St. Nicholas/Volume 40/Number 6/Books and Reading
BOOKS AND READING
BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE
STORIES OF NORMAN ENGLAND
The time was one of struggle and fighting. The nobles were all trying to snatch as much of the country as they could, in order to wring money from its wretched population. Each bold, ungoverned spirit behaved like a beast of the jungle, knowing no restraint, no law but its own desires. The great lords bore nicknames that tell sufficiently what sort of characters they possessed: the Wolf, the Flaming Torch, the Death, the Heavy Hand, were some of these nicknames.
When the people were n’t actually starving, they were usually being killed, or imprisoned, or sold as serfs, or forced into the wars. To escape these woes, many men became outlaws, adding to the danger of the rest, burning, robbing and slaying, fighting among themselves, living a hand-to-mouth existence in the forests that covered a large part of England and Wales.
Exciting, no doubt of that, these wild times! History passes over them with a general indication that they could n’t have been much worse—darkest England, that of the latter half of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries; but full of romantic possibilities, dashing stories, and stirring adventures. And so, good material for the historic novel. Many a quaint old manuscript tells personal tales of those far days, while records and letters and documents relating to the men in the thick of affairs yield many details. From these and other sources the romance writers have taken their facts.
In spite of all the terror and the suffering, life was still tolerable most of the time. Men and women married, and their children grew up, playing and laughing. There were good friends then as now, splendid acts of. courage and self-sacrifice, cheerfulness under difficulties, and a sturdy manhood that showed under the unlikeliest circumstances, with that same determination to be free which eventually brought about Magna Charta, and finally our own great Declaration.
It is all this we want to know about, and which we seek among the stories told of the men and women of that time. Stories that show us how the common people lived, what their homes were like, how they managed to withstand their oppressors, the jobs they worked at, the clothes they wore. England could hardly, as yet, be called a nation, so at enmity were its various parts; but it was being formed, and all this pain and suffering and grim struggling against tyranny had a glory.
William II, the second son of the Conqueror (whose eldest-born remained in Normandy), succeeded him. He was called Rufus, or the Red King, because of the extreme ruddiness of his complexion, which burned brick-red between the flowing blond hair that he wore long. Short and squat, powerful and utterly without even the haziest notions of right and wrong—everything he wanted being right, and whatever opposed him wrong—his one occupation was robbing; though, to be sure, he had a thousand methods for getting the money or land from its real owners, a few of which were dignified by the name of law.
Henry I, who followed Rufus, was called the Fine Scholar, because of a trend toward study remarkable in a royal personage at that time. Things were not so bad under him, but when he died, the long, fierce wars between Matilda and Stephen the Usurper began, desolating England.
You can get a brief glimpse of these rulers and some idea of their characters from the first few stories in Church’s “Stories of English History,” and Charles Morris’s “Historical Tales: English,” both of them excellent reading. They will refresh your memory as to the facts which the books I am going to tell about in this number base their stories upon. Church tells us that Rufus was said to have had but two virtues: one a devotion to his father, the other great personal courage. Once, it is said, while pursuing an enemy on horseback, he came to the sea, and commanded the owner of a small vessel to cross the Channel with him. A fierce storm was raging, and the man feared to attempt the crossing, saying no ship could live in such a sea, that to set out was certain death.
But Rufus shouted to him that go he would. “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.