Kate Sedley: The Lammas Feast

Once more, I decided that silence was golden. After all, what I knew of Jane Overbecks was mainly hearsay, gleaned from listening to the gossip of Margaret Walker and her friends. I knew that the Baldock sisters, Marion and Jane, who was the younger by some ten years, had arrived in Bristol from Devon in 1473, not long before I myself made my second visit to the city.

Jane must then have been about fifteen years of age, but with less sense than a child of ten. Moreover, she spoke so seldom that many people thought her dumb. No one seemed to know anything for certain of the sisters’ history because Marion, taciturn and wary, kept her own counsel, deftly fending off all questions from her neighbours. She set about renting a room over Master Overbecks’s bakery, and became one of his hucksters.

Unlike his rival, Jasper Fairbrother, John Overbecks was a decent, law-abiding man, keeping to the city ordinance that no bread should be hawked around the streets except by these women, who sold bread from door to door and received a penny in the shilling profit for their labours. It was hard, tiring work, humping the heavy baskets of loaves around the town, but I guessed that Marion Baldock was not the sort of woman to complain. And there had been no Mistress Overbecks to scold and generally make her life a misery, John being one of Bristol’s most confirmed bachelors.

Or so everyone had thought.

I had once overheard Bess Simnel remark to Goody Watkins that she suspected Master Overbecks of being sweet on Jane Baldock; an idea that had been scouted with scorn and derision, not just by Maria Watkins herself, but also by everyone else present at the time. Bess Simnel, however, had been proved right when, the year previous to this story, Marion had been accepted by the Magdalen nuns as a postulant. It was, it seemed, what she had always wanted, but had been unable to achieve because of the responsibility for her younger sister. But now that Jane had passed her nineteenth birthday, John Overbecks had offered his hand and heart in marriage, leaving the older woman free at last to pursue what she felt to be her true vocation.

I had been from home at the time, but had returned to a city humming with speculation, and chewing over the juiciest morsel of gossip that had landed on its plate for many a long day. The Redcliffe Goodies were well to the fore in prophesying doom and disaster; assuring all those who would listen that the marriage would not last a month. So far, it had survived the best part of a year and showed no sign as yet of running into trouble.

My family and I were, by now, almost abreast of the opening to Saint Mary le Port Street. This was a narrow alleyway of crowding shops and houses, clustered around the church of Saint Mary le Port and eventually leading, by various byways, to the castle. Master Overbecks’s bakery was on the corner, the shop frontage being in High Street, almost, but not quite, opposite the bakery of that other master baker, Jasper Fairbrother.

I think I have mentioned this gentleman — I use the word in its loosest sense — once before, somewhere in these chronicles. Jasper constantly flouted the law, particularly where the women hucksters were concerned, refusing point-blank to pay them more than a quarter of the rate laid down in the city’s Great Red Book, and threatening to set his gang of bravos on them if they went to the authorities with their grievances. Jasper was also a great gambler — a lucky one by all accounts — and these hefty young men were employed by him to collect his debts, as well as to menace anyone to whom Jasper took exception. He had once tried to recruit me, but I had declined his pressing invitation, in spite of the generous wages I was offered. He had never troubled me again: I was too big and too handy with my cudgel to make into an enemy. For similar reasons, or so I guessed, he lived at peace with his rival across the street, always remembering that John Overbecks had once been a soldier.

At the moment, his chief companion was a young ruffian called Walter Godsmark, who, when not otherwise occupied, helped Jasper in the bakery. He was lounging now against the bakery wall, just outside the entrance, picking his teeth and watching the world go by. He was a big lad, nearly as big as me, with brown hair that stuck up in tufts all over his head, blue eyes and a broken nose that gave him a slightly sinister appearance. He was still wearing his white apron over his clothes, and his round white baker’s hat, suggesting to me that he had been unceremoniously turned out of doors while his master conducted some business inside; nefarious business, most likely, to which Walter was not privy.

We stared at one another across the width of the street for a moment, before young Godsmark made me a lewd gesture. Hastily, I shepherded my flock of wife and innocent little darlings into Master Overbecks’s bakery, using the side door around the corner.

John Overbecks was there, with his apprentice, as I had guessed he would be at this time of the morning, baking his second batch of bread, ready for the hucksters when they arrived to refill their baskets. As in London, so in Bristol — although in no other town that I knew of — loaves could only be bought from these women, and this had been the city law for the past five years. Bakers could sell all other confectionery from their shops or market stalls, but not the main item of their trade. While it ensured a living for the hucksters, to me it was a pointless ordinance; as a staple item of our diet, bread was constantly in demand and I doubt if the hucksters would have suffered had the bakers sold it as well. (But then, I have always believed that those in authority feel obliged to make things as difficult as possible for the rest of us, just to prove to themselves that they are in charge.)

The apprentice, Dick Hodge, was sieving flour through a finely woven cloth, while Master Overbecks was removing loaves from the biggest of the wall ovens with one of those long-handled wooden spatulas that is called a pele. He put the hot bread on the trestle table behind him, spinning round lightly on his toes with all the graceful ease of a much younger and lighter man. His was a heavy, stocky build, and beneath the white baker’s cap, the wings of brown hair were streaked with grey. But the hazel eyes glowed with enthusiasm for life and his trade.

‘Roger! Mistress Chapman!’ he exclaimed as soon as he saw us, and beamed with pleasure. ‘And how are the little ones?’ He put down the pele and stooped to give the two elder children a floury hug.

Elizabeth and Nicholas returned his embrace readily enough, but their eyes were fixed on another trestle table close to the smaller oven, where cakes and buns had been placed to cool, ready for sale in the shop when it opened. John Overbecks chuckled.

‘I know what you’d like,’ he said, and fetched them each a piece of gingerbread, decorated with cloves and box leaves. Next, he bent and tickled a somnolent Adam under the chin — our younger son opened one eye a slit, belched, then went back to sleep — before turning his attention to Adela and me.

‘Let me guess what you’ve come for,’ he said, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘You want me to bake your Lammastide bread.’

‘Not just bake it,’ I explained. ‘ Make it — if you would.’ I glanced uncertainly around me. ‘Though I can tell that you’re busy.’

I could see scraps of torn parchment covered in drawings; plans, no doubt, of the sculptured centrepieces for the Lammas feast. I remembered Margaret’s words and asked Master Overbecks about the Garden of Eden and the three-tiered ship.

He admitted that this year he had been chosen as chief baker for the feasts of the various guilds. He was pink with pleasure at the honour thus conferred on him.