To the River

by Olivia Laing

  By the time Edward returned the fighting was done and the town choked with fleeing soldiers. According to the chronicle of Lanercost Abbey, which was supposedly based on an eyewitness report, the soldiers fled out of Lewes by way of the Ouse, crossing the bridge at Cliffe that was then the way out to the east. There:

  . . . the mixed crowd of fugitives and pursuers became so great, that many in their anxiety to escape, leaped into the river, whilst others fled confusedly into the adjoining marshes, then a resort for sea fowl. Numbers were drowned and others suffocated in the pits of mud, while from the swampy nature of the ground, many knights who perished there, were discovered, after the battle, still sitting on their horses in complete armour, and with drawn swords in their lifeless hands. Quantities of arms were found in this quarter for many years afterwards.

  The coincidence of men and horses dying simultaneously in the mud, without even a moment to lower their sword-arms, has been much remarked upon by later, less credulous writers, though many accounts agree that a mass of bodies and armour was later dredged from the water.

  Simon might have won the battle, but he’d yet to capture the king, who was by this time barricaded in the priory with his son. For a while he tried to burn them out, using spryngelles of fyre – pellets of tow dipped in bitumen, naphtha and sulphur – to set alight the wooden houses of the town. Lewes is claustrophobic even now, with narrow twittens dropping away from the high street, and it must that night have been a place of horror, strewn with the bodies of dead and dying men and horses, the church of the priory lit up in flames, so that the author of the chronicle of Oxenede was moved to write: ‘It was there seen that the life of man was as the grasses of heaven; a great multitude, unknown to me, was slain.’ But most of the dead would have been the common foot soldiers, the bran-dealers, soap boilers and clowns, who had borne the brunt of a battle that would barely change their lot.

  In the end, by threatening the execution of three royalist prisoners, Simon de Montfort won the king’s surrender and an agreement to uphold the Provisions, subject to whatever amendment was required. He became the de facto ruler of England, though support rapidly ebbed away from the baronial cause, not helped by Simon’s habit of helping himself to the country’s treasures. For a year Longshanks and Henry were held as hostages, though they were neither manacled nor locked in a tower. By May 1265, the inevitable had occurred. Edward escaped, an army was raised and in August, after a punishing series of sorties, the great set-piece battle of Lewes was reprised at Evesham, with entirely different results. The baronial army was by then small and exhausted; it no longer had the upper hand. On seeing Edward’s troops ride towards him, Simon is said to have cried out, with characteristic arrogance: ‘By the arm of St James, they come on well. They learned that order from me.’ A little later, and perhaps more quietly, he added: ‘God take our souls, for they will have our bodies.’

  The battle that followed was savage and brief, conducted on a hill near the river Avon during a sudden thunderstorm. Henry III was on the field, still a prisoner and dressed in Montfortian armour. More than one contemporary source describes him wandering between the soldiers in the pouring rain, crying out at intervals, ‘I am Henry of Winchester your king, do not kill me,’ and ‘I am too old to fight,’ until he was recognised and removed by royalists from the fray. As for Simon, his horse was killed beneath him and his armour dragged from his body. Then he was stabbed to death, and his body mutilated, though a knight was never usually killed in cold blood.

  There is a strange drawing now in the British Museum that shows some of what took place. Simon’s head, his hands, his feet and his genitals were lopped off. In the drawing they lie by his side, his head topped with curls, his neck gushing blood. His balls – but this the picture doesn’t show – were draped across the bridge of his nose and stuffed into his mouth, and this desecrated relic was wrapped in a cloth and sent to the wife of Roger Mortimore, a royalist knight, who is said to have received it as she prayed in church.

  The sea trout were no longer visible. The water was unpitted now; it caught the sky lightly and tossed it back. I’d begun to feel sick as I stood by the pool, and for the rest of the day I felt that I’d taken in some poison, though whether it had seeped from the dark water or fallen with the sun I couldn’t tell. It was time to get going. I crossed the road by Pikes Cottage and ducked through a gap in the hedge. My skin had dried as if it had been varnished, and all the cuts on my legs and wrists were smarting. It had been very hot, this proto-summer; perhaps the concentration of phosphates in that little stream had been too strong. From the road the path climbed up above the river, curving through dusty fields and across the dry, chalk-crusted beds of streams. I passed through a field of maize and one of wheat. Mayweed grew between the stones, and as I walked I kicked up circlets of dust from the dead ground. There was not a soul in sight, and in the distance I could make out Mount Harry and beside it the glaring white mark of the chalkpit at Offham, where skeletons of the fleeing Londoners had been found buried in groups of four or five.

  The past seemed to have fallen across the landscape like a body that though voiceless somehow still leaked or bled its language without pause. The horror of what had happened here had seeped into the soil as rain will do, waiting in the hidden interstitial spaces like groundwater before a flood. ‘The past only comes back,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her unfinished memoir, ‘when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.’ I wondered if the river itself was holding it, for some things are drawn to water and behave differently when they are near it. I’ve watched mist gather on the surface of a stream where there is none elsewhere, and seen those little circling courts of flies that dance all evening above a single kink in a current. Voices travel further by water too, as if the air’s been pulled so taut it carries impressions that would elsewhere be too subtle to perceive.

  ‘Is it not possible,’ Woolf asks earlier in the same piece, ‘that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?’ It’s the same argument ghost hunters tender: that events are locked into the ground just as surely as gold coins lie buried there, invisible to the eye but emitting their own small disruptions to the magnetic field. There’s a hill outside Halland, a few miles east of where I stood, that’s still called Terrible Down, for the blood that was spilled there by Prince Edward’s men. By the Rainbow in Cooks-bridge, maybe a mile or so the other way, bodies are said to have been hung from the trees till they rotted, to warn of the cost of fighting a king. The brutality of it reminded me of one of the beliefs of the Albigensians, the heretical sect that Simon de Montfort’s father spent his life eradicating. They thought, among other strange things, that the God of the Old Testament was in fact the Devil, and that no punishment awaits us, for this world, where man is wolf to man, is hell already and shall not be repeated.

  Simon de Montfort, though he favoured the russet clothes of the poor over the baronial red and wore anyway beneath them a close-fitting hair shirt to chafe away the sins of the flesh, was by no means a saint, for all that he was later proclaimed one. But if greed drove him, or the desire to elevate his own family, so too did a sense of basic justice. Listen, he speaks for himself: ‘The great men of the land bear me such ill-will because I uphold rights . . . of the poor against them.’ The picture of his end had imprinted itself on my mind. The blood came from his neck in flames, whelk-red, and also from his legs; when his son heard what had been done it is written that he could neither eat nor drink for days.

  I weighed it up, his death, against a story Matthew Paris tells, that dates from just before the war took hold. The king was caught in a storm and forced to take shelter at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, where Simon was coincidentally also staying. Simon, knowing the king was afraid of storms, came to the steps to greet him and seeing his face blanched white asked why he was scared now the danger had pa
ssed. The king, Paris claims, answered: ‘The thunder and lightning I fear beyond measure, but by the Head of God, I fear thee more than all the thunder and lightning in the world.’ It was the earl’s reply that had stayed with me. ‘My lord it is unjust and incredible that you should fear me your firm friend, who am ever faithful to you and yours, and to the kingdom of England; it is your enemies, your destroyers, and false flatterers that you ought to fear.’

  What drove him? Avarice? Arrogance? An unwillingness to break the vow he’d sworn in 1258, to uphold the Provisions whatever others might do? A case may be made for all of these things. Montfort did have a tendency – echoed three centuries on by Thomas Cromwell, the commoner who guided Henry Tudor through his break with Rome – to feather his nest, giving choice appointments to his family members and bringing domestic matters into what should perhaps have been purely political affairs. And yet he was also loyal and dogged, his word was his bond, and he possessed a clarity and independence of mind that would be rare in any time.

  What is it about these men who check the king, that they must be torn into so many parts? When Thomas Cromwell, who resembled de Montfort in his vision, his arrogance and his acumen, fell out of favour with Henry VIII, he also suffered a bloody death. His head was cut off and boiled, and what remained of it was placed on a spike on London Bridge, turned emphatically away from the city he loved. And though Oliver Cromwell, who went to war against King Charles and won, died in his bed of what seems to have been septicaemia, his body was three years later disinterred and subjected to a posthumous execution. For months afterwards the stinking head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall, that building so loved by Henry III. No one need pity old Ironsides, but there is a peculiar savagery in this need to take a man to such pieces that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together what was broken again.

  The light was getting to me. There was nothing to stop it. It came bowling down in strips and sheets and lifted in waves from the ground. At length I came to a farm that seemed to have been deserted in the centre of a great furrowed field. The barn stood open, and on the ground before it were ranked trays of rotting bedding plants, marigolds and begonias, their leaves as dry and discoloured as paper salvaged from a fire. The morning, which had started so well, had curdled and begun to sour. I felt I couldn’t walk another step, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to stop in that horrible, poisoned place. A harrow had drawn the flints to the surface, so that the field seemed bleached or drained. I began to count to a hundred over and again, and the green tips of the woodland stayed just out of reach until all of a sudden I was plunged within them, breathing the reek of dog shit and elder-blossom, the contaminated summer air.

  The path crossed the village of Hamsey and then I was flung out again, onto the banks where the sun beat down. The river was tidal now, and the tide was on the ebb, stinking of salt and carrying clotted creamish foam and a waste of rotten thistles. It was running far faster than I’d seen it. You’d be a fool, I thought, to swim in these teeming waters. At Hamsey Island it churned the colour of molten chocolate and as I rounded the corner and saw Lewes a cormorant winged by. There were two boys fishing on the island, both with shaved heads and shell suit jackets. They had a net and as I passed by one called out in fury I fucking nearly caught it.

  I was walking at the top of a grassy bank built to stop the river from flooding. The meadows below were edged by ditches that sprouted scrubby, waterlogged willows, their branches tipped with gold. It was here that the Londoners are said to have drowned, rushing from the heights onto ground that grew steadily quicker, shifting beneath their feet until it had them by the knee, the waist, until it had swallowed them up and marked where they lay with weeds, if it bothered to mark them at all. Much of this land was once underwater or on the verge of it, and even now it’s hard to track the little streams that dither hereabouts. Some have broken through where they’re not supposed to go, and a fisherman I once met claimed there are pike in even the narrowest ditches, though whether these are refugees from the last flood or proof that some channels are linked by underground waterways he’d not yet determined. He also told me about a bottomless pool in a wood he called the Pells, though that’s not the name it goes by on maps. Matthew and I went to find it last winter, with some friends who live nearby, and for a whole still afternoon we clattered through woods so deep and damp and sunk in upon themselves that though we were only feet from each other it seemed we might at any minute become hopelessly lost.

  I went on in the sick heat up through the Landport estate, where England flags bloomed from car aerials and the windowsills of council houses. The children were still at school, and no one was out on the baking streets but a couple of ginger cats sprawled like corpses beneath a car. I slogged all the way to the edge of the Wallands, where the body of the battle had taken place. The roads here commemorate those who had fought, though the royalists seem to have come out best in the deal. Prince Edward’s Road and King Henry’s Road were lavishly lined with cherry and service trees. The houses were gabled Edwardian villas, their gingerbread porches swagged with heaps of coloured roses. Queen Eleanor hadn’t done so well as one might expect from a woman who once smuggled the Crown Jewels to France. Eleanor Close was a dead end full of stubby purpose-built flats that looked out from small windows to the river beneath. As for De Montfort Road, it swooped from the Paddock to Lewes Prison, where the fiercest fighting probably took place. This theory was first advanced by the historian William Blaauw, who heard from a road-maker that when the Brighton turnpike was being lowered in 1810 three great pits of bones were found in the vicinity of the prison, each holding quite five hundred bodies.

  By the time I reached the High Street tiny flares were going off in the corners of my vision and all I wanted was to stand for a year beneath a cold shower and wash the river from my skin. The White Hart was a broad, sprawling building opposite the castle, with pretty carriage lamps and a neat wrought-iron balcony, a façade that can’t have changed much since the Woolfs bought Monks House at auction here in 1919. The lobby was even hotter than it had been outdoors, and smelled powerfully of boiled beef. My room was up in the eaves and from each of the high windows I could see martins lifting and falling like sifted flour. There was an odd hall or vestibule just inside the doorway, empty except for a locked chest that looked big enough to hide a body. The carpet was the colour of stewed damsons and so too were the curtains and chair, which was upholstered in a fabric that looked like velvet and emitted little ripples of static each time I brushed against it. Someone had stubbed a cigarette out on one of the arms. I was amazed it hadn’t burned the place down. Someone else – or perhaps it was the same person – seemed to have kicked a great chunk of plaster from the wall, exposing a crumble of flint and concrete that was festooned in cobwebs.

  It felt as if my blood had turned to mercury. I lay on the bed almost weeping, suddenly overwhelmed by the past few months. I hadn’t thought I was running away, but now all I wanted was to turn tail and fly, back into the woods, the dense, enchanted Andredesleage where no one could find me or knew my name. Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one’s corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?

  I’d been here before. Not the room, but the restaurant downstairs. We’d come almost a decade ago, Matthew and I, in midwinter, those dead weeks at the beginning of the year. It had snowed, or was just about to – see, already memory lets me down – and we drank house red in a room that smelled, then as now, of boiled beef, the warm air billowing from a concealed kitchen. I don’t remember what we ate. I know that I, half-consciously, kept laying my hands on the table, wrists upturned
. We hadn’t yet touched, and as we left I caught the smell of chlorine from a pool concealed in the basement. We were entirely blind. We didn’t know what lay ahead. So yes, I understand why the island of the sirens is piled high with bodies. If any one of us knew what the future held, I think we too would sit there, petrified, until the hide rotted from our bones.

  In her unfinished memoir, A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf turns again and again to the question of how one can make sense of what has gone before. This document – part diary, part autobiography – was begun on 18 April 1939 and added to spasmodically over the next year and a half, the last entry written on 15 November 1940, four months before she died. It eddies musingly through her early life, beginning with the gleeful free-range summers at St Ives and bowling on into the claustrophobic years of mourning that followed the deaths of her mother, Julia, and her half-sister Stella, when her father’s grief made him a tyrant prone to periodic and horribly childish rages. As he grew more deaf and isolated, greedy, chubby George Duckworth, Stella’s brother, rose to take his place, bullying Virginia and her sister Vanessa through a round of balls and parties as humiliating as they were dull.

  Towards the end of this long, fragmentary, intensely vivid skein of writing – in fact a series of faintly different and contradictory drafts, one of which tumbled into a wastepaper basket and was rescued only by chance – the figure of Thoby, her elder brother, drifts into view. He is tilling a boat, his eyes blue with concentration. He is standing upright in a Norfolk jacket too short in the arm and too narrow across the shoulders. He is drawing a bird, holding the paper easily and starting at some unexpected corner of the page. He is . . . but here the well of memories runs dry. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906, an event Woolf alludes to but never quite arrives at chronicling.