It was several years since Mary Shockley had died and the farm had passed to her nephew William, who spent most of his time in the city. Of the five children of John Wilson, only Walter remained on the farm; though he had been well treated, both he and his family continued to hate the Shockleys because they were their masters.
Peter Wilson was glad to get home. Neither he nor his family thought about the plague during the next forty-eight hours.
Nobody at Sarum did.
The one exception was Gilbert de Godefroi.
The strange behaviour of Gilbert de Godefroi, which for several days made people say that the knight had turned eccentric, was caused by a letter he received on the day of Peter Wilson’s return. It came from a cloth merchant, newly arrived in London from the continent.
Before this, Godefroi had heard vague rumours of a plague in the south of France; but he had given them no particular thought. The letter was more explicit:
This terrible plague is raging in Paris already. Even as I travelled north, it seemed to me that it was following hard upon my heels. No one knows what to do. They say that it is spread in the air and through the breath of those who carry it. Some believe they can save themselves by holding herbs before their noses. In the south, those who can have been fleeing from the pestilential cities where the disease seems to breed. Soon, I promise you, it must cross to England. Get herbs, avoid the city; clean your house and do not leave it. And set your affairs in order.
It was an ominous ending.
The merchant was a man he respected. As soon as he received this letter, therefore, Godefroi had a long discussion with his wife; then he swung into action. The courtyard of the manor house was cleaned out and washed down; fresh rushes were laid on the floor of the old hall; a manure heap that was situated near the buildings was completely removed in carts to a point half a mile away. Quantities of supplies were brought into the cool store rooms, and baskets of fresh herbs taken to the big stone kitchen or placed in the hall and solar. If the plague came, the manor house could virtually seal itself off from the outside world.
“It’s the foul air from the city and the breath of the townspeople which carries this plague,” Gilbert announced to his puzzled servants. He also inspected the village and ordered his tenants and villeins to take similar precautions, even burning down one small house which had been used as a piggery and from which he decided evil vapours might be arising. Then he ordered the vicar to say extra masses to ask for God’s deliverance for the villagers. The people of Avonsford did as they were told, but they were baffled. What was this plague the lord of the manor spoke about? No one else was making such preparations. But Godefroi was resolute. He had no idea whether these precautions would be effective, but he could think of no others. It was not only his duty as lord of the manor to take care of his people. He was determined that, if possible, nothing of his estate should be lost.
“At all costs,” he said to his wife, “I’ll preserve what we still have at Avonsford.”
It was a phrase she knew well. Since his father’s careless loss of the family’s second estate when he was a boy, Gilbert had been obsessed with preserving what was left. The memory of Roger’s spendthrift ways remained with him like a nightmare and made him excessively cautious in everything that he did. Once as a youth, with Roger’s encouragement, he had left Avonsford to seek his fortune: that had been in 1314 when he had gone as a squire on the king’s disastrous campaign in the north. It had been a fiasco: the campaign had ended in the crushing defeat of the English by the Scots of Bannockburn – a defeat that effectively ended hopes of a unified kingdom of England and Scotland for centuries; and he had returned discouraged and much the poorer. As a young man, he had little stomach for public affairs, for the court of Edward II disgusted him. His disgust was justified. First there had been the bisexual king’s favourites Gaveston and Despenser, and their years of misrule. Then, even more shocking, the queen had left and become the open lover of the great Lord Mortimer. It was a disastrous reign and when Parliament had finally deposed the king, Godefroi had felt a sense of relief. Soon afterwards his enemies had murdered Edward horribly in Berkeley Tower; he had been shocked, but not surprised.
Since then, times had been better. The new king, Edward III, soon showed himself to be a wise and competent governor. Indeed, when the king gave his trusted friend Montagu the vacant earldom of Salisbury ten years before, Godefroi had a chance of advancement: for the new earl, who now became Gilbert’s feudal overlord, kept a large retinue and a court of his own. But once again, Gilbert was cautious; instead of coming forward, he remained quietly and safely at Avonsford. “One’s always either in or out of favour at a court,” he told his wife. “Why take the risk?”
He had not gone to the French wars either. And this had probably been a mistake.
The old disputes with the French had smouldered on since Edward’s grandfather’s time and had been complicated because now, through his mother, the English king had acquired a claim to the French throne. At first young Edward had made the same mistake as his ancestor Henry III and tried to build up a great European alliance; as usual it had been unsuccessful, ruinously expensive and almost started a new barons’ revolt. But young Edward, unlike his great-grandfather, was flexible. Soon, he hit on a better way: small armies from England, without expensive and untrustworthy allies and comfortably paid for by English wool, had made straight for France. Their strength lay in the Welsh and English archers with their longbows, and also in the fact that the well-trained knights who accompanied them were not too proud, when it was needed, to dismount and fight side by side with ordinary men. In a series of short, daring campaigns they humiliated the proud but disorganised feudal cavalry of France. At Crécy, only two years before, Edward and his gallant son the Black Prince had routed the French king. The next year, the port of Calais had been taken. And when the Scots had played their usual trick and raided the north of England when they thought the English were busy with France, they were beaten and their King David captured. For the first time in many generations, war was popular in England. It was profitable, there was plunder, and there were French knights to ransom.
Gilbert regretted that he had not fought at Crécy. The profits could have been used at Avonsford. For his mind seldom left the manor now.
He made some modest improvements: he installed a bathroom with a large wooden tub which the maidservant filled with hot water once a week; he rebuilt the kitchen with a stone vaulted ceiling and two huge fires set in the walls. But though some of the richer landowners were building fine stone halls on the ground level of their houses, he stuck conservatively to the old Norman hall on the upper floor with its narrow windows. “It did for my grandfather,” he stated with finality.
The estate, too, was cautiously run. On the demesne land that he cultivated for himself, he had sharply reduced his activities from those of his father’s day; in order to ensure the maximum yield from the minimum investment, he now raised crops only on the best land.
Indeed, when he compared the estate accounts of today with those of two decades before he was surprised at the change himself. They were as follows:
Acres of lord’s demesne
|
Wheat
| Bere
| Barley
| Peas
| Vetch
| Drage
| Oals
| Total
|
1328
| 66
| 31
| 64
| 10
| 15
| 10
| 50
| 246
|
1348
| 48
| 53
| 10
| 10
| 33
| 154
|
The flocks of sheep were smaller, too, than in his father’s and grandfather’s time and he withdrew them from the poorer pastures on the high ground. But their wool was of a higher grade. Not only the acreage under cultivation had been reduced: he now needed fewer labourers and so more of his villeins paid him money commutations instead of service, increasing his modest profits further. Other men with larger operations might make a killing in good years, but careful Gilbert was never in trouble.
If sometimes his wife admitted to herself that her husband was a little too cautious, if sometimes she secretly wished that by bolder action he had built more of a reputation, she quickly reminded herself that his unadventurous life had all been for her and the boy; and she was contented. So was Godefroi.
By the afternoon of the second day as he sat down in his hall for the main meal, Gilbert was satisfied that he had done all he could for the manor and the village. But the most important decision of all had still not been taken, and so it was now, when the great salt cellar and the
nef
containing the spices were set upon the table, that he turned to his wife and asked:
“What about our son? What should we do?”
She looked at her cautious husband fondly.
Although Rose, daughter of the Winchester knight Tancred de Whiteheath, had been chosen for Gilbert by his father, and had brought only a modest dowry, their marriage had been an unqualified success. “The only good bargain my father ever made,” Gilbert would say contentedly. With her long pale face and her tall, willowy figure she was known at Sarum simply as the lady of Avonsford. But her most striking feature was her hair. When they married, it had been dark, but when she was thirty, it suddenly turned, not grey but snowy white, and the effect was, surprisingly, to make her look even more beautiful: “The lady of Avonsford is lovely; she is white like a swan,” the villagers used to say.
The knight of Avonsford and his wife had been in love for twenty years. Of their three children, two had died in infancy, one of them a girl; Rose wished she had been able to give her husband more. “I should like a daughter. She would be like you,” he had often told her, and she had loved him for this simple compliment. But one child had survived, Thomas, and he was their greatest joy.
Indeed this was the problem. Like many Englishmen of his class, Godefroi had sent his son to receive part of his education at the castle of anotner lord. The boy was fifteen now, a page; in due course he would become a squire and then, perhaps a knight. To teach him his knightly duties and the manners of a gentleman, Gilbert had chosen his own brother-in-law, Ranulf de Whiteheath – a sensible choice, not only because he was the boy’s uncle, but also because the Whiteheath establishment was considerably larger and more splendid than Avonsford. He had even heard that Ranulf used silver forks – a most unusual sophistication when most men even of his class were content with knives alone.
“You’ll see how things should be done,” he told Thomas; “and one day at Avonsford, if we find you a rich wife, you’ll be able to live as a noble really should.”
With this new threat of the plague, though, he was not sure what to do. Should he summon the boy home, or leave him at Whiteheath? He hated not to have Thomas at his side at such a time, but which was the safer place?
This was the difficult question he and Rose debated during their meal.
It was the normal custom at Avonsford for a musician to play while the lord of the manor supped, and then for the vicar of the little church, who in the absence of any other priest acted as a private chaplain to Godefroi as well, to read to the lord afterwards. Today however, Gilbert had dispensed with the musician, a peasant from the village who played the bagpipes atrociously.
At the end of the meal, they were still uncertain what to do. Perhaps, after all, this plague the merchant spoke of would not come.
It was now that Godefroi saw the priest enter and, not wishing to disappoint him, nodded curtly for him to begin. Perhaps his recital would help him to decide.
He was a balding young man in his twenties with gap teeth and a high-pitched voice; but he read clearly. Now he stood respectfully before the table and pulling out a little book that Godefroi had lent him announced:
“The tale of Sir Orfeo.”
There was no poem that Gilbert loved more than this popular ballad. In this recent courtly version, the legendary Orpheus had become an Arthurian Knight, Dame Euridice his lady, and the underworld to which he journeyed to find her had become the faery kingdom. It would have pleased Godefroi to know that, several feet under the ground of the manor house there lay a broken Roman mosaic celebrating its hero; but he would scarcely have recognised the Romano-British Orpheus depicted there.
It was a haunting tale.
In England, a high lording.
Loved the delight of harping.
As he recited the gentle cadences of the bitter-sweet poem, the vicar’s high voice became almost tuneful; and Gilbert, who knew it so well, nodded encouragement from time to time.