Meanwhile in Oxford, the debate raged. And to an idealistic young man like Martin Shockley, Wyclif’s lectures were not just heady stuff, but the beginning of a new world.
On an unusually chill day in May, the entire Shockley family went to the cathedral to celebrate the return of their son Martin from Oxford.
It was a pleasant domestic scene – Stephen, a well-to-do merchant in sprightly middle age, his pleasant, comfortable-looking wife Cecilia, and their five children of whom Martin, at twenty, was the eldest. Stephen was proud, glad that his son was home at last.
“It’s time he took a hand in the business,” he said to his wife.
The family sat quietly in the nave, wrapped in heavy cloaks as the priests came by to say their morning mass. Because of the cold, the canons were dressed in their heavy almuces – the capes lined with fur which the more important clergy favoured at the time – and their breath rose like steam as they chanted. There were not many others in the congregation – about thirty sat in the nave.
It had been some time since the family had seen Martin, and his brothers and sisters could not resist stealing furtive glances at him. He was a handsome young man, with his mother’s rich brown hair and his father’s slim build and brilliant blue eyes.
He had arrived late the previous evening, and apart from a little light conversation, none of the family had talked much before retiring for the night. There was a slight tension and intensity in his manner that Cecilia noticed and it worried her; but as he got happily into bed beside her, Stephen made light of it.
“They tell me the Oxford scholars all look thin and nervous,” he told her. “Too much reading and thinking. He’ll be all right once he’s settled in the business here at Sarum.”
The mass was over. The priests were coming back through the cathedral. The Shockley family respectfully bowed.
And then they stared. For something extraordinary was happening.
Martin was stepping out into the aisle, and he was shouting. What was he saying?
“Whores and thieves!” the young man cried at the astonished priests. “Your mass is an insult to God.”
For a moment the little procession stopped, staring first in disbelief, then in fury, at Martin and his father.
“Criminals,” Martin shouted again. But now, with a cry of fear from his wife, Stephen launched himself towards his son and dragged him out of the church.
Within minutes, standing beside the belfry tower, Stephen had learned the truth; and half an hour later, when he had locked his son safely in the Shockley house, he explained to Cecilia and the other children.
“He’s become a follower of Wyclif.”
He knew about Wyclif of course: how his preachings and writings had caused a storm at Oxford, how John of Gaunt had taken him to Parliament to make trouble for the Church, and how he had been inconclusively tried by an ecclesiastical court where, thanks to his friends at court, he had only been reprimanded, so far.
“But the man’s a troublemaker and our son’s a fool to listen to such stuff,’ he announced.
“Perhaps he’s a little feverish,” his mother suggested.
But Stephen shook his head. “Give him a potion if you like,” he said, “but if he’s not careful he’ll end up in the bishop’s prison – and so will we,” he added gloomily.
His fears seemed to be justified when the next day a sallow young priest named Portehors arrived from the dean.
“Not only the dean, but Bishop Erghum himself is anxious to know about this young man,” he gave Stephen a piercing look, “who has abused the priests in the cathedral.”
And since there was nothing else to do, Stephen replied sadly:
“Then you’d better see for yourself.”
The interview which followed, in which he took part himself, left him more depressed than ever. Portehors was two inches taller than Martin, two years older and, if it was possible, two shades paler. His grandfather Le Portier had fled the city at the time of the Black Death but when he became a priest, he had reverted to the name Portehors to stress the connection with the canon of the same family name in the previous century. Like all his family, he was painfully precise, and he questioned the young man carefully.
“You are familiar, I understand, with the preachings of the heretic Wyclif?”
“I am,” Martin answered proudly.
“And you find yourself in agreement with what he says?”
“Yes. Mostly.”
“For example?”
“You priests – the canons especially. You have rich benefices. You let your lands around Sarum for huge profits. You live like noblemen.”
“Is that wrong?”
“Yes. Christ taught that his disciples should give up their worldly goods.”
“The Church does not say so.”
“The Church is wrong.”
Young Portehors winced as though he had suffered pain.
“You think Christ’s followers should give up their worldly goods?”
Martin nodded. “Of course.”
Portehors smirked.
“You are wrong. Since you read the Holy Scriptures,” this, too, Martin knew was a presumption in a layman that was almost a crime, “you will remember that in the garden of Gethsemane, when the soldiers came to arrest Our Lord, the apostle Peter tried to attack them.”
“Of course.”
“And do you remember what Our Lord said to him?” He paused only for effect. “I will translate: he said – ‘Put up thy sword!’”
Martin nodded.
“You note the words: thy sword. From this it is clear,” Portehors recited the explanation as if by rote, “that the Apostles had personal possessions of their own. Our Lord did not, you notice, rebuke Peter for possession of a sword, but only for the use of it at that time and place.” He smiled. “So you see, the scriptures do not condemn personal property, even in the hands of St Peter himself.”
It was exactly the kind of preposterous logic through which the lesser scholastics delighted to exercise their ingenuity. Martin was familiar with the method and said nothing.
Seeing that he had not impressed him, Portehors asked crossly: “What else?”
“I’m against the endowment of chantries and the singing of obits by which your priests are paid to pray for a man’s soul, because he thinks that by feeding your mouths he can get time off his punishment in hell. I’m even more against the sale of indulgences where you give him time off without even troubling to pray for him. I’m similarly against the foolish practice of burning lights.”
“There’s nothing wrong with lights,” Stephen burst out. He himself had long belonged to a small confraternity of friendly merchants who had burned lights to a chosen patron saint. “It’s an act of respect.”
“And you pay the church when you do it,” Martin remarked. “The Bible enjoins a simple life, poverty, good works, and prayer. It says nothing about Caesarian prelates like our lord bishop at Sarum.”
This last phrase was a favourite of Wyclif’s: it perfectly described the worldly servants whom the king made bishops as a reward for their services. Though the system saved the king, and hence his subjects, a great deal of money, since clever and powerful men could take their rewards from the huge Church revenues instead of fleecing the treasury, it was anathema to the followers of Wyclif. Both the previous bishop, Wyville, and the present Bishop Erghum were men of this stamp.
Portehors was silent after this appalling impertinence.
“Anything else?” he asked dangerously.
“I’m against foreigners being given appointments in the cathedral by the pope when they never turn up.”
“They are not. The bishop has stopped it.”
For once Martin had slipped up. For two years before, partly in response to the growing agitation caused by Wyclifs sympathisers, this practice at Salisbury had been stopped.
“Perhaps, like Wyclif, you would like to depose the pope,” Portehors suggested sarcastically.
But here his self-confidence made him careless.
“The pope. Which one?” Martin asked pleasantly.
And at this Portehors could only scowl.
“Do you deny that the body and blood of Christ are present in the mass?” he asked suddenly. This was the dreadful notion of these heretics who denied the power of the priest to make God.
Martin looked at him coolly. He decided not to give the young priest such an easy heresy to accuse him of. “I’d like my priests to be men of God,” he replied contemptuously.
Appalled as he was by his son’s folly, Stephen could not help admiring his sturdy spirit; and when soon afterwards Portehors left, he went quietly to the store where he and Wilson kept their cloth and spent several hours there alone, scarcely able to decide whether he privately agreed with his son or not.
Two days later, he received a definite, but quiet warning to keep Martin under control; that was all.
For although young Portehors would gladly have seen the arrogant young merchant put to the rack, the Church authorities – perhaps because they were easy-going and frequently corrupt – took a generous view of the reformers. There was no Inquisition in England; and Archbishop Sudbury of Canterbury himself had only moved slowly and reluctantly against Wyclif even when the Oxford scholar was at his most tempestuous.
“And who are the best Christians?” Stephen asked his son a few days later.
“The poorest friars, and the mystics,” Martin answered at once.
The merchant could not, in his heart, disagree. It was a conclusion that many men, in that century shot through with the darkness of the Black Death, had come to. At this very time, great mystic writers like Thomas à Kempis and Julian of Norwich were writing books on the spiritual life that would be classics for centuries to come. When all the world’s riches could so visibly turn to dust, how could a thoughtful man fail to turn from the world?
But whatever his occasional thoughts might be, Stephen Shockley was a practical man.
“You’ve made your protest,” he told his son simply. “But you must consider your family now. You must either leave my house, and Sarum, or you must hold your beliefs in private.”
At first it seemed that Martin would refuse even this; but finally, after his mother had pleaded with him, he unwillingly agreed to say no more for the time being.
“Though at Oxford, or in London,” he assured his father, “it will be different.”
And Stephen was forced to confess to his wife: “I don’t think he’ll stay here for long.”
The uneasy peace between Martin Shockley and the cathedral canons was shattered by the events of June 1381.
The Peasants’ Revolt did not come to Sarum. It was from Kent and Essex that the great horde came, enraged by the king’s new poll taxes which fell most heavily upon the poor. At London, they had elected Wat Tyler as their leader and then terrorised the city for days.
Fortunately it was soon over. The brave young King Richard had gone out to face them and promised to grant their demands; then his followers had killed Tyler, and soon afterwards, all the king’s promises forgotten, the rebel leaders had been horribly punished. Sensible men like Stephen Shockley had breathed a sigh of relief.
But more worrying to those in authority was the sense of general unease in the countryside. The rebels in the east had been roused by the hedgerow preacher John Ball whose followers chanted the rhyme:
When Adam delve and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?
It was an ugly, seditious thought, and not to be tolerated. There must be masters and servants or the whole fabric of society would collapse. As for their demands that serfdom be ended and the Statute of Labourers abolished, that could not be either. True, the old feudal obligations had been gradually lessening for a century and a half, and the Statute of Labourers had frequently failed to hold wages down. But to demand that ancient obligations should be forgotten was another matter. That was a question of principle.
It was not surprising that many, especially in the Church, blamed Wyclif for these disturbances – though in fact anything that threatened the revenues from his small estates would have irritated that absentee landlord considerably.
“He sets his face against authority, and he encourages foolish and ignorant men to think they can take the law into their own hands,” Portehors told Stephen Shockley sententiously, soon after news of the troubles had reached Sarum. “I hope your son will soon learn his lesson.”
But even Portehors would never have imagined the wickedness and folly of what Martin did next.
For during the riots, Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was killed by the mob.
And it was on the morning that news of this terrible event was circulating in the market place that Martin Shockley let out a great cry and shouted: “Good! There’s one damned worldly prelate less!’
There was no doubt about it. There were fifty witnesses.
And now the bishop struck.
Bishop Erghum of Salisbury was not a man to be trifled with.
He also had a most unusual passion – for mechanical clocks.
These were still a great rarity. When the bellringers in the tall belfry tolled the hours, they were regulated not by any mechanical device, but by long candles, with marks on their side, whose accuracy was occasionally checked with a great hour glass. Erghum intended to change that.
It was while he was studying the design for the new clock – a large, cumbersome mechanism driven by weights hung from ropes and regulated not, as yet, by a pendulum but by a less accurate set of drums and wheels – that he was interrupted by an excited and scandalised Portehors with the news of Martin Shockley’s conduct in the market place.
To Portehors’s disappointment he did not rise from his chair in a towering rage; he only stared down at the picture of ropes, flywheels and gears and waved the young priest away. But if Portehors had looked more closely, he would have seen that the bishop’s face had set like a mask.
The next week they brought Stephen Shockley the news.
The bishop was going to excommunicate the Shockley family; and he was going to repossess the mill.
It was a terrible punishment, but the death of the archbishop and the fear of the revolt was causing a reign of harsh repression all over the country. The so-called Lollards who followed Wyclif’s teachings were heretics and their possessions could be forfeited.
“The bishop is my landlord,” Stephen reminded his son. “Now we’ll lose the mill through your folly.”
Yet even under this threat, Martin was unrepentant.
“John of Gaunt supports Wyclif,” he reminded his father. “So does the Earl of Salisbury himself, and other magnates, too.”
“The bishop can’t reach as high as Gaunt,” Shockley replied, “but he can crush us.”
His fears were well-founded: Erghum proved himself to be so strong that he even forced the great Earl of Salisbury to appear at Sarum and do penance for his Lollard sympathies in the cathedral. The Shockley family could be dealt with summarily and easily.
In the late summer of 1381, Stephen Shockley was about to lose his most valuable possession.
Edward Wilson used to laugh out loud when he remembered the events of the next few days. It was a story he loved to tell his children.
Stephen Shockley had been distraught.
“And then,” Edward would relate with a grin, “he came to me for advice.” He used to chuckle before he went on. “I told him not to worry.”
His business with Stephen Shockley had gone well; he had no wish to see his partner ruined, or to strengthen the hand of the bishop who as the feudal overlord of the town, interfered in its affairs too much. He also had one piece of information which Shockley did not possess.
This was that young Portehors was not, as he seemed, a paragon of virtue. For over a year, in fact, he had been having an affair with the wife of an ironmonger in the town. She was a large woman, far from good-looking, and it had always amused
Edward Wilson to think of the pale, thin priest in her company. The young priest had been discreet, but not cautious enough, and several people in the city knew about his visits to her.
It was this weakness that gave Edward Wilson his idea. He said nothing more to Shockley.
Three evenings later, a remarkable set of circumstances took place, all by chance.
By chance Stephen Shockley was detained by a merchant until late in the evening on the other side of the town; by chance also, the Shockley children were out of the house, and by chance, therefore, Cecilia Shockley found herself alone in the house in the High Street.
It was an hour after dark, and she had already retired to bed when she heard the noise. Thinking it must be one of her family, she called out. There was no reply.
Puzzled she turned to one side, where she knew there was a candle, but before she could even find it, the door of the chamber swung open, and a tall, thin figure entered the room.
Cecilia Shockley was a plump, good-looking woman with a soft, gentle face; her normal expression was one of happy submissiveness to her husband. But she was not a nervous woman, nor physically weak.
And so she fought long and hard, and screamed loudly as the thin young man, whose face was covered by a hood, threw himself upon her and tore away the nightshirt she was wearing. She could not get the hood off his face, but she managed to kick him soundly, disregarding the oaths he muttered as he seized her by her long hair. He was strong, and determined, and as she felt his long arms close around her, she knew she was going to be raped. But she kept fighting.
It was the shouts in the street outside that saved her. For suddenly, when she herself was near the end of her resistance, he heard them, panicked and fled, leaving her shaking and hardly able to move.
It was by chance that Edward Wilson should have been passing the house at that time with two of his apprentices, who heard her screams.
Just as it was also chance, no doubt, that young Portehors should have received a mysterious and urgent message from his lover to meet her at the corner of the market place after dusk that evening so that, when she failed to arrive for the appointment, he should have been seen loitering there, not far from the scene of the crime. It was bad luck for him that Wilson and his apprentices should have chased the thin figure down the street and then lost him, only to see Portehors a few moments later.