It was a long ride, and the sun was high when they approached the village. There were twenty or thirty houses surrounded by three big fields, all of them now stubble. Near the houses, at the edge of one of the fields, were three large oak trees in a group. As William and his men drew near, he saw that most of the villagers appeared to be sitting in the shade of the oaks, eating their dinner. He spurred his horse into a canter for the last few hundred yards, and the others followed suit. They halted in front of the villagers in a cloud of dust.

As the villagers were scrambling to their feet, swallowing their horsebread and trying to keep the dust out of their eyes, William’s mistrustful gaze observed a curious little drama. A middle-aged man with a black beard spoke quietly but urgently to a plump red-cheeked girl with a plump, red-cheeked baby. A young man joined them and was hastily shooed away by the older man. Then the girl walked off toward the houses, apparently under protest, and disappeared in the dust. William was intrigued. There was something furtive about the whole scene, and he wished Mother were here to interpret it.

He decided to do nothing about it for the moment. He addressed Arthur in a voice loud enough for them all to hear. “Five of my free tenants here are in arrears, is that right?”

“Yes, lord.”

“Who is the worst?”

“Athelstan hasn’t paid for two years, but he was very unlucky with his pigs-”

William spoke over Arthur, cutting him off. “Which one of you is Athelstan?”

A tall, stoop-shouldered man of about forty-five years stepped forward. He had thinning hair and watery eyes.

William said: “Why don’t you pay me rent?”

“Lord, it’s a small holding, and I’ve no one to help me, now that my boys have gone to work in the town, and then there was the swine fever-”

“Just a moment,” William said. “Where did your sons go?”

“To Kingsbridge, lord, to work on the new cathedral there, for they want to marry, as young men must, and my land won’t support three families.”

William tucked away in his memory, for future reflection, the information that the young men had gone to work on Kingsbridge Cathedral. “Your holding is big enough to support one family, at any rate, but still you don’t pay your rent.”

Athelstan began to talk about his pigs again. William stared malevolently at him without listening. I know why you haven’t paid, he thought; you knew your lord was ill and you decided to cheat him while he was incapable of enforcing his rights. The other four delinquents thought the same. You rob us when we’re weak!

For a moment he was full of self-pity. The five of them had been chuckling over their cleverness, he felt sure. Well, now they would learn their lesson. “Gilbert and Hugh, take this peasant and hold him still,” he said quietly.

Athelstan was still talking. The two knights dismounted and approached him. His tale of swine fever tailed off into nothing. The knights took him by the arms. He turned pale with fear.

William spoke to Walter in the same quiet voice. “Have you got your chain-mail gloves?”

“Yes, lord.”

“Put them on. Teach Athelstan a lesson. But make sure he lives to spread the word.”

“Yes, lord.” Walter took from his saddlebag a pair of leather gauntlets with fine chain mail sewn to the knuckles and the backs of the fingers. He pulled them on slowly. All the villagers watched in dread, and Athelstan began to moan with terror.

Walter got off his horse, walked over to Athelstan and punched him in the stomach with one mailed fist. The thud as the blow landed was sickeningly loud. Athelstan doubled over, too winded to cry out. Gilbert and Hugh pulled him upright, and Walter punched his face. Blood spurted from his mouth and nose. One of the onlookers, a woman who was presumably his wife, screamed out and jumped on Walter, yelling: “Stop! Leave him! Don’t kill him!”

Walter brushed her off, and two other women grabbed her and pulled her back. She continued to scream and struggle. The other peasants watched in mutinous silence as Walter beat Athelstan systematically until his body was limp, his face covered with blood and his eyes closed in unconsciousness.

“Let him go,” William said at last.

Gilbert and Hugh released Athelstan. He slumped to the ground and lay still. The women released the wife and she ran to him, sobbing, and knelt beside him. Walter took off the gauntlets and wiped the blood and pieces of flesh off the chain mail.

William had already lost interest in Athelstan. Looking around the village, he saw a new-looking two-story wooden structure built on the edge of the brook. He pointed to it and said to Arthur: “What’s that?”

“I haven’t seen it before, lord,” Arthur said nervously.

William thought he was lying. “It’s a water mill, isn’t it?”

Arthur shrugged, but his indifference was unconvincing. “I can’t imagine what else it would be, right there by the stream.”

How could he be so insolent, when he had just seen a peasant beaten half to death on William’s orders? Almost desperately, William said: “Are my serfs allowed to build mills without my permission?”

“No, lord.”

“Do you know why this is prohibited?”

“So that they will bring their grain to the lord’s mills and pay him to grind it for them.”

“And the lord will profit.”

“Yes, lord.” Arthur spoke in the condescending tone of one who explains something elementary to a child. “But if they pay a fine for building a mill, the lord will profit just the same.”

William found his tone maddening. “No, he won’t profit just the same. The fine is never as much as the peasants would otherwise have to pay. That’s why they love to build mills. And that’s why my father would never let them.” Without giving Arthur the chance to reply, he kicked his horse and rode over to the mill. His knights followed, and the villagers tailed along behind them in a ragged crowd.

William dismounted. There was no doubt about what the building was. A large waterwheel was turning under the pressure of the fast-flowing stream. The wheel turned a shaft which went through the side wall of the mill. It was a solid wooden construction, made to last. Whoever built it had clearly expected to be free to use it for years.

The miller stood outside the open door, wearing a prepared expression of injured innocence. In the room behind him were sacks of grain in neat stacks. William dismounted. The miller bowed to him politely, but was there not a hint of scorn in his look? Once again William had the painful sense that these people thought he was a nobody, and his inability to impose his will on them made him feel impotent. Indignation and frustration welled up in him, and he yelled at the miller furiously. “Whatever made you think you could get away with this? Do you imagine that I’m stupid? Is that it? Is that what you think?” Then he punched the man in the face.

The miller gave an exaggerated cry of pain and fell to the ground quite unnecessarily.

William stepped over him and went inside. The shaft of the waterwheel was connected, by a set of wooden gears, to the shaft of the grindstone on the upper floor. The milled grain fell through a chute to the threshing floor at ground level. The second floor, which had to bear the weight of the grindstone, was supported by four stout timbers (taken from William’s forest without permission, undoubtedly). If the timbers were cut the whole building would fall.

William went outside. Hugh Axe carried the weapon from which he got his name strapped to his saddle. William said: “Give me your battle-ax.” Hugh obliged. William went back inside and began to attack the timber supports of the upper floor.

It gave him great satisfaction to feel the blade of the ax thud into the building that the peasants had so carefully constructed in their attempt to cheat him of his milling fees. They aren’t laughing at me now, he thought savagely.