Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [454]
While the younger men ran the day to day business, his own concern turned increasingly to the affairs of the city. Which included the poor.
It was this that caused the rift with Forest.
The Poor Laws of Elizabeth were not generous; but they admitted, for the first time, that the charity of individuals and the Church might not be enough to help the army of poor. Not that one should be lenient. Able-bodied vagrants were still to be whipped and a hole bored through the gristle of their right ear. Persistent vagrants could even be executed.
There were plenty of poor in Sarum. Not only was the Sarum cloth trade in a recession, but on the land, things were worse. Spain’s decades of importing gold from the New World had brought about a huge increase in bullion that had spread inflation to every part of Europe. Corn prices rose, and the tenants on their farms had to pay more for their necessities. The fines paid on entering a tenancy went up and the peasantry were hit hard. Forest was an active landlord.
“He’s found better seed; and he folds more sheep on his fields than ever,” Shockley conceded. “It’s his poor tenants that suffer.”
And the problem of the poor increased.
Elizabeth’s solution was simple and practical. She decreed that a poor rate was to be levied compulsorily to pay for the helpless; and she set up apprenticeships and workhouses for poor children and families. The whole business was managed by the Justices of the Peace.
Forest was now a Justice of the Peace.
“If a man’s got even one leg, Forest will say he’s fit to work,” Edward complained. There was a new workhouse in the city now, the Bridewell. “He treats the poor in there as if they were animals.”
Edward Shockley was constantly trying to help the poor. Moody helped him. Forest once angrily complained that half their apprentices were taken from the poor house, and both Shockley and Moody had laughingly to admit that this was true.
There was another source of good workmen though, besides the poor house. For Lord Pembroke had encouraged a number of Flemish weavers fleeing the religious persecution to settle at Wilton. Although he was a Catholic himself and they were Protestants, Moody seemed to have a natural understanding with these skilful men and employed several of them for Shockley.
“So with our Flemings and our vagabonds,” Edward used to claim cheerfully, “we do very well.”
It did not make him popular with Forest.
Time and again, when Forest tried to deny the poor their aid, Shockley and his helpers raised the issue again. At first Forest had attempted to ignore them, but Shockley had grown too powerful for him. He was elected to the inner council of twenty-four – he was a man of consideration in the city.
The result of this, by 1570, was that Forest completely avoided him. When they met, it was in strictly formal settings; and though Edward himself was affable, Forest was cold and distant.
His favourite moment came in 1574.
For that was the year of the visit of the queen.
She came first to Wilton. There was a new earl now, not such a dour figure as his father, and a favourite with Elizabeth. On Friday September 30 he entertained her magnificently at his great house; on Saturday, he had prepared an elaborate banqueting house made of leaves in Clarendon Forest, but then the rains came and Elizabeth dined in the lodge. Even so, the deer were coursed with swift greyhounds, and the queen was said to be pleased.
And then, on Monday, after the afternoon dinner, the queen and her court came to the town.
They were magnificently dressed, the men in their tight-fitting under and over-robes, white ruffs at the collar and wrists, and short cloaks; the women with their stately, big-shouldered gowns that fanned down from a narrow waist to the ground, and huge ruffs that hugged their cheeks, rising to above the ears. But in both men and women, it was the material that made the cloth merchant gasp. Splendid silks, dazzling, heavy brocades of every colour.
“Why,” he murmured, “they’d stand up by themselves.”
His family were watching