Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [358]
The old disputes with the French had smouldered on since Edward’s grandfather’s time and had been complicated because now, through his mother, the English king had acquired a claim to the French throne. At first young Edward had made the same mistake as his ancestor Henry III and tried to build up a great European alliance; as usual it had been unsuccessful, ruinously expensive and almost started a new barons’ revolt. But young Edward, unlike his great-grandfather, was flexible. Soon, he hit on a better way: small armies from England, without expensive and untrustworthy allies and comfortably paid for by English wool, had made straight for France. Their strength lay in the Welsh and English archers with their longbows, and also in the fact that the well-trained knights who accompanied them were not too proud, when it was needed, to dismount and fight side by side with ordinary men. In a series of short, daring campaigns they humiliated the proud but disorganised feudal cavalry of France. At Crécy, only two years before, Edward and his gallant son the Black Prince had routed the French king. The next year, the port of Calais had been taken. And when the Scots had played their usual trick and raided the north of England when they thought the English were busy with France, they were beaten and their King David captured. For the first time in many generations, war was popular in England. It was profitable, there was plunder, and there were French knights to ransom.
Gilbert regretted that he had not fought at Crécy. The profits could have been used at Avonsford. For his mind seldom left the manor now.
He made some modest improvements: he installed a bathroom with a large wooden tub which the maidservant filled with hot water once a week; he rebuilt the kitchen with a stone vaulted ceiling and two huge fires set in the walls. But though some of the richer landowners were building fine stone halls on the ground level of their houses, he stuck conservatively to the old Norman hall on the upper floor with its narrow windows. “It did for my grandfather,” he stated with finality.
The estate, too, was cautiously run. On the demesne land that he cultivated for himself, he had sharply reduced his activities from those of his father’s day; in order to ensure the maximum yield from the minimum investment, he now raised crops only on the best land.
Indeed, when he compared the estate accounts of today with those of two decades before he was surprised at the change himself. They were as follows:
Acres of lord’s demesne
Wheat Bere Barley Peas Vetch Drage Oals Total
1328 66 31 64 10 15 10 50 246
1348 48 53 10 10 33 154
The flocks of sheep were smaller, too, than in his father’s and grandfather’s time and he withdrew them from the poorer pastures on the high ground. But their wool was of a higher grade. Not only the acreage under cultivation had been reduced: he now needed fewer labourers and so more of his villeins paid him money commutations instead of service, increasing his modest profits further. Other men with larger operations might make a killing in good years, but careful Gilbert was never in trouble.
If sometimes his wife admitted to herself that her husband was a little too cautious, if sometimes she secretly wished that by bolder action he had built more of a reputation, she quickly reminded herself that his unadventurous life had all been for her and the boy; and she was contented. So was Godefroi.
By the afternoon of the second day as he sat down in his hall for the main meal, Gilbert was satisfied that he had done all he could for the manor and the village. But the most important decision of all had still not been taken, and so it was now, when the great salt cellar and the nef containing the spices were set upon the table, that he turned to his wife and asked:
“What about our son? What should we do?”
She looked at her cautious husband fondly.
Although Rose, daughter of the Winchester knight Tancred de Whiteheath, had been chosen for Gilbert by his father, and had brought only