London - Edward Rutherfurd [135]
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.