Roger Belasis

A senior factor of the northern wool trade who has watched a great many southern buyers ride north. Of the four things a traveller sees first, he writes, the fourth is the one he will ask about; he will be answered shortly, and spend the rest of his journey counting.

Roger Belasis is named beside Hugh Brantingham as typical of the better sort of factor at Harrowgate: a man who owns little ground in the district and yet, by the price he will post before the clip, can move a season on the upland. Through such factors the Staplers of Sarrum buy the northern wool, and through them southern money arrives behind the clip; they are, in consequence, the richest and most visible of the town’s commercial people, and the March’s chief connection to capital it will never see.

His What the Trade Sees, dated 4614, is the book a stranger should have read before he crosses the bar. Stone, water, sheep, and a lamp burning at noon in an empty place: three of those four, Belasis writes, a traveller understands at once. The fourth he asks about, and whoever he asks answers him shortly, and he spends the rest of his journey noticing how many of them there are. The country he describes is low, thick and grey, stone to the eaves and roofed against the wind, and marked at thresholds, doors and field corners in ways that are understood locally and never explained to anybody who has not asked properly.

The lamps are the impression that unsettles. They are kept burning in the middle of the day at staithes, fold gates and the ends of causeways; somebody tends them; the oil is paid for out of a parish rate, and the accounts are kept as carefully as the accounts for the bridge. A factor’s eye is a reckoning eye, and Belasis has the trade’s habit of noticing where money goes. By the third or fourth day, the March’s own account runs, a traveller understands that this is a country arranged, at considerable expense, against something, and that the expense is buried in a dozen ordinary parish books.

Companies meet him when the clip must move, for the wool goes south by road and the road beyond the town is not the road below it, and when a southern buyer wants to know whether the price he has been quoted is a northern price or a stranger’s. His security, like the town’s, is goods and reputation rather than land, and he extends credit only against things that will cross the bridge. A party that has carried his wool to the bar without loss will find his signet on a letter that opens doors in Sarrum, and a party that has not will find him courteous, unhurried and engaged elsewhere.

In person

Roger Belasis is a large, older merchant with silver-grey hair and white mutton-chop whiskers. Old claw scars mark him, and he wears a distinctive signet ring that is known on every wool advance in Harrowgate.