Historical Setting: Northumbria, 793 CE.
Here, in this Northumbrian village I do find some merchants’ stalls set out selling sacks of grains for winter stores, beets and chard; but today there is no one here dealing in fabrics. I ask at a wine seller’s stall where I can find Cloothar, the merchant who is known to provide black robes for monks. He casts his gaze up and down my ill-fitting robe, raising one eyebrow, finding my conspicuous need to be his entertainment.
“Of course you are on a hunt for Cloothar. He must have had quite a lusty mead to fit you out like that. I mean, how hard can it be, to put a black robe on a monk?”
“Indeed. How hard can it be?”
“He’s been dealing in Viking loot these weeks.”
“So, he is probably at the market places across the North Sea?” I ask.
He gives me a sly eye, and leans in for a secret.
“There is some Christian loot that won’t sell in the pagan markets, like monk’s garb, for example. So, I happen to know, Cloothar is, this very moment, meeting Norsemen’s ships in the Farne islands, making his trades with the Vikings before those Norsemen cross back to the markets at Jutland. He’ll be back on his way to Jarrow. Might you try a flask of wine while you wait?”
“How long will I wait?”
“No more than a week, I suppose.”
“That would be a lot of wine. I’d best beg bread from a baker while I wait.”
I find a field of oats, ripened and late for harvest, and here the farmer welcomes my help in trade for shelter and straw for sleeping, and a fair share of gruel.
Here, I can watch the harbor for Cloothar’s so called “merchant ship” which, I am told, is nothing more than a leather currach. It is a week or more, and I begin to wonder if the dry goods merchant has chosen not to return to Lindisfarne after all.
But now, on this Thursday, just such a craft is tied at the dock. It is a three-man boat with only two coracles for oars, and in the middle space, in a third rower’s place is a large bundle of monk’s robes, but no colors in linen or silks for any liturgical pomp. This Viking booty has been picked over and the only things he has left wouldn’t be of value in the secular, pagan market.
(Continues Tuesday, October 14)
Lazarus Ink 