The Young Lovell: A Romance

by Ford Madox Ford

He went on to try to say that this lording was a soldier so cunning and so great a knight that all the countryside said they would very gladly go a-riding or a-foot with bows, into Scotland or Heathenesse or the South, whatever his enterprise. But, since he was a better hand at grumbling at taxes than in praising his lord, he got little of it out. Nevertheless he made it plain that fighting men would be there on the appointed day, and so they parted—the lord riding across the stream to the monastery and the hind along it to Belford town.

II

The monk Francis was a small, dark, quiet man and not overlearned. He was rising thirty and he was always at work. The monastery of Belford was one given over rather to study and learning so that he, the active one, had always much upon his hands. But all such time as he could save from his duties he devoted to praying for the soul of the cousin he had slain by mischance, taking her for a deer and slaying her with an arrow, as she came to him amongst thick underwood to tell him that the Scots were marching southwards through the Debateable Lands.

That had been ten years before; nevertheless he had prayed that morning very reverently for his cousin's soul, walking up and down between the rows of haymakers and their cocks, in the sunshine; keeping one finger between the leaves of his book of prayers and yet marking diligently that none of the bondsmen slipped away into their own grass to use the scythe there. For it was marvellously fine weather, and such as had never in the memory of man been known in those parts for the heat of the sun and the dry clear nights. So that it was considered that the saints must be blessing that part. Nevertheless, these naughty bondsmen, owing some three, some five days' labour of themselves and their wives and children to the monastery, must needs always be seeking to slip away to their own lands and doing their scythe work there. This they would do, if no monk watched them, though by so doing they robbed the monastery and went in danger of excommunication. But those, as the learned Prior said, were evil days, so that it might almost be said, as was said aforetime of the accursed robber who came against the Abbey and Church of St. Trophime, that he proclaimed that a thousand florins would get him more soldiers than seven years of plenary absolution from the Pope at Avignon. As to whom, said the Prior, Froissart, the chronicler declared that men-at-arms do not live by pardons nor set much store thereby. And as much might be said of their bondsmen.

For it was to be said for this monastery of Belford that the monks set more store by a great chronicle that they were assisting the monk Oswald to write—all of them searching here and there—than by the work done by their bondsmen, the good estate of the lands of the monastery or even the saying of the offices. They set more store by learning than by aught else.

Their lands were administered by laymen, so that they were often robbed, and when the monk Francis had come amongst them their revenues had been scarcely an hundred pounds by the year, or very little more. And, even at the time of his coming, the monks had been against receiving him, for they said that here was a man, though of piety undoubted, who could not tell the chronicle of Giraldus Cambrensis from that of the monk Florence, or Asser from Vergil and Flaccus. But, in those days, the Prior had over-ridden them, pointing out that this novice was very wealthy; that their kitchen and dinner tables were in a sad state, that they had no longer money enough to pursue, upon a princely scale, the succouring of the poor that sat upon their benches, and that they could with the greater serenity pursue their studies and sleep after meat, if they had amongst them a knight who had proven himself diligent upon his own affairs and had increased his substance in the world. For, though they had butlers and cellarers amongst their number, yet the butler thought more of Brute than of his office and the cellarer was more minded to know where lay the bones of the British Kings than where were his keys. The ungodly came in and drank their wine in the cellar, yea, and carried away the mead in black-jacks.

These monks were portly, learned and somnolent, religious with a solid contempt for the unlearned—though they would upon occasion, being large men, line the walls and hew down attacking raiders with balks of timber, bars of iron and other weapons that drew no blood, those being, according to the canon, the proper arms for churchmen. These haughty monks accepted this Francis, who was known to the world as Sir Hugh Ridley, to be of their holy and learned brotherhood. But yet they regarded him as little more than a lay brother, though he wore the monk's frock, and they never voted for his advancement to any office such as sub-prior or the like.

Yet that day he had said two offices for them, had watched in the hay fields and was now coming in, at noontide to check accounts with the bailiff of the Priory about the great tower that was then in building. Seventeen monks there were and twenty lay brothers who were a lazy band. Thirty men-at-arms they had for their protection under the leadership of a knight, Sir Nicholas Ewelme, and they afforded shelter and victuals for 136 poor men, each of the seventeen monks being the patron of eight of them. These poor men sat in the sun on benches, each before their patron's room and should be served by him at meals. But this was nowadays, mostly done by the lay brothers, the learned monk laying one finger beneath a dish or vessel served to the poor men, so that it would not be said that the custom had died out.

The monk Francis, in his grey cloak came in by the little postern gate from the hayfields. He went to his rooms across the quadrangle; and he perceived how certain peasants in hoods of black cloth with belts of yellow leather were bringing in sacks and baskets. These sacks and baskets, as the monk Francis knew from the dress of those peasants, contained ammunition, small round balls of lead or, in the alternative, well-rounded stones from the beach. These peasants were workers in the lead mines upon the lands of the monastery and it was so they paid tribute with balls to shoot against the false Scots if they came a-raiding to Belford.

And, as he was going into his room, before his benchful of poor men that stretched their legs in the sun, it happened that one of the peasant's bags burst open and all the round, leaden balls ran out under the archway. Then there was a great bustle, the guards on duty and the guards that came out of the chambers in the arch starting to pick up the balls. And the monk Francis smiled to think how universal is the desire in men to help in picking up small, round objects that fall out of a sack. So that if the false Scots had been minded to take that place, they could have done it very well then, all the guards and peasants and others being on their hands and knees, huddled together and the gate open. And it seemed to the monk Francis that that would be a very good stratagem for the taking of a tower or the gateway of a strong place.