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 turn
ed 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.”
Peter nodded. It was a splendid venture. He would run it, and then – then, to be sure he would marry Alicia. He smiled with anticipation at the thought. Le Portier could hardly refuse a young man with a mill.
The mill in which Godefroi and the Shockleys were investing had nothing to do with grinding corn. It was for making cloth, and it was a symbol of the era.
The process of clothmaking had altered very little from the most ancient times. First the sheep were sheared and the wool gathered; then the wool was combed, or carded with a thistle to straighten the fibres and open them out; then it was washed and dried to remove surplus grease. Next, the raw wool was spun – pulled and twisted into twine with a spindle – and this slow process was accomplished by hand, for the spinning wheel was not yet invented. Only then could the business of weaving begin.
The looms on which the cloth was woven had, for the previous two thousand years, been very simple: a high crossbar over which the long strands of yarn – the warp – were hung and weighted: then the shorter strands – the weft – were threaded through them and pushed tight with a crossbar. A thousand times this simple business, threading the weft in accordance with a carefully designed pattern, was repeated by hand and slowly, inch by inch, the rough cloth appeared on the loom. This continued until the end of the long warp was reached, which was the end of that piece of cloth.
This was the vertical loom. But more recently, a far better machine had come into use. In this, the warp was held in place horizontally on a frame and wound round a revolving beam, so that a roll of cloth of unlimited length could be woven. Moreover, the cloth could easily be made in broad strips by seating two men opposite each other on each side of the loom who could pass the weft between them. This was the double horizontal loom which revolutionised the medieval textile business, and it was these that Shockley possessed.
But the newly made cloth from the loom was, as yet, unusable. The fibres were still comparatively loose, the wool full of dirt and impurities; the next and important stage was the fulling: treading the raw cloth in vats of water to which a detergent, usually stale urine, had been added. As the fullers walked the cloth in the vats which gave off their pungent smell of ammonia, the cloth shrunk and tightened, and all the remaining dirt in the wool was loosened and fell out. Then, when the fulling was completed, the acrid smelling cloth was thoroughly rinsed. Afterwards, while it was still damp, the nap was raised with a teasle of thistle heads and then the nap was trimmed with shears. Lastly, it was spread on tenter frames to be dried.
The fulling process was laborious and long – it often lasted twenty hours at high temperatures – and it was heavy work: the heavier the cloth, the more thorough the fulling had to be; so that with a thick felt, for instance, the cloth was so shrunk and beaten that it became impossible even to see the original weave at all.
It was at this period of the island’s history that two more important changes were beginning to take place in the wool trade. The first was a gradual increase in clothmaking. As decade followed decade, though most cloth was still imported from Flanders and Italy, English-made cloth was beginning to make headway as well. The second development was mechanical: the introduction of the mechanical fulling mill.
And it was the potential of this huge new machine that had so excited Edward Shockley.
“You see,” he explained to Godefroi, “it operates just like a corn mill: the river turns the wheel, but instead of millstones, you have two huge wooden hammers on a ratchet that pound the cloth continuously. It can do the work of ten fullers: and the heavier the cloth, the more effective it is.”
The fulling mill was making its appearance in many places, especially in the west of the island. Though often resisted by the local fullers, who feared it might compete with their own traditional methods, it was a far more effective way of working on the heavier cloths. It looked exactly like a corn mill, the only difference as one drew closer being the rhythmic thump of the two heavy wooden hammers, and the pungent smell from the ammonia. Already, the Bishop of Winchester had set up such a mill on his nearby estate at Downton.
“There’s more cloth being made every year,” Shockley argued. “If we have a mill already operating, we can profit from this growth.”
All that he needed in order to do this was a parcel of land by the river at a spot where a mill race could easily be constructed, and a backer with sufficient capital resources to build the mill, or give security for the money that would be needed to do so. Naturally he had gone to Godefroi.
Under their agreement, Godefroi was borrowing the money for the mill from Aaron and would build it on the new estate he held as a tenant-in-chief and where he was free to do as he pleased without needing the permission of any superior landlord. Shockley, as the entrepreneur, in turn agreed to pay him half the receipts of the mill from all those who brought cloth to it from outside Godefroi’s estates, and all the receipts from Godefroi’s tenants and villeins – who would be compelled by the knight, as their feudal overlord, to use his mill. So Godefroi, using his ample lands as security for the loan, would add a valuable asset to his estate; and his feudal tenants would be compelled, indirectly, to increase his income. It was a combination of capitalism and feudalism that was typical of the times.
The building was not complicated, but solid stonework and carpentry would be required.
“Who will do the masonry?” Aaron enquired of Godefroi as they rode along.
“We’ve got a young fellow from my estate,” the knight replied, “who’s working in the town at the moment. He seems to be competent. His name’s Osmund.”
Aaron smiled.
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“Cheaper than hiring a master mason you can’t trust,” he remarked.
“Exactly,” Godefroi agreed.
When, half an hour later, William atte Brigge saw the little cavalcade of Godefroi, Aaron of Wilton and the hated Shockleys coming down the street, he knew instinctively that he did not like it; and when the party paused, while Godefroi turned aside to speak with a merchant, he loped across the street and sidled up to Aaron. Neither man liked the other, but as they were neighbours at Wilton, both observed a guarded politeness.
“What’s up?” William asked. “Godefroi and Shockleys after money?” Aaron said nothing. “They in trouble?” he suggested hopefully.
“Not at all. A very good investment I think.” Briefly he outlined the plan for the fulling mill. “I’ve already helped finance two others in the west,” he added calmly.
But William’s face clouded. His mind was making connections rapidly. His wife’s loom, his sheep, the source of his miserable cloth, lay on Godefroi’s estate. That could mean only one thing. His suspicions were confirmed a moment later when he became aware of the knight’s horse with its enamel decorations looming over him and Godefroi staring down at him with undisguised contempt.
“Doesn’t your wife’s family weave cloth on my land?” he demanded curtly.
William nodded.
“Good. They’ll be fulling it at my mill shortly.” He nudged his horse forward and the cart bearing the Shockleys rumbled after him. William heard someone laugh; he did not know who. Nor did he look up to see.
So the cloth which he had fulled cheaply before in Wilton, the cloth from his own sheep, would now have to go to a mill run by the cursed Shockleys. He would have to pay them and Godefroi to ruin him. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world that he could do about it.
Furiously he grabbed his cart and began to haul it away; but as he did so the accumulated insults of the day swelled in his mind until he could bear it no longer. Suddenly he stopped.