The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [72]
So, he was glad to say, was the abbey. October had passed quietly. The migratory birds had wheeled and headed southwards across the sea. Then November’s greying clouds, like the sails of an ageing ship, had drawn eastwards across the sky; the yellowed oak leaves had fallen by the river bank and nothing had disturbed the abbey’s silence. At Martinmass in November, at the Forest’s minor court, the Court of Attachments, the verderers had sent the incident at the grange forward to the senior court, which would be held at the good pleasure of the king’s justices, when they visited the Forest the following spring. Young Martell and his friends had wisely turned themselves in to the sheriffs of their counties, who would produce them at the spring court. Luke, the lay brother, had not yet been found. Kindly Brother Matthew had wanted to forgive him, but the abbot had been firm.
‘Justice must be seen to be done, for our good name.’
As he walked towards the abbot’s quarters Brother Adam looked with pleasure at the scene around him. Punctuated by the clanging bell that, every three hours or so, summoned the monks to prayer, the monastery was always a hive of quiet activity. There were the weaving and cloth-making workshops, and the fulling mill by the river at which the estate’s huge clip of wool was cleaned. The skins of the sheep and cattle provided numerous departments: a tannery – smelly, so outside the gate; a skinner’s shop for making hoods and leather blankets; a shoemaker’s – very busy since every monk and lay brother needed two pairs of boots or shoes every year. By the cloisters was the parchment and bookbinding department. There was a flour mill, a bakery, a brewery, two stable ranges, a piggery and a slaughterhouse. With its forge, carpenter’s, candlemaker’s, two infirmaries and a hospice providing accommodation for visitors – the abbey was like a little walled town. Or perhaps, with its Latin books and services, and the monks’ habits resembling the Roman dress of a thousand years before, it was more like a huge Roman villa.
Nothing, Adam reflected, was wasted; everything was used. Between the various buildings, for instance, the ground was carefully arranged in beds for vegetables and herbs. Fruits grew on trellises by sheltered walls, grapes on vines. There was honeysuckle for the bees whose hives, scattered about the inclosure, yielded honey and wax.
‘We are worker bees ourselves,’ he had once joked to a visiting knight. ‘But the queen we serve is the Queen of Heaven.’ He had been rather pleased with this conceit, although chiding himself afterwards for falling so easily into the sin of vanity.
Above all, the abbey was self-sufficient. ‘All nature’, he delighted to point out, ‘flows through the abbey. Everything is in balance, everything complete. The monastery can endure, like nature itself, to the end of days.’ It was a perfect machine for contemplating God’s wondrous creation.
And it was precisely this truth that was in his mind when he entered the abbot’s office, sat down beside the prior and gazed steadily forward, as the abbot turned to him and bluntly demanded: ‘Well, Adam, what are we to do about these wretched churches?’
It was a curious fact, born out of the experience of centuries, that if one thing brought trouble and strife to any monastery, it was, above all others, the possession of a parish church.
Why should this be? Wasn’t a church by its very nature a place of peace? In theory, yes. But in practice, churches had vicars, parishioners and local squires; and they all had one thing to argue about: money.
The church tithes – about a tenth of the parish’s production, usually – were paid by the parish to support the church and its priest. But if the church came into a monastery’s possession then the monastery took the tithe and paid the vicar. That frequently