Abbot's Passion (24 page)
Authors: Stephen Wheeler
Abbot’s Passion is a work of fiction but it is written around real events and real people. Wherever possible the narrative keeps to known facts the primary source for which is the
Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds
written by a twelfth-century monk at the abbey, Jocelin of Brakelond. Jocelin was a local man from a northern quarter of the town which still carries the name today - Brakelond, or Brackland possibly denoting an area of heath or marsh. The characters in the story are a mixture of the actual and the invented. Abbots Samson and Eustache, Priors Robert and Richard, Brothers Walter, Jocelin, and Jocellus were all real people as was Sheriff Peter de Mealton, although his sartorial tastes are imaginary. Everyone else is fictional.
THE BATTLE OF LAKENHEATH
Jocelin claims that nearly six hundred well-armed men set off from Bury to destroy the market in Lakenheath village in the spring of 1201. But Bury at the time was a town of some four thousand souls and six hundred would have represented close to half the entire adult male population of the town. This seems an extraordinarily large number to descend upon a tiny hamlet of twenty-four (at Domesday) houses. Given the Medieval propensity for exaggerating numbers, I’ve plumped for the smaller and entirely ad hoc figure of sixty. Given the capacity of a handful of drunken louts to wreak havoc in an average English town centre on any Saturday night, I don’t think this number makes the battle any less credible.
EUSTACHE DE FLY
Saint Eustache was born in about 1178 at Beauvais twenty miles north-west of Paris. As a very young man he joined the
Cistercians
at nearby St. Germer de Fly, was elected its abbot in 1200 and a year later became apostolic
legate
to England preaching crusade and an end to Sunday trading. In 1209 he was sent by Pope Innocent III to help suppress the Cathar heresy in southern France in what has become known as the Albigensian Crusade, one of the most vicious religious wars of the Middle Ages in which torture, murder and rape were routinely used as weapons to convert the heretics to the Catholic faith
.
Exhausted by his efforts, Eustache then returned to Saint Germer where he died on 7
th
September 1211 possibly from an infected bladder and was subsequently canonized.
SAMSON AND THE JEWS
The past is famously a foreign country and we should be wary of judging events of eight hundred years ago in the light of subsequent centuries. But there is no doubt that Samson’s attitude towards Jews was ambivalent - a product of circumstances, his own personality and the politico-religious attitudes of the day. According to Jocelin, Samson was capable of bearing a life-long grudge and he blamed Jewish money-lenders not only for the abbey’s crippling debts but also for stealing, as he saw it, the moneys he had amassed as sub-sacristan to build his beloved twin towers. No doubt he believed along with everyone else that the Jews were responsible for the ritual murder of twelve-year old Saint Robert whose body was buried in the abbey crypt. Then there was King Richard’s crusade to recover Jerusalem from the infidel, be they Arab or Jew. In that fevered atmosphere someone, possibly Samson himself, preached an anti-Semitic sermon to the townsfolk on Palm Sunday 1190 and in the subsequent riots fifty-seven Jews were massacred. Afterwards Samson’s solution to Bury’s Jewish problem was to expel them from the town which he did with King Richard’s blessing, and although King John later encouraged them to return they never again reached the numbers or the influence they had enjoyed before Samson’s time.
SWW October 2014
May 1199. Richard the Lionheart is dead and his brother John has just been crowned King of England.
John travels to St Edmund’s abbey in Suffolk to give thanks for his accession. His visit coincides with the murder of a twelve-year-old boy whose mutilated body bears the marks of ritual sacrifice and martyrdom. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. Eighteen years earlier another child was murdered in the town in similar circumstances.
Abbot Samson needs to find out if this is indeed another martyrdom or just an ordinary murder and appoints the abbey’s physician, Master Walter, to investigate. Walter discovers a web of intrigue and corruption involving some of the highest in the land but unbeknown to him his own past holds a secret which will put his life in danger before the final terrible solution is revealed.
“Wheeler engages the reader’s interest from page one and doesn’t let go. A book which will appeal to historical novel fans...”
Eastern Daily Press
November 1214. King John has returned to England having lost his empire to King Philip of France. Humiliated and desperate for support, he again travels to Bury St Edmunds where Abbot Samson has died and a battle is raging among the monks over who will be his successor.
In the midst of this there arrives in the town a seemingly inconsequential young couple and their maid. The wife is heavily pregnant and gives birth in the night to a baby daughter.
But then the maid is mysteriously murdered and it is soon apparent that the family is not all that it appears. With rebellion looming, abbey physician Walter of Ixworth is drawn once again into investigating a murder and a conspiracy that threatens to engulf the country in civil war and ultimately leads to the final nemesis that is Runnymede and Magna Carta.
January 1242. Brother Walter is dying. He is an old man but the prospect of death does not disturb him - indeed, he welcomes it to meet with old friends and see God in the face. But before he finally joins the heavenly host he is determined to solve one last mystery that has been plaguing him for decades.
But there are dark forces afoot that want to frustrate his efforts and are prepared to go to any lengths to keep secret events that even now could disturb the government of England - even murder.
In his mind Walter returns to those far off times when Abbot Samson took him on a bizarre journey away from the comforting familiarity of Bury Abbey and into the wilds of barbaric Norfolk where the abbot’s power is limited and be met by a far greater one in the guise of the Warenne family of Castle Acre - or as some still choose to call it, the
Devil’s Acre
.
Winifred Jonah seemed like an ordinary Norfolk housewife, jolly, plump and harmless. Yet her bland exterior concealed a sinister secret. At fourteen she had already murdered her aunt and uncle and forty years later it was her husband’s turn to die. Even so she might have made it to her own grave without further incident if she hadn’t met Colin Brearney. He thought she was going to be a pushover, but he had no idea who he was taking on. The day Colin knocked at her door was the beginning of a nightmare that could only end in blood, silence and death...
