London - Edward Rutherfurd [148]
There was, however, one feature of the English system of record-keeping that was peculiar to the island. Usually, parchment records were folded and made into books. When William the Conqueror had surveyed his new kingdom, it was into mighty volumes that his Domesday Book had been made up. In the generations following, however, for some reason English record-keepers had decided to preserve the Crown’s accounts rolled into cylinders instead, for which reason they became known not as books but as the Rolls, or, often, the Pipe Rolls.
The coins themselves were, at this date, still kept in the treasury – the thesaurus as the Latin clerks termed it – in King Alfred’s old capital of Winchester. But until conveyed there, they were stored in the chapel known as the Pyx in Westminster Abbey next door.
Such was the Exchequer.
Was he screaming? Was he shouting out the awful truth? He put his hand up to his mouth to make sure, then held his tongue between his teeth. The nightmare of the night before.
Pentecost Silversleeves was a very strange young man.
His biblical name, as it happened, was the least unusual thing about him, for in the religious revival that had swept London in recent generations it had become rather popular. His father, Henri’s grandson, now head of the Silversleeves family, would have preferred something Norman, but then a certain widowed aunt who had become a nun made it clear that she would provide a legacy for a son of that name. So Pentecost it was.
His looks were typical of his family: dark hair, a large, long nose, and mournful eyes. But nature had decided to deal Pentecost Silversleeves several particular blows. His shoulders sloped forwards; his hips were broader than his chest; his limbs were weak. As a boy, he had seldom been able to catch a ball thrown to him, and never in his life had he been able to hang by his arms. However, these physical shortcomings were compensated for by phenomenal mental gifts.
When Master Thomas Brown tested the young clerks – “Thirty-five knights must be paid five pence a day for sixty days. What is the total cost?” or “The county of Essex owes three hundred pounds. There are forty-seven knight’s fees. How much per knight?” – Silversleeves was forbidden to reply. He needed neither abacus nor writing tablets. He knew the answers instantly. He knew the entire contents of the Pipe Rolls, not because he had tried to memorize them, but because he had that kind of memory.
Such gifts should have made him a fine scholar, yet he had failed to excel. His parents had sent him first to the school at St Paul’s, then to another, then to the smaller school that had started at St Mary-le-Bow. At each he learned just enough to get by. Always his teachers complained: “It comes too easily to him, so he won’t really work.”
He had been sent to Paris. Here were the greatest scholars in Europe. Only recently, the famous Abélard had lectured, until his illicit affair with Héloïse had led to his castration and disgrace. Fellow Englishmen, like John of Salisbury, who had studied there had risen to high office and were today men of letters. It was a golden opportunity. A man who completed his studies in Paris was called, by courtesy, Magister – Master. Yet somehow young Silversleeves never completed his studies. He drifted briefly to Italy, then returned home. No one called him Master.
What did he know? He had mastered the basic trivium: grammar, meaning Latin, rhetoric and dialectic. Since the days of the Roman Empire, these had formed the foundation of the European educated class, the common language of which was still Latin. He had also studied the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, which meant he knew a little Euclid and Pythagoras, could name the constellations, and believed that the sun and the planets revolved in a complex pattern around the Earth. His study of divinity allowed him to quote biblical texts, in Latin, to buttress any argument. He could expose a dozen half-forgotten