The Witch Hunter (17 page)

‘Is that the mound?

The reeve bobbed his head. ‘It is, Crowner. Maybe you’d like a drink and a bite to eat while you talk to the man who found the valuables?’

Gwyn was through the door of the tavern before John could answer and with a wry grin, the coroner beckoned to Thomas and followed the Cornishman inside. Already a few curious villeins had gathered around the door and the reeve directed a few of them to take the horses to water. In the single room of the alehouse they sat on benches around the dead fire-pit while a young girl in a ragged smock fetched them pots of indifferent ale from a shed at the back.

Henry Stork came back inside and in the dim light of the windowless room they saw he was followed by a muscular youth of about sixteen, who had a disfiguring purple birthmark covering one side of his face. He seemed a bright, intelligent lad, his eyes flitting from one to the other of these strangers in his village.

‘Simon, this is,’ said the reeve. ‘He found the stuff yesterday, when he was digging out a badger sett.’

John caught Gwyn’s eye and he grinned. It was an unlikely tale, as mound digging was a common but illegal activity, invariably undertaken in the hope of finding treasure. De Wolfe wondered why this village had reported it, rather than keeping quiet, but maybe the surprise of actually finding treasure had unnerved the digger. He decided to bait the young man a little.

‘Why dig for a badger in the middle of an open pasture, boy?’

Simon looked back innocently. ‘We’ve had our turnips dug up at night – some with claw marks on them. I saw a hole, so I thought maybe I could raise a badger if I made it a bit bigger and sent the dog down there.’

John believed this as much as he believed that the moon was made of cheese, but decided to give the youth the benefit of the doubt. Just then, the silent girl padded barefoot into the room with a grubby board on which was a loaf cut into half a dozen chunks, together with a heap of sliced mutton. She wiped her running nose with her fingers, then handed out the bread to each of the visitors, leaving the meat board on the ring of stones around the fireplace.

‘So what did you find instead of your badger?’ demanded de Wolfe.

The young man hawked in his throat and spat on the floor before replying. ‘The turf had fallen in, because there was a hollow underneath. All that bloody rain had made holes everywhere, washing out the soil below. I stuck my spade in and straightway it hit something hard.’

‘An old box, it was,’ broke in Henry. ‘A bit rotten, but it was oak with some iron bands, so it kept together, just about.’

‘Where is it now?’ asked Gwyn.

‘In the church, only safe place we’ve got. The parson is guarding it himself.’

The coroner had less faith than the reeve in the honesty of parish priests, but recognised that there were few secure places in a remote hamlet like Cadbury. He drank down the rest of his ale and put the remnants of his crust down, together with the mutton, conscious that the little girl was eyeing it hungrily, waiting for them to go in the hope that something would be left for her.

He rose and jerked his head at Thomas and the still-champing Gwyn. ‘Let’s go and look this great treasure, then.’

Across the village green, the little Saxon church stood forlornly within its ring of old yews. It was stone built, but hardly more than a large room, with a small arched belfry perched on one end of the roof, which was made of overlapping flat stones. The inside was almost bare, a hard-packed earth floor leading up to a small apse where a table covered with a cloth did service as an altar, supporting a bronze cross and a pair of wooden candlesticks. The walls were whitewashed and some crude coloured paintings of biblical scenes were placed between the slit windows. More recent coatings of white lime had blurred the edges of some of the pictures, where the brush of a careless painter had slipped.

Squatting on the edge of the wooden platform that supported the altar was a thin figure dressed in a rough hessian smock, belted around his waist so that the hem came above his bandy knees. Wooden-soled working shoes were on the ends of his spindly legs and the only indication that this was the parish priest and not another villein from the fields was his shaven tonsure. A long-handled shovel, its wooden blade edged with an iron strip, leaned against the wall near by, increasing the impression that this was just a bald-headed labourer.

He climbed to his feet as the coroner’s party entered. Thomas was in the rear, crossing himself as he genuflected to the altar.

‘This is Michael, priest of St Mary’s, Crowner,’ said the reeve. ‘He has cared for this box since it was found.’ The priest was a slender man of about thirty, who to John’s eyes looked chronically ill, his eyes sunken in deep sockets above a wasted face where the cheekbones stuck as if in a skull.

‘Forgive my appearance, sir,’ he said in a surprisingly deep and firm voice. ‘But my pastoral duties in a place like this are light and I must work in the fields with my flock if we are to avoid starvation next winter, after this terrible year.’

De Wolfe was well aware that many priests, especially in tiny parishes with a scanty living, had to work hard to feed themselves, but this man seemed to be killing himself with toil. However, this was none of his business, although he determined to ask John de Alençon when he returned to Exeter, why the inordinately rich Church seemed indifferent to the poverty of many of its servants.

‘You will want to see the thing that young Simon discovered. I have placed it in the aumbry for safe-keeping. It is the only place in the village that possesses a lock!’

He led them to the north side of the semicircular apse where there was a large chest, made of blackened planks secured with large iron nails. He fished a large key from a pouch on his belt and opened the crude lock, pushing back the lid with a creak to reveal what was inside. A chalice, paten and cruet of a poor-quality mix of tin and silver were stored there between celebrations of the Mass, along with a breviary and a manual, the only sacred books the priest possessed. These had been pushed to one end of the chest and de Wolfe saw that most of the space was taken up with a battered box, with crumbly soil still adhering to its rough sides.

He motioned to the brawny Gwyn, who lifted it out with a grunt and dropped it on the edge of the dais.

‘Bloody heavy, that!’ he said, getting a poisonous glance from Thomas for using such language in the house of God.

He squatted alongside the box, almost nose to nose with the coroner on the other side. Usually they adopted this pose across a corpse, so this made a novel change.

‘It’s just a box, not a proper chest,’ observed the Cornishman.

The object that the lad had dug from the side of the mound was about four hands-spread long and three wide and deep. It seemed to be made of thick boards, now brittle and split, but was held together by two bands of thin beaten iron, almost completely rusted through. The remnants of a few nails were visible at the edges, where the boards had originally been butted together to make a rough box.

The reeve stooped above them, pointing at one end. ‘We saw silver coins through that broken part, so we didn’t go any farther.’

John again thought that the honesty of the Cadbury inhabitants was remarkable, but the next words of Michael the priest tempered his opinion a little.

‘I was up at the top of the fields when Simon came running from the mound. I stopped him and he took me back to show me what he had found. When we walked back to the road, we found that Robert Hereward was drinking ale after visiting his mill to collect the dues. He was the one who first saw the treasure through that crack and told us to report it straightway to you, Crowner.’

De Wolfe wondered whether the villagers, including their priest, would have been so honest if the manor-lord had not happened to be on the scene.

‘Where is Robert now?’ he asked.

‘He said he would come down here as soon as you arrived,’ replied Michael. ‘I sent a boy up there to tell him when I heard your horses coming.’

John turned his attention back to the box. A gap in the clouds must have passed overhead at that moment, as a shaft of sunlight struck through one of the narrow window slits and illuminated it in an eerie fashion.

‘Can you get the top off, Gwyn?’

His officer reached behind to his belt and pulled out a large dagger. Putting the thick blade flat under one of the fragile bands, he levered up and the parchment-thin metal snapped in a shower of rust. He did the same to the other one, then prised up the rotting remains of the top boards. Shreds of a decomposed linen bag failed to hide the closely packed coins that filled the box. Most were tarnished to a deep grey colour, but when the coroner disturbed them with his fingers, those beneath, which had been lying tightly face to face, showed the brighter glint of silver.

‘There’s another bag underneath,’ said Michael, jabbing a finger at the mass of coins. Where John had moved some aside, the top of a more intact pouch could be seen, tied with a thong. When de Wolfe pulled, it ripped, but enough material came up to reveal a leather purse.

Inside were several dozen bigger coins showing the yellow glint of gold.

‘Keep that aside, then tip the rest out of the box,’ he commanded.

Handing the leather bag up to Thomas, the fount of all knowledge as far as he was concerned, he demanded confirmation of their identity. ‘Look like bezants to me. What do you think?

The little clerk, his thin nose almost twitching with excitement, pulled the opening to the full extent of the purse-string and ferreted inside with his fingers. ‘These are indeed, Crowner! All gold
solidii
from Byzantium. Each is worth about six shillings today!’

Gwyn whistled. He had never seen half as much money in one place before. ‘How many are there, Thomas? And don’t go slipping a few up your sleeve when we’re not looking!’

Thomas flushed indignantly, though he knew Gwyn was teasing him. ‘I’ll lay them out in a row, before your very eyes, you ginger oaf!’ he retorted and proceeded to tip the bag on to the wooden platform.

‘May as well count the silver ones, too,’ ordered John, getting up from his crouch, his back reminding him that he was not getting any younger. ‘The two priests can do that. They can read, write and do their sums.’

He stood back with Gwyn and Henry to watch the other pair put the coins into small piles. Behind them, at a respectful distance, a dozen men and women of the village stood awe-struck at this display of wealth that was far beyond their comprehension. The average wage of a freeman farmer was about two pence a day, so to them one bezant was almost three months’ earnings. The villeins and serfs worked for nothing but the occupancy of their toft and what they could grow and breed on their croft.

‘There are fifty-two gold coins, master,’ declared Thomas, looking up from his little piles of money. The bezant, though minted in Asia Minor, had been a standard gold piece throughout Europe for hundreds of years and this little bagful was a small fortune in itself.

Thomas went to help Michael count the far more numerous silver pennies, the only English coin in circulation, all of these minted by the Saxons before the Conquest. After another fifteen minutes, during which the spectators appeared hypnotised by the chink of coins being put into piles of ten, the local priest announced that there had been four hundred and eighty-six pence in the box. Calculation was beyond de Wolfe, a soldier not having the computing power of a merchant, but his clerk rapidly had the answer.

‘Altogether, that’s about three hundred and twenty-eight shillings. That’s more than seventeen pounds, Crowner!’

‘And this!’ said the parish priest, suddenly. He held up a glinting object. ‘It was at the bottom, under the last of the pennies.’

He handed it up to the coroner, who turned it over admiringly in his fingers. It was a gold brooch, as long as his forefinger, an oval of delicate moulding, with a dragon-like heraldic beast across the open centre. On the back were two small loops with a thick gold pin between them, to fix it to a cloak or tunic. Of obvious Saxon design, it weighed as much as a dozen of the bezants, but was more valuable than its sheer mass, because of the exquisite workmanship.

De Wolfe handed it back to Michael. ‘Find a length of cloth and wrap everything up again and put it back in the box. Thomas, make a careful inventory on one of your rolls, with the names of the witnesses who were here present. I don’t want any accusations that some of this has gone missing later on.’

The reeve sent one of the villagers to find some wrapping while Thomas unpacked his writing materials from the bag that he carried on his shoulder. By the time he had written down all that the coroner had demanded, an old sack had been produced and the pennies, bag of gold and the brooch had been wrapped up and replaced in the old box, which was then secured with some cords to prevent it falling apart.

‘I want to see the place where it was found,’ announced de Wolfe. ‘So for now, can you lock the box back in your aumbry to be safe?’

The priest agreed and when the key had vanished back into the scrip on his belt, they all trooped out into the fitful sunlight. Henry Stork led the way and after the coroner’s trio and the priest came a straggling bunch of locals, all agape at this novel intrusion of the outer world into their monotonous lives.

The procession crossed the track and walked up a muddy lane at the side of a dry-stone wall, built more to accommodate loose stones from the adjacent strip fields than as a partition. It enclosed lines of crops grouped in sections belonging to different villagers, so that everyone had their share of good and bad soil. Oats, rye, peas and beans seemed the main crops, although farther away, the green heads of turnips and cabbage could be seen. In the centre, where the root crops had already been lifted, a pair of patient oxen were dragging a plough, with a bare-footed villein leading them and another leaning on the handles to keep the coulter in the ground.

On the other side of the path, fallow land stretched away for two hundred paces, part of the three-field system that rested the ground for a year, after two of cultivation. At the end of this, the path opened on to a dozen acres of pasture land, where sheep and a few lean cows grazed, along with a small herd of goats, watched over by a small boy.