Julian Fulk was fleetingly curious about the group of men who emerged from the lane, but he had other things to concern him. He was chronically anxious about his future and this had generated a slow anger that burned constantly and never left him. Although on the surface, he appeared amiable to the point of obsequious affability, this was a façade over the seething discontent beneath. To the members of his congregation, like Matilda, he was an urbane, unctuous priest, full of the social graces that attracted many of the more prominent wives of burgesses and officials like Sir John de Wolfe. They came to St Olave’s even when their dwellings were distant from his church.
Though formal parish boundaries were a thing of the future in Exeter, most people went to the nearest of about twenty-seven city churches, some only a few steps from their front doors. But Julian Fulk appealed to — and cultivated — those who, like himself, wanted social advancement. Though he was unaware of it, he had much in common with Adam of Dol of St Mary Steps, who also desired to be a canon and was as bitterly resentful that no such elevation seemed to be contemplated by the powers in the cathedral precinct.
Fulk turned away as the men disappeared from Fore Street and went inside his little church. Another oblong stone box, it was the cleanest of them all and, though bare of any decoration, its floor had fresh rushes strewn about and the shutters on the high windows were freshly painted. The altar table was covered with a lace-edged linen cloth, personally worked by the wife of one of the guild masters. The cross was filigreed silver donated by another guild, and before it was a pot containing fresh flowers, an unusual sight in an urban church.
But all of this was ashes in Father Julian’s mouth, though none of his gushing lady parishioners would have guessed it. He sat down on the unused bishop’s chair at the side of the altar to rest his bulk, for he was the shape of a barrel and perspired copiously at the slightest exertion. His moon-shaped face was pink, virtually the same colour as his almost bald head — he had only a rim of sandy hair from ear to ear. Nerves caused him to chew his flabby lower lip as he sat in his empty church, waiting for the few worshippers to arrive for his mid-morning Mass.
When the ladies came, he would smile and bob his head, for there were seldom men on a week-day. Julian Fulk would appear the soul of affability, especially to those he thought had husbands who might have influence with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Fulk knew that it was the gossip around dining tables in Canon’s Row and the guildsmen’s houses that made or broke reputations, and where preferment was assisted or frustrated with a nudge and wink.
As he pondered beside his altar, he once again cursed the fact that St Olave’s was different from all the other city churches, in that it belonged to St Nicholas Priory and its living was controlled by the Abbot of Battle, far away in Sussex. He had never even visited Battle and never met the Abbot, so he was at a double disadvantage in angling to be a canon-elect; the Bishop and Archdeacon here had no responsibility for his curacy of St Olave’s. Even that madman down at St Mary Steps had a better chance of promotion, for at least he was within the fold of Exeter.
Julian Fulk had got the living here almost by accident and had regretted it ever since. He was the son of a canon of Winchester and had been educated at the school there, some years earlier than Thomas de Peyne but he had been in the cathedral as a vicar-choral when Thomas was teaching juniors. His father had died suddenly and any chance of paternal influence had died with him, given the intense competition in Winchester between an excess of senior vicars. At a guest-night dinner in the Bishop’s palace, he had chanced to sit next to a monk who was Precentor at Battle — and Fulk, disillusioned with Winchester, was offered the living of St Olave’s. Without appreciating the insignificance of the church and the grave disadvantage of being outside the pale of Exeter’s episcopal establishment, he had moved and stagnated ever since. The impasse had become like a cancer, eating away at his soul and monopolising his every thought, but unlike Adam of Dol, he masked his resentment with a falsely benign face. Yet he knew that, like a cooking pot with a jammed lid, the pressure inside him was building.
De Wolfe had intended to go up to Rougemont after the hangings, to tell the sheriff about the second murder, but de Revelle spared him the trouble by attending the executions himself.
To be more accurate, he came to attend one of them, for the frantic activity to get everything ready for the Justices was mortgaging his time, if he was to conceal every irregularity in the accounts and records. However, he could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing Gocius de Vado swing that morning, after all the trouble the damned man had caused.
Gocius was a freeman who lived near de Revelle’s manor at Tiverton and had successfully fought the sheriff’s efforts to claim a hide of land from him through an attempted distortion of a land charter going back to the Domesday Commissioners. De Vado had even petitioned the King over the dispute and received a favourable judgement from Hubert Walter. De Revelle swore vindictively to get even with him and, using an agent provocateur and several bribed false witnesses, had his enemy convicted in his own shire court of receiving stolen property to a value of ten marks, far above the legal minimum of twelve pence for a felony and thus a capital offence. De Wolfe had not been involved, as no death, robbery or violence had taken place, but when he heard ale-house gossip on the matter, he strongly suspected some underhand dealing by his brother-in-law.
On this Friday morning, the coroner, followed by his officer and clerk, went out of the South Gate and up Magdalen Street on foot — it was not worth the trouble of saddling up three steeds for a half-mile journey. Though it was called a street, the way to the gallows became a country road, once beyond the huts and ramshackle dwellings that had sprung up outside the walls. These were not villages, like St Sidwell’s beyond the East Gate where Gwyn lived, but the overflow of the city. Due to its burgeoning prosperity, Exeter had expanded rapidly and the old walls could no longer house all those who worked there.
The coroner’s party walked with scores of others who were going to the hanging tree, either for entertainment or to see off a relative or acquaintance on their journey into eternity. Old men, too aged to work, and mothers with small children to entertain formed the bulk of the crowd, while hawkers with trays of pies and pasties, trinkets and lucky charms made up the rest. There were a few beggars too and even a hooded leper, forbidden to enter the city from the hospital outside the East Gate, but hoping for a few coins in his wooden bowl from those rash enough to brave the warning of his wooden rattle.
Magdalene Street, where Aaron had just been buried in the tiny Jewish cemetery, became the King’s highway to Honiton, and thence far away to Salisbury, Southampton, Winchester and even London. But today four men would never get beyond the first half mile, as their journey through life was to end abruptly at the gallows at the road-side.
Hanging was an accepted part of everyday life, preferred by many miscreants to mutilation, blinding or castration, which William the Bastard had favoured when he took over England. The Conqueror preferred these methods because the maimed victims remained in the community as a grim example to other potential wrongdoers. But conviction for a felony usually ended in a hanging, and all the executed person’s land and chattels were confiscated. It was not only the Crown that benefited: the power of life and death also resided in the manor and burgess courts when forfeited goods went to the lord or the town council. At this time, England hanged a greater proportion of its inhabitants than any other country in Christendom.