Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [253]
But the magnates were less impressed.
“It wasn’t the Bishop of Ely who sent the messenger,” William told Godefroi. “It was Matilda of Ramsbury: she couldn’t bear to see her son hanged.” He grimaced with disgust. “The king’s been lucky. But if the empress invades, he won’t be able to frighten her so easily.”
For the time being however, Stephen was satisfied. He had the castles of Devizes, Malmesbury, Sherborne and Sarisberie: not only that, he had all the treasure and arms that Bishop Roger had amassed in them. The immediate crisis appeared to be over.
That night there was a feast, to which Godefroi was summoned by William, and the next morning the men began to break camp.
But there was one more surprise in store for the knight from Avonsford. Just as he was saddling his horse, an unexpected arrival made his way through the tents and packhorses. It was William atte Brigge.
His face was sullen but determined. He loped through the camp, only stopping to ask the way to the king. For the cantankerous tanner, hearing the king was so near, had come to seek royal justice in the case concerning the Shockley farm.
Such quests were not uncommon: the king’s court existed at whatever place the king was, and any free man had a right to royal justice. Before now litigants had followed the Norman monarchs all over the island, and even across the sea to Normandy to try to get their case heard.
As soon as Godefroi saw the tanner’s dark face he guessed why he was there; since he had just sent the farmer of Shockley to London with his wife, he could not help feeling responsible for him. With an oath, he hurried after him.
He need not have worried. When William atte Brigge reached the place where the king and a group of his nobles were standing, he blurted out his demands to the squire who was sent to ask him his business. He was a wronged man, dispossessed of his farm; he had come to the king for justice. His angry words tumbled out all together. He seemed to expect the king to hear the matter at once.
Stephen stared towards him in surprise, then smiled.
“Where do you come from?”
“From Wilton,” the tanner replied.
Stephen turned to a group beside him.
“We have a castle near there,” he cried.
There was a shout of laughter. William atte Brigge glowered in confusion.
“I’ll hear your case, tanner,” the king called out. “In my castle of Sarisberie.” And he waved him away.
It was enough for the tanner. The nobles might be laughing at him, but the king had promised to hear his case. Satisfied, he turned to go, and Godefroi, shaking his head not only at the fellow’s audacity but at the trouble it could cause his friend from Shockley, mounted his horse and headed back to Sarum.
His mind was not at rest on any count. Whatever the king’s temporary success might have been, as he rode over the high ground the voice of the magnate echoed in his head:
“We’ll tell you what to do.”
There was something else that was wrong; and as he waited on events during the coming months at Sarum, Richard de Godefroi became increasingly filled with a sense of desolation.
It was not only the threatening political anarchy of a war between Stephen and the empress, not only the treachery in the air over Sarum, nor even the fear that in the uncertain times he might lose his lands that troubled his spirit.
It was something more profound – a sense that not only England, but all Christendom was sick – and it had been brought home to him by the sight of the bishops at Devizes and their conduct. For though he was a level-headed realist, the knight of Avonsford still believed that the Church should be sacred. And how could it be so with three such bishops as these?
“I believe in Our Lord’s true Church,” he confessed to John of Shockley a few days later: “Yet I no longer know where to find it.”
In other times, he believed, it had been easier. No man could doubt the saintliness of Bishop Osmund. Few even questioned