The Forest Laird(102)
“The nobles shilly-shally still, and I make shift to understand that. They are like coy young women, flirting with strutting suitors, withholding favours and denying commitment in the hope of coming to understand in full the proposals being made. But the time must come, sooner now than later, when the scales will fall from their eyes and permit them to perceive Edward for what he is.” His gaze sharpened. “You have a question.”
“What makes you think, my lord, that this time must come soon?”
His eyes grew wide and his brows arched high. “Because it must! We live in changing times, Father James, and there are shifts afoot today, even as we speak, that will reshape our very world. Look at our towns here, our burghs. What do you see?”
I blinked at him. “Towns, my lord, nothing more. Though I can see from your face that I am in error. What should I see?”
“Burgesses, Father. Merchants with counting houses, traders with warehouses full of goods, skilled artisans everywhere, masons and manufacturers. They are everywhere.”
“I know they are, my lord. But I still don’t understand what you are talking about.”
He bent forward, and there was an intensity about him that made me feel apprehensive. “Ask yourself where they came from, Father,” he said in a low voice, “and what their presence means.”
“Their presence in the burghs, my lord? They live there. What else should it mean? Forgive me, for I am not accustomed to feeling stupid, but I still don’t follow you.”
He grinned fiercely, a very un-bishoplike grin. “I know you don’t. Nor does King John, nor do his magnates, and King Edward and all his earls and barons are no more enlightened than any of those. These people, Father James, these merchants, traders, and their like, are calling themselves burgesses nowadays. Burgesses! Is that not a wondrous name? Perhaps not, you might think, but it is a new one. They were not here a hundred years ago—burgesses did not exist at that time. Nor sixty, nor even fifty years ago. But now every town in the land has its burgesses, and they all build and own guildhalls and craft centres and fraternal lodges. They are all solid, upstanding, and prosperous citizens, too wealthy to be thought of, or treated, as peasants.
“These are men of substance now, Father James. An entire new breed, a new kind of man. And they conduct their daily affairs—commercial enterprises, they call them—in every land throughout Christendom and even beyond, dealing in every kind of commerce you could imagine. Ours deal mainly in wool, shipping hundreds of bales each year to places like Lubeck and Amsterdam that have none, in return for finished cloth. But some of them send glazed bricks to Brussels, and others ship metal and ores of tin and lead and iron to France and Burgundy, and bring back wines in payment. Most of them use the good offices of the Temple bankers to conduct their business, and they pay heavy taxes in return for the rights to maintain trading premises and safe quarters in their various ports of call.
“And as they grow and prosper, their voices are being raised in the affairs of all the burghs throughout this land. They are demanding and receiving more and more say in how their towns are governed and maintained, and from year to year, as their good influence continues to expand, our burghs are being governed by their own burgh councils.”
He stopped, clearly waiting for me to respond, and when I failed to do so he succeeded in achieving the improbable, frowning and smiling at the same time. “You cannot see it.”
I was floundering in my failure to grasp his meaning, and I saw him shrug.
“Well,” he said quietly, sounding vaguely disappointed, “that is hardly surprising, I suppose. You are the first person with whom I have tried to talk about this, and I know I looked at it for years myself without seeing it for what it is.”
He coughed, clearing his throat, then began again.
“Now listen closely to me, Father James, for I am about to open a new window and show you a world you have never thought of and could never imagine. Are you listening?” I nodded. “This world of ours is changing, as I have said. It is changing visibly, from day to day. We are witnessing an upheaval that will rival the fall of Rome. Believe me when I tell you that the burgesses of our towns—and of all the other towns throughout Christendom—will change the very world as we know it.”
I confess I was half afraid that my mentor was losing his mind.
“The system cannot coexist with these new burgesses, Father James, and it cannot survive without them. And therefore it must perish. Not today, and probably not within our lifetimes, but the system will perish. Of that I have no doubt.”