Beyond Blakwater the track became even worse, winding circuitously over the hill to the little village of Preston Stautney some four miles away. It was inevitable that there should be a certain amount of intercourse between the two communities. The young people met in the woods to play games or to poach the lord’s deer, sometimes they carried their games a little further and two or three of the families were linked by marriage. But on the whole the two villages kept themselves to themselves. There was no bad blood between them but the Blakwater folk tended to think themselves considerably better than their neighbours. For Preston Stautney was poor and small. Its land was nowhere near as fertile but this alone was not enough to explain the contrast. Twenty years before, indeed, it had been by no means so marked. But Sir Peter Stautney, the lord of the manor, was something of a wastrel. He liked to spend his time as a soldier on the Continent when he should have been tending his estates at home. Nor was his performance as a soldier likely to win much glory for himself or vicarious satisfaction for his tenants. Once, indeed, he had got himself captured by the French and his steward had had to sell a couple of villages and extract the last possible penny from the others before he could raise the necessary ransom. Discouraged by the lord’s indifference the bailiff had grown slack and was believed to be lining his own pockets at Sir Peter’s expense. The villagers took advantage of his idleness but were none the less resentful of what they felt to be his unfair exactions.
Preston Stautney, in short, was an unhappy village. It had dwindled to some fifteen families, a little over sixty inhabitants in all, and several of those who remained were talking of trying their luck elsewhere. It was, of course, against the law for a villein thus to desert his master but the bailiff would be unlikely to take any very vigorous steps to recapture the fugitive – especially if he had been softened up with a shilling or two in advance – and by the time Sir Peter discovered what had happened the refugee would be far away and beyond discovery. Not that they needed to go very far to be lost to Sir Peter. One of the free tenants at Blakwater was known to be an escaped villein from over the hill. He was a good worker and an honest man and the reeve had no intention of handing him back. Even if Sir Peter found out and complained to the Bishop he would not be likely to get much satisfaction.
For William of Edendon was one of the great magnates of the kingdom, attaching little importance to the protests of a country knight. More to the point, he was a capable and conscientious landlord, always ready to invest some part of his great riches in improving his estates and, though determined to get his due, never harsh or unreasonable in his exactions. He knew Sir Peter as an inefficient absentee, of interest only in that the chaos of his finances might make it possible to snap up one or two of his manors cheaply at some future date. The Bishop had put in the present steward some three years before, paid him well – fifty shillings a year, clothing, stabling for his horse, the use of part of the manor house and a peck of oats each day for his horse – and expected good service in return. The steward was responsible for seven manors in all but Blakwater was one of the largest and the most central and it was there that he had made his home. He came from somewhere the other side of Winchester, for the Bishop believed in putting foreigners in positions of authority on his manors, but he had been accepted by the villagers, if not as one of them, then at least as the next best thing.
On the whole the people of Blakwater thought themselves fortunate. But though they knew that they were more prosperous and more secure than their neighbours in Preston Stautney, from time to time they hankered wistfully after the greater freedom which the instability of the smaller village had incidentally bestowed on its inhabitants. For not only could the men of Preston Stautney leave their homes with impunity if they wanted to but the bailiff was always so short of ready money that it was easy, in exchange for a small payment, to get out of almost all the services which they were supposed to perform on the lord’s demesne. Indeed, most of the former villeins had by now commuted all their services for life and worked on what little was left of the demesne only for a money payment. But though their neighbours might boast about their liberty, the Blakwater men were satisfied for most of the time that their own full stomachs and well-built houses made their lot the happier. Only now and then, when their reeve seemed more than usually exigent, did they wonder whether freedom might not after all be worth the price of poverty.
