THE SINFUL MONK

Centuries ago punishment for religious so-called sun could be quite horrific

Brother Joseph closed his eyes and sighed.

He was going to lose his head to the executioner’s axe before noon brought the morning to a ragged end, and he only vaguely knew why.

It was the fault of his God. It must be a divine requirement. It can’t have been his own fault, can it? He prayed as often as convention demanded, and sometimes a darned sight more often than that when he imagined he thought wicked thoughts, though he had no idea whether they were wicked or not. It can’t have been the king’s fault, can it, because the king is on his throne courtesy of that same God, the one he prayed to, the one who organised everything from the start of the world until its ending some time in the hugeness of the future.

Maybe it was all part of a grand and holy scheme. And maybe he’d be told. Maybe the first thing that his lord would say to him when they met face to face would be why...

It had been decided that he was to lose his head, which in itself was a blessing because one of the alternatives was being burned at the stake, and no matter how he looked at it, it sounded painful to die in fire. Maybe it was the courtroom itself, the bricks and mortar, the oak benches and sombre ceiling, that had been cursed by a damned Protestant and that curse had put words into the heads of the judges to condemn any good catholic boy who came that way in chains.

So he was condemned to lose his head. Before the clocks struck noon, giving him a few hours of torment while he thought about it, began to dread it, sweated at the promise of meeting his maker.. or would he? Many souls were released from their earthly bondage every day, most through old age and a few, like him, via the gift of the axe. Would his maker have the time to sit him by his majestic side and smile warmly on him and… but no! Stop this mental wittering! This was doubt! It was the beginnings of unbelief! This was a sure way his soul would be diverted to hell!

“What, my Lord, have I done that is so wrong I must sacrifice my life?” he whispered, and waited for the sound of his deity when it spoke to him in the very depths of his brain where only the noble words of his god could be spoken. He had been spoken to before, a sonorous voice squashing every other thought his head might contain and issuing incomprehensible orders.

That voice came into his head quite often, but it was silent now, when it was most needed, to maybe comfort him or explain the purpose behind his execution. Maybe he’d asked the wrong question, or maybe to die was no sacrifice at all… after all, everyone who was born had to die, usually in their dotage when their minds gets scrambled by the forces of Satan until they could barely think. At least he was being spared that. After all, he was only twenty three years old and so that dotage would rightly be many years away, many years for him to accumulate prayerful memories that would, if given their full term, writhe in his shattered mind and torment him with the madness of old age.

He can hear the clock in the great hall and counts its chimes, one soulful dong for each hour. Ten. So two hours until noon. It’s two hours to noon when they would come, accurate as ever, on the dot, a priest in his robes spouting the anti-Roman protestant nonsense as they led him to the platform where his life would be ended by, he hoped, just the single blow of an axe, and his jailer, grinning because it wasn’t him shivering on the bench seat in the cell.

Two hours for him to try and remember what he had done or said for the judge to have been so vitriolic in his condemnation of him, and ordered for the axeman to come and deal with him according to the law, at noon today.

He screwed his eyes up, and concentrated. What had he said, and where had he said it? Not surely where they’d said he had because, well, he had no idea where the place was. He’d never been far from the monastery, barely half a mile at a guess in all of his life. He can’t have been to where he’d been told he’d been and said what he knew he hadn’t said? He would never, and of this he was more certain than a man can be, say such a thing against a king?

The King was quite definite about his appointment by God to rule the nation. It wasn’t the clergy or bishops or even lowly monks like himself who determined what would or would not be right and beautiful and even holy in the land, it was the king.

So, ultimately, it was the king who wanted his, Brother Joseph’s, head on a spike. Because he was told he had gone to Winchester Cathedral and had actually spat on its sacred stones where the saints had knelt in prayer, and called the king a slave of the necromancer. That’s what they’d accused him of! Making the journey as a pilgrim to Winchester and then saying evil things about his King.

Where was Winchester? He’d heard there was a cathedral there, but hadn’t the least idea whether he’d go north, east, south or west in order to get there. And would he be able to walk the miles along the road, and return, in a day?

They said he had. They said it might sound a long journey, but Satan had helped him.

When he’d protested his ignorance and innocence he’d been told he was only making things worse for himself, by lying. It’s what servants of the necromancer do, the judge had said, tell lies in a holy court.

Dong. Another half hour has passed. Not so long now and they’d come. Praying to what? Not to his God, that’s for sure, because hadn’t he been told that the protestants had got it all wrong and were in thrall to a very different deity, not the omnipotent creator of all things but a shadow of that great force.

A rumble inside his head stopped his thinking. His Lord was coming to speak to him, to give him a final message before his head ended up on a blood-stained spike for all to see and scorn.

And the voice was there. Loud as if it was accompanied by a thousand trumpets, all in tune with its magnificence. Deep and resonant and so reassuring it was hard to believe that everyone in the castle jail, from the gate-keeper’s wife who spent so many hours loafing about and swinging on the gate itself when she thought no-one was looking, and lifting her skirts up when she thought he might be, threatening to expose the sin of his dreams…

BROTHER JOSEPH, boomed the voice so that it tickled the back of his eyes and made him clamp them shut, THOU HAST CAST SINFUL EYES ON SHE AT THE GATE AND THOU HAST HANKERED AFTER HER FLESH AND DISPLEASED ME, AND HER FLESH IS NOT YOUR FLESH, IT IS NOT FOR YOU, NO WOMAN’S FLESH WILL EVER BE FOR YOU, YOU CREATURE OF SIN… WHAT ARE YOU?

He swallowed. So that was his sin! How marvellously clever of his god to know he would hanker after the flesh of a woman, but not until he was sweating in a prison cell ready to be punished for doing it! The punishment proclaimed before the sin! How wonderful was his lord!

“O Lord, I am a creature of sin…” he whispered. And in his mind, as if a manuscript book was being opened to him for the first time, he saw the colossal size of his sin. Staring at the crumbling wall opposite to where he sat wringing his hands he saw a sharp and brilliant image of the gate-keeper’s wife as she divested herself of her garments and stood staring at him, naked as he’d never seen any woman in life. His God was showing him the substance of all his sinful dreams..

And the cell door opened.

Everything, the voice of his god, the woman on the wall, everything disappeared as he took his place with the jailer in front of him and the priest, belching breathy fumes he couldn’t place walking muttering behind him, and as if it was but a step away he found himself in front of a stone block, and then lying down, face down, with his neck exposed for the axeman to sever, and he swallowed, tasted the salt of his saliva, the jailer issuing an order, and then…

Nothing…

© Peter Rogerson 26.04.23