Brother Simon Lathom

He came with four brothers and a warrant, took a brick building behind the staple houses, and stayed. The house has stood in Fleecegate ever since. Why it was founded is the one question its own books never answer.

In 4457 a special assize at Sarrum, then a small fulling town, established a matter of black rites at law: nine were taken on three unrelated informations and four were hanged the next March, and the depositions have since vanished. Eleven years later the Black Lantern Brethren founded a house at Fleecegate. The volumes say nobody ever recorded why. The order's own tradition gives the founder's name and nothing more, and this telling keeps to that.

Simon Lathom came from the Wold house with four brothers and a warrant from the order, took the plain brick building behind the staple houses that the house still holds, and began attending the closed grounds and the pits. The wool men thought the house an insult to the town; the chapter thought it an expense. He answered neither in writing. He asked no fee of the fulling yards for twenty years and kept a light in the upper window every night, which the town came to set its night watch by.

When he died in 4489 the house had nine brothers and a lay staff, and the brothers had learned his one rule about the founding, which was not to discuss it. The house's book records his burial and no reason for anything. Canon Martin Elwick, the present proctor, has asked the house about it more than once and been given tea.

In person

About fifty at the founding, spare and dark, clean-shaven, with deep-set eyes, a long jaw and close-cropped grey hair. A black wool habit with a hood and a black leather belt, a horn lantern with blackened panes carried in one hand, a plain iron cross on the breast; he stands in a brick doorway on a narrow wet street, a wool cart going by.