‘You’d better tell M’Dame about it if you really think there were five,’ she said. But she too had thought there were five.

There was movement. People were finding themselves seats on the benches. Tom and Rob were heaving the roasted meats off the hooks and laying them on the huge wooden bowls. Whetstones rattled along knives. Joan was bustling round dropping thick trenchers of bread on the tables. Sir Hugh and his family and Father John stood in a row behind the high table, Rollo was fussing around with a number of earthenware vessels and a large bucket brimming with ale that stood on the end of the table. Ed-me-boy was going along the trestle tables sticking candles, from a bundle under his arm, into the wooden blocks along the length and lighting them one from another as he went. Many careful eyes watched him. Candles in this profusion were a luxury.

Sir Hugh, in the centre of the high table, banged on it with the handle of his knife, and in the following silence, announced that Father John, Tim Rockwell and three other boys would sing the blessing. Father John, who always conducted Mass in a vague monotonous sing-song, insisted on a sung blessing, such as he had learnt at Rochester as a young man. Musical he had never been, and the intervening decades had weakened what memory he had, but the Christmas ritual must be followed. So, as always before the Christmas feast, the four boys were ranged in a row at the side of the dais, and at Father John’s raised hand descending, the boys, not quite in unison, started intoning Non nobis, Domine, non nobis without understanding a word.

All were startled when Jo Hodgson, who seemed twice as tall as he had been at the sheep-shearing, said loudly, ‘No, that’s wrong,’ and joined in the singing himself in a newly acquired powerful tenor that surprised everyone. But an interruption could not be tolerated and several voices called out, ‘Shut up, Jo,’ and, ‘It’s the priest’s song – he knows how it goes,’ so the boys started again, in less unison, while Jo sat looking annoyed and preoccupied and the youngest singer collapsed into giggles. Father John was obviously relieved when it was over so that the eating could start.

Tom was serving at the high table, placing slices of roast veal on the bread trenchers, which, because there were gentry at the high table, had been put on wide wooden bowls which collected any fat and gravy that the bread had not absorbed. Joan followed him with a big earthenware jug containing the hot fat and gravy that had poured into the drip-pan. It was flavoured with thyme and sage, and the hot perfume was added to the smells of roast meat, steaming woollen clothes and tallow candles. Matt, the ploughman, bringing with him, as always, a whiff of the stables, was filling pots with ale from the bucket near Rollo and passing them to whoever happened to be sitting at the tables’ ends nearest the dais.