William, Duke of Normandy, was increasingly troubled, the dispute between Abbot Longfrank and Bishop Otto had tormented him for several months, and the sudden exile of his eldest son to England was even worse, and the Duchy's finances were equally alarming, and the war had exhausted the Duke's resources, and William had to stop many works around Caen.

"My lord, the documents are ready." Dean Longfrank said in Norman with an Italian accent.

Duke Wilhelm was like a stone statue, a sign that he was hesitating, and the Italian reminded again: "Everything has been done according to your wishes." ”

A sigh pierced through the cold air, and the Duke involuntarily wrapped his shawl and nodded, so Abbot Longfrank laid down the thick parchment scroll.

A few days later, Bishop Odo, who had been praying in Bayeux parish, was arrested without warning on charges of buying and selling the priesthood and illegally encroaching on the duchy's lands.

Caen's fortunes revealed ominous signs, but despite the Duke's years of power, the nobles still appeared in the courtroom. Abbot Longfrank first produced a document proving that Bishop Bayeux had helped Robert of Uriel bribe the election and establish a monastery without the approval of the Holy See – a practice that was so common that many local nobles would even build new dioceses and install their own family members as bishops or abbots in order to gain more power and seize estates.

As a prominent member of the Reformers, Abbot Longfrank once again read the Edict and a treatise of the Holy See, and named out other dignitaries involved in the buying and selling of clergy, including Bishop Geoffrey de Montbrray.

All eyes were on the Norman lord whose name was mentioned, but Bishop Geoffrey was undaunted, and he limped forward, the old wound from the battle of Saint-Lot, which immediately aroused the sympathy of everyone present.

"At the outset, I would like to say that I fully support the view of the Holy See that corruption and depravity only desecrate the rock of St. Peter, and that if anyone can prove any injustice and corruption in the ecclesiastical estate I administer, I am willing to accept all your judgments." This passage took everyone by surprise.

Bishop Geoffrey continued: "As for the priesthood I am currently holding, it was originally purchased by my brother without my knowledge, and it is well known that I was once blinded by worldly pleasures and refused to choose a life of service to God, but after accepting this appointment I came to realize the sins of my youth, and in the parish I administered, I built the walls and church towers with stones, in order to increase the glory of the Lord; I have also increased the inheritance under this office, and have never swallowed up the revenues belonging to Rome and the Duchy, and I am willing to hand over the shawl if Your Excellency and the adults present here consider it illegal. ”

After saying that, Bishop Jeffrey humbly saluted the Duke, and Duke William nodded to him. Then, all eyes turned to the protagonist of today's trial, Bishop Odo, of Bayeuux.

On the site of this tribunal there was an attendant, an Anglo-Saxon, who had a Norman name - Odrick. The young man came from a fishing village in Kent, and his ancestors may have come from a Jute tribe, but for the young Odrick, no place name was meaningful, he only knew that there were near places and far places in the world, just as there were noble and lowly people in the world. He knew early on that he belonged to the lowly kind of people, and was destined to work until death in the square inch of the fishing village where he was born, and that he would never have anything to do with the great names and noble people of the fishermen, and that he would marry a fisherman's daughter, the typical fishing village wife, and give birth to a group of children destined to be ignorant, after all, all the people in this place were blood relatives within three or four generations.

But a heterochromatic ornament is woven into the spindle of impermanence, and he is chosen as a spy after the boring life of mending fishing nets and peeling oyster shells. When he was a teenager, the world suddenly changed, and when the whole of England was threatened by war, a noble man in the court selected a child of low birth and taught him the art of a spy, and then took him overseas. Many years later, the boy had become a Norman squire, continuing to serve a master abroad, and Aldrick's experience was perhaps far more bizarre than the wildest dreams of his youth, but his world became more monotonous. Admittedly, if he had stayed in his hometown, perhaps the war of ten years ago would have killed a fisherman's son like him, just like the rest of the people who remained in that miserable village. However, after becoming a spy, Odric has already discovered that the world is not as complicated as his childhood dreams, he has traveled to distant cities, visited all kinds of noble princes, only to find that nobles and kings can be as lowly as fishermen, or even more shameless, and those distant place names have the same unpredictable climate and dirty environment as their hometown.

For example, in this scene, an invincible noble lord, the Duke's brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux is being judged harshly like a prisoner in the market.

As Odric listened to the names and numbers written on the long parchment, each worth ten times more than the entire property of the fishing village where he once lived, the hundreds of lords present were silent, not a single one spoke for the poor "prisoner," not even the Count of Mortan, the brother of Bishop Bayoux, bowed his head in silence. The silence of hundreds of nobles can be a silent protest, and the English spy thought, how could a noble duke investigate a lord's property in such detail as a calculating merchant? Will such an investigation be extended to others present? Such an event in itself might have been enough to send shivers of anger and shudder at the same time as all the Norman nobles, but now no one was silent, except for the abbot Longfrank, who read the documents in Latin.

Aldric did not understand the contents of Roman law, but he could feel a strange emotion spreading in the courtroom, he thought that those noble lords would suddenly burst out, even if a fisherman would inevitably lose his cool when he was humiliated like this, even if such a rebellion would cost him his life that was not worth mentioning, and what kind of people were present? Robert Bertram – A Norman lord with a hunchback, but amazing skill on horseback; Pinard de Mostier-Hubert – the tyrant who once slaughtered countless English militiamen; Then there are the nobles from Waldroll, whose archers once unleashed a black rain in Hastings that pierced the eyes of many enemies.

Yet there were hundreds of lords standing under the sky-blue wood carvings, and the whole hall was no more alive than a cemetery, and if it weren't for the peculiar smell that permeated the air, Audric would almost have thought that there were sculptures of brilliant colors standing between the blue and golden parapet panels and arched pilasters.

The wide rectangular hall suddenly fell into a deathly silence, for Longfrank had finished reading the parchment. It was as if Aldrik heard a humming sound, and just as he thought something was about to happen, a somewhat shrill voice rang out:

"Guilty!"

A tidal wave of roars echoed, and almost everyone except the Count of Mortan began to shout as if they had been infected with some contagious disease.

Aldrik suddenly felt a kind of absurdity: a powerful lord had fallen like this?