As far as the cathedral was concerned, the citizens of Salisbury cared about only one thing: the fact that the Bishop of Salisbury was still the city’s feudal overlord: and this they hated, not because his rule was oppressive, but because they resented any interference.
This resentment was nothing new. Even a century and a half before, the mayor and aldermen had tried unsuccessfully to throw off this feudal yoke and get a town charter of their own; but in recent years the friction between the bishop and the town he owned had become greater. The last bishop, Ayscough, had been especially unpopular and when Jack Cade led a brief and confused revolt in Kent six years before, a party of Sarum men, inspired by the rebellion, actually killed the bishop on Salisbury Plain. The ringleaders were hanged and the king sent a quarter of Jack Cade’s dismembered body to be strung up in the market place to encourage the people to good behaviour in future. But the quarrel still went on. Successive mayors had done all they could to ignore the new bishop, and only two years ago, mayor Hall had tried once again to get a new town charter from the king.
“The truth is, we don’t want the bishop – and we don’t need him,” Shockley remarked. It was a parochial self-confidence which most of the merchants in Salisbury shared.
For no place in fifteenth century England was more fortunate than Sarum.
Two things mattered: first, it was so perfectly situated.
To the north lay the sweeping chalk ridges where huge flocks of sheep grazed, and beyond them one entered the rich cheese and dairy country of north Wiltshire.
“Chalk and cheese,” the men of Wiltshire would say to describe their country. And Salisbury was the central market for all.
While wars and trading disputes in Europe had weakened many of England’s ports, Salisbury lay at the centre of a network of the three most successful: to the east was London, to the west Bristol, and to the south, closest of all, lay Southampton.
Second, the region produced cloth. And cloth was the key to everything. When Shockley and Wilson had started to engage in cloth exporting the previous century, they had joined a growing business. Now it had surpassed all others. While the trade in exporting raw wool had gradually declined, hitting many great cities like Winchester, Lincoln and Oxford, the areas that were strong in cloth had boomed. Salisbury lay at the very heart of the business. Not only did the city itself manufacture its rays and other textiles, but all over the western part of ancient Wessex, from Wiltshire to Somerset, the huge broadcloth business was at its greatest. Fortunes were being made by great merchants and landowners, like the soldier adventurer Fastolf. Every village now seemed to have its weavers and dyers, every stream – and swift flowing streams were abundant – its fulling mill. The place where the five rivers met was a focal point for trade, drawing in wealth all over the rich heartland of Wessex.
The town was organised for business: from the lowliest apprentice serving his seven long years’ apprenticeship in his craft, to the great men of the council of forty-eight and the inner group of twenty-four merchants who directed its affairs.
But today, in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of King Henry VI, the place was organised for a great festivity.
For tomorrow was the eve of the feast of St John.
There were several feasts of St John. There was the feast of St John of Patmos in May; of St John’s Day in Harvest in August, to remember the beheading of John the Baptist; but by far the greatest celebration was the one about to take place: the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist. And the importance of this great feast was not surprising: for the Nativity of St John fell on Midsummer’s Day.
On Midsummer’s Eve 1456, well aware of the town’s good fortune, the citizens of Salisbury had reason to celebrate.
At six o’clock, Eustace Godfrey left his house in the Meadow ward at the south east corner of the city.
His handsome face was determined but cheerful as he made his way towards New Street. He wore a long, red robe lined with fox fur – his best – and on his head was a small circlet of gold. For the plan in his head this evening would, he was sure, put his family on the road back to their former glory; and as always when he began a new project, he was optimistic.
For tonight he was going to marry off both his children.
His confidence seemed well-founded.
“After all, anyone in this city would be proud to marry a Godefroi,” he reminded his wife.
It was his grandfather who had finally sold the Avonsford estate. Like nearly every landlord in England, even great magnates like John of Gaunt and the Bishop of Winchester, the Godefroi family had found it was more economic to let all their land to tenants; for rising wages and a general agricultural depression had gradually made their estates too costly to run themselves. But whereas the large landholders still had handsome rents to live on, the Godefrois had not, and they failed to keep their expenditure down. By 1420 the lords of Avonsford had sold their manor and the remaining land to the Earl of Salisbury and, no longer lords of anything, they had gone to live in Salisbury.
By the time of Eustace’s father, the family themselves had adopted the anglicised name of Godfrey by which they were known in the town; though it still annoyed Eustace to discover a lowly merchant or craftsman who bore the same name and to think that other men might not make the distinction.
For he was still a nobleman. When the reeves collected the rent for his house he always made sure that their records correctly entered: Eustace Godfrey, Gentleman. He was pleased that the tall, four-storeyed house with its courtyard was in the ward furthest removed from the bustle of the town and nearest to the precincts of the close and the handsome old hall of the Grey Friars. From the top floor windows he could see the roof of the bishop’s palace: and when recently some houses in the close, formerly reserved for the clergy, had been rented to laymen, he had nearly moved to one of them. He liked to feel that he lived close to the bishop.
His most treasured possession was the heavy parchment scroll that bore the splendid Godefroi family tree. Nothing gave him more joy than to know that his wife, the daughter of a brewer from Wilton and to whom he had been devotedly married for twenty years, still looked at this document with awe.
Almost equally treasured were his children: Oliver, a good-looking, intelligent young man of nineteen studying for the law, and Isabella, sixteen, slim and dark, of whom he could only shake his head and murmur: “She is a jewel.”
Now it was time that the boy should make an alliance and the jewel should be bestowed.
He had considered the opportunities carefully, and also the advantages his children had. About the former he was optimistic but a little hazy; about the latter, certain.
“You have a noble name,” he told Oliver. “And equally important – you have connections.”
And connections there were, of a kind.
There was the bishop, for instance.
Godfrey did not share the townsmen’s scorn of the cathedral – indeed, during the last half century the diocese had been blessed with several distinguished and scholarly bishops, great men like Chandler and the noted preacher Hallam. The ancient Use of Sarum had even been adopted as the best order of church services in St Paul’s Cathedral in London now. The present incumbent, Bishop Beauchamp of Salisbury, was a figure of great importance, close to the royal house where other members of his noble family held high office. He was also chaplain to the noble Order of the Garter, and often at Windsor, which lay in his own diocese. Godfrey had taken care to draw himself to Beauchamp’s attention; only months before, he had made a modest donation towards the expenses of the negotiations for Osmund’s canonisation in Rome. When the bishop passed, he bowed politely and always, he noted carefully, the bishop had returned the bow with a smile. They had spoken on several occasions, which gave Eustace the opportunity to explain carefully to the bishop exactly who he was. The fact that Beauchamp, now that he knew, did not greatly care, had never occurred to him.
Once, he had met an even greater figure: for the old connection of his family with the knights of Whiteheath had not been completely forgotten, and on one of his visits to their estate, he was taken into Winchester and introduced to the great Beaufort himself. From this single meeting, when the mighty Bishop of Winchester conversed with him freely, although Beaufort himself had now been dead nearly ten years, he liked to think that he was in touch with the royal Council itself.
That was not all.
“These are dangerous times,” he told Oliver. “We need a foot in both camps.”
The great royal house of York, cousins to the king, had not only raged against the dominance of the Bishop of Winchester and the Lancastrian Council. When the king had gone mad two years before, the Duke of York had been made protector of the kingdom; the king had recovered but since then there had been a constant struggle for power between the two factions, until in May 1455 the dispute broke into an armed conflict at the battle of St Albans. Since the start of the year, the country had been quiet. The energetic queen was once again in control with her Council; York had returned as the King’s Lieutenant to Ireland. But there was still only a weak and half mad king with a single baby son. Who could tell what might happen next?
Of all the magnates on the Yorkist side none were greater than the members of the powerful family of Neville. Their estates were vast and they had acquired them by marriage, intrigue, and by fraud. By marriage with the Montagues they had obtained the earldom of Salisbury and successfully claimed the ancient right to the third penny – a third of all the royal revenues arising in the county. The earl, though seldom seen in Wiltshire, still held huge estates there; his possessions even included the little castle by the harbour at Christchurch, and if the Yorkist party were to take power he would surely become stronger than ever. Even now, though the Lancastrians ruled the Council, the earl and his mighty son Warwick held the fortified town of Calais just across the Channel, which they refused to give up.
“We’re known to the earl,” Eustace told Oliver seriously. His secret hope was always that one day the magnate, who now owned Avonsford, would return his broken estate to him with enough money to put it back in order. He had made several journeys to London during which he had contrived to get himself into the earl’s company and remind him of their common interest in the place. He did not know that the earl’s steward had several times recommended disposing of the unprofitable manor if they could find a buyer, and that this very week it was being offered to the bishop for a sharply reduced price.
While the town did its best to ignore the feudal goings-on, Godfrey longed to take part. Often he would calculate the relative local merits of the nearby Lancastrian estates of the Bishop of Winchester or the Yorkist ones of the earl; or he would consider the value of the friendship of the Bishop of Salisbury with the huge estates of the diocese, who managed to remain on good terms with both parties in the dispute.
So he wove his web of hopes and dreams.
“The family’s well placed,” he claimed cheerfully. All that was needed now to succeed was money.
He had tried to provide it.
First he invested in wool, buying quantities through an agent from local farmers for the export market. He invested heavily. But as a Flemish merchant complained to him:
“The trouble with English wool is that by the time you’ve paid the king’s tax on it, your raw wool costs almost the same as finished cloth.” This was indeed the effect of the fact that the king levied customs on raw wool but not on finished cloth: while the cloth trade boomed, the wool trade was now only profitable for the huge merchants of the Staple and after a few years of steady losses, Godfrey gave it up.
Then he tried to import wine from Gascony. This was a failure too. For after the successes of Joan of Arc had inspired the French to fight, and since the parochial English Parliament had kept the king short of funds for the war, year by year England’s share of France had been whittled away until finally, to Godfrey’s despair, the possessions in Gascony which had always been England’s stronghold had been lost as well. For a few months in 1453, he was full of hope when the great commander Talbot led an expedition to take Gascony back again. Salisbury even contributed fifty marks towards the cost. But Talbot was killed and the vineyards of Bordeaux were never to be in English hands again.
His trade with Gascony was at an end.
“I’ll never be a merchant,” he admitted, half with pride, half ruefully. And though he was only forty-two, it was to his son that he turned and said: “It’s up to you to save the family now.”
If he laid the task upon his son rather than himself, however, at least he knew what the boy must do.
“The law and Parliament,” he said. “That’s your way forward.”
In principle this idea was sound. More than ever before the sons of the gentry and the merchant classes were attending the schools where an excellent education for laymen, as well as priests, was available. Oliver had been sent to the school in Winchester established by the great chancellor Bishop Wykeham the century before; he had also spent two years at the recently founded King’s College in Cambridge. He was an intelligent boy with the capacity to be a good lawyer; his only fault was that he was lazy. But if he worked, Eustace told him, there were certain to be opportunities for him in the service of the king or of one of the magnates who kept their own courts of retainers and placemen.