A Fine Song of Love - Katherine Langrish

The past is a different country which requires a great deal of research and imaginative effort to recreate in its multilayered richness of sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes. Visiting the  Chiltern Open Air Museum a few years ago I found myself shouting to be heard over the almost unbearable thunder of iron-rimmed cartwheels rolling over cobbles. I’d had no idea carts were so loud – and that was one single, large, four-wheeled wagon pulled by a single horse. Imagine the din around the warehouses of London Docks in the 1880s! 

Music goes beyond natural sound, though. Music is a cultural construct full of meaning; it reflects, interprets, and to a large extent creates the manners and desires of its own time. It's natural to refer to music as we construct history. Swingtime, jazz, rock and roll, punk, reggae, hip-hop – all tell something about the decades in which they flourish. Impossible to imagine the sixties without the Beatles or the Kinks. The same must be true for the deeper past. I once thrilled to a British Museum reconstruction of a Roman trumpet call, and what about the prehistoric bone flutes that were played in caves like Lascaux?

My children’s novel DarkAngels (HarperCollins) is set on the Welsh borders in the 1190s, and features a flawed heroic figure, Hugo of La Motte Rouge, Norman warlord and ex-crusader who believes his dead wife may – just may – not be dead after all, even though seven years have passed since he buried her. She may have been spirited away by the elf-folk and taken into the tunnels under the hill. In which case, there may be a chance he could rescue her.

There are a quite a few 12^th century legends on this mysterious subject, the idea of lost lovers re-encountered in some fairy land of the dead. Walter Map, a courtier at the court of Henry II, tells the story of a Breton knight who rescued his dead-and-buried wife when, months later, he saw her whirling in a fairy dance. And the retelling of the Orpheus myth, Sir Orfeo, probably also ultimately dates from this time, from a Breton lai subsequently translated into Middle English.

So there I was with the idea that my knight Lord Hugo would be a sort of Orpheus figure. Therefore he needed to be musical. Now the Breton lais are lengthy stories in verse; they were performed by minstrels who probably chanted them with a musical prelude and interludes. And of course the 12^th and 13th centuries were also the time of the troubadours of southern France, whose songs were primarily songs of fin’ amour – of romantic love in high society.

Garden of Pleasure, Harley 4425, 15th C.

It’s been suggested that the notion, even the emotion of romantic love was created by the troubadours, a product of the hot-house needs of often very young noblemen and noblewomen living with nothing much to do in close proximity in small castles, spending time together every day, yet with sex strictly off-limits - marriage being a formal matter of property and alliances arranged by their elders. So this new music arose, a music of youth, full of expressions of forbidden desire: subversive, exciting, dangerous and fashionable.

Many troubadours were high-born men and women, whose songs would usually be performed by a joglar or jongleur, a professional singer. Still, it seemed to me quite possible that my own Lord Hugo might on occasion be prevailed upon to sing his own songs – especially if he thought that doing so might help win back his wife from the dead land.   

So now I needed to listen to troubadour songs. Here's one anonymous 13th century song, performed by Conjunto de Camara de Porto Alegre. They don't sing it all: as you can see, below, it's quite long. I made a free translation to get myself in the mood for writing songs for Lord Hugo.

Volez vous que je vous chante             Would you like me to sing you

Un son d’amours avenant?                 A fine song of love?                          

Vilain nel fist mie,                                By no peasant it was made,               

Ainz le fist un chevalier                       But a gentle knight who lay

Sous l’ombre d’un olivier                    With his sweetheart in his arms

Entre les bras s’amie.                          In an olive tree’s shade.

Chemisete avoit de lin                         She wore a linen chemise,

Et blanc peliçon hermin                      A pelisse of white ermine –

Et bliaut de soie                                   Of silk was her dress,

Chauces ot de jaglolai                         Her stockings were of iris leaves

Et solers de flours de mai                    And slippers of mayflowers

Estroitement chauçade                        Her feet to caress.

Ceinturete avoit de feuille                    Her girdle was of leaves

Que verdist quant li tens meuille,        Which grow green when it rains,

D’or est boutonade                             Her buttons of gold so fine,

L’aumosniere estoit d’amour              Her purse was a gift of love

Li pendant furent de flours                  And it hung from flowery chains

Par amours fu donade.                       As it were a lovers’ shrine.

Et chevauchoit une mule                     And she rode on a mule,

D’argent ert la ferruere                       The saddle was of gold,

La sele ert dorade;                              All silver were its shoes;

Sus la croupe par derriers                   On the crupper behind

Avoit plante trois rosiers                     To provide her with shade

Pour faire li ombrage.                         Three rose-bushes grew.

Si s’en va aval la pree                         As she passed through the fields

Chevaliers l’ont encontree                  She met gentle knights

Beau l’on saluade:                              Who demanded courteously:

“Belle, dont estes vous nee?”             “Fair one, where were you born?”

“De France sui la louee,                     “From France am I come.

De plus haut parage.”                        And of high family.”

“Li rossignol est mon pere                  “The nightingale is my father

Qui chant sor la ramee                       Who sings from the branches

El plus haut boscage.                          Of the forest’s highest tree.

La seraine est mon mere                     The mermaid is my mother

Qui chante en la mer sale                   Who sings her sweet notes

Li plus haut rivage.”                           On the banks of the salt sea.”

“Belle, bon fussiez vous nee!               “Fair one, well were you born!          

Bien estes emparentee                         Well fathered, well mothered

Et de haut parage.                               And of high family.

Pleüst á Dieu nostre pere                    Might God only grant

Que vous ne fussiez donee                   That you should be given

A femme esposade.”                           In marriage to me!”

Could a song be more sensual, the object of desire more dangerous? The lady in this chanson is a headily-erotic blend of wildwood flowers, songs and the fairy world; that purse which hangs from her girdle on flowery chains ‘like a lover’s shrine’ is certainly a metaphor Freud would have recognised. No wonder the young knights acknowledge her ‘high degree’ and long for her hand in marriage. It’s enough to turn their parents’ hair grey.  

Lady out riding, 16th C, by Gerard Horenbout

Troubadour songs often use images such as the coming of the green leaves in spring, and the song of the nightingale, to express the pain and delight and longing of love. Here’s Guillem de Peiteus, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, comparing love to a hawthorn bough:

As for our love, you must know how

Love goes – it’s like the hawthorn bough

That on the living tree stands, shaking

All night beneath the freezing rain

Till next day, when the warm sun, waking,

Spreads through green leaves and boughs again.

(Tr. W. D. Snodgrass.)

In the end I wrote this for Hugo to sing of his love:

When all the spring is bursting and blossoming,

And the hedge is white with blossom like a breaking wave,

That’s when my heart is bursting with love-longing

For the girl who pierced it, for that sweet wound she gave.

And I hear the nightingale singing in the forest –

Singing for love in the forest: “Come to me, I am alone…

Better to suffer love’s pain for a single kiss

Than live for a hundred years with a heart of stone.”

It’s Hugo’s love and pain that drives the plot of Dark Angels and I really needed the plangent, beautiful music of the 13^th century to get it right.

The Knight of the Tower - by Katherine Langrish

I was looking for something to write about for today’s blog post, and decided I’d try and find Thomas Tusser’s Book of Good Husbandry, that wonderful Elizabethan farmer’s guide written in pantomime-style couplets: this kind of thing, from memory:

Get home with ye brakes ere summer be gone

For tethered-up cattle to sit down upon.

But I couldn’t find it. If your bookshelves are anything like my bookshelves, you’ll understand why. Instead I spotted Caxton’s translation of ‘The Book of the Knight of the Tower’, published by the Early English Text Society.  Pulled it out, opened it, and came straight across this ridiculously wonderful anecdote – I’ve modernised the vocabulary and spelling a little.  When you’ve read it, you’ll know just why I had to write about this instead. Master Tusser must wait his turn. 

Of Her that Eat the Eele and Plumed [plucked] her Pye [Magpie]

I shall tell to you an example of the fate of women that eat the good morsels behind their husbands’ [backs].  There was a damsel that had a Pye in a cage which spake and said all that she saw.  And it happed [chanced] that the lord of the house made to keep a great Eele in a trunk in a pond. And he kept it much dearworthly [preciously, carefully] for to give it to some good lord of his, or to some friend, if they came to see him. And it happed that the lady said to the Chamberer, that it were good to eat the great Eele, and they thought that they would say to their lord that thieves had eaten him. And when the lord came home, the Pye began to tell and say to him, ‘My lady hath eaten the Eele.’  And when the lord heard this, he went to his pond and found not his Eele, and came home to his wife and demanded her what was befallen of his Eele?  And she attempted to make excuses.  And he said to her that he was certain thereof, and that the Pye had told him.  And in the house therefore was great sorrow and noise.  But when the lord was gone out, the lady and the Chamberer  came to the Pye and plucked off all the feathers of his head, saying ‘Thou hast discovered us of the eele [told on us about the eel]’, and thus was the poor Pye plucked and lost the feathers of his head.  But from then forth on, if any man came into that house that was bald, or shaved [like a monk] or had a high forehead, the Pye would say to them, ‘ye have told my lord of the Eele’.  And therefore this is a good example, that no good woman should eat for licorousness [greed] sweet or dainty morsels without the knowledge of her husband.  This damsel was after much scorned and mocked for that Eele, by cause of the Pye that so oft remembered it to such as came thither bald or shaven.

Fabulous, yes?  That’ll teach her to eat eels behind her husband’s back. I love the broad, almost slapstick comedy: ‘he went to his pond and found not his Eele’… It’s clear that this story was always intended to be a funny one: the difference between Now and Then, however, is that Now we enjoy the comedy but ignore the moral, whilst Then, the comedy was there only to enliven the moral and make it more memorable. The Knight of the Tower really did believe that wives had better not sneak delicacies their husbands never intended them to have. Besides, such deceit might lead to other things. It might lead to this.

by the Master of Guillebert de Mets, Walters Art Museum

The Knight of the Tower was Geoffrey IV de la Tour Landry, and he wrote this long book of advice in 1371-2 for the use and instruction of his daughters.  He was a widower, and doubtless a careful and loving parent, and he worried about his growing daughters’ reputations and morals. He opens the book in traditional medieval style, pensive in a garden, mourning his dead wife in a passage of great tenderness:

And of all good she seemed to me the best and the flower, in whom I so much me delighted: for in that time I made songs, lays, roundels, ballads, virelays and new songs in the most best wise that I could; but death which spareth none hath taken her, for whom I have received many sorrows and heaviness in such wise that I passed my life more than twenty years heavy and sorrowful…

Seeing his daughters coming towards him, ‘young and little…’, he begins to remember the days when he himself was a young man ‘and rode with my fellowship in Poitou’, how his friends (and he?) had made love to young ladies ‘for they had neither dread nor shame… and were well-bespoken … and thus they do nothing but deceive good ladies and damsels’. 

Like many a father before and since, The Knight of the Tower Landry decides his daughters have to be protected from such young men. ‘And for this cause… I have thought on my well-beloved daughters whom I see so little, to make [for] them a little book … to the end that they may learn and study and understand the good and evil that is past [ie: that has happened in the past] for to keep them from [that] which is to come.’

You can’t help but like him; and I like him even more when he adds:  “I have made two books, one for my sons and the other for my daughters.”  Sadly, I don’t think the one he wrote for his sons has made it down to us.  I dare say people have commonly been less concerned about the morals and behaviour of their boys: the book of advice for girls, however, became an instant smash hit. The introduction of the EETS edition says: “It was copied many times, and by the end of the 15^th century it had become widely known. There are still at least twenty-one manuscripts of the French text in existence; and English translation was made during Henry VI’s reign; Caxton made a new English translation which he printed in 1484, and German version made by Marquart vom Steim, ostensibly for his own two daughters, was published at Basle in 1493”  with woodcuts like the one below, in which a fiend stalks around a young woman who is committing the sin of vanity by dressing her hair and looking in a mirror. 

The book continued to be printed right down into the 19^th century, and it’s still so lively that you can see why. It must have been a popular read even for the young women who were supposed to be benefiting from it. The chapter on ‘How women ought not to be jealous’ begins with a fight between two ladies in which one of them breaks the other’s nose with a staff. Chapter 15 (xviij) is entitled ‘How a woman sprang upon the table’.  In Chapter 19 (xix), ‘Of the woman that gave the flesh to her hounds’, a lady insists on feeding her two little dogs on ‘daily dysshes of soupes and fryandyses delycyous’ (delycyous is so much more delicious than delicious, don’t you think?) in spite of the warnings of a friar who tells her not to waste food which could be given to the poor.  Naturally she then falls ‘sick unto the death’ and ‘there came upon her bed two little black dogs’ which lick her lips and mouth till they turn it ‘as black as a Cole’!  Shiver! 

Yes, there are nine chapters listing the nine follies of Eve (some of which I lifted for evil Brother Thomas to use in my medieval fantasy ‘Dark Angels’). Yes, there are plenty of pious examples taken from the Bible.  But these are constantly enlivened by tabloid stuff such as Chapter 62 (lxij) ‘Of the roper or maker of cordes and kables and of the fat Pryour that was Ryche and a great lechour’. Who wouldn’t want to read it?

A last example:

Fair daughters, see that you begin no strife to no fool [ie: don’t begin arguments with a fool], nor to them that are hasty and hot. For it is great peril. Wherof I shall show to you an example which I saw happen in a Castle wherein many ladies and damsels dwelt. And there was a damsel, daughter of a right good knight. And she wax angry [lost her temper]in playing at tables [gambling] with a gentleman, which was hot and hasty and most Riotous, and was not right wise.  And the debate was of a dice, which she said was not truly made. And so much it increased that words were enhanced, and that she said he was a coward and a fool. And so they left their play by chiding and strife.

Then said I to the damsel, My fair Cousin, anger yourself with nothing that he says, for you know well he is of high words and foolish answers … but she would not [take my advice] and she said to him that he was worth nothing and … not truth; and so the words arose, that he said, if she had been wise and good, she should not come by night into the men’s chamber and kiss them and embrace them without candles. And she … said that he lied, and he said he did not … and there was much people that heard it and knew not what to think.

It seems young people haven’t changed much down the years!  It’s a bright little glimpse of the lives of the privileged, bored and hasty-tempered young noblemen and women of the fourteenth century castle.

From a Book of Hours c. 1460 in the collection of the Walters Art Museum

The Devil At The Centre of The World - by Katherine Langrish

The Flammarion engraving, 1888, artist unknown

“Medieval people thought the world was flat.”  No they didn’t, not educated people at least (and after all there’s still a Flat Earth Society today, whose members appear to believe that the moonshots were a hoax, though it’s hard to tell how many of them are simply having a bit of straight-faced fun.)  And there were plenty of educated medieval people. 

Actually, the pre-Christian early medieval Norse did – theoretically – believe in a sort-of flat earth.  They imagined earth surrounded by an encircling ocean, with Yggdrasil, the World Tree, growing up from the centre of the land.  Even then, the delving roots and high branches of Yggdrasil speak of other dimensions.  But this poetic, mythic explanation of the universe was unlikely to have been applied in any serious way to the voyages the Vikings made, which were guided by careful observation of landmarks and ocean currents, of drifting seaweed and circling gulls, of the migration of whales and the position of stationary clouds over land.

I rather suspect early medieval Norse sailors of performing that simple human trick of being able to believe two incompatible things at once: religio-mythic descriptions of the universe were one thing: the sea route to Greenland was quite another. In my book ‘West of the Moon’, the storm-driven Norse sailors of the knarr ‘Watersnake’, sailing across the North Atlantic, argue about their position:

“What if we miss Vinland altogether and sail over the edge of the world?” Floki piped up, conjuring in every mind a vision of the endless waterfall plunging over the rim of the earth.

“Showing your ignorance, Floki,” said Magnus.  “The world is shaped like a dish, and that keeps the water in.  Ye can’t sail over the edge.”

“That’s not right,” Arnë argued.  “The world’s like a dish, but it’s an upside down dish.  You can see that by the way it curves.”

Magnus burst out laughing.  “Then why wouldn’t the sea just run off?  You can’t pour water into an upside-down dish.”

“It’s like a dish with a rim,” said Gunnar in a tone that brooked no arguments.  “There’s land all round the ocean, just like there’s land all round any lake.  Stands to reason. And that means so long as we keep sailing west, we’ll strike the coastline.”

Gunnar is wrong, of course, but in a practical sense he’s also right.  Sail far enough west from anywhere in Europe, and you’ll strike the American continent somewhere.

And Arnë’s right too in his observation of the curvature of the world’s surface, obvious to any sailor who sees the land rising out of the sea as he sails towards it. In  Canto II of Dante’s early 14^th century ‘Purgatorio’, the boat bringing the souls of the saved to the island of Purgatory rises above the horizon as it approaches: Dante spies the tips of its guiding angel’s wings before the boat itself is visible:

...as Mars reddens through the heavy vapours, low in the west over the waves at the coming of dawn, so a light appeared… coming over the sea so quickly that no flight equals its movement, and when I had taken my eyes from it for a moment to question my guide, I saw it once more, grown bigger and brighter.  Then something white appeared on each side of it, and little by little, another whiteness emerged from underneath it.

My Master did not speak a word, until the first whitenesses were seen to be wings… and it came towards the shore, in a vessel so quick and light that it skimmed the waves.

(trans. A.S. Kline © 2000)

The Greeks of the 4^th century had discovered that the world is a sphere, and the fact was commonsense observation and no news to most medieval people, including churchmen.  However, commonsense observation can also deceive.  With their own eyes, medieval people could see the sun, moon and stars turning around the earth.  But as C. S. Lewis points out in his book ‘The Discarded Image’, this geocentric view of the universe didn’t necessarily mean they thought the central Earth was the most important thing in it.  To get a genuinely Euro-medieval view, you have to turn your ideas about the cosmos inside out.  The eternal, unchangeable, holy realms were all out there, beyond the circuit of the changing Moon.  The sun and moon and stars and planets all turned around the earth, set in crystal spheres, making heavenly harmony as they went.  This is why Lorenzo exclaims to Jessica in ‘The Merchant of Venice’,

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings…

Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1

From The Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

My 12^th century Welsh heroine Nest, in ‘Dark Angels’, expresses it with the aid of a mural painted by her dead mother:

“See this picture, how beautiful it is?  A map of the whole of Creation! Mam painted it herself.  I used to sit on a stool eating nuts and watching her.”

She pointed.  “Look, here’s the Earth in the middle, like a little ball.  All around it is the air. Above that, the Moon.”  She traced a line up the wall.  “Next, Mercury and Venus.”  Her finger landed on a fiery little sun with a human face, crackling with life.  “Here’s the Sun.  Then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, spinning around and around the Earth, all of them set in crystal spheres, each one bigger than the last!  Then, this dark blue circle with the stars painted in it – that’s the Fixed Stars, all turning around together. And then the sphere that makes them all move, and beyond that” – her finger burst through the last ring, like a chicken pecking through an eggshell – “Heaven.”

She drew a deep breath.  “That’s where my mam is!  Outside the universe.  Safe with God.”

There’s a grandness of imagination to the medieval design of the universe, which for centuries worked well as a mathematical model – it takes into account huge distances, but on a human scale.  Humans are small, living on a world that is tiny compared to the vastness of the Primum Mobile, the sphere of the First Mover - but not scarily insignificant. 

Chaucer’s Troilus, in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (written mid 1380’s), ascends to the seventh sphere after his death and looks down:

And when that he was slain in this manere

His lighte ghost full blissfully is went

Up to the holowness of the seventh sphere…

…And down from thennes fast he gan avise

The litel spot of erthe, that with the sea

Embraced is, and fully gan despise

This wrecched world, and held all vanity

To respect of the plain felicity

That is in heven above…

Dante's Satan by Gustave Dore

Hell was of course located underground, at the centre of the earth – where Dante and his guide Virgil find gigantic Satan buried up to the waist at the very bottom of the funnel that is Hell – and have to turn around as they climb down his hairy body, to find themselves ascending as they pass the midpoint of the world.  Dante narrates:

[Virgil] took fast hold upon the shaggy flanks

and then descended, down from tuft to tuft

between the tangled hair and icy crusts.

When we had reached the point at which the thigh

Revolves, just at the swelling of the hip,

My guide, with heavy strain and rugged work

Reversed his head to where his legs had been

And grappled on the hair, as one who climbs.

I thought that we were going back to Hell.

But Virgil explains:

...When I turned, that's when you passed the point

to which, from every part, all weight bears down.

(trans: Allen Mandelbaum)

I’m struck dumb with admiration at Dante’s utterly fantastic feat of imagination here. He died in 1321, and it would be over 350 years before Isaac Newton worked out his theory of gravitation – which underlines my point: people observe things, and can deploy them for practical purposes, long before they can adequately explain them.

By the way, the medieval universe also included another underground world besides Hell.  Tinged with a whiff of the same infernal smoke - with a suspicion that the back door might lead much deeper down - in shallow caves and holes and hollow hills was Elfland…

But that is another story.

Snippets! by Katherine Langrish

I know we’ve all got plenty of these. All historical novelists must have. Fantastic snippets of material we’d LOVE to fit in to the book, anecdotes and incidents far too good not to use, but for which there turns out to be simply no room. But they often still provide invaluable insights into everyday life and attitudes.

Here are some of mine.

Gerald of Wales: Journey Through Wales, copyright British Library

Gerald of Wales, writing in about 1191 in his Description of Wales about hospitality in Welsh homes: he’d travelled through Wales with Archbishop Baldwin to raise support for the Third Crusade, and this account has all the immediacy of personal experience:

"In a Welsh house there are no tables, no tablecloths and no napkins. [Note how this means Gerald expected these items in an Anglo-Norman establishment.] Everyone behaves quite naturally, with no attempt at etiquette. You sit down in threes, not in pairs as elsewhere, and they put the food in front of you all together, on a single large trencher containing enough for three, resting on rushes and grass.

"Alongside one of the walls is placed a communal bed stuffed with rushes (and not all that many of them.) For sole covering there is a stiff harsh sheet, made locally and called in Welsh a brychan. They all go to bed together. They keep on the same clothes they have worn during the day, a thin cloak and tunic, which is all they have to keep the cold out. A fire is kept burning all night at their feet… and they get some warmth from the people sleeping next to them. When their underneath side begins to ache through the hardness of the bed and their uppermost side is frozen stiff with cold, they get up and sit by the fire, which soon warms them up and soothes away their aches and pains. Then they go back to bed again, turning over on their other side if they feel like it, so that a different part is frozen and another side bruised by the hard bed."

A page from the Peterborough Chronicle

Or this, from the Peterborough Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1095:

"In this year Easter was on 25 March, and then after Easter on the eve of St Ambrose’s day, which is 4th April, there were seen nearly all over this country nearly all night very many stars falling from the sky, not by ones or twos but so thickly that nobody could count them."

Or this, the opening of urbane clerk and courtier Walter Map’s description of the court of Henry II some time in the 1170’s:

A COMPARISON OF THE COURT WITH THE INFERNAL REGIONS:

" 'In time I exist and of time I speak,' says Augustine: and add, 'What time is, I know not.' In a like spirit of perplexity I may say that in the Court I exist and of the Court I speak, and what the Court is, God knows, I know not. I do know however that the Court is not Time: temporal indeed it is, changeable and various, stationary and wandering, never continuing in one stay. When I leave it, I know it perfectly: when I come back to I find nothing or but little of what I left there: I am become a stranger to it, and it to me.

"…Hell, it is said, is a penal place, and if I may presume so far I would rashly say that the Court is, not Hell, but a place of punishment. What torment has Hell which is not present here in an aggravated form? Have you read how Tantalus down there catches at streams which shun his lips? Here you may see many a one thirsting for goods of others which he fails to get…"

Later in his book the same Walter Map expresses an eloquent criticism of the Crusades and the crusading order of Knights Templar. We’re all so used to being told that medieval Christendom unanimously approved of the crusades, that to modern ears this may be quite surprising:

"Kings and princes came to think that the object of the Order was good and its way of life honourable, and by the help of popes and patriarchs, honoured them as the defenders of Christendom and loaded them with immense wealth. Now they do what they will and attain whatever they aim at. Nowhere save at Jerusalem are they in poverty; there they take the sword to protect Christendom, which Peter was forbidden to take to defend Christ. There Peter was taught to ensue peace by patience: who taught these to overcome force by violence I know not. They take the sword and perish by the sword. But, say they, all laws and all codes permit the repelling of force by force. Yet He renounced that law Who, when Peter struck a blow, would not call out the legions of angels. It does seem as though these had not chosen the better part…"

In this case I found a way to use Walter Map’s words: not directly, but as evidence that it was actually possible for a medieval man to question the attempt to ‘rescue’ the Holy Land by force. In my book ‘Dark Angels’ set in the early 1190’s, the eager young hero Wolf asks an old soldier, Rollo, to tell him about the siege of Acre.

The joviality died out of Rollo’s face. “Nothing to tell,” he mumbled. “The Saracens opened the gates and came out to surrender: two and half thousand of ‘em, maybe closer to four thousand with the women and children. Two bitter, bloody years they’d held out, and they came out in good order and gave themselves up.”


Wolf felt cheated. He’d wanted tales of gallantry and chivalry. “But there must have been some fighting,” he persisted.


“You want blood?” Rollo twisted round suddenly. “I’ll give you blood. Ask me what we did to the prisoners. Go on, ask! …We butchered them. Every single one of ‘em, men, women and children. The king ordered it and we did it.


“… Killing in battle’s one thing. Slaughtering prisoners - it can’t be right now, can it? In your heart of hearts you know it’s wrong. It would be a relief if someone said so. Seems to me I might have done something bad. Seems to me God might not want people climbing up to Heaven on a pile of corpses. But there’s the pope and the bishops and Holy Church all a-patting me on the back. What if they’re wrong? What if I’m going to Hell instead? What’s - I mean, what’s a man to think?” 




Gerald of Wales, The Description of Wales, trs Lewis Thorpe, Penguin
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, English Historical Documents 1042-1189, ed. David C Douglas, Eyre Methuen
Walter Map's De Nugis Curialum (Of Courtly Trifles) trs M R James, Cymmrodorion Records, 1923