Shrugging off her sledge ropes, she went up the few paces to the door. The cottage was a square box of oak frames, filled in with wattle and daub, a mixture of lime, clay, dung and horsehair, plastered over woven hazel panels. The thatch was old but in good condition, and two shuttered window spaces were set each side of the open front door.
Matilda tapped on the half-open door and peered in. In the centre of the single room she saw a large matron standing over the fire-pit, stirring the contents of an iron pot resting on a trivet over the glowing embers. Beyond her, an older woman was slumped on a stool, supporting herself against a table. One arm rested uselessly in her lap, and the corner of her mouth drooped as if part of her face had melted.
The neighbour looked around questioningly as Matilda entered. ‘Who are you, woman?’ she snapped. ‘You’re a stranger!’
‘I’m Matilda, widow of Emma’s nephew. I’ve come with my daughter to live here.’
Shebbear, August 1237
Gillota threw down the pile of dry grass in front of their cow, which had filled out well since the previous autumn. Served by the village bull, she had recently produced a calf and now munched away contentedly at the feed that the girl had cut with her sickle from the verges outside the village.
Matilda came out of the cottage with turnip peelings for the goats, and for a moment mother and daughter stood looking with satisfaction at their livestock. Their pigs were penned behind hurdles at the bottom of the half-acre plot, though in a month they would be let loose in the woods beyond the pasture, to root for beechnuts, on payment of a halfpenny-a-week pannage fee to the bailiff. A dozen fowls and four geese paraded around the back of the house, and in a distant corner half a dozen ducks splashed in the muddy water of a large hole dug in the ground.
They had worked hard since that day last summer when they came to find Aunt Emma struck with the palsy. Helped by the neighbours, they had nursed her back to reasonable health, and, though her arm was still weak and her speech a little slurred, her legs were sound and after a month or two she was able to do a share of the work in both cottage and on the croft outside.
Emma was a strong character, of formidable appearance. Tall and bony, she looked younger than her sixty-five years. The grey hair that strayed from under her head-rail still had streaks of russet in it, and she had kept many of her teeth, albeit discoloured and crooked. A devout woman, she was not given to much humour but was always even-tempered and tolerant of the two younger women who now shared her home.
‘You may stay here for as long as you need,’ she announced within days of their arrival. ‘And when I die, the toft will be yours, for I’ve no child to hand it to.’
Her gratitude for the attention that Matilda and her daughter gave her during her illness was muted, but nonetheless sincere, and as the months went by the all-female household became strongly bonded. Thankfully, it was a mild winter, with little snow and ice, though by the spring their stocks of food were running dangerously low. By March they were living on turnips and carrots stored in clamps in the yard, winter cabbage, onions and a few eggs that the fowls managed to produce off-season. The cow had a drain of milk left from last year’s pregnancy, but did not come into full flow until the calf was born.
It was a lean time, but they survived. Matilda again acted as a midwife and herbalist to the village and was paid for her services in kind: a loaf of bread, a pat of butter, a pan of wheat or a rabbit poached from the village warren. As they were acknowledged as free from serfdom in Shebbear, they had no allotted strips in the surrounding fields as did the villeins, who paid for the land allotted to them by the manor by the three days each week they worked for the bailiff on the King’s demesne, plus many other ‘boon days’. With Gillota’s help, Matilda dug and planted half the ground behind the cottage, keeping the rest for the animals, though each day Gillota led the cow down to the common pasture to graze.
One winter evening, when the aunt had recovered fairly well, the three women had crouched around the fire-pit, Emma and Matilda on the two stools and the daughter on the bracken-covered floor.
‘I still don’t understand how you say you are a free woman,’ muttered Emma thickly. ‘Your husband Robert was a villein when he left this village to go to Kentisbury.’
Her speech was improving, but the other two had to listen hard to understand her. Matilda frowned as she worked out the complicated family relationships.
‘Yes, all the Clapers were serfs, but that wasn’t the way we became free,’ she explained. ‘Robert, God bless his soul, married me, a Merland, who were unfree ever since William the Bastard conquered at Hastings.’
The aunt interrupted rather testily. ‘So was I, like all the Clapers, until Alan Revelle married me. He was a soldier and was freed for his service, so that made me free as well.’
‘Did he die, Aunt Emma?’ asked Gillota innocently, getting a lopsided scowl in return.
‘No, he went off to fight in the barons’ armies against King John. That was twenty years ago, and I’ve not heard a word of him since. Thank God I had this freeholding to live on, or I’d have starved.’
Matilda had waited patiently to finish her story. ‘Your nephew Robert came to Kentisbury, married me and worked both as a thatcher and in the fields, like all the villeins. My father was the manor reeve for many years, and he worked so well and was so popular that our lord, Matthew Lupus, freed him about three years ago.’
‘That wouldn’t have made Robert free — and you were his wife,’ objected Emma.
The younger woman nodded her agreement. ‘No, not then. We remained in serfdom and worked for the lord as usual. But when Robert died, I became unencumbered by a bonded husband and so, as the daughter of a free man, became free myself.’
Emma thought about this for a moment. ‘Can your lord testify to his freeing Robert?’
Tears sprang to Matilda’s eyes. ‘This is the problem! Matthew Lupus died last year, and his son Walter refuses to accept the situation. He denies that his father freed mine, and, especially since my father also died, he claims that I and my daughter remain in his servitude. He made us carry on in bondage as before, working for the manor and paying our boons the same as the other villeins.’
Emma poked the small logs in the ring of whitewashed stones with a rod held in her good hand. ‘Was there no document to prove the act of manumission?’ she asked.
Matilda shook her head sadly. ‘No one in the village apart from the priest can read or write. The king’s steward from Barnstaple comes with a clerk every quarter to record all the village payments and debts.’
‘But surely the village knew that your father had been freed?’ objected Emma.
‘When it came to the test, Walter Lupus denied it,’ said Matilda sadly. ‘How can you go against what your manor lord says?’
Gillota looked from her mother to her great-aunt as the dialogue swung from side to side. She was still anxious about being dragged back to Kentisbury, even though months had passed.
Emma was still raising objections to Matilda’s story. ‘But the manor steward and the bailiff would have known about the manumission of your father by this Matthew Lupus,’ she declared. ‘Could you not have appealed to them?’
Matilda shook her head. ‘The bailiff at that time left for a better post in Suffolk, and when his father died Walter got rid of the old steward and appointed another, younger man, Simon Mercator, who was always eager to do his bidding.’
‘The manor court, then!’ said the old lady. ‘Could you not have appealed to them?’
‘I did, even though the new reeve who replaced my father was reluctant to put my case forward. But when it came to the hearing, the new steward held the court, with Walter sitting alongside him. They dismissed my plea with contempt, saying it was a frivolous lie.’