his attention caught.
âBrother, what are you doing? Show me your hands. Look at that, will you? Blotched purple and orange and white â itâs too cold. Youâll be getting chilblains. Thatâs how they come â when you get your hands and your feet too cold, and then you go back inside â likely as not into the warming room to hold your fingers to the fire because they hurt so from the cold. The sudden alteration is too much. You must take care of your hands. Go back inside and get some mittens. Yes â now! I donât want to see you â any of you â working out in this weather with bare hands. Brother Cedd, you should have reminded him. It is a neglect of charity to let him put his health at risk like that. You should be ashamed of yourself.â
He spoke with more severity than he normally would, because he felt anxious and guilty. This was not a good time for his cellarer to die. The extra fires, the extra food â he needed advice to reassure him of the boundaries between necessary charity, advisable leniency, and extravagance that must stop. And a visitation from the new bishop looming later in the spring. He cursed himself that Brother Ambroseâs death had caught him on the hop like this. He acknowledged the truth of it was that William had left everything in such good order that, with the bequests from old Mother Cottinghamâs will just over a year ago, he had felt the constant nagging concern over their financial state lift, and relaxed too much. He knew Brother Ambrose was very old, knew he had to find another cellarer â but none of the men seemed just right for the work, and the easing of the situation allowed him to believe everything could roll along for another year or two. Just as soon as heâd caught up with the pastoral needs of vocational oversight, and improved his skills in the area of biblical exposition, and got to grips with the complexities of the abbeyâs role as a landlord, and paid some heed to whatever was happening in the school, he could turn his attention again to the task of replacing his cellarer.
And then Brother Ambrose had died; a sudden, quiet, unexceptional death. The old man had slipped out of this world in his sleep, his face peaceful and innocent in repose, wearing his stockings and a shawl tucked around him because the night was cold. When they called him, Abbot John had taken a moment to look with reverence on holy death and commend his brotherâs soul to God in prayer, twenty minutes to organize the laying out and removal of his body and the thorough cleaning of his cell, and then made himself look steadily at the dilemma he had created in not acting more timely, not finding someone to learn the work while the system ran smoothly and there remained an obedientiary alive to pass on what a cellarer needed to know.
The worst of it was that it made him face up to a further problem he had been avoiding: in Father Chad he had the most awful prior. An abbot needed at his right hand a man of authority and effectiveness, someone with enough confidence in his own judgment to allow humility and decisiveness to co-exist comfortably in his personality. A prior had to be like a rock. There must be no shifting ground in his soul. He must be shrewd, capable, unflappable, likeable, thick-skinned, and have his hand on the pulse of the abbeyâs life. With a really good prior, the unexpected demise of the cellarer would be an inconvenience but not a disaster. With an insecure ditherer holding the obedience, they had a problem as big as all three ridings of Yorkshire. John felt ashamed and embarrassed that this was compounded by his own unworldliness. He was no aristocrat. He had not been born to ruling men and managing wealth and administering great swathes of farmland and governing the decision-making processes that would affect the lives of scores of tenants in addition to the sons of his house and the various other
âBrother, what are you doing? Show me your hands. Look at that, will you? Blotched purple and orange and white â itâs too cold. Youâll be getting chilblains. Thatâs how they come â when you get your hands and your feet too cold, and then you go back inside â likely as not into the warming room to hold your fingers to the fire because they hurt so from the cold. The sudden alteration is too much. You must take care of your hands. Go back inside and get some mittens. Yes â now! I donât want to see you â any of you â working out in this weather with bare hands. Brother Cedd, you should have reminded him. It is a neglect of charity to let him put his health at risk like that. You should be ashamed of yourself.â
He spoke with more severity than he normally would, because he felt anxious and guilty. This was not a good time for his cellarer to die. The extra fires, the extra food â he needed advice to reassure him of the boundaries between necessary charity, advisable leniency, and extravagance that must stop. And a visitation from the new bishop looming later in the spring. He cursed himself that Brother Ambroseâs death had caught him on the hop like this. He acknowledged the truth of it was that William had left everything in such good order that, with the bequests from old Mother Cottinghamâs will just over a year ago, he had felt the constant nagging concern over their financial state lift, and relaxed too much. He knew Brother Ambrose was very old, knew he had to find another cellarer â but none of the men seemed just right for the work, and the easing of the situation allowed him to believe everything could roll along for another year or two. Just as soon as heâd caught up with the pastoral needs of vocational oversight, and improved his skills in the area of biblical exposition, and got to grips with the complexities of the abbeyâs role as a landlord, and paid some heed to whatever was happening in the school, he could turn his attention again to the task of replacing his cellarer.
And then Brother Ambrose had died; a sudden, quiet, unexceptional death. The old man had slipped out of this world in his sleep, his face peaceful and innocent in repose, wearing his stockings and a shawl tucked around him because the night was cold. When they called him, Abbot John had taken a moment to look with reverence on holy death and commend his brotherâs soul to God in prayer, twenty minutes to organize the laying out and removal of his body and the thorough cleaning of his cell, and then made himself look steadily at the dilemma he had created in not acting more timely, not finding someone to learn the work while the system ran smoothly and there remained an obedientiary alive to pass on what a cellarer needed to know.
The worst of it was that it made him face up to a further problem he had been avoiding: in Father Chad he had the most awful prior. An abbot needed at his right hand a man of authority and effectiveness, someone with enough confidence in his own judgment to allow humility and decisiveness to co-exist comfortably in his personality. A prior had to be like a rock. There must be no shifting ground in his soul. He must be shrewd, capable, unflappable, likeable, thick-skinned, and have his hand on the pulse of the abbeyâs life. With a really good prior, the unexpected demise of the cellarer would be an inconvenience but not a disaster. With an insecure ditherer holding the obedience, they had a problem as big as all three ridings of Yorkshire. John felt ashamed and embarrassed that this was compounded by his own unworldliness. He was no aristocrat. He had not been born to ruling men and managing wealth and administering great swathes of farmland and governing the decision-making processes that would affect the lives of scores of tenants in addition to the sons of his house and the various other
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