The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘Perhaps. But soldiers are always required at every hiring to swear an oath of loyalty to each new lord in turn.’

  ‘Even an oath can be bought and sold, especially when men grow evil and forget the ways of their fathers.’

  Quint pondered this for some fifty strides or so. Then:

  ‘We have already seen in the ranks of the Emperor of the East housecarls who fought by Harold’s side. Perhaps, had you the use of your sword hand, you might be one of them.’

  ‘Be careful, Dutchman, or whatever it is you are. I can give a good account of myself with what I still have.’

  Bless us, but he’s in a touchy mood today, thought Quint.

  ‘Frisian actually. Like you we are Saxon stock. But there is something about oath-taking I do not fully understand,’ he said, adopting a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then. Put me right where I am wrong. Your pupil awaits the attentions of his teacher.’

  Suspecting sarcasm, Walt threw him a quick look but found only bland interest on his companion’s face.

  ‘The oath of the housecarl comes from a heart that has been schooled from birth by example, by story-telling and nights spent in the Hall listening to the exploits of his forbears when as a boy he served as cup-bearer and later joined in the mead-drinking and the harp-playing himself. These are the nights when men make promises and boast of what they will do, boasts which are not bravado but solemn declarations of the lengths to which they will go in service of their lords. Above all they will promise again and again to serve their lord expecting no reward save the honour of serving him. And one other loyalty he swears - to his fellow housecarls he will always be true and faithful too, when standing shoulder to shoulder in the shield wall, yes, especially then. When a man has lived thus for twenty years you may trust his oath. Yes, indeed, you may trust him.’

  And he strode on, swinging his stump, holding his head in the air as if indeed on a march, a march into battle at his lord’s bidding. Dear me, thought Quint again, not just touchy, but a touch humourless too, taking himself very seriously today. But worse was to come. Walt began to sing. Quite well, in the middle register a man might sing in, not too low nor high.

  Think of all the times we boasted

  At the mead-bench, heroes in the hall

  Predicting our own bravery in battle.

  Now we shall see who meant what he said.

  I will make known my ancestry to one and all:

  I come from a mighty family.

  My grandfather was a mighty ealdorman.

  No thegn shall ever reproach me,

  Now that my Prince has been hewn down in battle.

  This is the most bitter sorrow of all:

  He was my kinsman and my Lord . . .

  And suddenly Walt threw himself at the foot of an ilex and clung to it with his left arm while he chewed on the stump, chewed the way a cat can chew your fist, and if you tease it, draw blood. Quint ran to him, pulled his good arm free and cradled him in his arms for a time, sitting beside him and rocking him like a child - he sang too, but in a very different way, a song his mother had sung when he had the toothache, about a fox going out one cold and frosty night, to get a goose . . . And as he sang, he thought -- this is not tetchiness or bravado, this is madness. Walt has a devil in him, not an actual devil, not possessed so it’s a matter for exorcism, but a deep devil, a deep distress, yes, perhaps exorcism is the right word, but not the silliness of bell, book and candle, but a deeper probing, a slow drawing forth of ancient poisons.

  The immediate crisis passed soon enough, a spasm racked Walt’s body, his face relaxed, the stump dropped from his mouth, and his face changed to that of a sleeping child as if a cloud had passed from it and the sun shone through again. He lay like that for almost an hour, then woke slowly and naturally.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine. Never felt better.’

  Walt stood, shook his head, fist and stump to his ears, elbows out like wings, and yawned.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we’d better get on.’

  And the strange thing was, it seemed he had no recollection at all of the fit he had fallen into.

  They set their faces to the slope again but now the hour was advanced to a time when the sun, though still with a long way to go before it set, had dipped beneath the escarpments above. The warmth of the day still lingered about them, and presently the oak gave way to aromatic mountain fir and pine. With the sun gone birds began to flit about again and above their heads a speckled warbler with red breast and a long tail poured forth a stream of song from a pine bough.

  Quint, curious as ever, wanted to know whether or not or to what extent his friend had suffered an amnesia of the events preceding his fit.

  ‘You have told me,’ he said, ‘of the hardships and companionship that go with learning to be a warrior, and of the teaching, the deep teaching . . .’ For a moment Quint’s mind played with words, as it often did, in several languages. To teach was in Latin docere and so it was that teachers were called doctors. There was teaching and teaching. By rote for practical purposes, such as a craft, a language, to read or write. But a deeper, more inner sort of teaching, doctoring, made a man and woman what they were, how they acted, tutored their souls. ‘Indoctrination?’ Perhaps; ‘. . the deep teaching that turns a warrior into a housccarl.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You did. But surely there is more to it than that. The lord has responsibilities towards his housecarls.’

  ‘Of course he does. Of course. No man would give his all without expecting some return. And, indeed, for what we did, substantial return.’

  ‘The lord is the ring-giver. Gold, of course. He stands up for you in the courts or in disputes, defends your kin. And when your fighting days are done he gives you land. There remain obligations. You can become one of his stewards, ambassadors even, or from your new estate supply more thegns, more warriors to become housecarls. And there are taxes and dues to pay as well. But at the end of the day you have land. Not just the five hides of a thegn but, according to the services you have rendered, maybe hundreds of hides. And these are like a little kingdom of your own to administer, according to the laws of course, but your own. To be passed on to your heirs.’

  This, thought Quint, is very far from the indoctrination inherent in poems like the Battle of Maldon. So different, to believe both at once must be like a soul facing two ways, torn in contradictory directions. A mind split. That could almost be a disease. Again, his own multifarious mind searched for a word and stumbled into Greek. Schizo-phrenia?

  He put it to Walt, bluntly.

  ‘How can you reconcile these things?’ he asked. ‘You serve your lord completely, you are his man, out of the oaths you have sworn, because it is a noble thing to do. Yet really you take lands and rings of gold from him, and that’s really why you do it.’

  Walt looked at him as if he were an idiot.

  ‘How would people know,’ he said, ‘that I had served my lord with total loyalty if I did not have his rings and land to prove it?’

  ‘So the reputation these things bring is more important than their actual worth?’

  This time there was no mistaking the sarcastic incredulity in his tone and Walt, turning away, decided to rise above it. There are some things common folk just do not understand.

  Meanwhile Quint, whose search for understanding was as much the very core of his being as seeking after self-worthiness was Walt’s, turned it all over again and again in his mind. On the one hand, he surmised, this Walt is riven with guilt because he survived the battle in which his lord died, and that crumbles his soul within him. But on the other he dreams of the lands he should have had, his own hall, his thegns and churls and freemen and slaves, and above all a wife and children, heirs of his own - things good in themselves and to be lusted after, but also proofs of his stature as a man amongst men; all, when you think about it, very Anglo-Saxon, and of all this he is deprived and that
makes him bitter, but it is a bitterness riven with guilt, guilt even that he should feel bitter against his dead lord.

  Welladay, he thought, I must do what I can for him.

  Chapter Nine

  They passed the tree line into a rolling climbing country of coarse pasture, low hemispherical shrubs of thyme and lavender, where long whale-backed boulders pushed their lichened humps through seas of grass. In places there were banks of spiky asphodel, white and black, such as grace the Elysian Fields. They reached the watershed as evening fell. On the other side they found the spring. The water was indeed very pure and icy cold, but bubbled slightly with tiny luminescent bubbles; it had an almost indiscernible blue depth to it when one peered into the cup.

  They made up a fire, boiled up the salted meat with some wild garlic Walt found, finished their bread and drank much of the wine. By then darkness had almost fallen and again they spread the quilt but because the air was chill Quint showed how they could get into it - there was room for both.

  Quint was soon snoring, but Walt lay awake and his mind dwelt on some at least of the things he had been thinking about during the day and describing to Quint. Shortly, through Quint’s snoring, he thought he could hear a distant sort of wailing or singing, or something between the two, perhaps an owl of a breed peculiar to these mountains, he thought, but it went on, and eventually he nudged Quint’s shoulder, until the traveller turned off his back and stopped snoring.

  Now Walt could hear it clearly, a lilting rise and fall, but sad, keening and some way off and below them on the north-facing mountainside up which they had come. For a time he was frightened, thinking of sprites or succubi, demons who take on female forms to seduce men in their sleep. He even thought of the Cornish girl, heathen as she was and probably not baptized, a troubled spirit come to haunt him for not saving her from Wulfric. But the singing came no nearer and finally sank away in a dying fall and Walt slept. Before dawn he woke again, was perhaps awakened, and in the very earliest greyest light, with a mountain mist thick and pearly around them, saw again the cowled and robed figure he had seen before, but now very close indeed and kneeling over Quint’s pack. His drawn-in breath startled it and it was gone, flitting away into the mist which wrapped it out of sight in seconds. Walt’s heart pounded as he tried to make up his mind whether to follow or not, but he could see no point: it could lure him to a precipice, or, if it was corporeal, have the advantage to take him from behind, so he decided to stay where he was, but determined to remain awake.

  However, the dawn was a long way off, he was still heavy from the wine, the climbing walk, and perhaps too from the effects of the fit he had had, and he soon slept again. And now, the way it often is in the latter part of the night, when dawn is near, it was a heavy deep sleep and when he awoke he was ready to dismiss it all, the keening and the figure, as the figments of a dream. He said nothing of it as they breakfasted off grapes and bread, and drank from the spring.

  The mist had gone with the first shafts of sunlight though it lingered in the river valleys far below. The view in front of them was now even more magnificent than that to the north, for the southern slopes were more broken and rolled on further without much descent but disappearing into the mauve distances of further mountain ranges. Above them larks sang and around them brown mountain swifts skimmed faster than the eye could hold them, plucking insects out of the air only inches above the thyme and grass and rocks.

  ‘Come now,’ cried Quint, ‘a sparse six leagues or so and all down hill will bring us to Nicaea well before nightfall, and as we go you can tell me what happened at Portland and after -- what, some sixteen years ago?’

  ‘This was before we went to Tidworth camp.’

  ‘I understand.’

  It’s quite a sight: a hundred ships or more anchored in the lee of the castle Alfred had built and Canute had enlarged, or pulled up on the eastern landward side of Chesil beach; the tents of a host some two thousand strong and most of them housecarls or men at arms, thegns committed to providing their lord with one man at arms (usually the thegn himself or one of his sons), helmet, shield, corselet of mail, two saddle horses and two pack animals - all these had come in from Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, risking the King’s displeasure. But all were happy to reassert their loyalty to Godwin and the Godwinsons. And no doubt across the bay where the gulls swoop over the refuse of the camp and the terns plummet for sprats in the breakers some nine miles distant along the white cliffs of Osmington and Durdle Dor, the King’s men and perhaps those of Robert of Canterbury and Siward of Northumbria, watch and mark the extent of Godwin’s support.

  ‘We all met up there and feasted in the great hall outside the castle for three days, a time not just for revelry but for reaffirming at the mead benches old loyalties and oaths. Then the combined hosts re-embarked and sailed back east again through the Solent, sailing into the estuaries to make landfalls at Portchester, Bosham, Shoreham, New Haven and so forth right along to Pevensey and now there was no pretence at all of harrying. Some say Folkestone but it was Pevensey. I was there. It was a triumph, a progress, that brought burghers and thanes alike out on to their walls or into their harbours, all promising support should the King not reinstate Godwin and his sons, for all feared the country would be sold to the Bastard and the Normans if the Godwinsons remained ousted.

  ‘Our march from Pevensey took us by Ton Bridge Wells, where there are springs much like the one where we have just passed the night, then Ton Bridge itself, where a small burgh straddles the upper Medway. We were on one of the three tracks, and there are only three, that cross the mighty forest of the Andredesweald, more than a hundred miles from east to west and often as much as forty from north to south. From Ton Bridge we climbed the North Downs into a place of pastureland crowned with a circle of Seven Oaks. Here the Celts amongst us, and there were a few, not just as slaves but some come as mercenaries from Ireland, some from Wales, grew restive and sad and talked amongst themselves of their Old Religion. It was said among them that many still lived like wild animals, elves or goblins in the green wood we had passed through, and that they came out at certain seasons, like St John the Baptist’s Day, to celebrate their awful ceremonies and sacrifices within the circle of these oaks.

  ‘The churchmen, the Norman churchmen that is, want to hew these ancient oaks down but the local thegns say no - the peasantry about the place believe to do so will bring plague, pestilence and murrain on the cattle and they will likely fight the churchmen’s foresters to save them-’

  ‘You say the Norman churchmen? Were they so very different from the English?’

  ‘Yes indeed, especially the monks and those who served in the bigger churches like Canterbury, London and Winchester. They were very strict in many ways - about collecting tithes and other taxes granted them by the King, but also about church discipline and doctrine - and the one thing they could not stand was any truck with or respect for the old religions and the customs that go with them, whether those the English brought with them or those the Celts observed. And, of course, they will not marry. They demand celibacy from the entire clerisy -- though nothing in scripture adjures it, as I understand. In short, they are a joyless bunch, interfering and bossy, do everything by rote. Even almsgiving and support for the sick and needy comes not from the heart but from the rule-book.’

  At all this Quint nodded his head in fervent agreement and his nose, which was often pink, became redder, but he did not then enlarge upon the subject beyond muttering: ‘Cluniacs, damned Cluniacs.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Walt resumed, ‘we came thus by the shortest route from Pevensey again to Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite London, just nine or ten months after our ignominious departure. The people of London, whether out of love for Godwin, or fearing a sacking, support us. At a great meeting of the Witan in the new Great Hall at Westminster, the biggest in the land, Godwin and the Godwinsons make a huge ceremony of oath-swearing -- of their loyalty to the King, of their innocence of all the crimes t
hey stand accused of, and perforce the King must accept them!-’

  ‘Because the host they have gathered is bigger than the one the King can bring against them.’

  ‘Well, partly.’ Walt frowned, sounded a touch puzzled at Quint’s ignorance. ‘But mainly because when such great men swear oaths together then, perforce, they must be believed -- unless an equal or greater number of great men can be found to swear them false.’

  ‘And the facts of the case,’ Quint sounded quite scandalised by what Walt was suggesting, ‘that Godwin some sixteen years earlier blinded the King’s elder brother and brought about his death, that Sweyn kidnapped and ravished an Abbess and murdered his cousin Beorn, and all the rest, all these count for nothing?’

  ‘Well, something, yes. I suppose. But only if the oath-swearing leads on to consideration of them. That is, if sufficient men can be gathered together to swear oaths in contradiction.’

  ‘So this oath-swearing is no more than a sign signifying the physical power the defendant, or plaintiff, can bring to bear upon the case?’

  ‘I am no lawyer,’ Walt was clearly irritated at his companion’s apparent attack on ancient custom; English custom anyway, ‘and all I can say is that oath-swearing is the basis of justice, and the greater the man the more powerful his oath. For instance, if a Lord of several manors swears one thing, then some twenty lesser thegns must be found to swear him wrong. This is justice. It upholds the framework we live by. If we took each man’s word as equal in weight then there would be no rule of law at all.’

  ‘So. All your oath-swearing law does is shore up, or rather express, the power of those who are already mighty.’

  ‘Exactly so. Is that not the meaning of all law? To uphold the status of the mighty but without resort to war, tumult, death and destruction?’