The chapman took his cider.
“Where was this work done?” he said.
“Nay, where but here on the bruary! The women were found Wednesday se’n-night by the herd as he went folding. They lay on the floor in their blood.”
Hilarius turned sick. In Westminster, by some miracle, he had been spared the sight of violent death—ay, or of death in any form—and had seen nothing worse than a rogue in the stocks, for which sight he had thanked Heaven piously.
“’Tis the fault of the rich,” said a voice, and Hilarius saw, to his surprise, that there was a second friar in the room; a tall, bullet-headed man, with a heavy, obstinate jaw ornamented with a scanty fringe of black hair.
“The rich grow fat, and the poor starve,” he went on, “’tis hunger makes a man kill his brother for a mouthful of mouldy bacon.”
“Nay,” said the miller, “there was no need to kill, Father. A man could have taken the meat from two lone women and left them their lives.”
“Why take from folk as poor as themselves?” said mine host. “Let them rob the rich an they must rob.”
“Ay,” said the friar, “rob the rich, say you, take their own, say I. God did not make this world that one man should be over full and another go empty; nor is it religion that the monks’ should live on the fat o’ the land and grind the faces of the poor. How many manors, think you, has the Abbat of St Edmund’s, and how many on his land lack bread?”
Hilarius listened, scarlet with indignation, a flood of wrathful defence pent at his lips, for the blind friar laid a restraining hand on his sleeve.