The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘You were magnificent,’ he asserted.

  That night he came to the small house Edward had been given within the walls King Alfred had set four-square round Winchester seventy years before. They supped together, drank mead and Tostig played the harp for a while before they took a candle to the upper room. There, behind warm tapestries and lit by a couple of beeswax candles, they became lovers.

  Naked, Tostig exceeded Edward’s expectations. His white body, though still slight, was well muscled and perfectly proportioned, long in neck, limbs, fingers and feet. Standing behind him the future king put his hands in Tostig’s armpits and then ran them down his chest, pausing to knead small erect nipples. Tostig leant into him and put his cheek on Edward’s shoulder, exposing his neck, which Edward now nuzzled, gently at first but then nibbling while his hands arrived round Tostig’s waist where his middle fingers met in the youth’s navel. After stroking and combing a pubic bush redder than his hair, one hand finally cupped Tostig’s balls and the other closed round a long but thin penis.

  ‘You have a lovely cock,’ he said, ‘the loveliest in the world,’ and Tostig felt his master’s - thick and strong now at the top of his buttocks, pressing into the small of his back.

  His master’s? Yes, indeed. That was the way it worked out and in a way Tostig was relieved. He was not, after all, that experienced in this sort of thing and had not relished the idea of putting his cock up another man’s bum, which is what his father had told him would be required of him. But after the initial shock and some pain he discovered that such was his partner’s experience and skill in these matters the act done the other way round was quite wonderfully pleasant . . .

  The first of many sessions of pillow talk followed.

  ‘You wooed me, the way you wooed my pony.’

  ‘What will you call him?’

  ‘Ned?’

  ‘I think not. Sultan, perhaps.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was bred in Barbary and that is the name they give their rulers.’

  ‘Sultan then he shall be. If you rule England as well as you rule us, then all will be happy.’

  ‘I have no intention of buggering England. Though I suspect your father may.’

  ‘What you did to me was not buggery. It was a fuck.’

  ‘Tell me about England.’

  ‘Compared with Normandy it’s a mess. At times it feels like an ugly, shapeless, heaving mass of conflicting parts -- at least five of them . . .’

  At the top of the heap came the King and his household which included the nucleus of an army made up of housecarls, the navy, tax-collectors, King’s reeves and what-all. The defence of the realm against both internal and external threat seemed to be his chief duty. Then came the church which itself was divided into competing parties - the minsters, the abbeys and the bishops. Third, the Earls and greater thegns -- owners of huge estates, capable of raising private armies; only a step away from the warlords of the previous century, they bound themselves with extravagant oaths to their King and broke them as soon as it was advantageous to do so. The only way of keeping them in order, it seemed, was to hold close members of their families at court as hostages -- they seemed marginally less likely to step out of line if it meant close kin would be mutilated and killed.

  ‘In that case you shall be my hostage to ensure your family’s good behaviour.’

  ‘Suits me.’

  Every man had his death price, wergild, what you paid his family if you caused his death. If you committed a lesser crime, like rape or adultery, you paid a fixed proportion of the wergild. Wergild was scaled according to rank, and, of course, to Edward’s despair, varied from place to place across his kingdom. Oath-swearing and wergild all more or less meant that a man could do almost what he liked if he had enough money to pay wergild to the people he’d hurt. And if his oath-swearing capability outmatched that of the plaintiffs he might get away with it altogether.

  Fourth came the boroughs or burghs, seventy or more of them, which could be as big as London, with ten thousand merchants, artisans, shipwrights, manufacturers and all their hangers-on, to a small town of five hundred centred round, say, a handful of weaving sheds or pottery kilns. In many ways these were the easiest to handle - chartered to do so by Alfred the Great, they made their own bye-laws, regulated themselves, and instead of paying taxes in kind set at often absurd amounts of absurd goods, like one porpoise out of every three caught, or two tuns of pure ale, seven oxen, six wethers, and forty cheeses, they paid in cash, licensed as they were to mint the coin of the realm.

  Most burghs minted coinage. Every four years or so the king called in the old coinage -- gold, silver and bronze. The metal was then melted down, made up to the required amounts, and redistributed to the mints where the coiners stamped it from dies they collected from London. Thus the coinage of the realm was standard throughout and always in good condition. It was the most advanced, effective and stable system of currency control in the world at that time.

  Finally, fifth, the so-called freemen of England. It seemed everyone was free unless they were serfs. Many of them had commuted their rights to tiny plots of privately owned land for the protection and security a powerful lord could provide. And they still had to pay almost crippling dues in terms of the proportion of their daily labour that they had to hand over to both their lord and the church. And even those who had a hide or two to their own name still had to work for the lord of the manor for two or more days a week, pay the church in kind or cash, and be on hand to turn out as part of the fyrd, the peasant army the king could raise when he needed one. Yet all of these, by far the largest section of the population, called themselves ‘free’.

  ‘Free! What -- churls, freemen, sokemen, even villeins . . . free!’

  ‘Yes. They even claim the right to get up from where they are, under one Lord of the Manor, and move to another if they feel like it.’

  Frequently Edward said to himself as this and other nights wore on: they order these matters better in Normandy . . .

  Chapter Fourteen

  Through Tostig Edward learnt a lot, but he learnt, too, from experience. Not all of what he learnt was to his liking. On Candlemas, the second of February, after Mass in the Old Minster, when, according to new custom just introduced from France, the year’s candles were blessed as well as the Purification of the Holy Virgin and Christ’s Presentation in the Temple celebrated, he, Tostig, his huntsman and four grooms set off for Romsey, arriving in the early afternoon.

  The next morning they pushed on into the forest and soon raised a small group of red deer. Spurs, crops and they were away, with their horse’s hooves crunching through leaf-mold bound with frost beneath the oaks and the mast beneath the beeches. Rooks rose cackling from the bare canopies above them, holly in the more open spaces flashed along their horses’ flanks. The most backward of the deer veered off to the right, and the huntsman winding his horn managed to steer the big dogs on to its track. All now thought they’d have an early kill, but the leading dog suddenly checked, sniffed around the crackling forest floor, and the others too soon came back and joined him. They snuffled, whined, pawed the ground and suddenly were off again, at a right-angle from the trail of the deer.

  The huntsman trotted back to Edward and Tostig, touched his whip to his cap.

  ‘They’ve picked up a fox scent,’ he said. ‘Shall us follow them or call them in?’

  ‘Oh, follow the bulgars,’ Edward cried, rather self-consciously aping their ways of speech. ‘At least Reynard will give us a good gallop,’ and set spurs to the flanks of the bay gelding he was riding. Tostig followed on Sultan.

  But they never caught him and only had a view of him once, and then outside the forest, slipping like a wraith along the rim of an ancient turf rampart, white belly to the ground, brush straight out, silhouetted against the grey sky where tiny snowflakes hovered like gnats. Dusk gathered, night closed slowly in and the snow thickened, dusting frozen ploughland. Then one of the huntsm
en’s horses stumbled, nearly threw its rider, and was instantly seen to be lame. The huntsman winded his horn again and two of the dogs slunk back - the others were never seen again.

  ‘We’ll freeze to death if we don’t find shelter,’ Edward remarked. He was not expressing fear, just making a statement.

  ‘There’s a small village over there, or a large manor farm, whatever.’ Tostig pointed down a coombe, terraced for rye, to a settlement about half a mile off, still just visible as the night gathered. They could see red lights as of flaming torches swinging about and then a sudden blooming of flames, yellow and orange. At that distance they were like a rose against the blackness.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Edward asked.

  The chief huntsman answered.

  ‘Candlemas. They take down all the green stuff they decorated the bowers and hall with for Yule-tide and burn it. Get everything swept up clean.’

  ‘Candlemas was yesterday.’

  ‘Shrove Tuesday?’

  ‘Not till the end of the month.’

  The huntsman licked his lips, muttered something about ignorant peasants who always got the dates of things wrong.

  They hacked down the grassy slope, and then through stunted apple and pear trees, the groom with the lamed horse following on foot. There were low cottages and huts outside the enclosure surrounded by field strips and small vegetable gardens. Beyond the palisade the roofs of the hall and three bowers could be seen and no doubt there were smaller buildings too -- huts for servants, barns, stabling.

  All was thrown into a flickering backcloth by the bonfire which was sited on the open space in front of the main entrance to the enclosure. Most settlements of this sort in England kept such a field free for recreation, country sports and so on. Men and women were heaving branches of yew and holly on to the fire: they crackled and flared instantly since it was some six weeks since they had been cut green; flaring ashes circled into the still air amongst the snow flakes, setting all in a whirling contradiction of heat and cold, light and darkness. There was music too - a couple of drums beat fast in a rattling rhythm, wailing pipes, and the occasional boom of a horn - and as they got nearer they could see that many of the silhouetted shapes were not merely fuelling the fire, they were dancing wildly around it.

  Suddenly a group of figures broke away from the fire carrying brands of flaming straw and ran right into the orchard, the torches against the trunks. When the brands burnt low they chucked what was left into the branches. They all seemed to be female, in flowing scraps of loosely tied worsted and, in spite of the cold and the danger of sparks, many barefoot or merely sandaled. They threw a fright into the horses and some of the men too with a constant flow of ululating cries.

  The women flew back to the fire. Edward told the men to wait to see if they would return, but when the wild dancing began again he told them to push on, albeit warily, ready for anything. Their presence had been noted and as they approached the enclosure, passing between the low round huts of the poorest retainers, a couple of middle-aged men, dressed soberly and with a look of some sense about them, came out to meet them.

  The oldest, who might have been the thegn or lord of the manor from the dignity with which he bore himself, demanded to know who they were and what their business.

  ‘Huntsmen,’ Edward replied, leaning forward over his gelding’s neck, ‘from Godwin’s household in Winchester. Our dogs picked up on a fox and led us astray.’

  ‘You’re not churchmen then?’

  ‘No. But we need shelter and food. We can pay whatever is fair. My name is Aelfric, and this is Eric, my son,’ indicating Tostig, who raised an ironic eyebrow at the news. ‘The rest are my servants’

  ‘They have names too,’ the thegn, if that was what he was, grumbled. But he did not divulge who he was. However, he whistled up a couple of lads who were watching the dancing. ‘Here, see their horses safely stabled.’

  Edward, Tostig and the rest followed him into the hall. Tostig, looking over his shoulder, saw how the men outside were now leaping through the dying flames of the fire.

  The hall was laid out for a feast and lit with flaming brands and candles, too. The tables were already piled with bread and apples, no doubt taken from the straw they had been kept in the roof of a barn since September. Heavy with the smell of roasting mutton clouds of blue smoke occasionally blew in from some outer room. The thegn found his visitors a corner up under the high table and bade them sit down. It would not be long, he said, before the feasting began.

  He was right. With the dying of the fire, the rhythm of the music changed to something less wild and the people of the village trooped in in family groups, passing beneath an arch of hooped quickbeam. Quickly but in due order, knowing their places, they seated themselves about the tables, the thegn too, but on the dais with his own family ranging from a very old granny to a new-born baby. And all set to as youths and girls went amongst them with great platters of meat and flasks of mead. The visitors were not forgotten and got their share.

  As the plates were cleared a youth with long, dark, brown hair, Saxon perhaps, with no Danish in him, came down from the dais.

  ‘My father has asked me to show you to the bower we keep for guests,’ he said. ‘A fire has been lit. He wishes you a very good night.’

  The timber-framed house he took them to was warm with a fire of seasoned wood glowing in a central fireplace and giving off little smoke and what there was aromatic, pine perhaps. There were two bed-frames covered with yew and then linen sacking and woollen blankets and similar on the floor for the huntsman and his grooms. The youth was polite but firm.

  ‘Do not let any noise we make disturb you,’ he said. ‘Stay here and sleep well.’

  Tostig’s face flared but Edward put out a restraining hand.

  ‘They don’t know who we are, ‘ he said. ‘If they did they would treat us more graciously.’

  ‘Then let us tell them.’

  ‘No. That would be an abuse of the hospitality they have given us.’

  Presently the music started again, at first in slow rhythms but, as the night wore on, faster, louder, more frenzied, accompanied by shouts and even screams, but not those of terror. Edward’s curiosity got the better of him. After all, he needed to know as much as he could about these people he was born to rule and he suspected that what was going on was some pagan rite, the Lupercal perhaps, which, when the time was ripe, it would be his duty to stamp out. Checking the others were asleep, he wrapped his cloak about him, slipped through the doorway, crossed the short space back to the hall.

  The music, and it was not what he, brought up on the pleasing of a courtly Norman lute, readily thought of as music, was now very loud indeed. Three drums, made of skins stretched over large barrels, were being beaten by a huge man clad in leathers. Others banged pieces of wood together, rattled vessels filled with stones, and one banged an anvil with a hammer. Above this two long pipes wailed, an old Viking horn boomed, and a couple of men twanged away on rebecs.

  Many of the lights that had illuminated the hall were now out or guttered smokily; the beams of those that still burned brightly were broken into rhythmic flickers by the dancers who whirled between. Some of these danced on their own, twisting and stamping, arms flailing, fingers clicking; others faced each other and emulated each others’ movements; and some clung to each other, in embraces as close if not as openly lewd as that of the couple he had passed on his way in. And many formed lines in fours or sixes, arms over each others’ shoulders, either side by side or in chains and swayed along, throwing legs first one way then the other.

  And while they did all this many of them, all together at a given moment, waved their arms in the air and sang in unison, a repeated phrase, a meaningless mantra, something about the moon.

  Bewildered and even disgusted, Edward returned unnoticed to his cot. In the morning the thegn was apologetic.

  'I hope,’ he said, ‘we did not keep you awake with our noise and dancing. The winter nights are
long and cold. Cheers us up, reminds us of Spring, you know?’

  Clearly there was still something that lingered about Edward that people recognised as foreign or at any rate not of their parts.

  This experience was the first of many which represented aspects of England he would never get used to, that remained alien to the day he died. He never learned to like the Englishmen’s capacity, at all levels, for rowdy, rough enjoyment. Moving with his court round the country, he found that everywhere they drank and ate enormously, especially drank.

  Partial though Edward was to mead (and he preferred it not fully fermented so there was still much sweetness in it) he could not see the point of drinking until one was first stupid, then dangerous to others and oneself and finally insensible.

  They all seized every opportunity, from heavy rain to drought, to down mattock, spade and sickle and leave the fields for a wide variety of sports and pastimes, none of which required cunning or skill, indeed most needed no more than brute strength and foolhardiness. Many were plain stupid - like putting a pole across a river so two men could sit astride and try to knock each other off with gravel-filled sacks. Or seeing who in a village could throw a leather boot the furthest. Or putting a cow in a small enclosure and striking wagers as to where it would shit first. They would fill a bladder with sand and then all the men of one village or farmstead would try to get it to the centre of another, while the men of the other did likewise. All of which was harmless in itself, but what would happen to an economy where all did not work night and day for the common good? A peasant who, when not actually at work, was not either briefly asleep, or eating just enough and no more to enable him to reproduce tomorrow the labour of today, was a bad peasant.

  The noblemen hunted with no concern for their own or anyone else’s safety, though they were punctilious about paying for any damage they did. They all loved fighting -- wrestling, with fists, with staves - but the fyrd was a joke. Get a hundred Englishmen together with an assortment of agricultural tools for weapons, make them march twenty miles, the first to arrive would be an hour or so ahead of the stragglers.