When tenants collect wood ash to spread on their fields, they find human bones among the remains of a great fire. Hugh de Singleton learns that several men from Bampton and neighbouring villages have recently disappeared; most can be accounted for, but one missing bailiff cannot. The dead man’s office gives Hugh an obvious line of inquiry. Bailiffs collect rents, enforce labour services and represent lordly authority, making them easy targets for resentment from the people whose obligations they police.
Yet the apparent explanation proves too simple. Hugh’s search moves through the economic relationships that bound peasants, tenants and manorial officers in fourteenth-century England, where customary labour and dues could generate enduring grievances. The attempt to burn the body also gives his surgical and observational skills unusual importance: the killer has tried to destroy the evidence rather than merely hide it. The result is a Bampton mystery in which social hierarchy, rural work and the mechanisms of manorial government are directly tied to motive.
