Features

An untold history of Sri Lanka’s Independence

Published

5 years ago

2022/02/5

By Uditha Devapriya

In Sri Lank, as in every other colonial outpost, resistance to foreign domination predated Western intervention by well more than two centuries. Surviving numerous onslaughts of South Indian conquest, the Anuradhapura kingdom gave way to the Polonnaruwa kingdom in the 11th century AD. The latter’s demise 200 years later led to a shift from the country’s north to the north-west, and from there to the south-west. It was in the south-west that the Sinhalese first confronted European colonialism, a confrontation that pushed the Kotte and the Sitava kingdoms to the last bastion of Sinhalese rule, Kandy.

The shift to Kandy coincided with the commencement of Portuguese rule in the island. Both Portuguese and Dutch officials emphasised, and sharpened, the line between the Maritime Provinces and the kanda uda rata. The Sitavaka rulers, in particular Rajasinghe I, had fought both Portuguese suzerainty and Kotte domination. These encounters more or less breathed new life into the country’s long history of resistance to foreign rule.

The Kandyan kings inherited this legacy and imbibed this streak. But under them resistance to colonial subjugation acquired a new logic and a fresh vigour. That was to define the island’s struggle against imperialism for well more than three centuries.

Sri Lanka’s confrontations with European colonialism took place in the early part of what historians call the modern period. The social, political, and economic transformations inherent in this period had a considerable impact on the trajectory of European imperialism and anti-imperialism. For that reason, any examination of Sri Lanka’s fight against colonial rule and its eventual independence must evaluate a broad array of historical trends. While the island’s lunge into statehood in 1948 followed a long period of peasant, elite, and radical struggles against foreign domination, the analysis would be incomplete without reference to how European colonialism itself influenced the course of such struggles.

The period between the British annexation of the island and the declaration of independence (1815-1948) unfolded in four successive but interrelated stages. In the first stage between 1815 and 1848, British colonialism was compelled to reckon with the reality of an unending series of peasant uprisings, beginning in Uva-Wellassa in 1817 and culiminating in Matale three decades later. In keeping with similar insurrections in other colonial societies, these were essentially Janus-faced: on the one hand, they sought liberation for a repressed group, the Kandyan peasantry, while on the other they envisaged a return to a pre-colonial polity. Yet, whatever their motives, they wanted to free the country of foreign rule.

The British government realised too late, the folly of assuming that its political-military grip over the island would weaken, and prevail over, peasant resistance. Since the annexation of 1815, the colonial government had drawn and redrawn the country’s borders, breaking up the former Kandyan kingdom into Central and North-Western provinces and separating the Kandyan kingdom from its Sabaragamuwa and Wayamba peripheries. With these measures, officials hoped for the breakup of Kandyan unity. The aim of these processes, notes K. M. de Silva, was “to weaken the national feeling of the Kandyans”.

However, for obvious reasons, none of these reforms could quieten or dispel the spirit of resistance among the peasantry. The Kandyan peasantry never accepted the notion of Sri Lanka as a unitary and united administration overseen by the colonial government. Indeed, when the subject of constitutional reform came up in the 1920s, the Kandyan delegation demanded federal autonomy, predating Tamil nationalist claims for a separate homeland by three decades. This showed very clearly that the British policy of amalgamating the Kandyan provinces with the rest of the country had not really worked out.

To complicate matters further, while dealing with peasant rebellions colonial officials had to put up with the growth of an assertive, and often radical, middle-class. To give one example, the Matala Uprising was never limited to Matale and Kurunegala: it erupted in Colombo as well, where Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher middle-classes protested the government’s tax policies. K. M. de Silva observes that attempts by these middle-classes to influence Kandyan agitation “achieved little impact.” Yet that such an attempt was made at all showed that the colonial government had to reckon with two distinct dissenting groups.

The middle-classes may not have been revolutionaries, but as their interventions during the Matale Uprising showed, they could combine their dissatisfaction with the way things were with popular hatred of the government, to make their own demands. As a way of resolving this issue, between 1848 and 1870 – the second of the four periods pertinent to this essay – the colonial government began hiring and empowering a subservient elite, drawn from “the second echelon of the Kandyan nobility” as well as a low country bourgeoisie.

Newton Gunasinghe has noted the paradox underlying these reforms. While putting an end to the monopoly of the Kandyan aristocracy, the British government reactivated the very social relations that had undergirded traditional Kandyan society. By reviving rajakariya in modified form, feudal production relations in temple lands, and a network of gamsabhas, colonial authorities grafted archaic social customs and practices on what was, essentially, a capitalist mode of production. This had the effect of building up a class of subservient elites and reducing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.

For a while, the strategy worked. However, while it kept the Kandyan peasantry in check and in control, it backfired when the same intermediate elite the government had employed to their ranks began demanding further reforms.

Here it’s important to clarify exactly what these elites wanted. In rebelling against the government, neither the newly co-opted aristocracy nor the middle-classes promoted the overthrow of the British government. They did not want a radical transformation of colonial society, largely because by then they had grown too dependent on that society to envisage, or desire, a Ceylon falling outside the British orbit. This is why, while clamouring for greater representation for themselves, they very carefully, and consistently, opposed the extension of the franchise. As Regi Siriwardena has noted, none of those celebrated as national heroes today – with the important exception of A. E. Goonesinha – wanted universal suffrage vis-à-vis the Donoughmore Commission. Such reforms had to be imposed on them.

Despite this, though, the British government’s policy of engaging with local elites worked fairly well. Colonial officials now had local emissaries through whom they could mediate potential peasant uprisings. Yet the policy necessitated the retention of archaic and quasi-feudal social relations, which in the long term stunted capitalist development. On the other hand, the new strategy paved the way for the revival of various art forms, most prominently the Dalada perahera. As scholars like Senake Bandaranayake have noted, the government defined the perimeters and the contours of cultural artefacts and objets d’art, ensuring that they were in line with the broader aim of legitimising colonial rule.

These reforms led, in the third period (1870-1915), to a Buddhist revival whose exponents alternated between championing opposing to and cooperation with colonial officials. These two lines were promoted, respectively, by the two Buddhist institutions of higher learning established in the late 19th century, Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya. While it’s rather difficult to draw a line between these two universities and their representatives, it is true, as H. L. Seneviratne suggests in The Work of Kings, that significant disagreements prevailed within the Buddhist clergy over the issue of British domination.

From their side, colonial authorities, especially governors like Henry Ward, William Gregory, and Arthur Gordon, sought closer cooperation with a conservative Buddhist bourgeoisie, legitimising British rule while implementing cultural and political reforms. Very often these reforms antagonised groups like Evangelical missionaries. Yet colonial officials ignored their concerns; endearing themselves to revivalists, orientalists, and moderate nationalist opinion to maintain the colonial administrative structure became the bigger priority.

The effect of these developments was to turn the Buddhist elite to the forefront of the reforms being supported by the British government. Towards the end of this period, the bourgeoisie, who were too entrenched economically in colonial rule to advocate radical change, yet too underrepresented politically to be content with the way things were, began to take the lead in these reforms through the Temperance Movement.

The Temperance Movement provided an impetus for a number of other organisations. K. M. de Silva has argued that none of them – not even the ambitious Ceylon National Association – fulfilled the aims for which they had been set up. Ranging from communal outfits like the Dutch Burgher Union to commercial groups like the Plumbago Merchants Union, these organisations, for the most, preferred gradual to radical change, dispensing with the sort of agitation politics that would come to define the Indian National Congress.

Moreover, Hector Abhayavardhana has noted that the bulk of the Sinhalese elite leadership consisted of “small men with narrow vision” who wanted to bring religion into politics. Any hopes for a multicultural alliance faded away with the establishment of Mahajana Sabhas, which campaigned for Buddhist candidates. However highly one may have thought of outfits like the Jaffna Youth Congress, the lack of enthusiasm for such alliances, among the colonial bourgeoisie, paved the way for their inevitable and tragic demise.

Meanwhile, the colonial bourgeoisie faced a more formidable foe, or competitor, in the form of nationalist firebrands like Anagarika Dharmapala. In a bid to blunt the fervour of such firebrands, who they viewed with much distaste, the Sinhalese bourgeoisie toed the Vidyodaya line, promoting change within the framework of a plantation economy while seeking more representation for themselves. This was necessitated by expedience: by the early 20th century a working class movement had begun to emerge in the country, as the Carters’ Strike of 1906 showed, and though it lacked proper leadership, it nevertheless concerned the bourgeoisie. Their rather ambivalent response to these developments had the unfortunate effect of stunting the rise of a mass struggle in the country.

The comprador bourgeoisie shot to fame, so to speak, with the 1915 riots. A point often forgotten in contemporary reconstructions of the riots is that none of the elites arrested by the British government posed a direct threat to colonial rule. As Kumari Jayawardena has pointed out, it was a case of official overreaction to the faintest threat of an anti-colonial uprising. Much like the J. R. Jayewardene government proscribing the Left after the 1983 riots, there was no link between the riots and the causes attributed to it, be it the supposed agitation of Buddhist elites or the politics of the Temperance Movement.

Kumari Jayawardena and K. M. de Silva point out that the period after the 1915 riots – the fourth period relevant to our discussion – witnessed the dulling down and fading away of the Buddhist revival. This is indeed what happened. In the person of Anagarika Dharmapala, the revival had brought together both reformist and radical streams. The Sinhalese elites, obviously cooperating with British authorities, marginalised him to the extent of excluding him from political activity. Yet Dharmapala’s departure from the island gave rise to newer parties and forms of struggle, many of them inspired by his vision. Among these, the most prominent was the Labour Party, founded in 1928 by A. E. Goonesinha.

Naturally enough, working class unrest dominated much of the post-1915 period, leading to the formation of a broad, radical Left. The newly formed Left identified the limitations of Goonesinha’s politics and sought to transcend them. To this end the establishment of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), in 1935, marked a pivotal turning point in the country’s lunge towards independent statehood. Envisioning a complete, radical transformation of society, its representatives and ideologues broke with the dominant political outfit of the day, the Ceylon National Congress, charting their own course.

The LSSP’s original objectives, as radical in their time as in ours, included the socialisation of the means of production, the attainment of complete independence, and the abolition of all forms of inequality, including caste. Given the state of the economy at the time – it was a plantation enclave heavily dependent on a few sectors – no other programme would have sufficed for an organisation calling for a mass struggle against colonial rule. It goes without saying that it was the stalwarts of the Marxist Left – specifically Philip Gunawardena – who first advocated complete independence for Ceylon.

In the meantime, the colonial bourgeoisie managed, rather dismally, to turn the Ceylon National Congress into a pale echo of what it had once aspired to. With the departure of Ponnambalam Arunachalam in 1921, there came an end to an era where, as K. M. de Silva and Hector Abhayavardhana have observed, Sinhala and Tamil communities constituted in unison the majority of the country. In the hands of a predominantly Sinhalese bourgeoisie the Congress became a little more than a communal organisation, a point reinforced by the decision of its leaders to disenfranchise estate Tamils. In this they were occupied more than anything else with the preservation of their economic interests.

All these developments led to a situation where the Left could claim, very validly, that the ruling elite had not won independence, but had secured it on a platter from Whitehall. The elite themselves were not unaware of the inadequacy of their campaign for freedom: when the masses reacted vociferously against the cosmetic reforms they had obtained from the British government, the Congress bourgeoisie quickly went back and pressed for what was being demanded. Yet tied to three agreements which made the defence, foreign policy, and civil service blanks of the government subservient to British interests, Ceylon could become free only through a radical transformation of its political structures.

In breaking off all remaining ties with the colonial government, the 1972 Constitution sought to give effect to such a transformation. By then even the Sinhalese bourgeoisie had come to realise the folly of maintaining the status quo and the inevitability of change: whereas John Kotelawala could support Ceylon remaining a Dominion, Dudley Senanayake could a decade later support the idea of it becoming a Republic within the Commonwealth.

I believe we need a new account of our country’s emergence as an independent state. The accounts we have at present, barring very few, glorify one set of leaders over all others, marginalising and excluding everyone else. Conventional narratives depict the colonial elite as national heroes. This was not always so, though important differences did exist within the bourgeoisie. What we have learnt about our own independence is hardly adequate to the task of helping us understand our past. We badly need a new history.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

Combining local resources,traditional knowledge and science to build a food-secure Sri Lanka

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/16

Thilina Walpola

World Food Day 2026: Innovating today for a better food future

by Dr. Kaushalya Wijayasekara

What will be on the Sri Lankan dinner table ten years from now? Will our children be able to get nutritious food at a price their families can afford? Will farmers be able to grow enough despite changing weather and rising costs? And how much of the food we produce will actually reach the consumer, instead of being lost or wasted along the way?

These questions can’t wait. A farmer faces unpredictable weather. A family faces rising food costs. Fruit goes unsold after a good harvest. Some children do not get enough nutrition. The future of food is tied to the future of Sri Lanka itself.

World Food Day 2026 is a chance to look beyond the immediate problems and ask whether we can build a food system that feeds our people well, gives farmers better opportunities, protects the environment and makes better use of what we already have. The answer can be yes, but we will have to think differently.

We are not starting from zero. Sri Lanka has diverse crops, fisheries, traditional food knowledge, indigenous varieties, research institutions, universities and a young generation able to create new solutions. What we need is to bring these together and act. Producing more will not secure our food future on its own. It will depend on how intelligently we produce, process, preserve, distribute and consume food.

Making more of what we already have

Innovation does not always mean inventing something new. Often it means finding better uses for the resources we have.

Sri Lanka grows traditional rice varieties, kurakkan, green gram, cowpea, jackfruit, breadfruit, cassava, sweet potato, coconut and palmyrah. All of them have great potential for modern, nutritious, value-added foods. Jackfruit and breadfruit can be made into flour and other convenient products. Traditional rice varieties can go into new foods that suit changing consumer needs. Palmyrah, with its strong cultural heritage, can create new income through better processing, packaging, quality assurance and market development.

The aim is to connect our traditional food knowledge with modern consumer needs and technology, while keeping our food heritage.

Stop wasting the food we produce

Reducing food loss and waste should be a major priority. Seasonal fruits such as mango, banana, papaya and pineapple can be lost in large quantities when production exceeds demand or when storage, transport and processing facilities are inadequate. With suitable technology, these fruits can become dried products, pulps, powders, beverages and other shelf-stable foods.

Agricultural and fisheries by-products are resources too. They could be turned into food ingredients, animal feed, bio-based products and other useful materials, which would move us toward a more circular food economy.

Technology alone is not enough. We need stronger local processing facilities, cold storage, efficient transport, collection centres and market information systems, especially close to where food is produced. Cutting food loss raises the value of what our farmers and fishers already produce.

Nutrition and food safety come first

Food security means more than having enough food. People also need food that is safe and nutritious.

Sri Lanka can develop affordable, nutritious foods from local pulses, grains, vegetables, fruits and fish. Children and other vulnerable groups should get particular attention. Schoolchildren in particular deserve a focus: safe, nutritious, locally sourced products for school feeding programs would support child nutrition, local farmers and domestic food industries at the same time.

Food safety must stay at the centre of food innovation. Good hygiene, quality control, laboratory testing, traceability and appropriate food safety systems are what make new products safe as well as attractive and nutritious.

A food system that can cope with climate change

Climate change is already affecting agricultural production, water availability, crop yields and food prices. We need food systems that can handle changing conditions. That means climate-resilient crops, efficient water use, soil and water conservation, better storage and resource-efficient food processing.

Traditional knowledge matters here. Generations of Sri Lankan farmers have developed practices suited to local climates and ecosystems. Combining that experience with modern science can give us solutions that fit local conditions and are sustainable. Technology alone will not build the future of food. Science, experience and local knowledge together can.

Give young people a bigger role

Sri Lanka’s universities have an important part to play in shaping our food future. Young people should be encouraged to identify real problems in the food system and work on practical solutions in areas such as food waste, sustainable packaging, nutrition, food safety, modernising traditional foods and digital technologies.

A good research project should not always end as a research paper. Where appropriate, research should be supported to move on to products, technologies, enterprises and community solutions. That needs stronger partnerships between universities and industry, along with mentoring, research funding, business support and market connections. If young researchers and entrepreneurs can turn their ideas into viable food innovations, both consumers and producers will benefit.

A pathway designed for Sri Lanka

We do not need to copy food-system models from other countries. We can build a pathway that suits our own resources, culture and needs. It would bring together local resources, traditional knowledge, scientific research, appropriate technology and entrepreneurship, with farmers, fishers, universities, research institutions, food industries, entrepreneurs and policymakers working side by side.

The goal goes beyond selling raw materials. We need to create more value, reduce waste, improve nutrition, generate jobs and strengthen rural livelihoods. This matters especially for small and medium-scale food enterprises, which can drive local economic development when they get the right technical, financial and market support.

The choices we make today

The food future will not create itself. It will be shaped by what we grow, what we research, what we process, what we consume and what we choose not to waste.

So, the question for World Food Day 2026 is this: what can we do today so that every Sri Lankan has safe, nutritious, affordable and sustainable food tomorrow?

The answers are already around us, in our farms, fisheries, food businesses, universities, laboratories and communities. We have the resources, the traditional knowledge, the scientific expertise and talented young people. What we need now is to connect them and act.

A better food future begins with the choices we make today.

Dr. Kaushalya Wijayasekara

Senior Lecturer, Department of Biosystems Technology, Faculty of Technology, University of Ruhuna

Features

20th Anniversary of Digampathana blast – the day Sri Lanka Navy cried

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/16

Thilina Walpola

Aftermath of the terror attack

By Admiral Ravindra C Wijegunaratne
WV, RWP and Bar, RSP, VSV, USP, NI (M) (Pakistan), ndc, psn, Bsc
(Hons) (War Studies) (Karachi) MPhil (Madras)
Former Navy Commander and Former Chief of Defence Staff
Former Chairman, Trincomalee Petroleum Terminals Ltd
Former Managing Director Ceylon Petroleum Corporation
Former High Commissioner to Pakistan

The Digampathana suicide truck attack on 16th October 2006 remains the deadliest single strike in Sri Lanka Navy history, leaving scars that time cannot erase.

It was a seemingly ordinary Monday morning on 16 October 2006, but the calm of that day would soon be shattered in a way none of us could have imagined. As the Commandant of the Naval and Maritime Academy and Flag Officer Commanding Naval Fleet at Trincomalee, I was aware that a number of my cadets were travelling that morning, part of a convoy of fifteen buses carrying naval personnel from Trincomalee, Colombo, and other bases, heading toward Dambulla to rendezvous with another group. The convoy also included trucks and escort vehicles, a routine movement planned and coordinated with the army to ensure the roads were clear. The morning started quietly. Some personnel greeted friends, handed over their weapons, or strolled to a nearby tea shop. It all seemed so ordinary—too ordinary for what would come next.

Sri Lanka Navy sunk LTTE Ships carrying arms, ammunition and warlike materials thousand miles away from Sri Lanka in Indian Ocean in September and October 2007.

By late morning, both convoys had reached the small ground at Digampathana, near the Sigiriya junction, and personnel mingled briefly, unaware that a carefully orchestrated act of terror was waiting. Then, suddenly, an empty half-truck veered directly into the convoy. It exploded with a ferocity I can still recall as if it were yesterday. Nuts, bolts, and high explosives tore through the air. Pandemonium erupted instantly. I later learned that 107 of our naval personnel were killed on the spot and another 153 critically injured. The scene was indescribable—bodies scattered, vehicles mangled, personal effects strewn across the ground. I remember later hearing that the head of the suicide bomber was recovered more than 100 meters away from the blast, a grim testament to the sheer force of the explosion.

I was in my office at the Naval and Maritime Academy when my mobile phone rang. A young midshipman from the 21st intake called, his voice trembling: “Sir, there was a huge explosion at the convoy point! Many are dead … my batch mate Wijesundara is among them.” I immediately jumped into my jeep with my escort Chief Petty Officer and driver and rushed to Digampathana, relying on every ounce of my driving skill to reach the scene. The journey, which usually took little more than an hour, felt endless that day, each passing mile weighed down by dread.

When I arrived, I was confronted with a sight that no training can prepare you for. The injured were being rushed to Dambulla Hospital, where doctors and nurses worked tirelessly, improvising in ways that saved lives despite the overwhelming chaos. I went back to the site after visiting the hospital. The remains of our naval personnel were scattered across the ground, and someone had begun collecting weapons and protective gear. I immediately contacted Surgeon Rear Admiral Nico Jayasekara and received his instructions: collect all body parts in separate bags and transport them to the Trincomalee Naval Hospital mortuary. This gruesome work had to be done with care and dignity, and it filled the icebox in my vehicle. Through DNA testing initiated by Rear Admiral Nico, we were able to identify every naval personnel lost that day, bringing some closure to grieving families.

The Navy Commander at the time, Vice Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda, was devastated. I had worked closely with him and knew how deeply he cared for his men. He ensured that the fallen were honoured with full ceremonial naval funerals at Welisara Naval Base, attended by families and comrades. Sixty-seven funerals were conducted in a single day—a number that still haunts me.

The Digampathana attack remains the largest single loss of naval life in our history. It was a day of sorrow, but also a day that reinforced our resolve. The tragedy galvanized the Navy to target the LTTE Sea Tiger wing with renewed determination and reshaped our maritime operations forever. Every time I think of that day, I remember not just the lives lost, but the courage, professionalism, and dedication of those who survived, those who treated the injured, and those who ensured the fallen were honored properly. May the souls of our naval hero’s rest in peace, their sacrifice guiding us and inspiring generations of naval personnel to come.

Features

‘Murder at Whitby Abbey’

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/16

Thilina Walpola

Tales of Mystery and Suspense – 24

I was intrigued by the title of a book I found in a book drop at the condominium of a friend, Murder at Whitby Abbey, and I brought it home with me though I will not be able to return it in the near future. It was described on the cover page as ‘a standout in the crowded medieval mystery field’, though I fear I do not know of other books in this field, apart from the Cadfael series, which I have dealt with earlier.

The book, by Cassandra Clark, is set during the reign of Richard II and has as a backdrop his precarious position, which led to his being replaced, and murdered, by his cousin Henry, who reigned as Henry IV. It is a gloomy book, the action taking place in the twelve days of Christmas leading up to the Epiphany. And the gloom is pervasive, even though this is supposed to be a time of festivity, with mummers performing, and many of those in the guest house where the heroine stays going to town to enjoy themselves, with much drinking and much music, which also fills the guesthouse.

The heroine Hildegarde is a nun, sent to try to acquire a relic being sold by Whitby Abbey, though this was also a penance set by the Abbot of the monastery that governed her abbess because she had had sex with a man. Soon after she and her companions reach the Abbey set high on a cliff, she finds that there are other bidders, and soon suspects that the hierarchy, not perhaps the Abbot who seems a weakling, but his rapacious bursar, is determined to make money, and not above creating false relics to sell to several aspirants.

After Hildegarde and her Cistercian companions – Whitby is a Benedictine Foundation – two monks, Gregory and Egbert, and a young priest Mark, reach the abbey, they find that Aelwyn, a monk they had met on their way to the guesthouse had died. This was in the apple store, and they realize, when they find the surplices of novices stuffed into the air vents, that he had been left to suffocate in the overwhelming scent of apples.

Clark

The Cistercians are asked to look into the death, perhaps because they are likely to get no cooperation from the Abbey folk, but perhaps because those in charge are keen to know what happened. And the infirmarer, an old monk, suggests Hildegarde talk to a man called Edred who worked for the bursar, and had been a friend of Aelwyn’s. But Edred too is killed, before he can keep an appointment he had made with Hildegarde, drowned in a pool near the farmhouse of the Abbey.

Meanwhile tensions arise between the fisherfolk and the abbey for the bursar wants to charge them for using the beach that technically belongs to the abbey to dry their fish and their nets. This leads to physical battles, when the guards used by the abbey, under the command it seems of the bursar whose determination to make money is not resisted by the abbot and the prior, try to storm the area where the fishermen live.

Hildegard finds out more about what had happened through two youngsters, one of whom Torold is the son of Aelwyn by a woman who worked as a prostitute for a cartel, and with whom Mark fell in love. The other works on the farm and had seen Edred meet someone near the pool, after which that someone left the place by himself. And the boy had also found in the pool a sort of dagger with the seal of the abbey.

He and his dog, and Torold who follows her, rescue Hildegarde from a man at arms who has waylaid her and tries to rape her earlier. Escaping into the abbey she was nearly been raped then by the bursar, but she managed to escape, in the process setting fire to him and the muniments room, which led, when he was rescued, to the discovery of a box with the money he said had been stolen, blame being cast on both Aelwyn and Edred.

Matters come to a head when the fisherfolk try to storm the abbey, being resisted by the men at arms stationed on the towers. But then Hildegarde realizes that behind the murders was the bursar’s clerk, whom she pursued to the cathedral. There is great drama then as she escapes from him when he tries to kill her, and then from the man at arms who had tried to both rape and kill her, but they both fall from the scaffolding she had climbed, the latter coming from a tower where he had been stationed.

Both of them think they run the rapacity of the abbey, the latter claiming to work for the nobles opposed to Richard, who is presented throughout the book as devoted to his subjects, not to power or money. But though the villains die, the bursar continues, having got over the hysteria the fire had caused and his acknowledgment then of guilt – and though the abbot and the prior seem less vicious, whether they will be able to assert themselves is questionable.

Before the climax, when the others in the guesthouse were leaving, Hildegarde found that two of them were in possession of the relic, for which they seem to have paid well. Hildegarde herself had made a derisory offer, but before she leaves the abbot gives her the relic, perhaps in gratitude for what she and her fellow Cistercians had discovered, the abbey having made as much money as it needed and more from the gullible other buyers.

Mark’s inamorata is saved from the stews because she moves in with Edred’s widow whom the bursar had thrown out of the rooms he occupied when her husband was found dead. Hildegarde had paid for lodgings, in a house run by the man who ran the brothels, but he had a kindly side and was going to finance them to make nets for the fishermen.

So, the Cistercians set off for their home as swiftly as they can to get there on the day of the Epiphany, having stopped en route to pray for King Richard whose birthday it was.