HAROLD
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
Dedicatory Epistle
TO THE RIGHT HON. C. T. D'EYNCOURT, M.P.
I dedicate to you, my dear friend, a work, principally composed under
your hospitable roof; and to the materials of which your library, rich
in the authorities I most needed, largely contributed.
The idea of founding an historical romance on an event so important
and so national as the Norman Invasion, I had long entertained, and
the chronicles of that time had long been familiar to me. But it is
an old habit of mine, to linger over the plan and subject of a work,
for years, perhaps, before the work has, in truth, advanced a
sentence; "busying myself," as old Burton saith, "with this playing
labour--otiosaque diligentia ut vitarem torporen feriendi."
The main consideration which long withheld me from the task, was in my
sense of the unfamiliarity of the ordinary reader with the characters,
events, and, so to speak, with the very physiognomy of a period ante
Agamemnona; before the brilliant age of matured chivalry, which has
given to song and romance the deeds of the later knighthood, and the
glorious frenzy of the Crusades. The Norman Conquest was our Trojan
War; an epoch beyond which our learning seldom induces our imagination
to ascend.
In venturing on ground so new to fiction, I saw before me the option
of apparent pedantry, in the obtrusion of such research as might carry
the reader along with the Author, fairly and truly into the real
records of the time; or of throwing aside pretensions to accuracy
altogether;--and so rest contented to turn history into flagrant
romance, rather than pursue my own conception of extracting its
natural romance from the actual history. Finally, not without some
encouragement from you, (whereof take your due share of blame!) I
decided to hazard the attempt, and to adopt that mode of treatment
which, if making larger demand on the attention of the reader, seemed
the more complimentary to his judgment.
The age itself, once duly examined, is full of those elements which
should awaken interest, and appeal to the imagination. Not untruly
has Sismondi said, that the "Eleventh Century has a right to be
considered a great age. It was a period of life and of creation; all
that there was of noble, heroic, and vigorous in the Middle Ages
commenced at that epoch." [1] But to us Englishmen in especial,
besides the more animated interest in that spirit of adventure,
enterprise, and improvement, of which the Norman chivalry was the
noblest type, there is an interest more touching and deep in those
last glimpses of the old Saxon monarchy, which open upon us in the
mournful pages of our chroniclers.
I have sought in this work, less to portray mere manners, which modern
researches have rendered familiar to ordinary students in our history,
than to bring forward the great characters, so carelessly dismissed in
the long and loose record of centuries; to show more clearly the
motives and policy of the agents in an event the most memorable in
Europe; and to convey a definite, if general, notion of the human
beings, whose brains schemed, and whose hearts beat, in that realm of
shadows which lies behind the Norman Conquest;
"Spes hominum caecos, morbos, votumque, labores,
Et passim toto volitantes aethere curas." [2]
I have thus been faithful to the leading historical incidents in the
grand tragedy of Harold, and as careful as contradictory evidences
will permit, both as to accuracy in the delineation of character, and
correctness in that chronological chain of dates without which there
can be no historical philosophy; that is, no tangible link between the
cause and the effect. The fictitious part of my narrative is, as in
"Rienzi," and the "Last of the Barons," confined chiefly to the
private life, with its domain of incident and passion, which is the
legitimate appanage of novelist or poet. The love story of Harold and
Edith is told differently from the well-known legend, which implies a
less pure connection. But the whole legend respecting the Edeva faira
(Edith the fair) whose name meets us in the "Domesday" roll, rests
upon very slight authority considering its popular acceptance [3]; and
the reasons for my alterations will be sufficiently obvious in a work
intended not only for general perusal, but which on many accounts, I
hope, may be entrusted fearlessly to the young; while those
alterations are in strict accordance with the spirit of the time, and
tend to illustrate one of its most marked peculiarities.
More apology is perhaps due for the liberal use to which I have
applied the superstitions of the age. But with the age itself those
superstitions are so interwoven--they meet us so constantly, whether
in the pages of our own chroniclers, or the records of the kindred
Scandinavians--they are so intruded into the very laws, so blended
with the very life, of our Saxon forefathers, that without employing
them, in somewhat of the same credulous spirit with which they were
originally conceived, no vivid impression of the People they
influenced can be conveyed. Not without truth has an Italian writer
remarked, "that he who would depict philosophically an unphilosophical
age, should remember that, to be familiar with children, one must
sometimes think and feel as a child."
Yet it has not been my main endeavour to make these ghostly agencies
conducive to the ordinary poetical purposes of terror, and if that
effect be at all created by them, it will be, I apprehend, rather
subsidiary to the more historical sources of interest than, in itself,
a leading or popular characteristic of the work. My object, indeed,
in the introduction of the Danish Vala especially, has been perhaps as
much addressed to the reason as to the fancy, in showing what large,
if dim, remains of the ancient "heathenesse" still kept their ground
on the Saxon soil, contending with and contrasting the monkish
superstitions, by which they were ultimately replaced. Hilda is not
in history; but without the romantic impersonation of that which Hilda
represents, the history of the time would be imperfectly understood.
In the character of Harold--while I have carefully examined and
weighed the scanty evidences of its distinguishing attributes which
are yet preserved to us--and, in spite of no unnatural partiality,
have not concealed what appear to me its deficiencies, and still less
the great error of the life it illustrates,--I have attempted,
somewhat and slightly, to shadow out the ideal of the pure Saxon
character, such as it was then, with its large qualities undeveloped,
but marked already by patient endurance, love of justice, and freedom
--the manly sense of duty rather than the chivalric sentiment of
honour--and that indestructible element of practical purpose and
courageous will, which, defying all conquest, and steadfast in all
peril, was ordained to achieve so vast an influence over the destinies
of the world.
To the Norman Duke, I believe, I have been as lenient as justice will
permit, though it is as impossible to deny his craft as to dispute his
genius; and so far as the scope of my work would allow, I trust that I
have indicated fairly the grand characteristics of his countrymen,
more truly chivalric than their lord. It has happened, unfortunately
for that illustrious race of men, that they have seemed to us, in
England, represented by the Anglo-Norman kings. The fierce and
plotting William, the vain and worthless Rufus, the cold-blooded and
relentless Henry, are no adequate representatives of the far nobler
Norman vavasours, whom even the English Chronicler admits to have been
"kind masters," and to whom, in spite of their kings, the after
liberties of England were so largely indebted. But this work closes
on the Field of Hastings; and in that noble struggle for national
independence, the sympathies of every true son of the land, even if
tracing his lineage back to the Norman victor, must be on the side of
the patriot Harold.
In the notes, which I have thought necessary aids to the better
comprehension of these volumes, my only wish has been to convey to the
general reader such illustrative information as may familiarise him.
more easily with the subject-matter of the book, or refresh his memory
on incidental details not without a national interest. In the mere
references to authorities I do not pretend to arrogate to a fiction
the proper character of a history; the references are chiefly used
either where wishing pointedly to distinguish from invention what was
borrowed from a chronicle, or when differing from some popular
historian to whom the reader might be likely to refer, it seemed well
to state the authority upon which the difference was founded. [4]
In fact, my main object has been one that compelled me to admit graver
matter than is common in romance, but which I would fain hope may be
saved from the charge of dulness by some national sympathy between
author and reader; my object is attained, and attained only, if, in
closing the last page of this work, the reader shall find that, in
spite of the fictitious materials admitted, he has formed a clearer
and more intimate acquaintance with a time, heroic though remote, and
characters which ought to have a household interest to Englishmen,
than the succinct accounts of the mere historian could possibly afford
him.
Thus, my dear D'Eyncourt, under cover of an address to yourself, have
I made to the Public those explanations which authors in general (and
I not the least so) are often overanxious to render.
This task done, my thoughts naturally fly back to the associations I
connected with your name when I placed it at the head of this epistle.
Again I seem to find myself under your friendly roof; again to greet
my provident host entering that gothic chamber in which I had been
permitted to establish my unsocial study, heralding the advent of
majestic folios, and heaping libraries round the unworthy work.
Again, pausing from my labour, I look through that castle casement,
and beyond that feudal moat, over the broad landscapes which, if I err
not, took their name from the proud brother of the Conqueror himself;
or when, in those winter nights, the grim old tapestry waved in the
dim recesses, I hear again the Saxon thegn winding his horn at the
turret door, and demanding admittance to the halls from which the
prelate of Bayeux had so unrighteously expelled him [5]--what marvel,
that I lived in the times of which I wrote, Saxon with the Saxon,
Norman with the Norman--that I entered into no gossip less venerable
than that current at the Court of the Confessor, or startled my
fellow-guests (when I deigned to meet them) with the last news which
Harold's spies had brought over from the Camp at St. Valery? With all
those folios, giants of the gone world, rising around me daily, more
and more, higher and higher--Ossa upon Pelion--on chair and table,
hearth and floor; invasive as Normans, indomitable as Saxons, and tall
as the tallest Danes (ruthless host, I behold them still!)--with all
those disburied spectres rampant in the chamber, all the armour
rusting in thy galleries, all those mutilated statues of early English
kings (including St. Edward himself)--niched into thy grey, ivied
walls--say in thy conscience, O host, (if indeed that conscience be
not wholly callous!) shall I ever return to the nineteenth century
again?
But far beyond these recent associations of a single winter (for which
heaven assoil thee!) goes the memory of a friendship of many winters,
and proof to the storms of all. Often have I come for advice to your
wisdom, and sympathy to your heart, bearing back with me, in all such
seasons, new increase to that pleasurable gratitude which is, perhaps,
the rarest, nor the least happy sentiment, that experience leaves to
man. Some differences, it may be,--whether on those public questions
which we see, every day, alienating friendships that should have been
beyond the reach of laws and kings;--or on the more scholastic
controversies which as keenly interest the minds of educated men,--may
at times deny to us the idem velle, atque idem nolle; but the firma
amicitia needs not those common links; the sunshine does not leave the
wave for the slight ripple which the casual stone brings a moment to
the surface.
Accept, in this dedication of a work which has lain so long on my
mind, and been endeared to me from many causes, the token of an
affection for you and yours, strong as the ties of kindred, and
lasting as the belief in truth. E. B. L.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The author of an able and learned article on MABILLON [6] in the
"Edinburgh Review," has accurately described my aim in this work;
although, with that generous courtesy which characterises the true
scholar, in referring to the labours of a contemporary, he has
overrated my success. It was indeed my aim "to solve the problem how
to produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense
of historical truth"--I borrow the words of the Reviewer, since none
other could so tersely express my design, or so clearly account for
the leading characteristics in its conduct and completion.
There are two ways of employing the materials of History in the
service of Romance: the one consists in lending to ideal personages,
and to an imaginary fable, the additional interest to be derived from
historical groupings: the other, in extracting the main interest of
romantic narrative from History itself. Those who adopt the former
mode are at liberty to exclude all that does not contribute to
theatrical effect or picturesque composition; their fidelity to the
period they select is towards the manners and costume, not towards the
precise order of events, the moral causes from which the events
proceeded, and the physical agencies by which they were influenced and
controlled. The plan thus adopted is unquestionably the more popular
and attractive, and, being favoured by the most illustrious writers of
historical romance, there is presumptive reason for supposing it to be
also that which is the more agreeable to the art of fiction.
But he who wishes to avoid the ground pre-occupied by others, and
claim in the world of literature some spot, however humble, which he
may "plough with his own heifer," will seek to establish himself not
where the land is the most fertile, but where it is the least
enclosed. So, when I first turned my attention to Historical Romance,
my main aim was to avoid as much as possible those fairer portions of
the soil that had been appropriated by the first discoverers. The
great author of Ivanhoe, and those amongst whom, abroad and at home,
his mantle was divided, had employed History to aid Romance; I
contented myself with the humbler task to employ Romance in the aid of
History,--to extract from authentic but neglected chronicles, and the
unfrequented storehouse of Archaeology, the incidents and details that
enliven the dry narrative of facts to which the general historian is
confined,--construct my plot from the actual events themselves, and
place the staple of such interest as I could create in reciting the
struggles, and delineating the characters, of those who had been the
living actors in the real drama. For the main materials of the three
Historical Romances I have composed, I consulted the original
authorities of the time with a care as scrupulous, as if intending to
write, not a fiction but a history. And having formed the best
judgment I could of the events and characters of the age, I adhered
faithfully to what, as an Historian, I should have held to be the true
course and true causes of the great political events, and the
essential attributes of the principal agents. Solely in that inward
life which, not only as apart from the more public and historical, but
which, as almost wholly unknown, becomes the fair domain of the poet,
did I claim the legitimate privileges of fiction, and even here I
employed the agency of the passions only so far as they served to
illustrate what I believed to be the genuine natures of the beings who
had actually lived, and to restore the warmth of the human heart to
the images recalled from the grave.
Thus, even had I the gifts of my most illustrious predecessors, I
should be precluded the use of many of the more brilliant. I shut
myself out from the wider scope permitted to their fancy, and denied
myself the license to choose or select materials, alter dates, vary
causes and effects according to the convenience of that more imperial
fiction which invents the Probable where it discards the Real. The
mode I have adopted has perhaps only this merit, that it is my own--
mine by discovery and mine by labour. And if I can raise not the
spirits that obeyed the great master of romance, nor gain the key to
the fairyland that opened to his spell,--at least I have not rifled
the tomb of the wizard to steal my art from the book that lies clasped
on his breast.
In treating of an age with which the general reader is so unfamiliar
as that preceding the Norman Conquest, it is impossible to avoid
(especially in the earlier portions of my tale) those explanations of
the very character of the time which would have been unnecessary if I
had only sought in History the picturesque accompaniments to Romance.
I have to do more than present an amusing picture of national manners
--detail the dress, and describe the banquet. According to the plan I
adopt, I have to make the reader acquainted with the imperfect fusion
of races in Saxon England, familiarise him with the contests of
parties and the ambition of chiefs, show him the strength and the
weakness of a kindly but ignorant church; of a brave but turbulent
aristocracy; of a people partially free, and naturally energetic, but
disunited by successive immigrations, and having lost much of the
proud jealousies of national liberty by submission to the preceding
conquests of the Dane; acquiescent in the sway of foreign kings, and
with that bulwark against invasion which an hereditary order of
aristocracy usually erects, loosened to its very foundations by the
copious admixture of foreign nobles. I have to present to the reader,
here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate monk, there, the dark
superstition that still consulted the deities of the North by runes on
the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in contrast to those
pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I have to bring
forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the coming
conquerors,--the stern will and deep guile of the Norman chief--the
comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church--the nascent spirit
of chivalry in the Norman vavasours; a spirit destined to emancipate
the very people it contributed to enslave, associated, as it
imperfectly was, with the sense of freedom: disdainful, it is true, of
the villein, but proudly curbing, though into feudal limits, the
domination of the liege. In a word, I must place fully before the
reader, if I would be faithful to the plan of my work, the political
and moral features of the age, as well as its lighter and livelier
attributes, and so lead him to perceive, when he has closed the book,
why England was conquered, and how England survived the Conquest.
In accomplishing this task, I inevitably incur the objections which
the task itself raises up,--objections to the labour it has cost; to
the information which the labour was undertaken in order to bestow;
objections to passages which seem to interrupt the narrative, but
which in reality prepare for the incidents it embraces, or explain the
position of the persons whose characters it illustrates,--whose fate
it involves; objections to the reference to authorities, where a fact
might be disputed, or mistaken for fiction; objections to the use of
Saxon words, for which no accurate synonyms could be exchanged;
objections, in short, to the colouring, conduct, and composition of
the whole work; objections to all that separate it from the common
crowd of Romances, and stamp on it, for good or for bad, a character
peculiarly its own. Objections of this kind I cannot remove, though I
have carefully weighed them all. And with regard to the objection
most important to story-teller and novel reader--viz., the dryness of
some of the earlier portions, though I have thrice gone over those
passages, with the stern determination to inflict summary justice upon
every unnecessary line, I must own to my regret that I have found but
little which it was possible to omit without rendering the after
narrative obscure, and without injuring whatever of more stirring
interest the story, as it opens, may afford to the general reader of
Romance.
As to the Saxon words used, an explanation of all those that can be
presumed unintelligible to a person of ordinary education, is given
either in the text or a foot-note. Such archaisms are much less
numerous than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and
they have rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have
been employed without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase.
Would it indeed be possible, for instance, to convey a notion of the
customs and manners of our Saxon forefathers without employing words
so mixed up with their daily usages and modes of thinking as
"weregeld" and "niddering"? Would any words from the modern
vocabulary suggest the same idea, or embody the same meaning?
One critic good-humouredly exclaims, "We have a full attendance of
thegns and cnehts, but we should have liked much better our old
friends and approved good masters thanes and knights." Nothing could
be more apposite for my justification than the instances here quoted
in censure; nothing could more plainly vindicate the necessity of
employing the Saxon words. For I should sadly indeed have misled the
reader if I had used the word knight in an age when knights were
wholly unknown to the Anglo-Saxon and cneht no more means what we
understand by knight, than a templar in modern phrase means a man in
chain mail vowed to celibacy, and the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre
from the hands of the Mussulman. While, since thegn and thane are
both archaisms, I prefer the former; not only for the same reason that
induces Sir Francis Palgrave to prefer it, viz., because it is the
more etymologically correct; but because we take from our neighbours
the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in which we apply
it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach to the
various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the
erudition of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have
read the Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these
gentlemen find the authorities to confute my statement I know not; all
I know is, that in the statement I have followed the original
authorities usually deemed the best. And I content myself with
referring the disputants to a work not so difficult to procure as (and
certainly more pleasant to read than) the old Chronicles. In Miss
Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England," (Matilda of Flanders,)
the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the same authorities.
More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in
all matter's of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that
I have overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that
which flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have
thought that the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most
thriving period of that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the
benefits it derived from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from
William, had been phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age,
and in the history of literature, to have met with an incredulity
which the most moderate amount of information would have sufficed to
dispel. Not to refer such sceptics to graver authorities, historical
and ecclesiastical, in order to justify my representations of that
learning which, under William the Bastard, made the schools of
Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a page or two in a book so
accessible as Villemain's "Tableau du Moyen Age," will perhaps suffice
to convince them of the hastiness of their censure, and the error of
their impressions.
It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but
of whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of
human industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, "that I am much
mistaken when I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers
and courtiers of the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with
the literature of Greece and Rome."
The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no
such thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a
reference to the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is
expressly stated in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally
intended for the Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his
literary information, rare in a soldier (but for which his earlier
studies for the ecclesiastical calling readily account, at a time when
the Norman convent of Bec was already so famous for the erudition of
its teachers, and the number of its scholars,) that attracted towards
him the notice of Lanfranc, and founded his fortunes. Pedantry is
made one of his characteristics (as it generally was the
characteristic of any man with some pretensions to scholarship, in the
earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical allusion, whether in
taunting a courtier or conversing with a "Saxon from the wealds of
Kent," it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry ascribed to him,
than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg Merrilies in
Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the same
unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in question, when inviting
his readers to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote Horace,
have omitted to state that de Graville expressly laments that he had
never read, nor could even procure, a copy of the Roman poet--judging
only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish author, who
was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.
So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in
the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone
through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never
thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems
of Homer themselves--he would have known that Homeric fables, or
personages, though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by
quaint travesties [7], even to the most illiterate audience of the
gothic age. It was scarcely more necessary to know Homer then than
now, in order to have heard of Ulysses. The writer in the Athenaeum
is acquainted with Homeric personages, but who on earth would ever
presume to assert that he is acquainted with Homer?
Some doubt has been thrown upon my accuracy in ascribing to the Anglo-
Saxon the enjoyments of certain luxuries (gold and silver plate--the
use of glass, etc.), which were extremely rare in an age much more
recent. There is no ground for that doubt; nor is there a single
article of such luxury named in the text, for the mention of which I
have not ample authority.
I have indeed devoted to this work a degree of research which, if
unusual to romance, I cannot consider superfluous when illustrating an
age so remote, and events unparalleled in their influence over the
destinies of England. Nor am I without the hope, that what the
romance-reader at first regards as a defect, he may ultimately
acknowledge as a merit;--forgiving me that strain on his attention by
which alone I could leave distinct in his memory the action and the
actors in that solemn tragedy which closed on the field of Hastings,
over the corpse of the Last Saxon King.
HAROLD, THE LAST OF THE SAXON KINGS
by Edward Bulwer Lytton
BOOK I.
THE NORMAN VISITOR, THE SAXON KING, AND THE DANISH PROPHETESS.
CHAPTER I.
Merry was the month of May in the year of our Lord 1052. Few were the
boys, and few the lasses, who overslept themselves on the first of
that buxom month. Long ere the dawn, the crowds had sought mead and
woodland, to cut poles and wreathe flowers. Many a mead then lay fair
and green beyond the village of Charing, and behind the isle of
Thorney, (amidst the brakes and briars of which were then rising fast
and fair the Hall and Abbey of Westminster;) many a wood lay dark in
the starlight, along the higher ground that sloped from the dank
Strand, with its numerous canals or dykes;--and on either side of the
great road into Kent:--flutes and horns sounded far and near through
the green places, and laughter and song, and the crash of breaking
boughs.
As the dawn came grey up the east, arch and blooming faces bowed down
to bathe in the May dew. Patient oxen stood dozing by the hedge-rows,
all fragrant with blossoms, till the gay spoilers of the May came
forth from the woods with lusty poles, followed by girls with laps
full of flowers, which they had caught asleep. The poles were pranked
with nosegays, and a chaplet was hung round the horns of every ox.
Then towards daybreak, the processions streamed back into the city,
through all its gates; boys with their May-gads (peeled willow wands
twined with cowslips) going before; and clear through the lively din
of the horns and flutes, and amidst the moving grove of branches,
choral voices, singing some early Saxon stave, precursor of the later
song--
"We have brought the summer home."
Often in the good old days before the Monk-king reigned, kings and
ealdermen had thus gone forth a-maying; but these merriments,
savouring of heathenesse, that good prince misliked: nevertheless the
song was as blithe, and the boughs were as green, as if king and
ealderman had walked in the train.
On the great Kent road, the fairest meads for the cowslip, and the
greenest woods for the bough, surrounded a large building that once
had belonged to some voluptuous Roman, now all defaced and despoiled;
but the boys and the lasses shunned those demesnes; and even in their
mirth, as they passed homeward along the road, and saw near the ruined
walls, and timbered outbuildings, grey Druid stones (that spoke of an
age before either Saxon or Roman invader) gleaming through the dawn--
the song was hushed--the very youngest crossed themselves; and the
elder, in solemn whispers, suggested the precaution of changing the
song into a psalm. For in that old building dwelt Hilda, of famous
and dark repute; Hilda, who, despite all law and canon, was still
believed to practise the dismal arts of the Wicca and Morthwyrtha (the
witch and worshipper of the dead). But once out of sight of those
fearful precincts, the psalm was forgotten, and again broke, loud,
clear, and silvery, the joyous chorus.
So, entering London about sunrise, doors and windows were duly
wreathed with garlands; and every village in the suburbs had its May-
pole, which stood in its place all the year. On that happy day labour
rested; ceorl and theowe had alike a holiday to dance, and tumble
round the May-pole; and thus, on the first of May--Youth, and Mirth,
and Music, "brought the summer home."
The next day you might still see where the buxom bands had been; you
might track their way by fallen flowers, and green leaves, and the
deep ruts made by oxen (yoked often in teams from twenty to forty, in
the wains that carried home the poles); and fair and frequent
throughout the land, from any eminence, you might behold the hamlet
swards still crowned with the May trees, and air still seemed fragrant
with their garlands.
It is on that second day of May, 1052, that my story opens, at the
House of Hilda, the reputed Morthwyrtha. It stood upon a gentle and
verdant height; and, even through all the barbarous mutilation it had
undergone from barbarian hands, enough was left strikingly to contrast
the ordinary abodes of the Saxon.
The remains of Roman art were indeed still numerous throughout
England, but it happened rarely that the Saxon had chosen his home
amidst the villas of those noble and primal conquerors. Our first
forefathers were more inclined to destroy than to adapt.
By what chance this building became an exception to the ordinary rule,
it is now impossible to conjecture, but from a very remote period it
had sheltered successive races of Teuton lords.
The changes wrought in the edifice were mournful and grotesque. What
was now the Hall, had evidently been the atrium; the round shield,
with its pointed boss, the spear, sword, and small curved saex of the
early Teuton, were suspended from the columns on which once had been
wreathed the flowers; in the centre of the floor, where fragments of
the old mosaic still glistened from the hard-pressed paving of clay
and lime, what now was the fire-place had been the impluvium, and the
smoke went sullenly through the aperture in the roof, made of old to
receive the rains of heaven. Around the Hall were still left the old
cubicula or dormitories, (small, high, and lighted but from the
doors,) which now served for the sleeping-rooms of the humbler guest
or the household servant; while at the farther end of the Hall, the
wide space between the columns, which had once given ample vista from
graceful awnings into tablinum and viridarium, was filled up with rude
rubble and Roman bricks, leaving but a low, round, arched door, that
still led into the tablinum. But that tablinum, formerly the gayest
state-room of the Roman lord, was now filled with various lumber,
piles of faggots, and farming utensils. On either side of this
desecrated apartment, stretched, to the right, the old lararium,
stripped of its ancient images of ancestor and god; to the left, what
had been the gynoecium (women's apartment).
One side of the ancient peristyle, which was of vast extent, was now
converted into stabling, sties for swine, and stalls for oxen. On the
other side was constructed a Christian chapel, made of rough oak
planks, fastened by plates at the top, and with a roof of thatched
reeds. The columns and wall at the extreme end of the peristyle were
a mass of ruins, through the gigantic rents of which loomed a grassy
hillock, its sides partially covered with clumps of furze. On this
hillock were the mutilated remains of an ancient Druidical crommel, in
the centre of which (near a funeral mound, or barrow, with the
bautastean, or gravestone, of some early Saxon chief at one end) had
been sacrilegiously placed an altar to Thor, as was apparent both from
the shape, from a rude, half-obliterated, sculptured relief of the
god, with his lifted hammer, and a few Runic letters. Amidst the
temple of the Briton the Saxon had reared the shrine of his triumphant
war-god.
Now still, amidst the ruins of that extreme side of the peristyle
which opened to this hillock were left, first, an ancient Roman
fountain, that now served to water the swine, and next, a small
sacellum, or fane to Bacchus (as relief and frieze, yet spared,
betokened): thus the eye, at one survey, beheld the shrines of four
creeds: the Druid, mystical and symbolical; the Roman, sensual, but
humane; the Teutonic, ruthless and destroying; and, latest riser and
surviving all, though as yet with but little of its gentler influence
over the deeds of men, the edifice of the Faith of Peace.
Across the peristyle, theowes and swineherds passed to and fro:--in
the atrium, men of a higher class, half-armed, were, some drinking,
some at dice, some playing with huge hounds, or caressing the hawks
that stood grave and solemn on their perches.
The lararium was deserted; the gynoecium was still, as in the Roman
time, the favoured apartment of the female portion of the household,
and indeed bore the same name [8], and with the group there assembled
we have now to do.
The appliances of the chamber showed the rank and wealth of the owner.
At that period the domestic luxury of the rich was infinitely greater
than has been generally supposed. The industry of the women decorated
wall and furniture with needlework and hangings: and as a thegn
forfeited his rank if he lost his lands, so the higher orders of an
aristocracy rather of wealth than birth had, usually, a certain
portion of superfluous riches, which served to flow towards the
bazaars of the East and the nearer markets of Flanders and Saracenic
Spain.
In this room the walls were draped with silken hangings richly
embroidered. The single window was glazed with a dull grey glass [9].
On a beaufet were ranged horns tipped with silver, and a few vessels
of pure gold. A small circular table in the centre was supported by
symbolical monsters quaintly carved. At one side of the wall, on a
long settle, some half-a-dozen handmaids were employed in spinning;
remote from them, and near the window, sat a woman advanced in years,
and of a mien and aspect singularly majestic. Upon a small tripod
before her was a Runic manuscript, and an inkstand of elegant form,
with a silver graphium, or pen. At her feet reclined a girl somewhat
about the age of sixteen, her long hair parted across her forehead and
falling far down her shoulders. Her dress was a linen under-tunic,
with long sleeves, rising high to the throat, and without one of the
modern artificial restraints of the shape, the simple belt sufficed to
show the slender proportions and delicate outline of the wearer. The
colour of the dress was of the purest white, but its hems, or borders,
were richly embroidered. This girl's beauty was something marvellous.
In a land proverbial for fair women, it had already obtained her the
name of "the fair." In that beauty were blended, not as yet without a
struggle for mastery, the two expressions seldom united in one
countenance, the soft and the noble; indeed in the whole aspect there
was the evidence of some internal struggle; the intelligence was not
yet complete; the soul and heart were not yet united: and Edith the
Christian maid dwelt in the home of Hilda the heathen prophetess. The
girl's blue eyes, rendered dark by the shade of their long lashes,
were fixed intently upon the stern and troubled countenance which was
bent upon her own, but bent with that abstract gaze which shows that
the soul is absent from the sight. So sate Hilda, and so reclined her
grandchild Edith.
"Grandam," said the girl in a low voice and after a long pause; and
the sound of her voice so startled the handmaids, that every spindle
stopped for a moment and then plied with renewed activity; "Grandam,
what troubles you--are you not thinking of the great Earl and his fair
sons, now outlawed far over the wide seas?"
As the girl spoke, Hilda started slightly, like one awakened from a
dream; and when Edith had concluded her question, she rose slowly to
the height of a statue, unbowed by her years, and far towering above
even the ordinary standard of men; and turning from the child, her eye
fell upon the row of silent maids, each at her rapid, noiseless,
stealthy work. "Ho!" said she; her cold and haughty eye gleaming as
she spoke; "yesterday they brought home the summer--to-day, ye aid to
bring home the winter. Weave well--heed well warf and woof; Skulda
[10] is amongst ye, and her pale fingers guide the web!"
The maidens lifted not their eyes, though in every cheek the colour
paled at the words of the mistress. The spindles revolved, the thread
shot, and again there was silence more freezing than before.
"Askest thou," said Hilda at length, passing to the child, as if the
question so long addressed to her ear had only just reached her mind;
"askest thou if I thought of the Earl and his fair sons?--yea, I heard
the smith welding arms on the anvil, and the hammer of the shipwright
shaping strong ribs for the horses of the sea. Ere the reaper has
bound his sheaves, Earl Godwin will scare the Normans in the halls of
the Monk-king, as the hawk scares the brood in the dovecot. Weave
well, heed well warf and woof, nimble maidens--strong be the texture,
for biting is the worm."
"What weave they, then, good grandmother?" asked the girl, with wonder
and awe in her soft mild eyes.
"The winding-sheet of the great!"
Hilda's lips closed, but her eyes, yet brighter than before, gazed
upon space, and her pale hand seemed tracing letters, like runes, in
the air.
Then slowly she turned, and looked forth through the dull window.
"Give me my coverchief and my staff," said she quickly.
Every one of the handmaids, blithe for excuse to quit a task which
seemed recently commenced, and was certainly not endeared to them by
the knowledge of its purpose communicated to them by the lady, rose to
obey.
Unheeding the hands that vied with each other, Hilda took the hood,
and drew it partially over her brow. Leaning lightly on a long staff,
the head of which formed a raven, carved from some wood stained black,
she passed into the hall, and thence through the desecrated tablinum,
into the mighty court formed by the shattered peristyle; there she
stopped, mused a moment, and called on Edith. The girl was soon by
her side.
"Come with me.--There is a face you shall see but twice in life;--this
day,"--and Hilda paused, and the rigid and almost colossal beauty of
her countenance softened.
"And when again, my grandmother?"
"Child, put thy warm hand in mine. So! the vision darkens from me.--
when again, saidst thou, Edith?--alas, I know not."
While thus speaking, Hilda passed slowly by the Roman fountain and the
heathen fane, and ascended the little hillock. There on the opposite
side of the summit, backed by the Druid crommel and the Teuton altar,
she seated herself deliberately on the sward.
A few daisies, primroses, and cowslips, grew around; these Edith began
to pluck. Singing, as she wove, a simple song, that, not more by the
dialect than the sentiment, betrayed its origin in the ballad of the
Norse [11], which had, in its more careless composition, a character
quite distinct from the artificial poetry of the Saxons. The song may
be thus imperfectly rendered:
"Merrily the throstle sings
Amid the merry May;
The throstle signs but to my ear;
My heart is far away!
Blithely bloometh mead and bank;
And blithely buds the tree;
And hark!--they bring the Summer home;
It has no home with me!
They have outlawed him--my Summer!
An outlaw far away!
The birds may sing, the flowers may bloom,
O, give me back my May!"
As she came to the last line, her soft low voice seemed to awaken a
chorus of sprightly horns and trumpets, and certain other wind
instruments peculiar to the music of that day. The hillock bordered
the high road to London--which then wound through wastes of forest
land--and now emerging from the trees to the left appeared a goodly
company. First came two riders abreast, each holding a banner. On
the one was depicted the cross and five martlets, the device of
Edward, afterwards surnamed the Confessor: on the other, a plain broad
cross with a deep border round it, and the streamer shaped into sharp
points.
The first was familiar to Edith, who dropped her garland to gaze on
the approaching pageant; the last was strange to her. She had been
accustomed to see the banner of the great Earl Godwin by the side of
the Saxon king; and she said, almost indignantly,--
"Who dares, sweet grandam, to place banner or pennon where Earl
Godwin's ought to float?"
"Peace," said Hilda, "peace and look."
Immediately behind the standard-bearers came two figures--strangely
dissimilar indeed in mien, in years, in bearing: each bore on his left
wrist a hawk. The one was mounted on a milk-white palfrey, with
housings inlaid with gold and uncut jewels. Though not really old--
for he was much on this side of sixty--both his countenance and
carriage evinced age. His complexion, indeed, was extremely fair, and
his cheeks ruddy; but the visage was long and deeply furrowed, and
from beneath a bonnet not dissimilar to those in use among the Scotch,
streamed hair long and white as snow, mingling with a large and forked
beard. White seemed his chosen colour. White was the upper tunic
clasped on his shoulder with a broad ouche or brooch; white the
woollen leggings fitted to somewhat emaciated limbs; and white the
mantle, though broidered with a broad hem of gold and purple. The
fashion of his dress was that which well became a noble person, but it
suited ill the somewhat frail and graceless figure of the rider.
Nevertheless, as Edith saw him, she rose, with an expression of deep
reverence on her countenance, and saying, "it is our lord the King,"
advanced some steps down the hillock, and there stood, her arms folded
on her breast, and quite forgetful, in her innocence and youth, that
she had left the house without the cloak and coverchief which were
deemed indispensable to the fitting appearance of maid and matron when
they were seen abroad.
"Fair sir, and brother mine," said the deep voice of the younger
rider, in the Romance or Norman tongue, "I have heard that the small
people of whom my neighbours, the Breton tell us much, abound greatly
in this fair land of yours; and if I were not by the side of one whom
no creature unassoilzed and unbaptised dare approach, by sweet St.
Valery I should say--yonder stands one of those same gentilles fees!"
King Edward's eye followed the direction of his companion's
outstretched hand, and his quiet brow slightly contracted as he beheld
the young form of Edith standing motionless a few yards before him,
with the warm May wind lifting and playing with her long golden locks.
He checked his palfrey, and murmured some Latin words which the knight
beside him recognised as a prayer, and to which, doffing his cap, he
added an Amen, in a tone of such unctuous gravity, that the royal
saint rewarded him with a faint approving smile, and an affectionate
"Bene vene, Piosissime."
Then inclining his palfrey's head towards the knoll, he motioned to
the girl to approach him. Edith, with a heightened colour, obeyed,
and came to the roadside. The standard-bearers halted, as did the
king and his comrade--the procession behind halted--thirty knights,
two bishops, eight abbots, all on fiery steeds and in Norman garb--
squires and attendants on foot--a long and pompous retinue--they
halted all. Only a stray hound or two broke from the rest, and
wandered into the forest land with heads trailing.
"Edith, my child," said Edward, still in Norman-French, for he spoke
his own language with hesitation, and the Romance tongue, which had
long been familiar to the higher classes in England, had, since his
accession, become the only language in use at court, and as such every
one of 'Eorl-kind' was supposed to speak it;--"Edith, my child, thou
hast not forgotten my lessons, I trow; thou singest the hymns I gave
thee, and neglectest not to wear the relic round thy neck."
The girl hung her head, and spoke not.
"How comes it, then," continued the King, with a voice to which he in
vain endeavoured to impart an accent of severity, "how comes it, O
little one, that thou, whose thoughts should be lifted already above
this carnal world, and eager for the service of Mary the chaste and
blessed, standest thus hoodless and alone on the waysides, a mark for
the eyes of men? go to, it is naught."
Thus reproved, and in presence of so large and brilliant a company,
the girl's colour went and came, her breast heaved high, but with an
effort beyond her age she checked her tears, and said meekly, "My
grandmother, Hilda, bade me come with her, and I came."
"Hilda!" said the King, backing his palfrey with apparent
perturbation, "but Hilda is not with thee; I see her not."
As he spoke, Hilda rose, and so suddenly did her tall form appear on
the brow of the hill, that it seemed as if she had emerged from the
earth. With a light and rapid stride she gained the side of her
grandchild; and after a slight and haughty reverence, said, "Hilda is
here; what wants Edward the King with his servant Hilda?"
"Nought, nought," said the King, hastily; and something like fear
passed over his placid countenance; "save, indeed," he added, with a
reluctant tone, as that of a man who obeys his conscience against his
inclination, "that I would pray thee to keep this child pure to
threshold and altar, as is meet for one whom our Lady, the Virgin, in
due time, will elect to her service."
"Not so, son of Etheldred, son of Woden, the last descendant of Penda
should live, not to glide a ghost amidst cloisters, but to rock
children for war in their father's shield. Few men are there yet like
the men of old; and while the foot of the foreigner is on the Saxon
soil no branch of the stem of Woden should be nipped in the leaf."
"Per la resplendar De [12], bold dame," cried the knight by the side
of Edward, while a lurid flush passed over his cheek of bronze; "but
thou art too glib of tongue for a subject, and pratest overmuch of
Woden, the Paynim, for the lips of a Christian matron."
Hilda met the flashing eye of the knight with a brow of lofty scorn,
on which still a certain terror was visible. "Child," she said,
putting her hand upon Edith's fair locks; "this is the man thou shalt
see but twice in thy life;--look up, and mark well!"
Edith instinctively raised her eyes, and, once fixed upon the knight,
they seemed chained as by a spell. His vest, of a cramoisay so dark,
that it seemed black beside the snowy garb of the Confessor, was edged
by a deep band of embroidered gold; leaving perfectly bare his firm,
full throat--firm and full as a column of granite,--a short jacket or
manteline of fur, pendant from the shoulders, left developed in all
its breadth a breast, that seemed meet to stay the march of an army;
and on the left arm, curved to support the falcon, the vast muscles
rose, round and gnarled, through the close sleeve.
In height, he was really but little above the stature of many of those
present; nevertheless, so did his port [13], his air, the nobility of
his large proportions, fill the eye, that he seemed to tower
immeasurably above the rest.
His countenance was yet more remarkable than his form; still in the
prime of youth, he seemed at the first glance younger, at the second
older, than he was. At the first glance younger; for his face was
perfectly shaven, without even the moustache which the Saxon courtier,
in imitating the Norman, still declined to surrender; and the smooth
visage and bare throat sufficed in themselves to give the air of youth
to that dominant and imperious presence. His small skull-cap left
unconcealed his forehead, shaded with short thick hair, uncurled, but
black and glossy as the wings of a raven. It was on that forehead
that time had set its trace; it was knit into a frown over the
eyebrows; lines deep as furrows crossed its broad, but not elevated
expanse. That frown spoke of hasty ire and the habit of stern
command; those furrows spoke of deep thought and plotting scheme; the
one betrayed but temper and circumstance; the other, more noble, spoke
of the character and the intellect. The face was square, and the
regard lion-like; the mouth--small, and even beautiful in outline--had
a sinister expression in its exceeding firmness; and the jaw--vast,
solid, as if bound in iron--showed obstinate, ruthless, determined
will; such a jaw as belongs to the tiger amongst beasts, and the
conqueror amongst men; such as it is seen in the effigies of Caesar,
of Cortes, of Napoleon.
That presence was well calculated to command the admiration of women,
not less than the awe of men. But no admiration mingled with the
terror that seized the girl as she gazed long and wistful upon the
knight. The fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and
frozen. Never was that face forgotten; often in after-life it haunted
her in the noon-day, it frowned upon her dreams.
"Fair child," said the knight, fatigued at length by the obstinacy of
the gaze, while that smile peculiar to those who have commanded men
relaxed his brow, and restored the native beauty to his lip, "fair
child, learn not from thy peevish grandam so uncourteous a lesson as
hate of the foreigner. As thou growest into womanhood, know that
Norman knight is sworn slave to lady fair;" and, doffing his cap, he
took from it an uncut jewel, set in Byzantine filigree work. "Hold
out thy lap, my child; and when thou nearest the foreigner scoffed,
set this bauble in thy locks, and think kindly of William, Count of
the Normans." [14]
He dropped the jewel on the ground as he spoke; for Edith, shrinking
and unsoftened towards him, held no lap to receive it; and Hilda, to
whom Edward had been speaking in a low voice, advanced to the spot and
struck the jewel with her staff under the hoofs of the king's palfrey.
"Son of Emma, the Norman woman, who sent thy youth into exile, trample
on the gifts of thy Norman kinsman. And if, as men say, thou art of
such gifted holiness that Heaven grants thy hand the power to heal,
and thy voice the power to curse, heal thy country, and curse the
stranger!"
She extended her right arm to William as she spoke, and such was the
dignity of her passion, and such its force, that an awe fell upon all.
Then dropping her hood over her face, she slowly turned away, regained
the summit of the knoll, and stood erect beside the altar of the
Northern god, her face invisible through the hood drawn completely
over it, and her form motionless as a statue.
"Ride on," said Edward, crossing himself.
"Now by the bones of St. Valery," said William, after a pause, in
which his dark keen eye noted the gloom upon the King's gentle face,
"it moves much my simple wonder how even presence so saintly can hear
without wrath words so unleal and foul. Gramercy, an the proudest
dame in Normandy (and I take her to be wife to my stoutest baron,
William Fitzosborne) had spoken thus to me--"
"Thou wouldst have done as I, my brother," interrupted Edward; "prayed
to our Lord to pardon her, and rode on pitying."
William's lip quivered with ire, yet he curbed the reply that sprang
to it, and he looked with affection genuinely more akin to admiration
than scorn, upon his fellow-prince. For, fierce and relentless as the
Duke's deeds were, his faith was notably sincere; and while this made,
indeed, the prince's chief attraction to the pious Edward, so, on the
other hand, this bowed the Duke in a kind of involuntary and
superstitious homage to the man who sought to square deeds to faith.
It is ever the case with stern and stormy spirits, that the meek ones
which contrast them steal strangely into their affections. This
principle of human nature can alone account for the enthusiastic
devotion which the mild sufferings of the Saviour awoke in the
fiercest exterminators of the North. In proportion, often, to the
warrior's ferocity, was his love to that Divine model, at whose
sufferings he wept, to whose tomb he wandered barefoot, and whose
example of compassionate forgiveness he would have thought himself the
basest of men to follow!
"Now, by my halidame, I honour and love thee, Edward," cried the Duke,
with a heartiness more frank than was usual to him: "and were I thy
subject, woe to man or woman that wagged tongue to wound thee by a
breath. But who and what is this same Hilda? one of thy kith and
kin?--surely not less than kingly blood runs so bold?"
"William, bien aime," [15] said the King, "it is true that Hilda, whom
the saints assoil, is of kingly blood, though not of our kingly line.
It is feared," added Edward, in a timid whisper, as he cast a hurried
glance around him, "that this unhappy woman has ever been more
addicted to the rites of her pagan ancestors than to those of Holy
Church; and men do say that she hath thus acquired from fiend or charm
secrets devoutly to be eschewed by the righteous. Nathless, let us
rather hope that her mind is somewhat distraught with her
misfortunes."
The King sighed, and the Duke sighed too, but the Duke's sigh spoke
impatience. He swept behind him a stern and withering look towards
the proud figure of Hilda, still seen through the glades, and said in
a sinister voice: "Of kingly blood; but this witch of Woden hath no
sons or kinsmen, I trust, who pretend to the throne of the Saxon:"
"She is sibbe to Githa, wife of Godwin," answered the King, "and that
is her most perilous connection; for the banished Earl, as thou
knowest, did not pretend to fill the throne, but he was content with
nought less than governing our people."
The King then proceeded to sketch an outline of the history of Hilda,
but his narrative was so deformed both by his superstitions and
prejudices, and his imperfect information in all the leading events
and characters in his own kingdom, that we will venture to take upon
ourselves his task; and while the train ride on through glade and
mead, we will briefly narrate, from our own special sources of
knowledge, the chronicle of Hilda, the Scandinavian Vala.
