An Audience with an Elephant (4 page)

It is 11 November 1283, and a king is writing to the Prior and Prioress of Sempringham. Edward I, the conqueror of Wales, has a request to make, ‘having the Lord before our eyes, pitying also her sex and age, that the innocent may not seem to atone for the iniquity and ill-doing of the wicked and contemplating, especially, the life of your Order’. But you can forget the phrases, typical of that legalistic and self righteous man; the King was making the Prior and Prioress an offer they could not refuse. He wanted a child to disappear.

With a dangled pension of £20 a year there came an orphaned baby, the only child of the first and last Prince of Wales, Llywelyn, but to the King a biological time-bomb. She must never be allowed to marry or have children, and so Edward was ordering them to make her into a nun. When his troopers brought her father’s few treasures out of his shattered principality, the coronet called the Crown of Arthur and the fragment of the True Cross, they brought her as well to Edward, in her cradle out of Snowdonia. She would never return.

Her name was Gwenllian, but the King’s clerks got that wrong, spelling it Wencilian. She had 54 years of life left among strangers who would never learn to spell it, for it is Wencialian to the end in the Priory records. More poignantly she may never have learnt to spell it herself, or even to pronounce it, for in her one letter, an appeal for money (the letters of the Middle Ages were either about money or the law), it is Wentliane.

Her father Llywelyn was dead, killed in battle in December 1282, his severed head whitening on a pole above the Tower of London where it became a landmark (men could still see it fifteen years later from the pubs at the Tower’s foot). With him had collapsed a Welsh nation state in its shaky beginnings, and a dynasty dating back to the Roman Empire which made the King’s own family tree a thing of whimsy. But it is the private detail of the fall of the House of Gwynedd that is so overwhelrning. Gwenllian’s mother was dead, giving birth to her the previous June; her uncle’s family had been hunted down. She was just seventeen months old when she was brought to the place of lost children.

You come on their names in footnotes for they are of little interest to historians. They did nothing, they went nowhere; once those doors closed on them in childhood they were the dead. ‘Three marks to be yearly laid aside to make good the wall and ditch to shut off the nuns, that no person may go in or have the least sight of them. No presents or messages to be delivered to or from the nuns. The windows through which anything is delivered to have wheels that turn so the sisters may not see anyone, or anyone see the sisters.’ The rules at Sempringham of England’s one monastic order, founded by the little hunchback Gilbert, were strict.

The children had committed one crime, that of being born. Even Stalin didn’t hold that against the children of his victims, for eventually these were allowed to emerge from their orphanages. But not Gwenllian or her little girl cousins who turned up the following year before being dispersed to other nunneries; had they stayed together they might have shared some memory of the past, and to the English this was Year Zero. The little boys of Gwynedd did not come, they had disappeared into perpetual imprisonment. The children of disgraced English barons came, one or two to be retrieved when a deal was struck in later years. But the Welsh children were already history and for them Sempringham was the dustbin of a broken dynasty. But where
is
Sempringham?

Find Grantham on the map. Forget the alderman and his grocer’s shop: follow the A52 eastwards until after about 9 miles you see a B road turning south to Billingborough and Bourne. Two miles after Billingborough you will find Sempringham, a place where Mrs Thatcher has probably never been.

Sempringham is a locked church at the end of an earth track, out in the fields with no houses near it. You will have no problem finding the church, for you will already have seen it from miles around; there is no landscape here, only sky. But once there was something which would have pushed up that sky. What survives is a church which was there when Gilbert came, but 350 yards to the south of this he built his Priory, the nave of which was 55 feet longer than Ripon Cathedral and 25 feet wider than Lichfield. When archaeologists excavated here before the last war it was this width which stunned them and the enormous buttresses which flanked it; together they suggested a towering loftiness which would have been one of the wonders of the Middle Ages. The local newspaper was suitably impressed: ‘Excavations at Sempringham. Remains of a big church discovered.’

Of this there is now no trace for at the Dissolution it became a quarry, the bumps still visible in the field being those of the mansion built from of its stones. Daniel Defoe saw that mansion when he came through, and the tactful old hack recorded its plasterwork was the equivalent of that in the Royal Palace of Nonesuch. There is no trace of any of the graves, so hers is as lost as those of the rest of her dynasty (though her great grandfather’s stone coffin lies empty in Llanrwst church); the English saw to it that there were to be no shrines, and two generations on were hiring an assassin in France to kill the last male member of the family. They had forgotten about him.

She would have seen the church, though not in its present form. It looks a bit odd now, having been restored from near ruin by a Victorian parson; its huge original arches and the fussy little chancel he added make it seem as though a giant’s clothing had been cut down to fit ordinary men.

There were 200 nuns in her time. A high wall ran the length of the Priory and separated them from the 80 monks, so that there were two altars, one on each side. Think of her there in those 54 years of institutional life. The coarse woollen clothing. The bells ringing for worship and work, matins and masses, masses and matins; the enforced silences which may have got easier as childhood ebbed; the windows squeaking as they turned on their wheels for a few inches when a stranger called. She had come from the mountains and she was to pass her life without seeing a single hill. The wind howling over the flat land, and time passing.

Perhaps she grew cynical, watching the arrival of other bits of jetsam, the children of her father’s enemies. Roger Mortimer’s daughter came after he escaped from the Tower, a member of the family suspected of the treachery which had led to her father’s death. The dustbin offered excellent views of English political fortunes. The two daughters of the executed Hugh de Despencer came, on a pension of £20 a year between them as they were not such big potatoes. She, Gwenllian, was a very big potato. They would not have allowed her to forget that. When Edward II tried to raise cash from the Pope for Sempringham it was Gwenllian’s presence there that he mentioned. When Edward III came through in 1327, the Priory records show that he confirmed her £20 a year, but then the English could afford to be generous.

They had always had this small, nagging guilt when it came to the Welsh, the Archbishop of Canterbury observing in 1199 that ‘the Welsh, being sprung by unbroken succession from the original stock of Britons, boast of all Britain as theirs by right’. Which was why, when her father’s head was paraded down Cheapside, the Londoners crowned it mockingly with ivy.

And now all that was over. Llywelyn’s halls had been destroyed, their timbers taken away, his archives burned, all this so completely men now argue as to where his power had its seat, even as to the form this took. There is one extraordinary little footnote: some years ago a family moved into a smallholding at Aber, near Conway, and found under a Victorian grate a massive medieval fireplace. Under the render of the walls they found mullioned windows and the outline of a great arch; and Mrs Kathryn Gibson who had bought a chicken farm found herself in the lost hall of the princes, where Gwenllian had been born.

Perhaps she was happy in her long exile in Sempringham. I like to think so, for everything else would be so sad; perhaps in time there was a stout, bossy woman as masterful as her father had been. The nuns would have been in awe of her anyway, let us hope she exploited this to the hilt.

We can imagine this because, with one exception, none of the lost children speak to us. The exception is her cousin Owain, who, with his brother Llywelyn, had been sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Bristol castle. Llywelyn died after a few years but Owain lived on, and 20 years later old King Edward was still worrying about him. This, you may remember, was the king who in public said that sin was not passed on. ‘As the King wills that Owain son of Dafydd ap Gruffydd who is in the Constable’s custody in the castle, should be kept in future more securely, he orders the Constable to cause a strong house within the castle to be repaired as soon as possible, and to make a wooden cage bound with iron in that house, in which Owain may be enclosed at night.’ Just like a mouse. That was in 1305.

But then something odd happened. Around 1312 Owain managed to get a letter out to the new king, Edward II, and his Council. The one voice for the lost children in speaking. ‘Owain, son of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, shows that whereas he is by order of the King detained in the Castle of Bristol in strong and close prison, and has been since he was seven years old, for his father’s trespass. He prays the King that he may go and play within the wall of the castle if he cannot have better grace of the King. . .’. It sounds like the plea of a small boy, but it isn’t. The man begging to be allowed to play within the wall of the castle is 36 years old; he has been locked up, probably without exercise, for 29 of them.

The Council ignored his appeal but was so startled to receive this, a hand has written across it in Latin, ‘Let it be enquired who sues this petition.’ They had forgotten who he was. What was this thing that had dared crawl into their daylight, this ghost out of history? It is like that scene in Koestler’s
Darkness At Noon
when the purged Communist learns that the man in the next cell is a Tsarist, still alive. Owain was still alive in 1320, when a bureaucratic hand records a change of constable. Thereafter. . . nothing.

‘1337. Wencilian, daughter of the Prince of Wales, died, after 54 years of life in the Order. The King excuses the Prior and the convent from a payment of £39.15s.4d. . .’. That payment was tax they were owing, but the King was grateful; a child had disappeared.

I walked up the track through the fields and, seeing something in the grass, bent down. It was a dead barn owl, the first I had seen, and, ruffling in the beautiful orange plumage to find a cause of death, I came on a tiny metal ring crowded with writing around one leg. It gave instructions so I wrote to the British Museum of Natural History, saying where and when I had found it. A month later a reply came. The bird had been hand-reared and had lived just 96 days, travelling only a mile and a quarter from its place of release. Its natural habitats had gone, there were so few barns now. But I kept the ring. At Sempringham I had found another small thing lost in a huge world.

The Last Tramp

Y THE TIME YOU
read this the subject of the article will have disappeared into Wales as effectively as any goblin or guerilla of the Middle Ages, as completely, in fact, as David Livingstone disappeared into Africa. George Gibbs is one of that shrinking body of men steadily eroded by the processes of government who can still do this, as for nine months of every year, in 20th-century Britain, he is beyond the reach of postmen and phone calls. Gibbs comes at the end of a very long tradition: at 53 he is the last of the wanderers.

For as long as there have been hearth fires and home acres some men have been forsaking them, to wander. Outraged legislation indexed their progress, spitting against ‘vagabondes, roges, masterless men and idle persons’ and ‘myghty vagabonds and beggars’; up until the nineteenth century, with its glimmerings of official enlightenment, society hounded and reviled its tramps because in their way they represented, like Soviet emigrants, an adverse comment upon it. Yet then tramps acquired a haze of romance, particularly with growing urbanisation. They were the men outside, the bronzed wanderers, men with no axes to grind (though ironically this is how many earned their livings), with no families, no past, no future. The romance was, of course, in contradiction of the facts. Tramps, the manager of a reception centre told me, were usually ‘physically or mentally disabled, or socially inadequate’. Besides, very few of them now did wander: what remained were derelicts or alcoholics shuffling through city centres. Philip O’Connor, author of
Vagrancy
, advised me to invent such a man: he doubted whether he existed in life.

Finally, I found George Gibbs. Since 1968 he has been something of a minor celebrity in Wales. Then, trying to light a fire in a deserted house near Llanelly, he had the good fortune first to push his hand up the chimney, and enough blasting powder came tumbling down to have sent him, the house, and most of the street, into kingdom come. It was the year before the Investiture.

Gibbs spent his winters at the Stormydown Reception Centre near Bridgend, leaving each year with the spring, and by summer could be anywhere between Glamorgan and Anglesey; the difficulties in contacting a tramp are legion. I rang some of his regular stops — a Carmarthenshire farmhouse, a Newtown presbytery — without luck. But there was one thing which characterised Gibbs: his fondness for the police force. Like an unofficial Inspector of Constabulary, he dropped in on their stations, chatted to them, discussed their families, promotions, moves, smoked their cigarettes and drank their tea. The Dyfed-Powys force offered to pass the message ‘up the line’ as they put it, to say I was interested in meeting George. A week later I was rung up from Machynlleth: ‘Mr Gibbs,’ said a voice, ‘is just entering town.’ Which made him sound like a gunfighter.