
Wallingford had been thinking, or, what is the same, taught what to argue.
“The old laws and
customs are the very things we stand against!” His face darkened with passion. His
voice rose over the hush of the near-empty church. “The laws don’t solve our
problems; they create them. The law does not give us hope. The law keeps us in
thrall.”
That was the exact
truth, although Thomas the monk was not about to agree with the rebels. Dickon
had the right of it, though. The law was not on their side, nor was custom.
Both held for those who were atop the people, were designed for the maintenance
of things as they had always been.
Once started, Dickon of
Wallingford could not stop his argument. “By whose advice are you so stubborn?
We have waited with more patience than you deserve; we have the warrant of the
King himself.”
Dickon brandished the
parchment from London in the abbot’s face. This was too great an affront for
the prelate, who sat in the king’s council and debated as a peer in the House
of Lords.
“Your ‘King’s warrant’
is a fraud, extorted by force. It does not move me.” Father Abbot’s eyes
flashed. The old imperiousness had returned; Thomas simultaneously welcomed it
and feared its consequences.
Dickon did not
disappoint him. “You don’t understand. We have tried to proceed by law. We
wanted to do this with reason and persuasion, but you will not hear us.” A
glance passed between Dickon and Cob. Something changed in the atmosphere in
the saint’s shrine.
“We have a thousand men
outside these walls,” Dickon said. “So far, they have been patient. Begin now
to understand, Father Abbot, that their patience will not last. And if a
thousand is not enough, Tyler and his men have promised to come from London. If
need be, we will tear down these walls and put all to the flame. We are not all
assembled for some trifle. We mean to have our rights, whether you agree or
not. It would be better were it peaceably done.”
The abbot’s face collapsed,
like a two-year-old child thwarted. He cried out, “No, you can’t,” and tears
flowed from his rheumy eyes. He fell back against the shrine to Alban, as if
seeking support from the saint.
The show of weakness
shamed Thomas. The old man’s tears were as nothing against the ancient angers
of the peasants. The three men of the delegation faced this weeping with stony
faces. Thomas could not meet their eyes, and would not further shame his abbot
by seeing his tears. He stared at the ribs of the vaulting above. There was
permanence in stone, and the vast columns down the nave that held the roof up.
But Thomas was too
honest, with himself at least, to dwell long on that comfort. Not sixty years
before, during a mass, part of the north aisle had cracked and fallen. The
great, heavy Norman columns gave way and tumbled to the ground. They scattered
worshippers in all directions. Even now, the repair work was not quite
finished.
“The foundation was not
faulty,” the masons had claimed. “Something down below shifted.”
The foundations of the
earth were shifting now. No one might foresee what would fall during this
rebellion, nor what unseen fault might lie below the surface.
“What do you want?”
Thomas asked the three men, but it was Cob who answered.
“We are called the
commons of England,” Cob began, “but nothing shall go well in England until all
there are no nobles. No one should lord it over another.
‘When Adam dug
‘And Eva span
‘Who was then
‘A gentleman?’”
It was an old piece of
doggerel that the commons were always throwing in the face of their betters.
That grin of Cob’s
flashed quickly before disappearing. “There must be no villeins, no
gentlemen—you who lord it over us should be no more masters than we are.
“What is our sin,” he
went on, “that we should be condemned to servitude? We all came from one
father, one mother, Adam and Eve. How can anyone say he is greater? Except that
he makes us work for what he spends. The lords wear velvet, and we homespun.
They have their wines; we have poor ale or water that sickens. They have good
bread; we have rye bran and straw to eat. They live in stone houses, like this
one, and we are barely allowed to huddle against their walls for shelter. And
what comes of our work, they keep. We are their bondmen, and unless we do you
service, you may beat us, and we may complain to no one. So we have gone to the
King, and shown him what our state is and what must be changed, and he has
granted it.”
Cob pointed at the
parchment. “He has granted it. Now it is for you to obey your liege lord, and
give us what we have come for.”
Cob’s grin was gone
now, vanished into the great maw of the commons’ determination.
But Dickon reasserted
himself. “Cob speaks well, but you, your grace, do not have the power to
abolish servitude. You might, however, give up the charters to us, and the
bonds paid by our parents against their good behavior.”
Father Abbot stirred
from the shrine. “Why is this come now? For thirty years, I have been a good
father to you all. When you were in trouble—even you, William Grindcob, even
such trouble as you caused yourself—I helped you. When you hungered, I fed you.
When you were thirsty, I gave you drink. I have been an honest lord to you. Is
it not true?”
Thomas turned his face
away, unwilling to show his father in God the contempt he felt for his pleading
with the rebels.
“Brother Thomas is
displeased with me,” the abbot said. “He will not write me down well in his
books.”
Thomas turned back,
doubly shamed. What game was the abbot playing?
Dickon of Wallingford
spoke up, his voice softer than it had been. “For a lord you have been honest
enough, even mild, some might say. This is not aimed at you, Father. I would
rather that we waited until the day of your death, to visit these things on
your successor, but events overran us. We were no more prepared than you.” He
advanced on the prelate. “But do not mistake kind words for weakness, Father
Abbot. We were not ready, but we are now. Nothing remains to you or to us but
that you surrender to our demands. One way or another, we will return to the
people with what we set out to get.”
Thomas listened in
amazement. Was this the accommodating Richard of Wallingford, the seller of
things? Was the King’s warrant so powerful a goad that it made a man change his
nature? Poor Dickon, to carry so much resentment for so long, always hiding it
behind the mask of a merchant, for the sake of the deal. He was the one man
among the rebels who might have negotiated.
But perhaps Dickon
might still strike a bargain—he did not seem so urgent for the lives of the
monks as others. Thomas shivered at the thought of John Eccleshall or John
Byker loose within the cloister. Dickon could be dealt with.
“If I might, your
grace, I could lead them to the muniment room.” Thomas hoped his suggestion
might ease the abbot’s shame at giving in. In the scriptorium, the men would
pay attention to the documents and not to threatening the monastery.
“There is no need.”
Cob’s maddening grin once again disfigured the face God had given him. “I know
the way.”
He sent Eccleshall
outside to keep the mob apprised of events. The abbot retired to his residence,
on the south side of the nave.
“Follow me.” Thomas led
the two rebel leaders to the south transept, then through the slype. The little
party went straight through the chapter house and out the back door, past the
monks’ dormitory, further to the south, until they emerged from the rabbit
warren of monastery buildings into unobscured light.
There, two-storied,
with gables in the roof to let in the sun, stood Thomas’s pride and joy, the
scriptorium, where he and his few helpers labored during work periods to save
whatever knowledge of whatever thing they happened upon. Thomas knew he was
indiscriminate. Their pens recorded bits of everything, from lawsuits to
political events to rumors of miracle and disaster, gossipy tidbits from abroad
concerning kings and emperors—it all took place in his scriptorium, on the
upper floor, where the light was best.
Down below, the ground
floor, lay their destination. There, the archdeacon had charge of the documents
once Thomas and his few copyists had done with creating them. Wooden chests
clutched books under their heavy lids. Lesser documents—charters, warrants,
bonds, deeds, and the like—nested like pigeons in their holes arrayed along the
north wall from floor to ceiling, east to west. Light from the large
south-facing windows streamed into the long room and fell across the floor in
oblique streaks.
The Archdeacon, Father
Roger, stood guard over his domain. An archdeacon tended to the temporal
affairs of the abbey, to legal matters, as the abbot’s representative. The
commons of Saint Alban’s detested Father Roger. Whenever there was conflict,
Roger was sure to be found. He was Thomas’ rival for the control of the
scriptorium.
Cob and Dickon brushed
right by the archdeacon. Roger spluttered like an angry rooster, feathers in
disarray, coxcomb erect. Thomas suppressed a smile and merely stood to one side
while the Cob, ignoring the man, led the way through the records.
Cob opened every scroll
and parchment, glanced through it, and either replaced it in its cubby or
tossed it on a growing pile in the middle of the room.
“It might help,” Thomas
offered, “if you would tell us what you were looking for.”
That was too much for
Archdeacon Roger. “You would help
these heretics rob us, Father?” He strode to Cob, busy rifling the documents,
some of them centuries old, and grabbed his arm.
Cob shook off the
offending hand. “Take him away.”
“Brother, brother, they
have warrant for this, from the king himself.” Thomas had no love the
archdeacon, but they were both of the house. He pulled Roger’s sleeve.
The tall, thin monk
rounded on him. “These are Christ’s own papers! The king’s council would never
agree—”
Cob gave Thomas a look
that spoke as much as any of the scrolls. Thomas clapped a hand over Roger’s
babbling lips. “Ssh!” He drew the archdeacon away from the rebels. “The abbot
himself allows this.”
“He can not!” Roger
said. “No one can allow this apostate, this sinner—this serf—to—”
Cob rounded on the man,
fist cocked, and covered the distance between them in an instant. Thomas
interposed himself between them.
“Cob—”
“We may be all that you
say, Sir Roger, but we are free men.”
“Now, Cob,” Dickon
stepped into the argument. Thomas pulled Roger further away, into the shadow
below the high windows.
“I cannot believe that
Father Abbot has agreed to this.”
“Then go see for
yourself,” Thomas snapped.
“I shall.” Roger
stalked off in a swirl of black wool.
Cob kept going through
the documents. Some were deeds, some pledges made in the past, all together
they made up the custom and usage that kept the commons under the heavy hand of
the monastery. Had Thomas known, years before, that this day would come, he never
would have taught the young boy how to read the Latin and French of the
documents, never shown him the charters. Especially the charter that they must
be seeking above all others, the charter that the old men of the village, men
like old Benedict, recalled generation after generation—the most ancient
parchment belonging to the abbey. It indeed was headed with two capital
letters, vastly complicated and intertwined, in the old Anglo-Saxon style, one
letter of gold, the other of the blue of the sky.
And it was not here. It
had accompanied the fleeing Prior to Tynemouth. Both the man and the charter
might be safe in the north, on the mouth of the River Tyne, where Saint Alban’s
had a branch priory. Thomas had been there; the journey was not easy, but there
was a constant traffic between the mother house and her dependencies. People in
the north were more traditional than the southerners. It was no accident that
the bulk of the rebellion arose in Essex and Kent, both southern counties with
much contact with the continent. Saint Alban’s, too, was more cosmopolitan than
the northern counties, because travelers constantly brought news. But, Thomas
hoped, the northern counties might be safe.
It would have been
better to have destroyed the ancient charter, though, than merely to have had
it carried off.
Cob raised himself from
the document bin. “Where is it?” he asked. “What have you done with it?”
The fiction had been
decided in chapter. The ancient charter was not to be found. It had seemed an
agreeable idea in the abstraction of the chapter house, with no member of the
commons to gainsay it. Now the one man of those commons who knew the
scriptorium as if he were a monk himself questioned Thomas.
“With what?”
“Don’t act the innocent
with me!” Cob’s golden eyes flashed with anger. He pointed at an empty,
oversized pigeonhole in the rack against the wall. It lay open and empty. “What
have you done with the charter?”
All Thomas could manage
was a stutter. The agreed-upon lie stuck in his throat, clogged the passage,
made breath difficult. He had not stuttered in years.
Cob went down the line
of documents and threw them to the floor. The sound as much as the sight
horrified Thomas. The scriptorium was a place of silence and study. Parchments
scraped and bounced. Binding ribbons slithered. Fine vellum crunched under
Cob’s crashing feet. Old texts cracked in two, the oldest leaving little more
than powder where words had once been.
Thomas followed Cob,
picking up what treasures he could and gathering them in the skirt of his
habit, like a woman harvesting her garden.
“Here, what are you
doing?” Dickon demanded. Cob turned at hearing his complaint.
“He’s helping us,
Dickon!” He tossed a tightly-bound scroll into Thomas’s skirt, and followed it
with others from the wall. Dickon, too, retrieved documents from the floor and
helped fill Thomas’s habit to overflowing.
There was a madness in
Cob’s golden eyes.
“You have lied to me,
Father, for the last time. There’s no truth in you, nor or in any of your kind.
Pity. The tale you tell has such beauty in it. It’s a pity you can’t live up to
it.”
The two men snatched
Thomas up, one at each arm. Their free hands held his habit up in the way of
women.
“My breeches—” Thomas
complained. He felt exposed.
“The least of your worries,”
Cob answered. He twisted the monk’s arm up high behind his shoulder, until
Thomas cried out in pain.
“Don’t fall,” Cob
warned. “Don’t spill your precious burden.”
They marched him out
from the scriptorium, between the abbey buildings, around the eastern end of
the great church, out the Waxhouse Gate to the town square.
Thomas stopped any
protest before it came out of his mouth. They had gone mad, their reason was
fled, they were like rabid dogs. Anything might set them off. Better to obey,
to let events open up, until an opportunity appeared to escape. They took him
to the cross that marked the center of the town square. Inns surrounded the
place. Next to the cross was the makeshift platform used when players came to
town.
People crowded into the
square, until they pressed up against Thomas and his captors, Cob and Dickon.
They were unlikely allies. Cob he understood—he was all anger and resentment
against the abbey as some children were against their fathers. Dickon puzzled
him. He earned substantial wealth from the monastery, had acted as a benefactor
to Thomas several times.
“Spill them out, monk.”
Dickon pointed to the ground at the foot of the cross.
Thomas let the
documents—deeds, bonds, pledges, contracts, the written evidence of hundreds of
relationships—spill onto the earth. Parchment, vellum, even some on paper,
touched the ground with seeming reluctance, as if unwilling to soil themselves.
Documents, after all, abstracted their contents from the dirty realities of
human business. Debts going back a century or more touched the earth as
unwillingly as falling angels. Judgments rendered by the abbot’s court trembled
to ground like the dried leaves of autumn.
Someone touched a
burning brand to the pile. It was John Byker, who had wanted to fire the
monastery itself. Thomas forced his face into memory. There would come, if God
willed it, a time when he must be a witness before a court of reprisal. Only he
had seen with his own eyes.
The writs and
judgements and lawsuits burned on the earth. The heat forced him to step back.
The people who gathered around cheered, as at a puppet show. The bonfire grew
as more and more documents were brought from the scriptorium, by the unwashed
hands of scores of the commons. They must be running riot within the abbey
gates now.
The past was dying in
the flame of rebellion. It was a kind of murder, as at Tower Hill, but here the
victim was not the archbishop, but law, precedent, and order.
“You understand, then.”
Cob’s lips were near his ear. “The old ways are going, as fast as we can send
them to the flames.” It was a strange, evil intimacy, acted out amongst the
rebel crowd. Thomas would have made a protest, but instead stood witness, his
eyes again stinging with smoke, the acrid scent of burning flesh—for what was
parchment but the skin of sheep?—harsh in his nose. The smoke curled upward,
the flames crackled, the dried old skins bent and twisted in a parody of agony
as they burned.
William Cadyndon pushed
his way through the crowd, jostling Thomas aside, his face flush with
excitement. “The abbot’s coming out—to Romeland,” he reported to Cob and to
Wallingford.
“When?” Cob asked.
“Now.”
Cob took only an
instant for thought. “Dickon, go hear him out. See that he says to them what he
said to us, and does not change his story.”
Wallingford nodded and
followed Cadyndon back through the commons.
Cob leapt atop the
players’ stage. “Give me a dozen men. Bring your shovels and picks. There’s
another garden ripe for plucking. The rest of you go to hear the abbot. Give
him to know that we are not fainthearted, that he and his will not win this
fight. And when he’s done, we’ll have a prize for you.”
The flames guttered
out. In only moments, Thomas was left alone in the town square, at the foot of
the cross. Nothing remained but ashes, the still-warm memory of the past.
Chapter
17
The abbey was never
designed for conflict. It was a peacetime foundation, deep within the realm.
Its defenses were minimal.
Sir William Croyser
stood in Cob’s way, backed up by his few men-at-arms, the same who had traveled
with them to London. Fatigue etched the lines of his face more deeply now, Cob
thought. He must show the same effect. He was far to busy to sleep, but the
thought of it drew him as seductively as fire pulled a moth. He shook his head
to clear it of the image of rest.
The abbot was out
defending himself to the commons, a defense bound to fail. Croyser and his men
faced Cob and his between the cloister and the parlor. Monks—tonsured,
frightened men in long black robes—moved like birds, in quick and sudden
gestures, froze in position like prey when they knew they’d been sighted by an
outsider.
“What sacrilege have
you come to practice now, Grindcob?” Croyser stood with feet spread, arms
folded, across the path from cloister to parlor. The abbey belonged to secular
men today.
“A visit to the parlor,
Sir William.” Cob let the honorific drop from his mouth, in spite of Croyser’s
calculated rudeness. The men behind him grumbled, but he silenced them with a
glance. “To retrieve some things left there too long.”
Croyser hesitated,
worrying Cob, then stepped aside, as did his men. Throughout, their weapons
remained sheathed. Cob was too tired to question; he took their acquiescence as
a piece of good luck and led his men into the abbot’s parlor.
“We’ll need a cart,”
Cob said. One of the men ran outside to find one.
The parlor was a sort
of in-between room that divided the public space of the nave from the
semi-private house of the abbot. Here, the abbot received guests on pilgrimage
or merely traveling, deputations from the town or surrounding villages, and
dealt with people of all sorts from without the abbey.
Tapestries hung down
the walls, softening the harsh flint and old Roman brick. Windows at the east
and west ends took in morning and afternoon light. The abbot’s throne hunched
at the southern wall, flanked by fabric hangings in bright blues and yellows,
the armorial colors of Saint Alban’s prelate.
But the glory of the
room lay in its floor—in the millstones laid down in mortar precisely
fifty-four years before, under another regal abbot, who shared his name with
Richard of Wallingford.
It was whispered that
Dickon was the bastard son of his namesake. Cob thought it halfway possible but
irrelevant. Dickon would certainly have none of the rumor; but for the man of
business, reputation was everything.
Fifty-four years had
passed since the commons of Saint Alban’s had last risen against their masters
in the abbey. It might have been another fifty-odd years, but for the risings
in Essex and Kent. Cob still felt under-prepared. He had to improvise every
step, feel his way forward through a haze of confusion as thick as the smoke
had been at Highbury.
He set his feet upon
the old mill stones. Born into the house of a miller, he knew the value of
these wheels of rock.
Bread was
everything—bread of wheat, of barley, rye, oats, dried peas, spelt. Bread of
dried grasses when the harvests were worse than usual. His father had ground
all of it, part of his duties at the abbey’s mill.
In the year one
thousand three hundred twenty-seven, the abbot of that time, Richard of
Wallingford, Dickon’s namesake, curbed the people’s anger, defeated them in
conflict, and, as a price for his forgiveness, took the millstones from their
homes and paved his parlor floor with them.
No one in Saint Albans
ever forgot a slight or a defeat. Neither abbey nor commons had forgiveness in
their bones.
Cob held out his hand.
“Give me an axe.”
The implement he
received was called bipenna—a two-bladed
axe—and a backbreaker. He slipped the blade under the edge of the outermost
millstone. Even the small stones used in a house, less than two feet across,
were heavy. Cob worked the axe head further under the stone, then levered it up
sharply to break the seal of the mortar. With bits of cement clinging to the
edges, the stone came free. Mortar cracked around the other stones from the
stresses.
“Give me a hand,” Cob
asked.
Willing, rough hands
lifted the stone. Cadyndon at that moment wheeled a small garden cart to the
door to the parlor.
“It won’t go through,
Cob.”
“We’ll come to you.”
One of the men bumped
into the doorframe and lost his grip. The millstone tumbled into the cart with
a heavy thump and broke into half a dozen pieces.
“Shit, Roger,” one of
the men complained. “Watch what you’re doing. That was my father’s stone.”
“Look here.” Roger held
out his hand. Blood trickled from a laceration. “The bloody thing sliced me
like a butcher knife.”
“No matter,” Cob said.
“Everyone can use the abbey’s mill. Gratis.
We’ll see to it later, after things are straightened out.”
Roger’s cut would heal.
“Let’s get the others.”
One by one, the party
of men raised the stones from the earth and piled them in the garden cart. Six
was the limit that cart would carry without breaking itself. Cob was reluctant
to leave the rest, but he had to. Time was short, and the cart groaned under
the weight.
“Where to now?”
Cadyndon grinned in anticipation as he hefted the cart’s handles. “Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph, it’s heavy.”
“Through the church,”
Cob said. “Let us go to Galilee.”
*
Thomas the monk was on
the porch at the western end of the abbey church, outside the monastery wall,
at the side of Father Abbot. They called it Galilee, the land of the gentiles,
because it belonged more to the lay people than to the clergy.
The abbot needed what
support Thomas could give. Traitors surrounded him. They were the people who
should have been his subjects. They filled the open ground in front of the
wall, a rude and noisy collection of rustics, people who belonged outside.
Thomas could scarce call them human.
Smoke drifted from the
east, a smoke that Thomas knew, not the smoke of houses burning, wood and wool,
but smoke tasting of parchment and vellum.
The crowd smelled it,
too. Their faces turned toward the town center. A murmur of excitement passed
through them.
But Father Abbot held
place now. Miter on his head, he would attempt to hold the people in place.
“What of the charter of
Offa?” A thin voice rose above the others, the voice of an old man. The mob
spewed old Benedict into the open space before the steps of the porch. He
stumbled, and a dozen pairs of hands stopped his fall. They led him up the
smaller steps in front of Saint Andrew’s Church. The northern saint’s home was
tacked on to the abbey, a sort of chapel for the use of the townfolk. The abbey
dwarfed it, but the porch on its front stood nearly equal to the porch of the
monastery.
“There is no charter of
Offa,” the abbot answered. It was a mistake for him to come outside, Thomas
believed. There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of the rebels, all
unwilling to be reasoned with, unable to hear a simple truth.
“There is,” Benedict
said. “The tale of it was given me by my father, who had it from his father,
who had it from his.”
The crowd roared its
approval, punctuated by the need of those in the front to repeat what was said
to those behind. The result was a wave of cheering for the old fool, catcalls
and hisses for the words of the abbot.
Pain crossed the
abbot’s face. His hand vanished from his sleeve, in a gesture Thomas knew.
Father Abbot’s hernia was aching him. The only remedy was to press the bulge
back into his abdomen.
Father Abbot grunted as
his fingers found the lump in his belly and shoved it back into place. His face
went gray with agony. Thomas placed his hand against the abbot’s back to
support him, but it was roughly shaken off.
Benedict took the
opportunity to shout in his crackling voice. “They’ll tell you there is no
charter from Offa. They’ll tell you Offa never lived long enough to see the
town rise around the abbey. They’ll tell you a thousand lies, but there is one
of us has seen the document, writ in old Latin, with capital letters of the
gold of the sun and the blue of the sky.” Benedict waited for his words to
travel to the crowd’s edge.
Thomas’ teeth clenched.
The abbot had never seen it, although he knew of its existence. In council, it
was thought better to ignore the old parchment. Its age made it unlikely to
survive the journey to Tynemouth in any case. Better a politic lie than to give
in to the rebels.
“There is one who has
seen it.” Benedict repeated.
But the ancient
document, which gave the commoners who had built the first abbey, in the days
of Offa six hundred years before, before the Danes came, before the Normans,
when the land was called Mercia, not England, a charter of rights and liberties
in return for their working and living in a wild place filled with danger, did
exist. And there was only one among all the commons who might have laid his
eyes upon it.
The western door of the
monastery crashed open and banged against the stonework. Pushing a garden cart,
William Grindcob emerged, his mouth as wide as a grinning gargoyle’s.
*
What kind of jape was Cob
trying now? He grimaced like a madman and bounced the garden cart down the
front steps of the Galilee. Predictably, Dickon noted, one of the wooden wheels
failed under the weight of the millstones. The old grinding wheels spilled out
onto the stone steps and broke into pieces. The crunch of stone on stone drew
everybody’s attention. So much for anyone ever using them again.
“What’s he doing,
Dickon?” someone asked. “What’s your plan?”
Plan was the wrong word. None of them—not Dickon nor Cob nor Eccleshall
nor Byker now anyone—had seen this revolt coming. But there it was, spilling
out before them like the bits of millstone Cob had broken on the steps of the
church.
His full belly and the
ale he had drunk gave Dickon an extra push forward. Cob was eyeing the mess on
the steps. The abbot and the scriptorius
had moved out of the way of the tumbling stones to the far corner of the
Galilee. Time had stopped, except for Dickon’s own movement. Everyone else was
frozen in place.
“Here, now,” he said as
he reached Cob, “what are you doing?”
Cob sat on the step.
All around him bits of millstone lay scattered. He picked one up.
“Here.”
Dickon took it, not
knowing what else to do.
“I had thought to give
you the means to make bread,” Cob said. “But all I have are bits of stone.”
He was off on one of
his tangents again, letting his feelings control him. That was the difference
between them. Cob was all feeling and action, nothing in between.
Nothing was happening;
the crowd was getting restive. They needed some progress.
The abbot and his monk
still cowered, in the apparent hope that people might forget their presence.
Dickon, however, felt an idea take him. He left Cob to sit among the shards and
ran up the short flight of steps to the two priests.
“Bless the stones.”
“They were stolen from us.” The abbot blustered.
“You can hardly expect—”
“They were stolen from us first,” Dickon countered. “This whole
business is stuck, like a cart that has been caught at high center. We cannot
go back, nor can we go forward. But if you bless the broken stones, it will be
seen as a sign of good will. People will listen to what you say. They will give
you a hearing.”
Dickon glanced at Cob,
who still sat staring at the broken millstones. The strength had gone out of
him. He was in a daze, and while they were sometimes at loggerheads over who
might lead, they were in this revolt together. Matters had gone too far to be
reversed. Something had to change.
The abbot stepped
forward. One of the broken shards lay at his feet. He bent, picked it up, and
straightened.
“My children,” he
cried. “These stones have long been the symbol of your subjection, since the
time of abbot Richard. We now return them to you, with our blessing.” He
mumbled some Latin words and made the sign of the cross over the wreck. Even
the broken cart caught of a little of the blessing, as did Cob, who, apparently
startled from his daze, looked up sharply toward the abbot.
Dickon muttered a
blessing on himself and made the sign of the cross. So did the multitude.
Everyone had expected obstinacy from the abbot, not charity.
The abbot finished his
Latin, which words Dickon found familiar but did not understand. Cob, though,
must have. He sprang to his feet and gathered bits of broken stone into his
arms.
“Help me, Dickon,” he
said.
Dickon hesitated.
“Do it!” Cob shouted.
“Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
Truth to tell, Dickon
didn’t see, but the strength of Cob’s awakening forced him to obey. He gathered
as many shards as he could of the broken millstones and followed Cob into the
crowd.
“Making and baking
bread is the blessing,” Cob said. “Blessed are they who labor.”
The people formed
lines, as at Easter communion, without having to be told what to do. The queues
wound across Romeland, under the oak and ash trees, back and forth across the
lanes that led from town to abbey gates. Someone from each family received a
piece of stone.
“It is a sign of the
worker’s honor,” Cob told them, and Dickon understood, finally, his intent.
“Blessed be the hands
that harvest, grind, and knead the bread,” Cob said, sounding like a preacher
with a new text. “Without these hands, there would be no Host for the priests
to bless.”
The sun strengthened.
The colors of the day—the green of the grass, the blue of the sky, the reds and
browns of the abbey itself, the yellow of the glowing sun—waxed the brighter
while Cob and Dickon distributed their stony eucharist.
“Who, when his son
asked for bread, would give him a stone?” Cob again turned preacher, talking
earnestly to each of the people as they took their shattered millstones back
into their own hands. “I would,” he
said, “for with a stone you can sharpen the scythe to harvest the grain to
grind into flour to bake into bread. The stone will feed your soul, while the
bread feeds only your belly.”
Dickon’s own heart
stirred at the words. Until this instant, he had not understood. The shattered
millstones, sharp-edged and gritty with the dust of their breaking, ached his
hands. The commons bestowed this sacrament on themselves. Others helped.
Hammers rang, and their sound echoed from the abbey to the gatehouse to the
homes across the lane; common people finished the cracking of the stones, until
there was a piece of their old defeat in each man’s hand.
They finished. Cob was
white, transfigured with the dust of the stones. Romeland, filled with hundreds
of commoners, seemed to glow with dust suspended in the air. Dickon’s nose
stung and his eyes itched from it. There was a quiet when the hammers finished
their song. The long night of subjection was ended. The people belonged to
themselves once again.
Cob lost his appearance
of beatitude. He ran back to the steps of the Galilee.
“Give it up,” he
shouted. “Give it up now!”
“What?” It was Thomas,
the monk, who answered. The abbot fell back in shock.
“The charter—the
charter of Offa.”
“We’ve been through all
that,” the monk said. He put himself between raving Cob and the abbot. “It
doesn’t exist.”
“It does!” Cob said.
“These eyes have seen it.” His eyes were red now, inflamed by the dust. He
whirled to the crowd. “I have myself seen the charter they say does not exist.”
What did it matter what
Cob had seen? Dickon doubted that, if the thing were so dangerous, the abbot or
his toady would have left it lying about.
“Brother Thomas is our scriptorius,” the abbot said, “our
keeper of the writings.”
“I know what the word
means,” Dickon snapped out. Their casual assumption of the commons’ ignorance
galled him, although it helped their cause, too. It made the clerics
underestimate their opponents.
The abbot ignored him.
“Brother Thomas, is there such a charter as they describe?”
Thomas the monk would
not look at Cob the rebel, nor at any of the rebels, but only at the sky above.
“There is no such document in the records, my lord abbot.”
“Weasel words, Thomas!”
Cob cried out. “Swear that you have never seen it, if you dare. Swear in the
name of Christ and the Virgin that it has never been in your hands!” Spittle
flew from his mouth. Sweat cut rivulets in the dust on his face.
The abbot rounded on
Cob. “My monk need not swear at your behest, apostate. It has been said, and I
will make the truth of it visible to all. Tomorrow on the Lord’s Day, at high
mass, I will swear to all who wish to hear it, on the living bread of the Host,
that there is no such charter here. On Christ’s body itself, in the most solemn
mass. Will that satisfy you?”
Dickon opened his mouth
to agree, but Cob was the quicker.
“Freedom will satisfy
me, Lord abbot. Freedom alone.”
Chapter
18
“By Christ, I’m tired.”
Cob let Joan wipe the stone dust from his face. Ned, somehow, napped in the
midst of the crowd, in the midst of all the excitement. Cob suddenly sat up
straight. The thought of Ned—“Mary Dene—did she—?”
“She died,” Joan said.
“The child lived only long enough to christen.” Joan smelled of the death room,
as Cob must smell of Bluefield’s death, of stone, of bread, of sweat—there had
been so many things.
“What happens next?”
Joan rinsed the cloth she had used on his face in a bucket of rainwater.
“We give them time to
think a little—not too much. We take some time for ourselves to do the same.
The main thing is to retain the initiative. The abbot will search for a way to
regain some control over events, and we mustn’t let him have it. Part of our
strategy is to keep him off balance.”
The space around the
little family was an island in a lake of people, a fair field full of folk, as
the poet said. Romeland overflowed its banks and spilled out into the tributary
streets and lanes. Cadyndon, Barber, and others protected Cob, in one island,
and Dickon in another (though Dickon was alone in his, without the ministration
of a wife or the distraction of a young son).
Joan leaned back
against the trunk of an ash tree and sighed.
“It couldn’t have been
easy for you,” Cob said. He leaned back against Joan; her arms snaked around
him. Ned lay peacefully supine in the dappled shade, with the hint of a snore
escaping his full, wet lips. “The Denes, I mean.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Joan
heaved a breath. “Not for them, either. The old monk, your friend, did well,
though. I hate to admit it.” She laughed, a warm, exhausted noise that started
deep down in her belly and tickled his back as it emerged behind him.
Joan was always
mistrustful of Thomas, as the monk mistrusted her. It was the greatest tension
in Cob’s life—please one, anger the other—and it had been that way since he had
first seen Joan.
How long ago it had
been, and how it still must rankle the old monk. Cob himself was no longer a
young man, though he retained much youthful vigor. His father had died in the
year of the first plague year. The monks had tended him, since his mother was
among the missing. No one knew what had happened to her. One day, so he was
told, she had gone from their house within the monastery walls on an errand and
never returned. When then his father died, with buboes and fever, Cob had been
alone.
Years in the care of
the monks followed. They allowed him his freedom rarely; they suspected his
youth, and were right to do so. He found Joan, the god-daughter of old
Benedict, during the perambulation of the town held every June just after the
feast of Corpus Christi. Monks and laity together marched from one landmark to
the next to outline the boundaries of the town and fix them into the common
memory. It saved endless disputes over who owned what bit of land and gave the
townfolk a day of feasting, of release from ordinary labor and time. Saint
Alban’s monastery owned Saint Alban’s town, and took every opportunity to
remind the commons of that fact.
Beating the bounds ten
years before gave Cob the chance to escape the attention of Thomas and the
other monks, and to discover the attentions of Joan. She was a dozen years his
junior, but his equal in wit and willfulness, and had a dozen curves in her
body that he wanted to learn better.
He still remembered
Thomas catching them out on that first day. Cob had thought the monk too busy
with the annual ritual of beating the bounds to pay attention to his absence.
Joan had taken him to a hidden place in the old Roman ruins, where two ancient
walls met. The whole town followed the monks on their perambulation. Will
Grindcob followed Joan to a heaven the monks would deny him.
But the memory of
heaven was interrupted in the person on Sir William Croyser, knight. He loomed
over Cob, blocking the broken sunlight, wrapped in black and casting a chill
shadow.
“The abbot wants to see
you.” Croyser’s voice was gruff, impatient.
“Does he now?” Cob
asked. This was a far different tone than had been before. “Does he require my
presence?”
“No,” Croyser allowed.
“He asked me to ask you to come.”
“And Dickon?”
“And Dickon. And anyone
else you might want to bring.”
“He said these things,
specifically?”
“He did,” the knight
admitted. “He surrenders. He has prepared a new charter for the commons, and
will sign it in your presence.”
Cob turned between
Joan’s legs, laid his head upon her breast for a moment, then kissed her full
on the mouth. “The abbot wants me—I mustn’t keep him waiting.” He stood and smiled
down at her, too pleased to restrain his grin. “We may have him, this time.”
“Be careful, Cob.”
He bent and touched his
lips against her forehead. “For you, always.”
Cob straightened and
bellowed—“Dickon! We are called for!”
Under a nearby tree, Dickon
looked up from his accounts. Even now, he counted gain and loss in numbers, as
if truth were in their relations, as if he could eat the dividends and
remainders, the percentages and ratios. Dickon made a brief note, folded the
book of accounts, tucked it in his tunic, and joined Cob. Croyser and his two
brother knights formed around them.
“What’s afoot, Cob?”
Barber called.
“The abbot wants to
concede. We go to give him terms.” Cob held up a hand to the three knights. The
sudden stop made their mail clink. Protected as they were, they would never
sneak up on someone.
Cob took Barber aside.
“Bring all the people to the west door. When the bell Gabriel strikes for the
noon prayers, unless you hear from me first, set them to shouting.” Cob gauged
the progress of the sun in the sky. “That should be within the quarter-hour.”
The three knights
escorted Cob and Dickon through the commons. They were a study in contrasts,
like a charcoal drawing, the knights all dark and frowning, fearful and
cautious, while the commons were all open faces and frank smiles; the knights
were stiff and heavy in their mail suits, the commons playful and light in the
noonday sun.
They entered the great
court of the monastery through the arches of the gate house. The door stood open,
but servants of the abbey guarded the entrance. Cob was, for the moment, happy
to have his commons outside the gates. Romeland, the stretch of dirt belonging
to the church, to “Rome,” was enough of an advance for the moment. He was not
bent on destroying the abbey; much within was worth saving, most especially the
scriptorium. If the commons rioted
through the abbey precincts, anything might be lost, up to and including the
town itself if fires got out of hand.
The troops led them
through the great gates to the cheers of the crowd. Ned would wake in the
turmoil, and he was always cranky if his nap was interrupted. Joan would
manage, though. Strange, the way one’s mind turned from the task at hand. That
old fox of an abbot would have some maneuver planned. He would not surrender
easily.
The great courtyard of
the abbey was a shambles. Croyser and his men led Cob, along with Dickon,
through a crowd within almost as motley as the gathering of the commons
without. Many bore arms; some were soldiers by trade, including a few knights
and squires Cob had not seen before—more armed men than he had thought present
within the abbey precincts. Monks in their black habits gawked at the two men
as if they were grotesques, fiends riven from hell’s mouth come to torment
them. Servants of the abbey had left their work, Cob saw, and he applauded
their laziness. Disruption of the monastery routine gave him hope that
surrender would come soon.
A surprising number of
townfolk cluttered the court—neighbors of the rebels who threw in their lot
with the churchmen’s authority. Cob saw innkeepers and their servants, some
handful of serfs who farmed the demesne land, the odd merchant and craftsman.
Even women habituated the courtyard, allowed in, Cob supposed, as an act of
mercy, or, more likely, to ensure the good behavior of their husbands and
fathers.
From the shadow of the
great gate, the party passed into sunlight for a brief time, then were led past
the guest houses, where the wealthy and powerful were entertained, to the inner
court of the abbot’s residence, and finally, passing between the cloister and
the dining hall, to the chapter house, at the end of the south transept of the
great church.
Here, atop the interred
corpses of earlier abbots, the living one awaited them.
Thomas de la Mare,
Abbot, perched on the edge of his throne. Arrayed around him were his
council-men, a covey—or coven—of black monks, all on the edge of their seats,
like crows ready for flight, or perhaps to peck away at the rights of the
commons. The monk Thomas, the writer, held pride of place at the abbot’s side,
pen and parchment in hand, to note down the monastery’s version of what took
place.
The chapter house was
dark with shadow. Light entered only from its upper windows, the others having
been covered with planking. The monks must have expected to be besieged, and
this their last redoubt. Above the council, sunlight played, but darkness
wreathed the monks’ faces.
They must be as
sleepless as we, Cob thought. Both sides will be without judgment.
The chapter house, the
abbot on his throne, surrounded by a council of crows, returned him to his last
visit before the revolt, when he had been tried and found guilty of apostasy.
They had excommunicated him, in large part because he stood alone. Now, he had
the whole commons at his back. It would not be the same.
The memory of the act
which caused his trial some years before made him grin. He let the wolfish
smile spread over his face, knowing it would make the monks scowl with the same
memory. They had won the skirmish, after a fashion. When he had attacked the
two monks sent to survey some houses that offended the abbot’s privileges,
being built too close to the abbey wall, Cob had attacked them and beaten them
soundly.
No one then had come to
his defense. The monks sent their men at arms to arrest him, threw him in the
gatehouse gaol, and let him stew for weeks, away from pregnant Joan, unable to
speak to his friends. The crime was a variety of lese-majeste, they said, but he had been standing for his rights.
Finally, they hauled him before the chapter.
He had made no defense
at his trial. It would have been a waste of strength. The abbot and prior and
precentor, the cellarer and the subcellarer, the almoner, the archdeacon, and
all the other office holders had no qualm in establishing his guilt. When they
pronounced him excommunicated, out of the community, they covered their
tonsured heads with the black hoods of their black robes. Even their voices
were muffled into senseless grunts by the black wool and their own guilt.
Cob had violated the
law, but done nothing wrong. Injustice spilled from the chalice of the law like
sour wine. During his time in jail, when Thomas the monk would visit him, he
had argued that even the church could be wrong, could and did violate its own
canons by behaving like a grasping, evil landlord. He threw scriptures in
Thomas’s face, leaving the monk no choice but to report back to the abbot that
Cob was obdurate in his apostasy.
None in the town might
speak to him, on pain of mortal sin, not even Joan. On his own Cob might have
simply left Saint Alban’s, gone to London, as his brother Henry had done, but
the abbot’s influence spread even that far. There was no civil place in the
whole of England where the writ of exclusion did not run.
So Cob submitted. He
bowed his head before the abbot and his council. He confessed his crime of
assault, for the sake of Joan and their unborn child.
The monks loved it,
made a ceremony of it, invited the townfolk into the great church to witness
his walking of the stations of the cross, stripped him naked before his
neighbors, wife, and enemies.
This time, he held the
whip hand. The abbot and monks pretended to courage, but he knew them fearful.
Every gesture of their bodies, every sound that proceeded from their mouths,
trembled with anxiety.
“You called us in
here,” Cob said.
“We have,” Father Abbot
said, his voice grave like a judge’s, but the effect was spoilt by an old man’s
tremolo, “we have decided that, in view of the King’s writ, to follow our
lord’s will in this matter.”
The historian’s pen
scratched against parchment. Cob turned on Thomas in anger.
“Do you record only his words, brother father?”
Thomas looked up, eyes
bright with liquid, then buried his head back within the cowl to stare down at
the parchment sheet on his lap. Cob felt a pang for the man who had raised him.
He must feel himself betrayed by Cob and torn by circumstance, which forced him
to oppose the nearest the church would ever allow him to a son.
“It is our intent,
therefore,” the abbot went on, unwilling to acknowledge what had just passed
between Cob and Thomas, “to provide a charter of liberties to the commons of
Saint Alban’s town, and those of our dependencies. Indeed, it is more than our
intent; it is our deed.”
He waved a negligent,
manicured, soft hand. Thomas had to fumble for a moment with his papers before
bringing forth the document called for. It gave Cob another chance to meet
Thomas’s gaze. In the older man’s eyes, he read pain, but little else.
Dickon pushed past him
and snatched the charter. The parchment rattled in protest at the rough
treatment.
Dickon read through it.
“It’s most of what we
asked for—”
“Let me see.” Cob tore
his eyes from Thomas and held out his hand for this new charter. Without
reading a word, he tore it in half, then in half again. The sound of tearing
sheep skin echoed against the stone walls.
Protests rose from
several ecclesiastical throats. Cob waited until the hubbub receded.
“It is not for you to
give us what is ours by right. We shall dictate, and this monk can write it all
down.” He pointed at Thomas.
It was harder than Cob
had thought to refer to old Thomas that way. When no one else, not even Joan,
could come to him in prison, Thomas had. He risked his abbot’s displeasure and
the disapproval of his brother monks to perform the act of mercy. His behavior
was unnatural, his words unnecessarily harsh; he would have swallowed them if
they would have flown back into his mouth. Thomas stared, his eyes wide with
incomprehension and hurt. Cob looked down and let the bits if sheepskin fall to
the ground.
“He is your father,”
the abbot said. “You have no care for the care he gave you.”
Cob forced himself to
look the abbot in the eye. What he saw there made him explain himself. Dickon
would hear, and would report to the others in the commons; it would not be the
less true for their hearing.
“He is the man who took
me in when my natural father died, and for that I owe him thanks and respect.”
The words cut the voice that spoke them at least as harshly as the ears that
heard them. Cob almost lost the power of speech when he went on. “My true
father would see the justice of my cause; he would be my ally, not my opponent.
‘Veni enim separare hominem adversus
patrem suum....’
The abbot roared. He snapped and bit
the air like a mad dog. “Do not cite scripture to me!”
Dickon tugged at Cob’s
sleeve and whispered. “What did you say?”
“‘For I am come to set
a man against his father....’”
The abbot was still
raging. “Not apostasy now, but blasphemy!”
Thomas laid a wrinkled
hand on his superior’s arm. “Father, this will not solve the problem.”
Cob smiled. The old man
was tougher than his abbot believed. When this was over, if it ever was, and
they had a chance to set things straight—
“Write what you will,
William Grindcob.” The abbot snarled, still furious but restrained by Thomas’s
calming touch. “Write your ‘charter of liberties,’ and I shall sign it. You
shall know my good faith.”
He turned in a swirl of
black wool and strode out of the chapter house. The others of his council
followed like flightless crows, cackling in shock and anger.
Thomas remained.
“Leave us, Master
Richard. Only for a moment.”
Dickon turned away. Cob
caught the deep sleeve of his new-style houppelonde. “Dickon can hear whatever
passes between us, Father Thomas. We are brothers in revolt.”
“Class means more to
you than birth, then?”
“When God made us, he
made neither lord nor abbot nor bishop nor king. ‘There is one lord, one
faith—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, no
more quoting!” Thomas complained. “You could always out-cite me, even when you
were a youngster. Why don’t you dictate your ‘charter’?”
“No need.” Cob pulled a
parchment of his own from his tunic. “I’ve had one written for months. It’s
very moderate, you’ll see. It’s not my purpose to overreach.”
Thomas read it over.
Cob had penned it in Latin and in French, the languages of church and court,
over a long period of time. Months and months before the revolt took shape, he
had dreamed of what the abbey could give, and what the people might settle for.
When the rising came, he had already thought through the specific details.
Although the rebellion caught almost everyone by surprise, commons as well as
gentry and clergy, it was not unhoped for.
“Well?” Cob asked when
Thomas looked up.
“There is at least a
chance that Father Abbot will agree to this.”
Dickon held out an open
hand. Thomas looked to Cob for permission.
“I have the right,”
Dickon growled.
“Indeed,” Cob answered.
“And the duty.” Cob owned his weakness as a leader was to forget to consult. “I
should have shown it to you straight off.”
Thomas handed the
document to Wallingford.
“What’s this?” Dickon
picked up one of the torn pieces from the floor and compared the writing. “It
is your hand! They are the same.”
“The words differ,”
Thomas noted wryly.
“But the hands are the
same.”
“He taught me to write
from a-b-c-’s forward,” Cob said.
“It looks bad,” Dickon
said, “that it is the same hand.
Cob took the written
charter from Dickon. The chapter house was the wrong place for
negotiations—dark with secrecy and walled off from the people. They could not
hear what was done and said. Dickon’s reaction would mirror that of the
commons. Their own had betrayed them too many times, for wealth, for position,
for gain.
“You have the right,
Dickon. All must be held in common.” He tucked the document back in his tunic.
“Send to us later for the charter.” He turned to leave, then returned. He did
not speak the thought that had entered his mind, but another. “Send Sir William
Croyser, after the midday meal. We shall have the charter newly written, in
front of all the people.”
Thomas nodded. Back the
way they had come, past frater and cloister, into the abbey court, and out
through the abbey gate, and past the prison, Cob and Dickon went. Cob felt the
pressure of hundreds of eyes, the stares of monks and servants of the abbey,
and the townfolk who waited within the walls for the rebellion to end. Some
would throw in with whoever won. Everyone sought the main chance. The community
was fractured, broken as the millstones shattered on the porch only—what?—an
hour before.
As they passed through
the gatehouse, relief swept over Cob. Enough men-at-arms occupied the inner
court to have taken him and Dickon without a qualm. Only the presence of this
great mass of people, over a thousand—over two thousand he now saw—crowding the
field of Romeland, prevented their capture.
They must have come in
from the villages, and as the thought bloomed in his mind, he saw men from
Luton, Rickmeresworth, more from Barnet, and a dozen other villages and towns
dependent on Saint Alban’s. He knew at least some of the newcomers, but many
would not know him.
But they knew that he
and Dickon had been treating with the abbot. Cob was bemused with the
complexity of events, but Dickon suffered no such confusion. He took the lead
and forced open a path for both of them through the press of people, back to
the church porch.
A Hanging Offense by Alan David Justice is licensed under a
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