Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

One weaver, a tall, thin old man, dressed in some splendour in velvet and with a gold chain round his neck, was especially pleased with this and invited us to take supper in his home and bed there too. So prosperous was he that he even had a spare room. His establishment put me in mind of Alderman Roger Dawtrey's in London, though it was not on the same scale. Still, he and his large fair wife, who had a big bony nose and huge breasts, together with his three daughters and his two sons-in-law, gave us excellent entertainment and a royal meal.

Later, as the maidservant of the household climbed the stair ahead of us with a beeswax candle to light us to bed, I asked Peter, 'And what of our lady? Our white lady on her white horse?'

And he replied, 'Oh, I love her madly, but would she get us to a table laden with roast goose, plum duff and cream? She dwells with the shepherds and the few ploughmen left, in the Green Wood, and with the gypsies.'

That night, as Peter lay snoring on the other side of the big bolster that lay between us I got to thinking. These people are prosperous. They make money. But they are frugal with it. They live well, but without ostentatious display or wild extravagance. Yet they are not misers. What do they do with their talents, their surplus gold?

A nobleman whose peasants have produced a surplus of food sells it for cash to artisans and merchants who do not have land. With this spare cash he indulges in conspicuous display, for that is what he values above all else, his self-esteem and the esteem of others. He will buy labour and materials to build ever larger castles and palaces, finer clothes, furniture, gargantuan* feasts, and, if, as so often happens, he is threatened by another nobleman, or he himself covets another nobleman's land, he will buy those most expensive items of all, arms, armour and men, and go to war.

And what will a peasant do who earns, either by hire or by selling his produce, more gold than he needs? Why, he will frugally save it up, bury it beneath the floors of his hut or hovel, against a day when the harvest will fail or his master turns him off his land.

But these weavers and spinners? And likewise merchants and artisans? Well, as a trader for others I have seen it with my own eyes, and I was seeing it again here in Burford. They buy another loom, more distaffs and spindles, and more wool. But they have no time of their own to operate them, so they buy the time of others. But just as they made more money from their own spinning and weaving than they needed, so they will sell their cloth for more than the cost of the extra looms and spinning tools and the time they had to buy, all added together, for there would be no point in doing it if they didn't. And that results in even more gold than they need. What to do with it? Why, the same again. Until one man would own hundreds, maybe thousands of looms, buy time from thousands of workers… and so on, and so on?

* Allow me one footnote as a warning to would-be pedants. OK, Rabelais came a hundred years later, but Gargantua and Pantagmel were popular names for giants throughout the middle ages – Enc Brit, 1911. J. R,

There'd be an end of it, of course. There would soon be more cloth in the land, in the world, than people needed, and once even-man had three coats, one for best, one for daily use, and one in case, there'd be an end of it. But would there? Would not the enterprising man not now look around for other things to make and sell?

My mind began to swim, I felt mentally dizzy, as I tried to formulate examples in my head of how it might work, inventing figures, multiplying them, forgetting the number I'd first thought of. Soon I began to sweat and moan at the enormity of it all. Peter woke up and, grumbling, prodded me into telling him what was bothering me.

When I had done so, with examples and figures, he finally said, 'Ali, with your tale of tubes that suck in sustenance and push out shit you fathomed the distant past. Now, with your man going to market with twenty yards of linen, you have unravelled the future. So go to sleep.'

'Wool,' I said. 'Cloth. Twenty yards of cloth not linen.'

'Funny,' he said, 'I could have sworn you said linen.'

The next day we set off in a north-westerly direction with serious intent to get towards Macclesfield, or Manchester, but still keeping to the byways and smaller places. The next night, I recall, we were given shelter in a barn in a bed of what was left of last year's hay. I remember it because when we stopped on the outskirts and looked around us there was a moment of evening stillness. Then a blackbird opened its throat and sang from the top of a willow tree, and round him, through the evening mist, we could hear all the birds, for miles around, singing their hearts out. The place was called Adle's Trap.

By now the bushes whose leaves had provided such tasty salads, and which served often in that area to make hedges, had burst into profuse bloom, which arched down over us, thousands of small white flowers in clusters so they looked like spray tumbling over the crest of a wave, the green surf that thunders against our coast here in Malabar. I know the comparison sounds far-fetched, but it was further justified by the fact that the ditches below these hedges were now filled with even tinier clusters of white flowers growing up in plate-shaped circles so it looked like the swirling of the wave before.

The first flowers, the ones on the bushes, had a heady fragrance, slightly sweet but somehow animal as well. Mah-Lo, I don't think I shall embarrass you by telling you what it smelt like. But for a man, and for some women, too, I daresay, it's the most exciting odour in the world. No wonder these flowers that bloom in the month of May are called may, which is one of the names Parvati or Uma has in those parts.

All of which led me to think with some nostalgia, indeed a little longing, for all I was even then a quite old old man, of our Uma, and to wonder where she might be and how she was faring.

Next day we passed through one of many towns in Ingerlond called Stratford. Peter said it was famed in those parts for the quality of the gloves it produced, which brought it some prosperity but nothing on the scale of that of the weavers and spinners in the hills we had left behind us. We crossed a river called Avon – there are as many Avons as there are Stratfords – and admired the swans that were building a big nest downstream in the rushes, which grew beneath a slanting willow in the churchyard. Then we pressed on a further hour or so up the Coventry road to a hamlet called Snitterfield.

Here a peasant called Shagsper took us in, showing some faith in Peter's robe for he needed help and guidance of the sort he felt a Franciscan might provide. The midwife hail gone into Stratford for the day and his wife was in labour and bleeding. Two or three women of the village, of the sort who make a profession of mourning and laying-out had already gathered at Shagsper's door anticipating the worst – or, from their point of view for they were like crows gathering about a corpse, the best.

Peter immediately made several infusions in which both fresh young raspberry leaves, willow-bark, valerian and rosemary figured, and, between her groans and screams, persuaded Mistress Shagsper to take them. Then he got his patient off her bed and on to the birthing stool, which her husband had been loath to do without the presence of the midwife. Presently she brought forth a thin-boned and wrinkled little boy. Peter hastily christened him John, thus ensuring that if he died he'd go straight to heaven.

However, the baby fed well from his mother's breasts, and the blue colour of his skin receded, became a healthier pink, and presently, hilled by his mother's singing, he went to sleep. 'Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, Come our lovely baby nigh,' she sang, probably making it up on the spot. 'Lulla, lulla lullaby.' Not the most moving or penetrating of lyrics, but it served.