Quae avis post mortem longissime volavit, dum caro iuxta focum mansit, ossa iuxta fossam quieverunt?
What bird flew farthest after death, while its flesh stayed near the hearth, and its bones stayed near the ditch?
A frost had sat on the sedge all night, and it had held its nerve into morning, so that the marsh-grass along the River Yare wore a pale glass on every blade. I walked the bank above Buckenham with my collar turned up, and the wind behaved like a petty official—insistent, counting my steps, taking my heat as a fee. Out on the wash, a skein of geese wrote a dark angle across the sky, and each wingbeat sounded, in my ears, like the practice clack of a fletcher’s knife against a splitting block. The Latin line rode with me like a bead of ice on the tongue. I carried a folded note with a shelf-mark, and the paper creased my palm as I walked, so that desire stayed bodily and continuous. A document can cling in the mind like burr and bramble. This one had lodged for years: a royal command that reached into villages, into yards where women salted meat and boys chased hens, and drew out of every goose a small tribute of flight.¹ The river went slow, as rivers in flat countries go, and its patience made the banks feel like a court waiting for sentence. Reeds held winter’s hush, and a heron rose from the far bank with a reluctance that looked like conscience taking wing. It lifted, it turned, it slid along the line of trees, and the air received it as though the air had kept a place for it. I watched the bird and I felt the long cord that joined village to Tower, a cord braided from writs, officers, and habit, tightened whenever a king’s hunger found a new form. The page I sought came to my mind with its clean chancery tone: sheriffs addressed, timetables set, obedience assumed. In the end the king’s voice reached the byre as a sentence of procedure—take feathers, count them, bind them, send them toward London—and the figure sat behind the sentence with a weight that made even a goose feel conscripted.¹
In my head the order had always sounded like myth, as though a realm could pluck itself by decree, yet the figure sits in the record with a plain hardness—hundreds of thousands, then the million itself—and the hardness carries its own kind of thunder. Scholars of war and governance treat such demands as evidence of a state learning to pull resources through administrative veins, and Kaeuper’s account of war, justice, and public order keeps the theme in view while the more popular archery summaries repeat the million-feather figure with a tone that slips between wonder and amusement.² The figure asks for a colder tone. Each feather came from a body that once warmed itself in a yard, and the extraction touched hands that had other uses for their days. A ledger can feel like linen on the eyes, softening the sight of what it contains.
Service, in medieval law and custom, often wore a theatrical mask. I stepped off the bank and crossed a stile into pasture, and the board gave a small groan as though the land kept its own register of obligations. The hedge along the boundary carried hawthorn thorns sharp as penance; elder stood with berries black as bruised fruit; dog rose hooked itself to the stems with an old insistence. Under those roots a rabbit bolt opened, a mouth in the earth, and the soil at its lip looked freshly worried, as if a hand had scraped there by candlelight. The sight pulled my mind toward token dues and symbolic rents, those small payments that trained a society to speak hierarchy in objects. A tenant might owe a rose at midsummer and lay it on a lord’s table with a smile tight as twine; a tenant might owe gloves and hand them over with the air of gift; a tenant might owe an arrow and set it down like a confession disguised as ritual. In the legal record the arrow appears with a coolness that feels chilling: land held of the king by service of a broad-headed arrow yearly.³
