“Damn the bishop and his bridge! Damn that aulnager! Damn that Jew and the Shockleys!” he screamed. Taking the bales of defective cloth he hurled them onto the dusty road, and turned to make his way under the sweltering sun, back towards Wilton.
Since Aaron had halted briefly in the market place, it was Godefroi and the two Shockleys who first confronted Canon Portehors. And since he knew nothing of what had taken place between Portehors and Osmund that morning, it was without any sense of danger that the knight reined his horse and beckoned to the boy to approach him.
But before Osmund could get up from the ditch where he was kneeling, he found himself pushed peremptorily back by the priest who now strode angrily towards the knight.
“What do you want with this young man?”
Godefroi eyed the priest calmly from his horse.
“I wish to speak to him. He is my villein.”
“He is busy.”
Godefroi inclined his head courteously. “I shall only detain him a moment, Canon Portehors.”
But Portehors did not shift his ground.
“If it is your intention to entice him from his work here, I forbid it.”
Godefroi stiffened. The priest had no jurisdiction over the young fellow whereas he, as the boy’s feudal lord, had.
“I’ll thank you not to interfere,” he said sharply.
Portehors did not move. The knight therefore ignored him and spoke to Osmund.
“We shall need you tomorrow to begin work on the mill,” he said pleasantly. “Report to the reeve at day-break.”
Godefroi was about to turn away.
He had no wish to confront Portehors and it seemed to him that the incident was closed.
But to the canon it was not.
“He is engaged in the Church’s work,” he declared.
It had not occurred, of course, to either the canon or the knight to refer any part of this matter to the boy himself, although in theory Osmund was free to engage himself as he wished on those days when he did not owe his feudal lord labour services. To Portehors, at least, the matter was too important even to consider Osmund’s wishes any longer, for now there was a point of principle at stake.
At the canon’s last statement however, Godefroi frowned in surprise.
“But he is building ditches in your street.” He pointed to the half finished watercourse.
Portehors hesitated for only a second.
“Tomorrow he begins work on the cathedral.” In order to suit his argument, Osmund’s destiny had just been altered.
Godefroi paused. Although he had a perfect right to the lad’s services, he would not normally have chosen to remove a worker from the cathedral itself. But he sensed that Portehors was altering the facts, and it irked him to be put upon.
“He will work for me,” he stated flatly.
But Portehors, having aroused himself, was now stubborn. His eyebrows contracted; he bristled.
“Do not insult the Church of God,” he cried, “or I shall speak to the bishop; and he may speak to the king.”
“That is absurd,” the knight very reasonably replied. But his eyes were suddenly cautious. Portehors saw it and stood his ground.
And despite the absurdity of the argument, Godefroi was wise to be careful: for Canon Portehors and his Church could be dangerous.
There were several reasons: one was King Henry III. Ever since he had come to the throne as a boy twenty years before, the pious Henry had consciously modelled himself on the last king of the old Saxon house, the saintly Edward the Confessor. With his passion for ceremonial and for church building, he made frequent trips from his hunting lodge in the nearby forest of Clarendon to see the progress of the new cathedral and was liable to fly into a rage at anyone who got in the way of his project.
But there was more to it than the king’s religiosity. The political struggle for supremacy between Church and State had already been a long one. It had begun when William Rufus had quarrelled with the saintly Archbishop Anselm, and it had reached a crisis in the quarrel between Henry II and the impossible Thomas à Becket that had ended in the murder of the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral. It had broken out once more, in some ways more seriously, a generation later when King John had refused to accept the pope’s choice of archbishop, Stephen Langton, and Pope Innocent III had then laid the whole kingdom under an Interdict. For six long years all church services, even Christian burial, were forbidden, a situation that God-fearing men like Godefroi had found intolerable.
John had retaliated by confiscating Church property and retaining the income for himself; Innocent in reply excommunicated him and thereby released all his feudal vassals from their vows of loyalty to him. He had even threatened to depose the king. For Innocent was not a man to be trifled with. Finally, when he was threatened by an invasion by the French king with the pope’s blessing, John capitulated, resigned his kingdom to the pope and received it back from him as a vassal. The Church had triumphed: the new archbishop was installed; and the Church’s superior power, even over kings, had seemed to be established. It was a tremendous power, not to be lightly challenged, and Godefroi had good reason to be afraid of it.
The political victory was theoretical. Much more important to every man in England was the fact that Church and State could not live without one another: the king needed the Church’s moral authority; the Church with its huge holdings of land, needed the king’s and the laity’s protection. In England after the Interdict, a new spirit of cooperation developed, which brought great blessings to the State. When the disasters of John’s reign finally led to the rebellion of many of his barons and the contract of Magna Carta, it was Stephen Langton, the archbishop he had opposed, who counselled the barons to moderation and who finally drew up a charter with such wise and statesmanlike provisions, even protecting humble folk, that both kings and magnates referred to it for guidance for generations afterwards. Now it was the Church which supported England’s kings and people alike against feudal power-seekers and whose high moral authority helped to prevent any return to the chaos of Stephen’s reign.
This could not have happened either if the bishops themselves had not been men of stature, or if they had been out of sympathy with the state itself. Sometimes they were candidates proposed by the English Church, or by the pope; sometimes they were servants of the king; but in the island now a period of practical compromise had set in. Church leaders usually emerged through mutual agreement; the disputes between the Church and the lay authorities were normally settled in court. Unlike the terrible days when Bishop Roger had built his castles, the bishops of Salisbury in recent generations had been worthy and distinguished men, and the respect of a man like Godefroi for the present Bishop Bingham was high. The new city, with its stately cathedral and busy market town side by side, expressed the cooperative spirit of the new era.
And so, both through caution and genuine sympathy, when the canon invoked the authority of the Church, the knight had good reason to pause.
But he was still unwilling to give way.
A little crowd had now gathered.
From his place by the ditch, Osmund looked up at the two men and hardly knew himself which one he wanted to win.
But as he watched, he noticed a slight twitch in the canon’s eyebrow – it was a sign he had come to know well. And it meant a fresh and very different attack was coming. He stared, spellbound.
For Portehors was not just a stern disciplinarian. He represented a new and powerful force.
In recent years, a new movement had appeared in the English Church, led by the exacting and scholarly Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. The duty of the Church, they reminded their colleagues, was the cure of souls, and nothing should interfere with that. Bishops and archdeacons had a duty to inspect the moral and spiritual condition not only of every priest in the diocese, but of the laity as well.
“It’s not that I object to Grosseteste in principle,” Godefroi had confided to the grey-haired Bingham. “It’s ju
st that he encourages the most narrow-minded of the Churchmen to become a damn nuisance.”
It was certainly true that this puritan wing of the old Roman Church could become a source of irritation to well-meaning laymen like the knight. But Bingham had only smiled sympathetically. He was too worldly wise to take sides on any issue of reform.
Of all the narrow-minded and dogmatic priests however, both men would have ranked Portehors amongst the first.
For if Christ came with a sword, to the canon religion was to be used like a knife.
As he surveyed the knight before him now, he sensed a possible victory and it exhilarated him. He had read the constitutions of Grosseteste to the letter and he knew what he must do. Pointing his finger at first Godefroi and then the two Shockleys he suddenly cried:
“The sin of pride, Jocelin de Godefroi. I see it in you. And you, Edward Shockley: avarice is in your soul.” He paused. Then his gaze rested upon Peter Shockley. “Lust,” he shouted in triumph. “I see the sin of lust.”
“There’s lust in every eighteen-year-old boy,” Godefroi muttered irritably.
But now Portehors had worked himself into a state of righteous authority:
“Do penance for your sins,” he ordered peremptorily. “And do not presume to disturb God’s work with your schemes:”
There was an awkward pause. The crowd was growing. Godefroi hesitated. The Shockleys watched anxiously and Osmund held his breath.
It was then, quite unaware of the drama taking place, that Aaron rode round the corner. He ambled to Godefroi’s side, bowed courteously to Portehors, gazed at Osmund and remarked pleasantly to the knight:
“Is this the young fellow who’s going to build our mill?”
And now Canon Stephen Portehors, disciplinarian and enquirer into morals, saw it all; the depravity of what he saw acted upon him as though he had been stung.
“Usurer!” he shouted at Aaron. No crime was worse in his eyes. “Miserable sinners.” He shook his long finger in fury at them all.
Aaron gazed at him coolly. The implied insult did not worry him, but there was a flicker of irritation in his eyes which he could not quite conceal and which the sharp-eyed priest did not miss. Portehors felt free to insult him further. He turned to the crowd.
“See how the ungodly Jews try to steal our labour and destroy God’s work!”
Aaron of Wilton had a fault and it was one that his father had warned him against. “Never argue with a fool, Aaron,” he had cautioned: “you will win.” For though he was a kind and gentle man with his family, and scrupulously honest in his dealings with men like Godefroi and Shockley, he had an intellectual arrogance that sometimes made him seem harsh when he was confronted with a fool.
Because he perfectly understood the island’s need for capital investment, and because he could see equally perfectly into the narrow walls of the canon’s inflexible mind, he could not resist exposing Portehors’s stupidity.
“Yet the Jewish community at York – before they were massacred,” he remarked drily, “did God’s work. They financed the building of nine Cistercian monasteries.”
This was true. The great sheep-farming monasteries in the north had done a huge and successful business with the Jews in financing their magnificent buildings. But this had mostly been two generations ago, when relations were better.
Portehors looked at him furiously.
“The Church has no need of your money now,” he retorted.
“Although the fourth Lateran council in Rome,” Aaron went on coolly, “asked us to pay tithes to the Church.”
“Which you refused to do,” Portehors spat back.
Aaron smiled grimly at his inconsistency.
“True, we had contributed enough already,” he replied softly. Having made his point, he was about to leave, but Portehors, blind to the fact that he was being worsted, was now aroused.
“Your only interest is to steal the land of Christians as security,” he accused.
Aaron stopped. How easy it was to make a fool of Portehors.
“Land? Not at all,” he answered blandly. “The Bishop of Ely, you may remember, offered the relics of the saints themselves as security for a loan.”
This, too, was a fact. The evil Bishop Roger’s nephew had done exactly that the previous century. It had scandalised many in the Church and caused some wry amusement in the Jewish community.
The canon flushed with anger. He knew that Godefroi and the Shockleys, watching in silence, were enjoying his discomfort.
“The king will deal with you before long.”
It was not altogether an idle threat. Henry had demonstrated mixed feelings about the Jews. He had allowed a ceremonial burning of the Talmud to take place four years before and had often given the Jewish exchequer into the hands of unscrupulous foreign favourites whom he had allowed to rob the community with impunity. But his extravagant building and complex foreign affairs had left him perpetually short of money, and he still needed this source of funds.
“The king received our gold at Westminster last year with his own hands.” The ceremony in which he had indeed taken the gold personally had caused some surprise, but Henry had seemed to be delighted.
“I am not concerned with that,” Portehors tried another tack. “I am concerned with building a house of God.”
Aaron nodded.
“And so, Canon Portehors, are we. For at this very moment the king is seeking a substantial loan from the Jewish community to rebuild his church of Westminster Abbey.”
Portehors’s jaw dropped. He had not known this. But the refounding of Edward the Confessor’s great church was indeed financed in part by a Jewish loan in 1245. Defeated, he stared at Aaron with loathing, and then at last, having no other insult to hand, he spoke the most bitter words he knew.
“What would you know, when the Jews are crucifiers of children?”
Of all the accusations made against Jews, heretics and other supposed enemies of the Church, one of the most monstrous but most widely believed was the accusation of ritual murder. It had started a century before when the body of a child, with what were claimed to be marks of crucifixion, was found at Norwich. Immediately a group of fanatical Churchmen had accused the local Jews of indulging in necromancy and ritual child murder. The absurd claim had surfaced several times since, when those embarrassed by debts hoped to find a way of attacking the creditors they blamed for their condition.
Against this outrageous insult there was no sensible reply to make. With a look of disgust on his face, Aaron turned his horse’s head and moved away. As he watched him go, a gleam of triumph appeared in Portehors’s eye. He might have lost the argument, but he had sent the Jew packing. With his sense of victory restored, his demeanour became calm and grave again, and he turned his attention back to Godefroi and Edward Shockley.
“If you take this young man from God’s work,” he threatened quietly, “to traffic with those who crucified Our Lord, you will be candidates for excommunication.”
It was a threat he probably could not carry out. There were no legal grounds for it. But as he saw that the canon was determined to make an issue of the matter, and as he had no desire for a quarrel with the Church authorities, Godefroi decided to give up. There were plenty of other masons.
“As you like,” he shrugged, and with a curt nod to the Shockleys, he moved away.
And so it was, in the year of Our Lord 1244, that Osmund the Mason was saved by Canon Portehors from the two deadly sins of avarice and sloth and transferred, at the wage of a penny farthing a day, to work on the new cathedral of our Blessed Lady Mary at New Salisbury.
That afternoon Peter Shockley walked with Alicia Le Portier through the town and told her the good news about the mill.
He pushed his fair hair back from his forehead and his blue eyes shone as he explained to her with pride: “We’ve got the mill and my father says I’m to be in charge of it.”
He was ambitious. She knew it. Ever since they were children, this simp
le, enthusiastic ambition had attracted her. Their conversation followed a familiar but delightful route as he walked beside her.
“I hope you’re up to it.” She could not resist deflating him a little: she liked to see him bounce back again.
He flushed.
“Of course I am. And that’s only the beginning.”
She looked at the ground, not wanting him to see that she was smiling with pleasure.
“Maybe you’ll manage,” she suggested in pretended doubt.
“Manage!” He outlined every detail of the fulling mill to her, explained how the heavy timber was being brought down from Godefroi’s estate to make the huge hammers, the turning mechanism with its cogs and ratchets and the huge water wheel. “It’ll be like the mill at Downton,” he proclaimed, “but I’ll run it even better.”
She turned her eyes on him for a moment.
“I shouldn’t think much of you if you didn’t,” she challenged him.
He had known her all his life; how was it that a few words from her could still send such a thrill of excitement through him? He would prove himself and then, in a year or two, as soon as he had made a success of the mill, he would marry her. The prospect had been one of the secret but fixed points in his imagination almost as long as he could remember, and as he saw it coming nearer he felt a glow of warmth and anticipation. “In a year, I’ll ask her father,” he promised himself.
She was a neat little figure with freckles and reddish brown hair which she wore cut short at the neck like a boy’s. She was light on her feet: when he was a boy, he had been able to outrun her, but she was never far behind, and when the children of the area had gone swimming in the broad pools near Wilton, she was like a fish in the water so that not even the boys could catch her. Her only brother, Walter, was many years older and so she had come to take his place like a second son to her father, whose calm authority she admired. “I’m not a boy,” she had told Peter when she was seven, “but I’m as good as any boy.”