The Medieval Murderers: The Tainted Relic

The narrow street was busy, especially with porters lugging large bales of wool or pushing handcarts laden with goods from the quay-side. The usual throng of loungers and tradesmen mixed with wives and grandmothers around the striped canvas booths that lined the edges of the muddy street. Beggars and cripples hunched against walls, and at the gate of the churchyard a leper swung his rattle and hopefully held out his bowl for alms. Some more permanent shops were open behind the flimsy stalls, their shutters hinged down to form counters displaying their goods.

But Robert Blundus was not looking to buy anything except a night’s lodging, and his gaze was turned upward to seek the icons of the local inns. Given that only one person in a hundred could read, the taverns advertised themselves by signs hung over their doors. Looking along the street, he picked out several familiar devices-there was a Bush, an Anchor and a Crown. He chose the latter as looking slightly less dilapidated than the others and, ducking his head under the low lintel, went inside.

The large room that took up the whole of the ground floor was lit only by the flames from a large fire burning in a pit in the centre, a ring of large stones embedded in baked clay separating it from the rushes strewn over the floor. A bench ran all around the walls and a few stools and more benches were scattered around the hearth. The room was filled with men, though in one corner he heard raucous laughter coming from a pair of whores who were cavorting with some travellers. The air was thick with wood-smoke, sweat and spilt ale, the normal atmosphere of a busy tavern.

Blundus made his way towards the back of the taproom, ignoring the blasphemous abuse of a young serving-maid who bumped into him with a tray of ale-pots. He found the innkeeper, a surly man with a face badly scarred by old cow-pox, and negotiated for accommodation and food. For a penny, he was promised supper, two quarts of ale and clean straw in the loft. The landlord pointed to a wide ladder in the corner and Blundus shrugged off his pack and manhandled it up the steps. Here he found a dozen hessian bags stuffed with bracken or straw, laid out in rows under the rafters of the thatched roof. He chose one nearest to a dim tallow-dip that flickered on a shelf and dumped his backpack alongside it. The loft was deserted at that time of day, but the pedlar was wary enough to remove a small package wrapped in kid leather and put it for safe-keeping in the scrip on his belt.

Downstairs, he was served his promised meal on a rough table under the ladder, alongside a row of casks of ale and cider. An earthenware bowl of mutton stew was banged down in front of him by the foul-mouthed serving-maid, together with a thick trencher of stale bread on which was a slab of fat boiled pork. A spoon crudely carved from a cow’s horn was supplied for the stew, but he used his own dagger to attack the pig meat. A half-loaf of rye bread and a lump of hard cheese followed, and he considered that the food was adequate in quantity, if not quality-though after days of shipboard tack, he was in no mood to complain. After two large pots of passable ale, he felt ready to sleep, as it was now dark outside.

Climbing back up the ladder, Blundus felt both his advancing age-he was almost fifty-and the effects of three days rolling across the Channel on a small boat, so he was glad to flop down on to his bag of straw. He opened his pack again to pull out a woollen cloak to serve as a blanket, then could not resist another look at his most prized acquisition. In the dim light, he groped in his belt pouch and unwrapped the soft leather bundle, revealing a small wooden box, small enough to lie across his hand, intricately carved and partly covered in gold leaf, though much had worn off to reveal the dark rosewood underneath. Blundus opened the hinged lid and looked again at the glass vial that lay inside. He took it out, pulled off the gilded stopper and tipped the contents into his palm. Though he had examined it several times before, the thing still intrigued him-a grey stick-like object, a few inches long, composed of dried wood, as hard as stone. The surface was dark brown in places, which he assumed was the alleged staining with the blood, though Blundus neither believed nor cared whether it had genuinely come from the cross of Jesus Christ. As a connoisseur of relics, however, he knew that it must have considerable value, given its unusual authentication.

Cynically, but realistically, he knew that if all the alleged fragments of the True Cross revered in abbeys, priories and cathedrals across Europe were assembled together, they would not reconstitute a cross, but a small forest! Similarly, most of the bone fragments of the saints and martyrs owed their origin to sheep, swine and even fowls. Still, no religious establishment that wished to attract the lucrative pilgrim trade could afford to be without a relic or two-and the more extravagant the claims of origin, the more valuable they were.

Robert Blundus slipped the relic back into its tube and replaced the wooden plug. Though ostensibly he was a common chapman, this was a cover for his real trade, as a dealer in religious relics. He travelled the roads of England in his search and often went to France, Spain and even Italy to seek sanctified artefacts. He prided himself on dealing in a better class of relics than the many pedlars who hawked homemade or obviously spurious objects about the countryside, and he had built up a reputation for procuring good material. This particular relic was such a prize addition to his stock because it had a certificate of provenance. He felt in the little box and took out a folded strip of parchment, bearing a short sentence in Latin. He could not read it, but for a silver coin a clerk in Fontrevault Abbey had translated it for him. This is a fragment of the True Cross, stained with the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was preserved for safe-keeping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It was signed by Geoffrey Mappestone, Knight-and, most important of all, bore a small wax seal carrying an impression from his signet ring over the date, July 1100.

Blundus grinned to himself as he carefully put away the vial and parchment and wrapped up the wooden box. Thankfully, the Crusader’s certificate of authentication made no mention of Barzak’s curse, which might well have reduced the value of the relic to almost nothing.

As he lay back on his pallet, trying to ignore the influx of strange fleas that entered his clothing to breed with his own French mites, he sleepily went over in his mind what the abbey clerk had told him. The man was a priest in lower orders, employed in the chancery of Fontrevault, the famous abbey in Anjou, and was thus well acquainted with the gossip and legends of that place. Sweetened by his translation fee and several cups of red wine, he told Blundus that the relic had been brought to the abbey over ninety years earlier, in the first years of the century. It had been sold to the then abbot by one Julius, who had travelled from Marseilles, where he had landed by ship from the Holy Land.

He was paid for it in gold, on the basis of Sir Geoffrey’s authentication, but that evening, on his way to the nearby Loire to take a boat down to the coast, Julius had been struck by lightning in a sudden violent thunderstorm that had appeared from a clear blue sky. The clerk was happy to relate the gruesome fact that when the blackened corpse was found, the gold had been fused into a molten mass which had burned into Julius’s belly!

The abbot had had a special gilded box made for the relic, which was placed in an ornate casket upon the altar of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, off the main nave of the great abbey. Though originally vaunted as a most important acquisition, it soon fell out of favour, as pilgrims and cripples who came to pray and supplicate before it either gained no benefit or actually became worse. Within a few years, the relic was shunned and ignored, especially after ominous rumours began circulating about the curse, brought back by knights and soldiers returning from the First Crusade, especially some of the newly formed Templars. The chancery clerk had told Blundus that the present abbot had plans to remodel the chapel and either consign the relic to a remote corner of the crypt or even send it to Rome for others to deal with the unwelcome object as they saw fit.