In Broughton, John’s future surrounded him like a death foretold. It was there in his father’s lame leg and in his uncle’s deformed back (spinal deformations, arthritis, and osteoarthritis were rife among the medieval peasantry), and it was there, too, in the worn faces of the village’s thirty-year-olds. John would work hard, die young—probably before forty—and, as sure as the sun rose into the cozy English sky above Broughton each morning, the day after his death an abbey official would be at the door to claim his best horse or cow from his widow as a heriot, or death tax.
