Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (39 page)
Read Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) Online
Authors: Roberto Calas
I make mention of the Flemish settling in Sudbury, but I couldn’t find room to talk about Simon of Sudbury, one of the town’s most famous sons. Here are Edward’s thoughts on Simon, in a paragraph that was cut from the book:
Sudbury also had a connection to the peasants’ revolt a few years back. Simon of Sudbury, the inventor of the poll tax and archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded by wild-eyed peasants in London during the riots. The peasants were not appreciative of his invention. Tristan likes to say that Simon’s head was staked to a poll.
In the chapter where Edward is being taken to the bandit camp, he sees Frenchmen strapped to carriage wheels with their limbs hammered to rubbery pulp. This is nothing invented. This sort of torture device is called the Saint Catherine Wheel and it was, unfortunately, popular during the Middle Ages. An unknown writer from long ago described a victim of the wheel in far better terms than I do. He said the victim looked like “a sort of huge, screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones.”
Something inside me shrivels when I read that. I can’t imagine the excruciating pain these poor victims must have felt. I feel shame for being nervous at the dentist.
The other form of torture I mention is the Spanish Donkey, and this, too, was a real form of punishment. It was reportedly still used well into the eighteenth century.
It’s sobering to think that human cruelty might actually be more terrifying than flesh-eating demons.
Most people think of the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance. A time when knowledge and the pursuit of scientific truths were suppressed. And in many ways, this is true. But a great many theories and discoveries were made during those so-called Dark Ages.
The Venerable Bede was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval age, and he came from some of the darkest years of the Dark Ages—the seventh century. Bede, a monk, wrote more than sixty books on a wide variety of topics, including, as Edward stated, a treatise claiming the earth is spherical and not flat. Did I mention this was in the seventh century? He was versed in the classical philosophies as well as the religious and scientific ideology of his time. Not bad for an old man in the dark age of history.
Edward spends much of this episode in the village of Edwardstone, in Suffolk. The village, which is to the east of Sudbury, has existed for more than a thousand years. It was one of the many locales to be swept up in Suffolk’s cloth trade, and it prospered in Edward’s time. The church is lovely. Battlemented on one side, with a thick, handsome Norman tower. It was renovated in the nineteenth century but still maintains much of its medieval feel, and the church has a thirteenth-century font that would have been there long before Edward was born.
Okay, now for a confession. Some of you may know this already, but the Scottish sport of tossing the caber is generally thought to date from the early sixteenth century. I say generally, because no one knows for sure. There is much discussion about the origins of caber tossing. But like any sport, it probably predates the written historical records. I like to think that some form of caber tossing was around back in the fourteenth century, even if it had a different name. Not convinced? Then think about ice hockey. Variations of ice hockey were played in the early Middle Ages by the Danes. That’s more than a thousand years before it became recognized as the sport we know today. But were Scots really throwing twenty-foot-long poles into the air in Edward’s day?
I’d say there’s a wee chance.
In this episode, Edward reflects upon the reason for spiral stairs going anticlockwise instead of clockwise. He would know a lot about such things because, as I have mentioned in the past, he designed and oversaw the construction of Bodiam Castle, which was—and is—in my opinion one of the finest castles in England. Edward was knowledgeable in the finer points of fortresses of all sorts. So knowledgeable, in fact, that he was appointed to survey the strengths and weaknesses of many English castles and settlements, including the towns of Winchelsea and Rye, and the castles in Calais and Picardy.
Edward’s assertion that the church considered the left hand to be evil is correct. All knights were anointed in the eyes of God and had to be right-handed. So when invaders stormed up spiral staircases, you could be fairly certain that the attackers would be at a disadvantage because of the tower walls.
Edward is a master of military tactics and defenses, but his Elizabeth wants him to be more than that. She goads him into reading the French Roman de Renard books. As Edward recalls, the Renard books were mostly about animals. They were a sort of twelfth-century
Aesop’s Fables
, except they rarely had a moral. They were simply snapshots that explored human emotions and motivations. The story Edward thought about is one of the most well known.
The order of the Knights Hospitaller is a real order, one that has been around as long as the order of the Knights Templar. Both were started during the Crusades for the purpose of protecting pilgrims making their way to the Holy Lands. The Knights Hospitallers held a wealth of lands in England, including the Little Maplestead Preceptory, which was founded in circa 1186. A preceptory is simply a community of Knights Hospitaller or Knights Templar. Not much is known about the preceptor at Maplestead except that it held a messuage (dwelling house and outbuildings) and a garden, a hospital, three hundred and eighty acres of land, sixteen acres of meadowland, thirty acres of pasture, and a dovecote.
I’m glad they documented the dovecote.
Those dancing people?
Yes.
There really was a sickness in the Middle Ages that caused men and women to dance uncontrollably. It was, as the knight Roger noted, called Saint John’s Dance, or, sometimes, the Dancing Plague. Although some cases of this peculiar illness were recorded as early as the eighth century, the first
major
outbreak was in Germany, in 1375. Thousands of people danced until they fell to the ground with exhaustion, and even after falling to the ground they would writhe and spasm. The theories as to why this occurred range from food poisoning to mass insanity, but nobody seems absolutely certain.
History often provides subjects that are stranger than anything writers can come up with. Case in point: Tristan said the dancers hated pointy shoes and the color red, which, according to historical records, is true. The dancers reacted violently to pointed shoes, the color red, and any attempts to stop them from dancing. Entire novels could be written about this odd illness.
Treatment for these people usually involved exorcism and isolation, and the success rate seems to have been about as low as you would expect. Which brings us to the treatment of wounds in general.
Barbers in Edward’s time were no longer mere cutters of hair. They knew how to leech patients and performed routine, if crude, surgeries. Doctors had more learning, although the profession was riddled with superstition, astrology, and false knowledge. Humorism was a medieval belief that the body was controlled by four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. All illnesses were caused by an imbalance in these humors, and to recover one’s health, one had to realign them. Often this involved drawing blood with leeches, or prescribing herbal medications. And while humorism seems a bit backward to us, it was a very complex system that sometimes arrived at the correct conclusion. Although usually for an incorrect reason.
Paul and the nun at Hedingham use mold to treat Edward’s wound. Mold, which is used to make penicillin in modern times, has been used to treat infection from as far back as the days of ancient Greece. In the Middle Ages, the mold often took the form of wet bread and cobwebs. I’m not entirely sure what the cobwebs added to the formula, but webs were often used to stop bleeding.
Maggots were also used to treat infection, especially on battlefields, where surgeons observed that wounds with maggots in them were cleaner than wounds without. Maggots only have the ability to eat dead flesh, and they leave healthy tissue alone. Clever maggots.
As with most areas of life in the Middle Ages, fraud was rampant in medicine. Some doctors or peddlers sold elixirs which they said would cure almost any illness. These elixirs were rarely useful in any way. Eventually a Latin term was applied to these sorts of worthless medicines that promised miracle cures.
Nostrum
.
Dragons have been a rich part of the history of England and Europe. Looking back with modern sensibilities, it may seem as if the people of England were a bit silly to believe in such things. But the beliefs of a society change as education and discovery shine light into the dark areas of our knowledge. There are many people today who believe that life-forms from alien planets come down and abduct humans. I can’t be certain this is not true, because our society has not explored the planets and galaxies of our universe. Perhaps, someday in the future, we will have irrefutable proof one way or the other, and the people of that distant age may look back with humor at
our
archaic beliefs.
The creature that Edward and Tristan fight in this episode is not a dragon. Not in the strictest sense of the word. What they fight is a particularly large, particularly aggressive Nile crocodile. And though it seems a bit farfetched that a Nile crocodile would prowl the waterways of England, it has happened at least once, and probably more times than that.
King Richard I, while on crusade, was reportedly given a crocodile as a gift. He is said to have sent the creature back to England and kept it in a menagerie at the Tower of London. The caretakers of this “dragon” had no way of knowing how to properly pen this creature, and the croc escaped in the Thames and drifted along the east coast of England, terrorizing villagers of Essex and Kent.
Another crocodile seems to have escaped from the Tower in 1405. And, after leaving the Thames, this one found the River Stour and the village of Bures (called Bure back them). The croc horrified the people of the village, ate a few sheep, ate a few shepherds, and grew fat and lethal. The people of Bures called it a dragon and discussed sacrificing virgins to it, but Sir Richard Waldegrave prohibited any sacrifice and sent his archers after the beast. They shot the croc, and the animal, in one story, fled to Wormingford, where it was killed by a knight (another Sir George, oddly).
The village of Bures still recalls the glory of its brush with a dragon. If you visit Bures today, you can see the massive silhouette, outlined in white, of a dragon upon a hillside. There is, from what I understand, another dragon artwork in the village. It is in the St. Stephan’s Chapel, a historic church where King Edmund was crowned in 855. There is, reportedly, a dragon etched or painted on the wall of the church.
But finding St. Stephan’s in the maze of farmyards and bridle trails is a quest worthy of Sir Edward himself.
Norwich, in the Middle Ages, was one of the largest cities in England. Its history fluctuates like a pendulum between the wonderful and horrible. In 1174, one of the most magnificent cathedrals in England was built there. Four years later, a boy was killed in the city and the large Jewish community was blamed for it. The result was a horrendous massacre of the Jews of Norwich. The Hospital of St. Giles (now known as the Great Hospital) was built in 1249 and became one of the finest hospitals in England. But in 1274 the entire city was excommunicated because of a riot against the monks of the cathedral. From sacks by the Flemings and the French to the flourishing of the wool trade, Norwich’s history is a fascinating one. I have yet to find any reference to disfigured demons roaming the streets of the city, but if Sir Edward speaks of such things, it must be true.
King Richard II had a tumultuous twenty-year reign. His father, Edward the Black Prince, died a year before his own father, King Edward III. The Black Prince’s death no doubt came as a shock to the people of England, who adored him and were expecting a long and successful reign from the prince. So when Edward III died a year later, the people were likely not impressed that instead of heralding the reign of the Black Prince, the crown was placed on the head of ten-year-old Richard. Not an auspicious start.
A council was created to advise the young king. The boy’s uncle, John of Gaunt, lobbied to have himself appointed regent, to rule England until the boy came of age. But a council was appointed to advise the boy instead, and John of Gaunt was on that council.
Richard showed occasional flashes of brilliance, as in his handling of the Peasants’ Revolt, but as he grew and took control of the kingdom, he became insular. He relied on very few advisers, close friends whom he rewarded and spent his time with. He did not interact well with the rest of his nobles and this brewed a resentment that spilled over in 1387, when a group of lords calling themselves the Lords Appellant wrested control of the kingdom for a short time.
Although Richard regained his throne from the Lords Appellant, his reign did not end peacefully. Years later, Henry of Bolingbroke, one of the three leaders of the Lords Appellant, raised an army and ousted the embattled king. Henry became King Henry IV, and Richard became a prisoner in the Tower of London and, it is said, died in captivity.
Another of the leaders of the Lords Appellant was none other than Richard FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel and patron to Sir Edward Dallingridge. Edward must have been torn by loyalties when it came to King Richard. On one hand, FitzAlan, a personal friend of Edward’s father, was leading a revolt against the king. On the other, Richard signed the order allowing Edward to build Bodiam Castle, which was Edward’s crowning achievement.