Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [209]
This was the great change that the Saxons had wrought. Whereas before, the higher slopes had been laid bare, and the farmsteads and villas had nestled in modest clearings on the valley slopes, gradually, century after century, the Saxons had carved great swathes out of the lowland forests, smashing down woods, and scrub, as they made the rich land submit to their will. At Avonsford there were now two huge open fields, extending for hundreds of yards over the sweep of the low ground, divided by ridges into long strips, so that it looked as if some huge comb had been passed over the bare landscape. The villagers had given the two fields names – the eastern field was called Paradise, the western, Purgatory. Heavy ploughs pulled by teams of six or eight oxen had clawed up the heavy soil, just as Caius Porteus had dreamed of doing eight hundred years before. The long ridges were carefully divided – some belonging to the lord, some to the individual churls or their own lesser tenants, the freedmen or former slaves. The village worked the fields; and the lord took his share. The land on each side of the river, which Aelfwald’s grandfather had drained with modest success, was now a huge meadow, where livestock was pastured.
This was the community, the basic village of England, which had now formed on the remains of the estate that had been the Porteus villa. Half a mile away, the woods began again; and these were used for pasturing swine. On the chalk slopes above, the ancient farmlands of earlier times were still used by Port and others like him to drive their flocks of sheep.
There was one other notable feature of the place: in a small field, reserved for pasture, that lay between Aelfwald’s hall and the village, stood a single wooden cross. This served as the open air church for the people, winter and summer. Here the elders of the village met when there were matters of importance in the village to discuss; and here the priest from Wilton would hold a service on Sundays and on the great feast days of the church.
As the setting sun caught the edge of the furrows in the open fields, creating a striking pattern of red and black, light and shadow across the land, the entire community were making their way towards Thane Aelfwald’s hall.
For tonight there was to be a great feast; and tonight, it was rumoured, the thane was to make an important announcement.
The hall accommodated a hundred people with ease. Trestle tables were arranged in two lines down the sides of the hall with a single table across the head, where the thane sat with his wife Hild, a tall, handsome woman in her fifties whose only sign of age seemed to be a light streaking of grey in her long, fair hair and a few lines in her forehead. The thane’s sons and Aelfgifu were dispersed around the tables amongst his retainers.
The feast was splendid. Beef and venison were complemented by huge plates of fish that Tostig the slave had provided from the river. A few of the men drank wine, but most drank the thickly scented ale of the region, and beside each man and woman was a cup into which the servants poured the most important drink of all, the sweet and heady mead that still, as in the most ancient times, was made from honey gathered in the woods.
At the head table, the splendid enamel dishes gleamed in the light from the tapers and from the roaring fire at the end of the hall.
“The hall of Aelfwald could be that of a king,” it was often said, and the thane lived up to his reputation.
In the place of honour, directly in front of him, rested the magnificent drinking horn that was one of his proudest possessions. It was the horn of that rarest and most stupendous of all beasts, the almost forgotten auroch, and it had been given by King Egbert of Wessex himself to the thane’s grandfather – a long, curving and fearsome object, polished so that its whiteness gleamed, bound with six bands of gold, and so big that hollowed out it could hold eight quarts of ale.
To his great pleasure, Port