Death and the Chapman

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In this year of our Lord 1522 I am an old man. I’ve lived through the reigns of five kings; six, if you count young Edward. By my reckoning, I’m three score years and ten, the age, so the Bible tells us, which is man’s allotted span on earth, and when my time comes, I shan’t be sorry to go. Things aren’t what they were, as I keep telling my children and grandchildren. And, come to think of it, as my mother told me.

‘Things aren’t what they were when I was a girl,’ she’d say, sweeping hard with her broom and sending the dust and bits of dead rushes flying out of doors, for all the world as though she were trying to sweep modern manners and modern thinking out with them.

I remember that little house in Wells as plainly as ‘though I’d been living there yesterday. My father, on the other hand, is a shadowy figure. Not surprising, really, because he died when I was barely four. He was a stone carver by trade, and very highly thought of, according to my mother. And it’s true that when he died, following a fall from some scaffolding while working on the ceiling of the Cathedral nave, the Bishop — I forget his name, but he was the one before Robert Stillington — paid my mother a small pension out of his own pocket. I think, really, that’s what started all her ideas, wanting me to have an education, to be able to read and write. Which is why she entered me as a novice with the Benedictines at Glastonbury.

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