OUTLAW
Literally, anyone outside the law, usually an escaped criminal or a fugitive. They often lurked in the forests and any person was entitled to kill them on sight to collect a bounty, as they were ‘as the wolf’s head’.
OUTREMER
The four Christian kingdoms in the Levant at the time of the Crusades, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
PHTHISIS
Tuberculosis.
PORTREEVE
One of the senior officials in a town, elected by the other burgesses. There were usually two portreeves, later superseded by a mayor. The first mayor in Exeter took office in 1208.
PREBENDARY
A canon of a cathedral. A priest who is granted a prebend, the income of a church in the diocese to support him. Many canons employed a vicar to look after their parish, while they stayed in the cathedral.
PRECENTOR
A senior cleric in a cathedral, responsible for organising the religious services, singing, etc.
PRESENTMENT OF ENGLISHRY
Following the 1066 Conquest, many Normans were killed by aggrieved locals, so the law decreed that anyone found dead was Norman and the locals punished by a murdrum fine (q.v.) unless they could prove the deceased was English (or Welsh). The presentment of Englishry by relatives of murdered people continued for several hundred years, as even though it became meaningless it was good source of revenue.
SANCTUARY
An ancient religious offer of mercy, where a fugitive from pursuit or a gaol-breaker could claim forty days immunity from the law if he reached a church or even the precincts of a church. This was not available for crimes of sacrilege.
SENESCHAL
The senior steward or head of the staff of a great household.
SHERIFF
A ‘shire-reeve’, the King’s representative in a county, responsible for law and order and the collection of royal taxes.
TITHE
A tenth part of the harvest, demanded by the church.
UNDERCROFT
The ground floor of a fortified building. The entrance to the rest of the building was on the floor above, which had no communication with the undercroft. Removable wooden steps prevented attackers from being able to storm the main door.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the following for historical advice, though reserving the blame for any misapprehensions about the complexities of life and law in twelfth century Devon; Mrs Angela Doughty, Exeter Cathedral Archivist; the staff of Devon Record Office and of Exeter Central Library; Mr Stuart Blaylock, Exeter Archaeology; Rev Canon Mawson, Exeter Cathedral; Mr Thomas Watkin, Cardiff Law School, University of Wales; Professor Nicholas Orme, University of Exeter; and to Clare Ledingham, Editorial Director at Simon & Schuster, for her unfailing interest and support.
Chapter One
In which Crowner John rides to Widecombe
The three riders plodded miserably along the rutted track. The hoofs of their animals splashed in the muddy water that trickled down to meet the Webburn river, a mile away. Leading the trio, Crowner John cursed as he felt the rain beginning to trickle from the edge of his leather hood into the neckband of his cloak. Even the hardships he had endured during the Crusades or the Irish campaigns had failed to immunise him against the purgatory of a wet autumn in the West Country.
Close behind his great grey stallion came a brown mare, carrying the gaunt shape of the coroner’s bodyguard, his ginger hair wrapped turban-wise in an oat-sack that dripped water down his frayed leather cuirass. ‘I thought November was for fog on these bloody moors, not this endless rain,’ he grumbled. Though he knew Saxon English well enough, Gwyn of Polruan spoke in his native Cornish, mainly to annoy the third member of the party.
‘Stop complaining, if that’s what you were doing in that barbaric tongue!’ whined the man bringing up the rear. He was half the size of the other two and sat his mule side-saddle, like a woman. An unfrocked priest, Thomas de Peyne was the coroner’s clerk and, in Gwyn’s eyes, as evil a little bastard as ever fouled the soil of Devon.
The weather had frayed their tempers more than usual, though they were ever a quarrelsome band. It was now more than three hours since they had left Exeter and the ceaseless downpour along the eastern edge of Dartmoor was enough to rot a man’s soul.
At last, the coroner’s horse breasted the ridge at the edge of Rippon Tor and Sir John de Wolfe could look down with relief on the wretched hamlet that was their destination. He brushed the rain off his eyebrows and wiped the drops from his hooked nose as he reined in his stallion. A tall, dark, sinewy man, John had a pair of deep-set, brooding eyes surmounting a long face with high cheekbones. It was a face that was not given to much humour – not that his previous soldiering life had offered much to laugh about.
The two other riders stopped alongside him and they sat in a row, gazing down without enthusiasm on the saturated countryside. To their right, a grey slope of bare moorland swept up to the granite crags of Chinkwell Tor and Hameldown Beacon, stark against the skyline. Below, the land canted away to the left, with clumps of trees thickening to forest as the moor gave way in the distance to the Dart valley. Strips of cultivated fields filled the middle foreground, with a dozen mean houses clustered around a wooden church. Further away they could see a band of dense woodland, beyond which drifting smoke indicated the next village, which the coroner thought to be Dunstone, though the few available maps of Dartmoor were a mixture of fact and speculation.
‘Another God-forsaken place,’ complained the hunchbacked clerk, in his irritating high-pitched voice. At frequent intervals he crossed himself nervously, where another man would pick his nose or belch.
John tapped his horse’s belly with his heel. ‘Come on, let’s see what they’ve got for us.’
He led the trio down the slope, their mounts picking their way carefully over the slippery mud and stones of the path down to the village of Widecombe.
A hundred paces from the muddy mound that served as the village green, they were met by a man with a reeve’s staff, who had ambled out of the nearest thatched hut. He was a rough-looking fellow, with unkempt hair plastered to his skull by the rain. Touching his brow in a grudging salute, he approached the grey horse. ‘You this crowner man, then?’ he demanded.
The rider glared down at him from under heavy black eyebrows that matched the dark stubble on his face, for against the fashion of the times he had no beard or moustache. With his black hood and dark riding cloak, he looked like a great raven perched on the horse.
‘Sir John de Wolfe to you, fellow! The King’s coroner in this county – so show some respect, will you?’ Though not a vain man, John was conscious of his new royal appointment, foreign though it might be to most people in this westerly limb of Coeur de Lion’s kingdom.
The manor reeve caught the snap in the coroner’s voice and became vastly more deferential. ‘Yessir, begging your pardon. Ralph the reeve, I am. Come indoors out of the rain, sirs.’
They squelched after him through the cattle-churned mud towards his long-house. Though the best in the village, it was a rickety low structure of frame and wattle, with a roof of tattered straw that sprouted grass and green moss. One end was a byre, from which came the lowing of cattle, most destined soon for the butcher’s knife as few could be kept fed through the coming winter.