Fear in the Forest (2 page)

CURFEW

The prohibition of open fires in towns after dark, for fear of starting conflagrations. Derived from ‘couvre-feu’, from the extinguishing or banking-down of fires at night. During the curfew, the city gates were closed from dusk to dawn – one thirteenth-century mayor of Exeter was hanged for failing to ensure this.

DEODAND

Literally ‘a gift from God’, it was the forfeiture of anything that had caused a death, such as a sword, a cart or even a mill-wheel. It was confiscated by the coroner for the king, but was sometimes given as compensation to the victim’s family.

DESTRIER

A large war-horse able to carry the weight of an armoured knight. When firearms made armour redundant, destriers became shire-horses, replacing oxen as draught animals.

DORTER

The dormitory of a monastery, abbey or priory.

EYRE

A sitting of the King’s justices, introduced by Henry II in 1166, which moved around the country in circuits. There were two types, the ‘Eyre of Assize’ which was the forerunner of the later Assize and latterly Crown Courts, which was supposed to visit each county town regularly to try serious cases; and the General Eyre, which came at long intervals to scrutinise the administration of each county.

FARM

The taxation from a county, collected in coin on behalf of the sheriff and taken by him personally every six months to the royal treasury at London or Winchester. The sum was fixed annually by the king or his ministers; if the sheriff could extract more from the county, he could retain the excess, which made the office of sheriff much sought after.

FLETCHER

A maker of arrows.

FOREST

Strictly, a wild area, with or without trees. The Royal Forests were areas sequestered by the king, whether he owned the actual land or not, where only he could hunt and take the profit from various activities, such as wood-felling, forges, brewing etc.

FOREST EYRE

The higher court enforcing forest laws, dealing with all offences against venison and those of vert worth more than four pence. Usually held every three years, after being summoned by letters patent from the king. The sheriff summoned all nobility, forest officers and four members of each township to attend.

FORESTER

An officer, similar to a gamekeeper, directly responsible for enforcing the harsh forest laws and taking offenders to the forest courts. He had a groom or page to assist him. He was nominated by the Warden of the Forest, but received no salary – sometimes paying for the privilege of the job, because of the opportunities for extortion. His badge was a horn.

HAUBERK

A chain-mail tunic with long sleeves to protect the wearer from neck to calf; usually slit for riding a horse.

HUNDRED

An administrative division of a county, originally named for a hundred hides of land or a hundred families.

JUSTICES

The king’s judges, originally from his royal court, but later chosen from barons, senior priests and administrators. They sat in the various law courts, such as the Eyre of Assize or as Commissioners of Gaol Delivery. From 1195 onwards, ‘keepers of the peace’ were recruited from local knights, who by the fourteenth century, evolved into ‘justices of the peace’.

KIRTLE

A lady’s gown.

MATINS

The first service of the religious day, originally at midnight.

MARK

A measure of money, though not an actual coin, as only pennies existed. A mark was two-thirds of a pound i.e. thirteen shillings and fourpence (sixty-six decimal pence).

MUTILATION

A common punishment as an alternative to hanging. A hand, foot, or genitals were amputated or blinding carried out.

ORDEAL

A test of guilt or innocence, such as walking over nine red-hot plough-shares, picking a stone from a barrel of boiling water or molten lead; if burns appeared, the person was judged guilty. For women, submersion in water was the ordeal, the guilty floating!

PALFREY

A small, docile horse suitable for use by a woman.

PAPAL LEGATE

An official emissary of the Vatican.

SECONDARIES

Young men aspiring to become priests, thus under 24 years of age. They assisted canons and vicars in their duties in the cathedral.

TERCE

The fourth of the nine services of the cathedral day, usually around nine in the morning.

TRIAL BY BATTLE

An ancient right to settle a dispute by fighting to the death. Usually, an appealer (qv) would demand financial compensation from the alleged perpetrator or be challenged to battle. Women and unfit persons could employ a champion to fight for them.

VENISON

The wild animals of the forest which were hunted, protected by the forest laws. They were divided into the ‘beasts of the forest’ – hart, hind, hare, boar and wolf, the ‘beasts of the chase’ – buck, doe, fox, marten, roe and the ‘beasts of warren’ – hare, rabbit (coney), cat, badger, pheasant, partridge, woodcock and squirrel.

VERDERER

An administrative forest officer responsible for holding the Attachment Courts every forty days and committing serious offences to the Forest Eyre. He was responsible to the sovereign, not the Warden. There were usually four in each royal forest, one to each bailiwick. His badge was an axe.

VERT

The vegetation of the forest – trees, bushes and pasture, the use of which was also subject to the forest laws.

VICAR

A priest employed by a more senior cleric, such as a canon, to carry out some of his religious duties, especially the many daily services in a cathedral. Often called a ‘vicar-choral’ from his participation in chanted services.

WARDEN OF THE FOREST

The senior forest adminsitrator, appointed by the king, who was responsible for organising the Forest Eyre and who nominated the foresters, but not verderers, who were individually responsible to the king.

WIMPLE

Linen or silk cloth worn framing a woman’s face and covering the throat.

WOODMOTE

An alternative name for the lowest level of forest courts, usually known as the ‘Attachment Courts’ or the ‘Forty Day’ courts. Sometimes incorrectly called ‘Swainmotes’. Only offences against the vert amounting to less than four pence could be dealt with by these courts; offences against the venison or larger vert offences could only be recorded and referred to the higher court, the Forest Eyre.

WOODWARDS

Employed by private landowners to protect the vert and venison, but outside the royal forests. Although they were servants of the landowner, they still had to adhere to the same oaths and codes as the foresters. Their badge was a bill-hook.

The hamlet dozed in the afternoon sun. The dappled shadows of a few fleecy clouds glided slowly across the green woods that rose on either side of the small valley. Most of the two score men and boys of Sigford were working in the strip-fields that lined the track through the village: a few more were scything hay in an enclosed part of the meadow land beyond the fields. The ragged idiot boy was hiding from the sun under a hawthorn bush, keeping an eye on a dozen goats cropping the summer grass along the verge of the dusty road that led to Owlacombe and distant Ashburton.

The smithy was silent, as the blacksmith was squatting outside the wall of the alehouse a hundred paces away, restoring his sweating body with a quart of Widow Mody’s indifferent brew. At least it was cool and wet, he thought – though he regretted the death of the widow’s sister from the yellow plague last year. By God, she used to brew a good ale!

The smith drank slowly, spinning out the time before he must go back to his forge, where the flames from the furnace and the labour of his hammering convinced him that Hell itself would be a relief from working in this summer heat. The only sound was the distant smack of mattocks as the labourers hacked at weeds in the furrows between the rows of beans, turnips and oats. This quilted patchwork of crops was all that stood between the people of Sigford and starvation next winter.

Much nearer, he heard the buzzing of a couple of bluebottles as they hovered over his boots, attracted by the dried blood of a chicken he had killed that morning. He felt himself nodding off and pulled himself together with a jerk. Sigford was too small to have either a church or a manor house and it belonged to the manor of Ilsington, a mile away. Their lord, William de Pagnell, had a nasty habit of sending his servants on unexpected visits to check on the village. Though the smith was a freeman, it would not be politic to be found in mid-afternoon dozing against the alehouse wall with a jar in his hand. He struggled to shake off his lethargy and stared out over the green hills in front, the outriders of Dartmoor, the grim plateau that lay high beyond the dells and coombes west of Sigford.

As he gathered the will to finish his ale and get back to work, a new sound began to insinuate itself into his consciousness. Faintly at first, then more clearly, the sound of hoofs reached his ears. Well used to horses from his trade as a farrier, he could tell that the rider was in a hurry. In case it was de Pagnell’s steward or manor-reeve, he gulped the rest of his ale, put the pot on the ground and hurriedly rose to get back to his smithy. But before he went five paces, his keen ears told him something else – this horse was running wild, without a rider.

A bend in the track hid the approaching animal until the hammering of its hoofs was all too clear. As a cloud of reddish dust swirled around the bend, he was aware of the men in the fields shouting in alarm.

Abruptly, Morcar, the village reeve, and a couple of good-wives appeared from their cottages opposite, as a tall brown mare materialised through the dust, its eyes rolling wildly as it charged down the track between the dwellings. Wary not to get trampled, both the smith and the reeve ran into the roadway, waving their arms and yelling. At the last minute, just as they were about to throw themselves out of its path, the mare shied, pranced and finally skidded to a stop, trembling and frothing, a foam of sweat mixing with the grime on its flanks.

Only then, as the dust settled, did they see what was being dragged from the left-side stirrup. With a foot trapped in the iron hoop, the rider was face down, and when in desperate haste the two villagers lifted him up, they looked in horror at his ravaged features, dragged an unknown distance on the flinty surface of the unforgiving road. His clothing was ripped to shreds, but two things were all too obvious to Morcar and the smith.

On his breast was an embroidered badge depicting an axe – and from the centre of his back protruded the broken shaft of an arrow.

As Sigford lacked a church or even a tithe barn, the coroner’s inquest had to be held in the open air on what passed for the village green. Where the Bagtor lane came down from the moor to join the main track, a triangle of beaten grass lay between the alehouse and the smithy. Here the villagers gathered to eat, dance and get drunk on saints’ days and the occasional chapman or pedlar set out his ribbons, threads and trinkets for the women to paw over.

This Tuesday noontide, however, saw a unique gathering on the dusty greensward. For the first time in history, a coroner’s inquest was to be held in the village, a happening beyond the comprehension of anyone other than Morcar, who had a vague notion of this new-fangled process.

The previous autumn, he had been told by William de Pagnell’s bailiff that henceforth all deaths, other than those from old age or disease, must immediately be reported to himself or the manor-reeve, so that the King’s coroner in Exeter could be notified. This obscure command had gone in one of Morcar’s ears and out the other, and as no unnatural deaths had happened in Sigford since then the matter had been forgotten until yesterday, when a battered corpse had been dragged into the village.

Now the sleepy hamlet had been invaded by three men from the great city of Exeter. Although it was barely sixteen miles away, only two villagers had ever been there, and these awesome officials were as alien as if they had come from the moon. The whole population, ordered by the bailiff to congregate on the green at midday, stood silently as the coroner and his companions rode into the village. At their head was a great black destrier, a former warhorse, carrying the lean and forbidding figure of the coroner himself. Dressed in a long tunic as black as his steed, he hunched in his saddle like some great bird of prey. Hair of the same jet colour was swept back from his bony forehead to the nape of his neck. Heavy eyebrows hung over deep-set eyes, and a long hooked nose added to his eagle-like appearance. The dark stubble on his lean cheeks gave further credence to his old nickname of ‘Black John’, given to him by the soldiers of campaigns from Ireland to the Holy Land. His wide leather belt and diagonal baldric carried a formidable broadsword.

Sir John de Wolfe walked his horse to the centre of the grassy patch, watched in silence by the small crowd as the reeve came forward to take the reins. Behind him, a giant of a man with wild ginger hair and a huge straggling moustache of the same colour halted his brown mare and slid to the ground. The third visitor was a complete contrast, a little man with a slight hump on his left shoulder, riding a grey pony side-saddle like a woman.

The coroner dismounted and the reeve and two other villagers led their mounts away to be fed and watered, whilst the three men stood in the centre of the green and looked about them.

‘God-forsaken bloody place!’ muttered the dishevelled redhead under his breath, as he looked around at the handful of dwellings that made up the village. They were all shacks built of cob, with roofs of thatch in varying states of dilapidation, most surrounded by a small plot containing a vegetable patch and a few scrawny fowls. The only larger building was the alehouse, and from its door now strode a man in a fine yellow tunic, followed by a pair in more sober clothes. He marched up to the trio on the green and smacked his forearm across his chest in greeting.

‘Sir John, welcome! I am William de Pagnell, lord of the manor of Ilsington – which includes this miserable vill!’