Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

  ‘Well, King Aella,’ I answered. ‘Everything he said was true, but there were various extenuating circumstances. I killed my brother in fair fight, when both of us were armed, because he tried to take from me my rightful spoil. Afterwards my father sought my life, and surely I was justified in making war on a German by descent who fought for the Romans. I did not tell you all this, since it is an involved story that needs a lot of explaining; perhaps I should have done so. At least you will agree that while I have been in your comitatus I have served you as a loyal comrade. I know the ways of the Romans, and if you allow me to remain in your company I will lead you to even better plunder.’

  I really wanted to stay with the Aellingas, or the South Saxons as they would be called in future. They were very pleasant companions, for Germans, and I could be happy with them if they ever lived in peace. But Aella had made up his mind, and I could tell, from the muttered growls all round me, that his followers agreed with him.

  ‘Then you admit the truth of the accusation,’ he said grimly. ‘You have served me well and faithfully, as you claim; that is why I am allowing you to depart in safety with your plunder. But we are noble Germans here, and we prefer not to share our feast with a scoundrel who has brought about the death of his father and his kin, besides committing murder on his elder brother. We none of us wish to be standing near you when the thunderbolt falls. Go now, at once. Remember that in three days you will be outlaw; and with the wealth you have from this city there will be many warriors eager to slay you. Give him a sack, so that he can carry the reward of his treachery.’

  There was nothing that I could say in reply to this sanctimonious speech. In fairness to Aella I must admit that he allowed me to take all the gold and silver I could carry, and he stood over me himself, with his sword out, so that none of the comrades should stab me while I was filling the sack. I thought to myself that if there really was a curse from Heaven on all parricides it was operating at that moment. I was being driven out of a successful war-band at the very time when they would all begin to live like wealthy nobles, with the fertile fields of Anderida to support them. And, of course, I was losing the rather nebulous chance of the throne that I had hoped for in the future.

  I was very tired and sleepy, and so was my horse. I rode a few miles out of the town, and spent the night under the wall of a burnt hut in the marsh. I woke at dawn, and considered what to do next; I was a free man, and rich, and I could take service with any war-band I chose, except the South Saxons. But in fact my choice was rather narrow; if I went west to the Christian rulers of the surviving Roman states, sooner or later the history of my youth would follow me; Kent was at peace, and anyway Oisc would still be seeking for my head; all the middle part of Britain, from the Sea of Vectis up to and beyond the sources of the Thames, was a welter of little bands of raiders and squatters, both Roman and German; their savage encampments were no place for a civilized man. My best course was to return to Germany. The next question was whether I should take Frideswitha also, or whether it would be better to vanish without trace. It would be enjoyable to live as a wealthy bachelor, even among the sunburnt and grubby women of Germany, and Frideswitha was quite capable of looking after herself. But there was one snag, my son Cynric. I could not bear to leave my only child for ever, particularly a child of such promise; if I could not have him without his mother, then I would put up with her also.

  When I reached the ruined house where she lived in Cissas-ceaster there was only one left of my three days of safety, and I had little time to explain the unfortunate end of my victorious enterprise. Luckily Frideswitha was at her best when things were disastrous, and she did not indulge in useless lamentations. There was a little fishing-boat in the harbour, that could take three passengers to the mouth of the Rhine, and she sent Cynric down to bargain with the master while she packed our cooking-pots and best clothes. But when the boy was out of the way she told me exactly what was in her mind.

  ‘I knew very little about your past life when I married you, but I took you for life, as a daughter of Woden should. Aella’s war-band is made up of very decent folk, and it is a pity you are not good enough for them. We shall start afresh in Germany. But now that I have heard the full story I have a natural fear that I am next on the list to be murdered. Cynric is probably safe, for you seem to adore the spoilt brat. Now I warn you that I always carry my seaxknife, as a free Saxon should; if ever you give me cause to fear for my life I shall slip it into your guts without thinking twice; but behave yourself reasonably to me and I shall do my duty as your lady and the mother of your son. What are your plans when we reach Frisia? With my brains and your lack of scruple, we ought to end up with a Kingdom of our own.’

  On these uncomfortable but fundamentally quite sensible terms we prepared for our flight to Germany.

  5.

  491–515

  The Founding of Wessex – My Wife

  Meets with Misfortune

  We made a safe voyage across the Channel, and then coasted up the German shore until we reached the mound-villages of the Frisians. There we landed, and journeyed inland to the more fertile and less crowded country where Aella had been living when I first came to his hall. I had a sack-load of gold and silver, and everyone was pleased to see us, though I gave out quite frankly that we had left Britain because I had been turned out of the war-band of the South Saxons. Of course, I did not say why I had been turned out, that would have been altogether too frank; I think most people assumed that Aella had considered me a dangerous rival, and a menace to his young son. Frideswitha was sensible, and she wanted me to be a great man for the sake of Cynric’s future. In public her attitude to me was one of respect and admiration, whatever she thought of me in private, and since men and women mix together a good deal among the Germans she helped to sway public opinion to my side, as the harmless victim of a suspicious ruler.

  The Saxons of the Continent are much poorer than their fellows who have plundered the rich provinces of Britain, and my sack of treasure made me the wealthiest man in the countryside. During that first autumn and winter of the year 491 we moved from hall to hall; but I found the lavish gifts that were expected of one in my position a serious drain on the sack, and next year I looked round for a permanent home of my own. As I have already told you, it is almost impossible to buy anything in Germany, for fear of insulting the possessor. In any case no one would dream of selling land, which is a hereditary possession that belongs to the family as a whole. But as all the German tribes are constantly on the move, land does in fact change hands, and not only through the death in battle of the original occupier; the system of mutual gifts provides a way out. I found a comfortable hall, with a good stretch of land attached; it was occupied by a lady whose husband had done well on the northeast coast of Britain, and had sent for his family to join him. In the course of a complicated transaction she made me a present of all future harvests until she or her descendents returned to Germany, and I gave her a well-founded ship to take her to the new settlement by the Wall. In a Roman province one would have said that I bought a lease, but here any such suggestion would have been an unforgivable insult. There is a great deal to be said for the straightforward Roman system of land sales by auction.

  I lived peacefully in my hall for the next three years. There were plenty of homeless peasants who were eager to do the actual work in exchange for a share of the crop; and I gathered a few young warriors round me, not enough to form a serious war-band, but sufficient to deter my neighbours from raiding. Frideswitha managed the household, and we were on friendly terms when we met; but we tended to go our separate ways, though she was too honourable to take a lover. Meanwhile Cynric was growing up, and learning the management of arms; he was a very promising youth, a splendid fencer with the scramaseax, an intelligent leader who could carry the lie of the country in his head, and a cheerful and witty companion. Such a young man had a right, when he grew up, to some better inheritance than a squalid little German hall.

&nb
sp; In theory I owed military service in the war-band of a local King, but in practice we were at peace; I joined the muster every spring to demonstrate my loyalty, and then we were all dismissed to our homes. So far my independence was complete, and independence was what I had been looking for all my life.

  But Frideswitha pointed out that my position was not really secure, and that I might not be able to transmit it to Cynric. One evening in the third winter, when we were drinking together, I said something about how contented I was with my present lot, and she at once took me up.

  ‘Remember that this hall is not an allod,’ she said. ‘The Wulfingas may be driven out of Britain one day, and then they could demand it back from your descendants. You are not even a true-born Saxon; according to your own story your ancestor was a King of the Alemanni. That means that you can never acquire a good title to land in Saxony, and your sons after many generations will never be true freeholders.’

  ‘Very well, my dear,’ I answered. ‘I am sure you are quite right as you always are. I can hold this little farm against all comers except a real army, but one day I shall be too old to fight, and we have Cynric to consider. I suppose you mean we should travel to one of the Roman provinces, where land is bought and sold, and you can leave it to your descendants.’

  She saw I was mocking her hankering after Roman civilization; but she took it in good part, for though we were no longer lovers we were old companions. All she answered was:

  ‘Which part of Britain would be best to raid? Will you enlist under some established chief, or do you think you could raise your own war-band?’

  ‘As you frequently remind me, I am under a curse from any gods who may be looking after the morals of Britain; although in view of the state of that island I think those gods must be taking a holiday. Seriously, my dear, there are not very many parts of Britain where I would find a welcome. King Aella has been superstitious enough to outlaw me after I had helped him to conquer his valuable Kingdom, and King Oisc of Kent would kill me at sight. We could go to the far north and join our landlords, the Wulfingas; but it seems silly to go right up there, where I should be a stranger, when I know the country south of Thames. We might land on a deserted part of the Channel coast, and hurry inland to the debatable land north of Londinium; but the settlers in the midlands are a brutish lot, and it would be a very savage country for young Cynric. If he did not end up as a bestial robber it would only be because he had sunk into a peasant ploughman.’

  ‘That would never do at all. You have had a good education, and we want Cynric to be more civilized than the average Saxon from Germany. We shall sail to some part of the country that you know, or at least have marched through in your youth. What is the land like immediately to the west of the South Saxons?’

  ‘I have been there, when I went to join Count Ambrosius for my first campaign. I suppose the next Kingdom to the west is the Roman state of Dumnonia, a poor land, and able to deal firmly with raiders. But there used to be a wide belt of devastation in between, inland from the Sea of Vectis. The Irish pillaged it before the Germans began to cross the sea, and it is one of the most desolate parts of Britain. You would find it just as savage as the midlands.’

  ‘But if it is on the coast it would be easy to bring in Saxons with their wives and families complete. It is only when you men go off to live in the woods without women that the decent customs of home are forgotten. If you went there with a good war-band, and enforced the laws you chose to make, would there be room in that land to found a strong Kingdom?’

  ‘That is a very sound suggestion, my dear. It should be very easy to land anywhere on the Sea of Vectis; but the trouble would come afterwards, when we try to found a Kingdom. Who would till the soil? We both hope our grandchildren will be civilized men, eating bread and drinking beer, and for that you must have a lower class to work on the land. I am not sure that our best plan would not be to go south and find some Roman land where the farms are still a going concern, and the coloni alive to till them.’

  My doubts were very real, for I thought that Hengist had long ago skimmed the cream from Britain, and I wished to see the great cities of the south. But Frideswitha was certain that it would be ridiculous to waste my local knowledge by going to an unknown country when there was still room in Britain for more German Kingdoms; she eventually persuaded me that our best landing-place would be somewhere on the Sea of Vectis. She pointed out that the difficulty of having no labourers to till the soil could be overcome so long as we kept control of a good harbour; we could conquer the land with a war-band of nobles, and send for farmers to join us later. I was not so sure that the farmers would come when we sent for them, since there was plenty of vacant land anywhere between the Rhine and the Ocean, now that Franks, Visigoths and Suevi were all making hay in Gaul; but she answered that farmers would not want to take up vacant land that might at any moment be plundered by any one of six raiding armies, and that we ought to be able to promise them peace.

  My son Cynric was sixteen years old, and it was only fair that he should have a voice in these discussions. He was rather shaken when he learned the whole truth about his parentage, for up to now he had thought himself a pure Saxon. When I had explained that his grandfather Elesa was really King Eleutherus of the Regni, and that he was a mixture of Aleman, Roman, and Saxon, he quite understood that it was necessary for him to start a new life in a new country, before someone challenged his right to take part in the assembly. I did not tell him who was responsible for the death of his grandfather; I did not want him to grow up feeling that he was under a curse from the Gods of the Family, and I hoped that the whole story would eventually be forgotten. At first he was reluctant to go oversea, when Gaul and Italy seemed to offer such rich prizes to a brave warrior; but he saw the disadvantage of having no tribe of his own behind him, and the necessity of founding a new Kingdom in an empty land. Once his mind was made up he threw himself into the business with enthusiasm, enlisting many of his young contemporaries without making extravagant and embarrassing promises. Such prudence does not come naturally to young men, but my son seemed to have inherited the good points of both his parents, and not their bad; in after life he never intrigued against authority like his mother, or made a snatch at the throne as I should have done in his place.

  The whole expedition was a gamble; and when I gamble, which is not very often, I like the stakes to be high. I remembered how it had been touch and go in the first years of Aella’s invasion, because we were not strong enough to fight a pitched battle as soon as we landed, and I made up my mind to take a really large force at the outset. That meant using all my wealth as presents to comrades and boat-builders, and I would land in Britain with no possessions at all; but that made the gamble all the more exciting. During the rest of that winter and the spring of 495 I was busy on the endless round of present-giving, flattery and drinking bouts without which you can never get Germans to do anything. Of course, Frideswitha and Cynric knew no other way of doing business, and they went about it with infinite patience, but I often sighed for the straightforward contracts of Roman law.

  At last I got together a good war-band of first-class warriors; many of them were exiles from various tribes, or of no tribe at all, like myself; but there were enough Saxons among them to enable me to call the new Kingdom by a Saxon name. I found that I had enlisted men to fill five ships, which meant we could give battle to any force that met us at our landing-place.

  We were ready to start after the sacrifices at midsummer; I really think that sacrifices the worshippers cannot eat afterwards are a stupid waste of valuable possessions, but Frideswitha was a stickler for the right forms and ceremonies, and we certainly needed all the good luck that the gods could give us. She threw into the fire a ring worth several oxen, and I hope she got value for it in the next world, which she soon entered.

  I had to take her with me, for I was now too poor to keep a wife in Germany while I was fighting oversea; we travelled together in the biggest ship of the f
leet, but most of my followers were young bachelors, and we brought no other women except a single slave to wait on her. Cynric sailed on the smallest ship, in his first independent command. I suppose we were a little more than three hundred strong, though no one would let me count exactly, for fear of ill luck.

  We met with fair weather, but the breeze soon died away, and we had to row to the Saxon settlements in Gaul. We reached their coast one day about sunset, and lay off the shore all night, with the men at the oars to hold us in the tides and currents. It was that night that I overheard a private conversation, which made a great difference to my domestic life.

  My ship was the usual narrow rowing-boat, and of course it had no deck anywhere; but the bow and stern were a little higher out of the water than the waist, and there was a platform aft for the man to stand on who wrestled with the heavy steering oar; underneath this was the only covered place in the boat, and Frideswitha and I were lying there together. In the middle of the night I awoke as she rose and went out; but I lay perfectly still, and went on breathing deeply; when I wake suddenly I am on my guard. I saw my wife crawl from under the low platform, and thought she was going to relieve herself; but instead of walking to the side she climbed very quietly on to the roof above me. This was queer, unless she was going to give orders to the steersman, which she had no right to do; he was an old fellow called Boda, who had once fought in the same war-band as her father; just the man who would make an unauthorized change of course, if a great lady asked him. Slowly I pushed my head through the curtain that closed our little hutch at the stern; no one could see me, and I could hear all that was said to the steersman.