For Osmund, having passed through the grand climacteric of his life, seemed to have settled quietly into an indestructible old age. Thin and bent, his shuffle a little slower, he seemed always to be in motion, and even as he neared his eightieth year, he still walked the few miles from Avonsford to the new city at least once a week if he could not get a ride in a cart. “We’ll be building another cathedral before that old man dies,” the masons began to joke, as he gamely pulled himself up the tall staircases that led to the spire.
Year by year it slowly rose, and year by year Osmund climbed up to inspect it, gazing carefully at the bending pillars. The buttresses that had been added seemed to be taking the strain of the arcades; the soaring purbeck shafts, miraculously, seemed to be holding in place.
The construction of the spire fascinated him, for there were several new technical problems to surmount. The first was how to fit an octagonal spire on to a square tower – a problem which fell into two parts: how to support its eight corners’ vertical thrusts, and how to counteract the eight horizontal thrusts that accompanied them. To support them, arches had to be constructed across the four corners of the tower, subdividing the area into eight bases. But now the weight of the spire was pushing upon not only the tower’s corners but the middle of the walls as well, where the new arches met, forcing them outwards and threatening to split the tower apart.
Once again, the builders decided to bind the tower with bands of iron, this time just below the parapet. Thin iron bands were therefore placed around the inside and outside, fastened securely together through the masonry, and again the work was so well done that it would not be reinforced for four centuries. Next, turrets were built at the corners to act as extra buttresses against the outward thrust at the bottom of the spire’s sloping walls. But it was something else that truly astonished Osmund. For on his fourth visit, when the cone had grown some twenty-five feet, he noticed that the last five feet of its walls were much thinner than the first twenty; and when he clambered up the scaffolding to inspect it, he was amazed to discover that it was only a little thicker than the span of his own small hand.
“Are you building the walls so thin right to the top?” he called down. Edward nodded. “Why then, it will be as thin as an eggshell,” he cried.
“And as light,” Edward remarked.
This was the key. The stone spire of Salisbury cathedral was built of masonry less than nine inches thick – an incredible thinness for a structure nearly two hundred feet high. Of the total weight of the tower and spire together, some six thousand five hundred tons, the spire represented only eight hundred.
When he descended to the cathedral floor that day and stared up at the bending pillars in the transept, Osmund, for the first time in years, allowed a hint of cautious approval for the daring building to pass his lips.
“If you brace those pillars and add more buttresses,” he remarked, “it might stand up.”
The work was intricate, and because of the difficulty of access, another unusual procedure was necessary: the scaffolding had to be constructed inside the spire instead of outside, the stones being drawn up using a huge, twelve-foot windlass that the labourers pulled round by hand. Nor could the stones in the sloping walls simply be laid one on top of another, as they were in the main body of the church: instead each was clamped to the next with an iron staple, sealed with molten lead, each octagonal layer being completed before proceeding to the next, so that the masons built it up in the same way as a potter lays on rings of clay.
The spire had reached a height of sixty feet when, one cold February, his wife caught pneumonia and died. He accepted it philosophically and soon afterwards moved in with Edward and his family.
By the turn of the century the old mason had outlived all his contemporaries.
Jocelin de Godefroi died in 1292; and in September 1295, Peter Shockley died, two days after Alicia. He was sixty-nine. Alicia had been taken ill that spring and during the summer he had watched her quietly fade. Shortly before the end, she had become delirious, and while he kept watch by her side, she chattered, to his great surprise, in French. He never made out what she said, nor to whom she was talking.
The day that they buried her in the little churchyard beside St Thomas’s church, he complained of feeling tired. They found him dead in his chair that evening.
But Osmund went on. And when his grandchildren asked the old man, “How long will you live, grandfather?” he used to answer: “Until the spire is built.”
The disasters that had struck both the Godefroi and the Wilson families by the early years of the new century were caused, indirectly, by the king.
For Edward I, the years after 1289 were times of gathering darkness. His plans for Scotland had collapsed in ruins when, in the late summer of 1290, the Maid of Norway died, and though he remained nominal overlord of Scotland, his hopes of uniting the north and south of the island peacefully under his dynasty were destroyed. Worse, his own life had been shattered in November of that year when his beloved queen, Eleanor of Castile, had unexpectedly died too. The grief-stricken king accompanied her bier from Lincoln to London, and at each place where the mournful party rested for the night, he had a fine stone cross erected. The last was the Charing Cross, at London.
On every side, it seemed things were going wrong. By the mid-nineties, England had drifted into war with France over Gascony, and both the Welsh and Scotland, which after the Maid of Norway’s death now had rival claimants to its throne, had risen in rebellion against him. The peace he had won, all the work he had done, was threatened and from now on he was almost constantly at war.
And the trouble, as usual, was the cost. For while the kingdom of England with its growing towns and thriving wool trade grew richer, King Edward himself did not. His finances still relied upon his feudal dues, his own estates, the profits from the courts, and whatever taxes he could raise by special assessments on his feudal tenants and the Church. In times of war, he knew, these were not enough. Worse, strong as he was, Edward could not enforce his will. The greatest landowner was the Church and since each generation saw more lands given to the Church by a pious nobility – land which then passed forever out of the king’s control – the Church’s wealth could only increase at his expense. This was another situation which he had tried to correct by insisting, in his Statute of Mortmain, that only the king should license these land grants in future; but even so, the wealth of his kingdom that was controlled by the bishops and abbots was huge. And if this was not bad enough, in 1296, in the great Bull
Clericis Laicos
, the pope had now declared that no subsidies should be paid to the king without his permission. Not only the Church gave him trouble. The very next year, when Edward held a parliament of his magnates at Salisbury, they had even refused to go to Gascony unless the king went too. “By God, earl,” he was said to have cried in exasperation to the marshal, “You will either go or hang.” To which the magnate replied: “By God, king, I will neither go nor hang.” And so, once again, England’s king found himself confronted with exactly the same problem that had forced King John to agree to the Magna Carta and Henry III to give way to Montfort. The feudal king had neither the money nor the power to govern in troubled times.
The answer was wool. Roughly half the value of the kingdom now lay in its wool, and Edward made every effort to increase the wool exports from his own estates and to tax the trade of the merchants. Why, after all, should the king not profit from the greatest source of wealth in his kingdom?
It was Edward who first established the customs and excise. And in 1294 he began the tax on wool exports called the maltote.
In doing so he ruined John Wilson completely. It was Wilson’s fault.
The grant of the farm, small as it was, had given the merchant a new confidence. A subtle change came over him and his wife. He trimmed his cotte with fur around the collar; Cristina, who had persuaded the Scottish secretary to part with a golden chain, wore it proudly round her neck. When they went to hear the mass on Sundays, they almost strutted down the street.
And in 1291, John Wilson began to speculate in wool.
It had seemed safe enough. Under the system known as arra, a merchant would advance money to a farmer at a discounted price on the security of his next crop of wool. There was nothing new in this, and since the wool business was booming, the risks to the merchant were slight. In his first year, by driving a hard bargain with some of the smaller wool growers, many of them villeins from nearby estates, Wilson did well.
He grew more ambitious. The following year, he not only advanced small amounts of money of his own; he borrowed sums from larger merchants so that he could advance more, using the security of the farm. For two years he made handsome profits. He gambled more.
The effect of the maltote tax was simple. The wholesale wool exporters, unable to pass on all the tax as a price increase to their customers, made up for it by paying less for their wool. And so although at the end of the thirteenth century the wool market was booming, the prices paid to suppliers actually fell. John Wilson, now the owner of large quantities of wool he had bought two years ahead and paid for with borrowed money, was left with a huge shortfall. To meet it he had to sell the house and business in Wilton, all his livestock, and the tenancy of the farm. By the spring of 1296 the Wilson family, after only half a decade of prosperity, was completely ruined.
Though he was only a boy of five at the time, John’s son Walter remembered what happened next all his life.
On a cold spring day, when the little family were disconsolately huddled by the cottage, it was Mary Shockley who came striding down the path from the Shockley farmhouse towards them.
What a strange figure she had seemed: a big, bluff woman with her hair cut short and dressed like a man, as she came stomping through the mud in her heavy boots. When she reached the cottage she stood in front of them with her hands on her hips and to the boy she seemed very tall. Her violet eyes took them all in, and she came straight to the point.
“Well, ferret-face,” she addressed John Wilson. It was said cheerfully and without malice. “I hear you’ve got to give up the farm.”
John gave her a sidelong glance, but said nothing.
“Where will you live?”
John shrugged. “Dunno.”
She had grunted thoughtfully.
“I need some help on my land. If I buy this farm, you can stay on it and work for me. I need four days a week. How’s that?”
To little Walter this seemed wonderful news: they would not have to leave. He could not understand the look of white anger that passed over his father’s face.
“If I do that,” John said slowly at last, “then I’d be a villein. I’m a free man now.”
Mary did not seem interested.
“Can’t help that. It’s work anyway.”
It was not uncommon for a free man without money to be forced to take a position giving work-rent to a landlord which made him technically a villein, and it was possible for a villein to become rich again and buy his freedom back. But after all his efforts, to be the serf of one of the hated Shockleys! He tasted his greatest bitterness.
“At least you stay on your farm,” Mary said, not unkindly.
Walter remembered so well his father’s sad nod. Even at this age, he knew it was a gesture of surrender, and, though he did not understand the reasons, he felt sorry for his father, and angry with the big woman who seemed to be bullying him.
“All right.”
Mary smiled.
“That’s settled then.” She was turning to go, when she paused. She had noticed something on Cristina.
“Want to sell that gold chain?”
Mary thought she was doing the family a favour, but Walter remembered only how his mother’s hand had reached up and grasped the chain, as though someone was trying to tear it from her. He did not know where it had come from.
“Maybe,” Cristina had replied, dismally.
“Good,” Mary said. “I like that chain.”
It was the only ornament she ever bought in her life.
But what stuck in Walter’s mind even more was what followed after Mary Shockley had gone. Never, during the long sad years that his father worked the Shockley land, never while he saw Cristina slowly turn into an old woman with arthritic hands, and never afterwards did the vision leave him. For it was to him, Walter, that his father had turned when Mary had gone; it was he who saw, to his astonishment, his father’s calm and pleasant face suddenly contort into a look of savage hatred, and it was into his eyes that his father’s, full of an age-old urgency and rage, had looked as he took him by the shoulders and exclaimed:
“We’ll take this land back one day, and Shockley farm, and the mill, you understand? We’ll kick him out. If I don’t, you will. Don’t ever forget.”
He never did.
The trouble with Roger de Godefroi, on the other hand, was that he overspent. The two fine estates old Jocelin had preserved for him were there to be enjoyed; nothing had given his grandfather greater joy than to see his heir cut such a fine figure at the joust: he had pleased him by being everything a young noble should be. It was natural that after Jocelin was gone, he should live in a manner befitting so fine a gentleman; he knew it was expected of him.