Part 9

King Stephen being a close prisoner in the castle of Bristowe, and the Earl of Gloucester being well guarded in Rochester Castle, each of the contending parties was, in a manner, without a head, for Stephen's brother, the bishop-legate, was, after all, but a priest, and the woman Matilda was nothing without her half-brother. A negociation was therefore set on foot for a mutual release of prisoners. This was several times interrupted, and at each interruption the party of King Stephen threatened to send the Earl of Gloucester out of the land unto Boulogne, there to be buried in a castle-prison deep under the ground, and the party of Matilda threatened to send King Stephen over to Ireland and consign him to the wild Irishry; but at last, on the first of the kalends of November, it was agreed between them that the great Earl of Gloucester should be exchanged for King Stephen; and the earl and the king being both liberated, each betook himself to the head-quarters of his friends and partisans. Both factions now stood much as they did previously to the battle of Lincoln; but fearfully had the people of England suffered in the interim. And yet, after all these sufferings, neither faction did turn its thoughts _ad regnum tranquillandum_; but both did prepare for more battles and sieges, sending forth their bands of foreigners and leaving the cruel castle-holders to seize, torture, plunder and kill. While the land was thus weeping tears of blood, the king and his brother, the bishop, made repair unto London, where the king had his best friends, and where the legate did summon a great ecclesiastical council to meet at Westminster on the 7th of the kalends of December, _ad pacem componendam_, for the composing of peace unto the church and kingdom. When this council met on the appointed day, which was in the octaves of Saint Andrew, King Stephen addressed the prelates: he mildly and briefly complained of the wrongs and hardships he had suffered from his vassals, unto whom he had never denied justice when asked for it; he said that if it would please the nobles and bishops of the realm to aid him with men and money, he trusted so to work as to relieve them from the fear of a shameful submission to the yoke of a woman, and so to succeed in his enterprises as to put an end to intestine war and havoc, and establish his throne in peace. When the king had done speaking, the legate his brother, who only nine months before had in the synod held at Winchester declared for Matilda, rose and proclaimed that the pope had ordered him to release and restore his brother, that Matilda had observed nothing of what she had sworn to him; that the great barons of England had performed their engagements towards her, and that she, not knowing how to use her prosperity with moderation, had violated all her engagements and oaths; that she had even made attempts against his, the legate's, liberty and life; and that this freed him from the obligations of the oaths he had taken to the Countess of Anjou, for he would not longer call her queen. The legate further said that the judgment of Heaven was visible in the prompt punishment of her perfidy, and that God himself now restored his brother the rightful King Stephen to the throne. Albeit there were some among them who had but lately quitted the party of Matilda, the prelates and great men at Westminster assembled did agree that all loyal men ought forthwith to arm for King Stephen, and that the adherents of the countess should be everywhere stripped of their usurped authority, whether in church or civil government; that forced elections should be all annulled, and that sentence of excommunication should go forth against all the obstinate and irreclaimable partisans of the countess. And the Bishop of Winchester, as legatus à latere, did stand up with a new bull of the pope in his right hand, and pronounced the dread sentence against all such as should disturb the peace in favour of the Countess of Anjou, or should build new castles in the land, or invade the rights and privileges of the church, or wrong the poor and defenceless.

Judge ye if the news of these high proceedings at Westminster did not bring with them joy and comfort unto the friends of the late Lord Abbot Edward and all the honest monks of Reading abbey! Besides the sin and shame of his forced election, we had suffered many things at the hands of Anselm during the few months that he had held rule over us. In all that time he had kept the stout-hearted prior Reginald in the prison underground, and had maliciously devised penances and punishments for all such members of the community as had pitied the prisoner. He had alienated and sold some of the abbey lands to furnish out men-at-arms for his countess. He had half-starved the brotherhood, and no hospitality had he exercised unto strangers except to some Angevin marauders; and when he went away to see the countess, which more than once he did, he left in the abbey some of these outlandish men to keep us in submission and dread. But now his evil reign was over, for so soon as they had learned what had passed at Westminster, and had gotten a rescript from the legate, the elders of our house took counsel together and resolved to liberate Reginald the prior, and offer him the mitre, and to throw Father Anselm into the prison instead of the prior. And the thing was easy to do, for by this time Anselm had given offence to every cloister monk, novice, and lay-brother, and the warier sort did all opine that now that King Stephen was liberated, and his enemies excommunicated by the legate, the cause of the countess must be altogether desperate. And so with one voice and one will Anselm was seized and thrown into the underground cell, and the prior was brought forth, and conducted in triumph to the abbat's house, and there told that he must be our lord abbat. Most true it was that he had never wished for this post of eminence, and now prayed the brotherhood to elect the chamberlain or the sacrist or any experienced cloister-monk rather than him; but the universal will and voice of the community would not be gainsayed, and in the course of a few days the prior was unanimously elected, by those who had the right of voting in the Chapter, to be our abbat; and then we all carried him into the church in procession, sang _Te Deum laudamus_, with loud and jubilant voices, rang the bells until they well nigh cracked, and set him on the abbat's throne, and did him all the homage that is due unto the mitred abbat of a royal abbey; and then brought up Father Anselm, and drove him out of our gates with many kicks behind, for our new lord abbat would not have him linger and pine in that cold dark cell underground, saying that he knew to his cost how sad a thing it was, and that to hold any captive therein would be to make the wholesome air of the house infaust and insalubrious.

As he was crossing the Holy Brook the townfolk of Reading, who no more loved Anselm than did we the monks, caught him by the girdle and threw him into the stream, so that he was nearly drowned at the place where he had forced us against our conscience to psalmodize for Matilda. He took these things so much to heart that he got him back into Normandie. It was said by some that he falsified his history and his very name, and so gained admission into the abbey of Bec, but from the volatile nature of the man, I did rather give my belief to another report--to wit, that he turned himself into a jongleur or trouvere, and went about France with women and menestrels and other lewd people.

Sundry times he promised, and did in his heart intend, to visit our house, and force the restitution of the lands which the usurping Anselm had alienated to ungodly men; yet King Stephen came not to Reading for many a year, and when he came he could not tarry with us. But the king sent Sir Alain de Bohun to build up and restore the ruinous castle of Reading; and when this had been done, and when, by the vassals and serfs of the abbey, the walls of the township had been strengthened, we entered upon the enjoyment of such peace and tranquillity as we had not known during five long years; for the Philistines could not come suddenly upon us, or easily break through our defences. At Reading, indeed, we did live as in a little Goshen, while war was raging all round about; and albeit we could not always defend our outlying manors and houses from fire and sword, but suffered many and grievous losses in serfs, cattle, corn, hay, farm-houses, and granges; we yet suffered less than other communities, and nothing at all in comparison with the abbat and monks of Abingdon, our neighbours, but not always friends. Driven from their once quiet seat at Oxenford, or too sorely troubled in their residence there by the people of the countess, and the constant coming and going of warlike and plundering bands, many of the professors and pupils, _doctores et alumni_, did come unto Reading, and under the shadow of our secure and peaceful walls, pursue those studies which were destined to give to England a learned priesthood and a universal increase of civility. Our brotherhood too did attend to that learning and to the making of many good books which had done honour to the Benedictines ever since their first foundation and in whatsoever country their order was established. Our scribes and copyists once more worked amain in their quiet cells, multiplying with a slow but correct pen the precious works of antiquity, and the holy books, and the lives of saints; and need there was for this labour, since other religious houses had no peace or leisure, and great and fearful was the destruction of books and codices in the conflagrations and stormings of this long intestine war. But for the labours of the Benedictines and some few learned monks of other orders in England, and but for the blessed saints, who kept alive their love of letters and books, and gave them heart and strength to work even in a season of horror and despair, the land would have been plunged back into utter barbarism, and would have been void of learning and of books as when the great Alfred came to the throne. In the tranquil easy days in which I now write, for the solace of my lonely hours and for the preservation of the fading memory of the times of trouble, and for no fame or vain glory, the sense of these things hath already become faint in men's minds, and mayhap, in after ages, when the world shall have made great strides in learning and all civility, these labours of the Benedictines will be altogether forgotten, or be treated as nought. Yet was it they that did mainly save the land from a great retrograde step; and I, Felix, _servus servorum_, the humblest or least worthy member of the order (who have so often seen shining in our western turret the midnight lamp which lighted our copyists and makers of books at their solitary labours, and who have seen those labours steadily pursued when the country was ringing with the din of arms, and was blazing with midnight fires, and when no earthly honour or reward whatsoever seemed to attend their toil), would fain put upon record some faint notice of that which was done in the evil times by our house and order: but not unto us the praise, but unto thee, oh Lord! They, themselves, sought for no applause--_Celata virtus_--their virtue is all hidden: not so much as the name is preserved of these good and laborious monks who did so much for learning and religion.

It was about the time in which Sir Alain de Bohun did re-edify Reading Castle, that I, Felix, recovering from my early podagra, under the instruction and guidance of old father Ambrosius (he hath now been many years at rest in the chancel of our church, and I in gratitude do say a daily prayer over his grave), did first addict myself to the use of the pen, beginning with a missal, which our Pisan limner did richly illuminate; and when this my first essay was finished, I did present it unto the Ladie Alfgiva in her house at Caversham, and that bountiful and right noble ladie did acknowledge the gift by sending unto the abbey five milch cows and a goodly stock of Caen fowls, which our community at that time much needed, for there had been a murrain among cattle, and the spoilers had again swept bare our best farms.

Many were the tears shed by me, and many the masses and prayers said by our house for the said Ladie Alfgiva and the two missing children. Grief and anxiety for her son and foster daughter did at times almost bow that noble dame to the earth, and her grief was the greater because of her frequent loneliness and the hazards her lord was running in the many sieges and battles of the times; but although her health declined and her cheek became wan, hope and trust in heaven's goodness did not forsake her. A pious dame was Ladie Alfgiva, and of a nature high and noble in all things. Though thinking day and night of her only son and her only living child, she never once implored Sir Alain to purchase the boy's release and his restoration to her arms by proving false to his oath and untrue to the king, and every time that her lord came to his home she dried her tears and did all that she could to conceal her great grief so long as he tarried with her. The virtuous woman is a crown unto her husband, and verily there be wives as well as virgins that merit the crown the church awards to saints and martyrs. Saint Catherine on the wheel, or Saint Agatha at the fiery stake, suffered not pangs so acute as those of this bereaved mother; and their torture was soon over, and while they suffered they saw from the wheel and stake the heavens opening to the eye, and they heard heavenly music in the air which made them deaf to the shouts of the infidel rabble that were slaying them. So much bliss and so great a foretaste of celestial joy was not vouchsafed unto the secular Ladie Alfgiva, and could not be expected by her: nevertheless had she her happy visions and sweet soothing sounds during her long bereavement. More than once, in her great loneliness, when her lord was away fighting for King Stephen, as she stood on the battlements of her castle at eventide, she saw her boy and his playmate Alice sitting on the flowery bank which slopes down to the river, as they used often to sit before Sir Ingelric did steal them away; and she heard their merry little voices on the breeze, and their frolicsome laugh. Some would say that she but took two stray lambs for the lost children, and that the sounds she heard were only made by the evening breeze among the tall growing grass and the leafy coppices; but I, Felix, could never so interpret it unto her. But constantly did I strive to give her comfort, and to conceal from her the cruelties that were daily committed in the land, and to stop the thoughtless indiscreet tongue of her people who would have filled her ears with horrible tales of murdered children and babes, for not the massacre of the Innocents in Judea was so fierce as the slaughter that raged in England.

VII.

When our good lord abbat Edward had been dead well nigh a year, to wit, in the summer season of eleven hundred and forty-two, King Stephen, from great fatigue of body and uneasiness of mind, fell sore sick, and lay for a long while like one that was dying. While this lasted the barons of his party did many evil deeds, there being no authority strong enough to check their lawlessness; and, at the same troublous season, the partisans of Matilda and the foreign mercenaries in her pay did ravage all the western parts; and more robbers came over from Anjou, Normandie, and Picardie, asking no pay, but only free quarters, and the right of plundering the poor English. It was a Benedictine from Rome that had studied medicine in the school of Salerno, that brought a healing potion to the king, and snatched him back to life from the jaws of the grave.

So soon as Stephen could mount his war-horse he marched with a great force unto Oxenford, where the countess had fixed her court; and he invested that unhappy city with a firm resolution never to move thence until he had gotten his troublesome rival into his hands. After some fighting, in which many lives were lost by both parties, Stephen burst into the town, and having set fire to a large part thereof, he laid siege unto the castle into which Matilda and her people had retired. Now the castle of Oxenford, standing in the midst of waters, was very strong. From St. Michael's mass well nigh unto Christ's mass, _à festo Michæelis usque ad natali Domini_, did King Stephen persevere in the siege, telling all men that complained of the hard service that he must have the castle, and in it the countess, and that then there would be peace in England.

In the mid siege, our new lord abbat, who had had much correspondence with the lord abbat of Abingdon, with the prior and monks at Hurley, and with other Benedictine houses, for the good purpose of saving the remnant of the Christian people in those parts, and putting an end to the cruelties and many deadly sins which were daily committed, received from the Abingdon cell at Cumnor, nigh unto Oxenford, a missive from the abbat of that community, who entreated him, now that the country was clear of Matilda's people, to repair unto Cumnor that they might take council together, and together confer with King Stephen, who seemed at that moment to be in a heavenly disposition, and to have an exceeding great desire to tranquillize the land, and to consult with the loyal abbat of Reading. Now albeit Stephen had, by means of Sir Alain de Bohun, expressed his great contentment at the expulsion of Father Anselm, and at all that had been done by our community since the great meeting of the synod at Westminster, the election of the prior to be our lord abbat had not yet been formally confirmed by the king; and therefore Dominus Reginaldus did make haste to accept the invitation of the abbat of Abingdon, and to get him unto Cumnor. Not for any merit of mine own, but through the kind favour he was ever pleased to show me, I was chosen to be of the travelling party. Philip the lay-brother went likewise; but Philip was a brave and ready man, quick-witted, and well-trained aforetime in the use of arms, and in the riding of the great horse. Although the nerve of the Angevin faction was shut up in Oxenford Castle, my Lord Reginald was too wise a man to put himself on the road with a weak escort; for he well knew that there were many barons and knights, calling themselves King Stephen's friends and the friends of mother church, that would not scruple to plunder an abbat, or to keep him in their donjons for the sake of a great ransom; and well nigh every castle between Reading and Oxenford, and between Oxenford and Bristowe, was a den of thieves, and worse; and Lord Reginald had not lost his bellicose humour by being promoted to the highest dignity. "By the head of Saint John the Baptist," said he, as we were about to take our departure, "not a robber of them all shall lay me in his crucet house without having a hard fight for it! Before I bear the weight of their sachenteges, I will make them taste the sharpness of my lance, and the weight of my mace." And so was it that we went forth from Reading forty and one strong, and every man of us armed cap-à-pie, and most of us well mounted. The lord abbat wore a steel cap under his hood, and a coat of mail and steel hose under his robes; and he had a two-edged sword at his side and a heavy mace at the pommel of his saddle, and a good lance resting on stirrup-iron; yea, and I, Felix the novice, wore ringed armour and a steel casque, and had my sword and lance: Englehard de Cicomaco, that famed and well-judging knight, who was one of the retainers of our abbey, doing military service for the abbey lands he held near Hurley Common, did say that I looked a very proper man-at-arms, and did bestride my steed like a knight--but these are vanities, and I by my vows did renounce all vanity. Yet can I but mark that when we came to Cumnor a great baron asked who was that gallant well-favored young soldier that rode in the van, near to the lord abbat of Reading.

On our way we tarried for a night at Berecourt by Pangbourne, where we had a goodly house among the hills which had wont to be a summer residence of our abbats. But this goodly house had been robbed and spoiled, and our vassals and serfs had not yet been enabled to restore it. We were therefore roughly lodged and not over well fed; but that which affected me more grievously than this was the sad condition of the poor people of Pangbourne, who had been so prosperous and happy before these accursed wars began. Sad were the tales they told, and not the least sad of them all was this: my quondam friend and brother novice, Urswick the Whiteheaded, had been in the spring season of this year at Pangbourne with a great band of English and foreign robbers, ransacking the place of his birth and maltreating the friends among whom he had been born and bred; and his aged father had to his face pronounced a curse upon him; and in a quarrel with some savage men from Anjou touching the division of spoil, Urswick had been slain on the bank of Thamesis, before he could recross the river or get out of sight of his native village: and, since that black morning, or so our serfs did say, his well-known voice had been heard at midnight, and he had been seen by the light of the moon, now habited as a monk, and wringing his hands by the river side where he fell, looking piteously towards the abbey of Reading, from which he had fled, and now equipped as a man-at-arms, and galloping on a great black horse, across the country and up the steep hills and down the precipices--fire flashing from the eyes and nostrils of the infernal steed, and from the burning heart of the lost novice.

On our march from Pangbourne we shunned the townships and castles as much as we could, and took especial heed not to get near unto Wallingford; for the strong castle there was held by Brian Fitzcount, the most terrible of all Matilda's partisans, and the greatest robber of them all; and the castle at this very time was known to be full of unfortunate prisoners whom he kept and daily tortured in order to make them disclose their supposed hidden treasures, or to pay a heavier ransom than any they had the means of paying. Christian burghers and franklins, noble knights who had warred against the heathen in Palestine, nay churchmen, the highest in the hierarchy, were known to be in his foul prison, pent up with Jewish traffickers and money-dealers; the noblest and the purest with the vilest and foulest of the earth: and the gaolers and torturers of Brian Fitzcount treated the Christians no whit better than the Israelites that were chained at their sides, contaminating them with their touch and poisoning the air they breathed. Night after night, such of the poor townfolk as had contrived to live in the midst of these horrors without deserting Wallingford, were startled in their sleep by the cries and shrieks which came from the grim castle; and when in the morning they adventured to ask what had been toward in the night watches, the Count's people would tell them jestingly from the battlements that it was nothing, or that Brian Fitzcount had only been coining a little more money, or that a Jew had had his teeth drawn, or that a traitor to the empress-queen had been questioned about his treason and treasure.