Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [246]
At last he finished, and pushed the abacus away from him. He had done all that he could.
Before getting up, he stretched his hand out to one of the two leatherbound books that lay on the table beside the abacus. Godefroi was one of a minority of knights who was literate. Not that education was hard to find. The schools were no longer confined to the monasteries as they had been in previous centuries. And not only were there now schools of law, philosophy and literature at the great centres of Laon, Chartres, Paris and Bologna – schools that produced such scholars as the great Abelard, the lover of Heloise – but in the town of Oxford a small learned community now existed, and cathedrals like Sarisberie attracted scholars too. But few men of Godefroi’s class bothered to read and write, and he was proud of this ability. As a boy he had received tuition from the canons at Sarisberie, along with other young men of Sarum, some of whom, like the great cleric John of Sarisberie, were to go to make a name for themselves as scholars as far afield as Rome. His own attainments were more humble. He read Latin well enough to work his way through a charter, or to decipher the new histories of the island, such as that of William of Malmesbury. He read English with greater ease, and one of the most treasured of the eight books he possessed was the translation of Boethius into English made two hundred and fifty years before by Alfred of Wessex. In times of stress, its stoic philosophy often calmed him. But his greatest love was the songs and tales of courtly love of the troubadour poets which he could read in his native French. This was the knightly world as it ought to be – chivalrous, civilised, where the nobles of the castle served an idealised lady as faithfully as if she were the Virgin Mary herself. It was a delicate, sunlit world, a fantasy far removed from the grim realities of the castle of Sarisberie; but it invoked an ideal of chivalry which the hard-headed knight nevertheless respected and took seriously.
A week ago he had been sent a new book, however: a small volume hurriedly and badly transcribed from Latin into French by a scribe whose handwriting was abominable. And yet the little volume – it was no bigger than his two hands held together – had given him more delight than anything he had seen in several years. With a smile on his severe face, he pulled the book to him and slipped it into a large leather pouch that hung from his belt, before striding out of the house.
An hour later he had completed his inspection of the fields and of the shearing, had seen the reeve inspect the carcasses of two sheep to make sure no murrain was affecting the flock, and satisfied himself that the quality of the wool being sheared was up to that stipulated in the contract with the Flemish merchant. Only then did he make his way to his favourite spot.
The little clearing on the hill at the edge of the high ground had always been a place of special solace to him. As it lay only half a mile up the valley from the manor, it had been the first place he could remember walking to as a child, and even now he always took the same path; up the steep track through the little beech wood that covered the slope from the valley floor, across the strip of land where the trees were thinned with scrub. Then, suddenly cresting the lip of the ridge where the trees abruptly ended, he would encounter