London - Edward Rutherfurd [252]
But the Church was also worldly. It owned a third of England. On any day in the streets, one could see portly Blackfriars, and even Franciscan Greyfriars, who lived too well and preached too little. There were priests who sold pardons; there were scandalous convents. And in recent years, the Church had been split once again, with two rival popes each claiming the other was an impostor, or even an Antichrist. Like any huge and powerful institution, the Church was a natural target for satire. This cheeky fellow Wyclif from Oxford appealed to the Londoners’ robust common sense. It was all summed up by Dame Barnikel one evening when she eyed a portly Blackfriar who was drinking in the George and remarked:
“If this fellow Wyclif translates the Bible, Fatty, I’m going to find out what you’ve been hiding from me.”
The Church declared Wyclif a heretic; Oxford censured him. But that was all. John of Gaunt himself, who enjoyed irritating bishops, gave the reformer his protection. And so Wyclif quietly continued his work, with other scholar friends, preparing an English Bible.
Most Londoners cheerfully agreed with Wyclif, but Carpenter thought about these matters more seriously. In the long hours, when he stood at his archery practice or laboured at his woodwork, the quiet craftsman had been turning everything over in his mind.
“Something bad is going to happen,” he warned Amy. “I don’t know what it is, but God will probably send a sign.”
But he continued to go about his work; he courted her as usual. Whatever storms might be brewing, it seemed to the girl that their own little ship sailed on, sound and steady as usual. At times, she wondered if Carpenter brooded too much, but she knew that she could rely on him.
Young Ducket had continued to lead a carefree life. For some time, unknown to the talkative Whittington, he had enjoyed the favours of Sister Olive. Gaining confidence, he also slept nowadays with several other women in the town. But certain things puzzled him. Though business in the market was better and Fleming seemed more cheerful, he would still disappear from time to time, and on one of these occasions Ducket found him the next morning, his eyes bloodshot and his hand bandaged from a severe burn. “An accident,” he had muttered, but declined to say more. Stranger yet was the behaviour of Dame Barnikel. While Amy was friendly enough, her mother seemed to have changed towards him. Her eyes were watchful. She was cold. He had no idea why.
But he did not allow these matters to worry him. If people around him behaved oddly, he accepted it cheerfully. In less than two years, his apprenticeship would end, and then he would have to make serious decisions. Until then, he thought, I might as well enjoy myself.
During the year there had been another disastrous expedition to France. The council chose the Archbishop of Canterbury to be chancellor that year, and that well-meaning but not very wise man, faced with a huge bill, decided with Parliament to levy another poll tax. But this one was to be different. Instead of making a small levy on the poorer folk and a high one on the rich, the archbishop for some reason designed a flat rate tax. The rich would pay proportionately less; the poor, three times as much as they had before – an entire shilling a head.
“We shall actually pay less,” Dame Barnikel pointed out to her family, “because we were well enough off to be assessed high last time. But do you realize what this means for the peasant? A shilling for himself. Another for his wife. Say they have a fifteen-year-old daughter still at home. She counts as an adult. Another