Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [238]
Godefroi entered the church alone.
It was a large, three-aisled structure with heavy, rounded arches which the Normans had built in the outer ring of the castle. Like most Norman churches, it was designed in the form of a simple cross, and to this Bishop Roger was adding splendid embellishments.
He was glad to enter its quiet, solemn spaces and leave behind the noise and the brawling that had so irritated him a few moments before.
For Richard de Godefroi had important matters to consider.
The stately arches and the cool light pleased him. Forty years before when the church had first been completed, it was nearly destroyed by fire. It was then that Roger had started to rebuild this new and heavier structure on the shell of the original, and the work of rebuilding that kept Nicholas and many others so busy had been going on ever since. A few of the tombs and the pillars had been painted, but while the work on the roof continued, much of the decoration of the interior had been held over. The bare stone, so solemn and simple, suited his mood. He felt his irritation fall away and breathed more easily.
The object of his quest was a modest stone tomb that lay on the north side of the bishop’s new presbytery. It was here that the knight liked to pray, and as he sank to his knees he touched the bare slab affectionately. Beneath it lay the remains of the former bishop, the saintly Osmund who had built the first church. Richard could just remember him, a quiet, white-haired man whom children used to follow in the street. It was Osmund who had brought such an air of sanctity to the cathedral on its bleak castle hill; it was he who had collected the canons and other priests who had turned the grim castle into a place of learning; and it was Osmund who had begun to set out the rules for the ordering of the cathedral and its services which later, under the name of the Sarum missal, would be used all over England and beyond. He had been, and to Godefroi he still was, the guiding spirit of the place. That the previous king had given the bishopric of this holy man to the evil Roger was a crime which even the loyal knight had found it hard to forgive.
Alone now, Godefroi raised his long, aquiline face and spoke aloud to the bishop’s tomb.
“What shall I do, to save my soul?”
It was not an unusual question. Like every man from the king downwards, Godefroi knew very well that the whole world was in a state of perpetual war – not just between order and chaos, but between God and the Devil, the spirit and the flesh. This was the universal conflict, which would not be resolved until the Day of Judgement, which gave all life its dazzling colour and its terrible poignancy. Whatever his position, feudal lord or knight, burgess or villein – even Bishop Roger himself – each man knew that he must make his peace with God, or after death suffer perpetual hellfire.
Yet for a Norman knight to save his soul, the Church had devised some attractive choices. He could, like other men, do penances; he could endow the church with lands, or better yet, he could travel.
In his grandfather’s day it had been easy. When Pope Urban II, in the year of Our Lord 1095, had announced the First Crusade, the previous Richard de Godefroi had gladly gone. What more could any knight ask for than the chance to purge his soul in the warfare he knew best and most enjoyed? He thought with envy of those days and of his grandfather’s tales of the privations they had endured and the brave campaigns in those distant lands under the parching sun. These had been the stories that fired his imagination when he was a child.
It was not only the thought of winning honour in arms that attracted him. Deep within him he felt a restlessness, a wanderlust that, despite his contented life on his manor, seemed to grow stronger and more urgent with the passing of the years. He could not explain it. Yet the explanation was simple. For the Norman conquerors of England were mainly Norsemen, cousins of the Danish Vikings, who had only settled in northern France a century and