Hoodsman: Blackstone Edge Read online

  This was probably all due to the promises made in Henry's Coronation Charter. Over the past year, the tax burden had been lifted, and the coins in use had been restored to their proper weight in silver. He made a mental note to ask his friend Gregos at the treasury, if they had any method of measuring the changes in well-being of the folk.

  When he reached Winchester the next day, he went directly to Edith, or rather 'Mathilde Queen of the English', to share the news with her. She of course had heard it already via the official palace couriers, but they had told only of the treaty, not the how or the why or the events that made the treaty possible.

  The lovely Edith was so eager for the full stories that she would not wait for him to go to Gregos's quarters to retrieve his own clothes, and instead sent word for Gregos to bring Raynar's clean clothing to her chambers. Gregos grumbled about a busy chief treasurer being used as a chamber- maid, but he was secretly overjoyed to be able to listen to Raynar's stories while surrounded by Edith's ladies-in-waiting.

  Later that night, after Edith's thirst for stories was quenched and after she had sent them away so she could go to bed, Gregos led Raynar to his humble quarters to finish a pitcher of wine. It was then that Raynar asked about measuring well-being amongst the folk.

  "At the treasury," Gregos replied, "we have many measures of wealth, but few of well-being. They are not the same. The book," he looked at Raynar to ensure he knew they were talking about the Domesday Book, "gives us a comparison of the England that William conquered, to the England after the conquest was complete.

  Because it lists herds and cropland and villages, the comparison could be a reasonable measure in the change in well-being. Although the book has become our bible for assessing taxes, the comparison does hint at how the English suffered under William. The kingdom was worse off after him than before him. Much worse. The tax records made since the book clearly show that the trend towards poverty continued under William Rufus. It is too early to say about Henry, but I live in hopes of a marked improvement."

  Raynar related what he had seen on the Basingestoches highway. The folk seem better off already, and Gregos agreed with him.

  "It would be useful to have a measure, a measure wider than just one stretch of highway. And not just for our curiosity, but for the King as well, " said Gregos. "Let me ask my clerks. Perhaps there is one already, or perhaps I will have to craft one." Gregos was lost in thought about counting births or new roofs or the total size of herds. "Yes, we need to do something akin to the Book. I find that the Book is completely untrustworthy in some shires. I suppose that was the fault of the different clerks and estimators in the different shires at that time."

  Raynar yawned, and then gave a snort of laughter. He shouldn't have asked such a question so late in the evening.

  "It is no jest, Raynar. I was looking at the entries in the Book for some of the northern shires, and they are totally unbelievable, to the point of being useless. I mean really. A thousand villages just don't disappear. That is two hundred thousand people, ten times that number of animals. The counts are in error, but I do not know how to correct them."

  "The counts are not in error," moaned Raynar and he suddenly felt dizzy and sick from the memories flooding into his mind.

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  The Hoodsman - Blackstone Edge by Skye Smith

  Chapter 2 - Drifting down the River Wharfe, Yorkshire in November 1069

  The flooding River Wharfe floated the old boat carrying young Raynar through a flood plain that was depressing to see. There were no crops, no people, no animals, and no buildings. The mud walls of farmer's houses dissolve quickly when opened to water, and then the roof caves in and the house becomes soil again.

  He cursed all nobles and all armies, no matter whose side they were on. When would he learn to stay far away from them. He was a peasant. The armies and the nobility that led them gobbled up his help and then spat him out when they were finished with him. It was as if the nobles hated him for his competence.

  Yesterday, he and thirty bowmen had held a ford against the Norman army massed the south side of the River Aire. Held it for five critical hours, which gave most of the Northumbrian army time to escape William the Conqueror's flanking move around the Aire from the hills in the west. The English nobles hadn't even thanked him, and not just for holding the ford, but for warning them of William's flanking move in the first place

  The nobles were all so full of themselves that they were incompetent. Three weeks ago, just because the River Aire had flooded, they stopped pushing south to crush the Norman army. Because they waited, the flood got worse, their camp was wrecked, their Danish allies withdrew, and everyone got the water sickness. A sure victory over the Normans had now turned into a sure defeat, and all because of the incompetence of the English ruling class.

  Well he was finished with them. The Northumbrian bowmen who had stood with him at the ford had helped him fix up this boat, seal it, build a roof for it, and float it. He was glad of the supplies they had foraged for him, especially the extra sheepskin. Living on this damp boat for days while he drifted down the river Wharfe would be a chilling experience.

  Since he was floating downstream, the only work he did on pole or oar was to keep the boat straight and in the middle so that he was as far from either bank as possible. Unfortunately that left him lots of time with nothing else to do but to seethe at effing armies, and effing nobles, and effing Normans, and effing William the effing Conqueror.

  He had worried about passing the town of Tatecastre and its ford, but he needn't have. It was dark by then and the filthy oilcloth of the low tent he had built on the boat was dark in color. The river bottom was shallower and the still flooding stream was swifter over the ford and he was passed the town in minutes. Besides, there was no one crossing the ford at night. He could tell by the number of cooking fires that someone's army was camped towards York, but no guard hailed him, so he didn't know whether the camp was English or Norman.

  Once well downstream from the fires he tied off on an island formed by the roots of a giant beech tree and slept. With the flap of the tarred cloth in place, the entire boat became a dry tent. His bed was salvaged planks lain along the floor and he was warm between the two sheepskins and under his warm, felted, but very smelly winter cloak. Or at least something in this boat smelled most fouly.

  The smell was so bad that he could not sleep. After sniffing and sniffing to locate the source of the smell, thinking there was a mound of shit in the boat somewhere, he found the smell was from his boots. He kicked them off and washed them in the river and stuck them toes up on two poles. His feet smelled just as bad so he washed them too, and chastised himself for not taking better care of his feet. Rotting feet was the downfall of many an infantry warrior.

  He woke at first light and was again astounded and depressed at the complete devastation along the River Wharfe caused not just by the armies that had been fighting over this river for three months, but by the flood. As he drifted downstream into the lower, flatter land, his biggest problem was staying in the river's true channel.

  There were many braided channels caused by the flooding and only by following the main channel was he assured of finding his way out of this bleak, muddy landscape. When the current stopped, he was forced to row across a lake, which turned out to be the mouth of the Wharfe where it met the Ouse.

  By noon he was passing the mill where he had first met Hereward back in '66. Meeting Hereward had turned his entire life upside down, and he had ceased to be a poor porter and had become quite a wealthy warrior. That was before he had killed Harald, the King of Norway. The mill was now a ruin, everything in this land was in ruin, but he recognized the lay of the buildings.

  He held up his Byzantine bow, and his Syrian sword and he said a prayer for the strange warrior with almond shape eyes that he had burried in a shallow grave behind the mill. The man whose weapons these had been. Even his wealth was from selling the man's exotic arm
our. The man who had carried them from the grasslands beyond the Black Sea, to Norway, and then from Norway to this lonely place with a ruined mill, where he had died with a porter's arrow in his throat.

  He was now on the River Ouse that came here from York, and he was surprised by the absence of boat and ship traffic on the river. There were not even ferries and shuttles working the traffic from bank to bank. Just beyond the merging of the rivers where the banks narrowed there was a camp of folk on the north bank. There must be a main cartway there.

  They were waving to him and yelling at him to come and ferry them across the Ouse. He saw no warriors, so he steered closer to the bank and spoke to them. They were Daneglish. Not only were there no warriors with them, but there were no men of warrior age at all. Once he started talking, other folk appeared on the mucky flood bank, and then more.

  "How many are you?" he hailed.

  An old man yelled back, "Ten villages, perhaps more."

  "The boat is too small!" he yelled back , but the ealder did not smile at the attempt at a jest.

  "We must get across," the ealder yelled back. "The Normans have burned us out, and pushed us out. They warned us to keep moving south if we didn't want to perish."

  Raynar felt helpless. These folk had no shelter, and were camped in the mud of a flood. The water sickness would race through them soon, and after sickness would come weakness, and then hunger, and then death.

  He agreed to take a group of ealders across so that they could seek help along the south bank of the Ouse. It took him an hour to ferry ten of them in five trips. On the last pickup, some of the other folk tried to grab the boat and take it from him, but he hit out with his pole and they backed away.

  The news from the ealders had been very disturbing. The Norman patrols had told them they were clearing the villages from wherever the Danish fleet could easily raid for supplies. Any food or animals that they did not take with them, were destroyed. Any tools they did not take, were burned. Any axemen they found were killed.

  "The axemen are in hiding." said one of the ealders. "The patrols are too large to defend against, so the axemen are wise to hide. When they return to their villages, there will be nothing there, but at least they will be alive. The rest of us have no choice. Once they destroyed our villages and tools, we came out of hiding and they herded us away as if we were cattle. They did not bother to tell us that there was no way across the Ouse."

  An ealder in another boat load told him, "We were the first village to arrive. Since then at least ten more have arrived. More come every day. There is already sickness in the camp, and no dry wood to make soup, and the ale was too heavy to carry with us. Since the rain has stopped falling we have become thirsty. If the fools in the camp start drinking the river water, we are finished. There will be no stopping the water sickness once it starts."

  Another ealder told him, "On the south side of the Ouse there is a continuation of the cartway. There has always been a ferry here because the Ouse is too deep to ford. We will walk south to the first cross in the road and then make for Selby. Perhaps the lord there will send us the ferry."

  Raynar would not have made wager on this. He had met the new lord of Selby before. He was a typical Norman ass. He would have ferried more of the folk, himself, but he no longer trusted the folk not to take his boat. After the fifth trip across, he went to midstream and ignored the pleas to return, and floated downstream.

  An hour later he floated passed a very strange sight on the north bank of the River Ouse. There were hulks of longships, some sunken, some thrown up on the mud banks by the floods. Many hulks. This must be Riccall, where Harald of Norway had berthed his fleet when he invaded back in '66.

  That invasion had been a disaster for the Norse fleet. They had come in three hundred ships, and had left in thirty. These hulks would have been the ships that had been sunk in those battles, or had been the least seaworthy and had been left behind by both the Norse and the English armies. What a waste.

  In less than two more hours he saw Selby on the south bank. The north bank of the big bend in the Ouse was still under water. As he rounded that last full bend, he saw many men on the bank and worried that it was an army camped here. He had no choice but to continue but as he closed on them, he realized why the men were on the bank.

  As part of the Norman defense of the River Ouse, and therefore of York, from the Danish invasion fleet, the river had been blocked by a log boom here at Selby. The boom had been defended by archer towers on both banks. He had helped Thorold, the old Shirereeve of Lincolnshire, to build them.

  The boom and the towers were now gone, swept away on the first days of the flooding rains a month ago. He had watched them being swept away. Once they were no longer blocking the River Ouse, the Danish ships had come and had captured both banks of the River Ouse, and the River Wharfe, causing the Normans to retreated to the south bank of the River Aire.

  He again cursed the incompetence of the English ruling class. Those Normans should now all be in shallow graves or fleeing for their lives back to Normandy. He waved to the men on the bank. They were obviously building a new log boom and new archer towers.

  He gave thanks to Woden for his luck. If they were rebuilding the boom, then there would be people here that he knew, perhaps even his old friend Thorold. He grabbed his paddle and steered the little waterlogged boat towards the south bank, and to what was left of the Selby waterfront.

  Thorold was indeed in Selby. He was standing on the bank directing the salvage of the remains of the original towers. Raynar beached his boat and tied it off, and then walked up the bank towards him. Thorold ignored his calls, but a foreman standing close by did not, and came over and pushed him back towards the river.

  "Where you goin shithead, get back to work," the foreman told him in English.

  "I am going to visit the Countess Beatrice," replied Raynar in a loud voice and in French.

  Thorold turned at the French words, and the name of his wife, and looked at him, and slowly he saw through the filth of face and tunic. "Raynar, old friend. I thought you dead. I am glad to see you still live. You still owe me a horse," and they grasped each other's forearms while the foreman quietly disappeared out of sight behind his own work crew.

  They had a brief catch up on any personal news that could be spoken of in front of strangers, the main of which was that Beatrice was still in Lincoln. Taking advantage of the audience of the one-time Shirereeve of Lincolnshire and of the Norman commanders standing close to him, Raynar told the story of the folk camped five miles upstream, and of his fears for it.

  "Is there a large boat or a ship that can be sent to replace the ferry?" he asked hopefully. "Else those folk will be lost to the water sickness."

  The Norman commander looked down his ample nose at him. "They can walk downstream and cross here. Why should we send a ship there?"

  "I have just come by boat. There is no bank on the north side of the Ouse. It is all still flooded. It is as if they were on an island." The commander gave him a stubborn look so Raynar changed tack. "The ealders said they were sent there by Norman patrols under orders from the King to clear any villages that might provide succor to the Danish fleet.

  Those patrols assumed that the ferry would be running again by now, otherwise they would have sent them to Selby instead." It was a believable reasoning, although he seriously doubted that any Norman patrols would care if there were a ferry or not.

  Thorold spoke up. "The ferry is there," he said pointing to an ugly hulk stranded six feet above the current water level near where the old archer platform had been. There were men working around it. Thorold strode towards the hulk and the Normans and Raynar followed him. "I need it off this bank anyway. It is in the way of laying out the new boom."

  Thorold stopped beside the hulk and began talking to a tall Englishman who was working on the hull, and nearly naked in the slop and mud. There was nodding and gesturing but eventually something was decided and Thorold turned back to them.


  "He was the barge owner. They are recaulking the thing as fast as they can while it is high and dry, but they need to get it back in the water before the river level drops any further. He says it will take fifty men about an hour to launch it and then a day for the same fifty with oars and poles to push it upstream against the current."

  The Norman commander must have wanted to prove that he was still in control, and not Thorold. He stepped away and signaled the various foremen to come forward and then ordered them to stop working on the salvage for now, and to work for the ship owner instead. Before dark the ship had been refloated and tied off. It would be moved upstream at first light.

  That evening while he eagerly waited to eat his first hot meal since he had left Sherwood Forest almost two weeks ago, Raynar told Thorold his sad tales of armies and idiocy. "William and his Normans should have been crushed by now. All Cospatrick and the other Earls needed to do was to hike their army west to where they could still cross the Aire, and push the Normans out of Castleford and Pontefract so that the Danes could land their ships on the south bank. Instead they waited for three weeks in the mud of the flood until they were too sick and too weak to do anything but retreat."

  "The worst news," replied Thorold, "is that camp of homeless folk that you found at the ferry dock at Cawood. The Normans have paid off the Danish fleet with a huge Danegeld to have them leave England. They are worried and frustrated that the Danish fleet still hasn't set sail. So long as the Danes are in the Humber, the Normans must keep watch along the rivers and shores.

  My best guess is that same Danish fleet must have done much damage to the Norman fleet in the south because there are still no Norman ships here about, and without ships they cannot force the Danes to leave."

  The stew arrived from the camp kitchen and they stopped talking until they had soaked the stale bread in the salty broth. "I fear that camp is the first of many," said Thorold. "William has issued a logical order. Deprive the Danish fleet of succor around the Humber. That means clearing the land of anything they can use. That means clearing the villagers and destroying the roofs and anything they leave behind.