Sarum (74 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
Nor could John of Shockley explain his feelings himself. He only knew that he loved his farm, and that to him, peace seemed more important than it did to other men.
“Will you go to Herleva?” he asked hopelessly.
She shook her head.
“Not until William comes to you.”
Godefroi entered the church alone.
It was a large, three-aisled structure with heavy, rounded arches which the Normans had built in the outer ring of the castle. Like most Norman churches, it was designed in the form of a simple cross, and to this Bishop Roger was adding splendid embellishments.
He was glad to enter its quiet, solemn spaces and leave behind the noise and the brawling that had so irritated him a few moments before.
For Richard de Godefroi had important matters to consider.
The stately arches and the cool light pleased him. Forty years before when the church had first been completed, it was nearly destroyed by fire. It was then that Roger had started to rebuild this new and heavier structure on the shell of the original, and the work of rebuilding that kept Nicholas and many others so busy had been going on ever since. A few of the tombs and the pillars had been painted, but while the work on the roof continued, much of the decoration of the interior had been held over. The bare stone, so solemn and simple, suited his mood. He felt his irritation fall away and breathed more easily.
The object of his quest was a modest stone tomb that lay on the north side of the bishop’s new presbytery. It was here that the knight liked to pray, and as he sank to his knees he touched the bare slab affectionately. Beneath it lay the remains of the former bishop, the saintly Osmund who had built the first church. Richard could just remember him, a quiet, white-haired man whom children used to follow in the street. It was Osmund who had brought such an air of sanctity to the cathedral on its bleak castle hill; it was he who had collected the canons and other priests who had turned the grim castle into a place of learning; and it was Osmund who had begun to set out the rules for the ordering of the cathedral and its services which later, under the name of the Sarum missal, would be used all over England and beyond. He had been, and to Godefroi he still was, the guiding spirit of the place. That the previous king had given the bishopric of this holy man to the evil Roger was a crime which even the loyal knight had found it hard to forgive.
Alone now, Godefroi raised his long, aquiline face and spoke aloud to the bishop’s tomb.
“What shall I do, to save my soul?”
It was not an unusual question. Like every man from the king downwards, Godefroi knew very well that the whole world was in a state of perpetual war – not just between order and chaos, but between God and the Devil, the spirit and the flesh. This was the universal conflict, which would not be resolved until the Day of Judgement, which gave all life its dazzling colour and its terrible poignancy. Whatever his position, feudal lord or knight, burgess or villein – even Bishop Roger himself – each man knew that he must make his peace with God, or after death suffer perpetual hellfire.
Yet for a Norman knight to save his soul, the Church had devised some attractive choices. He could, like other men, do penances; he could endow the church with lands, or better yet, he could travel.
In his grandfather’s day it had been easy. When Pope Urban II, in the year of Our Lord 1095, had announced the First Crusade, the previous Richard de Godefroi had gladly gone. What more could any knight ask for than the chance to purge his soul in the warfare he knew best and most enjoyed? He thought with envy of those days and of his grandfather’s tales of the privations they had endured and the brave campaigns in those distant lands under the parching sun. These had been the stories that fired his imagination when he was a child.
It was not only the thought of winning honour in arms that attracted him. Deep within him he felt a restlessness, a wanderlust that, despite his contented life on his manor, seemed to grow stronger and more urgent with the passing of the years. He could not explain it. Yet the explanation was simple. For the Norman conquerors of England were mainly Norsemen, cousins of the Danish Vikings, who had only settled in northern France a century and a half before. It was not only to England either that this tribe of adventurers had gone: they were inveterate wanderers. Norman knights had already made names for themselves as mercenaries in Italy, where they had first seized tracts of land and then become the most powerful allies of the pope. They had made themselves lords of Sicily. Kinsmen of his own, he knew, had sailed their long ships all over the Mediterranean and in those warmer climes carved for themselves splendid fiefs which made his modest manor look humble indeed. They journeyed south and served the church just as in earlier centuries, his pagan Viking forbears had roamed the northern world and when they had died, been buried or burned with their ships, so that their spirits could make the still greater journey over the soul-bridge to join their ancestors and the northern gods. The spirit of the roaming Norse adventurer – though now he spoke French and lived off the land – was still in his blood.
The crusade had been so easy: a warrior could travel, fight for God, and have all his sins forgiven him. He could have asked for nothing more. But alas, in his own generation there had been no crusade. Which left the next alternative – a pilgrimage, preferably to the Holy Land.
And this was the problem facing Richard de Godefroi. For years he had been working to provide for his wife and three children; both his estates were now in perfect order. For years, not a day had gone by when he did not dream of setting out on his life’s great adventure. He yearned to go, and it was time to begin.
“I’m almost fifty,” he murmured. “If I don’t go soon, it will be too late.”
But now, just when he was ready, a foolish king and a group of unscrupulous and powerful lords were threatening to tear the country apart in a feudal war, If it broke out, he knew he could not leave his family; and in the current uncertainty, his own feudal overlord, William of Sarisberie, would probably not give him permission to go as far as one of the shrines in Italy, let alone to the Holy Land.
He remained at the tomb of Osmund for half an hour, supposing that he was praying, but in fact weighing up the likely dispositions of the great feudal magnates; and realising with a sigh that he was reaching no conclusion, he rose at last, and made his way slowly out of the church.
It came as no surprise to him that Nicholas was waiting for him respectfully just outside the door. He gave a thin smile, and, remembering their interrupted conversation, cut the villein short before he could make a tiresome speech.
“Your nephew, Godric Body,” he said abruptly. “What was it you wanted?”
As he looked out over the sunlit fields the following morning, it seemed to Godric Body that his life was not without hope. His uncle was working on his behalf with the lord of the manor, and the bruises from William atte Brigge’s attack were not as bad as he had thought.
He stretched his hand down and ruffled the smooth hairs on the neck of the young dog that stood expectantly by his side. Named Harold, it was an animal of uncertain parentage, though he called it a strakur – the lowest kind of hunting dog, which roughly resembled a lurcher – and it had a black and tan coat and a bright and watchful pair of eyes. Godric looked down at his companion with a mischievous grin.
“We’ll get even with William,” he assured him; though exactly how he did not yet know.
He would be careful: only the week before, the reeve had grumpily warned him:
“I think you’re a troublemaker, Godric Body. Take care: the frankpledge is watching you.”
The frankpledge system, by which twelve men from each village were pledged to answer to the king’s sheriff for the good behaviour of all those in their community, was an informal police force, but highly effective – for in the event of their allowing a criminal to escape its members were liable to a fine themselves. Godric knew that the reeve had only picked on him because he was small and weak; his crimes were confined to the petty theft of occasionally short-changing Godefroi on some of his corn or livestock; so he did not take the threat too seriously; and he continued to think of his revenge.
The life of Godric Body was bleak. He owned almost nothing. The reeve, the most senior man in the village, held a whole hide scattered, as were all the individual landholdings, amongst the strips of the two huge open fields of Paradise and Purgatory beside the village of Avonsford. Nicholas and his family held a virgate, or quarter hide – some thirty acres in all from which they could derive a modest surplus. His uncle also had forty sheep, which he pastured on the common land on the slopes above. But the lowly Godric, at the bottom of the feudal social scale, held only two acres of strip land. When his father died a few years earlier, Godefroi took the best of the three poor cows the family pastured in the common meadow. This was not an imposition but the customary heriot payment to which the lord of the manor was entitled when a villein died. Godric also owed Godefroi four days work a week on the lord’s land – hard work, from harvesting to carrying dung and weeding; and while this duty was normally shared out amongst the family of a villein, poor Godric, all alone, had to complete it by himself. This was not all he owed. At Easter he would give the local priest the customary present of Easter eggs from the dozen hens he kept beside the hut, and at harvest, a tenth of the small amount of corn from his strips went as payment of tithe to the priest as well. Alone, as long as he was fit, he could just support himself; but he needed a wife to help him. And though his mother, looking at his wretched physique, had always assured him that no one would ever marry him, the spirited little fellow had not given up hope.
He even had a candidate in mind. For the youngest daughter of the village smith had suffered a skin ailment as a child which had left her pock-marked and undeniably plain. She was a small creature with eyes that squinted so that they gave her a look of suspicion, and there was often an air of bitterness about her that was not attractive. Her family were almost as poor as his and she always looked hungry. And yet in other ways she was not, he considered, so ill-looking and he had let her see that he was interested. If the smith had had any better hope for her he would have driven Godric away; but as things were, he tolerated him; and as for Mary, she had once or twice, without great enthusiasm, allowed him to hold her hand. Despite her suspicious look, he found that he was excited by the two small breasts that had begun to jut out sharply from her thirteen-year-old chest, and he had made himself a promise that by the harvest, he would take them in his hands.
And perhaps, the smith had acknowledged to his wife and daughter at Easter, there were a few things to be said for young Godric. Whether he had inherited the skill from his mother’s family, or whether it had been given him as a special gift by God to make up for his deformity, there was no question that he could carve wood with astonishing genius. His speciality was the carving of shepherd’s crooks. The badgers, the sheep, the elegant swans that adorned the curving handles seemed to come to life in the hand. Godefroi had also given him a few pieces of work in the manor house, and from these he had been able to add a few pence to his subsistence wages. But he was still painfully poor.
“And he’s not strong,” the smith’s wife complained. “The work in the fields is hard for him. If only he were a shepherd.”
If only. For this was exactly what Godric wanted to be. At every spare moment from his other work, he would roam the high ground where the sheep were grazing, talking to the shepherds who guarded them, and helping gladly in the washing and shearing, without needing to be asked. There was little about the care of sheep that he did not already know; and certainly he was physically far better suited to this work than to the heavy drudgery in the fields. A shepherd, too, was entitled to a bowl of whey all through the summer, ewes’ milk on Sunday, one of the lord’s lambs at weaning time and a fleece at shearing. This had been the subject of his uncle’s plea to Godefroi the day before.
“Make the boy one of your shepherds,” he begged, “and I’ll vouch for him that you won’t be disappointed. He’s not cut out for the fields.”
Godefroi had not committed himself. He disliked being manoeuvred.
“But he didn’t say no,” Nicholas told his nephew.
Since it was the day after Hokeday, the second Tuesday after Easter, there was much to do. On Hokeday, the community’s sheep were folded on the lord of the manor’s lands where they would remain until Martinmas in November, so that the lord would have the benefit of their richest manure during the summer months for his fields. All through the morning Godric helped the other villeins to erect the stout wattle sheepfolds on the slopes above the valley. Then at noon he was summoned to help one of the teams of oxen which were harnessed two by two to pull the heavy plough. It was to turn the huge field which was to lie fallow that season. By mid-afternoon, the reeve had no further work for him, and he was told he could go.
This was an unexpected piece of good luck since there were still many hours of daylight left, and he was hardly even tired. It did not take him long to return to the village, collect his dog, and set out down the valley.
It was quite by chance that he found his opportunity to take his revenge on William that day.
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