The first is a royal wedding, the second, a royal scandal; and just before Christmas of the year of Our Lord, 1477, information reached us in Bristol that the country was shortly to be edified by both. With my wife, Adela, and our two small children, Elizabeth and Nicholas, I was paying a Sabbath visit to the Redcliffe home of my erstwhile mother-in-law, Margaret Walker, when I first heard the news. We were all returning to her cottage from the nearby church of Saint Thomas, where we had stood, crowded cheek by jowl, with the rest of the weaving community for morning Mass, when we were overtaken by Jack Nym. By trade, Jack was a carter and had, until six months earlier, worked mainly for the late Alderman Weaver, bringing bales of raw wool from the Cotswold pastures to the Redcliffe weaving sheds, or carting the finished cloth to its various destinations. But now that the alderman was dead, his looms and house sold, his wealth passed into the hands of his younger brother who lived in London, Jack Nym took work wherever he could find it, and had, he was pleased to inform us, but recently returned from delivering a cartload of merchandise to the capital.
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