Doctor Mirabilis Read Free

charter. But this game had run out
     quickly, and the faint remains of what the palimpsest had carried before it had been pumiced for the charter proved even duller:
     pieces of a crabbed hymn bysome barely literate canon. There was
no
way to put off thinking about the message on top in new ink.
    It was brief and disastrous enough. A villein whom Roger did not even remember had thought well enough of him to dictate it to Ilchester’s recorder, and had it sent to him by the most reliable means available to a man with neither purse nor freedom: a beggar. It said:
    pis daye d Burh his Menne hap despiled
    Franklin Bacon & putte alle in fleyht to
    ferne Strondea Ihab aseyden for Mr
    Roher ac hem schal cleym it Aske of pe
    Franklin his serf Wulf at pe Oxen
    Ad majorem gloriae
    This, in, an oval-rubbed spot in the centre, surrounded by a haze of extinguished knowledge, or what passed for it. There
     was, unhappily, nothing in the least cryptic about the message. It meant that Roger’s home was gone and his money with it.
     Somehow the soldiers of the King’s justiciar, scouring the country for remaining pockets of baronial resistance, had happened
     into Ilchester, and had seen in the substantial heirs of Christopher Bacon, freeman landholder, some taint of sympathy with
     the partisans of the rebel barons, or some stronghold for the mercenaries who had infected the whole east of England, since
     the evacuation of the French in 1217. The rest had followed inevitably. No matter that Ilchester had always been an uneventful
     town, notable for nothing but its Wednesday market and its authorized fair every twenty-ninth of August; Hubert de Burgh stood
     accused of the failure of last year’s expedition to the west of France (regardless of the fact, or, as Adam Marsh had remarked
     sadly, perhaps because of the fact that the justiciar had advised King Henry most strongly against any such hunting party);
     he was out to prove that French sedition was still eating away at the body politick, even in a place as unlikely as Ilchester,
     and that the King’s justiciar was swift and terrible in hawking it. And so, farewell, suddenly,to the ancient yeoman house of Bacon, though it had yet to see partisan, baron, Frenchman or mercenary; the serfs would thieve
     away the harvest, and leave the family only exile and poverty. The reference to ‘ferne Strondea’ could only mean exile for
     Harold, Christopher’s brother; he was the last of authority in the family to remain in Ilchester; not even Hubert de Burgh
     could touch Robert Bacon in his factor’s fastness in London.
    Very well; and so, good-bye as well to new copies of old books, to virgin parchment, to clean quills and fresh ink, to meat
     and to wine, to warm wool and pliant leather, to a new growth in wisdom under Oxford’s once
magister scholarum
Robert Grosseteste, to a doctorate in theology, to becoming
(Thou art addled in thy wits! the
self cried in its sweet voice) the world’s wonder in moral philosophy. From now on, he would be poor. Robert Bacon would
     not help him, that was certain; Robert had been scathing, indeed flyting, of Roger’s scholiast bent and his penchant for the
     Latin language of the papal parasites, and of the money spent to support it – a scorn which had not been much tempered by
     the fact that Robert had twice been captured by the soldiers of Prince Louis’ invading army shortly after the thirteen-year-old
     Roger had entered Oxford, and had had to ransom himself. By now, Robert thought of Roger as a renegade from the family – and
     never mind that the still younger Eugene, now fifteen and at the new University of Toulouse, had shown the same scholar’s
     bent without being flyted for it; nor that now in. London Robert was farther away from the family than Roger and had even
     less of the grain on his tongue; still the indictment stuck.
    As well it might,
the self whispered in the darkness.
Distresseth thou thyself, an thy people be dispersed?