London (32 page)

Yet even with this prospect opened up before him, he knew he could not. Hadn’t he given Barnikel his word? It was now, for the first time in his life, that just for a moment the honest Saxon experienced a truly base thought. If by chance the Dane or his son were to be killed in battle, then he would be free of his promise and the family fortune saved.

“I will consider the matter,” he said weakly, “but I fear –”

“We shall await your decision,” Silversleeves interposed smoothly, and raised his beaker. “There is, by the way, one small condition,” he began to add.

But what this was, Leofric did not discover. At this moment, one of the lay monks burst in at the door, and as Silversleeves looked up in annoyance, the fellow cried out wildly:

“Sirs! The king is dead. The Duke of Normandy has beaten him.”

“Where?”

“At a place by the coast. Near Hastings.”

The Battle of Hastings, which so profoundly changed the course of England’s history, took place on Saturday, 14 October.

William of Normandy had several advantages. He attacked at first light, surprising King Harold. He had formidable contingents of bowmen and trained cavalry, neither of which the English king possessed. Also the English hilltop position was too narrow, allowing the bowmen to concentrate their fire with deadly effect.

Yet even so, the battle went on all day. The bowmen failed to break the English defence. When the cavalry charged, they wilted before the tremendous two-handed axe blows from men like Barnikel, which bit through their chain mail. They fled, and only William himself prevented a general rout.

Hour after hour they continued. Twice the cavalry advanced and pretended to flee, luring many of the English down the hill into a trap. Gradually, as their leaders fell, the English were worn down, but even then, as the long, grey afternoon began to darken, their battle line was still standing, and might have held till nightfall, had not a single arrow, loosed, it is said, at random, chanced to fall into the socket of King Harold’s eye, wounding him gravely. Minutes later he had received a deathblow.

Then it was over. The Staller of London, badly wounded, was carried from the field. Amongst the little group of stalwarts with whom he had fought by the king’s standard, Barnikel and his son survived to accompany him.

It was two months later, on a bright December morning, that, in the churchyard of St Paul’s, where the Folkmoot had just finished meeting, several hundred of London’s citizens witnessed a curious scene.

Barnikel of Billingsgate was red in the face. He was glowering at his friend Leofric, and he had just bellowed, in a voice that could be heard halfway down the West Cheap, a single, terrible word:

“Traitor!”

Not that his rage was directed only at the Saxon merchant. The huge Dane was furious with them all.

The weeks after Hastings had been tense. William could not immediately press home his advantage: his troops were weakened after the battle; disease broke out in his camp. He had to wait at the coast for reinforcements. Meanwhile, contingents from the north and other shires had finally begun to arrive in London. The Witan hastily named the legitimate heir, old Edward’s foreign nephew, as king.

“Why don’t we strike again?” Barnikel would roar.

Yet even to young Alfred the situation had been plain enough. The city was full of armed men, but there seemed little direction. The Staller, still wounded, was carried about in a litter. The young prince, king in name only, was seldom seen. The northern nobles were talking of returning home. Even the apprentices heard rumours that the Archbishop of Canterbury was secretly negotiating with the Normans.

On 1 December, William of Normandy had finally made his move. Advancing up the old Roman road of Watling Street, through Canterbury and Rochester, his advance guard had reached the southern end of London Bridge itself. The wooden bridge was defended; the city gates closed. The Normans had contented themselves with setting fire to the houses on the southern bank before retiring. “He’s too clever to attack the bridge,” Leofric remarked. “He’ll wear us down instead.”

Which was precisely what the Norman did. Slowly flanking the city, he crossed the river upstream, beyond Windsor, and then circled to the north, burning the farms as he went. “A few more days,” Leofric had grimly noted, “and he’ll come to our land.” By mid-December both the archbishop and even the Staller had made visits to his camp, and the Saxon merchant judged: “The city will hold out for terms.”

The terms came. All the city’s ancient rights and privileges would be respected. William of Normandy would be a father to them. That morning, beside St Paul’s, Leofric the merchant, with grim common sense, had not hesitated to state his position: “We should accept.”

Even the Staller agreed. London would yield to William and there was nothing Barnikel could do about it.

“Traitor!” he shouted again. And then half London heard him say: “As for your daughter, keep her. My son will marry no traitor’s child. Do you hear?”

Leofric heard. In the circumstances, sad though the business was, he supposed he should thank his stars.

“As you wish,” he replied, and walked away.

It was three days later when they brought Barnikel the news of Hilda’s betrothal to Henri Silversleeves. For a few moments he could not believe it.

“But you told him we didn’t want her. You refused the marriage,” his son pointed out miserably.

“He might have known I didn’t really mean it,” the Dane moaned, before it occurred to him that Leofric had.

And then Barnikel of Billingsgate became very angry indeed.

It was generally agreed by the inhabitants of Billingsgate and All Hallows that there had been nothing like it in their lifetime. Even old men who could remember the entire reign of King Canute and would swear they had seen Ethelred the Unready, confessed they had witnessed nothing better. People stood in their doorways or leaned out of their windows; a few desperadoes who had run up from the wharf gathered, ready to scatter in a moment, only thirty paces from Barnikel’s door.

The Dane’s rage continued for more than an hour. The next day, when his family ventured back into the house, they could not prevent their neighbours from entering with them to survey the damage he had wrought. It was awesome.

Three barrels of ale smashed, seven earthenware pitchers, six wooden platters, two beds, a cauldron, five wooden stools, fifteen pots of preserved fruit, a chest. Twisted beyond all further use: three meat hooks and the spit on which the meat was roasted. Broken: the shaft of a double-handed battle-axe. Further destroyed or greatly reduced: a trestle table, three wooden window shutters, two oak doors, and the larder wall.

Even his Viking ancestors, they said, would not have disdained these efforts.

The coronation of William the Conqueror of England was fixed for Christmas Day 1066. It took place in the sacred church of Westminster Abbey.

Silversleeves and Leofric attended, standing side by side. The marriage had been fixed for the following summer. Leofric was free of his debts. The sole condition on which the Norman had insisted turned out to be that Leofric should henceforth import his wines through Silversleeves and cease to do business with Becket, the merchant of Caen. Leofric did this with some regret, but it seemed a small price to pay.

It was with some surprise that, two days after the coronation, young Alfred, chancing to meet Barnikel in the East Cheap and remarking that the Norman king was making himself master of London now, received this admonition:

“Wait and see.”

Unusually for the Dane, it was said very quietly. Alfred wondered what it meant.

THE TOWER

1078

And now by the riverside, below the slopes where the ravens dwelt, a new presence was beginning to rise.

It had always been a quiet place, this south-eastern corner of the city where the ancient Roman wall came down to the Thames and the spur of the eastern hill created its natural open-air theatre by the water. A few fragments of the old Roman buildings had stood there, like guardian sentinels, or actors from some antique drama, turned to stone. But if the croaking ravens on the slopes had been expecting entertainment from the grassy stage below, then they had been waiting for the play to recommence for nearly a thousand years.

Until King William came.

For now, on this sheltered green, a large earthwork had been formed, behind which were the beginnings of a new building. From its foundations alone, it was clear that it would be massive.

It was made of grey stone. And it was called the Tower.

When King William I conquered England, he made a very understandable mistake.

Although there were still rivals for the island kingdom, he had assumed that his nobles, who were not so great in number, would settle and live peaceably with the English, side by side. After all, wasn’t that what had happened with the Danish King Canute? And even though he spoke French, wasn’t he, William, a Norseman too?

To begin with, all his actions had been conciliatory. England kept her Saxon common law, London her privileges, and though, as was normal throughout the medieval world, some estates had been confiscated to provide for his followers, many English nobles had in fact kept their lands during those early years.

So why the devil couldn’t these cursed English be reasonable? For twelve years now there had been challenges to the Norman king. First there had been English revolts; Scotland had threatened; the Danes had invaded. More than once it had looked as though William might lose his new island kingdom. And each time, those Anglo-Saxon nobles he thought he could trust had proved to be false, and the harassed Norman had been forced to bring more mercenaries from overseas, and to reward more of these foreign knights with estates confiscated from a new set of Saxon traitors. So it was that, over more than a decade, the old English nobility had been replaced. And with truth the Conqueror could claim: “They have only themselves to blame.”

These were also the years when another innovation began to change the face of England.

At first the Norman castle at London was quite a modest structure: a simple, stout wooden tower built on a high earth mound and surrounded by a palisade. This was the Norman motte-and-bailey. It was simple but strong, and it overawed any town. Such castles had already been built to garrison Warwick, York, Sarum and numerous other English boroughs. But at the two key eastern defensive sites, here at London and at Colchester on the east coast, something more ambitious had now been planned: a massive castle keep, not of wood, but of stone. Its message to the Londoners was bleak.

“King William is your master.”

It was morning. Under a hot August sun, the labourers were swarming like so many ants on the building site by the river.

Ralph Silversleeves stood with a whip in his hand. Before him, the young labourer was gazing up hopefully, holding out the small object like a religious offering.

“You did this?”

The young fellow nodded, and Silversleeves stared at it thoughtfully. The thing was remarkable. No doubt about it. Then he looked at the supplicant again. It gratified him to know that the youth’s entire life now lay in his hands.

The Conquest had been good for Ralph. All his life he had known that he was the family fool. Though he would, one day, inherit equally from his father, it was still his clever brother Henri who would run the family business. He admired Henri; he wished he could be like him. But he knew that he could not. He was useless, and people laughed at him.

But with the coming of King William, things had changed. His father had obtained a position for him with no less a figure than the magnate Geoffrey de Mandeville, the king’s chief agent in London. Now, for the first time in his life, Ralph could feel himself a fellow of consequence. The fact that Mandeville only used him for jobs that were menial and brutal did not trouble him. “I am a Norman,” he could say. One of the new élite. For the last year he had been the overseer at the new Tower of London.

“So, Osric,” he said coolly, “what are we going to do with you?”

He was a small fellow, only sixteen years old, but his hard life and the disfigurement he had suffered had already given him an ageless look. His short legs were bandy, his fingers stubby, his solemn eyes set in a head that was too big for his body.

He came from a village in the west of England, near the ancient settlement of Sarum. Not long after the Conquest, the village had passed into the hands of one of William’s greatest magnates. Though they were good craftsmen, amongst the hundreds of peasant families on the magnate’s vast landholdings, young Osric’s had been of no special significance, and the great magnate would never have known of his existence if Osric had not foolishly set a snare to trip the horse of one of his knights, who as a consequence had broken his arm. The boy might have expected death, but King William, still hoping to ingratiate himself with his English subjects, had told his followers to show clemency. So they had only slit young Osric’s nose.

In the midst of his solemn face, therefore, there was now a sad little reddish-blue mess. He breathed through his mouth. And he hated all Normans.

Since the magnate had also been granted the manor of Chelsea, upstream from London, he had sent the boy there. A year later, his steward had sold Osric to another magnate, none other than Geoffrey de Mandeville. Now the boy was not sure whether he was a serf or a slave. But one thing he did know: if he gave any trouble, Ralph Silversleeves would cut off his ears.

He waited nervously, therefore, whilst the surly overseer considered his verdict.

As the sun beat down, it seemed to Osric that the site where they were standing was like a huge, mysterious forge. The grassy platform was like a great green anvil; the carpenters, with the tap-tapping of their hammers echoing softly round the slopes, might have been so many elfin blacksmiths.

Within the curve of the high ground, the Tower lay in its own, inner enclosure. Just east of it was the ancient Roman wall; on its western and northern sides, the earthwork rampart and palisade of the wooden fort had been left in place. Within the enclosure stood several workshops, storehouses and some stables.