The Poisoned Chalice (2 page)

HUE AND CRY

When a crime was witnessed or discovered, the First Finder (
q
.
v
.) had to knock up the nearest four households and if possible give chase to the suspect.

HUNDRED

A sub-division of a county, originally named from a hundred hides of land or a hundred families.

JURY

Unlike modern juries, the medieval jury were witnesses, local people who were obliged to gather to tell what they knew of a crime or dispute and to come to a decision on the verdict. The coroner's jury was supposed to comprise all the males over twelve years old from the four nearest villages, though this was often a practical impossibility.

KIRTLE

A woman's dress, worn to the ankles, with long sleeves, though fashions changed frequently. The kirtle was worn over the chemise, the only undergarment.

LEAT

A ditch cut to drain a marsh.

MANOR REEVE

A foreman appointed in each village by the lord of a manor to oversee the daily farm work. Although illiterate, like the vast majority of the population, he would keep a record of crop rotation, harvest yields, tithes, etc., by means of memory and notches on tally-sticks.

MANTLE

A cloak, usually of square or semicircular shape, secured at the neck by a brooch-pin or ring. May have a hood for travelling.

MARK

A sum of money, though not an actual coin, as only pennies existed. A mark was two-thirds of a pound, i.e., thirteen shillings and fourpence (sixty-six decimal pence).

MIDDEN

A rubbish pit or dump, often used for sewage.

MURDRUM FINE

A fine or amercement levied on a village by the coroner when a person was found dead in suspicious circumstances and no killer could be produced, if the locals could not make ‘presentment of Englishry' (
q.v.
).

ORDEAL

Though sometimes used to extract confessions, the Ordeal was an ancient ritual, abolished by the Vatican in 1215, where suspects were subjected to painful and often fatal ordeals, such as walking barefoot over nine red-hot ploughshares, picking a stone from a vat of boiling water, licking white-hot iron, etc. If they suffered no injury, they were judged innocent. Another ordeal was to be thrown bound into deep water: if they sank, they were innocent, if they floated, they were guilty and were hanged or mutilated!

PEINE FORTE ET DURE

‘Hard and severe punishment' used for the extraction of confessions from suspects.

PORTREEVE

One of the senior burgesses in a town, elected by the others as a leader. There were usually two, later superseded by a mayor, the first mayor of Exeter being installed in 1208.

PREBENDARY

See ‘Canon'.

PRECENTOR

A senior cleric in a cathedral, responsible for organising the services and singing, etc.

PRESENTMENT OF ENGLISHRY

Following the 1066 Conquest, many Normans were killed by aggrieved Saxons, so the law decreed that anyone found dead from unnatural causes was Norman and the village was punished by a murdrum fine (
q.v.
) unless they could prove that the deceased was English or a foreigner. This was usually done by a male member of the family. This continued for several hundred years, as even though it became meaningless long after the Conquest, it was a good source of revenue.

REEVE

See ‘Manor Reeve'.

SENESCHAL

The senior servant or steward to a lord.

SHERIFF

A ‘shire-reeve', the King's representative in each county, responsible for law and order and the collection of taxes.

SUPER-TUNIC

Similar to a surcoat, but usually heavier: worn as a lighter alternative to a mantle (cloak).

SURCOAT

A garment worn over the tunic, usually shorter. It was also used to cover armour, to protect from the sun and used for heraldic recognition devices.

TABARD

A male over-garment, open at the sides and laced at the waist.

TITHE

A tenth part of the harvest, demanded by the Church.

TUNIC

The main men's garment, pulled over the head to reach the knee or calf. A linen shirt may be worn underneath. For riding, the tunic would be slit at the sides or front and back.

UNDERCROFT

The ground floor of a fortified building. The entrance to the rest of the building was on the floor above, isolated from the undercroft, which might be partly below ground level. Removable wooden steps prevented attackers from reaching the main door.

VICAR

A priest employed by a more senior cleric, such as a prebendary or canon, to carry out his religious duties. Often called a ‘vicar-choral' from his participation in chanted services.

WIMPLE

A linen or silk cloth worn around a lady's neck to frame the face. The sides were pinned up above each ear and the lower edge tucked into the neckline of the kirtle or chemise.

The chamber was almost in darkness. The only light came through the slightly open door, from three tallow tapers burning in a candlestick in the next room. From the large bed came muffled whisperings and the sounds of increasing intimacy. A woman's gasps of half-reluctant delight alternated with the deeper murmurings of a man intent on extracting every ounce of pleasure for himself. He remained steadfastly in control, while she became progressively more abandoned, throwing her arms wildly above the fleeces that covered them, arching her back as she sobbed, and biting back cries of desperate delight.

The carved bedstead, itself a novelty in Exeter where most folk slept either on rushes or a mattress on the floor, began to creak rhythmically, then with increased vigour and pace. Suddenly there was a duet of strangled gasps, the sheepskins heaved in a final spasm and the creaking subsided.

After a moment or two of silence, a gentle sobbing could be heard. ‘This is so wrong,' she whispered. ‘I must never come here again … never!'

The answering voice was deep and strong, with confidence verging on arrogance. ‘You say that every time, Adele. But still you come. You need a man, a proper man.'

She sniffed back her tears. ‘If we should ever be found out – oh God, what would we do?'

He grinned in the darkness. ‘Well, I'll not tell anyone, if you won't!'

Then they were silent, each with their own thoughts in the guttering candlelight.

Silence also reigned in the narrow chamber set high in the gate-house of Rougemont Castle. It was broken only by the steady champing of Gwyn's jaws as he finished the last of the crusty bread and cheese left over from the trio's second breakfast. The other two members of the coroner's team were totally silent. Thomas, the clerk, was laboriously penning a copy of yesterday's inquest held on a forester crushed by a falling tree. The coroner himself was covertly studying the latest lesson set him by a cathedral canon, who was trying to teach him to read and write.

Sir John de Wolfe sat, silently mouthing the simple Latin phrases. With an elbow on the table, he held his hand casually across his mouth to hide the movements of his lips from the others. After twenty years as a soldier, he was sensitive about his efforts to become literate, in case it was thought effeminate. Thomas de Peyne, the unfrocked priest who was his very literate clerk, knew of his master's ambition and was somewhat piqued that he himself had not been asked to be the tutor – though he appreciated the coroner's sensitivity about his inability to read his own documents. Gywn of Polruan knew little of this and cared less, as sensitivity was foreign to the nature of the red-haired Cornish giant, who acted as the coroner's officer and bodyguard.

This comfortable peace continued for a while, its background the mournful whine of the winter wind as it blew around Exeter Castle. There was the occasional slurping noise, as Gwyn washed down his food with rough Devon cider from their communal stone jar, ignoring the stringy curds that swirled from the bottom like seaweed in a rock pool.

As he concentrated on the neatly written vocabulary, the coroner's brow creased with the effort of making sense of these marks on the parchment. His clerk looked up covertly now and then to will his master to make a success of his studies.

The unfortunate Thomas was a born teacher and, had he known of it, would have agreed wholeheartedly with the quotation ‘Far more than the calf wishes to suck, doth the cow wish to give suck'. His sly glances showed him a tall, lean man, who gave a potent impression of blackness. De Wolfe had thick, neck-length black hair, and though, unlike the usual Norman fashion, he had no beard or moustache, his long face was dark with stubble between his twice-weekly shaves. Bushy black eyebrows surmounted a hooked nose and deep-set eye sockets, from which a pair of hooded eyes looked out cynically on the world. The only relief to this hardness was provided by his rather full lips, which hinted at a sensuality that many women, both in Devon and much further afield, could happily confirm.

Black John, as he had sometimes been called in the Holy Land, enhanced his dark appearance by his choice of garments. He rarely wore anything but black or grey, and his tall, sinewy body with its slight stoop often looked like some great bird of prey. When his black cloak swung widely from his hunched shoulders, some men said he was like a huge crow – though others compared him more to a vulture.

The little clerk turned down his eyes again and was just reaching the end of his inquest record when their tranquillity was broken. He had barely scratched the final date on the parchment with his quill – ‘the Second Day of December in the Year of Our Lord Eleven Hundred and Ninety-four' – when footsteps and the clanking of a broadsword scabbard sounded on the narrow staircase coming up from the guard-room below.

Their tiny office, grudgingly allotted to them two months ago, was the most cramped and inconvenient chamber the sheriff could find in the whole of Rougemont, perched high in the gate-tower set in the inner curtain wall. Three heads turned to see who would appear in the doorway, a hole in the wall draped with rough hessian in a futile attempt to reduce the draughts. This sacking was pulled aside and a sergeant-at-arms appeared, dressed in the usual peacetime uniform of a basin-shaped metal helmet with a nose-guard, a long over-tunic with some chainmail on the shoulders, and cross-gartering on the hose below the knees. His baldric, a leather strap slung across one shoulder, supported a large, clumsy sword that dangled from his left hip.

Gwyn climbed down from his stool, his towering height causing his tousled ginger hair almost to touch the ceiling beams. ‘Gabriel, be damned! You're too late to eat, but there's some drink left.' Hospitably, he held out the stone jar to the sergeant, who took a deep draught after nodding a greeting to everyone.

Gabriel was one of the senior members of the castle garrison, a grizzled and scarred veteran of some of the same wars that John de Wolfe and Gwyn had fought in Normandy, Ireland and France although, unlike them, he had never been crusading to the Holy Land. He was an old friend and a covert antagonist of the sheriff, Richard de Revelle, who unfortunately was his ultimate lord and master, though Gabriel's immediate superior was Ralph Morin, the castle constable.

The coroner casually slid his Latin lesson under some other parchments and leaned back on his bench, his long arms planted on the table. ‘What brings you here, Gabriel? Just a social visit to sample our cider?'

The sergeant touched the brim of his helmet in salute. He respected John de Wolfe both for his rank as a knight and for his military pedigree. Though his relations with the new coroner's team were relaxed, he took care not to be over-familiar with this tall, dark, hawkish man who, after the sheriff, was the most senior law officer in the county of Devon.

‘No, Sir John, I bring a message from Sir Richard.'

The coroner groaned. Relations with his brother-in-law were more strained than usual, since the controversy last month over the murder in Widecombe.

The problem of jurisdiction over criminal deaths between sheriff and coroner was still unresolved and remained a bone of contention between them, so any message from Richard de Revelle was hardly likely to be good news. But John was to be surprised.

‘The sheriff's compliments to you, Crowner, and he asks, will you please deal with three deaths reported from Torre?'

John's black eyebrows rose on his saturnine face, crinkling the old sword scar on his forehead. ‘Good God! He's actually asking
me
to deal with them? What's the catch, Gabriel?'

The old soldier shrugged, his lined face wooden. He was not going to get involved in the well-known power struggle between Sir John and the sheriff, whatever his own personal sympathies.

‘Don't know, sir, but he doesn't want to go down there himself. Far too busy, he says, with the Chief Justiciar coming to Exeter in a few days' time.'

Hubert Walter, the Justiciar and Archbishop of Canterbury, was virtually ruler of England now that King Richard had gone permanently back to France. He was to visit Exeter at the end of that week and one of his tasks would be to try to settle this demarcation dispute between coroner and sheriff.

Thomas de Peyne, the crook-backed clerk, made the Sign of the Cross at the mention of the Archbishop – an obsessional habit he had developed since the mental trauma of being dismissed from the priesthood two years earlier. It was a counterpoint to Gwyn, who was prone to frequent and vigorous scratching of his crotch. ‘What sort of deaths are these?' he demanded, in his squeaky voice, thinking ahead as to how much writing he would have to do on his sheepskin rolls.

Gabriel took off his helmet to run a horny hand through his greying hair. ‘All I know is that a messenger came in from Torre an hour ago, saying that a hermit monk turned up there last night with a story of three corpses on the beach somewhere between Paignton and Torpoint. Drowned sailors, most likely. Doesn't sound very exciting.'