Crusade

The rebellion was over in the rest of the country. Rufus had acted swiftly and decisively and his supporters had followed his lead. One of the most dramatic stories came from the far west. The rebel earl, Geoffrey of Coutances, had recruited hundreds of troublesome Welsh tribesmen to swell the numbers of his own retinue and those of his landowners. They had laid waste to vast parts of the Marches and slaughtered livestock, burned villages and torched acres of tinder-dry crops. It was reported that for days on end the whole of Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire had been covered in a pall of acrid smoke.

This wanton destruction united non-rebellious Normans and non-aligned Englishmen in fierce indignation and common cause. Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, became the voice of incensed protest, issuing a solemn curse on the rebels. Over eighty years of age, a patron of music and learning and the only surviving Englishman from pre-Conquest days to hold the rank of bishop in the realm, he then led a citizen army to challenge the Norman rebels in battle.

Driven on by his oratory, a motley crew numbered in thousands, composed of English clerics, townsfolk and yeoman farmers, lined up behind Norman lords loyal to King Rufus and hurled themselves on to the rebel army. In a battle of astonishing savagery, joined just four miles east of Hereford at the confluence of the Wye and the Lugg in the tranquil water meadows of Mordiford, Wulfstan’s zealots cut the insurgent Normans to pieces.

After the melee, Wulfstan stepped into the morass of bodies and, from the middle of the battlefield, said Mass for the dead and dying. He then proceeded to preach to the dead about their wrongdoing in threatening the peace and security of England before condemning them to the fires of Hell for eternity. He ordered a mass grave to be dug, insisting that every participant in the battle, whether earl or villein, wielded a pick or shovel until the task had been completed. The number of dead was so great that the grisly chore was still underway a week later.

As we made our way to the forces of King Rufus besieging Pevensey, Sweyn, Adela and I reflected on Wulfstan’s deeds and what had become of our homeland. Bishop Wulfstan was the oldest and most senior Englishman of stature in the land. He had lived through the reigns of the Danish kings and the long tenure of King Edward. His loyalty to Harold was absolute throughout 1066 and the revolts which followed, but now, regardless of what had happened in the past, like us, he found himself fighting for a regime which had subjugated his own people.

‘Does it really matter to be English or Norman?’

Sweyn would never have asked such a question before, but his love for Mahnoor, a girl of a different faith from a distant land, had led him to question many of his assumptions previously cast in stone.

‘I’m not sure. I often ask myself the same question. We’re all God’s children. Perhaps that’s all that matters?’

Adela also had her misgivings about a blind devotion to the English cause.

‘If you think about what Hereward and the Brotherhood fought for at Ely, it wasn’t simply justice for the English; it was justice for all men and women. There were Normans within the Brotherhood, as well as men from Spain and Wales, and many Anglo-Danes from the north.’

Sweyn warmed to the point.

‘We have spent a large part of our lives in Aquitaine and recently in Sicily where Count Roger is creating a domain based on fair and equal treatment of all men.’

Adela quickly added a rejoinder.

‘And women! Where the Mos Militum is a code of honour accepted by knights and where I, as a woman normally denied independent status, can rise to the level of a knight of Islam.’

We could smell death two hours before we reached Pevensey. The defenders had finally capitulated and those who had survived the six weeks of the siege were being led away — at least, those who could walk. Farm carts carried those too weak to go on foot, and more carts brought out the dead, which was by far the greater number.

Odo and Mortain, together with their knights and their elite guards, looked reasonably well fed and watered, but the rest of the garrison — over 400 people — were in a dreadful condition. Water had been severely rationed from the outset and food supplies started to dwindle after a couple of weeks. In the end, rats were being caught and eaten and the final supplies of flour limited to a handful per person per day. Order had been maintained only under pain of death until the majority were either dead or too weak to protest.