Village Christmas

by Laurie Lee

  Spring is the best time, with the hills slate green and Wordsworth’s daffodils fringing the lakesides. In the fall the bracken is copper red; in winter the wild geese come. But should you go in summer, make it the third Thursday in August and you can follow the Grasmere Sports – with Cumberland wrestling, the trailing of hounds and the famous Fell Race to the top of Butter Crags and back, one of the most exhausting tests in the world.

  Man has spoiled much in the last hundred years, but the mountains and the sea still resist him. So does the Lake District. It is not very big. But it still reminds us of much we have lost.

  Lords of Berkeley Castle

  The colours of the walls of the castle – as Vita Sackville-West points out – have been compared to those of dried rose petals mixed with the grey of lavender. When seen through the mellow mists of a late-afternoon summer afternoon, this may strike one as a fair description. In fact, it is deceptively cosy; there is nothing soft about the castle, it is hard, granite-hard, standing out with something of the metallic rustiness of some old engine of war, a punitive system of ramparts which the Berkeley family have maintained through the centuries in order to resist and endure, and at times to command, the onslaught of violent times.

  Inside, the fierceness of the castle is a little mitigated; the walls are hung with Brussels tapestries, seascapes and Gainsborough portraits; generations of Berkeley wives have contributed a female and civilizing influence, the floors are covered with fine rugs, and there are tapestry seats and stools woven by a wife of the seventeenth century. The impedimenta of past domesticity survive intact: in the great kitchens, spits and churns and huge lead sinks. But even so, the castle inside is still a little untamed. It is not the graceful interior of a country house, but a series of great rooms connected by narrow staircases and passageways, with doorways which could be held against attack by a few men armed with swords and pikes. Not all the fine mirrors, rich rugs and silver services of succeeding generations can tame the place: as Vita Sackville-West wrote, it is a fortress, an alarming place that exacts a high level of living from the soul.

  The raised mount, or rocky outcrop, upon which this Norman castle is built, must have been the site of far older strongholds. Strategically, it dominated part of the left bank of the tidal Severn, and also connected with ancient sea routes to Ireland, Gaul, Spain and the Mediterranean.

  Even earlier in time, when the Severn was young and wide, and ran in a great shining curve from central Wales to the sea, the Vale of Berkeley, through which it passed, was then just a flat marshy jungle overlooked by the Neolithic tribes who lived among the high Cotswold ridges.

  The Romans, when they came, found firmer ground in the Vale and set up a station to guard the river crossing. (There are still earthworks near Berkeley called ‘Welshman’s Castle’ – probably a Romano-British defence against Irish pirates.) After the Romans, the Saxons – arriving by land and water, first to pillage and then to settle. It was the great tribe of the Hwicce who overran most of what is now Gloucestershire, and who later, seduced by the fertility of the place, turned their spears and shields into ploughs and crosses and became Christianized farmers and priests.

  ‘Berkeley’ was originally an abbey, and the first known reference to it goes back to AD 759, when the presiding Abbot witnessed a deed. ‘Beorc lea’ is Saxon for ‘birch clearing’ or ‘birchwood’; and in 804 a document mentions the ‘Beorclingas’; the ‘Men of Berkeley’ – or Abbey monks.

  This was the dawn of ecclesiastical power, and Berkeley Abbey, at that time, was one of the most substantial landowners in the west. Even in those days Berkeley was a coveted prize, especially among the spiritual heads of the Saxon Church, and when Æthelmund, chief of the Hwicce, was killed in 802, and his widow Ceolburh appointed Abbess of Berkeley, the Abbots of Worcester fumed for nearly a hundred years and were only quietened by the intervention of King Alfred.

  Then in 910, the Danes came up the river, destroyed the Abbey and put their own priests into Worcester. Not till now, out of the miasmas of the Severnside mists, do the outlines of Berkeley Castle first begin to emerge.

  England at this time was a patchwork of rivalries and relationships – ethnic and political. Saxon chieftains were trying to buy off the Danish raiders, who took the money and also large parts of the country. There were claims to kingship, and counter-claims, guerrilla warfare, treaties, takeovers – while among it all French-speaking Norsemen from Normandy were infiltrating into positions of power and authority.

  The Berkeley family stem back into this whirlpool of opportunism, to this critical floodtide in the history of Britain. Their line may be said to have begun with Edward the Confessor, the mild, peaceable mystic, who had kinsfolk among the Normans, and who seemed already resigned to their eventual invasion.

  Edward the Confessor’s ‘staller’, or ‘horse-thane’, was a Saxon noble called Eadnoth, who could be called the true sire of the Berkeley clan. Eadnoth was remarkable in being perhaps one of the few Saxon chiefs to survive the coming of the Norman conquerors. After the Battle of Hastings, he switched his allegiance to William and was allowed a position of military authority. In 1068, he fell fighting against the rebel sons of King Harold, whose grandson, Robert Fitzhardinge, was to be the key figure in the fate of the Berkeleys.

  But the first Lord of the West, after the Normans came, was William FitzOsbern, the Earl of Hereford and the Conqueror’s defender against the Welsh. FitzOsbern recognized the importance of Berkeley and fortified the place in the eleventh-century Norman manner – not with a castle of stone, but simply a high mound encircled by a moat and crowned with a wooden stockade.

  When FitzOsbern returned to France in 1070, he set aside ‘five hides’ for strengthening the castle, and put in charge his local representative, Roger de Dursley. Roger’s family held the ‘Castle’ during the early struggles for power between the various Norman claimants for the late Conqueror’s throne. But they backed Matilda and Stephen, the weaker side, and so in the end lost their vast possessions. Stephen’s successful rival, Henry Plantagenet of Anjou, had based himself for a time in Bristol, where his cause received the generous backing of the rich city merchant and reeve, Robert Fitzhardinge, descendant of Eadnoth the Horsethane.

  When Henry won his throne, he rewarded his loyal supporter with huge estates down the western edge of the Cotswolds and also with a charter to the Manor of Berkeley. Robert received his prize in 1153 – and his family have held the castle till the present day.

  This unique fact of survival might be traced to certain hereditary traits which the first Robert Fitzhardinge showed from the beginning – tact, a sense of compromise, flexibility of mind and wit, and also the talent, when necessary, to lie low and appear invisible when greedy monarchs were out looking for loot.

  At least one of these qualities was called upon right from the start; for when Robert Fitzhardinge moved in, he found ex-King Stephen’s Roger de Dursley (who had changed his name to Berkeley) still in possession of the castle. Roger was of course thrown out, but he and Fitzhardinge were left with all the elements of a bitter blood feud and rivalry. The dangerous situation was characteristically solved by the arrangement of a double marriage between the houses. Robert Fitzhardinge, in turn, now changed his name to Berkeley, and married his heir, Maurice, to Roger’s daughter, Alicia. Then the dispossessed Roger, with what grace he could muster, gave a daughter to another of Robert’s sons.

  This is how the grandson of the Saxon horsethane found his power as a Norman baron confirmed; as ‘Robert de Berkeley’ he strengthened the walls of his castle, enjoyed his great possessions in peace, founded St Augustine’s Abbey in Bristol, and in due course died and was buried there.

  Now began one of the most prolonged, unusual, quixotic, razor-edged yet successful survivals of any of the great houses of Britain. Over eight centuries the castle has been altered, enlarged, been humbled, impoverished or enriched. Sometimes it was a royal plaything, a toy, a tease, to be snatched away from the owners
and held in a mood of mischief or spite, or tossed as a bauble to some temporary court favourite. Sometimes it was a forgotten pile standing in an unfashionable marsh, a pawn in a battle, or the key to a whole campaign. But throughout the many onsets of danger to this great craggy edifice, standing rose-tinted above the Severn, resolute generations of Berkeleys have successfully clung to its ancient stones, have hovered, circled, stooped and struck, like kestrels defending a threatened nest.

  In Robert of Berkeley’s long line of heirs and collaterals, one finds almost every type of our landed gentry – from the dull unremembered, the studious and devout, the plain country farmer and fiery squire, to the schemer, eccentric, cultured patron of the arts, military hero, rakehell and bounder. Many were fortunate enough to live lives of sylvan quiet. Others found their castle placed in the cannon’s mouth. But desperate as they were – and must have been – there remains concealed behind all their differences one consistent tenacity of action.

  Something of this quality is described by the Berkeleys’ historian, Smythe, when writing of Thomas of Berkeley (c. 1170–1243): ‘Hee soe evenly observed a prudent inclyninge after the strongest powers, that he ever avoyded those Court and Country stormes which in his tyme blewe down many stronger Cedars than himself.’ This same Thomas also displayed early the family’s knack at consolidating their estates by arranging enclosures, exchanges of ground, and by paring ‘the skirts of his chace of Michaell of it Wood by granting in fee many Acres thereof to divers men at three pence, fower pence and six pence the Acre.’

  These were tremulous times of political pitch and toss when life and lands so often depended on chance. Thomas’s predecessor, for instance, Robert, was nearly destroyed by joining an abortive plot against King John. Then Thomas’s successor, Maurice, most elegantly recouped by marrying the daughter of one of King John’s bastards, and, in the face of general protest, enclosing more land to the commoners’ ‘small comfort and still less gaines’.

  It was about now that the sulphurous clouds of history began to settle most darkly upon the castle. The story begins at the time of Thomas, first Baron Berkeley, a straightforward loyalist, ‘twenty-eight tymes in armes’ for his king. He was captured at Bannockburn, freed by ransom, and returned to Gloucestershire to die in peace. But his successor, Maurice, second Baron Berkeley, possibly sniffing winds of advantage elsewhere, gave his monarch no such support. Edward II, after all, was already in deep trouble with his subjects, having lost Scotland to the Bruce, the respect of his barons, and the allegiance of his queen, Isabelle. Yet he continued to shower estates upon unpopular favourites – particularly Hugh le Despenser. Maurice of Berkeley joined a revolt against the King, was betrayed, and died in chains at Wallingford.

  And this is where his son, Thomas, third Baron Berkeley, emerges as one of the most enigmatic and possibly the most treacherous of all the Lords of Berkeley. First, to avenge his father, Thomas became a more devious rebel and married the daughter of Roger Mortimer, the Queen’s lover and Edward’s usurper. Then, with Mortimer and Queen Isabelle established in power, he recovered all his dead father’s lands. By now, King Edward II was on the run in Wales, a disgraced fugitive, with few friends in the land.

  He was hounded, captured and, by order of Queen Isabelle, carried to Berkeley Castle. Thomas is said to have received him with every courtesy and kindness. Subsequent events throw some doubt upon this.

  In the old keep at the castle there was, and still is, a deep well or dungeon, with stagnant water at the bottom. According to a copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine, a tame seal was once kept there which slowly devoured all miscreants thrown down to it. A stronger tradition has it that the carcasses of animals (and humans) were regularly dumped in the well, and when any commoner or thief incurred the Lord of Berkeley’s displeasure, he was thrown after them, closed in and forgotten. Prisoners of nobler birth, however, received less summary treatment. They were merely placed in a tiny windowless cell which stood above the dungeon and abandoned to the stench of the rotting corpses below.

  When the doomed King Edward was brought to Berkeley it was the Queen’s intention that he should not leave the castle alive. Early in April 1327 he was shut up in this noisome cell, but five months later, because of his robust constitution, he still had not sickened and died, as was hoped.

  At this, Queen Isabelle sent fresh instruction to the castle, demanding some swift conclusion. The King’s official jailors at Berkeley were two imaginative brutes, Sir John Maltravers and Sir Thomas Gurney. On receiving the Queen’s message, they acted forthwith; but no one will ever know whether the castle’s lord acted with them. The rest is recorded, however: on the night of September 21, the jailors burst into the King’s cell, seized him, and pinioned him between two mattresses, then ‘a kind of horn or funnel was thrust into his fundament through which a red-hot spit was run up his bowels’. The shrieks of the tortured King were said to have been heard far outside the castle walls; and there are those who say they can be heard today.

  Edward II, among other things, was a homosexual, and the manner of his death may have been supposed by his murderers to be one that would appeal to the people’s sense of justice and humour. In fact, they were mistaken; the news of the atrocity was received everywhere with horror, and the unpopular Edward rapidly became a martyr.

  In fear of the Queen’s temper, the Abbots of Bristol and Malmesbury refused to accept the King’s body for burial. But John Thokey, Abbot of Gloucester, in a moment of inspired courage or opportunism, immediately sent off to the castle an escort of funereal monks. They found the royal corpse lying abandoned in his cell, naked under a pile of sacking. With sombre pomp they prepared a wagon and horses and proceeded to bring the dead King back to Gloucester. His passage up the Vale was extraordinary. Peasants massed along the route in tears; and when the procession halted at dusk, a few miles from the city, at Standish, a nightlong vigil was held with torches.

  Edward was buried near the high altar at St Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, where he rapidly became the centre of a quasi-religious cult. Pilgrims thronged to his tomb from all over the country, and St Peter’s modest little Abbey prospered. Soon the monks were able to enlarge it into a major cathedral, while the Abbeys at Malmesbury and Bristol declined. Indeed, it may be true to suppose that much of the splendour of Gloucester Cathedral today may be traced back to that Berkeley murder some 650 years ago. And the carved likeness on the King’s sepulchre still bears the look of twisted anguish said to have been copied directly from a contemporary death mask.

  Understandably enough, when Edward III succeeded his father, Thomas of Berkeley faced some awkward questions. He kept a cool head, however, and when summoned for trial before Parliament, came up with some prompt though improbable answers. One of these was that he had been ordered out of the castle owing to his ‘consistent courtesies’ to the King; another that he wasn’t there on the night of the murder anyway but lying ill at Bradley, some five miles distant.

  Parliament and Edward III accepted his word and acquitted him; he was restored to grace from the edge of doom, fought a few token battles behind his new king’s banner, and continued to prosper and extend his lands. But the family historian, Smythe, in spite of his affection for the Berkeleys, felt bound to record one ice-cold fact – that from a careful examination of the household accounts, it was clear that Thomas was at the castle at the time of the murder.

  Now the castle was to witness a new twist in British history by seeing the end of the Plantagenets – when a Berkeley marriage into the family of Lord de Lisle, a Lancastrian, brought Henry of Lancaster face to face with Edmund of York.

  Thus began that period of national gangsterism cosily named ‘The Wars of the Roses’, during which the Berkeleys and their castle passed some perilous years. It was a time of reckless opportunism, of king-making-and-breaking, the quick stab in the back, the law of the man in possession.

  The Berkeleys’ ploy of non-involvement, together with their art of survival, were foun
d suddenly to offer them no protection. The powerful de Lisles, aided by another marriage with the House of Warwick, now had a strong claim to the Berkeley inheritance. But though the de Lisle heirs and their allies held most of the cards, the Berkeleys still had their native wit. Compromise, bribery, more intermarriage was tried, but the de Lisles continued to press down hard. There were years of bitter rivalry between heirs male and heirs general; feuding, raiding and litigation – during which one Lord of Berkeley, on receiving a subpoena, made the messenger eat the parchment, wax seal and all.

  The matter was finally settled in a dramatic manner. After a recent plot to seize the castle had frustratingly miscarried, the twenty-year-old Viscount de Lisle, having just inherited the title and its claims, impetuously wrote off a letter to Berkeley’s then lord, William, challenging him to decide the affair by a ‘meeting of armes’.

  Berkeley agreed immediately. Young de Lisle gathered an army of several hundred retainers and pitched his camp on some high ground near Dursley; while foxy Lord William, taking advantage of his position on the Severn crossing, secretly ferried over one thousand bowmen from the Forest of Dean. He hid most of his men, by night, around the approaches to Dursley, and then encamped openly, with a modest following. The next day he called out the local children and told them to climb the treetops if they wanted to see a battle. De Lisle was lured into attacking the Berkeley forces where he ran into ambush at Nibley Green. His army was routed almost immediately, and broke and fled before the watching children; the young Lord himself was shot by Will Black, the Forest Archer, and finished off with a dagger stroke. The Battle of Nibley Green is considered to have been the last private battle in England, and everyone seemed to accept the outcome. Lord de Lisle’s young widow was given a pension of £100 a year, and the Lord of Berkeley confirmed in all his disputed possessions.