The Bishop Must Die

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Third Saturday following the Feast of St Michael, sixteenth year of the reign of King Edward II*

Gloucester Gaol

The stench was unbelievable.

Hundreds had gone through this place in recent months. Since the battle at Boroughbridge, the ‘contrariants’, who chose to dispute the king’s excessive powers, had been hunted down and incarcerated — many of them here in Gloucester, and all appeared to have left their mark. The gaol reeked of sweat, piss and blood — and the little sewer outside was incapable of taking away the faeces of so many.

Men died here every day. The battle had been lost, and since then the fortunate ones had been taken out in their threes and fours, and executed on the green, where the city’s folks could watch. Sometimes there was a festival atmosphere, and loud cheering and laughter heralded the latest jerking body at the end of a rope, but that was at the beginning. Now even Gloucester’s people were grown weary of the sight of so many men being killed. There had been a feeling after the battle that the king’s rage was natural. Not now. The dead were displayed in cages up and down the country; some, quartered, had their leathery limbs decorating the principal cities, while their blackened, skull-like heads stared out from the tops of spikes in London.

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