II

I am the son of Rotrou, Lord of Mortagne and Comte de Perche, a small county but important because of its central position towards the southern end of the Duchy of Normandy. My name is Bertold. I am a good-looking bastard, though I say it myself, or I was in those days, but the emphasis is very much on bastard. I am illegitimate. I don’t mind making jokes about bastards, but I would rather you didn’t.

Duke Henry is master of Normandy, or most of it – the Normans are a troublesome lot. It is the season of spring, in the year of Our Lord 1118.

A fortnight or so before, on my twenty-first birthday, I had been summoned to my father’s castle. I had been in an abbey for eight years, learning Latin (it is the lingua franca of advancement) and other useful things, like avoiding the groping hands of certain monks. I had almost, but not quite, become accustomed to thinking that a monastic life was for me. It had its advantages, and there was no other comfortable alternative. I could become a soldier, but that was a desperate calling and I was ambitious. I wanted to turn my learning to some use; but what, and how?

The summons, which solved my problem, had surprised me. I had had no idea that the old Comte thought of me in any way at all, least of all remembered my birthday, since I was his bastard, not his legal son. It soon turned out that it was my dead mother’s husband, my stepfather, the castle cellarer, who had put him up to it. He had urged the Comte to summon me home. At Mortagne, the cellarer was more important than in many such places because here the butler was old and infirm, and leant on him heavily. My stepfather was, in fact, his deputy and aspired to that title, but he needed someone to help him with his duties, and thought he could use me and pay me nothing. He was a mean man and never forgot a debt of any kind, and he considered that I owed him something for having been given his shelter as a child. No wonder my mother had succumbed to the temporary advances of the Comte de Perche who – though he, God knows, was no great shakes – at least appreciated a beautiful woman.

On my return to the castle, I had found the place in a state of some excitement, as sometimes happens when Lent draws to a close and the girls and boys start looking at each other in that way they have. It was particularly the case this year, however, because William, son of Duke Henry, was due to arrive with his retinue on Easter Saturday. The sixteen-year-old Prince was accompanying his father for the first time at the start of the year’s campaigning in Normandy, knocking the barons’ heads together, but he had taken leave from his military duties to celebrate the feast of Easter with his half-sister, my little stepmother the Comtesse Matilda, my father’s bride of a couple of years. The Prince had been very close to her, apparently, when they were in England, but until today I had had no idea quite how close they had been.

The old Comte, my father, had married this Matilda, Duke Henry’s illegitimate daughter, when she was just sixteen because his first wife had died. The Comte was feeling cold in bed, and the Duke wanted an ally, so it suited them both. Admittedly the girl was a bastard but still a daughter of a Duke – a Duke who was also King of England. It was an honour of a kind, even though Henry has more bastards than any King of England before him, and that is saying something. I don’t blame him. If I were a king and a duke, I would have plenty myself, but somehow the same opportunities do not come my way. Lovely blonde Saxon girls are not two a penny in the county of Perche, where the local specialities are big handsome draught horses, sometimes dapple-grey, or thick-waisted Norman girls with hair like a rope-trick and a laugh like a saw-blade.

So it was a marriage of convenience, the Duke wanted powerful allies in Normandy, and the Comte de Perche, who was not universally popular – though who is in Normandy? – could bask in the ducal favour and all it entailed. Perche was useful to the Duke, who had given another beautiful daughter in marriage to the neighbouring Comte de Breteuil, a man with a face like a suet pudding whose favourite occupations were fighting and drink. The Comte de Breteuil and his Comtesse, half-sister to our Matilda, were also guests at Mortagne this Easter, on the occasion of the Prince, their half-brother’s, visit.

No one had asked either of the girls whether they wanted to be married to these Norman gargoyles. The Pope had now declared it sinful for anyone to force a girl to marry, but when you are a princess there are other considerations, and the Pope was always ready to listen to reason from a king. When I think of what it must be like to be married to the Comte de Breteuil or to my father, I am pleased to be an unimportant bastard. Not that I think bastards are unimportant, please don’t get that idea. As bastards go, I give a pretty good account of myself.

I am just under six foot tall (six foot on a good day). I have dark hair (with a Norman tendency to unruliness), clean features, a fresh face, clear, blue eye, and a ready smile. Too ready, my father – who values seriousness – would say, but I would rather disarm with a smile than fight. However, if it comes to fighting, then I am the man for it. In Normandy all the barons have their own little armies and love to use them. And one thing I learned at the monastery – well, I learned many things, but one thing I learned which may surprise you – was wrestling. I don’t want you to think of me as a pale shrimp of a clerk. The monks loved a wrestle, a useful art in those dangerous days, though they would not necessarily have liked the world to know it, and some of them were very proficient at it, but I was abbey champion. The other thing we were good at was music. The Abbot saw no contradiction in that. Mens sana in corpore sano was his creed – or one of them.

Back to the barn, then, and on with the bastard’s tale – a better one, you may find, than many a story told by a man born between lawful sheets.