Crusade

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that, we are both too stubborn to give in yet. But we will be the last of our breed. There’s no shame in that — all lineages come to an end, even the mightiest, and the Gul and the Cerdicians have much to be proud of.’

William does not answer; he knows that Edgar is right. He smiles warmly, bows deferentially and kicks his mount eastwards beyond Ashgyll Force towards the ford over the Grue Water.

An hour or so later, as William and Roger begin the climb up Black Fell to traverse the high moors to Appleby, they hear the ominous scream of the Helm Wind. It is cold and gloomy and more like dusk than the middle of the day.

Then, as if the Helm Wind has heralded him, Owain Rheged appears, just as he did on that day over a week ago, a day that now seems a lifetime away.

He is standing on a crag about 100 feet above them, wrapped in a bearskin. He raises his ram’s-head staff above his head as a salute and a grant of safe passage through the land of the Gul, England’s last vestige of the people of Ancient Britain.

William and Roger halt their horses, and William raises his hand in a reciprocal gesture of friendship.

After all the trauma of their journey to reach Edgar’s lair and the long, tiring days and nights hearing his story, Roger is at last at ease.

‘Abbott, you were right about this journey. I am privileged to have heard Prince Edgar’s account in this mysterious place.’

‘So you should be. We have touched three ages of these islands in a heritage that spans hundreds of years. Owain Rheged is a remnant of the people who ruled this land centuries before the legions of Rome came here. Edgar is the last of the Saxons who ruled here after the Romans left. And, my instincts tell me, Harold of Hereford represents the future. He is an Englishman, but one who has embraced Norman ways and thus thickened his English blood. His service in the King’s guard would make his parents and grandparents, and all who followed their cause, very proud of him.

‘He is the future of these islands. When I am long gone and he is ready to tell his story, you would do well to seek him out and ask him to share it with you.’

Roger of Caen turns round to take one last look at Owain Rheged, but the Druid has gone.

‘Thank you, Abbott; perhaps I will come back here too, to see if the Gul survive another generation.’

‘Good idea. We’ll make a scribe out of you yet.’

Postscript

The motives of Alexius I, the Emperor of Byzantium, in calling for help from the Latin Princes in 1094, were largely met. The Crusade helped him subdue the Seljuk Turks of Anatolia and stabilize the empire in the south and east. He died in 1118.

Following his death, he was succeeded by his son, John Comnenus, whose reign was the high point of a Comneni dynasty noted for the wisdom and justice of its rule. His own tenure as Emperor was so highly regarded that he became known as ‘John the Beautiful’.

The Crusades continued for nearly 200 years and, by 1292, numbered nine major expeditions in total. But there were also smaller Crusades, including a Children’s Crusade (mostly teenagers and young men) in 1212, where none made it to the Holy Land and few managed to survive crossing the Alps. Some Crusades had other targets, including pagan Balts, Mongols, Slavs, Christian Heretics and Greek Orthodox Christians.

Pope Urban II, the instigator of the First Crusade, died in Rome two weeks after the fall of Jerusalem, but before the news had reached the Holy See.

Robert of Flanders returned to find his realm in chaos. His reputation from the Crusade stood him in good stead and he brought order back to Flanders and lived until 1111.

Gaston of Bearn travelled to Spain, where he lent his siege skills to the fight against the Moors.

Raymond of Toulouse returned to the Holy Land in the ill-fated Crusade of 1101. He eventually turned his attention to creating a Christian enclave in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. He died in the attempt in 1105. The city finally fell in 1109 and his son, Bertrand, completed his father’s mission. Tripoli remained a Christian city until 1289.

Stephen of Blois returned home in disgrace. Under pressure from his formidable wife, Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, he tried to redeem himself by returning to the Holy Land with the Crusade of 1101, where he perished at the hands of the Seljuk Turks.

Bohemond of Taranto, not satisfied with his lordship of Antioch, travelled to the Adriatic in 1105 to mount a campaign, sanctioned by Pope Paschal II, against the Byzantine rule of Alexius I. He was heavily defeated by Alexius at the Battle of Durazzo and was forced to sign a humiliating surrender. He returned to southern Italy a broken man and died in 1111.

It fell to Tancred of Hauteville to consolidate the Christian hold on Antioch. He increased its power to rival even that of Jerusalem. He died in 1112. Even though his successor, Roger of Salerno, nearly lost all