Bernard Knight - The Tinner's corpse

De Wolfe confronted one of the hulking men holding his officer, prodding him hard in the chest with a bony finger. ‘Get these irons struck from this man immediately!’

The tinner looked warily across at his companion, who gripped Gwyn’s other arm, then shook his head. ‘The crowner up there told me to fetter him,’ he growled uncertainly.

‘And the crowner here is telling you to unfetter him!’ snarled de Wolfe. ‘That fellow up there is no longer a coroner.’

Fitz-Ivo let out a howl of protest, and a few yells of dissent and abuse from the hall encouraged Richard de Revelle to rise and half-heartedly contradict his brother-in-law. ‘You have no cause to interfere in this, John!’

De Wolfe swung around to face him. ‘Indeed I have!’ he roared, in a voice that quelled the rising murmur in the court. ‘I am the only coroner in Devon appointed by King Richard and his justices. I had grave reservations, expressed to you, Sheriff, about even provisionally appointing this man to office, and I’ll prove to you that my misgivings were indeed well founded.’ His voice crackled with authority, and although Fitz-Ivo opened and closed his mouth a few times, he could find no words to utter.

‘First, my officer here was in Chagford expressly at my orders, to safeguard the coroner’s interest in the investigation of two murders. Thus he was acting on my behalf in all he did.

‘Second, the action of that unruly mob in hanging the Saxon was unlawful. They were well within their rights in seizing him if he was caught causing damage, but they had a duty to deliver him into custody until a proper trial could be held.’ He scowled at de Revelle and added, ‘I am surprised and concerned, Sheriff, that you, being present with men-at-arms, did not insist on — and enforce — this proper course.’ He turned to his now silent audience. ‘To hang that man without trial was a crime against the King’s peace equivalent to murder. I shall hold an inquest in Chagford on this Aethelfrith and will report those responsible to the King’s judges when the Eyre of Assize comes to Exeter in the near future.’

This provoked an angry response from certain parts of the gloomy chamber. ‘We live by Stannary law here, not yours, Crowner,’ yelled a voice from the back.

‘No, you do not!’ retorted de Wolfe, with a voice like a bull. ‘The King gave you tinners those special dispensations because of the value of the metal to the Crown. But you know well enough — and your Lord Warden here can confirm it — that Stannary law strictly excludes any jurisdiction over crimes of violence, those against life, limb or property.’

De Wolfe now fixed his eyes on Fitz-Ivo, who was as deflated as a pricked bladder. ‘Finally, you claimed in your fine speech just now that my officer cruelly beat this man to death!’ He pointed a quivering finger at the corpse lying on its bier. ‘Yet you did not invite your jury to inspect the body, as you should have done, and if they had, they would have noticed a strange lack of evidence about this cruel and fatal beating.’

De Wolfe bent down and grasped the shoulder of the stiff cadaver, turning it on its side to face Theobald Fitz-Ivo. ‘The face is unmarked, is it not?’ He pulled down the grubby sheet and pointed to the neck and chest, then hoisted the body half off the bier to display its back. ‘So where are the signs of this merciless beating, eh? A single bruise behind the ear!’ He let the body fall back and dragged the sheet over it.

‘The truth of the matter is that the deceased man struck my officer a sudden cowardly thrust with a dagger, as the bailiff of Chagford can testify, as well as Gwyn of Polruan himself — and, no doubt, a dozen witnesses, if they were honest enough to come forward.’ He turned to the Cornishman. ‘Show them your wound, Gwyn.’ Awkwardly, the officer lifted his chained arms to show the fresh slash in his thick jerkin. ‘Under that, Crowner.’

De Wolfe pulled aside his outer garment and displayed a large circle of dried blood on Gwyn’s duncoloured tunic, just over the edge of his ribs on the left side. ‘We are lucky not to be holding another inquest — this time on a murdered law officer!’ he shouted, with real anger in his voice. ‘He struck the coward a single blow in self-defence, which must have caused an apoplexy in the brain. He fell unconscious and died some hours later.’

He bent again towards the sweating Fitz-Ivo and snarled, ‘A royal law officer trying to uphold the King’s peace against an unlawful lynch mob is attacked with a knife and has to defend himself with a single blow from his fist. Where now are your grounds for murder, Fitz-Ivo?’

He drew back and turned his thunderous features upon the sheriff. ‘I shall report all of these matters to the Justiciar, Sheriff. Not only about Fitz-Ivo’s irresponsible incompetence, but also your own failure to uphold the rule of law and the King’s peace by not even attempting to prevent the unlawful killing of the old Saxon — and your lamentable inaction in not curbing the present folly of this so-called coroner!’

As de Revelle began to huff and puff in his own defence, de Wolfe’s stentorian voice overrode him. ‘As the only official coroner in this county, I declare this travesty of an inquest null and void. I will take it over myself to reach a proper and legal verdict.’

He hoisted himself up on to the platform and stood menacingly over the crestfallen Fitz-Ivo, then signalled peremptorily to the pair still holding Gwyn. ‘I told you to take my officer out to the smithy and get those bonds struck off — at once.’

As the Cornishman, grinning with relief, shuffled towards the door, de Wolfe beckoned to the front row of the sullen but subdued audience. ‘Those of you who were named as the jury, come forward and look closely at the corpse.’

A couple of hours later, the coroner and his officer were riding almost knee to knee along the road back towards Exeter.

‘That was a near thing, Crowner. If you hadn’t arrived when you did, they’d have strung me up for sure, just like that old Saxon.’

No formal word of thanks had passed between Gwyn and his master, but the bond that twenty years of companionship had forged was sufficient to leave many things unspoken.

John gave one of his gargling grunts, which obscured a whole range of emotions from displeasure to contentment. ‘That swine was the cause of most of the trouble,’ he muttered, jerking a gloved hand at the sheriff who rode twenty yards ahead, behind Sergeant Gabriel and two of his men, the others forming a rearguard.

‘Fitz-Ivo was no help, either!’ growled Gwyn cynically.

John spat accurately into the ditch as they trotted along. Their discussion lapsed for a while as they reached a rutted part of the track, where wagons had cut deep grooves in the mud, formed where a stream had overflowed recently. The horses picked their way delicately through the morass until a rise in the ground hardened off the surface once more.

De Wolfe picked up the talk where it had ended, speaking in a Welsh-Cornish patois, as he and Gwyn always did when alone together. ‘Fitz-Ivo’s just an ignorant fool — but de Revelle is a malignant, scheming bastard! He’s also a spineless bastard, when it comes to a challenge, God be praised. If he’d not been so weak back there, my task would have been the harder.’

Gwyn was thankful that both the sheriff and Fitz-Ivo had caved in so readily under the coroner’s verbal onslaught in Lydford Castle. The neutral attitude of Geoffrey Fitz-Peters had helped, too, as although the manor lord wished to stay on the side of the powerful community of tinners, he had been uneasy about the flagrant breaches of law, both concerning Aethelfrith’s lynching and the illegal inquest that aimed to sentence Gwyn to death. Geoffrey also hoped to succeed Richard de Revelle as Lord Warden, and de Wolfe’s threat to report the sheriff’s failings to the Chief Justiciar and demand a Commission of Enquiry into the running of the Stannaries had been music to ears that wanted de Revelle dispossessed of the Wardenship.