The Medieval Murderers - Sword of Shame

‘Hurry, Dole,’ whispered Askyl. ‘My eyes grow dim.’

The chaplain gabbled through the ceremony at a furious lick, while Askyl’s breathing grew more laboured as his lungs filled with blood. Rose cried when it was finished, and kissed his cold hand.

‘And now I shall absolve you of your sins,’ said Dole in a voice that cracked with emotion. ‘But I wish to God none of this had happened.’

‘I killed Curterne after Poitiers,’ breathed Askyl, almost inaudibly. ‘I did not do it because I wanted the sword, but because the sword had made him a coward. I never intended Lymbury to find it, or for us four to draw lots to keep it. I was going to drop it in the nearest river, but I did not have time…’

‘You did not have time because I suggested we search for Curterne’s belongings when his corpse was discovered,’ said Dole, self-disgust and bitterness strong in his voice. ‘I thought his armour and purse might soften the news of his death for his family. But Lymbury found the sword and declared Curterne’s family would have no need of such a weapon. We should never have let him convince us that keeping it was right. It was a shameful thing to have done.’

‘Lymbury and William were stabbed in the back,’ whispered Askyl with the last of his strength. ‘And now the blade has led a knight to slaughter a woman. It is truly a Sword of Shame.’

Rose’s child was born on a bitter January night. Prioress Christiana came to sit with her, Hog stood ready to run for the midwife should anything go wrong, and Dole whispered prayers for her safe delivery. Later, when the child lost the anonymity of babyhood, Hog liked to think the boy took after him.

The bailiff was content with his life, although he grieved for James, who had died quietly in his sleep just after the harvest had been gathered. Rose never meddled with his running of the estate, and since Michaelhouse always received prompt payments, their distant landlords did not interfere, either. The villagers were happier once the spectre of vengeful Frenchmen had been erased, and saluted strangers who rode through their parish.

Christiana received many piteous letters from Dame Pauline, begging to be allowed back because she was half-starved and constantly cold, but Christiana could not read, and her new secretary, Chaplain Dole, always told her the old nun was happy at Chatteris.

Dole baptized Rose’s child Elias Askyl. The boy’s mother wanted him to be a warrior, and return home loaded with the spoils of war, but Elias preferred ploughs to weapons, and showed no interest in the broken sword Rose kept hidden in a disused chimney. His son-also Elias, although he preferred the more refined ‘Haskell’ to Askyl-inherited his father’s love of the land, but he paid a smith to repair the sword, although the job was poorly done and the weapon was never the same again. Rose died at a great age bemoaning the fact that she had sired a dynasty of farmers, and the sword was consigned to the chimney again.

Another Elias Haskell found it many years later, when he demolished the old manor house and built himself a larger, grander home. He polished it up and hung it over the fireplace, where it remained until a bitterly cold winter, when a stranger from the Globe Playhouse in Southwark, London arrived cold and weary at Valence Manor.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Michaelhouse was granted the hundred-acre Ickleton estate known as Valence Manor in 1349, and the rent was an important source of income for the College-it funded two fellowships and a chaplain. Joan and Philip Lymbury were lords of Lymburys Manor in the mid-fourteenth century.

Ickleton Priory, a house of Benedictine nuns, was founded in the 1150s. Prioress Alice Lacy was deposed by the Bishop of Ely in 1352, and her successor may have been Christiana Coleman, who was in post by 1361. Other nuns were Pauline de Gras, mentioned in a deed of the 1350s, and Rose Arsyk. William the Vicar was priest of St Mary’s Ickleton after 1353, and the nuns’ chaplain in 1378 was Geoffrey Dole. An Ickleton villager, who destroyed all the convent’s deeds during the Peasants Revolt of 1381, was called James Hog.

The Battle of Poitiers was on 19 September 1356.

Ickleton, 1604

It was early afternoon but already the weather was closing in, so I was relieved to see the arrow-shaped spire of the church and a scatter of houses. The snow, which had been falling in a half-hearted fashion, was starting to come down in great wet gouts. I reined my horse in and took stock of the surroundings. What little I could see of the landscape stretched flat and lifeless beyond the confines of the village. Bare trees marked the lines of watercourses, before everything was swallowed up in the snowy haze.

My hired horse shook his head as if in doubt over the whole enterprise. The horse’s name was Rounce. Rounce wasn’t happy. Well, that made two of us. The extra sense which animals are said to possess probably told him that I wasn’t comfortable in his company.

I glanced over my shoulder as if I might have been able to glimpse the city of Cambridge but, of course, it lay several miles behind me. If I turned round straightaway, I’d probably get back by nightfall-or I would have done in the absence of snow. Now the track would be growing obscure and I risked blundering into some fen. There were more ditches, rhines and fens in this part of the world than you could shake a stick at. In any case, I was reluctant to give up my quest.

I’d found the village of Ickleton, identifying it by the arrow-like spire of the church. An old fellow who was a member of one of the university colleges had been very helpful, even if he turned out to be somewhat deaf so that I’d had to repeat my request several times. He told me that the Maskells were long-time inhabitants of Ickleton, a village to the south of the city. The kind old gent had even traced out the route on a scrap of paper. Finding the house called Valence should be the easy part. And at least I had come this far, although the journey had taken longer than I’d thought and I hadn’t foreseen the change in the weather. My horse and I had started off on a cold, crisp morning with the sun burning fair in the sky. Now I was growing anxious about the return. But before I could turn round I had to reach my destination.

If only this damned snow would lift for a moment…

And, as if my thoughts had been overheard up above, it did lift when the wind dropped momentarily and the snow paused about its business. To my left was revealed a large house standing in isolation. Trees lined the sides of a track leading towards it. The house looked flat in the whitened air, as if cut from card. Instinctively I knew that this was the place I was looking for, the house called Valence. More cheerful now, I turned Rounce’s head in the direction of the house. But the animal’s gait altered within a few paces and I realized something was wrong.

I dismounted thankfully-getting off a horse is always a pleasure as far as I’m concerned-and lifted Rounce’s front hoof, his left one. Sure enough, a stone was lodged there. I took off my gloves and tried prying it out with my fingers. But my hands were cold and clumsy, and the horse suddenly grew restive. Rather than attempting to get the stone out myself it would be much easier to lead him the short distance to the house I’d just glimpsed and let the stable-hand take care of him. Why, old Rounce might even be fed and watered there, and old Nick Revill receive some refreshment indoors.

While I was down at ground level I saw that I was having trouble with my own left foot. It wasn’t so much that my shoes weren’t watertight-nothing new there, I’m only a poor player who must wear his shoes to the bone-but that the copper buckle on the left one was loose. The buckle has no value but I like it because it is in the shape of a love-knot. Rather than risk the buckle falling off and getting lost, I detached it altogether and slipped it into the pocket of my doublet.