London - Edward Rutherfurd [108]
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,