'Would he recognise them again, if he saw them?'
Thomas nodded emphatically. 'I asked him that question directly and he seemed in no doubt about one of them.'
De Wolfe glowered into his ale as he drank the last drop. It was a damned nuisance that the fair would finish in two days' time, for the chances were that these men had arrived in the area to attend it and would most likely be gone as soon as the fair ended.
'How soon will this fellow be up and about?' he demanded.
The clerk's peaky face brightened. 'Remarkably, by tomorrow, according to the monks who are caring for him. He has a constitution like an ox, they said, and is already off his pallet arid demanding to be allowed to return home to Totnes. They will be glad to be rid of him, as he's eating too much and upsetting their quiet life in the priory.'
The coroner considered this for a moment. 'Then if I send Gwyn and a hired horse down there tomorrow, would they release him to us? I need him to identify the assailants, if he can.'
Thomas nodded. 'I'm sure they will, Crowner. Apart from his being knocked senseless and dumped in the river, his other injuries are no threat to his life.' Gwyn would have left the city for his hut in St Sidwells by now, to beat the closing of the gates at curfew, but John felt there would be plenty of time for him to give his orders first thing the next morning. Thomas made his escape from the alehouse to return to his free lodgings in one of the canon's houses in the close, where he had the use of a thin mattress in the servants' quarters. John sat on in the Bush for a long while, being content to have Nesta's company intermittently, between her bustling about between the patrons and haranguing her servants over the business of keeping her customers filled with food and ale.
Eventually, John judged that his odious brother-in-law must surely have left his house and, after a final discreet cuddle with Nesta at the back door, he left for home and the inevitable verbal skirmish with his wife.
On Wednesday, his duties at the tournament did not begin until noon, so he had ample time to dispatch Gwyn to St James' Priory. With him he sent a spare palfrey from Andrew's yard, the livery stable in Martin's Lane, with orders to bring Terrus back to Bull Mead.
De Wolfe then walked up to Rougemont to see whether any more deaths, rapes or other tragedies had been reported overnight to the guardroom, which was always manned. News of these events came in to the coroner from the city constables and from the manor reeves of outlying villages. When the coroner's system had been introduced in September the previous year, there were supposed to have been three such officials appointed for the county, but only two could be found willing to undertake the unpaid work. Within a few weeks, the knight covering the north of Devon was killed when he fell from his horse, and it was only recently that a replacement had been found. John still had to cover a huge area in the southern half of the county, and there was no doubt that cases in the more distant villages often went unreported, as the distance involved in riding to Exeter was too great for many manor-bailiffs and reeves to contemplate.
This morning, the guardroom had nothing to offer, for which John was thankful. Sergeant Gabriel and most of the men-at-arms were already patrolling the fair and the city streets, so the castle was almost deserted. He found Thomas upstairs, busily writing out copies of inquest proceedings, executions, ordeals, amercemerits, attachments and other legal documents, which all had to be duplicated to present to the King's justices when they next came to Exeter. These judicial visits were very irregular, even though the judges were supposed to appear every quarter.
The Commissioners of Gaol Delivery managed to get around their circuit several times a year, to hear cases and clear the prisons of captives, either by hanging them, fining them or acquitting them. Much less often, the Eyre of Assize trundled along, with four senior members of the Curia Regis, to hear the most serious cases — and even more infrequently, the great General Eyre arrived. This looked into the more weighty matters of the administration of the county, a nightmare for the sheriff, especially the recently deposed one, who had had to cover up his embezzlement as best he could.
But today there were no legal problems for Sir John de Wolfe, and he retraced his steps back down Castle Hill and made his way through the crowded streets to the fairground. Business was in full swing, and though he was happy to see soldiers and stewards patrolling the lanes between the booths, there seemed to be no trouble, apart from an odd scuffle and the occasional drunk stumbling to upset a tableful of goods.
At one point everyone stood aside to gape and shout and clap as a colourful procession squeezed down the central lane. This was a guild pageant, put on by the craft organisations that controlled the many trades in the city. Several flat carts, covered in white and coloured cloth, were pulled by teams of apprentices to show off the tableaux displayed on these mobile stages. One was of a mock crusade, with half a dozen knights wielding wooden swords and axes upon twice their number of 'Saracens'. Again these were all apprentices, arrayed in garish costumes, accompanied by much yelling and screaming as the Christians vanquished the Moors.
Another cart had tumblers wheeling about alongside jugglers, a fire-eater and a sword-swallower. The last float was a sop to the ecclesiastical establishment, being a re-enactment of the John the Baptist story. While a parish priest shouted the story from a parchment, a tall bearded man in a white robe stood in a River Jordan made from a horse trough full of water, enthusiastically dousing a trio of the youngest apprentices with a pitcher normally used for ale. At the end of the wagon, another young man dressed in oriental female attire with a blond wig and padded bosoms portrayed Salome, holding aloft a tray on which was a realistically bloody severed head.
As John watched, the crowd cheered their appreciation and threw coins on to the carts, alms for the guilds to donate to the poorhouse near the West Gate. When the parade had passed, he followed the crowd of urchins that capered behind it until it reached the centre, where another miracle play was in progress, a competitor to the more popular guild spectacle.
As he walked past, John turned his head to look and saw that today they were performing 'The Wise and Foolish Virgins', again with a bevy of young choristers dressed as girls — in fact, several of the more comely ones were impossible to distinguish from females.
As they tripped about the stage, over-dramatically posturing with their lamps and oil vessels, a vicar-choral chanted a commentary in verse, based on the Gospel parable.
But de Wolfe, who had seen them all before, loped on and made his way back to a form of entertainment that suited him better, on the turf of Bull Mead. The area was now crowded, compared to his visit yesterday, as the contests had been in progress for several hours.
The stand was filled with the more exalted spectators, colourful in a variety of costumes, including quite a few women. They were by no means all dewy-eyed maidens come to wave a handkerchief at their champions, for a good half were the solid wives of burgesses, knights and several barons who had come to watch the bouts. Along the ropes marking off the battle area was a straggling line of lesser spectators, many from the city itself, together with supporters and gambling men from the Devon countryside and several other counties. As John arrived, a series of trumpet blasts from a herald marked the end of the morning's bouts and the field was cleared for workmen and boys to go out to shovel up piles of dung and to knock the worst of the hacked-up turf back into shape, after the pounding it had had from so many heavy hoofs.