The Witch Hunter

CHAPTER SIX

The sky, which had been holding its hot and humid breath for days, eventually decided that it had had enough. Later that morning, the heavens split above the city in a crashing peal of thunder and black clouds loosed a torrent of vertical rain that fell like a waterfall into the dusty streets.

Thomas de Peyne was caught by the downpour just as he was limping from the cathedral up to Rougemont. Within seconds, his threadbare black tunic was saturated and his mousy hair was plastered in lank strands around his thin face. He was soon so wet that there was no point in sheltering or trying to run the rest of the way, so he ambled along, the rain streaming off his eyebrows and long nose. On either side, tradesmen were cursing as they struggled to cover the goods displayed on their flimsy stalls, the rain drumming on the striped fabric of the awnings over the booths. By the time Thomas got to the bottom of Castle Hill, the high street was already a morass of fine mud. The central gutter was pouring filthy water down towards the river, and he had to stretch his short legs to cross it, as a flotsam of rubbish, including a decaying cat, careered past.

As he passed into the outer ward of Rougemont, he saw that some wives were chasing after their urchins, who were dancing gleefully in the rain, while others were desperately collecting their washing, which had been drying on bushes. At the inner gate, the solitary guard was sheltering under the arch of the gatehouse, thinking dolefully that he would later have to take sand and a rag to his round iron helmet to polish off the new rust that the rain would cause. He nodded at the familiar figure of the coroner’s clerk as Thomas passed behind him to climb laboriously up the steep steps to the upper chamber.

‘We’ve got a drowned rat, Crowner!’ cackled Gwyn from his usual seat on the window ledge. ‘For Christ’s sake take those wet clothes off, or you’ll catch the ague.’

Thomas pulled his black cassock-like garment over his head and stood shivering in his patched undershirt. The rain had brought welcome relief from the heat, but his soaked body now felt cold.

‘You’d better take it all off, Thomas,’ recommended de Wolfe, from behind his table.

‘We’ve seen naked bodies before, lad,’ said Gwyn. ‘I doubt that yours will drive us crazy with lust!’

Thomas blushed and refused to undress altogether, his modest upbringing at odds with their rough military humour. Gwyn, whose teasing of their little clerk was a mask for his kindliness, took an old riding mantle from a wooden peg driven between the stones of the wall and draped it over Thomas’s shoulders.

‘There’s been quite a commotion in the lower town, Crowner,’ said the clerk, as he perched himself on his stool at the table. ‘Canon Gilbert has had a witch locked up in the proctors’ cells, after Osric the constable refused to arrest her.’ Thomas was exceptionally well connected with the city grapevine and seemed to hear gossip ahead of anyone else. His remarkable gift for intelligence-gathering was another reason why he was so valuable as a coroner’s assistant, apart from his talents in reading and writing.

De Wolfe’s ears pricked up at this latest titbit and he rapidly drew out from Thomas all that he knew about the affair in Rock Lane.

‘So that damned apothecary and the de Pridias widow were there with that interfering canon!’ he grunted. ‘That seems too much of a coincidence. I smell some sort of conspiracy in this.’

‘What can you do about it, Crowner?’ asked Gwyn, tugging at one side of his drooping moustache.

John shrugged helplessly. ‘Not a thing, as it stands. I’ve no jurisdiction over allegations of sorcery. Osric was right for once, refusing to have anything to do with it. If there was no violence or damage to property, then it’s none of the business of the law officers.’

He looked at the hunched figure of his clerk, swathed in the oversized brown cloak. ‘You’re the authority on matters ecclesiastical, Thomas. Has a canon the right to drag some poor wretch from her home and incarcerate her in the church dungeons?’

Thomas looked up with a rather hang-dog expression. He felt guilty on the rare occasions when he was unable to be of help to his master. ‘The matter has never arisen before, to the best of my knowledge,’ he admitted. ‘Though there is a clear admonition in the Book of Exodus that witches should be put to death, the Church has never enforced it in living memory. In fact, I doubt if it has even addressed the problem.’

‘Looks as if this bloody canon is stirring it up for his own ends,’ growled Gwyn, in his usual blunt fashion.

John sighed as he uncoiled himself from his stool. ‘I’m sorry for the poor dame, but there’s nothing I can do at the moment. I’ll seek out the archdeacon later and see what he feels about it. I know he was unhappy with Gilbert de Bosco’s performance last week.’

He stretched his long arms and straightened his back after being hunched over his Latin lessons for the past hour. Going to the window opening, he peered out at the rain.

‘Easing off a little, Crowner,’ observed Gwyn. ‘But still coming down steadily enough. It’ll last all day, a poor look-out for the harvest if it keeps on.’

‘If you’re right, we’re going to get a wetting this afternoon. We have to ride to Cadbury, whatever the weather.’

Usually it was Gwyn who brought new cases to John’s attention, as the castle guards normally directed reeves and bailiffs to his officer when they arrived at the castle to report deaths, assaults, rapes and other assorted disasters. This time, de Wolfe happened to be coming out of the keep when he heard a dusty rider asking for the coroner. He made himself known to the man and found that, unusually, this was no murder or mayhem, but a discovery of treasure trove, another event that fell under the jurisdiction of the coroner. The man was the manor-reeve of Cadbury, a small village eight miles north of Exeter, about halfway to Tiverton. John listened to his brief story, then sent him off to feed and water both himself and his horse, with instructions to meet them at the North Gate soon after the cathedral bells tolled for vespers, which was a couple of hours after noon.

It was midday now and John announced that he was seeking his dinner at the Bush, as Matilda was spending the day with her sickly cousin in Fore Street. It was an opportunity for him to sneak away to his mistress without suffering the abrasive recriminations of his wife. Thomas decided to stay in the chamber and dry off, claiming he had some cases to copy on to the parchment rolls that must be presented to the justices when they came to the Assize of Gaol Delivery in a couple of months’ time. John privately thought that the clerk relished the chance of his own company and the opportunity to read in peace from his precious Vulgate. He lived on sufferance in one of the canons’ houses in the Close, sleeping on a straw mattress in the passageway of the servants’ quarters, where there was no privacy at all.

Gwyn went off to eat, drink and play dice with the off-duty men-at-arms in the guardroom below and the coroner strode off towards Idle Lane. It was raining steadily, but not the drenching downpour that had soaked Thomas. He had borrowed Gwyn’s tattered shoulder-cape with the pointed hood, the worn leather keeping most of the rain off, though the skirt of his long grey tunic and his boots were soon wet and muddied.

At the tavern, he found that Edwin the potman had just lit a fire in the stone hearth, as a number of other patrons were in varying stages of dampness and needed to dry off, even though the summer afternoon was still warm, in spite of the change in the weather.

John stretched out his legs to the blazing logs and watched as steam began to wreathe up from his clothing. Almost immediately, Nesta appeared with a jug of ale and sat down on the bench alongside him. ‘Your boots will split if you dry them too quickly!’ she warned, giving him a quick kiss on his stubbled cheek.

‘It’s a waste of time anyway, they’ll be wet again soon enough.’

He explained about the journey to Cadbury that afternoon, to examine an alleged find of coins. After assuring him that his dinner was on its way, she asked him to explain about treasure trove. Nesta was an intelligent woman, with a healthy curiosity about a whole range of matters and John delighted in pandering to her inquisitiveness.

‘Why should a coroner be involved?’ she asked. ‘I thought your task was to investigate deaths and evil things like that.’

He took a pull at his ale and shook his head. ‘It’s mainly about money, good woman. Though it’s true that death and injury is a big part of the work, that’s because there’s silver to be gained out of it for the King.’

He explained again that Richard the Lionheart was always short of money, especially since Henry of Germany had demanded the vast ransom of a hundred and fifty thousand marks for Richard’s release from capture. John still felt guilty about this, as he had been one of the small bodyguard that had travelled with the King through Austria, when their ship had been wrecked on the shores of Dalmatia, coming back from the Holy Land. They had been ambushed at an inn in Erdberg and John had never forgiven himself for having been absent, looking for fresh horses, when the Mayor of Vienna had burst in with his men and captured Richard.

‘So the Chief Justiciar, Hubert Walter, was given the job of raising the money — and he has to keep on finding it, now that the King wages these incessant campaigns against Philip of France. One of the ways he invented — apart from taxing the barons, the Church and everyone else — was to bring back the old Saxon office of coroner, to drive more cases into the royal courts, instead of them going to the county courts, the manor courts and the rest. And as you well know, any fault in the process of dealing with the legal process leads to fines, all of which goes into the King’s treasury.’

Nesta had heard most of this before, but still wanted to know more about treasure trove. Just then, one of her maids arrived at the trestle with a wooden board on which was a thick trencher of yesterday’s bread supporting a slab of boiled bacon, with two fried eggs on top. A wooden bowl contained cooked beans and peas, which John heaped on to slices of the meat which he cut off with his dagger. Between chewing and swallowing ale to wash it down, he explained about finds of treasure.

‘There’s a great deal of valuable metal hidden about the countryside, especially since the Battle of Hastings. Very many Saxons hid their wealth to keep it from us Normans — then they were either killed or died before they could recover it.’

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth to remove the bacon fat.

‘I have heard of much older coinage being found, even going back to the Romans. But whatever it is, it has to be either gold or silver to be reckoned as treasure trove. Jewel stones don’t count, unless they are set in precious metal.’

‘But who does it belong to?’ persisted Nesta, her big eyes round as she looked up at her dark and angular lover.

‘That’s why there must be an inquest on the finds, to decide if the finder or the owner of the land or the King gets the value. There are rules, but I rely on Thomas to put me right on the details. You know what a mine of information he is, I’d be lost without him when it comes to fiddling details.’

Some ripe plums and an apple rounded off the meal and as there was no time to climb the ladder for a dalliance in the loft, he had to be satisfied with another quart of ale and a relaxed gossip with his mistress — though she was constantly interrupted by either Edwin or the maids to settle some dispute in the kitchen or a problem among the patrons.

He asked her whether she had heard anything about the strange arrest of Alice Ailward by the cathedral proctors, but Nesta had no more information than himself. ‘It will be a dismal day if any good-wife who gives a potion or a poultice to a neighbour, gets herself locked up for it.’

She sounded worried, and John wondered whether her own activities in that direction were more extensive than she had admitted to him. Nesta was a tender-hearted soul and he knew that she often went out of her way to help those less fortunate than herself. Beggars were often to be found around the back gate, where she unfailingly let them have the old trenchers and scraps of food left over from the kitchen. He suspected that the families in nearby Smythen Street and the upper part of Priest Street were quite familiar with her Welsh folk cures for a wide range of illnesses.

‘You be careful yourself,’ he admonished her. ‘Lay low with your cunning-woman activities, until this stupidity has blown over.’

He left the alehouse before the vesper bell and was helping Andrew the farrier to saddle up his great horse Odin when it finally pealed out from the cathedral tower. The rain was now an intermittent drizzle and there were gaps in the cloud where scraps of blue sky suggested that maybe it would clear up towards evening.

When he reached the North Gate, Gwyn was waiting on his big brown mare and, just outside, Thomas was perched side-saddle on a small cob, all Gwyn’s efforts to get him to ride like a man having failed. Alongside him was Henry Stork, the reeve from Cadbury, a leathery, taciturn man of about fifty, who spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. He had said little about the discovery, other than it was on the land of Robert Hereward and had been found in a mound by one of Robert’s villeins.

The four set off northwards along the road to Crediton, the rain causing little problem to men used to travelling in all weathers. The main problem was the surface of the track, which after a couple of weeks of drought, had now been converted into a sticky red paste by the recent downpour. The mud was not yet deep but was slippery and occasionally one of the horses would slide and lose its footing in the rutted surface. Even at a cautious trot, the eight miles did not take long to cover. They left the Crediton road soon after leaving the city and followed narrow tracks to the village of Thorveton, then on through mixed forest and cultivated land to Cadbury, a small hamlet in deeply undulating country just west of the River Exe.

The rain had stopped by the time they arrived and broken cloud allowed shafts of sunlight to draw steaming wreaths of vapour from the pasture land around the village.

‘It’s but a small place, Crowner,’ grunted Henry Stork, as they walked their horses into the grassy area in the middle of the hamlet, where the track divided into two, the right-hand one going on to Tiverton, a few miles farther on.

‘You say the manor is held by Robert Hereward?’ asked de Wolfe, as he slid from Odin’s high back.

‘Indeed, but he doesn’t own the land. He has Saxon blood on his grandmother’s side, they used to hold it. But they became Norman when William de Pouilly’s son married into the family a century ago.’

‘So who owns the freehold?’ persisted the coroner. This was not just idle curiosity; the resolution of a find of treasure trove needed all the information available. His black eyebrows went up sharply when the reeve told him that the ultimate landlord was Sir Richard de Revelle, sheriff of the county and a substantial landowner around Tiverton. His wife, the glacial Lady Eleanor, lived in his main manor near there, refusing to stay with her husband in the grim and draughty castle of Rougemont.

‘Does the sheriff know of this find?’ he asked curtly.

Henry shook his head. ‘I was charged by Sir Robert’s bailiff to give him a message, but at Rougemont I was told that he had just left Exeter for Revelstoke and will be away for at least four days.’

Revelstoke was one of Richard’s manors near Plympton, on the coast in the far west of Devon.

They had stopped outside a small alehouse, a hut of wattle and daub with a ragged thatched roof, slightly larger than the dozen tofts clustered around the centre of the village. A steep hill rose behind, with some ancient walls hidden in the turf at the top. On each side, strip fields ran up the sloping sides of the valley, the oats and rye beginning to brown up after a week of hot sun, though still not ripened sufficiently for harvesting. Strips of green alternated with the grain, where beans and peas were looking healthier. As John stretched his aching back, his gaze travelled around the horizon, where dark forest began beyond the waste ground that surrounded the cultivated areas. About a quarter of a mile to his left, he saw a hump in the pasture, just before the trees began. It was about the height of a cottage, smooth and covered in grass.

‘Is that the mound?

The reeve bobbed his head. ‘It is, Crowner. Maybe you’d like a drink and a bite to eat while you talk to the man who found the valuables?’

Gwyn was through the door of the tavern before John could answer and with a wry grin, the coroner beckoned to Thomas and followed the Cornishman inside. Already a few curious villeins had gathered around the door and the reeve directed a few of them to take the horses to water. In the single room of the alehouse they sat on benches around the dead fire-pit while a young girl in a ragged smock fetched them pots of indifferent ale from a shed at the back.

Henry Stork came back inside and in the dim light of the windowless room they saw he was followed by a muscular youth of about sixteen, who had a disfiguring purple birthmark covering one side of his face. He seemed a bright, intelligent lad, his eyes flitting from one to the other of these strangers in his village.

‘Simon, this is,’ said the reeve. ‘He found the stuff yesterday, when he was digging out a badger sett.’

John caught Gwyn’s eye and he grinned. It was an unlikely tale, as mound digging was a common but illegal activity, invariably undertaken in the hope of finding treasure. De Wolfe wondered why this village had reported it, rather than keeping quiet, but maybe the surprise of actually finding treasure had unnerved the digger. He decided to bait the young man a little.

‘Why dig for a badger in the middle of an open pasture, boy?’

Simon looked back innocently. ‘We’ve had our turnips dug up at night — some with claw marks on them. I saw a hole, so I thought maybe I could raise a badger if I made it a bit bigger and sent the dog down there.’

John believed this as much as he believed that the moon was made of cheese, but decided to give the youth the benefit of the doubt. Just then, the silent girl padded barefoot into the room with a grubby board on which was a loaf cut into half a dozen chunks, together with a heap of sliced mutton. She wiped her running nose with her fingers, then handed out the bread to each of the visitors, leaving the meat board on the ring of stones around the fireplace.

‘So what did you find instead of your badger?’ demanded de Wolfe.

The young man hawked in his throat and spat on the floor before replying. ‘The turf had fallen in, because there was a hollow underneath. All that bloody rain had made holes everywhere, washing out the soil below. I stuck my spade in and straightway it hit something hard.’

‘An old box, it was,’ broke in Henry. ‘A bit rotten, but it was oak with some iron bands, so it kept together, just about.’

‘Where is it now?’ asked Gwyn.

‘In the church, only safe place we’ve got. The parson is guarding it himself.’

The coroner had less faith than the reeve in the honesty of parish priests, but recognised that there were few secure places in a remote hamlet like Cadbury. He drank down the rest of his ale and put the remnants of his crust down, together with the mutton, conscious that the little girl was eyeing it hungrily, waiting for them to go in the hope that something would be left for her.

He rose and jerked his head at Thomas and the still-champing Gwyn. ‘Let’s go and look this great treasure, then.’

Across the village green, the little Saxon church stood forlornly within its ring of old yews. It was stone built, but hardly more than a large room, with a small arched belfry perched on one end of the roof, which was made of overlapping flat stones. The inside was almost bare, a hard-packed earth floor leading up to a small apse where a table covered with a cloth did service as an altar, supporting a bronze cross and a pair of wooden candlesticks. The walls were whitewashed and some crude coloured paintings of biblical scenes were placed between the slit windows. More recent coatings of white lime had blurred the edges of some of the pictures, where the brush of a careless painter had slipped.

Squatting on the edge of the wooden platform that supported the altar was a thin figure dressed in a rough hessian smock, belted around his waist so that the hem came above his bandy knees. Wooden-soled working shoes were on the ends of his spindly legs and the only indication that this was the parish priest and not another villein from the fields was his shaven tonsure. A long-handled shovel, its wooden blade edged with an iron strip, leaned against the wall near by, increasing the impression that this was just a bald-headed labourer.

He climbed to his feet as the coroner’s party entered. Thomas was in the rear, crossing himself as he genuflected to the altar.

‘This is Michael, priest of St Mary’s, Crowner,’ said the reeve. ‘He has cared for this box since it was found.’ The priest was a slender man of about thirty, who to John’s eyes looked chronically ill, his eyes sunken in deep sockets above a wasted face where the cheekbones stuck as if in a skull.

‘Forgive my appearance, sir,’ he said in a surprisingly deep and firm voice. ‘But my pastoral duties in a place like this are light and I must work in the fields with my flock if we are to avoid starvation next winter, after this terrible year.’

De Wolfe was well aware that many priests, especially in tiny parishes with a scanty living, had to work hard to feed themselves, but this man seemed to be killing himself with toil. However, this was none of his business, although he determined to ask John de Alençon when he returned to Exeter, why the inordinately rich Church seemed indifferent to the poverty of many of its servants.

‘You will want to see the thing that young Simon discovered. I have placed it in the aumbry for safe-keeping. It is the only place in the village that possesses a lock!’

He led them to the north side of the semicircular apse where there was a large chest, made of blackened planks secured with large iron nails. He fished a large key from a pouch on his belt and opened the crude lock, pushing back the lid with a creak to reveal what was inside. A chalice, paten and cruet of a poor-quality mix of tin and silver were stored there between celebrations of the Mass, along with a breviary and a manual, the only sacred books the priest possessed. These had been pushed to one end of the chest and de Wolfe saw that most of the space was taken up with a battered box, with crumbly soil still adhering to its rough sides.

He motioned to the brawny Gwyn, who lifted it out with a grunt and dropped it on the edge of the dais.

‘Bloody heavy, that!’ he said, getting a poisonous glance from Thomas for using such language in the house of God.

He squatted alongside the box, almost nose to nose with the coroner on the other side. Usually they adopted this pose across a corpse, so this made a novel change.

‘It’s just a box, not a proper chest,’ observed the Cornishman.

The object that the lad had dug from the side of the mound was about four hands-spread long and three wide and deep. It seemed to be made of thick boards, now brittle and split, but was held together by two bands of thin beaten iron, almost completely rusted through. The remnants of a few nails were visible at the edges, where the boards had originally been butted together to make a rough box.

The reeve stooped above them, pointing at one end. ‘We saw silver coins through that broken part, so we didn’t go any farther.’

John again thought that the honesty of the Cadbury inhabitants was remarkable, but the next words of Michael the priest tempered his opinion a little.

‘I was up at the top of the fields when Simon came running from the mound. I stopped him and he took me back to show me what he had found. When we walked back to the road, we found that Robert Hereward was drinking ale after visiting his mill to collect the dues. He was the one who first saw the treasure through that crack and told us to report it straightway to you, Crowner.’

De Wolfe wondered whether the villagers, including their priest, would have been so honest if the manor-lord had not happened to be on the scene.

‘Where is Robert now?’ he asked.

‘He said he would come down here as soon as you arrived,’ replied Michael. ‘I sent a boy up there to tell him when I heard your horses coming.’

John turned his attention back to the box. A gap in the clouds must have passed overhead at that moment, as a shaft of sunlight struck through one of the narrow window slits and illuminated it in an eerie fashion.

‘Can you get the top off, Gwyn?’

His officer reached behind to his belt and pulled out a large dagger. Putting the thick blade flat under one of the fragile bands, he levered up and the parchment-thin metal snapped in a shower of rust. He did the same to the other one, then prised up the rotting remains of the top boards. Shreds of a decomposed linen bag failed to hide the closely packed coins that filled the box. Most were tarnished to a deep grey colour, but when the coroner disturbed them with his fingers, those beneath, which had been lying tightly face to face, showed the brighter glint of silver.

‘There’s another bag underneath,’ said Michael, jabbing a finger at the mass of coins. Where John had moved some aside, the top of a more intact pouch could be seen, tied with a thong. When de Wolfe pulled, it ripped, but enough material came up to reveal a leather purse.

Inside were several dozen bigger coins showing the yellow glint of gold.

‘Keep that aside, then tip the rest out of the box,’ he commanded.

Handing the leather bag up to Thomas, the fount of all knowledge as far as he was concerned, he demanded confirmation of their identity. ‘Look like bezants to me. What do you think?

The little clerk, his thin nose almost twitching with excitement, pulled the opening to the full extent of the purse-string and ferreted inside with his fingers. ‘These are indeed, Crowner! All gold solidii from Byzantium. Each is worth about six shillings today!’

Gwyn whistled. He had never seen half as much money in one place before. ‘How many are there, Thomas? And don’t go slipping a few up your sleeve when we’re not looking!’

Thomas flushed indignantly, though he knew Gwyn was teasing him. ‘I’ll lay them out in a row, before your very eyes, you ginger oaf!’ he retorted and proceeded to tip the bag on to the wooden platform.

‘May as well count the silver ones, too,’ ordered John, getting up from his crouch, his back reminding him that he was not getting any younger. ‘The two priests can do that. They can read, write and do their sums.’

He stood back with Gwyn and Henry to watch the other pair put the coins into small piles. Behind them, at a respectful distance, a dozen men and women of the village stood awe-struck at this display of wealth that was far beyond their comprehension. The average wage of a freeman farmer was about two pence a day, so to them one bezant was almost three months’ earnings. The villeins and serfs worked for nothing but the occupancy of their toft and what they could grow and breed on their croft.

‘There are fifty-two gold coins, master,’ declared Thomas, looking up from his little piles of money. The bezant, though minted in Asia Minor, had been a standard gold piece throughout Europe for hundreds of years and this little bagful was a small fortune in itself.

Thomas went to help Michael count the far more numerous silver pennies, the only English coin in circulation, all of these minted by the Saxons before the Conquest. After another fifteen minutes, during which the spectators appeared hypnotised by the chink of coins being put into piles of ten, the local priest announced that there had been four hundred and eighty-six pence in the box. Calculation was beyond de Wolfe, a soldier not having the computing power of a merchant, but his clerk rapidly had the answer.

‘Altogether, that’s about three hundred and twenty-eight shillings. That’s more than seventeen pounds, Crowner!’

‘And this!’ said the parish priest, suddenly. He held up a glinting object. ‘It was at the bottom, under the last of the pennies.’

He handed it up to the coroner, who turned it over admiringly in his fingers. It was a gold brooch, as long as his forefinger, an oval of delicate moulding, with a dragon-like heraldic beast across the open centre. On the back were two small loops with a thick gold pin between them, to fix it to a cloak or tunic. Of obvious Saxon design, it weighed as much as a dozen of the bezants, but was more valuable than its sheer mass, because of the exquisite workmanship.

De Wolfe handed it back to Michael. ‘Find a length of cloth and wrap everything up again and put it back in the box. Thomas, make a careful inventory on one of your rolls, with the names of the witnesses who were here present. I don’t want any accusations that some of this has gone missing later on.’

The reeve sent one of the villagers to find some wrapping while Thomas unpacked his writing materials from the bag that he carried on his shoulder. By the time he had written down all that the coroner had demanded, an old sack had been produced and the pennies, bag of gold and the brooch had been wrapped up and replaced in the old box, which was then secured with some cords to prevent it falling apart.

‘I want to see the place where it was found,’ announced de Wolfe. ‘So for now, can you lock the box back in your aumbry to be safe?’

The priest agreed and when the key had vanished back into the scrip on his belt, they all trooped out into the fitful sunlight. Henry Stork led the way and after the coroner’s trio and the priest came a straggling bunch of locals, all agape at this novel intrusion of the outer world into their monotonous lives.

The procession crossed the track and walked up a muddy lane at the side of a dry-stone wall, built more to accommodate loose stones from the adjacent strip fields than as a partition. It enclosed lines of crops grouped in sections belonging to different villagers, so that everyone had their share of good and bad soil. Oats, rye, peas and beans seemed the main crops, although farther away, the green heads of turnips and cabbage could be seen. In the centre, where the root crops had already been lifted, a pair of patient oxen were dragging a plough, with a bare-footed villein leading them and another leaning on the handles to keep the coulter in the ground.

On the other side of the path, fallow land stretched away for two hundred paces, part of the three-field system that rested the ground for a year, after two of cultivation. At the end of this, the path opened on to a dozen acres of pasture land, where sheep and a few lean cows grazed, along with a small herd of goats, watched over by a small boy.

The meadow rose gently towards the edge of the forest and the reeve marched up this towards the tump in the ground, just before the trees began. They followed him to a spot at the base of the mound, where the soil was disturbed, forming a red scar in the green grass.

‘This is where it was found, Crowner,’ declared Henry, with a flourish of his hand towards a hole in the ground. He beckoned Simon and the youth came sheepishly forward, standing awkwardly before the ring of spectators. ‘Tell them, boy!’ commanded the reeve.

‘Not much to be told, sirs. I was up here looking for a stray heifer two days ago and saw a hole. So yesterday I brought up a shovel and had a poke around — in case it was a badger sett,’ he added hastily, recalling his original lame excuse. He squatted alongside the hole and pointed down. ‘Just in there it was, barely covered in earth, once the top turf was off.’

De Wolfe peered in, then looked up at the mound, which close up, looked larger than it had from a distance. It was twice as high as a man and roughly circular, being about fifty paces around.

‘You know everything, clerk!’ said Gwyn to Thomas with mock sarcasm. ‘So what is this poxy lump?’

The former priest gazed up at the smooth grass-covered cone and crossed himself. ‘No one rightly knows, but they are pagan temples of some kind, built by the ancients, long before the Saxons came. There are many more in Wiltshire, where some have bones hidden in crypts of stone in the centre.’

The coroner had no interest in such antediluvian monuments, but had heard that many had been dug into in the hope of finding ancient treasure, which had sometimes been fulfilled. But this particular treasure was not all that ancient, as the silver coins were Saxon.

There was nothing more to be seen and he was just about to leave when there was a cry from across the pasture and two men could be seen hurrying up to them.

‘Who the hell is this?’ growled Gwyn.

‘It’s our landlord, Robert Hereward,’ said the reeve.

The tenant lord arrived, somewhat out of breath, his stocky bailiff close behind. Robert was younger than de Wolfe had expected, a man of about thirty, with thick fair hair swept back off his face. He had a beard and moustache of the same colour which, with his rather ruddy complexion and blue eyes, betrayed his Saxon blood, even though it had been diluted by four generations of Normans.

‘Sir John, I am glad to see you!’ He sounded genuinely pleased to have the coroner on his land, a somewhat uncommon sentiment, as a visit from officials of the King usually meant trouble or expense — often both. The two men exchanged some civil words of greeting and explanation, then Robert Hereward peered down at Simon’s excavation. ‘I presume you have already examined what this youth discovered?’ he asked.

John described the contents of the box and Robert was keen to see inside it for himself. The whole party went back down the meadow and into the village, the coroner and the manor-lord walking together behind the bailiff and the reeve. John took the opportunity to discover the exact status of Hereward’s tenancy of the land, anticipating problems ahead over the ownership of the find.

‘I rent this village from de Revelle for a fee each year,’ explained Hereward. ‘I have the manor that I inherited from my father over in the next county at Hillfarrance, but it’s too small to provide a comfortable living, so five years ago I took on this manor, which is about ten carucates. The place has a special meaning for me, as it once formed part of my ancestor’s lands.’

They were approaching the church now, as de Wolfe carried on with his questions. ‘Why would our noble sheriff want to part with it?’

Robert shrugged. ‘He has very large estates, some from his family and the rest from his wife, the Lady Eleanor. That’s why he married her. It certainly wasn’t for her looks or her charm!’

His tone was sarcastic and the coroner guessed that he was no great friend of the de Revelle household.

‘With so much land, I think he became impatient with its management, even though his bailiffs did most of the work. Cadbury was run down and poorly productive, so he preferred to get a steady rent, rather than try to bring it back into profit.’

As they marched up the path to the church door, John asked a last question. ‘And has it done better since you took the tenancy?’

‘It’s certainly improving. I have a good bailiff and reeve — but these last two years have been disastrous for the crops. I hope to God the weather lets us have at least some sort of harvest or there’ll be empty bellies and full graves come the winter.’

Robert Hereward seemed a sensible, practical man and de Wolfe took a liking to him. He reminded him of his own brother William, who prudently administered their two manors down near the coast, at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Holcombe.

Michael the priest was still in the church and took the box from his aumbry to show to his manor-lord, upon whom he was dependent for his tithes. Robert looked at the coins with interest, but it was the brooch which really captured his attention.

‘For all I know, this may have belonged to one of my Saxon forebears!’ he said forlornly. ‘They were ejected from the land when William de Poilly was granted it by William the Bastard.’

He put it back rather reluctantly into the box, but before the treasure was put away, the coroner took the precaution of getting Thomas to recount all the coins in the presence of Robert Hereward and then adding his name to the parchment that certified the exact amount discovered. Only then would he allow the box to be tied up again and placed in the priest’s chest.

‘What happens now?’ asked Robert.

‘There has to be an inquest, but in this case I can see no way in which I can declare who is the owner, other than to formally seize it for King Richard. But I can decide whether or not it is treasure trove.’

Robert Hereward looked puzzled and decided to seek enlightenment in more comfortable circumstances. He invited the coroner’s team to the manor house for refreshment and with the bailiff and Thomas in attendance they began walking up the track from the village green. The coroner sent Gwyn with Henry the reeve to assemble a jury for the inquest in an hour’s time, confident that his officer would pass most of that time drinking ale in the tavern opposite the church.

The manor house, a few hundred paces along the Tiverton road, was a small and rather dismal dwelling, for which Robert apologised. ‘I only wanted the land here, as I live at my other place in Somerset,’ he explained. ‘Certainly my wife refuses to stay here and I only sleep here about once a fortnight when I visit.’

The house was a wooden structure with a thatched roof, sitting in a circular compound within a fence of stakes built on a low earthen bank. There were several rooms off the draughty hall and inside the palisade there was a barn and outhouses for animals, cooking and storage. It was more a barton than a manor house and Robert explained that his bailiff lived there with his family. They sat at a table in the hall, where the bailiff’s rosy-cheeked wife brought them fresh bread, cheese, slices of cold meat and some passable wine, as well as good ale.

‘Crowner, explain this treasure trove business to me,’ pleaded Hereward. ‘Who does the stuff actually belong to?’

De Wolfe was not all that clear on the law himself, although he had held a couple of inquests on discovered valuables in the ten months in which he had been coroner.

‘This case is more complicated, because you are not the freeholder of the land. Knowing Richard de Revelle as I do, he’s going to fight tooth and nail to get his hands on it.’

As they ate and drank, John did his best to explain the rules as he understood them. ‘Putting aside that complication for the moment, everything hinges on whether the valuables were deliberately hidden with the intention of recovering them later — or had just been lost accidentally.’

He saw the puzzlement on Robert’s face and tried to explain more fully.

‘Look, if a man walks across a field and a gold coin drops unnoticed from a hole in his purse, that would be an accident. He had no intention of either hiding it or recovering it later.’ De Wolfe took a large swallow of ale while Robert digested this situation. ‘But if a man was in fear of being robbed — or probably, in this case, if he anticipated a troop of Normans riding up to his door to dispossess him — then he might gather up all his treasure and hide it in the ground, with the intention of reclaiming it secretly at some later time.’

Hereward nodded. ‘That’s obvious, but what difference does it make to ownership?’

‘Firstly, the treasure must be deliberately concealed to be treasure trove. If it just falls on the ground, then it is the property of any finder. It’s only hidden gold and silver that is considered to be treasure trove — and the purpose of my inquest is to decide that first.’

‘Pretty simple in this case, buried in a box underground!’

‘Yes, but it has to be done officially,’ replied John. ‘Once I’ve decided, it becomes a felony to retain the treasure, under pain of hanging.’

‘That still doesn’t settle to whom it belongs.’

Thomas, who had been sitting farther along the table, opposite the bailiff, had been listening intently and now couldn’t resist airing his undoubtedly large store of knowledge.

‘It goes back to Roman times. They called treasure thesaurus inventus and divided it equally between the finder and the owner of the land.’

De Wolfe shook his head. ‘Not so now in England, though I think some countries abroad still adhere to that. The theory here is that the King owns the whole country and that though he doles out parcels of it to his barons, he still retains the basic ownership. That’s why they are called “tenants-in-chief” and “free-holders” — they only hold it at the King’s pleasure. So anything found hidden belongs to him, unless he waives the right.’

Thomas nodded eagerly. ‘It says in the Holy Gospel of St Matthew that a man who knew there was treasure in a field, sold all his worldly goods to raise the money to buy the field, so that he could claim the treasure.’

He crossed himself devoutly as he mentioned the gospels, but John scowled at him. ‘What’s that got to do with it? We’re in Devon, not Palestine.’ He turned back to Robert Hereward. ‘I’m going to leave the knotty problem of who owns the treasure to the King’s justices when they next come to hold the Assize of Gaol Delivery in a couple of months.’

An hour later, de Wolfe held the inquest at the gate of the churchyard, with a jury of about twenty men and boys gathered from the fields by Gwyn and the reeve. Behind them, along the hedge that surrounded the churchyard, a score of wives, old men and widows, together with a gaggle of children, watched the proceedings with slack-jawed fascination, as an inquest was something none of them had ever heard of before.

John once more had the box taken from the church and placed at his feet, before he stood in front of the half-circle of jurors as Gwyn bellowed the inquest summons at the top of his voice, something he always enjoyed doing. ‘All you who have anything to do before the King’s coroner for the county of Devon, touching the finding of this treasure, draw near and give your attendance!’

With Robert Hereward, his bailiff and Michael the priest at one side and Thomas squatting with his pen, ink and parchment on a stool on the other, the coroner called for the finder to step forward. Gwyn helpfully pushed the young Simon, who stood sheepishly before de Wolfe for his brief moment of fame. He repeated what he had said about the discovery and thankfully melted back into the jury line. Henry Stork, the manor-reeve, then confirmed that Simon had reported the matter to him without delay and that he had consulted the bailiff, who stepped forward to say that he had sent to Exeter to notify the coroner, as he had heard was the proper thing to do since last year.

John then got Gwyn to untie the bonds around the box and fold back the cloth so that the contents could be seen. The jury then filed past, gaping at the sight of more money than they would see in a score of lifetimes. Standing back in their ragged line, they listened bemused as de Wolfe concluded the proceedings.

‘I have to pronounce on three matters, when such wealth is discovered. Firstly, is it gold or silver? In this case, both are present and I have no hesitation in declaring that this is treasure.’ He scowled around the throng before continuing. ‘Secondly, where was it found and who was the finder? Obviously, it was this Simon, who unearthed it in a mound in the vill of Cadbury.’

For the finale, he stood with his thumbs hooked into his either side of his wide sword-belt, his tall, spare body slightly stooped. With his long dark grey tunic, his black hair and his predatory nose, he looked like a great crow standing guard over the box of precious metal.

‘Next, was this treasure deliberately hidden or merely lost? There is no doubt that it was secreted by intent — no one can just lose a box of this size and weight. And was it abandoned or was there the intention to recover it at some later date?’ He glared around again, as if challenging anyone to disagree with him. ‘Of course it was not abandoned. No one in their right mind would discard gold and silver! And if it was hidden, then there must have been the desire to reclaim it one day, else there would be no point in hiding it.’

There was no demur from the jury, who were not going to bandy words with this forbidding official from far-away Exeter.

‘Lastly, who did it belong to and who hid it? We will never know, though the fact that none of the coins was minted after the arrival of King William in this land, suggests that the owner was a Saxon.’ John shot a quick glance towards Robert Hereward, but there was no sign that he wished to claim his ancestors as the original owners. ‘As we can never be sure that there are legitimate heirs or successors to the unknown owner, the matter ends there and all that remains is for me to declare that the find is treasure trove and it will be so recorded in my rolls.’ He jabbed a finger towards Thomas, who was busy scratching away on his stool. ‘The amount has been accurately recorded and witnessed by several persons. I therefore seize this treasure in the name of King Richard and will cause it to be held in safe-keeping in Exeter until the royal justices confirm that it should be sent to the King’s treasury in Winchester.’

Gwyn marched forward to close the proceedings by shooing away the jury and picking up the valuable box, which he retied once again.

‘What’s to be done with this, Crowner?’ he boomed.

‘I want you to take it straight away back to Rougemont and give it into Ralph Morin’s hands, to be locked up somewhere safe. I’m staying here for a few hours, as Robert Hereward has kindly invited me to eat with him at the manor house. I’ll ride back this evening with Thomas.’

It was a decision that was to cause de Wolfe considerable aggravation some time later.