The Medieval Murderers: The Tainted Relic

‘You’re too late, Gabriel, the ale is all gone!’ mocked Gwyn, grinning at his friend, the sergeant of the castle’s men-at-arms. The grizzled old soldier touched his hand to his helmet in salute to de Wolfe, who he greatly respected as another seasoned warrior.

‘This man wants to report a violent death, Crowner. Aylmer is his name, the reeve from Clyst St Mary.’ A reeve was the overseer of a manor, who organized the work rotas for the bailiff and was a kind of village headman. This was the first time he had had dealings with this new-fangled business of coroners, and he looked at the new official with curiosity and some unease.

He saw a forbidding figure sitting behind the trestle, a man as tall as Gwyn, but not so massively built. He was dressed in a plain tunic of black, a colour that matched the abundant jet hair that curled down to his collar and the dark stubble on his long, lean face. Heavy black eyebrows overhung deep-set eyes and his big hooked nose and slightly stooped posture gave him the appearance of a great bird of prey. Aylmer had heard gossip about him and saw now why his military nickname had been ‘Black John’.

‘Well, what’s it all about, man? Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,’ snapped the coroner.

The reeve was jerked into activity and quickly described how a man had been found that morning at the side of the road, with injuries from which he died in less than an hour. He had been discovered by a couple of villagers who were on their way to repair sheep pens on the other side of the woods. One had run back to Clyst to raise the hue and cry, but nothing had been found anywhere and the bailiff had sent Aylmer posthaste to Exeter to notify the coroner.

‘We have heard that we must tell you straightway of all deaths, Crowner,’ he said earnestly. ‘Not even to move the body, so we understand.’

He said this as if it were a totally incomprehensible command, but de Wolfe nodded. ‘You did the right thing, Reeve. Do you know who this man might be?’

Aylmer shook his head. ‘A total stranger, walking the high road. God knows where he was coming from or going to. Not a local, that’s for sure.’

At the moment when the reeve was telling his story, a small group of men were squatting around a dying campfire in a forest clearing, a couple of miles from Clyst St Mary. All were dishevelled, some were dressed in little better than rags, and none looked well fed-a pathetic band of outlaws, bound together only by their hatred of authority and their fear of the law officers of Devonshire. Each one of the nine had a different reason for being outcast in the forests-some had escaped from gaol, either before trial or after they had been convicted, and were waiting to go to the gallows. Gaol-breaking was common, as every prison guard was open to bribery, and often the local community was eager to save the expense of feeding them until they were hanged. Others had sought sanctuary in a church after some crime, then chosen to abjure the realm. The coroner would have taken their confessions, then sent them dressed in sack-cloth to a port to get the first ship out of the realm of England-but as soon as they were around the first bend in the road, many such abjurers would throw away the wooden cross they had to carry and melt into the trees to become outlaws. The remainder had just run away when accused of some crime, whether guilty or not. Many did not trust the rough justice meted out by the manor, shire or King’s courts-others knew they would be convicted and, as the penalty for most crimes was death, they chose the leafy refuge of the forest or the wilderness of the moors. If such suspects failed to answer to four calls at the shire court, they were declared outlaw and henceforth were ‘as the wolf’s head’-in other words, any man could legitimately slay them on sight and, as with the wolf bounty, claim five shillings if they took the outlaw’s head to the sheriff. This particular group eked out their existence by preying on travellers on the roads between Clyst St Mary and Honiton, though they also stole sheep and poultry from neighbouring villages. One or two even earned a few pence by working in the fields of certain villages, where the reeves turned a blind eye to outlaw labour when the need arose. They lived rough in the forest, sleeping in shelters of woven branches or holes dug in hillsides or river banks, stealing food from isolated crofts or buying it with money thieved from passers-by.

Today, they clustered around the two men who had assaulted and robbed the chapman on the high road, to see what they had stolen.

There was no communal spirit among these men, no sharing of booty, and, unlike the larger gangs, they had no proper leader. Each man kept what he had stolen, and those who failed to make a hit went hungry. But curiosity was a powerful thing, and they all wanted to see what Gervase of Yeovil and Simon Claver had managed to get today.

‘We had to beat the bastard quite hard,’ grunted Gervase. ‘He fought back well enough.’ As he spoke, he untied the straps on Blundus’s pack and tipped the contents on to the ground.

‘What in God’s name is this rubbish?’ snarled Simon, stirring a collection of small boxes and packets with his foot. Apart from a moderately clean spare tunic, a couple of undershirts and some hose, the packets were the only things in the pack.

‘I thought you said he was a chapman?’ sneered one of the other outlaws. ‘Where’s all his stock, then?’

‘He had twenty pence in his purse,’ countered Simon defensively, aggrieved at the critical attitude of his fellows. ‘I took that and Gervase here snatched his pack.’

‘You came off best, then,’ cackled the other man. ‘What he’s got doesn’t look worth a ha’penny!’

Gervase was looking thoughtfully at the collection of oddments on the ground, and began sorting through the packets and rolls, mostly wrapped in bits of leather or parchment. One particular object, a small wooden box wrapped in soft leather, caught his attention, and he unwrapped it and studied a small piece of parchment with interest, Simon looking over his shoulder suspiciously.

‘I might get a few pence for some of this stuff, if I can get into the city,’ he said with false nonchalance. He threw the clothing at Simon as he stuffed the other objects back into the pack.

‘Here, you can take these, you could do with some clean clothes, the way you stink!’

Simon, a tall, sinewy man of thirty, with a nose horribly eroded by some disease, looked suspiciously at his fellow-robber, afraid that he was being outwitted.

‘What’s that stuff, then? It was me that hit the pedlar the hardest, maybe I should be getting a share of it?’

To appease him, Gervase, a stockier older man, unrolled one of the packets and displayed a shrivelled piece of skin in a glass vial.

‘Some lucky charm to peddle to a gullible widow, no doubt. Probably claimed to be St Peter’s foreskin! Worth tuppence, if I’m lucky!’

Though Simon continued to look suspiciously at Gervase, the others soon lost interest in this mundane collection and, after kicking the last glowing embers of the fire into extinction, drifted away, leaving Gervase to shoulder the half-empty pack and wander off deeper into the trees, headed in the general direction of the road to Exeter.

As he walked, he again gave thanks for the fact that he was better educated than these dolts among whom cruel fate had thrown him. He had plans to escape the outlaw life as soon as he could, and this might be the opportunity he had been seeking for over a year. Gervase knew that many other outlaws had unobtrusively slipped back into normal life after an interval, usually at a place well away from their original haunts. One had even become a sheriff, until he was found out several years later.