The Rival Heirs Part 1

The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune.

by A. D. Crake.

PREFACE.

This little volume, now presented to the indulgence of the reader, is the third of a series intended to ill.u.s.trate the history and manners of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, whom a great historian very appropriately names "The Old English:" it does not claim the merit of deep research, only of an earnest endeavour to be true to the facts, and in harmony with the tone, of the eventful period of "The Norman Conquest."

The origin of these tales has been mentioned in the prefaces to the earlier volumes, but may be briefly repeated for those who have not seen the former "Chronicles." The writer was for many years the chaplain of a large school, and it was his desire to make the leisure hours of Sunday bright and happy, in the absence of the sports and pastimes of weekdays.

The expedient which best solved the difficulty was the narration of original tales, embodying the most striking incidents in the history of the Church and of the nation, or descriptive of the lives of our Christian forefathers under circ.u.mstances of difficulty and trial.

One series of these tales, of which the first was Aemilius, a tale of the Decian and Valerian persecutions, was based on the history of the Early Church; the second series, on early English history, and ent.i.tled "The Chronicles of Aescendune."

The first of these Chronicles described the days of St. Dunstan, and ill.u.s.trated the story of Edwy and Elgiva; the second, the later Danish invasions, and the struggle between the Ironside and Canute; the third is in the hands of the reader.

The leading events in each tale are historical, and the writer has striven most earnestly not to tamper with the facts of history; he has but attempted to place his youthful readers, to the best of his power, in the midst of the exciting scenes of earlier days--to make the young of the Victorian era live in the days when the Danes harried the shires of Old England, or the Anglo-Saxon power and glory collapsed, for the time, under the iron grasp of the Norman Conqueror.

Sad and terrible were those latter days to the English of every degree, and although we cannot doubt that the England of the present day is greatly the better for the admixture of Norman blood, nor forget that the modern English are the descendants of victor and vanquished alike,--yet our sympathy must be with our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, in their crushing humiliation and bondage.

The forcible words of Thierry, in summing up the results of the Conquest, may well be brought before the reader. He tells us that we must not imagine a change of government, or the triumph of one compet.i.tor over the other, but the intrusion of a whole people into the bosom of another people, broken up by the invaders, the scattered community being only admitted into the new social order as personal property--"ad cripti glebae," to quote the very language of the ancient acts; so that many, even of princely descent, sank into the ranks of peasants and artificers--nay, of thralls and bondsmen--compelled to till the land they once owned.

We must imagine, he adds, two nations on the surface of the same country: the Normans, rich and free from taxes; the English (for the term Saxon is an anachronism), poor, dependent, and oppressed with burdens; the one living in vast mansions or embattled castles, the other in thatched cabins or half-ruined huts; the one people idle, happy, doing nought but fight or hunt, the other, men of sorrow and toil--labourers and mechanics; on the one side, luxury and insolence; on the other, misery and envy,--not the envy of the poor at the sight of the riches of others, but of the despoiled in presence of the spoilers.

These countries touched each other in every point, and yet were more distinct than if the sea rolled between them. Each had its language: in the abbeys and castles they only spoke French; in the huts and cabins, the old English.

No words can describe the insolence and disdain of the conquerors, which is feebly pictured in the Etienne de Malville of the present tale. The very name of which the descendants of these Normans grew proud, and which they adorned by their deeds on many a field of battle--the English name--was used as a term of the utmost contempt. "Do you think me an Englishman?" was the inquiry of outraged pride.

Not only Normans, but Frenchmen, Bretons--nay, Continentals of all nations, flocked into England as into an uninhabited country, slew and took possession.

"Ign.o.ble grooms," says an old chronicler, "did as they pleased with the best and n.o.blest, and left them nought to wish for but death.

These licentious knaves were amazed at themselves; they went mad with pride and astonishment, at beholding themselves so powerful--at having servants richer than their own fathers had been {i}." Whatever they willed they deemed permissible to do; they shed blood at random, tore the bread from the very mouths of the famished people, and took everything--money, goods, lands {ii}.

Such was the fate which befell the once happy Anglo-Saxons.

And it was not till after a hundred and forty years of slavery, that the separation of England from Normandy, in the days of the cowardly and cruel King John, and the signing of Magna Carta, gave any real relief to the oppressed; while it was later still, not till after the days of Simon de Montfort, when resistance to new foreigners had welded Norman and English into one, that the severed races became really united, as Englishmen alike. Then the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward the First, the pupil of the man he slew at Evesham, was proud to call himself an Englishman--the first truly English king since the days of the hapless Harold; and one of whom, in spite of the misrepresentations of Scottish historians and novelists, English boys may be justly proud: his n.o.ble legislation was the foundation of that modern English jurisprudence, in which all are alike in the eyes of the law.

Not long after came the terrible "hundred years war," wherein Englishmen, led by the descendants of their Norman and French conquerors, retaliated upon Normandy and France the woes they had themselves endured. Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt avenged Hastings; the siege of Rouen under Henry the Fifth was a strange Nemesis. During that century the state of France was almost as sad as that of England during the earlier period; it was but a field for English youth to learn the arts of warfare at the expense of the wretched inhabitants.

But these events, sad or glorious, as the reader, according to his age, may consider them, were long subsequent to the date of our tale; they may, however, well be before the mind of the youthful student as he sighs over the woes of the Conquest.

Two remarks which the writer has made in the prefaces to the former Chronicles he will venture to repeat, as essential to the subject in each case.

He has not, as is so common with authors who treat of this period, clothed the words of his speakers in an antique phraseology. He feels sure that men and boys spoke a language as free and easy in the times in question as our compatriots do now. We cannot present the Anglo-Saxon or Norman French they really used, and to load the work with words culled from Chaucer would be simply an anachronism; hence he has freely translated the speech of his characters into the modern vernacular.

Secondly, he always calls the Anglo-Saxons as they called themselves, "English;" the idea prevalent some time since, and which even finds its place in the matchless story of Ivanhoe, or in that striking novelette by Charles Mackay, "The Camp of Refuge,"

that they called themselves or were called "Saxons," is now utterly exploded among historians. It is true the Welsh, the Picts, and Scots called them by that designation, and do still; {iii} but they had but one name for themselves, as the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle make manifest--"Englishmen." Nor did their Norman conquerors affect to call them by any other t.i.tle, although in their mouths the honoured appellation was, as we have said, but a term of reproach {iv}.

The author has chosen his two heroes, Wilfred and Etienne, if heroes they can be called, as types of the English and Norman youth of the period, alike in their merits and in their vices. The effects of adversity on the one, and of success and dominant pride on the other--happily finally subdued in each case beneath the Cross on Calvary--form the chief attempt at "character painting" in the tale.

It is not without a feeling of regret that he sends forth from his hands the last of these "Chronicles," and bids farewell to the real and imaginary characters who have seemed to form a part of his world, almost as if he could grasp their hands or look into their faces.

They are interwoven, too, with many treasured remembrances of past days, of the listening crowd of boys, now scattered through the world, and lost to the sight of the narrator, but who once by their eager interest encouraged the speaker, and at whose request the earliest of these tales was written. Happy indeed would he be, could he hope the written page would arouse the same interest, which the spoken narrative undoubtedly created, or the tales had never been published.

And now the writer must leave his tale to speak for itself, only taking this opportunity of a.s.suring old friends, whose remembrances of a vanished past may be quickened by the story, how dear the memory of those days is to him; and to show this, however feebly, he begs leave to dedicate this tale to those who first heard it, on successive Sunday evenings, in the old schoolroom of All Saints'

School, Bloxham.

A. D. C.

CHAPTER I. THE ANGLO-SAXON HALL.

It was the evening of Thursday, the fifth of October, in year of grace one thousand and sixty and six.

The setting sun was slowly sinking towards a dense bank of clouds, but as yet he gladdened the woods and hills around the old hall of Aescendune with his departing light.

The watchman on the tower gazed upon a fair scene outspread before him; at his feet rolled the river, broad and deep, spanned by a rude wooden bridge; behind him rose the hills, crowned with forest; on his right hand lay the lowly habitations of the tenantry, the farmhouses of the churls, the yet humbler dwellings of the thralls or tillers of the soil; the barns and stables were filled with the produce of a goodly harvest; the meadows full of sheep and oxen--a scene of rich pastoral beauty.

On his left hand a road led to the northeast, following at first the upward course of the river, until it left the stream and penetrated into the thick woodland.

Just as the orb of day was descending into the dense bank of cloud afore mentioned, the watchman marked the sheen of spear and lance, gilded by the departing rays, where the road left the forest.

Immediately he blew the huge curved horn which he carried at his belt; and at the blast the inhabitants of the castle and village poured forth; loud shouts of joy rent the air--the deeper exclamations of the aged, the glad huzzas of children--and all hastened along the road to greet the coming warriors.

For well they knew that a glorious victory had gladdened the arms of old England; that at Stamford Bridge the proud Danes and Norwegians had sustained a crushing defeat, and been driven to seek refuge in their ships, and that these warriors, now approaching, were their own sons, husbands, or fathers, who had gone forth with Edmund, Thane of Aescendune, to fight under the royal banner of Harold, the hero king.

Who shall describe the meeting, the glad embraces, the half-delirious joy with which those home-bred soldiers were welcomed? No hirelings they, who fought for mere glory, or l.u.s.t of gold, but husbands, fathers of families--men who had left the ploughshare and pruning hook to fight for hearth and altar.

"Home again"--home, saved from the fire and sword of the Northman, of whom tradition told so many dread stories--stories well known at Aescendune, where a young son of the then thane fifty years agone had died a martyr's death, pierced through and through by arrows, shot slowly to death because he would not save himself by denying his Lord {v}.

At that dismal period the whole district had been devastated with fire and sword, and there were old men amongst the crowd who well remembered the destruction of the former hall and village by the ferocious Danes. And now G.o.d had heard their litanies: "From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us," and had averted the scourge through the stout battle-axes and valiant swords of these warrior peasants and their n.o.ble leaders, such as Edmund, son of Alfgar.

Amidst all this joy the Lady Winifred of Aescendune stood upon the steps of the great hall to receive her lord, fair as the lily, a true Englishwoman, a loving wife and tender mother.

And by her, one on each side, stood her two children, Wilfred and Edith. He was an English boy of the primitive type, with his brown hair, his sunburnt yet handsome features, the fruit of country air and woodland exercise; she, the daughter, a timid, retiring girl, her best type the lily, the image of her mother.

And now the n.o.ble rider, the thane and father, descended from his war steed, and threw himself into the arms of the faithful partner of his joys and sorrows, who awaited his embrace; there was a moment of almost reverential silence as he pressed her to his manly breast, and then arose a cry which made the welkin ring:

"Long life to Edmund and Winifred of Aescendune!"

The bonfires blazed and illuminated the night; the bells (there were three at S. Wilfred's priory hard by) rang with somewhat dissonant clamour; strains of music, which would seem very rough now, greeted the ears; but none the less hearty was the joy.

"The comet--what do you say of the comet now?" said one.

"That it boded ill to the Northmen," was the reply of his neighbour.

They referred to that baleful visitor, the comet of 1066, which had turned night into day with its lurid and ghastly light, so that the very waves of the sea seemed molten in its beams, while the beasts of the field howled as if they scented the coming banquet of flesh afar off. Well might they stand aghast who gazed upon this awful portent, which had seemed to set the southern heavens on fire.