From now on, he would be able to get into the Tower cellar from the river, through the damp and narrow tunnel.
“Ralph won’t think of that,” he had pointed out to his friends. “After all, who wants to get into the Tower cellars except me and the rats?”
Three days later they stored the arms in the Tower. Everything went smoothly as, under close armed guard, three carts went from each of the several armouries to the Tower.
When they came to Alfred, however, he was not ready, and with some irritation they went away, to return later. In fact, it was not until the very end of the day that Alfred was ready to load all the arms, carefully wrapped in oiled cloths, on to the carts.
Noticing that there was an even larger quantity than they had been told to expect, the guards, accompanied by Alfred himself, went as quickly as possible to the great keep.
A number of men were needed to carry the heavy loads up into the Tower and down the spiral staircase into the cellar, where they were stacked against the walls. When Alfred peremptorily called to Osric, who was standing nearby, to help, nobody took any notice. Even Ralph, as he watched the arms go into the great fortress, was not suspicious. After all why should he be, when the weapons were going into the Tower?
Nor, at the end of the day, when they locked the two doors to the cellar and set the guard on the main floor, did anyone notice that Osric had vanished.
All night he laboured. It had to be done carefully. As quietly as he could, using the tools Alfred had smuggled in for him, he worked the stones loose to gain entry to the secret chamber. Then he began to move the arms.
Alfred had arranged everything cleverly. Each rolled cloth contained a second in which an illicit weapon was wrapped. Even after all the illegal weapons had been removed, therefore, there appeared to be just as many arms as before. One by one, Osric extracted the swords, spearheads and other arms and took them round to the hiding place. Two hours before dawn, he had stacked everything in there. Then he put the stones back in the wall and, as before, fixed them with a little mortar.
After this, the plan was simple. All he had to do was unlock the grille over the drain and clamber in. Putting his hand up through the bars, it would be easy enough to lock it after him and make his way out to the riverbank, opening the grille there and then fixing it behind him.
He tarried, though. First he threw dust at the freshly rebuilt wall to conceal the wet mortar. Then, lamp in hand, he checked round again and again to make sure that there was no other sign of his having been there. Dawn was approaching when at last he satisfied himself he could go. He was just halfway down the great western cellar when, suddenly, he heard the heavy oak door at the bottom of the stairs creak open behind him.
Ralph had been unable to sleep. He was too excited. The king himself had already expressed his pleasure about the arms operation and now, in the early dawn, Ralph had decided to survey his work.
Holding a torch high over his head, he walked down the huge western cellar where the arms had been stacked. With a smile he looked at them. A fine collection, all secure.
Then he saw Osric. The little fellow was asleep, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. What the devil was he doing there? Ralph lowered the flaming torch near Osric’s face until his eyes blinked open. And then Osric smiled.
“Thank God you’ve come, sir,” he said.
He had been left down there, it seemed, the evening before. “I hammered on the door and shouted,” he explained. “But nobody came. I’ve been here all night.”
Suspiciously Ralph looked around, then searched him.
All the time, Osric was inwardly thanking the Lord that, as well as all his tools, he had thought to throw the key of the grille into the well behind him.
Finding nothing suspicious, Ralph considered the situation. The fellow must be telling the truth. How else could he have got there? Besides, what could he do down there anyway? And then, because the long-nosed Norman was in such a good humour anyway that morning, he did something most unusual. He made a joke.
“Well, Osric,” he said. “This makes you the very first prisoner of the Tower.” Then he let him out.
Later that day, Barnikel murmured with even greater satisfaction: “The arms are in the one place in London where no one would ever think of looking for them. And thanks to that drain, we can get them whenever we want.”
But the Dane’s satisfaction at this triumph was short-lived.
By the month of June, London was full of mercenaries. Every day the invasion was expected. The city was more nervous than it had been since 1066. July came. August. Soldiers came and went. Every sail upon the estuary seemed a threat. Rumours flew. “Yet still they don’t come. I can’t understand it,” Barnikel grumbled. And then, gradually, word began to filter through. “Something’s happening. There’s been a delay. He isn’t coming.”
England waited, but still no Viking ships hove into sight.
The collapse of the great Danish expedition of 1085, which might, indeed, have meant the end of Norman rule in England, remains a historical puzzle. The vast fleet was assembled. The new King Canute was ready and eager to sail. And then some kind of disagreement took place. Exactly how or why has never been entirely explained. Certainly the next year Canute was murdered. Whether the disputes were genuinely internal or cleverly fostered by the agents of William of England will never be known. But whatever the true reason, the fleet did not sail.
Autumn departed and the Tower grew. Cold Christmas came, and as the Dane trudged down to the riverside, he saw only the bleak outline of the great stone square, dark in the snow. A sense of uselessness and lassitude descended upon him.
But it was for spring that fate had reserved her grim surprise.
Even in the autumn, Barnikel had suspected he was being cheated. Just after Michaelmas, when he had asked for the rents from his new estate at Deeping, the steward there had sent a derisory amount. When he demanded an explanation, the man had returned a message that made no sense at all. “Either this fellow is a fool or he takes me for one,” swore the Dane, and if it had not been for a heavy fall of snow he would have gone to sort him out there and then. As soon as the snow cleared in early spring, therefore, he set off.
It took him several days. First he had to pass through the thick forests beyond London, then travel across the huge, flat wilds of East Anglia. The east wind was damp but bracing.
On the day he arrived, however, it had dropped to a light breeze and the sky had partly cleared. It was a pleasant March morning by the time he came to the coastal hamlet of Deeping.
Where he was unable to believe his eyes.
“What the devil happened?” he asked the sullen steward. The fellow only answered: “You can see.”
For the hamlet and its green were standing alone, not amid broad fields, but marooned, surrounded on three sides and gently lapped by the salty waters of the grey North Sea.
“It came in another fifty yards this year,” the steward told him. “Another two years and we reckon the whole village will be gone. It’s like this for five miles along the coast,” he explained. And then, with a kind of dour satisfaction on his long, pale face, he added: “There’s your estate, sir.” He pointed eastward. “All in the sea.”
Seeing that it was so, poor Barnikel bellowed: “I’ve been cheated by that damned Silversleeves!” And then: “I’ve been cursed.”
But why, he wondered in bafflement, why was the sea rising?
In fact, it was not. Or hardly. Although, even now, the final thawing of the last Ice Age was still fractionally raising the sea levels of the northern world, the true cause of this flooding lay in that other long-standing phenomenon; the tilting of England. This was what Barnikel really saw, the slow geological tilt that drives the coast of East Anglia down and raises the water level in the Thames Estuary. It was because of this that, here and there along the low-lying east coast, the land was being waterlogged and taken back by the northern seas of his Viking forefathers.
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br /> He stared east and shouted curses at the sea, still more at cunning Silversleeves, but knew there was nothing he could do. “I made my mark and seal on it,” he cried. The document was legal. He had been duped.
He would have been even more bemused had he understood the true origin of his misery.
When, long ago, Silversleeves had taken over Leofric’s debt to Becket, the merchant of Caen, he had simply been continuing the long process by which he secretly came to control all his old rival’s trade with London. Only last Christmas, when Becket was owed for six separate shipments, the subtle Canon of St Paul’s had suddenly stopped all payments and refused all supplies. “And that,” as he explained to Henri, “should ruin them by Easter.” Thanks to his foolish insult of twenty years ago, Barnikel had been added to this process, rather as an architect might add a side chapel to complete the symmetry of an otherwise perfect building.
Wiser, poorer and suddenly older, Barnikel returned sadly to London with an unremitting sense that the Normans had won. Upon reaching his house at Billingsgate he did not break a single door, but instead took to his bed for three weeks, during which time he drank far more ale than he should have. He did not come to himself again until Hilda, having tried unsuccessfully three times, at last gained admittance and, with her own hands, made him a bowl of sustaining broth.
In the year 1086, prompted partly by his need for extra revenue during the panic of the previous year, one of the most remarkable administrative feats in history was begun by William, the Conqueror of England. It was an amazing testimony not only to his thoroughness, but still more to his domination of his own feudal magnates. Certainly no other king in medieval Europe ever dared attempt such a thing.
This was the Domesday survey. William ordered it on Christmas Day, 1085. Village by village, the entire countryside was to be investigated by his clerks; every field and coppice measured and valued, every free man, serf and even the livestock counted. “He didn’t miss a pig,” men said, with a mixture of awe and disgust. At the end of it, King William would have the basis for the most efficient tax assessment seen until modern times.
In this respect, William was uniquely fortunate. Most feudal lords in Europe gave only grudging obedience to their monarch, and would never have tolerated such an inquisition. Even William never attempted such a thing in his own duchy of Normandy. But the island of England was different. Not only did he claim it belonged to him by conquest, but most of the landholders were now his own men, bound to him personally, and obedient. He could, therefore, be thorough.
On a bright morning in April, Alfred the armourer arrived at the hamlet near Windsor that he had left as a boy. He had meant to visit his family for some years, and now, as he approached the familiar bend in the river, he felt quite excited.
It was thanks to his father that he still had an interest in the place. In the years following the Conquest, the smith had acquired the tenancy of a number of strips of land on the manor, for which he paid a money rent. On his death he had left some of these to Alfred, who paid the rent while his brother arranged for the land to be worked. It brought the Londoner a modest extra income, for which he was glad, and also preserved a link with his childhood. Now, knowing that the Domesday surveyors would shortly be in the Windsor area, he had decided to go there to make sure his land claims were properly recorded.
It was a pleasant, lively scene that he found. The great field had already been ploughed. The seed had just been scattered and now, before the birds could eat it, the field was being harrowed. Four great carthorses were dragging the big wooden frame with its toothed underside across the heavy soil, covering the seed, while a gaggle of children followed, shouting and flinging stones to drive away the greedy crowds of birds.
There was the old forge with its wooden roof, his father’s anvil and the sharp, familiar smell of charcoal. Nothing had changed.
And yet it had. Though his brother and his family greeted him warmly enough, there was something, something he could not quite put his finger on, that disturbed Alfred. Was it a tension between his brother and his wife? Was there a hangdog look about the fellow? He wondered what it was about, but had no time to ask, for the surveyors had already arrived.
There were three of them: two French clerks and a fellow from London who helped to translate. The reeve, the landlord’s steward, was taking them round. Their practised eyes noted everything.
They had nearly finished when they got to the smithy. One of the clerks had gone with the London man to inspect the meadow, and as the other went round the cottages with the reeve, it was clear that he was anxious to leave. They paused politely, however, to inspect the forge. The clerk glanced enquiringly at the reeve, who, indicating Alfred’s brother, remarked: “A good cottager. He does labour service for his land.”
Alfred stared. How could this fellow be so careless?
“You pay rent,” he prompted his brother. But his brother only looked sheepish and said nothing as the clerk made a note on his slate.
“And this one?” They were looking at him.
“I am Alfred the armourer, of London,” he announced firmly. “A free citizen. I pay rent.”
The steward nodded, confirmed the rent, and the clerk was about to write it down when his colleague called him away to show him something by the meadow. While he was gone, Alfred turned upon his brother.
“What does this mean?” he demanded. “Are you a serf?”
And then it came out. Times were hard; there was not enough work for the smithy and too many mouths to feed. His brother spoke sullenly, without conviction, before ending with a shrug.
Alfred understood. Free men paid rent; they also paid the king’s taxes. It was not uncommon for a free peasant, unable to cope with these burdens, to pay his lord with labour instead and become a serf. “What difference does it make?” his brother weakly demanded.
In practice, in his day-to-day life, not much. But to Alfred that was not the point. It meant that his brother had given up. Then he glanced at his brother’s wife and saw the thought in her eyes: if this rich brother from London gave us the land he had here, which he doesn’t need, we’d be better off.
At that moment Alfred experienced the curious sensation that is often felt by successful men with poor relations. Perhaps it was meanness, or a deep instinct for survival, or a fear of contamination, or just impatience, but he felt a sudden rage. And if an inner voice reminded him that he, too, might have starved if it had not been for Barnikel, he countered this at once. When my chance came, I took it, he reminded himself. So it was that, gazing at them with disgust, he merely remarked: “I hope our father cannot see you now.”
When the French clerk returned he did not ask any more questions. After a rapid glance at the other cottages, he prepared to leave. Only then did he recall that he had been about to write down something about the fellow with the white patch in his hair. What the devil had the man said he was? “Damn these English,” he muttered. “They make such a confounded muddle of everything.”
For despite the thoroughness of the Domesday survey, the French clerks who compiled it were frequently baffled by what they found.
“Is this man a slave, a serf, or free?” the orderly, Latin-trained clerks would ask. In return, they would very often receive an account of curious, indefinite arrangements that time and custom had wrought and which even local people could scarcely disentangle. How could they put these Anglo-Saxon uncertainties into the clear categories that their document demanded? Often they were unsure, so they would resort to some general category whose legal status was deliberately vague. One of these was the category of villanus – a villein – a term that carried no specific legal sense at this date, and meant neither serf nor free man but merely “peasant”.
The clerk frowned. He could not remember what the fellow with the white flash in his hair had said, but he recalled that the man beside him, who looked like his brother, was a serf. He sighed, therefore, and noted: villanus. And so it was that Alfred app
eared in the great Domesday Book of England as a small, nameless mistake. It did not seem important, at the time.
1087
In August 1086, a great and symbolic meeting took place eighty miles west of London at the castle of Sarum. There King William was presented with the huge volumes of his Domesday Book and all his chief men did homage to him. It was supposed to be an occasion to celebrate, but even at this time there was a sense of melancholy in the air. The king was growing old. He was very corpulent; when he hoisted himself into the saddle, it was with a groan. His enemies were as many as ever, the most notable being the jealous King of France. Seeing him now, ageing and unwell, the great men of the kingdom were filled with a new foreboding.
For if few loved William, all feared him. If he was brutal, he kept order. What, then, would become of his Norman lands and his English kingdom when the great Conqueror was gone?
They would fall to his sons. To Robert, dark and moody. William, called Rufus for his red hair, a clever, cruel fellow. Unmarried still, it was said that he preferred the company of young men in his bed to that of women. And Henri, the youngest, devious and unknowable. There was also their ambitious half-uncle, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, still waiting in the jail in which King William had put him. What, indeed, would happen with such fellows as these free to roam after the Conqueror had gone?
In the spring of the new year, things grew worse. Cattle disease broke out in the west and spread rapidly. In late spring there were terrible storms and it was feared the harvest might be ruined. Once more, King William was fighting on the Continent, and his agents were already trying to raise new taxes.
It was not surprising, therefore, that in London, amongst the merchants who contemplated the future, there should be careful calculation. As the months went by, there were many secret conversations. Nor was it surprising that some of them involved Barnikel.
Even in dark days, however, a small ray of light may warm some corner of the world. And so it was that in the spring of 1087 Osric learned that Dorkes was pregnant again.