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Wicked Sheriff and Outlaw Lord: republishing my Robin Hood essay

Quite a number of years ago, after writing the third and final part of my big historical fantasy novel, Forest of Dreams (also known as The Laylines Trilogy) I wrote an essay based on one of the inspirations for that third part of the book. That essay, Wicked Sheriff and Outlaw Lord, was subsequently published itself in print a couple of times. Today, I’m re-publishing it, for any readers who might be interested and might have missed it.

By the way, Forest of Dreams itself is still in print and still available, you can check it out here.

Wicked Sheriff and Outlaw Lord

By Sophie Masson

The legend of Robin Hood is the quintessential English myth. In it, we find all the elements that make up the English—as opposed to the Celtic British—character in the ancient land that the Celts called Logres. Combining ancient magical and symbolic aspects with the trauma of the Norman Conquest, Robin Hood’s legend still has many reverberations in modern England. It could be said, for instance, that the vicious class conflict which characterises English social life had its origins in the almost total destruction of the native English-speaking Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and its almost complete replacement by French-speaking Norman nobles. This produced a vast gulf of misunderstanding between the two peoples which became, in effect, class-based, for ‘ordinary people’ tended to be native English, whilst ‘the upper crust’ traced its origins to foreign despoilers!

As well as preserving the memory of the hideous physical and moral destruction wrought on Anglo-Saxon culture by the Conquest, the legend of the greenwood lord Robin Hood and his merry men is a perfect distillation of that light, lively and melancholy English spirit which had its most gifted and brilliant expression in the work of William Shakespeare. The slanting, ambiguous, mischievous light of the greenwood and its magic is more powerful, in the end, than the shadow of the castle stronghold in the stories of Robin Hood: an ancient light, that predates the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, and even the Celts, and symbolises the enduring nature of the land.

It’s always a hard one, conquest. The attempt to brutally suppress a vanquished culture and replace it wholesale usually leads to it haunting the landscape, and the cultural psyche, in a way that eventually takes its toll on the confidence and identity of the conquerors themselves. It’s been the same story all over the world, including in Australia. In England, it happened to the Normans.

In the year of Our Lord, 1066, thousands of men came ashore at Pevensey under Duke William of Normandy’s lion flag. Attired for battle, William’s warhosts were attracted by the prospect of more loot and plunder than their Norse ancestors could ever have dreamt was possible, and also by the joy of teaching their arrogant Anglo-Saxon rivals a lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Lots of men there, twitching with excitement, the thrill of the hunt and of the fabulous rewards promised to them: landless sons, and illegitimate sons; adventurers and pirates and those who followed along just to see what would happen. Like the wolf in the fable, however, they must have a good reason for gobbling up their prey. And so they had it, not one, indeed, but several. Political reason: hadn’t Harold pledged support to William’s right of kingship in England, before Edward the Confessor had died? Religious reason: the Pope had given his blessing to the invasion, because the English Church was going its own way far too often. Cultural reason: the Norse thirst for gold and blood, only thinned a little by la douce France, was rising high. No doubt many of the French breathed a sigh of relief when the Norman army was gone. Personal reason: Duke William, driven by his illegitimacy, driven to conquer England and make it his own, though always his heart stayed in his green Norman fields.

That gathering of men, that roundup of reasons, was to have a far-reaching effect. Those warriors twitching to be gone to battle weren’t to know it: but this was to be the last conquest of England, because it was the most traumatic. And in its trauma would be born the greatest of the English legends: that of the outlaw Robin Hood, and his arch-enemy, the wicked Sheriff. Generations and generations into the future, the affrontement of Saxon and Norman would become metamorphosed into the age-old conflict of freedom and tyranny, of nature and authority, of summer and winter, of wild magic and castle law. And men who were once opponents would become reconciled within it. For the terrible crucible of history distils some potent brews, and the tale of the wicked sheriff and the outlaw lord was one of the most potent of all. And it is fascinating to peer into that crucible of time and watch the ingredients of legend being cooked up before your very eyes. . .

There, among those men on the English shore, are many who will leave the imprint of their characters and presence on legend. There are the powerful ones, first: greedy Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and William’s half-brother, notorious even amongst the Normans for his rapacity and lust, the epitome of a corrupt and oppressive Church; there is the honourable Ralph de Todeni, or Raoul de Conches, magnanimous when it suited him; there is complex William the King himself, moneybags, tough warrior, harsh legaliser, driven bastard, nature-lover, faithful husband, cold in judgement, the man to whose bureaucratic instincts avant l’heure we owe the inestimably precious Domesday Chronicle, yet the man of whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sadly wrote:

He had castles built

and wretched men oppressed.  

He was fallen into avarice,

and he loved greediness above all.

He forbade hunting the stags, so also the boars

he loved the stags so very much,

as if he were their father.

Alas, woe! that any man should be so proud,

raise up and reckon himself above all men.

But it was not only the powerful who made that part of the legend, for if that was not so, the legend would not have become so ingrained. Oppression must be localised and personalised before it becomes more than just a distant story. And so, William’s followers, great and small, in all the corners of that green and pleasant land, all did their bit to help it along. . .

Urse d’Abetot, or d’Abitot (the medieval chroniclers are notoriously cavalier about names!) was just one of those petty followers. Urse hailed from a tiny place called Saint Jean d’Abetot, on the white cliffs of the Seine near Le Havre. From being a very minor lord in Normandy, a vassal of the powerful Tancarville family, who were chamberlains to William himself, and a mere mention in the invading fleet’s roll call, Urse went on to become Sheriff of the rich Western Midlands county of Worcestershire, and through the marriage of his daughter Emmeline, allied to one of the greatest of Norman families, the Beauchamps, from whom past and present royal families are descended in one way or the other. Such were the rich rewards of conquest for the conquerors.

Urse bursts into history fully-fledged, as it were, as a perfect example of Norman rapacity, arrogance and violence. His name means Bear, and it is hard to avoid the image of him rampaging heavily through the older culture, looking neither to right nor left as he swipes this hive of honey, and that one, and that one, squashing all the bees in the process. Being no respecter of Anglo-Saxon persons, whether secular or ecclesiastical, he managed to grab one-sixth of the county for his personal holdings: not only from banished and dispossessed English thanes, or lords, but also from the Church. Illiterate himself, he showed his contempt for the highly literate and cultured monks at Worcester (it was here that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was in part written) by building his castle in such a way that his latrines and drains overflowed onto the monastery cemetery. For this, Urse achieved the distinction of being cursed by the Saxon Archbishop of York, Ealdred, who was also the protector of the Worcester monks. Alas, poor Ealdred: the curse has ever been the last refuge of the powerless and vanquished! Ealdred’s words, as recorded by William of Malmesbury, can’t have made the Bear tremble too much:’Hiest thou, Urse! Have thou God’s curse!’

Sure it is, anyway, that Urse lived on for a good many more years of despoiling (he was Sheriff for 40 years!), whilst Ealdred died only a year after the Conquest. But later, maybe those words came back to haunt Urse, for his only son Roger, the inheritor of all his lands, was banished and disinherited by King Henry I, William’s son, for killing a servant of the King(and thus ensuring that Urse’s heir would now be his daughter Emmeline). The violence displayed by Urse and Roger seems to have lived on in the family: a d’Abitot was one of the four knights who rushed off to Canterbury to answer King Henry II’s exasperated question, ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’

Like thugs loyal to their gang leader, men like Urse took their vassalage seriously. An eager servant of William, the Sheriff of Worcester helped put down the 1067 rising of the Welsh and the English, as well as the later revolt of the Norman Earl of Hereford. And it was in that 1067 rebellion that we come to the other face of the Robin Hood legend, that of the outlaw lord. For one of the leaders of that rebellion in the West was Prince Eadric of the Magonsaeton tribe of that part of what had once been West Mercia: a famous figure who is known as Edric Silvaticus, or Edric of the Woods; and as Edric the Wild.

Even today, there are stories about Edric in the West Midlands, especially in Shrosphire, where he had most of his lands; but he also held some in adjoining Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Edric is rumoured to have married a fairy wife, and to sleep under the ancient lead mines of the Stiperstones, waiting for the call that England is in danger again. What is known of Edric’s real history is just as extraordinary. A wild-tempered, dark-haired man who may well have been half-Welsh and half-English, he was the nephew of the infamous Edric Streona, who earlier on in that turbulent century had been instrumental in bringing England to the brink of ruin. Streona was a consummate politician who attempted to play off Saxons and Danes against each other, for his own gain. All these efforts came to naught in the end. For hated and reviled as a traitor by his own people, he was executed by orders of the ferocious English-born Viking ruler, King Canute. Edric the Wild’s own father, Aelfric, was not associated with this, however; and the family were undisturbed in their western lands.

All English thanes who had fought against William at Hastings were dispossessed of all their lands. In this way the new King sought to make an example to all who might try to rebel. Those who had fought against him to protect their lands were, in a neat bit of doublespeak, called traitors, and thus unworthy of holding land at all. In this way he hoped to break the backbone of resistance in England. Many of the dispossessed lords, witnessing the total collapse of their country, did in fact give up, and fled England: some of them ending up as far as Byzantium. Others made whatever accommodations they could with the invaders. Still others took to the woods and harassed the Normans. In the North of the country, this resistance was so strong that William determined to put a stop to it; the subsequent Harrowing of the North was a wound that bled for generations. But in the end, no matter what measures the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy took to protect and fight for their lands, all failed. By 1086, the time of the Domesday Book, there was only a tiny handful of landholders with Anglo-Saxon names left in the whole of England.

Edric the Wild, meanwhile, had not been at Hastings, for whatever reason. He was not dispossessed of his lands immediately. But he did not lie quietly under the Norman yoke and refused to submit to William. Almost immediately, in fact, he gathered support from two erstwhile enemies of his, the Welsh princelings Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, and descended on Herefordshire, harrying the Norman marcher lords in every direction. The historical record is silent on whether Urse the Sheriff met Edric of the Woods in armed combat; but one can certainly assume that their forces would have affronted each other. Edric and his allies were not successful in destroying Norman rule in the Borders; but they harried and harassed the thinly-stretched garrisons in the heavily wooded region to such an extent that William offered him peace.

In 1070 Edric was reconciled to William, but this was not a popular outcome amongst his people, and no doubt the name of the traitor Streona was much bandied about. Whether the old fox William and the lame wolf Edric really trusted each other is open to question: but as William had the reputation of keeping to his promises, and as his ‘protection’ was perhaps preferable to his agent Urse’s naked rapacity, Edric agreed to keep quiet for the time being. In some ways, this part of the story is like the episode in Robin Hood when the outlaw is lured to the court and made soft with promises and protection by the King, who sees in this a better, more subtle way of keeping Robin under control than the Sheriff’s blunt, brutal approach, which has been a failure. Certainly ordinary people saw it that way, judging by the Shropshire legend of Edric—he is not allowed to die, but must be forever watchful against enemies, because he must expiate his crime of parleying with the invader instead of fighting him. . .

What happened after this is not entirely clear. But what is certain is that by the time of the Domesday Book, Edric was not a landowner any more. In fact Urse had some of the English thane’s former holdings. What happened to Edric? He must have been outlawed. Did he take part in the earl of Hereford’s rebellion in 1075, and was he punished for that by being deprived of his lands? It seems extraordinary that he might have joined up with a Norman, however rebellious; but those were extraordinary times, when ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ was the only constant. He had engaged in woodland guerilla warfare before; there is no doubt that his cognomen Silvaticus was given for good reasons. Whatever, though, he lost out, like all the other thanes: the outlaw lord brought low not by the wicked sheriff, but by the inexorability of authority, and the crushing of time itself.

And so, Urse prospered, whilst Edric vanished; yet it is not as simple, and saddening, as that. For though it seems as if in this story the wicked Sheriff won, in fact the outlaw lord did not lose. For Edric’s family did not disappear: and the Savages, as they were then called, intermarried in later times with some of the great aristocratic families of England—including the Beauchamps. And their descendants included the Kings of England.

But there was more: for Urse himself, and his deeds, and his glory, were forgotten, doomed to remain as footnotes in history; whilst Edric was immortalised in legend as the consort of an elf princess, and became a kind of spirit of the land.  A wryly melancholic, truly English, ending worthy of Shakespeare himself.

Robin Hood, by NC Wyeth

 

 

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Writing about World War One…

Today, April 25, is Anzac Day, and the hundredth anniversary of the battle at Villers Brettoneux in northern France on 25 April 1918, where Australian regiments were instrumental in helping to secure the liberation of that area of France. As someone brought up between Australia and France, it’s made me reflect not only on the joint experiences of French and Australian troops and civilians in that terrible war, but also on how difficult it is to try and convey, as a writer, something about those experiences, especially when you are writing for children.

Until a few years ago, I never expected to write about World War One. In both France and Australia, as a child I’d seen, in churches and memorials, the staggeringly long rollcalls of the dead in World War One; a war that seemed not only horrible and tragic but absolutely incomprehensible. World War Two seemed more understandable by comparison, in part because my parents were children during the German occupation of France. I could imagine myself writing about World War Two (though I didn’t, in fact until very recently) ) but not World War One. Partly, perhaps it was because in Australia, Gallipoli loomed large, of course, and I did not feel able to write about it, but also could hardly begin to understand, let alone depict, the ghastly long years of trench warfare on the Western Front.

What changed that was, first, a brief visit many years ago to the heartbreakingly big and neat Commonwealth war cemetery just outside Villers-Brettoneux. In the back of my mind, a seed was being planted–and years later, in 2010, it sprouted, inspired by a longer visit–a stay of a few days, in fact, in the pretty, and war-haunted, cathedral city of Amiens and the countryside beyond. Being on the spot, in the quiet streets of the city and the green and pleasant Somme countryside which yet saw so many deaths, looking at memorials and the French Australian museum’s collections of touching photographs of both Australian and French soldiers and the local civilian population, made me change my mind. And also I read about the last year of the war–the way in which in 1918, trench warfare, at least in northern France, gave way not to the pitched open battles of the very beginning of the war, but to a more ‘guerrilla’ style campaign, on both sides, with ambushes and surprise attacks and street-by-street battles in devastated villages. I began to see how I could perhaps tell a story, through the eyes of a young French-Australian character .

So that’s how my first World War One novel, My Father’s War(Scholastic Australia 2011), began. Set in 1918, it is told in the voice of eleven year old Annie, whose Australian soldier father, fighting on the Somme, goes missing, and who goes with her French mother to Amiens to try and find him. Through Annie’s diary unfolds the story of that last year in the war and the experiences of both soldiers and civilians in northern France. It was a story that both flowed naturally from having been in the areas I was writing about and being immersed in pictures and documents of the time, but was also very hard to write. This was a work of fiction so it had to work as an engaging story, especially given the age of my readers, but I also felt a great responsibility to tell it in a way that would not trivialise or falsify. It was a very delicate balance to strike and at times felt almost impossible(and saddening; I found myself weeping several times over scenes) but in the end it worked. Or at least, readers seem to think so–seven years after its release, it is still finding its way into libraries, schools, and homes.

Writing My Father’s War had made me see I could tell a story set in that time. Three years later, my second World War One novel was published. This was 1914 (Scholastic Australia 2014), which from the point of view of Louis Jullian, teenage son of a French diplomat and his Australian wife, told the story of the beginning of that ‘war to end all wars’. It was a very different book, because it was set in a very different time to that of My Father’s War. In 1918, four years of dreadful stalemate and horrendous slaughter had changed the face of Europe, destroying the old order forever.  In 1914, the old order was still there, sleepwalking towards disaster, and even by the end of that year, people imagined that the war might soon be over and things go back to what they’d been before. And my characters might both be French Australian, but they came from very different backgrounds and experiences. Annie had a difficult childhood dominated by war and her father’s absence; Louis, whose childhood was cosmopolitan and carefree, was coming of age at a time when everything would be thrown into question by a conflict that would engulf the world and truth itself. It was just as hard to write this novel as the first; harder even in a way, precisely because it was the beginning: reading about the causes of the war and the chain of events in those fateful few weeks from June 28 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, you get a sense both of the so-called ‘inevitability’ of the war but also the fact that it need not have been so. There were times when the momentum could have been halted–but it was not. I chose to tell that story, and the way in which a carefree summer turned into a deadly winter, through Louis’ eyes as he goes from helpless witness of the attack in Sarajevo to scarred and determined young war correspondent on both the Western and Eastern fronts.

Both the novels have had unexpected offshoots: minor characters from My Father’s War inspired a short story of mine, The Other Anzac Day (set during the battle in Villers Brettoneux on 25 April 1918) which was published in a UK collection, Stories of World War One, edited by Tony Bradman(Orchard Books, UK, 2014). This story, told in the voice of Archie, a tough but troubled young Australian soldier, both echoes and contrasts with Annie’s own view of that ‘other Anzac Day’ in My Father’s War. And Louis’ daughter as well as the son of one of his pre-war Austrian friends will be featuring in a novel I’ve been writing, set at the beginning of World War 2 this time, to appear in 2019. In the novel, the experiences of World War One, which transformed the lives of Louis and his friends, haunt the lives of their families too–and of course, by extension, their communities and nations, as the drums of war beat yet again.

 

More about My Father’s War and 1914:

My Father’s War

By Sophie Masson

(My Australian Story, Scholastic Australia 2011)

ISBN 9781741698282

It scares me a lot, thinking of Dad out there, far away in that dangerous, terrible place, wondering how it will be when he comes back-if he comes back, that is . . .

Annie’s dad has been away for two years, fighting on the Somme battlefields in northern France. For months there has been no word from him, no letters or postcards. Annie and her mother are sick with worry, so they decide to stop waiting-and instead travel to France, to try to find out what has happened to him. There she experiences first-hand what war is like, as she tries to piece together the clues behind her dad’s disappearance. Will Annie ever see her father again?

Teacher’s Notes My Father’s War: http://resource.scholastic.com.au/resourcefiles/8005439_228.pdf

1914

By Sophie Masson

(Australia’s Great War, Scholastic Australia 2014)

ISBN 9781743622476

A small black bottle or a torch came sailing through the air, and landed on the side of the car, close to the Archduke. An instant later came a terrific bang, the road exploded in a shower of dust and stones, and tiny sharp things went flying through the air like angry bees.

In June 1914, Louis and his brother Thomas are enjoying the European summer in a small town near Sarajevo. In the shadow of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, the world erupts into war and Louis’ life changes forever. Old Europe is torn apart and Louis finds himself in the midst of his own battle – and fighting for the truth in war means that sometimes even your own side is against you.

Teacher’s Notes 1914: http://resource.scholastic.com.au/resourcefiles/8284239_24164.pdf

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Wicked Sheriff and Outlaw Lord

Robin Hood by N.C. Wyeth

Today, I’m republishing a historical essay of mine about a real-life model for the legend of Robin Hood, back in the 11th century and the period of the Norman Conquest. It was inspired partly by research I conducted for the third volume of my big historical fantasy novel, Forest of Dreams, and partly by the fact my husband comes from Worcestershire, an area of England I’ve come to know quite well.

Wicked Sheriff and Outlaw Lord

by Sophie Masson

The legend of Robin Hood is the quintessential English myth. In it, we find all the elements that make up the English—as opposed to the Celtic British—character in the ancient land that the Celts called Logres. Combining ancient magical and symbolic aspects with the trauma of the Norman Conquest, Robin Hood’s legend still has many reverberations in modern England. It could be said, for instance, that the vicious class conflict which characterised English social life–and which still reverberates throughout it to this day–had its origins in the almost total destruction of the native English-speaking Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and its almost complete replacement by French-speaking Norman nobles. This produced a vast gulf of misunderstanding between the two peoples which became, in effect, class-based, for ‘ordinary people’ tended to be native English, whilst ‘the upper crust’ traced its origins to foreign despoilers!

As well as preserving the memory of the hideous physical and moral destruction wrought on Anglo-Saxon culture by the Conquest, the legend of the greenwood lord Robin Hood and his merry men is a perfect distillation of that light, lively and melancholy English spirit which had its most gifted and brilliant expression in the work of William Shakespeare. The slanting, ambiguous, mischievous light of the greenwood and its magic is more powerful, in the end, than the shadow of the castle stronghold in the stories of Robin Hood: an ancient light, that predates the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, and even the Celts, and symbolises the enduring nature of the land.

It’s always a hard one, conquest. The attempt to brutally suppress a vanquished culture and replace it wholesale usually leads to it haunting the landscape, and the cultural psyche, in a way that eventually takes its toll on the confidence and identity of the conquerors themselves. It’s been the same story all over the world, including of course in Australia. In England, it happened to the Normans. . .

In the year of Our Lord, 1066, thousands of men came ashore at Pevensey under Duke William of Normandy’s lion flag. Attired for battle, William’s warhosts were attracted by the prospect of more loot and plunder than their Norse ancestors(the word ‘Norman’ comes from ‘Norse’ itself)  could ever have dreamed was possible, and also by the joy of teaching their arrogant Anglo-Saxon rivals a lesson they

Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry

wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Lots of men there, twitching with excitement, the thrill of the hunt and of the fabulous rewards promised to them: landless sons, and illegitimate ones; adventurers and pirates and those who followed along just to see what would happen. Like the wolf in the fable, however, they must have a good reason for gobbling up their prey. And so they had it, not one, indeed, but several. Political reason: hadn’t Harold pledged support to William’s right of kingship in England, before Edward the Confessor had died? Religious reason: the Pope had given his blessing to the invasion, because the English Church was going its own way far too often. Cultural reason: the Norse thirst for gold and blood, only thinned a little by la douce France, was rising high. No doubt many of the French breathed a sigh of relief when the Norman army was gone. Personal reason: Duke William, driven by his illegitimacy, driven to conquer England and make it his own, though always his heart stayed in his green Norman fields.

That gathering of men, that roundup of reasons, was to have a far-reaching effect. Those warriors twitching to be gone to battle weren’t to know it: but this was to be the last conquest of England, because it was the most traumatic. And in its trauma would be born the greatest of the English legends: that of the outlaw Robin Hood, and his arch-enemy, the wicked Sheriff. Generations and generations into the future, the affrontement of Saxon and Norman would become metamorphosed into the age-old conflict of freedom and tyranny, of nature and authority, of summer and winter, of wild magic and castle law. And men who were once opponents would become reconciled within it. For the terrible crucible of history distils some potent brews, and the tale of the wicked sheriff and the outlaw lord was one of the most potent of all. And it is fascinating to peer into that crucible of time and watch the ingredients of legend being cooked up before your very eyes.

There, among those men on the English shore, are many who will leave the imprint of their characters and presence on legend. There are the powerful ones, first: greedy Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and William’s half-brother, notorious even amongst the Normans for his rapacity and lust, the epitome of a corrupt and oppressive Church; there is the honourable Ralph de Todeni, or Raoul de Conches,

Arms of d’Abitot family from a ms held in Worcester Cathedral Library

magnanimous when it suited him; there is complex William the King himself, moneybags, tough warrior, harsh legaliser, driven bastard, nature-lover, faithful husband, cold in judgement, the man to whose bureaucratic instincts avant l’heure we owe the inestimably precious Domesday Chronicle, yet the man of whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sadly wrote:

He had castles built

and wretched men oppressed. .

He was fallen into avarice,

and he loved greediness above all. 

He forbade hunting the stags,so also the boars

he loved the stags so very much,

as if he were their father. .

Alas, woe! that any man should be so proud,

raise up and reckon himself above all men.

But it was not only the powerful who made that part of the legend, for if that was not so, the legend would not have become so ingrained. Oppression must be localised and personalised before it becomes more than just a distant story. And so, William’s followers, great and small, in all the corners of that green and pleasant land, all did their bit to help it along.

Urse d’Abetot, or d’Abitot(the medieval chroniclers are notoriously cavalier about names!)was just one of those petty followers. Urse hailed from a tiny place called Saint Jean d’Abetot, on the white cliffs of the Seine near Le Havre. From being a very minor lord in Normandy, a vassal of the powerful Tancarville family, who were chamberlains to William himself, and a mere mention in the invading fleet’s roll call, Urse went on to become Sheriff of the rich Western Midlands county of Worcestershire, and through the marriage of his daughrer Emmeline, allied to one of the greatest of Norman families, the Beauchamps, from whom past and present royal families are descended in one way or the other. Such were the rich rewards of conquest for the conquerors.

Urse bursts into history fully-fledged, as it were, as a perfect example of Norman rapacity, arrogance and violence. His name means Bear, and it is hard to avoid the image of him rampaging heavily through the older culture, looking neither to right nor left as he swipes this hive of honey, and that one, and that one, squashing all the bees in the process. Being no respecter of Anglo-Saxon persons, whether secular or ecclesiastical, he managed to grab one-sixth of the county of Worcestershire for his personal holdings: not only from banished and dispossessed English thanes, or lords, but also from the Church. Illiterate himself, he showed his contempt for the highly literate and cultured monks at Worcester(it was here that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was in part written) by building his castle in such a way that his latrines and drains overflowed onto the monastery cemetery. For this, Urse achieved the distinction of being cursed by the Saxon Archbishop of York, Ealdred, who was also the protector of the Worcester monks. Alas, poor Ealdred: the curse has ever been the last refuge of the powerless and vanquished! Ealdred’s words, as recorded by William of Malmesbury, can’t have made the Bear tremble too much:’Thou are called Urse. Have thou God’s curse!’

Sure it is, anyway, that Urse lived on for a good many more years of despoiling(he was Sheriff for 40 years!), whilst Ealdred died only a year after the Conquest. But later, maybe those words came back to haunt Urse, for his only son Roger, the inheritor of all his lands, was banished and disinherited by King Henry I, William’s son, for killing a servant of the King(and thus ensuring that Urse’s heir would now be his daughter Emmeline). The violence displayed by Urse and Roger seems to have lived on in the family: a d’Abitot was one of the four knights who rushed off to Canterbury to answer King Henry II’s exasperated question, ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’

Like thugs loyal to their gang leader, men like Urse took their vassalage seriously. An eager servant of William, the Sheriff of Worcester helped put down the 1067 rising of the Welsh and the English, as well as the later revolt of the Norman Earl of Hereford. And it was in that 1067 rebellion that we come to the other face of the Robin Hood legend, that of the outlaw lord. For one of the leaders of that rebellion in the West was Prince Eadric of the Magonsaeton tribe of that part of what had once been West Mercia: a famous figure who is known as Edric Silvaticus, or Edric of the Woods; and as Edric the Wild.

Even today, there are stories about Edric in the West Midlands, particularly in Shrosphire, where he had most of his lands; but he also held some in adjoining Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Edric is rumoured to have married a fairy wife, and to sleep under the ancient lead mines of the Stiperstones, waiting for the call that England is in danger again. What is known of Edric’s real history is just as extraordinary. A wild-tempered, darkhaired man who may well have been half-Welsh and half-English, he was the nephew of the infamous Edric Streona, who earlier on in that turbulent century had been instrumental in bringing England to the brink of ruin. Streona was a consummate politician who attempted to play off Saxons and Danes against each other, for his own gain. All these efforts came to naught in the end. For hated and reviled as a traitor by his own people, he was executed by orders of the ferocious English-born Viking ruler, King Canute. Edric the Wild’s own father, Aelfric, was not associated with this, however; and the family were undisturbed in their western lands.

All English thanes who had fought against William at Hastings were dispossessed of all their lands. In this way the new King sought to make an example to all who might try to rebel. Those who had fought against him to protect their lands were, in a neat bit of doublespeak, called traitors, and thus unworthy of holding land at all. In this way he hoped to break the backbone of resistance in England. Many of the dispossessed lords, witnessing the total collapse of their country, did in fact give up, and fled England: some of them ending up as far as Byzantium. Others made whatever accomodations they could with the invaders. Still others took to the woods and harassed the Normans. In the North of the country, this resistance was so strong that William determined to put a stop to it; the subsequent Harrowing of the North was a wound that bled for generations. But in the end, no matter what measures the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy took to protect and fight for their lands, all failed. By 1086, the time of the Domesday Book, there was only a tiny handful of landholders with Anglo-Saxon names left in the whole of England.

Edric the Wild, meanwhile, had not been at Hastings, for whatever reason. He was not dispossessed of his lands immediately. But he did not lie quietly under the Norman yoke and refused to submit to William. Almost immediately, in fact, he gathered support from two erstwhile enemies of his, the Welsh princelings Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, and descended on Herefordshire, harrying the Norman marcher lords in every direction. The historical record is silent on whether Urse the Sheriff met Edric of the Woods in armed combat; but one can certainly assume that their forces would have affronted each other. Edric and his allies were not successful in destroying Norman rule in the Borders; but they harried and harassed the thinly-stretched garrisons in the heavily wooded region to such an extent that William offered him peace.

In 1070 Edric was reconciled to William, but this was not a popular outcome amongst his people, and no doubt the name of the traitor Streona was much bandied about. Whether the old fox William and the lame wolf Edric really trusted each other is open to question: but as William had the reputation of keeping to his promises, and as his ‘protection’ was perhaps preferable to his agent, Urse’s naked rapacity, Edric agreed to keep quiet for the time being. In some ways, this part of the story is like the episode in Robin Hood when the outlaw is lured to the court and made soft with promises and protection by the King, who sees in this a better, more subtle way of keeping Robin under control than the Sheriff’s blunt, brutal approach, which has been a failure. Certainly ordinary people saw it that way, judging by the Shropshire legend of Edric—he is not allowed to die, but must be forever watchful against enemies, because he must expiate his crime of parleying with the invader instead of fighting him.

What happened after this is not entirely clear. But what is certain is that by the time of the Domesday Book, Edric was not a landowner any more. In fact Urse had some of the English thane’s former holdings. What happened to Edric? He must have been outlawed. Did he take part in the earl of Hereford’s rebellion in 1075, and was he punished for that by being deprived of his lands? It seems extraordinary that he might have joined up with a Norman, however rebellious; but those were extraordinary times, when ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ was the only constant. He had engaged in woodland guerilla warfare before; there is no doubt that his cognomen Silvaticus was given for good reasons. Whatever, though, he lost out, like all the other thanes: the outlaw lord brought low not by the wicked sheriff, but by the inexorability of authority, and the crushing of time itself.

And so, Urse prospered, whilst Edric vanished; yet it is not as simple, and saddening, as that. For though it seems as if in this story the wicked Sheriff won, in fact the outlaw lord did not lose. For Edric’s family did not disappear: and the Savages, as they were then called, intermarried in later times with some of the great aristocratic families of England—including the Beauchamps. And their descendants included the Kings of England.

But there was more: for Urse himself, and his deeds, and his glory, were forgotten, doomed to remain as footnotes in history; whilst Edric was immortalised in legend as the consort of an elf princess, leader of a ‘wild hunt’, and became a kind of spirit of the land.  A wryly melancholic, truly English, ending worthy of Shakespeare himself.

The Wild Hunt by Johann William Cordes

 

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The Mirror of Honour and Love: a woman’s view of chivalry

I’ve always been interested in the Middle Ages, especially the chivalric period between the 12th and 15th centuries, and wrote this essay some years ago, after the publication of my historical fantasy trilogy, The Lay Lines Trilogy,  released in an omnibus edition as Forest of Dreams. The trilogy was inspired by the shadowy life and extraordinary work of 12th century writer Marie de France, one of the writers mentioned in this essay. I’m republishing the essay today and hope readers find it interesting–and with some relevance to our times as well!

THE MIRROR OF HONOUR AND LOVE:
a woman’s view of chivalry

by Sophie Masson

 

Chivalry. Isn’t that a bloke’s thing? Isn’t it do with being a man-at-arms, with strapping on armour, and sallying forth into the wildwood on your horse, your lady’s token on your arm, to right wrongs and do great deeds? Isn’t the only role of the woman in chivalry to be the inspirer, the Muse of a paragon of the knightly virtues? Well, yes–and no. Chivalry was much more than that. And its ideals encompassed both sexes, actively.

As the French-derived term chivalry indicates–it is originally from chevalerie, meaning horsemanship, literally–it came about as a means of codifying and disciplining a mounted order of military types. Mounted men-at-arms–knights, in the English word, which by the way derives from the same root as knife, referring to weapons–could be a damn nuisance in the early and later Middle Ages. The way they were regarded by many people is perhaps best summed up in the German proverb, Er will Ritter an mir werden; ie, he wants to play the knight over me, ride roughshod over me. That is, these mounted men were regarded as tyrannical bullies, delinquents and pests. That they were more often than not is indisputable; a combination of young man’s energy, a lack of efficiently centralised civic or moral teaching(the State did not really exist, and the Church struggled mightily to tame the warriors for centuries), and the fact that on a horse you could quickly get away from the scene of your crimes, mixed with a kind of carte blanche, a blind eye turned to your hi-jinks by the man–or woman–who paid your wages when you were at war with their rivals or enemies(but cut you loose when they didn’t need you, leaving you to fend for yourself), made for quite a potent little cocktail of public nuisance. The Middle Ages was a young person’s period; though many people did live on into old age, the average age of death for a woman was thirty-three; for a man, especially a knight, it was under thirty. The often wild energy, idealism and exaltation that characterises medieval culture comes from that demographic fact. This was real youth culture.

But as time went on, and the disorder of the post-Roman period, the invasions, and the Norman adventures receded, and prosperity and peace descended in Europe, due to some kind of balance being precariously achieved, more attention was being paid to the fact that the youth had not only to be kept in line, but also to be given a channel for their energies which would make them both more productive, and more disciplined. Added to that was the change in peacetime culture, particularly in England and France, with women becoming more prominent again, able to provide a guiding hand. Modern people all too often view the Middle Ages through distorting mirrors; and one of the most distorting is the idea of medieval women’s position. In fact, it is probably true to say that women in the Middle Ages, especially after about the eleventh and up to the fifteenth centuries, enjoyed a level of relative freedom not equalled until the twentieth. The fall of Rome had also made many of her laws recede into the distance, slowly; Roman statute law was notably more misogynist than the customary law of the tribal groups the Empire had conquered. Celtic and Germanic women enjoyed a degree of freedom that scandalised the Romans: perhaps the greatest and most serious of the rebellions against Rome in Britain occurred when an arrogant Roman governor flouted the realpolitik of his masters and cut across British customary law by refusing to ratify the awarding of the chieftainship of the Iceni to the widowed Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea.

Now as the Middle Ages advanced and people forgot about Roman law, or cheerfully ignored it, opting instead for a mixture of old and new in their customary law, so the position of women improved. Please don’t think I’m talking modern feminism here. Medieval society, like pre-Roman society, was one of kinship and hierarchy(which is NOT the same as class, by the way). If you were related to the right people, if you were part of the clan, you had a right to exercise the rights given to you on that basis, no matter what your sex. So women in the Middle Ages, as in the Celtic and Germanic worlds, could openly be chiefs, could command armies, run huge estates and businesses, inherit and so forth, in a way that women in Roman times and women in the Renaissance–which rediscovered Roman law and reinstated many of the old ways, including the institutionalised repression of women–could not, or only do through subterfuge. The thing was that medieval people recognised custom, and its pre-eminence; kinship, and its inextricable centrality; hierarchy which meant that everyone had a place but that people could move between them, in case of great personal merit (eg there were quite a number of serfs who became knights).

What we now think of as chivalry came out of that world. It began, as a codified idea, in the twelfth century, in the courts of two famous and talented and powerful women of the time: the extraordinary Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her daughter, Marie of Champagne. Eleanor was a force of nature, a brilliant figure whose true stature is only now being rediscovered. Sole heir to the vast lands of Aquitaine, the teenaged Eleanor married the pious, shy Louis VII of France, who was no match for her wilfulness and talents. She went along with him on Crusade, as an important person in her own right, had several children with him, including Marie, then tiring of him and his font-frog ways, and infatuated with the younger, sexy Henri Plantagenet d’Anjou, a.k.a. Henry II of England, she concocted an excuse to get rid of Louis. She even managed to persuade the Pope to grant her a annulment on the basis of too-close kinship to her former husband, and so, despite having had several children with Louis, was able to enter into legal marriage with Henry.

Effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine on her tomb in Fontrevaud Abbey in France.

She and Henry were a match for each other, but too much so in many ways; though they had six more children, and for a long time had a strong relationship, Henry’s roving eye and bad temper, and Eleanor’s sometimes arrogant pride proved the undoing of a partnership that had had all Europe enthralled. During the happy times, she ran her own court separately in Poitiers, and was the patron of artists, poets, musicians and philosophers. It was at this court, and at her daughter Marie’s in Champagne that the codes of chivalry and of courtly love were established, in close contact with the great ladies, and a flourishing literary and social culture was born. Eleanor and Marie were aware not only of the delinquent tendencies of knights, but also of the boredom of ladies–and of the many sexual adventures that went on. They would encourage the concept of a new form of chivalry, which would not only emphasise prowess in arms and great deeds, as had been the case in the past, but also the great adventure of love, the way that it helped in the journey to self-knowledge and integration. It would mean that women would have a central part in the culture, as muses and inspirers certainly, but also as honourable beings in their own right.

Secular Woman in Romance, and Sacred Woman, the Madonna, dominated medieval culture from the twelfth century, in the process turning a rather rough and ready culture to a most beautiful, subtle and richly patterned one. As well, contact with the East meant that philosophy, astrology and astronomy, and the natural sciences in general, flourished.

So, what were the distinguishing elements of chivalry? I have devised a list of the Seven Qualities of Honour, gleaned from various medieval books, qualities which were firmly to be sought after by both men and women. These are:

Franchise, or frankness(ie openness of mind and honesty); Pitié, or Compassion; Courage; Courtoisie, or Courtesy; Sagesse, or Wisdom; Largesse, or Generosity; and Temperance, or Moderation. As is obvious, these were not sex-limited characteristics. Within those seven qualities, we can get a sense of the characteristics admired by twelfth century medieval culture. Hotheadedness was to be restrained; greed and avarice, always pet hates of the times(and major problems)cast into the darkness; ignorant yobbo behaviour firmly rejected. Respect for the other, and for oneself as a growing soul is iabsolutely ntrinsic to the chivalric tradition. It is intended to carry through into all aspects of one’s life; at its best it is truly impressive. It is pointless to keep saying, as some modern writers do, that the ideal wasn’t always lived up to; what ideal ever is? The fact is that this ideal genuinely changed a whole society, and laid the groundwork for many other social developments in the future.

Writers like Chrétien de Troyes and André le Chapelain–or Andreas Capellanus, as he’s often known–wrote books demonstrating and portraying the new ways of being and relating between the sexes: incidentally also changing the face of literature(the romance being the true ancestor not only of the novel in general but of fantasy!) As time went on, more and more writers, inspired by the beauty and depth of the ideas embodied within the notions of chivalry, explored it in ever greater depth. Many of these (in the main) male writers saw Woman as Muse: whether spiritually as well as romantically, like Ramon Llull, for instance, or practically and realistically, like Godefroi de Charny (both men wrote books on chivalry which are still in print today). Of course, there were also those who fought hard against the new works and their implicit validation of women as real human beings, worthy of respect,

a manuscript of Le Roman de Renart, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

true love, and even adoration. Such a one was Jean de Meung, writer of Le Roman de la Rose, or Romance of the Rose, which especially in its second part is an anti-woman diatribe, and the mostly anonymous authors of the cynical, savagely amusing and often obscene Roman de Renart, or The Romance of Reynard the Fox, an extraordinary anthromorphic ‘novel ‘ in many episodes, which in many ways could be seen as the anti-romance. (Mind you the Roman de Renart is something of an equal-opportunity offender, satirising both men and women)

Between idealism and misogyny, though, there were also those who saw women as equal partners in the great journey of life, and of the quest for honour, and the development of the soul that chivalry represented. At least two of those writers were women: the twelfth century writer Marie de France (not the same person as Marie de Champagne, incidentally!)and the early fifteenth century Christine de Pisan. Marie wrote fiction: lais, or lays, narrative poems, romances based on Celtic motifs, full of love, magic, humour and adventure. But Christine was a non-fiction writer, who wrote hugely popular and influential books on the achievements and behaviour of women. Some of these were intended as self-help guides; others as witty and fierce ripostes to anti-woman propagandists. Two of her books, La Cité des dames, or City of Ladies, and its sequel, The Treasury of the City of Ladies, examine at length about the ways in which women achieve honour and respect, and the ways in which the chivalric code can be applied to everyday life.

Let’s have a look at some of the things these women writers said. Marie, who has a rather salty tongue and sardonic eye and ear for the way people behave, is particularly preoccupied with love and the different ways in which lovers act. She firmly tells her audience that chivalry and courtliness are about real things, including sexual things, and that hypocrites and coy flittergibbets are without honour:

The professional beauty will mince

and preen her feathers, and wince

At showing she favours a man,

unless it’s all for her gain.

But a worthy lady of wisdom and valour

will not be too proud to show her favour

and enjoy the love of her man

in every way that she can.

(this quote is from Marie’s poem Guigemar–the translation is my own, you can find it in Forest of Dreams).

Marie’s outlook is that of an upper-class medieval woman, fluent in several languages, moving easily around Europe, sure of her place and independent within it. She roundly chastises those snooty critics from her time who say that what she writes about is not serious literature, or that it is immodest, or ‘untrue’, because it has magic in it. (Such wet blanket critics still exist in our time of course!) She is very concerned with female honour, and makes it quite clear that women must show as much courage, courtesy, generosity, etc, as men. She has several examples of female characters who run a love affair from beginning to end, fight, travel, and so on; just as she has a female character, werewolf knight Bisclavret’s merciless wife, who is punished severely–not for being a woman but for being faithless. This savage justice is equally meted out to men who transgress the code.

Women really did live by this code; there are numerous examples of women left in charge of large estates who faithfully and bravely mounted the defence of those estates against the enemies of their house, and were praised for it by chroniclers of the time. Medieval people had a horror of treachery and cowardice; the two were often felt to go hand in hand. The fact you were a woman did not absolve you from keeping to the ideals of chivalry, in times of crisis and in your ordinary life. And in her fiction, Marie demonstrates clearly both the complex realities of medieval life, and what was considered honourable for both sexes.

From the twelfth to the early fifteenth is quite a jump. We come here to the tail-end of the code of chivalry–we have been through the culture-shaking hideousness of the Black Death, and are close to the shift in thinking represented by humanism and the Reformation. In this climate, propaganda against women was growing, though some of the old chivalric spirit remained and indeed never went away altogether. Women of all backgrounds were still very much in evidence in ordinary life, in all kinds of ways; the cruel Roman-derived statutes, which wiped out many customary rights of inheritance and divorce and so on, had not yet been applied.

Christine de Pisan presenting her work, from a painting of the time

Christine de Pisan, a prolific and indefatigable writer who proselytised tirelessly for the recognition of the talents, achievements and potential of women, gave her advice and insights in the form of allegory and exposition. She was enormously influential and popular; her own life story is an inspiration. Left a widow at a young age, with small children to support, Italian-born Christine launched into a professional career as a writer in early fifteenth-century Paris. She was not one to bite her tongue, but took part vigorously in many of the intellectual debates of the day, her sharp intelligence, comprehensive education and refusal to be beaten thrilling her fans and infuriating her enemies. She launched into a lively denunciation of the anti-woman Romance of the Rose, pointing out tartly the many faults in its logic and its humanity, and La Cité des dames was conceived as a direct riposte to Jean de Meung’s jeremiads(The Romance of the Rose still being popular in her time. ) In the book, she used the device of three allegorical figures: Dame Reason, with her mirror of self-knowledge, the ‘mirror held up to nature’, as she called it; Dame Rectitude, with her rod of peace; and Dame Justice, with her cup from whence she pours out stability and equilibrium, to frame a discourse in which a ‘City of Ladies’ can be constructed, which allows women to fully develop their talents and potential. In so doing, she refuted many of the criticisms of women made by contemporary writers, and highlighted the achievements of women in many areas. The sequel, The Treasury of the City of Ladies (republished a few years ago, in English, as The Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honour), was more of a self-help and advice book, tailored not only to aristocratic women but to women of all social backgrounds, from rich merchants to poor cottage women. The thrust of her argument is that, in order to act honourably, women do not need to fight against nature, but to follow selectively and intelligently the dictates of their truest selves. Real self-knowledge and respect for others, so central to chivalry, is also the centre of Christine’s words to her readers, the armour she advises them to put on to sally forth into the great adventure of life. From it grow all those qualities of honour, from courage and generosity to openness of mind and temperance, compassion and courtesy–and the result is true wisdom. For that was the aim of chivalry:  a way of reaching one’s own fullest potential as a human being, but always tied in to the presence, the needs, and the worth of other people too. Chivalry, both male and female, recognised that each of us is, indeed, our brother’s or sister’s keeper–but also courageously responsible for our own actions. It is an ideal which is of increasing and urgent relevance in the world we live in today.