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Authors: J. Anderson Coats

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I should be weeping for my mother. I should be tearing my hair and smearing my face with soot. Or at least drying tears, as does English, who barely knew her.

Instead I feel light. As if I could float away on the wind, somewhere far from here.

Ashes to ashes. Mam is buried. My neighbors cluster, pushing English aside.

Your mother is with God now, they say. Her suffering is over. Beyond the cares of the world.

It's like saying the sky is blue or the Pope is Christian.

I lag behind till they strip away and head for their own hearths to what's left of their children and beasts. Soon it's just English and I, heaving uphill toward the steading that's mine now. Empty and mine.

And English says, even when you know it's coming, it still hurts. She squeezes my hand and whispers, I'm sorry . . . Gwennaver.

She's filthy and tattered and hungry, waiting on a cousin who may never arrive. Her hands are blistered raw and her cheeks windburned, but she looks me in the eye and she hasn't broken and she's sorry.

Now mayhap time can do its work.

 

 

N
ICHOLAS ARRIVES
when the wind off the strait is flinging angry snow against the steading. He lurches up the hill on a half-dead horse and leaps from the saddle as if it's afire. His face is mottled red and his hands are like leather, but I throw my arms about him and hold on hard.

“Thank Christ,” he whispers into my hair. “Oh, Cecily, I never thought I'd see you again in this world.”

It's Nicholas. Lop-eared, gingerfool Nicholas. My eyes sting.

“I had a look at Caernarvon as I passed,” he growls. “They will pay for what they've done, mark me. His Grace the king is even now massing forces at Chester.”

“What they've done,” I echo, in the shadow of hungry crofts and churchyard graves and toll-table splinters.

“Come, we ride for Chester,” Nicholas says. “Father will meet you there and take you back to Coventry.”

He's tugging me toward his horse, but I pull away. “First I must bid farewell.”

“To whom?”

She puts the bucket down as I near the steading door. We regard each other for a long moment. She's a lot thinner than the girl who came with my house, but she stands just the same. Chin up, shoulders squared, steady as the Adversary's throwing arm.

But I understand why.


Pob llwyddiant,
” Gwennaver says. “
Hwyl.


Di-diolch yn . . . er, fawr,
” I stumble, and I mean every word. I need every bit of good fortune I can get, and although a simple thank-you seems inadequate, it's the best I can do with my new words.

I turn away, but Gwennaver catches my sleeve and presses a folded packet into my hands. Ere I can respond, Nicholas manhandles me atop the rickety horse and leads it away.

I look over my shoulder, but she has already disappeared.

“Barbarous,” Nicholas mutters. “I cannot believe Henry thinks to return once these beasts are put down.”

“What else is he to do?” I ask, and Nicholas grunts.

What else am I to do?

Swaying on Nicholas's horse, I unfold the packet Gwennaver gave me. Saint Joseph and the Christ Child wait while the Virgin, still merely an outline, prays at the roadside. Caernarvon has been torn away, but its outline remains. It will not be hard to restitch.

I fold the linen and stow it close to my heart.

I wish Gwennaver health and Griffith safety, for both will need it for what's coming. Then I pray for my father's soul.

From this far, Caernarvon looks just as it did upon our arrival. Gray and weathered and solid as Jerusalem, and it's only because I know to look that I see the makeshift gate and crumbled tower-tops.

The king will have it back. The burgesses will return. They will all remember what happened here, and why.

My cousin Henry will be among them. He will need a chatelaine to run his house and preside over his kitchen. Someone who knows the market and the countryside, someone who knows the Welsh and how to treat with them. Someone with a townhouse two streets over, held in trust till her marriage, when she will become its lady. Someone who'll not dishonor her father's memory and give up her new birthright as if it's worthless.

I know just the girl for the job. She will walk her cousin's townhouse amid a faint jingle of keys while a wolfhound puppy follows at her heels.

Historical Note

Caernarvon in 1294 was a great place to live—as long as you were English. A decade earlier, after two hundred years of near-constant conflict, the English brought about the final collapse of native government in Wales with the battlefield killing of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and the execution of his brother Dafydd, the last Welsh Princes of Wales. Although the fall of Wales was not his precise intention, Edward I, king of England, quickly consolidated the old princely lands into what became known as the Principality of North Wales.

Once Edward held Wales, he wanted to ensure that it never troubled England again. To that end, he instigated an extensive—and expensive—castle-building, urban development, and settlement program to maintain control of the land and its inhabitants. A critical aspect of this project was a series of walled towns like Caernarvon, intended to attract English settlers to support the castle garrisons and help develop the local economy.

These towns were very much on the frontier, surrounded by a hostile, newly subjugated Welsh population—people like Gruffydd and Gwenhwyfar—who were still becoming accustomed to English government. Cecily's concern that she would be murdered was not entirely unfounded. Wales had a fierce reputation in the thirteenth century, so Edward had to offer settlers an array of privileges to entice them to take burgages, mostly in the form of tax breaks and subsidized farmland. One of the few requirements was residence, and one of the only burdens was a modest yearly rent. In the Middle Ages, this kind of offer was almost unheard of.

But Caernarvon was not the best place to be if you were Welsh. The same conditions that attracted English settlers to the Principality made life very difficult for the Welsh, who had until recently been governed by a familiar and long-standing set of laws and customs. Gwenhwyfar would have been raised on stories of Welsh princes who resisted encroaching English domination with diplomacy when they could and with the sword when they had to. It was not an easy transition for the Welsh, and Gwenhwyfar's resentment toward her new English masters had ten years to simmer.

On the surface, the introduction of English rule to Wales was surprisingly lenient. There were no wholesale executions of Welsh nobility, and only a few, like Gwenhwyfar's father, who died fighting the English, lost their lands. Edward made no attempt to ban the Welsh language or any other type of cultural expression. In many places, Welsh civil law remained in effect, and it was only for criminal cases that English law was imposed. Although he enacted a number of underhanded, semilegal measures to protect the castles and new walled towns, Edward went out of his way to ensure as peaceful a transfer of power as possible, mainly because he was more concerned with events on the Continent than with those in Wales.

Since Edward's attention was elsewhere, he placed a number of officials in charge of Wales with express instructions to govern according to the Statute of Rhuddlan, a document issued by the king in 1284. But the burgesses in the walled towns had different ideas. They were nervous already, outnumbered fifty to one by a disgruntled populace, and they harbored a certain sense of entitlement due to their presence on the front lines of a hostile frontier. Some of them had lost loved ones in the two wars leading up to the fall of Welsh native government. All of them saw the opportunity to profit from a demoralized and marginalized population that was in no position, legal or otherwise, to fight back. It wasn't long before corruption set in, and Edward's officials either looked the other way or benefited right alongside the burgesses at the expense of the Welsh.

The first hint of trouble was a famine that swept through Wales and England in 1290. Famine was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, but in the subsequent year, 1291, Edward called for a tax that amounted to a fifteenth of the movable goods of all of his subjects—including, for the first time, his Welsh subjects. Welsh landholders didn't object on principle to being taxed, but medieval taxation was assessed and collected in such a way that the burden per capita fell more heavily on the Welsh because of their lower population, and also because the burgesses in the walled towns were not subject to this type of taxation.

By 1294, Wales had been suffering under four successive years of famine and three years of a tax many Welsh landholders saw as unreasonable and dangerous in its precedent. In the summer, when the king proclaimed that Welshmen of military age like Gruffydd and Dafydd would be compelled to serve overseas under the royal standard in Gascony, it became clear to the Welsh that things in the Principality had to change.

By all accounts, the English were taken completely by surprise by the events of Michaelmas 1294—not just the sack of Caernarvon, but the simultaneous attacks on castles across Wales, nearly all of which were successful. ft was Christmas before Edward could divert enough troops from his campaign in Gascony to deal with the rebels. The rebellion was put down conclusively by the summer of 1295, but there were no mass executions or crippling legal retributions. The royal inquiry into mismanagement that Dafydd predicted did in fact come about, and the outcome told Edward all he needed to know about how to secure peace in the Principality. Wales was not taxed to any significant degree until well into the fourteenth century, and the next time he needed fighting men for his army, Edward did not attempt to conscript the Welsh. Instead, he invited them into the army at full pay, the same as English foot soldiers, and they volunteered by the thousands.

When the burgesses returned to Caernarvon after the revolt, they were forgiven the payment of their rents for ten years to help them recover. Although the rebellion stirred up a lot of English mistrust and hostility against the Welsh, it wasn't long before all the boroughs in North Wales recovered from the physical damage and experienced a social and demographic shift. By the middle of the fourteenth century, every walled town in the Principality had some Welsh burgesses, a few of whom had made their way into civil government. This social shift was a result of interactions very much like those among Cecily, Gwenhwyfar, and Gruffydd. Each community had to come to terms with this new world, and such exchanges set the precedent for cooperation, even if it was initially reluctant.

As the frontier became less volatile, and indeed stopped being a frontier at all, local government became more diverse and the culture of the walled towns began to better reflect the communities that shared the space. These changes took time, but the cracks that began in Caernarvon shaped Wales well into the future.

 

 

In chronological order, my sincere thanks go to . . . 

 

My mother, for reading to me every night till I was nearly twelve. And for patiently fueling my teenage research interests with a never-ending stream of interlibrary loan materials.

 

My father, for buying the first book-length manuscript produced by thirteen-year-old me, thereby ensuring I kept writing through a very dark time. It's quite possibly the best ten dollars he ever spent.

 

Kelly Stromberg and Dean Rieken, two AP English teachers who tolerated my teenage hubris, doused my writing in red ink, and held up a mirror at all the right times.

 

The staff and librarians at too many research libraries to count, but particularly those at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington.

 

My husband and son, for their love, encouragement, and most of all, patience. Living with a writer is no easy thing.

 

Mary Pleiss and Sara Polsky, my beta readers. Without their time, insights, and raw honesty, this book would not exist. Thanks also to Mary Cummings for her valuable comments on an early draft.

 

My agent, Ammi-Joan Paquette, for her excellent advice and tireless work on my behalf. I'm very fortunate to have her in my corner.

 

Reka Simonsen, my editor, for her wisdom and enthusiasm. I couldn't ask for a better hand on the tiller.

About the Author

J. A
NDERSON
C
OATS
has master's degrees in history and library science, and has published short stories in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She lives with her family in Washington State. This is her debut novel. Visit her website at
www.jandersoncoats.com
.

BOOK: The Wicked and the Just
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