Bodmin, 1349

an epic novel of Christians and Jews in the plague years

by Roberta Kalechofsky, micah@micahbooks.com, www.micahbooks.com

This is the full text of the novel, in one file. The print version is available from Micah Publications, 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945, www.micahbooks.com  Roberta's other work includes: Orestes in Progress, Justice My Brother, A View of Toledo, Solomon's Wisdom, The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner, and Autobiography of a Revolutionary: Essays on Animal and Human Rights.

All of the above books are now available on CD, in a "context" of 270 related classic books,  for just $29:
Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context contains five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion, Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne. Table of Contents

Micah Publications also publishes Jewish vegetarian and animal rightsbooks, such as: The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook, Vegetarian Judaism--A Guide for Everyone, and Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb. For a full list with descriptions, see www.micahbooks.com

Several of her stories, and two novellas, La Hoya and Stephen's Passion, have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. La Hoya received excellent reviews in major publications, such as Corriere Della Sera., and was included in a college curriculum in Italy under the title, Veduta di Toledo.. Stephen's Passion has also been included in a college curriculum in courses in American Fiction in the University of Florence, under the title, La Passione Di Stephen. Her novel, Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years, was included twice in a college curriculum in the United States.

She began Micah Publications in 1975 and has received publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, in addition to her literary fellowships. As a publisher, she created The Echad Series, which includes five anthologies of Jewish writing from around the world, and has published 40 different titles in poetry, fiction, scholarship, vegetarianism and animal rights. She is active in the animal rights and vegetarian movements and began the organization, Jews for Animal Rights, in 1985, and coordinates publishing projects with this organization.

She has also been a contributing editor to various magazines, such as Margins, and On The Issues, and taught at Brooklyn College for four years.

She was a participant in a round-table discussion, "Please Use Other Door: Literary Creativity and the Publishing Industry," with Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Sifton and Robert Boyers, which was published in RSA Journal, #3 (March, 1992).

She graduated from Brooklyn College and received a doctorate in English literature in 1970 from New York University.

A critical essay on her work can be found in the Dictionary of Literary Biographies, Volume 28: Jewish Fiction Writers. A list of her published work and/or extended resume is available upon request.

Text on back cover:

"... an amazing work -- Cynthia Ozick

"Bodmin, 1349 is a masterful work. Language here is a powerful and highly original cognitive instrument, surpassing Eco's The Name of the Rose. -- Mario Materassi

"... skillful novel... grounded in well-documented data -- provides a fascinating glimpse of the rich relilgious heritage of both Christians and Jews." -- Publishers Weekly

"... a very unusual work of fiction and scholarship ... Bodmin, 1349 is a fascinating introduction to a vanished era." -- Sylvia Rothchild

"... remarkable novel ... every sentence in her book is grounded in little-known but fascinating details fo the daily lives of serfs, monks and Jews in the Middle Ages." -- Gerald Jonas

Here is history with veracity and humor, told from the point of view of all the social classes who experienced The Black Death.

Here is history with human faces in the charactreers of Will, a peasant from York, and his wife, Miriam, rumored to be Jewish, a "leftover" from the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, who becomes a picaresque heroine through whom the events fo the Black Death on the continent are told.

The novel is passioinate and witty as it interweaves existing documents from the times, charters and chronicles, monastic life and town life, the rectory and the brothel, with fantasy, vision, and lyricism. It is a compelling work of the religious and historical imagination.

for Kal, whose perseverance saw this through

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: The Road to Bodmin Priory
• Chapter Two: The Holiness of Poverty
• Chapter Three: The Road to Newool
• Chapter Four: The Road to Bodmin Village
• Chapter Five: The Treasury of Heaven
• Chapter Six: Denarii Dei
• Chapter Seven: The Road to London
• Chapter Eight: Stadluft Macht Frei

In 1349, European man perceived that his problem, like ours, was survival, not salvation. We have still to work out that religious insight.

n our time the fate of man and the fate of life are one, and we would be less than wise to ignore the survivor's voice... To new prisoners on their first night in Sachsenhausen, a survivor spoke these words: "I have not told you of our experiences to harrow you, but to strengthen you... Now you may decide if you are justified in despairing."

-- The Survivor by Terrance Des Pres

CHAPTER ONE:  THE ROAD TO BODMIN PRIORY

Will Langland, a good man in search of peace in the year 1348, came from York to the priory of Bodmin in the early spring of that year, six months before the plague came to England, although the n   ¨ews of it had already reached the shores, carried in the throats of birds that crossed the waters from Europe, and each man dealt with the rumor as best he could.

Will walked the road to Bodmin in the county of Exeter and thought in the manner of his times: "A man can choke on his thoughts if he be by himself too long." The loneliness of travelling alone was harder to bear than he had bargained for, and his feet were sore, the scenery now soothing, now bleak, depending which way his thoughts blew, back to his wife who had run away, or forward to peace at Bodmin.  Will walked doggedly, putting the distance between himself and his wife, she to Europe and he to the priory, he a man who loved living itself, a glass of ale and a lass upon the knee, the hum of a river in his ear and the look, oh! the look of a beauty as his hot eye caught hers.  He, this Will of the world, went to make inquiry about matters of faith.

In his way was a fork in the road: two roads as plain as his two hands, two feet, two eyes and two ears, and never a sign to tell him which road to take.  He sat down against a rock to deliberate and cut himself a piece of cheese and bread to help the matter, and the dew and dream of the scene fell upon him.  He laid himself down in the wilderness of this world and dreamed a dream of fair earth, of wife and home and hearth: pasture, farmland, and hill all about him, his boyhood's beloved countryside, with cows and sheep and rounded hills.  And on the flat of the land the windmill and around the bend beside the bank the watermill, and all around in the further distance God's spire and the air adrift with bells and the earth beneath, God's great gift to man He loves, laid clean with arable strips and humps of growing edibles, and a crouching man or woman to gather them, pare them, peel them, and bring them. to table, and one early lass to carry an apronful to her babe or man to give him a taste of goodness to come: warm milk smelling of the cow's grass, Betsy beloved of poor farmers, patient in the pasture, standing ready to hand, her great moo God's voice to a starving man, and Will's wife so dear on their wedding day kicking her shoe up a tree.

"Fetch it, fetch it.  Aha!  I'll give you my body if you fetch it, aha!"

Oh! love, I climbed into the tree and set my eye upon a blossom for your hair and fell into your arms afaint with love and heat.  Oh! love, you kicked your shoes off and danced upon the river and all about you the guests laughed and the cows mooed and the sheep baaed.  And you called through all the sacred voices, "Will. Love. Now." Such was Will's great love.  To walk barefoot in her grass, to drink from God's good running stream and let his eye go blind with looking at the hot sun upon it, God's great rivers flowing with milk and honey and oil   » and wine and in each Will dipped his love and she rose three times on their wedding night raining love and the guests and the bells laughed all night and all day and the smell of the hay on the next hot day made him dizzy with more desire and he bellowed like a bull as he drove his plough through field and furrow and bed, and the steam came smoking with green flies from the cowpile behind the shed. And this was Will's great love.  He caught her behind a hill and under a tree and in back of Betsy and before the bells stopped ringing the thing was done in the heat of the day and all the folk passed into church in the evening in the village, and the stars cooled him not a bit. This was his great love for three years, three months, three weeks, and three days, a lass and grass and a roaring river and hay in the hot sun.  Oh! love.  Where has she gone, Will?  Gone to doom, he thought unkindly, damning her as he bit his cheese and chewed his hard    bread.  Ah!  Will!  Oh!  Will!  She was your great springtime heat.  You clutched her to your bosom when she was warm to hand and wrapped your long legs about her and three times called upon your ram's horn and now the altar lies in shambles and weeping flowers.  She to Europe and you to Bodmin.  Plainly the road has become twain.  He, with Christ's help, to heaven, for he cared not for this world anymore, a world of rude rumors and ruder fates, grey mists and grimy clouds.  He for heaven where all voices sing the same and that was good enough for him.  He for the eternal choir and she for the constant cackle.  "Whore!  Greatest deceiver of them all, deceiver of all good Christian men.  Whore of Babylon!" Let her be in Europe!  He to Bodmin, and he rose up and set out upon the road.

The birds cawed and flew in circles.  Will brushed his crumbs to them with a curse.  "Get yours," he thought.  "Who cares what for what?"

The birds dove and dipped for the crumbs, while W   äill chose his road and kicked the pebbles in the dust.  The grass turned brown before his eyes.  "Now what?" he thought, and blinked unhappily, and woke from his good dream.  No doubt about it.  The earth had turned upside down, the cows lay in the field with blackened tongues, the sheep on the hillside staggered and stiffened and fell one by one.  The lambs bleated, all ribs and shrunken heads and weeping seared eyes.  Flve thousand sheep in one field lay rotting, their coats all black with vermin, and before Will could hide his face a thousand, thousand men, a thousand, thousand, thousand men came over the hill, with black and furry tongues, and cried out to him in the language of famine, "Europe is coming, Will, and you will not escape, run as you can." And the vultures hovered and circled but wisely came not to earth, for the dead lay rotting in the sun and rotting in the hay and rotting in the furr-ows with the vegetables, and mothers turned to slime before their children's ey   ìes and fell before the dead could close their eyes upon their children or their children upon each other, and in every town and in every village the dead lay in higher and higher heaps, brothers in the arms of sisters, the mother dead in her labor and the half born babe dead of the plague, and young gentlemen in knight's armor dead upon their horses, and the shepherd dead upon his hill and the sheep dead all about him, and the young husband dead upon the altar and the weeping bride gone home to die and to bury her parents who buried her brother who buried his wife who buried her sister who buried her husband who buried his father who buried his son who buried his mistress who buried her child from plague and shame; and the tavernkeeper and the fiddler, the yeoman and the farmer, dead, dead, dead in the fields, dead in the roads, dead in the byways, and none to ring the bell of mourning and none to bury them, no, not priest or friend, for all who could have fled and only the gravediggers can prosper for never have there been such prices for burial without benefit of prayer, and fires lit the length of Europe to bum the dead and clean the air, and men with garlic who bathed in vinegar with charcoal on their bodies; but nothing helped and the whole earth stank for never had the earth known such smells and sights, such putrid winds and deaths.  Will saw it all and shook with rumor and vision and called out to his great foreboding: "Oh, God, what have we done this time?  Thy great punishments are beyond all reckoning and all thy great good earth and all the air above it and all thy animals created with love and genius stiffen here with fright, their ears flick this way and that to get away from thy wind and they stand, even as I do, trusting to Providence and scared, hopeful in thy judgments and terrified." Will's tongue dried even as he prayed and he tasted Europe upon it and regretted that his wife was there and prayed that God would cancel    Ühis harsh thoughts about her, but God knows he knew not what to do with her or about her.

Will tasted Europe upon his tongue and looked about the countryside now restored to former good, Betsy, brilliant Betsy in her generous charity and all the good fattling sheep, sheep and lamb, the young and the old, md thanksgiving broke out in him in a sweating prayer: "Oh, God, took Thou upon these handsome sheep and cows, look Thou upon these folk in field, Thou who saved a gourd, look Thou now before Thy great death cometh."

Will tasted Europe upon his tongue and like all men stalked by a bad rumor, disavowed all his past mean thoughts to man or beast, even to his wife, prayed to be remembered for his good deeds and not for his bad thoughts, reminded God that a man's temper is wind, and his heart is better than his mouth, and prayed that God keep far from England this death that no man could see.   Having done what he could to stave off disaster, he took a drink from his pouch a   Ïnd hastened through Barnstable to Bodmin, to arrive there before ghosts or doom or evil spirits or loneliness or the plague catch him unawares.

He crossed the bridge over the Tamara River into Cornwall and took stock of himself again.  "You have but a little way to go now, Will, that is to Bodmin, but a great distance to heaven for your mind shifts about like bog.  All your thoughts are muddied and confused.  Did not Adam deprive you of Paradise because of love of Eve and would you repeat that sorry fate for love of your wife? He saw he must strengthen himself against his thoughts of her and, as is the custom of everyone resisting temptation, he magnified his temptress, and was seized wi th desperation as if the world's fate lay with him, as he knew it did with every good man who wished to be a good Christian man.  He spat into the river, gesture of defiance at Adam's weak member, and crossed the bridge into Cornwall.

And there put up in Launceston for the ni   ¼ght where the talk at the inn was of Edward's doings and bad bishops, the pope in Avignon, the wars in Spain, the Jews, the Moors, the sheep, the evil French, the plague, the war, the trade in tin, and worse than all the rest, the price in barley and wool, and clay pits wherein a man may sink feet first to eternity, so what need had an honest sinner of hell?

"Ha! Will! your hot eye is upon me," the innkeeper' daughter crowed.

"Much good it does my eye," Will said.

"Where are you bound for?"

"I be bound for Bodmin Priory."

"To be a monk?" she winked at him.

"Aye, to do the Lord's work."

Claryce chuckled in her throat.  "The LordÕs work," she sang out.  "God help all men to love the Lord's work as I do." And she caught his hot eye on her wet lip and whispered to him, "You have a hot look, Will.  Wilt bed with me awhile?" No sooner did she whisper this to him than to his surprise his member stood bolt upright and he winked back at her, "I   Î be not at Bodmin yet."

"You have a good day's journey, I warrant," she said.

"More's pity if I make me not a good monk tomorrow, I'll be a good man tonight."

But in the morning he felt differently about it.  His tongue felt green and dissolute and thoughts of hell attacked him.  He looked at Claryce curled up in the bed and blamed her and Adam for his fall. "You betrayed me," he said.

"So say all men," she mumbled.

"Nay," Will said, more to himself as a continuation of the thoughts that were pressing on him, "Adam satisfied no lust when he was betrayed by Eve.  It was not his member but his heart that drew him."

"You is ready to be a monk," Claryce yawned.  'You was more honest last night."

Will condemned her as a whore and left Launceston in a somber mood.  It was a mystery how attractive and proper his desire seemed at night, and how rude it appears in the morning.  He blamed his wife for causing this delusion.  "Had you not tricked me like the whori   Þng devil you be, I would not have been tempted by the whore," he said.  He took the road through the Moors, which added loneliness to his sense of shame.

If ever there was a landscape to give a man respect for the devil it was Twelve Men's Moor which Will crossed in the grey light of the dawn.  Not only grim and craggy with twists in the high rocks and the high tors that looked over one like shapes the eye had never seen before, there was not a sign for a man to go by to know where he was heading.  Not a bird's sound broke the air nor a lizard brought movement a brush.  Nothing liked the Moors.  Will was unlearned, but he was a speculative man, and all manner of thoughts blew through him, and he decided that an empty space that has no social friendliness of any kind in it, or inhabitant to assure a man of the 'force of life, is an evil thing.  And a lonely man in that empty space, though he call upon God, it is fear that answers him.

Will got hungry, but would not stop to eat.  He got tired, but would not stop to rest.  Such psalms and prayers as he remembered fluttered through his brain. "What has man to fear if the Lord be with him," he said, and tried to blow the spirit of Christ upon the Moors.  But this spirit, familiar in his village church, familiar in the folk who greeted him there, was not familiar here at all. Christ seemed not to know the Moors.  He seemed to like a human scene as well as any man, for it was easier to think of God where mankind was or had been.  Will looked upon this naked nature and felt a jolting disbelief, a thing different from whether one believed precisely this or that, but whether one believed in anything at all, in God or man or in the world.

The place was like hell to Will, though he had fancied hell to be a crowded place, full up, so to speak, with a lot of whimpering and crying people and a lot of crawling things with wings and teeth and claws and such, so that a man was always covering his head or privy parts and wa   ¦s in constant motion to protect himself against swirling objects.  But here hell was silence and a lot of empty space, more like what he had been told Eternity would be like.  "Nay, it can not be," he said, wondering of what use such an eternity would be and fearing he was losing his wits.  He thought of his good dog, Rug, and a dumb thing it was that he hadn't taken the animal with him for company. "There be no lizards in these rocks but all manner of creeping things be in my head.  "Nay, Will," he chided himself, "you will not fall to doubting on your way to Bodmin to become a monk," and he took stem hold of himself and paused.  "Let up," he said out loud, "and best pray now while your wits are still in place," and he clumped to his knees and made the sign of the cross.  "Lord, Lord, help this sinner on these Moors. you must know where I am, for you made this place.  And I pray you, Lord, not so much for understanding    Àwhy you made this place, but for courage to pass through here and to keep my wits to serve you.  I will say now with the psalmist that you alone must be my shepherd here, for I see none other, and though you take me through this valley for reasons unbeknownest to me, I will not fear the passage, seeing how you took it into your mind to make it." Then God's spirit blew through the Moors for Will, and he triumphed over primordial matter.

He came at last to Dozmare Lake lying in a flattened hollow between the hills.  For all its boast that it was here that Belvidere threw King Arthur's sword, Dozmare Lake was a clammy, gloomy water lying under a clammy, gloomy sky.  The naked eye, Innocent of its legends, saw nothing in it but gloom and the effort one must make to cross it or walk around it or sink beneath the boggy shore.

'Heart, man," Will said to himself, "it is but a little way more,Ó and though he knew he was bound for heaven it was thoughts    of a bowl of soup and a log upon the fire that set his feet to walking fast and drew up the heat of Claryce's flesh.

"Nay, not so soon again," he said.  "This time I am forewarned and forearmed.  Aye." he sighed, "and alone too.  Well, that must be God s sign that I am heavenbound, for God knows if flesh were here I would sin again."

And so by nightfall, what with saying one thing to himself and then another, he had crossed treacherous Twelve Men's Moor and Bodmin Moor, the craggy spine of Cornwall.  He crossed brook and bog and marsh, and climbed cliff and tor and found by evening an old pilgrim's resting place in a wild wastrell laying by -the side of a wasted road, deserted of mankind but himself and, God give him cheer for a blasted day spent in cold misery, another fellow traveller sitting upon the wall of the place.

"Good day," Will said, "what be this place and who be yourself?"

The fellow traveller was a stringy looking fellow, scabby but ch   Þeerful, flee bitten but dogged with a sprightly eye for argument and adventure.  "I'm called Walt of Landsend," he said, "this place be Capella de Temple, built for pilgrims who be bound for Jerusalem."

"I be bound for Bodmin," Will said.

"I for London," Walt said.  "Where hail you from?"

"Settle."

"Where be that?"

"Settle on the River Ribble, hard by Kirkly Lounsdale."

Walt shrugged his shoulders.

"Has heard of Harrowgate?" Will asked.

"Nay."

"Has heard of the River Lune?"

"Nay."

"There be where Settle is, upon the River Ribble not far from the River Lune against Harrowgate.  A long journey from where I stand now.  I be upon the road three weeks, all the way through Wilts and Somerset and Devon, and all the time walking but for a single day when a wagon gave me a ride with two oxen."

"Mankind is not good these dayes," Walt said, dispassionately.  "It is a bad time for God and man."

"Mean you the plague?" Will asked.

"Plague and popes, Walt said.

That was a cu   ïe to Will that Walt was a political man.  He shrugged his shoulders and said, "What is that to an Englishman?" and looked at Walt more keenly.  "What manner of man are you?"

Walt laughed.  "I'll tell you for you have an honest face, but it is atwixt you and me that I be a priest."

"For sure?" Will asked, surprised, for the man had an unpriestly look about him.
"For sure and true," Walt said, but he drew his fingers under his throat to indicate the ax.

"Art a criminal man?" Will asked, uneasily.

"Aye, a criminal priest, as all good priests are."

Will was not dense.  He was aware of the loneliness of the spot and the cutting temper of the man.  "Good ay to you, Walt," he said.

"Make you for Bodmin Priory?" Walt called after him, but Will felt he had shared enough information with a stranger.  Walt called after him again, "Monks and priests are sworn enemies, for the monks eat the fat of the earth while the priests starve with the sheep.  Good day to you yourself, monkman.  Keep your vest    ­laces untied for your spreading belly."

Will kept his ears shut, for it was never good to hear seditious talk.  The man was intemperate and careless of the distrust he spread, sure clues of a desperate nature.  Will had enough to do with the weariness of the journey without being bitten by a rabid stranger. He shrugged the words away and crossed Cornwall, King Arthur's land, as rumor had it, and in that year under the guidance of good John de Grandisson, the seventeenth bishop of Exeter.

It is said that Cornwall was first populated by a Celtic people, ruddy and foreign looking to the English. Places abound in legends of cutthroats and saints, bloody wars and miracles.  The site of Bodmin Priory, It is said, was first chosen by a hermit named Goron who, in 348, had founded a single cell where the grand monastery now stands.  Here he had lived his life, as saints used to do, surrounded by the moors and sky, living on berries an   Çd lizards and the Gospels which he sang night and day, so that the stones were worn smooth with his songs.  Goron yielded his site for the future of the commonwealth of Bodmin saints, to St. Petrock, who is accorded to be the true founder and patron saint of Bodmin Priory, and whose bones are kept beneath its floors.

Will was not aware of any of this. He had never heard of Goron or St. Petrock, nor did the past as a number mean anything to him.  The past to him was the year of the Great Storm or the year his brother Davey got the smallpox.  All Will saw about him was a grey countryside, a desolate land that was hard on the eyes, where sky and earth were the same color as slate, a country of broken rocks and forsaken battlements, settled by Celtic missionaries and early Romans, so that no one could now tell what part was nature and what part humans had left behind, whether the rocks were placed by Roman, churchmen, or God.  And here in the heart of it all sprawled Twelve Men's Moor and icy estuaries and behind every rock the sound of unkind water wearing the earth away and cutting brooks from quagmires.

"Well, Will, " he said to himself, "you like not the scenery after a day's travail.  But here is landsend and spirit's beginning.  Stick that into your mind and let it root there."

The demesne of Bodmin Priory began at the bottom of Twelve Men's Moor and stretched to the Cornish Heights and to Truro on the coast.  Its village lay at the southwest end of the moor, on the main Landsend Road which some say once was a transpeninsular route between the two estuaries, the Fowey and the Camel.  The village had sixty-eight families, cotters, villeins and serfs, a freeman called Leboren, a miller, a reeve, a blacksmith, and a priest called Clooke the clerk, and three leper houses, St. George, St. Anthony, and St. Laurence.  But the salt from the sea ten miles away was on everybody's tongue.

Will ca   Õme at last to the gate of the priory in the ringing him to lay the monastery stones, and where his bones now lay in an ivory box beneath their floors.  "Safe," Will said to himself, "or safe enough." The ringing of the bells in the coming night echoed this thought, and Will knew he had taken the right road, away from the world, away from his wife who had deceived him.  For how can a man settle the score with his soul unless he take a great step out into the wilderness of his being?

Here was the great gate of peace and behind him the night where no man would cross the moors after dark.  Here was peace and order, Matins, Prime, Tierce, Sexte, None, Vespers, Compline, three and six and nine and noon, three and six and nine and noon.  Here was silence and prayer, here was learning and God.  Here was the voice of a brother soul, not the quarrelsome voice of a difficult woman.  "Through all eternity she will stand outside the gate, Matins, Prime, Terce, Sexte, None and Ve   æspers, and will cry.  Ha!  Ha! While I will sing all day in heaven with pater, ave, and creed." There was nothing left for him to do but to knock upon the door.

"True, true," the bell tolled, "now is this monastery your Eden.  Guard yourself against the works of woman.  Here is order, Will.  Here is the mastery and mystery of order.  The soul is nought without order, it is nought but fluid and efflorescence.  It has no shape but what order gives it.  This is the secret of monk's stones.  Order is man and time and building, each brick and bush and chore and prayer in place.  Here is harmony between man and time and building, in the great transept of the church, as in the transept of the soul.  Seekest peace?  Fasten thy anchor in order.  Seekest joy?  Lay hold of praise to God.  Here thou leavest earth's cares to the earthly, thy ancient passions and heat to the fire-eaters.  Shal t stoke no more that fire that crackled at sight of thy wife.  Three years, three months, three weeks an   Ód three days Is enough for any man to bum.  Now slake your thirst In Christ's waters.  Your choice is clear. thy soul or thy wife, heaven or earth, the eternal choir or the cackle in the grass.

Six bells tolled in Will's head: peace, peace to thee, Brother Will, peace to thy distraught member.  It is but a small part of thy being and no part of the v eternal soul, for in heaven it is useless.  Put it aside as thou hast put aside thy wife.  Hast heard of an angel fornicating?  Cut thyself off from thy wife and from temptation to return.  Cut it off, Will.  In heaven it is useless and would but frighten the angels.

So the bells tolled, saying first one thing and then another.  The tunes bellowed about in Will's head and gave such thoughts that knocked about, fear of going in and fear of staying out, that to still the matter once and for all he raised the clangor on the gate and banged it with all his might, lest standing there he lose heart at the sight of heaven.
   á
"Hold your peace," the gatekeeper grumbled.  "I am not deaf, and Christ knows there be nought in this doorway but bells and knocks.  What manner of man is it knocks so hard at twilight?"

"I be Will Langland from York," he shouted above the bells.

"The devil care where ye be from, you be a hard knocker.  Have you got your seal on you?"

Will took out his pass with his bishop's seal on it and the gatekeeper, though he could not read, looked it over carefully under his torch.  "That be a good seal to seal you in a lifetime," he said, and opened the gate for Will, and before him lay the priory of Bodmin like an anchor in the ocean of worldliness, great, green acres of landed peace that swept across more acres to the cluster of buildings huddled in the stillness of holy stones, cloister and tower and transept.

No sooner did Will take a step towards them than he heard a ssshhhing in the grass.

"I say ye hid it in your pants, Brother Sneak."

"You may search me, Brother Catseyes,    åcome and search me with your gaming hands."

"Wouldst have me touch a filthy body?  Give me the dice and not another word."

"Now, Brother Catseyes, wouldst accuse a monk of gaming?"

"What's this? Will said, and the bells stopped tolling.

Brother Ralph stepped out from behind a tree.  "Who be you?"

"Will Langland, to begin service tomorrow.  If this be Bodmin, what be this talk?"

Brother Ralph laughed, untroubled.  "All God's children quarrel.  We be but God's children.  Came you a long way?"

"From York, all the way by foot but for half a day on a wagon with an ox."

'That be long enough.  Came you to take up the monk's life?"

'Aye, and put down the burden of this other one."

"Aha," Brother Ralph laughed.  "We are all fishes in God's net.  Now is it cast this way and now that way.' And he looked Will over and winked to Brother Walter who winked back and shrugged his shoulders and shook his head and flicked his ears.

"Now, what be this game?" Will said to himself.

Though Wil   «l did not speak, Brother Ralph divined his question.  "Brother Walter will not break his vow of silence to a stranger."

"Aha," Will said, "methinks his head wags more than tongue would."

Brother Ralph, as Will was soon to learn, took such comments placidly and was rarely offended.  In like manner, he asked, "What news of the plague?" as if it were all one to him what the world said, he having heard enough of it by now."

"Pray it comes not to England," Will said.

"That be for certain it will not.  Here be no Jews 40 to let it in.  Praised be Edward."

Brother Walter's amen hung in the air, but Will preferred not to address himself to this remark.  Instead, he said parenthetically, "I saw in a tavern I arrived in in Launceston, The Sign of The Red Whale, it was called, a hard writing upon the wall where I had reason to go, having drunken more wine than is usual, what with the innkeeper and his wenches singing,

White wine,   Å red wine,
Gascon and Spanish
Wash down your meat
With the finest Rhenish

and I did my best to accommodate all men of good will in that tavern, not thinking of my bladder nor my pocketbook until it was too late for either and I jumped to the wall not a drop too soon."

"Now what was this writing?" Brother Ralph said.

"What writing?"

"This writing upon the wall, Brother Long, that you just spoke of where you hurried to the wall not a drop too soon."

"Aye, not soon enough as matters turned out and my leather hose got one good soaking.  But so beclouded was my head I could barely read this sign being but a newly reading man thinking his way through the wine. Well, to be brief, it said when you see the sun awry and two monksheads in heaven, one that talks much and one that shakes his head as if he had the palsy and when a maiden has her magical powers about her then the plague and the famine shall judge the world and Davy the ditcher shall die of hu   ²nger unless God in his mercy grant us at once a truce with his judgment."

"What made you of this sign'?"

Will laughed ruefully.  "See you mercy, brothers Christ's or man's.  I tell you plainly I had more of Claryce the whore who watched me through a hole in the wall and called out, have you not a drop left, Will?"

"Now, now, none of that here," Bother Ralph said. "That be not monk's talk fit for monk's ears."

Will felt himself properly chastised, for had he not shaken the dust of the world from his shoes.  "You be right," he said generously, "I forgot my pledge."

Brother Ralph was equally generous, detecting Will's honesty.  "It be best to leave such thoughts outside the gate.  What were you, Will, in York?"

"A laboring man, a shepherd when there were sheep, with a little learning, and a married one."

Brother Walter cast his eyes toward heaven.  "That be a laboring man twice over," Brother Ralph said.  "And you left your wife   µ for the sake of Jesus Christ?"

"She left me and I left her and I left her once and she left me for good then.  First we quarrelled and then I left her, and when I returned she left me and so then I left her.  Now we are apart.  What were you in the world?"

"I was a babe," Brother Ralph said.  "I came here at age six without mother or father, only a mean uncle.  Some man took me on his horse and said I best be cared for by the brothers.  How be it to live beyond the gate, Brother?"

Will scratched his head.

"I mean be it good or bad?"

"It be a bit of both," Will said.

"Can you get into heaven if you live out there?"

"If you be a good Christian," Will said, and then laughed slyly.  "I tell you something to warm your tempers a bit.  Some say out there all good men get into heaven except the monks and Jews and Saracens.  Have you never heard that saying?"

"Na, I never did.  But I tell you what.  I tell you that them that says it be   « jealous for our clean souls that we keep so white for Christ's sake."

"Aye," Will said, "an' they be jealous for the Jews?"

"They be right there," Brother Ralph said, "for no man without baptism can go to heaven.  Where think you the Jews go when they die?"

"I know not," Will said, "nor will thinking upon it, one way or the other or altogether tell me, for I have thought and thought and do not know."

"We best return," Brother Ralph said, seeing Will's impatience.  "You might as well begin at once to rehearse the rules.  Keep your eyes upon the ground od your tongue in your mouth.  If you have chosen to serve God you must begin by mastering yourself, first tongue and eyes and lastly cock and I fear that since you was a married man you best begin at once no more to think upon your former life, for evil is first thought upon and then is remembered and then is done.  Better it would have been had Adam covered his mouth that    °knew the apple and wherein sin entered than covered his loin which knew not of the apple.  Keep your mouth shut and your eyes cast down and you will make a good monk.  Think upon Adam's sin that lusted for the apple and for his wife.  It is that way with sin, all cut from the same cloth, desire and lust.

Homely Will was overcome by such a speech.  Though he knew he had a soul, never yet had the ambulation from the body to the spirit taken such a circuitous route and never had apple led him to temptation for woman.

Brothers Ralph and Walter brought him to the guest house where he was to stay for three days, according to the rules, before he could petition the brethren to be admitted among them.

Bodmin was a modest priory and its guest house was a modest stony square room which had a single cot and a blanket, a cruet of oil, some scented hay upon the floor and a crucifix upon the wall.  A large monastery, such as Glastonbury or C   ±luny, could accommodate a king and his retinue.  But not Bodmin, which had seen better days and worse days and was, in this year when Will arrived, on a middling course of prosperity.  It housed only eleven brothers, but held a title from William's time to the land and the villages about, the woodlands, pasturelands, five thousand sheep and more.  It leased the mill on the nearby river and collected fees from the grindingstone.  Though Bodmin was modest, it clung to an income of sorts on the edge of debts.  The Norman tower was antiquated and looked primitive in an age of stone lacery, but the tower boasted six bells and the priory a fashionable lady chapel.

No one came to greet Will that night, not even the guest-master, Brother Benedict, who left the problem of novices to Brother Bernard whenever he could.  Brothers Ralph and Walter walked silently along, having said all that was fit to say for the day, and only the swish of the   Äir boots and linen capes made a sound as they moved.  They showed Will to his room and bid him goodnight.  Will thanked them, and hoped to put the bidding to good use, for he was tired with his three weeks' walk, and tired with thinking, and tired with the talk of plague wherever he stopped, and tired most of all with the tiredness that comes to a man who changes his way of life and must find new habits and new ways of thinking.

But when he sank upon his cot, sleep, for which he would have paid a pence, did not come, for all that this was the first time that he had a room and a cot himself, and scented hay upon the floor.  In his worldly life Will had been a great sleeper, first on the bosom of his mother, then penned and pinned between mother and father like a skiff between two waves that heaved all night and thrashed and spewed out dreams, while his brother Davey lay crosswise at the bottom of the bed, hanging on to Will's toe like an anchor lest    Êa legjerk from his father send him sprawling on top of Rug, the sheepdog who lay on the floor. Will not once had had a bed for himself until this night, and his loneliness was keen without his wife or Rug, who filled her bedspot with smell and snore in her absence.

This room had nothing in it but a light, a crucifix and a cot and he missed the smells and snores and that once had lullabied him all night long.  At Matins and at Lauds he heard the bell that woke the brothers for their nightly prayers, and heard or thought he heard their slippered footfall and their distant voices. He woke at Prime feeling not at all like a man who had come in search of peace.

And later at breakfast, as he sat apart from the others in the refectory, in a caracel that was kept for novices, he discovered that the morning meal was only a quarter pound of bread and a third of a pint of beer, eaten while Brother Benedict read from the Book of Martyrs. Will ate hopefully, but wit   µh little pleasure, no different from the others whose acquaintance he was soon to make: Brother Stephen from Ireland and Brother Thomas from Scotland, Brother Harald from York, Brothers Claude and Bernard from France, Brother Benedict from Rome and Brother Anthony from south of there; Brother John from hereabouts, Brothers Ralph and Walter also from hereabouts, and Brother Namlis from nowhere.  These were now Will's family to take the place of his brother Davey and his sheepdog, Rug, and other members of his natural family.  Here was his holy family: Brother Stephen, scabby and saintly, who had made his way in a corked wicker basket that bobbed from Bantry Bay to Barnstable across St. George's Channel, and arrived with a bleached, bald head and a single tooth in his mouth, faithful, fearless, fierce and feared.  Like other Irish saints before him, he did not hold with Roman rules, cut his tonsure as he pleased and kept a private dating   Ø of Easter.  He preached that the Irish were a lost tribe, that the prophet Jeremiah had made his way to Ireland via Egypt and was known to the saintly community everywhere in Ireland as the prophet Ollam Fola.  He himself had seen tombstones in Bantry Bay with legends of: "Aaron de Hibernia, Jusaeus etc., dead with wife and child, Sept. 12, 1189," and who had put such tombstones there, he would like to know and how had this Aaron come to Ireland.

Prior Godfrey advised Will in a private chat that morning "that there is nought to any of this," but that Brother Stephen held these notions "to vex the English with antiquity as well as with other sundry and peculiar matters."

Brother Stephen had not removed his hairshirt in thirty years.  He ate but a single piece of bread a day which he chewed with his single tooth, and felt no ill
effects. His body had adapted totally.  His flesh was worn away to nerves and vessels, strings and things that clung with suckers to his inmos   Ât will.  Like most
other men, Will admired and was awed by him, and believed the world was saved by such, content as he was himself to lapse from practice now and then.

Then there was Brother Thomas, an easier sort of man, who had come with the Scots in 1333.  He had been a soldier, and loved to jab and stick, playfully.  When the Scots receded, they left Brother Thomas behind who took up the staff to Jerusalem, with begging bowl and two mild eyes that won the hearts of women, who passed him along as far as Byzantium when hard luck overtook him.  He acquired the French disease and palsy and a little paunchy belly.  He shook and twitched and itched his way back to Dover and came to rest at Bodmin Priory.  His eyes were now weepy blue and he prayed constantly to St. Mathurin, even throughout the night, to the consternation of the others who shared the dormitory with him.

Brother Bernard was an altogether different man, with a reputation for great l   Ùearning though he was slow of speech.  His birthplace was in Provence, a descendant of the Albigensians who had been done away with in the Great Crusade.  A few offspring had survived and passed the trauma of their history down through the generations.  Bernard was now a faithful Christian, with no leaning towards heresy or extinction.  He was scholastic, honest, ponderous, and very melancholy, digesting tomes of arguments, pros and contras Arians, Monophysites, gnostics, Marcionites, and other sundry histories of heresies and wars and stratagems against them.

He was the the master-of-novices as well as the cantor or precentor, and had charge of regulating the right hand side of the choir.  But chiefly he was the librarian and archivist in charge of records, lists, necrology and charters, and faithfully kept the ledgers and records of the daily life of Bodmin, as well the habits of the birds thereabout.  He was tall and thin and kind and looked down upon the world from    ·a height of melancholy memory and melancholy learning.
But though Brother Bernard had great learning he could not impart it.  He had not an inkling of how to go about ordinary conversation.  Talk passed through him ponderously as grass through a cow's stomach, chewed twice over.  Will had to learn his Latin on his own and he stumbled through the chants and prayers from one mnemonic device to the next.

Bernard's countryman from the north of France, Brother Claude, was again a different sort.  A perfect warrior, he had fought triumphantly against Saracens and other infidels in Spain and Egypt and the Holy Land, and wherever else they could be found.  He had seen Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, travelled with his squire, dined in castles, and had picked up along the way a little Latin, a little Arabic, and much refinement in the art of love.  He was in Rome in 1300 when Pope Boniface had appeared before all the world wearing the imperial   ³ insignia and carrying the two swords of spiritual and temporal power while heralds ran before him and proclaimed, "I am Caesar!  I am the Emperor!" Brother Claude had seen what there was to see of Christendom in that century, its crusades, its great jubilee, its auto-da-fes and pilgrimages, and was soon to see the plague.

Misfortune overtook him in the form of age, when his hand could no longer bear the weight of his sword nor his body that of his armor.  He fell from his horse one day near a chapel on the River Seine, while baroque images of hell sucked at his brain, drawing off the moisture from his mouth.  His loyal squire hacked Its suit of armor from him and exposed the grey skin to sun and air.  "S'done," Sir Claude said.

"Not so, m'lord," his squire murmured.

Sir Claude pressed his eyes shut.  The sun, the sight of past processions, of jousts, the brotherhood of shout and smell, of sweat and danger, the knighthood of ten t   Âhousand men with plumes and banners bearing down upon the infidel, the castles, the fruits, the dainties, the sweat, the venison, the beribboned ladies with bared bodices and veils across their faces, the nights beneath stars and furskins.

"S'done," he said and lay inert upon the ground.

"Steady, m'lord," his squire said.

"Nay, I will have it back," Sir Claude wept.  "it is the sweetest life on earth."

"Perhaps on earth," his squire said and led him to a chapel near at hand where his master discovered the afterworld of knighthood.  The year was 1336.  A poster on the wall announced that the Doctrine of Benedictus Deus had been proclaimed, which clarified the state of hell, revealing that punishment took place immediately after death.  Brother Claude perceived he had not a moment to waste.  He denounced war, he denounced lust, he denounced himself.  He presumed he was a changed man and sought his peace at Bodmin, 'la grisly cheerless place which   ¥ is punishment enough and will reduce my stay in hell," he thought.  His arms aged appropriately, his legs aged as well so that he tottered when he walked, but his loins refused to age, and he soon became famous for his lusts.  He worshipped Mary and feared hell and by his sixtieth year was dark and grizzled and corpulent in paunch and jowl.  He prayed day and night to St. Caesarius and was a dangerous mysogynist, though no one could restrain him if a woman crossed his path.  Twice Priory Godfrey had sealed the laundry maid's lips with coins.  Brother Claude was given services to perform that kept him within the cathedral walls.  He had to regulate the singing on the left side of the choir and prod the sleepy monks awake during the Night Office.  Better it would have been had he remained a boon companion and died upon his horse, for he carried his wars within himself and became dyspeptic to everything that lived.

Broth   ªer Claude and Brother Harald, it seemed to Will, were peculiar kinds of men, without a good word for human flesh.  Brother Harald was quick to recommend odd remedies for spiritual incontinence that Brother Thomas' tongue be taken out, that Brother Claude's clapper be removed, "else it will ring all up and down the countryside before the plague takes him."

It amused Brother Harald to say such things, for he did not wish to be at Bodmin where his father had put him.  Brother Harald was one of those who believed he deserved better, deserved at least to be an abbot, for he had a genius for administration, while Prior Godfrey had none.  Hence, his talents and his soul were wasted, one by bad luck and the other by an unrelenting hypochondria.

His father had married a daughter to Baron Roundsleigh's nephew, one son he kept at home with him, but four others he had put away in monasteries to shift as they could with the circumstanc   ¨es.  One was the famous Abbot Roland, a second was a nullity and was sent to be a monk at Skye; the third was a monastic disgrace, hot as a dog in heat; and the fourth was Brother Harald, sent to Bodmin to keep an eye on the manor there, while the first and eldest son sat in York and ate venison and had his fill of women, and never Christ seemed to care.  The brother that was the famous abbot chose to be in France, "for advancement's sake," Brother Harald said through bloodless lips, "now that the pope is in Avignon." Still, he practised monkhood perfectly, kept all his vow, never lost his place in the Psalter or sang a false note.

But Brother Harald's talents were not altogether wasted at Bodmin Priory.  Since he knew the value of movables as well as land, he was given the care of altar cloths and candlesticks, the hangings, ornaments and corporals.  He looked after the lighting: four cressets in the cloister in the wint   Ðertime, and four in the church, in the nave, at the choir-gates, at the top of the steps to the sanctuary, and in the treasury.  Such tasks pleased him, for while he required little food and little sleep and no sex, and was lean and hypochondriacal, he liked to be in charge of things like gold and linen and souls and minds, and best of all to go about through the priory grange on a horse, for he had been bred to the medieval respect for land and all forms of institutional power in pope and king and baron md bishop; and most of all he had the medieval covetousness for landpower, and so served Bodmin Priory very well.  He performed the services of gathering rent and overseeing the overseers punctiliously, and next to Brother Ralph who was born an eunuch, was the only one Prior Godfrey could trust to go outside the monastery walls to collect the tithes and taxes, for which tasks he was well suited, being an exacting man without nerves.

Of the lowborn, Walter, Ralp   æh, and Namlis, was nothing much to say except that Brother Namlis had a hump and no tongue.  Between them and Brother Thomas they divided the work of the kitchen and the lavatory: the cellarer's chores were Brother Ralph's, who did the catering and the marketing.  The cook was a hired servant who kept an apprentice, who was his son.  Brother Walter was the kitchener, whose duty it was to clean and count the household goods, plate, linen, napkins, baskets, barrels and anything else that moved from the kitchen to the refectory.  It also fell to him to keep the fish fresh with damp cloths and to keep charge of the beer allotments.

Brother Namlis was the chamberlain.  He had charge of old clothes, and kept the supply for the poor, as well as tallies and lists for the laundry.  He was chosen for this latter because the duty involved social intercourse with the laundress, a paid servant from the village.  Brother Namlis was no eunuch, but Prior Godfrey believed his hump would help him kee   Åp his vow of chastity. Brother Namlis was fond of women and women were fond of Brother Namlis, but in an appropriate way, which left him free to do his duties. He kept the supplies of catskins and lambskins ready for the winter, of pigs' fat to weatherproof the boots, he was in charge of baths and shaving and the communal feet-washing every Saturday.  He also kept the heating-room or calefactory ready throughout the winter months so that the brethren could take refuge there from the cold.  He did the tailoring, for which he had great talent and often could be seen sitting at a carrel in the cloister with crossed legs, his hump hanging on his back, sewing a brother's hood while the others studied Latin or read.  Brother Namlis sometimes went with Brother Ralph to market to purchase cloth and needles, which he loved to do, to push and jostle and make his way in the market crowd, and gape and snort and smell, for in all the world there is nothing like a    ¨trade for entertainment.

Brother Thomas saw to the lavatory and Brother Stephen, as refectorian, set the table and kept the hay and rushes on the floor clean and smelling sweetly.  And finally, of Brothers Benedict and Anthony, the first was from a Roman family with pride of lineage and land.  He was the guest-master because he was considered knowledgeable in men and manners, being very patrician in his carriage.  But his Christianity had in it some Marcionite matter, which the Church had labored to purge, to no avail.  Underground, here and there, in written and in oral tradition, the Marcionite heresy which looked upon God the Father with a jaundiced eye, expressed itself towards Jews and women and the Creator of matter with greater vehemence than was usual, even for the Medieval
world.  Brother Benedict had renounced his wife, his land, his castles, the Hebrew Scriptures and meat, and in their place embraced the law o   Éf chastity.  Unlike Brother Claude, Brother Benedict altered the function of his appetites and his nature, but not of his temperament.

He was large of girth, the picture of the type of monk regarded as a glutton, lecher, viper and dicer, but he was in fact as ascetic as Brother Stephen.  Inside his large body were tissues and organs which had become dehydrated with fasting.  His liver was comatose and did not do its proper job of cleansing the
bile.  The fecal matter was often green.  Brother Benedict rightly suspected cancer, but Prior Godfrey was certain the trouble was extremes of abstinence.  He disapproved of such extraordinary measures.  He even loathed them on patriotic grounds, regarding them as "continental, of "Spanish," or "Italian." Brother Benedict ignored Prior Godfrey's order to be sensible or consider another monastery.  Believing there was a connection between corruption in the world and his own corrupt nature, redemption of the world be   Òcame for him a matter of moral willpower.  He fasted on behalf of Avignon and simony, on behalf of luxurious cardinals, on behalf of the Pope for having a mistress, on behalf of his wife whom he no longer saw, on behalf of his children, two of whom had gone to Jerusalem and married Saracens.  But he never transcended his self denial and acquired peace.  Within his corpulent and dignified frame, he was remorseless, somber, and agitated.  More than anyone else at Bodmin, he conveyed the authority of the embattled spirit, the metamorphosis of sinner turned saint, and the idea of personality as an historic form.

Virginity was the distinguishing mark of Christian salvation.  Aquinas had declared it to be the state closest to that of the angels.  Its reputation seemed firmly fixed, if not its practice.  Consequently, woman was despised as the stumbling block into heaven, and lusted after.  But it did not follow from this that men, even when they practised chastity, nec   ³essarily hated women and regarded them as inferior.  There were other options, and the monks showed as much variety of attitude in their observance of chastity as they did in the practice of their other vows.  Some, like Brother Stephen, were vigorously chaste, but regarded men and women as equally depraved; Brother Anthony was chaste, but regarded woman as salvageable; Brothers Walter and Thomas never thought about women and resorted to private acts; Brother Ralph was never troubled and never thought about the matter, Brother Namlis was always troubled and would have sinned gladly if given the chance; Brother Claude denounced woman and was unchaste as often as he could be; Brother Benedict had ceased communication and would not even read about female saints, or appear in the queen's presence if summoned there, and Prior Godfrey condemned all unpragmatic attitudes which hampered his administration and for this reason could not abide    ¿either Brother Anthony or Brother Benedict.

Brother Anthony came from a little further south in Italy than did Brother Benedict.  They were rivals in spiritual matters as well as in class.  Brother Benedict spoke French and Latin, but Brother Anthony had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem on his knees and afterwards had lived on locusts in the desert.  He carried splinters between his nails and was purged of earth and matter.  Morning, noon, and night he said the psalms with his eyes upon the ground.

It might be thought that he and Brother Stephen were of one cloth, but saints can differ quite a bit.  Brother Stephen had been known to laugh and had an edge of humor to him, though he was quick to tell a man his failings.  Brother Anthony communicated with no one. Fenced in as he was with prayer as he polished and fished and drank his bowl of soup and said the Gospels four times a day and had known no other speech for forty years.  He was appointe   ®d as the infirmaries, since he knew herbal secrets, and had the care of the cemetery, which was a charge of some scope, housing as it did six centuries of saintly lives sleeping beneath rose bushes and mint patches, some in crypts with Celtic crosses.  A stone angel of Gabriel's demeanor stood guard over the hallowed ground, blowing a silent horn and calling the faithful to the resurrection.

No one ever discovered what had brought Brother Anthony to Bodmin Priory, since he was originally a hermit, having lived most of his life on a blob of sand in north Africa.  It could not have been a longing for social intercourse, for he never broke his vow of silence, even when the brethren had permission to.  But perhaps it is a mistake to believe that the hermit found peace in his lonely hermitage.  We should not overlook in the hermit-saints' literature the repetition of never-ceasing battle with temptation that beset them.  No doubt Br   Æother Anthony found this unique torment in his loneliness, a perpetual bedazzlement and betrayal of the senses, beastly hallucinations which he transcended only occasionally.  The cries of the damned were very real.  Aquinas regarded them as the chief reward of the saved, those who would be fortunate enough to sit in heaven and listen eternally to the cries of the tortured.  The energies of medieval man were mobilized by these terrors of the afterworld and of Christ's judgment, and in this world by a rapacious hunger for land and earthly power.  His breathtaking colorfulness and adventurism and profound cruelty are of a piece.  No other people combined piety with greed for gold and land with such historic force.  Thus, the Middle Ages have become famous for being both spiritual and earthy.  But here on earth, Brother Anthony heard the cries of the tormented inside his head day and night.  He found succor from these voices at Bodmin, not among the livin   ¿g, whose grimacing silences and tawdry gossip he could hardly bare, but among the dead to whom he sang the Gospels all day long.

Brother John was the last and youngest member of Bodmin.  He was fifteen, and still a novice, but distinguished because he was Bishop Roundsleigh's firstborn and, in opposition to his father, had conceived an appetite for the holy life.  He was yellow haired and milky skinned, and Bishop Roundsleigh had a French wife picked for him, and planned for him to inherit his lands which lay in the north of England, near York, as well as in the southeast near Barnstable, as well as in the south of France in the Provence.  But Brother John chose instead a cubicle and a caracel, and not at Cluny but at Bodmin.  Prior Godfrey regarded him as the most valuable object in the Priory, next to St. Petrock's bones, but Bishop Roundsleigh swore up and down the countryside that he would have Its revenge for this.

Such were they about th   Ëe table in the refectory that morning, each seated according to his station and rank, eleven brethren in black capes and hoods, all bound for the same port with tonsures cut in the same manner (except for Brother Stephen), all pressed into the same duties day and night, spring and winter, all praying with one voice, all eating the same food, all sleeping in one place and at one time, all rising together to pray, to work, to read, to sing, to eat, to weed and plant,and plant and weed, all attending to their wants at the same hour and in the same way, all recognizing the same God, all copying the same Bible (except Brother Benedict), all obeying the same bells, all living in the same calendrical climate that made of each season and each hour a ritual, each ear attuned to the same great toll, each man's hopes bound for the same heaven and in fear of the same hell, each living in the same eternity, grasping the same, time and the same spirit with one mind, till   Ïing God!s earth for the same purpose.

Yet it was not long before Will could distinguish which man smelled of Europe and which man smelled of English soil, which came of landed people and which of the landless, and which man he felt at ease with.  Though each man's soul was known to God alone, it was not long before Will felt their individual weight and not long, despite their vows of silence and the grace of only half an hour a day in which to hear the human tongue in idle conversation, before Will knew what each man's life had been before he came to Bodmin.  For the great gossip of the world, like the salt of the sea and the climate of Cornwall, could not be kept out.

The distinctions of personality pervaded the monastery.  Traits there were that transcended the order or were irrelevant to it, and traits which could not be absorbed by it, and traits which sometimes, but rarely, were transformed by it.  This life suited some very well and others not at all.     äSome adjusted, while others developed kinks and fell into terrible depressions or developed unseem ly habi ts: ticks and twitches, palpitations, nail-biting, eye-rolling, murmuring, deafness, or were given to bedwetting and became childish and ludicrous, banal and senile, weepy and melancholy, remote and transcendent, or morbidly irritable.  The religious spirit is not democratic.  Some have more of it than others.  It is not like the right to vote: available to everyone.  As St. Bernard noted, "The sun does not warm all those on whom it shines: many of those who are taught what they must do by Wisdom are not equally inspired to do it." Here was the best of institutions created for the noblest of reasons: to save the world; yet the human traits of well being and sourness, the capacity to love and enjoy, the tendencies to hate and revile, the temptations to insurrection and rebelliousness, lapses into boredom and remoteness, in short the human range of humankind is recorded to have remained the same during these formidable and strenuous soul-saving centuries.

As with any institution or vocation, some are better suited for it than others.  The status and availability of a dominant institution will attract the unsuitable as well as the suitable.  The chronicles kept by the monks indicate a sociology in spiritual matters, social drifts and norms and appetites, modes of pettiness and viciousness irrespective of salvation.  It was not unheard of for a monk to arise from an ardent prayer to the Virgin Mary and forcefully seduce the closest female peasant.  Medieval literature abounds with such anecdotes and with the populace's fiery resentment of monkish venery and greed.

For some such as Will, preoccupied with "holy," "sacred," "chosen," and "redemption," the monastery was a welcome place.  But other monks suffered unendurable tedium, called the "monk's disease," or accidie, diagnosed as melancholy or "vicious impiousness" and suffered it in the face of Christ.

On that first morning Will did not know what the others thought of the poor breakfast fare, but he remembered the lard and eggs that lay on his breakfast table in York, and a terrible regret settled on him as he thought: "it is not enough," and immediately felt each eye say back to him, "It is." He dared not raise his eyes while all ate standing while Brother Benedict read to them from the Book of Martyrs and the glorious tale circled above them. Will looked covertly at the eleven brothers in cassocks and capes who appeared to be steady souls, not at all troubled by their meager breakfast.

The reading was finished with a murmuring amen and amen and a ringing bell, and as soon as the bell was finished and all filed out to say Mass, up comes the thought to Will again, "It is not enough," and behind him, next to his left ear, though the brother moved not a lip, Will heard him say, "It is," and next to his right ear as distinctly as the bell tolled, though that brother too moved never a lip, he heard another one s   Æay, "Bad thoughts make a great noise." The first was Brother Stephen who had a way of saying much with few words or none at all, and the second was Brother Harald whom even Prior Godfrey respected for his cleverness and wished him somewhere else.

"Come, Will," Prior Godfrey said to him, and invited him to his private room where, to Will's happiness, he offered him another quarter pound of bread and another third of a pint of beer and said, "Now, Will, we mean not to have you spend your first day weeping for what you left behind." Will sensed that his appetite had been revealed, but he assured Prior Godfrey that he was full to the level of his adam's apple. Prior Godfrey winked at him and said he doubted not but that such a long log as Will would find more room inside himself, and pushed the bread and beer forward.  Will thought it would be churlish to quarrel on his first day, and thanked Prior Godfrey and ate gratefully, but feeling awkward.

The room was severely silent except for his chewing, or so it seemed to him, until Prior Godfrey cleared his throat, said "ahem" and "well," and took St. George, his falcon, from his perch where he sat in front of the bay window and put him on his wrist like a jewel and walked about with him and said again, ahem," or "well," and finally, "Now, Will, what shall I tell you of your new life.  You must know somewhat of it already or you would have gone elsewhere." Here there was an embarrassing pause, and Will felt that Prior Godfrey wished him to give an explanation, a confirmation of his calling towards the canons, but Will had made up his mind to be as quiet as he could be f or as long as he could, though he could not say why he had laid this command upon himself.  Bu t Will often laid commands upon himself and they would take hold of him as keenly as a superior's command: he would no more   Á question the one than the other.  So he kept still and looked respectful and inspired as he felt it befit a man who wished to begin a monk's life.  Moreover, he did not know if Prior Godfrey could settle his peculiar problem and he decided, between craft and faith, to practice craft.  Once the great cow was out of the barn she could give milk to any man, but while Will kept his hand upon the latch and his tongue in his mouth he was the master of his fate.

So when Prior Godfrey said to him, "You were a married man," Will said, "Yes, it and said no more, but sat on his chair and ate his bread and gazed wonderfully at St. George, who tinkled the little bells attached to his leg, engraved with the name of Bodmin Priory on them, his black eyes wise with the knowledge of his descent from Osiris and Isis, his speckled chest filled with pride of lineage, and that his master, Prior Godfrey, had accomplished the art of carrying him properly, at the fashio   ¾nable height and distance from the waist.

"You therefore give up more than some," Prior Godfrey said, forcing his attention back to Will, "and I know full well it will not be easy for you to become a monk, for even when you swear and war against the flesh the flesh will remember your wife by itself.  Thou hast a hard battle, Will, and I must ask if you are prepared to do such battle day and night, to still the burning that be in the heart and elsewhere."

He paused at his lectern, where he kept his accounting book and business notes concerning Bodmin Priory, and waited there for Will's reply.  Will knew he should give an account of himself, but only said, "I cannot say. have been away more than three weeks and my heart has been so heavy, nought more can I feel but grief and loss and confusion."

"How long have you been a married man?"

"Three years, three months, three weeks, and three days."

"And your wife left you for another?"

Will shifte   Ïd in his chair.  He would not have this particular construction put upon his marriage, yet he could not find another that suited him.  "We left each other somewhat," he said thriftily.  "First, she left me, but only in a manner of speaking, but in such a way you might say by her manner of speaking that I must leave her and when I returned she left me and so I left her.  I cannot say how all this leaving began because I loved her right well but she wouldn't forgive me for a knock I gave her on her head and wept and left me."

Well, what was in it, Prior Godfrey thought, but a little of this and a little of that, as in most matters.  He advised Will to pray to St. Caesarius and picked up a crumb from Will's plate and offered it to St. George.

"Now, Will," he said, "you shall be neither here nor there if this be the matter.  If you have still a longing for your wife you may put your soul in danger.  You must think upon what the good doctor Aquinas said, that virg   ßinity alone can make men equal with the angels and it is already late for you.  You cannot any longer be as the angels and in eternity you will be leaven though you may still save your mortal soul.  Think upon it, Will, whether you came here for peace or for faith."

"I came for both," Will said pugnaciously.  "I have wrestled with Christ because of my wife and I have wrestled with my wife because of Christ and now I must choose a road and walk upon it. I have been a laboring man with a little learning and I mean to become a learned man and to labor now to know God!s will for this world.  I have been walking three weeks and sometimes the scene looks this way and sometimes the scene looks that way with every green thing turned black and I know that here you have great books that will tell me how I should look upon these things and I came not for peace or faith alone, but for help, for peace and faith and help are one to me."

What another would have made of this speech cannot b   e known, but Prior Godfrey, as the administrator of an establishment, never addressed himself to imponderables.  He dipped his 'quill with dye and wrote a note in his accounting book.  "Canst speak a bit of Latin?" he asked.

"I speak nought but the English tongue."

"Your letter said you had a bit of learning."

"Only  in matters natural, not in matters of many languages.  I can read my native tongue and have preached somewhat here and there to my fellowman."

Prior Godfrey looked up from his accounting book and said sternly, "Here we pray and sing in Latin and do God's work, for you know right well that prayer will redeem the world, prayer will redeem the lusty men outside these walls.  It is a great thing to dwell in brotherhood in one house, but it is a hard thing.  'You must know your place, hold your tongue, keep your eyes down and your stomach from talking when it is hungry, to pray when it is cold, study when you be ti   Ôred, stay awake when you be sleepy, eat little and pray much, keep your tongue still and your thoughts clean.  Here you know we do only God's work.  Here we all row together like Noah's helpers.  We be an ark upon the waters and our mariner Christ who oftentimes has sailed the sea calls us to tell us of where the perils be, the perils within and the perils without, perils of ourselves, perils of enemies, perils of the high sea and perils of ports where drunken sailors be among them that wash their deeds in wine.  Christ guides us through many bitter storms, for we be the sailors upon a ship called Holy Church and if you be here you must row with us and take your orders like a sailor in danger of death upon the high sea.  With poverty you must renounce the world, with obedience to your superior you must renounce your worldly pride, with silence you must renounce frivolity and with chastity you must renounce the flesh and all these vows you must keep.  We be not like    ·the Jews who be children of the flesh but we be children of the spirit, circumcised as St. Paul has said in the spirit and not in the flesh as was the Hebrew.  Therefore it be for you that separation of husband and wife be your sign and your price of eternal life.  It must be this way for love of wife leads man into privacy and love of finery and soon he buys a house to dwell in with his wife and so he takes himself a wife and forsakes his soul, as the old god said to Adam you shall cling to your wife and forsake the others, which was a law given to the Jews.  But it is not fit for Christian man to do so.  He must follow Christ's words when Christ said to leave your brother and your wife and your children too, leave all, even your cat and follow after him, who is the son of God.  You cannot have it both ways, Will, you must choose Heaven or earth, Christ's way or the old Adam."

The length of the speech amazed Will, containing as it did    Êa few words on the virtue of silence.  He was furthermore perturbed by it because, like any other man, Will preferred a bit of this world and a bit of the other and to avoid, if he could, a hard choice.  Prior Godfrey, an the other hand, felt he had set the record straight, showed Will the road he must travel and if matters did not work out well Will had only himself to blame.

"Do not say I will begin tomorrow to do God's work, or that God will forgive me if I think once more upon her. For if you think once you be as good as married again. First you think, then you want. There is no doubt but that the way back to the world is through the woman, for what led Samson astray and what Adam and what caused David to sin and led Solomon to idolatry so that God must divide the Jew's kingdom, and what be the bride of Israel but the whore of Babylon.  If you wish to go to Heaven you must stamp out thinking upon your wife, and if the devil sends her to you in your th   Ëoughts make the cross and call upon the name of holy Mary.  Remember Will, if you choose the monk's life, the holy spirit will be your Eve."

A bird perched upon the window sill with a worm in its mouth.  And as often happened with Will, who was a great lover of the world, whenever bird or it animal looked him in the eye, he looked back at it.  So it is," he thought, regarding the bird, "Christ said the great Father will feed us as he feeds the birds in Heaven, but it seemes to me we be as the birds on earth.  And who can tell why God made the earth this way and not another md why He gave to man a worm that he must carry upon his soul."

Will did not say any of this to Prior Godfrey, who liked his own speech well enough.  Will never said such things to any man, for such thoughts were barely in his head before they blew away.  They went by like a shadow, without enough substance for language.  All of Will's life, as he planted and seeded, he thought such tho   Èughts, for the earth gave a man different sights from those he had when he looked up to heaven.  Shepherding and planting, Will would think, "This earth that God created with love and genius must be substantial to the heart.  This flesh that will be made clean through and through in the Resurrection, why is it not holy here on earth?"

A man, he discovered, could read good things in the stars and hear a heavenly music, but the tune of the earth kept changing.  It could not be heard this way or that.  It was full of chase and hunt and dark beguilements, buzzing gnats that ate your brains out and a green hillside of white flowers, fields of rock and bog and marsh to befuddle your wits.  Will was a torn man, half in love with the world for all the good things in it and the rest of him filled with hatred for its malice and  diseases.  And the shadow of  his hatred would come upon him from nowhere, and was so ever since he could remember and had nothing to do with what any man had taught him or preacher had preached, but came with the wind and went that way.  So he could not tell Prior Godfrey about it, for it was in and out of his brain before he knew it.

"Now is heaven sufficient, Bodmin thy Eden," Prior Godfrey said.  "Here poverty is blessed, here are sinners converted, here the fallen are raised, the stricken succored, the poor are fed and here is silence worshipped, for language is but corruption.  Of the making of books there is no end and of whys and why nots even the infidel ask.  One idea spawns but another, even as rabbits do. Knowledge is quicksand.  The more a man struggles to know the further he sinks.  Here is nought but faith, Will.  Christ did not say a man must study to be saved.  Such did the pagans, yet we know they bum right well.  Plato and Aristotle, they be not in heaven, for they had not the word of Christ that he is raised from the dead.  They worshipped reason which is nought bu   àt a bird which flies away.  The mind is like this bird, it is transitory and all that it knows is shadow.  Plato proved all this and said himself that the soul alone is eternal.  The mind is a net.  Many waters  flow in and out of it, but the soul is a good container made by a goodly potter which holds all the right morsels.  If you choose to stay and put on the habit, Jesus Christ will be your portion, your knowledge, and your world."

"I came not to seek advice," Will said impatiently, "for I made my mind up before I set my foot out the door of my house, and while a man has more thoughts in his head than he cares for, I have chosen my road and mean to walk on it.  I be not learned, but I be not ignorant."

"Well, then, Will, I will show you all the grounds so that you may see how fair your new home will be.  Hard though it may be to be a monk the cloister is the fairest world upon this earth.  When the flood fails and the fishes lack fresh water they gasp and die with drought   µ upon the land.  Likewise is a monk who delights in living outside the cloister.  He be like a fish outside of water, for here is our life in common.  Here is all property God sanctified by church. She owns everything as God owns everything, and the church, as you know, is the trustee for Jesus Christ as Noah was God's servant and the master of his ship, so is Christ
the master of our cloister which is likewise an ark which swims upon the worldly flood.

He then led Will out to see the grounds, carrying St. George on his wrist with impunity, letting him take flight when he wished to, for not the peasants of the land nor even the eagles of the sky would dare to trouble him.

Bodmin was as spacious and fair as Prior Godfrey said it was.  There were grounds for gardening and shepherding, a pond stocked with carp and pike, a sweet smelling herbiary, vineyards and granaries, a woodshed with wood piled high enough for three winters, an infi   Érmary and a cemetery.  Behind the refectory was the kitchen with a bake-house, a hay-house, a brewing house, a stockfish house, a pudding house, a house for keeping beer, a collumbarium where Prior Godfrey kept his pigeons and doves, a pantry, and a boulting house where the corn was sieved.

There were thirteen servants on the grounds: Adam, the larderer who had charge of the live animals and who milked the cows and made the butter and slaughtered the fowl and ground the spices and was in charge of the keys to the pantry and the hay-house and the stock-house and, as general husbandman, ran all day between the animal-keep and the kitchen in his leather apron; and Matthew the bell-ringer who was a short, thick man with bowed legs and rounded shoulders and thickened arms; and Peter the gardener who was long and lean with a ti red face, whose third wife had died in the birth of his fif th son; and the cook who was a giant of a man who daily worked three cauld   Érons of boiling soup, and his son who worked the spit in the fireplace and whose eyes were blind f rom its sm oke; and Michael, Michael the gate-keeper whom Will had met the night before; the carriers, Rufus and Luke who removed the refuse and brought the fuel; and the breviator who went about like a letter-carrier from monastery to monastery, and from monastery to village and read the scrolls of news and the names of the recently deceased.

Of the women servants, there were two pudding-wives who came on the occasions of guests or holidays, to bake or make special soups and sauces, the elderly Moll with grey hair on her chin and her dim-witted granddaughter who had one eye; the two launderesses, Beth whom the smallpox had robbed of skin and Rose who limped pitifully and snivelled when she spoke.  They came on Monday and Thursday to collect the washing from Brother Namlis, and
whatever could be given to the poor.

It took three hours for Prior Godfrey to take Will about and show him all there was at Bodmin and to relate to him how each thing had come to be and was attended to with ritual and with love; how Brother Bernard drew up the mortuary role when a brother died and how he gave it to the breviator who carried the death notice to the other monasteries and religious houses in England, and how this breviator was received with honor and was entitled to the mattress of the deceased.  Prior Godfrey told Will of the cunning names by which place or person had come to be known at Bodmin, how the cemetery was called God's Acre, how it was Brother Anthony's responsibility to keep the sacred plot free from wandering animals and weeds and marauders who were known to dig up the graves even of monks in search of treasure; how Brother Harald had to see to the reliquaries and the shrines, the altars and the sconces and the cloths and to look after the supply of wax which sometimes was as much as thi   Ñrty pounds a year,, how Brother Claude was called the watchman because it was his duty to prod the sleepy monks who nodded at Matins.  He told him how Brother Namlis made grease for their boots and stored lambskins and catskins for the cold weather, how Brother Stephen cleaned the refectory and purchased five loads of straw three times a year to carpet the refectory floor with, how he scattered bay leaves in the necessarium: how every domestic duty had its wise servant, for however a man may hope for heaven he must still keep his earthly home in order.  He told Will he must bathe four times a year and let his blood four times a year, in April, September, October and February; and was most particular about these last orders.

They circled Bodmin twice, until Prior Godfrey came to the end -of the history and the gossip, for Bodmin Priory, like all great institutions, had its own history and had undergone vicissitude and permutations.  'There hath been monks, then n   uns, then secular priests, then monks again, and last we come, the canons regular in this, St. Petrocke's Church." The priory had been a Benedictine monastery at one time, and the religious orders that had come and gone reflected the adjustment each age had made to crisis and to inspiration.  Bodmin was now an Augustinian monastery, and not Cistercian, Benedictine, French or what," Prior Godfrey said, for he had no taste for "religious aliens."

"Henry I loved the canon and now we have two hundred and eight houses in this land, and we feed the poor and care for them, keep hospital and hear confessions, and here monks do not eat meat."

Bodmin was only a small priory at lands end in Cornwall, but Prior Godfrey knew that it was as good a link as any in the medieval chain of rex et sacerdos and the trinity of clergy, king and usurer which has vanished with its labyrinthine economy, leaving behind its monumental stones and the mem   Ëory of the usurer.

Bodmin was small, as monasteries were considered in that day, for there were far greater establishments, such as Cluny and Glastonbury which undertook not only the salvation of souls, but the world!s business by way of finance and industry, art, culture, and administration.  At Cluny and other such monasteries, four hundred monks could find joy, as well as popes and kings with retinues of servants, scholars, artists and usurers, tax collectors, lawyers, and soldiers.  The abbot of such an establishment was as important as the governor of a modern state.  In such a monastery, lay servants and serfs tilled the earth and performed the mundane tasks of delivery and trade and carting out the refuse, to protect the monks from contact with a soiled world; to provide them with the leisure to pray and copy, compose and read.  In this form, the monastery was the dominant institution in Europe for a thousand years, in which time some 40,000 monaste   ±ries had acquired institutional power, some spiritual gain, and then oblivion.

A paradox inheres in the history of salvation, for the monastery was created to offer man an alternative to the world. But where it established itself, common civilization flourished: industry, art, finance, and administration, and even the business of salvation acquired a history.

The monastic movement can be traced to pre-Christian times, to the Essenes and the Jewish Theraputae in Egypt, and before that possibly to Eastern religions.  Its early Christian beginnings, however, are inauspicious: a counterculture movement of desert hermits on Egyptian soil who retreated from the Roman world, men like Brother Anthony, hermits of the lonely cell whose only defense against evil was retreat and abstinence.  Spiritual longing led them away from civilization at first, as it later inadvertently led them back.  They froze in caves of Cappadocia and burned on African sands and dined on wine and wafers and apocalyptic visions until the earth and its inhabitants became shadows.  Their skins became the color of chestnuts and as wrinkled as an elephant's.  Their beards grew everywhere and their skins fell detached from their bony structures.  They became scabs and ribs and acquired lice and warts, training themselves to sit still for forty days and forty nights until their knees could not unbend, and they ceased to move; or like Simon Stylites stood continually upon a column sixty feet in the air and unhinged their knees only to pray; or like the Irish saints, they stood in icy water up to their necks and sang the psalms for hours.  Legends of prodigious feasts attend these saints in search of God.  They chained themselves to rocks, they lived in wattled huts, in holes, in cages, in baskets.  The birthpangs of Christianity were terrible. Its saints willingly confronted the hazards of solitude and nature with a naked spirit. But none ever reported that the world is saved.

A follower of St. Francis, Brother Salimbene, records the imitatio dei of a fellow monk: he had himself circumcized "to be very like the Lord and lay down by a woman's side and there did drink her milk." Energies drawn from the primal therapy of a religious day!  But what of salvation!  Saint! tell me, what of salvation.

Early ecclesiastics suspected the monastic movement in spite of such influential proponents as Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine.  But by the fifth century, the movement had the support of the papacy.  In 410, 'Honoratus established a monastery in southern Gaul and between 413-416, John Cassian established the monasteries of St. Victor and St. May, which housed over five thousand monks and nuns.  Still further civil order was required for bands of roaming monks who plagued the countryside with all kinds of fervors.

There seems to be a millennial rhythm to European history.  In 529 C.E. the schools of  the Athenian philosophers closed after a continuous existence of a thousand years, and the Roman emperor Justinian formulated his Code; St. Benedict of patrician Roman lineage, hailed as "a very Roman of the Romans," emerged from a cave in a gorge in the wild Abruzzi, where Nero once had had a palace, and there gave his famous Rule at Monte Cassino which tamed the desert ascetae and brought stability to their flaming fervor.  Guiding this tradition of the desert monks, with their desperate requirements of solitude and asceticism, he of all men's brought their ardor within the grasp of all men's potential, and established the monastic tradition which saved Europe from the Goth for the benefit of future generations.  He gave the desert saint a home behind the walls of civilization, where he mastered many arts and industries and grew very wealthy and very necessary.  Looking back, we see that all forms of social life, h   ±owever desperate the hour and the spiritual need, are drawn towards civilization.

St. Benedict and his sister, Scholastica were buried with the gratitude of loving followers in a grave where once had stood the altar of Apollo.  Literature cannot embellish this historic fact.  Thus, and tritely, the new order buried the old order and even the Romans were glad to see it go, and now worked in the monastic fields in the lowly garb of monks.

The Church became very rich and popes sat on gilded thrones, but such as Brother Anthony still clung to rocks and sat in the deserts, and now prayed for the salvation of the Church.  Reform movements came and went, and Boniface VIII ignored them all, and in the year of the first jubilee he had himself addressed as "Caesar and "Emperor."

By the end of the next millennium there were many kinds of monasteries: Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian, Carthusian, canons regular of the order of St. Augustine   Ä, Premonstratensian canons, Gilbertine canons, Knights Hospitaller, Knights Templar, Dominican Friars, Franciscan Friars, Friars of Our Lady, Friars of the Holy Trinity, Crutched, or Crossed Friars, Bethlemite Friars, Pied Friars or Frates de Pica; Friars of the Sack, Trinitarians, Bonshommes, and many others.  Monasteries bred monasteries as clusters and colonies.  Great establishments, such as Cluny, gave birth to daughter and sister establishments which fell under complex administrations.  In Charlemagne's time, the entire town of Tours, composed of 20,000 people, was monastic, its numbers swollen by political prisoners, opponents of Charlemagne, and by others pressed into monkhood by their lords, or recruited into monkhood like soldiers, and bought like slaves, "condemned to monkhood," as some complained.  Sad to say that so much of the grandeur of an era, of its art and learning, rests upon simple criminal impulse and plainest vainglory.

Still,   × the flock gathers where there is wealth and social safety.  Vagabonds and orphans, civil servants seeking sinecures, prelates seeking power, discarded soldiers and multitudes of boys sought salvation in the monastery.  It functioned as an orphanage, as an old age home, as a place of retirement, as a resting place for pilgrims, as a barracks for armies, so intimate was this religious institution with the social needs of its day.

Orders arose in response to the Crusades, in response to the growth of cities, in response to reforms, in response to political pressures, in response to financial needs, or for the production of wine or wool, and monasteries arose even in sheer spite, in response to other orders. Monasteries were established on the basis of trade or philosophies. Monasteries arose which followed the Roman sentiment of regarding manual labor as degrading, and monasteries arose which honored manual labor. Monasteries arose which stressed contemplation and scholasticism, others which developed esthetic ambitions md became skilled in the production of stained glass windows, illuminated texts, and chanting.  Many abbots shared with the imperial rulers a passion for building on a colossal scale and bled the peasant with taxes for these glories. As much as any Puritan in Milton's day, St. Bernard retched at this extravagance of the combined force of art, religion and imperial design.   He reminded his fellow monks that their concern should be for souls and not for stones.  But souls vanish and stone remains, and what remains on earth counts for its history.  Still other orders arose, like the Cistercians led by St. Bernard, which denounced art as a distraction from the spiritual life.  And finally monasteries arose which denounced the monastic habit of separation from the world, the cycle came full swing and there was no one prevailing philosophy of how the monastery Would accomplish the work of salvation.

As Prior Godfrey showed Will the grounds of Bodmin Priory on this afternoon, and related to him its history of wars and skirmishes with the local gentry, disruptions and eruptions, its great visitors and processions, and showed Mm the new scriptorium with its great new Latin Bible, the garden where his best roses blew in the sea wind, and the treasury buried beneath the spot where they stood, where the notes of debts and credits of the priory, its jewels and relics and precious objects lay buried, nothing of the dismal future occurred to him.  He had every reason to believe, as he took Will about, that his was an eternal order, but his is a vanished order we address ourselves to and bid come forth from the winding sheet of history.  Prior Godfrey's bald and slightly oily forehead looked serene, and his round, Nordic, uninteresting, mild and plain blue eyes looked trusting in the order which he knew and loved.  He could not even see six months' time   Ô ahead when Brother Claude!s lascivious ravings would come to an end and Brother Harald's hypochondria would be mocked by reality.  Of the brethren, only two would survive and of the paid servants only Moll, the pudding-wife.  The bell-ringer would be found dead in the Norman tower with a black tongue sticking out of his mouth, and Michael the gate-keeper would be found dying of thirst outside the priory wall.

The midday bell rang.  Prior Godfrey had been tried in his competence and felt relieved to go and rest.  "I will not detain you any longer," he said to Will, "but I will advise you to eat a good meal.  It makes the body better able to let the soul labor for God's sake.  But I would you go first to the necessarium, for a monk must keep himself clean.  We be not like some that let in the lice to eat of their bread and their bodies.  Heaven must be clean," Prior Godfrey said with an em phasis that suggested hostility for hidden enemies and ideas which eluded Wil   èl.  "If Christ let in dirty monks, they would not keep it clean, and it is not dirty, for none have said so of heaven, but that the streets are of marble and the saints wear spotless robes."

Prior Godfrey's insistence upon these matters, to the exclusion of other matters, confounded even Bishop Grandisson.  When he made his visitation, Prior Godfrey showed him first the necessarium.  "Your books, Prior Godfrey," Bishop Grandisson would say, "not your lavatory.  I would see your accountings, not your toilets."

At night, in bed, Brother Harald would silently rehearse this scene with delirious disapprobation.  On the other side of him, where they slept, Brothers Benedict and Claude communicated their disdain for the English with a secret telepathic device which the other brothers were privy to.  Brothers Ralph and Walter dreamed of dice and Brother Thomas tossed and yelled, "I dareye, I dareye," and woke in the morning, wrinkled and unfit.

Bishop Grandisson was God's wise, good, and co   æurageous administrator for four decades in the see of Exeter, and a word must be said for him.  He was a good man in a bad time: 1328-1369.  Englishborn in Herefordshire in 1298, he ww French educated, as was any educated man of his day, and rose to be chaplain to Pope John XXII in Avignon, and was consecrated there in the Church of the Friars at age 36, before he set out for England to assume his duties, the previous Bishop Stapeldon having been murdered.  The see was in shambles when he crossed the channel at Christmastime and arrived in Dover on the 3rd of February, 1328, and at his diocese on the 9th of June to lament the case of a monk who had married, and of cne who had not merely married but had sent food from his table to one Joan, the wife of Henry Cosyn, his partner in sin, " and to excoriate the practice of child-marriage among the Brotherhood of Brothelyngham, and to avert an attempt upon his own life on the 13th of October in the year, 1343, and to censure an invasion of   î the Scots, the first of several that took place in that dark century.

But it was on October 24, 1329, when he first visited the Priory of Bodmin, that Bishop Grandisson understood  the scope of his duties. Rot was in the fields. Negligence was everywhere. Ink blots like bats adorned the scripts and the margins of holy texts were ornamented with unspeakable ditties:

Adam had a wife named Eve,
She hid her apple where she pleased;
He put his serpent between her knees,
So God He cast them from Paradis

Neither had the straw been changed from the refectory floor in more than a year and an odor was discernible everywhere.  There was no lard in the larder or tallow in the storeroom or f ish in the pond.  Evidence of gambling and gaming and dicing was everywhere.  The bishop issued an ordinance for the reformation of these abuses.  He dismissed the then prior and had a new one put in his place.  Things at once improved, and then slid to a side and changed the shape of their corruption.  The larde   çr was stocked and the hay removed, but neglect and mismanagement continued in other ways, undreamed of by the bishop. The lavater was cleaned, the monks were shaved, the linen kept in order, but bible scripts remained untouched, the fields unharvested and the poor scrounged the countryside for food.  Ten years before Will arrived, the priory walls, the great gate and sundry other buildings had been battered by the storms of 1338 and were in desperate condition.  Bodmin was forced to do unholy things to raise money for repairs, because things did not repair themselves even when set aside for spiritual use.  Storms, like plagues, are careless with the sacred, and Prior Godfrey put up St. Petrock's bones as collateral for a loan.

But worse was yet to come.  The year before Will arrived, the almoner was removed for an unspeakable offense, the numbers of paid servants increased in an alarming way, were reduced, and increased again.  Bishop Grandisson sent Prior Godfrey away and appointed   ó an interim administrator to patch things up: books and records and discipline.  When Will arrived at Bodmin, f rom the point of view of history, things were not as good as they could be, but hardly as bad as they had been.  Things had improved from deterioration to stasis.  Prior Godfrey had been returned and was at pains to know what Bishop Grandisson now wished reformed.  Bishop Grandisson was a nuisance!  Prior Godfrey sent papal letters to Avignon, but Bishop Grandisson came of an established family and had a manor at Cyst in Exeter and a residence at Chudleigh.  In fact, Bishop Grandisson could have settled for land and power and bribes and promises and peace.  Instead, he settled for such as Prior Godfrey.  He undertook the reformation of the monasteries in his diocese, and the thankless job of lecturing to the heads of powerful families who neglected their lands and their duties, and bled the people with taxes on their crops; who went abroad to raise money from the usurers, to return to E   àngland to wage war to win more land to neglect; whose sons were priors and abbots and had the care of souls and monasteries and neglected churchlands to travel abroad and consult with kings and other heads of other powerful families.

It was one thing if Walt of Landsend scratched his scabby cheeks and protested that the times were bad.  It was another thing if Bishop Grandisson, born to wealth and rank, undertook the tedious job of checking books and records, stock and larder, and listening to every complaint and asservation from monks' lechery and claims of miracle births to accusations of spite and wrath and greed and gluttony.

Oh, Bishop Grandisson!  You could have hunted and wenched and slept under three layers of fur. You could have sported a falcon on your wrist, but did not.  In every age and place there is a man who plugs up the hole in the dikes of sin with nothing but soul and effort and keeps the times from going utterly to rot.

So Will was to learn that when thi   ñngs went wrong, he was to bring his petition to Bishop Grandisson, though Prior Godfrey considered himself unfortunate in having been appointed such a bad-tempered bishop, precise in his figures and so fussy about trivial matters, altogether unbecoming in a bishop, whose complaints should be set on higher things than book-keeping matters. There was neither lechery nor usury, to speak of, at Bodmin Priory, and certainly no uncleanliness.  The evidence that Bishop Grandisson brought him of an unfortunate thought here or there scribbled in the scriptorium was unbecoming for a bishop to show his prior, who was his equal in family.

"What of it?" Prior Godfrey said, "it is in the Jews' part of the book and can be said to be dirt only in a manner of speaking."

Bishop Grandisson cared nothing for Prior Godfrey's family, but he was loath to remove him again, to make such notoriety public.  Besides, dismissals, as everyone knows, only leave gaps filled in by other jackals.  Bishop Grandisson became res   Åigned.  Superficiality is the common vice of bureaucracies, and not its worst.  In Bishop Grandisson's rule over many monasteries he dealt with worse: gaming, hunting, whoring, incontinences of all kinds, lasciviousness, drinking, and praying in such a manner as to convey the opposite effect of belief and piety. No highborn could bribe Bishop Grandisson with the gift of a relic or the promise of advancement.  And a fool could not worst him with his foolishness.  He learned to deal with Prior Godfrey.

Will followed the brethren from the necessarium to the refectory and was gratified to see that the midday meal was considerably ampler than breakfast had been: cheese and bread and eggs and beans and oysters and a glass of mead.  The meal reconciled him to other losses.  "Now this be more like what my stomach wants," he thought, but he didn't enjoy the thought for long.  The habit of recrimination took root early, and he imagined Brother Harald looked su   Çspiciously at him.  He searched the other faces, but no one else's looked perturbed.  Brother Anthony left all his food but his one cup of mead and a slice of bread.  Brother Stephen ate only half of what was given him.  Brothers Wait and Ralph looked  fondly at their empty plates when they were done, but otherwise seemed cheerful enough.

Nor did Will see a face to his liking on this first morning. He never could tolerate young old men like Brother Ralph and Brother Walter, and Brother John was still a lad with rapt eyes set to become a saint before he was twenty; and Brother Benedict moved his mouth, small as a cherry, in such a way Will knew he could never abide his company.  Each man had his tic or wrinkle that set his nerves on edge, and he wondered why he had come there.

After the meal they went out into the garden where Prior Godfrey preached a sermon against accidia, "the midday demon, the little voice that will tell you that all is vanity, tha   Át God sees not our work, nor our reaping and sowing matter, nor reading nor copying nor monks' learning.  There be those who slander the monks ks and say he is a sleuthful man, for the times are against the Lord.  But Christ loves the labor of the monk and the Augustinians have wrought well with their wool trade on English grounds.  The laborer is worthy of his hire and a monk's labor is trebly worthy."

Brothers Ralph and Walter looked singularly alike in spirit, as they listened to the sermon, and a thing like that is apt to make each man look less serious than he might be.  Brother Ralph had the sharper glance and more knowing air. Otherwise, both seemed genial and candid, and accustoms to monkhood.  That is to say, they had known no other life, desired no other, and believed that fate had done wisely with them.  They had come as babes, though at different times.  Now being the oldest residents at Bodmin, having seen three priors come and go an   ³d a score of brethren, they enjoyed each other's friendship by virtue of similar experiences and similar temperaments.  They never quarrelled.  They had achieved a state of communication untroubled by the baggage of language, even though Brother Ralph liked very much to gossip and gossiped on every possible occasion, gardening, reading, praying, and washing his hands in the necessarium.  He whispered news behind Will's ear as they promenaded in the cloister, and whispered news from behind his prayerbook to whomever, as they knelt in the choir box.  Brother Ralph gossiped in his sleep.  He spoke aloud in the dark like a possessed oracle imparting to the air and all who stayed awake to listen, information about what dignitary was about to visit Bodmin, what Moll the laundress had said, what the king's mistress was like, what discrepancy Bishop Grandisson had found in the books, whether Prior Godfrey would be removed again, whether the    Ôwool trade was succeeding or failing, whether war would come this spring, how it went in neighboring monasteries, who had died, who had wined, who had wived and who had been caught and punished.

Brother Ralph's nocturnal speeches had been brought to Prior Godfrey's notice several times.  One afternoon following the midday meal, there was a sermon and debate on whether talking in one's sleep violated the vow of silence.  Brother Thomas pleaded guilty and offered to have his tongue removed.  To Will's surprise, Brother Ralph took a hard line and said that a monk who practised his vow properly would not speak even in his sleep.  "Even had he a nightmare he will not call out but swallow his tongue to keep himself from speaking out.  A monk that speaks in his sleep is the bait of Satan.  Brother Thomas was crushed by such a judgment and could not keep his head erect, but he made a good recovery by the evening meal and appeared with a cheerful patch of red on each cheek.

Brother Benedict could not abide Brother Ralph's speech, rendered in his lowborn tongue.  Nor could he abide Brother Ralph's complexion, "dirty-dark," with yellow eyes.  Brother Harald smirked as usual, more accustomed to sin by innuendo than by commission, but Brother Stephen said stonily: "If Brother Ralph likes the taste of human tongue and if he is not prepared to feast upon his own he should not recommend that of others.

Brother Stephen was never sparing in his censure.  Will heard Brother Harald call him "a little Jonah cast up by the Irish Sea." Brother Stephen was barely five feet tall with dainty hands and dainty feet and coal-black eyes and a smoldering tongue that darted like a snake's about your ears when he spoke.  He never slurred or praised and said candidly there was nothing on earth worth his praise.  'It is nought but a mudhole that sucks and bubbles about your feet."

"Do you not like the sunshine?" Will asked him once.

Brother S   ¤tephen put his hands inside the sleeves of his cape, and for all his size, looked imposing.  "A man who reckons prayer as praise means to buy off the world and take a cheap recompense."

Will puzzled over this speech many times.  There was a hint of something marvellously austere about it that was belittling to a man like himself.  Brother Stephen always spoke this way, to the point and never waywardly or frivolously, but always with a suitable bitterness that, for all Will could see, came from the air itself.

Brothers Ralph, Walter, and Namlis the hunchback, had the distinctions of seniority, for they had been at Bodmin longer than the others, almost from infancy.  Brothers Harald and Stephen enjoyed the distinction of merit in that they fulfilled their vows to perfection and were allowed to lead in prayers and give readings; Brother Benedict and Brother Anthony who knew the Bible, and Brother Claude who knew Arabic,   ¸ and Brother Bernard who was the archivist, enjoyed the distinction of culture; while Brother John enjoyed the distinction of youth and the uncared-for- distinction of being Bishop Roundsleigh's firstborn son.  And so at Bodmin, as everywhere else, were these ways of judging merit.

The morning before Will was to make his profession, he was left to wander by himself.  Indecisiveness and muddle followed him about.  He sat down by the fishpond to straighten out his thoughts, his brain adazzle with lectures and readings and having heard little but the word of God since he had arrived. He scratched his head. "It is a question, after all, if heaven be man's proper element.  Nay Will," he chided himself, "you cannot doubt the joy of eternity.  See how the f ish swim about in their element, yet tomorrow at mealtime they will be in thine, without a view of heaven.  Marvellously innocent of you," he said to them, "to go about your watery business    ¯careless of your souls."

He caught sight of Brother Namlis fishing on' the opposite side of the pond and came around to stand beside him, for politeness sake, for it was as little to converse with a man who had no tongue as to converse with the fish.

"You seem a good fisher," he said courteously Brother Namlis could only smile and nod his head and blink his eyes.

Will thought it a hard fate for a man to be so homely, with a hump, and without a tongue.  Still, he seemed cheerful enough, and Will was as glad to prattle to him as to the fish.  "I tell you what I think," he said.  "I do not think Namlis is your Christian name, if I must tell you truly.  My dog had a better name and was known by all as Rug, God bless her soul." Her image appeared before him, leaning starboard in her old age, and he began to cry and craved a word of comfort for his homesickness, even from a tongueless man, but Brother Namlis became more distressed t   rhan Will and it was Will who had to do the comforting- "I tell you what," he said, "the tongue's not worth much in man anyway.  Here was my dog Rug and she could not speak yet I loved her full and here was my wife who spoke right well and we quarrelled the whole day of it.  Had you ever a wife?"

Brother Namlis smiled slyly, but shook his head.

"That's a good man," Will said, recovering his equanimity. "You will be with the angels, as Aquinas said, no doubt. What need has a silent man for a wife. That end works harder than the other end. It is not worth a bet to say whether a married man quarrels or beds more.  If one end is not wagging, the other is. Though I trust they did not cut off your other end as well."

Brother Namlis tossed his fishpole in the air with glee, and laughed, but his laugh, like his cry, was a terrible sound to hear and it took Will aback.  Still he was content to make a tongueless man so merry, and he warmed to the subject of a sermon.  "I say with the preacher, God alone knows why He made woman and maybe He knows it not.  You have not your tongue and I have not my wife." With this, to his surprise, he began to cry again.  "Truth be, Brother Silence, you be not company for a man without a wife though I like you well enough, and do not mind your hump at all.  Think upon it this way, Brother Silence, you may not have a tongue but you have a soul and I had a wife which had no soul though Christ knew I meant her no harm for the lack of it, but seeing I will not be with her in Heaven I thought it best to call it off with her here.  Man may cut off either end of you, seeing the angels care not for such clappers.

It was Brother Ralph who told Will a few days later how Brother Namlis had come to lose his tongue.  His mother had cut it out.

"It cannot be   œ," Will said, astounded.

"As ever I tell you," Brother Ralph whispered.

"Did ever man hear of such evil," Will cried.

"She said he whined and puled too much.  She was nought but a wench who went about the land with any man and she has sent many a babe to a monastery."

That was not the whole of the story, for Brother Namlis' survival had been miraculous in every way.  Not content to cut his tongue out, his mother had thrown him down a well. "Along came this ruffian," Brother Ralph said, "drunk with the barley and stops to fetch a drink when he hears this thrashing from down below and fetches it up, believing it is a fish and he will have his supper from it.  His mother came running and screeching, for she was for throwing the babe back, but this wayfarer held her off and made off with the babe and brought him here.  Never has God done to man what this one's mother did to her own, for his back was broke in th   ¨e fall."

"God give all women a good black eye," Will said.

Brother Namlis held no such view of his mother, but cherished the few good memories he had of her and prayed for her soul every night.  Will waxed loquacious, standing by the side of the pond with him.  Talking with a tongueless man had its merits. Will could argue his points without contention.  Nor could it be counted for a sin against the vow of silence, since it could not be said that they conversed.

Suddenly, however, a ferocious noise brought the bliss to an end.  It was a hunting call, but it came like a clap of thunder and before Will could catch his breath, a band of dogs and horses jumped the wall to the sounds of horns and tally-ho, and immediately Prior Godfrey came running and shouting curses, "Damnye, damnye," with vexation and wringing of hands, pursued by the brethren and calling out, "The devil bum your horse's tail and your own as well, you devil of a baron."

But this was Baron Roundsleigh who was not put off by such a speech.  He leaned down from his horse and I "sounded his horn in Prior Godfrey's ear and said with I merry hatred, "You blooksuckin' landleecher, who told you to set my son in your priory.  I will have my son or your grounds. Christscabsandwounds, may blood dry on your sores and embalm you if I don't shake St. Petrockes bones loose from you." With that, he drove his horse so hard her hoofs churned up the earth beneath, and he drove her straight across the cemetery, across the hallowed grounds, while Prior Godfrey ran after him and screeched that Christ will put him in hell, him and his hounds and his dogs and his whores, and he will hunt for foxes in the fire.  But Baron Roundsleigh had no fear of heaven or of hell, and neither did his lords or ladies or his dogs.  They all galloped across the hallowed ground in pursuit of a fox or a whim.  Baron Roundble   Ðigh was an atheist and no man could threaten him.  His motto on his banner and his breastplate was, "als ik kan." His people had come with William the Conqueror and he recognized no native Englishman above himself, especially not Prior Godfrey who had borrowed from him £ 300 on pledge of St. Petrock's bones, in return for which Baron Roundsleigh had the r-entals and the harvest from a portion of the manor lands until such time as Prior Godfrey would pay him back the money which, for all Baron Roundsleigh could make of Prior Godfrey's inefficiency, would be never.  So he rode across the hallowed grounds where five centuries of saints awaited the resurrection, conscious of his castles on the Rhine, his tin mines in Cornwall, and Prior Godfrey's debts to him.

"God save me from these cocks that neither crow nor generate, these landleechers and bloodsuckers that will steal a man's son as ever the gypsies are said to do."

He caught sight of his son, John, running wi   ®th the other brethren and called out to him, "It behooved you to be like Ysaac and obedient to your father's ways.  The Jew had more from his son than ever I will have of mine.

The brethren held their tongues and ran in silence, Brother Stephen's face cursed as loud as thunder, but never a word was sounded.  Brother John swooned.  Brother Anthony caught hold of the reins of the baron's horse, but could not hold on.  The foxes, the dogs, the horses, the hounds and the lords and ladies jumped the wall and disappeared into the countryside.

"It be not so tame here as I thought," Will said to himself. The bell for vespers rang.  "Oh!  Will, what are you doing here?"

He followed the brethren to the refectory and took his meager breakfast of bread and beer, and thought again, "It is not enough." The thought would not stay down, but floated up again and again like a bloated bubble, though it was the morning when he was to enter the C   Îhapter House and say his profession and be parted from the things he loved, village dances and village laughter, Claryce and Rug and Davy, good souls he had nothing against if truth be told, yet he had pledged to renounce them in order to save them.

He could not accommodate the thought, no matter how he turned it, Christian though he was all his life.  It was his hunger that made it took peculiar, he thought, as he knelt among the brethren in the Chapter House and said a prayer in Latin and asked to be received into their community and promised to take his vows and part from the world though he would pray for its redemption.  This Christianity, with the eyes of the brethren upon him, was not the familiar one he knew when he tramped through a muddy meadow to hear a preacher say Mass in a clay hut where the farmers stood with their animals and pitchforks and the women carried their babes, where the folk laughed and pushed and shoved forward rudely for salvation.

De profundis demani ad te, Domine;
Domine, ex dudi vocen mean
Fiant aures tuae intendentes in vocem

Will was a man fraught with sincerity, but this tongue was not his and he suffered the travail of a foreign language.  Still in his leather pants and jacket of a farming man, he kneeled with confusion and solicited the goodwill of his prior and brethren to permit him to become one of them.  He vowed to adopt them as his spiritual family, to serve his year as a novice, to become practised in duty and prayer, to keep his vows of silence, poverty, obedience, and chastity, to set his feet upon the heavenly road, and in all ways to follow Jesus Christ. Throughout his petition, Brother Benedict rang a small bell, and when Will stopped the bell stopped.  There was a great amen, and then there was silence.  That night Will was given a place to sleep in the dormitory between Brother Namlis and Brother Thomas.

The next afternoon, Brother Namlis took him to the cupboard to fit him with a monk's habit and cowl.  He was taught first monastic manners, for the monastery was a way of life, not only accountable for conduct and ethics, but for having a style that was appropriate to iL As with all civilizations, it placed value on outward behavior as a sign of the inward state of mind.  Brother Bernard gave him his first lessons as well as that grave man could deal with mundane matters; how to wear his habit properly, how to get in and out of bed with modesty, how to walk with dignity, how to hold his hands and head so as to assume a bearing of gravity.  If Will was to be a monk, he must look and act like a monk as well as feel like one.

His second lesson concerned the custody of his eyes and tongue and respect for his superiors.  Will was urged to think of his senses as being in the custodial care of Ids soul.  Medieval man sought a state of grace, not a' state of nature.  After he was taught how to chant and to pray properly, then began his lessons in Latin.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Gloria Patri, Filio et Spiritu Sancto

Brother Bernard intoned, and Will intoned after him. To learn to read was to learn to pray and to chant, for reading was said aloud. "The tongue dictates to the hand," the great scholar Alcuin had said. He who wished to read properly must learn to pronounce and to recite, to sing and to play aloud, to create an aural chamber in the brian, for sound enforced memory, and language and reading were to be enjoyed sensuously. Brother Bernard's Latin was excellent, but he was loath to correct errors and Will was left to render his Latin in his Yorkshire accent.

The month of May passed for him with increasing interest in what he was learning, except for his stomach. The cattle were put out to pasture and their bells and lowing mingled with the steeple bells. In the village, Clooke, the village priest, led the villagers in procession to celebrate Rogat   Íion Days. They carried banners and bells an crosses and went about the boundaries of the village and their land to bless it and to mark it, and on Sundays came to hear Mass in the priory.

Will slept in the dorter with the others, a long hall with a c