Authors: Bruce Holsinger
The nearest clerk shook his head. “Been summoned to Westminster.” He turned. “Chancery, Pinkhurst?” he called to one of his counterparts.
“Chancery, right,” the man called back. “Expect him back at two or thereabouts. But you’ll catch him before then at the Pin-and-Wheel.” Sometimes it seemed that London’s clerks and lawmen spent half their lives in taverns.
At Cat Street the way narrowed and bent to such an extent that even an experienced Londoner might find himself lost, though I never minded this part of the city. Nowhere else were so many trades practiced, so many goods sold and resold with such spirited rivalry. Silks of Lyon, hanging from poles of polished elm jutting out over the lane; olives of al-Andalus, displayed in shortened barrels and scooped out with great pomp by a shopkeeper’s girl; cinnamon and cloves from who knew where, filling the air with exotic scents—and all available at a stone’s throw from the knit hose and rough leather work-gloves crafted across the river in Southwark.
Outside a leatherworker’s shop, as I stooped to examine a row of tooled belts, I saw Ralph Strode coming up Cat Street from the church of St. Lawrence. With him was Sir Michael de la Pole. James Tewburn walked behind them, and as I watched the trio approaching I wondered what would bring the chancellor to these precincts. The baron’s finger was aimed at Strode’s wide chest as they walked, thrusting sidewards to reinforce his points. All three appeared agitated, Tewburn’s face in particular clouded, the corners of his mouth pulled back in what looked almost like physical pain. Not wanting to get caught eavesdropping, and with nowhere to conceal myself, I stepped from behind the display.
“Gower!” Strode called, suddenly all cheer. The chancellor’s manner had also transformed, and after my bow arms were grasped all around. Tewburn, said Strode, had good news.
The clerk turned to me with a forced smile. “Only this morning, Master Gower, I secured the writ of
pone
necessary to move your property matter into Common Pleas.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” I said. “Thank you, James, for taking care of it so quickly.”
“I’d wager your adversary will drop the matter soon.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said.
The clerk bowed. Strode dismissed him. Tewburn’s face fell again as he turned for the Guildhall, giving the impression of an unresolved conflict. Strode watched Tewburn’s back until the man disappeared. “A peculiar one, our Tewburn,” he said distantly. “
Deficit ambobus qui vult servire duobus.
”
“Surely he regards you as his primary master, Ralph,” said the baron.
“Perhaps,” said Strode, his face clouded. “In any case . . .”
“Yes,” said the chancellor with a brisk tone. “Thanks as always for your counsel, Ralph.”
“At your pleasure, your lordship.”
The baron turned to me, his brow arched. “I understand your son is back from Italy, Gower. He sounds like a promising young man.”
“Thank you, my lord,” I said, wondering how such information could have reached the chancellor so quickly. The Baron de la Pole was by reputation and action a fiercely independent man, one who had earned the friendship of old King Edward and now spoke for the House of Lords with persuasion and quiet force. It was he who had arranged King Richard’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia several years before, and though he came from a lesser family than most of those in his circle, there was no one in the realm who commanded more respect. I decided to be direct. “You know, my lord, he is eager to find a position in the government—perhaps too eager, given that he’s just returned.”
“Do send him my way, will you?” said the baron. “With all the ruckus over levies it would be good to have some steadier hands among the ledgers. The court of Chancery has never been busier.”
I bowed. “Simon would be delighted to serve in any capacity, my lord. He’ll call at your chambers tomorrow.”
The chancellor said his farewells. We watched as two of the baron’s guards, who had been shadowing their master as he walked along Cat Street, converged on the chancellor in the middle of the lane and proceeded with him toward the river.
“Simon is back in England?” Strode asked when the baron had left us. “When did he return?”
“Not a week ago,” I said, still wanting to know the purpose of his colloquy with de la Pole.
Strode glanced down the street. “The Bent Plow, if you aren’t pressed for time, John?”
“If
I’m
not pressed?”
“Be good to have a sip,” he said. “Hear your news, your latest connivings.”
Ralph Strode was hardly one to spend the middle of a workday in idle chat. Yet he seemed eager to speak, though I would have to tread lightly. I gestured back toward St. Lawrence. “The chapel would be fine, if you wouldn’t mind.” Strode used the chapel of St. Eustachius within the church as a secondary chambers of sorts, conducting all kinds of business from the dim space. If we went to the tavern, as he had suggested, I would get nothing else done that afternoon.
“So be it.” His heavy arm wrapped my shoulders and we made our way into the church. The nave was mostly empty, though the clink of silver from up ahead suggested some lingering business. In the Eustachius chapel I half-sat on one of the misericords, a row of narrow seats that had been moved to the side after their replacement some months ago. Eight of the displaced wooden chairs, grouped in two rows of four, rested vertically along the chapel’s north wall, their underseats carved with scenes of rural life: a wife wielding the distaff against her cowering husband, a rotund fellow at the hurdy-gurdy, a plowman sodomizing a goat.
“You look troubled, John,” he said with no preface.
“Simon’s return has me a bit thrown off, I suppose.”
“Not a pure source of joy?”
Strode knew nothing about the accidental death on the wharf. “For the last two years he’s been working in the White Company. The clerk of a mercenary, blood for hire. Not the career I would have chosen for him.”
“I had understood that his position with Hawkwood was more in the clerical line.”
I leaned against the cool wooden back of the misericord. “Sir John hires out his troops to anyone. His last client before Florence was Clement of Avignon, when he bought himself a papacy. The man led the slaughter of an entire village in the Romagna. To imagine Simon notarizing and sealing bills for such an alliance of convenience—not a settling thought.”
“I speak from experience when I say that the servants of great bureaucracies rarely have an effect on their policies. Don’t be too hard on him, John.”
“I’ve already been too soft. When I saw him standing in my hall I wanted to strangle him.” I shook my head. “To return from Tuscany with no message ahead, no warning?”
“ ‘
For youth,
’ as our good friend writes, ‘
shall have neither guide nor straight line.
’ ”
“ ‘
Nor old age dewed grapes to pluck from the vine,
’ ” I replied, completing Chaucer’s couplet.
Strode chuckled and sat back. It was time to broach the other subject. “You know, Ralph, may I draw on your knowledge for a moment? I need the ear of an Oxford master.” Before moving to London and taking up his current office, Strode had enjoyed a long career as a theology fellow at Merton, where his connections were still quite deep.
“You flatter me, John,” he said, looking amused.
“There’s a certain author I need to know more about, an ancient writer,” I said. “You know I’m not boasting when I tell you I’m pretty well read in the authorities. But this man is an utter mystery. I’ve never heard of him.”
Strode shifted on the misericord. “What author?”
I watched Strode’s eyes. “His name is Lollius.”
He blinked.
“The name means something to you?”
Strode toyed with a loose button, his jowls working a tooth. “You’re testing me, I can see it in your eyes. Yet I know you well enough to take no offense. So I’ll take your test, then you’ll tell me whether I’ve passed it.”
Pleased at the frank reaction, I grasped his near arm. “You just did, Ralph.”
“Good, then.” He cleared his throat. “When we met at Westminster, I mentioned a murder. A girl, slain in the Moorfields.”
“I remember.”
“What she took from La Neyte, it’s said, was a book. This book contains a number of prophecies written by this Lollius. Twelve of them foretell the deaths of our past kings.”
“And the thirteenth,” I added, “the death of King Richard.”
Strode studied me. “You are well informed.”
“Braybrooke.” This prompted a brisk nod. “The bishop is confounded, has no more idea about Lollius than I do. Without having seen the work I can’t speak to its accuracy, of course—but I have my suspicions.” I lowered my voice. “From all I have heard, this
Liber de Mortibus Regum Anglorum
must be a forgery.”
He frowned.
“To write a prophecy about times already past is hardly a challenge,” I said. “What would prevent a living man from tracing back through our chronicles the means of these royal deaths, and ‘prophesying’ accordingly?”
Strode nodded slowly. “Then simply writing a new prophecy about King Richard.”
“What better way to trouble the realm than to predict the manner and means and even time of its sovereign’s death?”
Strode’s eyes caught flecks of candlelight from the chapel’s altar. “I have thought about the name ‘Lollius’ a good deal myself. Is there a taste for Lollius’s work in Wycliffe’s circles, among these Lollers?”
“Braybrooke thinks so.”
“I’m not surprised, though I’ve heard nothing of it from my former colleagues in Oxford.”
“I can’t help but think I might have better luck than Braybrooke’s men in identifying this Lollius. But I need an excellent library, Ralph. A library with the—ah, the muscle to bear up under the inquiries of a dogged man.” I thought of Chaucer’s account of the Visconti library, the immense holdings that had furnished him with the Italian writings that inspired so much of his current making. “The problem is, there’s little time, and I can’t go abroad.”
Strode, always up for an intellectual challenge, adjusted his bulk and sat forward. “There are libraries aplenty in Oxford, Gower, of more variety than even the great monkish collections at Bury or St. Albans. In fact, now that I think on it, there may be a collection of books in Oxford uniquely suited to your purpose.”
“At Merton?”
“No indeed,” Strode said. “The library I’m thinking about is in an outbuilding behind the Durham grange. A roomful of trunks and crates. I know little about the collection beyond the fact of its existence. Yet I do know its keeper. A cantankerous old man, but we are on friendly terms, and I’d be happy to write you a letter of introduction. The man in Oxford you’ll want to see is Peter de Quincey.”
“And he’ll admit me, even though I’m not a monk?” Durham was a small Benedictine college, and the order was jealous of its privileges.
Strode shook his jowls. “Quincey is a lay brother to the order. His late master was Richard Angervyle de Bury.”
“Bishop of Durham?”
“And a great lover of books. You’ll have read his
Philobiblon,
of course.”
I gave a chagrined frown, feeling ignorant, as I often did in Strode’s presence. “I haven’t, though the title intrigues me. Do you own it?”
“I do,” said Strode. “I’ll have my copy sent round to St. Mary’s in short order. As for the collection, well.” He looked up at the vaults, as if searching the ceiling for the appropriately lofty words. “The most mysterious collection of books in England, some say, though I’ve never plumbed it. Few in Oxford have, though it’s the subject of endless speculation.”
“And Angervyle himself?” I asked.
“He was quite the figure: clerk of the privy seal, a noted emissary at Avignon before this disastrous break with Rome. Peter de Quincey was his most trusted clerk. He’s an old man now, though with a letter from me he should give you a friendly hearing, despite the whiff of suspicion in the Oxford air these days.”
This took us to the subject of rising heresy and the disturbing news out of Oxford. Strode had mixed feelings on the matter of Wycliffe’s emergent sect. “The condemnation of Wycliffe before his death has divided my colleagues on the faculties of logic and theology,” he said, getting to his feet. “Every syllogism is now parsed for heretical content. The old freedoms are being threatened.”
He led me out of St. Lawrence and onto the street. “The effect is chilling, Gower. You have to wonder how long it will be before the same scrutiny comes to the inns, and infects how we teach the very laws of England.”
“It surely won’t come to that,” I said, considering this dire possibility. I struggled to match his pace. “Would you recommend against this visit to Oxford, then? This Lollius could be anyone.”
“One has to start somewhere,” said Strode. “Take our students, who must entertain absurdities of the most outrageous sort when they’re first learning to theologize. ‘Suppose God revealed Christ not to be His Son. What then would be the authority of the sacrament?’ ‘Suppose it were discovered that the faculty of intellection resides in the stomach. Could a hungry man think well?’ Such inquiries aren’t threatening. They merely
pretend
to question our beliefs precisely in order to strengthen them. Consider the nature of the irrelevant proposition. Such a proposition must be greeted with skepticism, and yet we cannot discard it entirely, can we?”
I hesitated, not sure where Strode was taking me. “I suppose not.”
“Suppositions are exactly the point in the case of an irrelevant proposition. If the proposition proves useless, we simply ignore it. If, on the other hand, it proves itself worthy to think with, why, we should do everything we can to exploit its use. There’s hardly heresy in that.” We had reached the porch at the Guildhall, where Strode indicated that he would leave me for an appointment with the mayor. “It’s a lesson,” he said, “we would all do well to remember. In dialectic, even what seem the most irrelevant propositions can lead us to the truth.”
“Or truths,” I muttered, feeling glum.
Strode paused on the first step, towering over me. “Tell that to Braybrooke, Gower. The bishop of London should cultivate a taste for tolerance to match his enthusiasm for gardening.” He took the shallow steps in one move, his long robes fluttering in his wake.