The other half of the building was a windowless dwelling, smoke filtering from under the low eaves of the thatch. A puny lad hurried out from somewhere to take the reins of the horses and lead them off to feed.
The three travellers followed the village headman, the tall figures of John and Gwyn having to stoop under the doorway to enter the house. In the dim light, they saw a bare room with an earthen floor. A smoky fire burned dully in a clay hearth-pit in the middle, over which a small cauldron hung on a trivet. One crude door led to the cowshed and another to the luxury of an inner room, where two runny nosed barefoot children gaped with round eyes at these visitors from the unknown outer world.
‘Sit yourselves, sirs,’ invited the reeve. He pulled forward a low bench and a milking stool to the fire, virtually the only furniture, then called brusquely to a woman lurking in the darker recesses of the room. ‘Martha, bring ale, bread and some bowls for this broth you’ve got warming here.’ His English was thick with the local accent.
The official party shrugged off their sodden outer clothes and the reeve hung them on wooden pegs fixed into the wall-frames. He wondered where Gwyn and the small man fitted into the system. The Cornishman, betrayed by his accent, was even taller and certainly more massive than the crowner, but with his ginger hair and moustache, was a complete contrast to the saturnine blackness of Sir John. Although the man had no beard, his moustache was so profuse that its bushy tails hung down on both sides of his mouth and chin almost to his chest. His unruly shock of hair ran down as sidewhiskers to join his moustache.
Gwyn had been born forty-two years earlier, to a tin-miner who had turned to fishing and moved to the coast at Polruan, on the opposite side of the river entrance to Fowey. Gwyn had followed the fishing trade until he was seventeen, then come to Exeter to be a slaughterman in the Shambles. His huge size brought him an invitation to become bodyguard-cum-squire to a local knight off to the wars. Fourteen years ago, in 1180, he had come to Sir John de Wolfe and they had remained together ever since, fighting and travelling in Ireland and to the Third Crusade.
The coroner’s clerk, Ralph saw, was a furtive little man with a dropped shoulder from old spinal disease and a shifty pair of eyes that darted everywhere and missed nothing.
The visitors were served a simple meal by the silent woman, who was pale and toothless though probably no more than thirty. While they slurped meat broth over the edges of wooden bowls and champed at the hard bread, the coroner sat and listened to the story of Ralph the reeve.
‘Found him before milking time, yesterday morning, we did,’ the village overseer said, with a certain morbid relish. Little happened in Widecombe and the finding of a body made an intriguing change from sheep foot-rot and mouldy oats, the only local topics of conversation. ‘Lying on the bank, he was – head in the water. In the little stream that runs into the Webburn, between here and Dunstone, a fair way beyond the old Saxon well.’
Gwyn’s ruddy face followed the story carefully, while the button eyes of the sparrow-like clerk jumped restlessly about the room.
Crowner John held up a large hand, keeping his half-consumed bowl of broth in the other. ‘Wait a minute, man! Whose side of the stream was it on – yours or the next village’s?’
The reeve looked shiftily from John to Gwyn and then to the clerk.
‘The truth, man!’ snapped the coroner.
Ralph’s acne-scarred cheeks twitched and the single yellow tooth in his upper jaw stuck out like a spike as he grinned feebly. ‘’T was on our side, sir … though I’ll swear those damned Dunstone folk put him across in the night.’
The big Cornishman grunted. ‘Why should they do that? And how could you know they did?’
The reeve scratched vigorously at the lice on his head as an aid to thought. ‘To save themselves the trouble of all this new-fangled crowner’s business – beggin’ your pardon, sirs,’ he added hastily. ‘That body wasn’t there the night before, for our pig boy was down in that there meadow till dusk.’
‘He could have come there and died during the night, you fool!’ whined Thomas.
Ralph shook his head. ‘His belly was blown up. Been dead a while – a good few days at least, at this season.’
‘Washed down the stream, then?’ hazarded John.
The reeve rocked his head again. ‘’Tis but a trickle of a brook before it joins the other stream. Not enough to move a badger, let alone a man’s corpse. No, them Dunstone people dumped him on us, so as not to be first finders, that’s for sure.’
The law laid an obligation on those who discovered a body, the so-called ‘First Finders’, to raise the hue-and-cry by immediately rousing the nearest four households and starting a chase for the culprit, as well as notifying the authorities. It was an obligation that carried penalties for errors, and most people made every effort to avoid being involved.
The coroner finished his soup, put the bowl on the floor and stood up, his head all but touching the rough beams above. He moved to stand right over the fire, letting the moisture steam off his worsted breeches and the grey knee-length surcoat, slit back and front for sitting a horse.
‘Any idea who this corpse might be?’ he snapped at the reeve. The battle-scarred veteran of a score of years spent campaigning in Ireland, France and Palestine, John had a demanding manner. A man of few words, he wasted none and, in turn, expected no fancy turns of phrase or beating about the bush.
Ralph shook his head again. ‘No one from these parts, Crowner. Not a serf nor villein, neither. More a gentleman, by his garments.’
John’s eyebrows rose a little, crinkling the forehead scar he had won from a Saracen sword outside Acre. ‘A gentleman? We’ll see about that. Where’ve you got him?’
The abruptness of his deep voice sent Ralph scurrying to get their cloaks, still dripping on the wall hooks. ‘In the tithe barn, just inside the entrance. Starting to smell a bit, he is.’
They trooped outside to find that the rain had eased to a fine drizzle. The sodden village sat dejected in its valley and now a pall of white mist had settled on the moor above, heightening the feeling of isolation from the rest of the world. A few curious souls watched covertly from the doorways of their cottages as the procession left the reeve’s dwelling.
‘Over this way, sirs,’ called Ralph, splashing ahead towards the small church and larger barn that sat slightly below the crest of the village green.
John saw that the hamlet, set in a valley, was all slopes and mounds, but fertile from the soil washed down from the moors over aeons of time.
‘We called you right away, Crowner, just as we should,’ said Ralph virtuously. His initial truculence had long vanished, now that he realised that under the new law Sir John de Wolfe was a force to be reckoned with.
It was only a month since his own lord, Hugh FitzRalph, had assembled his six manor reeves and told them of various new laws that had filtered down from the royal court, where the King’s justiciar, Archbishop Hubert Walter, was ruling England now that Richard had returned to France.
One new regulation had come from the General Eyre, sitting in the county of Kent: in September, it had revived the ancient Saxon post of coroner.
To the ignorant reeves, including Ralph, Kent was as remote as the moon and coroners were equally incomprehensible. They had gathered that the new men would record illegal events and enquire into dead bodies, but their interest waned rapidly as FitzRalph’s clerk, the only man in the manor who could read, droned on. All that Ralph remembered was that if a death occurred violently or unexpectedly, a runner had to be sent straight away to Exeter to notify the sheriff and this new official – otherwise the village would be amerced, which meant a heavy fine. As he heaved at the tall, rickety door of the barn, it occurred to Ralph that if he wanted to keep the perquisites of his job as village reeve, he had better find out a little more about coroners and stick to the rules: if this hawkish black beanpole was crossed, he might prove a handful of trouble. As he wrestled with the door Ralph looked covertly at Sir John de Wolfe and decided that the stern, sallow face, with the deep furrows running down to the corners of the mouth, was that of a hard man. His great height and slightly hunched shoulders gave him the appearance of a bird of prey, ready to swoop on any wrong-doer. De Wolfe’s lips, though, made Ralph wonder if the new crowner made himself more agreeable to the ladies than he did to men: they had a full sensuality at odds with the man’s otherwise flinty appearance.