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By Root 554 0

has whores arrested if they pick up scholar boys, and fines bakers for selling a loaf that's half an ounce too light. The University holds all liberties, all the privileges granted it by a long line of kings; it oversees the weights and measures, the selling of bread and meat and fish and wine and ale; it holds governance and punishment of all things. Last year, a brewstress from Castle Street was found guilty of selling weakened ale to the scholars. In Margery's village you'd be fined sixpence for that, if anything, but the woman shouted out in court that her accusers were a pack of liars, and Chancellor said it was high time to set an example to these grasping townsfolk. He had her ducked at the stool by the bridge, not five yards from this house. The woman survived, but took a spluttering cough that killed her by Christmas. Margery passes the Stool every day; she tries not to look into the water, or imagine the press of it in her lungs, the brief green taste of death. It reminds her of one of the rules she holds to: Never cross a cleric.

But what do they do all day, you may ask, these scholars and their masters who lord it over those who feed and clothe them? What's their honest work, their valuable trade? Books, that's all! It makes Margery laugh. These clerics spend all day reading books and copying them out onto paper, and what's that but dried mash of dirty old rags or straw? Some books are the size of your palm, others the width of your table, all with leather covers as hard as wood. Some are psalters and some are hour-books and some are romances and Margery's damned if she knows the difference. In her youth, at least a man who was reading muttered the words aloud, but this sinister new fashion for reading with eyes alone means a bystander can't even tell if it's scripture or fable! All Margery knows is, this strange town is built on paper, and it prizes greasy old books above wool or wine or roasted goose.

What good ever came out of a book? she wonders sometimes. She doesn't need to read them to know what's in them; she's heard enough. Tales of lickerish widows who force men to lie with them; tales of clever young men who trick girls into lying with them; whole books full of wicked wives, like Eve who let the snake into Paradise. No wonder, Margery reckons, seeing as it's men who write the books.

Now she comes to think of it, there's an anchoress down at Norwich who lives bricked up in a cellar and has visions and has set them down in a book. Sometimes, this woman claims, the devil comes and seizes her by the throat with his big stinking paws. So that's where book-learning gets you!

No, Margery Starre is better off keeping to herself and making her ale. Brewing has always been women's business, and folk will always want the stuff, that's one sure thing. No one can live without ale, whatever may happen; whatever may overtake the land. Ale for bridals and wakes, for dinner and breakfast, for thirst and misery, in times of merriment and disaster alike.

But trouble hangs like mould on the air: she can smell it. Where will the ruckus begin, when it begins, as surely it must? On Peas Hill or Findsilver Lane or Butchers Row, among the clinking weights at the Tolbooth, in the gutters of Foul Lane under the college privies? In St. Rhadegund's Convent, where the dozen remaining nuns sing like swans and nibble their crusts to make them last? In the stew run by the Weavers Guild, where the whores lie counting the cracks in the ceiling? Between the pursued mouths of the fish caught in the tangled river, in the taut bowstrings of the archers always practising on the Green?

Margery Starre jumps at the sound of a bell. Then another, louder. That must be St. Benet's, calling the boys to their last lesson of the day. Margery looked in the door of St. Benet's once, as she was passing with a great jar of honey on her head. The scholars knelt there on rushes, taking words down on green wax tablets—puny half-sized lads, some of them—while the Master read aloud in Latin from a long scroll unwinding from a wooden pin like a distaff.