Crusade (50 page)

‘Why would I falsely praise you? You are far too worldly to be deceived by a sycophantic priest at work. Besides, you know in your own heart the weight of your achievements; you don’t need me to tell you.’

‘I suppose you are right … I am content.’

‘You should be. Your deeds in the Holy Land, King Henry’s Charter of Liberties, the protection of Hereward’s family and his legacy – any man should be proud of such things.’

‘Thank you, William of Malmesbury.’

‘And now, let us drink to Harold of Hereford. May he live a life that all who went before him would be proud of!’

‘A good toast. I will drink to that.’

Both men – as many who have drunk too much often do – drain their flasks in deep, satisfying quaffs.

William then gets to his feet and staggers waywardly to his chamber.

Edgar does not stir at all, but descends into a deep slumber in front of the fading fire. Within moments, the widow Awel appears. She summons the steward, and together they help Edgar to his bed.

He will sleep well, the memories of Palestine finally purged, the exploits of an honourable life recorded for posterity.

Late the next morning William, heavy-headed and regretting his excesses, and Roger, brighter and relieved to be going home to Wessex, say their farewells.

They are about to leave Ashgyll Force when Edgar, seemingly none the worse for his intemperance, tells them of some news. He takes a deep breath and looks down, clearly anxious about what he has heard.

‘My sergeant returned from Durham this morning. The King has had a shortage of silver for minting for
some time now. He has just ordered the royal mint at York to open up the old Roman silver mines on these moors. He is going to build a new settlement at Alston to protect the mines and process the shipments. It is only five miles from here … and so, my many years of tranquility in this beautiful wilderness are about to be destroyed by hordes of uncouth miners from all over England and Scotland.’

The old Prince casts a teary eye towards the moors above him, before continuing.

‘It will be the end for the wolves and the bears and, of course, for my friends Owain Rheged and the Gul. But nothing is for ever, I suppose.’

‘Edgar, don’t be too pessimistic. You and Owain have survived for a very long time; your lineages stretch back centuries. I’m sure you will both live out your days in peace.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that, we are both too stubborn to give in yet. But we will be the last of our breed. There’s no shame in that – all lineages come to an end, even the mightiest, and the Gul and the Cerdicians have much to be proud of.’

William does not answer; he knows that Edgar is right. He smiles warmly, bows deferentially and kicks his mount eastwards beyond Ashgyll Force towards the ford over the Grue Water.

An hour or so later, as William and Roger begin the climb up Black Fell to traverse the high moors to Appleby, they hear the ominous scream of the Helm Wind. It is cold and gloomy and more like dusk than the middle of the day.

Then, as if the Helm Wind has heralded him, Owain
Rheged appears, just as he did on that day over a week ago, a day that now seems a lifetime away.

He is standing on a crag about 100 feet above them, wrapped in a bearskin. He raises his ram’s-head staff above his head as a salute and a grant of safe passage through the land of the Gul, England’s last vestige of the people of Ancient Britain.

William and Roger halt their horses, and William raises his hand in a reciprocal gesture of friendship.

After all the trauma of their journey to reach Edgar’s lair and the long, tiring days and nights hearing his story, Roger is at last at ease.

‘Abbott, you were right about this journey. I am privileged to have heard Prince Edgar’s account in this mysterious place.’

‘So you should be. We have touched three ages of these islands in a heritage that spans hundreds of years. Owain Rheged is a remnant of the people who ruled this land centuries before the legions of Rome came here. Edgar is the last of the Saxons who ruled here after the Romans left. And, my instincts tell me, Harold of Hereford represents the future. He is an Englishman, but one who has embraced Norman ways and thus thickened his English blood. His service in the King’s guard would make his parents and grandparents, and all who followed their cause, very proud of him.

‘He is the future of these islands. When I am long gone and he is ready to tell his story, you would do well to seek him out and ask him to share it with you.’

Roger of Caen turns round to take one last look at Owain Rheged, but the Druid has gone.

‘Thank you, Abbott; perhaps I will come back here too, to see if the Gul survive another generation.’

‘Good idea. We’ll make a scribe out of you yet.’

Postscript

The motives of Alexius I, the Emperor of Byzantium, in calling for help from the Latin Princes in 1094, were largely met. The Crusade helped him subdue the Seljuk Turks of Anatolia and stabilize the empire in the south and east. He died in 1118.

Following his death, he was succeeded by his son, John Comnenus, whose reign was the high point of a Comneni dynasty noted for the wisdom and justice of its rule. His own tenure as Emperor was so highly regarded that he became known as ‘John the Beautiful’.

The Crusades continued for nearly 200 years and, by 1292, numbered nine major expeditions in total. But there were also smaller Crusades, including a Children’s Crusade (mostly teenagers and young men) in 1212, where none made it to the Holy Land and few managed to survive crossing the Alps. Some Crusades had other targets, including pagan Balts, Mongols, Slavs, Christian Heretics and Greek Orthodox Christians.

Pope Urban II, the instigator of the First Crusade, died in Rome two weeks after the fall of Jerusalem, but before the news had reached the Holy See.

Robert of Flanders returned to find his realm in chaos. His reputation from the Crusade stood him in good stead and he brought order back to Flanders and lived until 1111.

Gaston of Bearn travelled to Spain, where he lent his siege skills to the fight against the Moors.

Raymond of Toulouse returned to the Holy Land in the ill-fated Crusade of 1101. He eventually turned his attention to creating a Christian enclave in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. He died in the attempt in 1105. The city finally fell in 1109 and his son, Bertrand, completed his father’s mission. Tripoli remained a Christian city until 1289.

Stephen of Blois returned home in disgrace. Under pressure from his formidable wife, Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, he tried to redeem himself by returning to the Holy Land with the Crusade of 1101, where he perished at the hands of the Seljuk Turks.

Bohemond of Taranto, not satisfied with his lordship of Antioch, travelled to the Adriatic in 1105 to mount a campaign, sanctioned by Pope Paschal II, against the Byzantine rule of Alexius I. He was heavily defeated by Alexius at the Battle of Durazzo and was forced to sign a humiliating surrender. He returned to southern Italy a broken man and died in 1111.

It fell to Tancred of Hauteville to consolidate the Christian hold on Antioch. He increased its power to rival even that of Jerusalem. He died in 1112. Even though his successor, Roger of Salerno, nearly lost all that had been gained when his army was destroyed at the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, Antioch remained a Christian city until 1260.

Following his bravery during its capture, Godfrey of Bouillon took the greatest prize of all: Jerusalem. But he soon became ill and died in 1100.

Baldwin of Boulogne achieved remarkable success in his avaricious campaign into Mesopotamia in 1097. All cowered before his fearsome Norman knights, and he soon received an invitation from an Armenian named Bagrat to move eastwards towards the Euphrates, where he occupied Turbessel. Another invitation came from Thoros of Edessa, who adopted Baldwin as his son and successor. When Thoros was assassinated in March of 1098, Baldwin became the first Count of Edessa, thus creating the first Crusader city in the east. He ruled the county until 1100, marrying Arda, the daughter of Thoros of Marash. When Godfrey of Bouillon died, Baldwin ceded Edessa to his cousin and rushed south to grab the spoils of Jerusalem. He was crowned the first Christian King of Jerusalem on Christmas Day 1100. His ruthlessness built a powerful Christian domain throughout Palestine and beyond and guaranteed the legacy of the Crusade, until his death in 1118. Edessa remained a Christian city until 1144 and Jerusalem stayed under Christian control until it was taken by Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, in 1187.

The reign of Henry I brought a period of peace and prosperity in England and Normandy, notable for its judicial and financial reforms. He established the biannual Exchequer to reform the treasury. He used itinerant officials to curb the abuses of power at the local and regional level that had characterized Rufus’s unpopular reign. The differences between the English and Norman populations began to break down during his reign, and he made peace with the Church after the disputes of his brother’s reign.
But he could not solve the issue of his succession after the loss of his eldest son, William, in the wreck of the White Ship.

Henry’s Queen, Edith/Matilda (the niece of Edgar the Atheling and a pure Anglo-Scot) had a great interest in architecture and instigated the erection of many buildings, including Waltham Abbey (interestingly, the resting place of King Harold). She also had the first arched bridge in England built, at Stratford-le-Bow, as well as a bathhouse with piped-in water and public lavatories at Queenhithe. Her court was filled with musicians and poets. She commissioned a biography of her mother, Saint Margaret, was an active queen and, like her mother, renowned for her devotion to religion and to the poor. William of Malmesbury describes her as attending church barefoot at Lent, and washing the feet and kissing the hands of the sick. She also administered extensive dower properties and was known as a patron of the arts, especially music. Matilda died on 1 May 1118 at Westminster Palace; she was buried at Westminster Abbey.

Henry I died on 1 December 1135 at Saint-Denis-en-Lyons (now Lyons-la-Forêt) in Normandy. According to legend, he died of food poisoning, caused by eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, of which he was excessively fond. His remains were sewn into the hide of a bull, to preserve them on the journey, and taken back to England to be buried at Reading Abbey, which he had founded fourteen years earlier. The abbey was later destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. No trace of his tomb has survived.

By the time of King John, Henry’s great-great-grandson, much of what Henry had delivered in the Charter of
Liberties became enshrined in Magna Carta. The ‘Great Charter’ was signed by John in a meadow at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 and became the first milestone on the road to modern democracy.

Empress Matilda (also known as Matilda of England, or Maude) was the daughter and heir of Henry I. Matilda and her younger brother, William Adelin, were the only legitimate children of King Henry to survive to adulthood. William’s early death in the White Ship disaster in 1120 made Matilda the last heir from the paternal line of her grandfather William the Conqueror. As a child, Matilda was betrothed to and later married Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, acquiring the title Empress. The couple had no children. After being widowed for a few years, she was married to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, with whom she had three sons. Matilda was the first female ruler of England. However, the length of her effective rule was brief, lasting a few months in 1141. She was never crowned and failed to consolidate her rule. For this reason, she is normally excluded from lists of English monarchs, and her rival (and cousin) Stephen of Blois is listed as monarch for the period 1135–54. Their rivalry for the throne led to years of unrest and civil war in England that have been called ‘The Anarchy’. She did secure her inheritance of the Duchy of Normandy – through the military feats of her husband, Geoffrey – and campaigned unstintingly for her eldest son’s inheritance, living to see him ascend the throne of England in 1154 as Henry II.

Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the Conqueror, died in 1134 in Cardiff Castle in his early eighties. He was buried in the abbey church of St Peter, in
Gloucester. The exact place of his burial is difficult to establish – legend states that he requested to be buried before the high altar. The church has subsequently become Gloucester Cathedral.

There is little mention in the historical records of the whereabouts of Edgar the Atheling after the beginning of the reign of Henry I. All that is said by William of Malmesbury, writing in 1025, was that he ‘had retired to his estates in England’. There is no record of him ever marrying. Intriguingly, there is mention of an ‘Edgar Atheling’ in the
Great Pipe Rolls of the Second, Third and Fourth Years of the Reign of Henry II
. It is recorded that ‘Edgar Atheling owed money for a donum [Latin: present, gift, offering] taken in Northumberland’ before 1157. If this Edgar is Prince Edgar, he would have been 105 years old. It seems unlikely. However, it also seems odd that a man living in Northumbria at this time would carry a name suggesting he was the heir to the English throne – unless he was a twelfth-century Walter Mitty!

It has been written that Hereward of Bourne returned to his mountain eyrie after the Crusade and lived for many years as the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’. But the true circumstances of his life or death after the Siege of Ely remain a mystery. Even though he is now known as Hereward ‘the Wake’, Hereward of Bourne was not given the suffix ‘Wake’ until many years after his death. The term is thought to come from the Old French ‘wac’ dog, as in wake-dog, the name for dogs used to warn of intruders.

The present-day Wakes of Courteenhall are directly descended from a Geoffrey Wac, who died in 1150. His
son, Hugh Wac, who died 1172, married Emma, the daughter of Baldwin Fitzgilbert and his unnamed wife. That wife, it is supposed, was the granddaughter of either Gunnhild or Estrith in the female line from Hereward and Torfida. It is suggested that her mother had married Richard de Rulos and her grandmother had married Hugh de Evermur, a Norman knight in the service of King William. It is a tenuous link, but a remote possibility.