London (40 page)

Wiser, poorer and suddenly older, Barnikel returned sadly to London with an unremitting sense that the Normans had won. Upon reaching his house at Billingsgate he did not break a single door, but instead took to his bed for three weeks, during which time he drank far more ale than he should have. He did not come to himself again until Hilda, having tried unsuccessfully three times, at last gained admittance and, with her own hands, made him a bowl of sustaining broth.

In the year 1086, prompted partly by his need for extra revenue during the panic of the previous year, one of the most remarkable administrative feats in history was begun by William, the Conqueror of England. It was an amazing testimony not only to his thoroughness, but still more to his domination of his own feudal magnates. Certainly no other king in medieval Europe ever dared attempt such a thing.

This was the Domesday survey. William ordered it on Christmas Day, 1085. Village by village, the entire countryside was to be investigated by his clerks; every field and coppice measured and valued, every free man, serf and even the livestock counted. “He didn’t miss a pig,” men said, with a mixture of awe and disgust. At the end of it, King William would have the basis for the most efficient tax assessment seen until modern times.

In this respect, William was uniquely fortunate. Most feudal lords in Europe gave only grudging obedience to their monarch, and would never have tolerated such an inquisition. Even William never attempted such a thing in his own duchy of Normandy. But the island of England was different. Not only did he claim it belonged to him by conquest, but most of the landholders were now his own men, bound to him personally, and obedient. He could, therefore, be thorough.

On a bright morning in April, Alfred the armourer arrived at the hamlet near Windsor that he had left as a boy. He had meant to visit his family for some years, and now, as he approached the familiar bend in the river, he felt quite excited.

It was thanks to his father that he still had an interest in the place. In the years following the Conquest, the smith had acquired the tenancy of a number of strips of land on the manor, for which he paid a money rent. On his death he had left some of these to Alfred, who paid the rent while his brother arranged for the land to be worked. It brought the Londoner a modest extra income, for which he was glad, and also preserved a link with his childhood. Now, knowing that the Domesday surveyors would shortly be in the Windsor area, he had decided to go there to make sure his land claims were properly recorded.

It was a pleasant, lively scene that he found. The great field had already been ploughed. The seed had just been scattered and now, before the birds could eat it, the field was being harrowed. Four great carthorses were dragging the big wooden frame with its toothed underside across the heavy soil, covering the seed, while a gaggle of children followed, shouting and flinging stones to drive away the greedy crowds of birds.

There was the old forge with its wooden roof, his father’s anvil and the sharp, familiar smell of charcoal. Nothing had changed.

And yet it had. Though his brother and his family greeted him warmly enough, there was something, something he could not quite put his finger on, that disturbed Alfred. Was it a tension between his brother and his wife? Was there a hangdog look about the fellow? He wondered what it was about, but had no time to ask, for the surveyors had already arrived.

There were three of them: two French clerks and a fellow from London who helped to translate. The reeve, the landlord’s steward, was taking them round. Their practised eyes noted everything.

They had nearly finished when they got to the smithy. One of the clerks had gone with the London man to inspect the meadow, and as the other went round the cottages with the reeve, it was clear that he was anxious to leave. They paused politely, however, to inspect the forge. The clerk glanced enquiringly at the reeve, who, indicating Alfred’s brother, remarked: “A good cottager. He does labour service for his land.”

Alfred stared. How could this fellow be so careless?

“You pay rent,” he prompted his brother. But his brother only looked sheepish and said nothing as the clerk made a note on his slate.

“And this one?” They were looking at him.

“I am Alfred the armourer, of London,” he announced firmly. “A free citizen. I pay rent.”

The steward nodded, confirmed the rent, and the clerk was about to write it down when his colleague called him away to show him something by the meadow. While he was gone, Alfred turned upon his brother.

“What does this mean?” he demanded. “Are you a serf?”

And then it came out. Times were hard; there was not enough work for the smithy and too many mouths to feed. His brother spoke sullenly, without conviction, before ending with a shrug.

Alfred understood. Free men paid rent; they also paid the king’s taxes. It was not uncommon for a free peasant, unable to cope with these burdens, to pay his lord with labour instead and become a serf. “What difference does it make?” his brother weakly demanded.

In practice, in his day-to-day life, not much. But to Alfred that was not the point. It meant that his brother had given up. Then he glanced at his brother’s wife and saw the thought in her eyes: if this rich brother from London gave us the land he had here, which he doesn’t need, we’d be better off.

At that moment Alfred experienced the curious sensation that is often felt by successful men with poor relations. Perhaps it was meanness, or a deep instinct for survival, or a fear of contamination, or just impatience, but he felt a sudden rage. And if an inner voice reminded him that he, too, might have starved if it had not been for Barnikel, he countered this at once. When my chance came, I took it, he reminded himself. So it was that, gazing at them with disgust, he merely remarked: “I hope our father cannot see you now.”

When the French clerk returned he did not ask any more questions. After a rapid glance at the other cottages, he prepared to leave. Only then did he recall that he had been about to write down something about the fellow with the white patch in his hair. What the devil had the man said he was? “Damn these English,” he muttered. “They make such a confounded muddle of everything.”

For despite the thoroughness of the Domesday survey, the French clerks who compiled it were frequently baffled by what they found.

“Is this man a slave, a serf, or free?” the orderly, Latin-trained clerks would ask. In return, they would very often receive an account of curious, indefinite arrangements that time and custom had wrought and which even local people could scarcely disentangle. How could they put these Anglo-Saxon uncertainties into the clear categories that their document demanded? Often they were unsure, so they would resort to some general category whose legal status was deliberately vague. One of these was the category of
villanus
– a villein – a term that carried no specific legal sense at this date, and meant neither serf nor free man but merely “peasant”.

The clerk frowned. He could not remember what the fellow with the white flash in his hair had said, but he recalled that the man beside him, who looked like his brother, was a serf. He sighed, therefore, and noted:
villanus
. And so it was that Alfred appeared in the great Domesday Book of England as a small, nameless mistake. It did not seem important, at the time.

1087

In August 1086, a great and symbolic meeting took place eighty miles west of London at the castle of Sarum. There King William was presented with the huge volumes of his Domesday Book and all his chief men did homage to him. It was supposed to be an occasion to celebrate, but even at this time there was a sense of melancholy in the air. The king was growing old. He was very corpulent; when he hoisted himself into the saddle, it was with a groan. His enemies were as many as ever, the most notable being the jealous King of France. Seeing him now, ageing and unwell, the great men of the kingdom were filled with a new foreboding.

For if few loved William, all feared him. If he was brutal, he kept order. What, then, would become of his Norman lands and his English kingdom when the great Conqueror was gone?

They would fall to his sons. To Robert, dark and moody. William, called Rufus for his red hair, a clever, cruel fellow. Unmarried still, it was said that he preferred the company of young men in his bed to that of women. And Henri, the youngest, devious and unknowable. There was also their ambitious half-uncle, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, still waiting in the jail in which King William had put him. What, indeed, would happen with such fellows as these free to roam after the Conqueror had gone?

In the spring of the new year, things grew worse. Cattle disease broke out in the west and spread rapidly. In late spring there were terrible storms and it was feared the harvest might be ruined. Once more, King William was fighting on the Continent, and his agents were already trying to raise new taxes.

It was not surprising, therefore, that in London, amongst the merchants who contemplated the future, there should be careful calculation. As the months went by, there were many secret conversations. Nor was it surprising that some of them involved Barnikel.

Even in dark days, however, a small ray of light may warm some corner of the world. And so it was that in the spring of 1087 Osric learned that Dorkes was pregnant again.

It was her third pregnancy. After their daughter there had been another girl, this time stillborn. But this healthy bundle kicking inside her so vigorously seemed different somehow. Osric noticed that she was carrying this baby differently too. And in his heart he was certain: it would be a son.

A son. Osric was only in his twenties, but in those harsh times a labourer could not expect to live for very long. In the comfort of his house, a rich merchant might live to be old indeed. But Osric would probably be dead at forty. He had already lost three teeth.

A son who would be grown, with luck, before his father died. A son who might have a better life. “Maybe,” he said to Dorkes, “if he has better luck than me, he’ll be a carpenter.”

“And what will you call him, if he’s a boy?” she asked.

To which, after a little thought, he replied: “I’ll give him the name of our greatest English king. I’ll call him Alfred.”

But perhaps the most astonishing event that took place that year concerned Ralph Silversleeves.

In the month of August, just when another storm made it quite certain that the harvest would be ruined, he announced that he was going to be married.

He had met the girl in May. She was a large blonde creature, the daughter of a German merchant then residing at the German wharf by the mouth of the Walbrook. Her father was even quite rich. She had a large, flat face, large blue eyes, large hands, large feet and, as she cheerfully told anyone who cared to listen, a large appetite. Finding herself sturdy and unwed at the age of twenty-three, she had spotted Ralph and decided that she liked his clumsy ways; and nothing had given Ralph greater pleasure than the look of delight on his father’s face, and the astonished disbelief on Henri’s, when he had told them.

On a chain around his neck he proudly wore a talisman she had given him depicting a rampant lion. She said it was how she thought of him. They were to be married before Christmas.

Her name was Gertha.

That summer, there was one other important change in the Silversleeves family, but it happened so quietly that not even a ripple appeared on the surface of their lives.

During the month of June, Hilda realized that her husband was unfaithful. She could not say for sure when it had begun. The gap between them had slowly grown wider, until one day she discovered that, if the truth be told, neither of them wished any longer to cross it. She guessed there might be other women. Then, one evening in June, he went out and indicated he might not return that night.

Since her father Leofric had been unwell recently, she went to stay with him in her old home by the sign of the Bull. A few nights later, Henri went out again. By then she was sure.

When, at last, the impending crisis came, it did so rather unexpectedly.

Following the storms that ruined the harvest, the weather grew hot and dry. The heat of that wasted summer continued late into a tinder-dry September, and it seemed to most men that some conflagration was likely.

At the end of summer, in the year of Our Lord 1087, while besieging a French castle of no great importance, William, Duke of Normandy and King of England, was wounded. The wound festered. Very soon it was clear that William was dying.

Around his deathbed his family gathered. To Robert was given Normandy; to William Rufus, England; to young Henri, money. Odo, the dying king’s half-brother, was released from prison. Thus the stage was set for a generation of jealousy, intrigue and murder. Some days later, after a long, hot journey across country to the Norman ancestral church at Caen, the putrid corpse of King William the Conqueror, so swollen that it could not be forced into its coffin, burst over the bystanders, scattering entrails and much else besides.

Meanwhile, as quickly as he could, Rufus crossed the Channel to be crowned in England.

Two weeks later, on a warm, dry, October day, a small group of men paid a call on Barnikel the Dane at his house by All Hallows. When Barnikel heard what they wanted, he smiled. “I can provide what you need,” he said. “I have it all under lock and key.” Then, secretly, he sent for Osric.

Barnikel the Dane had no idea that his luck had just run out.

Ralph Silversleeves could hardly believe his good fortune. What a chance, if things worked out, to impress the new Norman king.

He understood the political situation, because Mandeville had patiently explained it to him.

“Robert will try to seize England from Rufus, because he wants to rule over as much as his father did. Odo will probably support him. If so, he’ll be able to bring in a huge party of knights from Kent. To my knowledge, because they don’t like Rufus, a number of the other barons are ready to join them. And you can be sure there’s a party in London ready to go with them if they think there’s profit in it. But,” the magnate continued, “most of the sheriffs and the countryside want the King of England, not the Duke of Normandy, to rule over them. So we are backing Rufus.” He had looked at Ralph bleakly. “Our job is to keep London quiet. Find the conspirators. Find their arms. Rufus will be grateful if we can turn something up.”