The aggrieved tone of the man’s voice suggested to de Wolfe that this was a source of discontent in the village.
Sidbury was about fifteen miles from Exeter and they reached it in less than three hours’ easy riding. Thomas Tirel took them straight to the mill, a wooden structure astride a brook that ran underneath it. Upstream there was a deep pool formed by an earthen dam, and a crude sluice-gate controlled the flow to the wheel.
A rumbling noise came from the mill and John saw a cloud of dust drifting from an open door at the side. ‘They are still grinding corn?’ he demanded.
‘The bailiff insisted. The gear was not broken, so he had the blood washed away and told the miller to carry on.’
‘So where’s the body?’
‘Taken to the church, poor boy. We couldn’t give it back to the mother in the state it was in.’
With Gwyn at his side and Thomas de Peyne trailing behind, de Wolfe followed the reeve into the mill, coughing at the cloud of dust and chaff that filled the atmosphere. In the single room, a large circular stone, four feet across and a hand’s breadth thick, was slowly revolving below a similar but stationary wheel resting on top. A large wooden hopper fed grain into a hole in the centre of the upper stone and a circular tray around the moving lower quern collected the flour that dribbled from the joint between the stones.
The miller, a large, perspiring man dressed in a thin smock and a hessian apron, was adjusting the flow of grain from the hopper. Because of the noise, he was unaware of their presence until the reeve tapped his shoulder. Almost guiltily, the man turned around and, on seeing the coroner, tugged at his ginger forelock, which was almost white with dust.
‘Turn it off!’ yelled Gwyn, pointing at the stones.
The miller nodded and gestured at a young boy, who was up on a platform tipping a sack of grain into the hopper. Without a word, he ran out like a frightened rabbit and Gwyn, peering around the door, saw him racing up the bank of the stream.
‘He has to close the sluice to stop the wheel. That’s why we took so long to free the lad yesterday,’ explained the miller, looking uneasily from the reeve to the coroner.
A few moments later, the rumbling beneath slowed, then stopped. The silence was almost as oppressive as the grinding judder had been.
‘There’s where the floor gave way, Crowner,’ explained Tirel, pointing down at a series of loose boards laid across half of the floor on one side of the millstones. De Wolfe stamped experimentally with his heel on the planks where he was standing. The edge of his riding boot made indentations in the soft surface of the timber.
‘This whole place is decaying, for Christ’s sake!’ he exclaimed. ‘How old is it?’
‘My father was the miller here — and his father before him. It was here in their day, that’s all I know,’ said the ginger man defensively.
At the reeve’s demand, the miller took them outside and down the grassy bank towards where the stream gushed out from under the building. He opened a low, rickety door and led them into a cramped chamber below the millstones. Looking up, de Wolfe could see a splintered hole a few feet across, with a length of rotten joist hanging loose. To his left was the now silent water-wheel, eight feet high, with a shaft like a small tree-trunk lying horizontally at his feet. This ended in a stout wooden wheel with projecting pegs which interlocked with similar pegs studded around a larger wheel at the base of the vertical shaft, which went up to drive the millstone.
‘The poor little devil was caught in those gears, Crowner,’ explained Tirel. ‘Tore his throat open, it did. Blood everywhere by the time we got down here.’
‘It stopped the wheel for a moment, the gears being jammed,’ added the miller, with morbid relish. ‘But then the pressure of water built up behind the wheel and it broke two of the pegs off, throwing his head aside — but by then he must have been dead. Had to make two new pegs this morning to get the mill going again.’
John peered more closely at the crude gearing. In spite of vigorous washing, part of the flat gearwheel and some of the pegs were ominously ruddy-brown. Straightening up, he made for the door, leaving Gwyn to squint inquisitively at the machinery.
‘How much does the Bishop get for milling?’ de Wolfe demanded.
‘A ha’penny for five bushels, sir. Everyone in the manor must have their corn ground here, they’ve no choice. Anyone found using a hand quern is amerced at the manor court.’
This was usuaclass="underline" the lord had the monopoly of milling and guarded it jealously as a steady source of income. De Wolfe thought angrily of the mother mourning her youngest son, and determined to have some strong words with the bailiff — or even Henry Marshal himself. ‘Then the Bishop can spend a little of his profit on a new floor — though he needs a whole new mill, before it collapses into the brook,’ he said acidly.
A few hours later de Wolfe held an inquest, after Gwyn had rounded up enough men and boys from Sidbury and the neighbouring village of Harcombe, to form a jury. The proceedings were held in the graveyard of the old Saxon church, after John and the jurymen had solemnly inspected the mangled remains of the miller’s boy. Although he had seen countless corpses on a score of battlefields and had been present at a legion of hangings, beheadings, castrations and mutilations, de Wolfe was affected by the sight of the weeping mother and distraught father standing at the edge of the small crowd in the churchyard. There was little he could do for them other than offer some gruff words of sympathy after he had passed the inevitable verdict of accidental death.
He could have declared the gears of the mill ‘deodand’, as many coroners would have done in those circumstances. This meant confiscation of the object that had caused the death, either for the King’s treasury or sometimes as recompense to a widow for the loss of her breadwinner. In this case, it was physically impossible to remove the gears to sell them, as could have been done with a lethal dagger or even a runaway horse. As the boy was a fifth son and of tender years, his monetary value to the family was very small — he shrewdly guessed that the offer of a mark or two for the boy’s life would be more of an insult than a gain to the family.
Instead, he took the opportunity to berate the bailiff publicly for allowing the mill to fall into such a dangerous state of dilapidation. The man, a pompous, self-important fellow, blustered that he was not responsible for spending the Bishop’s money, but was soon deflated by the coroner’s tongue-lashing and threats to consider attaching him to the forthcoming Eyre on a charge of manslaughter by negligence.
When the inquest was over, with the sun dropping over the trees, Gwyn raised the matter of a night’s lodging. ‘After the mouthful you gave the bailiff, he’ll not be too co-operative in finding somewhere for us to stay,’ he said. ‘If we left now and put on a good pace all the way we might just get back to Exeter before the curfew.’
But de Wolfe had other plans. ‘We’ll keep clear of that puffed-up braggart, and clear out of this damned village. Sidmouth’s only a couple of miles away at the coast. We’ll find an inn there and go back to Exeter in the morning.’ He was happy to pay for a penny meal and a mattress for his officer and clerk in the small fishing port down the road, but with luck, he hoped to find a softer, warmer bed for himself.
The sun was low in the sky when they reached Sidmouth. A single street went down to the strand, where a line of fishing boats was drawn up across the pebble bank. A score of huts built of cob and turf spread out from a nucleus of larger wooden houses and a few stone ones around the church. There were three mean ale-houses, full of fishermen, and two better inns that offered a sleeping place in their lofts.
After seeing to their horses in the yard of the bigger tavern, which had an old anchor hanging over the door, the trio settled in the smoky, sweaty tap-room to eat and drink. The food was more notable for its quantity than quality, which suited Gwyn’s vast appetite, but even Thomas, after a day on a bouncing pony, managed to do justice to his grilled herrings, onions and cabbage.