The Lost Prophecies Read Online Free PDF

shut the door behind him.
    Unsurprisingly, the jury at the short inquest decided that the finds from the new well were treasure-trove, as the original owner must have buried them deliberately in the expectation that he would one day recover them – as opposed to an accidental loss from a hole in a man’s purse or pocket. In that case, the booty would belong to the actual finder, but obviously this could not apply to a sackful of coins and jewellery. Thomas de Peyne had recorded the findings on his rolls, to be presented to the king’s justices when they eventually arrived in Exeter to hold the next Eyre of Assize. When the proceedings were finished, he went back to the cathedral to get on with his other work. The archives and library were also the scriptorium and exchequer of the cathedral, where clerks laboriously wrote out all manner of documents, from orders of services to the financial accounts of the diocese.
    The library formed the upper floor of the Chapter House, a wooden building adjacent to the huge church, where the daily meetings of the Chapter were held. This was the controlling body of the cathedral, consisting of the twenty-four canons, who included the four archdeacons, as it would be some years before Exeter followed other cathedrals in appointing a dean.
    The benches for the members were on the ground floor, below the lectern from which a ‘chapter’ of either the Gospels or the Rule of St Benedict was read, giving the meeting its name.
    In the corner was a steep stairway up which Thomas de Peyne now climbed to the large chamber that contained the mass of documents which he had the task of organizing. A dozen high desks filled the centre of the room, around a charcoal brazier which stood on a slab of slate on the wooden floor. Its heat barely warmed the atmosphere, as the shutters on the un-glazed window openings were wide open to admit light to the handful of shivering clerks who were working at the desks. Around the walls were sloping shelves on which to rest the heavy books, the more valuable of which were chained to the wall, such as the Exon version of King William’s Domesday Book. Other shelves and pigeonholes contained a mass of parchment rolls, and a number of boxes and chests on the floor were filled with more documents.
    Thomas stood and stared at the collection with a mixture of pride and exasperation. An intelligent man, he had been schooled in Winchester and was unusually well informed about all manner of topics, from history to theology, from geography to the classics. He was delighted to be given a free run of all these literary treasures, but the task of putting them all in order was a daunting prospect. Many of the smaller tracts and loose parchments had never been listed, and Thomas suspected that some of the boxes below the shelves had not been opened in decades.
    He had appropriated a corner desk to himself, where he had begun the marathon job of cataloguing each item before putting them in order on the upper shelves. One of his problems was that he could never resist reading through anything that seemed interesting, which slowed down his progress considerably, even though it added to his already compendious knowledge. Now he settled himself on the high stool at his desk and began sorting through the pile of documents that he had selected the previous day, working steadily for the next hour.
    ‘How are your labours going, Thomas?’ A deep voice dragged him from his efforts to read the crabbed Latin script of a long-dead priest who had listed the donations for the building of a shrine in the cathedral some sixty years before. The speaker was Jordan le Brent, the canon who acted as archivist and master of the scriptorium. He was an amiable, elderly man with a devotion to learning and history similar to that of the coroner’s clerk.
    ‘Well enough, sir, though slowly,’ replied Thomas. ‘At least we seem to have at last been spared all those who came searching for maps to buried