Above the rooms on the east side of the cloister is the cathedral library. The collections here comprise over eighty medieval manuscripts, more than three thousand books, and a wide variety of documents relating to the cathedral’s history. The earliest pieces in the collection are pre-Norman manuscripts that came to Barchester when the cathedral’s collections were merged with those of the nearby Priory of St. Ewolda at the time of the Reformation.
October 28, 1539, Priory of St. Ewolda
It was the tradition of the monks of St. Ewolda’s to observe silence between the hours of Prime and Sext, save for words spoken or chanted at the service of Terce—one of the seven services held in the abbey church each day. In this silence, Brother Thomas was working in the scriptorium in the cloister, carefully copying the words of Psalm LIX onto a sheet of parchment that would eventually be bound with other such sheets to serve as a Psalter for a nearby parish church. The sunlight streaming into the cloister from the garden illuminated his work but would do so for only a few hours that day, now that Michaelmas was nearly a month past. He had just dipped his swan-feather quill into the inkwell in order to copy the second verse, “Libera me ab operariis iniquitatis et a viris sanguinum salva me,” when the door from the south transept was flung open and a voice rent the peace.
“They are coming. The king’s commissioners are coming. The day we feared is at hand.”
“Brother James, calm yourself. We are not to speak until Sext.”
“You do not understand, Brother. They will be here by nightfall. They bear an indictment for the prior for treason and will no doubt plunder what few treasures we have before the day is out.”
Thomas could not confess himself surprised. King Henry had been dissolving the monasteries for years now; only a few remained. Just last month news had come of the fall of Glastonbury, and that should have been enough to reveal the truth to Robert Ward, the stubborn prior of St. Ewolda’s. But Ward had clung to his belief that the king’s plan was to leave a few uncorrupt monasteries standing. He had posited to Thomas just a few days ago that St. Ewolda’s was neither so poor as to have been dissolved when the smaller houses were swept away nor so wealthy as to attract the greedy eyes of the king and his regent Thomas Cromwell, with whom the prior had refused to negotiate. But now the commissioners would soon be at the door.
“What are we to do?” said Thomas. “If we secret the plate and other treasures we will be tried for treason.”
“The plate is lost, there can be no doubt, but I come to speak to you of the books.”
“Surely they will be plundered, too,” said Thomas, who had heard stories of manuscripts from other monasteries being toted away to Oxford or Cambridge or even to the private collections of the commissioners and their friends.
“Perhaps,” said James. “But we may be able to save some of them.”
“But to what end?” asked Thomas. “The monastery will be torn apart, if we are to believe the reports from other houses.”
“But the cathedral will remain,” said James. “True, the shrine of St. Ewolda will be plundered, but some, at least, of our books might remain safe. I come to ask your aid. How quickly could you prepare an inventory of those manuscripts kept in the book chest in the treasury?”
“They number fewer than fifty,” said Thomas. “It would be the work of an hour or two if done with haste.”
“You must undertake the work at once,” said James.
“But I have no parchment prepared for such a list,” said Thomas.
“What is that you write?” asked James, nodding toward the uncompleted psalm on Thomas’s desk.
“The Psalter for St. Savior’s. This sheet begins Psalm Fifty-nine.”
“And have you written on both sides?”
“All I have inscribed is what you see,” said Thomas.
“Then you must use this very parchment.”
“But to write such a list on a Psalter page would be a sacrilege,” said Thomas.
“My brother, before this day is out we shall see acts of sacrilege such as St. Ewolda’s has never known. Now let me explain exactly how you are to prepare the inventory, and then you must make haste, for our time is short.”
—
James shuddered to think of the responsibility that had now befallen him as Guardian. He had served in that post for almost forty years, since the day when a brother named Peter had passed the title to him. Peter had spoken of threats, but James knew he had never imagined the disastrous fate that now faced England’s monasteries. The greatest threat Peter had faced had been a curious knight, Sir Thomas Malory, who was thinking of writing a book.
“He came here early in my guardianship,” Peter had told James, “claiming to have heard rumors of an ancient treasure at Barchester. How such rumors are started one never knows.” James suspected that Peter himself had started the rumor—the old man had a penchant for drink, and his lips could be dangerously loose when he was under its influence.
“He pestered me for two days to tell him stories, to show him treasures. When I refused, he partook of our wine and our bread and read to the brothers from a book of history by someone called William of Monmouth—a book about the ancient kings of England and about one king who particularly interested him. Though this visitor had the credentials of a knight, the curiosity of a scholar, and the language of a poet, he seemed more like a rogue than anything else to me. I feared he would uncover the relic of which you are about to become Guardian,” Peter had said to James. “But in the end he departed. Many years later, I saw his book. We could not afford such things as printed volumes here in those days, but another visitor showed me a copy. Although the visiting knight had told me his proposed title, King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table, William Caxton, the publisher, called it simply Le Morte d’Arthur. I looked through the book for evidence of our secret and was relieved to find none.”
A single visitor curious about an old secret who drank wine and told stories—if only the present threat to the priory’s treasures were so petty.