The Clerk's Tale

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All in all it was a warm January, as Januarys went, this year of God’s grace 1446, with never a freeze nor snow after Twelfth Night, even at St. Hilary’s that was supposed to be a year’s coldest day and now it was coming on to St. Paul’s. The nights nipped and there were ice-rims to puddles and watering troughs more dawns than not but the days were only damp and gray, the world all heavy with rain and thaw rather than stiff with cold. In some sheltered places there was even grass beginning to green, as here in St. Mary’s infirmary garden where the little square of turf with the ash tree in its midst, the herb beds, and careful gravel paths were kept from the winds of the Chiltern Hills and the Berkshire Downs by nunnery buildings on three sides and on the fourth by a low turf-wall topped by a withy-woven fence.

It was a quiet place, meant not only for the growing of the infirmarian’s healing herbs but for those nuns who had been ill enough they must needs stay in the infirmary but were at last able to come out to sit or walk quietly on warmer, drier days than presently there were.

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