The rush of the reel, like the rush of their life together, was a potion stronger than any wine. He leaned down and kissed her, not in the way kisses were giggled over in the bower, all frenzy and moisture, but more as if his words ran along the curve of her mouth and disappeared again into the press of other dancers.
‘My Mathilda, my Mora, my queen.’
EPILOGUE
Jumièges Abbey, Spring 1067
‘And is it just like that?’
Mathilda raised a hand to the magnificent abbey, glowing in the spring sunshine in the valley below them, and tried to imagine a similar building in place of the rickety old London church in which she had celebrated a tense Christ’s mass fifteen long years ago. She could still picture the old buildings on Thorney Island, rough and worn but so very, very sure of themselves. She could still see the great hall, rich with festive greenery and full of the bobbing blonde heads of their Saxon cousins, now her subjects. She could still see Emeline dancing and that young guard rescuing the girl from the horse and King Edward leaning over a brazier like an everyday neighbour and promising them the throne. It had been a long road from that day and one that had felt, at times, impossible, but at last they had reached their destination.
‘Like that only grander,’ William assured her. ‘The new Westminster Abbey is a beautiful building, Mathilda. It honours God greatly and I cannot think of a richer place to see you crowned Queen of England.’
Queen of England!
She remembered her father talking of such a possibility when she, fool girl, had been trying to refuse William’s suit. She had thought Baldwin mad but in fact he had seen clearer than most. He had been to visit recently, old now but propped up with pride. He was not long for this world, she feared, but he would leave it content and she was glad to have been a part of that.
‘See, Maud,’ he’d said, ‘I told you Duke William would make a good husband for you.’
‘You did, Father.’ She’d kissed him. ‘And you were right.’
A tiny, still youthful part of her had baulked at the words but she’d chased it away. Count Baldwin had been right. William had matched her all the way for determination and ambition and drive and any day now she would step onto the Mora at last to sail to her new kingdom.
She turned to the north but the Narrow Sea was too far away to see. No matter. The boats were almost ready to carry William and his still-surly Saxon ‘guests’ home and she was to go too. She would be crowned at Whitsun and could begin to get to know her new people and their ways. It would be a challenge but she was ready. She and William had brought Normandy a long way in their years here, despite their subjects forever petulantly rebelling. England would, pray God, be far more stable and Mathilda would finally be able to focus less on holding power and more on developing it with art and culture. Judith, safe in her new Bavarian home, would be proud of her.
She looked back to the abbey.
‘It has been a hard path to travel, William.’
‘Not really, for I have had you at my side and that has made everything easy.’
More tears. She batted at them.
‘William – you old romantic!’
He grinned and opened his arms and she stepped gladly into them, turning her face up to his for a kiss, but as she did so a cry echoed up the hillside. They turned reluctantly to see La Barbe riding towards them.
‘Goodness,’ William grumbled, ‘can we have no time alone?’
But his chamberlain was closer now and they could both see his horse frothing with the hard pace he was driving and the stiff determination in the line of his usually loose shoulders. William’s hands tightened around Mathilda’s back and her own, against his chest, thrummed with the drum-beat of his heart.
Roger reined his horse in and leaped down before them.
‘What is it?’ William asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
Roger looked from William to Mathilda and back to William again, his eyes black.
‘I have had word from Fitz,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It is rebellion, Lord King. Rebellion in England.’
HISTORICAL NOTES
Many readers ask me why I write historical fiction and I will admit that there are times in both the research and planning stages of my writing that I ask myself the same question. The answer, of course, is that I am fascinated by past lives and by the shape our ancestors’ decisions and actions have imposed upon our own, but writing from ‘real life’ does carry a huge responsibility. I live in almost constant terror of getting something wrong and am very well aware that I will have done so somewhere in this and other novels.
I research as exhaustively as I am able but there will always be more to know and at some point I have to stop looking up history and start writing my story. I hope readers will forgive me any minor errors and am always happy to hear from anyone with greater knowledge than my own. For now, however, here are a few notes on areas I found especially interesting or wished to explain further than is possible within the story.
Character Details
Lord Brihtric
The novel opens with Mathilda’s ‘dalliance’ with Lord Brihtric and this liaison is a documented fact – or, at least, a documented rumour. Brihtric Mau (Snow – for his blondeness) was, as portrayed here, a wealthy English landowner with big estates around Tewkesbury. He travelled to the Flemish court in the mid-1040s and, according to the Chronicle of Tewkesbury, got himself involved in a minor scandal in which he and Mathilda, who was about sixteen years old, grew so close that when he had to return to England she sent an envoy after him, offering herself in marriage.
Brihtric did not take her up on this generous offer. Clearly understanding that ambitious Count Baldwin would not look favourably upon such a lowly match for his eldest daughter, he stayed well out of the way. Accounts suggest that Mathilda was madly in love with Brihtric and whilst such tales are almost certainly exaggerated it is more than possible that her concerned father decided to marry her off before she did anything else foolish. William was an ambitious young man on the lookout for a bride and the match seemed perfect to all, bar pining Mathilda. And so our story began . . .
Herleva, the ‘tanner’s daughter’
Herleva (or Herleve, or Arlette, depending on sources) has gone down in history as the daughter of ‘Fulbert the Tanner’. Tanners were the tradesmen who cured the hides of beasts to turn them into workable leather and as this was done largely by soaking them in urine they were considered the lowest of the low and kept to their own rather smelly areas of town.
There is little record of Fulbert, but what we do have notes him as a ducal chamberlain. This was not necessarily a high office but it does indicate that he was a man of some import in Falaise and not just a lowly tradesman. It is likely, therefore, that he was more of a fur-trader than an actual workman and that although he may have had dealings with tanners he was not one himself. ‘Furrier’, however, does not make such an effective insult and so was conveniently forgotten by history. Certainly it seems a well-known story that the men of Alençon received the harsh treatment they did after hanging hides over the walls and abusing William’s mother as a ‘tanner’s daughter’.
Whatever her father’s actual profession, Herleva was certainly not a noble and was a royal mistress solely on account of her beauty. Duke Robert probably had other mistresses but he seems to have favoured Herleva, especially after she’d borne him William. Certainly he cared enough to ensure her a comfortable future by marrying her off to Herluin de Conteville, a well-born Norman nobleman. There is some suggestion that Robert was in negotiations to marry Estrith, sister to King Cnut, and this may have motivated him to see Herleva securely settled. It may also have prompted the pilgrimage which ultimately killed him, leaving William as his only son.
William seems to have genuinely loved his mother and to have promoted both her and her family at court, offering various maternal relations high office and great lands. He shows no signs of having been ashamed of her or of giving in to any criti
cism of her – as the men of Alençon found out to their cost!
William, ‘the bastard’
William is often spoken of as William ‘the bastard’, a derogatory term gleefully embraced by the Saxons in preference to the more glorious epithet of William ‘the conqueror’. That said, William was called ‘the bastard’ before the conquest, more a point of fact than an insult, though he does seem to have been rather sensitive to it, reacting violently to slights. He also, perhaps more tellingly, remained notoriously – and unusually – faithful to his wife.
His sensitivity is interesting, for in the pre-1066 period it was far from unusual to be born to a mistress or handfast wife – indeed both Harold of Wessex and Harald Hardrada had such sons – and it is one of the intriguing features of poor William’s life that he seems to have been so vilified for his birth.
It is probable that he was simply born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. From the mid-eleventh century there was a huge movement of church reform from the papacy. Indeed, the Council of Rheims at which William and Mathilda’s match was banned (for very political reasons, as described in the novel) was largely concerned with stamping out simony (buying offices), pushing for church marriages, and persuading the clergy into celibacy.
William was born at the start of a zealous move towards a far more moral and monogamous way of life and Normandy was at the heart of that reform. Ironically William giving his duchy the prosperity to embark upon a huge, pious programme of abbey building – very much encouraged by himself and Mathilda – may have fostered an atmosphere in which the circumstances of his own birth were held against him far more than they would ever have been before.
Mabel de Belleme, the poisoner
Readers could be forgiven for assuming Mabel de Belleme is a creation of my own but she was in fact a real noblewoman and genuinely seems to have been a proper fairytale witch. There is even a recorded story of her killing someone with a poisoned apple!
Mabel was the sole heiress to the massive Talvas estate, so was a powerful, financially independent woman and made the most of that fact. Orderic Vitalis describes her as ‘extremely cruel and daring’, characteristics she seems to have inherited from her father, William Talvas, who stands out in recorded history for his brutality at a time when brutality was pretty much the norm. This is a man who grew so bored of his wife berating him for his lack of morals that he had her strangled on the way to church. He then went on to invite a rival to his second wedding to ‘make peace’ but proceeded to have him seized, blinded and mutilated! Mabel must have learned her vicious ways from the cradle.
Poison is known to have been favoured by Normans as a conveniently untraceable way of disposing of rivals and has also long been held as a female weapon. Mabel de Belleme, along with the more famous Lucretia Borgia later on, seems to have been one of the women who helped to create that image.
In the novel I show her poisoning Hugh de Grandmesnil with a cup of doctored wine, which is something she is genuinely known to have done, though not to Hugh. As shown here, Arnold d’Echauffour, the son of her father’s mutilated rival, tried to claim some of her lands and Mabel clearly couldn’t be bothered with legal dispute when good old murder would be so much simpler. In reality it was Fulk’s brother Gilbert who drank the poisoned chalice but I hope readers will forgive me transmuting the incident to avoid introducing yet more characters. Poor Gilbert did, in fact, die, as, some time later, did Arnold.
Mabel herself died as she lived, having her head cut off in either her bed or her bath (depending on the imagination of the chronicler) by a man called Hugh Bunel whose lands she had taken by force. I suspect she was little loss, although I have indulged myself in the novel by showing a more positive side to her herbal crafts.
Judith’s gospel books
Judith of Flanders seems to have been, as I have hopefully shown, a quietly strong woman with a dedicated interest in religious art. She had very little independent income but still managed to secure funds for considerable patronage of the White Church at Durham and, later, St Martin’s Monastery in Weingarten. She was unusual in this time in that she did not endow or refurbish any abbeys or churches and her interest seems to have been primarily in movable goods, perhaps reflecting the rather unsettled life the poor woman was forced to lead.
Primary among her commissions was a set of four gospel books which are still in existence and, indeed, are unique in being the largest group of extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts anywhere in the world from a single patron. Two of the books are kept at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, one is in Italy and one in Germany. All four are sumptuous, distinctive and costly works, using extensive gold in the illustrations and the lettering. Two of the covers are sadly lost but those we still have are magnificent, made of metal and encrusted with jewels.
A study of the gospel books by Jane Rosenthal and Patrick McGurk demonstrated that the same scribe worked on them all and that the first three were completed in England and taken to Bruges with Judith when she had to flee into exile in 1065. The fourth seems to have been started in England but completed by a Flemish artist soon after Judith’s sad return to Bruges.
There is no evidence that Judith herself was the artist and it is probably unlikely as such work was normally done by monks, but the possibility is there and I enjoyed playing with it. What is clear is that Judith took great pride in these gospel books and that they meant a lot to her and so I felt that extending her involvement in them was warranted for the story.
Missing Characters
Students of the Norman era will no doubt have noted the absence of several key figures from this story. There are more Norman records than there are for their Saxon or Viking cousins so I was able to locate a wide number of people in William’s court. Trying to include them all in the story, however, would have resulted in an overcrowded narrative so I had to be selective. In particular I was forced, reluctantly, not to include the following:
Lanfranc: Lanfranc was a famous and very influential scholar and monk who brought Italian learning to Normandy and was part of the reason why the church flourished in William’s reign and afterwards. He was also, it seems, William’s personal chaplain and one of his advisors. He later became his Archbishop of Canterbury and was a key prop in the post-conquest government of England. I studied his life in some detail and found it fascinating but in the end I chose to hone in on William’s four military companions – Fitz, Hugh, Fulk and Roger – instead of this more spiritual one.
Robert Champart: Champart is mentioned in the novel but does not feature as a character. He was the Abbot of Jumièges Abbey near Rouen and travelled to England with Edward when he went to join his half-brother Harthacnut in the court. He was with him, therefore, when Harthacnut died at a wedding feast in 1042 and Edward was suddenly made king and he was his key advisor in the early years of his reign.
Champart was also responsible for the promotion of Norman interests in the English court and it was his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1051 that led indirectly to the Godwinsons’ exile and opened up the way for William to be invited to England and offered the crown. When the Godwinsons fought their way back into favour in 1052 Champart fled and died, a few years later back in Jumièges, a bitter man. He was in the novel up until the final edit but had little narrative arc of his own and cluttered the path of the story as a whole so sadly he had to go.
Robert, Count of Mortain: In the novel I feature Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, son of Herluin de Conteville, but he actually had another brother, Robert. As there were already a number of young men around William, however, I decided not to include him. It is probable that William also had several sisters and half-sisters but they barely feature in records so I chose not to include them either.
Sweyn Godwinson: In Chapter Nine Tostig tells Judith that his brother Harold is likely to get Wessex for he ‘gets everything’. In fact, in 1051, their elder brother Sweyn was still alive and was the one in the running for the main Godwin
son inheritance. Sweyn was a wild child, noted in history for capturing and running away with the abbess of Leominster who may well have been the mother of his son, Hakon. He was exiled for this conduct in 1047 and then, after persuading his cousin Beorn to help him get back into the king’s good books, fell out with him and stuck a sword in his back – resulting in further exile. By 1050 he was tentatively returned to favour and after the family’s exile in 1051–2 he seems to have repented of his sins (or just decided to stay out of the way) and gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Like so many others in this period – William’s father included – he caught a fever on the way back and died. Harold became the eldest Godwinson and was a far more worthy heir. I decided, although a year early, to have Tostig refer to Harold as the oldest to avoid confusion with Sweyn who was so nearly gone from the story anyway.
Name Changes
The Normans, like most nations at the time, were not given to originality in the naming of their children. In researching this period, therefore, I came up against a seemingly endless parade of Williams, Roberts, Richards and Rogers. I can only assume that this would have been as confusing for them as it is for us and that, although official records would always be in their formal name, they must have had a way of shortening those to differentiate in day-to-day speech. Rarely do we know what these informal monikers were (‘La Barbe’ for Roger de Beaumont is one that is recorded), so for the purposes of this story I have had to choose a couple of my own.
Fitz: William FitzOsbern was known to be William’s closest companion and they cannot have always called each other William. Fitz is almost certainly not a shortening they would have used as it simply means ‘son of’ (the same as Mac in Scottish surnames or indeed ‘son’ in English and Norse) but for me it retained a feel of the original and also felt like an appropriately jaunty-sounding name for William’s lively friend.
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