The Lost Prophecies (3 page)

‘Another box of money, Crowner! How many more?’ he said, echoing Gwyn’s words.

De Wolfe stooped to peer into the hole that had been dug, about five feet wide. The wooden tripod reached a few feet above his head, supporting a pulley and a rope to lift buckets of soil and rock as the well was deepened. However, it had had little use as yet, as only a small pile of waste lay nearby. The hole was barely three feet deep, and in the bottom he could see the broken lid of a wooden chest, with some coins glinting beneath the smashed boards.

‘Have any been taken out?’ he demanded, his first concern being to prevent any pilfering.

‘Show Sir John what you found,’ ordered the constable, prodding a burly soldier who was leaning on a pickaxe.

The man bent down and picked up a crumpled woollen cap, which he handed to the coroner. ‘I put a few in there after my pick went through the box, sir,’ he grunted. ‘Bloody hard work it was, cracking through that frozen ground!’ he added, eyeing the coins in his hat hopefully.

John ignored the hint and tipped the dozen coins into his hand for a closer look. All were silver pennies, with the exception of one larger gold coin.

‘These are Saxon, I’m sure,’ he said, but then held them out towards Thomas de Peyne, who seemed to have a wide knowledge of almost everything.

The clerk peered at them short-sightedly and poked them around with a spindly finger. ‘Indeed they are, Crowner. From different mints and different monarchs – there’s Ethelred and Athelstan.’

‘What about the gold one?’ growled Gwyn. ‘That’s a bezant, isn’t it?’

‘It’s certainly a foreign coin, but I’m not sure from where,’ admitted Thomas. Always keen to show off his learning, he added: ‘Bezants are named after Byzantium, where lots of gold
solidi
came from many years ago.’

‘Right, let’s get that box up,’ commanded de Wolfe, handing the empty cap back to the disappointed soldier. He pulled it on his head, spat on his hands and lifted the pick.

‘Easy with that! Get it out in one piece if you can!’ snapped the constable.

Together with another man, the soldier lowered himself into the shallow excavation, and between them they levered up the metal-bound box and in a few minutes had it on the ground at the coroner’s feet. It had no lid or lock, being a sealed case bound with iron straps, which had rusted so badly that they could easily be snapped with the point of the pick. The elm boards had softened after more than a century in the wet soil, and once the bands were broken the smashed top could be pulled apart to reveal the contents.

‘Must be a good few hundred in there,’ muttered Ralph Morin.

The box was full of silver coins, many stuck together by the damp tarnish that covered them. When John dug his fingers into the mass, he saw a few more gold bezants and, at the bottom, some gold brooches and buckles. The onlookers gaped and drooled at the sight of such riches, which for most of them would equal several lifetimes of their daily wages.

‘What do we do with it – the same as the others?’ asked the constable.

The previous hoards had all been taken to the sheriff for safekeeping until an inquest could decide what was to be done with the finds. He had the only secure place for valuables, in his back chamber in the keep of the castle. One of the sheriff’s main functions was to collect the taxes from the county and deliver them in person every six months to the Exchequer in Winchester, so several massive strongboxes were stored in his quarters under constant guard.

On the constable’s orders, two men carried the box up to the keep, with Morin marching close behind them to make sure that it reached the sheriff intact – though like de Wolfe, he wondered if an odd coin or two had already found its way into the pouches of the men digging the well.

The coroner and his two assistants followed them to the sheriff’s chamber, which was off the large main hall in the two-storeyed keep at the further side of the inner ward. Henry de Furnellis, an elderly knight with a face like a bloodhound, had been appointed sheriff the previous year as a stopgap when the former sheriff, John’s brother-in-law, had been dismissed in disgrace. Now Henry looked with a pained expression at the muddy box lying on a table in his room. ‘Another bloody burden to carry to Winchester and to explain to those arrogant Chancery clerks,’ he complained to his elderly clerk, Elphin.

Together, the coroner and the constable sorted out the coins into piles and placed the bezants and the five gold ornaments alongside them. Thomas, who always carried his writing materials in a shapeless shoulder bag, sat with parchment, ink and quill and recorded the exact details of the treasure. ‘Nine hundred and forty pennies, twenty-eight gold coins, three gold brooches and two gold cloak-rings,’ he intoned when he had finished.

‘A nice little collection, and not much doubt that it now belongs to King Richard,’ declared Ralph Morin.

De Furnellis nodded his old head wisely. ‘No, as it was found within his own castle! Can’t very well belong to anyone else, can it, John?’

De Wolfe cleared his throat, his usual response when he had some doubts. ‘I suppose not, but I’ll still have to hold my inquest for a jury to decide if it was accidentally lost or whether the owner intended reclaiming it at some future date.’

The sheriff cackled. ‘He’ll have a hell of a job doing that now, John. He’s probably been dead for a century!’

Gwyn pulled on his drooping ginger moustaches as an aid to thought. ‘Why are we getting all these finds in and around Exeter?’ he rumbled. ‘Especially this one inside the castle itself?’

John de Wolfe managed to beat the know-all clerk to the answer. ‘It wasn’t a castle then, that’s why. Almost all these hoards were hidden by the Saxons when they knew that Harold had lost at Hastings and realized that our Norman forefathers would soon be marching towards them. Many of them buried their money and valuables, hoping to retrieve them later.’

As he paused to draw breath, Thomas jumped in. ‘King William put down the rebellion in Exeter two years after Hastings – then, to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, he knocked down fifty houses to make room for this very castle.’

Gwyn nodded slowly. ‘So these things today were probably buried in what would have then been someone’s back yard!’

‘A rich someone’s back yard, by the looks of it,’ added the sheriff. ‘I wonder what happened to him?’

There was silence for a moment, as although the despoliation of Saxon England had been carried out by their grandfathers or even great-grandfathers, there was still some unease at the memory that a few thousand Normans had slain or dispossessed almost all the Saxon nobility and wealthy landowners. Even though well over a century of intermarriage had diluted the blood, all of them except Gwyn considered themselves Normans.

‘As I said, he certainly won’t be coming back to claim them,’ grunted the sheriff.

After his clerk Elphin had added his signature to the bottom of Thomas’s list as a witness to the exact value of the hoard, the coins were placed in a large leather bag, together with the ornaments carefully wrapped in a cloth. The whole lot was then locked away in one of the massive treasure chests, which carried clumsy but effective locks on the iron bands riveted around them.

‘I’ll hold my inquest this afternoon,’ promised John. ‘Gwyn, round up all those soldiers who were digging the well and get a few more to make up a score for a jury. We’ll hold the proceedings in the Shire Hall – and I’ll have to have that sack to show them, to make it legal.’

The coroner’s trio left the keep and went back to the gatehouse, this time hovering over a charcoal brazier that Gabriel had burning in the guardroom, which slightly warmed the chilly air. A pitcher of ale was produced, and one of the men-at-arms stuck a red-hot poker in it and passed around some mugs of the warm but still sour liquid. Thomas declined his, as ale was not to his taste, preferring cider, even at freezing point.

‘At least this last hoard was found by sheer chance, not from a message from beyond the grave like the first one!’ said Gwyn.

The previous month, a few hundred silver pennies and some bezants had been found after the cathedral archivist had come across a sheet of parchment tucked between the pages of an old volume of chants. This bore a brief message from someone called Egbert to his son, indicating that, fearing the imminent arrival of the Norman invaders, he had buried the family wealth at the foot of a preaching cross in the churchyard of Alphington, a village just outside Exeter. The archivist, Canon Jordan le Brent, had reported this to his bishop, and a search soon revealed the truth of the claim.

Unfortunately, Bishop Henry Marshal immediately confiscated the hoard on the grounds that it had been found on Church property and even forbade the coroner to hold an inquest upon it. Unsure of the legal position – as few people, including the king’s ministers, had any clear idea of the extent of a coroner’s powers – de Wolfe had had to submit, though he intended complaining to the Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, when he had the chance. Unfortunately, the Justiciar, who now virtually ruled England since the king was permanently absent fighting the French, was also the Archbishop of Canterbury, so it would be difficult for the Primate of the English Church to overrule one of his bishops.

‘Ever since that scrap of vellum came to light, we have been plagued by people wanting to search the library at the cathedral,’ complained Thomas. He had a particular interest in the matter, since he worked part time in the archives above the Chapter House just outside the cathedral’s South Tower.

When he had been restored to the priesthood the previous year, his uncle, Archdeacon John de Alençon, had arranged for him to be given a stipend for saying daily Masses for the souls of certain rich men who had left bequests for the purpose. Another task, which was dear to Thomas’s heart, was to sort and catalogue the disorderly mass of material in the library, in anticipation of a move to a new Chapter House, for which the bishop had already donated a part of the garden of his palace.

‘Do people come in off the street to search the records?’ asked Gabriel, unused to the ways of the ecclesiastical community.

‘They probably would if they could read!’ replied the little clerk. ‘No, it’s the priests who seem to have caught this gold fever, especially since that hoard was found in a churchyard. We’ve had a few literate clerks sent by their merchant masters to snoop around, but they don’t get admitted. Unfortunately, we can’t stop the parish priests coming into the library.’

‘I presume no one has found anything more since that one scrap of parchment?’ asked the coroner.

His scribe shook his head. ‘No, even though they’ve been through almost all the books and rolls now, often not reading anything, just looking between the pages or shaking them to see if anything drops out!’

Thomas shook his scrawny head in disgust, though it was not clear to his master if this was at the greed of his fellow priests or their failure to benefit from the wealth of scholarship that passed through their hands.

Just as the ale was finished, they heard the distant cathedral bell calling for Terce, signalling the tenth hour at that time of year. John de Wolfe reluctantly rose from near the brazier and pulled his cloak tightly around him, fixing the upper corner to his opposite shoulder with a large silver pin and clasp. He pulled on a felt coif, a close-fitting helmet that covered his ears and tied under the chin.

‘Come on! Freezing or not, it’s hanging day,’ he said brusquely. ‘We have three fellows to see off. In weather like this, they may be quite glad to go!’

They collected their horses from the lean-to stables against the wall of the inner ward and left the castle, their steeds treading cautiously on the icy surface of the steep slope down to the East Gate. With the coroner on his old warhorse Odin and Gwyn on his big brown mare, Thomas looked a poor third as he rode awkwardly on his thin nag behind them. It was not that long since he had been persuaded to give up riding side-saddle like a woman.

They went around outside the walls via Southernhay to join Magdalen Street and rode away from the city towards the village of Heavitree, near where the gallows was situated, a long high crossbar supported at each end by tree-trunks. Usually, there was a crowd of spectators, with hawkers selling pasties and sweetmeats, but today the icy weather had limited the onlookers to a handful of wailing relatives.

The coroner had to attend to record the names and property of those executed, as any land or possessions of felons was forfeit to the king. Today there would be thin pickings, thought John cynically, as one of the men was a captured outlaw owning nothing but the ragged clothes he wore and the other two were little more than lads, caught stealing items worth more than twelve pence, the lower limit for the death sentence.

De Wolfe and Gwyn sat on their horses to watch, glad of even the slight body warmth that came off the large animals, while Thomas shivered as he sat on a tree-stump at the edge of the road, his parchment roll and writing materials resting on a box.

The three condemned men did their own shivering in the back of an ox-cart, their wrists bound to the rail behind the driver as he drove it under the three ropes hanging from the high crossbar.

One of the half-dozen men-at-arms who had escorted the cart down from the castle shouted out the names to Thomas, as he untied the men and made them stand on a plank across the sides of the wagon while the hangman, who was a local butcher, placed the nooses around their necks.

A smack on the rump of the patient ox sent the cart lumbering forward, and in a trice the three victims were kicking spasmodically in the air. The relatives of the two younger ones dashed forward and dragged down on their thrashing legs, to shorten the agony of strangulation, but the lonely outlaw had to suffer the dance of death for several more minutes.

The sensitive Thomas always averted his gaze and concentrated on his writing, but John and Gwyn watched impassively, having seen far worse deaths a thousand times over, in battles and massacres from Ireland to Palestine. When the performance was over, they left the gallows and returned to town for their dinners, for it was approaching noon. The coroner went back to his house in Martin’s Lane, one of the many entrances to the cathedral Close, and sat at table in his gloomy hall with his equally gloomy wife Matilda. In spite of a large fire burning in the hearth, the high chamber, which stretched up to the roof beams, was almost as cold as the lane outside, and his stocky wife wore a fur-lined pelisse over her woollen gown and linen surcoat.