Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [181]
Peter’s family had been especially hard hit. They were not important tenants in chief—vassals of the king himself—with holdings in many of the Plantagenets’ wide domains. They were vassals of his vassals. Their modest lands in Wales were all they had. And by the time that Peter’s father, David, had died, they had lost two-thirds of those. What remained was only enough to support Peter’s mother and his two sisters.
“You’ll have nothing to support you, my poor boy,” his father had told him, “except your family’s love, your sword, and the good name I leave you.”
By the time Peter was fifteen, his father had taught him everything he knew about the arts of war, and Peter was an accomplished swordsman. The love of his family was not in doubt. As for his name, Peter had loved his father and so he loved that, too. For just as in Celtic Ireland, the term “Mac” implied “the son of,” so in Norman England, the French term “fitz” had a similar meaning. His father had thus been known as David FitzHenry; and he was proud to be called Peter FitzDavid. Now it was time to seek his fortune as a fighting man for hire.
Warfare has always been an expensive and specialised business, conducted on a temporary basis, and so the instruments of war have always been for hire. Arms and equipment were traded. Transport in particular was hired for the occasion. Only two years earlier, the men of Dublin—as the merchants of Dyflin were usually calling the big port now—had offered their great fleet to King Henry of England for a campaign against the Celtic princes of Wales, a deal which fell through only when Henry changed his mind.
But above all, across the huge patchwork of tribal lands and dynastic lordships that, since the fall of the ordered Roman Empire, now made up most of Christendom, it was armed men who were for hire. When William the Conqueror came to England, it was not just his Norman vassals that he led but a whole collection of armed adventurers from Brittany, Flanders, and other places, and who were granted estates in the conquered country. After their defeat, a large contingent of English warriors travelled right across Europe and formed what was called the Saxon regiment in the service of the Emperor of Byzantium. Adventurers from England, France, and Germany had already gone on Crusade to get land in the kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusader colonies in the Holy Land. Celtic kings in Ireland had been hiring Vikings to fight for them for generations. It was not strange, therefore, that any young man from Wales in search of his fortune should have gone to the Plantagenet King of England to see if that mighty monarch needed some hired help.
When Peter FitzDavid first set out, it was to the great English port of Bristol that he had travelled. His father had once had some acquaintance with a merchant there.
“After I’m gone,” his father had advised Peter, “you could pay him a visit. He might be able to do something for you.”
Bristol lay more than a hundred miles away, across the huge estuary of the mighty River Severn which traditionally separated Saxon from Celtic Britain. It had taken Peter five days to reach the Severn, and another half day riding up its western bank to a place where there was a horse ferry across. When he arrived at the ferry, however, he was told that on account of the Severn’s swift and complex currents, he would have to wait some hours. Looking about he saw that on the slopes just above there was a small fort and, set in an oak grove nearby, there seemed to be some ancient ruins. Making his way up to these, he had sat down to rest.
It was a pleasant place with a fine view over the river. Without particularly thinking about it, he sensed that the ruins had a religious air. And indeed they had, for the site he had come upon was the old Roman temple to Nodens, the Celtic god of healing. Christianity had long since submerged the god as well as his temple: in England he had been quite forgotten, and across the sea in Celtic Ireland, under the name of Nuada of the Silver Hand, he had long since been converted by