Page 160 of The Pillars of the Earth

William had not been here since the Whitsunday when Philip and his army of volunteers had frustrated Waleran Bigod’s scheme. Then it had been forty or fifty wooden houses clustered around the priory gate and scattered along the muddy footpath that led to the bridge. Now, he saw as he approached the village across the undulating fields, there were three times as many houses, at least. They formed a brown fringe all around the gray stone wall of the priory and completely filled the space between the priory and the river. Several of the houses looked large. Within the priory close there were new stone buildings, and the walls of the church seemed to be going up fast. There were two new quays beside the river. Kingsbridge had become a town.

The appearance of the place confirmed a suspicion that had been growing in his mind since he had come home from the war. As he had toured around, collecting arrears of rent and terrorizing disobedient serfs, he had continually heard talk of Kingsbridge. Landless young men were going there to work; prosperous families were sending their sons to school at the priory; smallholders would sell their eggs and cheese to the men working on the building site; and everyone who could went there on holy days, even though there was no cathedral. Today was a holy day—Michaelmas Day, which fell on a Sunday this year. It was a mild early-autumn morning, nice weather for traveling, so there should be a good crowd. William expected to find out what drew them to Kingsbridge.

His five henchmen rode with him. They had done sterling work in the villages. The news of William’s tour had spread with uncanny speed, and after the first few days people knew what to expect. At William’s approach they would send the children and young women to hide in the woods. It pleased William to strike fear into people’s hearts: it kept them in their place. They certainly knew he was in command now!

As his group came closer to Kingsbridge, he kicked his horse into a trot, and the others followed suit. Arriving at speed was always more impressive. Other people shrank back to the sides of the road, or jumped into the fields, to get out of the way of the big horses.

They clattered over the wooden bridge, making a loud noise and ignoring the tollhouse keeper, but the narrow street ahead of them was blocked by a cart loaded with barrels of lime and pulled by two huge, slow-moving oxen; and the knights’ horses were forced to slow abruptly.

William looked around as they followed the cart up the hill. New houses, hastily built, filled the spaces between the old ones. He noticed a cookshop, an alehouse, a smithy and a shoemaker’s. The air of prosperity was unmistakable. William was envious.

There were not many people in the streets, however. Perhaps they were all up at the priory.

With his knights behind him he followed the ox cart through the priory gates. It was not the kind of entrance he liked to make, and he had a pang of anxiety that people would notice and laugh at him, but happily nobody even looked.

By contrast with the deserted town outside the walls, the priory close was humming with activity.

William reined in and looked around, trying to take it all in. There were so many people, and there was so much going on, that at first he found it somewhat bewildering. Then the scene resolved into three sections.

Nearest him, at the western end of the priory close, there was a market. The stalls were set up in neat north-south rows, and several hundred people were milling about in the aisles, buying food and drink, hats and shoes, knives, belts, ducklings, puppies, pots, earrings, wool, thread, rope, and dozens of other necessities and luxuries. The market was clearly thriving, and all the pennies, half-pennies and farthings that were changing hands must add up to a great deal of money.

It was no wonder, William thought bitterly, that the market at Shiring was in decline, when there was a flourishing alternative here at Kingsbridge. The rents from stall holders, tolls on suppliers, and taxes on sales that should have been going into the earl of Shiring’s treasury were instead filling the coffers of Kingsbridge Priory.

But a market needed a license from the king, and William was sure Prior Philip did not have one. He was probably planning to apply as soon as he was caught, like the Northbrook miller. Unfortunately it would not be so easy for William to teach Philip a lesson.

Beyond the market was a zone of tranquility. Adjacent to the cloisters, where the crossing of the old church used to be, there was an altar under a canopy, with a white-haired monk standing in front of it reading from a book. On the far side of the altar, monks in neat rows were singing hymns, although at this distance their music was drowned by the noise of the marketplace. There was a small congregation. This was probably nones, a service conducted for the benefit of the monks, William thought: all work and marketing would stop for the main Michaelmas service, of course.

At the far side of the priory close, the east end of the cathedral was being built. This was where Prior Philip was spending his rake-off from the market, William thought sourly. The walls were thirty or forty feet high, and it was already possible to see the outlines of the windows and the arches of the arcade. Workers swarmed all over the site. William thought there was something odd about the way they looked, and realized after a moment that it was their colorful dress. They were not regular laborers, of course—the paid work force would be on holiday today. These people were volunteers.

He had not expected that there would be somanyof them. Hundreds of men and women were carrying stones and splitting timber and rolling barrels and heaving cartloads of sand up from the river, all working for nothing but forgiveness of their sins.

The sly prior had a crafty setup, William observed enviously. The people who came to work on the cathedral would spend money at the market. People who came to the market would give a few hours to the cathedral, for their sins. Each hand washed the other.

He kicked his horse forward and rode across the graveyard to the building site, curious to see it more closely.

The eight massive piers of the arcade marched down either side of the site in four opposed pairs. From a distance, William had thought he could see the round arches joining one pier with the next, but now he realized the arches were not built yet—what he had seen was the wooden falsework, made in the same shape, upon which the stones would rest while the arches were being constructed and the mortar was drying. The falsework did not rest on the ground, but was supported on the out-jutting moldings of the capitals on top of the piers.

Parallel with the arcade, the outer walls of the aisles were going up, with regular spaces for the windows. Midway between each window opening, a buttress jutted out from the line of the wall. Looking at the open ends of the unfinished walls, William could see that they were not solid stone: they were in fact double walls with a space in between. The cavity appeared to be filled with rubble and mortar.

The scaffolding was made of stout poles roped together, with trestles of flexible saplings and woven reeds laid across the poles.

A lot of money had been spent here, William noted.

He rode on around the outside of the chancel, followed by his knights. Against the walls were wooden lean-to huts, workshops and lodges for the craftsmen. Most of them were locked shut now, for there were no masons laying stones or carpenters making falsework today. However, the supervising craftsmen—the master masons and the master carpenter—were directing the volunteer laborers, telling them where to stack the stones, timber, sand and lime they were carrying up from the riverside.

William rode around the east end of the church to the south side, where his way was blocked by the monastic buildings. Then he turned back, marveling at the cunning of Prior Philip, who had his master craftsmen busy on a Sunday and his laborers working for no pay.

As he reflected on what he was seeing, it seemed devastatingly clear that Prior Philip was largely responsible for the decline in the fortunes of the Shiring earldom. The farms were losing their young men to the building site, and Shiring—jewel of the earldom—was being eclipsed by the growing new town of Kingsbridge. Residents here paid rent to Philip, not William, and people who bought and sold goods at this market generated income for the priory, not the earldom. And Philip had the timber, the sheep farms and the quarry that had once enriched the earl.

William and his men rode back across the close to the market. He decided to take a closer look. He urged his horse into the crowd. It inched forward. The people did not scatter fearfully out of his path. When the horse nudged them, they looked up at William with irritation or annoyance rather than dread, and moved out of the way in their own good time, with a somewhat condescending air. Nobody here was frightened of him. It made him nervous. If people were not scared there was no telling what they might do.

He went down one row and back up the next, with his knights trailing behind him. He became frustrated with the slow movement of the crowd. It would have been quicker to walk; but then, he felt sure, these insubordinate Kingsbridge people would probably have been cocky enough to jostle him.

He was halfway along the return aisle when he saw Aliena.

He reined in abruptly and stared at her, transfixed.

She was no longer the thin, strained, frightened girl in clogs that he had seen here on Whitsunday three years ago. Her face, then drawn with tension, had filled out again, and she had a happy, healthy look. Her dark eyes flashed with humor and her curls tumbled about her face when she shook her head.