Justice for the Damned

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This early May morning in 1272, near the feast of Saint Melor, dawned with such sweetness that the Fontevraudine monks and nuns of Amesbury Priory rushed from Chapter with far more eagerness to their assigned tasks than they had felt heretofore.

Although a few were laggard, those for whom early rising would always be akin to the wearing of hair shirts, none regretted this coming of soft spring. The fog from the River Avon swirled like thick smoke through their cloister garth, but it came with a pleasing scent, suggestive of tender, bright flowers and the coming warmth of lengthening days.

Indeed, there was such happiness amongst the monastics of the ancient priory that some began to sing, their voices so filled with reverent joy that the force of their fervent celebration must have breached the surrounding stone walls and surged into the secular land beyond.

As Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal walked slowly out of the Chapter House and into the tranquility of the nuns' cloister, the cheerful voices of her fellow religious began to grow faint in her ears. She hesitated, leaned against a pillar, and glanced up at the wooden roof over the walkway. Although the stone felt cold through her woolen habit, she found comfort in the familiarity of its gouged and pitted surface. She shut her eyes and slowly breathed in the sharp river scent that clung to the twisting wisps of fog drifting through the shrubs and walkways of the gardens before her.

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