Blood Moon (28 page)

One final ironic twist to this saga needs to be told. Important as the charter was, more important still was the oath to be taken by all free men to the committee of twenty-five barons charged with ensuring the king did not renege on his commitments contained therein. Among these twenty-five “surety barons” as they were to be called was none other than my old enemy, Geoffrey de Saye. I permitted myself a brief snort of contempt when I heard the news for having Geoffrey de Saye police the liberties of
England was like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. But what goes around comes around and within a few short years many of the rebels would be dead including Archbishop Langton and, sadly for me, my mother. Some say this was God’s judgment wrought upon the ungodly. I leave that for others to decide.

*

All of which is a matter of record to be nit-picked and crawled over endlessly by future historians. But now I am going to reveal something that you will not find in any of the history books:

Just after Hugh had been confirmed in his position as abbot and my brother monks were filing out of the royal enclosure, King John indicated that I should remain. The others, Prior Herbert in particular, looked on in annoyance I’m pleased to say, but what could I do but shrug and obey my sovereign’s command? John again dismissed his guard leaving just the two of us alone in his tent. I say “tent” – it was more substantial than many a burgess’s dwelling with rushes on the floor, hanging tapestries and couches to recline upon. He took off his coronet and gloves, laid aside the sword of state and poured himself a goblet of wine.

‘Well Bumble, what did you make of that?’

I eyed the goblet covetously and cleared my parched throat. ‘Sire, I’m sure I speak for all my brother monks when I say I welcome the appointment of our new abbot.’

‘Not that, you fool, I meant the charter. Have you read it?’

I demurred. ‘Some of it.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘The parts your mother had a hand in. Oh don’t look so surprised – you think I don’t know of Lady Isabel’s predilections? Or about the barons’ meeting in the abbey church? I should have surrounded the place and burnt it to the ground and that lot with it. Save me a lot of trouble.’ He waved a dismissive hand towards the barons. ‘But the pope wouldn’t have liked that. He sees your abbey as something of a milch-cow - and who would there be left to collect my taxes if half my barons were slaughtered?’

‘I am much relieved to hear it sire.’

‘Why? Because you were inside too?’ he asked sardonically.

I felt the blood drain from my face. ‘Not on the ground floor, sire.’

‘No, up in the air where you always are, Bumble, up in the air.’ He flopped down on one of the couches. ‘So, what do you think. Should I have signed or not?’

I took a deep breath. ‘No sire
. Definitely not. It was so…demeaning. It made you no better than they are.’

He nodded gravely. ‘Nicely said, Bumble. No different from them, certainly. Maybe I should have made you Abbot of Edmundsbury instead of Hugh Northwold. I could do with a few friends
around.’ He took a long draught of his wine.

‘Oh sire,’ I simpered, ‘you have many friends.’

He shook his head. ‘Kings don’t have friends, Bumble, they have allies, associates, collaborators.’

‘I like to think I’m your friend, sire.’

He smiled and patted me on the head like a pet dog. ‘Fret not, Bumble. I haven’t lost yet. That
thing
I signed this morning - anyone can see it will never work. Under its terms they have the right to take up arms against me for any infringement I make however trivial. So I’ll simply commit some minor indiscretion and they’ll mobilize their forces. I’ll back down and they’ll
de-
mobilize. Then I’ll do something else that upsets them, they’ll mobilize again. I’ll retreat…and so on. They’ll soon get sick of putting on their armour every time one of their fellows decides he’s been badly done by. Sooner or later they’ll get fed up, we’ll have another Runnymede and then it’ll be me dictating the terms. You’ll see. I can’t lose - unless of course I die beforehand which isn’t very likely. I’m not yet fifty and strong as an ox. Even my father was fifty-six when he died and my mother was over eighty. I’ve got years ahead of me yet. And in the meantime more of them will come over to me. Then when I’ve got enough I’ll crush them and consign their precious charter to the dunghill of history where it belongs.’ He crushed his fist by way of demonstration.

I could see he was in earnest, the anger simmering barely below the surface. But he seemed to have better control over his temper these days able to bide his time rather than burst into a rage as he once would have done. Still, I did not envy the barons who continued to oppose him - and that included Geoffrey de Saye. Well,
they say every cloud has its silver lining.

‘By the way, Bumble,’ he said pouring himself a refill of wine. ‘How did you get on with that murder? Did you find the culprit?’

‘I did, sire - eventually.’

‘All stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? That boy needn’t have run for
France. I knew everything he knew before he did. A total waste of time.’

And thus in a sentence did he dismiss the lives of Effie, Raoul, Hervey and Mother Han, not to mention Eusebius in his bricked-up cell.

‘How…erm…did you know?’

He smiled. ‘Remember
those two young men, pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham?’ He chuckled. ‘You really shouldn’t take everyone at face value, my overly-trusting friend.’

*

Those were the last words the king ever spoke to me. I did see him one more time - briefly, the following spring as he passed through Bury on his way to lay siege to Earl Bigod’s castle at Framlingham. But he was a soldier then at the head of an army and had little time for monks. The castle surrendered almost immediately but seven months later despite his predictions to the contrary King John was dead – dying, strangely enough, at the time of the next Blood Moon.

Hugh showed me our copy of the charter when we finally got it home. It seems I got my way over the inclusion of forestry law reform. Clause 48 of the charter provided for twelve knights of the shire to investigate the “evil practises and customs” in the old forest laws.
Under their auspices all royal woodlands enclosed since the time of John’s father, King Harry, were deforested and all those outlawed for breaches of the forest law were pardoned. Unfortunately for Gil the amnesty did not go so far as to pardon him for the murder of his lord’s son, nor did it restore to Lena her virginity, Will Conyer his family, Fra William his living or Fitchet his nose. What happened to them I never discovered. I can only hope that since I never heard the name Gil of Nayland mentioned again he managed to survive my blundering into his camp and lives still in his comfortable forest hideaway.

Eventually the forestry reforms became so many they were given their own separate
Charter of the Forest
while everything else was put into the bigger one which became known as the
Great Charter
- or to give it its Latin name,
Magna Carta
in order to differentiate between the two. I like to think the name-change was my personal contribution to the business. Not that I ever dreamed it would survive, but survive it has despite civil war, John’s death and the enthronement of his son, Henry - the little boy who I had last seen holding his mother’s hand in the abbot’s palace. At least we have the blessing that he was not called Louis.

And one last word before I lay down my pen. Once back in Bury, Prior Herbert still did not manage to find the courage to have his bad tooth removed.
He suffered agonies for most of the time he was away despite my ministrations, I’m happy to say, and in fact his problems in that quarter seemed to be getting worse. A few days after our return I saw him creeping across the cloister garth holding his mouth and looking very sorry for himself. Once I’d managed to persuade him to remove the hand I saw that he had burns all over his chin and lips. When I enquired how he got them he explained that an old medicine woman had told him to hold the naked flame of a candle beneath the painful tooth and a bowl of cold water beneath that. The worms that were gnawing at the tooth would then drop into the cool water to escape the heat and thus the toothache would be cured.

‘Did it work?’ I asked struggling to keep a straight face.

‘Does it look like it?’ he groaned.

Such invention! Such audacity! Such
nonsense!
It could only be the work of one person. It seems that Mother Han didn’t die at the hand of Eusebius after all and I wondered, as I laughed myself to sleep that night, when or even whether I would be seeing the old miscreant again.

HISTORICAL NOTE

King John has had a bad press. That’s because most of his obituaries have been written by churchmen who didn’t like him very much. But he was probably a better king of England than his brother Richard who had contempt for all things English and didn’t even speak the language. John’s monument is not a bronze statue of a sword-wielding crusader sitting astride his charger outside the Houses of Parliament but a two-foot square piece of parchment written in archaic Medieval Latin.

The name
Magna Carta
, or Great Charter, has almost magical resonances today but it was only called that in order to differentiate it from the smaller
Charter of the Forest
which accompanied it. Americans in particular revere the document as a precursor to their own constitution. In fact Magna Carta was little more than a negotiating tool and a thoroughly unworkable one since it institutionalized rebellion and ensured permanent civil war. It was revised many times before it was finalized and the document we have today is not the one John signed at Runnymede in June 1215. Nevertheless that first attempt set out certain principles which have been expanded upon over the eight hundred years since it was drafted and which form the basis of modern western democratic government particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. John did not sign it willingly. In fact the greatest service he did this country was to die before he had a chance to revoke it leaving a nine-year-old child on the throne and the barons thereby free to enact its principles.

Most of the characters in this novel were real people and many of the events actually happened. Prior Herbert was the prior of Bury during the interregnum between the death of Abbot Samson and the election of Hugh Northwold. Geoffrey de Saye did become a member of the committee of twenty-five “Surety Barons” whose job it was to enforce the terms of the charter. He later went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for a lifetime of sin and died in Poitou in August 1230 aged seventy-five. King John did come to Bury St Edmunds in November 1214 to impose his own candidate for the vacant abbacy only to be sent away by the monks with a flea in his ear. Hugh Northwold was eventually confirmed by John as the eleventh abbot of Saint Edmund’s at Runnymede the day after the signing of Magna Carta. He went on to become Bishop of Ely Cathedral where his tomb can be seen today in the presbytery that he built there. Bishop John de Gray did die in France on his way back from seeing the pope and his bones are buried in Norwich Cathedral. He may well have had a nephew who could have got wind of the barons’ rebellion and tried to get to France to warn his uncle - dressing as a woman was a favourite ruse of fleeing fugitives in those days. There is some question as to whether the barons’ meeting in the abbey church of Bury St Edmunds actually took place, but they must have met somewhere at sometime in the months before Runnymede to agree their strategy, and where better than before the high altar of greatest abbey in England on the feast day of its saint?

SWW July 2011

DEVIL’S ACRE

January 1242. Brother Walter is dying. He is an old man but the prospect of death does not disturb him - indeed, he welcomes it to meet with old friends and see God in the face. But before he finally joins the heavenly host he is determined to solve one last mystery that has been plaguing him for decades.

But there are dark forces afoot that want to frustrate his efforts and are prepared to go to any lengths to keep secret events that even now could disturb the government of England - even murder.

In his mind Walter returns to those far off times when Abbot Samson took him on a bizarre journey away from the comforting familiarity of Bury Abbey and into the wilds of barbaric Norfolk where the abbot’s power is limited and be met by a far greater one in the guise of the Warenne family of Castle Acre - or as some still choose to call it, the
Devil’s Acre
.