The Conquering Family

by Thomas B. Costain

  It was almost as though the forces of heaven and earth watched, as they had done once before at the crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel, and waited for the exact moment to strike. Although the tide was on the rise, John shouted an order to the wagon train to come on. The drivers obeyed and the wheels began to grind their way into the wet sand. One by one the wagons entered the water, the horses urged on by loud shouts and the cracking of whips. Then, as they had done when the Egyptians pursued the fleeing Israelites, the waters came rushing in at the outstent line. The swirling flood rose to the hubs, then to the tops of the wheels. It was too late for the wagons to turn. Was it too late for them to get through?

  The strong current of the river accepted the challenge of the sea and the jousting began. The King saw his wagons engulfed with a suddenness which seemed incredible. There were mad cries for help from the drivers and the shrill screeching of horses fighting to get free of harness. And then, in a matter almost of seconds, the whole train vanished from sight. Such a thing was impossible—and yet it had happened! The crown and the scepter of England and the regalia of Matilda had been lost to sight and washed away by the furious waters. The fabulous sword of Tristan, minus the splinter of steel which had been left in the skull of the giant Morôlt, would never be seen again.

  The blow which nature had dealt him left the King speechless. This, he knew, was the end of everything. What use now the exactions of a lifetime, the endless taxes which had driven his subjects to rebellion, the theft of a brother’s legacies, the pulling of teeth from helpless Jews! Every coin which had not been doled out painfully to Mauger the Murderer and Ivo the Ironhearted was gone, tossed about in wagons which would soon disintegrate and scatter the treasure on the bottom of the North Sea. He had no gold left now to pay his mercenaries. He was tired and ill. The uneven struggle could not be continued.

  Turning his horse without a word, John rode up the grade to the northern road. In an unbroken silence he galloped to Swineshead. Here he was given a lukewarm welcome, for he was always at odds with the Cistercians over the sums he demanded from them, and proceeded to eat a heavy meal, ending with a dish of late peaches and a tankard of ale. He became ill almost immediately and loudly declared that the monks had poisoned him.

  Later the story spread that one of the staff had put the blood of a toad in the ale and, being forced by the King to drink of it first, had gone out to the garden and died immediately, the whole region of his weasand becoming black and corrupt from the virulence of the poison. This was one of the wild stories which invariably grow out of tragedies in high places.

  It is true, however, that the King called for a horse litter and went on that night, in a raging fever and acute pain, to Sleaford. It was raining the next morning, but he insisted on continuing the journey. At midday he was so weak that he almost fell from his saddle and had to finish the distance in a horse litter. He groaned and cried out with the pain but would not allow a stop to be made until they reached Newark and he was taken to the palace of the Bishop of Lincoln.

  On the way from Sleaford the mind of the King had been constantly on his loss. He had moaned and ground his teeth and cursed the day he was born. But when they laid his sick bones on a bed in a tower from which there was a view of the Trent and of the country beyond, he subsided and had nothing more to say.

  The King was dying. The abbot of Croxton, who was a wise man with herbs and bloodlettings, was brought to attend him. After one glance at the inert form and the livid cheeks, the abbot turned to the royal servants clustered in a silent group and shook his head. There was nothing to be done for John of England.

  Nature took a most active part in the last hours of the wicked King’s life. The storm promised by the scurrying Gray Monks had arrived the day before with flurries of wind and rain. Now it took the form of a gale, roaring down from the north and howling about the tower of the bishop’s palace. Everyone knew that such winds were sent for one purpose, to carry off souls, and the servants hastily bolted shutters over the linen frames in the windows. This did no good, for nothing could keep out the sound or conceal the purpose of the blasts from the ears of the dying King. John accepted the inevitable with more resignation than he had ever been known to show, speaking occasionally in a low voice and eagerly welcoming the bishop, who administered the last rites. He dictated a statement which was all he left in the way of a will, the only important clause it contained being the appointment to the guardianship of his son and heir Henry of the only man he thoroughly trusted, William Marshal; a confidence which that stout veteran justified soon thereafter by the expedition with which he relieved England of the French threat.

  4

  When a king is dying, the world about him stands still. The lashing rain could not keep the curious people of the neighborood from leaving the counter and bench and plow and gathering at the gates of the bishop’s palace. They even wedged themselves into the courtyard and stood about in soggy discomfort, whispering among themselves and staring up at the lights in the tower windows, the wind blowing their horn-peaked caps into fantastic shapes. Respect for death is one of the deepest of instincts, and there was no tendency to decry the man who was passing or speak of his wickedness.

  The castle was filled to overflowing. The knights who had arrived in the King’s train remained in a body, a grim and uneasy lot. All of them knew the decision they faced, on which their possessions and perhaps their lives depended; whether to remain under the royal banner and fight for a nine-year-old boy or to go over to the other side and fight with the French invader. Each man eyed his neighbor suspiciously; they spoke seldom, and briefly; they watched the door behind which the King was dying, and waited.

  There were the captains of mercenaries also, who were in a still sharper dilemma, for it was doubtful if any of them could hope to escape from England with whole skins. Every man’s hand would be against Mauger and Ivo and Dennis as soon as the last breath left the body of the laboring King. They should have departed before this, but there was pay owing to them and they perhaps hoped the new King would have need of them. There were churchmen of all degrees, as wary and expectant as the men in arms. The policy of Innocent had chained them to the cause of John, but now the strong Pope was dead, and the future was a void into which even a powerful bishop could not gaze without uncertainty and dread. One thing was certain: this was a case where there would be no demand for deodand; unless they wanted to distrain on the waters of The Wash and the Willestrem and the sands of the Fossdyke. It would have been a profitless venture, for the only part of John’s treasure which was ever recovered was a round and rusted article on which a peasant stumbled while bowel-deep in the water and later sold to a peddler for a farthing. It was of gold and shaped like a crown but so small that it had certainly never rested on the broad pate of John of England. More likely it was the top of a standing cup. Everything else was lost.

  There were droves of men of lesser degree: spies from the northern reaches of Ermine Street (parts of which are now incorporated in the Great North Road) who had come to report on baronial strength and activities; contractors who had arrived in the expectation of selling sheep and beeves to the royal forces; clyster-pipes, as doctors were popularly called because of their method of affording bodily relief, all of them with miraculous cures which would bring recovery to the King and fame to them; and the usual mysterious individuals who refused to divulge anything about themselves. A self-seeking lot: it almost seemed as though every man in England who had reason for wishing John to live had found his way to the tall and glum castle of the Bishop of Lincoln.

  None of them had any hope left. They paced about and muttered among themselves and pounced on every royal servant who emerged from the inner rooms. They listened apprehensively to the wind which seemed to be growing more violent. It was after the most demanding blast, which tore at the shutters and roared over the battlements, that the abbot of Croxton appeared in the doorway and made the sign of the cross.

  The abbot
embalmed the body and it was taken to Worcester. Here John was buried in accordance with his last instructions beside the bier of good St. Wulfstan, clothed in the white robe and red cross of a Crusader. John had had no illusions about himself. He knew how sinful he had been and he believed, as all men did, that the devil prowled about new-made graves for the souls he could claim as his own. The dead King wanted to be well disguised when the odor of brimstone filled his tomb and the long satanic fingers came prying at his winding sheet.

  CHAPTER XVI

  A Nation Again

  THE reign of John marks the end of the period during which the effects of the Conquest were felt. In view of the terrible sufferings of the people in the first stages, and the monstrous injustice of the land seizure, it may seem callous to assert that the destructive aspects of 1066 were outweighed by the benefits. Looking back over the centuries, however, it is easy to see that this was so.

  In Anglo-Saxon days the land was torn by civil wars. The men of Northumbria were as foreign to the people of Mercia as those of Gaul or Spain. With the coming of the foreign kings, and their stern conceptions of law enforcement, the country drew together; in silence and suffering and under the iron hand of oppression, it is true, but with the corrective speed of the surgeon’s knife. What might have taken centuries to accomplish was effected in a little more than one hundred years. Internal peace was a boon the Normans brought.

  The towns benefited almost immediately from the Conquest. There had been a change of masters, and the native part of the population had a sense of racial inferiority imposed on them, but prosperity visited them at once. The ships of the world came to their ports, and the wool of England gave back higher standards of living. The Normans were commercial-minded. They were sharp dealers, acquisitive and shrewd. The power of the guilds developed rapidly from the time when Norman merchants and artisans were admitted to the ceremonies of the Craft-box and to a part in electing the portreeves and mayors. In a few generations a man’s name meant little. He might carry the Norman patronymic of Fitz and still be three quarters Saxon in blood. What counted was that the towns were spreading out beyond their walls and their power growing so great that kings had to listen to them.

  In the country the sufferings of the conquered people were deeper. The castles of the grasping barons, who had come over with steel in their hands and rapine in their hearts, overawed the land and put the stamp of slavery on the men who labored with plow and rake and hoe. In the Saxon days, however, the villein had worn the iron collar of the thrall and had seen his children stolen for the Irish slave trade. Again it was a change of masters, again the greatest suffering came from the sense of inferiority thrust upon them by the lords of the land. Class distinctions were more marked in the agricultural districts, and so the coming of racial unity was slower. But as early as the days of John the lines of demarcation were no longer sharp. The man with the longbow on his back looked the knight on his steel-accoutered horse squarely in the eye and did not hesitate to claim his rights.

  The Normans, numerically inferior, had come to a land of settled customs and traditions. Inevitably they were drawn into the life of England. The country and the people remained Anglo-Saxon in spite of everything. The natives took the newcomers into their ways of living and thinking, to the worship of their saints. The proof of Norman absorption is found in the gradual mastery established by the English language, despised though it had been at the start. Historians have cited the fact that in the writings of the native Layamon, when “pen he took with finger and wrote a book-skin,” there were few Norman words, although Layamon lived at the end of the twelfth century. Green estimates that he used no more than fifty words in thirty thousand lines. As time went on, of course, Norman terms and phrases were borrowed wholesale but to serve as additions and embellishments only to the noble tongue of the island.

  The emergence of English as the sole language of general use was delayed by the tendency of men like Thomas à Becket, Nicholas Brakespeare, and Stephen Langton to go abroad in search of learning, to Paris in particular, and to come back with French and Latin on their lips. Even in the stormy days of the sons of Henry, however, a university was growing up around St. Frideswide’s and St. Martin’s at Oxford. In less than a century the teaching of eager and poverty-striken youths in the porches of the churches and in the hospitia formed by groups was helping in the gradual establishment of the native tongue.

  John’s mistakes brought about the two great changes to which may be attributed the final unity of the land. The first was the loss of Normandy. Once the duchy which Rollo had conquered with his sea rovers had been incorporated back into the realm of France, the Normans in England ceased to be anything but Englishmen. This had been coming about gradually before. Few of the barons had continued to hold land along the Seine, the Epte, the Eure, or the Sarthe. The tendency to divide estates among sons on each side of the water had in a generation alienated the possessions in the duchy. English barons crossed the Channel to fight or to journey to the Holy Land, and for practically no other reason. Certainly there had been no visiting back and forth for a century. Navigation was a perilous and hit-and-miss affair, and too often a traveler would wait a month for a favorable wind. The wives and children of the Normans in England had not known their cousins across the Channel. The country along the Seine had become less than a memory.

  To complete the division, news traveled slowly, and the echo of events on one side of the water was faint when it reached the other. Take a case in point. After John’s death his widow returned to Angoulême, where her daughter Joan was being brought up as the future bride of the man she had jilted herself, Hugh the Brown of Lusignan. Isabella was in her early thirties and at the very peak of her dazzling beauty. Hugh saw her and declared fervently that she must be his bride and not the little Joan. Isabella was happy enough to make the change (probably she had it in mind in going over), they were married forthwith, and Joan Makepeace was sent back to England. Isabella had involved her new husband in trouble with the King of France by her plotting to create an English confederacy, and with his neighbors by her queenly ways, before the news reached England that the old romance had blossomed again.

  Thus quickly the two divisions of the once extensive Angevin empire drew apart; and in that drawing apart a great nation was born.

  The second change was Magna Charta, which gave back the Saxon conceptions and laws. The Conquest had interrupted the development of the English idea of justice and the emergence of a workable parliamentary system. By his oppressive rule John brought the Norman part of the population to a realization of the need for the ancient checks and safeguards, for the personal liberties and privileges toward which the English had been working. Not until the Saxon conception had been carried forward so far and so vigorously by Magna Charta could the effects of the Conquest be considered at an end.

  2

  It is easy now to see that the defeat at Hastings was in the long run a great benefit for the English people. Generations of readers, identifying themselves with the gallant Saxons, have suffered with Harold in his death throes on the spur of land, and with his lovely mistress, Edytha Swannes-hals (the Swan-necked) when she came at night to the battlefield, her fair hair wrapped in a black couvre-chef and a lantern in her hand, searching through the piles of dead for his body, and finding it at last, mangled almost beyond recognition, with the head and one leg severed from the trunk. Inevitably they had speculated on what the history of England would have been if right had triumphed at Hastings.

  If Harold had won, the English people would have been spared a long period of suffering and oppression at the hands of cruel masters. But there would have been a great loss. The Anglo-Saxons had an instinct for self-government, a willingness to struggle on toward a distantly glimpsed goal. Left to themselves, would they have achieved in time all the objectives which have been reached? Perhaps: but it is impossible to avoid doubts. The Saxons had certain racial weaknesses which would have held them back in other
respects. Could they have advanced to greatness in one direction while lagging in so many others?

  They were a gross people, dull, sensual, inclined to a degree of drunkenness which the Normans called a tirelarigot. They were lacking in ambition, in dispatch, in commercial instincts. These lacks would have handicapped them, particularly as they lived in the racial privacy, amounting almost to a vacuum, which island existence supplies. It is futile to speculate on what the future of England would have been if the Norman invasion had been a failure. This much is certain, however: the city of London would never have been the capital of a great empire. Would the people have been happier in the semi-obscurity of insular life? Would they have achieved sufficient strength to maintain their independence through centuries of pressure from without?

  As it fell out, the Normans possessed the qualities lacking in the Anglo-Saxon. They had drive, an instinct for mastery, a never idle ambition. Without the Saxon instinct for political progress, they were as incomplete in their way as the English were in other directions. The mingling of Saxon and Norman blood produced a great race.

  If Harold had not lost, there would never have been the opportunities which sent Drake around the world and Wolfe to the Plains of Abraham. If the smoldering Tostig had not been willing to betray his country to avenge himself on his brother, there would not have been a race of shopkeepers which could lead the world at the same time in political and scientific advance and produce a glittering roster of great names—Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Wycliff, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Darwin, Winston Churchill. If the men who died on the ridge had been allowed a glimpse into the mists of the future and had seen great continents reclaimed, an empire built around their little island, the path of freedom won, they might have counted their lives well lost.