He had walked down the valley with no particular object except to stay clear of the village in case the reeve changed his mind; but as it was a fine day and the dog Harold was eager to go forward, he soon found himself skirting the castle walls and turning east across the lightly wooded bowl of land below.
He had gone another mile before he stopped abruptly; for it was only then that he realised suddenly that he had carelessly entered a forbidden area.
Without thinking, he had entered the royal forest of Clarendon.
The Norman royal forests covered a huge area, almost a fifth of the kingdom, and Sarum lay at the centre of some of the greatest. To the west, between the rivers Wylye and Nadder lay the ancient woods of Grovely, and past that running north to south just as it had in King Alfred’s day, the broad band of Selwood. To the south west, where the grass-covered
agger
of the old Roman road to Dorchester could still be seen, was another hunting area, the wild and desolate region of Cranborne Chase. But it was immediately to the east of the place where the five rivers met that the largest forest in the south of the island began. Here, stretching roughly north to south, from the north eastern edge of Salisbury plain, down past Sarum and on in a huge broadening sweep that did not end until it reached the Solent, lay forty-seven miles of continuous woodland and wasteland. Through the Middle Ages the names given to its various parts would become well known in the island’s history: from Savernake in the north, Clarendon just past the village of Britford below Sarum, to the so-called New Forest that stretched to the coast. Within its bounds lay not only woodland but open lawns – grasslands where livestock could graze – and areas of wilderness. And almost the whole of it, every deer, every boar and every tree belonged to the king and was reserved for his hunting.
It was protected by strict forest laws. A man might, with a licence, pick up dead wood for his fire; but if he touched a living tree he would be fined. No farmer could turn his pigs or cattle loose to graze anywhere in this vast area unless he paid a fee to the agisters who regulated all the forest pasturing; and though a man might kill one of the unreserved warren animals or fowl – the hares, foxes, squirrels, the partridges, pheasants or woodcock – woe betide him if he touched a deer. That offence was punishable by maiming or death.
Godric knew that he had already committed a crime. For Harold had not been lawed.
It was a sensible precaution which the foresters enforced strictly: any but the smallest dogs were forbidden to enter the forest unless three claws from their forepaw had been cut off: a painless operation, but one that left the animal too lame to chase the deer. Godric rarely entered the forest, and, having already trained Harold to help with driving the sheep, at which the young dog had shown a remarkable talent, he had no wish to have him lawed. He called the dog to him quickly and began to retrace his steps.
Before he had gone a hundred yards, he froze.
He had seen an agister.
Fortunately, the agister had not yet seen him. He was walking slowly through the wood and was not at that moment concerned with poachers. His mind was taken up with a discrepancy he had discovered in the accounts which were to be presented to the warden of the forest. Edward Le Portier was a precise man: most people thought him fussy. But he was a figure of some authority. At the Norman invasion his grandfather, who bore the family name of Port, had (to the disgust of the other thanes) decided that, since the Norman William was fighting under the pope’s banner of approval, he should support him. It was a decision that the people in the area had never forgiven, but it had won the family the grant of prosperous estates, some of which lay within the bounds of the forest. The name of Port, whose Roman origin they had now long since forgotten, but to which they still tenaciously clung, had become altered to the French Le Portier, and both Edward and his father had been elected as agisters.
He was thin and dark, with a clean-shaven moonlike face; his eyes had a strange, intense stare that was completely without humour. His voice was rasping and high-pitched. And he was now only twenty yards from the youth and his unlawed dog.
By good luck, there was an oak tree a few feet away which shielded them from view. Godric went down on one knee, placed his hand gently over Harold’s muzzle and held his breath. He heard Le Portier pause for a moment. But the agister had only stopped to think, and a second later he moved on.
For several minutes more, however, Godric did not move. Harold waited patiently at his side. It was only when he was sure the coast was clear that the boy stood up and left his cover. It was time to go home.
Then he saw the pig.
The pig was black. It was not large, but it was plump and moving at a leisurely pace in a straight line across the ground with its snout down. No doubt it was searching for any remaining acorns that might be embedded in the forest floor. There was nothing remarkable in this sight, except for one thing: a small brand mark on the pig’s hindquarter which told Godric that it belonged to William atte Brigge.
He knew that the tanner had half a dozen swine and that he paid a fee for pasturing them loose in the forest; as he watched the animal go past, his face broke into a smile. The risks were great, but now he saw how to take his revenge. Resting his hand on Harold’s back he pointed at the pig and whispered:
“Follow.”
It was dusk, three days later when Godric Body called at the smith’s and asked Mary to walk out with him. After some hesitation, and giving him as usual the suspicious, sideways look that should have discouraged him, she consented. But Godric was in high spirits and, without being asked, took her hand as they walked along the lower end of the huge furrowed fields. Harold bounded beside them. The first shoots of the summer crops were already showing; there was a faint chill still in the damp air so that, after a few minutes he put his arm around her. At first she shook her shoulders crossly; but when he persisted she made no further protest. At the end of the field he turned round and asked her casually:
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Depends,” she replied flatly.
For a few minutes he said nothing. They started back.
“What?” she enquired at last.
He paused once again, before answering.
“I’ll show you.”
Slowly he led her back towards the village where his mean hut was the last of the straggling line of dwellings. She noticed that there was a thin column of blue smoke rising from it. As they reached the entrance she hesitated and he felt her shoulders hunch defensively. He grinned.
“It’s inside.” He led the way.
The hut was a simple affair. Under a thatch roof, the outer, larger compartment was a storeroom containing two chickens in a cage, his farming tools, several sections of wattle and half a dozen wooden stakes together with the other debris of his poor life. The floor was of earth. The inner compartment was smaller, about twelve feet square, its floor covered with dried rushes and in the middle, a small open fire in a grate under a hole in the roof. In the far wall there was a little square opening to let in some light, and this, in the manner of modest cottages, was covered with a thin sheet of lambskin, stretched and oiled so that it was translucent.
But what she noticed at once when she gingerly entered, was that on a spit over the fire was a small piece of salted pork. Despite herself, her eyes brightened as she sniffed the aroma. It was a month since she had last eaten meat.
“Want some?” he asked quietly.
She stood quite still. He knew the temptation she felt.
“Where d’you get it?” Her voice was low, a little frightened.
“Doesn’t matter. Want some?”
Still she hesitated. He took out his knife and began to cut a piece. Without looking at her, he could feel her weakening.
There was a chair with a rush seat in front of the fire. Slowly she came forward and sat in it.
They ate it all.
When they had done, he turned to her and looked at her seriously.
“You won’t tell?”
She stared at the floor. They both knew the seriousness of what they had done. At best a thief would be fined; he might be hanged.
She shook her head.
“If they ask you ever, you had no meat,” he reminded her.
She nodded.
Then she got up and he escorted her out. “There’s more,” he whispered as they emerged into the night.
“Where?”
He smiled.
“Nowhere they’ll ever find it.”
She was impressed by his caution.
Slowly he took her home; at the door of her father’s cottage he kissed her on the cheek and she did not protest.
Then Godric and his dog walked home, and the young man smiled to himself once more. He had taken the first step with Mary. Now there was a bond between them.
Midsummer’s Eve was to be a busy day at the manor of Avonsford, and it began with a brief but important meeting between Richard de Godefroi and John of Shockley.
On several occasions in recent months the farmer had approached the knight for advice on the continual threats from William to reopen the lawsuit against him, and although Godefroi thought the Saxon worried more than he should, he had listened patiently each time and given John sensible advice about how to proceed.
“Above all, give no sign that you’re afraid of him. And in the name of God keep your wife out of trouble,” he counselled.
But now he had sent for the farmer to ask a favour in return.
It concerned his own wife.
By midsummer, the political situation in England had become alarming. Only the previous week, in the little fortified port of Twyneham, a merchant from France had assured him that the Empress Matilda was planning to cross the Channel to England later that year, and that she could count on the support of Robert, Earl of Gloucester – one of the many bastard sons of the last king – and his allies who held the great western towns of Bristol and Gloucester on the river Severn, both of which were impregnable. Despite the fact that Matilda, with her high-handed ways, had made herself unpopular in many quarters, despite the fact that both the pope and King Louis of France were staunchly for Stephen, the rebel party was convinced that it could topple him.
In Godefroi’s opinion, they could be right. The good-natured king had shown too many signs of weakness. Matilda’s second husband, the vicious Geoffrey of Anjou, was still seeking by every means to wrest Normandy from Stephen’s ally and brother Theobald. The king’s support south of the Channel could crumble at any time. Apart from the glorious Battle of the Standard the previous year, when he had trounced an invading army of Scots in Yorkshire, he had few decisive actions to his credit. Now the air was thick with rumour.
As he considered the major landowners at Sarum, it seemed to Godefroi that the prospects were bleaker than ever. To the south, the huge estate at Downton, which stretched almost as close as Britford, was in the hands of another of the king’s brothers, the Bishop of Winchester, still furious that Stephen had not made him Archbishop of Canterbury, and dissatisfied with his position as papal legate.
“A born traitor,” Godefroi had told his wife. Of the other landowners, the abbesses of Wilton and Shaftesbury, who owned much of the land to the west, would probably be neutral; as to the local families like the Giffards, Marshalls and Dunstanvilles, he was not sure. But he was certain that William of Sarisberie would turn on Stephen if it suited him, and as for the bishop with his four castles, they were already prepared for war. It was said that recently the king, usually good-natured to a fault, had become morose and suspicious. He had cause.
But what should he do himself?
When he considered his feudal position, he could only shake his head irritably. It was complex. William of Sarisberie as a tenant-in-chief of the king, owed Stephen the service of a number of knights. In theory he in turn provided them by settling the required number of lesser nobles as his own sub-tenants, each on a parcel of land sufficiently large to represent a knight’s fee. But in practice, his land was instead split into many much smaller estates whose tenants might be due for only a quarter, a tenth, even a fortieth of a knight’s fee – which they usually paid to him in cash. Godefroi himself was such a tenant; but he was also a trained military knight and therefore one of those on whom William would certainly call for actual service – for which he would also be paid. So although his feudal duty was to serve his lord, he was in truth no more than a part-time mercenary. But what if he were asked to fight against the king? Where then did his duty lie? And what would be the safest course? He had turned the matter over countless times in his mind, and still he did not know the answer.
One thing he had decided, however.
He looked thoughtfully at the blue-eyed Saxon farmer.
“You have a kinsman in London, I think?”
“I have. He is a burgess.” John said it with pride. The free burgesses of London were already a force to be reckoned with.