Susanna GREGORY: A Bone of Contention

‘No!’ exclaimed Kenzie loudly. The others regarded him uncomfortably. He glanced round at them before continuing in more moderate tones. ‘It would not be fair. We did not start it – they did.’

‘People in this town do not like the Scots,’ agreed Fyvie vigorously. ‘Is it our fault that they choose to fight us?’

‘Oh, come now,’ said Bartholomew wearily. ‘The Scots are not singled out for any special ill-treatment. That honour probably falls to the French at the moment, with the Irish not far behind. Go back to David’s and study. After all, that is the reason you are here.’

Before Fyvie could respond, Ruthven gave Bartholomew a hasty bow, and bundled his friends away towards Shoemaker Row. Bartholomew watched them walk back along the High Street, hearing Ruthven’s calming tones over Kenzie’s protestations of innocence, and Fyvie’s angry voice. Ruthven would have his work cut out to keep those fiery lads out of trouble, Bartholomew reflected.

He rubbed a hand across his forehead, and felt trickles of sweat course down his back. The sun was fierce, and he felt as though he were being cooked under his dark scholar’s gown.

On the opposite side of the street, Michael dismissed the student friars with a contemptuous flick of his fingers, and sauntered over to join Bartholomew. The friars, apparently subdued by whatever Michael had said to them, slunk off towards St Bene’t’s Church. The plague, four years before, had claimed many friars and monks among its tens of thousands of victims in England, and the University was working hard to train new clerics to replace them. The would-be brawlers were merely two of many such priests passing through Cambridge for their education before going about their vocations in the community.

The large number of clerics – especially friars – at the University was a continuing source of antagonism between scholars and townspeople. Much of the antipathy stemmed from the fact that clerics – whether monks and friars in major orders like Brother Michael, or those in minor orders like Bartholomew – came under canon law, which was notably more lenient than secular law.

Only a month before, two apprentices had been hanged by the Sheriff for killing a student in a brawl; less than a day later three scholars had been fined ten marks each by the Bishop for murdering a baker. Such disparity in justice did not go unremarked in a community already seething with resentment at the arrogant, superior attitudes of many scholars towards the people of the town.

‘I suppose the friars said the Scots started it,’ said Bartholomew with a grin at Michael, as they resumed their walk up the High Street.

Michael nodded and smiled back. ‘Of course. Unruly savages trying to start a fight, while our poor Dominicans were simply trying to go to mass.’ He pointed a finger at the friars as they disappeared into the church. ‘Remember their names, Matt. Brothers Werbergh and Edred. An unholy pair if ever I saw one, especially Edred. I am surprised the Dominican Order supports such blatant displays of condescension and aggression.’

‘Well, perhaps they will make fine bishops one day,’ remarked Bartholomew dryly.

Michael chuckled. ‘I will go to David’s Hostel later today,’ he said, ‘and see their Principal about those rowdy Scots. Then I will complain to the Principal of Godwinsson Hostel about those inflammatory friars.’

Bartholomew nodded absently, walking briskly so that Michael had to slow him down again, so that they – or rather the overweight Michael – would not arrive too sweat-soaked at the Hall of Valence Marie.

As they approached the forbidding walls of the new College, Michael turned to Bartholomew and grimaced at the sudden stench from where the King’s Ditch was being dredged. Years of silt, sewage, kitchen compost, offal, and an unwholesome range of other items hauled from the dank depths of the Ditch lay in steaming grey-black piles along the banks. The smell had attracted a host of cats and dogs, which rifled through the parts not already claimed by farmers to enrich their soil. Among them, spiteful-eyed gulls squabbled and cawed over blackened strips of decaying offal and the small fish that flapped helplessly in the dredged mud.

Bartholomew and Michael turned left off the High Street, and made their way along an uneven path that wound between the towering banks of the King’s Ditch and the high wall that surrounded Valence Marie. Because Cambridge lay at the edge of the low-lying Fens, the level of the water in the Ditch was occasionally higher than the surrounding land; to prevent flooding, the Ditch’s banks were levied, and rose above the ground to the height of a man’s head.

Away from the High Street, the noise of the town faded, and, were it not for the stench and the incessant buzz of flies around his head, Bartholomew would have enjoyed walking across the strip of scrubby pastureland, pleasantly shaded by a line of mature oak trees.

‘You have been a long time, Brother,’ said Robert Thorpe, Master of the Hall of Valence Marie, as he stood up from where he had been sitting under a tree.

There was a hint of censure in his tone, and Bartholomew sensed Thorpe was a man whose authority as head of a powerful young college was too recently acquired for it to sit easily on his shoulders. ‘I expected you sooner than this.’

‘The beginnings of a street brawl claimed my attention,’ said Michael, making no attempt to apologise. ‘Scots versus the friars this time.’

Thorpe raised dark grey eyebrows. ‘The friars again? I do not understand what is happening, Brother. We have always had problems with warring factions and nationalities in the University, but seldom so frequent and with such intensity as over the last two or three weeks.’

‘Perhaps it is the heat,’ suggested Bartholomew. ‘It is known that tempers are higher and more frayed when the weather is hot. The Sheriff told me that there has been more fighting among the townspeople this last month, too.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Thorpe, looking coolly at Bartholomew in his threadbare gown and dusty shoes. As a physician, Bartholomew could have made a rich living from attending wealthy patients. Instead, he chose to teach at the University, and to treat an ever-growing number of the town’s poor, preferring to invest his energies in combating genuine diseases rather than in dispensing placebos and calculating astrological charts for the healthy. His superiors at the University tolerated this peculiar behaviour, because having a scholar prepared to provide such a service to the poor made for good relations between the town and its scholars. Bartholomew was popular with his patients, especially when his absent-mindedness led him to forget to charge them.

But tolerance by the University did not mean acceptance by its members, and Bartholomew was regarded as something of an oddity by his colleagues. Many scholars disapproved of his dealings with the townspeople, and some of the friars and monks believed that his teaching verged on heresy because it was unorthodox.

Bartholomew had been taught medicine by an Arab physician at the University of Paris, but even his higher success rate with many illnesses and injuries did not protect him from accusations that his methods were anathema.

Thorpe turned to the obese Benedictine. ‘What word is there from the Chancellor about our discovery?’ he asked.

‘Master de Wetherset wants Doctor Bartholomew to inspect the bones you have found to ensure their authenticity,’ said Michael carefully. What the Chancellor had actually said was that he wanted Bartholomew to use his medical expertise to crush, once and for all, the rumours that the bones of a local martyr had been discovered.

He did not want the University to become a venue for relic-sellers and idle gawpers, especially since term was about to start and the students were restless. Gatherings of townspeople near University property might well lead to a fight. The Sheriff, for once, was in complete agreement: relics that might prove contentious must not be found. Both, however, suspected that this might be easier said than done.