Hodd Read online

  She did not say, like the others, ‘Let God provide for you,’ for we had no money; instead, being of devout faith, she was glad to give a holy monk and his page a meal of bread, gruel and ale by the fire; my master recounting to her the false tale that the chief outlaw had instructed him to tell. Shivering still, despite the heat from the flames, he blamed the weather for our plight, that made his horse to slip, and drown in the ditch. ‘This ditch flowed with water like a stream,’ he said; and added, ‘nay, more like a filthy sewer.’

  And the woman, who was stooped and (though she was young) had hands that were gnarled – for to sweat and swink [laborare] was all her life – asked, ‘Where are your belongings, good brother?’ ‘The water took them!’ my master cried, and then wept so that I could not tell whether this was part of the fraudulent tale or a true sorrow. He agreed, as payment for our meal, to lay his hand upon the head of the woman’s husband (who lay sick abed from a witch’s curse), and to say prayers for him, that the demon within might flee, who gazed out from his eyen.

  My master’s mind being distracted over the foulness of the farmer’s palliasse, I heard ‘one hundred pounds!’ muttered between the sacred words. While the serfs in the lord’s fields plodded outside, as if through pottage (the slough splashed upwards e’en onto their chins),17 the homely flames beat on my face, and I was grateful to God for being alive.

  Yet was I intent already on retrieving my harp, as precious to me as one of my own limbs – though the source of my foullest sin so far, at that time; one of the many stains, indeed, that the angel-sentries at the gates will smell upon my risen soul, though the sweet savour of the trees of Paradise (such as aloes) be all about in the sacred air.

  2

  My harp’s strings are broken. Damp has long ago buckled the wood.18 Age has buckled my fingers. I am already Death’s head, but I cannot die, perched on the outermost bench of life’s cloister, blearily twitching my goosefeather – e’en by candlelight! And so we are all old, for our time itself is old, our world being in the sixth and last age, a mere cloth stretched over worms and fire …

  Following some convoluted reflections on the diligence of the Saints and the Holy Virgin versus the faithlessness of the present times, the author proceeds with the pith of his narrative in a characteristically abrupt manner.

  … It was the year of Our Lord 1225 when we were robbed on the road to Dancaster: King Henry of England was a youth.19 I still hear in my waking hours (some eighty years later) the voice of Robbert Hodd saying to me, in my pinched ear, so close that his breath seems to stifle me again: ‘You are one of the chosen. I choose you. Rise, and be blessed as one of us.’

  I must shake my head to banish him, for this is really a fiend of the size of a flea, assuming in my suffering ear the voice of the outlaw; just as minstrels, who are really buffoons, take on his voice when singing of his merry exploits, that are all lies – or when wrestling in the disgusting plays of the outlaw Robbin, that are now become the delight of fools all over the kingdom.

  And this wantonness, this false message, was put about by my own hand; and as fathers of crippled infants or disgustingly wanton youths can scarcely sever that blood-tie, then how can I disclaim responsibility for what I engendered so long ago? For the all-seeing Lord and Judge of mankind doth not miss a single lie, as a brother secretly slipping into the back door of a bawdy-house cannot but be reconnoitred by Him.

  Wearily I set this down, alone on my bench against the cloister’s outer wall, that future ages may understand the gravity of my sin, as a leper claps the lid of his dish, alerting all of his approach.

  Then God’s voice comes unto me and is untarnished silver, every word, with the breath of forgiveness in it, and takes my hand and moves it over the page …

  Here follow several passages of pious tendentiousness, which I again omit. The narrative resumes with the olfactory likening of Hell-mouth to a tannery pit.

  … This [stench] I well know, because my master’s house of St Edmund’s was afflicted with the stink of a great tannery that lay downwind with its several foul pits of excrement, and caused much trouble to the brothers when the wind was disfavourable. And also, being hard by the river, the house was much affected by smoke from the boatyard when they were tarring therein, and e’en within the cloister the blasphemous curses and obscene ribaldry of the boatmen in the vicinity of the wharf could sometimes be heard, as peasants in the fields about us here similarly shout, their women squealing in turn like sucking-pigs.20

  It was hoped by the prior and other brothers that more land might be purchased along with its close-cropped serfs and their progeny,21 that high stone walls around this additional acreage might be built to shut off such nuisances. But the grievous loss of the hundred pounds made this harder to justify to our abbot, Father Gerald, who was a careful22 man and did not seem to notice the wintry blasts whipping through the cloister and the dorter,23 cruelly exposed on the north side; for the abbey church, owing to the uncertain nature of the river-ground, had been built some thirty-five years before on the eastern side.24 Within it was the reliquary in which exceedingly valuable items were to be found in a glass tube, including among others the hairs of St Mary, a fragment of the bush that burned before Moses, and a piece of the Lord’s winding-sheet stained with his sweat, that had healed a man whose side had so rotted away that his liver was open to the air.

  The abbot decided in the chapter-house that flogging of my master by birch-rod might assuage his shame [at losing the money]; for father Gerald considered that brother Thomas had been foolish in passing through that dangerous section without escort, and that the loss was a reckoning by God for his well-known negligence of the Rule.

  As my master could not appeal, he suffered the punishment with dignity. The brother charged with the punishment was a lean man of great strength and holy zeal, whose forehead sprouted beads of sweat as his instrument smote with a slapping noise such as one hears in the bakehouse when paste is being prepared for bread [in the kneading-trough], my master being exceedingly fleshy behind.

  I had secretly peeped upon the punishment from [a slit in] the wall of the dorter’s day stairs, that looked down upon the chapter, yet said nothing of the shadows about my master’s mouth, as of fluttering black flies – which were no doubt devils fleeing the pain; ’tis well known that the evil spirits who take up residence within us feel the pain of righteous punishment when it is administered to the body, as much as they feel the grate and itch of the hair-shirt, or the pinch of cold, or e’en the pangs of hunger during holy fast, when only a crust of bread and water is allowed and their discomfort turns one’s breath foul. And they also experience our pleasures, for by doing so they enhance and encourage their host bodies to steep themselves further into sin, whether the sweetness be found in the arms of a comely woman, or the ale pot, or the laden dish.

  In truth, these devilish little guests had not so much opportunity for pleasure since brother Gerald was made abbot. Before his appointment some two years before, the refectory had been witness to the brothers’ gross appetites; five courses of meats and fish disguised in rich sauces, swallowed down with wine and other intoxicating liquors, in a hymn to the sin of gluttony. But the new abbot reminded them of the Rule and of the need for parsimony, and month by month withdrew their dishes, which would have given rise to complaint were it not for the severity of his demeanour, and the lustiness of the birch-rod, and the recognition among the brethren that a brief temperance or moderation in this earthly life is better than an eternity of torment and griping pangs – with the possible reward of heavenly bliss in the after-life, wherein our useless dust may be transformed into the body of spiritual delight.

  Although after [the beating], my master complainingly showed me the marks left by the wealing instrument on his buttocks, which were bruised and cut on their white flesh, and into which I had to rub ointment of honeysuckle, it was from this time that his fatherly ardour towards me and my education and general advancement in the world gr
ew lukewarm [tepidus], for in his heart he blamed me for his disaster. Furthermore, I was no longer a musical balm to him, since I was lacking my harp.

  His coolness grieved me, and I feared being cast from the house, for I had no family left nor roof to go to, and I felt a great hunger for learning; this hunger having been started, years before, in a sea-cave: the wet sand before it being all my slate, with nothing but a stick for my pen, and my teacher a hermit of exceeding holiness and humility. And I had fled him as a serpent flees the leaves of the ash tree e’en into the hot fire, so virtuous is that tree, and utterly unworthy the serpent!

  Without my precious instrument, so abruptly stolen, I was no better than a beggar, and yet I looked upon the oblates with no envy; for the abbot believed that boys were naturally perverse and ordered them to be given many stripes – sometimes so severely that their ribs were blackened and came up swollen in red weals. Many were the times I had secretly spied upon them being stripped of their frock and cowl and beaten in only their shirt, with smooth osier-rods, or having their hair (already cropped about the neck) plucked like chickens, for they oft slept during the Hours instead of singing, so weary were they and poorly fed – though some were of noble families.

  Neither were they permitted to address one another without permission, not even in the dormitory, where a brother always lay between two children that they might not converse at night. Sometimes in the cloister I did whisper to them through a chine25 in the kitchen wall, despite the Master [of the Boys] standing close by, and would pass them choice cakes still warm from the oven, for I felt pity for them and was foolhardy and reckless.

  Even my master pitied them, and especially the youngest who was of very tender years and an outwardly angelic countenance, called Henry; and [my master] did often say (after St Anselm) that caresses were more fruitful than stripes. Having fled my home some years earlier, an orphan with naught but a harp upon his back, and been discovered lying on the wayside grass, half starved, by brother Thomas, I was glad of caresses, yet stripes were all I deserved.

  For though he believed, on so discovering me in the wayside ditch, that the harp was stolen (as it indeed was), and that I was a houseless vagabond, his astonishment that I already knew my letters, and could pluck the harp gallantly, fitted him to treat me kindly. Being well taught by one with no name – my earliest master the hermit considering even names to be a possession, shielding him from God and His Creation – I yet had this grievous fault: a foolish pride, that should have been scourged from me there and then.

  And as I lay my first night in the hospitium of St Edmund’s on the imperial luxury of a palliasse, in brother Thomas’s care, at the tender age of nine or ten, I was forever darting and swooping across the sea-cave’s cliff-face as doth a gull, watching myself trace letters upon the sand of the marge, knowing e’en in my fever that the tide would come to erase my efforts: as might this very strigil on this parchment, that wipes away the efforts of my weary pen when the point is careless or splits.

  And if my good saviour, the portly monk, had regarded the harp closely, he might have espied salt in its grain, and e’en smelt the sea – for we know that smell is a vapour of particles, and that these adhere to objects that are long remaining within that odour, to be drawn inside the nose where the brain might capture it with its moist teats. Yet I invented another lying tale, after I was saved: that of a feud between wealthy merchant families that had led to our ruin, and thus to my wandering life – heir to no riches but the road’s, and this one treasured possession of my relatives, who were all lost to poverty, disease and grief. And scarce had these lies left my mouth, when the good, gullible brother embraced me as though I were his own – and so I remained until that fateful robbery upon the road.

  By dint of questioning those passing through the abbey, including pedlars and even those miserable or afflicted creatures begging for alms at the infirmary kitchen, or hovering by the bakehouse and the malthouse, I was furnished with information concerning the felons and their leader, whose name was given as Robert Hode, and about whom many knew tales of sufficient terror to chill the blood, but which others regarded as of no more worth than a bundle of straw.

  This Hodde was certainly a fugitive, and was reputed to have magical powers equal to any witch, as well as axes, [cross]bows, swords and staves, and was skilled with the use of the longbow, that pierceth a man through more easily than a white bear of the land of glass might break ice with its claws, to draw out fish through the holes it has made26 as doth an arrow draw out a man’s sinews, veins and many inner substances, if pulled from the wound.

  An apprentice glazier of some eighteen years, who had come to our house to estimate and measure for the lancets in our freshly built chancel, informed me that Hod’s felons wore steel caps beneath their hoods and a coat of leather under their cloaks, like yeomen fighting for the king. ‘He is a brazen-faced villain,’ I said, ‘and no yeoman.’ This apprentice, whose name was Rycherd, gathered ferns upon the wastes (near where we were robbed) to burn for the ash.27 He had hair the colour of straw, but his skin was dark from the burning of fern and of wood, and he smelt as the lower devils must smell as they pitch sinners into the eternal bonfire. Richerd, laughing at my answer, said that I must have been robbed myself to speak in such a wise.

  I told him of my grievous loss at supper,28 while he dipped his bread into the ale pot; then he offered that I should return with him to the glassworks on the morrow, and to accompany him after to where he must burn [more fern], this being the autumn season when the plant begins to wither and is dry: ‘For that brackeny spot upon the heath is but half a league away from the thick wood where the outlaws are said to have their lair.’ And Ricchard laughed again, for he no doubt thought he was making a fine jest.

  I straightway seized his arm and said, ‘I will accompany you, for I mean to take back what they stole from me; namely, my harp.’ He drank and wiped his mouth, saying that I was a fool. ‘But you are not afraid,’ I said, ‘to burn the fern nearby.’ ‘That is because I am poor and have nothing to steal,’ he replied. ‘I will work with you by day,’ I declared, ‘then crawl on my belly into the wood and they shall not see me though they have ten sharp-eyed sentries, for I hunt pigeon and other fleet creatures in the same way, seizing them with my hands.’ ‘You are lucky they have no hounds,’ he said, ‘not even the mangiest, to warn of your approach.’

  His master bidding him to come into the abbey church, where a ladder was set to measure the new lancets, and to draw their shapes like a mason traces his mould, through which the naked light at present fell unpainted, I followed and helped them by holding the ladder, which rose exceedingly high into the chancel like Jesse’s tree.

  At the very moment that Rycharde set himself before the unglassed window, the late sun came from behind cloud and shone upon his face and fair hair, making them resplendent against the gloom of the church. I thought of the angelic messengers, the Light of Lights, and felt a flame rise within me as I gazed, knowing that I must go forth and seize back my treasure that was the harp; as if the unfinished cherubim painted on the wall, still only shaped by the workmen in the sombrest hue of green,29 had settled in my heart and stretched forth their golden wings.

  Alas, that I heeded such a false vision, and failed to think rather of the same place a few months previously, when the leads of the new windows in the nave had been liquid, melted in a hearth near the door that poured forth its ugly fumes, thus causing the brothers to cough without cease during Terce; for the abbot had ordained that no Hours were to be lost on account of the works – and it was, he maintained, a fitting reminder of what awaiteth those who sin. For in the lead’s grey vapours the tortured souls’ lamentations were plainly to be heard, though in truth it was the cries of the lead-makers to each other, who are e’er coarse and dull-witted. Mayhap then I would have quelled my pride, that thoughteth naught of puffing me up like a bladder; for in this state I saw myself as gilded in fame.

  Let me say that, though I
was a boy minstrel, I was never a play-actor grossly contorting his body behind a loathsome mask, cavorting upon a wooden stage and making horrible noises as loud as Pilate for the pleasure of fools and simpletons gathered in the market place; nor was I a buffoon, the type that wanders from court to court and jests wickedly, biting men behind their backs to make lords and ladies laugh; nor was I the type of actor who sings to his instrument only to drive men and women to wantonness, lechery and lewd gestures, and that urges them to dance upon the tables in taverns or inns, enchanting them ever more deeply with his music until sometimes they see phantasms and are transfixed among the broken pots of ale as if by a wicked spell.

  Instead I was of that calling approved by the Pope himself, that is called joculatores or, in the base tongue, jongleur or jougleur.30 I sang only of princes, saints and other great men and their deeds, that men might find solace from their sufferings and their anguish.

  In truth, I was no jougleur but merely an orphan kitchen boy of fourteen or fifteen, dreaming that he might one day entertain great lords and even the king himself. I am on the very rim or marge of this life and must not lie, for lying is to invite fiends to your table, whose red leathery wings, bloodshot eyes and frisky, busy claws are hid beneath fine cloaks and manners and smiles, and only their stink – as of an old hound pulled out by a rope from the dunghill to be drowned – might give their presence away. I was a vain child, not seeing the traps laid all about me. And now I am a mere bag of bones with the gout in every joint, and half deaf, and no teeth to speak of, and my few hairs white as lint; and yet my sight suffices to write these pages e’en by candlelight, until weariness snuffs it a mere two or three hours before the bells of Matins and Lauds and [Prime?] …