Part 2

Philip was an honest lay-brother of the house, and between him and me there had always been much friendship; for on my first coming to the abbey, to be trained to religion and learning, he had procured many little indulgences for me, and had ofttimes taken me behind him on his horse when he rode towards Sunning to look after a farm which my lord abbat had near to that place. He was a mirthful man, and so fond of talk, that when he had not me riding behind him he usually discoursed all the way with his horse. Now he took up the corbel with as much gentleness as a lady's nurse, and we began to go on our way, the dear child still piping and bewailing. The sub-prior followed us to the gate to give Humphrey the needful order to open, for at that hour the janitor would not have allowed egress to any lay-brother or novice. "Beshrew me," said old Humphrey as the sub-prior withdrew, "but this foundling hath brought trouble upon me and sharp words; yet let me see its face, good Philip, for I hear 'tis a Christian child, and a lovely ..."

Hereupon we took the basket into Humphrey's cell by the gate, where a light was burning; and the janitor having peered in its face, vowed, as others had done, that he had not seen so fair a babe. "'Tis nine months old, at the very least," said he; "and ye may tell by its shrill piping that 'tis a strong and healthy child. Mayhap it cries for hunger;" and at this timeous thought the old janitor brought forth a little milk and honey and gave it to the babe, who partook thereof, and then smiled and dropped fast asleep.

We took the shortest path across the King's Mead to Caversham bridge. As we walked along Philip ceased not from talking about the child and the unprecedented way in which it had been left at the abbey. Being a man much given to speculation and the putting of this thing and that together, he made sundry surmises which I will not repeat, for they touched the good lord abbat, and the next morning proved that though very ingenious they had no foundation in truth. When we came to the long wooden bridge, we found, as we had expected, that part of it was raised, and that the old man that levied the toll for the baron was fast asleep. But our shouting soon roused the toll-man, and he soon challenged us and lowered the draw-bridge, though not without sundry expressions of astonishment that two monks should be abroad at so late an hour. When we told him whither we were going, he bade us make haste, for the lights were disappearing in the mansion, and the family would soon be buried in sleep. He then lowered the draw-bridge at the other end, and we went on towards the hill side with hasty steps, the only light visible in the mansion being one that shone brightly through the casement of the southern turret.

"Ralpho, the toll-man," said I, "must have been more than half asleep, or assuredly he would have asked what we were carrying in the basket at this time o'night."

"May the babe have an extra blessing," quoth Philip, "for that it sleeps on and did not wake on the bridge! A pretty tale would gossip Ralpho have had to tell about us Benedictines if the babe had set up its piping on the bridge!"

The castellum or baronial mansion stood on the top of Caversham hill at the point where that hill is steepest; the village lay at its feet, and the church then stood midway between the castle and the village. We were soon at the edge of the dry moat; but the draw-bridge was up, and we had to shout and blow the cow-horn for some time before we could make ourselves heard by any one within; and when the warder awoke and looked forth he was in no good humour. But as we made ourselves known, and told him that we came from the lord abbat upon an occasion that brooked no delay, he altered his tone; and after telling us that though bedward, he believed his lord and ladie were not yet in bed, as he could see a light in their bower above, he lowered the draw-bridge and unbarred the wicket. That which Ralpho had omitted to do on the bridge, the warder did under the gateway of the castle; for, pointing to the basket, he said, "What have we here, brother Philip? Cates and sweetmeats for my lord and ladie? Ay, Reading Abbey is famed for its confections!"

He had scarcely said the words when a noise came from the basket which made him start back and cross himself; for the dear child began to pipe and scream, and much more loudly methought that I had heard it do before. We, however, stayed not to talk with the astonished warder; for a waiting-woman had come down from the southern turret to inquire what was toward, and we followed this good woman, who was still more astonished than the warder, to the chamber where the lord and ladie were. Sir Alain de Bohun was a bountiful lord, ever kind of heart and gentle in speech; and the Ladie Alfgiva, his wife, descended from the Saxon thanes who had once owned and held all the country from Caversham to Maple-Durham, was the gentlest, truest ladie, and at this season one of the fairest that lived anywhere in Berkshire or Oxfordshire. Before hearing the short tale we had to tell, Sir Alain vowed that the little stranger was welcome, and that so sweet a foundling should never want home or nurture while he had a roof-tree to sit under; and the ladie took the child in her arms, and kissed it, and pacified it; and before I had gotten half through my narration, and the message from my lord abbat, the babe went to sleep on the ladie's bosom. Our limner from Pisa ought to have seen that sight; for the Madonna and Child he did afterwards paint for the chapel of our Ladie was not so beautiful and tender a picture as that presented to mine eye by the wife of Sir Alain de Bohun and our little foundling. Much marvelled the gentle ladie at the tale; but her other feelings were stronger than her curiosity and astonishment; and she soon withdrew to place the child with her own dear children--a little boy some four or five years old, and a little girl not many months older than the stranger. Sir Alain gave to the lay-brother Philip a piece of money, and to me a beaker of wine, and so dismissed us with a right courteous message to our abbat and his good and right reverend uncle.

The warder would have stayed us to explain how it was that monks went about in the hours of night with a babe in a basket; but as he had a sharp wit and a ribald tongue, we forbore to answer his questions, and recommending him to the saints that keep watch by night, and telling him it was too late for talk, we began to return rapidly by the way we had come. As Ralpho let us across Caversham bridge he bemoaned the hardness of his life, and complained that Sir Alain put him to much unnecessary trouble in a time of peace and tranquillity, when the bridge might very well be left open by night and by day without fear of the passage of foes. Alack! before the next morning dawned Ralpho was made to know that Sir Alain's caution was very needful. Scarcely had Philip and I gotten a rood from the bridge-end when that honest lay-brother shouted "Fire! Fire! a fire!" and looking to the west, the sky behind the town and hills of Reading seemed all in a blaze. The young moon had set; but as we came to the King's Mead our path was lighted by a glaring red light, which seemed every instant to become stronger and redder. "Eheu!" said Philip, who knew every township better than I then knew my Litany; "Eheu! there is mischief afoot! The flames mount in the direction of Tilehurst and Sulham and Charlton! More than one township is a-burning!"

I looked down the river, and joyed to see that there was no sign of conflagration at Sunning, and returned thanks therefore to my patron saint.

We were now running across the mead as fast as we could run; but before we came to the abbey-gate the alarm-bell rung out from the tower, and a loud shouting and crying came from the town of Reading, and the sounds of another alarm-bell from Sir Alain's castellum at Caversham.

"What can this mean?" said Philip. "The two serfs that brought the babe to our house came from the westward, or did go back in that direction, or so said old Humphrey. After twenty years and more of a happy peace, is this land to be wasted again by factions and civil war?"

Alas! Philip had said it! This night witnessed the beginning of those troubles which carried woe into every part of England, and which ended not until sixteen long years had passed over our heads, sending some of our brotherhood with sorrow to the grave, and making others old men before their time; for, to say nothing of our personal sufferings and hazards, there was not one among us but had a brother or a sister and friends near and dear to him tortured or butchered in these the worst wars that were ever waged in England.

When we returned into the abbey we found that the lord abbat had called up his men-at-arms, and the three good knights who did military service for the abbey in return for the lands they held; that one of these knights and divers of the men-at-arms were mounting and about to go forth; and that the better conditioned of the town people of Reading were already bringing their goods and chattels to our house for protection; for the walls of the town had been allowed to fall into ruin during the long and happy peace which Henricus Primus had kept in the land, and our burghers had almost wholly lost the art military. Some of these men, who had been to the hills, said that the whole country was on fire from Inglesfield to Tilehurst, and from Tilehurst to Purley, which news destroyed the hope our good abbat had been entertaining that the fire might be accidental and confined to the thatch-covered houses of one village or township. And, in very deed, by this time the whole west seemed to be burning, and the welkin to be overcast by smoke and flame, and a reflected lurid and horrible light. The swift stream of the Kennet looked as though its waters had been transmuted into red wine, and the broad Thamesis shined like a path of fire. No eye closed for sleep in the abbey that night; and it was not until a full hour after the scarcely perceptible dawn of day that certain intelligence was brought us as to the causes and parties which had thus begun to turn our pleasant and fruitful land into a wilderness.

II.

We had sung matins in the choir, and had nearly finished chanting lauds, when three knights of good fame, to wit, Sir Hugh de Basildon, Sir Hugh Fitzhugh, of Purley, and Sir Walter de Courcy, from Inglesfield, arrived at the abbey, and demanded speech of our superiors. So soon as the service permitted, the lord abbat, the prior, and the other obedientiarii of our house retired into the abbat's garden with these worthy knights, who were in great haste, insomuch that they would neither stay to partake of my lord's collation, which was now nigh upon being ready, nor allow the saddles to be taken from their wearied horses. They stayed but a short while in the garden, and then remounting their steeds, they spurred away for Caversham, bidding the burghers of Reading and a number of serfs, who had collected outside our gates, to look after their bows and arrows, and to get such other weapons as they could, and to stand upon their defence, as traitors to King Stephen were abroad and might be soon upon them. These good people made loud lamentation, for they were ill prepared and provided, and they could not divine who these enemies and night burners could be. We, the humbler members of the house, were alike ignorant; but after he had refreshed his inward man, the good abbat came forth and addressed us all, and the people without the gate, in this wise:--

"My brothers and children, and ye good men of Reading, who be also my children, lift up your voices and say with me, God save King Stephen, the rightful king of this realm, and down with the traitors who would shake his throne!"

Having all of us shouted as we were bidden to do, and with right good will, for King Stephen at this time was much loved in the land, my lord abbat continued his oration.

"The case," said he, "stands thus. That ungodly restless woman, the undutiful daughter of our late pious King Henry, whose body rests within these walls--that presumptuous Matilda, once Empress, but now nought but Countess of Anjou, hath sent over her bastard half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, to claim the throne of England as her right; as if the martial nobility and bold people of this land could ever be governed by a woman, and as if Stephen, our good king and the well-beloved nephew of our late King Henry, who appointed him to be his successor, had not been elected with the consent of the baronage, clergy, and people of England, and confirmed in his lawful seat by our lord the Pope! Now this traitorous Earl of Gloucester, after taking the oaths of fealty and homage to King Stephen, and obtaining by the act possession of his great estates in this realm, hath suddenly lifted up the mask and thrown down the gauntlet, and sundry false barons like himself have followed his pernicious example, and are now raging through the country, seizing upon the king's towns and castles, treacherously surprising the castles of honest lords and good knights, and burning the homes and destroying the lives of all such as will not join them, or of all such as hold the manors and lands these traitors desire to be possessed of. In the east Hugh Bigod, steward of the late king's household, and the very man who made oath before the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other great lords of the realm, as well lay as ecclesiastic, that King Henry on his death-bed did adopt and choose his nephew Stephen to be his successor, because this Matilda, Countess of Anjou, had been an undutiful child unto him, and had given him many and grievous offences, and was by her sex disqualified for the succession; this Hugh Bigod, I say, hath in the east seized Norwich Castle and hoisted thereupon the banner of this Angevin Countess. In the west the Earl of Gloucester hath armed all his vassals, and is calling upon all such friends as hope to better their worldly fortunes by deluging the country with blood and wasting it with fire. Some of these evil men have raised the banner of war in our quiet neighbourhood, and have fallen with merciless fury upon some of our noblest and best neighbours, taking them by foul treachery and surprisal, and waging war upon women and children, and unarmed serfs, in the absence of their lords. Yesterday a great band of these traitors marched from the vicinage of Windsore, and, last night, after a foul plunder and butchery of the people, the townships of Basildon, Whitechurch, Purley, Tidmersh, Tilehurst, Sulham, Theal, and Speen were given to the flames. Sir Ingelric, of Huntercombe, who hath ever been held as a loyal and fearless knight, and whose noble mate could trace her Saxon ancestry beyond the days of King Alfred, was not at his home, but his fair young wife being forewarned of their coming, made fast the gates and defended the manor-house for divers hours: but, woe is me! the evil men set fire to the house, and--_combusta est_, it is burned, with the gentle dame and all that were in it! The brave Sir Ingelric of Huntercombe was not there, or mayhap----"

"Ingelric of Huntercombe is here," cried that dark and sad-looking knight, who had just arrived on a panting steed; "Ingelric of Huntercombe is here, with a soul athirst for vengeance! But, my child! My lord abbat, tell me of my babe!"

The fearful conflagration, which had made us all think of the day of judgment, had caused my lord abbat, as well as the rest of us, to forget the little stranger that had come in the basket, not without bringing some trouble to him and to some of us; but his lordship soon collected his thoughts, and seeing how the matter stood, he clasped in his arms the knight, who had dismounted from his horse, and said to him in his kind fatherly voice, "Sir Ingelric, may the saints vouchsafe thee strength to bear the woe that hath befallen thee; but thy child is safe."

"Let me see her," said the knight; "let me hold her in mine arms; her mother shall I never see more! Her sweet body hath been consumed in the fire that hath left me without a home! I can see my wife no more--no, not even in death! But let me have sight of my child!"

The abbat then explained in a few words where the child was, and in what good and tender keeping; and while he was doing this, Humphrey, our old janitor, looking steadfastly at a churl who had dismounted to hold Sir Ingelric's horse, and at another serf, who remained mounted, he said aloud, "These be the two knaves that gave me the basket!" and then entering into short converse with the men, Humphrey brought out these facts:--At the near approach of the danger, of which she had been forewarned, their mistress had given her child to them, with charge to hasten with it to Reading Abbey, and then to make all possible speed back to Tilehurst, whither, as she had fondly hoped, her lord would be returned before his enemies could do her harm, for Sir Ingelric had gone to no greater distance than to Wallingford, and a messenger had been despatched after him on the only fleet horse he had left in the stable, and well did she know that the love her husband bore her would bring him rapidly to her rescue. This was all we learned now, but we afterwards learned that the messenger on the fleet horse had been intercepted and slain; that the manor-house had been stormed and set on fire before the two serfs who had brought the child to Reading could get back; and that, at this sad sight, the said two bondmen, full of devotion for their lord, had thrown themselves into the woods, and had gone a wearisome journey on foot in search of him, and had met their master between night and morning near North Stoke Ford, for the conflagration had been seen at Wallingford, and had filled the heart of Sir Ingelric with awful presentiments, albeit he and no other man could at first conceive the cause and nature of the mischief which had so suddenly broken out in a time of the most perfect tranquillity. When Sir Ingelric had understood that which had befallen, he had well nigh died of sudden horror; but, rousing himself to vengeance, he had collected a few honest men and some horses, and had ridden with all speed to our abbey, being but too surely confirmed on his way, by a few of his serfs who had escaped, of the fate his fair young wife had met in the manor-house. Never did I see a face fuller of woe than was that of Sir Ingelric of Huntercombe when our good abbat, taking him by the hand, led him within the house, to give him ghostly consolation, and to commune with him upon the measures which ought to be adopted for the defence of the country. But I should tell how that, before our lord abbat quitted the outer gate, he gave commandment that the draw-bridge, which had not been raised for many a day, should be hauled up, and that the serfs of our abbey lands should be set to work to deepen the ditch, and to dig a new trench right down to the Kennet. Albeit no enemy was visible, the townfolk of Reading and all the simple hinds that had assembled were seized with a mighty consternation when we began to take measures for heaving up the bridge and closing our strong iron-bound gate. By order of the prior many of the better sort were admitted into our outer court, with their wives and children, as well as their property. Those who remained without wrung their hands, but departed not, for they felt that the very shadow of our holy walls would be a better protection unto them than any other they could find; and certes we would have brought them within those walls in case of extremity; for was not our house the asylum of the unhappy as well as the _refugium peccatorum_?

When Sir Ingelric had communed until the beginning of tierce with our lord abbat, and had been somewhat restored by prayer and exhortation, and by meat and wine, he came out and called for his horse. But the abbat noted that the knight's horse needed rest, and so he ordered a fresh steed to be brought from his own stable, together with his own quiet grey palfrey, telling the brethren that he was minded to ride over to Caversham with Sir Ingelric to deliberate with his well-beloved nephew, who was too good a man of war to have omitted making some preparations against the threatening storm. "You will put up a prayer or twain for my safety," said the abbat to the prior, "and cause a _Miserere, Domine_, to be sung in the church. And thou wilt hold thyself ready, oh prior, to hurl an anathema at the head of the rebels, if they should come near unto this godly house; and moreover thou wilt see to such war-harness and weapons as we do possess, and station the strongest-armed of our monks and lay-brothers, and the stoutest-hearted of our serfs, with our men-at-arms, in the tower and turrets, with bows and cross-bows; for it may chance that those who respect not the Lord's anointed will have no respect for holy church that hath anointed him; and when the children of Ishmael fall on, the children of Jacob may defend themselves with the arms of the flesh."

Now our prior was a man of a very martial and fearless temperament, and one that well remembered how, in the times that were passed, bishops and abbats had put chain armour over their rockets and albs, and had ridden forth with lay-lords and men of war, and had ofttimes done battle for the cause which they held to be the just one, or the cause of the church. It is not for a humble servant of mother church like me to decide whether such actions be altogether conformable to the councils of the church and the canons therein propounded; but this I do know, that the sword and battle-axe have wrought their effects upon stubborn and impenitent minds when our spiritual arms had failed, ay, when the wicked had laughed to scorn our interdicts and our very excommunications. But not to press further this _casus conscientiæ_, I will only record that our prior responded with a firm voice and willing heart to the warlike portions of our lord abbat's instructions, and that he, with marvellous alacrity, did arm the house and prepare to do battle.

As the gate was unbarred and the draw-bridge again lowered to allow the abbat and Sir Ingelric to go forth for Caversham, those of our knights and men-at-arms who had ridden at an earlier hour to make reconnaissance, came back with loose bridle to report that a great battalia of the rebels was advancing upon the town of Reading by the western road.

"Then," quoth our abbat, "is there no time to lose;" and putting his foot in the bright silver stirrup, he got into his saddle without the least assistance, albeit he was a corpulent man, and had had podagra. Two of our knights and half of our men-at-arms rode after the lord abbat and Sir Ingelric of Huntercombe, but the rest tarried with us.

"Remember," said the abbat, turning the head of his palfrey, and addressing the townfolk and the serfs, "remember well that ye be all true men unto King Stephen!"

The poor people made a very feeble essay to shout "Long live King Stephen!" and then prayed that we would admit them in at the postern-gate if the rebels came nearer; which thing we did now promise them to do.