Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [376]
“Put them in the cottage,” he ordered. And then, with a sudden uncharacteristic grin directed only at him he murmured: “And keep them there.”
The next morning there were more surprises.
“Shockley’s dead,” Walter announced. “So’s his family. Good riddance. One boy’s left though: Stephen.” He nodded to Edward. “You come with me: we’re going to see him.”
When they arrived at the house in the High Street, they found it in a state of chaos. He felt sorry for the boy, who was about his own age. Stephen had been through worse, Edward realised, than he had, since he had remained in the house in Salisbury throughout the plague and seen every one of his family die while being spared, by some miracle, himself.
If his father had sworn to destroy the Wilsons, poor Stephen Shockley had neither the desire nor the energy to persecute anybody. He was exhausted and he looked at them dully. Walter came straight to the point.
“You hold the tenancy to the farm from the Abbess. What are you going to do about it?”
Stephen looked blank. He did not know.
“My family’s all dead, except this one.” He jerked his thumb at Edward. “You’ve got no one to work the land.”
Still Stephen stared at him hopelessly.
“If you don’t work the land, you’ll have to give it up.”
Now the boy reacted. It was as if he had been slapped in the face.
“We’ve always had the farm,” he protested.
Walter shrugged.
“Are you going to work it yourself?”
Stephen fell silent. They all knew he could not. The Shockley business in the town, and the fulling mill in the Avon valley were worth more than the farm. Whatever skill and energy Stephen had must be applied to these businesses first. But if he could not work the farm and pay the abbess her rent, she would repossess it.
“I’ll get more labourers,” he suggested hopefully.
Walter shook his head. “You won’t find them,” he stated. “Most of them are dead around Shockley.” This was perfectly true and Stephen knew it. There was a pause. Then Walter said, in a voice that sounded more like a sad admission than a threat:
“Fact is, I’ve had other offers.”
Was his father bluffing? Edward did not know. And certainly Stephen Shockley didn’t. Walter’s face was expressionless.
The young merchant was in a quandary, and in this he was not alone. The problem he faced was repeated all over the country. For the Black Death – the Pestilence or General Mortality as contemporaries rightly called it – had carried off something like one third of the population of England. It may have been more. Not since events described seven centuries before by the Saxon historian Bede, the chroniclers noted, had there been such a mortality. Estimates are that in the whole of Europe in the years 1347 to 1350, about twenty-five million were lost. Its effects had varied from area to area, town to town, even from one estate to another – some were hardly affected, others saw an entire village completely destroyed.
Already, as he wandered about Sarum, Edward had heard widely different stories. But one thing was certain. Many fields would be untilled that year, and every landlord in the region was anxiously looking for labourers. Within a week of the first sign that the plague was passing on, farmers were out offering astonishing wages to anyone who would come and work for them.
“You owe me two days’ work,” Stephen reminded him. This was the condition of villeinage that Walter had inherited. But instead of acknowledging the fact, Walter now only shrugged.
“That was before the plague.”
The young merchant looked at him thoughtfully. He was not a fool and he was well aware that in the general chaos in the countryside, villeins were already deserting their own cottages, breaking their feudal obligations, in return for high wages. Technically they were