London - Edward Rutherfurd [212]
But if Waldus Barnikel had glanced back at the old Abbey, which he did not, he would have seen nothing wrong with it. Because that day, it seemed to him, everything was perfect. “I am,” he had just remarked to the king himself, “the happiest man in London.”
Waldus Barnikel of Billingsgate was as round as a ball. It was as though nature, having decided to confine the towering strength and temper of his ancestors into a smaller space, had realized that so much fermenting energy could only be contained, with any hope of avoiding an explosion, in a perfect and solidly constructed sphere. He was clean-shaven, though his red hair hung halfway down his neck, and he wore a fur hat. He radiated confidence.
As well he should. For hadn’t the common fishmongers raised their craft fraternity to the city’s heights? Already he was wearing the red robes of an alderman. Henceforth, all men would call him “Sire”. As for the humiliation of the proud, patrician Bulls whom he had hated all his life: “My soul is soaked in honey,” he confessed. Indeed, he need not even be in awe of the Bulls’ wealth nowadays. For Barnikel was rich.
His route to riches was typical of the fishmongers. Soon after the reign of King John, the family had acquired a small fishing vessel, then another. By the time Waldus was born, they not only had a warehouse at Billingsgate wharf and a huge stall in the market with six men behind the counter, but most significant of all, like several of the more successful London fishmongers, they had also set up a second base of operations. This was at a small but busy port called Yarmouth, nearly a hundred miles away on the eastern coast, where they had two more fishing vessels and a half share in a highly profitable cargo ship. And it was in Yarmouth that Barnikel had met his wife, his great fortune, and also become part of a curious historic movement.
The great territory of East Anglia had kept its ancient character in the centuries since the Conquest. True, outsiders had arrived – chiefly Flemish weavers, whose skills had been turned to good use. But in essence, the vast tracts of pasture, wood and fen were still the Danelaw: land of Angles and Danes, homesteaders and merchants; isolated, independent, open only to the great east wind that came in from the echoing sea. Like the rest of England that century, East Anglia had grown rich; and most notably had begun to export its own cloth, of two types, each taking the name of the village which was its centre of manufacture: Kersey in the southern part, and in the northern, the little town of Worsted.
It was natural therefore that when Barnikel had met a rich young heiress from Worsted, a descendant, like him, of seafaring Vikings, he should have married her. This doubled his fortune. When he took her back to London, her whole family had come too.
Of all the many groups who flocked into London in that generation, many were merchants from East Anglia. As Barnikel had recently remarked: “People are even starting to talk differently. They all sound like my in-laws!” But he did not perceive that this slight shift in London’s local accent was the signal of a deeper quirk of history. For whether by chance or by destiny, in the late thirteenth century, the Norsemen were coming to London again, not as Viking seafarers, but as their solid, middle-class descendants.
He was a rich merchant. He still sold fish,