The Town House (12 page)

This story rang through the town, adding to the ill-feeling which the enforcement of the old rules had brought about.

Worse followed; for as soon as the monopoly of milling was assured, the charge for milling was raised. It had been one-fourteenth, that is a pound of flour for every stone of corn ground, henceforth it would be two pounds – one-seventh. This was bad for everybody, since it put up the price of bread.

Everywhere now people were speaking against the Abbey and the monks and it was curious to hear mixed with the straight-forward grumbling voiced in their own simple words, the echo of the Friar’s accusations. Even those who had listened to him least had picked up from those who had given him their attention, some phrases which sounded foreign on their tongues, ‘appearance of sanctity’, ‘abuse of privilege’, ‘temporal power’, ‘private lechery’. Many of them hardly knew what the words meant, but they did know that they were speaking against the Abbey and the monks, and whipping up the ill feeling.

Nothing might have come of it, but in early November the Abbey officers arrested a man known as John Noggs who kept a little ale-house just inside the west gate of the town. He had set up and been working a small hand mill and his customers had been seen to arrive with sacks
of corn and to depart carrying sacks of flour. The power to turn the stone was supplied by two simple-minded boys and if it ground one hundredweight of corn in a full day’s work that was its limit. Still the new Cellarer was a man rather to take account of the breaking of a rule than of the damage done by the breaking. He was also a man to judge the customers of the illicit mill equally guilty with the miller. Within the next few days several more arrests were made. One of those accused of cheating the Abbey of its rightful dues was a respectable solid townsman who owned a cook shop, and one was a poor old woman who had gleaned diligently all through the harvest and taken her gleanings to be ground where the charge was lighter; the others I knew nothing of.

Immediately all the ill feeling came, like a festering boil, to a head. The whole town was now united against the Abbey. Over most matters it was difficult to get the comfortably off to join with the poor, or the merely poor to join with the destitute, and there was a severance, always, between those within and those without the Guilds. Now the arrest of the pastry-cook, who was a Guildsman, was an affront to them all, the fate of the inn-keeper-turned-miller was of concern to the middle sort, and the very poor were all agog in sympathizing with the old woman. The sullen grumbling changed to a more active, though still vague feeling that ‘something should be done’.

At this moment there popped up a very ancient fellow, half blind and more than half rambling in his wits who could remember back to when he was a little boy, when on a somewhat similar occasion the townsfolk had all joined together and shown ‘them’ that even ‘they’ couldn’t have everything their own way. The squabble then had concerned the taking of eels from the river – another Abbey right – and when the townspeople had done considerable damage to the Bell Tower and the Main Gate, the rules had been modified. The old grandfather, after years of obscurity, suddenly, found himself the centre of attention. The little house of his grand-daughter with whom he lived was always thronged with people anxious to hear his tale of what had happened seventy years ago. He conveniently forgot, or left out of his tale anything which the townsfolk would not find agreeable and the effect was to make them feel that they were a pack of powerful wolves who, for many years, had allowed themselves to be bullied by a few bleating old sheep and who had only to show their teeth to turn the tables. Very soon, before the arrested people could be brought before the Abbey Court, an attack on the Abbey was being planned.

I heard all about it. I was always moving about the town, here and there, in search of work. I was hungry and poor, one of the oppressed whose bread would be dear, whose feelings would veer towards the old gleaning woman. By the simple process of listening and saying nothing I learned a great deal. Sometime in November, at the dark of the moon, the Abbey was to be attacked. The monks would then be in bed and sound asleep; they retired soon after Compline which was at seven in the winter and slept until midnight when they were roused for Matins. It was not badly planned. The postern gate in the great Main Gateway was to be forced by means of a battering ram, and then a body of apprentices, armed with the bows and arrows with which they practised on Saturday afternoons, was to march in and demand the release of the prisoners. The aldermen of the Guilds, dressed in their livery, and unarmed, but under guard of another group of apprentices and journey-men, were then to go and negotiate with the Abbot, or the Prior, and get the charge for milling reduced again to one-fourteenth and the claim on the dung waived. All this under threat of real violence, letting the riff-raff run wild through the Abbey, and firing timbers and thatch. This, according to the old grandfather, was how the townspeople had conducted their business seventy years ago, and they had won what they asked for. Why shouldn’t it happen again?

Now it is true that an ordinary poor man like me can go through a lifetime without once testing his loyalty to anything save his own belly and his own family. In the main he cannot even be said to be loyal to his own kind, since at any moment he is prepared to snatch a job, or a crust from another man exactly like himself; I had done it many a time by the town gateway. But it is equally true that some extraordinary circumstance may arise and the most simple man must ask himself the question – where do I stand in this matter? and the answer is there, clear and certain as soon as the question is asked.

Such a testing point I had now reached and there was no doubt at all in my mind that I was with the monks. I had lived in the town for over four years and the only kindness that I had received from anybody had come from within those Abbey walls. Brother Justinius was mean: the increase in the milling charge made my bread dear, but those facts looked small when placed beside the alms Kate had received in both her pregnancies, the fair, just way in which the Trimble Charity had been administered, the careful attention I had been given in the Infirmary, and the way Brother Sebastian had devised and Brother Anthony had carried out the scheme to make me less crippled.

I owed the Abbey a good deal. And I hated the Guilds, their Aldermen, their journeymen and their rules.

At the same time I will not pretend I was ruled either by gratitude or hatred. Expediency played its part. The old grandfather remembered only that the townspeople had gained their point about the eels; the fact remained that after seventy years the Abbey still governed the town; and even if the townsfolk had won back their right to go eel-fishing, the Abbey had retained every right that mattered. It seemed to me that I should do myself no harm by trying to get into favour with those who would surely get the better of the dispute in the long run. I might even contrive to put in a word for my little threatened house. If I warned the monks in time they would be grateful and then I could say, ‘Please don’t demolish my neat thatched hut with the rest of Squatters Row.’

I was obliged to settle all these things in my mind rather quickly when it came to the point. After all the weeks of grumbling and plotting the decision to make the attack on the twelfth of November was only settled on the evening of the eleventh. On the morning of the twelfth I was helping a man to slaughter a pig; we had its throat cut and its guts out when the man’s neighbour looked over the wall and passed the news. I stood for a moment with my filthy hands hanging idle and the scent of blood in my nostrils and ran through all the arguments again. The townsfolk who had never shown me any kindness at all, or the Abbey which had given me alms and mended my leg? The townsfolk who would never do me any good, or the Abbey which might grant me the right to go on living in my hut?

I made up my mind, and striking my leg in a gesture of sudden comprehension I exclaimed,

‘Holy Mother, my shoe! The monk Anthony is the only one who knows how to mend it. If trouble is brewing I should get it done today.’

The man I was helping gave a loud yelp of laughter and smote me on the back.

‘Thass the way,’ he exclaimed, ‘take the honey before you smoke out the hive. Get what you can out of the rogues. They’ll hev more than shoes to mend tomorrow, I’ll warrant.’

I limped along to the Alms Gate and stood at the end of the little crowd who were drawing their dole. Brother Justinius was on duty, for which I was a little sorry; but when my turn came at last, I took off my shoe and leaning against the hatch said,

‘Brother Justinius, I have some information which is of importance to the Abbey.’

I spoke softly, for there were some who, having snatched their dole, were eating it then and there.

The monk had his wits about him. Taking the shoe he said in a loud, scolding voice,

‘What again! I declare you wear out more shoes than a tinker’s ass! You’d think Brother Anthony had nothing else to do. Wait there.’

He slammed down the hatch.

I curled my bare foot round the shin of my other leg and leaned against the wall. One by one those who were wolfing down their food finished it and wandered away: all but one, a stranger to me, his hand wrapped in a filthy, bloodied clout.

‘Keep you waiting,’ he said, coming close to me. ‘Keep you waiting like you was a dog, for the bits they scrape off their plates.’ He cleared his throat and spat out his rancour.

‘I must wait,’ I said. ‘Only the monk can mend my shoe.’

‘That may be. But if they was the kind brothers to everybody like they make out to be, wouldn’t they say, “Come in. Sit you down”, not “Wait there”. Same with food. Why, once I heard a Friar preach; telling about our Lord Jesus Christ…’ he crossed himself piously.
‘He
fed five thousand once, and He said, “Sit down on the grass”, He said, “and be comfortable”. And he didn’t hev no hatches and waiting about till the hour struck. Fish He give them, too, and when their bellies wouldn’t hold another bite He filled baskets for them to take away. Maybe you never heard that tale.’

‘I’ve heard all the tales,’ I said shortly, wishing he would take himself off.

‘I’m a stranger here. I s’pose you don’t know a place where I could lay, cheap, for the night.’

‘As it happens, I do.’ I directed him to the loft where Kate and I had lived during our first weeks in the town. I praised it, saying it was so good, so cheap that if he wanted to get a bed he should hurry. As I talked he began to unwind the rag from his hand. Under it flesh and bone were whole and sound.

‘The monk will return in a minute. If you want to eat here tomorrow. …’ I said warningly.

He winked at me and hurried off. All poor men took it for granted that they were in league together, I thought.
I
was the one exception.

As soon as he had gone Brother Justinius opened, not the hatch but the whole door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The room was small and square with wide wooden shelves on the walls to left and right of the door. There were the remains of the loaves, and the big bowls of pease-porridge, cooked and allowed to set firm and then cut into sections. Some one in the crowd must have claimed Trimble too, for there was a joint of beef, glazed and brown without, pink and juicy within, which even at that nervous moment, brought the water gushing into my mouth. I was meat-hungry. The thought struck me that had I stayed until that pig was dismembered I should have been given a couple of trotters, or even maybe a hock.

‘Now,’ Brother Justinius said, briskly, ‘what is it that you have to tell?’

Tell him, I thought, and he would push me out, go to his immediate superior and say, ‘A man at the Alms Gate just told me …’ How much would that profit me?

‘It is for the ear of my Lord Abbot alone.’

He looked at me. Kate went round my head and those of the boys every month with a pair of borrowed shears, and my time to be shorn was about due. Where I was not patched I was ragged, filthy from my last dirty job, and wearing but one shoe. A likely visitor for the Abbot!

‘Who sent you?’

‘Nobody. My own conscience compelled me.’

He gave me a cold cynical look and said,

‘Oh, come along. What is it you have to say?’

‘It is of importance. I can only speak of it to my Lord Abbot.’

He said to me with great seriousness.

‘Do you know what you ask?’ And I said to him with equal seriousness,

‘I know what I have to tell.’

I could see him debating with himself whether or not to open the door and push me out. Finally he snapped out the one word,

‘Come.’

He opened a door in the wall opposite the hatch and set off, at a great pace along a stone passage, so cold, with the stored up chill of many sunless years that my teeth began to chatter. After what seemed to my bare limping foot a long walk, he stopped and threw open a door, saying in exactly the voice he had used before,

‘Wait here.’

The room was warm, with a good fire on the hearth and settles on either side. I went and warmed myself, slowly turning round like a roast on a spit, then I sat down. Something about the way I had been received, and this long waiting, started a doubt in my mind. Might it not have
been wiser to stay with my own kind, outside these walls, thrown myself wholeheartedly into their plot, perhaps distinguished myself by boldness in the assault, so that they would say – This man must be admitted to the Guild forthwith; he is worthy to be a journeyman.

Well, it was too late now.

The door opened and another monk entered. I jumped up, forgetting my bare foot, lurched and had to catch at the settle to save myself.

‘I trust you are not drunk.’

The voice was no more friendly than Brother Justinius’s, but it was different, cool, distant, very faintly amused. The face, narrow within the cowl’s shadow, matched it, thin sharply curved nose, arched brows above bright intelligent eyes. There was nothing about his garb to mark him from any other monk but I knew at once that I was in the presence of someone important.