So. I’ve told you about the rebellion. I’ve told you about our raids upon the enemy, how we ravaged their lands as we tried to take the war to their gates. But we knew we were fighting a losing battle. For all the damage we inflicted and all the Frenchmen we slew, it was never enough. We could never stay for long in any one place; we had to keep moving to avoid capture. All the while they were growing stronger as the other risings around the country were gradually put down, as they threw up great mounds of earth upon which they set the strongholds they call castles, and surrounded them with ramparts and ditches and timber palisades to defend against people like us.
The days grew darker, the nights colder. Our spirits were failing. Each evening we would pitch our tents and bed down on cold earth, and each dawn we would wake up, our limbs and joints as stiff as the frost that covered the land. After those early weeks, when we lived off what we could plunder, the Normans guarded their convoys more closely. We came to rely on provisions brought to us in our woodland hiding places by folk in the surrounding countryside who were friendly to us. They took huge risks on our behalf, slipping away from their manors in the dead of night to bring what they could from their own winter stores, even when they didn’t have enough to feed themselves and their families.
Such kindness, though, could never keep so many hungry men fed for long. And that wasn’t the only reason we were despondent. Our tunics and cloaks were ragged and dirty and full of holes, and we were each nursing some injury – bruised ribs, a broken nose, a missing finger or something more serious. We had all lost friends, good men who had given their lives for us. For all the care we took in planning our raids, we could never be sure when we set out which of us would be coming back.
The one thing that kept us determined, kept us fighting through those difficult weeks, was what the Normans were doing to the people under their rule. How in places they were treating the English folk who worked their land as little more than slaves. How they were seizing their treasured possessions, their hard-won harvests, as if it all belonged to them by right. How they didn’t care whether that meant that those who had toiled so hard all year would starve. Any who dared challenge them, they hanged as examples.
From all across the kingdom we heard such tales. But there was one baron in particular whose name we kept on hearing and whose appetite for blood never seemed to lessen. Malger fitz Odo, he was called. Malger of Stedehamm—
*
‘Did you say Stedehamm?’ Guthred asks, interrupting.
‘That’s right. What about it?’
‘Nothing really. It was just one of the places we used to visit when Master ?thelbald took us out with him into the shire, that’s all. It was only a couple of days’ ride from Licedfeld, as I remember. It wasn’t much then. A few cottages. Not even a church. He had to say Mass in the open, on top of the moot hill, in the rain—’
‘Do you want to tell the story, priest, or are you going to let me?’
*
This Malger was the cruellest of them all. Whenever a Frenchman was found dead on the roads that ran through his lands, he would round up all the men who lived nearby and demand that they produce the murderer within a week. If they failed, he would pick five of them and take their thumbs, or their ears, or sometimes their noses as punishment. He would seize the womenfolk who lived on his manors and take them to his bed, even though he had a wife of his own back across the sea. If they tried to resist he would threaten them and their brothers and husbands and fathers with violence.
Even his countrymen thought he went too far, we heard.
Geburs and ceorls alike had been put to work building a new great hall, twice the size of the old one, sawing and jointing timbers, digging ditches and post holes, throwing up earthworks and hauling flagstones to set around the hearth and at the door. Anyone he and his steward decided wasn’t working hard enough was stripped to the waist and flogged in the yard in full view of the rest, until his back was raw and streaked with scarlet, his flesh torn to ribbons.
When I heard all this, there was no question in my mind what we had to do. Nor in Cynehelm’s. Nor in most of the others’ too. We thought that if we could rid England of such a man, then we would have achieved something worthwhile, however small. A couple, though, said it was folly to pit ourselves against him. We were only fourteen in number by then. Several had left; others had died, including three of Cynehelm’s own hearth warriors, men I’d known for many seasons, alongside whom I’d bent my back to the waves on many a voyage across the whale road. Their deaths came especially hard. Yes, others had joined us since, but they were mostly pups newly weaned from their mothers’ teats, who for all their keenness barely knew one end of a spear from the other.
All the reasons the doubters gave were good ones. I wasn’t so blinded by hatred that I couldn’t see that. But for me they changed nothing, and I told them so plainly.