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.