Timeline - Michael Crichton [136]
Marek said, “Do you play here often?”
“Exercise invigorates the body and sharpens the mind,” the monk replied immediately. “We play in two cloisters here.”
As they passed through the cloister, Marek noticed that several of the gamblers wore robes of green, trimmed in black. They were rough, grizzled men with the manner of bandits.
Then they left the cloister behind, and went up a flight of stairs. Marek said to the monk, “It appears the order makes welcome the men of Arnaut de Cervole.”
“That is sooth,” the monk said, “for they shall do us a boon and return the mill to us.”
“Was it taken?” Marek asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” The monk walked to the window, which overlooked the Dordogne, and the mill bridge, a quarter mile upstream.
“With their own hands, the monks of Sainte-Mère have built the mill, at the bidding of our revered architect, Brother Marcel. Marcel is much venerated in the monastery. As you know, he was architect for the former Abbot, Bishop Laon. So the mill that he designed, and we built, is the property of this monastery, as are its fees.
“Yet Sir Oliver demands a mill tax to himself, though he has no just cause for it, except that his army controls this territory. Therefore my Lord Abbot is well pleased that Arnaut should vow to return the mill to the monastery, and end the tax. And thus are we friendly to the men of Arnaut.”
Chris listened to all this, thinking, My thesis! It was all exactly as his research had shown. Although some people still thought of the Middle Ages as a backward time, Chris knew it had actually been a period of intense technological development, and in that sense, not so different from our own. In fact, the industrial mechanization that became a characteristic feature of the West first began in the Middle Ages. The greatest source of power available at the time—water power—was aggressively developed, and employed to do ever more kinds of work: not only grinding grain but fulling cloth, blacksmithing, beer mashing, woodworking, mixing mortar and cement, papermaking, rope making, oil pressing, preparing dyes for cloth, and powering bellows to heat blast furnaces for steel. All over Europe, rivers were dammed, and dammed again half a mile downstream; mill boats were tethered beneath every bridge. In some places, cascades of mills, one after another, successively used the energy of flowing water.
Mills were generally operated as a monopoly, and they provided a major source of income—and of conflict. Lawsuits, murders and battles were the constant accompaniment of mill activity. And here was an example that showed—
“And yet,” Marek was saying, “I see the mill is still in the hands of Lord Oliver, for his pennant flies from the towers and his archers man the battlements.”
“Oliver holds the mill bridge,” the monk said, “because the bridge is close to the road to La Roque, and whoever controls the mill controls the road. But Arnaut will soon take the mill from them.”
“And return it to you.”
“Indeed.”
“And what will the monastery do for Arnaut in return?”
“We will bless him, of course,” the monk said. And after a moment, he added, “And we will pay him handsomely, too.”
:
They passed through a scriptorium, where monks sat in rows at their easels, silently copying manuscripts. But to Marek, it looked all wrong; instead of a meditative chant, their work was accompanied by the shouts and banging of the game in the cloister. And despite the old Cistercian proscription against illustration, many monks were painting illustrations