“Hold thy peace, man,” he commanded. “Kings are never drowned.”
There are several good historical novels telling the story of England from 1087, when William the Conqueror died, to the end of the Norman rule in 1158. Unluckily, they are not very easy to come by.
I don’t think you should have any trouble in getting Gertrude Hollis’s story, “In the Days of St. Anselm,” however. It is a comparatively recent book, and it is so good that it remains in print, and is usually in the public libraries.
In this story we follow the fortunes of a Saxon “villein” and his wife throughout the reign of the Red King. Purkess and Judith are two fine specimens of the old race, then reduced to slavery, but still retaining a spark of the sturdy, liberty-loving spirit which distinguished it in the past. They live near Canterbury and are serfs to the monastery under Prior Godrich, a good man, but unable to do much for his people, since he is himself oppressed by the king and his wicked minister, Ranulph. We are given a clear view of this oppression, and then, by a fortunate circumstance, Purkess and Judith are freed.
This ceremony of “manumission,”’ as it was called, was extraordinarily picturesque and impressive. Miss Hollis puts it very vividly before us, with all its color and tense feeling. After it, Purkess is allowed to bear arms, to defend himself to some extent at least from wrongful oppression, and to choose his own lord and place of abode.
In this book we look out on the England of the end of the eleventh century with the eyes of one of the lowliest of the country’s population. We rage with him at the overpowering insolence and rapacity of the great captains and noblemen; we are conscious of his helplessness and sharers in his bitter poverty. And we rejoice with him and his wife as gradually things get a little better; for luck is on Purkess’s side, as it is apt to be on the side of a fine, strong, fearless young fellow, faithful and trustworthy. Good friends come to aid him, and through a series of events he becomes one of the servants of Anselm, whom the king, thinking himself to be dying, has made Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important position in the state, next to that of the crown.
Adventures follow each other thick and fast; we get to Wales and see a large part of England. And in the end we are brought with Purkess, who has long since gone to live in the New Forest as a charcoal-burner, far from the tyranny of the masters, to find the body of the king, who was shot while hunting, by no man knows whom, an arrow having glanced and pierced his heart. This forest was created by the Conqueror for his pleasure, he having turned hundreds upon hundreds out of their poor homes in order to reduce the land once more to a wilderness; and it was the common belief that the place was a fatal one for his family. At any rate, two of his sons and a great-nephew were killed in it.
I have only been able to find one book on the times of Henry I—“Pabo,” by S. Baring-Gould. Its scene is Wales, and it is especially concerned with showing how Henry tried to subjugate the wild Welshmen. The author was a finished writer, capable of taking you straight into his book, of making you feel twelfth century and Welsh yourself, and no one knows better how to make a story alive and interesting.
If you can get R. D. Chetwolde’s book, “The Knight of the Golden Chain” (Appleton, $1.50, 1898), it is just the volume to read next. It is a collection of splendid stories of outlaws in the years immediately following Henry’s death, when the long and terrible strife between the Empress Matilda and Stephen was devastating the land, and when many thousands of men took to the forests and hills, living by robbery. This is a book that any girl or boy will love, it is so crowded with adventure, and with many a fine and brave deed to redeem the general lawlessness.
Quite another view of these dread times of Stephen and Matilda is to be found in the story by Charles MacFarlane, “A Legend of Reading Abbey” (Dutton, $1.00, 1904). It is a book that gives a most intimate, gentle, home view—pictures of people engaged in their every-day occupations—and yet through it runs the constant menace of sudden death and violent disturbance.
Another book that covers the same era is by Rev. C. W. Whistler, “For King or Empress” (T. Nelson Sons, $1.25), and is a good, thrilling story that puts the situation pretty completely. It is set in Somersetshire and Norwich, where the struggle was particularly fierce. There were wild doings, and these disturbances were fated to endure for centuries. You find them still going on in “Ivanhoe,” though that is in the time of Richard, the Lion-Hearted, many years later.
There is a glimpse of England in the time of Rufus at the end of Scott's “Count Robert of Paris.” Most of the book is in the Holy Land with the first Crusaders, but it closes in England.
With the above books, or even half of them, you will get a fine idea of Norman England, and I can promise you an enjoyable time reading them. And by this time you will begin to feel very much at home in Old England, quite as though these ancient ancestors of yours were friends and companions.
