‘He’s dead … dead as a salted ham!’ she proclaimed, after holding a capable hand over the place where a light summer tunic covered his heart. For good measure she thumbed up his eyelids and looked at the sightless orbs staring at blue sky.
‘But he can’t be — he rode up on this horse not three minutes ago!’ protested one old man.
‘I know a corpse when I see one, Wilfred Coe!’ the widow snapped. ‘He’s had an apoplexy or a visitation of God. But dead he is and you’d better get the reeve and the priest, for he looks like a rich man — and that can only mean trouble for the likes of us if it’s not handled properly!’
The ale-wife was right in her gloomy foreboding, for the complex demands of the law could eventually cost the village many precious pennies in fines by the time the King’s coroner had finished with them.
The dead man lay in the dust at the edge of the road while the reeve was sent for, the priest being away in Exeter for the day. A reeve was the villager who represented the manor-lord and who organised most of the activities in Alphington, especially the work in the fields. As the manor was a royal one, belonging to the King himself, there was no local lord, the demesne being managed by a bailiff, who had several similar villages to oversee.
The first problem for the reeve was to discover who the dead man might be. There were parchments in his saddle-bag with writing upon them, but as no one in the village could read, apart from the absent priest, these were of no help. Luckily the next rider to come along the high road from the direction of Plymouth, within a few minutes, was a merchant from Exeter, who recognised the victim. Seeing the knot of people clustered around the door of the tavern, he reined in his steed and slid from the saddle to investigate.
‘This is surely Robert de Pridias, of the weavers’ guild,’ he exclaimed in concern. The pallid features looked very different in death and he squinted at them from several angles, then bobbed his head in confirmation. ‘No doubt about it, it’s de Pridias, poor fellow.’
The reeve, an emaciated fellow with a skeletal face and a hacking cough which suggested he had the phthisis, offered the parchments to the newcomer, but he shook his head.
‘I can’t read those, I do all my trading on tally sticks! But it’s him alright, he owns a fulling mill on Exe Island.’
This was the large area of flat, marshy ground just outside the city. Exeter was built on a marked slope, running down from its castle on the east side to the river on the west. The swampy island was cut through by leats and gullies and after heavy rains up on Exmoor, these often overflowed to flood the low-lying ground and the mean huts of the wool workers perched upon it. However, the many fulling mills that cleaned and prepared the raw wool needed great quantities of water and the site was ideal for industries such as those of the late Robert de Pridias.
When the traveller was told how his fellow-citizen had fallen dead across his horse, he offered to take the sad news to his family. ‘I can be at his house in well under the hour,’ he said solicitously. ‘Where shall I tell his family to seek his body?’
The reeve looked at the ale-wife, but she shook her head firmly. ‘No, I’m not having a corpse in my taproom, it’s bad for trade. The church is the place for him.’
With an assurance that the fuller would be handled reverently, the merchant rode off with his doleful message. The reeve called two younger men from the nearest strip-field and they went to fetch the village bier, a wooden trestle with handles at each end, which was kept hanging from the roof beams of the church. On this they carried Robert into the small building and left him lying before the altar until the priest returned. However, the family arrived first, within two hours of the messenger leaving Alphington. The first was the son-in-law, Roger Hamund, whose feelings of grief were secretly alleviated by the unexpected prospect of inheriting de Pridias’s business. He had cantered ahead in his enthusiasm, but within a few minutes his wife and mother-in-law appeared, sitting side-saddle on their palfreys, escorted by their household steward. They were all well dressed and well fed, contrasting markedly with the threadbare inhabitants of the village, as they stalked past them into the church.
The new widow, Cecilia de Pridias, marched towards the tiny chancel and stood looking down at her dead husband, more in anger than desolation.
‘I knew it, I knew something like this would happen!’ she snapped, sounding as if her husband had dropped dead purely to annoy her.
Roger Hamund stared at her, habitually open mouthed because of his adenoids. He was not an intelligent man and his mother-in-law’s strong personality always overawed him.
‘He must have had a stroke, Mother,’ he ventured tentatively. ‘The apothecary said he was in poor health.’
‘Nonsense, boy!’ grated Cecilia. ‘He was done to death by that swine Henry de Hocforde and I’m going to call the coroner.’
Though by August the long summer days were beginning to shorten, there was still plenty of time for Roger Hamund to ride back to the city and fetch Sir John de Wolfe. He found him in his dismal chamber at the top of the tall gatehouse of Rougemont Castle, listening to his clerk reciting some inquest proceedings from a parchment roll. The soldier on guard duty at the gate had directed him up the steep, winding staircase inside the tower and when he pushed his way through the sacking curtain that hung over the low doorway at the top, he found himself in a small room with rough stone walls and two narrow unglazed windows. The furniture consisted of a crude trestle table flanked by a couple of stools, which were occupied by a little man with a slightly humped shoulder and a tall, gaunt figure dressed in a grey tunic. The light from one of the windows was blocked by a giant of a man sitting on the sill, pouring ale from a large pot into his mouth, which was just visible beneath a huge ginger moustache which matched a wild thatch of hair.
The visitor knew all three by sight, as did most of the inhabitants of Exeter, for the coroner’s team was a familiar and usually unwelcome sight about the city. Wherever a King’s crowner appeared, it usually meant either a death or a lightening of the purse — and often both.
Roger stood hesitantly inside the doorway and addressed himself to the lean, forbidding figure behind the table, whose swept-back ebony hair and dark-stubbled cheeks made it easy to believe that the troops in his campaigning days had nicknamed him‘Black John’. Now he was known as‘Crowner John’, and beneath the beetling brows, the deep-set eyes that used to rove over battlefields now sought out the crimes and tragedies that beset Devonshire.
‘Sir John? I have come with a sad request for you to attend the body of my father-in-law, who has died suddenly and most unexpectedly.’
Three pairs of eyes swivelled around to stare at him. He was a podgy fellow of about twenty-eight, amiable but indecisive. His wife, a younger version of her formidable mother, directed his life from the security of their home near the East Gate, though she acted meekly and demurely enough when out in company.
The coroner aimed his predatory hooked nose in the man’s direction and scowled at him ferociously. ‘Why should his death concern me, sir? Was he beaten, kicked or stabbed?’
Roger shuffled his elegantly clad feet uneasily.
‘He fell dead across his horse, Crowner. I would think some form of apoplexy was the most likely cause, but his wife is insistent that he was put under a malignant spell.’
The little clerk’s eyebrows rose and he rapidly made the sign of the Cross. ‘A spell? Nonsense, there is no such thing, it is against the precepts and teachings of the Holy Church!’ he squeaked indignantly.
Roger recoiled slightly at Thomas de Peyne’s vehemence. Although he had seen the clerk about the town, at close quarters he even more strongly resembled a priest, in his threadbare black cassock and the shaved tonsure on top of his head. A pair of bright little eyes darted intelligently from a thin face, which carried a long pointed nose and receding chin.