THE MONKS OF ELY COMPLAIN AND PLOT.
As no corn came, and no wine could be had, the tribulations and
murmurings in the monastery grew louder and louder. Certain of the
monks had never looked with a friendly eye upon Girolamo the
Salernitan, but now there was suddenly raised an almost universal
clamour among them that that dark-visaged and thin-bodied alien was,
and ever had been, a necromancer. Unmindful of the many services he had
done, and forgetting how many times they had, when the drinking-horns
could be well filled, rejoiced and jubilated at his successes, and
_specialiter_ on that not far by-gone day when he had burned the Norman
witch, in the midst of her incantations, with the reeds and grass of
the fen, the monks now called him by the foulest and most horrible of
all names, and some of them even called out for his death. These men
said that if Girolamo were brought to the stake and burned as he had
burned the Norman witch, the wrath of Heaven would be appeased, and
matters would go much better with the house of St. Etheldreda, and with
all the English people. Albeit they all knew how innocently those
devils had been made; and, albeit they had seen with their own eyes,
that Girolamo was constant at prayers, mass, and confession, and that
he never prepared his mixtures and compounds until after prayer and
long fasting (to say nothing of his frequently partaking in the
Sacrament of our Lord’s Supper), they rumoured, even like the Normans,
that he had raised devils, and employed fen-fiends, and incubuses, and
succubuses, and had lit hell-fires upon the pools and within the holy
house at Crowland; that he was ever attended by a demon, called by him
Chemeia;[212] that he had been a Jew, and next a follower of
Mahound;[213] that he had sold his soul to the devil of devils at
Jerusalem or Mecca: that he did not eat and drink like Saxons and
Christians, only because he went to graves and charnel-houses at the
dead of night, and feasted upon the bodies of the dead with his fiends
and hell-hounds—with a great deal more too horrible and obscene to
mention.[214]
Now before a breath of this bad wind reached him, Girolamo had begun to
grow a-weary of the Fen-country; and but for his deadly-hatred to the
Norman race and his great love for the Lord of Brunn, he would have
quitted it and England, long before this season, to wander again into
some sunny climate. Ofttimes would he say to himself in his solitary
musings,—“Oh flat, wet, and fenny land, shall mine eyes never more
behold a mountain? Oh fogs, and vapours, and clouds for ever dropping
rain, shall I never see a bright blue sky again?[215] Oh fireless,
watery sun, scarcely brighter or warmer than the moon in my own land
beyond the Alps and the Apennines, shall I never see thee again in thy
glory? Am I to perish in these swamps—to be buried in a bog? Oh for
one glimpse before I die of mine own blue mountains, and bright blue
seas and skies!—one glance at thy bay, oh beautiful Salerno, and at
the mountain of Saint Angelo and the hills of Amalfi, at the other
mountains, and hills, and olive-groves, and gay vine-yards that gird
thee in! There be no hills here but mud-banks; no trees but dull alders
and willows.[216] But courage, sinking heart, or sinking, shivering
frame, for there is food here for my revenge; there be Normans here to
circumvent and kill!”
So did the Salernitan commune with himself in his many lonely hours
(many because he sought them and avoided the society of men) before the
evil tongues were wagged against him. Upon his first hearing what the
monks were then beginning to say of him, he only muttered to himself,
“This is a dull-witted generation that I have fallen among! These
Saxons go still on all-fours! They are but ultra-montanes and
barbarians, knowing nothing of the history of past ages, or of the
force and effect of the natural sciences! Dolts are they all except the
Lord Hereward, and his share of wit is so great that none is left for
his countrymen. But Hereward is worthy of ancient Rome; and it is not
the stupid sayings of his people that will make me quit his side and
disappoint my vengeance. I have done these same Saxons some good
service, and I will do them more before I die or go hence. They will
think better of me when they know more of me, and of the natural means
wherewith I work mine ends. Ha! ha! I needs must laugh when I hear that
Girolamo of Salerno, the witch-seeker and the destroyer of witches, the
sworn foe to all magic save the MAGIA ALBA, which is no magic at all,
but only science, should be named as a wizard and necromancer! Oh! ye
good doctors, and teachers of Salerno who flourished and began to make
a school for the study of Nature before the Normans came among us,
think of this—think of your pupil, penitent, and devotee, being taken
in these dark septentrional regions for a sorcerer! Ha! ha!”
But when Girolamo saw that the Saxon people were beginning to avoid him
as one that had the pest, and that the monks of Ely were pointing at
him with the finger, and that silent tongues and angry eyes, with
crossings and spittings on the ground and coarse objurgations, met him
wherever he went, he grew incensed and spoke freely with the Lord of
Brunn about it.
“Girolamo, my friend and best coadjutor,” said the Lord of Brunn,
“think nothing of it! This is but the talk of ignorance or malice.
Beshrew me an I do not think that the Normans have gotten some traitor
to raise this babel and thereby injure us. But the Lord Abbat Thurstan,
who hath shrieved and assoiled thee so often, will now answer for the
purity of thy faith as for his own, and will silence these murmurers.”
But it was not so: Hereward made too large an account not of the good
will, but of the power of Thurstan, not knowing all that passed in the
chapters of the house, nor so much as suspecting half of the cabals
that were framing in secret meetings and in close discussions by night
in the dormitories. No sooner had the Lord Abbat begun to reprehend
such as spoke evil of the Salernitan, than the factious and false parts
of the monks declared among themselves that, Christian prelate as he
was, he had linked himself with a sorcerer; and in charges they had
already prepared, and with great privacy written down upon parchment,
they inserted this—that Abbat Thurstan, unmindful of the duties of his
holy office, and in contempt of the remonstrances of the prior, the
chamberlain, and others, the majority of the house Ely, had made
himself the friend and defensor of the said Girolamo of Salerno, that
dark mysterious man who had notoriously sold himself to the arch-fiend,
who had gone into the depths and iniquities of necromancy beyond all
precedent, and who had, by his truly diabolical art, raised devils,
trafficked with witches, and brought hell-fires upon earth.
It was at this juncture of time that two pretended pilgrims and
devotees of Saint Etheldreda arrived at the guest-house of Ely, giving
out that they had with great risk and real danger found their way
through the lines of the beleaguering Normans, but that, so entire was
their devotion to the saint, no perils could prevent them from coming
to the shrine. It was not much noted at the time, but it was well
remembered afterwards, and when it was all too late, that these two
palmers spent much more of their time in walking and talking outside
the abbey walls with the prior and the chamberlain, than in the praying
inside the church and in the chapel of the saint: that they seemed to
shun the Lord Abbat, and that they took their departure in a sudden
manner, and without taking leave of the Abbat as good pilgrims were
wont to do. And almost immediately after the departure of the two false
palmers, a proclamation was made by sound of trumpet and by Duke
William’s orders, that the Abbat of Ely, having leagued himself with a
sorcerer (having long before leagued himself with traitors and rebels
and robbers), had incurred the anathemas of the church, which would
soon be pronounced upon him by bell, book, and candle,[217] and with
all the formalities in use. And after this had been proclaimed by sound
of trumpet in the Camp, and at the cross of the town of Cam-Bridge, and
at the crosses of Peterborough, Huntingdon, Stamford, and many other
towns, the cloister-monks most adverse to the Lord Abbat began to throw
off all secrecy and disguise, and to talk as loud as trumpets both in
the streets of Ely and in the monastery, calling Girolamo a sorcerer
and worse. Upon this the dark Salernitan came up from the Camp to the
monastery, and demanded to be heard in the church or in the hall, in
the presence of the whole house. Thurstan, with right good will,
assented; and although some of the monks tried to oppose it, Girolamo
was admitted to plead his own defence and justification in the great
hall. It was the envious prior’s doing, but the novices and all the
younger monks were shut out, for the prior feared greatly the effect of
the speech of the Salernitan, who by this time had made himself master
of the Saxon tongue, while in the Latin tongue and in Latin quotations,
Girolamo had few equals on this side the Alps. He presented himself
alone, having forcibly and successfully opposed the Lord Hereward, who
would fain have accompanied him to the abbey. “If you should be with
me,” he had said to the Lord of Brunn, “they will impute it to me, in
case of my effacing these vile stigmas, that I have been saved by your
favour and interference, or by the respect and awe which is due to you,
or by the dread they entertain of your arms; and should I fail in my
defence, they might afterwards work you great mischief by representing
you as mine advocate. No! good my Lord, alone will I stand upon my
defence, and bring down confusion upon these calumniators!”
And thus it was all alone that the dark and thin and sad Salernitan
entered the great hall, in the midst of a coughing and spitting, and an
uplifting and a turning away of eyes, as if the monks felt sulphur in
their gorges, and saw some fearful and supernatural object with their
eyes. Nothing abashed, the Salernitan threw off the black mantle which
he ordinarily wore, and stepping unto the midst of the hall—the monks
being seated all round him—he made the blessed sign of the cross,
threw up his hands for a moment as if in prayer, and then spoke. And
when he first began to speak, although he more immediately faced the
abbat and his friendly honest countenance, his coal-black eyes, which
seemed all of a blaze, rested and were fixed upon the envious false
visage of the prior, who wriggled in his seat, and whose eyes were bent
upon the ground, all unable to encounter the burning glances of that
animated, irate Italian.
“My good Lord Abbat,” said Girolamo, looking as we have said, not at
Thurstan, but at the prior, “what is this horrid thing that I hear?
What are these evil rumours which have been raised against me, while I
have been adventuring my life for the service of this house and the
good Saxon cause?”
“There hath been some idle talk about sortilege, and it grieves me to
say that this idle talk hath of late become very loud in this house,”
responded Thurstan.
“And who be they who first raised this talk?” said Girolamo; “where are
my accusers? Who are the members of this house that have not seen as
well my devotion to Heaven as the earthly and natural and legitimate
means by which I have worked out mine ends for the furtherance of the
good cause? Where are they, that I may speak to them and tell them to
their faces how much they have erred or how greatly they have lied? But
they dare not look me in the face!”
And as he said these words he turned his burning eyes from the prior to
the chamberlain, and then from the chamberlain to another cankerous
monk, and to another, and another, and they all pulled their cowls over
their brows and looked down upon the floor. But at last the chamberlain
found voice and courage enough to raise his head a little; and he said,
“Oh, stranger! since thy first coming amongst us thou hast done things
most strange—so strange that wise and good men have thought they have
seen the finger of the devil in it.”
Quoth the Salernitan, “It was to do strange things that I came hither,
and it was because I could do them that the brave and pious Lord of
Brunn brought me with him to bear part in a contest which was desperate
before we came. But I tell thee, oh monk, that all of even the
strangest things I have done have been done by legitimate and natural
means, and by that science which I have acquired by long study and much
fasting, and much travelling in far-off countries, where many things
are known which are as yet unknown in these thy boreal regions. To
speak not of the marvels I have witnessed in the East, I tell thee,
Saxon, that I have seen the doctors who teach, or who used to teach, in
the schools of my native town before the Norman barbarians came among
us, do things that would make thy dull eyes start out of their sockets,
and the hair stand erect round thy tonsure; and yet these doctors and
teachers were members of that Christian Church to which thou, and I,
and all of us belong—were doctors in divinity, and priests, and
confessors, and men of holy lives; and it never passed through their
bright and pure minds that what the ignorant could not understand
should be imputed to them or to their scholars as a crime. Saxon, I
say, take the beam of ignorance out of thine eye, and then wilt thou
see that man can do marvellous things without magic or the aid of the
devil. The real wizard or witch is the lowest and most benighted of
mankind, and necromancy can be employed only for the working out of
wicked and detestable ends. But what was and what is the end I have in
view? Is it wicked to defend this house and the shrines of your
national saints from violence and spoliation? Is it detestable in one
who hath known in his own person and in his own country the woes of
foreign conquest, to devote his sword and his life, his science, and
all the little that is his, to the cause of a generous people
struggling against fearful odds for their independence, and fighting
for their own against these Norman invaders!”
“By Saint Etheldreda,” said Abbat Thurstan, “these ends and objects
cannot be sinful! and as sinful means can be employed only for sinful
ends, so can righteous ends be served only by righteous means. Fire
mingles with fire, and water with water: but fire and water will not
mingle or co-exist.” And divers of the cloister-monks, who had never
been touched by the venom that was about to ruin the house of Ely and
the whole country of England, took up and repeated the Abbat’s words,
speaking also of the facts in evidence, as that Girolamo the Salernitan
had many times conferred great benefit on the Saxon cause, and the
like. And even some of the house who had turned too ready an ear to
their own fears, or to the evil and crafty whisperings and suggestions
of the prior and his faction, assented to Thurstan’s proposition, and
said that verily it appeared the Salernitan was free from the damnable
guilt wherewith he was charged, and that if he had used any magic at
all, it was only that Magia Alba, or White Magic, which proceeded from
the study and ingenuity of man, and which might be used without sin.
Now as these things were said in the hall, the prior, fearing that his
plot might be counter-plotted, and the meshes he had woven be torn to
pieces, and blown to the winds, waxed very desperate; and, after
whispering for awhile in the ear of the chamberlain who sat by him, he
threw his cowl back from his head, and standing up, spoke passionately.
But while the prior spoke he never once looked at Girolamo, who
remained standing in the middle of the great hall, firm and erect, and
with his arms crossed over his breast. No! desperate as he was, the
prior could not meet the fiery glances of that dark thin man; and so he
either looked at the round and ruddy face of Thurstan, or in the faces
of those monks of his own faction who had made up their minds to
support him in all that he might say or do.
“It seemeth to me,” said the prior, “that a wicked man may pretend to
serve a good cause only for the sake of injuring it, and that a weak
man may be brought to believe that good can come out of things that are
evil, and that witchcraft and all manner of wickednesses may be
employed against an enemy, albeit this is contrary to the doctrine of
our Church, and is provocative of the wrath of Heaven. Now, from the
first coming of this alien among us, things have gone worse and worse
with us. Not but that there have been certain victories and other short
glimpses of success, meant only to work upon our ungodly pride, and
delude us and make our present misery the keener. When this alien first
came, the Lord Abbat liked him not—I need not tell ye, my brethren,
that the Lord Abbat said to many of us, that he liked not the looks of
the stranger the Lord Hereward brought with him; or that I and the
cellarius, and many more of us, thought from the beginning that the man
was a Jew—an Israelite—yea, one of that accursed race that crucified
our Lord!...”
“Liar or idiot,” said the fiery man of Italie, “thou wilt be cursed for
saying it!”
“That which I have said I have said,” quoth the prior; “we took thee
for a Jew, and the Lord Abbat confessed, then, that thou didst verily
look like one, although he hath altered his tone since. And stranger, I
now tell thee to thy face (but still the prior looked not in Girolamo’s
face) that I believe thou mayest well be that wandering Jew that cannot
die until the day of Judgment come.”
The Salernitan shrieked rather than said, “This is too horrible, too
atrocious! Malignant monk, wouldst drive me mad, and make me slay thee
here in the midst of thy brothers?”
“In this hallowed place I am safe from thy magic and incantations,”
said the prior.
Girolamo could not speak, for the words stuck in his throat, but he
would, mayhap, have sprung upon the prior with his dagger, if the Lord
Abbat had not instantly raised his hand and his voice, and said,
“Peace! stranger peace! Let the prior say all that he hath to say, and
then thou shalt answer him. Nay, by Saint Etheldreda! by Saint
Sexburga, and by every saint in our Calendarium, I will answer him too!
For is he not bringing charges against me, and seeking to deprive me of
that authority over this house which was given me by heaven, and by
King Edward the Confessor, and by the unanimous vote of the brethren of
Ely in chapter assembled? Prior, I have long known what manner of man
thou art, and how thou hast been pining and groaning and plotting for
my seat and crozier; but thou art now bolder than thou wast wont to be.
’Tis well! Therefore speak out, and do ye, my children, give ear unto
him. Then speak, prior! Go on, I say!” In saying these words, Lord
Thurstan was well nigh as much angered as Girolamo had been; but his
anger was of a different kind, and instead of growing deadly pale and
ashy like the Salernitan, his face became as red as fire; and instead
of moving and clenching his right hand, as though he would clutch some
knife or dagger, he merely struck with his doubled fist upon the table
before him, giving the table mighty raps. All this terrified the craven
heart of the prior, who stood speechless and motionless, and who would
have returned to his seat if the cellarer had not approached him and
comforted him, and if several cloister-monks of the faction had not
muttered, “Go on to the end, oh, prior! thou hast made a good
beginning.”
And then the prior said, “I will go on if they will give me pledge not
to interrupt me until I have done.”
“I give the pledge,” said the Abbat; and the Salernitan said, “The
pledge is given.”
Being thus heartened, the prior went on. Girolamo the Salernitan, he
said, had been seen gnashing his teeth and shooting fire out of his
eyes at the elevation of the Most Holy; had been heard muttering in an
unknown tongue behind the high altar, and among the tombs and shrines
of the saints; and also had he often been seen wandering by night, when
honest Christians were in their beds, among the graves of the poor of
Ely, and gazing at the moon and stars, and talking to some unseen
demon. He had never been seen to eat and drink enough to support life;
and therefore it was clear that he saved his stomach for midnight
orgies in the church-yard with devils and witches. It was not true that
all the devils at Crowland were sham-devils, for some of the novices
and lay-brothers of the house, and some of the clowns of Crowland town,
who had been seduced, and made to disguise themselves in order to give
a cover to what was doing, had since declared that, although all their
company made only twelve in number, they had seen twice twelve when the
infernal lights were lit in the dark cellars of the house where their
pranks began; and it was a notable fact that one of the Crowland hinds,
first cousin to Orson the smith, had been so terrified at this increase
of number and at all that he had heard and seen on that fearful night,
that he had gone distraught,[218] and had never yet recovered it. It
was known unto all men how, not only on that night and in that place,
but also on many other nights and in many other places, the alien had
made smells that were not of earth, nor capable of being made by
earthly materials, and had made fire burn upon water, mixing flame and
flood! Now, the Lord Abbat himself had said that fire and water would
not mingle! Nor would they but by magic. The convent would all remember
this! Not content with possessing the diabolical arts himself, Girolamo
had imparted them to another: Elfric the sword-bearer, from whom better
things might have been expected, considering his training in a godly
house, had been seen mixing and using these hellish preparations which
he could not have done if he had not first spat upon the cross and
covenanted with witches and devils. Nay, so bold-faced had this young
man been in his crime that he hath done this openly! The stranger had
been seen many times in battle, and in the thickest of the fight, yet,
while the Saxons fell thick around him, and every man that was not
killed was wounded, he got no hurt,—no not the smallest! When the
arrows came near him they turned aside or fell at his feet without
touching him. There was a Norman knight, lately a prisoner in the Saxon
Camp, who declared that when he was striking at the thin stranger with
the certainty of cleaving him with his battle-axe, the axe turned aside
in his firm strong hands as though some invisible hand had caught hold
of it. Moreover, there was a Norman man-at-arms who had solemnly vowed
that he had thrust his sword right through the thin body of the alien,
had driven the hilt home on his left breast; and that when he withdrew
his sword, instead of falling dead to the earth, the stranger stood
erect, laughing scornfully at him, and losing no blood, and showing no
sign of any wound. Now all these things fortified the belief that the
stranger was the Jew that could not die! Seeing that a deep impression
was made upon many of his hearers who had gone into the hall with the
determination of believing that there had been no magic, and that
nothing unlawful had been done by the defenders of the liberties of the
Saxon people and the privileges of the Saxon church, the cunning prior
turned his attack upon Thurstan. It was notorious, he said, that
Thurstan had been a profuse and wasteful abbat of that house, taking no
thought of the morrow, but feasting rich and poor when the house was at
the poorest; that he was a man that never kept any balance between what
he got and what he gave; and that he had always turned the deaf side of
his head to those discreet brothers the chamberlain, the sacrist, the
cellarer and refectorarius, who had long since foretold the dearth and
famine which the convent were now suffering. [Here nearly every monk
present laid his right hand upon his abdomen and uttered a groan.] It
was known unto all of them, said the prior, that under the rule and
government of Thurstan such things had been done in the house as had
never been done under any preceding abbat. The shrine-boxes had been
emptied; the plates of silver and of gold, the gifts of pious kings and
queens, had been taken from the shrines themselves; the treasure
brought from the abbey of Peterborough had only been brought to be
given up to the Danes and sent for ever from England, together with the
last piece of silver the pilgrims had left in the house of Ely! And
then the Jews! the Jews! Had not dealings been opened with them? Had
not a circumcised crew been brought into the patrimony of Saint
Etheldreda, and lodged in the guest house of the abbey? Had not the
abbat’s seal been used in sealing securities that were now in the hands
of the Israelities? And was not all the money gotten from the Jews gone
long ago, and was not the treasury empty, the granary empty, the cellar
empty,—was there not an universal void and emptiness in all the abbey,
and throughout the patrimony of St. Etheldreda? [The monks groaned
again.] In concluding his long discourse the prior raised his unmanly
voice as high as it could be raised without cracking, and said—“Upon
all and several the indubitable facts I have recited, I accuse this
Girolamo of Salerno of magic and necromancy; and I charge Thurstan,
abbat of this house, and Elfric, whilom novice in the succursal cell of
Spalding, of being defensors, fautors, and abettors of the necromancer.
And what saith the sixteenth of the canons enacted under the pious King
Edgar? And how doth it apply to our abbat? The canon saith this—‘And
we enjoin, that every priest zealously promote Christianity, and
totally extinguish every heathenism; and fordid necromancies and
divinations and enchantments, and the practices which are carried on
with various spells, and with frith-splots and with elders, and also
with various other trees, and with stones, and with many various
delusions, with which men do much of what they should not.’ I have
done.”[219]
For a while there was silence, the monks sitting and gazing at each
other in astonishment and horror. At length, seeing that the abbat was
almost choked, and could not speak at all, Girolamo said, “my lord, may
I begin?”
Thurstan nodded a yea.
Hereupon the Salernitan went over the whole history of his past life,
with all its sorrows, studies, and wanderings; and bade the monks
reflect whether such a life was not fitted to make a man moody and sad
and unlike other men. He acknowledged that, as compared with Saxons,
and more especially with the Saxon monks of Ely, he ate and drank very
little; but this was because his appetite was not good, and his habit
of life very different from theirs. He allowed that he was fond of
wandering about in lonely places, more especially by moonlight, but
this was because eating little he required the less sleep, and because
the sadness of his heart was soothed by solitude and the quiet aspect
of the moon and stars. All this, and a great deal more, the Salernitan
said in a passably composed and quiet voice; but when he came to deny
and refute the charges which the prior had made, his voice pealed
through that hall like thunder, and his eyes flashed like lightning. In
concluding he said—“I was ever a faithful son of Mother Church. The
blessed Pope at Rome—Pope Alexander it was—hath put his hand upon
this unworthy head and given me his benediction. The pious abbat of the
ancient Benedictine house of La Cava that stands in the chasm of the
mountain between Salerno and the city of Neapolis held me at the
baptismal font; cloister-monks were my early instructors, and learned
doctors of the church were my teachers in youth and manhood. I have
been a witch-seeker and a witch-finder in mine own country. Ye have
known me, here, burn, or help to burn, a witch almost under your own
eyes. Jews have I ever abhorred,[220] even as much as witches,
necromancers, and devils! Saracens and Moors, and all that follow
Mahound, have I ever hated as Jews, and as much as good Christians
ought to hate them! Oh prior, that makest thyself my accuser, thou hast
been a home-staying man, and hast not been called upon to testify to
thy faith in the lands where heathens rule and reign, and Mahound is
held to be the prophet of God, and superior to God’s own Son. But I
tell thee, prior, that I have testified to my faith in such places, and
openly on the threshold of Mahound’s temples, braving death and seeking
a happy martyrdom which, alas! I could not find. Saxons! in a town in
Palestine wherein, save a guard of Saracens, there were none but Jews,
I took the chief rabbi by the beard at the gate of his synagogue.
Saxons! to show my faith I have eaten swine’s flesh at Jerusalem, in
the midst of Saracens and Jews. Saxons! in the Christian countries of
Europe I never met an Israelite without kicking him and loading him
with reproaches. Bethink ye then, after all this, whether I, Girolamo
of Salerno, be a Jew, or Mahounder, or necromancer! If ye are weary of
me let me be gone to the country from which I came. I brought little
with me, and shall take still less away. If ye would repay with torture
and death the good I have done ye, seize me now, throw me into your
prison, load me with chains, put me to the rack, do with me what ye
will, but call me not Jew and wizard!”
Sundry of the monks said that the words of the stranger sounded very
like truth and honesty, and that of a surety the good Lord Hereward
would not have brought a wizard with him into England, or have lived so
long in friendship with a necromancer. Others of the cloister-monks,
but they were few in number, said that Girolamo had disproved nothing,
and that it could be but too well proved that woe and want had fallen
upon the good house of Ely—that the treasury, granary, wine-cellar
were all empty. The Lord Abbat now spoke, but his anger had cooled, and
his speech was neither loud nor long. He declared that every man, being
in his senses and not moved by private malice, must be convinced that
the Salernitan was a good believer and no wizard; and that, whatever he
had done, however strange some things might appear, had been done by
means not unlawful. This being the case there could be no sin or blame
in his having made himself the defensor of the stranger, and no sin in
Elfric’s having associated with him, and assisted in his works. “But,”
said the abbat, “though the prior hath not been bold enough to name
that name, ye must all know and feel that, if this man were a
necromancer, charges would lie far more against Hereward, our great
captain, than against me or that poor young man, Elfric. Would ye
accuse the Lord of Brunn of sorcery and witchcraft? I see ye dare not,
nay, I see ye would not!”
As to the daring, Thurstan was right: but as to the will, he was wrong;
for the prior and the chamberlain, and some others, would have accused
Hereward if they had only had courage enough so to do.
The abbat next told the prior and all the members of the house that
were present, that he had taken no important step without the advice
and vote of the chapter; that of late, in many cases, the vote in
chapter had been in direct opposition to his own wishes and declared
feelings; and that whether it were the taking of the shrine-money, or
the bargaining with the Israelites, or the calling back of the Danes
(that source of so much woe), or the giving up of the Peterborough
treasure, he had been out-voted by the majority, at the head of which
had always stood the prior and the chamberlain. If honest-hearted
Thurstan had called for a vote of the brotherhood at this moment it
would have gone for him, and the prior and his coadjutors would have
been confounded; if he had ceased speaking altogether, and had
dismissed the assembly, some mischief might have been avoided or
delayed; but unluckily he went on to speak about the obligation the
house lay under of feeding and supporting the Saxon lords and warriors
in the Camp of Refuge, about his general administration of the revenues
of the abbey, and about other matters which had nothing to do with the
Salernitan or the foul charges brought against him; and, saying that
these were things to be discussed in a chapter of the whole house, and
that if it could be proved that in any of these things he had wilfully
done amiss or acted upon a selfish motive, he would readily resign
mitre and crozier and return to the lowliest condition of a
cloister-monk, he quitted the hall, beckoning Girolamo to follow him,
and leaving the monks together to be wrought upon by the craft and
malice and treachery of the prior and the chamberlain, who had sold
their souls not to one devil but to two—the demon of lucre and the
demon of ambition and pride. As soon as he was out of the hall, the
prior put his evil face under the cowl of the chamberlain, and
whispered, “Brother, ’t was our good fortune that put the word in his
mouth! We will soon call a chapter and depose him from his authority.
Our task will then be easy; but as long as he is abbat many timid minds
will fear him.”
“But,” whispered the chamberlain in return, “we must first of all shake
the faith which too many here present have put in his words, and in the
protestations of Girolamo.”
“The logic of hunger will aid us,” said the prior, “and so will the
promptings of fear: there is not a measure of wheat in Ely, and the
report hath been well spread that the Normans intend to begin their
attack very soon, and to put every monk to the sword that shall not
have previously submitted. To-morrow Hereward goes upon some desperate
expedition to try to get us corn and wine: he cannot, and will not
succeed; and, while he is absent, we can report of him and his
expedition as we list.”
“’Tis well imagined,” said the chamberlain in another whisper; “but we
must undo the effect of that devil Girolamo’s speech, and prepare the
minds of the monks for the work we would have them do.”
While the prior and the chamberlain were thus whispering together,
divers of the old monks, who loved not their faction and who had grown
weary of this long sitting, quitted the hall without leaving the mantle
of their wisdom and experience behind them; and after their departure
the prior and his faction so perplexed the dull wits of the honester
part of the community, that they again began to believe that the
Salernitan was a necromancer and the abbat his fautor, that there was
no hope of getting corn or wine unless they submitted to Duke William,
and that if they did not submit they would all be murthered by the
Normans.
They also spoke, and at great length, of the privations they had
undergone ever since the beginning of the war.
“Yea! how long and how manifold have been our sufferings,” said the
sub-sacrist. “When this accursed Camp first began to be formed, was not
our house entirely filled with guests? Did they not seize upon our
hall, nay, even upon our kitchen? And were not we of the convent
obliged to take our meals in the dormitory, as well on flesh days as on
fish-days? Were not all open spaces in the monastery crowded, so that
the abbey looked more like a fair than a house of religion? Was not the
grass-plot of the cloisters so trampled down by the feet of profane
fighting-men that no vestige of green was to be seen upon it? And
though most of these guests be now gone into the Camp, because there is
little left here for them to devour, do not the cellars, the
store-houses, the kitchen, and every part of the house speak of their
having been here, and of the poverty and disorder in which they have
left us?”
“Aye,” said the refectorarius, “wonderful hath been the waste! The
revenue of the abbat, the common property of the house, and the
incomings allotted to the several officials to enable them to bear the
charges and do the duties of their offices, have all been anticipated
and consumed! And let our improvident Abbat tell me how I am to find
that which I am bound to provide for the whole convent to wit, pots,
noggins, cups, table-cloths, mats, basons, double-cloths, candlesticks,
towels, plates, saltcellars, silver plates wherewith to mend the cups
that be broken, and the like; besides furnishing three times in the
year, to wit, at All Saints, Christmas, and Easter, five burthens of
straw to put under the feet of the monks in the refectory, and five
burthens of rushes and hay wherewith to strew the hall?”
“And I,” quoth the cellarius, “how am I to be father unto the whole
convent inasmuch as meat and drink be concerned, when I have not a
penny left to spend in township or market? By the rules of the Order,
_Statutis Ordinis_, when any monk at table asks me for bread or for
beer, in reason, I am to give it him; but how am I to give without the
wherewithal?”
“And I,” said the chamberlain, “how am I to find, for both monks and
novices, gowns and garters, half socks and whole socks, and bed and
bedding, and linsey-woolsey for sheets and shirts, and knives, and
razors, and combs, in order that the convent go clean and cleanly
shaved? Aye, tell me how I am to change the straw of the beds, provide
baths for the refreshment of the bodies of the monks, to find shoes for
the horses and spurs for the monks when they are sent travelling, to
keep and entertain two bathers and four tailors, when Abbat Thurstan
hath taken mine all or hath forced me to give it to laymen and
strangers and Norwich Jews? Let our universal poverty say whether this
hath been a misgoverned house! Brothers, judge for yourselves whether
Thurstan, who hath brought down all this ruin upon us, ought to be
allowed to rule over us!”
The crafty prior said in a quieter tone of voice, “For my part, I will
not now dwell upon these temporal evils, albeit they are hard for men
in the flesh to bear; but I would bid the convent take heed lest one
and all they incur the sentence of excommunication by the pope himself.
It is now quite clear that Pope Gregory wills that William the Norman
shall be King of England, and that the English church, with all English
houses of religion, shall submit to him, and take their instructions
from Archbishop Lanfranc.”
When the meeting in the hall broke up, the chamberlain said to the
prior, “We shall yet have the pleasure of burning Girolamo as a
necromancer!”
“An he be not the Jew that cannot die,” quoth the prior.
When the Salernitan reached the Camp that evening he said to the Lord
of Brunn, “Certes the monks of Ely will no longer say I am a wizard;
but there be traitors among them, and much do I fear that their
rebellious stomachs will make traitors of them all!”
“Against that must we provide,” quoth the Lord Hereward; “to-morrow we
must go get them corn and wine from the Normans. Our stratagem is well
laid, but we must die rather than fail. So good night, Girolamo, and to
our tents and sheepskins.”