Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [78]
"The charters!" he roars. "Every liberty and privilege of the University is writ down on these scrolls and sealed with royal wax. How fast do you think they'll burn, Margery?"
He's never called her that before. She answers before she's had time to think. "Not fast enough," she says, and runs to help the men drag the chest out into the daylight.
In Market Square the bonfire rages against the pale Sunday morning sky. Doors, windows, posts, and rafters frame its scarlet heart. The heat is fierce; it draws Margery Starre like a child.
A bearded man tosses some writing tablets onto the pyre, and the green wax runs off like Cam water. A book flies past Margery through the sooty air, like a heavy bird briefly lifted on stiff leather wings, and lands with a terrible scattering of papers. They singe, their edges curling up prettily like the thinnest pastry. They dance as if glad to have the words cleaned off them in this purgatorial fire.
Yes, Margery Starre thinks, let the old lying books be cast into the fire like gnawed bones with no juice nor marrow left in them, like skeletons that are good for nothing else. She dwells for a moment on the years, the lives of scritch-scratching work spent on these flaring pages. Well, let the learned churchmen see now how little their labours have amounted to in the end: no more than all the ale she ever brewed or the milk she ever had in her to give, gone now, dried up in the blaze of this morning.
Margery Starre wades into the crowd, hoists a book about the weight of her son on the night he was born and died, tosses it into the bluest tongue of the flames. She snatches an armful of scrolls from a cobbler's wife and slings them one by one into the crackling bonfire. The pen outdoes the sword, or so they say, but Margery reckons the flame outdoes them both.
Of course there'll be punishment. Is there a single day that doesn't drag its punishment behind it, as a ewe her filthy tail? Margery knows and right now Margery couldn't give a fart. Once in a while comes a day unlike all the others, priceless in your hand like a peppercorn you must wager the rest of your days to win.
The flames lick lovingly. The scent of black soot clouds round Margery Starre. It's the sweetest smell she can remember. She goes closer, breathing destruction, and dips her hands into the delicate ash. She feels no pain. Her palms are singing. She scatters the ash on the air like rice at a wedding, like blossoms at the end of spring. "Away with the learning of the clerics!" she bawls, hoarse with laughter; "away with it!"
And even though she knows there are hundreds of books still locked up safe in the libraries and universities of the world, still the churchmen will tremble when they hear of Margery Starre—read of her, even, maybe. In the turning of a page, in the lifting of a pen, in the taking of a breath, they will pause to think how fast paper burns.
Note
When the Peasants' Revolt came to the city of Cambridge on 15 June 1381, and University charters and books were burnt in Market Square, an old woman called Margery Starre is said to have scattered the ashes and shouted "Away with the learning of the clerks, away with it." This brief anecdote, the basis for "The Necessity of Burning," is found in the Arundel MSS.350 fol 15.b (British Library), first translated and published in Victoria History of the County of Cambridgeshire, Vol. I'll (1948). My source for detailed information on the Revolt was Rowland Parker, Town and Gown: The 700 Years' War in Cambridge (1983).
The violence in Cambridge was quelled by the Bishop of Ely four days after it began, and all the University's privileges were restored. Margery Starre is not one of the rioters recorded as having been imprisoned or executed, and nothing further is known of her.
Looking for Petronilla
I've been away too long.
The plane took me (rom London to Dublin in less than an hour. I would have come this way before if I had known how simple it was. When I first took the boat to England, vomiting up my whole self into the Irish Sea, I swore I'd never go