Stephen stared towards him in surprise, then smiled.
“Where do you come from?”
“From Wilton,” the tanner replied.
Stephen turned to a group beside him.
“We have a castle near there,” he cried.
There was a shout of laughter. William atte Brigge glowered in confusion.
“I’ll hear your case, tanner,” the king called out. “In my castle of Sarisberie.” And he waved him away.
It was enough for the tanner. The nobles might be laughing at him, but the king had promised to hear his case. Satisfied, he turned to go, and Godefroi, shaking his head not only at the fellow’s audacity but at the trouble it could cause his friend from Shockley, mounted his horse and headed back to Sarum.
His mind was not at rest on any count. Whatever the king’s temporary success might have been, as he rode over the high ground the voice of the magnate echoed in his head:
“We’ll tell you what to do.”
There was something else that was wrong; and as he waited on events during the coming months at Sarum, Richard de Godefroi became increasingly filled with a sense of desolation.
It was not only the threatening political anarchy of a war between Stephen and the empress, not only the treachery in the air over Sarum, nor even the fear that in the uncertain times he might lose his lands that troubled his spirit.
It was something more profound – a sense that not only England, but all Christendom was sick – and it had been brought home to him by the sight of the bishops at Devizes and their conduct. For though he was a level-headed realist, the knight of Avonsford still believed that the Church should be sacred. And how could it be so with three such bishops as these?
“I believe in Our Lord’s true Church,” he confessed to John of Shockley a few days later: “Yet I no longer know where to find it.”
In other times, he believed, it had been easier. No man could doubt the saintliness of Bishop Osmund. Few even questioned the authority of such great Church servants as the great Archbishop Lanfranc or the scholarly Anselm in previous reigns. Had not a former abbess of Wilton and member of the old Saxon royal house, Edith, already been made a saint? When Pope Leon announced the First Crusade, did anyone doubt that they were doing God’s will in going to fight the Saracen? This was the true Church: the Church that governed the spiritual life of all Europe just as, in times past, Rome had governed the temporal world with her armies; the Church that was the undisputed voice of moral authority; the Church that ordered monarchs themselves to observe days of peace; the Church that, even if it had faults, constantly renewed itself.
Bishops should be men of God – named by the king, certainly; holding their vast lands with his permission too; but they should be drawn from the monasteries or put forward by their congregations, as they once had been. That was the knight’s view. He was prepared to modify it in one respect. It had long been the practice of kings to reward their greatest servants with rich bishoprics which were, of course, only held for the servant’s lifetime, and which, being church lands, cost the king nothing to bestow. This was a compromise; but he saw no great harm in it if the king’s servants were worthy men. What he had seen now, however, was nothing more than three rascals from an upstart family, making a mockery of a sacred office. And even the king seemed to accept it. He felt nothing but a sense of disgust.
Church and state were both necessary; but they should be opposite sides of the same Christian coin, in harmony with each other.
But it was no longer so. In recent generations a new conflict had been born, a conflict between State power and religious authority, regnum et sacerdotum, that was to echo through the Middle Ages and far beyond. Who was superior on earth, the pope or a monarch? Who invested bishops with their spiritual authority and their estates – the Vicar of Rome or the king? Who chose abbots and bishops? If a priest committed a criminal act, should he be tried by the king’s court or the bishop’s? At its best, this quarrel was between the king and the universal church which was determined to maintain its spiritual independence. At its worst, it was an excuse for cynical power politics between the monarch and the Church with its huge estates. It was exactly the struggle for power that was to have a bloody outcome when Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in the next reign.
And now, in the months following the scene at Devizes, the dispute was to be seen at its most cynical. By his Charter of Liberties, Stephen had confirmed that the church would be free of all secular interference. Now therefore, Bishop Roger and his rascally nephews, on the grounds that they were ordained priests, claimed that the king had no right to lay hands on them. The other bishops, supported by that master of duplicity, Stephen’s brother Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, supported them. By the end of August, a council of bishops had met at Winchester and tried to summon the king to them to explain his conduct.
Fortunately, by the start of September, Stephen had won his case when the Archbishop of Rouen arrived from Normandy to remind the council at Winchester that bishops had no business to be holding fortified castles anyway. The leading bishops went to the king on their knees; and after that Roger returned to skulk at Sarisberie, where he was not much seen.
But the whole affair left Godefroi depressed.
If God’s kingdom on earth is like a great castle, he considered, then these councils were only putting plaster over the cracks. The foundations themselves were rotten.
It was at the end of September that the great blow at last fell. The Empress Matilda landed at Arundel, in the south east.
And it was then, to the stupefaction of Godefroi and almost every knight in England, that Stephen made perhaps the most foolish move of his reign. On the advice of the double-dealing Bishop of Winchester, the king cheerfully allowed the empress a safe conduct across his own kingdom to join her supporters who were gathering in the western stronghold of Bristol.
Whatever his motives for this extraordinary action, it ensured that, before the month was out, civil war had begun.
It was exactly as Godefroi had feared: would the troubles reach Sarum?
He waited.
Godric Body and his dog moved quietly across the bowl of land below the castle walls. The afternoon sun warmed his hunched back. He kept Harold close by his side and walked with care; for he did not want to be observed as he crossed the ground where the autumn leaves were falling.
It was a few days past Michaelmas. The last of the harvest was all gathered, and in the big open fields they were sowing the new seed. On the slopes above, the last signs of the ruddle on the rams’ chests, painted on so that they would leave a mark on each ewe when she had been serviced, were wearing off. Each morning now he was having to keep the sheep in their pens a little longer until the sun had dried the mildew off the turf that would give the sheep disease if they grazed on it. The warm, damp autumn season was a dangerous time in the shepherd’s calendar.
Two days before, the last of the old ewes had been slaughtered and salted and at Hallowmas, the day after Hallowe’en, there would be a great feast on the slaughtered beasts in the village.
But it was not the sheep that Godric was thinking about that afternoon. It was William atte Brigge’s vanished pig.
He had supposed by the end of summer that the tanner would have forgotten it; but he had not, and his interview with the king had left William so elated, that at Michaelmas he had decided to offer a reward of three marks for information about the animal. This was more than the value of the pig, but William was as obstinate as he was bad-tempered, and he was already disappointed that the reward had so far yielded no result.
Godric had been careful. It was four months since he had been near the spot in the forest where the animal’s carcass was buried, and it was so well hidden that he was sure it could never be found. All the same, a mixture of prudence and curiosity made him make one more visit to the spot just to make sure it had not been disturbed.
He left the river behind and made h
is way slowly and cautiously into the forest.
It was a good month for hunting: hind and doe were in season and since Holy Rood in mid-September the boar was in grease and could be hunted also. He knew the foresters would be about and kept a wary eye for them.
It took him half an hour to reach the place: a sheltered dip in the ground with a thick screen of brambles in front. He inspected it carefully. The remains of the pig were three feet underground, completely safe behind the cover. Leaves had fallen on the ground too: there was not even a hint of the animal’s presence. Satisfied, he walked further on. Perhaps he might catch a coney.
He did not; and after a further hour scouting the woods in a wide arc he began to head towards home.
Dusk was almost falling when he saw the deer.
It was in a clump of saplings in a dip in the ground, and the little doe had obviously gone down there to feed; then, clearly, something had happened and he could guess at once what it was. He moved close.
She had been snared – by a cunning cats-cradle of twine woven between the saplings in such a way that it would catch the antlers of a stag as it lowered its head to eat, or enmesh the feet of smaller deer. It had done its work: the doe’s fore-legs had become hopelessly entangled and one of them had broken as she struggled desperately to jump out. Now the little animal was standing there trembling pitifully.
He disliked snares: they were a cruel way to catch an animal, but he knew better than to touch one of the king’s deer; on the other hand, though he could alert one of the foresters’ men, he was unwilling to encounter them since Harold was with him, and the dog had never been lawed. The safest thing to do was to get away from the illegal snare as quickly as possible.
But he did not. A mixture of curiosity and concern for the doe made him instead take cover fifty yards away and wait.
The dusk began to close in. No one came. Still something – was it only curiosity? – held him there.
And then the animal began to cry.
It was not a loud noise; at times it was no more than a snuffle, followed by a little moan; but then it would rise to a whimper and conclude with an eerie, weeping cry that echoed softly across the forest floor. It was the desolate cry of an animal that has been deserted.
Darkness fell, and a light wind began to blow through the trees, making a soft rustle. It was suddenly cold. It seemed to Godric that the whole forest was still: nothing was stirring in the tall trees, silent except for the rustle as they were brushed by the wind.
Once, far away, he thought he heard a cry from a wolf. There were few wolves about at Sarum now, but occasionally they still appeared at the forest’s edge and killed sheep who were not properly protected. The deer heard the sound too, and for a time fell silent.
But then, after a period of quiet, the little doe, alone and now invisible, began crying again in the darkness. She seemed to be calling him.
No one came.
At last he could bear it no longer.
He knew that a deer with a broken leg would have to be killed by the foresters; there was no question of that.
“I hid the pig well enough,” he thought. “Why not a deer?”
Softly he moved out of his hiding place.
“Mary will eat venison tomorrow,” he said to himself.
When he reached the deer he put his arm round her neck to calm her. She shuddered. Then, reaching cleverly for his knife, he put her out of her misery.
A moment later the doe sank to the ground, and he knelt over her.
The sudden start that Harold gave came too late for him even to rise before he felt the hand on his shoulder and heard the voice of Le Portier, the agister, who, from another vantage point, had been watching him for over an hour.
Richard de Godefroi was alone in the yew arbour, enjoying the last of the warm autumn sun and, for the tenth time, reading Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of King Arthur when he looked up angrily to see the squat figure of Nicholas advancing towards him: how dare the fellow trespass into his most private retreat?
But the stoneworker, red-faced and sweating, was not daunted by even the knight’s deep frown, and his sharp question: “What now, Masoun?”
“My nephew Godric, my lord,” he burst out. “They say he has taken a deer. Help us.”
At which the knight rose, closed his book, and came without a word.
The situation could hardly have been worse, as Godefroi discovered when he spoke to the agister at his house in the forest.
There were several ways in which a man guilty of a crime against the Norman forest laws could be apprehended: but the most damning of all was guilt by bloody-hand – red-handed men sometimes called it; and Godric not only had blood on his hands – he had been taken in the act itself.
“And his dog had not been lawed,” Le Portier told the knight: he dragged Harold out from the little kennel where he was keeping him and insisted on demonstrating that he was too big to fit through the leather hoop which had to be passed fully over any forest dog if it were to escape the operation.
“What about the boy’s story?” The knight had spent an hour with Godric that morning at the house of the forester where he was being held, and had listened to his account; though it was hard to believe, he had finally decided that he was probably telling the truth.
But Le Portier only stared at him blankly. “It makes no difference,” he said. “He had blood on his hands and the law says. . . .”
“We know what the law says,” the knight interrupted impatiently. In a court of law the boy’s explanation would be useless. “But are you sure it should go to court? What if the boy made a mistake?”
It would be up to the meeting of the forest officers, the swanimote, to consider the matter at their own informal court of attachment before deciding whether to refer it to a formal prosecution before the king’s justices, and the agister’s statement would be crucial.
“Are you sure he should be accused?” Godefroi demanded.
But if the agister had any imagination, it seemed that he was determined not to use it.
“The terms of the law are clear,” he said and once again gave him the same blank stare and fixed smile.
That evening the knight told Nicholas regretfully:
“I don’t hold out much hope, Masoun.” But he did not give up.
The month that followed was a bleak period.
Poor Godric could scarcely have chosen a worse time to fall foul of the forest laws. The swanimote was due to take place at Martinmas, the eleventh day of November, and it had been decided to hold the court of attachment immediately after it. There was less than a month to go. After that, unless it could be prevented, he would go before the justices. The court of the Forest Eyre visited Wilton usually only once in three years: but as ill luck would have it, it was due to sit there at the end of that November and, as Godefroi soon discovered, the forest officers were on the lookout for offenders.
“They expect a few you know, otherwise they say we’re getting slack,” one of the knights who inspected the forest told him.
Nonetheless, Godefroi did what he could, not only because he believed the young man was probably innocent, but because he was a useful worker and nephew of the stoneworker for whom he had a warm regard. He spoke at length to Waleran the warden, who oversaw the forest all the way down to the coast, and who would run the court of attachment. He spoke to the foresters and the knights of the court, and at his request, several of them had interviewed the boy. By the end of October there was considerable sympathy for his case. But as Waleran warned him:
“I’d take a lenient view; but if the agister insists that he took him bloody-handed, there’s very little option: he’ll have to go to the Forest Eyre.”
“And then?”
Waleran waved the question away. They both knew what would happen then.
Twice he saw Le Portier, but the agister would not budge.
The news from beyond Sarum was bad as well. It was obvious that the country was drifting furt
her into anarchy every day. Despite Stephen’s success with the bishops the rebel forces were increasing their hold on the west. They took Malmesbury. Wallingford near Oxford was staunchly held for them. Soon other strongholds, including nearby Trowbridge, were in their hands. As usual, Stephen raced from one trouble spot to another, always active, but accomplishing nothing. As November began, rumours reached the knight that the important Midland towns of Worcester and Hereford were about to fall to them too.
“Before Christmas,” he remarked to John of Shockley, “the whole west side of England will be theirs.”
He thanked God that his wife and children were safely in London.
For the farmer had done his work well, installing them safely there and, though he had both his farm and his troubles with the tanner to think of, refusing to leave for a month until he had satisfied himself that they were being well cared for by his relations. Godefroi was grateful; but when he asked the Saxon what he could do for him in return, John only laughed cheerfully and replied:
“You could slay William atte Brigge for me, my lord.”
It could not be long, he thought, before the warfare reached Sarisberie; but so far everything there was quiet. A small group of the king’s men held the garrison; and if William of Sarisberie, or the Giffards, or the other magnates were plotting treason, they had not yet shown their hand. As for Bishop Roger, he had hardly been seen since his return, and there were rumours that he was sick with a quartan fever. It seemed to Godefroi that the whole area lay under a cloud.
His own gloom was made deeper when, in early November, he saw the girl Mary. She was standing in the street at Avonsford as he was riding through one evening, and though her head was lowered in respect, he was aware of her squinting up at him as he passed. He paused to say a word to her, but after he told her that perhaps the young man might escape with his life, she only shook her head morosely and pointed to her stomach.