‘You’ve been doing your homework, haven’t you?’ he said appreciatively. ‘Yes, this is where the king, or any other noble guest, would have been entertained. This wasn’t one of the greater houses, but even here, in its heyday, the abbot may have had five hundred guests to dinner. If there was a king among them, the whole house would be given over to him. Of course, when it became a private house, however wealthy, those days were over. The rooms you see have almost all been adapted later. But not the hall.’
From the house he led them eastward through a wilderness of truncated flower-beds and scoured areas of excavation, towards what was now the stable block, or had been when the Macsen-Martels could still afford horses and carriages, and arrayed them along a slightly bumpy aisle of grass on the outer side of the stable-block’s northern wall.
‘Now you’re standing in what was once the nave of the abbey church. You can see it’s completely gone, at least above-ground. Not so much as the base of a pillar. It wasn’t one of the greater efforts, but all its stone was used for other purposes after the Dissolution. And you can see, if we’re in the nave of the church, that inside there, in the stable enclosure, that same square was once the abbey cloister. It usually adhered to the south wall of the church, and so it did here. We’ll look at that from the inner side on the way back, for that’s one wall that’s practically untouched since the secularisation.’
Bossie was gazing with absorbed attention at that rough stone wall, under its roof of yellow-lichened tiles. Spuggy, on the other hand, was staring in the opposite direction, where, in the middle of what had certainly once been the cemetery of the brothers, two pick-ups were unloading more sections of scaffolding, and two folding metal ladders, and a lorry was tipping cement. There was a mixer turning busily in a corner, under what would once have been the north transept, and a thickset elder shovelling in sand. So much more interesting to Spuggy that he almost got left behind when the party moved on, over the site of the altar and through the gardens, to the dove-cote, where there was a pause to allow everybody to duck inside by the low doorway, and gape up at the vast expanse of wooden framework inside, and the tier after tier of nesting-alcoves.
Jimmy Grocott, whose father kept racing-pigeons, stared with glazing eyes, imagining the flock needed to people such a palace. The guide laughed goodhumouredly, and invited him to start counting, but he lost count before he was a third of the way up the walls. Even when Spuggy Price was discovered three tiers up, head and shoulders into one of the nesting-places, he was merely slapped amiably on the behind, and invited to get down before the warden spotted him. He slid down backwards, grinning, scouring the toes of his school shoes raw on the stonework. They had come to the conclusion that they were lucky in their guide. He seemed quite impressed with Bossie, by the way he kept drawing him out and inviting him to display his knowledge.
‘Now we’re coming to the edge of the grounds, and as you can see, we’ve uncovered the outline of a whole range of buildings, that actually stretch away beyond the hedge, under the lane and into the village. Probably the outlying barns and stores go halfway under this side of the housing estate. But these four rooms you see laid out here form a sort of hospital block. The monks’ infirmary – then that small apartment, which was the misericorde.’ He caught Bessie’s knowing eye, and grinned. ‘Go on, you tell ’em what the misericorde was.’
‘It was where the rules were relaxed, so that the monks who were ill could have special food, and eat meat, and all that.’
‘Quite right! That leaves two more rooms to the block, the kitchen, and their own chapel. Some of them would be too feeble to get as far as the main church. And close by here was a small cloister, handy for them to take the air if they were fit enough. You can see the shape of the square maintained in the arrangement of these flower- beds, though we may have to take those up later, to see what we’ve got there.’
They had turned back now on a more southerly line.
‘Here along the north side of the small cloister a passage ran through to the great cloister, and along this passage were the cells of the scriptorium. I’m sure you can tell us what happened there?’
‘It was the place where they did their writing,’ said Bossie.
‘It was indeed. The provision here was fairly lavish, though neglected later. Ten cells, with doors on to the passage and windows to the north. And what sort of writing do you see them working at?’
‘Well, letters – there’d be a lot of business to conduct. And then they made their own copies of the Gospels and church service books, and decorated them with coloured initials, and gilt, and all that.’ Bossie was slightly shaken to hear himself drawing so close to the secret purpose of their visit, led on by this friendly chap who could put up even with Spuggy’s exploratory excursions into the stonework, and refrain from saying: ‘Don’t touch!’
‘You know, you could volunteer to do guide duty here any time you’ve got a free afternoon’ said the fair young man, laughing. ‘OK, what else did they write? Not here necesarily, I’m not sure our lot were all that scholarly by the end, but no doubt they had their day earlier. You can’t imagine them writing novels, now, can you?’
‘Lives of the saints?’ suggested Bossie tentatively. He had seldom had this sort of encouragement anywhere but at home. ‘And they were the historians, weren’t they? I mean, nearly all the records from the Middle Ages were written by monks.’
‘They were indeed! At St Albans, and Abingdon, and Malmesbury, and Evesham, and a dozen others. What should we do without the monastic chronicles? Yes, they had plenty of writing to do. Right, come along, then! Now we’re about at the end of that row of ten cells, passing what was once the south transept of the church, and coming to what looks to you, I’m sure, like a perfectly solid eighteenth-century stable-block, renovated from earlier work, but mainly eighteenth-century.’
That was exactly what it looked like, a huge, square enclosure of brick walls, under mellow tiled roofs coloured gold and lime with mosses. There was a little turret over the entrance archway, with a drunken weather-cock leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees, and a clock-face that had been inscrutable probably for a century. A wrought-iron gate had been fitted into the archway, but stood open now, during visiting hours, and admitted the party to a spacious cobbled yard, a filigree of fine green grasses, with coach-houses and stalls round three sides, somewhat decrepit now, with doors sagging or missing. On the fourth side, the north, the full length was obviously one great room, with only one door, at the northeastern corner, and a range of very high, small windows along the rest of it, tack-room, store and hay-lofts all in one.
‘You’re looking at the actual shape of the great cloister,’ said their guide, with a companionable hand on Bossie’s shoulder as they entered. ‘The Macsen-Martel who got this place after the Dissolution kept the whole range of the cloister as stables and stores, and long after that the early eighteenth-century one pulled down some of the decaying brickwork and rebuilt in contemporary style. Just one side he let alone, it was still serviceable. That’s this north range. Come on, let’s have a look inside.’
The corner door was new, and fitted with a lock. This bit was precious, and under treatment. They trooped in after their guide, Bossie with eyes mildly crossed in his passionate concentration, and nostrils quivering.
It was rather dim within there, after the bright daylight outside. The inner wall, windowed as they had observed, let in a certain amount of light, enough to show the lofty timbering of the open roof, and the layout of the
