the steading to honour our pledge of work. In return, he gave neither man nor maid worse than he’d accept for himself or his house, and that’s a right rare thane, that is. Show me another as decent and honest, and I’ll drink a health to him here and now.
Not like these Norman vermin—call them what you like: Franks, Ffreinc, or Normans, they’re all the same. Lords of the Earth, they trow. Lords of Perdition, more like. Hold themselves precious as stardust and fine as diamonds. Dressed in their gold-crusted rags, they flounce about the land, their bloody minds scheming mischief all the while. From the moment a Norman noble opens his eye on the day until that same eye closes at night, the highborn Frankish man is, in Aelred’s words, “a walking scittesturm” for anyone unlucky enough to cross his path.
A Norman knight lives only for hunting and whoring, preening and warring. And their toad-licking priests are just as bad. Even the best of their clerics are no better than they should be. I wouldn’t spare the contents of my nose on a rainy day to save the lot of them . . .
Sorry, Odo, but that is God’s own truth, groan as you will to hear it. Write it down all the same.
“If it please you, what is scittesturm?” Odo wants to know.
“Ask a Saxon,” I tell him. “If bloody Baron de Braose hasn’t killed them all yet, you’ll learn quick enough.”
But there we are. Aelred is gone now. He had the great misfortune to believe the land his father had given him—land owned and worked by his father’s father, and the father’s father before that—belonged to him and his forever. A dangerous delusion, as it turns out.
For when William the Conqueror snatched the throne of England and made himself the Law of the Land, he set to work uprooting the deep-grown offices and traditions that time and the stump-solid Saxons had planted and maintained since their arrival on these fair shores—offices and traditions which bound lord and vassal in a lockstep dance of loyalty and service, sure, but also kept the high and mighty above from devouring the weak and poorly below. This was the bedrock of Saxon law, just and good, enforcing fairness for all who sheltered under it. Like the strong timber roof of Great Alfred’s hall, we all found shelter under it however hard the gales of power and privilege might blow.
The thanes—freeholders mostly, men who were neither entirely noble nor completely common . . . Willy Conqueror did not understand them at all. Never did, nor bothered to. See now, a Norman knows only two kinds of men: nobles and serfs. To a Norman, a man is either a king or a peasant, nothing else. There is black and there is white, and there is the end of it. Consequently, there is no one to stand between the two to keep them from each other’s throats.
The Welshmen laugh at both camps, I know. The British have their nobility, too, but British kings and princes share the same life as the people they rule. A lord might be more esteemed by virtue of his deeds or other merits, real or imagined, but a true British prince is not too lofty to feel the pinch when drought makes a harvest thin, or a hard winter gnaws through all the provisions double-quick.
The British king will gladly drink from the same clay cup as the least of his folk, and can recite the names of each and every one of his tribesmen to the third or fourth generation. In this, King Raven was no less than the best example of his kind, and I’ll wager Baron de Braose has never laid eyes on most of the wretches whose sweat and blood keep him in hunting hawks and satin breeches.
Like all Norman barons, de Braose surveys his lands from the back of a great destrier—a giant with four hooves that eats more in a day than any ten of his serfs can scrape together for the week. His knights and vavasors—hateful word—spill more in a night’s roister than any hovel-dweller on his estate will see from Christmas Eve to Easter morn, and that’s if they’re lucky to see a drop o’ anything cheerful at all.
Well, de Braose may never have shaken hands with one of his serfs, but he knows how much the man owes in taxes to the nearest ha’penny. That’s a kind of talent, I suppose,