The Heresy of Dr Dee

XXV

Thrown From the Body





MY TAD HAD entertained me, as a boy, with tales of the Glyndwr wars. I can see his face now, reddened by the fire, his eyes bulging like a clown’s as he relates how the rebel leader calling himself Prince of Wales rose against the English King, Henry I V, destroying all the border castles in his path. Oh, the romance of it.

A romance conspicuously missing from Stephen Price’s account of the Battle of Brynglas as we set off up the hill, Price making a hand-gesture at the steepening slope before us.

‘Imagine a thousand dead and dying men. Hear their hoarse whimpers. Many more dead men than there are sheep yere now. Arms and legs and guts. And hogsheads of blood. Imagine the sorely wounded crawling through the plashy pools of blood.’

Tad had claimed once that the Dees were descended from the same family as Glyndwr – well, who of note were we not descended from? But why don’t I remember him ever speaking of the Battle of Brynglas?

‘In a way,’ Stephen Price said, ‘it was almost separate from Glyndwr’s campaign. It was about the Welsh and the Mortimers – the arrogant Norman Marcher lords with their impregnable castles and their contempt for the Welsh – the last true Britons. The lowly Welsh hated the Mortimers. Hate beyond our understanding in these modern days.’

‘If the castles had been impregnable,’ I said, ‘would there be so many bald mounds the length of the border?’

‘Or so many well-built stone farm buildings.’

Stephen Price chuckled bleakly. Looking back, we could see my father’s birthplace, seeming the size of a candle box, and a smaller farmhouse the other side of the bridge, both part of the original Nant-y-groes estate. The English army on that June day must surely have assembled somewhere close to whatever kind of wooden bridge had crossed the river there.

And the Dees… had they just sat and watched from their farms? Or had they taken part? The previously unconsidered question of whose side my family had been on was writ now, in illuminated script across the deep grey sky.

‘They say Edmund Mortimer’s army was a ragbag of peasants, hastily recruited,’ Price said. ‘But that wasn’t it. He knew the Welshman was on his way down from the north and reckoned to crush him for good and all. Grind him into the ground. Mortimer had two thousand in his army, including a core of well-trained fighting men – his own and the men brought along by the knights supporting him. And then there were the archers. Welsh archers, many of ’em – Mortimer pulled his bowmen from both sides of the border. No, it was at least a halfway-proper army.’

‘Yet slaughtered by half as many Welsh?’

‘Don’t sound likely, do it, till you know what happened. Rhys Gethin, he had his own archers. And rage on his side, see. And cunning.’

Price pointing to the rounded top of the hill, almost violently green now against the charcoal sky. Evidently, no hay crop had been taken from Brynglas this year.

‘No armour to slow them up,’ Price said. ‘Fast on their feet. Mountain men, like goats. Over the hill, by there, I can show you a dip you can’t see from this side, all full of trees and bushes. And that’s where they hid out the night before. With their women, too. Day of the battle, they all come to the top of Brynglas. But they didn’t come down, see. Didn’t charge. If they’d charged into Mortimer’s army they’d’ve been carved up into pieces and it would have ended here.’

‘They simply waited?’

‘Forcing Mortimer’s boys to charge up the hill to attack, and it don’t matter how strong your legs are, a charge up yere…’

‘Steeper than it looks.’

Feeling the pain in my bookman’s calves already. What in God’s name was I doing here?

Price looked back the way we’d come.

‘A full charge up yere in full armour, on a day in June – even a bad June? Full into a hailstorm of arrows with the slope behind them. Havoc, boy. Bloody havoc.’

I began to see it. I could see dead and wounded men falling back on those behind, who could only go on, their faces soaked with the spurted blood of their falling comrades.

‘And then what happens?’ Price stopped. A sheep track had become a muddied footpath. ‘This is the worst of it. As the dead Englishmen start to fall back in greater numbers, Mortimer’s Welsh archers, marching with the English, of a sudden they all turns round, these Welshies, bowstrings pulled hard back…’

He did the motion, one arm outstretched, the other withdrawn to the shoulder.

‘And they all put their arrows… into their own side. And at that range, boy, they don’t miss. They does not miss.’

I must have winced, as if an arrow had rushed with crippling force into my own chest.

‘A planned treachery?’

‘Some say that, some say they just seen the way the battle was going and changed sides. Yet… all at once? As if they was all moved by the same muscles.’

I was glad he didn’t ask me what, other than an act of prearranged military precision, might have caused several dozen Welsh archers to act as one.

‘Several of the knights died and Edmund Mortimer himself was taken prisoner when the Welshies finally come charging down. Hacking through what was left. Oh, the bitterness and shame of the all-powerful Mortimers. The only time the name of Pilleth has ever been yeard in London. All of Europe, come to that.’

‘And the Dees… Which side were they on?’

Price shrugged.

‘Never that simple. Even the Norman, Mortimer… after he was took prisoner, the King of England wouldn’t pay the ransom, so all Mortimer done, he just changed sides. Married one of Owain’s daughters, in the end. No border easier to cross than this one.’

On which side might Elizabeth’s own family have fought? With which side would it look best now for my kin to have allied itself?

‘The big, old families, they just goes on,’ Stephen Price said. ‘The small men, the farmers and peasants forced into fighting – they’re the ghosts as walks the battlefields and the sad dreams of the widows, for as long as they lived.’

We were nearing the church now, a squat grey tower and nave, hard against the hill.

‘The bones are everywhere in the soil,’ he said. ‘Down the valley, far as Nant-y-groes, as I discovered quite recently. Far as the mortally wounded could crawl. Like farming a churchyard, it is.’

‘What do you do when you find the bones?’

This was like pulling rotting teeth. How he’d ever debated in Parliament was a mystery to me.

‘They gets buried again,’ he said. ‘With suitable prayer and litany. We have a place, just by yere.’ Pointing to the side of the church, where the land was level. ‘Men of either side, they goes in together. With prayer upon prayer.’

‘And do the dead then rest?’ I asked.

He looked away. I wondered about the betrayed dead, impaled on the arrows of their comrades. Imagined myself, blood welling in my mouth, helplessly gazing over the reddening shaft of the arrow through my throat… into the merciless face, already misting over, of a man I’d marched with up this hill.

‘Nobody likes to dig out a ditch up yere for fear of what they’ll find,’ Price said. ‘If a man’s bones are unearthed, all work stops till the whole body’s been dug up and reburied.’

‘Or…?’

‘Or the ghost will haunt the man who fetched up the bones. If so much as a sheep-shelter is to be built, efforts are made to be sure it en’t built on some man’s bones, else there’d be no luck there, neither. And that’s when they send for the boy.’

‘To find the bones before they rise? How often does this happen?’

‘The dead rising? Of late… too often. This summer, in all the rain… thirty or more.’

‘It’s the wet bringing them up now? The swelling of the… ground?’

My voice tailing off. There would have been many a wet summer since 1402.

The track had steepened under the church, and I stopped on a small promontory, offering a vast far-reaching aspect to the emptiness of the west. I marked two horsemen down near Nant-y-groes. Not moving, as if they were watching us. They might have been outriders from some long-gone army. How would you know when a man was a ghost?

‘Is it easy,’ I said, ‘to separate one body from another?’

‘Not really. Not much else left apart from ole brown bones. All the valuables would’ve been stripped off the corpses where they lay within days of the battle. And that wasn’t all.’

Price sucked in his breath, stared up at me almost angrily.

‘The matter of it is, Dr Dee, some of the dead… they weren’t whole, that’s what’s said. Weren’t whole for very long after they died.’