The knight nodded.
“Good. I wish you to go with my wife and children to London and place them under his care. Will you do it?”
John blushed. It was an honour.
“Of course.”
“I am grateful to you,” Godefroi inclined his head gracefully.
John of Shockley guessed what this must mean. He wondered what news Godefroi might have.
“Will they,” he hesitated, “be there for long?”
“Perhaps.” It was clear the Norman did not wish to discuss it. “You’ll leave tomorrow.”
After John withdrew, Godefroi gazed thoughtfully about the room. His manor house was not large, but typical of the time. On the ground floor level, it consisted of a broad, vaulted undercroft, like a barn, with thick stone walls and pillars down the centre, which was used mainly for storage. Above this however, reached by an outside wooden staircase, were the living quarters. These consisted of a large, handsome hall that took up two thirds of the space, and divided from this by a heavy leather curtain was the
solar
, where the family’s sleeping quarters were partitioned by screens. There was a huge stone fireplace set in the wall of Godefroi’s hall, and on the north east corner of the building was a small garderobe tower where he kept his valuables. The windows of the upper rooms were large and fitted with panes of soft, potash glass – less durable than the soda glass of Roman times, but which shed a pleasant greenish light in the interior. The windows of the undercroft however were no more than narrow slits, in case the manor should ever need to be defended.
He was sitting at a large oak table. On the wall above him hung a wooden shield: on its red background was depicted an elegant white swan. The art of heraldry, just beginning, was still an informal affair, but when the fashion for a knight to have his own insignia had begun, Godefroi chose for his symbol one of the swans which, if he looked out of the window of his hall, he could see gliding silently by on the Avon below. Near the fire, darkened by the smoke, stood a wooden screen, to the ends of which had recently been fixed wood carvings of two more swans, whose graceful lines had delighted him. They were the work of the boy Godric, whom he had recently made a shepherd, and the young fellow had given them to him, unasked, to thank him for the new position. He would have young Godric do other work, he thought.
But not at present. The following day Nicholas the stoneworker was to take the glass out of the upper windows and reduce them to narrow slits, like those below: the manor was being fortified.
“Just as a precaution,” he sighed.
A few minutes later when his wife, a pleasant, quiet woman, daughter of a Breton knight, came to him with their three children, he gave them their instructions.
“John of Shockley will take you to London tomorrow. I am sending money with you – half of all I have. His kinsman is a burgess who will find lodgings for you and see that you are safe.”
It was a wise move. For centuries, even since the time of Alfred, London had been a world apart. It was the greatest port in the kingdom; its walls were formidable. And despite the great tower that the Conqueror had built beside it to overawe its citizens, the independent burgesses of the city would make their own terms with any king who tried to seize the crown. Not only would his wife be safe there, but if by chance he finished on the losing side in the conflict, she would be in a position in the independent city and with ample funds, to plead his case and arrange whatever financial settlement might be needed to win him back to favour. Though quiet, she was a capable woman, and he knew he could trust her.
“What do you think will happen?” she asked.
“I think the rebels will hold the west. This area will then be a battle ground. We must expect the worst.”
Left alone once more, Godefroi returned to his work.
On the table lay two books and an abacus, a recent importation from the Mediterranean that Godefroi had been quick to master. Since dawn that day he had been reckoning up his accounts.
The account of the manor of Avonsford in William the Conqueror’s great Domesday survey of England had been brief and simple.
Richard de Godefroi holds Avonsford from Edward of Sarisberie. In the reign of King Edward it paid geld for 6 hides. There is land for thirty ploughs. In demesne are 10 ploughs and 20 slaves; 30 villeins and 15 bordars have 20 ploughs. There is a meadow for 4 ploughs and pasture for the beasts of the village. There is a church.
It was a typical feudal manor, consisting of the lord’s own land, his demesne, farmed separately, and the common land he shared with the villagers. The estate was profitable and yielded him over twenty pounds a year. The estate in Normandy, which he seldom visited but which one of his wife’s family kept an eye on, yielded him another ten pounds.
In addition to this, he had some years previously bought a wardship in Devon. This was the practice by which an overlord could grant the estate of one of his tenants, which was in the hands of a widow or a minor, as payment to another landowner, who would then manage the estate and take most of its profits until the widow remarried or the minor came of age. Originally designed to protect the estates of those who were unable to manage them, the system in practice often led to terrible abuse, with the assets being systematically sold off by profiteers who finally returned only the shell of the estate to the rightful inheritors. Godefroi was a conscientious manager, but the Devon estate still brought him a useful twenty pounds a year.
Now he was considering the assets of his own estate. That spring he had decided to turn everything he could into ready cash, and midsummer was a crucial period. He had ordered the reeve to select a larger number of beasts than usual – both cattle and sheep – to be fattened for slaughter. They were in prime condition, and would be driven to market within the next few days – most to Wilton market, and a few to the new, smaller market which the burgesses now ran in the castle town of Sarisberie. On the ridges above, the sheep shearing had also begun. Half of the expected wool had already been pre-sold to a merchant from the great cloth centre of Flanders across the Channel; the rest would go to local markets. So would all the excess cheese and corn that the estate produced. He calculated that in two weeks’ time, he could forward a further ten pounds to his wife in London.
At last he finished, and pushed the abacus away from him. He had done all that he could.
Before getting up, he stretched his hand out to one of the two leatherbound books that lay on the table beside the abacus. Godefroi was one of a minority of knights who was literate. Not that education was hard to find. The schools were no longer confined to the monasteries as they had been in previous centuries. And not only were there now schools of law, philosophy and literature at the great centres of Laon, Chartres, Paris and Bologna – schools that produced such scholars as the great Abelard, the lover of Heloise – but in the town of Oxford a small learned community now existed, and cathedrals like Sarisberie attracted scholars too. But few men of Godefroi’s class bothered to read and write, and he was proud of this ability. As a boy he had received tuition from the canons at Sarisberie, along with other young men of Sarum, some of whom, like the great cleric John of Sarisberie, were to go to make a name for themselves as scholars as far afield as Rome. His own attainments were more humble. He read Latin well enough to work his way through a charter, or to decipher the new histories of the island, such as that of William of Malmesbury. He read English with greater ease, and one of the most treasured of the eight books he possessed was the translation of Boethius into English made two hundred and fifty years before by Alfred of Wessex. In times of stress, its stoic philosophy often calmed him. But his greatest love was the songs and tales of courtly love of the troubadour poets which he could read in his native French. This was the knightly world as it ought to be – chivalrous, civilised, where the nobles of the castle served an idealised lady as faithfully as if she were the Virgin Mary herself. It was a delicate, sunlit world, a fantasy far removed from the grim realities of the castle of Sarisberie; but it invoked an ideal of chivalry which the hard-headed knight nevertheless respected and took seriously.
A week ago he had been sent a new book, however: a small volume hurriedly and badly transcribed from Latin into French by a scribe whose handwriting was abominable. And yet the little volume – it was no bigger than his two hands held together – had given him more delight than anything he had seen in several years. With a smile on his severe face, he pulled the book to him and slipped it into a large leather pouch that hung from his belt, before striding out of the house.
An hour later he had completed his inspection of the fields and of the shearing, had seen the reeve inspect the carcasses of two sheep to make sure no murrain was affecting the flock, and satisfied himself that the quality of the wool being sheared was up to that stipulated in the contract with the Flemish merchant. Only then did he make his way to his favourite spot.
The little clearing on the hill at the edge of the high ground had always been a place of special solace to him. As it lay only half a mile up the valley from the manor, it had been the first place he could remember walking to as a child, and even now he always took the same path; up the steep track through the little beech wood that covered the slope from the valley floor, across the strip of land where the trees were thinned with scrub. Then, suddenly cresting the lip of the ridge where the trees abruptly ended, he would encounter the breathtaking sweep of the bare chalk ridges extending north and east, it seemed, for ever. And there, in a circle of trees on a little hump of ground was the clearing with its dish-like surface some ninety feet across and concave towards its centre.
It was his father who had first taken notice of this place and made it his own. That the circular mound was a barrow, or that any Celtic predecessors had worshipped here more than a thousand years before, he had no idea; but something about the place besides its fine view appealed to him, and shortly before Richard was born, he had planted a double circle of yew trees round the spot. They were tall and thick now, obscuring the view; but they also protected the place from the wind, and Richard had placed two benches there, on top of the barrow, where he liked to sit alone.
He knew of no more silent a place: it was quieter even than inside the cathedral on the castle hill. And it was open to the sky. On the bare slopes around, where the scars of the ancient Celtic cross ploughing still left traces, as though the land had been lightly etched, only the sheep now occasionally grazed on the short turf. Nobody came there.
This was the place that Godefroi called the arbour, and it was here that he finally sat down to forget his troubles for an hour and read his little book.
It was a remarkable work. It purported to be a history of the English kings, by a clerk called Geoffrey of Monmouth – a Breton by birth who had been brought up on the borders of South Wales and who had neatly calculated how to please not only his patron the dangerous Earl of Gloucester, but a wide audience all over northern Europe. The book had been completed only four years before, but already translations like those in Godefroi’s hands were circulating all over the island.
One story in particular had caught the knight’s attention, as it had so many others. It was the story of King Arthur. For from scraps and hints in earlier chronicles, the clever writer had concocted an extraordinary tale of a western English king in a courtly setting that echoed the world of the troubadours, and who had fought for chivalry and Christianity against the forces of darkness. It was a magnificent invention, a romantic saga like the famous
Chanson de Roland
, and a worthy tale for crusaders. With the reality of the almost forgotten general Artorius who had tried to defend the civilisation of later Rome against the heathen Saxons it had almost nothing to do, beyond the name. And Geoffrey’s story still lacked many of the Arthurian world’s finest features: the knights Lancelot and Percival, the tale of Tristran and Iseult, the legendary Round Table and the Holy Grail were all to be added by romantic writers a century later. But bald as it still was, the story moved Godefroi considerably. In his present mood it seemed to him better than the songs of the troubadours, better even than Boethius’s sober
Consolations of Philosophy
. For here had been a Christian monarch, the proper ideal of a feudal king – a man of the stature of such Christian heroes as the mighty Charlemagne, or Saxon Alfred, or the last true monarch of the island kingdom before the conquest, the saintly Edward the Confessor, whose very touch was known to cure the disease of scrofula. Yes, there really had been great and Christian kings like Arthur.
“But not in my lifetime though,” he said bitterly.
He closed the book. Perhaps, when the present troubles were over, he could throw off the cares of his life at Sarum, turn his back in disgust on incompetent Stephen, on the evil Bishop Roger and, if there was no Christian war to fight, begin his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
“More and more,” he thought, “I grow sick of this world.” He longed to save his soul. “But will God grant me time?” he wondered.
It was midsummer. In the royal forest, it was the fence month when the deer were in fawn and the foresters ensured that no unwelcome intruders disturbed them. On the slopes around Sarum, it was the time for sheep shearing.