A Plague of Heretics

Prologue

November 1196

The chapman could see that it was an unusual sort of funeral, even for such an outlandish place as Lympstone. There were corpses, bearers, mourners and a grave, but it was nothing like he had ever seen before.

He shrugged his bulky pack from his back and set it down with some relief on the dusty road outside the church gate. Behind him, the track led down to a primitive wharf, where the river lapped against the muddy banks of the estuary of the River Exe. From where he stood, he could see over the low hedge around the churchyard to a corner well away from the existing grave-mounds. Here a flat farm-cart had just arrived, with a patient ox between the shafts. Six sheeted bodies lay on its bare boards, but there was no sign of coffins. Two of the shrouded shapes were pitifully small.

At the side of the cart lay a large pit, a dozen feet square and almost the depth of a man. Some distance away, three labourers leaned on shovels, their noses and mouths swathed in rags, knotted at the backs of their necks.

As the pedlar watched, he saw four other men, swaddled in cloaks and gloves, with hoods over their heads and cloths tied around their faces, begin to carry the bodies to the gaping pit. Near the east end of the small church, from which a bell tolled mournfully, a group of silent people watched, taking care not to come within fifty paces of the cart. The only exceptions were a tall man, dressed in sombre grey, and a diminutive priest with a slightly humped shoulder. On the side of the pit, the tall one stood, his black hair blowing in the breeze as he held the edge of his cloak across his mouth. The little priest took no such precautions, but was standing boldly on the very edge of the grave, reading loudly in Latin from a small book, his other hand making the sign of the cross as each corpse made its final short descent down into the earth.

The chapman turned to a burly man standing next to him, the foul smell from his soiled leather apron marking him out as a fuller.

‘What’s going on, friend? What tragedy was this?’ he asked.

The fuller looked suspiciously at the pedlar. ‘Where’ve you been these past few weeks?’ he snapped.

‘Just got off a boat down at the quayside.’

The other fellow backed away, his suspicions deepening. ‘Not from abroad, are you? From foreign parts?’

His aggressive tone made the packman hurriedly shake his head.

‘No, I’ve come no further than from Paignton, down the coast. Hoping to sell more of my needles and threads up this end of the county.’

The fuller relaxed with a grunt. ‘The yellow plague is back again, no doubt brought in by seamen from across the Channel. Twice it’s struck this village since last month.’

He nodded towards the churchyard, where the last body was being laid in the common grave. ‘A whole family there, laid low inside three days. Yellow as gorse flowers, the lot of them.’

They both watched as the men with spades advanced on the heap of red earth alongside the pit, preparing to fill it in without delay.

‘So who are the two men at the graveside?’ persisted the pedlar, a naturally inquisitive soul.

‘The tall one is the king’s coroner from Exeter, Sir John de Wolfe. The bailiff called him because there were six dead in one house. Why he was summoned, I can’t fathom, for it’s obvious that it wasn’t foul play.’

‘The other one’s the parish priest, I suppose?’

The fuller spat contemptuously on the ground. ‘Not him! Our craven bastard’s too scared to go near anyone with the plague, even to shrive them. That brave little fellow is the crowner’s clerk.’

As the crowd in the churchyard began to drift away, the chapman shouldered his pack and trudged away from the village, heading for open country. Weary though he was, he had no desire to stay around Lympstone, if the yellow sickness was stalking its lanes.