Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [247]
It was his father who had first taken notice of this place and made it his own. That the circular mound was a barrow, or that any Celtic predecessors had worshipped here more than a thousand years before, he had no idea; but something about the place besides its fine view appealed to him, and shortly before Richard was born, he had planted a double circle of yew trees round the spot. They were tall and thick now, obscuring the view; but they also protected the place from the wind, and Richard had placed two benches there, on top of the barrow, where he liked to sit alone.
He knew of no more silent a place: it was quieter even than inside the cathedral on the castle hill. And it was open to the sky. On the bare slopes around, where the scars of the ancient Celtic cross ploughing still left traces, as though the land had been lightly etched, only the sheep now occasionally grazed on the short turf. Nobody came there.
This was the place that Godefroi called the arbour, and it was here that he finally sat down to forget his troubles for an hour and read his little book.
It was a remarkable work. It purported to be a history of the English kings, by a clerk called Geoffrey of Monmouth – a Breton by birth who had been brought up on the borders of South Wales and who had neatly calculated how to please not only his patron the dangerous Earl of Gloucester, but a wide audience all over northern Europe. The book had been completed only four years before, but already translations like those in Godefroi’s hands were circulating all over the island.
One story in particular had caught the knight’s attention, as it had so many others. It was the story of King Arthur. For from scraps and hints in earlier chronicles, the clever writer had concocted an extraordinary tale of a western English king in a courtly setting that echoed the world of the troubadours, and who had fought for chivalry and Christianity against the forces of darkness. It was a magnificent invention, a romantic saga like the famous Chanson de Roland, and a worthy tale for crusaders. With the reality of the almost forgotten general Artorius who had tried to defend the civilisation of later Rome against the heathen Saxons it had almost nothing to do, beyond the name. And Geoffrey’s story still lacked many of the Arthurian world’s finest features: the knights Lancelot and Percival, the tale of Tristran and Iseult, the legendary Round Table and the Holy Grail were all to be added by romantic writers a century later. But bald as it still was, the story moved Godefroi considerably. In his present mood it seemed to him better than the songs of the troubadours, better even than Boethius’s sober Consolations of Philosophy. For here had been a Christian monarch, the proper ideal of a feudal king – a man of the stature of such Christian heroes as the mighty Charlemagne, or Saxon Alfred, or the last true monarch of the island kingdom before the conquest, the saintly Edward the Confessor, whose very touch was known to cure the disease of scrofula. Yes, there really had been great and Christian kings like Arthur.
“But not in my lifetime though,” he said bitterly.
He closed the book. Perhaps, when the present troubles were over, he could throw off the cares of his life at Sarum, turn his back in disgust on incompetent Stephen, on the evil Bishop Roger and, if there was no Christian war to fight, begin his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
“More and more,” he thought, “I grow sick of this world.” He longed to save his soul. “But will God grant me time?” he wondered.
It was midsummer. In the royal forest, it was the fence month when the deer were in fawn and the foresters ensured that no unwelcome intruders disturbed them. On the slopes around Sarum, it was the time for sheep shearing.
It seemed to Godric Body that the world was a