Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [232]
That this was so was thanks to the efforts of King Alfred and his thanes in the heart of Wessex, in the winter and spring of the year of Our Lord, 878.
THE CASTLE
A.D. 1139
The two figures stood side by side on the wall of the castle of Sarisberie. It was a week after Easter and the weather had turned pleasantly warm.
The taller man wore a fine black cloak of wool, faced with silk and held by a golden chain across his chest; his brown hair, greying at the temples, was dressed in a curious style: it was long, and parted on both sides while the locks in the centre were brushed forward into a fringe; his beard was curled. His face was long, with an aquiline nose and two deep lines that folded from almost under his eyes to the corners of his long, thin mouth which occasionally turned down with an expression of sardonic amusement. This was Richard de Godefroi, minor Norman knight.
As he glanced down now at the stout figure of Nicholas who stood in his leather jerkin beside him, the impassive lines of his face did not mask the fact that his eyes were troubled. For the stoneworker had just asked in his native English a question that the French-speaking knight understood perfectly, but did not wish to answer:
“Why is the bishop filling the castle with weapons?”
Across the fields below lay the undefended town of Wilton where, in times of peace, the sheriff held the county court; to the north, up the valley which three generations of the Norman’s family had come to love, lay the knight’s English estate of Avonsford, which he held of the great Wiltshire landlord, William of Sarisberie. As he gazed out now, he could see every detail of the landscape: the day had that sparkling clarity that presages rain – like the serene face of a man, Richard thought grimly, who is about to commit treachery.
“Perhaps he means to hold the castle against the king,” the stone-worker suggested.
Which was exactly what Richard dreaded.
The castle towered over the place where the five rivers met. It was far higher, and more terrible, than any building that Sarum had seen before.
On top of the huge chalk ring of the original dune on its windswept promontory, there now rose a high, nearly completed curtain wall of flint. Outside and below it lay an untidy mass of houses and allotments. Inside, in the centre of the dune, a second, inner hill had been raised by the Norman conquerors – an enormous mound, an acre across at its summit; and this was surrounded by another frowning wall. Within this central enclosure, they had built yet again – a great, grey tower. And so, like an inverted telescope, the castle soared up: from promontory to wall, from wall to inner mound, to second wall and on, up to the final massive tower with its battlements in the sky.
This was the typical Norman stronghold of mound and enclosure – motte and bailey. When William the Bastard of Normandy and his following of Norman, Breton and other assorted adventurers had conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England in 1066, he had speedily erected castles all over the land. Unlike the modestly fortified Saxon burghs, the Norman castles were tall, compact and almost unassailable. First built of wood they had gradually been converted, in the reigns of his two sons, and now his grandson Stephen, to bastions of stone. The castle of Sarisberie was not one of the largest, but it was a significant place nonetheless. It was here, when he received the great Domesday inventory of his island kingdom, that William the Conqueror had summoned his nobles to perform their oath of fealty to him – a memorable ceremony that Godefroi’s grandfather had attended. Within the broad sweep of the curtain wall it even included the massive, towered cathedral that was the bishop’s seat. The stone pinnacles and thatched roofs of the castle’s many houses clustered tightly around the central mound with its soaring dongeon which hung over the landscape, heavy, dark and menacing.
The castle belonged to the king: it was held for him by the sheriff. So it had always been in the reigns of the Conqueror, and