Edward smiled now, at the thought of the days that followed. They were a revelation.
Elias never even caught the plague. “Too stupid to catch anything,” his father commented sourly. The rest of the family were neatly buried in a small trench above the cottage. “Half Sarum’s dead,” Walter informed him the next morning. “Go to your cousins. Bring anyone here who’s alive. Get back by evening.”
“Why?” he asked. But when Walter made to strike him he ran quickly off and did as he was told.
The little group – the remnants of Walter’s brothers’ and sisters’ families – was not impressive. There were two widows, a boy and a girl, both under twelve, who looked thin and frightened, and the husband of one of his sisters, who was thin and sickly looking. One other brother, whose family had escaped the plague, had refused to come. But to Edward’s surprise Walter seemed pleased with this little company.
“Put them in the cottage,” he ordered. And then, with a sudden uncharacteristic grin directed only at him he murmured: “And keep them there.”
The next morning there were more surprises.
“Shockley’s dead,” Walter announced. “So’s his family. Good riddance. One boy’s left though: Stephen.” He nodded to Edward. “You come with me: we’re going to see him.”
When they arrived at the house in the High Street, they found it in a state of chaos. He felt sorry for the boy, who was about his own age. Stephen had been through worse, Edward realised, than he had, since he had remained in the house in Salisbury throughout the plague and seen every one of his family die while being spared, by some miracle, himself.
If his father had sworn to destroy the Wilsons, poor Stephen Shockley had neither the desire nor the energy to persecute anybody. He was exhausted and he looked at them dully. Walter came straight to the point.
“You hold the tenancy to the farm from the Abbess. What are you going to do about it?”
Stephen looked blank. He did not know.
“My family’s all dead, except this one.” He jerked his thumb at Edward. “You’ve got no one to work the land.”
Still Stephen stared at him hopelessly.
“If you don’t work the land, you’ll have to give it up.”
Now the boy reacted. It was as if he had been slapped in the face.
“We’ve always had the farm,” he protested.
Walter shrugged.
“Are you going to work it yourself?”
Stephen fell silent. They all knew he could not. The Shockley business in the town, and the fulling mill in the Avon valley were worth more than the farm. Whatever skill and energy Stephen had must be applied to these businesses first. But if he could not work the farm and pay the abbess her rent, she would repossess it.
“I’ll get more labourers,” he suggested hopefully.
Walter shook his head. “You won’t find them,” he stated. “Most of them are dead around Shockley.” This was perfectly true and Stephen knew it. There was a pause. Then Walter said, in a voice that sounded more like a sad admission than a threat:
“Fact is, I’ve had other offers.”
Was his father bluffing? Edward did not know. And certainly Stephen Shockley didn’t. Walter’s face was expressionless.
The young merchant was in a quandary, and in this he was not alone. The problem he faced was repeated all over the country. For the Black Death – the Pestilence or General Mortality as contemporaries rightly called it – had carried off something like one third of the population of England. It may have been more. Not since events described seven centuries before by the Saxon historian Bede, the chroniclers noted, had there been such a mortality. Estimates are that in the whole of Europe in the years 1347 to 1350, about twenty-five million were lost. Its effects had varied from area to area, town to town, even from one estate to another – some were hardly affected, others saw an entire village completely destroyed.
Already, as he wandered about Sarum, Edward had heard widely different stories. But one thing was certain. Many fields would be untilled that year, and every landlord in the region was anxiously looking for labourers. Within a week of the first sign that the plague was passing on, farmers were out offering astonishing wages to anyone who would come and work for them.
“You owe me two days’ work,” Stephen reminded him. This was the condition of villeinage that Walter had inherited. But instead of acknowledging the fact, Walter now only shrugged.
“That was before the plague.”
The young merchant looked at him thoughtfully. He was not a fool and he was well aware that in the general chaos in the countryside, villeins were already deserting their own cottages, breaking their feudal obligations, in return for high wages. Technically they were breaking the law, but in practice, when half the landowners were conniving with them, it would be futile to protest about it. If Walter deserted him, the farm would be empty and he would probably lose it. The villein had outmanoeuvred him and he knew it.
“So what do you want?” he asked.
That had been the beginning. And how clever his father had been.
“Go to the abbess,” Walter told the young merchant. “Tell her you can’t pay as much for the land.”
“And then?”
“I’ll pay you a fixed rent for it and make what I can. I’ll try and find labourers, but if I can’t, the boy here and I will have to do our best. That way we all survive and you keep your farm for no trouble.”
There was sense in this. The abbess of Wilton from whom the Shockleys held the farm had many properties already vacant because of the plague. She would be glad enough to keep a good tenant even at a reduced rent for the time being. As for Stephen, he certainly hadn’t the time to oversee the farm and try to find workers, who would in any case cost him more. The fact that he himself already had a workforce concealed in his cottage was something Walter carefully did not mention.
It worked. Two days later both Wilton Abbey and Stephen Shockley were receiving a sharply reduced, fixed rent for the farm. And Walter Wilson, now a subtenant instead of a villein, had the use of all the Shockley land for four pence an acre – less than half its value the year before.
But when Edward grinned at his father and said happily: “So we’re Shockley’s tenants now, not his villeins any more!” Walter turned on him viciously.
“Fool. We only need Shockley this year. Next year, we kick him out.”
And when he looked puzzled, Walter only grunted.
“You’ll see.”
His father’s extraordinary foresight was shown again when they discussed how to farm the land that first year. He had assumed that they would look for stock, including sheep, so that at worst they could get some return from selling wool. But Walter shook his head.
“This year, corn,” he announced. “Sow every acre we can. Especially wheat.”
“But half the people are dead,” Edward suggested. “There’ll be fewer mouths to feed – no market for corn.”
But Walter only gave him a look of contempt.
“They’ll be crying out for corn,” he answered curtly.
And by the next summer they were. For in the confusion following the plague, many fields still lay uncultivated, and furthermore, there was a tendency amongst landlords to put all their efforts into making sure their own demesne land was sown and harvested and then to keep back most of their corn and store it in case of further trouble. As Walter had foreseen, there was a shortage and the price of wheat had soared.
In the autumn of 1349 the Wilsons, while they paid Stephen Shockley a pittance, made a huge profit.
It was not their only source of wealth. For the commodity even more in demand than corn was the labour to produce it. And Walter possessed that too.
For the little group – the old man, Elias, the two women and the children – were all, undeniably, his. Each, individually, had nowhere to go. And so he housed them, he clothed them, he fed them. And he terrorised them. He did it by sheer cunning and force of character.
They worked the Shockley land: he made them plough until they almost dropped. At harvest time, when extra help should have been called in, he kept them in the fields from before dawn until night fell. As the harvest time drew near its close, and the work was not finished, he even lit torches in the fields so that they could work on after dark.
At other times, when the work was lighter, he hired them out, singly or as a group, insisting that their day’s wages should be paid directly to him. If they complained he would snarl: “Look after you, don’t I?” And his menacing character was so strong that they were too frightened even to run away.
Once Edward told him: “I think the women will die if you work them so hard.”
But Walter was not concerned. “They’ll last a few years,” he said gruffly. “That’s all we need them for.”
Between his own children he made a strict differentiation. Elias was a work horse. He was half as big again as his father, and though he had the same long hands and close-set eyes, it was as if some supernatural force had first flattened and then twisted his body: his face was broad and usually wore a look of blank stupidity; his shoulders were hunched; his walk was ungainly. “His mother must ‘a looked at the moon before he was born,” Walter remarked cheerfully. But he was strong, and he was anxious to please. “The idiot loves me,” Walter explained. “He’ll make my fortune.” And indeed, though he would curse and even whip the young man as he went about his work, he could often find local farmers prepared to give him the incredible sum of two pence a day for Elias’s services because he was so willing and so strong.
But Edward was let off lightly. He worked, as Walter did, but reasonable, regular hours. And often his father would take him with him on his busy trips around Sarum.
“Don’t talk. Just listen,” he was always told curtly. And that is what he did.
It was a year after he had first rented the farm from Stephen that Walter came home one evening with a broad grin on his face. He nodded to his son:
“Young Shockley’s in trouble.”
It was hardly surprising. Though nature had made him slight, where his father had always tended towards corpulence, he resembled William Shockley in many ways, not least in having a shrewd business brain. But though he was a capable, intelligent boy, and the abrupt death of his family had made him mature for his seventeen years, the sheer weight of the Shockley businesses had swamped him. When Walter had paid him a visit, he had found the boy showing every sign of being harassed, constantly pushing his thin flaxen hair back over his head in a nervous gesture, his pale blue eyes unable to conceal the fact that he was worried.
Fundamentally, there was nothing wrong with his affairs. The store and the fulling mill were both excellent businesses. But he was still learning how to manage them at a time of crisis which would have tested even an experienced merchant. And he had run out of cash.
The next day they went to visit him; and once again his father astonished him. For Walter was courteous, even generous.
“You’re already running two businesses,” he remarked pleasantly; “no man can do more than that. I want to make you an offer.” He paused. “Let me take over the tenancy from the Abbey and I’ll give you three years’ rent for it. Fifteen pounds.”
As he watched, Edward could not tell which one of them was more surprised – himself or young Shockley. It was more than a fair offer, and a substantial sum of money. Though he could not read or write, he could reckon with lightning speed, and he knew that, with the whole profit from their sales, together with the money saved from hiring out the family, Walter could not have produced such an amount. He must have stolen it, he thought to himself.
“You have that?” Stephen queried.
“An inheritance,” Walter said coolly.
The youth considered. He was loath to give up the farm which had been in the family so long, but such a sum, in his hands now, would tide over the Shockley business where he knew his own future lay.
He nodded.
“Yes. I’ll take it.”
And with those words, the farm which King Alfred had given his Saxon forebears nearly five centuries before, and which had given him his name, passed for ever out of the family’s hands.
The next day, the former villein and new tenant of Shockley had a brief interview with the steward at Wilton Abbey. Edward was not asked to come. He never discovered how his father had done it, but the rent on the farm was lowered again.
“Now we’ve kicked those damn Shockleys out,” his father told him. “And this is only the start.”
“What’s next?” Edward asked. But Walter did not say.
The next year, 1350, was a bad harvest; but they managed to salvage some of their corn and sold it at a handsome profit.
During this time, a subtle change began to take place in their relationship. For although his father would still occasionally strike him and frequently scowled at his foolish mistakes, he noticed that sometimes Walter would turn to him, apparently for advice, when they were doing business, and would even send him to attend to small matters by himself.