PREORDER THE BRUS TODAY. John Barbour’s epic poem of Knights Errant and Chivalrous, a vivid recreation in verse of the celebrated Battle of Bannockburn: available from all good escritories and parchment titivators today.
‘Al fredome is a noble thing’
ANGLO-PORTUGUESE ALLIANCE SIGNED
PHILIP II OF TARANTO HANDS OVER RULE OF GREEK ACHAEA TO HIS COUSIN, JOANNA I OF NAPLES
DANCING MANIA IN AIX-LA-CHAPELLE
Prince returns to England. Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, Count of Biscay, heir to the throne of England and France, experienced a worsening of his medical condition in the town of Cognac, and has returned to England to seek the expert medical care only English doctors can provide.
The following statement from his office has been released: ‘the noble prince’s health has taken a temporary downturn, but with proper medical care we fully anticipate that he will be able to resume his military duties before the end of the year.’
FOR SALE. Treatises
A Treatise, entitled, The Enchantment of the Lullillus, and a Tract against such as Pray to Dæmons;
A Treatise against those that oppose the Pre-eminence of Jesus Christ and the Virgin;
A Tract against the Oath taken by the Pope and Cardinals after the Death of Urban V. and against the Letter of the University of Paris, proving beyond all doubt that Eymericus was not dead in 1370 as some have assured us;
A Treatise against the Chymists;
The Correctory of the Reprimand: A Treatise against those, who will define the Time of the End of the World;
A Treatise against Astrologers, Necromancers, and other Diviners;
A Treadle against those, who had broached this Heresy, That St. John the Evangelist was the Natural Son of the Virgin Mary;
A New Treatise of the Admirable Sanctity of the Mother of God-Man
He lay in his chamber at Westminster Palace, and listened to the sucking and cooing of the great river as it flowed. Sweet Thames. There was a wisdom hidden in those endless vowels, as in the hushing of the breeze, some hidden message the world was trying to convey to him. He had better nights and worse nights, but never, it seemed, good nights. His doctors said the wine was unbalancing his humours, but he was not beholden to doctors, and he drank a good deal of wine. One morning he woke to the cry of gulls and the splashing of the river as the tide fought the flow, and he felt he was on the very cusp of understanding what the waters were saying. But comprehension slid past him, and he let it go.
His whole body was covered in sweat, and his legs were shaking. A servant came to help him up, pointedly not mentioning the stink of piss – came to remove the sheets and wipe him all over with a square of damp linen, and feed him some gruel, like a baby. He preferred a posset of milk and wine to start the day, but the physicians had forbidden this. No wine at all until lunchtime, they said. He was a prince and they were mere commoners. How dare they command him? How could they? Yet he didn’t fight them. The fight was all gone out of him now.
He had them set a chair by his casement, so that he could look out. Down at the shores of Thorny Island, across at the far side of the river where buildings snaggletoothed the bank. A boat passed slowly upstream on four oars, in a pulsing forward-two-yards back-one-yard motion: forward two and back one, forward two and back one. There was something profound in that pulse – wasn’t there? He pondered it idly and didn’t plumb its mystery. Thorny Island was where King Canute had bid the waves retreat, and been made wet for his pains. And now there was a palace built here. One day the palace would be nothing but the outline of rooms, mud banks and river-grass, not one brick standing upon another. A seagull coasted the air like a skater, turned its head and shrieked at him: qui-ose? qui-ose? qui-ose?
—Begone, he yelled back, and shook a wobbly arm. But even so feeble an action wore him out. Once on a time city walls had tumbled, and a thousand fine French knights had died, from one gesture of this right arm. Now it ached and shivered even in the warmth of day. Allez! Allez! he croaked.
The bird took him at his word.
He thought of asking for Joan, but then remembered she was not in London. His son was in the palace though, so he struck the bell and summoned his servant to get him dressed. That took them both a long time. He had heard Wycliff preach, and would hear him preach again, he decided. But not today.
He was carried out onto the small well-kept lawn of one of the palace’s inner courts, and settled in a chair. The sun was warm on his face. Two thrushes bickered in the branches. A bird-husband and bird-wife? A maid-of-honour cleared her throat.
And here was Richard: sweet-faced but sombre, dressed exquisitely in a miniature surcoat with the three lean lions and clusters of trifoil feathers. He greeted his father with his piping boy’s voice. Like a woman’s voice.
—The feathers, said Ned, in a creaky voice. Did I tell you where they come from?
—Yes, Father.
Ned didn’t hear his son’s reply, or didn’t understand it, and so explained yet again how he had fought at Cressy in France when he was not much older than the boy was now (the boy was not yet nine, so this was not quite the truth). How he had discovered the corpse of the good old King of Bohemia, dead honourably in battle, blind but brave, fallen on the ground.
—Yes, Father, said Richard, obediently. His two nurses hovered in the background.
—So that’s where it comes from, said Ned, truncating the story, his tiredness suddenly swimming up and taking him. The three feathers and the motto as well. The King of Bohemia had a son who was fighting for the French. Blind and old he was, the father I mean, and he asked to be led into the fighting. He was killed – not by me, thank God – and I took over his emblem and his motto. I was only a boy, not much older than you are now. Sixteen I was.
—Yes, Father.
—Blind, but brave. His son was fighting for the French. I suppose he knew he would die in that battle, but he rode into the fight anyway. That’s where I got it from.
Something in his son’s expression stung him. He realised he was rambling. He tried to gather his strength, inwardly, and sat up a little straighter.
—I serve, he said. I didn’t realise what a responsibility it was.
—I serve, repeated Richard. And then, in his clear, flute-like voice: I serve what?
—Oh, something very vague – honour, chivalry. God. What it ought to mean (he thought, for some reason, of the endless song of the river) what it ought to mean is doing something for the people. When you become Prince of Wales – if you become Prince of Wales – try and do something for the people.
—You said if, Richard said, quickly. Sharp little eyes.
—In the first place that depends on your grandfather. But in the last place it depends on Parliament.
—The little men?
—Not so little, said Edward, feeling a huge weariness pushing up inside him, like a tide. Not so little.
Not so little. He was exhausted and trembling, and the nurses led the boy away. His people took him to the main hall, and he ate some fowl and creamed turnip, and drank two goblets of wine, and almost immediately threw the whole lot straight up into a bowl they had ready. He was sweating. His whole body was trembling, his arms like pennants in strong wind, and he was sweating so hard it dribbled into his eyes. He was carried, as a wounded knight is borne from the battlefield, by two strong men and taken to his chamber. A physician bled him with sharp little knives, and in his increasing delirium he thought he was being attacked by Frenchmen with crossbow bolts, or that he was Christ on the cross and the Romans – Italians, Genoese, mercenaries – were stabbing him in the arm with their spears, aiming for his flank but striking only his side. He wept, and railed, and struggled, and his man had to hold him against his bed whilst the physicians took more blood. Eventually the letting calmed him, and he breathed shallowly, and felt very thirsty. When he tried to say j’ai soif the words stuck in his throat and would not come out, but when he said I am thirsty the words came babbling out.
His people brought him something to drink. He dozed, and woke with a gasp. A dove was perched on his windowsill, but it was much too big to be a regular dove, and there were many brilliant hues somehow tangled in with its white feathers, and its beak was red like a ruby, and its eyes were blue like a sapphire, and the whiteness of its feathers was of a clearness like snow or milk or the desert sky at noon or bleached bones that have lain in the sun for decades or the central whiteness of a star that has looked, coldly, down upon humanity for unimaginable eons and will continue to look down for eons more, equally indifferent to caring or uncaring.
—Sir? Sir?
His man is touching him on the shoulder. Ned comes fully awake.
—What? he croaks. What?
—You were shouting, sir. A tree, a sword, a great crowd of leaves.
Ned looked about.
—Bring me something to drink, Ned croaked. Then fetch my priest.
The priest came, clutching one of Ned’s fine illustrated Gospel Books. He heard the Prince’s confession, and absolved him, and set him the kind of penance a very sick man might be capable of, and afterwards Ned told the holy man his dream. He had planted his sword in a wide, flat, green plain, and the ground had bled like it was flesh, but afterwards his blade had turned into a tree and branches had creaked out, and many leaves – a great mass of leaves – an uncountable number of leaves. And each leaf bore a human face. Pray to Christ, was the priest’s advice, and to his holy mother, and to God himself. Pray for peace and recovery. Pray for understanding, too, of your dream and of anything. For understanding only comes from God.
Ned tried eating once more, but once more vomited up his meal. An hour later, as the light over the Thames dimmed and sweetened, and a golden hue lay upon his windowsill, he drank a little milk, which he was able to keep down. He was too weak to stand. Each breath was a little hill he had to, as it were, march up and over. Each exhalation was a struggle and a small victory.
The vision of the dove had been the Holy Spirit. Or he had feverdreamed something along those lines. Idly he thought to himself: why three? Why not seven? Or many millions? Would not that speak more magnificently to the splendour of God? But then he knew from experience that though a larger army might overawe the eyes, it was in reality a tiresome entity: more mouths to feed, more people to discipline. The smaller army beats the larger, as at Cressy and Poitiers, provided only it is tighter and more disciplined. And so, with the divine. What God prized was not hugeness, but purity. So the real question was not why not three million?, but rather, as the Mohammedan might ask, why so many as three? Why not one? It must, Ned thought, drowsily, speak to something fundamental about the cosmos. Above, and here, and below. Father, son and what? What? Spirit, spirit, spirit. As opposed to: body. To body. To body. He looked at his own wasted and uglified corpus and told himself: you have been too concerned with the things of the body, the pleasures of the body, and the discipline of the body. Bodies fighting other bodies on the battlefield. Bodies arrayed in glory. Bodies tangling with one another in the bedroom. He had neglected the spirit. And that was what the Holy Spirit meant: that there was spirit, and that it was holy. It was so obvious it almost shocked him. He began to sweat, as if with fear, or exertion. God was – God, Himself, neither body nor spirit but rather the ground of everything, the page upon which the manuscript of the universe was illuminated. Christ was the body, who must have experienced the blisses of the body when he was on Earth, and who certainly experienced the pains of the body when he was crucified. If it were merely God and Christ, then religion would be saying: the cosmos is God, and inside it God has created these puppets of flesh. But of course that would not be enough. That was the impious parody of God he had made himself, as a general – seeing not eternal souls, parading in rainbow beauty past him, but only manikins of flesh to do his bidding, to go when he said go and come when he said come. To encounter others of their kind and chop them to pieces. The Holy Spirit was also God, because God was spirit as well as Everything. And the Holy Spirit was Christ, because Christ was a man and so more than just a body, was a spirit himself. And the Holy Spirit was itself because the whole universe was suffused with spirit, and was the Father and the Son because they were both spirits too. And Edward thought to himself: I have neglected spirit, and abused spirit, and repudiated spirit. I was too focused on God the father, on my father, on the Son, on myself, and though the spirit was some emanation of me, or my military victories, or or or. Peace is harmony and wholeness and tranquillity and balance and war is the undoing of that. The Holy Spirit is both a dove, which is of peace, and a flame, which is destruction. The screeches of people trapped inside their houses as Limoges burned. The birdsong outside his window, right now, right here. A green force that erupted after fire had made hospitable ashes of the old order, and fresh rain had fallen from God’s sky. A viriditas. The Earl of Derby had smashed Poitiers to pieces, and yet only a few years later it was restored, its walls built back up, its people working and growing and making and paying taxes. The same was probably true of Limoges, by now. And the Prince thought: I break them down, they build them up again.
Grass and trees and wheat are powered by this greenness, but in them it is a hectic and a wilderness force. Only in men and women is it something more harmonious, something more controlled, the rule of order in place of chaos, the force as a calm, inner stability: whole, complete, orderly, stable, and poised for blessing. And with a pinprick sense of total realisation, enough to bring tears to his weary eyes, the Prince understands, at last, for the first time, where the Holy Spirit dwells.
In the morning he would go and hear Wycliff preach.
After that, he slept.
The holy gospel tells by a parable how by right judgement of God men should be merciful. The kingdom of Heaven, says Christ, is like to an earthly king that would reckon with his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was offered unto him that owed him ten thousand crowns, and when he had not to pay of, the lord bade he should be sold, his wife and his children and all that he had, and that that he ought the lord should be always paid. This servant fell down and prayed the lord and said, Have patience in me, and I shall quit this whole debt. The lord had mercy on him, and forgave him all his debt. This servant went out and found one of his debtors, that owed him an hundred pence; and took him and strangled him, and bade him pay his debt. And his servant fell down and prayed him to be patient, and he should by time yield him all that he owed him. But this wicked first man would not, and went out and put him in prison, until he had paid the debt that he owed him. And other servants of this man, when they saw this deed, mourned with grievous hearts, and told all this to the lord. And the lord said unto his man, wicked servant, all thy debt I forgave you, for you begged me to do it. Behoved it not thee to have mercy on thy servant, as I had mercy on thee? And the lord was angry, and the anger of lords is a terrible thing, and he gave him up to prison and to tormentors, until he had paid all the debt that he owed him. On this manner, said Christ, shall My Father of heaven do to you, but if you forgive, each one to his brother, of your free heart, the trespass that he hath done him.
The kingdom of heaven is holy Church of men that now labour and struggle in this belowplace; and this Church by his head is like to a human king, for Christ, head of this Church, is both God and man. This king would reckon with his servants, for Christ has will without end to reckon with men thrice, thrice, thrice. First, Christ reckons with men when He teaches them by reason how much they have had of Him, and how much they owe Him; the second time Christ reckons with men, when in the hour of man’s death He tells them at what point these men shall ever justly stand; the third reckoning is general, that shall be at the day of doom, when this judgement generally shall be openly done in deed. As concerning the first reckoning, Christ reckons with rich men of this world, and shows them clearly how much they owe Him, and shows by righteousness of His law how they and theirs should be sold, and so make amends by pain of things that they performed not in deed. But many such men for a time have compunction in heart, and pray God of His grace to have patience in them, and they shall in this life serve to Christ truly. And so Christ forgives them upon this condition. But they go out into the world, and sue not Christ their Lord in mercy, but oppress their servants that owe them but a little debt, and put them in prison, and think not on God’s mercy; and other servants of God both in this life and in the other tell to God this fellness, and pray Him to serve their vengeance. No doubt, no doubt, God is filled with wrath at this, and at two reckonings with man He reasons this cruel man, and judges him justly to pain.
And therefore, Christ bids, by Luke, all men to be merciful, for their Father of Heaven that shall judge them is merciful.
+TREATY OF BRUGES SIGNED+
Conference called at the instigation of Pope Gregory XI leads to treaty. France represented in the negotiations by Philip II, Duke of Burgundy; England by John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster. A truce has been agreed was initially for one year, and the territory lately reconquered by the French king recognised as his.
The gift of wisdom corresponds to the virtue of charity.
The gifts of understanding and knowledge correspond to the virtue of faith.
The gift of right judgement corresponds to the virtue of prudence.
The gift of fortitude corresponds to the virtue of courage.
The gift of fear of the Lord corresponds to the virtue of hope.
The gift of Reverence corresponds to the virtue of justice.
COLUCCIO SALUTATI APPOINTED
CHANCELLOR OF FLORENCE
‘Florence will flourish’ he tells shocked assembly. ‘I will prove salutary to this city.’
The gift of fear of the Lord corresponds to the virtue of hope.
WALDEMAR IV, KING OF DENMARK, DIES IN HIS 55TH YEAR. The ruler they declared ‘a New Dawn’ has seen his sun set.
The gift of Reverence corresponds to the virtue of justice.
Plague Returns. New cases reported in Wales, Bristol, Southampton and Bordeaux. Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, advises earnest prayer to God, Christ and the Holy Spirit from all quarters.
The gift of wisdom corresponds to the virtue of charity.
Three times, as a baby, he had fallen into sicknesses they were sure would kill him: once with a speckled pox, once a fever that turned him redder than robin’s breast all over his body, and once he slept for seven days and nights and grew cold and clammy as a fish. Yet he survived all three, and by the time he was seven years of age Iowerth was as strong as any lad of his parish. He lived on a farm in Brecknockshire, and his father was a freeman, and travelled widely – often as far as Hereford and Bristol, and once even to London by boat. Iowerth kept his mother and sisters company on the farm at Llanfaes when his father was away, and he rode a pony, and sometimes dreamed he was a chivalric knight on adventures, and he helped with services at the church.
It was a fine church, dedicated to Saint David, and had a slate roof, something not even true of the big church at Cardiff in those days, where the roof was only wooden. Inside there were half a dozen pews, and benches for the rest, and the tiles on the floor alternated blue and white, the colours of the blessed virgin herself.
Pigeons had nested on the roof. He could hear them, when he was inside the church sweeping the floor alone, hear them overhead murmuring to one another in their bird-voices like running water.
There were stories about the Church. One was that the foundation stone had been laid by Joseph of Arimathea soon after arriving by boat from the Holy Land, and that therefore it was the oldest church in the land. There was a story that a local nobleman had spent the night in the church with his hounds, ready to go hunting at first light; but when the dawn came he found his dogs had all been driven mad, and he himself was blinded, presumably for the blasphemy of using a church as a hunting lodge. This story bothered Iowerth: for what had the dogs done to deserve such divine punishment? And when Dafydd told the story the nobleman was Sir Richard of Hay, and when Owain told it the nobleman was William of Braose. It would hardly be both.
Still, Iowerth always felt the shiver go through him when the priest said mass, and once a bishop came through asking for volunteers to take the cross and fight to regain Jerusalem, and Iowerth almost stepped from the crowd and presented himself, child though he was. He didn’t, of course. But he daydreamed often of riding a great warhorse across the pristine yellow plain of the deserts of Judea, armed with a sword and wearing the red cross on white over his breast, and doing great deeds.
One week it rained every day from Sunday to Sunday, and the house flooded, and there were great shallow pools of water standing about. Another time there was no rain for a month, and the leaves on the trees grew dry and brittle as fine crusts, and rattled together with a noise like tin.
Iowerth listened to the smug cooing of the pigeons on the church roof.
One day Iowerth thought he would take the pigeon-eggs, and present them to his mother. Then he thought: he could take the pigeons too, and snap their necks, and his mother would be happy with the free meal. So he climbed up the wall of the church, putting his bare feet on the outcropping flints, and hooked his elbow about the top, where the roof slanted away. He could see the nest, and the brooding bird sitting on its eggs, and it looked at him with one inkdrop eye. Iowerth reached out with his free hand, and, almost losing balance, slapped it onto the stone just in front of the nest. He kept his balance. But when he came to withdraw his hand, he found it would not come free. He tried to pull it, to lift it straight up – a simple matter. But it would not come free. It would not release itself from the stone.
At first Iowerth was more puzzled than afraid. But after a while it became clear that the hand was not going to come loose, and he grew very afraid. The wind got up and rummaged through his hair, and dried the tears on his cheeks. His left armpit, where he was supporting himself, grew painful with the unrelieved pressure, and then grew numb. Iowerth tried sliding the hand along the stone, but it would not move. He tried a sudden tug, and tried pulling with all his might. He called out with the frustration and the pain.
Soon enough somebody heard him, or saw him from below, and came and stood at the base of the wall and shouted up at him. He tried to answer, but he was crying so much his words were smothered. The fellow went away, and came back with several others.
They put a ladder up, so Iowerth could rest his feet, which took some of the pain out of his armpit. But then they tried hauling him down by main force, and that hurt his arm more. It felt like they would yank his arm clean off, and that surely would kill him, so he begged them to stop and the copiousness of his tears persuaded them. His mother came – his father being away – and climbed the ladder, something she would not normally have attempted, to hug him and weep and ask what was going on. She helped him up, so that his knees were just about resting on the narrow stone ledge, but it was a precarious position. Why could he not release his hand?
Was there some strange substance or glue upon the roof of the church? Then the sun set and everybody went home except his mother and one of his sisters, who lit a candle and prayed and sang hymns; but when the candle went out and it grew cold they threw a blanket over Iowerth and went to their home.
Iowerth slept barely at all. From time to time exhaustion propelled him into a stupor, but then the pain in his arm, or the numbness in his hand, or his shivering from the cold, despite the blanket, woke him up again. Twice he slipped from the ledge, and yanked his pinned arm painfully, and had to scramble and struggle back up onto the narrow rim.
He tried praying to God, and then tried bargaining with God, and then in the darkest hour of the night, as a wolf snuffled menacingly around below him somewhere, and owls blew a cold wind through their beaks with hooo and woe, he cursed God, and railed that he had only wanted an egg, one solitary egg, to feed his hungry mother, and how was it fair that he be punished so? When dawn came he wept again, this time with relief. He soon became warm, and when people returned they brought him food and some milk to drink. But he could not unfix his hand. Trying to pull it, he fell from the roof again and dangled.
By noon his whole arm had lost sensation. The skin looked greyblue, something like an unusually uniform bruise, spread over the whole area. People had come from neighbouring parishes to see the strange event, and many of them were sceptical. They said Iowerth was shamming, only pretending to hold his hand there, that he ought to be ashamed, that it was blasphemy. So up the ladder came two men from a strange village, to heave and haul at the boy. His arm was so numb that it hardly hurt, though it hurt a little, and he moaned. They gave up after a while. People came and went, and a bonfire was built in the churchyard, although the priest complained it was disrespectful. People sang, people played dice, people came and went. The second night was a little easier than the first: for though he was still horribly uncomfortable it may be that he was growing accustomed to his strange posture. Or perhaps he was simply worn out. At any rate he slept for hours and woke before dawn with a new clarity in his head. People were snoring on the ground below him. The bonfire had burned low, and glowed ruby under a web of black ash. He prayed to the mother of God, Mary in her mercy and beauty, to intercede for him; and then he prayed fervently to Saint David, in heaven, for forgiveness for what he had done. As he prayed he began to feel the stone under his hand soften. Though his hand was numb as with great cold, and he could feel almost nothing, he was able to flex the fingers, just a little. It felt, very distantly, as if he were gouging into dough. Then, as the sunlight broke over the horizon, his hand came free, and he almost fell down the ladder, but was able to clutch at the stones with his tingling left hand. He clung there for a while, and eventually he came tremblingly down the ladder, half stepping, half falling. He woke his mother who wept and embraced him, and soon everybody was awake, and people were coming from all around to clasp him and look at his hand – slowly regaining its colour, painfully stabbing as sensation returned – and to praise God, and thank the virgin Mary, and the saints, and redouble the sanctity of the human heart, which is, after all, the only kind of sanctity that exists in the world.