She smiled at Ranulf and the manservant glimpsed the lechery in the prioress's eyes.

A hot one there, he thought, and smiled to himself – perhaps a visit to the good canonesses might not go amiss. Ranulf often boasted to Maltote, 'I was born a villain and I can smell villains'. Well, he had smelled them tonight and, as he held the prioress's glance, Ranulf fleetingly wondered what old Master Long Face thought of it all.

'And the women travel abroad as well?' Corbett asked.

'Why shouldn't they?' Father Augustine asked. 'What's a young girl's lot in a peasant village? Hard work, marriage to some lout? Half-dead with child-bearing by the time she's reached her twentieth summer. It's not much better for the young men, they're either chained to the plough or sent off to the king's wars in Scotland.'

'I don't like them,' Adam Catchpole interjected. He carefully placed his thick, muscular arms on the table top. 'I don't like Philip Nettler or even the saintly Master Joseph. They are both idle buggers! I come from a village something like this.' His harsh voice suddenly rose. 'I've seen these movements before! They tell the simpletons that Jerusalem is round the corner or over the brow of the next hill. It never is!' He stared at Corbett. 'And you know that, don't you, Sir Hugh? Otherwise you and Master Monck would not be here.'

'In a way, yes,' Corbett replied quietly. He paused as a servant refilled his goblet. 'The Pastoureaux,' he went on 'originated in France. The name means Shepherds. They were organized some fifty years ago by a renegade monk called Jacob who assumed the strange title Master of Hungary.' Corbett sipped from his goblet. 'According to reports, Jacob claimed to have been told in a vision to organize the poor, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, and send them to the Holy Land to await Christ's return. Unfortunately, he attracted all society's human flotsam and jetsam – apostate clerics, prostitutes, thieves, murderers and wolfsheads.