Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [357]
It was an ominous ending.
The merchant was a man he respected. As soon as he received this letter, therefore, Godefroi had a long discussion with his wife; then he swung into action. The courtyard of the manor house was cleaned out and washed down; fresh rushes were laid on the floor of the old hall; a manure heap that was situated near the buildings was completely removed in carts to a point half a mile away. Quantities of supplies were brought into the cool store rooms, and baskets of fresh herbs taken to the big stone kitchen or placed in the hall and solar. If the plague came, the manor house could virtually seal itself off from the outside world.
“It’s the foul air from the city and the breath of the townspeople which carries this plague,” Gilbert announced to his puzzled servants. He also inspected the village and ordered his tenants and villeins to take similar precautions, even burning down one small house which had been used as a piggery and from which he decided evil vapours might be arising. Then he ordered the vicar to say extra masses to ask for God’s deliverance for the villagers. The people of Avonsford did as they were told, but they were baffled. What was this plague the lord of the manor spoke about? No one else was making such preparations. But Godefroi was resolute. He had no idea whether these precautions would be effective, but he could think of no others. It was not only his duty as lord of the manor to take care of his people. He was determined that, if possible, nothing of his estate should be lost.
“At all costs,” he said to his wife, “I’ll preserve what we still have at Avonsford.”
It was a phrase she knew well. Since his father’s careless loss of the family’s second estate when he was a boy, Gilbert had been obsessed with preserving what was left. The memory of Roger’s spendthrift ways remained with him like a nightmare and made him excessively cautious in everything that he did. Once as a youth, with Roger’s encouragement, he had left Avonsford to seek his fortune: that had been in 1314 when he had gone as a squire on the king’s disastrous campaign in the north. It had been a fiasco: the campaign had ended in the crushing defeat of the English by the Scots of Bannockburn – a defeat that effectively ended hopes of a unified kingdom of England and Scotland for centuries; and he had returned discouraged and much the poorer. As a young man, he had little stomach for public affairs, for the court of Edward II disgusted him. His disgust was justified. First there had been the bisexual king’s favourites Gaveston and Despenser, and their years of misrule. Then, even more shocking, the queen had left and become the open lover of the great Lord Mortimer. It was a disastrous reign and when Parliament had finally deposed the king, Godefroi had felt a sense of relief. Soon afterwards his enemies had murdered Edward horribly in Berkeley Tower; he had been shocked, but not surprised.
Since then, times had been better. The new king, Edward III, soon showed himself to be a wise and competent governor. Indeed, when the king gave his trusted friend Montagu the vacant earldom of Salisbury ten years before, Godefroi had a chance of advancement: for the new earl, who now became Gilbert’s feudal overlord, kept a large retinue and a court of his own. But once again, Gilbert was cautious; instead of coming forward, he remained quietly and safely at Avonsford. “One’s always either in or out of favour at a court,” he told his wife. “Why take the risk?”
He had not gone to the French wars either. And