The Iron of Chartham

by Anselm of Canterbury, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The iron of Chartham lived in the church chest, wrapped in a sheepskin, under the chrism and the good altar cloth and over the old vestments nobody wore. It was a bar a little longer than a man's hand, black, with one face worn smooth and grey where the hands had held it, and it weighed a pound. Sired the priest had taken it out of the chest twelve times in nineteen years. On the Tuesday after Michaelmas he took it out for the thirteenth.

The fleeces were Brihtwold's. He had sheared late, because of the rain, and stacked eight fleeces in the shed below his house, where the ground runs down to the Stour, and on the third morning there were none. There had been a mark of a foot in the mud by the shed door, a bare foot, and Cola had bare feet from Easter to All Saints. That was not much. But Cola took the monks' hares out of the Christ Church warren in snares of horsehair, and everyone knew it, and the monks' reeve knew it, and when the hundred met and Cola said he had not touched the fleeces, nobody stood up to swear with him except his mother, and a woman's oath and a poacher's together came to less than one man's. So he was to go to the iron.

He came to the priest's house three days before, as the law says, and he ate there what the law says: bread, and water, and salt, and herbs from Gytha's bed by the wall. He heard Mass each of the three mornings standing at the back, with his arms folded, as if he were waiting for a cart. On the Tuesday he made his offering, a halfpenny that his mother gave him at the church door, and swore on the book that he was clean of the fleeces, and Sired gave him the book to kiss and the cross to kiss and sprinkled him with holy water, and Brihtwold's people with it, and Cola's mother, and the fire.

There were seven on Brihtwold's side, which was a great many for eight fleeces, and two on Cola's. Sired measured the nine feet himself, heel to toe, with Cola's own bare foot set against the floor of the nave and a mark made in chalk at the end of each length. Cola had a long narrow foot. The nine feet went nearly to the font.

The iron lay in the fire while Sired said the prayers over it. Then he took it out with the tongs and laid it on Cola's palm, and Cola's face did not change at all until the third step, and then it changed, and he walked the other six with his eyes shut and his mouth open, and threw the iron down past the last mark so that it skidded on the stones and lay smoking against the foot of the font. Sired bound the hand himself, in clean linen, round and round, and tied the ends, and pressed the church's seal into the wax over the knot. Leofrun, the mother, held the cup of water to her son's mouth. She did not look at Brihtwold's people. Nobody on either side said anything at all.

On the third day the hand would be unwrapped before them all, and Sired would look at it and say clean, or say foul.

---

He did not sleep well on the Thursday night. He had not expected to sleep badly, and that kept him awake longer than the thing itself.

In the dark, with Gytha breathing beside him, he began, for no reason he could name, to count the others. He had them all; he was surprised how readily they came. Ælfgar the smith's boy, the first year, the hand clean. A man from Thanington, foul. Wynflæd, who had sold a cow that was not hers, foul. The two brothers from up the valley, one clean and one foul, on the same day, and that one he remembered best because it had been the hardest, because the brothers had looked so alike. Tofi, twice.

He went through them a second time, more slowly, and he made himself do a thing he had not done before. He did not ask of each one what the hand had looked like. He asked what he had thought before he saw it.

Ælfgar: clean. He had thought clean. Everyone had; the boy had carried the iron for his master, who had beaten him for it afterwards. The man from Thanington: he had thought foul. Wynflæd: foul. The brothers: he had thought the elder had done it and the younger had only stood by, and the elder's hand was foul, and the younger's clean.

Twelve. In twelve, not once had he lifted the linen and seen something he had not already thought.

He lay and turned this over, carefully, as he would have turned over a coin with a doubtful edge. It might mean that he had a good eye for men. He had been nineteen years in Chartham and had buried their parents and stood at their weddings. It might mean that God had been gracious to Chartham twelve times, and to its priest. It might mean that the iron and he agreed because they were both right.

He tried to remember Tofi's hand, the second time, the time that had cost Tofi the hand. He could remember the linen, and the colour of the wax, and Tofi's wife making a noise like a gate. He could remember saying foul, quite clearly; he could hear it. He could not see the hand. He tried, lying there, until his eyes ached in the dark. Where the hand should have been there was only the word.

---

In the morning Gytha was at the hearth with the porridge. The archbishop's council at Westminster had said, the autumn before last, that priests were to put away their wives. Gytha had heard this and gone on making porridge.

"Well," she said. "Clean or foul?"

"I have not seen it."

"You know what I mean."

He did. He thought about whether to say. "Foul," he said.

"Then it will be foul," Gytha said, and put the bowl in front of him, and went out to the hens.

He sat and looked at the porridge. She had not meant anything by it. She had meant: you are seldom wrong. She had meant it kindly. He ate the porridge, and it was the same porridge as every morning, and he could not taste it.

---

They came to the church at the third hour, Brihtwold's seven and Cola's two and Cola between them, his bound hand held against his chest in the other hand, the way a man carries a bird. A good many others had come who were on neither side, and stood in the porch and along the north wall where the light came in. The day was grey. Sired had lit the candles on the altar because of the dark, and then wished he had not, because they made the nave look as if something were about to be sung.

He had Cola stand by the font, where the iron had fallen, and he took the knife from his belt to cut the linen. Then he stopped.

"Before I open it," he said, "I want to say what I think."

There was a small movement along the north wall.

"I think it will be foul," Sired said. "I thought so on Tuesday. I thought so last night, and this morning, before I came out. I want you to know I thought so. Brihtwold. Leofrun. Remember that I said it."

Brihtwold said, "Why?"

Sired did not answer, because he did not have an answer that he could give in a church in front of forty people; he had only the twelve, and the word where Tofi's hand should have been. He cut the wax, and the linen under it, and began to unwind.

The linen stuck at the last turns. It had dried into the wound. He wet it from the jug of water he had brought and worked it free, slowly, with Cola breathing through his teeth, and then he took the hand by the wrist and turned it to the light from the north window and looked.

It was a burn three days old.

There was a band across the palm, a little slanting, where the iron had lain, the width of two fingers. The great blister had broken, as they all broke, and the skin hung off it in a loose white rag at one end. Underneath, the flesh was red and wet, and at the edges it was paler, and at one corner, by the root of the thumb, there was a yellow shine that might be the beginning of matter or might be only the wet. There was a smell, faint; there was always a smell, faint. The fingers were swollen, but Cola could close them a little. Sired asked him to and he did.

Sired looked at it for a long time. He was waiting, he understood after a while, for it to say foul to him, as the others had. He had said foul aloud in front of them all, and still he was waiting for the hand to agree with him, and the hand only lay in his own hand, wet and red, like a burn three days old.

He thought of Ælfgar's hand, which had been clean. He could not see it either. But he had a sudden certainty, standing there, that if he could have seen it, it would have looked like this.

"Well?" said Brihtwold. He had come up close, nearly to the font. "You said."

"I said what I thought," said Sired. "I did not say what the iron said." He found his voice was quite steady, which surprised him. "That is why I said it first. So that you could see which was which."

"And which is which?"

Sired turned the hand once more to the window. The yellow by the thumb. The rag of white skin. He could make it foul. He could feel exactly how it would be done, the way you feel the step down in your own house in the dark; it was the easiest thing in the church. He had only to look at the corner by the thumb and not at the rest, and say the word he had already said, and everyone on the north wall would nod, because it was what they had come thinking too.

"The iron was to show it," he said. "If it is foul, it was to show it so that a man who knew nothing of Cola would see it. A stranger. Somebody from Sussex who had never heard of the hares." He let go of the wrist. "I cannot say that a stranger would see it. I can only say that I would, because I came wanting to. That is not the iron. That is me."

"So it is clean," said Leofrun, from behind her son. It was the first thing she had said in three days.

"It is not shown foul," said Sired. "The law asks the iron to show it. It has not. So he is clean."

---

Brihtwold went out without speaking, and five of his seven with him. The other two stayed and looked at Sired in the way people look at a man who has fallen down in the road for no reason, to see whether he will get up. Then they went too. Brihtwold would go to the monks, Sired supposed, and the monks' reeve would say that the priest had pronounced and there was an end, and Brihtwold would not greet him at the church door for a year, and then he would. That was what it would cost. It was eight fleeces.

Cola stood by the font holding his hand against his chest. He did not thank the priest, and Sired was glad he did not. Leofrun bound the hand up again in a rag from her own head, quickly and badly, and took him out, and the people along the north wall went out after them talking, and Sired was alone with the candles burning on the altar for nothing.

He put the candles out. He picked the iron up from the place by the font where it still lay — nobody had moved it since Tuesday; nobody liked to — and wrapped it in its sheepskin, and stood holding it.

---

Tofi was at the mill-tail in the evening, where he was most evenings, with a wicker eel-trap in the water and his back against the wall of the mill. He held the trap's cord in his left hand. His right arm ended a little above the wrist in a smooth, puckered round, like the end of a loaf, which he rested on his knee.

Sired sat down beside him on the wet grass. Tofi moved over a little to make room and said nothing. They watched the water come white off the wheel and go brown again under the alders.

"You let the Cola boy off," Tofi said at last.

"Yes."

"They say you told them first you thought he did it."

"Yes."

Tofi nodded, slowly, and pulled the cord a little to feel the weight of the trap. Then he looked at the priest, sideways, with the face he had always had, which was a narrow, patient face, and which Sired found he could see perfectly well.

"What did you think about me?" Tofi said.

Sired opened his mouth. The water came off the wheel. Down by the alders a moorhen went across, jerking its head.

Tofi waited. Then he turned back to the river, and drew the trap up out of the water, streaming, and held it out to Sired with his one hand, so that the priest would have to take it from him, which he did, and they looked together at what was inside.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ab Anselmō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Anselm of Canterbury, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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