Once again, the builders decided to bind the tower with bands of iron, this time just below the parapet. Thin iron bands were therefore placed around the inside and outside, fastened securely together through the masonry, and again the work was so well done that it would not be reinforced for four centuries. Next, turrets were built at the corners to act as extra buttresses against the outward thrust at the bottom of the spire’s sloping walls. But it was something else that truly astonished Osmund. For on his fourth visit, when the cone had grown some twenty-five feet, he noticed that the last five feet of its walls were much thinner than the first twenty; and when he clambered up the scaffolding to inspect it, he was amazed to discover that it was only a little thicker than the span of his own small hand.
“Are you building the walls so thin right to the top?” he called down. Edward nodded. “Why then, it will be as thin as an eggshell,” he cried.
“And as light,” Edward remarked.
This was the key. The stone spire of Salisbury cathedral was built of masonry less than nine inches thick – an incredible thinness for a structure nearly two hundred feet high. Of the total weight of the tower and spire together, some six thousand five hundred tons, the spire represented only eight hundred.
When he descended to the cathedral floor that day and stared up at the bending pillars in the transept, Osmund, for the first time in years, allowed a hint of cautious approval for the daring building to pass his lips.
“If you brace those pillars and add more buttresses,” he remarked, “it might stand up.”
The work was intricate, and because of the difficulty of access, another unusual procedure was necessary: the scaffolding had to be constructed inside the spire instead of outside, the stones being drawn up using a huge, twelve-foot windlass that the labourers pulled round by hand. Nor could the stones in the sloping walls simply be laid one on top of another, as they were in the main body of the church: instead each was clamped to the next with an iron staple, sealed with molten lead, each octagonal layer being completed before proceeding to the next, so that the masons built it up in the same way as a potter lays on rings of clay.
The spire had reached a height of sixty feet when, one cold February, his wife caught pneumonia and died. He accepted it philosophically and soon afterwards moved in with Edward and his family.
By the turn of the century the old mason had outlived all his contemporaries.
Jocelin de Godefroi died in 1292; and in September 1295, Peter Shockley died, two days after Alicia. He was sixty-nine. Alicia had been taken ill that spring and during the summer he had watched her quietly fade. Shortly before the end, she had become delirious, and while he kept watch by her side, she chattered, to his great surprise, in French. He never made out what she said, nor to whom she was talking.
The day that they buried her in the little churchyard beside St Thomas’s church, he complained of feeling tired. They found him dead in his chair that evening.
But Osmund went on. And when his grandchildren asked the old man, “How long will you live, grandfather?” he used to answer: “Until the spire is built.”
The disasters that had struck both the Godefroi and the Wilson families by the early years of the new century were caused, indirectly, by the king.
For Edward I, the years after 1289 were times of gathering darkness. His plans for Scotland had collapsed in ruins when, in the late summer of 1290, the Maid of Norway died, and though he remained nominal overlord of Scotland, his hopes of uniting the north and south of the island peacefully under his dynasty were destroyed. Worse, his own life had been shattered in November of that year when his beloved queen, Eleanor of Castile, had unexpectedly died too. The grief-stricken king accompanied her bier from Lincoln to London, and at each place where the mournful party rested for the night, he had a fine stone cross erected. The last was the Charing Cross, at London.
On every side, it seemed things were going wrong. By the mid-nineties, England had drifted into war with France over Gascony, and both the Welsh and Scotland, which after the Maid of Norway’s death now had rival claimants to its throne, had risen in rebellion against him. The peace he had won, all the work he had done, was threatened and from now on he was almost constantly at war.
And the trouble, as usual, was the cost. For while the kingdom of England with its growing towns and thriving wool trade grew richer, King Edward himself did not. His finances still relied upon his feudal dues, his own estates, the profits from the courts, and whatever taxes he could raise by special assessments on his feudal tenants and the Church. In times of war, he knew, these were not enough. Worse, strong as he was, Edward could not enforce his will. The greatest landowner was the Church and since each generation saw more lands given to the Church by a pious nobility – land which then passed forever out of the king’s control – the Church’s wealth could only increase at his expense. This was another situation which he had tried to correct by insisting, in his Statute of Mortmain, that only the king should license these land grants in future; but even so, the wealth of his kingdom that was controlled by the bishops and abbots was huge. And if this was not bad enough, in 1296, in the great Bull Clericis Laicos, the pope had now declared that no subsidies should be paid to the king without his permission. Not only the Church gave him trouble. The very next year, when Edward held a parliament of his magnates at Salisbury, they had even refused to go to Gascony unless the king went too. “By God, earl,” he was said to have cried in exasperation to the marshal, “You will either go or hang.” To which the magnate replied: “By God, king, I will neither go nor hang.” And so, once again, England’s king found himself confronted with exactly the same problem that had forced King John to agree to the Magna Carta and Henry III to give way to Montfort. The feudal king had neither the money nor the power to govern in troubled times.
The answer was wool. Roughly half the value of the kingdom now lay in its wool, and Edward made every effort to increase the wool exports from his own estates and to tax the trade of the merchants. Why, after all, should the king not profit from the greatest source of wealth in his kingdom?
It was Edward who first established the customs and excise. And in 1294 he began the tax on wool exports called the maltote.
In doing so he ruined John Wilson completely. It was Wilson’s fault.
The grant of the farm, small as it was, had given the merchant a new confidence. A subtle change came over him and his wife. He trimmed his cotte with fur around the collar; Cristina, who had persuaded the Scottish secretary to part with a golden chain, wore it proudly round her neck. When they went to hear the mass on Sundays, they almost strutted down the street.
And in 1291, John Wilson began to speculate in wool.
It had seemed safe enough. Under the system known as arra, a merchant would advance money to a farmer at a discounted price on the security of his next crop of wool. There was nothing new in this, and since the wool business was booming, the risks to the merchant were slight. In his first year, by driving a hard bargain with some of the smaller wool growers, many of them villeins from nearby estates, Wilson did well.
He grew more ambitious. The following year, he not only advanced small amounts of money of his own; he borrowed sums from larger merchants so that he could advance more, using the security of the farm. For two years he made handsome profits. He gambled more.
The effect of the maltote tax was simple. The wholesale wool exporters, unable to pass on all the tax as a price increase to their customers, made up for it by paying less for their wool. And so although at the end of the thirteenth century the wool market was booming, the prices paid to suppliers actually fell. John Wilson, now the owner of large quantities of wool he had bought two years ahead and paid for with borrowed money, was left with a huge shortfall. To meet it he had to sell the house and business in Wilton, all his livestock, and the tenancy of the farm. By the spring of 1296 the Wilson family, after only half a decade of prosperity, was completely ruined.
&nbs
p; Though he was only a boy of five at the time, John’s son Walter remembered what happened next all his life.
On a cold spring day, when the little family were disconsolately huddled by the cottage, it was Mary Shockley who came striding down the path from the Shockley farmhouse towards them.
What a strange figure she had seemed: a big, bluff woman with her hair cut short and dressed like a man, as she came stomping through the mud in her heavy boots. When she reached the cottage she stood in front of them with her hands on her hips and to the boy she seemed very tall. Her violet eyes took them all in, and she came straight to the point.
“Well, ferret-face,” she addressed John Wilson. It was said cheerfully and without malice. “I hear you’ve got to give up the farm.”
John gave her a sidelong glance, but said nothing.
“Where will you live?”
John shrugged. “Dunno.”
She had grunted thoughtfully.
“I need some help on my land. If I buy this farm, you can stay on it and work for me. I need four days a week. How’s that?”
To little Walter this seemed wonderful news: they would not have to leave. He could not understand the look of white anger that passed over his father’s face.
“If I do that,” John said slowly at last, “then I’d be a villein. I’m a free man now.”
Mary did not seem interested.
“Can’t help that. It’s work anyway.”
It was not uncommon for a free man without money to be forced to take a position giving work-rent to a landlord which made him technically a villein, and it was possible for a villein to become rich again and buy his freedom back. But after all his efforts, to be the serf of one of the hated Shockleys! He tasted his greatest bitterness.
“At least you stay on your farm,” Mary said, not unkindly.
Walter remembered so well his father’s sad nod. Even at this age, he knew it was a gesture of surrender, and, though he did not understand the reasons, he felt sorry for his father, and angry with the big woman who seemed to be bullying him.
“All right.”
Mary smiled.
“That’s settled then.” She was turning to go, when she paused. She had noticed something on Cristina.
“Want to sell that gold chain?”
Mary thought she was doing the family a favour, but Walter remembered only how his mother’s hand had reached up and grasped the chain, as though someone was trying to tear it from her. He did not know where it had come from.
“Maybe,” Cristina had replied, dismally.
“Good,” Mary said. “I like that chain.”
It was the only ornament she ever bought in her life.
But what stuck in Walter’s mind even more was what followed after Mary Shockley had gone. Never, during the long sad years that his father worked the Shockley land, never while he saw Cristina slowly turn into an old woman with arthritic hands, and never afterwards did the vision leave him. For it was to him, Walter, that his father had turned when Mary had gone; it was he who saw, to his astonishment, his father’s calm and pleasant face suddenly contort into a look of savage hatred, and it was into his eyes that his father’s, full of an age-old urgency and rage, had looked as he took him by the shoulders and exclaimed:
“We’ll take this land back one day, and Shockley farm, and the mill, you understand? We’ll kick him out. If I don’t, you will. Don’t ever forget.”
He never did.
The trouble with Roger de Godefroi, on the other hand, was that he overspent. The two fine estates old Jocelin had preserved for him were there to be enjoyed; nothing had given his grandfather greater joy than to see his heir cut such a fine figure at the joust: he had pleased him by being everything a young noble should be. It was natural that after Jocelin was gone, he should live in a manner befitting so fine a gentleman; he knew it was expected of him.
As a youth he had attended the king on his expeditions to Wales: the revenues from the estates allowed him to do so in style. He jousted. He could afford it. He entertained sumptuously at Avonsford; the estates almost supported this and could have recovered. He married: a lady from Cornwall. She had wonderful Celtic looks – rich brown hair and dazzling blue eyes, which were greatly admired – and a tiny dowry. He had chosen her because she was the most beautiful woman watching a tournament at which he had triumphed. He provided her with magnificent dresses from London and the knight of Avonsford and his lady were pronounced the most handsome couple in the region. The estates groaned. He built a fine walled garden and planted it with mulberry trees, nut trees, roses, vines and willows; it was only luck that he never found time to build the fine new hall he was always planning. And lastly, he made splendid benefactions to hospitals and religious orders: and this the estates could in no way support.
By these means, not suddenly but steadily over the years, he extended his credit on every side.
And it was while he did so that the king’s maltote tax came and the price he was paid for his wool dropped. It was from this cut in his income that he never recovered. He did nothing about it except, once, curse his steward.
By 1300, the situation was serious.
By 1305, it had become desperate.
He knew it. He was not a fool. But still he went on, for besides being a perfect model of chivalry, he was also spoilt, and inside him the small, insistent voice that sooner or later, as the centuries pass, beggars almost every aristocrat, said: “If you do not keep up your state, people will scorn you.”
For a man like Roger de Godefroi, there was only one way out of his difficulty.
He had two daughters now, and a baby son. The daughters would have to be married off, the son provided for, and as he admitted to himself: “I’ve my sword and nothing else to make my fortune.”
There had been opportunities. The king had been forced to make several campaigns in Scotland against the rebels Wallace and Bruce; he should have gone, but there had always seemed to be too much to be done at Avonsford. Now he could delay no longer.
“I have to bring myself to the attention of the magnates, and the king,” he told his wife. “It’s now or never.”
An opportunity came in 1305; for that year there was a great tournament at Sarum, in the lists between the old castle and the town of Wilton.
Retinues came from all over the country; the whole area was buzzing with armed men. The cathedral chapter with the Church’s suspicion of tournaments, and already harassed by an unruly mayor and council who were trying to avoid paying the bishop their taxes, issued a furious order, with the king’s authority, threatening excommunication on any of those attending who disturbed the peace of the city. It was a useless threat: the whole of Sarum was in genial uproar. And Godefroi swore:
“This is my chance.”
Of all the retinues attending the joust, none was more splendid than that of the knight of Avonsford. His grey charger was magnificent. He was attended by a squire and two pages. On his shield, his surcoat and all his accoutrements shone the noble device of the white swan on the red ground.
“If I show my skill,” he explained to his wife, “the king will hear of it. On the next campaign it could mean a command – and that could be valuable.”
He had planned for the joust meticulously. His weapons were splendid; he had obtained the latest armour – a light chain mail, with extra protection provided by solid plates of steel on the outer arm, legs and feet. It was the most sophisticated equipment available and he had paid dearly for it – with borrowed money. But it was a calculated gamble, for he knew that few knights were better prepared for war.
And what a magnificent affair it had been. Roger’s spirits always rose when he saw the dazzling array of tents, flags and the brightly dressed crowds that made these pageants such a cheerful spectacle; and as he walked his horse along the edge of the lists, and looked at the other knightly competitors, he experienced that strange but familiar sense of timelessness that these festivals always seemed to have. “Sure
ly,” he thought, “there is nothing better in this world than to be a knight.”
But that day, for the first time, he also experienced another sensation: it was quite new to him, and it was uncomfortable.
Before the proper tournament began, there was often a burlesque of some kind; on this occasion it was two women tumblers, dressed as knights, who entered the lists on horses and cavorted around grotesquely, swearing oaths in a mixture of broken French and English of the most ribald kind. The crowd applauded wildly. Even the priests of whom many, despite the bishop’s strictures, were to be seen in the crowd, rocked with laughter. Pieces of the women’s armour fell off; one of them wore a cooking pot on her head at which the children threw things as she whirled past, and both shook their weapons with indecent gestures while the people roared their approval. To complete this good-natured farce, the heralds solemnly sounded their trumpets and the two women with exaggerated pomp took their positions at each end of the lists. Bets were placed. Several women threw their gloves to be worn as gages, and then the women charged. Once, twice, three times they rode at each other down the lists, waving their lances in a ludicrous parody of the knightly contests until one of them was finally knocked off her horse, while the crowd, from magnate to churl, hooted with delight and derision.
Godefroi watched in silence. To his surprise, the spectacle no longer amused him. His brow darkened. Suddenly, without wanting to, he remembered his terrible debts. For all the brave show he was making, nothing could take them away. And then, as he sat on his magnificent grey charger, with weapons and armour he could not pay for, about to fight to keep his estates, he was afflicted with a terrible sense of emptiness. A wave of desolation seemed to cover him. He shook his head in surprise at the awful thought that had just thrust itself so unpleasantly upon him. Was even his own jousting, perhaps, like the vulgar display of these two women, nothing more than an elaborate, a fantastic charade? His armour, his shield with the white swan gleaming upon it; was all this really, as the church’s preachers often warned, mere vanity? He did not know. He tried to put the ugly thought from him. But it would not go away.