London (58 page)

Silversleeves had only gone three miles from the castle gates when he wished he hadn’t. The sun had been out when he left that June morning, but now it was raining hard. As the lush meadows all around roared with the din of falling water, and the raindrops gathered on the end of his nose, he cut a sorry figure.

The truth was, as every new Exchequer clerk was told nowadays: “Old Silversleeves is a bit of a joke.” It was not simply his age. After all, the mighty Earl Marshal, one of the greatest officers of the kingdom, was still fighting in the saddle at over seventy. But poor Silversleeves, with his stooping shoulders and his nose that seemed to grow even longer with advancing years – Silversleeves whose half-century at the Exchequer had never led to advancement – Silversleeves was certainly an object of fun. The legend of Henry II chasing him out of Westminster Hall was now told in several amusing versions. His last-minute changes of allegiance were cautionary tales. And if it were not for the fact that he carried the entire Exchequer Rolls in his head and could compute sets of figures quicker than most men could blink, he would probably have been retired years before.

But at least he could console himself he had been important enough to be present at the great meeting three days before in the meadow near the castle called Runnymede.

King Richard the Lionheart had not been a good king. He was never in England. When he had died in battle and his brother John succeeded, some people had hoped things would get better. Certainly no one could have predicted the disasters of John’s reign. He had murdered his nephew, poor young Arthur of Brittany. Then, in a series of ill-judged campaigns, he had lost almost all his father’s empire across the Channel. Henry had quarrelled with Becket, but John managed to quarrel with the Pope so thoroughly that England was placed under an Interdict. For years, there had been no Masses; you could hardly even get a decent burial. Finally he had managed to offend so many of England’s powerful feudal families that a determined group had decided to rebel and bring him to order.

The result had been Magna Carta, the great charter to which John had been forced to swear three days before at Runnymede.

In some ways it was a conservative document. Most of the conditions it placed on the king and the basic liberties it asserted for the people were no more than the long-established conventions of feudal society and old English common law. John was being put on notice that he must abide by the rules. Some improvements were made, though: widows could no longer be forced, as Ida had been, to marry. There were clauses, too, protecting men against imprisonment without trial. But one set of provisions was truly radical. Instead of the ancient council – the group of great nobles who had always expected to advise the king – the rebels now insisted there should be a named council of twenty-five men, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Mayor of London, to make sure the monarch abided by the charter. If he did not, they would depose him.

“It’s unheard of!” Silversleeves had remarked to one of the rebel barons. “No monarch has ever submitted to such a thing. “Why,” he added, “England would then be just like a commune. Your twenty-five barons would be like so many aldermen, and the king no more than a mayor!”

“I quite agree,” the nobleman replied. “It was London, my dear fellow, that gave us the idea.”

Nor was London itself left out of the charter. Strangely enough, though they were determined to preserve their privileges, the aldermen had not held out for their right to have a commune. The reason for this had been explained to Silversleeves by Bull. “It’s the taxes.” He grinned. “You see, we soon found that since a commune is treated like a single baron when it comes to taxes, the other citizens would want the richest of us to pay a bigger share. But if the king taxes each citizen individually, we aldermen don’t get hit so hard. So we don’t want the commune so much as we thought we did, after all!” But the mayor was another matter. The king’s charter confirmed him in perpetuity. “He’ll never be taken from us now,” Bull assured him. One other small clause was added. It was number thirty-three.

Henceforth all kiddles shall be completely removed from the Thames and the Medway and throughout all England, except on the sea coast.

After over forty years of waiting, Alderman Sampson Bull had triumphed over the king.

Looking for a place to shelter, Silversleeves now took a lane that led to a hamlet he had not visited before. Riding up to a cottage, he demanded entrance. Only after he had begun to dry out did he notice something rather curious about the peasant family who were his reluctant hosts: the father had a white patch in his hair. He remained with them an hour, until the shower passed; after which he paid a call upon the steward of the estate in which the hamlet lay.

When he returned to London later that day, Pentecost Silversleeves was smiling.

Life had treated Adam Ducket well. He was a member of the fishmongers company now, a modest craft guild, but nonetheless a respectable position. There had been sadness, true: his first wife had died in childbirth several years before, but his old patron Barnikel had a daughter, Lucy, of marriageable age. They were due to marry in the spring.

On a dull November afternoon a messenger with strange news arrived at the house of Adam Ducket on Cornhill. It was not merely strange, it made no sense at all.

He was summoned to appear before the Hustings court in two weeks’ time. “I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said to the messenger. “What’s it all about?” When he discovered, at the house of the mayor the next day, he could not believe his ears.

The ancient court of the Husting generally met on a Monday. The place of its meetings was a simple stone hall, of quite modest dimensions, with a steep wooden roof, that stood in the ward known as Aldermanbury, just above the Jewry. The ground beside it was rather more open than elsewhere, with several courtyards, and it was also noticeable that the streets around this area had a curious curve. Until a few generations before, the outlines of a Roman amphitheatre had still been visible upon the site, but this was now entirely forgotten. The little stone courthouse, where the mayor and aldermen met, was known as the Guildhall.

Inside the Guildhall on a cold November morning, with Barnikel and Mabel beside him as supporters, Adam Ducket faced the mayor and aldermen of London. And also his accuser: Silversleeves.

The last ten days had been like a bewildering dream. The accusation had come from nowhere, from a man he scarcely knew, even by sight. He was not even accused of a crime. It was more incomprehensible than that. “They say I’m not who I think I am,” he told Mabel, “and I can’t prove it.”

He had tried. He had ridden down to the hamlet near Windsor the very day after hearing the accusation. But to his astonishment, the distant cousins he had never visited before, and the landlord’s steward, confirmed his guilt. “If only my mother were still alive. Maybe she could have told me something,” he cried. But no one could help him.

Silversleeves had begun. Thin, stooped, and an object of ridicule he might be; but now, entirely in his element, he became strangely impressive. “The accusation, Mayor and Aldermen, is very simple,” he declared. “Before you stands one Adam Ducket, fishmonger and supposed citizen of London. My duty today is to tell you that I have discovered he is an impostor. Adam Ducket he is. But a citizen of this noble commune,” he used the word with a deep bow of respect, “he may not be. For Adam Ducket is not a freeman. He is a serf.”

The great men of London sighed wearily. “Give us your proof,” they said.

They were by no means uncommon, these accusations of serfdom, and they were heard by the London courts for many generations. True, in theory, a serf might run away and live in a town, unclaimed, for a year and a day: at which point he became free. But such runaways were not common, and were likely to be treated as vagabonds unless they had money. Besides, the freemen of London had their own families to employ, their own guilds to protect. They were a proud community. And one thing – custom was very clear on this – which the freemen of London would not tolerate was the presence of servile men amongst the citizenry. “We are barons,” they said, “not runaway serfs.” As for an actual serf trying to masquerade as a citizen – it was unthinkable.

Nonetheless, the men sitting in judgment sensed that there was probably some game of personal vengeance here, and they were cautious. “Your proof,” the mayor warned, “had better be good.”

It was. In quick order Silversleeves produced Adam’s cousins whom he had brought up from Windsor. Then the estate steward. Both swore that Adam held the strips of land, which his father before and his forebears had held, not by rent, but by servile labour service. “Just,” his father’s cousin declared, “like us.”

In a way, they were telling the truth. For as the years of Adam’s childhood had passed, neither he nor his mother had bothered about the place, and his cousins had fallen into the habit of paying the rent for Adam’s land in labour instead of cash and then keeping all the modest profits for themselves. Ever since the steward had been there, which was now twelve years, he had known that Adam’s strips owed labour service, which his cousins provided for him. Therefore, even though he was living in London, he was still in this matter a serf. It was obscure, it was highly technical, but in the feudal world it was such technicalities that mattered.

“I was told I had cousins who were serfs, but that we were always free,” the young man protested. And indeed, on his visit to the hamlet he might have found one old man who could have testified to that effect – except that he had died the week before.

Now Silversleeves produced his masterstroke. It had suddenly occurred to him a few days before. “I have even consulted the great Domesday Book of King William,” he blandly informed the court. “And there is no word of any such free holding. The members of this family were always serfs.” The fact that a century and a half before a hurried Norman clerk had made one of the few errors in that great compilation and forgotten to record Ducket’s ancestor as free was something Silversleeves neither knew nor cared.

The mayor was silent. The aldermen looked grave. And then Sampson Bull spoke up. “There’s something wrong here,” he said gruffly. “This man’s father was Simon the armourer, a respected citizen” – he gave the Exchequer clerk a stern look – “with whom, as I recall, Silversleeves had a quarrel. If Ducket is Simon’s son, then he’s a citizen by right, and that’s that.”

There were looks of relief. Nobody liked this case.

But Silversleeves was not a royal clerk for nothing. “If Simon was a citizen,” he said, “he probably shouldn’t have been. But either way it’s irrelevant. Because, Mayor and Alderman of the city, Adam Ducket holds his land by labour service
at this very moment
. He is a serf,
now
.” He paused to survey them carefully. “Or are we to change the ancient custom of London, and make this serf a citizen?”

Here even Bull could not argue. Ducket was a serf, no question. As for Silversleeves’s canny suggestion that they were changing London’s sacred customs – that had gone home.

The mayor spoke. “I’m sorry, Adam Ducket,” he said. “This is a bad business and you may not even be to blame. But we can’t have serfs as citizens. You must leave us.”

“What about my craft? I’m a fishmonger.”

“Oh, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave off that,” the mayor replied. “You’re not a citizen.”

As Barnikel and Mabel went out with him, Adam turned to them helplessly. “What am I to do?” he cried.

“We’ll help you,” Barnikel promised.

“But what about Lucy?” he asked.

And now Mabel, second mother though she might have been, spoke in the true voice of London.

“This is terrible, Adam,” she said sadly, “but we can’t have Lucy marrying you any more. You’re not a citizen.”

And so, after a very long wait indeed, Pentecost Silversleeves finally had his revenge.

1224

There was no doubt about it: things were getting better. As she surveyed the world around her in the seventy-fifth year of her robust life, Sister Mabel could not avoid feeling cheerful.

England was at peace. After continued strife between the barons and the king, John had suddenly died, leaving his son, only a boy, to rule with the help of a council. The council governed well. The great charter and its liberties had twice been confirmed. London had a mayor. If they had failed to avoid the tallage tax, the new administration, keeping out of foreign wars, had not needed to levy much money anyway. “We’re not even in trouble with the Pope at the moment,” she would cheerily add.

In London, too, there had been several recent improvements. The most striking, perhaps, was the great lantern tower that had just been completed above the nave of St Paul’s. Breaking the long, narrow line of the building, it added a new grace and dignity to a dark mass that had loomed over the western hill rather like a barn. But what had given Mabel even more pleasure in the last three years had been the arrival in the city of two new kinds of religious folk, unlike any that had been seen there before: the friars were busy building their modest lodgings at that very time; the followers of St Francis, the Franciscans or Greyfriars, and the Dominican Blackfriars.

“I like these friars,” Mabel would say. “They work.” The Franciscans, dedicated to personal poverty, cared for the poor. The Blackfriars were committed to teaching. The Greyfriars she especially liked. “Everything can be improved,” she would say. “So long as we all keep busy.” And it was no doubt with this in mind that she had undertaken her mission that day.

They were a strange couple, as they inched their way along. Mabel, solid and bustling, even if a little slower, and the stick-like figure who moved stiffly beside her, holding her arm. Thin and pale as a dusty old stick of chalk, bent at the shoulders as if he had been snapped, it still appeared that Silversleeves would live for ever.

He was completely blind, and every week, Mabel would take him for a walk. “You can’t sit in here all day,” she would tell him in the stout stone hall below St Paul’s. “You get out and take some exercise or you won’t be able to move.” Their expeditions fell into two parts. First she would lead him on his little palfrey to some convenient spot. Then she would make him walk. Then lead him home again.