The plague had been in London for a week when Agnes Mason once again gathered her family together and prepared to lead them to the high ground.
“We’ll go to the sheep house,” she told them. She knew it had not been used that year.
The group that set out from the village this time was rather different. Agnes’s children were grown: her elder girl had a husband now. But they had quietly loaded the carts under her directions, just as they had twelve years before. Only John was missing. Agnes had invited her stepson and his family to join them, but when he had refused she was not surprised and had not pressed the matter.
She herself had changed though. Her reddish hair was grey; twelve years had seen her body grow thin, and a nagging arthritis made her walk with a slight limp. It was not only her body that had started to fail her with the passing of the years: there was a weariness of spirit about her this time as she led them up the path past the manor.
It was as she had just reached the crest of the ridge overlooking the valley that they met Walter Wilson.
Edward always remembered the encounter.
His father had stood in the middle of the path, scowling at them and barring their way. The party stopped, eyeing him nervously. But it was only Walter and Agnes who spoke.
“Where are you going?”
“To the sheep house.”
Walter shook his head.
“I’m using it.” It lay on land where he had grazed his sheep from time to time, even though it had been deserted that year.
“You’re not,” she replied firmly.
“Going to tomorrow,” he retorted sourly. “Not yours anyway. Stay out.”
“The lord of the manor let me use it before,” she told him.
“He won’t now. I rent this land.”
Neither of them moved, but Agnes guessed that what he said might be true. She shrugged.
“I’ll go elsewhere then.”
But Walter had no intention of letting her pass.
“You owe me three days’ work,” he reminded her.
“The plague’s coming.”
“Damn the plague. You work.”
“I’m leaving the village,” she said with quiet obstinacy.
But Walter only shook his head again.
“Anywhere you go on the high ground,” he said, “I’ll set the dogs on you.” Then he grinned. “Send you dead rats too,” he added.
She stared at him, and for the first time Edward saw her falter; for she knew Walter would be as good as his word. He had not forgotten how she had humiliated him over her wages and now he was getting his revenge.
“Want to take me to the shire court?” he snarled.
There was a long pause.
“God will strike you down” she said quietly.
Walter laughed.
“After he’s sent you the plague,” he chuckled.
Without another word, she turned round and the party went back down the path into the village.
“Suppose you think I should have made friends,” Walter remarked to Edward. But Edward had only shrugged. He knew the Masons were not important.
“We live in dark days.”
How many times, Edward Wilson sometimes wondered, had he heard Stephen Shockley’s favourite phrase? Many times, certainly, for since he had moved with his family into the city of Salisbury after Walter’s death, he had assiduously cultivated the merchant’s friendship.
Shockley’s verdict was one that most people would have agreed with.
There had been the repeated plagues – not only the plague of 1361, which had carried off Agnes Mason – but another in 1374. The triumphs of the middle of the century had faded. The Black Prince had died; his son Richard, who had now ascended the throne, showed few of his father’s noble and warlike qualities; and the splendid possessions in France, except for a small area around Bordeaux and the Channel port of Calais, in little more than a decade had all been lost. Indeed, there had even been fears of invasion so that a rampart around the new open city had been started and partially built. Not only the state was troubled: the Church itself was now divided. For over half a century the popes had found it necessary for their safety to live in Avignon, in southern France. But at least their rule had continued from there. In 1378 however, the great schism had begun. Like rival emperors in the Roman Empire, there were now rival popes: the French supporting one, the English and Netherlands another.
“There’s nothing you can trust any more,” Stephen Shockley used to complain to his family.
But through all these dark days, Edward Wilson kept his own counsel, and passed on to his children a very different view of the world, with equally good reason.
“Most men are fools,” he told them. “When things are bad, the world is full of opportunities.”
The life of Walter Wilson had proved it. When he had died in 1370, he had left behind him, besides a quantity of cash that his son never divulged, the following property, duly itemised in the newly fashionable documents known as Wills:
A messuage, a carucate of land and seven acres at Winterbourne, which are held of the Earl of Salisbury; at Shockley, two virgates, held of the Abbess of Wilton. At Avonsford, two hundred acres held of the king; from the Bishop of Salisbury, near Avonsford, a messuage, a dovecote, a carucate of arable and ten acres of meadow.
The family, besides their substantial cloth interests, now ran over a thousand sheep on the high ground.
And each year the family became richer – as did many others. Not only former villeins like Wilson, or merchants like the Shockleys profited. Great men like John of Gaunt’s retainers, the Hungerford family, had ever larger sheep interests on the chalk downs; all over the south western part of the country, weavers and fullers and cloth dyers were setting themselves up as the new cloth business boomed. The production of English broadcloth multiplied nine times in the half century after the Black Death. When Richard II came to the throne in 1377, Salisbury was the sixth greatest city in the kingdom.
Though his methods were different from his father’s, Edward Wilson never failed to take advantage of every opportunity. One of these was a joint venture with the Shockleys for making cloth.
“This will feed you and your children,” he told his young family as he proudly showed them the new cloth. “It’s better even than broadcloth. They called it ray.”
The new cloth was a speciality of Salisbury, and it was, as he predicted, to prove hugely popular. Salisbury ray was heavy, with a single background colour, like the broadcloth, but woven across it were patterns of coloured stripes giving an effect like a bright tweed.
Unlike the broadcloth, the different coloured threads had to be dyed before they were woven.
“See, it’s dyed in the wool,” Edward explained.
It was a sturdy cloth, often delivered rough to the customer who then gave it its final shearing, and it was not long before the Shockleys and Wilsons were turning it out in huge quantities.
Above all, as he looked at the changing world about him, the far-sighted Edward was able to tell his children:
“Stick to trade, and even the king will have to do what we want.”
This was true. For now at last the power that Peter Shockley had only dreamed of when he witnessed Montfort’s parliament the century before was starting to become a reality. All through the century the lesser men – the knights and burgesses – had been making their presence felt at the parliaments King Edward III had had to call. They had successfully imposed their wishes on the king back in 1353 over the Staple. In the 1360s, the hated maltote tax on wool had been almost abolished. But most dramatic of all had been the so-called Good Parliament of 1376, the year before King Edward died. The magnates and bishops had met in the White Chamber of the king’s palace; but the gentry and burgesses – the Commons – had held their own meeting in the octagonal chapter house of Westminster Abbey, that had been the model for Salisbury’s own.
Now for the first time they had come to the bar of the magnates’ house and made their demands – and those demands had been remarkable: namely that they would not vote taxes until the king had dismissed several of his ministers, who had embezzled the funds they had been voted before, and that the king should also send away his mistress who was in league with them. Demands like this had been made before by unruly feudal barons, but never with such bluntness by mere burgesses and minor gentlemen. Not only this: the Commons got their way.
Underlying this political progress was also a financial need. For all his successes in the French wars – whose ransoms alone had brought huge sums into the king’s coffers, Edward III had a growing financial embarrassment. By the 1340s he had, some said unscrupulously, bankrupted the Italian Peruzzi and Bardi bankers by refusing to pay his debts to them, and when the monopolist wool merchants of the Staple lent him money after that, a combination of his spending and the Black Death bankrupted many of them too. Edward was forced to look to wider sources of income: the city merchants of London, the church, the customs duties; as for Parliament, the principle of no taxation without representation was becoming established anyway, but now it was not just a case of the merchants – as Peter Shockley once had done – hoping that the king would hear their advice. “He’ll listen to the Commons’ demands,” Wilson stated flatly.
The Commons generally favoured local magistrates, chosen by men like themselves, to sit in local courts and maintain the peace – and so the system of amateur local justices slowly began. The Commons disliked the foreigners appointed to English benefices. “Those popes at Avignon send men to Sarum you never see and who can’t speak English if they do turn up,” men like Wilson and Shockley agreed. But this time they not only agreed, their burgesses in the Commons forced the king to do something about it and appoint more Englishmen instead. One other event, seldom remarked in histories, but significant nonetheless, had taken place in 1362. For in that year, the antiquated use of Norman French in the law courts was abolished. Gilbert de Godefroi had still understood it and mourned its passing. Few others did. Within a generation, Langland’s
Piers the Ploughman
and the
Canterbury Tales
of Geoffrey Chaucer with its huge, courtly Anglo-French vocabulary had been written in something very close to modern English.
“England is ours now,” Edward Wilson told his children. It was a confident boast, but not an idle one. Few men understood the world better than Edward Wilson.
But if he thought he understood the world so well that he could no longer be surprised, he was wrong.
The events of 1381 amazed him. And when he thought about the unlikely person who had set the drama in motion and the strange part which he personally had played, he used to grin with amusement.
It was Stephen Shockley’s son Martin who caused the uproar.
It had been a point of special pride with the burgess that his son, though not a priest, should be a scholar. This was not unusual: for though the landed gentry and the magnates usually did not trouble much with education, there were many sons of merchants, or even poor men if they could find a patron, to be found in the colleges of England. Stephen had been so determined to do the thing well that, seeing how the colleges in Salisbury had fallen into decline he had sent his son to the University of Oxford itself.
“But damn it, Wilson,” he moaned afterwards, “I wish I hadn’t.”
For at Oxford, Martin Shockley heard the lectures of John Wyclif.
The great forerunner of the Protestant Reformation was not a heroic figure. He was a timid, ill-tempered academic who, as a priest, himself derived income from several benefices which he seldom visited. But when challenged, he became obstinate, and this was his strength.
From the philosophical notion that a man may know God directly, rather than blindly follow the logic-chopping dogma of the Church, he was soon preaching doctrines that were utterly subversive.
He developed what he called his theory of lordship – that only the good, not the wicked, should govern, or even own the land. The authorities protested. He promptly went further and announced that if the pope showed himself to be too worldly, he should be deposed. By 1379 he had denied publicly that the bread and wine in the mass were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ and, even worse, declared that the Bible should be translated into English so that ordinary men could receive the word of God direct.
It was this denial by his followers, known as Lollards, of the power of the priest to make God, that was so particularly objectionable, and their reading of translations of the Bible that proved them to be subversive.
Yet, even in high places, they were not without friends.
There were magnates and gentlemen who would be glad to weaken the power of the Church. There were taxes being paid to Rome which both the king and his parliament would rather have seen go to the exchequer. This Wyclif with his denial of the pope’s power could be a useful weapon. It was for this reason that the great John of Gaunt, brother to the Black Prince and uncle of the new King Richard II, supported and protected the obstreperous academic.