Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [411]
“See – he writes ‘plough’ like a northerner,” the merchant-turned-gentleman complained: for as written, the word would have sounded more like ‘pluff’, or ‘rough’. “This won’t do.”
Robert said nothing. He was not interested. But his father was right, and the confused and illogical spelling chosen by Caxton’s whim was to be the hallmark of written English from then on.
Upstairs, above the parlour, were bedrooms with scented rushes on the floors, and behind the house was a courtyard with kitchens and storerooms grouped around.
Indeed, it was a remarkable fact, of which the present occupants could have no idea, that the newly laid out manor house fitted almost exactly over another, deeply buried floorplan – that of a Roman villa, that a family named Porteus had built on that site, with roughly the same degree of sophistication, more than a thousand years before.
Beside the house was a small family chapel with a little turret into which Benedict Mason had been commissioned to install a new bell. On the other side of the house was a squat stone tower, twenty feet high, and on top of that was a wooden structure pierced with numerous small entrance holes. This was the dovecote, around which several dozen doves made their peaceful cooing and fluttering. Just past the dovecote, Robert had built a walled garden in which neat rows of hedges formed a framework for arbours and beds of roses. The whole place was a little heaven.
Sometimes, it was true, there were screams and cries of pain from the house, but if they heard them the villagers only shrugged.
Robert Forest was a rich and increasingly powerful man. If the quiet, dark-eyed squire of Avonsford chose to beat his wife or his children for some offence, it was his right.
“There’s good order at the manor,” it was said, sometimes with a nervous laugh.
It was bad luck for young Will that Robert Forest had turned him out. There were several reasons.
He was the only one of a family of five children to survive. His mother had died when he was ten, and after struggling on for six more years in the little cottage in Avonsford, his father had died that January. This was the problem: for the family’s lease was a copyhold, expiring at the death of the tenant. The yearly rent had not been high, but rents were rising now, and not only would the new rent be higher, but the squire as lord of the manor had the right to the old heriot death duty and also to a new entry fine before he would renew the lease at all. And Will had no money.
The village was small: the few other tenants were poor: no one had offered to help him. They could not. Nor had Forest.
“If you can’t pay, you’re out,” the steward told him. “The master says so.”
Which was not surprising, for two reasons.
The first was that Robert Forest had other uses for the cottage.
Since the Black Death the century before, the village of Avonsford had never recovered. Its population had remained meagre and, by chance rather than any design, the families in the place had formed into two groups at opposite ends of the straggling village, while the houses between gradually decayed and were pulled down. The larger group lay at the south end; the smaller, where Will lived, at the north. The northern cluster was reduced to only four cottages now, but around them were outhouses and a plot of common land where they had the ancient right to graze livestock: a fact which made Robert Forest angry.
“It’s a waste of good land,” he remarked drily each time he passed it. “Five acres I could use.”
The new lord of the manor had come to his decision that winter. He would rehouse the northern families in the southern group where there was already one vacant cottage and where he now built two more. The death of old Wilson in January made matters easier. Will, having no money, would not have to be rehoused at all but could be turned out. It was obviously a sensible decision.
The second reason was