The Song of Giraldus

By Richard M. Loomis

"A fan letter. I very much enjoyed and appreciated your novel, with its splendid evocation of the medieval worldas seen through the consciousness of a historian of the time. Your sense of language has a wonderful feeling of a vanished age, and yet with a kind of modern, almost minimalist restraint. Bravo for a job well done."

Robert Rosenstone

Cal Tech, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 9, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462824571

Richard M. Loomis

Richard M. Loomis has published several translations of medieval Welsh literature. Available from Xlibris are novels he has written in the new millennium: The Song of Giraldus presents the medieval Welsh historian, Giraldus Cambrensis, as narrator and protagonist of his own story. Ragnarsdatter, set in America at the beginning of World War II, traces the coming of age of Gloria Ragnarsdatter, who learns the ways of love on her way through high school. New House offers documents on an imaginary monastery in Wales, including poems, tales, and journals, together with an essay on the fifteenth-century Welsh poet, Guto’r Glyn.

Book preview

Copyright © 2000 by Richard Loomis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE SONG OF GIRALDUS

For Joseph and Rebecca

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE

medieval historian Giraldus de Barri, known as Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales, lived from about 1146 to about 1223. He was born in southwestern Wales, studied in England and Paris, and traveled to Rome and Ireland. He is best known for his pioneering ethnographic studies of Wales and Ireland, but he had a role as churchman and writer on the international scene. He served in the court of King Henry II of England, was acquainted with the Carthusian saint, Hugh of Avalon, and presented the case for his own consecration as bishop of St. David’s to Pope Innocent III.

It is not certain where he spent his last years. This book imagines him living those years in Lincoln, where Hugh had been elected bishop at the urging of Henry II.

While all the major figures and events are historical, the book is developed with invented scenes, invented supporting characters, and invented dialogue. Giraldus wrote in Latin and would have spoken Norman French in the Angevin empire of Henry II. Angevin domains extended from Aquitaine through Poitou, Anjou, and Normandy, and across England to Scotland and into Wales and Ireland. In this book, Giraldus speaks my own American English, a mongrel blend perhaps not unlike the linguistic whirl that must have spun in the head of a Welsh-born Norman writer for whom Latin was the premier international tongue and English the language of a subject race conquered by the Normans and not yet in a position to outlaw Welsh.

This book’s front cover photograph, showing late medieval woodcarvings from Beaumaris Parish Church in Anglesey, is by Mick Sharp; the back cover photograph is by Joseph Laub.

Giraldus lived long enough to witness the rise and fall of Henry

II and his sons, a subject that fascinated him and on which he delighted to spin commentaries. Wherever he may have resided, he continued writing in his old age and paid constant tribute to St. Hugh, bishop of Lincoln from 1186 to 1200 and canonized in the year 1220. Giraldus wrote a book on the life and miracles of Hugh cited in the process of canonization.

Henry II, son of the count of Anjou who became duke of Normandy, Geoffrey Plantagenet, was crowned king of England in 1154. Two years before, Henry had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose first husband was King Louis VII of France. The son of Louis VII, Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, proved the most formidable antagonist of the Angevin kings of England. Philip was born in 1165 and lived until 1223; he became king of France in 1180. Giraldus de Barri was a student in Paris when Philip was born and lived to the end of Philip’s reign. Henry II died in 1189, defeated by the combined forces of his son, Richard, and the young Philip II. Richard Lionheart died in 1199. In 1216, the year Innocent III died, Richard’s brother, King John, died, locked in combat with rebellious barons and their ally, the son of Philip II, Prince Louis, whose own son would become the crusader saint, Louis IX.

A celebrated contemporary of Giraldus, the knight William Marshal, rose from obscurity to eminence during these years. I draw his career into the reminiscences of Giraldus, as I also imagine Giraldus giving attention to calamitous crusades called by Innocent III, the Fourth Crusade that brought Latin rule to Greek Constantinople and the Albigensian Crusade conducted by northern French nobles against the cosmopolitan southern region known as Languedoc.

In the year 1206, defeated in his campaign to be named bishop of the ancient Welsh see of St. David’s and having, in the style of King Lear, resigned his post as archdeacon of Brecon in favor of a nephew named for him, Giraldus made a pilgrimage to Rome. In that same year, the young Francesco di Bernardone of Assisi also made a pilgrimage to Rome. I imagine the two of them meeting,

Giraldus not yet humbled enough to appreciate the poverty and devotion of the man who became St. Francis.

Storms subsequently broke upon Giraldus that are fully but confusedly recorded in his book, Speculum Duorum, a work that has been edited and translated only in recent years and is coming to be recognized as a primary document of great interest, since it reveals the life of a medieval cleric not just in stately externals but also in desperate depths. It is Giraldus on the heath with Lear, raving, passionate, broken, human.

This outburst of invective and lament and the sensitive accounts Giraldus gives of the tenderness and wit of Hugh of Lincoln are the contrary fires that have moved me to dream how Giraldus might sing his own life.

My edition of the life of Hugh of Avalon by Giraldus, published by Garland Publishing, Inc., in 1985, provides documentation for the relationship of Giraldus and Hugh. The works of Giraldus Cambrensis are included in the Rolls Series, 21: 1-8 (1861-91). Speculum Duorum, edited by Yves Lefèvre, R. B. C. Huygens, and Michael Richter, and translated by Brian Dawson, was published by the University of Wales Press in 1974. Modern editions and translations of other works of Giraldus are the following, in sequence of publication:

The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis. Edited and translated by H. E. Butler (principally from De Rebus a Se Gestis and De Iure et Statu Menevensis Ecclesiae). London: Jonathan Cape, 1937.

The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978.

Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland. Edited and translated by A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978.

The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of Gemma Ecclesiastica. Translated by John J. Hagen. Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, No. 2. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979.

Topographia Hibernica: The History and Topography of Ireland. Translated by John J. O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982.

Modern translations of other relevant primary sources are these:

[Adam of Eynsham.] Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis: The Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln. Edited and translated by Decima L. Douie and Hugh Farmer. 2 vols. London: Thomas Nelson, 1961-62; 2nd edition, Oxford Medieval Texts, 1985.

Duby, Georges. William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry [based on the medieval poem, Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal]. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Geoffroy de Villehardouin. The Conquest of Constantinople. Translated by M. R. B. Shaw. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963; reprinted 1984.

Hallam, Elizabeth, General Editor. The Plantagenet Chronicles. Godalming: Colour Library Books, 1995.

Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated with an introduction by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986.

Wilhelm, James J., Editor. Lyrics of the Middle Ages. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities (Vol. 1268). New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.

Secondary sources I have consulted include these:

Abrahams, Israel. Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1896; third paperback edition, 1993.

Bowen, E.G. Dewi Sant: Saint David. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983.

Davies, John. A History of Wales. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990; 1994.

Duby, Georges. The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 9801420. Translated by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Farmer, David Hugh. Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Kalamazoo: Cistercian

Publications, 1985. Gillingham, John. Richard the Lionheart. New York: Times Books, a division of Quadrangle/ The New York Times Book Co., Inc., 1978.

Hoyt, Robert S., and Stanley Chodorow. Europe in the Middle Ages.

3rd edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1976. Lloyd, John Edward. A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest. 2 vols. 3rd edition. London: Longmans, Green, 1939.

Painter, Sidney. William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron, and Regent of England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933; reprinted by Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967. Richter, Michael. Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation. 2nd edition. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1976.

Roberts, Brynley F. Gerald of Wales. Writers of Wales Series. Cardiff:

University of Wales Press, 1982. Strayer, Joseph R. The Albigensian Crusades. New York: The Dial Press, 1971.

Turner, Ralph V. King John. London and New York: Longman, 1994.

Warren, W. L. Henry II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.

A recent survey of medieval Europe that analyzes the dynamism of the period is The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350, by Robert Bartlett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). This work studies medieval Europe as a frontier society that was building its centers of power and culture even as it extended their reach beyond its borders. Giraldus de Barri lived as a player and an observer in some centers and on some edges of that civilization.

His imagined voice is my probe of his world’s changes.

THE SONG OF GIRALDUS

1

C

URRENTS

of the sea bathe the shore, shooting fingers of surf over the rubble of stones, turning pebbles to sand by long sifting and scraping. On the west, cliffs hang straight down into the churn and men fall to their death by water slamming them against the black gleaming stone till they’re sea stuff muzzled by fish and the monsters that slew our ancestors. At Manorbier there’s sweet sand and a protected shore where a child can build. I build churches. My uncle, the bishop of St. David’s, observes me, my straight neck and dark eyes. This one, he says, has bishop in him.

My mother Angharad sings Welsh songs, not the lullabies that nurses sing, but laments and riddles and conversation songs of old men and lonely women remembering hopes and disappointments. She’s amused by the attention I pay her. She tells me stories of her mother who loved many men, and the men slain for love of her, and all the men who fought for rule of the land, northern princes and southern lords, her grandfather the king fighting, and the dead fallen in the great battle of Mynydd Carn, because my eyes are steady on her and a tear shines at her from my cheek.

My brothers are hurling stones while I write slow letters in the wet sand. They send me to school at Gloucester, and I gasp at the green roll of England lounging off to the east and at the brown rivers and the trees heavy and idle as giants. I draw a map with east on top and great cities of the world converging toward Jerusalem. I know it’s my world.

I come to Paris when my legs can bear me as smartly as they can command a horse taking me wherever I want to go, and I want to go to Paris. My voice is already strong and intelligent, like a Welsh harmony. Other students mistake me for a master. One August night in the year 1165, I wake to all Paris in clamor and lighting fires, and I call a street woman and ask her what’s the trouble. She knows I come from England, by my lodging and accent, a mix of Norman and Welsh, English and school Latin, enough to know me not a Parisian. A prince is born, she says, to drive you English out of France! She says it to me, a green sprout of a student, as a boast to bleed a warrior.

That’s my first brush with Philip, who grows to be king of France, Philip Augustus, whom I shall praise more than I ever praise a king of England.

2

I’M

a writer with the English court.

The king knows he needs us. We present him to the literate world, and since we read whatever we can get our hands on, we present the recorded world to him. He’ll catch us when his sagging eye happens to fall on us and ask us what’s new, what are they writing about his enemies, what are they writing about him, what are we writing about him.

Your great struggle to keep your lands, sir. The perfidy of your sons.

He tries to focus an old eye on my features and asks me who I am.

Your clerk, sir, Giraldus de Barri.

The Welsh master?

I acknowledge I’m partly Welsh and, yes, a master, a published author enjoying a measure of international fame. My color rises to be speaking of myself and my accomplishments, and I’m ready to speak at more length on the lovely stir caused by my work on Ireland, but Ireland isn’t on his mind.

Where’s Richard?

We’re in the castle at Le Mans, and I tell him where Richard is. He’s with King Philip outside the city.

Rip his eyes out and bring them here.

Me, sir?

Any loving sweet subject with two hands and a knife, bring me Richard’s eyes on a dish, so I can look in his eyes and see the devil there. The king smiles a bad curl. I’ve seen him clap his arms around Prince John and smile like the sun. He trusts John.

You’d better not be facing the Count of Poitou, I said, with a crooked smile of my own.

His neck went stiff. I can stare him sightless. Get him here. It’s time I give him back to God.

The notion of my bringing the young bull before his father wasn’t worth a laugh. I’m not one to put mad animals eye to eye.

The king had an ulcer they were treating with a poultice, and he turned his attention to that. His chancellor, Geoffrey Plantagenet, the bastard he loved more than any of his legitimate sons, approached. As I drifted from the couch, I could hear the murmur between them, earnest, tender. Geoffrey kept the wreck alive.

The king’s seneschal, Stephen of Anjou, broke into the chamber and hurled a shout at him, They’re moving!

Stephen had a red face and bulging eyes, like a Canterbury monk, but he knew how to defend a castle. The king said, What do we do?

Fires can block them.

Start fires, said the king, sighing out the words like a log hissing on the hearth.

The seneschal left, and the king glanced at the shadows where I’d joined other noncombatants. With a sweep of his hand, he ordered us gone, too. Get those clerks out of here, he said. I won’t lose my whole court. Send them north.

Geoffrey started toward us, but the king stopped him. You stay.

I’ll tell them the way.

They’ll find Rouen. Don’t leave me.

Geoffrey knelt at the couch, and lesser knights ushered us out of the doomed presence.

He’d inherited Anjou and Normandy and married his way into Aquitaine and got crowned king of England and had to fight all his life to hold onto it all.

He drove west and north across Britain like a flame. Three times he invaded Wales. He sailed at the start of the conquest of Ireland to Waterford and walked across the Talking Stone of St. David’s on his return, challenging the alleged prophecy of Merlin that an English king who crossed Llech Lafar after conquering Ireland would die.

He stepped on the polished cracked marble and said, Merlin’s a liar.

He captured the king of Scotland, William the Lion, and set him free on mean terms. He loved books the way he loved birds of prey, soaring with them to look down on the world. Sometimes he showed mercy to the broken, but he dealt terror to any of his own who turned against him. On the hunt, he rode deliriously to trim his paunch. I saw him for the last time on that couch at the siege of Le Mans, his bastard chancellor by him, a weight of muscle and armor bent over the ruins of Henry II.

The patriarch of Jerusalem had asked him to lead a crusade against Saladin. He was responsible for the crime of the century, the murder of Thomas Becket, and had plotted to keep his wife and sons from taking his empire away from him, but he was a successful penitent and a strong king, and the patriarch asked him to defend the city of King David.

Before the wheel turned, he was a god on earth.

We could see the suburb of the city burn as we rode north.

It was after we’d lost sight of Le Mans that the wind shifted, sending fires against the city, and the attacking French chased the defenders right through the gates, crowding in as they ran, the flames bursting in with them and licking at the castle. Henry II had to scurry away like us.

Rumors of him reached us on our way to Normandy. He’d thrown himself at Richard, and Richard had throttled him and given the corpse to dogs. Or King Henry had surrendered and embraced his son and put a dagger in him and watched the blood flow at his feet. Or Henry II had run and stumbled and hobbled and got a ride from a carter and run again and scrambled into the hills, and King Philip of France had laughed to see the man who’d taken a wife from his father scramble through the brush like a rabbit.

Farmers who didn’t care who was king if only the wars stopped said they didn’t know where the king of England was, but if he wasn’t in England, what was he doing anywhere else?

In Normandy, the barons were maneuvering to be in charge when it was over. My chief was Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, who waited for word of the king.

It was warm. Rivers full the year before were brown-banked and shallow. Out of the heat one July afternoon came Geoffrey Plantagenet. Not everybody cared to welcome the only loyal son of Henry II. We dined together at Baldwin’s table. Word that the king had died had spread like a hot breeze when Geoffrey’s party entered Rouen. Geoffrey told us how it happened.

He wouldn’t give up, he said. "Riding from Le Mans, he had the bridge over the Sarthe destroyed, but Richard charged straight across the river, splashing water around him like a clatter of swords. He had to bloody his horse to get up the bank, but he set his lance and drove at the king. To kill him? God help us. Make him give up? My father couldn’t mount without help, but he’s on his horse like a rock with Richard charging. He keeps his eye on him, about to die. William Marshal whoops in like a star rising and drives his lance into Richard’s horse. Down it goes, and Richard with him, pinned by his own mount. We gallop off, and you can hear Richard cursing. He blasphemes by every part of the Lord’s body, by God’s foot, by God’s lungs, by God’s teeth, but nothing touches the king who taught him to curse. He rides free as a boy.

Once he stopped to watch the town burn. The smoke’s rising like a tree. His eyes go to heaven with the smoke, and we hear him say, ‘You’ve taken the town I love best.’ He was born there, and the cathedral holds his father’s body. The city burns, the smoke of it goes to the sky, and he says to God, ‘I’ll keep the thing You love best in me.’

What could he keep from God? I said to Geoffrey. He was losing everything.

His soul, said Geoffrey Plantagenet.

Geoffrey’s enemies called him uncouth. A plain man, no politician. His passion was for battle, and he wanted to climb without blaspheming his way like his father and his half-brothers.

I put my thumb to his lips and made a cross to wipe away the evil, said Geoffrey.

He became a priest only after he was named archbishop of York, but he had the instincts of a pious peasant. From his mother, Ykenai? Even before the king put Eleanor under house arrest, Ykenai was his favorite bed mate, whatever the gifts he piled on his darling, Rosamond Clifford. It was the son of common warm Ykenai who had regard for his father’s soul.

Most of us thought Henry had long gone the way of the old lords of Anjou, to the devil. An ancestress was a fiend, they said. Bernard of Clairvaux looked for a Charlemagne from Paris, not Anjou, and he saw the devil in Henry Plantagenet. Saints can see these things, even in a boy.

3

I

HEAR

voices telling of lives.

When there’s no sun to fill the chamber and my candle gutters, I can still see the light of things. Grosseteste says light is at the heart of everything. The substantial real thing.

Hugh kept moving through the enormous diocese, confirming and burying and managing, or he was abroad trying to talk to the king, but if he saw a corpse by the road, he’d stop the whole train and have the body examined and arrange for burial. An unknown soul of no worth, and he halts the clerks and servants and says the prayers very slowly.

He comes to my chamber now. Unseen by the eye, but mind sees him, here to tend my soul, help me to a good death. A friend’s voice that stays with you, the stir in the heart a friend gives you that stays.