“Fat smiles on the faces of the husbandmen,” saidHugh Beringar, fresh from his own harvest in the north of theshire, and burned nut-brown from his work in the fields, “andchaos among the kings. If they had to grow their own corn, milltheir own flour and bake their own bread they might have no timeleft for all the squabbling and killing. Well, thank God forpresent mercies, and God keep the killing well away from us here.Not that I rate it the less ill-fortune for being there in thesouth, but this shire is my field, and my people, mine to keep. Ihave enough to do to mind my own, and when I see them brown androsy and fat, with full byres and barns, and a high wool tally ingood quality fleeces, I’m content.”

They had met by chance at the corner of the abbey wall, wherethe Foregate turned right towards Saint Giles, and beside it thegreat grassy triangle of the horse-fair ground opened, pallid andpockmarked in the sun. The three-day annual fair of Saint Peter wasmore than a week past, the stalls taken down, the merchantsdeparted. Hugh sat aloft on his raw-boned and cross-grained greyhorse, tall enough to carry a heavyweight instead of this light,lean young man whose mastery he tolerated, though he had preciouslittle love for any other human creature. It was no responsibilityof the sheriff of Shropshire to see that the fairground wasproperly vacated and cleared after its three-day occupation, butfor all that Hugh liked to view the ground for himself. It was hisofficers who had to keep order there, and make sure the abbeystewards were neither cheated of their fees nor robbed or otherwiseabused in collecting them. That was over now for another year. Andhere were the signs of it, the dappling of post-holes, the pallidoblongs of the stalls, the green fringes, and the trampled, baldpaths between the booths. From sun-starved bleach to lush green,and back to the pallor again, with patches of tough, flat cloversurviving in the trodden paths like round green footprints of somestrange beast.