The Medieval Murderers - The Deadliest Sin

‘What is the town gossip saying about this new fellow?’ demanded the coroner of William Hangfield one morning. ‘Is he living in Giffard’s house now – and possibly in Giffard’s bed?’

His officer grinned at his master’s salacious mind.

‘I doubt that very much, sir! He has taken lodgings in Queen Street and, though he is apparently a good-looking fellow of about Eleanor Giffard’s age, the gossips still have their money placed on Jordan fitz Hamon as the next occupant of her bed.’

The routine of coroner’s work soon displaced the death of the physician as the centre of discussion between the coroner and his officer. As well as the usual run of fatal stabbings in the wharfside alehouses, deaths under millwheels or the occasional hanging, William’s time was occupied by a collision of two vessels in the narrow Avon Gorge during a gale, which led to the drowning of a dozen seamen. Recovering and identifying the bodies from the several miles of tidal mud and turbid water then took him several days. It was at the end of this that the Giffard murder reared its head once again.

When William arrived at the castle one morning, the old clerk said that one of the city watchmen was waiting in the Great Hall to report a death. The Watch was the rudimentary police force of Bristol, a handful of men each armed with a staff and a cudgel, who attempted to keep order in the city streets, especially at night when drunken sailors were brawling outside every alehouse. The coroner’s officer knew them all and he soon found Egbert, a tall blond man of Saxon descent, sitting at a bench in the hall, drinking from a pint pot of cider.

‘What have you got for us this time?’ he asked. ‘Not another boatload of drowned shipmen, I hope.’

The watchman shook his head. ‘Just a dead beggar, William. As usual, it was a boy with a dog who found him, in a hovel along Welsh Back.’

This was part of the long quayside along the river, between the city walls and the bend in the Avon where it turned down into the gorge.

‘He’s gone off a bit, but no signs of violence,’ he added.

William decided he had better look for himself and the two men set off for the riverside. They crossed the entry of the Frome stream into the Avon, dug out in the last century to divert the smaller river, to act as an additional defence to the city and to give some extra space for the burgeoning number of ships coming up from the sea. This was the maritime heart of the city, the second busiest port in England. An unbroken line of ships lay against the wharfs, riding high on the flood tide.

Labourers ran up and down gangplanks with sacks of merchandise on their shoulders, taking them either in or out of the warehouses set back from the quayside. Wooden derricks craned bales and barrels from the ships’ holds, and the scene was one of prosperous activity. For a moment, William was reminded of Jordan fitz Hamon and his wealthy father, who probably owned many of these vessels.

As well as storehouses and barns behind the quay, there was a variety of other buildings, a few alehouses and some private dwellings, mostly small and often semi-derelict, to the point of being little more than heaps of rotting timber. Many of the stevedores working the ships lived there in mean circumstances and it was towards one of these that Egbert made his way.

‘He’s in that one, probably been dossing down in there for weeks,’ he said, leading William to a ramshackle hut, which still had a sagging roof of mouldering thatch on walls of rotting wood. There was a door, but it was half open, tilted back on the one remaining hinge.

‘Stinks in there, mainly due to the corpse itself,’ warned the watchman.

Once inside, Williams saw that the single room was half-filled with rubbish, but on the beaten-earth floor a figure lay on its side. It was fully clothed but the skin visible on the back of the neck was swollen and greenish in colour. Several dead rats lay on the floor a few feet away.

‘He’s been dead a couple of days, given this hot weather,’ said Egbert. Both men were well used to visiting corpses in all states of decay, and the sight and smell did not cause them any distress, The coroner’s officer pulled on the dead man’s shoulder to roll him face up, when an elderly man with grey hair was exposed. The features were distorted by pressure against the floor as well as early putrefaction and a number of rat bites, but the watchman immediately said that he knew the man.

‘Don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him about the city for years, usually rooting in rubbish middens for something to eat.’

William crouched to make a cursory examination of the neck and head to exclude obvious injuries, but given the state of the flesh, he made no effort to look at the rest of the body under the clothing.

‘Best get him taken on a handcart up to the dead-house in the castle, where we can have a better look, before he gets a pauper’s burial,’ he said, rocking back on his heels. He looked around the derelict room and then frowned. ‘It’s strange that he has such good clothing upon him. This cote-hardie is of best wool under the dirt. Odd that such a beggar as this would be so well-dressed, unless he stole the clothing.’

Egbert agreed, pointing to the man’s footwear. ‘Those boots are very fine, if you like toes as pointed as that. They must have cost a few shillings – and they are hardly worn, if you ignore the rat bites.’

William looked more closely at the boots, which were of fine soft leather. In a number of places, this had been nibbled away, the edges being serrated, typical of rat bites, which were also present on the old man’s face and hands. The woollen hose underneath was exposed in places, ripped and torn by the rodents’ sharp teeth.

Something in William’s memory clicked into place as he recalled helping the boot-boy shift some of his master’s clothing.

‘I wonder if he got these from the monks in St James’s?’ he said to Egbert. ‘The widow of Robert Giffard gave away a lot of clothes for charity.’

The watchman shrugged. ‘Maybe, but this poor old soul didn’t enjoy them for long.’

He suddenly turned away and stamped hard on the floor with his heavy boot. William saw that he had crushed the head of a rat, which had still been moving slightly.

‘May as well put the thing out of its misery,’ he said laconically, showing a compassion that was unusual in that day and age.

William looked more closely at the rats on the floor. There were three that were obviously stone-dead, though not decomposed in any way. Then his eye caught a movement under a pile of rubbish and he saw another rodent, twitching and jerking slightly, its back arching spasmodically. Then it sudden went limp and lay still, obviously dead.

‘What’s killing these vermin?’ asked Egbert. ‘Is there something poisonous amongst this rubbish?’

The coroner’s officer rubbed his stubbly chin thoughtfully. ‘You may be nearer the truth than you imagine, Egbert. Let’s get this old fellow’s cadaver taken back to the castle dead-house as soon as we can, before he goes off any further.’

The watchman went off to the quayside to commandeer a handcart to shift the corpse up to the castle, where a leanto shed in the outer bailey was provided as a temporary mortuary for bodies awaiting burial. While he was away, William found an old sack amongst the debris in the hut and dropped the four dead rats into it, carefully picking them up by the tails, using a piece of rag to protect his fingers from any noxious substance that might be exuding from them.

An hour later, they had pulled the clothing from the beggar, not without a few choice oaths at the smell both of the putrefaction and of the filthy state of the old man, whose last wash must have been long before the King’s coronation. The boots and brown woollen hose were placed in a clean sack, the rest bundled up and put on a shelf in the deadhouse.