Sarum

  “Stop.”

  At this unexpected interruption from the sheep farmer, the monk looked up, astonished.

  “There are eight oxen there, not six,” Port objected.

  Alfred stared at him, then seeing what kind of man he had to deal with, smiled.

  “Are you sure?”

  Port nodded.

  At a sign from the king, the monk crossly altered the charter, before continuing.

  And to receive from the dairy farm there twenty weys of cheese, fifteen lambs, fifteen fleeces . . .

  But Port was shaking his head.

  “They produce twenty-five weys of cheese,” he told the king.

  Now Alfred and all those around burst out laughing, and even the monk could not suppress a smile. Again the charter was altered.

  That he may have and possess and present the aforesaid land to whomsoever he shall choose in all things with free will, except the fortification of fortresses, construction of bridges and military service.

  He had land, and he had it for ever. The Charter ended with the usual flourish.

  If anyone shall insolently attempt to infringe this generous munificence, let him know that, on the great Day of Judgement when the deepest caves of Hell shall open and the whole world tremble, he will perish in the infernal fire with Judas and all traitors and suffer agonies for all eternity, if he shall not have previously made amends, with compensation.

  It was done. Aelfwald and the others witnessed the charter. Port had lost his hands, but regained a portion of his ancient ancestral territory.

  When it came to Aelfwald’s turn, Alfred had a special gift: an inscribed ring and a small jewelled casket. To accompany these personal mementoes, he added a fine new farm.

  The farm of Shockerlee lay just to the north west of Wilton, on the wooded slopes of the small ridge that rose between the two broad valleys of the Wylye and the Nadder rivers, and which was known as Grovely Wood.

  Like many new farms, it had been carved out of the edge of the woodland, as its name – meaning the sheaves of corn, shocker, in the wood, lee – implied. It was excellent, well drained land.

  When the king had passed on to the next thane, Aelfwald turned to Aelfstan and Aelfgifu and told them:

  “You both fought bravely together. In my will, when Aelfric inherits the lands at Avonsford, you shall jointly own Shockerlee.”

  At the end of the granting of lands, Alfred addressed those present:

  “Remember,” he said with a smile, as his pale blue eyes searched them out one by one, “when you look at your estates in times to come, that they were won when we saved the kingdom of Wessex, at Edington.”

  There was one other memorial to that day however, which the king did not plan.

  Two days later, Aelfstan and a group of young men were riding over the high ground near the battlefield and the young Saxon’s thoughts returned to the extraordinary events of those recent months, and to the battles, side by side with his sister. In later times, he thought, who would believe the part that Aelfgifu had played.

  “She should have a memorial,” he cried aloud.

  As he gazed up at the bare turf on the hillside above him, he saw what he should do; and calling to his friends he told them what he planned.

  All that day, and for two more afterwards, the party of young men worked busily; and when they had finished, carved in the chalk hillside where they had cut back the turf and staring proudly over the valley below, there was a fine white horse, forty feet across.

  Aelfstan looked at it with pride.

  “That’s for Aelfgifu, and our victory,” he told them; and feeling that he had done a fine thing, he returned to the camp more contented than he had been for many months.

  The chalk had been well dug. The white horse on the hillside remained.

  Only one other surprise awaited the thane when he returned to Athelney.

  Tostig had disappeared.

  He had gone one night, taking one of the boats loaded with valuables with him. He had departed without warning and left even his family behind. At first the thane supposed he had gone for some legitimate reason; but he had not.

  He was never seen again.

  The kingdom of Wessex was by no means free of its troubles. There were still many battles to be fought and accommodations to be made with the Vikings on the island. There were also personal disappointments for the king, as when Earldorman Wulfhere, a little after Edington, suddenly and unexpectedly defected to the Vikings in the Danelaw.

  But never again would the kingdom of Wessex be in danger of extinction. The burghs were fortified, new monasteries and schools were built, the nunnery where Edith remained at Wilton was re-established even more splendidly than before; and despite his many campaigns, Alfred found time, as he had always hoped, to translate his chosen classics into the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

  During the rest of his reign and those of his successors, the influence and rule of Wessex was gradually extended over the Danelaw; the Scandinavian raiders mostly settled and were even converted to Christianity; and the process by which the Anglo-Saxon and Danish people gradually became fused into a single island kingdom continued steadily.

  Although, for a short period before the Norman Conquest, the island came to be ruled as part of a larger Scandinavian confederacy by the great King Canute, it was no longer in doubt that the kingdom of England was a single whole, and its people English.

  That this was so was thanks to the efforts of King Alfred and his thanes in the heart of Wessex, in the winter and spring of the year of Our Lord, 878.

  THE CASTLE

  A.D. 1139

  The two figures stood side by side on the wall of the castle of Sarisberie. It was a week after Easter and the weather had turned pleasantly warm.

  The taller man wore a fine black cloak of wool, faced with silk and held by a golden chain across his chest; his brown hair, greying at the temples, was dressed in a curious style: it was long, and parted on both sides while the locks in the centre were brushed forward into a fringe; his beard was curled. His face was long, with an aquiline nose and two deep lines that folded from almost under his eyes to the corners of his long, thin mouth which occasionally turned down with an expression of sardonic amusement. This was Richard de Godefroi, minor Norman knight.

  As he glanced down now at the stout figure of Nicholas who stood in his leather jerkin beside him, the impassive lines of his face did not mask the fact that his eyes were troubled. For the stoneworker had just asked in his native English a question that the French-speaking knight understood perfectly, but did not wish to answer:

  “Why is the bishop filling the castle with weapons?”

  Across the fields below lay the undefended town of Wilton where, in times of peace, the sheriff held the county court; to the north, up the valley which three generations of the Norman’s family had come to love, lay the knight’s English estate of Avonsford, which he held of the great Wiltshire landlord, William of Sarisberie. As he gazed out now, he could see every detail of the landscape: the day had that sparkling clarity that presages rain – like the serene face of a man, Richard thought grimly, who is about to commit treachery.

  “Perhaps he means to hold the castle against the king,” the stone-worker suggested.

  Which was exactly what Richard dreaded.

  The castle towered over the place where the five rivers met. It was far higher, and more terrible, than any building that Sarum had seen before.

  On top of the huge chalk ring of the original dune on its windswept promontory, there now rose a high, nearly completed curtain wall of flint. Outside and below it lay an untidy mass of houses and allotments. Inside, in the centre of the dune, a second, inner hill had been raised by the Norman conquerors – an enormous mound, an acre across at its summit; and this was surrounded by another frowning wall. Within this central enclosure, they had built yet again – a great, grey tower. And so, like an inverted telescope, the castle soared up: from promontory to wall, from wall to
inner mound, to second wall and on, up to the final massive tower with its battlements in the sky.

  This was the typical Norman stronghold of mound and enclosure – motte and bailey. When William the Bastard of Normandy and his following of Norman, Breton and other assorted adventurers had conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England in 1066, he had speedily erected castles all over the land. Unlike the modestly fortified Saxon burghs, the Norman castles were tall, compact and almost unassailable. First built of wood they had gradually been converted, in the reigns of his two sons, and now his grandson Stephen, to bastions of stone. The castle of Sarisberie was not one of the largest, but it was a significant place nonetheless. It was here, when he received the great Domesday inventory of his island kingdom, that William the Conqueror had summoned his nobles to perform their oath of fealty to him – a memorable ceremony that Godefroi’s grandfather had attended. Within the broad sweep of the curtain wall it even included the massive, towered cathedral that was the bishop’s seat. The stone pinnacles and thatched roofs of the castle’s many houses clustered tightly around the central mound with its soaring dongeon which hung over the landscape, heavy, dark and menacing.

  The castle belonged to the king: it was held for him by the sheriff. So it had always been in the reigns of the Conqueror, and his sons Rufus and Henry, when the king was in firm control and the castle was a symbol of military rule and order. But four years ago Henry’s nephew Stephen had ascended the English throne, and though his claim had been supported by most of the magnates and been sanctioned by the pope, there were already murmurs of discontent as it became clear that he was not as strong as those who had gone before. And now the castle was in the bishop’s hands, instead; and the bishop was filling it with arms.

  The feudal system, under which most of Europe now lay, had enormous weaknesses. In the centuries following the break-up of the empires of Rome and later of Charlemagne in the west, first tribes and then individual families had seized power over huge tracts of land which had yet to coalesce into the countries of modern Europe; and although a powerful king might assert his sovereignty over many lesser magnates, the individual feudal lords were in a state of almost perpetual dispute amongst themselves. No people claimed a single country as their nation state: Europe was a huge patchwork of estates to be bought, sold, fought for or obtained by marriage. Even a minor knight like Godefroi had estates on both sides of the English Channel. True, there were laws to govern feudal relationships and possession; true, the Church had proclaimed a Christian peace and ordered days of truce to be observed in every territory. The result, however, was only to add endless legal disputes and appeals to the long and complex process of intermittent violence that was the feudal world.

  It was this system of formalised chaos that the counts and dukes of Normandy had tried to reduce to order first in Normandy and then, with more success, in the conquered island of England. For at the conquest, the Kingdom of Harold had fallen, at least in theory, entirely into the hands of Duke William; and though he had granted to his chief supporters the vast estates of the leading Anglo-Saxons, they were to hold them only as his tenants in return for military service. Though trusted lords were sometimes given wider powers where the king’s primitive bureaucracy was not large enough to cope, justice too – and most of the profits of justice in the form of fines – was generally the king’s. Such a centralised system, such order, was unique in Europe.

  It worked well, as long as the king was strong.

  But Stephen was not, and already his right to rule had been challenged by the late king’s daughter, and widow of the German ruler, the Empress Matilda. It was just the excuse that ambitious English nobles were looking for: where two sides might bid for their support, there must be chances for profit. In the spring of 1139 there was treachery in the air.

  And no man was more treacherous than the bishop.

  “I think he is a devil,” Nicholas remarked, and though Godefroi gave him a stern look to discourage such impertinence, he would privately have agreed. The bishop was usually absent, but when he appeared, his great, heavy jowl and angry, watchful eyes made even the knight afraid.

  Roger of Caen, a low-born adventurer, had first ingratiated himself with King Henry, it was said, because as a young chaplain he could complete the mass before the King went out hunting in less time than anyone else. He had risen rapidly to be Chancellor of England, running the whole machinery of government for Henry with a ruthless efficiency matched only by his own greed and ambition. He was a priest, but he kept mistresses and had a son who came to succeed him as chancellor. As a reward for the family’s services the king had made him Bishop of Sarisberie and his two nephews Bishops of Lincoln and Ely, so that, within a single generation, his family had raised itself to a wealth and power equalled by only a few of the greatest nobles in the land.

  Furthermore the ailing King Henry and weak Stephen had allowed Roger to hold castles as well: in the spring of 1139 the family controlled not only Sarisberie, but the other southern castles of Malmesbury, Sherborne and Devizes. And now they were being filled with arms. As Godefroi had warned his wife that morning: “One false move by the king and there will be anarchy.”

  It was all the worse for the knight of Avonsford, for he had secret plans of his own – plans which a civil war would ruin. As he looked down now at the little workman by his side he pursed his long lips and remarked in Nicholas’s own language:

  “You’d better pray, then.”

  The relationship between the two men was an easy one. When the descendants of Aelfwald the thane fought and lost at Hastings, they were deprived of most of their estates. The estate at Avonsford had been granted, along with dozens of others, to the great family of which William of Sarisberie was the present head, and they in turn had given it to the Godefroi knights as hereditary tenants. Though the thanes and minor landowners had lost their estates, the humbler folk – the semi-free villeins like the family of Nicholas – had suffered no particular harm. They now had a new lord of the manor to whom they owed services or rents and who held a summary court of justice over the estate; but this was little different from their status in the old days under Canute, Edward the Confessor or Harold. The family of Godefroi, though stern military men, had not been oppressive lords. Though they spoke Norman French, they had soon learned to make themselves understood in the local English dialect, and had treated the family of craftsmen with respect. It was Nicholas’s father who had helped to build the Norman’s house, and when Nicholas’s skill with his hands had shown itself, Richard had let him go to work on the castle buildings in return for a modest rent to cover the manual service he owed the manor, which was easily covered by the wages he received in the castle.

  One thing that the family had acquired since the conquest was a nickname. It was because of their skill in building. For often, when the Godefroi knights could not be bothered to remember the individual names of Nicholas or his father before him, they would shout: “Here, do this, Masoun,” using their own Norman word meaning stoneworker’ – and though the villagers in Avonsford still called him Nicholas, they too, half in mockery at the Norman’s arrogant call, and half out of respect for his skill, would sometimes call after him: “Here, Nicholas – Masoun.”

  Now he looked at the knight’s saturnine face thoughtfully. Although he had known Godefroi all his life, he still did not find it easy to gauge his mood; and it was important that he choose his moment carefully.

  For the stoneworker had an important matter of his own on his mind, a subject that he wished to broach only at the right time. He glanced down at his short, stubby fingers while he considered whether to speak.

  “You have a villein on your estate,” he said finally. “Godric Body.”

  Godefroi knew the young fellow well – a meagre insignificant little serf of seventeen. The boy’s mother, he knew, had been Nicholas’s sister; his father a fisherman. Both were dead and he had no relations, so far as the knight knew, except Nicholas and a cousin o
f the boy’s father, who was something of a troublemaker.

  “Well? What do you want?” His voice was sharp and cold; he had learnt that it was best to be severe when people asked for favours, as it was clear the fellow was about to do.

  Nicholas cleared his throat.

  But as he did so, the air was pierced with a scream.

  Godric Body could not believe his luck.

  In the first place, he had eaten meat the evening before. It was not a thing he often did, except when he snared a rabbit or received his modest share of the meat from the cullings of livestock that took place at midsummer and the start of winter. But his uncle Nicholas and his family, though humble villeins like himself with little land, were far better off. Thanks to his skill the stoneworker often received twice the normal labourer’s wage of a silver penny a day and his family not only ate meat, but on occasion shared it with their poor relation.

  “My wife looks like a pear,” Nicholas remarked with satisfaction as the cheerful little woman with her huge posterior bustled about the room; “and my children are like apples.” As Godric looked at their rosy cheeks and round faces he had to agree that the description was exact.

  If he closed his eyes, he could still taste the salted pork, smell its aroma: it brought a smile to his usually dispirited face.

  Godric Body was small and thin. The narrow face which he inherited from his fisherman father always seemed to be pale and pinched; shocks of reddish hair grew unevenly, like tufts of grass, on his head, giving him an untidy look. His hands were thin and delicate and looked unsuited to the rough work which was his lot. And worst of all, he had been born with a hunchback – not a pronounced and grotesque hump, but an unmistakable curvature that thrust his head savagely forward and caused the other children to call him Godric the rat. His parents had hoped he would not live, his mother because she feared he would be unable to work, his father because he loathed to see what he called a runt.