Baldric scratched his head. He couldn’t remember much else except the matter he had saved for last. “Now, to the main business. Hayward, step forward.”
A young hayward had been elected last year, though none knew the manner of his thinking. He and Herwin often discussed better ways to plant and harvest. He ran to the fore of the assembly and began to speak in a hopeful tone. “I met with Prior Mattias, the steward, and the abbot, himself. We met together with other haywards and reeves from all the villages of the abbey and learned of some new ways.”
Another grumble passed through the village men.
“Nay, nay, y’ought not fear. Firstly, let me remind all we needs sickle our crops no more than a palm height off the ground. Some are wasting thatch by cutting too high. ‘Tis easier on the back to be sure, but we can ill afford the waste.”
He swigged some ale and raised his hands over the murmuring crowd. “Now hear me. The old ways are not working. We divide our fields in two and of all the land we have, we only keep a sixth part for ourselves. In France and England, and even in parts of our own Holy Empire it is now being done a different way. Take your strips of land and mark them so that we have three parts, not two. One part is fallow, another planted with a spring seed and the third in an autumn seed. Each year the parts are changed about so the land does not weary.” He paused.
Herwin called out. “Ja! Would mean two of three parts would be yielding, and the work is spread over more time.”
Another objected. “Nay! The old ways be good enough. They are tested with time and serve us well.”
The crowd grumbled questions and complaints until Baldric raised his hands. The men quieted. “Listen, men, and hear me. What the young hayward says is what is to be. I’ll have not a single word against it.” He set his jaw and stared at the villagers until there was absolute silence—and submission.
The men were quiet, confused, and fearful of the new way. But for Herwin and the hayward this day was one of great hope, for they had always believed what manors across Christendom were learning: the land was a sure and constant servant, yearning to yield and gifted with plenty—if only men had the courage to change.
News did not travel quickly unless it was of such gravity as that which weighed upon the subjects of Emperor Friederich Barbarossa in the late spring of 1190. The emperor had risen to rally the armies of the German states in a third crusade against the infidels who yet defiled Palestine. He had led a consecrated column of knights, priests, and footmen from their rendezvous in Ratisbon, through the lands of the Huns, the realm of the great lord of the East, Isaac Angelus, and finally into Asia Minor. But, while pausing to bathe in the icy waters of the Calycadnus River, the seventy-year-old guardian of the Germans drowned.
A pilgrim bore the sad news to Weyer on a summer’s night. He and a small company were passing through the village on their way home to Cologne in the north. Most travelers hurried past the dreary village in hopes of finding comfort in the guesthouse of the abbey, but darkness had fallen and they sought shelter in Weyer’s church.
Strangers were rarely welcomed, for they were generally feared. These pilgrims, however, walked with a large, wooden cross at the head of their short column and the symbol gave Weyer’s peasants a sense of safety. So, before they settled into the sanctuary of the nave, the reeve begged their indulgence and invited them to address the village folk in the village common by the well.
Sitting beneath the linden, the pilgrims were served a gracious meal of boiled pork, some precious wheat rolls, a pottage of lentils, leeks, and dried peas, and a flask of mud-colored ale. Heinrich and the other village men sat round about, spellbound as the leader told tales of Palestine, crusaders, and the dark-eyed demons corrupting the holy places.
“My name, good people, was once Gerhard of Cologne. I have taken the name of Balean, after Commander Balean of Ibelin.” The man paused and licked pork fat off his fingers. He guzzled some ale and continued. “I left my city ten years prior as a man of means, a trader in cloth and furs, a freeman in a free city. But I was a man touched by the love of God in such a way that I thought my petty treasures to be vanity. I had lived a charitable life, was educated in the university, and became a man of letters. Ah, but I thought it to be of no end, ‘a chasing after the wind.’”
Balean reached for a wheat roll and acknowledged the baker. Heinrich beamed. “Believing it would suit my soul, I began to wander the banks of the Rhine, and I recited the psalms to the squirrels and rabbits scampering about!”
The men laughed.
“Ha. I began to think of myself as a bit foolish until some aging monk surprised me from behind a tree. We’ll done!’ he says. ‘Your memory is far better than mine!’ I stared at him in wonder, for he looked like no other churchman I had seen. ‘What are you?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ answers he, I’ve oft wondered that m’self!’ Well, I shan’t forget the man. He was a bit reluctant to speak of himself, but it seems he was once a warrior, a priest, and a monk. He claimed to be a fellow priest, as it were, for he claims we Christian men to all be priests!”