The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

Relics of saints were widely used to heal the sick, and also in rituals to raise spirits, angels and demons. The sword described in the story was used by priests who had been trained in the art of necromancy and in summoning spirits. Priests would undertake these rituals in the service of the Church, just as others would perform exorcisms. Today such rites would be condemned by most bishops, but in the Middle Ages they were regarded as part of Christian belief and practice, and a number of learned medieval scholars and theologians wrote detailed treatises on these rituals.

The widely held superstition that a dead man’s hand, or ‘hand of glory’, could be used to open any lock, render a thief invisible and put the occupants of the house to be burgled into a deep sleep was still believed as late as the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Observer newspaper of 1831 reports the arrest of a burglar caught using a hand of glory. These hands were normally cut from the corpse of a hanged man, but since they were also believed to have great curative powers, Father Edmund, in his crazed mind, might well have believed he could use the saint’s hand for this purpose, if she failed to cure the plague.

The return of the plague in 1361 affected Cambridgeshire particularly badly, striking many villages and towns that had escaped the first wave in 1348, with devastating results. Although young men and women were the major casualties of the 1361 outbreak, it did claim the lives of many others, especially those already weakened by the famine.

The events that led to the death of Christopher Dole, playwright and player, began one autumn evening when he put down his pen with a sigh. He rubbed his eyes and, by the light of the guttering candle, looked again at the last word he had written. Finis . The End. The conclusion of two days and nights of frantic scribbling. He had scarcely stopped to eat or drink. He had taken no more than a mouthful of bread and cheese or a gulp of small beer. If there were moments when he slept, he did not remember them.

Christopher shuffled the loose, folio-sized pages into order on his desk-top. He noted, almost with indifference, the way his handwriting grew worse as side after side of the ruled sheets was filled. The first few pages were neat enough but after that came the blotches, the crossings-out and inserted words. ‘Foul papers’ was the name for this, the first draft of a play. Well, these were very foul papers indeed.

Usually, the draft would be passed to a professional scrivener to make a fair copy. Then it would be transcribed once more into separate rolls containing the parts for the various players. But this play by Christopher Dole would never be seen and heard by an audience. A pity, thought Christopher, blinking and looking through the casement window, which was so small that, if he wished to read or write, he required a candle even on midsummer’s day. Yes, it was a pity this play he’d just completed would never be staged. There were some good things in it. Good things beginning with the title, which was The English Brothers . It contained a scattering of neat verses. A few good jokes. But there were also some dangerous items in The English Brothers . Items meant to bring down trouble on the head of the playwright. Not Christopher Dole but Mr William Shakespeare.

As Christopher thought of Shakespeare, his hands clenched and he felt the familiar knot in his stomach. The rest of the world considered the man from Stratford to be one of nature’s gentlemen, a generous and mild-mannered individual. But Christopher had particular reasons to hate the more successful playwright. One of them was to do with Shakespeare’s opportunism. Years before, Christopher had devised a play based on an old poem entitled The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet . Perhaps he was unwise enough to speak about his intentions, and word got back to WS. Or perhaps the Stratford man stumbled, by coincidence, across the same source. Certainly he worked much more quickly than Christopher. And, as Dole was bound to acknowledge when he finally saw Shakespeare’s love tragedy, WS had done a better job than he, Christopher, would have been capable of. A much better job.

This was the beginning of their rivalry, even if it was a rivalry mostly apparent on Dole’s side. Now he was determined to revenge himself on the individual who’d wronged him, using the playwright’s own medium of words. It was his last chance for revenge since Christopher Dole did not think he would be alive for much longer.

So he cobbled together, during forty-eight hours of frantic scribbling, a piece guaranteed to cause WS a few problems. And it was all his – Christopher Dole’s – own work. Or very nearly all. Lying on the desk-top was an ancient vellum manuscript, some of which Christopher had put to use in The English Brothers . This was an old drama known as The Play of Adam . To bulk out his own play, Christopher had copied a couple of pages from this piece, ones telling of the rivalry between Cain and Abel and the first murder, and presented them as a play-within-a-play. The manuscript was worn and, in places, the writing so faded that Christopher was forced to peer closely in order to copy it out. The play-within-a-play was a fashionable device. Shakespeare himself had done the very same thing in Hamlet .

A few months earlier Christopher had discovered the vellum manuscript in a chest in a neglected corner of the shop belonging to his brother, Alan, a bookseller. Alan had just turned down Christopher’s request for a loan and disappeared upstairs, above the shop. Christopher, feeling aggrieved at his brother’s refusal, had poked around among Alan’s stock of books. He’d unfastened the chest in the corner and, straight away, his curiosity was sparked by a wax seal securing one of several rolls bundled inside. The elaborate seal suggested the contents might be valuable.

Unthinkingly, Christopher broke the disc of wax. Casting his eyes over the text inside, he soon saw that it was from the earliest days of drama, a period when plays were scarcely to be distinguished from religious celebrations and festivals. He secreted the scroll inside his doublet, believing it might come in useful. And so it proved when he had transcribed a few dozen lines from the old text into his own hastily composed piece. Since Christopher Dole did not get on with his brother, he liked the fact that the section he’d copied out was to do with Cain and Abel. It had given him the idea of titling his work The English Brothers .

The material for the play itself he had discovered in a collection of antique tales. It was a narrative about the rivalry between a pair of English siblings who should have been fighting the Norse invaders but were instead more interested in fighting each other over the same noble lady. Christopher versified this story and dashed it down any old how, hardly caring how it came out.

The English Brothers was never going to be performed.

It would be printed, however. Printed without the approval of the authorities and without a licence. And it would bear Shakespeare’s name on the title page or, if not his name in full, then a hint of it. Let the man from Stratford explain himself to the Privy Council. They would definitely be interested in some of the coded comments in The English Brothers .

It was a late afternoon in autumn and growing dark. Christopher Dole might have slept now his work was complete but he was seized with the desire for action. He took the old vellum manuscript and hid it away inside his own chest, which contained nothing more than his shirts and other faded garments. Then he folded up the foul papers and tucked them inside his doublet. He snuffed out the dying candle and made his way out of the little top-floor room and down the rickety stairs of his lodgings.