The Forest (31 page)

One afternoon, when he was all alone with no one to see, he even took out a small knife he had been using earlier in the day, and discreetly carved a little letter ‘A’ in the stone beside him.

‘A’ for Adam. And sometimes, he thought, if his punishment was to be cast out of God’s garden into some darker place, then still, perhaps, for the sake of his son, he would do it all again.

So, for many years, Brother Adam lived with his secret, in the abbey of Beaulieu.

LYMINGTON

1480

Friday. Fish market day in Lymington. On Wednesdays and Fridays, at eight o’clock in the morning, for one hour, the fishermen set out their stalls.

A warm early April morning. The smell of fresh fish was delicious. Many of them had been landed down at the little wharf that dawn. There were eels and oysters from the estuary; hake, cod and other white fish from the sea; there were goldfish also, as they called the yellow gurnard then. Most of the women in the small borough went to the fish market: the merchants’ wives in their big-sleeved gowns with wimples covering their heads, the poorer sorts and the servants, some in back-laced bodices, all with aprons and little hoods on their heads to make them look respectable.

The bailiff had just rung a bell to close the market as, from the direction of the wharf, two figures appeared.

Even a glance, as the lean figure made his way up the street that warm April morning, and you felt you knew him. It was just the way he walked. It was so obvious he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. The loose linen leggings he favoured flapped cheerfully on his calves, leaving his bare ankles exposed. On his feet he wore only sandals secured with leather thongs. His jerkin was made of ray – striped cloth – blue and yellow, none too clean. On his head was a leather cap he had stitched together himself.

Young Jonathan Totton could not remember ever seeing Alan Seagull without this item of headgear.

If Alan Seagull’s cheerful face took a short cut from his mouth to his chest, if his sparse black beard went from his mouth down to his Adam’s apple pretty much without pausing for such an ornament as a chin, you could be sure it was because he and his forebears had reckoned they could do perfectly well without one. And there was something about his cheerful, canny grin that told you they were right. ‘We’ve cut a corner, there,’ the Seagull smile seemed to say about their chin, ‘and we could probably cut a few more too, that you don’t need to know about.’

He smelled of tar and of fish, and of the salty sea. As he often did, he was humming a tune. Young Jonathan Totton was enchanted by him and, walking proudly beside the mariner, he had just reached the point on the sloping street where the squat little town hall stood when a voice, calm but authoritative, summoned him: ‘Jonathan. Come here.’

Regretfully, he left Seagull’s side and went over to the tall-gabled timbered house outside which his father was standing.

A moment later, with the older man’s hand resting on his shoulder, he found himself inside and listening to his father’s quiet voice. ‘I should prefer, Jonathan, that you should not spend so much time with that man.’

‘Why, Father?’

‘Because there is better company to keep in Lymington.’

Now that, Jonathan thought, was going to be a problem.

Lymington, lying as it did by the mouth of the river that ran down from Brockenhurst and Boldre to the sea, was geographically at the centre of the Forest’s coastline – although, strictly speaking, on its small wedge of coastal farmland and marsh, it had not been included in the legal jurisdiction of the Conqueror’s hunting forest.

It was a thriving little harbour town nowadays. From the cluster of boathouses, stores and fishermen’s cottages down by the small quay, the broad High Street ran up quite a steep slope fronted by two-storey timber-and-plaster houses with overhanging upper floors and gabled roofs. The town hall at the crest of the hill on the left-hand side, typical of its kind at that date, was built of stone and consisted of a small dark chamber surrounded by open arches in which various sellers offered their wares; above which, reached by an outside staircase, a spacious overhanging penthouse served as a courtroom for discussing the town’s affairs. In front of the town hall stood the town cross; across the street, the Angel Inn. About two hundred yards further along the crest of the slope, a church marked the end of the borough. There were two other streets, at right angles, a church, a market cross – for Lymington had the right to hold an annual three-day fair each September. There was a stocks and a tiny prison house for malefactors, a ducking-stool and whipping post. There was a town well: all this to serve a community of, perhaps, four hundred souls.

From the High Street you could look down over the wharf and the little estuary water to the high slope of the river bank beyond. From behind the town hall, you could see the long line of the Isle of Wight on the other side of the Solent.

This was the Lymington that contained better company than Alan Seagull.

It was hard to say when Lymington had first begun. Four centuries before, when the Conqueror’s clerks had compiled his Domesday Book, they had recorded the little settlement near the coast known now as Old Lymington, with land for just one plough, four acres of meadow and inhabitants to the number of six families and a couple of slaves.

Technically, small though it was, Lymington was a manor held along with many others, by a succession of feudal lords who first began to develop the place. Its original use, as far as they were concerned, was as a harbour from which boats could cross the narrow straits to the lands they also held on the Isle of Wight. Even this choice was not inevitable. The feudal lords also held the manor of Christchurch where, soon after the death of Rufus, they had built a pleasant castle beside the new priory and the shallow harbour. At first sight that seemed the natural port. The trouble was, however, that between Christchurch and the Isle of Wight there were some awkward shoals and currents to navigate, whereas the approach to the Lymington hamlet was discovered to have a deep and easy channel.

‘The crossing’s shorter, too,’ they observed. So Lymington it was.

It was still only a hamlet; but around 1200 the manor lord had taken a further step. Between the hamlet and the river, on an area of sloping ground, he had laid out a single dirt street with thirty-four modest plots beside it. Fishermen, mariners and even traders, like the Tottons, from other local ports were encouraged to come and settle there. And to induce them still further, the development, known as New Lymington, was given a new status.

It became a borough.

What did that mean in feudal England? That it had a charter from the monarch to operate as a town? Not quite. The charter was granted by the feudal lord. Sometimes this might be the king himself; in the new cathedral cities springing up at this time – places like Salisbury – the charter would come from the bishop. In the case of Lymington, however, it was granted by the great feudal lord who held Christchurch and many other lands besides.

The deal was simple. The humble freemen of Lymington – they would be called burgesses now – were to form themselves into a corporation, which was to pay the lord a fee of thirty shillings a year. In return, they were recognized as free from any labour service to the lord, and he also threw in the concession that they could operate anywhere on his wide domains free of all tolls and customs dues. Confirmed half a century later by a second charter, the Lymington burgesses could run the borough’s daily affairs and elect their own reeve – a sort of cross between a small-time mayor and a landlord’s steward to answer for them.

Know ye all men present and to come that I, Baldwin de Redvers, Earl of Devon, have granted and by this my present charter have confirmed to my burgesses of Lymington all liberties and free customs … by land and by sea, at bridges, ferries and gates, at fairs and markets, in selling and buying … in all places and in all things …

So began the stirring words of the charter, typical of its kind, by which the lord’s small harbour graduated into a little town.

But the feudal lord was nonetheless the borough’s lord and its burgesses and mayor, as the reeve was called nowadays, though free, were still his tenants. They still owed him the rents on the plots of land – the burgages – and tenements they occupied. If they made rules, he had the right to approve them. In day-to-day matters of law and order they and their borough were subject to his manor court. And even though, as time went on, the king’s courts took over more and more of local justice, the feudal manor of Old Lymington, based on the rural land holding outside the borough, still continued as legal custodian of the place.

For about a century the great events of English history barely touched the place. Around 1300, when King Edward I asked why this borough had failed to supply a vessel for his campaign against the Scots, his commissioners reported back: ‘It’s a poor little harbour – only a village, really’ and they were excused. But the next century saw a dramatic change.

When the terrible Black Death swept across Europe in the years following 1346 it altered the face of England for ever. A third of the population died. Farms, whole villages, were left empty; labour was so scarce that serfs and poor peasants could sell their labour and acquire their own free land. In the great deer forests, with their small populations of woodsmen and huntsmen, there was little to change; but in the eastern half of the New Forest, on the Beaulieu estate, a muted form of the great agricultural revolution did occur. There were no longer enough lay brothers to run the granges. The abbey continued its life of prayer, therefore; its monks actually lived rather well. But instead of running the granges on their huge estates, they mostly let them out, sometimes subdivided, to tenant farmers. Young Jonathan was taken out to one of the granges from time to time to visit his mother’s family, who had lived there very comfortably for three generations. When his father pointed eastwards along the coast, he did not say to Jonathan: ‘Those are Cistercian lands’ but ‘that’s where your mother’s farm lies’. The Beaulieu monks were no longer a special case. They were just another feudal landlord, now.

And if the abbey retreated, the little port advanced. Soon after the great Death, when the third King Edward and his glamorous son the Black Prince were conducting their brilliant campaigns – in the so-called Hundred Years War – against the French, the Lymington men were already able to supply several vessels and mariners. Better yet, this proved to be one of the few wars that were actually profitable for England. Plunder and ransom money flowed in. The English took land and valuable ports from their French cousins. Modest though it was, the port of Lymington found itself trading wines, spices, all sorts of minor luxuries from the rich and sunlit territories of the French. Its merchants grew in confidence. By the time, in 1415, that heroic King Henry V won the final English triumph over France at Agincourt they felt very pleased with themselves indeed.

And if, in recent times, things had not been going so well, their attitude was: ‘There’s still money to be made.’

There were times when Henry Totton worried about his son. ‘I’m not sure he really takes in what I say to him,’ he once complained to his friend.

‘All ten-year-olds are the same,’ the other assured him. But this was not quite good enough for Totton and, as he looked at his son now, he felt an uncertainty and disappointment he tried not to show.

Henry Totton was of rather less than medium height and he had an unassuming manner; but his dress informed you at once that he meant you to take him seriously. When he was a young man, his father had given him clothes suitable for his station; and this was important. The old Sumptuary Laws had long ago set out what each class in the richly varied medieval world might wear. Nor were these laws an imposition. If the aldermen of London wore crimson cloaks and the lord mayor his chain, the whole community felt honoured. The master from Oxford University had earned his solemn gown; his pupils as yet had not. There was honour in order. The Lymington merchant did not dress as a nobleman and would have been mocked if he had; but he did not dress like the peasant or the humble mariner either. Henry Totton wore a long
houppelande
– a sleeved coat, buttoned from neck to ankle. He wore it loose, without a belt and, although plain, the material was the best brown burnet cloth. He had another, made of velvet, with a silken belt for special occasions. He was clean-shaven and his quiet grey eyes did not quite conceal the fact that, within the precise limits belonging to his station in life, he was ambitious for his family. There had been Totton merchants in Southampton and Christchurch for centuries; he did not intend the Lymington branch to lag behind their many cousins.

He tried not to worry about Jonathan. It wasn’t fair to the boy. And God knows he loved him. Since the death of his wife the previous year, young Jonathan was all he had.

As for Jonathan, looking at his father, he knew he disappointed him even if he did not quite know why. Some days he tried so hard to please him, but on others he forgot. If only his father would understand about the Seagulls.

It was the year his mother died that he had taken to wandering down to the quay alone. At the bottom end of the High Street, where the old burgage plots came to an end, there was a steep slope down to the water. It was a sharp drop in every sense. The old borough stopped at the top of it; so, as far as people like the Tottons were concerned, did respectability. Down that steep social slope clustered the untidy cottages of the fishermen. ‘And the other flotsam and jetsam,’ as his father put it, that drifted in from the sea or the Forest.

But to Jonathan it was a little heaven: the clinker boats with their heavy sails, the upturned boats on the quay, the seagull cries, the smell of tar and salt and drying seaweed, the piles of fish traps and nets – he loved to wander among all these. The Seagulls’ cottage – if you could call it that – lay at the seaward end. For it was not so much a cottage as a collection of articles, each more fascinating than the last, which had gathered themselves together into a cheerful heap. It must have happened by magic – perhaps the sea one stormy night had deposited them there – for it was impossible to imagine Alan Seagull going to such trouble to build anything that was not meant to float.

Perhaps, though, the Seagulls’ cottage would have floated. Along one wall the remains of a large rowing boat, hung lengthwise, its sides turned outwards, formed a sort of arbour where Seagull’s wife would often sit, nursing one of her younger children. The roof, which tracked this way and that, was made from all manner of planks, spars, areas of sailcloth, exhibiting here and there ridges and bumps that might be an oar, the keel of a boat, or an old chest. Smoke issued at one place from what looked like a lobster pot. Both roof and the outer plank walls were mostly black with tar. Here and there a tatty shutter suggested the existence of windows. By the doorway stood two large painted scallop shells. On the seaward side of the cottage a boat stood and fishing nets hung out to dry, with numerous floats. Beyond that lay a large area of reed beds, which sometimes smelled rank. In brief, to a boy it was a place of magical wonder.