THAT LIFE OF MINE BEGAN ON the Feast of Saint Giles in the Year of our Lord 1363, the thirty-sixth year of the reign of Edward the Third, England’s great warrior king. We resided in Stromford Village, with its one hundred and fifty souls.
For as long as I could recall, my mother had simply called me “Son,” and, since her name was Asta, “Asta’s son” became my common name. In a world in which one lived by the light of a father’s name and rank, that meant—since I had no father—I existed in a shadow. But he, like so many, had died before my birth during a recurrence of the Great Mortality (often called the Plague)—or so my mother had informed me. She rarely mentioned him.
Nor did she ever take another husband, a circumstance I did not question. It would have been a rare man who would want so frail and impoverished a woman for a wife. For in the entire kingdom of England there could have been no poorer Christian souls than my mother and I.
I had few friends and none I completely trusted. As “Asta’s son,” I was oft the butt of jests, jibes, and relentless hounding.
“Why do they taunt me so?” I once asked Father Quinel during one of my confessions. These confessions were numerous, since I had become convinced there was some sin embedded in me, a sin I was desperate to root out.
“Be accepting,” was the priest’s advice. “Think how our Blessed Christ was taunted on His cross.”
I did try to accept my life, but unlike our perfect Jesus, I was filled with caution and suspicion, always expecting to be set upon or mocked. In short, I lived the life of the shunned, forever cast aside, yet looking on, curious as to how others lived.
There was little my mother or I could do about our plight. We were not slaves. But neither were we free. The steward, John Aycliffe, never lost an opportunity to remind us of the fact that we were villeins—serfs—bound to Furnival, Lord of Stromford Village.
Yet this Lord Furnival had fought in France or had been off to mercenary wars for so many years that most villagers, including myself, had never set eyes on him.
It did not matter. Spring, summer, and fall—save certain holy days—my mother and I, like every other Stromford villager, worked his fields from dawn to dusk.
When winter came, we fed the animals—we had an ox, and now and then a chicken—gathered wood and brush for heat, slept, and tried to stay alive.
At a time when bread cost a quarterpenny a loaf, the value of my mother’s daily labor—by King Edward’s royal decree—was a penny each day; mine, but a farthing.
Our food was barley bread, watered ale, and, from time to time, some cooked dried peas. If good fortune blessed us there might be a little meat at Christmastide.
Thus our lives never changed, but went round the rolling years beneath the starry vault of distant Heaven. Time was the great millstone, which ground us to dust like kerneled wheat. The Holy Church told us where we were in the alterations of the day, the year, and in our daily toil. Birth and death alone gave distinction to our lives, as we made the journey between the darkness whence we had come to the darkness where we were fated to await Judgment Day. Then God’s terrible gaze would fall on us and lift us to Heavens bliss or throw us down to the ever-lasting flames of Hell.
This was the life we led. It was no doubt the life my forefathers had led, as had all men and women since the days of Adam. With all my heart I believed that we would continue to live the same until Archangel Gabriel announced the end of time.
And with my mother’s death, it was as if that time had come.