Part 4

It had so happened that in this same week of Candle Mass the melting of the snows up in the Morvan, under a breath of milder wind, had swollen the Seine high, and the flood of it had carried away the piles of the Little Bridge to the south, and had left it in ruins; and so the tower beyond it, which defended it, and the twelve men within, were left all alone. These the pagan host, having come round to the southern bank after their defeat upon the north, challenged and summoned, but they would not yield. Then the pirates, seeing that this little band of a dozen were beyond succour, and that none could reinforce them, piled wood all about the tower and set fire to the wood, so that the stones cracked and crumbled, and that the beams within and the roof were aflame. The twelve men within were forced out by the fierce heat, but yet they would not yield. They got them backwards upon the ruined ends of the bridge, and there, drawing their swords, they prepared to meet any that should come against them; though they knew that this was useless, for now there was no defence left to flee to behind them (the bridge being broken down) and many thousands of the pagans before, since the tower had fallen. The pagans therefore summoned them and offered them life, and they, upon promise of their lives, came up on to the land; but when they came there the pagans, who were treacherous, killed them in spite of their word. And the Christians upon the walls of the city saw this thing done beyond the river.

There was in Paris a certain man of great birth and wealth, and one of the leaders of the people, who had heard the perpetual cry of the citizens against the Emperor, that nothing was done for their relief, and that they must die unsuccoured. And this man escaped by night and went off eastward to find the Emperor Charles where he might be, and to bring him to shame, for if Paris fell the northmen would ravish all Gaul, and Christendom itself might fail. The bishop was dead of the siege; spring had come, and yet there was no message of relief, but still the block of the invaders and a perpetual defence of the bridges. One duke, indeed, whom the Emperor had sent, coming with a column, had fought his way in with food; but there had come no strength to disperse the host and the fleet of the pirates, and once again the city was beginning to starve. Therefore did this man of great birth, and a leader, leave the city to find the Emperor, who should have succoured Christendom; and the man who thus left to shame the Emperor into marching was Eudes himself, the lord of Paris.

He found his Emperor Charles surrounded by his Court at Metz, whither he had marched back from Italy. The Emperor Charles was huge and unwieldy of body, and he was palsied so that his head shook, and he had no will. But Eudes spoke to the Nobles and shamed them into marching, though it was not until July that they tardily agreed to go westward, nor until September, when for now ten months little Paris had stood up against the northmen, that the great army of the Empire was seen marching up from the north and the east, until it lay camped below Montmartre, not an hour from the town. Even here so feeble was Charles that he would not fight when he saw the host of the northmen. He lay there is his camp treating, and one that watched him has written: “He did nothing worthy of the Majesty Royal.” And it was October, and nearly a year since the Normans had come, before his treating was ended.

The chief of the pagans was one Siegfried, who had sailed from Thames, having gathered his men about him at Fulham above London, after King Alfred had broken their power. Siegfried it was who had so sailed with his followers out of Thames mouth and up Seine, sacking Rouen and coming at last to Paris itself. And with Siegfried the dull, palsied Emperor bargained, buying him off with silver to seven hundred pounds weight, and shamefully permitting that heathen to go east into the heart of Gaul and to pillage Burgundy.

So was the great siege ended and Paris saved by its valour and by the valour of Eudes: but not avenged, because the blood of Charlemagne had lost its vigour in his descendants, and the Emperors were nothing worth.

But as for Paris and her lord, they now stood out separate from these Emperors who could do nothing for them; and Eudes, the son of Robert, made himself more great, so that when Charles the Emperor died a year later, the great men met together and said to themselves: “As for the Germanies, let them go where they will, but Eudes shall be our king here.” And Eudes was crowned and anointed in Compiègne, not two years after his manliness in the great siege, and being so crowned he rode out eastward to where the northmen were pillaging in Argonne, and finding there the body of the pirates he destroyed them; and to this day it is remembered how powerfully he blew his horn in that fight.

From him and from his father Robert all the kings of France descend.

THE CROWNING OF THE CAPETIAN

(_Sunday, July 3_, A.D. 987)

Let any one who would understand the fortunes of the French wander for days in the wooded valley of the Oise. There great forests still clothe the low rounded hills which border the widenings of the slow river, where it saunters through its pasturages and its marsh, with tall, delicate aspens in solemn lines to mark its passage. It is a flat river floor of half a league across and about it the great woods of Compiègne and of Coucy, and all the others that still bear the name of their towns or castles, make a sheet of trees. That sheet of trees may have been a wider thing in the old days, but it remains for any one who will visit it (and it is a countryside that will harbour a man for as long as he will, so broad is it and so deep) the memory of that landscape in which the fortunes of his country changed and re-arose.

But, in particular, the forest of Coucy and the depths of the tall trunks understand how the lords hunted there when the Emperor was still the Emperor, and before France was once again France. See how there still remain in fragments the lines of the Roman roads that led from town to town; all the towns that make up this countryside. Consider Paris, one hard day’s ride away, two or three days’ marches. Remember Laon on its impregnable horse-shoe hill upon the edge of those woods, overlooking the plains to the east and the north, and forming a bulwark and a stronghold for the last of the blood of Charlemagne.

Then, in your mind, see westward and southward the open land, Normandy and Anjou, the Island of France, the gardens of Touraine, Nevers, the high Morvan, the Champagne, crammed with Latinity, and the valleys of the Allier, of the Cher, and of the Vienne, leading upwards and southwards into those dead mountains of the centre which are the frontier against the south. Remember also the good lands that flank Brittany, and that make an approach and a barrier at once for that jealous, silent land. Do all this, and you will understand what happened when the Carolingians fell, and when, in one moment, a new line of kings that stood for Gaul re-arisen was accepted and crowned in the person of its ancestor.

France would be. The Germanies learning the Faith, and informed by the French, were still the Germanies: barbaric, lacking in stone and in letters; lacking in roads. The Latin speech had not followed in them the Latin rule, and the Church which had made them human had hardly welded them into Christendom. It was not possible that Gaul should any longer be confused with these, unless, indeed, they would consent to be ruled from Gaul. That, in their newfound faith and culture, they would not consent to. Yet the imperial line and the old name of Charlemagne, now wasted for nearly two hundred years, pretended to control the issue. But France knew itself again--that is, Gaul knew itself again, through the confusion of how many centuries, and a symbol must be found for France. The line of Charlemagne was exhausted. It could present for claimant to universal rule over the Germanies, as over Gaul, as over Italy, nothing that men respected, no one whom soldiers followed.

But in Gaul itself was a family and a man.

That Robert who had died at Brissarthe, and who had come, no man knew whence, but who was so strong, and who was called “The Strong,” had founded lineage. It was a man of his blood who had held Paris against the Normans. Men of his blood had claimed the crown and kingship once, and had been a part of the Empire, and had yet dropped the claim. But their great estate of land had grown and grown. Their command over many soldiers had grown therewith. They spoke in the Latin tongue; they were of us. And of all of those who were of us they were the richest and, what is much more, the most captaining family of them. Of that great line Hugh was now the man. For a hundred years his father and his father’s father and his father before him had been the true masters of those good river valleys, the Loire, and the Seine, and the Oise. If there was to be government, he, Hugh, must come.

Rheims of the Champagne, the town where Clovis, five hundred years before, had accepted the Faith and made a unity for Gaul, had in this moment for its great archbishop one Adalberon, a man very subtle, and more learned than subtle, stronger in will than either in his learning or in his subtlety, and perceiving future things.

In those days there was between men a division. The great were very great. The mass of men were hardly free, and were all very small. The slaves that had worked for Roman lords in generations now half-forgotten, if they were no longer slaves, were still mean men; and the few that could ride by the day through their estates inland were great above all men--the great bishops, the great counts, the men of the palace, and the masters of the countryside.

These, then--the Empire now plainly in default, and wealthy Gaul, as it were, derelict, and the Germanies, in their barbarism, sheering off--counselled what they should do. They met in an assembly, going up the northern road from Paris to Senlis; and here there was great tumult. For each man came with his armed men about him, and confusedly they knew how mighty a thing was toward.

In that tumult it was Adalberon who spoke: “Charles of Lower Lorraine,” he said, “has many to speak for him, and he says that the throne should come to him by right of lineage. But there should not stand at the head of this kingdom any but he who is great. Hugh, the commander of armies, is known to you by his deeds, by his descent, and by the armed men in his troop, who are many. If you will have government, take him.”

In the further tumult that followed Adalberon persuaded, and Hugh, coming from those who had saved Paris, and who had commanded armament in Gaul for now so long, was acclaimed by the great lords as king.

When the time came for the anointing and the crowning, and for this separation of France again from what was not France, this re-seizing of the nation to itself, Noyon was the town they chose.

Little Noyon, with its vast arcaded church, strong and Roman, amid the woods of the Oise, the altar before which Charlemagne himself had been crowned. To Noyon they came in the midst of those forests of the Oise, by that strict road of the Romans which bridged the river, and which is but one of the many that there meet, as in the centre of a wheel; for the dignity of Noyon, now so forgotten, lay in this--that men could come to it easily, even in those days of difficulty and of old arts forgotten.

In Noyon, then, was Hugh crowned.

He had no name but Hugh. Since, however, men must give names to a family as well as to a man, all the generations after him have remembered what his nickname was. For he had a nickname, this soldier and lord, and from his helmet or his hood he was called Hugh Capet, the man of the head covering--the man of the head or cap. And that is why this family is called Capetian: a little cause for a great thing.

THE TORRENT

(A.D. 1030)

Down the mountain side there went in long procession, slipping here and there upon the unbroken frost of the morning, jangling all of them with bells, mules by the hundred--quite three hundred mules.

They that led them were short, lean men with hard, clean-shaven faces, bronzed in colour, and on their heads they wore a loose, flat cap that hung to one side or the other. Each man led his beast, and each beast was heavily laden as it picked its way down the slope; and here and there, sitting sideways upon her mount, was a woman of these hills, holding in her arms a child. The sun had not yet risen behind the red earth of the eastern peaks. The broken road that had once been a passage for the Roman armies over the Pyrenees (and that was now a mere bank, unsurfaced, down which the mules warily shuffled) was touched everywhere with rime. For it was but the opening of summer, and the snow still lay everywhere upon the high mountains around.

At the head of the valley below, fixed in the narrow valley floor, lay huddled and tangled together such a little mass of dirty brown as looked like a fantastic chaos of rock. As one came closer one could see that it was a cluster of human buildings--a town, but a town so squeezed together, so suspicious of all around, so made for defence, that, seen from the pass above, it was like the shell of some armoured animal.

One street alone led through its houses, very narrow indeed (for up in these mountains nothing goes on wheels)--so narrow that two loaded mules could barely pass. And this narrow street, under the first glory of the morning sky, which made a strip of light above it, was full of the cries of sellers and of grooms, of the stamping of horses’ feet, and of the innumerable little jingles of steel which come from bit and bridle and curb, stirrup and scabbard and halter-chain, and the rings of mail upon a hauberk, wherever men are gathered together to ride out in arms.

For there was in this town an assembly made of farmers and free men and one or two lords as well. They had come for the beginning of the summer season, now that the crops were sown, to ride out south against the Mahommedan, to see what they could see, and take what they could take. It was for this force that the mules were coming over the hills to provision it. A great train did every such expedition need of servitors, and oats, bread twice baked, and salted meat tied tightly round with strings, olives also, and oil and much wine; four men, perhaps, afoot for one that fought on horseback; and many of those afoot were half slaves.

Under the low, thick arch, where the track came in through the town wall and became the narrow street of the town, swayed in the first of that long procession of mules. To the cries of the sellers and the grooms, and to the jingling of steel links, there was now added the music of little bells. But dominant over all such noises, louder than them all, and a background of sound upon which all this life was woven, was the torrent swollen with the melting snow that ran beyond the houses a few yards to the east, and filled the deep, cool valley with its rumour. The name of this torrent was Aragon.

Near a wide and ancient door of mouldering oak, that hid a deep, dark stable beyond, was a farmer from the Canal Roya upon his horse, and he talked to his lord.

“Those of Jaca, at the beginning of the plain, sent in a man last night to say that we could catch a few of them beyond the Peña, beyond the high hill. They camped on the slope of it, marauding. We should be upon them before the sixth hour. It is not many miles.”

But his lord, looking at the Peña where it stood, a grey wall miles away, answered him,--

“Their horses are swifter than ours, and they go very light without armour, God curse them!”

And he spat as he spoke of the Moslem.

Then the farmer said,--

“Two days ago they raided the farm of Peter, the free man, and took his four serfs away on halters, running behind their horses, and they burnt a rick of his, and behind them they left a coin. This coin I bought of Peter.”

He showed it. It was a coin of the mint of Saragossa, and the lord bent over his saddle and peered curiously at the Arabic script stamped upon it. Then he made the sign of the Cross slowly over his broad shoulders.

“These words,” he said, “are in the devil’s language, and with these they summon Mahound.”

“Sir,” said the farmer, “some day some men now mounted here will ride into Huesca and cleanse it of the infidel. There is a monk who lives alone, and is a hermit up on the Peña. The Mahommedans fear him and will not pass his cave, and God gives him knowledge in dreams. This man is very old, and this same Lent he said (when he came down into Jaca for the Adoration of the Cross and the Blessing of the Oils), this very Lent he said (and from the altar, note you, by leave of the bishop), that he had seen St. Lawrence standing glorified in the air, who held a banner, and that Huesca would be ours and Christ’s at last.”

The lord smiled. “These things are lies,” he said.

“Was not Huesca the town of the great St. Lawrence,” answered the farmer doggedly, “whom the Emperor of the Romans, possessed by a devil, roasted upon a gridiron for the Faith? Will he not lead the host into Huesca at last? And then all the plains will be before us, whereon we can call upon St. James, and charge!”

But the lord still shook his head and smiled unpleasantly.

“All these things are lies,” he said. “But whatever great lord shall ride at last into Huesca for Christ, and cleanse it of the infidel, shall not only conquer it for Christ but for himself. Sancho is our great master, whom we serve, but whoever can hold Huesca will be a little king all the same.”

The farmer looked back up the narrow street to the mountains, and he said, “The lords come riding in from the Major Land, from the broad Christian land that goes up and away northward for ever beyond the hills; they come in greater and in greater bands with every season; they are strong men heavily accoutred. With their aid we shall take Huesca.”

“But this season,” laughed the lord again, “we shall not take more than a farm, nor raid more than an orchard, nor carry much home beyond a few apples, and a little wheat perhaps from the first plough lands of the infidels in the plain.”

By this time it was full day. There was a new warmth in the air, and the noise of the torrent seemed louder under the growing light. The torrent, roaring southward, seemed, with its adventure and its plunge, a sort of leader; and these mounted men, now gathering into column for the raid, thought of the south and of the stony path that led along its banks on, away, over the ford to Jaca: and thence to the plains and the battle. The torrent of Aragon is a maker of kingdoms and of soldiers destined to conquer. Though as yet these Christians had but a few bare parishes of land, hardly held by day and by night with arms, and the little town of Jaca only for their bastion, yet in them all, whether doubters or visionaries, there lay smouldering some certitude of future things, and a promise of the reconquest of Spain beyond and of the freeing of all Christian land.

So they rode out, in number about four hundred and fifty mounted men, with many more afoot that made a straggling herd about them and behind them. So they filed out by the southern gate.

The priests and the women watched them as they went by, and so did the children in the crowd. There were shrill cries of prophecy and of warning. To the last of them that rode by a deacon held up the relic of St. Lawrence, which was a piece of cloth from his tunic. The armed man bent over the saddle on the near side and kissed it as he passed.

Their marching raised a cloud of dust that blew softly away to the southward under the summer air, and in a little while the noise of the horses’ hoofs was lost, and the little place was quiet again.

There was a woman, one of those that had ridden in with the mules. She stood now by the fountain filling a leathern gourd with water and crooning a song of the Basques. For she was of the Basque country, to the east, an unconquered tribe. And with her was her little son, four years old, who held her skirts and watched the cool, clear water running into the gourd.

“Mother,” he said, “where do all those tall gentlemen go?”

“They go to fight against the men in white cloaks,” she said, “the men who serve Mahound. They go to catch them in their camps, and to bring us home good things--as it says in the song that we sing on winter evenings,” and she crooned the tune to him.

The little child said, “Mother, what is Mahound?”

“Mahound,” said the woman, “is a great beast that lives in an island of the sea. He has a head like a goat, and great shining eyes.”

The child looked at her, glorying and delighting to hear the story again. “And are not his eyes jewels?” he said.

“Yes, baby,” said the woman, “great jewels from the East, such as there are in kings’ crowns, in the crown of Sancho our king, or in the middle of that cross which the archbishop bore before him in the procession when he came down this Lent from Toulouse with the great lords of the north who were riding to help Leon.”

“And mother,” went on the child again, “is there not a fire behind those eyes of Mahound, and has he not great gilded horns, and does he not prophesy from his goat’s mouth?”

He continued to recite all the tale that he knew so well.

“Yes, baby,” said the mother (the gourd was filled, and she was leading him away by the hand), “and this beast is black all over, whence they that worship him, the Moriscos, are dark also, and they grin with white, shining teeth like his. And between him and his followers and our Christ and His Blessed Mother and His Saints there is perpetual war.”

As the child so babbled, and as the woman answered him, there still ran, with its triumphant noise below the houses, the thundering torrent. The little child caught between two walls the glint of its water foaming under the sun.

“Mother,” he said, “what is the name of that water?”

She answered in a more solemn tone, “Its name is Aragon, a famous water; the sick bathe in it and are healed, and from all time it has baptized Christian men.”

* * * * *

When this child was grown a man, though he was a serf’s child he became skilful in the riding and the management of a horse and in the handling even of arms, which the young free men lent him for a jest in the village games. So at last he went riding as a companion with one from his village, and was enfranchised. And by the time that he had taken his farm from his father and had himself bred a son, he followed the Cid Campeador. At last he, too, grew old. He came back to his farm to sit by the fire; and his son in turn tilled the land of those few acres in the hills, and rode out every season farther and farther south against the oppressors, cleansing the land. Until there came the rumour of a great marching that was going eastward to the Holy Places for the recovery of Christ’s grave, and this son of his, following that rumour, begged of his old father a little store of gold which he had put by, and went out himself upon Crusade, leaving the old man by the fire in the Pyrenees.

THE CONQUEROR

(_January to September_, A.D. 1066)

William, the Bastard of Falaise and Lord of all Normandy, had ridden into St. Germer four days before the feast, and with him a small retinue very richly dressed.

Upon the day of the feast he stood in the ante-chamber of the presence near the chapel door with but two to serve him, which two stood behind and were humble, the one a clerk, the other a treasury man but a knight. Normandy had on the sword belt and the sheath, but not the sword. For it is not lawful to carry arms in the presence of the crown.