Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [290]
He felt the back of his head crack against the top of the stocks as he instinctively tried to dodge; his face winced and his eyes closed tightly. He heard a thump and a cry. But he felt nothing. Could William have missed?
As he opened his eyes, he saw with astonishment that the young friar was lying three feet in front of him, struggling to get up; blood was streaming from a huge gash in his forehead. In the background, William had picked up his basket and was scurrying hastily away.
How the friar had seen what was happening and managed to throw himself in the stone’s path he never knew.
“Why did you do that?” he asked in wonder.
Young Giovanni looked up at him ruefully.
“Didn’t they tell you, Franciscans are all a bit simpleminded?” Then he fainted.
A number of the men in the market had seen what had happened and they stared after the departing trader with disgust. Two men hurried from their stalls to help the friar to his feet and a third went in search of the bishop’s bailiff. Within minutes Peter found himself free.
The next day he and his father went to visit the friars’ house. Giovanni was already up and about, but he had a large, jagged wound on his forehead that he would carry as a scar for the rest of his life. He was cheerful.
“Made it up with your father yet?” he asked.
Peter Shockley was never a religious man, but for the rest of his life he was known to make regular donations to the Franciscan friars of New Salisbury.
Although Peter Shockley had regained his father’s good graces, he nearly lost his mill the following spring.
The new disaster that nearly destroyed the Shockleys’ plans when the building of the mill had hardly begun was the one contingency which neither Godefroi nor Edward Shockley had even considered.
It was the fault of King Henry III, and resulted from events which had nothing to do with Sarum.
The problem lay in France. Nearly all the disasters that embarrassed Henry so many times during his fifty-six-year reign originated in his passion for intrigues across the English Channel – an interest which almost none of his subjects shared. Yet it was understandable enough. He could not forget the great empire in western France that his grandfather Henry II had ruled and his father John had lost. He would not accept that Normandy was gone. And when a few years before the new French king Louis had overrun the province of Poitou on the Atlantic coast, of which he was still at least the nominal overlord, it added insult to injury. He was determined to get his mighty inheritance back.
In order to understand the true state of affairs it must be remembered that the high politics of Europe were still entirely a feudal business. Though the English wool merchants, the Flemish and Italian clothmakers during the peace might raise their countries’ wealth to new heights, the kingdom and provinces of Europe in which the merchants operated remained related to each other by family ties. The ties were endless. They crossed the continent like huge and intricate spiders’ webs; and the shifting family ambitions and alliances of the rulers frequently overrode all considerations of peace, prosperity, or even common sense.
Of no one was this situation more true than King Henry III of England. His second wife was the daughter of the lord of Provence, that sunny southern region of France where the troubadour poets and minstrels had their origin. His mother Isabella, after the death of King John, had returned to France, thrown out her own daughter who was engaged to the head of the great Poitou house of Lusignan, with whose father she had once been in love, and married him herself. Henry was also cousin to the King of Aragon, who had claims on southern France, and brother-in-law to the German emperor, who was anxious to weaken the French and seize northern Italy.
To all these, and many others, Henry was a dupe.
In the year 1242 he had undertaken what was, even by his own remarkable standards of incompetence, one of