"Well, ye have learnt your lesson, the mass priest has taught you well."
Then the crafty bondsman, seeing that his lord's face was softened, and hoping, by means of his brother, still to escape his due payments, sighed and said:
"I would indeed, and before the saints, that I must give greater payments to my lord if there were none to other people. For there is no end to this payment of taxes and tithes. No sooner is my lord's bailiff gone than there come my Lord Warden's men seeking to take my horse for the King's wars in France—God curse that Lord Warden! And he gone, comes the Bishop Palatine's bailiff seeking payment for the milling of my corn at his mills on the Wear though the grists were all my own. Then comes the prior of St. Radigund's for a half tithe; then Sir John, the mass priest, for a whole. Then there are the market dues of Belford—for God His piteous sake, ah gentle lording, set us up here in Castle Lovell a market where we may sell toll free—we of the Castle. Now if I will sell some bolls of wheat and ship them to the Percies at King's Lynn, I must pay river dues at Sunderland according to the brass plate that is set in the Castle wall at Dunstanburgh. And if I pay that due it is claimed of me again a second time by the Admiral of the Yorkshire coast, saying that I should not have paid it the first, though God He knows what maketh the Admiral of Yorkshire in our rivers and seas. So with wood haulage to Glororem, and maltings to the King's Castle guard at Bamburgh, and a day's work of service here and two days in harvest there, God knows there is no end to a poor man's payments. But this I know..." and the peasant scowled deeply, "that my Lord of Northumberland may rue the day when he taxed us for the French wars. It is not that Lord Percy that shall live long."
The bondsman allowed himself these words against the Percy partly out of his great hatred, and partly because he knew his lord did not love this Earl of Northumberland for his treachery to King Richard upon Bosworth Field.
They were still halted at the edge of that plain that the lord might the better hear his bondsman. But the Young Lovell heard only parts of what the peasant said, for he was nearly lost in thought whilst the great white horse cropped the grass. At last the Young Lovell spoke.
"For what you say," he exclaimed, "as to the multiplicity of burdens there is some sense in it. And it might well be that I could buy some of these rights from the King, or the Prince Bishop, or others, as it chances. And, for a market, I am well minded to buy the right to hold one from the King. And so was my father minded before me. But you know very well that your gossip, Corbit Jock—like the tough rogues that ye all are—this Corbit Jock stood in the way of it. For the only piece of land I have that is fitting for a market lies under the wall of that my Castle on the way running through that my township of Castle Lovell. And amid most of that, as ye know, Corbit Jock has a mound of his holding. How his father got it I know not. But there, running into my Castle wall, is his mound, and on it a filthy barn leaning against my Castle wall, and before the barnekyn a heap of dung and a shed that might harbour five goats. The whole is not worth to him ninepence by the year, and it is far from his house and of no use to him. Yet, though I would well and willingly buy this of him, and my father would have bought it of his father that there we might have a market holden, ye know very well that this Corbit Jock will not sell and I have no power to take it from him. For, though I might get a broad letter from the King in his Council to take this mound by force, and to pay him full value, yet such a letter must cost me much gold, and it is doubtful if the King's writ, in such matters, runneth in these North parts. In the country of France, as I heard when I was there of the Sieur Berthin de Silly, such things are done every day by the King's letters. Nay, he was about then engaged in such a matter with a peasant, whom he dispossessed, but paid well and so has a fair market below his Castle of La Roche Gayon. And so it may well be in the South of this realm for aught I know. But here it is different, and I am not minded to have a hornet's nest of lawyers about my ears in order to give a market place—that should cost me dear enough when I bought the rights of my lord the King—to such rogues and cozeners as you and Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock and the widow of Martin Taylor. But, if ye will talk of the matter with Corbit Jock that he may sell his mound to me, I will promise you this, that you shall have your market. For I am your very good lord. And so no more of talk for this time."
He set his horse towards Belford, going decently by roundabout ways and paths from landmark to landmark that he might not trample down the long grass of which his bondsmen were making their hay all about him. Of late years, since his father had been too heavy to ride, the Young Lovell had considered much the matters of his lands, and he had done certain things, such as selling by the year to third parties of the rights to collect his dues, whether on malt, hens, salt, housing and of other things. And these new methods, of which mostly he had heard in the realms of France, Gascony and Provence, had worked well enough, for his incomings had been settled and the buyers of his rights had neither the power to steal his moneys nor so much to oppress the bondsmen as his own bailiffs had. So that, in one way and another, he could talk of these things to his bondsman whilst he thought of other matters. And one of these matters came into his head from that talk of the shed of Corbit Jock that leant against the very rock below his Castle wall.
From below the flags of the men-at-arms' kitchen, in the solid stone of the rocks, there ran a passage going finally through the earth not ten feet from the mound of Corbit Jock. The only persons that might know of this passage had been the dead lord and Young Lovell himself. The Decies might know of it, for the dead lord had prated of all things to his bastard. But it was odds that it would never come into the Decies' head, for he was a very drunken fellow and remembered most things too late.
Now if, under cover of night, the Young Lovell could introduce a dozen or twenty lusty fellows with picks and other instruments into Corbit Jock's barnekyn, in five hours or less they could dig a way into that tunnel where it went under the ground. Then it was but pushing up the flagstones of the kitchen and they would be terrifyingly and surprisingly within the Castle whilst all the men-at-arms could be drawn off from those parts with a feigned attack on the outer walls. Or, if by chance there were men in that passage and guarding it, they could put into it a great cask of gunpowder and so kill them all. It was a task much easier than my lord of Derby and Sir Walter Manny had, who tunnelled under the Castle of la Réole for eleven weeks when Agout de Baux held it and yet could not take that place which is in Languedoc, though he had with him three Earls, five hundred knights and two thousand archers. The young Lovell thought he would have his Castle more easily.
And as he rode through the fields, the thoughts of war driving out those of the lady with the crooked smile, the siege of that Castle grew clear to him and like a picture, red and blue and pink, at the edge, or the head of a missal. At first, hearing that the White Tower was held for him with its gold and cannons, he had thought that, going by sea into that place, which was like a citadel over against a walled city, such as he had seen at Boulogne and Carcassowne and other places, he would set the cannon to batter down the walls and so enter in with what many he could get together.