For he had shrewdly observed that people liked his son better than they did him. It did not worry him in the least; but he saw at once how it could be used as a weapon.
“You just smile. Soften them up,” he would instruct Edward, and it was not long before the two of them had evolved a system of negotiating in this way that was devastating.
In the summer of 1350 Walter was ready for his next big step.
Edward still laughed when he remembered that day, when they had called for the first time upon Gilbert de Godefroi, and he had followed, so perfectly, his father’s instructions.
The Black Death had taken a terrible toll upon the knight of Avonsford. He had one consolation, perhaps the greatest: he and his son had been spared. But both his wife and almost the entire village of Avonsford had been lost. The Masons, Margery Dubber and half a dozen more remained. The rest all lay in a trench beside the little churchyard. And now the knight was in deep difficulties.
The first year after the plague, this had not been so. For although the villeins and free tenants who should have worked his land had gone, he still had the right to the heriot tax payable when a peasant died. From the possessions of the dead he had collected some twenty pounds, which had at least kept the estate’s accounts in balance. During the previous year he had paid high wages to cultivate at least part of his own demesne lands, but this had brought him no actual profit. And he had also been hard hit, like many others, by a murrain which had carried off most of his sheep. The Avonsford estate needed badly to be restocked and to find fresh tenants.
Thus it was that Walter Wilson and his son presented themselves respectfully at the manor house one morning, to enquire what land might be available.
They had walked all over the estate with the knight and his son. The land, Edward could see, was good, though untended; but it was the knight’s son Thomas, a young man of his own age, who fascinated him most of all. He had never spent any time close to such a person. It was not only his pale, fine face and dark hair that made him so strikingly handsome, not only his splendid, athletic body; it was his bearing, the way he walked, the way he addressed others. How elegantly the fellow carries himself, he thought, and he was not ashamed frankly to admire him.
He did not forget their purpose, though. At each place they came to, Walter would survey the land silently. Occasionally he would mutter, or even sigh, but he seemed, out of deference to the knight, to hold back from speaking. But the more he saw, the more depressed he looked.
At last he shook his head.
“Land’s tired.”
It was true that in recent years Gilbert had used dung and marl fairly intensively to improve the yield from the land – a fact of which Walter was well aware – but to say the land was exhausted was an exaggeration.
“Don’t think I can do anything with it,” Walter said, “Sorry.” He turned to go.
As he did so, Edward watched the knight. He saw Gilbert’s face fall. It was his turn now.
“Let me put sheep on it father,” he suggested. “Graze them above and then fold them here, let them dung it. I could work some of this land.”
Walter glared at him.
“Land’s no good, you fool,” he snapped. “Can’t make any money.”
“We could do something.”
“Better land elsewhere.”
He looked sad, as if having to acknowledge that this was true.
“You said I could take on a piece of land . . .” he began, then looked at the knight and his son, as though pleading with them for support.
Walter paused.
“And what do you think it would cost?”
Edward looked confused.
“Maybe . . . a penny an acre.” That was only half what Godefroi had wanted, but Walter made a sound of disgust.
“You’ll ruin us.”
This carefully calculated discord between them was kept up throughout the rest of the negotiations. It was clear that Godefroi wanted tenants, and that at present he had not enough takers. Half an hour later they had left with an agreement which was so advantageous to them that, once out of sight, Edward and his father had to lean against a tree they were laughing so hard.
For a pitiful rent they were to get almost a third of his best fields while, apparently as a favour, paying a small rent for a huge tract on the high ground above that the knight had not expected to rent at all.
“We could graze a thousand sheep up there – if we had them,” Edward cried.
“And we can fold them on those fields. They’ll yield plenty,” Walter reminded him.
“That knight’s a fool,” Edward declared. “He doesn’t know what he is doing.”
This was not quite correct. Gilbert did know what he was doing, even though the choice he had made was still wrong.
The options open to the lord of Avonsford were simple. He could invest in his own land – restock it and, if necessary, pay higher wages. Or he could find good tenants and lease it out, withdrawing from the everyday business of agriculture almost entirely. Other men in his position were following either course. But now, at this critical point in history, the knight’s cautious nature had done him a great disservice: or to be more cruel, he had lost his nerve. He was not prepared to risk the investment; he was not prepared to wait, as he should have, for the right tenant. He had simply played safe by accepting a rent that was too low rather than risk getting none. Indeed, he was pleased to have got anything for the marginal land on the high ground on which poor but extensive terrain Wilson could now graze his few sheep, forgetting that in the process, he was getting far too little for the good land.
As they turned to home, for the first time in his life, Edward felt his father’s bony hand clap him on the back.
The thing which had surprised him most of all, however, had been the behaviour of young Thomas. For while the negotiation went on, the knight’s son watched with a mixture of bafflement and scorn. He had taken no part in the discussion and it was obvious that, while too polite to say so, he felt nothing but disgust for the whole business.
“That Thomas,” he said to his father in wonder. “He doesn’t even care.”
Walter nodded.
“He’ll fight, but he’ll never work,” he replied.
For the years at Whiteheath had turned young Thomas into a most perfect squire. He carved to perfection; he sang, he could even, a little haltingly, read and write. And though English was his native tongue, he could speak a few phrases in Norman French – enough at least to exchange compliments with any French noble he might be lucky enough to capture in war. For war – and only war – was what he was made for. He had been as thoroughly trained in all its aspects as any of his ancestors. If another campaign came, he might grow rich; if not, it was clear that he would never take more than a cursory interest in his estate.
In the next four years, Edward scarcely set eyes on young Thomas, since the young squire was often away. But he came to know every corner of the Avonsford estate, and there was hardly an inch on his part of it from which he did not wring a profit.
For those with initiative, the 1350s were good years at Sarum. Despite the shock of the Black Death, the area soon picked itself up again, and in this respect the south and west of Wiltshire was more fortunate than many parts of the country.
For not only was the wool trade recovering there, but a new and formidable business was starting to grow: the manufacture of cloth.
In former times, England had exported her wool and imported cloth from the continent. The home manufacture had been mainly confined to the cheap burel cloth made at towns like Marlborough, to the north of Salisbury Plain, and a limited quantity of the heavier broadcloths which had especially benefited from the vigorous pounding in Shockley’s fulling mill. But now a lively market for broadcloth began to develop not only in London and other major settlements, but on the continent as well. All over the area, there was more work for weavers, fullers and dyers. New mills were being built and merchants like Shockley were prospering. Nor were the great landlords left out. They supplied the wool. The Bishop of Winchester, the abbeys, and new feudal families who had gained royal favour, like the Hungerfords, were building up huge flocks of sheep on the rolling chalk ridges, on estates that stretched above Sarum for dozens of miles right across the northern sweep of Wessex.
It was a good time for those with initiative: and no men had more than Walter Wilson and his son. Walter got the better of every deal he made; and he continued to drive his little labour force unmercifully.
Only one person ever defeated him.
Agnes Mason and her little family had remained at Avonsford; but certain things had changed.
For although the family still held together, their life could never be the same after the experience on the high ground.
John had taken over his brother’s work at the cathedral, and though Nicholas’s death was seldom mentioned, Agnes was aware that her stepson treated her with a reserve, a distance, that was new. She was not surprised, nor was she dismayed when, six months later, he married and moved to another house in the village.
He still came, each day, to make sure that the family was not in need, but Agnes found that even without his help now, she was able to manage. Godefroi had not raised the rent on their cottage, and while she and the knight came to a new agreement that she would give the Avonsford estate three days work each week, he paid her well for these days and she had her older children to help her besides. Indeed, she soon found that she was better off than ever, since labour was scarce and she was able to sell the rest of her days either to Godefroi or to local farmers for handsome wages. Each week the square-jawed widow would visit the local landholders with her children, selling their free days to the highest bidder and though they could never achieve the rates that Elias Wilson got, they did well all the same, for they were known to be steady and reliable.
It was not surprising therefore that when Walter Wilson concluded his deal with Godefroi, that shrewd opportunist insisted as part of it that the Mason’s three days paid labour should be given to him. To her annoyance, Godefroi had weakly given way.
“You work under my orders now,” he curtly informed Agnes at once, and to Edward he remarked: “We’ll work those cursed people till they drop.”
For although Agnes was scarcely aware of the fact, Walter had not forgotten that it was old Osmund the mason who had spoken against his father to King Edward on the day of John Wilson’s accusation at Clarendon, and when Edward had looked surprised at his father’s vehemence he was reminded sharply: “We’ve a score to settle with those Masons too.”
But he had reckoned without Agnes.
Their relationship had been calm for a month; Agnes had worked her usual three days and, although he had grumbled, Walter had paid her the same wages she had received before. But then he started to apply pressure. First he demanded an extra hour a day; she quietly refused. Then he demanded that not only she, but two of her children as well, should work all three days; this she simply ignored. When he tried in his usual way to terrorise her, she did not even complain, but her jaw set in the firm line her family knew so well and all his threats were useless.
Edward watched his father’s mounting fury, but decided to stay out of the quarrel himself.
“There’s no profit in that family,” Walter would storm. “I’ll get rid of them.” But for the time being, as Agnes knew very well, there were no cheaper workers to be found, and so he had to put up with the infuriating situation.
It was not until a year later, in 1351, that he thought he saw his chance to get the better of her.
His weapon was given to him by Parliament.
For the free market in labour that had allowed Walter Wilson to make some of his most rapid gains had also, very naturally, produced a sharp reaction. It was not that the problem was new: wages in England had been rising steadily since the start of the century. But the sudden, acute labour shortages that occurred all over the country as a result of the Black Death had produced examples of wage increases that were spectacular. Nor had landlords liked losing their peasants, whatever their feudal obligations, when neighbours tempted them away with higher wages.
“It’s outrageous, what labourers are being paid,” Walter stormed.
“But that’s how we made so much money,” Edward protested.
“Not any more, fool,” his father reminded him curtly. “We’re the ones who pay, now.”
All over the country, not only feudal landlords like Godefroi, but those acquiring lands at cheap prices – merchants, freemen, or former serfs – were in the same position, and they naturally came to the same simple conclusion: those working on the land were asking too much. There were protests about labour costs by 1349. By 1351 the Statute of Labourers was passed in Parliament, regulating wages through the courts.
It was armed with this new weapon that Walter, accompanied by his son, faced Agnes and her children at their cottage and told her curtly:
“I’m cutting your wages.”