Again, de Wolfe refused to rise to de Revelle’s mischievous bait. ‘I’ll leave you here to play at being Lord Warden, Richard,’ he replied evenly. ‘I need to go to the church now, to attend the disposal of Walter Knapman. One never knows what intelligence may be picked up on such occasions — and one of us has to try to find his killer.’
He collected Gwyn and Thomas, leaving the horses with Gabriel’s minion, and they walked to St Michael’s to stand at the back of the church, which was filled with mourners come to see off their well-known townsman. The corpse was now in a coffin at the foot of the chancel steps, and through the rood screen Paul Smithson could dimly be seen preparing the Host for the requiem mass.
When the parish priest came to the opening in the screen to commune with the congregation, de Wolfe became conscious of a stream of Latin being whispered just behind him and turned to see Thomas, with tears dribbling from his eyes, reciting the Office word for word with the priest. Once again, the coroner wondered at the intense emotion the ecclesiastical life engendered in his little clerk and he worried again for the man’s mental stability. He only hoped that John de Alençon would be able to do something to alleviate Thomas’s abject misery.
As the service droned on, Gwyn became restive and soon slipped away — de Wolfe suspected to the Crown alehouse across the road. Eventually, when the mass was over, the congregation trooped out to follow the coffin to a newly dug grave where, with due solemnity, the tin-master of Chagford was laid to his final rest.
Joan had reverted to a black gown and cloak, which contrasted sharply with the snow-white cover-chief and wimple around her head and face. As silent as ever, she acted the part of the bereaved widow admirably, though Thomas outdid her in tears. De Wolfe noticed that Stephen Acland was absent, either from discretion or because he wanted to be at the coinage, which would have started by now.
At the churchyard gate, the elegant widow courteously invited de Wolfe to the house for refreshments, but he declined, pleading that he had to return to the square to talk to the sheriff, though in fact he wanted to observe the coinage procedure. ‘And then I will be off to Exeter. God knows what problems may have accumulated there by now.’
At this, Matthew asked if he and Peter Jordan could ride back to the city with the coroner, both for company and to allay their uneasiness when going through the Dunsford area where Walter had been attacked: Matthew now claimed to favour outlaws as the culprits, rather than tinners. De Wolfe readily agreed, thinking that he might learn something useful during the few hours’ journey.
After promising to call back at the house in an hour or two, he walked with Thomas back to the square, where the rough enclosure was the centre of even more activity than before. Gwyn was already there, after a quick quart in the nearest tavern, so they pushed their way through to the shelter and stepped over the rope for a closer view of the proceedings.
Richard de Revelle was standing with Gabriel, Ralph Morin and two guards close by. For the moment, the tinners had given up their sneers and abuse, concerned with the coinage ritual, which meant the prospect of a cash return on weeks or months of hard work on the moor.
A line of men had formed along the length of the shelter, each standing or squatting alongside their pile of black tin, which they had carried across from carts, barrows or panniers. As each man was dealt with by the coinage officials, he vacated his place and someone else brought in his load of bars. Over half the total came from the workings of Knapman or Acland, but the procedure was the same: their employees did the fetching and carrying on a shuttle system from the large stocks standing at the side of the square.
Gwyn, who had seen the system operating in Cornwall, explained what was going on. ‘That’s the assay master, who is in charge of the whole proceedings,’ he muttered, pointing at a grey-bearded man dressed in a brown tunic and grey hose with cross-gartering down to his stout shoes. He wore a close-fitting black cap, tied under his chin with tapes, and round his neck hung a chain of refined tin with a large medallion denoting his official status. ‘The others are the Steward, who is responsible for the register, the Receiver and the Controller, with their pair of clerks. They all have to read and write, for the weight of each bar has to be agreed by them all and written down against the name of the owner and the quality of the metal.’
De Wolfe noticed that the Controller, a stocky man in a long leather apron, was fiddling with a large steel-yard suspended from one of the roof beams. It was a weighing scales, with one short arm carryinga flat pan and a longer arm from which hung a smaller weight-pan that could be slid back and forth on the yard. ‘His main concern is that King’s beam,’ explained Gwyn. ‘He brings it here with a sealed box of weights that has been checked by the mint in Winchester.’
The assay team worked with brisk efficiency, born of years of practice. John watched as the Steward went to a fresh applicant at the rope and dictated his name to the clerk, who allotted simple code letters to the tinner, usually based on his initials. The Receiver, another grizzled veteran in a leather apron, took the bars over the rope and rapidly impressed the code on to the soft metal with a hammer and set of dies. Then he handed them up in quick succession to the Controller, who weighed them on the beam, had it checked by the Steward and called out the result to the clerk, who entered it on his roll. The bar was passed quickly to the assay master, who squatted on a small milking stool before a large log of hard oak, which acted as an anvil. With a hammer and small chisel, he dextrously knocked off a small corner of the bar, exposing the shinier grey tin underneath. Immediately, he exchanged the chisel for dies and struck two other impressions on the bar, one the King’s mark of a couchant lion, and another a set of dots, the purpose of which was incomprehensible to de Wolfe.
‘What’s that one for?’ he grunted to Gwyn.
‘The quality mark, Crowner, what he considers to be the purity of the metal, which will affect the price it gets from merchants like Matthew Knapman.’
‘How does he know that?’ demanded de Wolfe.
Gwyn chuckled. ‘Black magic, some say. But he’s been doing it for years. A good assay master is worth his weight in gold, let alone tin. He can tell by the way the chisel cuts the metal, its hardness, even the sound it makes when it’s sliced, as well as the colour and the amount of impurities on the surface.’ Gwyn sounded almost wistful, as his mind went back to the days of his youth, before his father left tinning for the dangers of the sea.
De Wolfe was almost as impressed by the speed of the operation as by the ability of the assay master to value the quality of the bars. With many hundreds if not thousands of ingots to deal with in two days, the rapidity of the process was remarkable. The calling out of the weights, the clang of the bar into the weighing pan and the steady pounding of the hammers as they embossed the tin were almost hypnotic.
Outside the ropes there was now equally frantic activity, as tinners and porters hurried back and forth across the square with piles of bars, fetching them for assay and returning them to the stacks at the edge of the roadway. Mugs of ale and cider were ferried across to the coining team, as were loaves and pasties, so that the labouring officials could grab a bite or swig from a drink between their incessant handling of the black metal.
After a few minutes, de Wolfe noticed that the sheriff, who had so far ignored him, seemed restive, and soon afterwards he left the enclosure with Morin and two men-at-arms and vanished up the high street, no doubt to seek refreshment in one of the taverns. The novelty of watching the coinage soon palled on John, too, and he turned to Gwyn to give him his orders. ‘I must go back to Exeter this morning. I’ll take Thomas with me, but you must stay until the coinage has finished tomorrow. I’m told the sheriff is going to stay until the end, to emphasise his role as Lord Warden, so maybe you can ride back with Gabriel and his men behind de Revelle and the constable.’