The meeting that so interested young Osmund took place by the side of the river Avon that morning, half a mile south of the village of Avonsford.
Two splendid horses and a cart had been left beside the track above the river. Twenty feet away, a little group consisting of two men and a boy were conversing in low tones; below them on the edge of the river bank, a single figure in a long black cloak with a hood was pacing up and down, deep in thought. The other three glanced at him from time to time, anxiously.
Jocelin de Godefroi, Edward Shockley and his eighteen-year-old son Peter, were awaiting the decision of the hooded man below.
“If he will agree this morning to what we ask,” Edward had told his son, “it will be the most important thing I have ever done. It’ll make our fortune.”
Now they were waiting for the hooded man, and Shockley could hardly contain himself.
The family had prospered modestly. They had kept the farm of Shockley, which had now become their family name, but as a young man, Edward had taken the house in the new city as well, and there he had opened a small but profitable business by installing three large looms at which he employed weavers for making cloth. The times were busy; the family was trusted and well liked. Big, bluff Edward Shockley had become a member of the merchant guild of the new town; by 1240 he was a burgess of some standing and the Shockley farm was managed on a day to day basis by a villein who acted as steward.
Jocelin de Godefroi was calmer.
Since the terrible reign of Stephen, the times had favoured his family. Though Edward of Salisbury and his brother had declared for the empress against the king in the Anarchy, they had kept their influence when Stephen finally prevailed, and no harm had come to their minor follower, Godefroi. Indeed, under Henry II and Richard, the family had not only prospered but won honour for itself when the great Ranulf de Godefroi had fought with Richard Coeur de Lion in the third crusade to the Holy Land. In the little church at Avonsford, a splendid tomb bore a statue of Ranulf, lying with his sword at his side, a broad cross on his chest and one leg crossed over the other, in the traditional posture of the deceased crusader knight. The little pewter badge which had been sold to him by monks in the Holy Land as a memento of his pilgrimage, had been set into the outer rim of the church bell. For these and other deeds, the family was honoured locally. They had obtained a second estate at Sarum too, this one held directly of the king, and now that the king was choosing some of the lesser nobles for the position, there was even a rumour that a notable gentleman such as Jocelin de Godefroi might be asked to serve as sheriff.
But in one important respect, Jocelin was very different from his ancestors: for though he had two estates, he had only one home: and that was England.
This state of affairs was new. For the first hundred and fifty years after the Conquest, many a Norman and Breton had held estates both in England and across the Channel; asked to state which was home, many would have had difficulty in replying; but when King John in his disastrous wars lost Normandy to the French king, those with estates in both regions were told they must choose – either they must give up their English estates and do homage to the French king or vice versa. The Godefroi family of Avonsford had chosen England. The loss had not been serious. Both monarchs, as feudal men themselves to whom the idea of the family was still far more important than any vague concept such as a nation, gave their vassals time to rearrange their affairs and the Godefroi estates in Normandy were satisfactorily disposed of by sale in due course. But as a result of this, Jocelin was the first of the family who had never known a second country as home and who, if asked his identity, would have answered not Norman, but English.
He was a fine figure, of medium height. Unlike his ancestors in Stephen’s reign, he was clean-shaven, and his hair, instead of being parted, was cut in a fringe across his forehead and curled carefully, with heated tongs, under the ears, giving his fine-boned, aquiline face an intellectual look. He wore the long cotte robe of linen that fell to his ankles and over it a surcoat lined with fox fur. His soft leather shoes, buttoned round the ankle, were embroidered with silver thread on their long points, and in his hand he held a three-cornered felt cap. On a golden chain round his neck hung two little amulets which commemorated his own two pilgrimages: one from St James of Compostella in Spain, and the other from the shrine of St Thomas à Becket, killed after his quarrel with Henry II at Canterbury, only seventy years ago. From his horse’s bridle hung two tiny emerald shields an inch across, bearing his coat of arms – a white swan on a red ground.
For no family in Sarum was more devoted to the cause of chivalry than that of Godefroi. At the end of the last century, when that irresponsible paragon of chivalry Richard I had started the jousting tournaments in the broad fields between the old castle of Sarisberie and the town of Wilton, no knight had supported them more vigorously than old Ranulf de Godefroi. His son, and now his grandson, were amongst the most prominent patrons and organisers of these festivals.
For all that however, Jocelin had a good head for business, and the meeting today was about a highly important venture, so that he, too, carefully watched the hooded figure who was now, at last, coming up the slope towards them.
Now he reached them. What would the verdict be?
He was a large, well-built figure, somewhat inclined to stoutness, and he stepped heavily on the turf as he walked. As he reached them, he pulled back his hood, to reveal a dome-like, balding head, with hair greying at the temples, and a face with a fine aquiline nose, a firm, pleasant mouth and broadset blue eyes full of humour and intelligence. He was thirty, but already an experienced man of affairs.
“The current is strong; the ground’s firm.” He smiled. “You have your loan.”
He spoke in French, since it was Godefroi that he was addressing; and both this fact, the rich cloak he wore and the splendid horse which obviously belonged to him suggested that he was a member of the Norman ruling class. Yet there was one strange feature of his dress: on his chest was sewn a double rectangle of white cloth about two inches across and three in length: a badge, known as the tabula, that represented the two tablets of stone which bore the Ten Commandments. For Aaron of Wilton was a Jew.
The Jews of England belonged to the king. They had mostly come from northern France and both the Conqueror and his sons Rufus and Henry had encouraged them to settle in their new kingdom where, although they were forbidden to own land or engage in ordinary trade, they enjoyed a privileged and protected status in the Norman feudal system as financiers and moneylenders. The Jews were not the only group to perform this necessary function. Both the Italian merchants and the most Christian order of Knights Templar, whose international network was large, lent money too; but in England the Jews were the most significant raisers of finance at a time when the need for ready money for the king for his crusades, foreign wars and mercenaries, was increasing and when the expanding economy of the island had no other corporate body within its feudal system for raising liquid capital. French-speaking, often cultured, and necessary to the court and greater magnates, their leaders – though outside the feudal caste as such – were closer to being aristocrats than any other group apart from the bishops and greater churchmen. And for about a century, their relationship with the Church itself – whose bishops frequently required funds to raise their great cathedrals and whose monasteries soon found themselves tempted into borrowing on the security of their huge output of wool – were usually friendly.
The community had thrived, despite a few local demonstrations against them, through the long reign of Henry II in the twelfth century as well; they became treasury agents for the king, raising finance from him on the security of the revenues that the sheriffs received from the shires, and thus anticipating the sophisticated government borrowing of later centuries. They were even allowed to hold land as tenants-in-chief of the king as well. Technically the king still owned them. The estate of every Jew escheated to the king upon his death, but this was a privilege the king rarely exercised in practice, since it hardly made sense to destroy his own bankers when they could be of such use. And useful they certainly were. By the latter part of the twelfth century, the king began to raise money from the Jewish community by the system of arbitrary taxes, the tallages, which he could impose at will. And although Henry II was moderate in his demands, by the last part of his long reign, about one seventh of his entire yearly revenue came from the Jewish community.
“We may be useful,” Aaron’s father had warned him. “But do not ever think we can be secure.”
He had good reason for his caution. The crusaders had whipped up a general prejudice against all who could be accused of being infidels, and in England the preparations for King Richard’s crusade had seen a new series of anti-Jewish riots in some cities, culminating in the terrible affair at York, when a hundred and fifty Jews, trapped in the castle where they had gone for protection, killed themselves rather than face a worse fate from the armed mob. But this trouble was quickly stopped by Richard himself and, once again, the Jewish community was given relative security under the king’s protection.
But the tallages increased. When Richard was captured and held to ransom on his return from the Holy Land, the little Jewish community were taxed five thousand marks – three times what was given by the burghers of the mighty trading city of London. And under his successor John, always short of money, the taxes reached even higher levels.
Indeed, the position of the king in this became curious. For while the Church, despite the activities of its own agents, increasingly condemned the practice of lending money at interest, which it termed usury, and while the king paid lip service to this doctrine, it was the King of England, by his increasing tallages, who reaped most of the profits of the Jewish financial system he retained under his protection; and it was therefore a fact that the greatest usurer in the realm was the king himself.
Whatever the faults of the system, it was certainly well organised. There was a separate court and exchequer for the community; and there were a number of towns where the official records of all moneylending transactions were kept in the
archae
, the great chests for holding these chirograph documents. Wilton, which had long possessed a prominent Jewish community, was one of them and Aaron was one of its most senior members.
It was a century since his family had arrived there and he knew both Godefroi and Shockley well. His own grandfather had, in happier times, enjoyed long and friendly arguments with the great Ranulf de Godefroi; his father had made a small loan to Edward Shockley when he had first set up his business in New Salisbury. It was natural that both families should now have approached him to help them with this new and much more substantial venture.
Aaron turned to Shockley next.
“One question,” he said seriously: “You already have a farm and your weavers in the town. Who is to oversee this new business, day to day?”
Edward pointed to Peter.
“My son.”
Aaron’s blue eyes took in Peter Shockley carefully. He liked the young man, had known him since he was a boy; he was steady enough, but he sensed an impulsiveness in him, that gave him a slight concern.
“Very well. But he’s young,” he said. “You must keep an eye on him.” He began to move towards his horse.
Was it possible that he had forgotten the most important condition? Godefroi and Shockley looked at each other.
“Aaron.” Edward Shockley stopped him. “You haven’t said,” he paused nervously. “the rate of interest.”
The Jew smiled.
“Did I forget? How careless. Shall we say the usual?”
The two men sighed audibly with relief. It was better than they had dared hope for.
In the growing economy of the thirteenth century, when liquid capital was so hugely in demand and the supply was still so limited, even ordinary rates of interest were high. The normal rate was between one and two pennies in the pound per week – an annual rate of twenty-one to forty-three per cent: but when the king imposed heavy tallages on the lending community it often forced rates up and, although the king officially disallowed them, rates of sixty or eighty per cent were not unknown. Nor was this high cost of money confined to Jewish creditors. The Christian Cahorsin merchants would often make out a bond for half as much again as the amount of the loan, to be paid at the end of the current year – thus in fact charging a fifty per cent interest over what might be a period of only a few months. But business was booming and both landowners and merchants were prepared to pay the staggering rates. Aaron however had dealt with both Shockley and Godefroi families for years: the usual rate to which he referred was a comparatively modest twenty-five per cent.
The party mounted, Aaron and Godefroi on their horses, Shockley and his son in their cart; since they all had business to attend to in the new city, they rode together at a leisurely walk down the green Avon valley.
As they did so, Edward Shockley turned to his son and whispered softly:
“We’ll start to build at once.” And then he added, not for the first time. “This mill will make our fortune.”