the following month. Those who are pregnant such as Anne, or who are ill, would also weaken. May I ask that you grant a dispensation on each Sunday for the following week on those occasions the weather has prevented fishing for the preceding three days, permitting fowl to be eaten that week, in moderation and perhaps only once in the day?”
Brother Wacian frowned. He was quite strict in his religious observations and his requirements of others to do the same. This idea was distasteful and offensive to him, but he did recognise that his congregation had both spiritual
“Thank you, Brother Wacian. Hopefully, it will not be necessary and the Good Lord will grant us fair weather- but if he does not it behooves us to care for our people as best we can.
“Also, as you know, Anne attends the three Masses said here at Thorrington each week. She would like, when possible, for you to provide her with the Eucharist each day. Again, given the weather and her condition, may I request that you do this and perform a shortened service at the New Hall?” Brother Wacian agreed easily enough, after all it was only a few minutes walk and would take little of his time. He could perform the service in the late evening and no doubt would often then be invited to stay for the evening meal, which was no small consideration for a man who was single and did his own cooking most of the time. The women of the parish did provide him with the occasional crockpot of cooked stew or baked pies- outside the Lenten period. Brother Wacian wasn’t a good cook and that was one of the things that he missed after leaving the abbey, not that the food provided in the abbey refectory was anywhere near the quality of the provender on offer at Alan’s high-table. He also missed lively intellectual conversation, which wasn’t something that could be offered by the villagers but which certainly occurred at the table of the highly-educated lord and his lady.
On the way back to the New Hall, Alan and Anne passed arm-in-arm over the wooden draw-bridge crossing the defensive trench and through the gate in the wooden palisade between the towers that contained the ballistae which Alan had built partly from plans dating back to Roman times and partly from his own tinkering. Anne commented, “Of course, the fact that you hate fish didn’t have anything to do with that request, did it?” asked Anne. Alan laughed and patted her bottom without replying.
The next day dawned cold but windless. Alan took horse with his steward Faran and two men to ride the thirteen miles to his manor at Ramsey in the north of the Hundred. Ramsey was a neat village located about a mile inland with some 55 cottages, a mill and a salt-house, being administered for Alan by the steward Durand. The steward was under close supervision as he was a hang-over from the previous tenants Aelfhare and Bertholf Kemp, who had attacked Alan after he had taken possession, with Alan’s archers killing them in his protection. Ramsey also had Alan’s horse breeding stable, run by studmaster Roweson, an elderly thickset white-haired cheorl who had been in charge for twelve years under both Alan and before him the Kemps.
The journey to Ramsey was difficult with the horses walking through thick snow and Alan and his men were more than happy to receive a hot bowl of vegetable pottage from Arlene, Durand’s wife and housekeeper. The stew had a surprisingly strong flavour of bacon, on which Alan didn’t comment. After all Ash Wednesday had been only the day before and presumably the pottage had been on the make for several days. The meal was accompanied by ale and fresh bread, although made of rye and without butter due to the Lenten restrictions..
The stud was a short distance from the village and Alan rode out in the early afternoon. Roweson greeted them as the knight and his men dismounted. The yard was surrounded on two sides by horse stalls and on the third by several cottages used by the staff, and a large barn where hay, oats and carrots were stored.
“God Hael, Ealdor!” Roweson called as he limped forward, seemingly to have significantly aged in the months since Alan had seen him last. Presumably the cold was making his joints stiff.
“God Hael,
“Well enough, Ealdor! Well enough! We now have 76 breeding mares. The 34 from last year plus 16 of the fillies who were yearlings last year- we lost one in the summer to snake bite; we also have the 6 you bought at Ipswich and those others bought at London and Colchester. We still have the 3 stallions, and your stallion Odin in season. The 14 geldings are now about 18 months old and ready to start training, but of course not ready for heavy use. Of the 76 mares, 68 are in foal- some arrived too late to be bred for the season. Two ‘slipped’.
“Our problem is going to come in spring. All the horses are in stalls to protect them from the weather. They’re crammed in two or three per stall, except the stallions of course. We have 25 stalls. When the mares foal we won’t have stalls for them all. We also won’t have enough meadow or fenced fields- we’ll be up to our eyes in horses! I suggest you use some of your land at Great Bentley, which has good meadow and pasture land. Build stalls, say another 25 or 30 there and 10 more here. If you build a stud at Great Bentley it will also need cottages and a barn. That’ll take care of this year. My assistant Brunloc can run Great Bentley under my instruction. When is this master horse-trainer you promised going to arrive? We can train the horses to be ridden as usual, but you want them to be trained for war, which is a different thing altogether.”
“Sorry, I’d forgotten about that,” admitted Alan. “I’ve had too much to think about. We need him here… when?”
“As soon as you want the horses to be trained to fight! That beast Odin is like nothing I’ve ever seen! A vicious beast, but intelligent and tractable- when he wants to be. If you have 50 men on horses like him, you’d be damn hard to beat,” replied Roweson. “I used to think that what you were saying was crap, but I’ve seen him out on the training-field and any competent man-at-arms on a horse like that… I’m not surprised you Normans beat Harold.”
“I’ll attend to it and send a letter to my father and ask him to get the best man available.” Alan paused and then asked, “So what do you expect from the breeding program?”
“That depends,” said Roweson with a shrug. “I think you chose good animals last year. We should get a good batch of foals from the mares we bred to the big stallions. If we keep doing that for a few years the resulting horses will be nearly as large as your destrier Odin. Big, strong, plenty of endurance, reasonably fast- although not very quick to change direction. The main problem will be temperament, which is why I want this person you have promised to work magic with them. The best horse in the world is useless if you can’t get it to do what you want. One thing’s for sure, in four or five years we’ll have bred all the warhorses you could reasonably want. You’ll probably need four or five stallions at stud by then.”
Alan inspected the horses and stables. Each horse had a blanket buckled on to keep them warm. The stalls were clean, obviously mucked out daily, and with fresh straw. Chaff and oats were available for the horses to eat. The horses looked rough in their winter coats but were clearly well fed and comfortable. The mares looked at him placidly and accepted the carrots he offered. As Roweson had said, the only real problem was overcrowding with two or three mares, nearly all in foal, in most stalls.
After taking his leave Alan and his men returned to Ramsey for the night. They wouldn’t have been able to return to Thorrington before nightfall, and trying to travel through the deep snow in the darkness was not a viable option. Durand and Arlene vacated the master’s bedroom to sleep by the fire in the Hall. Alan spent an uncomfortable night in a bed that smelled strongly of its former occupants, scratching at the bites of the fleas that swarmed off the skins that formed part of the bedding.
They departed next morning after a breakfast of porridge sweetened with honey. Ramsey had eight taxed beehives and at least two dozen that didn’t ‘appear on the books’ and which disappeared each time the tax collectors were in the area. It was hard to hide a forest, a salt-house or a mill, but beehives were supposed to be moveable-and were valuable. Alan had a reasonable suspicion that there were more hives than even he knew about, but as long as Durand kept his cheating within reasonable limits he wasn’t too concerned. Osmund had ‘passed’ the accounts for the mill and salt-house when he’d inspected them in the autumn, so Durand wasn’t being as blatant in his larceny as Kendrick, the previous steward of Thorrington.
The party, now including the head-groom Brunloc, paused at Great Bentley for several hours while Alan and Brunloc discussed the requirements for the new horse-stud with the young steward Tamar and the head-cheorl Alstan. Horse paddocks and sites for buildings were marked out and orders given to commence construction as
