The Forest (20 page)

As he walked towards the abbot’s quarters Brother Adam looked with pleasure at the scene around him. Punctuated by the clanging bell that, every three hours or so, summoned the monks to prayer, the monastery was always a hive of quiet activity. There were the weaving and cloth-making workshops, and the fulling mill by the river at which the estate’s huge clip of wool was cleaned. The skins of the sheep and cattle provided numerous departments: a tannery – smelly, so outside the gate; a skinner’s shop for making hoods and leather blankets; a shoemaker’s – very busy since every monk and lay brother needed two pairs of boots or shoes every year. By the cloisters was the parchment and bookbinding department. There was a flour mill, a bakery, a brewery, two stable ranges, a piggery and a slaughterhouse. With its forge, carpenter’s, candlemaker’s, two infirmaries and a hospice providing accommodation for visitors – the abbey was like a little walled town. Or perhaps, with its Latin books and services, and the monks’ habits resembling the Roman dress of a thousand years before, it was more like a huge Roman villa.

Nothing, Adam reflected, was wasted; everything was used. Between the various buildings, for instance, the ground was carefully arranged in beds for vegetables and herbs. Fruits grew on trellises by sheltered walls, grapes on vines. There was honeysuckle for the bees whose hives, scattered about the inclosure, yielded honey and wax.

‘We are worker bees ourselves,’ he had once joked to a visiting knight. ‘But the queen we serve is the Queen of Heaven.’ He had been rather pleased with this conceit, although chiding himself afterwards for falling so easily into the sin of vanity.

Above all, the abbey was self-sufficient. ‘All nature’, he delighted to point out, ‘flows through the abbey. Everything is in balance, everything complete. The monastery can endure, like nature itself, to the end of days.’ It was a perfect machine for contemplating God’s wondrous creation.

And it was precisely this truth that was in his mind when he entered the abbot’s office, sat down beside the prior and gazed steadily forward, as the abbot turned to him and bluntly demanded: ‘Well, Adam, what are we to do about these wretched churches?’

It was a curious fact, born out of the experience of centuries, that if one thing brought trouble and strife to any monastery, it was, above all others, the possession of a parish church.

Why should this be? Wasn’t a church by its very nature a place of peace? In theory, yes. But in practice, churches had vicars, parishioners and local squires; and they all had one thing to argue about: money.

The church tithes – about a tenth of the parish’s production, usually – were paid by the parish to support the church and its priest. But if the church came into a monastery’s possession then the monastery took the tithe and paid the vicar. That frequently meant a dispute with the vicar. Even worse, if a Cistercian house had land in a parish it would normally refuse to pay any tithes itself – an ancient exemption granted the order when it was mostly clearing wasteland for its sheep, but hardly fair when it took over existing productive land. This would infuriate the vicar, squire and parishioners, and often led to litigation.

It was the threat of just such a dispute that had caused the abbot to ask Brother Adam to go through the abbey’s entire cartulary record and make a recommendation. The church in question lay a hundred miles away, beyond even the abbey’s little daughter house of Newenham, in still more westerly Cornwall and had been given to the abbey by a royal prince several decades earlier.

The abbot was particularly anxious to have everything settled because he had soon to depart, as abbots often did, to attend the king’s council and Parliament – a duty which might keep him away for some time.

‘I have two recommendations to make, Abbot,’ Brother Adam replied. ‘The first is very simple. This Cornish vicar hasn’t got a case. The yearly income he is to receive was agreed with his predecessor and there’s no reason to change it. Tell him we’ll see him in court.’

‘Quite right.’ John of Grockleton might be jealous of Adam, but he approved of this kind of talk.

‘You’re sure of your legal ground?’ the abbot asked.

‘Certain.’

‘Very well. Let it be done.’ The abbot sighed. ‘Send him a pair of shoes.’ The abbot had a rather touching faith that anyone who needed placating could be rendered happy by a gift of a pair of the abbey’s well-made shoes. He gave away over a hundred pairs a year. ‘You said you had a second recommendation?’

Brother Adam paused a moment. He had no illusions about the reception he was about to get. ‘You asked me to go over the entire record of our dealings with churches,’ he began carefully, ‘and I did. Outside Beaulieu itself, we have holdings in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Cornwall – where we also receive a large income from the tin mines. All these have parish churches. We also own a chapel elsewhere.

‘And in every single case we have been involved in disputes. In the nine decades since Beaulieu’s founding I can’t find one free from legal disputes over churches. Some have dragged on for twenty years. They’ll still be fighting us down in Cornwall, I can promise you, long after we’re all underground.’

‘But the abbey has always managed to deal with these problems, hasn’t it?’ the abbot asked.

‘Yes. Our order has become highly skilful at it. A compromise is found. Our interests are always protected.’

‘There we are, then,’ Grockleton interjected. ‘We always win.’

‘But’, Brother Adam gently went on, ‘at what cost? In Cornwall, for instance, do we do any good works? No. Are we respected? I doubt it. Hated? Certainly. Are we legally in the right in these matters? Probably. But morally?’ He spread out his hands. ‘We are amply endowed with Beaulieu alone. We don’t actually need these churches and their income.’ He paused. ‘I dare to say, Abbot, in this respect, that we are scarcely different from the Cluniacs.’

‘Cluniacs?’ Grockleton almost jumped out of his seat. ‘We are not in the least like the Cluniacs.’

‘Our order was set up precisely to avoid their mistakes,’ Adam agreed. ‘And after performing the task you set me, Abbot, I read the founding charter of our order again. The
Carta Caritatis
.’

The
Carta Caritatis
– the Charter of Love – of the Cistercians was a remarkable document. Written by the first effective head of the new order, an Englishman as it happened, it was a code of rules designed to ensure that the white monks would stick, without deviating, to the original intent of the ancient rule of St Benedict. His point was, exactly, that the Cistercian houses should be modest, plain and self-sufficient, so as to avoid the distractions of worldly entanglements. And one of his sternest injunctions was that on no account were Cistercian houses to own parish churches.

‘No parish churches,’ the abbot nodded sadly.

‘Would it not be possible’, Adam asked gently, ‘for Beaulieu to exchange these churches for other properties?’

‘They were royal gifts, Adam,’ the abbot pointed out.

‘Given long ago. Perhaps the king would not mind.’

King Edward I, that mighty legislator and warrior, had spent much of his reign subduing the Welsh and was planning to do the same to the Scots. He might not be interested in what the abbey did with its royal endowments. But you never knew.

‘I’d hate to ask him,’ the abbot confessed.

‘Well,’ said Brother Adam with a smile, ‘I have satisfied my conscience by bringing the matter before you. I can do no more.’

‘Quite. Thank you, Adam.’ The abbot indicated that he could retire.

For some time after he had gone, the abbot remained gazing silently into space, while John of Grockleton, his claw-like hand resting on the edge of the table, sat watching him. At last the abbot sighed.

‘He’s right, of course.’

Grockleton’s claw clenched just a little, but he did not interrupt.

‘The trouble is,’ the abbot went on, ‘many of the other Cistercian houses own churches too. If we make a fuss, the other abbots might not take it very kindly.’

Grockleton continued to watch. Privately he couldn’t have cared less if the abbey owned a dozen churches and hammered half the vicars in Christendom.

‘As abbot,’ the abbot mused on, ‘one has to be careful.’

‘Very.’ Grockleton nodded.

‘His first recommendation is clearly right. This Cornish vicar must be squashed.’ He sat up briskly. ‘What else have we to deal with?’

‘The assignment of duties, Abbot, while you are away. There were two appointments you mentioned: the novice master and the new supervisor of the granges.’

After the recent violent episode involving Luke at the grange the abbot had decided that, for a year at least, a trusted monk ought to act as a permanent supervisor, visiting the granges continuously. ‘I want them to feel’, he had said, ‘an iron hand.’ It was not a pleasant task for any monk; he would miss many of the daily offices in church. ‘But it must be done,’ the abbot had decreed.

‘Novice master,’ the abbot began. ‘Brother Stephen needs a rest, we all agree. I was thinking, therefore, of Brother Adam. He’s awfully good with the novices.’ He nodded contentedly.

Grockleton’s claw remained at rest upon the table. When he spoke, it was quietly. ‘I have a request, Abbot. While you are away and I am in charge, I should like you not to put Brother Adam in charge of the novices.’

‘Oh?’ The abbot frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because this matter of the churches is in his mind. I do not doubt his loyalty to the order …’

‘Certainly not.’

‘But if, for instance, a young novice should ask, while reading the
Carta Caritatis
…’ He paused conscientiously. ‘Brother Adam might find it hard not to criticize us …’ He stopped, then added meaningfully: ‘That would leave me in a very difficult position. I don’t think I’d be adequate …’

The abbot gazed at him. He wasn’t deceived. He could just imagine the care with which Grockleton would ensure that Brother Adam was embarrassed. On the other hand he couldn’t deny that there was an element of truth in what the prior said. ‘What do you propose?’ he asked coldly.

‘Brother Matthew is still shaken. But he would make a perfectly adequate novice master. Why not let Brother Adam supervize the granges? His period of meditation, I believe, will have strengthened him for the task.’

The sly dog, the abbot thought. That last was a dig at him for favouring Adam with light assignments. The message was clear: I’m your deputy, making a reasonable request. If you don’t give your favourite an unpleasant task I’ll make trouble for him.

And then an unworthy thought occurred to him: if I can put up with the prior, then Adam can put up with the granges for a while. He smiled at Grockleton sweetly. ‘You are right, John. And if, as I suspect, Adam may one day be abbot, a
reforming
abbot, perhaps’ – he enjoyed watching Grockleton wince when he said that – ‘then this experience will be very useful to him.’

So, before the abbot left the monastery at the ending of the year, Brother Adam was assigned to the granges.

On a wintry December afternoon Mary walked hurriedly towards Beaulieu.

A cold wind was blowing into her back, pushing her along the tiny track as the heather scraped her legs. To the north the distant tree line had sunk beneath the slow swell of the ground so that the landscape resembled the bare tundra it must have been thousands of years before. Behind her, over the expanse of brownish heather and dark-green gorse, banks of cloud with a faint orange glow were moving steadily along the coastline, threatening to overtake and smother her as she went eastwards, across the great waste between the Forest centre and the abbey, which was now called Beaulieu Heath.

She had no wish to be there; she was only doing it to please her husband.

Tom did not work for the abbey in winter, but this year the monks had called him in for a special task. They wanted a cart.

Tom was not usually a carpenter. It was difficult to persuade him to make anything in the house. But for some reason, all his life his imagination had been fired by the idea of making carts. A cart made by Tom Furzey was a formidable affair, with a framework base and four framework sides, each of which could be removed. Every beam was neatly jointed into its fellow. Tom’s carts were always the same and they would last until doomsday. But he would never make the wheels. ‘That’s wheelwright’s work,’ he would say. ‘I make the cart and he makes it go. That’s the way I look at it.’ He seemed to like to dwell upon this thought.

Once, when they were still on speaking terms, John Pride had got him to confess that he disliked the thought of making wheels because they were curved. ‘You’d make wheels if they could be square, wouldn’t you Tom?’ he had genially asked.

And Tom, to Pride’s delight had answered, thoughtfully: ‘Reckon I might.’

So Tom had gone to work on the cart for the monks. That had been ten days ago. It would take him at least six weeks to complete and while he did so he was staying at St Leonards Grange. Every few days Mary would visit him there. Today, she had promised to bring him some cakes. She was especially anxious to do so because she felt guilty for the fact that she was glad he was away – firstly because of Tom’s moods; secondly because of Luke.

In his strange, dreamy way, Luke had seemed almost happy living out in the Forest. Even as the weather grew cold he had always managed to make himself a snug lair somehow. ‘I’m just a forest animal,’ he had told her contentedly. He always claimed he could feed himself. But as she pointed out: ‘Even the deer get fed in midwinter.’ So as soon as Tom had departed for St Leonards she had brought Luke into their little barn. No one, neither her brother nor her children, knew he was being fed and sleeping there. She didn’t know how long it could last; it frightened her. But what else was she to do?

By the time she reached the edge of the farmlands that lay around the grange the wind had strengthened. There was a cold dampness around the back of her neck. Looking behind her, she saw that the yellowish clouds were barrelling on to Beaulieu Heath, bringing flurries of snow to the western edge. For a moment she wondered if she should turn back, but decided to continue, having come so far.