The Forest (35 page)

But the feudal lord was nonetheless the borough’s lord and its burgesses and mayor, as the reeve was called nowadays, though free, were still his tenants. They still owed him the rents on the plots of land – the burgages – and tenements they occupied. If they made rules, he had the right to approve them. In day-to-day matters of law and order they and their borough were subject to his manor court. And even though, as time went on, the king’s courts took over more and more of local justice, the feudal manor of Old Lymington, based on the rural land holding outside the borough, still continued as legal custodian of the place.

For about a century the great events of English history barely touched the place. Around 1300, when King Edward I asked why this borough had failed to supply a vessel for his campaign against the Scots, his commissioners reported back: ‘It’s a poor little harbour – only a village, really’ and they were excused. But the next century saw a dramatic change.

When the terrible Black Death swept across Europe in the years following 1346 it altered the face of England for ever. A third of the population died. Farms, whole villages, were left empty; labour was so scarce that serfs and poor
peasants could sell their labour and acquire their own free land. In the great deer forests, with their small populations of woodsmen and huntsmen, there was little to change; but in the eastern half of the New Forest, on the Beaulieu estate, a muted form of the great agricultural revolution did occur. There were no longer enough lay brothers to run the granges. The abbey continued its life of prayer, therefore; its monks actually lived rather well. But instead of running the granges on their huge estates, they mostly let them out, sometimes subdivided, to tenant farmers. Young Jonathan was taken out to one of the granges from time to time to visit his mother’s family, who had lived there very comfortably for three generations. When his father pointed eastwards along the coast, he did not say to Jonathan: ‘Those are Cistercian lands’ but ‘that’s where your mother’s farm lies’. The Beaulieu monks were no longer a special case. They were just another feudal landlord, now.

And if the abbey retreated, the little port advanced. Soon after the great Death, when the third King Edward and his glamorous son the Black Prince were conducting their brilliant campaigns – in the so-called Hundred Years War – against the French, the Lymington men were already able to supply several vessels and mariners. Better yet, this proved to be one of the few wars that were actually profitable for England. Plunder and ransom money flowed in. The English took land and valuable ports from their French cousins. Modest though it was, the port of Lymington found itself trading wines, spices, all sorts of minor luxuries from the rich and sunlit territories of the French. Its merchants grew in confidence. By the time, in 1415, that heroic King Henry V won the final English triumph over France at Agincourt they felt very pleased with themselves indeed.

And if, in recent times, things had not been going so well, their attitude was: ‘There’s still money to be made.’

There were times when Henry Totton worried about his son. ‘I’m not sure he really takes in what I say to him,’ he once complained to his friend.

‘All ten-year-olds are the same,’ the other assured him. But this was not quite good enough for Totton and, as he looked at his son now, he felt an uncertainty and disappointment he tried not to show.

Henry Totton was of rather less than medium height and he had an unassuming manner; but his dress informed you at once that he meant you to take him seriously. When he was a young man, his father had given him clothes suitable for his station; and this was important. The old Sumptuary Laws had long ago set out what each class in the richly varied medieval world might wear. Nor were these laws an imposition. If the aldermen of London wore crimson cloaks and the lord mayor his chain, the whole community felt honoured. The master from Oxford University had earned his solemn gown; his pupils as yet had not. There was honour in order. The Lymington merchant did not dress as a nobleman and would have been mocked if he had; but he did not dress like the peasant or the humble mariner either. Henry Totton wore a long
houppelande
– a sleeved coat, buttoned from neck to ankle. He wore it loose, without a belt and, although plain, the material was the best brown burnet cloth. He had another, made of velvet, with a silken belt for special occasions. He was clean-shaven and his quiet grey eyes did not quite conceal the fact that, within the precise limits belonging to his station in life, he was ambitious for his family. There had been Totton merchants in Southampton and Christchurch for centuries; he did not intend the Lymington branch to lag behind their many cousins.

He tried not to worry about Jonathan. It wasn’t fair to the boy. And God knows he loved him. Since the death of his wife the previous year, young Jonathan was all he had.

As for Jonathan, looking at his father, he knew he
disappointed him even if he did not quite know why. Some days he tried so hard to please him, but on others he forgot. If only his father would understand about the Seagulls.

It was the year his mother died that he had taken to wandering down to the quay alone. At the bottom end of the High Street, where the old burgage plots came to an end, there was a steep slope down to the water. It was a sharp drop in every sense. The old borough stopped at the top of it; so, as far as people like the Tottons were concerned, did respectability. Down that steep social slope clustered the untidy cottages of the fishermen. ‘And the other flotsam and jetsam,’ as his father put it, that drifted in from the sea or the Forest.

But to Jonathan it was a little heaven: the clinker boats with their heavy sails, the upturned boats on the quay, the seagull cries, the smell of tar and salt and drying seaweed, the piles of fish traps and nets – he loved to wander among all these. The Seagulls’ cottage – if you could call it that – lay at the seaward end. For it was not so much a cottage as a collection of articles, each more fascinating than the last, which had gathered themselves together into a cheerful heap. It must have happened by magic – perhaps the sea one stormy night had deposited them there – for it was impossible to imagine Alan Seagull going to such trouble to build anything that was not meant to float.

Perhaps, though, the Seagulls’ cottage would have floated. Along one wall the remains of a large rowing boat, hung lengthwise, its sides turned outwards, formed a sort of arbour where Seagull’s wife would often sit, nursing one of her younger children. The roof, which tracked this way and that, was made from all manner of planks, spars, areas of sailcloth, exhibiting here and there ridges and bumps that might be an oar, the keel of a boat, or an old chest. Smoke issued at one place from what looked like a lobster pot. Both roof and the outer plank walls were mostly black with tar. Here and there a tatty shutter suggested the existence of
windows. By the doorway stood two large painted scallop shells. On the seaward side of the cottage a boat stood and fishing nets hung out to dry, with numerous floats. Beyond that lay a large area of reed beds, which sometimes smelled rank. In brief, to a boy it was a place of magical wonder.

Nor was the owner of this maritime hovel a pauper. Far from it: Alan Seagull owned his own vessel – a singlemasted, clinker-built craft, bigger than a fishing boat and with enough hold to carry small cargoes, not only along the coastal waters but even across to France. And although nothing was ever polished or showy, every part of that ship was in perfect working order. To the ship’s crew he was the master. Indeed, it was widely believed that Alan Seagull had a bit of money hidden away somewhere. Not like Totton, of course. But if ever he wanted something, it was noticed that he could always pay for it with cash. His family ate well.

Young Jonathan had often hung around the Seagull place, observing the seven or eight children who, like fish in an underwater grotto, would continually dart in and out of it. Watching them with their mother, he sensed a family warmth and happiness that had been missing from his own life. He was walking alone near their cottage one day, when one of them, a boy of about his age, had slipped after him and asked: ‘Do you want to play?’

Willie Seagull – he was such a funny little boy. He was so skinny you might have thought he was weak; but he was just wiry, and he was ready for anything. Jonathan, like the other sons of the better-off merchants, had to attend a small school run by a schoolmaster whom Burrard and Totton had hired. But on days when he was free, he and Willie would play together and every day had been an adventure. Sometimes they would play in the woods or go up the Forest streams to fish. Willie had taught him to tickle trout. Or they would go down to the mud-flats by the sea, or along the coast to where there was a beach.

‘Can you swim?’ Willie asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Jonathan replied and soon discovered his new friend could swim like a fish.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll teach you,’ Willie promised.

On level ground Jonathan could run faster than Willie; but if he tried to catch the smaller boy, Willie could dodge him every time. Willie also brought him into games with the other fishermen’s children down by the quay, which made him very proud.

And when, encountering Alan Seagull by the waterfront one afternoon, Willie had said to that magical personage, ‘This is Jonathan; he’s my friend,’ young Jonathan Totton had known true happiness. ‘Willie Seagull says I’m his friend,’ he had told his father proudly that evening. But Henry Totton had said nothing.

Sometimes Willie was taken by his father on his ship and would be gone for a day or two. How Jonathan envied him then. He had not even dared to ask if he could go too; but he was sure the answer would be no.

‘Come, Jonathan,’ the merchant now said, ‘there is something I want to show you.’

The room in which they were standing was not large. At the front, it gave on to the street. In the middle stood a heavy table and around the walls were several oak cupboards and chests, the latter with impressive locks. There was also a large hourglass, of which the merchant was very proud and by which he could tell the precise time. This was the counting house where Henry Totton conducted his business. On the table, Jonathan could see, his father had arranged a number of items and, guessing at once that these were intended for his instruction, he gave an inward sigh. He hated these sessions with his father. He knew they were meant for his own good; but that was just the trouble.

To Henry Totton the world was simple: all things of interest were shapes and numbers. If he saw a shape he understood it. He would make shapes for Jonathan out of parchment or paper. ‘See,’ he would show him, ‘if you turn
it this way, it looks different. Or spin it and you produce this figure.’ He would rotate triangles into cones, build squares into cubes. ‘Fold it,’ he would say of a square, ‘and you have a triangle, or a rectangle, or a little tent.’ He would invent games for his son with numbers, too, assuming these would delight him. And all poor Jonathan could do, to whom such things seemed dull, was yearn for the long grass in the fields, or the sound of the birds in the woods, or the salty smells down by the wharf.

He would try so hard to be good at these things, to please his father. And just because he was so anxious, his mind would seize up and nothing would make sense and, red-faced, he would say foolish things and see his father try to hide his despair.

Today’s lesson, he could see at once, was meant to be straightforward and practical. Spread out on the table were a series of coins.

‘Can you tell me’, Totton asked quietly, ‘what they are?’

The first was a penny. That was easy. Then a half-groat: twopence; and a groat: four pence. Standard English coinage. There was a shilling: twelve pence; a ryal, worth more than ten shillings. But the next – a splendid gold coin with the figure of the Archangel Michael killing a dragon on it – Jonathan had not seen before.

‘That’s an angel,’ Totton said. ‘Valuable and rare. But now’ – he produced another coin – ‘what’s this?’

Jonathan had no idea. It was a French crown. Then came a ducat and a double ducat. ‘That’s the best coin of all, for sea trade,’ Totton explained. ‘Spanish, Italians, Flemings – they’ll all take a ducat.’ He smiled. ‘Now let me explain the relative value of each. For you will have to learn to use them all.’

The use of European currency was not only for the merchant who traded overseas. Foreign coins were found at inland market towns too. The reason, very simply, was that they were often better value.

The fifteenth century had not been a happy period for the English. Their triumph over the French at Agincourt had not lasted long before that extraordinary figure Joan of Arc, with her mystical visions, had inspired the French to kick the English out again. By the middle of the century when the long drawn-out conflict of the Hundred Years War finally ended, the conflict had become costly and trade had suffered. Then had followed the generation of dispute between the two branches of the royal house, York and Lancaster. If these so-called Wars of the Roses were a series of feudal battles rather than a civil war, they did nothing to promote law and order in the countryside. With civil disorder and land rents falling, it was not surprising if the royal mints, as they have always done when the treasury is empty, clipped the coinage. And although some efforts had been made in recent years to improve its value, Henry Totton was quite right in saying that good English coinage was hard to find. Trade therefore, whenever possible, was carried on in the strongest currency, which was usually foreign.

Henry Totton quietly explained all this to his son. ‘Those ducats, Jonathan,’ he concluded, ‘are what we really need. Do you understand?’ And Jonathan nodded his head, even though he was not truly sure whether he did or not.