Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

  I explained all this to Aella and his captains, with a good deal more eloquence and logic than barbarians are accustomed to hear. In the end they agreed to give my plan a trial. It was slow and not very exciting, but it promised the secure Kingdom that most of them wanted, if only they could persuade the lesser warriors to stay for several years in the one stretch of wasted country. That would be the most difficult part of the scheme, and probably the tough Kentish veterans would soon drift away to more exciting employment; but the young recruits from Germany were fairly biddable, and we ought to be able to raise more men from the overcrowded mound-villages of Frisia.

  That winter passed in peace and what the Germans consider to be comfort. We had turned the hill-fort into a permanent encampment, and collected a large flock of sheep which grazed under guard in the valley below. The great advantage of keeping sheep, rather than cattle, is that they are slow movers; they cannot be galloped away by a raiding party of horsemen. We were not far from the outlying groves of the Forest, and I was impressed by the use the Saxons made of it; their axes are better than anything the coloni are equipped with, and every man knows how to fell a tree and split it into planks as well as he knows how to use his weapons. The palisade was high and thick and sharp, and the huts were built almost entirely of stout squared logs, where a Roman would have used nothing more ambitious than turf. Nevertheless, though the huts that they built were stouter than the shacks of the coloni, they were also far more draughty; I would have liked to make a turf-hut for myself, but no one had ever taught me, a King’s son, how to go about it, and I could never keep a captured peasant alive long enough to show me.

  That was one of the principal troubles in the camp. The leaders would point out to the young warriors how much more comfortable everyone would be if we had plenty of servants to carry water and clear away the rubbish; the young men would agree most willingly, and bring back a good collection of able-bodied peasants from the next raid; but the warriors naturally wore their weapons all the time, they were quick-tempered and harsh, and they demanded willing service from the communal slaves. After a few days in the camp a prisoner would look surly, or fail to understand some complicated instructions in a language that was quite unknown to him. Then the nearest German would split his head with an axe, and we would find ourselves short-handed again.

  So we never seemed to have enough slaves in camp to keep the place reasonably clean. That did not matter much in winter, for offal does not stink in cold weather, and smoke from the numerous fires kept the flies and other insects at bay; but next summer we would have an outbreak of disease if we didn’t do something about it, and Aella decided that the best remedy was to fetch some respectable women over from Germany. As soon as spring came it was easy to send a messenger across the channel in a small boat. We hoped that Aella’s wife would be able to raise enough money to fit out a small warship, with a crew of reinforcements and a cargo of wives. It meant that I would see Frideswitha sooner than I had intended, but I found it rather a bore living alone and doing my own chores. In certain circumstances any woman to keep house for you is better than none.

  When the campaigning season opened we began to put into effect our plan, which we hoped would one day lead to the evacuation of Noviomagus. A few more warriors had come in from Kent, where Oisc seemed to be more ambitious to make a success of his rich farms than to win fame as a mighty war-leader; but others had drifted away, when they realized that our plan would entail a very slow and toilsome series of campaigns; our numbers were no greater than at our first battle.

  The army was divided into three detachments, which relieved each other in rotation. One rested in camp, looked after the flocks, and did a little ploughing in the deserted fields. Another raided in untouched territory, more especially for silver and jewels; but they went out only to the north and west, so that the men of Anderida in the east should think themselves free from German raids. The third was entrusted with the task of making Noviomagus a miserable place to live in; they had all the ponies we had managed to get hold of, that they might retreat quickly if the garrison came out to offer battle, and their mounted scouts hung about, day and night, just out of range of an arrow from the walls. If any party of less than fifty men left the shelter of the town we attacked them at once, and when the citizens came out in a body to plough their fields we kept them standing to arms all day. I was permanently attached to this part of the army, as an expert on Roman agriculture and how to hinder it; I also had the very difficult job of seeing that the men before the walls were fed and supplied with their fair share of plunder. It was a wearing occupation, for Germans are very slack about keeping appointments, and most of them are quite unable to reckon numbers accurately; but they are not so sly and quick to see their own advantage as Romans, and I managed somehow to get enough food. The other leaders pitied me for having drawn such a dull task, while they each had a turn at the delights of raiding; but I was satisfied. Every man in the army came under my orders sooner or later; I thought that if anything unexpected happened to Aella, I would have a good chance of succeeding to the supreme command, since the whole army was accustomed to obeying me.

  In the early summer the comitatus of the Regni came out once again, to see if they could chase us right out of their Kingdom. We concentrated at our old camp, but the Romans had levied a thousand peasant spearmen, and it was ridiculous for us to think of meeting such numbers in the open field; at the last moment we retreated to the Forest, leaving a very neat little ambush hidden in a dip of the chalk.

  Presently pirates began sweeping the eastern marshes and carrying off the sheep, and a band of the Kent-folk raided right up to the walls of Anderida. The Kingdom was all boundary, hemmed in as it was between the Forest and the sea, and the profits from its chalky soil would not support enough warriors to defend such a frontier. As soon as the comitatus had dispersed we came back and destroyed very thoroughly the cornfields they had planted. Then we cut stakes for a new palisade, and refortified our old camp; it was a little too far from Noviomagus to be quite convenient, but I told Aella that nothing would get more on their nerves than to find us back at the very same spot.

  The Romans must have guessed by now that we were led by an intelligent and educated man. I suppose I was one of those suspected, but most Regnians had a very exaggerated idea of the dangers of the Forest, and many of them believed that I had died of exposure during my flight. Occasionally a mounted man would ride up to our camp in the dark, and shout abuse in Celtic at the renegade who was doing them such harm, but I was the only man on our side who understood what he was saying.

  By the late summer things had settled down to a stalemate, which must eventually lead to a victory for the Saxons. The citizens of Noviomagus were unable to reap their fields; we, on the other hand, managed very well on the plunder of the open country, and our men had begun to prepare new land at the edge of the Forest, where German axes easily cleared the trees. This new land was the most fertile in the country, far more promising than the bare chalk that Roman peasants preferred because it needed no labour to clear, and if we only kept our men steadily at work we would be assured of plentiful supplies in the future.

  One thing that would encourage the lesser warriors to stick to their farming was a wife and family. It fitted in very nicely with our plans that at this time the ship arrived from Germany. There were more than fifty women and girls on board, including Aella’s wife and my own Frideswitha. To my great surprise and delight she brought our infant son, to whom she had already given the noble name of Cynric. He was a fine sturdy boy, who displayed remarkable intelligence. I enjoyed playing with him in camp, and no longer volunteered for more than my fair share of duty with the outposts.

  Frideswitha was no fool, and she understood exactly what we were driving at in our constant harassing of Noviomagus. She even thought up some new ideas to make the Romans abandon their city; for example, ten men were told off to blow horns and simulate an attack on the walls every night, and when the
garrison got used to the din and began to disregard it we made a real attack, and damaged one of the gates. We also fouled their water-supply with dead bodies, though that had less effect on their health than we had hoped; I suppose because they had been accustomed to drinking foul water all their lives. During that autumn Frideswitha was at her best; Aella’s wife was so young that nobody consulted her about anything, although in theory she held the highest position among the women; the mother of my son was the recognized leader in all female affairs.

  In the spring of 479 the Dumnonians at last sent help. A force of about three hundred well-armed warriors of the comitatus marched in from the west, and reinforcements also came from Anderida. The combined army made a serious effort to chase us right away. They did not halt when they came to the edge of the Forest, as they had done in the previous year; our scouts kept an eye on them, and we always marched in time to avoid battle with superior numbers, but we were driven right into the open country to the north. The Romans kept on our heels, and we had to march so fast that there was no time to forage; of course the children would die first if we had to face serious hardship. I particularly wanted to keep Cynric alive, not only because he was my son, but because he was really a most remarkable infant. In this predicament I remembered my first campaign, and the journey to the upper Thames with which it had begun. I guided the whole army northwards to Calleva; the walls were still standing, and the puny band of robbers who sheltered there, joined forces with us. We palisaded the gaps where gates had stood, and our pursuers halted, refusing to attack such a strong fortification. The country round about was uninhabited, and there was not much food to be gathered from the woodland. I suppose the Dumnonians felt they had been away from home long enough, and the Regnians must have been getting anxious about the coast. Before any of us had actually died of hunger they retreated.

  At first Aella was rather inclined to stay where he was. He wanted a Roman town to dwell in, where he could play at being a civilized man; and here was a town, with defensible walls and no war-like neighbours. I was against the idea; I pointed out that the Romans had left the place desolate because it had no natural boundaries and was exposed to incessant raids; that although the soil was fertile it would need great labour to clear it; and that so far inland we would be out of touch with Germany. I think my advice was right, though I had an ulterior motive in giving it. I wanted to stay on the open chalk; all the advantage of my local knowledge, that gave me prominence as a leader, would be lost if we embedded ourselves in a forest; and I really did fear a decay of the little culture that we struggled to teach our children. At the present day Calleva still lies desolate, and Celtic bands, with no trace of Roman civilization, lurk in the tangled woodlands to the north.

  The lesser warriors agreed with me, and the brutish and badly armed robbers who had joined us said that Calleva was a hungry place in winter. The day after the enemy had left we beat the woods for many miles, to kill game for our homeward journey; next day we marched south. We were getting quite expert with our hunting arrows by now, though the deer in the Great Forest are shy.

  I must have crossed the Great Forest more often than any other living man, and I know all the dodges for finding an easy way and picking up something to eat as you go along. But I have always hated the journey, and there is really no way of doing it without considerable hardship. On this occasion we were hampered by women and children, but we also had ponies to carry our gear, and the sick could ride except where the branches were too low. By the end of June we were back in our old camp, and our scouts were once more shouting rude remarks to the sentries on the wall of Noviomagus.

  We had sown enough corn to see us through until next harvest, so long as we could supplement our bread with stolen cattle. In any case, we were raiders, living on other people’s food, and I have always found that it is much easier to starve on stolen property than on the proceeds of your own labour; just as warriors will cheerfully dig a trench after a long day’s march, when the same men would take it as an insult if you ordered them to dig a drain. The citizens had none of the exciting consolations of active service; they were merely trying to earn an honest living in extremely discouraging conditions; and they must be getting very tired of it.

  All the same, they hung on through that winter. The Romans of Britain are noted for their stubbornness, which is why most of them are dead now, instead of earning a living as slaves.

  When the spring of 480 came round we had been outside Noviomagus for nearly three years; there was a good deal of murmuring among our men, and I feared that we would have to give up just when we ought to be in sight of success. It was the presence of the women that saved the situation; they had been living in the camp, and regarding it as their only home, for a year and a half, and it is really surprising the amount of heavy and useless rubbish a woman can collect in that time. They knew that if we made a fresh start in some different countryside they would have to begin all over again, building fresh huts and finding another washing-place by a new stream; they backed me up when I pleaded with the army to give my plan another trial, and see if this year would not finally rid us of those obstinate Romans.

  The men of Anderida took the field once more. Again we retreated from our camp, but this time they only pursued us to the edge of the Forest; and when they began to return home we followed them boldly, at a distance of only two miles. Then they gave way to despair. The whole army of the Regni marched to the city of Noviomagus, and stayed for a few days. Our scouts watched with growing excitement as they saw smoke rising from many parts of the town, and much burying of the dead in the cemetery outside the walls. At last, at the time of year when the days are longest and travellers are in least danger from ambush, the whole able-bodied population of Noviomagus came out. They had endured a blockade of three years, and during the last winter conditions must have been very bad, for there were no old people and very few small children in the column. I was proud of my British blood as I watched these obstinate creatures struggling along with all their possessions on their backs, to the very delusive safety of Anderida.

  Soon we were streaming down into the abandoned city; of course the Romans had burnt everything that would burn, and taken special care to break gaps in the walls. Even so the remains of the stone houses, and the piped water-supply that picks and shovels could not destroy, made the place a paradise to our women. Aella divided up the available space very fairly, and Frideswitha was given a nice square house with a courtyard, and the remains of mosaic on the floor of the principal room. It was too late to sow corn that year, but we had plenty of grazing and unlimited hay. Next year we ought to live very well.

  Best of all, the town had a harbour. A beginning had been made, and now the Kingdom would grow.

  The next ten years were the longest period of peace that my stormy life has known. I was in my thirtieth year when we took over the deserted city of Noviomagus, and I did not fight another serious campaign until just after my fortieth birthday. The little Kingdom of Anderida to the east of us accepted the defeat that reduced its territory by more than half, and the comitatus of the Regni made no effort to reconquer their old homeland. This meant that there was a wide belt of ravaged villages on the chalk hills where the Romans had grown most of their corn, and it was not worth while to plant seed that would certainly be trampled by warriors before harvest; but we found a solution for this problem by clearing the valleys to the north; we used the chalk as grazing for sheep, which could be driven into the hill-forts when raiders were about. It made a complete break with the old system of cultivation; but then the previous population had been completely wiped out in the course of the three years’campaign.

  In the spring of 481, when Aella proclaimed that there would not be another campaign that year, there was discontent in the war-band. For the last two summers he had been the only important Saxon leader who was waging aggressive war against the Romans, and warriors had come to serve him from all the German settlements of the east coast; they were
a mixed lot of professional plunderers, calling themselves Angles as well as Saxons, so that poets began to praise him as Bretwalda, meaning war-leader of all the barbarians in Britain. They were not men who had the patience to grow rich slowly by farming good land, and most of them left us for the Anglian settlements in the northeast. The places of those who left were more than filled by crowds of low-class peasants from the mounds of Frisia, who came flocking to take up new farms that stayed above sea-level all the year round. Few of them had any better weapon than a spear, and they could not boast about their noble descent; but they knew all about growing corn in a damp climate, and they made very satisfactory subjects. From now on we would not be so formidable in battle, but then we had no powerful foes on our frontiers; the Regnians were cowed, to the north a desert stretched from the Forest to the Thames, and the Dumnonians to the west had troubles of their own. If we kept quiet, and did not provoke our neighbours, there was no reason why anyone should invade us.

  Rather to my disappointment the three Woden-born captains decided to stay with us and live as peaceful landowners. Aella had not taken the title of King, for he only ruled half of quite a small Kingdom, and that meant that his leadership need not necessarily descend to his son. They were considerably younger than he was, and I suppose they all had hopes of the succession. The trouble was that I had made similar plans for myself; I quite genuinely liked Aella, and was content to be his follower as long as he lived, but a married man with a son must look to the future.