Michael Jecks - The Butcher of St Peter's

‘He’s more than half simple. Couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. I don’t think he even carries a dagger now, not for his protection nor for cutting his food. He’s entirely innocent of violence. The thought of it would be enough to addle his mind.’

‘I have known some remarkably foolish men who took to murder,’ Sir Peregrine murmured.

‘I don’t move in your circles,’ Saul agreed easily.

Baldwin cleared his throat before the astonished Sir Peregrine could give vent to his anger, saying quickly, ‘What sort of man is he, then? Why do you say he is innocent of violence? Because he was born foolish?’

‘He was born as bright as you or me,’ Saul said. He saw no need to make mention of Sir Peregrine. ‘I knew him from the first, I suppose. Our fathers were both butchers, and although I was a little older than him, we were apprentices at more or less the same time and messed together quite often. He was fine.’

‘Why then is he a fool now? Did he have an accident? A blow to his head?’

‘Nothing like that. Poor fellow, he married quite young. Must have been ten years ago now, back in the sixth year of the reign of the King.’

Baldwin calculated. King Edward II came to the throne in 1307, so Est’s marriage was in 1313 or 1314. ‘Yes?’

‘They were obviously happy, and soon after, they were blessed. Emma, she was his wife, and a lovely girl. There was a lot of jealousy about when he caught her. Anyway, she fell pregnant a year or so after their marriage and they couldn’t have been more delighted, the pair of them. He was running his own business by then, and making good money, so when the baby was born in 1314, about the month of July or August, I remember, all seemed well. Except you never can tell, can you? You never know what’s round the corner.’

All the men sitting at that table knew well enough what had happened next, though. It was the great famine, the terrible time when everyone had friends or family who had died.

‘Yes, well, here in Exeter, we got it worse than most, I reckon. There was hardly a soul hadn’t lost someone. Well, you all remember it. Est, he fared worse than some, but it affected him badly. First his little baby girl died, only a year or so old, she was. So many of the little ones did. They couldn’t feed properly and their mammies couldn’t give them pap, so that was it for them. The little mite faded over a few days, and then was gone.

‘Est himself could have coped with that, I dare say, but then they couldn’t bury the little chit on consecrated ground. It had been a hard birth, and the midwife thought Cissy wouldn’t live, so she baptized the babe herself.’

‘That’s acceptable,’ Baldwin commented.

‘Normally, but this woman was no good. She just mumbled some nonsense about “God and Saint John bless this body and these bones,” and that was it. No one thought about it until Cissy was dead, and then it was too late. The priest told the midwife she’d consigned little Cissy to eternal suffering. The soul was lost. That was why Est’s wife lost the will to live, I reckon. He never got over the horror of burying his child. Then he lost her too, and in the worst way. She hanged herself. I was there with the jury when the Coroner heard the case. A bad business, a terrible business.’

Saul stopped and picked up his ale. He sat staring into it so long that Baldwin thought he was demanding a fresh quart, and was debating whether to order one for him when he realized that Saul was staring through the ale into the past.

Much of what he saw there was unpleasant. Saul could remember the carts carrying the dead to the cemetery, the houses with the shutters wide even at night because the whole family had died and been taken away. Burial pits dug by the fossors to encompass entire households, for when the food was gone there was nothing to be done. Women might whore for a few pennies, men might sell all their prized possessions, but when all wanted the same scarce goods — foods — the prices of bread and grain rose as those of silver, pewter and gold fell. No one could eat metal.

Even in Exeter there were murders, and once there had been a suggestion that a man had broken that ancient taboo: cannibalism. But stories of that nature abounded when all were so desperate. When a man was prepared to boil his boots for the sustenance the leather might hold, you knew that the fellow was starving.

‘Everyone suffered,’ Saul said quietly. ‘I lost a brother and a child, although my second son — God be praised! — lived. And now he’s a bone idle arse with turds for brains … still, I’d not lose him too. One was bad enough. And Est lost both. His wife and his child. And neither could be buried on consecrated ground.’

‘It must have been very hard,’ Baldwin said. ‘But most people recovered. Why did not this fellow?’

Saul shrugged. He had no answer for that.

‘The parents, surely, should have realized and had the baby baptized?’ Sir Peregrine commented in a hushed tone. It was still a source of profound pain to him that he had not been able to ensure his still-born child’s burial in the churchyard as a baptized Christian. ‘No parent could fail that responsibility.’

‘There were too few priests to go round … they were not educated like some. They trusted the midwife. Later, when their baby was screaming all night and all day because she was so hungry, and they were desperately trying to feed her, they had other things on their minds,’ Saul said sharply. ‘Even the best of parents can fail, Sir Knight! These two were good parents.’

He hadn’t taken to this arrogant piece of piss. Tall he might be, with his fair hair and green eyes, but that didn’t impress Saul. Saul was a butcher, and as such he was used to lifting pig carcasses and half-oxen on his back, hoisting them onto tables or lifting them onto hooks. And when it came to swordplay, he had an eighteen-inch knife in his sheath now that would be more than a match for any man’s blade in a fight here in a darkened tavern.

The other one, though, he looked as though he understood suffering. Saul looked at him. ‘You were here in the famine, sir?’

Baldwin nodded. ‘Not here in Exeter, but up in Cadbury. We did not suffer so much as you down here, I think. Still, I have seen people starve to death. It is not a pleasant sight.’ In his mind’s eye he saw again the streets of Acre as the siege began to bite. The women and children lying in the streets, the decomposing heads of their husbands and fathers lying where they had bounced, obscene missiles hurled by the great engines of war outside. One woman had come across her only son’s head lying in the roadway, and then, a few paces on, her husband’s. The men had fought together, and must have died so near to each other that their enemies decapitated both at the same time and hurled their heads into the city together. It was an unbelievably cruel way for that woman to discover that her family was no more. He suddenly wondered what might have happened to her. Perhaps she too committed suicide. So many did in that terrible battle. Better to die unshriven than to wait for the Moors to come and take their sport. ‘So Estmund lost all, and then lost his mind?’

‘I think he would have come round. He was a sturdy fellow and capable of great courage and resilience, but then he was prevented from burying her in the graveyard.’

‘A cruel thing, but normal,’ Baldwin observed.

‘The tragedy was that an officer lost his temper when he saw Est digging a pit for his woman, and went and raged at him to stop. He’d heard that Est was not allowed to bury her in the cemetery, but Est and Henry Adyn were outside the consecrated area, and had been given permission to bury her there. When they refused to move, Est and Henry were attacked, and Henry was crippled for life.’