The Medieval Murderers: King Arthur's Bones

So it was just the three, the abbot, chaplain and sacristan, who sat by the fire, musing over what had occurred and wondering what to do next.

‘Did we dream this?’ said Geoffrey. ‘Did we dream that we had found those bones?’

‘Of course not,’ said Henry. ‘Nor have they been taken by magic.’

‘Brother Owen seemed to think so,’ said Frederick. ‘He has been more affected than any of us.’

‘It is the Celt in him,’ said Henry. ‘But we shall all be affected if we do not act to remedy this situation. I mean, the good name of Glastonbury will suffer if it ever becomes known that we had Arthur’s bones in our care… and then mislaid them. Or allowed them to be taken from under our noses.’

‘No one knows yet that we have found the relics,’ said the sacristan.

‘No one apart from we four,’ said Geoffrey, pedantically counting on his fingers, ‘and Michael and the others who were present when they were exhumed. How long do you think they will keep it a secret?’

‘There is only one thing to do,’ said Henry de Sully.

He stood up so that his back was to the fire. He smiled without humour at the other two. He outlined his plan. There were, he said, other pieces of bone which had been disinterred during the excavations. It should not be too hard to find some larger-than-usual items that might be substituted for the missing ones belonging to the king. Even a skull which, by dint of artful bashing, might be given a blow simulating a fatal wound. They would pick among the bones in the coffin in the Lady Chapel and select those that might be fit for a monarch. ‘And after all,’ added the abbot, ‘we still have the cross signifying that Arthur was buried here.’

‘With respect, Abbot, it is an imposture,’ said Frederick the sacristan.

‘Good Brother, how is anyone to say with absolute certainty that the bones we choose are not a king’s?’

‘What about the lock of hair?’ said Geoffrey.

Henry de Sully turned and gazed into the depths of the peat fire. When he turned back again, his face was flushed from heat or inspiration.

‘There is a woman in the town, Margaret the wife of the tavern-keeper, I mean. She has a fine head of hair, fair hair. Brother Owen… talks to her from time to time, doesn’t he?’

The other two exchanged glances.

‘Our brother hears her confessions, yes,’ said Geoffrey.

‘He shrives her,’ said Frederick.

‘Well, then,’ said the abbot, ‘nothing could be simpler. When he has recovered, get Brother Owen to see what he can do to get a tress from this Margaret. Remember, meanwhile, that we do this not for personal profit or glory but for the sake of the abbey; we do it to protect our future.’

So it was that under the brightly coloured vaulting of the Lady Chapel and in the secrecy of night, the abbot, the sacristan and the chaplain rummaged among the human remains that had already been disturbed in the graveyard. They found what they were looking for: large bones for a man, even a skull that might be taken for the king’s, especially after it was given a great tap with a hammer.

Meanwhile, in the infirmary, Owen sighed and sweated with guilt. He turned on his side on his hard, narrow bed and remembered how he had copied the key to the abbot’s parlour, how he had slipped it to the tavern-keeper as he walked across the green on the way to evensong. He had already alerted Glyn, knowing from the abbot’s earlier summons that something of signifi cance had been found.

Lying on his sickbed, eyes staring into blackness, he had visions of men stealing into the abbey precincts while the monks were occupied at vespers, of dark shapes scurrying on the edge of the cloisters and the back of the kitchen quarters. It would not have taken the group long to get into the abbot’s parlour and scoop up Arthur’s relics.

Where were the bones now, he wondered?

But if he did not know exactly where they were, he knew in which direction they were going. They were being ferried across the marshes and peat bogs to the great channel separating England from Wales, they were being carried to the west under the protection of the guardians.

Once Arthur’s bones were safe from discovery by the English, Owen the cellarer did not much care if his own role in this affair was discovered. He had played his part, he had done his duty. Even so, once he was out of the infirmary the next day, he took the precaution of disposing of the duplicate key by throwing it in a stew in the abbey grounds. A large fish swam towards the surface to inspect Owen. Its mouth gaped. Owen was reminded of the abbot’s teeth.

There was no sequel to the disappearance of the bones. No one mentioned it. In fact, to his amazement he was invited to feast his eyes on those very items once again in the abbot’s quarters. Nods and hints gave him a good idea of what had occurred. As did Henry de Sully who, drawing him aside, explained that he should use whatever influence he had with the tavern-keeper’s wife to get her to surrender a lock of her golden hair.

‘Do you think you can manage that?’

‘Yes,’ said Owen cautiously.

‘Suggest she give it up as an act of penitence,’ said the abbot, smiling. ‘Her hair is a snare in which the hearts of men are caught. I refer to secular men, Brother Owen, who must be protected from the perils of golden hair. Penitence, I say.’

‘Yes, Abbot.’

‘She has much to be penitential about, I dare say.’

‘We all have,’ said Owen the cellarer. ‘We all have.’

Many miles across the water and among the hills to the west, at the time when Brother Owen was gazing open-mouthed on the substitute bones, a similar scene was taking place in an isolated, long-abandoned church. A second group of men was assembled in a circle around the genuine relics which had been taken from the abbot’s Hall in Glastonbury. They spoke little but their words were solemn. The men were dressed in the garb of artisans, which some of them were.

The church was a shell rather than a building, with ragged walls and a roof which was more holes than thatch. Tucked away in a fold among the hills, it had fallen into disuse when the village it served had withered away through sickness and migration. All that remained inside was a stone altar, as rough and fissured as a boulder newly tumbled from a hillside. The bones of Arthur and the leathern pouch containing the tress of hair were spread across the altar, illuminated by nothing more than the light of the moon and the stars which soared above the gaping roof. Yet to each man in that place the relics of the king seemed to shine with their own light.

They had paid their homage to the bones and now their leader – a slight man whose name was Meurig ap Rhys, a man with a widow’s peak as sharp as a flint dagger – gave his instructions on the safeguarding of the remains of the great king. When their duties ended, which they surely must at the conclusion of their own mortal existences, the task would pass to their offspring, he said. They were the Guardians. They held in trust the future lives of their race. He predicted that the day would come – not in their lifetime, nor that of their sons or even their sons’ sons, perhaps, but come it would – when the bones of the great warrior-king would be required once more. The crisis when the descendants of the present company would be called on to throw off the invader’s yoke. He swore them to silence on pain of those same lives.

Ap Rhys may have been slight of stature but his word was law. Two of his own sons were among the group. He nodded at them with particular emphasis as he bound the group to silence.

None of those standing in a ring about the bones doubted him. When the ceremony was finished, ap Rhys dismissed everyone save for his sons. He waited until the sounds of footsteps and horses’ hooves had died away on the still, frosty night. Then the three men retrieved the bones and leather pouch from the top of the altar-stone and reverently folded them in silken wrappings and deposited them in a small chest which had been brought to the dilapidated chapel for this very purpose. The chest was not large, certainly not large enough to draw attention, being no more than the length of a man’s arm and about two-thirds as wide. Placing the chest in a cart to which was tethered a small but sturdy pony, the men bowed their heads under a moon which was nearly at the full. After a moment’s silence, with the father leading the horse and the sons on either side of the cart, they paced off down the track towards the lowlands.