Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [386]
“I’ll go elsewhere then.”
But Walter had no intention of letting her pass.
“You owe me three days’ work,” he reminded her.
“The plague’s coming.”
“Damn the plague. You work.”
“I’m leaving the village,” she said with quiet obstinacy.
But Walter only shook his head again.
“Anywhere you go on the high ground,” he said, “I’ll set the dogs on you.” Then he grinned. “Send you dead rats too,” he added.
She stared at him, and for the first time Edward saw her falter; for she knew Walter would be as good as his word. He had not forgotten how she had humiliated him over her wages and now he was getting his revenge.
“Want to take me to the shire court?” he snarled.
There was a long pause.
“God will strike you down” she said quietly.
Walter laughed.
“After he’s sent you the plague,” he chuckled.
Without another word, she turned round and the party went back down the path into the village.
“Suppose you think I should have made friends,” Walter remarked to Edward. But Edward had only shrugged. He knew the Masons were not important.
“We live in dark days.”
How many times, Edward Wilson sometimes wondered, had he heard Stephen Shockley’s favourite phrase? Many times, certainly, for since he had moved with his family into the city of Salisbury after Walter’s death, he had assiduously cultivated the merchant’s friendship.
Shockley’s verdict was one that most people would have agreed with.
There had been the repeated plagues – not only the plague of 1361, which had carried off Agnes Mason – but another in 1374. The triumphs of the middle of the century had faded. The Black Prince had died; his son Richard, who had now ascended the throne, showed few of his father’s noble and warlike qualities; and the splendid possessions in France, except for a small area around Bordeaux and the Channel port of Calais, in little more than a decade had all been lost. Indeed, there had even been fears of invasion so that a rampart around the new open city had been started and partially built. Not only the state was troubled: the Church itself was now divided. For over half a century the popes had found it necessary for their safety to live in Avignon, in southern France. But at least their rule had continued from there. In 1378 however, the great schism had begun. Like rival emperors in the Roman Empire, there were now rival popes: the French supporting one, the English and Netherlands another.
“There’s nothing you can trust any more,” Stephen Shockley used to complain to his family.
But through all these dark days, Edward Wilson kept his own counsel, and passed on to his children a very different view of the world, with equally good reason.
“Most men are fools,” he told them. “When things are bad, the world is full of opportunities.”
The life of Walter Wilson had proved it. When he had died in 1370, he had left behind him, besides a quantity of cash that his son never divulged, the following property, duly itemised in the newly fashionable documents known as Wills:
A messuage, a carucate of land and seven acres at Winterbourne, which are held of the Earl of Salisbury; at Shockley, two virgates, held of the Abbess of Wilton. At Avonsford, two hundred acres held of the king; from the Bishop of Salisbury, near Avonsford, a messuage, a dovecote, a carucate of arable and ten acres of meadow.
The family, besides their substantial cloth interests, now ran over a thousand sheep on the high ground.
And each year the family became richer – as did many others. Not only former villeins like Wilson, or merchants like the Shockleys profited. Great men like John of Gaunt’s retainers, the Hungerford family, had ever larger sheep interests on the chalk downs; all over the south western part of the country, weavers and fullers and cloth dyers were setting themselves up as the new cloth business boomed. The production of English broadcloth multiplied nine times in the half century after the Black Death. When Richard II came to the throne in 1377, Salisbury was the sixth greatest