Aelfwald the thane, rich with many lands, liked to give rings to his men, for it enhanced his own dignity.
Now, as the voices in the hall died away to a murmur, he pointed to Port.
“Today,” he announced, “Port received the wergild for the loss of his right hand.” There was a friendly banging on the tables and some laughter. “And so today, my loyal friends, I give him a ring to wear on the hand he still has.” There was a roar of cheerful approval. Port inclined his head gravely. “Keep this ring for me, Port,” the thane cried, “and,” he winked at the audience, “try not to lose it!”
The hall rocked with applause and laughter. Port’s face went crimson with pleasure.
While Aelfwald held the ring high for all to see, his wife moved along the table and ceremoniously offered Port the drinking cup. As soon as he had drunk, Aelfwald himself followed his wife and handed Port the ring. It was a thick band of gold with a runic inscription.
Port fitted the ring on the little finger of his left hand. Then he, too, rapped on the table for silence. As he did so, the merriment ceased; for although the stiff and solemn sheep farmer was regarded as something of a joke, the pledge he must now make in reply to the ring-gift was a serious matter which must be heard with respect.
“Thane Aelfwald is my lord,” he replied solemnly. “I have drunk his mead; I have received his ring. If any man attacks him, I will defend him with my life.”
There were nods of approval. The Saxon code of honour demanded that such oaths should be sworn, and Port, Celtic though his ancestors were, would be as good as his word.
Then Aelfwald raised the huge auroch’s horn to his lips and cried: “Port, we drink to you.” And the company drank the toast.
Several toasts followed. More rings were given and elaborate oaths sworn. Port sat flushed and happy, his wife smiling proudly beside him.
But as he looked around the great hall, the disquieting thought of that morning returned more strongly than ever.
Truly, he thought, it is a fine thing to be called a thane. And he remembered his four hides of land. For the hundredth time he made his calculations. Perhaps I could buy the hide and give Edith a silver cross, he reckoned. That would do. But he knew it would not. The image of his sister rose before his eyes, first angrily, then piteously. He tried to put her out of his mind, but without success, and he frowned with vexation.
His thoughts were interrupted by Aelfwald, who had risen once more to his feet. This time he gave the table three loud bangs, to signal absolute silence, and the hall waited expectantly. This must be the expected announcement and they wondered what it would be.
The thane’s face was now serious, and he looked slowly about him to convey this change of mood to his people. Even young Aelfstan managed to look grave for once. When he judged that the company was ready, he spoke.
“Friends,” he began, “we have eaten and we have drunk mead together. We have taken rings and given oaths. But there is something more important that we have not done yet.” He paused. “I am speaking of our duty to God.”
There was a respectful silence. It was right that a great thane should speak of such things. Did not King Alfred always spur his men on before a fight by reminding them of God’s ever watching eye; had not the king’s own brother won universal admiration for refusing to begin battle, when under attack, until he had finished the mass in his tent?
“This year,” Aelfwald reminded them, “our lord Alfred at last forced the Viking heathens, those wasters and destroyers, to leave our land. Not only that: their fleet was smashed and sunk off our coast. And for these events we must now thank God.” All around the table, those seated bowed their heads, while Aelfwald repeated the little prayer of which he was especially fond:
And suddenly moved himself, the thane went on:
“Our life on earth is short.” He glanced up at the rest of the great hall. High in the beams were several birds’ nests, and at each end through a small square ventilation hole, the birds were accustomed to go in and out. “It is like a sparrow that flies through the hall. It comes from outside, and flies away again, no one knows where. And so, friends, we travel, from darkness to darkness. For the few years of our life we live in the great hall.” He paused, unable to find more words to express the transitory nature of life. “But there is a greater hall,” he went on, “where life is eternal.”
Port nodded slowly at the thane’s words. They expressed exactly his own feelings, though he could never had spoken them himself.
“Today I have an important announcement,” the thane continued. “For when my mother died, I swore an oath to her, that I would give generously to God’s Church.” He looked about the room. “Four years ago I established the religious house on my estate at Twyneham, where my son Aelfwine is a monk.” There was a murmur of approval. “Today, I decided that Osric the carpenter’s son shall go at my expense to the school at Canterbury to learn the art of illumination.” At this there was applause. “But this is not enough,” the thane cried. “And so, to redeem the oath I swore to my mother, I am making a new endowment.” Port wondered what this could be. A gift to the nunnery perhaps? “In the field beside this place, where the cross now stands,” Aelfwald proclaimed, “I will build a church. It will be made not of wood, like this hall, but of stone. And I will give land to support a priest who will minister there.”
There was an awed silence. Such churches, the first of the parish churches of England, were still a rarity; and a church of stone still more so. There had only been one other in the area, just south of the place where the five rivers met, at the little hamlet of Britford, where a former king had endowed a small structure on his estate there, using stones from the ruins of Roman Sorviodunum; but no one else in the area had done such an ambitious thing in a generation. The cost of such a building, even a modest structure, would be formidable and represented a major sacrifice even to a wealthy man like Aelfwald.
Port stared down at the table. His mind was in a whirl. As he thought of his own unwillingness to redeem his own vow to his sister he felt his face go scarlet with shame.
“I am unworthy to be a thane,” he moaned softly to himself.
And then, as Aelfwald sat down and the toasts were drunk again, he knew what he must do.
His face still flushed, his head spinning slightly, he rose a little unsteadily to his feet. As the hubbub around him died down, and the faces of the feasters turned towards him in surprise, he cried out, so that his thin voice echoed round the hall:
“I, Port, to redeem the pledge I gave my sister Edith, give to the nunnery of Wilton a fine gold cross, for the glory of God.”
He sank down. It was done. The people applauded. His honour was satisfied. And the money was gone.
He would never be a thane now.
He sat by his wife, hardly knowing what to think. He trembled with pride: yet, though he tried to disregard it, in the pit of his stomach, he felt a terrible coldness at the great opportunity he had lost. His face now burning, he stared down into his lap, and when from the head of the table Aelfwald gave him a warm smile of encouragement, he did not see it.
In the darkness outside the hall, a light snow had begun to fall over Sarum: a token, it seemed that this winter at least, there would be peace.
It was an hour after dawn. In the little wooden chapel where the six monks performed their simple devotions, Osric rose stiffly from his knees. There was a cold, hard January frost on the ground.
It was time to begin the day, and like all his days at the monastic cell, the boy was dreading it. For nearly half an hour he had been praying alone; but his prayers had brought him no comfort. One thought, and only one kept him going: “Six months more,” he whispered, “and then I’ll be sent to Canterbury.” If he could just work out how to get through them.
At the place where the two rivers, the Avon and the Stour, ran into the sheltered harbour by the sea, there was now a modest settlement of some two dozen houses protected by a palisade, which had acquired the name Twyneham. It meant the place by two rivers, and like Wilton, it was set in the angle between them. Opposite lay the long spit of land with its low hill that protected the shallow harbour from the turbulence of the English Channel; and along the northern side of the harbour, to the east of Twyneham, lay the broad, flat marshland that gradually turned into woods as one went further inland. It was here that Aelfwald owned a large hunting estate, and it was on the edge of the wood that he had carved a spacious, dry clearing on which the modest buildings of the little monastery stood.
The thane’s endowment of a monastic cell was a rarity. In the last generation there had been fewer monks in Wessex, despite the fine old monasteries it possessed. Those that continued had often degenerated into communities where the rules were lax or almost non-existent. And though the king was constantly urging his nobles to improve the situation, few of the young men of his kingdom had been volunteering to enter monastic orders. In this respect, Aelfwine was unusual, and Alfred had warmly congratulated the thane on his modest initiative. Though the cell consisted of only a dormitory, a refectory with its kitchen, and a Chapel, in effect three enlarged huts, it did boast a fine psalter and a pair of magnificent jewelled candlesticks given by the thane’s wife.
There, under the vague and somewhat informal leadership of Aelfwine, the six monks led an approximate version of the life prescribed under the great and wise Rule of St Benedict.
Osric turned to leave the chapel. At dawn the six monks had sung the first of the day’s seven offices in the chapel. Before the next, Prime, he must sweep the little courtyard outside the chapel clean; and before the third service, Tierce, he must work in the kitchens, preparing the modest meal,
prandium
, that would be eaten at noon. But between Tierce and noon, when the little bell would be rung for the midday meal, he had some two hours of free time. As always, that time he would spend out in the marshes, away from the monks. And this was for a very good reason.
Now as he left the chapel, he spoke aloud a final prayer:
“Please God, do not let Aelfwine touch me again.”
Why had the thane’s son chosen to be a monk? It was believed by some at Sarum that it was because he had not been able to live up to the strength and prowess of his brothers.
“Even Aelfgifu could break him with her little finger,” it was said; and indeed, it was well known that when she was a girl of twelve, she had humiliated him in a wrestling match before a crowd of children, and that he had never got over it. It was not that Aelfwine was weak: in any other family he would have been normal: but by the standards of his brothers and sister, he was inadequate.
Whatever his reasons were, at the age of fifteen Aelfwine had told his family that he wanted to become a monk, and since then he had never altered his mind. He was twenty-five now – a fair, sparely built young man, usually rather reserved in his manner, but whose pale blue eyes seemed to shine sometimes with an intensity that was not quite natural. To Osric it seemed that he smiled too much.
At first it was nothing: the young man had been kind to the boy his father had sent: each week he had given him religious instruction, and he had sent back good reports of him to Avonsford from time to time. The other monks, too, were kind, instructing him in his daily tasks, which were certainly not onerous. Indeed, on the land which his family leased from the thane, the work was much harder. Occasionally, during their lessons, Aelfwine used to walk about the room, and once or twice paused and rested his hand on the boy’s head – a gesture which Osric had hardly even noticed at the time.
Nor had young Osric thought much about it when one day Aelfwine sat next to him, and at one point had allowed his hand to rest lightly on his leg. It had not seemed so remarkable. Osric looked up to the thane’s son, even if instinctively he liked him less than Aelfgifu or his brothers. If Aelfwine showed him a small sign of affection, he felt honoured.
Often, when he was working at his tasks. Aelfwine came and spoke a few friendly words to him, or chatted with him easily about his life. When he rang the little bell attached to the side of the wooden chapel as the monks went in to their devotions, the young man usually gave him a pleasant smile. All these were small attentions which Osric was grateful for. And if Aelfwine sometimes let him walk with him and the other monks across the flat open ground to the river, or by the harbour shore, he would return more cheerful than before. But once, when Aelfwine had walked with him alone and put his arm round him, the boy for some reason felt uncomfortable. He felt his body freeze, uncertain what to do; and he had been glad when, after a time, Aelfwine disengaged his arm, to point at a heron, scudding over the harbour water.