ACT ONE
Exeter, February 1196
When three golden beasts did reign by bishop's rule,
A bearded champion fought oppression's realm,
His secret horde defied the edicts cruel,
But all was lost beneath the budding elm.
It was an unusual case for coroner Sir John de Wolfe -- not so much because it was a find of treasure-trove but that it occurred not a hundred paces from his dismal chamber in Rougemont Castle. He was more used to ranging the length and breadth of the county of Devon to view some corpse, sometimes riding for three days on a journey to the more remote parts.
His clerk brought the news to him on a winter morning when the frost lay hard on the ground and even the sewage lying in the city streets was frozen solid. Thomas de Peyne, his thin cassock swathed in a threadbare cloak of grey serge, pushed his way through the curtain of sacking on the doorway at the top of the winding stairs cut into the walls of the tall gatehouse. The little priest's narrow face, with pointed nose and receding chin, was blue with cold, but he managed to control the chattering of his teeth to blurt out the exciting news.
'Crowner, they have found money in the outer ward!'
De Wolfe, sitting behind his rough trestle table, almost the only furniture in that spartan chamber, looked up irritably. 'What, has some man-at-arms dropped a penny?' he asked cynically.
'No, there are many coins, hundreds of them - and some gold too!' squeaked Thomas, rubbing an almost frozen dewdrop from the end of his nose. 'Ralph Morin is there. He asked that you come and look, for it will be coroner's business.'
There was a voice from the other side of the room, where Gwyn of Polruan, de Wolfe's officer and squire, was sitting in his usual place on the cold stone of a window embrasure, apparently impervious to the icy wind that whistled through the slit.
'What's going on, Crowner?' he rumbled in his deep Cornish accent. 'This is the fourth such find since Christmas!'
John rose to his feet and pulled his grey wolf-skin cloak closer about his long, stooped body. As tall as Gwyn, but much leaner, he looked like a great crow, with his jet-black hair, hooked nose and dark stubble on his leathery cheeks.
'After the first two hoards that were found, folk seem to have caught gold fever,' he growled. 'Half the town have found shovels and are digging into every mound they come across.'
As the three men moved to the doorway, Thomas added: 'This wasn't a mound. They were digging a new well for the garrison families living in the outer bailey. It seems they had not gone down more than an arm's length when they found it.'
At the bottom of the stairs, which came out in the guardroom at the side of the entrance arch, they were joined by Gabriel, the sergeant of the men-at-arms who formed the garrison of Rougemont. The castle was so called from the red colour of the local sandstone from which it had been built by William the Bastard a mere two years after the Battle of Hastings. Gabriel was a grizzled veteran of some of the same wars in which John and Gwyn had fought, and they were old friends.
As they walked down the drawbridge over the dry moat that separated the inner from the outer wards of the castle, they saw a small crowd clustering around a wooden tripod, fifty paces off the steep track that led to the outer gate. Most of them were soldiers, huddled in thick jerkins against the cold, but a few hardy wives were peering from behind them, and a brace of ;children, apparently oblivious to the winter chill, were racing around and shouting. The outer ward, meant to be the first line of defence for the castle, was where most of the families of the garrison lived, their huts forming a small village inside the city walls.
Striding over the sparse grass and frozen mud, de Wolfe and his companions reached the excavation, where the circle of onlookers opened up to let them through. Here, another large man was issuing orders to the soldiers who were digging the well. He was Ralph Morin, the castle constable, responsible to the king for the defence and maintenance of Rougemont, for it was a royal possession, not the fief of a baron or manor lord. A tall, erect man, he had a forked beard that gave him the look of Viking warrior.
'Another box of money, Crowner! How many more?' he said, echoing Gwyn's words.
De Wolfe stooped to peer into the hole that had been dug, about five feet wide. The wooden tripod reached a few feet above his head, supporting a pulley and a rope to lift buckets of soil and rock as the well was deepened. However, it had had little use as yet, as only a small pile of waste lay nearby. The hole was barely three feet deep, and in the bottom he could see the broken lid of a wooden chest, with some coins glinting beneath the smashed boards.
'Have any been taken out?' he demanded, his first concern being to prevent any pilfering.
'Show Sir John what you found,' ordered the constable, prodding a burly soldier who was leaning on a pickaxe.
The man bent down and picked up a crumpled woollen cap, which he handed to the coroner. 'I put a few in there after my pick went through the box, sir,' he grunted. 'Bloody hard work it was, cracking through that frozen ground!' he added, eyeing the coins in his hat hopefully.
John ignored the hint and tipped the dozen coins into his hand for a closer look. All were silver pennies, with the exception of one larger gold coin.
'These are Saxon, I'm sure,' he said, but then held them out towards Thomas de Peyne, who seemed to have a wide knowledge of almost everything.
The clerk peered at them short-sightedly and poked them around with a spindly finger. 'Indeed they are, Crowner. From different mints and different monarchs -- there's Ethelred and Athelstan.'
'What about the gold one?' growled Gwyn. 'That's a bezant, isn't it?'
'It's certainly a foreign coin, but I'm not sure from where,' admitted Thomas. Always keen to show off his learning, he added: 'Bezants are named after Byzantium, where lots of gold solidi came from many years ago.'
'Right, let's get that box up,' commanded de Wolfe, handing the empty cap back to the disappointed soldier. He pulled it on his head, spat on his hands and lifted the pick.
'Easy with that! Get it out in one piece if you can!' snapped the constable.
Together with another man, the soldier lowered himself into the shallow excavation, and between them they levered up the metal-bound box and in a few minutes had it on the ground at the coroner's feet. It had no lid or lock, being a sealed case bound with iron straps, which had rusted so badly that they could easily be snapped with the point of the pick. The elm boards had softened after more than a century in the wet soil, and once the bands were broken the smashed top could be pulled apart to reveal the contents.
'Must be a good few hundred in there,' muttered Ralph Morin.
The box was full of silver coins, many stuck together by the damp tarnish that covered them. When John dug his fingers into the mass, he saw a few more gold bezants and, at the bottom, some gold brooches and buckles. The onlookers gaped and drooled at the sight of such riches, which for most of them would equal several lifetimes of their daily wages.
'What do we do with it -- the same as the others?' asked the constable.
The previous hoards had all been taken to the sheriff for safekeeping until an inquest could decide what was to be done with the finds. He had the only secure place for valuables, in his back chamber in the keep of the castle. One of the sheriff's main functions was to collect the taxes from the county and deliver them in person every six months to the Exchequer in Winchester, so several massive strongboxes were stored in his quarters under constant guard.
On the constable's orders, two men carried the box up to the keep, with Morin marching close behind them to make sure that it reached the sheriff intact -- though like de Wolfe, he wondered if an odd coin or two had already found its way into the pouches of the men digging the well.
The coroner and his two assistants followed them to the sheriff's chamber, which was off the large main hall in the two-storeyed keep at the further side of the inner ward. Henry de Furnellis, an elderly knight with a face like a bloodhound, had been appointed sheriff the previous year as a stopgap when the former sheriff, John's brother-in-law, had been dismissed in disgrace. Now Henry looked with a pained expression at the muddy box lying on a table in his room. 'Another bloody burden to carry to Winchester and to explain to those arrogant Chancery clerks,' he complained to his elderly clerk, Elphin.
Together, the coroner and the constable sorted out the coins into piles and placed the bezants and the five gold ornaments alongside them. Thomas, who always carried his writing materials in a shapeless shoulder bag, sat with parchment, ink and quill and recorded the exact details of the treasure. 'Nine hundred and forty pennies, twenty-eight gold coins, three gold brooches and two gold cloak-rings,' he intoned when he had finished.
'A nice little collection, and not much doubt that it now belongs to King Richard,' declared Ralph Morin.
De Furnellis nodded his old head wisely. 'No, as it was found within his own castle! Can't very well belong to anyone else, can it, John?'
De Wolfe cleared his throat, his usual response when he had some doubts. 'I suppose not, but I'll still have to hold my inquest for a jury to decide if it was accidentally lost or whether the owner intended reclaiming it at some future date.'
The sheriff cackled. 'He'll have a hell of a job doing that now, John. He's probably been dead for a century!'
Gwyn pulled on his drooping ginger moustaches as an aid to thought. 'Why are we getting all these finds in and around Exeter?' he rumbled. 'Especially this one inside the castle itself?'
John de Wolfe managed to beat the know-all clerk to the answer....
