Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [240]
The life of Godric Body was bleak. He owned almost nothing. The reeve, the most senior man in the village, held a whole hide scattered, as were all the individual landholdings, amongst the strips of the two huge open fields of Paradise and Purgatory beside the village of Avonsford. Nicholas and his family held a virgate, or quarter hide – some thirty acres in all from which they could derive a modest surplus. His uncle also had forty sheep, which he pastured on the common land on the slopes above. But the lowly Godric, at the bottom of the feudal social scale, held only two acres of strip land. When his father died a few years earlier, Godefroi took the best of the three poor cows the family pastured in the common meadow. This was not an imposition but the customary heriot payment to which the lord of the manor was entitled when a villein died. Godric also owed Godefroi four days work a week on the lord’s land – hard work, from harvesting to carrying dung and weeding; and while this duty was normally shared out amongst the family of a villein, poor Godric, all alone, had to complete it by himself. This was not all he owed. At Easter he would give the local priest the customary present of Easter eggs from the dozen hens he kept beside the hut, and at harvest, a tenth of the small amount of corn from his strips went as payment of tithe to the priest as well. Alone, as long as he was fit, he could just support himself; but he needed a wife to help him. And though his mother, looking at his wretched physique, had always assured him that no one would ever marry him, the spirited little fellow had not given up hope.
He even had a candidate in mind. For the youngest daughter of the village smith had suffered a skin ailment as a child which had left her pock-marked and undeniably plain. She was a small creature with eyes that squinted so that they gave her a look of suspicion, and there was often an air of bitterness about her that was not attractive. Her family were almost as poor as his and she always looked hungry. And yet in other ways she was not, he considered, so ill-looking and he had let her see that he was interested. If the smith had had any better hope for her he would have driven Godric away; but as things were, he tolerated him; and as for Mary, she had once or twice, without great enthusiasm, allowed him to hold her hand. Despite her suspicious look, he found that he was excited by the two small breasts that had begun to jut out sharply from her thirteen-year-old chest, and he had made himself a promise that by the harvest, he would take them in his hands.
And perhaps, the smith had acknowledged to his wife and daughter at Easter, there were a few things to be said for young Godric. Whether he had inherited the skill from his mother’s family, or whether it had been given him as a special gift by God to make up for his deformity, there was no question that he could carve wood with astonishing genius. His speciality was the carving of shepherd’s crooks. The badgers, the sheep, the elegant swans that adorned the curving handles seemed to come to life in the hand. Godefroi had also given him a few pieces of work in the manor house, and from these he had been able to add a few pence to his subsistence wages. But he was still painfully poor.
“And he’s not strong,” the smith’s wife complained. “The work in the fields is hard for him. If only he were a shepherd.”
If only. For this was exactly what Godric wanted to be. At every spare moment from his other work, he would roam the high ground where the sheep were grazing, talking to the shepherds who guarded them, and helping gladly in the washing and shearing, without needing to be asked. There was little about the care of sheep that he did not already know; and certainly he was physically far better suited to this work than to the heavy drudgery in the fields. A shepherd, too, was entitled to a bowl of whey all through the summer, ewes’ milk on Sunday, one of the lord’s lambs