Canon Bertram Halden

The villages went hungry while the tithe barn stood full, and the keeping of the grain was his. The valleys say he chose it. It has never been proved, nor do the valleys pretend that it has.

Bertram Halden held a canonry of the Halden church, and the granary office under it, in the shortages of the late eleventh century, as the books date them; no year is given, and none can now be fixed. He was a man of the house in the house’s own country, the tithe valleys of Oxford, where the authority of the Golden Sheaves rests on feeding the realm and is therefore suspected whenever the realm goes unfed.

What the valleys tell is worse than what the record says, and they have had centuries to sharpen it. The barn at the head of the valley stood full through a famine winter, its doors chained, and the canon kept the key on his own girdle. Families who came to the gate were sent to pray. When the young men of two parishes came with bars, the granary watch set the dogs on them, and a boy of fourteen died in the snow with his throat torn. Grain went out after dark, the valleys say, by the back road to the city, at a price no village could pay; and the burial roll of that spring was the longest the valleys had seen. Obedience, the story concludes, rose with hunger, which was what he meant it to do.

The record holds a good deal less. One chronicle, eleven lines, written forty years after by an author with an interest in the chapter, says that grain was not released, that he had the keeping of it, and that men said what men say. It does not say he hid grain. No verdict survives. When Dean Frere was asked in 4586 whether the Granary Wolf were a slander, he replied that the chapter had no means of knowing, had never had any, and that a body claiming to know would be lying.

The name has outlasted every other scandal of the house because it gives a village a way of speaking. A villager cannot accuse a duke. He can mention the Granary Wolf in a tithe barn, and the bailiff understands him exactly, and nothing actionable has been said.

In person

About fifty-five, heavy-set and well fed, with tonsured grey hair, a broad clean-shaven face and small watchful eyes. A black canon’s habit and fur-lined cape, the iron keys of the granary office at his belt and a brass grain-measure, inside a full barn while the hungry wait in the snow beyond the door.