Now that Port had made his accusation, the court could move on to the trial.
In doing so, it would follow the traditional Anglo-Saxon procedure, hallowed by the centuries: there would be no advocates, no jury, and no examination of any evidence. Despite these apparent drawbacks, the system worked.
For the time being, all that mattered was that the extent of the injury should be known – a hand had been lost, but not a whole forearm; and this was important.
At a nod from the earldorman, Port lowered his arm and began to bind it up again.
“Have you any other injury?”
Port shook his head.
“But he struck me four times,” he added.
“The number of blows makes no difference,” Wulfhere reminded him.
“Four times,” Port repeated obstinately, and many in the crowd smiled; for his meticulous precision was so well known that there was a local saying: when grain is ground, Port counts each grain.
The injury had taken place two weeks before, in that very market place. Sigewulf, a local farmer, had left his horse straying in the street while he was drinking in one of the booths by the market. When he had reeled out in the dusk, he had seen Port, who was leading his horse to a post to tether it, and in his befuddled state he had decided that the fellow was trying to steal the animal. Furious, he had lurched towards him; there had been a scuffle; he had drawn his sword, waved it wildly, and as Port had raised his arm, the accident had occurred. He did not remember striking four times; but Port was adamant that he had.
Now it was Sigewulfs turn to tell his story. He was a short, thickset man whose sullen manner, even when he was sober, did not inspire confidence.
“Port attacked me,” he said. “I struck him once, not four times; it was self-defence. He tried to steal my horse.”
He finished. He knew the crowd was against him, but it did not matter; nor did it matter that his version of the events was improbable. For the Anglo-Saxon court took no account of evidence.
The trial had now reached its crucial stage. It was time to hear the oath helpers. At a sign from Port, three men stepped forward into the circle and announced their names and ranks. All were churls: small, free farmers.
“Upon the blood of Christ,” each repeated, “I swear that Port’s accusation is true.”
Immediately, three churls stepped forward and swore similarly on behalf of Sigewulf.
This was the ancient oath swearing upon which Saxon justice turned. No evidence was examined, no jury asked to decide on the merits of the case: but the number of oath swearers each side could produce, together with the rank of the swearer, decided the outcome. The oath of a slave counted for nothing; the word of a churl, as a free peasant, had weight. The word of a thane, a noble, outweighed that of any number of churls; an earldorman outweighed a thane; the word of the king, of course, could not be questioned.
The apparent stalemate between the parties was broken however, as a splendid figure now stepped into the circle.
He was a tall, well-built man in his forties. He had been standing quietly at one side of the circle with a group of young men and a girl whose strikingly blond good looks marked them out as his children. He carried himself with an air of easy authority; his blue eyes seemed amused, and as he came forward, Sigewulf’s face looked more depressed than ever.
“Aelfwald the thane,” he announced calmly. “I swear that Port’s words are true.”
There was a murmur from the crowd, followed by silence. No thane stepped forward for Sigewulf. The case was over.
Wulfhere looked at the three elderly men before announcing the verdict.
“The decision is for Port,” the three men agreed, without hesitation.
“So be it,” Wulfhere announced. “The wergild will be paid for his hand. His lord will be compensated accordingly.”
No system of law was more important than the ancient code of the wergild. Under the wergild system, every Anglo-Saxon, in common with other Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, knew the exact value of his life, and that depended on his rank. The life of a churl was worth two hundred shillings; that of a thane, like Aelfwald, six times as much, and the price to be paid for an injury, like the loss of a hand or a leg, was calculated in proportion. It was for this reason that it had been necessary for Port to show his injury to the court: the loss of a hand was one thing; but if he had lost his whole forearm, Sigewulf would have had to pay more. The wergild payments, codified in writing the century before by the great King Ine of Wessex, were essential to the ordering of society. Without them, any injury done to an individual would, under the strict code of honour of all the Germanic tribes, have meant that his family must begin a blood feud. But by paying a fixed compensation instead, most of these costly feuds could be avoided. It was a sensible system for settling disputes, which King Alfred encouraged.
The trial by open court was a primitive affair, but it had its benefits too. Since every man above the rank of slave had his individual wergild, no one, not even an earidorman, could attack him with impunity. The trial moreover, was a communal business, conducted by free men. The judgement was not simply handed down by Earidorman Wulfhere, but agreed and witnessed for the community by the three old farmers, learned in the law. It was in these quaint courts, deriving from ancient Germanic folk practice, that the common law of the English speaking people had its roots.
Under the judgement just given, Port and his family would be compensated by the family of Sigewulf, and since he was Port’s lord, Aelfwald would also receive a payment because his man had been harmed.
Sigewulf could only count himself lucky that the king had been absent from Wilton on the day of the incident, as otherwise he might have been judged to have broken the king’s peace and have had to pay a fine to the reeve as well.
Sigewulf shook his head sadly nonetheless. He had known the case would probably go against him, but the price he would have to pay was considerable. This was for two reasons: firstly because wergild payments were deliberately set high to encourage peaceful behaviour; and secondly, because Port belonged to a rare class in Anglo-Saxon society. He was what some folk called half a thane, and his wergild, though only half that of Aelfwald, was therefore three times that of an ordinary churl. For Port’s ancestors had been noble Britons.
The ancient Roman name of Porteus had been long forgotten at Sarum, and so had most of the remains of the Roman world. Many of the metalled roads were overgrown, and some had disappeared entirely; there were new pathways in the valleys, and on long journeys travellers might easily take the old, prehistoric tracks up on the high ridges. The towns, the temples and baths built of stone, had nearly all gone, except in the great port of London where the shells of some of the old buildings lingered on. In King Alfred’s new capital of Winchester, the old Venta, parts of the stout Roman wall remained; but the settlement of Sorviodunum was marshy grazing land and where the old Porteus villa had been, with its mosaics and its hypocaust, there now stood a fine timber barn with a steep gabled roof, and just below it, the sprawling farmstead and splendid oak-beamed hall of the family of Thane Aelfwald.
Not that the memory of Roman and Celtic times had died. The river Avon had kept its Celtic name; so had the river Wylye to the west. The memory of a Roman spring – fontana – was alive a few miles up the Wylye at the estate of Fonthill. And besides, though the old Roman Empire had departed from the west of Europe, everyone in its many kingdoms knew that Rome was civilisation. Was not the Bible, were not all the works of philosophy, literature and learning to be found in the churches and monasteries of Europe, written in Latin? Had not Charlemagne, the greatest emperor Europe had seen in centuries, taken care to be crowned in Rome? Had not King Alfred himself made three journeys there when still a boy? The imperial troops had long gone, but their legacy would never die.
If the Porteus family name had become obscure, this was only a matter of convention: the Saxons rarely used surnames in the Roman or the modern manner: neither Earldorman Wulfhere nor thane Aelfwald had more than a single personal name. And the stubborn Porteus family, who reminded each new generation that they had been famous Romans once, had themselves forgotten how to pronounce their own name. Over the centuries they had called themselves by names such as Port, Porta or Porter, which were recognisable to Saxon ears as terms meaning doorman or gatekeeper.
“Never forget,” Port told his two young sons, as he pointed to the dune at Sarum, “when this place was taken, we were the lords of it and we fought bravely.”
This was true. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded for the year 552: “Cynric fought the Britons at a place called Searobyrg and put them to flight.” This was the dune, whose new Saxon name meant the place of battle. There the descendants of Petrus Porteus had fought bravely and lost; and the only survivor of the family, whose valour the Saxons admired, was honoured by them after the final surrender. It was because of this incident three centuries before that Port kept the last remnants of his nobility in the wergild which marked him out as, if not a thane, at least something more than an ordinary churl.
The old Porteus wealth was gone. The villa and most of its lands, were taken from them and given to the family of Aelfwald the thane. But not all. While the Saxons took the rich land on the lower slopes, the Porteus family was allowed to keep the bare land on the high ground; and here, in a small farmstead, sowing a little corn and pasturing the white sheep their ancestor had brought to the place, the descendants of Sarum’s ancient lords had lived for three hundred years.
But today, all this could change; and this was Port’s terrible dilemma. For today’s events had given him a chance to raise his family to a position it had not known in centuries.
“With the money from the wergild added to what I am holding,” he thought, “by sunset tomorrow I can be a thane.” And not for the first time that morning he shook his head in discouragement. Yes, it could certainly be done, but to do it, he must break his word: and the promise he had made to his sister Edith was a solemn one. Worse, now that the trial was over, he was about to have to confront her. If only there were some way out.
“Well, are you coming?”
The tall figure of Aelfwald was beside him. He was smiling broadly. The two men, so strangely contrasted, liked each other, and though Port’s secret ambition was to become a thane himself, he had no complaint to make about his lord.
Accompanying Aelfwald was a small retinue consisting of two of his sons, his daughter, a boy dressed in the habit of a novice monk, and a young man with a pinched, ageless face, whom Port recognised as the slave called Tostig.
Port nodded to them. It was clear from the grins on the faces of Aelfwald’s children that they regarded him as something of a joke, but he did not mind. The sons: Aelfric and Aelfstan – the repetition of the first syllable in a family’s name was a typically Saxon custom – were close in age. Aelfric, the eldest, was twenty-six; and the girl, Aelfgifu, was only eighteen. He bowed to her gravely. He did not dislike the cheerful, rather childish high spirits of the young men, but Aelfgifu’s wild, tomboy antics shocked his sense of propriety. It was of course this which gave the thane’s children such delight in teasing him.
Aelfwald looked at this little retinue contentedly. He was typical of the Saxon folk who had made the island their own: an easy-going, even-tempered man, with a mind that moved slowly, but steadily. He was not much given to argument or speculation, but once he had seized an idea that he believed in, he could be massively obstinate in defending it. The fiery Celtic peoples, who had held out in Wales, despised what they saw as the slow-witted Saxon settlers who had taken their lands; but their contempt was not necessarily returned, and the two communities had long since lived on the island with only sporadic outbreaks of violence over the border.
Aelfwald had good reason to take a comfortable view of life. The thane possessed estates in several parts of Wessex, including a fine area of woodland down at the coast. His eldest son was married and he had already been able to give him handsome farms. He hoped soon to find a husband for Aelfgifu.
“Though who’ll want to marry such a tomboy, the Lord knows,” he complained laughingly to his wife.
Now the trial was over, he was going personally to conduct his man back to his farm where Port’s wife and two sons were waiting; and that night he had invited Port and all his other dependants to a feast in his spacious hall in the valley.
But first they must pay the visit that was causing Port so much secret anguish.
Together the party moved along the main street of Wilton.
It was a small, sheltered town, pleasantly situated in the angle where the rivers Wylye and Nadder ran together. The stout wooden wall around its west side, despite the fact that a Danish force had briefly overrun the place seven years before, was still only half finished, and the palisades and banks that completed the circuit had been left in some disrepair for the winter. The little river Nadder wandered along the southern edge of the town; trees flanked the river, and magnificent oaks and beeches stood on the slopes that led quietly up towards the great chalk plateau on the northern side. The two central features of the place were the small market square, surrounded by modest wooden buildings, and a large building in stone that lay just east of it. This was the Kingsbury, the royal palace, for although King Alfred was now lavishing more attention on the larger town of Winchester, Wilton was still the second most important royal town in his kingdom.