Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Yes, there are people about. A very large number, filling the wide central nave, many kneeling, some standing, some praying with their eyes shut passing the foolish beads they use to pray with through their fingers, almost all with bowed heads, and those who keep their heads upright have their eyes fixed forward on the high altar beyond the choir, where all is a blaze of light from a thousand candles, some very big indeed. Clouds of incense fill the air, choirs chant that wretched rising and falling wail, bells chime, the chains on thurifers clank, jewelled vestments flash back the lights, and, happy Easter, no one has eyes for the naked wench who strides down one of the side naves, past the chancel and choir and so to the ambulatory and, at its apex, the lady chapel. I suppose if anyone does see me they put me down to hallucination produced in a dirty mind by the devil.

Here, behind the rood-screen, all is almost dark, and certainly deserted. I climb on the small altar and reaching up take her ladyship in my arms and, with a muttered apology, I hoick her down to the floor. She has a gold crown with a sunburst behind it which is not gold at all but leafed wood. She is a wooden doll, quite well carved and painted where her face and hands are visible to her worshippers, but left rough and unfinished where the cloth of her robes covers her. Her face and hands are polished oak, a little darkened with age, and not far off the colour of my own complexion. Her robes are a woollen blue mantle with a hood, a long black dress, and an underskirt of white linen trimmed with lace, which turns out not to be a skirt at all but merely an apron. I prop her against a pillar and climb into these clothes. They are not a bad fit, though I think I would have more than filled them had I not been starved for so long.

I tuck my wet hair up under the hood. The shudders recede. I almost feel warm. And, of course, hungry too. Well, I have learnt enough of the rites of this strange cult to know what lies in the little walled box behind its glowing oil lamp, and I make a very brief and inadequate snack of the dried while biscuit and the small silver cup of wine I find there. It's not a lot, but certainly I feel better for it. Time to go. I pause. Then, why not? I turn back, pick up the gold crown and place it on my head, over the hood, and then the jewellery – her rings, her ear-rings, and so forth.

Still clutching the bunched-up apron in my hand, I head for the transept doors that will take me back to the square and, in one of the darkest comers of all, find myself faced with none other than old Scar-face himself, my evil-minded torturer, of whom my last memory before I fainted was of him bringing himself off with one hand while poking a stick up my cunt with the other. A stick with thorns, a pruning from a rose perhaps.

I recognise him, he recognises me. 'By Our Lady…' he begins, and 'Yes, indeed,' I reply. For all I have been weakened old skills remain and I have surprise on my side. Furthermore the old fool drops to his knees, crossing himself as he does so. Quickly I wind the lacy apron round his neck once and still holding both ends of the scarf I have made of it, brace the sole of my right foot on his forehead, and… Snap!

Unwrapping the scarf and murmuring a Thuggee prayer to Kali, I run out into the square. There I stop, and look around. My breath returns to normal, my heartbeat steadies, the glow that took fire in my womb and spread to my furthest extremities when I straightened my knee begins to fade, and I look about me with a curse on my lips for all that this wretched city has done to me.

'Burn,' I say. 'Burn.'

And I know one day it will.

Interlude

Brother Peter Marcus preaches in the church of St Francis, Osneyy, on Easter Morning, 1460

'Ev erywhere on your road preach and say, "The kingdom of God is at hand". Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out devils, freely have you received, Freely give. Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor start", for the workman is worthy of his hire." The seventh to tenth verses of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

'Dear children of God, my sermon this Easter morning will be a very simple one. All I aim to do is remind you of the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, the kernel of his thought at any rate, and suggest how his teaching points down paths we should try to follow.

'First, at the centre of his thought was poverty. In this he followed in the footsteps of Francis, our founder, who heard the words of the Gospel I have just read to you at the moment of his conversion. From this came the certainty that righteousness has nothing to do with power or dominion or possessions or property. To own something is to take it from someone else. He who has a penny more has caused another to have a penny less. Nor does true righteousness confer power or the right to power, dominion or the right to dominion. John believed that dominion and power were the prerogatives of the civil authority, and not of the Church or churchmen. But even this he saw was a standby, a provisional thing, until all men and women, all people, should live together in harmony, all equal, and come together as the Israelites did in every jubilee year and hand back to all, to the people as a whole, all personal property.

'Next, Father John believed that the central thing in every man's life was the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon Cod, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the Church are not essentially necessary. Indeed, he went so far as to assert that round the sacraments, which are but signs and symbols, a dreadful and harmful habit of superstition has grown up, later hardened by the closed minds of the so-called fathers of the Church into dogma and doctrine. And by these means, by making the sacraments the prerogative of the priesthood, to grant or withhold as their fallen natures dictated, power and dominion over the gates of heaven and hell were seized by the Church, Thus no one can go to heaven unless they have received the body and blood of Christ and only the anointed priest has the power to magic the bread and wine into the body and blood. Brethren, I tell you, following the teaching of our Father John, this doctrine of transubstantiation is a blasphemous folly, a deceit which despoils the people and leads them to commit idolatry. If sacrament there must be, then let it be the sacrament of sharing the good things of life, the bread and wine, in good fellowship, as we have just done in our Easter Communion, and remembering as we do so the teachings of Jesus and his example, as he bade us.

'Brethren, these doctrines of the sacraments as laid down by Rome, Avignon or wherever the Pope is these days, deny the true Church that is in all of us and especially when two or three are gathered together in His Name. That is the Church our Lord left us with, the Church John lived and breathed for. The true Church consists solely of the community of the righteous, and its only authority is the teaching of our Lord as left to us in the New Testament. The supreme authority, the only authority, is Holy Scripture and particularly the actual words of our Lord as recorded in the Gospels. Which is why John Wycliffe devoted so much of his life to translating and disseminating the Gospels in our own tongue. It is for these and like reasons that after his death his hones were dug up and burnt for a heretic, as if this mean, malicious act could in any way diminish the power of his thought.

John's wisdom was not a homely stuff woven together on the loom of mere common sense, though there is much of that in it. It was far more, drawing together the threads left by his two great predecessors. Roger Macon and William of Occam. The first found truth in what he could see, feel, touch, hear, smell and measure. The second showed how the teaching of the fathers and the schoolmen has dragged us away from experience to speculation, from the particular to the general, from fact to essence. John began to see how all this provided the foundations for the tyrannies that spoil us all. It behoves us to continue down the road these three have shown us.