Acting jointly—and somewhat to William’s surprise—they crowned him at the victory celebrations. His title:
William, Rex Britannorum et Imperator Occidentalis: King of Great Britain and Emperor of the West.
William the Great (as he was henceforward universally known, somewhat to his own embarrassment) reigned for several decades until his death in a fox-hunting accident in CY 39/2037, and over a largely peaceful realm, acknowledged as first among equals among the allied European states—except, of course, Provoland, where whiskey and grudges were the national industries.
British Religious Developments:
The post-Change population of Britain was drawn from two main elements—indifferentist British, lapsed Lutheran Icelanders and Faeroese, and a smattering of others.
However, the aftermath of the Change saw a powerful if low-keyed religious revival among the survivors. The mass death of the aftermath was traumatic enough; perhaps almost as important were the long-term implications of the Change, an inexplicable upheaval in the constants of natural law itself. Scientistic materialism was, for most of the population, discredited at a stroke.
For the most part this revival centered around the Church of England—the immigrants had no established church of their own to provide a rallying point, and in any case were mostly eager to ‘fit in’ in their new environment.
As it happened, the three surviving bishops (who did not include either the pre-Change Archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of Portsmouth) were all of the High Church party, traditionalist Anglo-Catholics. And in any case, this ‘tendency’ within Anglicanism became a powerful beneficiary of the nostalgia for an older England which swept much of the surviving population.
Accordingly, by the end of the first decade of the Change the Church of England was once again attended by a large majority of the population of the kingdom—and was once more largely a matter of village churches and their congregations. Theologically and ritually, this was very much a “smells and bells” organization.
Organizationally, the traditional supremacy of Canterbury was replaced by that of Winchester, which was established as an archbishopric.
In CY5 regular communications were established with the Umbrian League, a group of small villages and towns (effectively city-states) which had survived in northern-central Italy, and which had been reinforced by survivors from the Italian Alps and elsewhere.
(A somewhat larger group of survivors held out in central Sicily around the town of Enna; this became a Kingdom, under somewhat mysterious circumstances about which the island’s emissaries remained resolutely close-mouthed.)
The Umbrian League was a loose federation under the titular supervision of the new head of the Church, a cardinal entrusted with that task by Pope John II before the final collapse in Rome. Escorted by the Swiss Guard, and by some elements of the Vatican bureaucracy, Cardinal Ratzinger had escaped to the north. By CY10 he had also been proclaimed Pope Benedict XVI by the first gathering of Catholic cardinals since the Change; the convening of the College had been an epic in itself.
Benedict had no ambition for secular power. He did, however, have a cold determination to re-knit the global fabric of the Catholic Church, and to establish foundations for the future—he took as his personal motto the Benedictine maxim, “pruned, it grows again”.
One aspect of this was his negotiations with the Church of England. Accidents of survival had made the Anglican hierarchy more receptive to his approaches than had ever been possible before. Negotiations, slowed by distance and initially cautious on both sides, took up the whole of the decade before the accession of William the Great; the new king was however anxious that they succeed, not least because it would help bring the Umbrian and Sicilian forces into his anti-Moorish alliance.
Benedict shared William’s policies in that respect, but also pressed the reunion for its own sake. It was obvious that Great Britain would be the foundation for the rebirth of civilization in most of the West European territories, and he was determined that that regrowth would be on a Catholic basis. Norrland was smaller, farther away, and firmly Lutheran, but there was a crucial window of opportunity for Britain.
Theological problems proved less onerous than organizational ones; the Anglican tradition of a married clergy was a particular stumbling-block.
The eventual reunion was corporate: the Church of England once more recognized the Throne of St. Peter as the head of Christendom, and Benedict (as a “symbol of reunion” and to put the vexed matter of the validity of Anglican orders aside) consecrated the Archbishop of Westminster as priest, bishop, Archbishop and Cardinal-Primate of the Anglican-rite Catholics. He in turn did the same for his subordinates, and so on down to the parish priests.
The matter of the marriage of the clergy was settled by analogy with the Uniate church (Greek Catholic), which had also been permitted to retain this feature when it returned to communion with Rome.
The reunion was greeted with enthusiasm or at least acceptance in most quarters—except, for equal and opposite reasons, in Ian’s Rump and Provoland. The Principality of Ulster remained a dour Free Presbyterian enclave for the most part, and the Republic of Ireland (Provisional) ironically went into schism rather than stay in a Church which included the hated English.
Greater Britain: CY 41:
By the end of William the Great’s eventful life he reigned over a realm encompassing Britain proper, the (internally autonomous) Principality of Ulster, the mainland territories stretching from the Rhine mouth to Gibraltar, the Mahgreb from the Atlantic east to the borders of Sicilian-settled Tunisia, and Prince Edward Island and its offshoots from Barbados to Montreal on the western shore, with the odd scattered bits and pieces elsewhere. (The Falklands were part of the realm once more, for example, and shipped their wool to Bristol in a yearly merchantman.) All of these sent representatives to Winchester; the Principality and PEI also had their own local assemblies for internal issues.
Although independent and four months round-trip traveling time away, the Commonwealths of Tasmania and New Zealand still formally acknowledge the Crown, and solemnly send the name of their new Governor-Generals for ‘approval’ after the fact.
By the end of William’s reign the total population is 2,200,000; 1.2 million in Britain proper, 150,000 in the Principality of Ulster, 250,000 on the western side of the Atlantic, and nearly half a million on the European and African mainlands.
The overwhelming majority, 80% or better, were rural, dwelling in manor, farm and village as farmers, cottagers and craftworkers. With 60,000 dwellers, Winchester was the political, economic, cultural and social capital and the largest city in Europe. Portsmouth (20,000), Bristol (15,000) and Gibraltar (15,000) were the next-largest urban centers. Oxford (5,000) was a sleepy backwater, but its university had been reestablished and some of the ancient buildings refurbished.
Within Britain itself, the population was heavily concentrated in the south and east, with its fertile soils and relatively good farming weather. The mainland territories’ largest settled zone was in southern Spain, in the fertile lowlands of Andalusia; elsewhere pockets along the coasts and up the major rivers were frontier zones. Northern Britain and most of Europe were wilderness, where budding forests of oak and beech and chestnut grew up through a scrubby jungle of thorn and brambles.
The economy is dominated by agriculture—local versions of ‘high farming’—and handicrafts, with some water-powered factories and a good deal of seaborne trade; the latter is carried by sophisticated windjammers, and is mainly in luxury goods, but includes some shipments of bulk staples produced in different climatic zones—wine, olive oil, wheat, rice, sugar, dyestuffs like indigo.
Manufacturing centers on textiles (wool, flax, cotton), processing agricultural products, construction, and working up metal goods from salvaged scrap; the dead cities are an endless mine of everything from iron and steel to glass. The largest imports from outside the Empire are exotic goods like coffee (south America), tea (
Ceylon) and spices (Zanzibar and the Far East). The cities have small paper mills (using linen rag pulp for the most part), and specialist industries such as printing and the manufacture of precision instruments.
A Visit To Eddsford:
A visitor from any time before the Change would find an exotic mixture of centuries and periods in a typical British village.
But it might take him—call him Chesterbelloc or Billy Morris, if we want him to be happy, or Polly Toynbee (leader-writer for the Guardian), if we want her to be miserable—a while to tell what came from where.
Let him (or her) therefore visit the village of Eddsford, somewhere in eastern Hampshire or western Sussex, on a mellow day late in August, in the fifty-first year after the Change. (AD 2049).
Eddsford was resettled in CY2, but most of its straggle of cottages, shops and worksteads and houses, its irregular green and watering-pond and war memorial (though now including post-Change names), all long predate the catastrophe—although it is more populous now than for a long time before that. The use of older buildings is typical of the zone that was resettled within a few years of the change, before time and weather and fire had a chance to destroy too much. Brick and half-timbering are the commonest materials, with a few stone-built structures; in areas which went decades without human occupation only the sturdiest stone buildings would survive and much would be new-built.
The rural landscape around our hypothetical Eddsford, with its hedge-enclosed fields of moderate size planted to grain, pasture, roots and orchards and hops, its farmsteads, villages of thatched or tile-roofed cottages, and inns brewing their own beer… it might all be Victorian or Edwardian save for the lack of steam railways. The inhabited part of the countryside is carefully kept, fields neatly tilled, hedges hand-trimmed, woodlots near habitations managed for firewood and coppice-timber.
Yet there is more wildwood in spots and more in the way of birds and wildlife than our Chesterbellocian or bien-pensant visitor would be used to, and it includes species long extinct in the wild before the Change. Deer of several types are common, and the rivers are thick with otter and the odd beaver; salmon run seasonally in many streams. Bears are seen now and then, and wolves; even tigers occasionally drift south from the trackless Wild Lands which stretch from the ruins of Birmingham to Scotland, especially in a hard winter.
Just a little east of here the difficult clay soils of the Weald hills are reverting to the great trackless forest of Andredesweald that the Saxons knew and the Romans before them—it isn’t worth anyone’s while to keep them clear when so much better land is available, and their shaggy hedgerows have merged into a mass of thicket where the roots of the king trees grind the bricks of the stockbrokers’ houses and lever steadily at the roads the commuters used. A day or two’s travel to the West the New Forest is already wilder than it was in the Conqueror’s day.
The dress of the Eddsford villagers would also show that this wasn’t really the year of the old Queen’s diamond Jubilee. Some of them wear smock-frocks of linen over shabby-comfortable pants and jackets and shirts, and some don’t bother with the outer garment; women may wear trousers (usually the younger and unmarried) or calf-length skirts and blouses. And outside the bounds of the village, it’s common to see travelers alone carrying a spear or bow, or a sword at their belt. Everyone wears a hat, usually a rather floppy wide-brim, occasionally a pork-pie or straw boater.
Their speech would be another clue. It would be easily comprehensible to a 20th-century Englishman, but it is not quite like anything the pre-Change world knew either; perhaps the basis for it is the Hampshire drawl, but there are turns of phrase and accent that recall Wales or northern Scotland, and words that have naturalized themselves but still show their archaic-Scandinavian roots in Iceland, as does a slight sing-song lilt. It is the common speech of everyone in the countryside about, and of every villager save for two Irish immigrants.
Apart from the squire, parson and schoolteacher, everyone except the plumply prosperous man who keeps the Moor’s Head wears sturdy shoes made by the village cobbler and his family, whose shop stands next to the blacksmith’s and just across from the inn/public house, near the general store that stocks everything from pins and scissors to peppercorns and oranges and boxes of tea. The cobbler will repair a saddle or bridle—if you want one made from from scratch, you must go a little west to Musgrove, which is larger than Eddsford and halfway to becoming a town.
The innkeeper’s footwear comes from a fancier establishment in Winchester, the capital. Our hypothetical Guardian columnist’s unhappiness would increase at the sign creaking over the entrance to his establishment, which indeed painted with a Moor’s Head, severed and bleeding, on a silver platter. The innkeeper’s father fought in William the Great’s battles with the corsairs, and came back with a limp and a paying-off bonus that set him up as landlord of this rambling establishment during the privatization. The Moor’s Head’s core is a pre-Change brick building, built as a pub in the Napoleonic period, but it was a realtor’s office in the decade before the Change.
Within you may purchase ale (home-brewed, 1d per pint), wine from the European provinces of the Empire, brandy, Irish whiskey, lodging for the night, a quite pleasant if simple meal (the beef-and-truffle pie is justly famous), or play a game of darts or billiards.
The weekly Winchester-Dover stage stops here, and the innkeeper earns a pleasant supplement to his income by supplying fresh teams.
Right now the squire’s estate steward is in one of the snugs, discussing threshing fees with several farmers of the neighborhood. Those who rent land from his employer get the use of the mobile horse-powered machine for nothing (or as part of the share of the crop they pay, depending on how you look at it), but freeholders negotiate a fee, a percentage of the threshed grain. It won’t be very steep, or they might find it easier to club together and buy one of their own, or even just hand-thresh with flails over the slow winter months. Grain buyers from Winchester and Southampton will visit later in the year. Half a dozen of the King’s troopers are present as well, mail-shirted hobelars whose nags stamp in the stableyard; the men are in from road patrol and calling for beer and more beer before they head on to barracks at Musgrove.
Closer examination of the village street would show more craftworkers than in any period since the Industrial Revolution, but also the use of highly sophisticated machinery powered by water, wind and animal power. The gristmill, however, is halfway between the village and Colonel Barrington’s residence, Royston Hall; the squire’s father oversaw its building during the resettlement, and the miller rents it from him. Just now the miller and his two elder children are stripping down the wheel and checking the bearing race; soon the busiest time of their year will come.
Roads and canals knit the island kingdom together, along with horse-drawn railway cars; a network of heliograph/semaphore telegraphs stretches a little further each year, and every village has its post office, but a visitor from outside the Eddsford neighborhood will still attract curious glances, or a crowd of small children.
When some black-avised Moors (in fact a Wolof dignitary and his entourage, all on their way to Winchester as emissaries of the Emir of Dakar) passed through Eddsford last year it was a sensation which still has the dignified quasi-retired regulars at the Moor’s Head talking over their evening pints.
Or as Mrs. Tofford (who is postmistress) says, ‘set those idle old soaks gossiping for a year and a day’.
The post office has a small public library attached, also run by Mrs. Tofford. In it one can read back issues of the Times of Winchester, (the Empire’s Paper Of Record, its byline boasts), the Illustrated Monthly News with its engraved pictures of court events, and any number of edifying and improving publications including the Church Times and the British Agriculturalist.
(Most visitors prefer blood-and-thunder novels of adventure in far countries, though, from the presses in Winchester and Southampton and Bristol; mysteries set in the fabulous times before the Chan
ge are also popular.)
Only a few elderly men and women in Eddsford remember that world themselves, and even to them it seems like a far-off dream of their youth. They seldom speak much of it, except when their grandchildren pester them for tales of wonders and they drag out stories of cars or airplanes told so often the tellers aren’t sure how much is real anymore. The children believe them… but then, they believe in Robin Hood, too. Some of the youngsters more than half-believe in Puck, since “Rewards and Fairies” and “Puck of Pook’s Hill” are part of the school curriculum.
A typical Sunday would see most of the village and surrounding area (except for the cobbler, a contumacious and outspoken atheist) at Communion service/Mass in the village church, an ancient gray-stone Norman foundation. The ceremony would be familiar to a late-19th-century Anglo-Catholic “ritualist” (the Sarum Missal is used), and if transported there he might find the prayers for “the Holy Father, Innocent VI” (following those for the King-Emperor) congenial.
The congregation files out past a notice-board outside the door which lists meetings of the vestry, the choral society, the Harvest Festival Committee, the Mothers Union, and a dozen other organizations. On the other side of the churchyard is the parson’s house, where his wife is currently teaching the local Sunday School; the house is the largest in the village after the squire’s, but comfortable rather than grand, a Georgian structure set in an acre or so of garden. The school proper is not far away, which is convenient when the vicar tutors a few of the more promising village students, the ones he is grooming for scholarship examinations for the school at Winchester.
After the service the local squire in his Harris tweeds could linger at the parsonage in the well-filled library, sharing a glass of sherry with the vicar and discussing the management of the local school or a family where the husband has been drinking more than local standards find acceptable.
The squire’s tweeds are peaceful enough, as are the hunting pinks he wears when pursuing Charlie James Fox later in the year together with neighbors, relatives, the officers of the garrison in the market town southwest of here, and some of the more prosperous farmers… but the scar on his cheek and the notches in the longsword that hangs over the library fireplace in the Hall half a mile up the road from the churchyard were both put there by the scimitar of a Berber raider, east of Rabat. The squire’s smile is a little crooked because of the scar tissue, but he doesn’t regret it much; the raiders came off far worse.
Emberverse Short Stories Page 14