Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [409]
He smiled politely, but his eyes were cold.
Something told her that she might not be happy.
In the year of Our Lord 1457, the canonisation of St Osmund of Salisbury was made absolute. It had cost the dean and chapter the astounding sum of seven hundred and thirty-one pounds – as much as the yearly revenue of some bishoprics.
There is no record that any bell was made in his honour, although the guilds made his day, July 15, an occasion for another yearly procession through the town.
In 1465 a great dispute began between the citizens of Salisbury and Bishop Beauchamp. It was sparked off by a dispute between the two great rival merchants John Halle and William Swayne over who had the right to use a plot of land in the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr. The bishop as feudal overlord had granted Swayne the right to build a house for a chantry priest there, but Halle declared that the plot belonged to the town corporation. Swayne began to build. Halle and his men tore part of the building down. But the origin of this dispute was soon forgotten, for the real quarrel lay between the citizens, led by Halle, and their overlord the bishop. They were determined to end his feudal rule and Halle was summoned to appear before the king himself and his council, where he spoke so intemperately that even Henry VI decided to put him in gaol, where he remained for some time. The dispute dragged on for nine years before the King’s Council finally decided for the bishop.
“The charter is clear,” Godfrey told his family. “The city belongs to the bishop and there’s nothing the merchants can do about it.” The final triumph of the bishop was one of his few consolations, as his own fortune continued gradually but inevitably to decline. He paid Bishop Beauchamp a personal visit to congratulate him, and was delighted that he was received.
It was strange that when even those citizens who were Halle’s enemies, like Shockley, supported him in his fight against the bishop, John and Robert Wilson, to whom Halle had acted as a patron, remained completely silent during this time. No word of either condemnation or agreement came from the handsome house in the New Street chequer.
But then John Wilson already had other plans.
A JOURNEY FROM SARUM
1480
Young William Wilson did not move. He watched.
The damp, cold April morning mist had formed a fine coat over him; tiny droplets of which he was not even aware hung from the hairs of his thin eyebrows and his nose.
He had not eaten the day before.
But though he was cold, damp and hungry, he forgot those facts, and on his narrow sixteen-year-old face, there appeared a smile.
He could not see the river, though he knew it was there, a hundred yards in front of him; nor could he see the top of the ridges which were also enveloped in the mist. But he was beginning to see the outlines of the ground: a tree here and there, a hint of the track leading up to the high ground, for the sun was rising over the ridges now and starting to warm the hamlet and the manor of Avonsford.
He watched in the silence as slowly the yellow morning sun appeared and the mists began to dissolve. It was a moment he knew well and that he loved: for then the mists would slowly part, the upper layer drawing softly back like a veil up the valley slope before dissolving in the morning sunlight, leaving only the lower layer resting over the ground.
As he watched, two things happened.
Suddenly, from within the mist that covered the river water, he heard a beating of wings and then, out of its wreaths, came six swans. Their powerful wings whirred and moaned as they rose from the silent, invisible stream and swept down the valley.
At the same moment, the veil lifted off the foot of the slope behind the river and revealed the house.
How beautiful it was. Its long grey, uneven line with its gabled