Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [276]
“Damn the bishop and his bridge! Damn that aulnager! Damn that Jew and the Shockleys!” he screamed. Taking the bales of defective cloth he hurled them onto the dusty road, and turned to make his way under the sweltering sun, back towards Wilton.
Since Aaron had halted briefly in the market place, it was Godefroi and the two Shockleys who first confronted Canon Portehors. And since he knew nothing of what had taken place between Portehors and Osmund that morning, it was without any sense of danger that the knight reined his horse and beckoned to the boy to approach him.
But before Osmund could get up from the ditch where he was kneeling, he found himself pushed peremptorily back by the priest who now strode angrily towards the knight.
“What do you want with this young man?”
Godefroi eyed the priest calmly from his horse.
“I wish to speak to him. He is my villein.”
“He is busy.”
Godefroi inclined his head courteously. “I shall only detain him a moment, Canon Portehors.”
But Portehors did not shift his ground.
“If it is your intention to entice him from his work here, I forbid it.”
Godefroi stiffened. The priest had no jurisdiction over the young fellow whereas he, as the boy’s feudal lord, had.
“I’ll thank you not to interfere,” he said sharply.
Portehors did not move. The knight therefore ignored him and spoke to Osmund.
“We shall need you tomorrow to begin work on the mill,” he said pleasantly. “Report to the reeve at day-break.”
Godefroi was about to turn away.
He had no wish to confront Portehors and it seemed to him that the incident was closed.
But to the canon it was not.
“He is engaged in the Church’s work,” he declared.
It had not occurred, of course, to either the canon or the knight to refer any part of this matter to the boy himself, although in theory Osmund was free to engage himself as he wished on those days when he did not owe his feudal lord labour services. To Portehors, at least, the matter was too important even to consider Osmund’s wishes any longer, for now there was a point of principle at stake.
At the canon’s last statement however, Godefroi frowned in surprise.
“But he is building ditches in your street.” He pointed to the half finished watercourse.
Portehors hesitated for only a second.
“Tomorrow he begins work on the cathedral.” In order to suit his argument, Osmund’s destiny had just been altered.
Godefroi paused. Although he had a perfect right to the lad’s services, he would not normally have chosen to remove a worker from the cathedral itself. But he sensed that Portehors was altering the facts, and it irked him to be put upon.
“He will work for me,” he stated flatly.
But Portehors, having aroused himself, was now stubborn. His eyebrows contracted; he bristled.
“Do not insult the Church of God,” he cried, “or I shall speak to the bishop; and he may speak to the king.”
“That is absurd,” the knight very reasonably replied. But his eyes were suddenly cautious. Portehors saw it and stood his ground.
And despite the absurdity of the argument, Godefroi was wise to be careful: for Canon Portehors and his Church could be dangerous.
There were several reasons: one was King Henry III. Ever since he had come to the throne as a boy twenty years before, the pious Henry had consciously modelled himself on the last king of the old Saxon house, the saintly Edward the Confessor. With his passion for ceremonial and for church building, he made frequent trips from his hunting lodge in the nearby forest of Clarendon to see the progress of the new cathedral and was liable to fly into a rage at anyone who got in the way of his project.
But there was more to it than the king’s religiosity. The political struggle for supremacy between Church and State had already been a long one. It had begun when William Rufus had quarrelled with the saintly Archbishop Anselm, and it had reached a crisis in the quarrel between Henry II and the impossible Thomas à Becket that had ended in the murder of the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral. It had broken out once more, in some ways more