Crowner’s Quest

Chapter Three In which Crowner John holds an inquest

A few minutes later, de Wolfe was back in the cathedral Close, where Gwyn and Thomas waited for him at the front of the dead canon’s house.

‘There are too many folk to fit inside so I moved the cadaver out into the backyard,’ explained his officer. ‘I’ve laid him on a bier we borrowed from the cathedral porch.’

They walked through the house and out at the kitchen door. Gwyn had taken a chair from the hall and set it against the wooden fence. In the centre of the yard was the bier, a stout wooden stretcher with four legs and handles, on which lay the mortal remains of Robert de Hane, decently covered with a linen bedsheet. In a wide circle around it stood the servants from the house, the vicar-choral, the secondary priest, two choristers and several similar residents from nearby houses.

As John took his solitary seat, a convoy of priests, their black cloaks billowing, hurried down the alleyway from the Close to join the throng. They included the Archdeacon, the Precentor, the Treasurer and half a dozen canons, including the two who had been at the meeting that morning. De Wolfe noticed that the sheriff was not among them: he had no legal obligation to be present.

Gwyn started the proceedings in the traditional way, enjoying his chance to bellow at a group of senior churchmen. ‘All persons having anything to do with the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, draw near and give your attendance!’

The buzz of conversation died down as those present gave their attention to the coroner.

‘This is the inquest into the death of Robert de Hane, lately a canon of this cathedral,’ began de Wolfe formally, his hard voice cutting incisively through the cold air of the winter afternoon. ‘It is not the usual procedure as we are on ecclesiastical ground, which strictly is within the jurisdiction of the Church. However, Bishop Henry Marshal has agreed that whenever there is an unnatural death in the cathedral precincts he will defer to the secular authorities, embodied in the King’s sheriff and coroner.’

He paused to look sideways at Thomas de Peyne, who was squatting on a small stool with a roll of parchment, quill and ink spread on a box before him. ‘Normally, a jury would be gathered from all who might know anything about the death – in the countryside every man above twelve years of age from the Hundred or the four nearest townships should be summoned – though that is often an impossible task. Here we cannot drag half the population of Exeter into the Close, so I will make do with those who may have any information by virtue of their nearness to this house.’

He paused again, to let Thomas write a summary of what he had said, then went on. ‘Where a corpse is found in the countryside it is also usual to demand presentment of Englishry. Here this is pointless, as we all well know the late Robert de Hane for a Norman. And as there is no village or town to amerce for the death of a Norman and as this is Church ground, I will dispense with that aspect.’

‘Not a lot left to say, then,’ murmured Gwyn to himself, under cover of his huge moustache.

The coroner scowled around the expectant throng. ‘Let the First Finder step forward.’

The servant who had discovered the body when he visited the privy the previous night trod hesitantly forward. He described in a few words that at about two hours before midnight he had found the canon hanging by the neck when he pushed open the door. When the shock had passed, he had run to the house and roused the older steward, then they had raced to the adjacent houses to raise the alarm. One of the servants remembered that Thomas de Peyne, the coroner’s clerk, lodged in a nearby house. As they had a vague idea that this new official called the coroner had to be told about sudden deaths, Thomas was sought and he had taken control of the situation.

One by one, the servants from de Hane’s house were called but, as John already knew, there was virtually nothing they could add.

‘He was in his room from about the sixth bell,’ quavered Alfred, the old steward, near to tears at the sight of his master lying still under the sheet in front of him. ‘After that, I didn’t see him again – alive.’

‘Was that at all unusual, for him to stay alone all evening?’ asked the coroner.

‘Not at all, sir. He was a great one for reading and praying, or sometimes writing about his old churches. And he went to bed very early, as he was used to getting up at midnight for matins.’

The other servants all told the same tale, as did Robert de Hane’s vicar-choral and his secondary. De Wolfe avoided the matter of historical research and the canon’s trips into the countryside, as he could not see that the inquest was the place to delve into those. When all who might have had anything useful to say had been heard, he rose from his chair and advanced with Gwyn to the bier.

‘It is necessary for you, the jury, to examine the body, before coming to a verdict based on what you know, what you have heard and what you see on the corpse,’ he said. He nodded to Gwyn, who pulled down the sheet to expose the cadaver as far as the waist. The Cornishman usually flicked off the death shroud to expose the whole body, but de Wolfe had warned him that in the presence of a gaggle of senior cathedral canons, he had better be a little more reverential. Even so, there was a communal sigh as the pallid skin of the dead priest was revealed. Reluctantly, the jury shuffled a step or two nearer at John’s impatient gesture.

The coroner stepped to the side of the wooden stretcher and began to demonstrate to the onlookers. ‘The victim had a cord around his neck, which sat in this upper groove.’ He ran his finger around the deep valley under the left side of the corpse’s chin. At the same time, Gwyn held up the offending ligature and showed it to the jury, like a mountebank conjuror about to perform a new trick. ‘But that had not killed him,’ barked de Wolfe. ‘Here you also see a mark, lower down, which does not rise behind the ear.’ Gwyn lifted the head and the coroner jabbed at the skin of the nape of the neck. ‘Here there is a cross-over mark. A cord – no doubt the same one – was pulled from behind to strangle him.’ Gwyn lowered the head and at a sign from his master held up the arms. ‘On both arms, betwixt shoulder and elbow, there are fresh blue bruises, where he was gripped – see?’ Finally, after Gwyn had replaced the arms by the sides, the coroner pointed at the dead man’s mouth and turned out the lower lip to show the bruising inside. ‘He was struck in the mouth – there!’ Then de Wolfe stepped back and Gwyn pulled up the sheet with a flourish.

‘Now, you jurymen, I suggest that you have little choice as to a verdict, given what you have heard and seen. It was not an act of God, like an apoplexy. It was not a misadventure, as no one is strangled accidentally in a privy. The taking of his own life would be extraordinary in a man of God who wishes to preserve his immortal soul – especially so near Christ’s birthday. And, in any event, he could not assault himself then strangle himself before he hanged himself!’

There was a single nervous snigger among the jury, which attracted ferocious looks from the clergy.

De Wolfe glared around the assembled men and fixed on one, a servant from next door. ‘I appoint you the spokesman. What is your verdict?’

Surprised, the man looked hurriedly around at his fellows, who all nodded vigorously, anxious to be compliant. ‘We agree it was a killing, Crowner. Somebody else done it.’

John nodded briskly. ‘I therefore declare that the death of Canon Robert de Hane was a homicide by persons as yet unknown. There is no question of amercing anyone. The First Finder seems to have done his duty correctly by immediately raising what amounts to a hue and cry. The surrounding four households were alerted, as the law demands. The coroner was notified without delay and the body was not moved or buried, so all these requirements were met. As I have said, the matter of presentment does not arise and, although he was a Norman, there is no question of a murdrum fine as the ground belongs to the Church.’ He bowed his head perfunctorily to the canons in the back row before declaring the inquest closed.

As the jury and audience dispersed, the coroner went across to John de Alencon, who was standing with the Precentor, Thomas de Boterellis and the Treasurer, John of Exeter. ‘The corpse is now yours. The legal processes are finished,’ he said sombrely.

The Archdeacon stepped forward and laid a hand on the shoulder of the still form under the linen sheet. ‘Poor Robert. We will arrange for him to be taken straight away to the cathedral. He can lie there with candles at his head and feet until we can bury him with due honour.’

Thomas de Boterellis fastened his small, beady eyes on John and demanded to know what was being done to arrest the perpetrators.

‘That is the sheriff’s task,’ replied de Wolfe, ‘but we both feel an obligation to seek out the killers. There are some pointers, but we have a long way to go, I fear.’

The cathedral Treasurer shook his head sadly. ‘What a way to have to spend part of Jesus’s birthday,’ he said. ‘We should all be celebrating, not mourning.’

After a few more minutes of commiseration in a similar vein, the group drifted away and de Wolfe told the house steward to have the body taken back into the house and to dress it in whatever was appropriate for a priest lying before the high altar.

The rest of that Yuletide day was an anticlimax, as far as de Wolfe’s coronial duties were concerned. After the inquest, he made his way slowly and reluctantly back to Martin’s Lane, but was relieved to find that Matilda was still absent. He assumed she was deliberately shunning him, for which he was thankful, so he walked back to the Bush and spent a few hours in pleasant dalliance with Nesta, first in her bed upstairs then, in the early evening, over another good meal before the hearth downstairs.

When he eventually trudged home it was snowing fitfully, and this time he found his wife sitting grimly before a small fire in the gloomy hall. Matilda responded to his attempts at conversation with monosyllabic curtness, so John gave up trying to heal the breach and sat silently fondling his hound’s ears until Mary came in to see if they wanted food or drink. Matilda shook her head sulkily, but her husband, determined to dull his smouldering resentment, called for mulled wine.

However, while this miserable holy-day evening was being endured in the coroner’s household, others were pursuing the mystery of the canon’s death: his clerk in the cathedral and his officer in another tavern.

Thomas de Peyne, eager as ever to prove his worth to his master, had already started his researches in the cathedral library. He had taken the Archdeacon’s consent literally, and had obtained the key to the Chapter House from one of the cathedral proctors. With the light of a few candle ends from one of the side altars, he was poring over the parchments scattered on and around de Hane’s desk. They were in total disorder and Thomas thought that either the old canon had been utterly disorganised in his way of working or that someone had been rooting though the rolls and sheets.

By the dim light of the guttering candles, the little clerk began to sort the documents into some kind of order, trying to match up separate sheets so that they followed a pattern. There were long rolls of sewn vellum, which were easier to deal with as the text was continuous, but sorting the many single sheets needed the patience of Job. Thomas, perched on a high stool, carefully compared sheet after sheet of parchment, checking the subject matter and the last few lines of Latin script, to match them where possible with other leaves to make continuous text. Some were single pages, but others were fragments of incomplete narratives. Many of the parchments were ancient, dry and brittle, often faded and discoloured, to the extent that they were virtually indecipherable. Some were ragged and frayed, or even torn in half. Many were palimpsests, sheets that had been used more than once previously, the old writing having been scraped off and the surface chalked so that they could be re-used. Parchment was sheepskin that had been laboriously treated to take ink – the best quality was vellum, the soft skin of young lambs. But all this effort was a task in which Thomas delighted: parchment and ink were more to him than food and drink and his exceptional literacy, in an age when fewer than one person in several hundred could read, made him the ideal choice for a nosy coroner’s clerk.

In a couple of hours, he had made as much order as was possible among the material on the desk and the nearby floor and had a score of neat piles and rolls in front of him. During his sorting, he had gained a cursory impression of the subject matter and, as the archivist Jordan de Brent had said earlier, it was apparent that Robert de Hane’s main interest had been in the early history of the parish churches in Devon, especially the transition from Saxon to Norman control soon after the Conquest.

There was much reference to the Domesday survey of 1086, and most of the parchments seemed to have been written by priests and canons in the decades after this. They were of all degrees of quality, both in penmanship and literacy; some were of fluent and elegant prose, others of a crude doggerel, written by country clerics with little learning apart from the ability to put quill to parchment to record bare facts.

That evening Thomas sat in the lonely archive room for hours, lighting one candle stump from another as the flame flickered down to the last blob of wax. He was fascinated by the stories of the days when a few thousand Norman invaders had subjugated two million Saxons and imposed a whole new administration, secular and religious, upon them.

But his task was to find something in these records that might shed some light on the canon’s death. He sat back in the icy room to try to assemble his thoughts on what he had read so far. Most of the texts were factual records of the names of priests, both Saxon and their Norman successors, changes in manorial tenancies that affected the gift of the curacies and lists of grants, tithes and largess from new Norman lords who had ousted the Saxons from their lands.

But which one, thought Thomas anxiously, held a clue to the current tragedy? The coroner seemed convinced that de Hane’s death was connected with his researches in the archives. As the clever little man reviewed in his head the parchments he had just scanned, he failed to see anything that might have had a financial aspect, such as was hinted at by de Hane’s confession and the vague promise to the cathedral Treasurer.

The only faint clue he had found was a pen mark in the shape of a cross in the margin of one parchment. Many of the documents were so creased and stained that marks were abundant, but Thomas’s expert eye saw that the ink on this little crucifix was fresh. The mark was on a single sheet of aged parchment which had a few paragraphs about the original Saxon landowners of some land west of Exeter – and about those Normans who had acquired it after the Conquest. Thomas recognised the parchment as one of a number of sheets that between them covered most of the county. Unfortunately the little ink mark was not against any particular parish or hamlet, but was at the start of a line in Latin that contained the word ‘Saewulf’. The clerk knew this to be the name of a Saxon earl who had been a substantial landowner in the county and whose name cropped up time after time in the Domesday survey. Thomas also noticed that the mark had been made against the first of many entries of Saewulf’s name in the parchments that he had sorted, so he reasoned that whoever had drawn the cross had a particular interest in the long-dead noble. The fresh look of the mark strongly suggested that it must have been made by Robert de Hane as, according to the other canons, no one had looked at these dusty archives for many years.

The little clerk sat back on his stool in the gloom and pondered his find. It did not seem to help much, as it gave no clue as to where geographically de Hane’s interest might have lain. He turned over the sheets following the marked one and saw that Saewulf’s name was attached to many manors and villages, which he had owned before 1067. There was no indication by any other fresh marginal mark of which of Saewulf’s possessions might be singled out for special attention and, even after another hour of squinting in the flickering illumination of the remaining candles, the coroner’s assistant failed to make any other discoveries.

Twenty miles from Exeter, another Yuletide celebration was being held that evening in Berry Pomeroy Castle, a square tower perched on the edge of a lonely crag two hundred feet above the Gatcombe brook. Around it on the other three sides was a bailey, protected by a wooden palisade with a central guard-tower and massive wooden gates. Henry de la Pomeroy had invited a number of his more noble neighbours to a banquet, which was in the last stages of preparation in the kitchens outside. In the hall, which occupied the whole of the first floor of the donjon, sixty people were already sitting at long tables being regaled with drink and entertainment from musicians, mummers and jugglers as they waited for the food. The walls were decorated with holly, fir branches and mistletoe, and two huge fires burned in chimneyed hearths to keep at bay the cold wind that moaned up the narrow valley below the castle.

The upper table was for the host and his most favoured guests, but the three centre chairs remained empty until the meal began. The absentees were in an upper chamber, on the floor divided into solar, chapel and guest rooms. They were drinking wine, standing around a glowing fire in the hearth. This was their host’s first Yuletide as lord of Berry, following the violent death of his father earlier in the year – an incident his guests were careful to avoid mentioning. Henry de la Pomeroy was a thick-set, short-necked man of thirty years, though he looked older. His large, drooping moustache was of the same mousy brown as his long hair, but he sported no beard. Henry wore a permanently aggrieved expression, as if the whole world were conspiring to annoy him. He had worried one wife into an early grave and was working on the second.

‘This retaliation you promised to arrange for me, Bernard. You say it is fixed for tomorrow?’ He waved his wine cup at his cousin, Bernard Cheever, who held several manors along the lower reaches of the river Dart. Cheever, a dapper man of more placid nature than Pomeroy, smiled amiably. ‘Don’t fret about it, Henry. I told you days ago that I would arrange it – and I did. It’s not the most important thing you have to worry about.’

Pomeroy, dressed in a yellow tunic with a short red cloak pinned around his shoulders, still looked unhappy. ‘It was that damned bailiff’s fault, I should have his hand chopped off. I told him to leave a couple of men-at-arms with the felling team, but the idiot took them off after a couple of days because nothing happened.’

The third member of the group smiled wryly. He was a namesake of the host, Henri de Nonant, Lord of Totnes, whose burly joviality concealed a hard heart and a scheming mind. ‘You sound outraged, friend, yet it’s you who are stealing the man’s land! Are you surprised that he shows his disapproval?’

Pomeroy threw the dregs of his wine into the fire and picked up a flask from the table to refill all their cups. ‘It’s a moot point, whether that land is his or not, Henri.’

‘You mean, we’re not sure which of our families stole it from the Saxons?’ drawled Cheever mischievously.

‘Conquest is not stealing, Bernard,’ snapped Pomeroy, who had not a trace of a sense of humour. ‘William the Bastard had a better claim to England than Harold – and he won. So his followers had a right to all the land and William gave this honour to Ralph, our grandfather four times removed.’

‘The Domesday commissioners were not at all clear on where his boundaries lay,’ commented de Nonant.

‘Then I’ll clarify it for them – at the point of my sword if needs be! If you look at the lie of the land, those three virgates in the valley between Afton and Loventor obviously belong to Afton. Cleared of forest, they make a continuous sweep of ploughland.’

‘But William Fitzhamon thinks otherwise – and he says he has four generations of occupation to uphold his claim,’ said Cheever mildly.

‘And I’ve got five generations that say he’s wrong – so to hell with him!’ retorted Pomeroy. ‘I need a strong arm or two to keep him from interfering again. My reeve says that Fitzhamon used ragged outlaws to assault his team. What does it matter if we kill a few to make our point?’

Henri de Nonant held up a cautionary hand. ‘Have a care, we don’t want to start a private war here, not at this delicate time.’

Pomeroy was dismissive. ‘Who’s to censure us, eh? We are the law in these parts. The only one who could cause us problems is the sheriff – and Richard de Revelle’s not going to bother us, is he?’

‘What about the new coroner, this former Crusader?’ asked Bernard Cheever.

‘That’s John de Wolfe, from over at Stoke-in-Teignhead,’ supplied de Nonant.

‘Coroner! Who the devil takes any notice of a coroner?’ said Pomeroy derisively. ‘Just a glorified tax-collector recording the pennies of dead felons for the Exchequer.’

Henri de Nonant was not so easily convinced. ‘There is talk that this crowner has the ear of both Hubert Walter and even the King.’

‘They’ve got a bloody long ears, then,’ cackled Cheever. ‘I wager that Richard will never set foot in England again.’

The more cautious Nonant shrugged. ‘So be it, then. But be careful – for the sake of a few acres of land, we can’t risk drawing attention to ourselves, until everything is in place.’

Pomeroy swallowed the rest of his wine and moved towards the door. ‘Let’s go and eat and drink our fill. And, Bernard, I trust I will hear tomorrow that these fellows have done their job. I want that felling completed and the stumps pulled out before the end of January.’

While Thomas de Peyne was indulging in his lonely labours in the cathedral, Gwyn of Polruan was mixing business with pleasure in another hostelry in the city. Not far from the Bush was a less reputable tavern on Stepcote Hill, called the Saracen. It was run by a fat, surly landlord known as Willem the Fleming and attracted a rougher class of customer, many from the Bretayne district just across Westgate Street, as well as dubious strangers entering the city through that gate.

However, Willem brewed good ale and it was also the place to pick up criminal gossip, as well the pox from the many harlots who used it as a business address.

This Christ Mass evening, the burly Cornishman was sitting in the Saracen with a quart pot of best ale, talking to some acquaintances and listening to the buzz of conversation around him. He had already eaten heartily with his wife and two children at her widowed sister’s house in Milk Street. They had left their own small dwelling in St Sidwell’s to spend the festive day there. Gwyn, tiring of women’s gossip in the tiny room, where the children slept on a straw mattress in the corner, had wandered out for a drink and some male company. He knew every tavern in the city, both as a customer and as coroner’s officer, for many of the inns were the scene of fights, assaults and even killings. Only last month the Saracen had been the scene of a fatal robbery for which two men had been hanged – and Willem was still bemoaning the ruination of one of his mattresses from the blood of one of the victims. Gwyn sat on a bench against one wall, sucking the ale from his bushy moustache and listening to one of his companions complain about the cost of living since the King had restarted his campaign against Philip of France. ‘With a pair of working shoes now almost threepence, how can we live?’ he whined, but Gwyn’s attention was suddenly elsewhere.

He noticed a face across the room that he could not quite place, though he had seen it recently. Then he realised that the young man’s clothing was different from what he had worn that afternoon: his priest’s garb was shrouded in a dun cloak that enveloped him from neck to ankle. He was one of the vicars from Canons’ Row in the close, who had been at the inquest and had been hovering around on the previous evening when the body was discovered. Gwyn did not know his name or to whom he was a vicar, but certainly he was not Robert de Hane’s: his had been a pasty-faced man with a pug nose; this was a dark fellow with acne scars on his cheeks. He was talking animatedly to a tall young man with very blond hair and beard, and a large sword at his belt. Between them was a very attractive, if bold-looking, woman of about twenty-five, her long dark hair rippling unbound over her shoulders.

Though some priests were dissolute, both in drink and womanising, they were usually discreet in the cathedral city and did not publicly flaunt their lifestyle: normally they kept their mistresses indoors and did their drinking in relative privacy. It was strange to see a vicar, even in plain clothing, in a seedy tavern like the Saracen, especially in the company of a woman who looked as if she might be ‘of a certain character’.

Gwyn watched them for a few moments, heedless of the continuing complaints of the man sitting next to him. He saw the vicar talking quickly to the fair man, his head close to the other’s in an attitude of confidentiality. His hands waved in nervous gestures and he darted frequent glances about the large room as if suspicious of an eavesdropper. The coroner’s officer dropped his head and looked across the inn from under his bushy red brows, not wanting to be recognised. The low, smoky chamber was full of people, drinking and talking loudly, so there was not too much chance of the vicar spotting him – even though Gwyn was a giant of a man, he was sitting behind a shifting throng.

The blond fellow was listening attentively to the priest, nodding every now and then but saying little. The woman’s handsome face looked from one to the other, her full red lips pursed in a somewhat anxious expression. Gwyn recalled having seen her about the town before – he had a healthy appreciation for an attractive woman – but he did not know her name. She was not a common whore, as far as he knew, but there something about her manner that spoke of easy sensuality.

He interrupted his companion, a leather-worker from Curre Street, who was still prattling on about the cost of living. ‘Who’s that good-looking dame there, Otelin?’ he asked.

The man lowered his jar from his lips and craned his head around a bystander to see across the smoky room. ‘The woman with the big dugs? That’s Rosamunde of Rye, who’s no better than she should be – but, like most of the men in Exeter, I’d not kick her out of my bed.’ Otelin licked his lips with futile desire.

‘Is she from the city? And who is the man with her?’ demanded the coroner’s lieutenant.

‘She follows the younger knights and squires about the country, so I hear,’ Otelin answered. ‘The likes of you and me wouldn’t get a hand into her bodice – she fancies the bright young fighting men, and some of the older ones, too. No doubt that yellow-haired fellow is one of them, by the way he flaunts his broadsword.’ Otelin peered across the inn again. The tall young man was now taking over the discussion, the priest and raven-haired woman listening intently. ‘I don’t know his name,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen him with others of the same type. I think he is squire to one of those mercenaries, from down Totnes way.’

A group of drinkers moved across their field of view, and when they had a sight across the room again the priest had moved away in the company of another girl, with a pallid face but a gaudy kirtle. They went across to the ladder in the corner, which, like the Bush and most other inns, led up to the primitive sleeping accommodation on the floor above.

As they pushed their way through the throng, the blond squire and Rosamunde of Rye went hand in hand towards the street door and vanished. Gwyn of Polruan spent the next hour sitting in the Saracen, drinking his ale and pondering on whether what he had seen had any significance in the case of the murdered canon.