The Office of the Dead (11 page)
Osbaston had marked a letter, one of a number printed at the end of the
Journal.
I read it after supper when David was working in the study. Janet was trying to reconcile the butcher’s bill with what we had actually received and said she would look at it later.
From the Revd Canon F. St J. Youlgreave:
Sir,
I write to apprise you and other members of the Society of an interesting discovery I have made in my capacity as Cathedral Librarian. I had occasion to examine the binding of a copy of the Sermons of Dr Giles Briscow, the Dean of Rosington in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was in a decayed condition, with a view to seeing whether it should be rebound. I discovered there were annotations on the end-paper at the back of the book. These are in a Secretary hand which I judge to be of the first half of the seventeenth century. The writing is in Latin and appears to have been copied from an older work, perhaps a Monkish Chronicle dealing with the history of the Abbey of Rosington.
Evidence on the flyleaf at the front of the book suggested to me that the volume had once been in the possession of Julius Farnworthy, who of course was Bishop from 1619 to 1628, and whose tomb is in the South Choir Aisle. It is possible, even probable, that Bishop Farnworthy, or one of his contemporaries at Rosington, was responsible for the memorandum inscribed on the end-paper.
For the time being I have entrusted the book to an acquaintance who has some skill at palaeography and who is also in a position where he may conveniently examine the Farnworthy Collection in the British Museum Library. First, however, I took the precaution of copying the memorandum in full. When the results of the palaeographical examination are known, and when I have had an opportunity to complete other researches, I hope to be in a position to present a paper on the subject to the Society. I intend to assess the authenticity and provenance of this curious discovery, and also to sketch in the background of the events which it describes insofar as this proves possible to do. In the meantime, I hope you will permit me to whet the appetite of my fellow members of the Society with my rendering of the memorandum into English.
‘In the third year of King Henry’s reign, plague swept this part of the country. Merchants and pilgrims alike dared not cross the Great Causeway for fear of infection. Houses were left empty, fields untended and animals starved for want of feeding.
‘Men said openly that the devil was abroad in the land.
‘In the village of Mudgley, the parish priest died in much agony. His housekeeper stood at the cross and told those that remained alive that the Devil had carried away his soul, but at the same time an Angel had protected hers. And she uttered this blasphemy: that the Angel had told her she was chosen among all women to be His first priest of her sex. And the Angel ordained her, saying unto her, “Am I not greater than any Bishop?”
‘Whereupon the woman led the people into church and celebrated Mass. Hearing this, the Abbot, Robert of Walberswick, sent men to bring her to Rosington where she was tried before God and man for blasphemy. But the Devil would not leave her. She would not confess her sins nor repent of her evil so they burned her in the marketplace. Her name was Isabella of Roth.’
Robert of Walberswick was Abbot from 1392 to 1407. The third year of King Henry’s reign must refer to Henry IV and therefore date this episode to 1402. It is not clear whether the village mentioned is Mudgley Burnham or Abbots Mudgley. The Latin shows no signs of the influence of the Renaissance and it contains many characteristically Mediaeval contractions and turns of phrase. At present, at least, we can only speculate why the unknown writer of this memorandum should have wished to copy the passage. The whereabouts of the original is equally mysterious.
If I may be permitted to end on a personal note, you will notice that Roth is mentioned. I can only assume that this is the village of Roth in the County of Middlesex. Strange to say, this is a locality I know well, since my family has resided there for more than forty years.
I am, Sir, etc.
F. Youlgreave
I also found Youlgreave’s poem, ‘The Judgement of Strangers’, in an anthology of Victorian verse in the dining room bookcase. If I hadn’t read the letter, I don’t think the poem would have made any sense to me at all. But if you assumed it was Isabella’s story, then everything fell into place. Well, perhaps not everything because some of it was almost wilfully hard to understand. But you could see that the poem might be an impressionistic account of a woman being martyred for her beliefs in a vaguely medieval setting.
I read both the poem and the letter again when I was in bed with rather a large nightcap. The gin gave a slight hangover later and probably caused the nightmare which woke me covered in sweat in the early hours. I dreamed I was in Rosington marketplace. Someone was burning rubbish near the cross and people were shouting at me. Just before I woke up, I glanced into a litterbin fixed to a lamppost and found a doll with no arms staring up at me.
Theologically the idea’s completely untenable, as Youlgreave would have known,’ David said. ‘The notion of women priests simply doesn’t make sense.’
‘Why?’ I asked, not because I cared one way or the other. It was just that I wanted to keep David talking, and he was particularly appealing when he became passionate about something.
He glanced up at the Cathedral clock. ‘I don’t want to go into it now. There isn’t time and it’s a very complicated subject.’
‘Come on. That’s no answer.’
He stopped at the door to the cloisters. We had been walking round the east end of the Cathedral on our separate ways to work. It was another beautiful day. A wispy cloud hung behind the golden weathercock at the tip of the Octagon’s spire. Every detail of the stonework was crisp and clean. A swallow appeared round one of the pinnacles at the base of the spire, banked sharply and swooped down the length of the nave towards the west end. Suddenly David smiled, and not for the first time I thought that there is something cruel about beautiful people. Their beauty sets them apart from the rest of us. From the beginning they are treated differently.
He said, ‘I don’t believe a woman can be a priest any more than she can be a father.’
‘But being a priest’s a job. If you can have a woman on the throne, why can’t you have one in the pulpit?’
‘Because God chose to become incarnate in a patriarchal society. He chose only male apostles. Just as he wanted a woman, the Virgin Mary, to have the highest possible human vocation.’
‘We’re not living in first-century Palestine any more.’
‘I don’t think God’s choice of time and place was an accident. It would be absurd for a Christian to think that. There’s nothing in Scripture to support the idea of women priests. So we can only conclude that a male priesthood is what God wanted. If it were just a matter of human tradition, of course it could be changed. But it’s not. It’s a divine institution.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for it. But can’t the Church sometimes admit it’s got it wrong? After all, it’s changed its mind before. For instance, you don’t go around burning people at the stake any more just because they don’t agree with you.’
‘The two things aren’t analogous.’
You can’t argue with fanatics, I thought. If David wanted to inhabit a fairy-tale universe conducted by fairy-tale laws, that was his business.
‘I’ve got to do some work,’ I said. ‘I’d better go. Thanks for the theology lesson.’
For an instant I thought he looked disappointed, like a dog deprived of a bone. Perhaps he had seen me as a potential convert, the prodigal daughter on the verge of a change of heart. We said goodbye and he walked on towards the Porta and the Theological College.
I ducked into the cloisters and walked slowly towards the south door of the Cathedral. On my way I passed the entrance to the Chapter House, a large austere room with a Norman arcade running round the walls below the windows. Nowadays the chapter met in more comfortable surroundings and the room was used mainly for small concerts and large meetings. They were going to use the room for the exhibition. Hudson was in there talking to the dean, and he gave me a wave as I passed the doorway.
Before I started work I got out a couple of histories of Rosington and one of the county. There were references to Mudgley, both Abbots and Burnham, and to outbreaks of plague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But I found nothing about Isabella of Roth, women priests or angelic visitations.
After that I catalogued half a dozen books. But my attention kept wandering back to Francis Youlgreave and Isabella and to the boy called Simon, the one Youlgreave thought might be ‘useful’. Finally I decided that I would take my coffee break early and skip the coffee part of it.
Instead I went to the public library which was housed in a converted Nissen hut in a street off the marketplace. Janet had taken me to join the library a few weeks before but I had never used it. The librarian in charge was a thickset man with a face like a bloodhound’s and thick, ragged hair the colour of wire wool. I asked him if they had anything on Francis Youlgreave.
‘About him or by him?’
‘Either.’
‘We’ve got a book of his poetry.’
‘Good. Where can I find it?’
Wheezing softly, he stared at me. ‘I’m afraid it’s on loan.’
I felt like a child deprived of a treat. ‘Can I reserve it?’
The book was called
The Tongues of Angels.
‘Is there a biography?’ I asked as I handed the librarian the reservation card and my sixpence.
He glanced at my name on the card. ‘Not that I know of, Mrs Appleyard. But he’s in the
Dictionary of National Biography
, and there’s also something about him in a book we have called
Rosington Worthies.
Chapter nine, I think. You’ll find it in the reference section under Local History.’
I was impressed and said so.
‘To be honest, I hadn’t heard of him until last week. But someone happened to be asking about him.’
‘Would that have been Canon Hudson, by any chance?’
‘It wasn’t him. No one I know.’
It was another little mystery, and one which irritated rather than intrigued me. I was surprised to find I didn’t like the idea of someone else being interested in Francis Youlgreave. I felt he ought to be mine. A substitute for Henry, perhaps, safely dead and therefore able to resist the lures of widows with more money than morals.
I thanked the librarian, went into the little reference department and dug out the bones of Youlgreave’s life. But, like the model of the Octagon we’d found in the library, the bones didn’t give much idea of the finished article.
Francis Youlgreave was born in 1863, the younger son of a baronet. He published
Last Poems
in 1884 while he was an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford. After coming down from the university he decided to go into the Church. These are facts, you can look them up for yourself in the
Dictionary of National Biography.
He was in fact one of the first ordinands at Rosington Theological College. Several curacies followed in parishes on the western fringe of London.
In 1891, still in London, Francis became the first vicar of a new church, St Michael’s, Beauclerk Place, which is west of Tottenham Court Road. (That’s how I came to think of him, by the way. As Francis, as if he was someone I knew.) In 1896 he published his second volume of poetry and then
The Four Last Things.
Four years later he became a canon of Rosington. Osbaston had been right about a family connection. The dean at the turn of the century was a cousin of Francis’s mother.
His last book,
The Tongues of Angels
, was published in 1903. The following year ill health forced him to retire. He went to live in his brother’s house, Roth Park in Middlesex, where he died on 30th July 1905. Nowadays he was best known for the one poem ‘The Judgement of Strangers’, said to have been admired by W. B. Yeats.
At lunchtime there were usually only the three of us at the Dark Hostelry. Rosie was at school and David had lunch at the Theological College. Janet had found time to read Youlgreave’s letter in
The Journal of the Transactions of the Rosington Antiquarian Society.
While we ate cold lamb and salad I told her about the failure of my attempt to find out more about Isabella. Meanwhile Mr Treevor chewed methodically through an immense quantity of meat.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Janet asked.
‘It’s such a strange story. And I can’t help feeling sorry for the woman.’
‘If she ever existed.’
‘I think she did. Why would Francis have invented something like that?’
Janet looked across the table at me. ‘I don’t know. So you think the poem
was
inspired by Isabella?’