Crusade (26 page)

Driven on by his oratory, a motley crew numbered in thousands, composed of English clerics, townsfolk and yeoman farmers, lined up behind Norman lords loyal to King Rufus and hurled themselves on to the rebel army. In a battle of astonishing savagery, joined just four miles east of Hereford at the confluence of the Wye and the Lugg in the tranquil water meadows of Mordiford, Wulfstan’s zealots cut the insurgent Normans to pieces.

After the melee, Wulfstan stepped into the morass of bodies and, from the middle of the battlefield, said Mass for the dead and dying. He then proceeded to preach to the dead about their wrongdoing in threatening the peace and security of England before condemning them to the fires of Hell for eternity. He ordered a mass grave to be dug, insisting that every participant in the battle, whether earl or villein, wielded a pick or shovel until the task had been completed. The number of dead was so great that the grisly chore was still underway a week later.

As we made our way to the forces of King Rufus besieging Pevensey, Sweyn, Adela and I reflected on Wulfstan’s deeds and what had become of our homeland. Bishop Wulfstan was the oldest and most senior Englishman of stature in the land. He had lived through the reigns of the Danish kings and the long tenure of King Edward. His loyalty to Harold was absolute throughout 1066 and the
revolts which followed, but now, regardless of what had happened in the past, like us, he found himself fighting for a regime which had subjugated his own people.

‘Does it really matter to be English or Norman?’

Sweyn would never have asked such a question before, but his love for Mahnoor, a girl of a different faith from a distant land, had led him to question many of his assumptions previously cast in stone.

‘I’m not sure. I often ask myself the same question. We’re all God’s children. Perhaps that’s all that matters?’

Adela also had her misgivings about a blind devotion to the English cause.

‘If you think about what Hereward and the Brotherhood fought for at Ely, it wasn’t simply justice for the English; it was justice for all men and women. There were Normans within the Brotherhood, as well as men from Spain and Wales, and many Anglo-Danes from the north.’

Sweyn warmed to the point.

‘We have spent a large part of our lives in Aquitaine and recently in Sicily where Count Roger is creating a domain based on fair and equal treatment of all men.’

Adela quickly added a rejoinder.

‘And women! Where the Mos Militum is a code of honour accepted by knights and where I, as a woman normally denied independent status, can rise to the level of a knight of Islam.’

We could smell death two hours before we reached Pevensey. The defenders had finally capitulated and those who had survived the six weeks of the siege were being led away – at least, those who could walk. Farm carts
carried those too weak to go on foot, and more carts brought out the dead, which was by far the greater number.

Odo and Mortain, together with their knights and their elite guards, looked reasonably well fed and watered, but the rest of the garrison – over 400 people – were in a dreadful condition. Water had been severely rationed from the outset and food supplies started to dwindle after a couple of weeks. In the end, rats were being caught and eaten and the final supplies of flour limited to a handful per person per day. Order had been maintained only under pain of death until the majority were either dead or too weak to protest.

In the reckoning that followed, supervised by King Rufus himself, Robert Mortain was treated remarkably well. He was banished from England and required to live in Normandy, but his English estates were left intact. The same generosity was shown to the rest of his fellow conspirators. Only Odo was treated harshly by Norman standards. In the eyes of the English, who had been on the receiving end of his cruelty many times during and after the Conquest, he was lucky to escape with his life. Rufus considered execution, but decided that the killing of a bishop, even with legal endorsement, who was so close to the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the whole of Europe, was unwise at the beginning of his kingship.

The punishment began with Odo being paraded out of Pevensey’s keep through a cordon of the local community, accompanied by the deafening echoes of the King’s victory horns. He was then stripped of all his regalia as Earl of Kent and Bishop of Bayeux, his rings and seal and fine clothes, and left standing in front of the crowd dressed only in his woollen pants.

I was near the King, no more than ten yards from the great Norman lord who had once sat at the top of both the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies of England and Normandy. He shivered in the cold air and, no matter how hard he tried to appear noble and dignified, looked like a peasant standing trial for stealing game from a king’s forest.

He had soiled his pants, his face was unshaven and he looked pale and dirty. The crowed bayed and jeered and hurled insults at him in English and French, the mildest of which referred to his girth and dishevelled appearance, while the worst included every vile taunt imaginable.

Odo caught my eye and that of Sweyn, who he must have remembered from their previous bloody encounter. He looked at us with a withering stare that would condemn us to Hell if it had its way. I felt sorry for him – he had reaped his own whirlwind but, even so, it was always sad to see a man humiliated, especially one previously so high and mighty.

Rufus then passed judgement.

‘Odo of Bayeux, for the crimes you have committed against your sovereign lord and the people of England, you are banished from this land. You will be escorted to the coast at Dover through all the burghs of Kent and put on a humble merchant ship bound for Normandy, where the Duke will determine your fate. You are never to set foot in England again.’

He was then bound at the wrists and led away on foot, tethered by rope to a mounted escort. Making him walk across his earldom tied to a horse was a significant humiliation for a man who had often ruled England as sub-regulus when Rufus’s father was in Normandy. Rufus no doubt also
hoped that many local people would find various forms of verbal and physical insult to direct at him during his long journey.

Odo’s vast estates were confiscated by Rufus and taken into his household, thus swelling his coffers significantly. He had handled the crisis and its denouement well. Not only had he acted swiftly to meet the armed threat, but by pardoning Odo’s co-conspirators he had guaranteed stability within the Norman hierarchy for the time being. On the other hand, his degradation of Odo showed that he could be resolute when he needed to be, even with the second most powerful man in the land.

Before the King left for Westminster later that day, he summoned me.

When he spoke, it was almost like an aside.

‘Get that little army of Robert’s back on its boats and take them back where they belong. Tell my devoted brother that the King of England is grateful for the Duke of Normandy’s support but, as you can see, it isn’t really necessary.’

They were clever words and did not require an answer, but I could not resist a sentence or two in similar vein.

‘Sire, I am sure the Duke of Normandy is mightily relieved that you have dealt with the minor local difficulty that the King of England has had with one of his clerics. Rest assured, when your uncle reaches Normandy, Duke Robert will ensure that he is treated in a manner that you would find appropriate.’

With that, I bowed and left. There was nothing more to be said.

20. Battle of Alnwick

Events over the next few years unfolded in a series of complicated and confusing political manoeuvres by Rufus in numerous attempts to commandeer his brother’s dukedom in Normandy.

He used England’s vast wealth to win the support of magnates in the north of Normandy and to recruit mercenaries to threaten Robert with force. Eventually, he had a sufficiently strong power base on the coast to spend most of his time there and become de facto joint lord of the dukedom. Robert had no choice but to accept this and was forced to attend Rufus’s courts and crown-wearings, to his increasing humiliation.

The King also extended the authority of England into Wales and the North, building castles deep into Wales, in the remote Pennines and into Cumbria as far as Carlisle.

There was also a new ingredient in the regal mix. Henry Beauclerc, by now in his early twenties, was not without talent or ambition and had established a stronghold at Domfront, a towering fortress above the Varenne, in Normandy’s north-west. So, by 1093 a pair of quarrelling sons had become a trio and the dukedom was governed by one anointed duke and two pseudo-dukes.

We continued in the service of Duke Robert, a task that became more and more onerous as the plots and intrigues became more and more convoluted. Robert bore
it all with good grace and continued to be thoughtful and generous.

Although Edwin remained steadfast and content, Sweyn and Adela had become restless. They no longer shared a chamber, but did share a tent on campaigns and were as close as they had always been. Their ambitions remained unfulfilled – they often said that the skirmishes and squabbles of spoiled dukes and kings should not be the preoccupation of chivalrous knights.

A familiar set of circumstances alleviated our tedium in the middle of 1093. Malcolm, King of the Scots, had taken advantage of the civil strife between the Normans at regular intervals to fill his treasury with barrels of English coins and cartloads of clerical plate. In 1091, I had been an intermediary and negotiated yet another settlement between him and the Normans when King Rufus sent a huge army and navy north of the border to threaten his realm.

Since then, the significant reinforcement of English fortresses at Carlisle, Durham, Newcastle and Bamburgh had led Malcolm to feel threatened and he now asked to see Rufus in Gloucester.

Once again, the King asked if I would play honest broker. As usual, Robert was generous to his brother and agreed that I could go. By the time we arrived in Gloucester, Malcolm had been escorted from the border with all the courtesies appropriate to a visiting monarch and had been welcomed to the Royal Burgh of Gloucester with due ceremony on King Rufus’s behalf by Alan the Red, Earl of Richmond.

Then the good manners ceased.

Rufus refused to see Malcolm in person, insisting that he negotiate with Alan of Richmond and Hugh, Earl of
Chester. Malcolm was incandescent when I tried to persuade him to meet with the two earls.

‘Who does he think he is, the little sodomite!’

‘Malcolm, he knows exactly who he is – he’s the King of England. It would be wise to negotiate. Although Normandy is divided and the three sons fight all the time, they will unite against you if you give them enough cause – and they’re getting richer and stronger all the time.’

‘Where is Rufus? I hear he’s gone hunting.’

‘He may have done.’

‘You know damn well he’s gone hunting! Where are his hounds? They were here when I arrived.’

I had no plausible answer to give Malcolm.

‘Well, you can tell him that as he likes it up the arse, he knows what he can do with the negotiation!’

Malcolm did not wait for an escort. He summoned his retinue and was riding north for Scotland within the hour.

When I reported the outcome to Rufus – without, of course, Malcolm’s colourful invective – he smiled mischievously. His refusal to see Malcolm was a deliberate provocation, and it had worked perfectly. Instead of meeting the Scottish king, he had returned to Gloucester with his courtiers, their carts full of venison and boar, and had begun his regular regime of feasting and frolicking after a successful hunt.

Rufus had built a sumptuous new Great Hall in Gloucester and liked to go there as often as possible to enjoy the plentiful game in the nearby forests. The walls were covered in vast tapestries embroidered in Flanders and were lit by huge torches which, even on the darkest nights, bathed it so brightly that it was like daylight.

His hunting dogs took pride of place. The King’s high table was at the western end of the hall, with a huge hearth behind it. The eastern end was a mirror image, with its own massive fireplace, some thirty paces from its twin, except that it was the exclusive domain of his dogs. When all his guests were assembled and the entire court sat down after grace was said, Rufus demanded that his dogs be fed first, while his noble lords and ladies waited patiently for the regal dogs to finish. Only when the dogs had had their fill, and were lying farting and snorting by their fire, was the court allowed to begin its feast.

Rufus’s effeminate appearance had become impossible to ignore. He had grown his thinning red-blond hair, which he now parted down the middle, and wore even more outlandish jewellery and yet more ostentatious clothes. He was surrounded by his coterie of young men who fawned all over him, each trying to catch his eye.

Concerned for my sister in Dunfermline, with Malcolm almost certain to do something rash, I approached him and asked for his leave to travel north.

‘Sire, as you know, Margaret, King Malcolm’s wife, is my sister. I would like your permission to follow Malcolm to Scotland. He is very impetuous, but I’m usually able to placate him.’

‘Are you playing another astute game with me, Prince Edgar, as is your wont?’

‘No, sire. I am genuinely trying to protect my sister and to prevent Malcolm from overreacting to the provocation you have inflicted on him.’

‘You are impudent to suggest such a thing!’

‘Sire, please. Malcolm may not be able to discern your
tactics, but I see them clearly. You could achieve what you want in Scotland without bloodshed. Let me go and try; I’ve done it before.’

Rufus smiled. Despite his foppish appearance he had become a clever and ruthless politician.

‘Very well, but don’t placate him too much. I’ve got him just where I want him.’

We made haste to Scotland and, travelling lighter and faster than Malcolm, managed to get ahead of him before Preston so that I could speak to Margaret in Dunfermline before he arrived.

The sturdy walls of Malcolm’s fortress were always a welcome sight, and Margaret looked as serene as ever.