‘Perhaps that is because the Earth does not always rotate in the same direction,’ reasoned Hamon. Several of his friends voiced their agreement.
‘But it must always rotate in the same direction,’ said Bartholomew, regarding him askance. ‘Otherwise the moon would not always rise after the sun sets.’
‘But it does not,’ said Eltisley. ‘We have all seen the moon in the sky while the sun is still up, and sometimes we cannot see whether it has risen at all because of clouds.’
‘But it is still there,’ said Bartholomew, startled. ‘Even if we cannot see it.’
‘Prove it,’ challenged Eltisley. Several villagers began to shout encouragement, some to Bartholomew, others to Eltisley. ‘You do not know what is above the clouds.’
‘Only God knows that,’ put in William loudly.
‘But this rotation of the Earth would explain the wind,’ said Hamon thoughtfully, once the racket had died down. ‘And when it is very windy, it means the Earth is rotating faster than usual.’
‘No, it does not,’ said Bartholomew, feeling as though the points raised were becoming steadily more outrageous. ‘The wind is independent of rotation. As the Earth moves, everything – the earth, the air and all sublunar matter – moves with it in a circular motion, the wind included.’
‘Rubbish!’ said Dame Eva in a surprisingly strong voice for a woman of her years. ‘And, despite Eltisley’s experiment, I have tossed things in the air that have returned directly to me, not landed half a league down the road.’
‘There are two types of motion associated with an object thrown into the air,’ said Bartholomew, remembering a lecture he had heard by the young scholar Nicole Oresme. ‘The first is an upward motion, and the second is west to east, following the circular motion of the Earth. Therefore, an object thrown into the air that returns to the place where it originated, does not prove or disprove that the Earth rotates.’
‘But we can only see one motion,’ argued William. ‘The vertical one.’
‘That is because we are part of the Earth’s circular motion, too,’ said Bartholomew.
‘We cannot see the circular motion because we are part of it?’ asked Tuddenham, eyeing Bartholomew doubtfully. ‘I cannot imagine where you scholars find the time to concoct all these peculiar ideas.’
‘Let us conclude,’ said Michael, sensing the whole affair might become acrimonious if allowed to drag on. He rubbed at a flabby chin. ‘It has been argued that the Earth does not rotate, because we would feel dizzy and we would all be after Mother Goodman for remedies for sick stomachs. It has also been argued that we do not need points of reference to know whether we are moving or not, because we just know.’
‘Right.’ Hamon nodded vigorously. ‘That makes sound sense. We just know.’
‘On the other hand, Master Eltisley demonstrated that an object thrown in the air does not fall to the Earth at the point from which it originated, thus proving that the Earth is spinning in a west-to-east direction.’
‘And it explains the seasons,’ added Eltisley, reluctant to let that one pass.
‘And the wind we feel is because the Earth is spinning,’ added Hamon. ‘Any changes in wind direction means that the Earth is spinning a different way.’
Bartholomew sighed in exasperation.
‘Quite,’ said Michael. ‘Argued most intelligently, Sir Hamon.’ Hamon exchanged a smile of pride with his uncle, and Michael continued. ‘And so, weighing up both sides of the argument, as is my duty as presiding master, I can only conclude that the evidence is insufficient on either side to answer the question satisfactorily.’
There was silence in the room, and a number of mystified looks exchanged.
‘Now, just a minute,’ said Tuddenham indignantly. ‘There was plenty of evidence presented here for you to make up your mind. You are just trying to please everyone by calling it a draw.’
‘The point of a debate, Sir Thomas,’ said Michael, ‘is not to discover the definitive answer to a question, but to present the evidence, such as it is, and examine it logically, demonstrating the human ability to think and process information.’
‘You what?’ demanded the man with the pig. ‘Does the Earth spin or not? That is what we all want to know, not whether you can examine evidence loquaciously.’
There was a cheer from the audience at his eloquence, and he enjoyed the adulation of the people who stood around him.
‘Did I say “loquaciously” instead of “logically”?’ asked Michael of Bartholomew, as the audience clapped and banged their feet on the floor. ‘I may have done, you know. I have seldom been less in control at a disputation than at this one. At least scholars generally keep to the rules.’
When the racket showed no sign of abating, he stood and raised his hands to quieten the excited villagers. ‘We will decide this democratically, by asking the audience which theory it thinks is correct,’ he yelled.
‘No!’ said Hamon, leaping to his feet and looking around at the assembled villagers. ‘We will not decide democratically. We will have a vote!’
‘I should have let you be presiding master, after all,’ muttered Michael to William, his words barely audible over the thunder of applause that met Hamon’s suggestion, while Bartholomew sat in Michael’s chair and laughed. ‘This is all quite beyond me.’
‘All those who think the Earth rotates, raise one hand,’ bellowed William, the only one with a voice that could be projected over the babble. Immediately, nearly all the hands in the room were waved at him. ‘I said raise one hand!’ thundered William. He made a sound of exasperation as most of them went back down again. ‘I meant one hand each, not one hand between all of you!’
‘Come on!’ cried Hamon, prowling around the room and grabbing the arms of those who were not voting. ‘What is wrong with you? All of you have felt the wind on your faces as the Earth moves. Think about that storm we had last autumn – that was the Earth speeding up.’
‘Now, all those who believe that the Earth is motionless, raise one hand,’ said William, once he had made a quick count. Bartholomew started to laugh again when he saw an equal number of hands raised, most of them from the people who had already voted the other way. Hamon leapt around the room slapping them down until he was certain his side had the majority, and grinned at Dame Eva triumphantly.
‘The Earth does spin,’ he announced. ‘You are wrong in thinking that it does not.’
She gave him a weary look, and hobbled from the room. Hamon led his supporters in a chorus of loud cheers, which quickly petered out when Tuddenham fixed them with an admonishing glare. As people began to disperse, Tuddenham sought out Michael.
‘So, that is how debates are held at the universities,’ he said. ‘Most intriguing, although I am a little surprised at its brutality of reason. I expected something a little more probing and subtle, not all this yelling and hurling of objects up to the ceiling.’
‘They vary,’ said Michael vaguely. ‘It really depends on the participants. Come to visit us in Michaelhouse, and I will take you to a real one.’
‘Perhaps I will,’ said Tuddenham, a little wistfully. ‘But thank you, Brother. I have not enjoyed an event as much since last year’s muck-spreading competition.’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Michael.
Bartholomew awoke the following morning to a dawn that gleamed dully with a silver mist that lay in uneven strips across the fields and along the river. Gradually, as the sun rose above the tree-ridged hill, it bathed the mist in red and then gold, before burning it away altogether. He stood with his arms resting on the windowsill, listening to Eltisley’s cockerel crowing in thee yard below, and watching two of the surly men heave barrels of ale from a cart into the cellar. Eltisley saw him, and waved cheerfully. Absently, Bartholomew waved back, thinking of the colleague whose funeral was that day.