Hodd Read online

  It was in this state of profound contentment that I woke up in the hide. Robert Hode was snoring in the far corner, on a palliasse of straw thicker than mine own. There being no one else in the hut, I might have slit his throat, as all men have the right to slay one who is outside the law; yet any escape would have been thwarted by the watchmen outside. As I lay there, very sick in my belly, I could hear these sentries murmuring and chuckling.

  The bright, deceiving pictures and the dark hut with its vicious, blaspheming occupant became great adversaries in my mind. I closed my eyes again and swiftly entered a garden with high stone walls and well-tended flower- and herb-beds, therein coming across the loveliest woman I had ever beheld, dressed in the most delicate apparel. I glided over to her [like] a ghost, but [it was] not as a ghost79 that I stole my arm about her, so that my fingers appeared from under her arm, reaching e’en [further] to lie on her breast. She had delicate, pliant breasts set high under a chemise of silk edged with an intricate brocade, from which emerged a smooth, flowing expanse of neck, as perfectly white as the inside of an apple.80 I kissed her mouth and began to fondle her woman’s parts as if I were her husband in the privates of my chamber; she was naked under her chemise, as most women of any refinement be, and her perfume was musk like that of Eve the temptress, and I tasted violets from a muscadin81 in her mouth.

  She broke away from me, suddenly, and told me that she was already betrothed to another man – a great count called Mars, who was away fighting in the Holy Land. I found the harp in my hands and began to play and sing the most passionate of the love songs I knew, but I had no voice and the harp was woven from spiders’ webs and wrapped my hand in its sticky [tenacibus] threads. I woke up in great shame and confusion to the girl’s shriek of laughter, which was (in truth) the outlaws’ horn blowing outside: a very strange and frightening sound, for as I later learned it was the horn of a ram that had belonged to a Jew, robbed and slain on the same road as we had been – a horn made to be blown in the Jews’ synagogues, not in a wood, and which is called a shofar in their tongue, and is the only instrument permitted [by us] in their places of worship.

  Thus it was that I was doubly bewitched, both by the devilish mushrooms and by the Jews’ horn that creeps into the ear like a goblin and howls with delight.

  Hod stirred, swearing lustily, and shouted for a bowl of water; he was truly like a king. An outlaw entered with the water and Hod cleared his nose into it, a nostril [at a time], and then offered the bowl to me and ordered me to wash. I shook my head, my brain lying atop my hair.82 Hod stared at me with protuberant eyes, holding the bowl in his hand, his expression that of a clawed beast judging the prey, that is unneth worth the effort to pounce on and tear.

  He drank the water himself, gulping it down as if he was suffering from a great thirst. The man who had brought the bowl eyed me as if to say: ‘You must be favoured. Normally you would have been slain.’ The man’s cheeks were bursten-veined [sanguine suffusos], and his nose was pitted and swollen: it was the same felon who had snatched my harp from my shoulders the time we were robbed, and I instantly felt an iron dart of hateful choler.83

  I was made to follow Hod out of the hut, leaving my harp within. The hour was yet early and it was very chill, although the ground was not frozen. The fire was smoking fitfully, thickening the mist that hung about us and that crept under my clothing, for it was the twilight that forerunneth the sun’s rising.84 The morning air and the freshness of the autumn wood eased my sickness and the heaviness in my head. I looked about for my fellow prisoners, and saw no one but the watch. Then I stared upwards into the greatest oak where the tregetour still perched like a tiny hawk, for I could see his long legs either side of the tree-limb, and was glad he had not fallen from that height in his sleep. And Hod said to me, ‘We shall see if he can fly,’ and laughed for a long time as do gentlemen in a dicing house when one cries ffissh ffissh,85 or like an infidel acted in the false merriment of masked players [larvati].

  As in the camp of an army besieging a town or a castle, there was great idleness among the men, from want of tasks. This was worsened by their leader’s manner of conducting affairs, guided by his belief in the divine rightness of whatever he thought to do, so that his orders were erratic and even fruitless [vani]. At times, no orders were given at all, because nothing came into his head: as I imagined it, he was waiting for a messenger to arrive from the realm of thother. The outlaws would grow restless and impatient, arguing with each other and coming to blows. They might only indulge in bow practice or contests of archery on Hod’s orders, and yet like bees one travail was common to them all, one common working and one common meat and one habitation which was the wood; and if a woman was taken into the wood, she was common to them all until thrown out like a goshawk that is old or no longer living, yet which before was formerly beloved of its lord, and borne on his hand and stroked on the breast and tail and is now thrown out on a dunghill.86

  There was a great metal plate on the fire, and on it they cast a paste of oatmeal to harden it for biscuits [panibus], which was my whole fare that morning, yet afterwards my stomach was filled. Knowing where the harp now lay, I was planning my escape [with it]. I had slender legs and was swift in running, but the wood contained many armed men: I risked certain death, even if the horses tethered among the trees would not be used to harry me, as they had harried the deer on the lord’s estate.

  Then I saw the friar and the carters being led towards the clearing, tied together with a single rope knotted around each of their waists, as official prisoners have when led to the market-square for execution. They were filthy with mud, and were naked as Adam before the Fall, without even stockings. I imagined they had not eaten, as they gazed with longing upon the little biscuits tempered by the fire, that was now well ablaze; yet when I offered them some, the sturdy felon guarding the naked captives rebuked me sharply. This man’s face was so cut and scarred, like a veteran soldier’s (as if by the sharp steel of a lance in many affrays), that it made me think of great battles and of knights in armour, and of the strokes of lance or mace on headpieces that might be heard from a distance of a mile or more, such was my boyish greenness and the lingering effects of the [mushroom] soup – when my poor head should only have been filled with prayers to the Lord Our God, Creator of all things visible and invisible.

  But in this lack I was only as our clerks and country priests are at this very time in Yngelond, who understand so little of what they service that they are no better than ignorant boys themselves, and preach insufficiently, keeping their mortal sins hid as deeply as their chaplains do their filthy concubines; who store their barley, wheat, peas and so forth in the church, which is oft in poor repair or even ruined entirely. And even when a witch resides in their parish, they cannot root her out by asking her to repeat the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, for they barely know anything themselves – though they maintain on [episcopal] visitations87 that they are good and faithful Christians …

  I have somewhat abbreviated and truncated the above diatribe (familiar in the Middle Ages), for being detrimental to the flow of the narrative.

  … Hode then appeared out of the morning mist, his breath thickening it with clouds that hung in the damp woodland air like the smoke of a dragon [serpentis]. I took it as a further sign of his devilish [powers?]. He stared at the men and I [remembered what he had said?] about the impossibility of sinning. Whatever he decided to do would be right, because he was [in his own eyes?] perfect.88

  He ordered the guards to undo the ropes. Then he signalled to one with an outgrowth of red beard, and told him in his ear to fetch a thing. The prisoners covered their [privy] parts and shivered, dipping their heads like seed-fowl, certain from the look on their faces that they were doomed to be miserably and horribly slain. The friar held his great paunch and wept, no doubt also from cold, by which he was all over blue; I felt pity, but then he gazed upon me with a look of such exceeding venom that I knew he believed me to be behind his plight, for w
hy else was I free? And there are indeed boys who lead innocent travellers to traps on the road, or to wild places where the same [travellers] are robbed or murdered; but I could say nothing, for the battle-scarred outlaw was standing by, holding a stout cudgel.

  Hode was stirring the fire with a long stick as the pox-marked felon returned with a large sackcloth parcel in his arms; this he untied, pulling out a glistening [lucidam] robe. At first I did not see it was a lady’s silken gown, but thought it a lordly vestment: other gowns followed and rustled in the felon’s hands like the leaves at our feet. Hod indicated which captive should receive which vestment, for they were of bright and tempting hues: yellow, citrine, red, blue and green. The prisoners being forced to don these garments, I saw they were ladies’ gowns of the finest Byzantine silk. One of the carters, in his fear, caught his foot on the hem and tore it. He began to weep, thinking his last hour had come, as the poor wretches pulled each bodice about the chest, doing up the clasps with some difficulty, for the fastenings were fine and their fingers chapped and cumbersome. The friar, being tall and stout, could but squeeze into a green gown, looking as doth a bean swollen in its pod, the hem of the full skirt coming only to his lower calves from his belly.

  Even in the mistiness, it was plain that all the dresses they wore were women’s garb and not cloaks or tunics or robes or men’s skirts or gowns,89 for they all had a bodice wherein the greater breasts of females customarily sit and remain hidden, lest they infect others with lechery, though pale as whale bone. And in place of a maiden’s swan-white throat was only stubbled and ill-coloured flesh.90

  The victims made no effort, as travelling players or buffoons [scurrae] might, to imitate a lady’s mincing, pliant comportment, but stood about as men, wondering, ‘Ey, what might next befall us?’ Two of the gowns were long, and their wearers short with hefty shoulders, so they must hold the folds to keep them free from the ground. The faces were mostly like those of ugly women or female serfs of the rougher sort, and stubbled or bearded on the jaw so they might have been crones or witches (whom all righteous men fear), yet robed in splendour. And the fearful name Lucifer spread in my mind like a banner, and all his glittering host following like summer fireflies from ear to ear.

  Hodd did not laugh, and so the felons under the trees kept silent likewise: this I found remarkable, for they were cruel men, and delighted in others’ misery and humiliation. He gazed upon the shivering captives, nodding slowly, as if he was discovering something afresh. When he looked about him, any smile was extinguished like a taper, and the entire band of felons was now gathered in anticipation: I counted above forty. Watching R[ober]t Hodd, I understood then what it was to fear a man, not for his strength but for his diabolical influence, as sorcerers and witches are feared; and e’en the scar upon his head, like drops of molten wax, seemed invested with malign powers.

  The captives were made to dance hand in hand, which to my mind was a mingling of two evils, for the dancing of women is horribly wicked, and men dressing in women’s attire is also an unnatural vice, and thus Hod mixed a brew that was corrupt and stinking and which the outlaws might drink from with their eyes, as the fiends of Hell sup upon pitch and sulphur, to strengthen their evil.

  And when, after this buffoonery, the prisoners were driven from the encampment by the outlaw guards – being permitted to scramble away in their finery through bramble-weft and thicket, their costly silken stuff grievously torn, as was their flesh, the five of them resembled a horrible dream in the mist, a dream of disorder and the end of days, when gentlefolk become muddy serfs, and men become women, and lepers and beggars feast in noble halls and filthy concubines wield swords and lances, throwing groaning men to the ground and treading them underfoot, that the very substance of the world is sodden away and immoderate mirth becomes the wailing of unceasing plague.

  Then Hod turned to me, as I watched (secretly plotting how to escape with my instrument), and told me that I was favoured to be his servant: ‘For verily I am in need of music, and you have been chosen by the othar, to reside here in our New Jerusalem!’ This name he delivered with much mockery, looking about him at the wood-ways on every hand that were not true ways at all but utterly wild and traced only by beasts: for the felons, too, were no more than beasts. And then he added, for I had said nothing, that if I were caught escaping, I should suffer the punishment of a poacher caught with a bow or an archer caught by the enemy in battle: ‘That is, to lose three of the fingers of your right hand, that you might no longer pluck your instrument for me, or for anyone.’

  Then we heard a shout, and looking up, we saw the quack or tregetour still perched high among the remaining golden foliage of the oak tree, clutching the great branch like a squirrel doth, and pleading for release now that his companions had been set free. Hod took up his bow, that was of his own size and exceedingly well made of the ewe,91 with fletchings92 bound with red silk and a barbed head of bluish-grey [glauci] steel, and drew it back bodily;93 shooting with a sharp hiss [sibilo] its arrow upwards towards the poor man.

  And so skilled was the villain in archery, that the missile pinned the quack to the branch by the very hand that clutched, leaving no more showing of the arrow than a few inches above the fletching, as it seemed to us below, so deeply did the point drive into the wood through the flesh. A great shriek sounded, that shook the birds from the trees – these mostly crows and suchlike – and then a sobbing that was grievous to hear, though faint to our ears below, and obscured by the cheerings of the other felons who had seen the action. What pity did I then feeleth, for the man shuddering upon his high perch!

  ‘Now he can boast and brag of flying all he wishes,’ cried Hodde, ‘for only a surgeon can unpin him, e’en after every leaf hath fallen to the ground.’ And I marvelled at his cruelty as much as his bowman’s skill, for the leech had done little to deserve such a fate: if he fell he would not die promptly, but dangle by his pinned hand as though from a gibbet.

  Alas, I now well believed Hodd, concerning the punishment to my own hand if I were to attempt to escape; and I cursed the day I had ever set out to retrieve my beloved harp, a mere bauble (it seems to me now) that had replaced a finer love in my mind – of that eternal Light that will never dim, even after the promised End of Days94 have brought darkness over this wretched earth, and which Light that horrible play-acting and buffoonery had recalled to me: for (strange to relate!) that scene took me back to the sandy marge of the sea, and my first and most holy master, the aforementioned hermit, who yet had no name.

  Part Two

  The manuscript is here separated by a superfluity of prayers and pious thoughts from the previous section, creating the equivalent of our modern blank leaf – which in the medieval period would have been regarded as shockingly wasteful. It is impossible to know whether this was a later interpolation or the author’s original indication of a division in the narrative, which I nevertheless acknowledge, although the transition seems to be otherwise smooth.

  1

  Now I must tell you something of my early childhood, and how I came to learn in this wise.

  My mother told me how, when I was not yet born, he [the hermit] had come to our northern village from afar, and knocked on our humble door. He received kind welcome from my father and mother, though he was a stranger to them and they were ever-hungry, being mere cottars [rustici] dressed in hodden grey, and their bread coarse, and the land all abouts very wild, windy and desolate, with little habitation. My parents respected holy men who were not false beggars or thieves, and he ate with them at their meagre table and laid a hand on their careworn heads and blessed them. Which, when my mother felt it, was like a wing of goosedown (as she told me much later), or as if the Saviour had brushed her face with his chestnut95 hair. ‘The poor shall inherit the earth,’ he told them, ‘for they are Christ’s treasure.’

  There was yet frost on the ground, though he was barefoot and ragged and very thin, having eaten nothing at times but wild grasses, tubers, acorns, beechmast,
eldre96 and e’en nettles from the woods, and drunk [the juice of ] birch. In those earliest days the hermit still had long hair and a crisp beard like flax, above which his cheekbones stuck out like plough-shares. He did not care a clove of garlic for coins and wealth, supping on my parents’ thin gruel of beans as if at a feast. ‘You surpass the rich as gold surpasses silver,’ [he went on]. ‘Being in material want, you are held in grace by Our Lord.’

  He told them that men fighting in the Holy Land had seen crosses appear miraculously between the shoulderblades of the Christian slain – but only on those of the poor. My parents, who were hungry and short of fuel in that fierce winter, felt his words warm their souls with hope, and my mother would say that she did feel, at that very moment, a hot finger trace the Holy Sign on her back, that caused her almost to cry out.

  As a young child, I would examine her back, under her clothes, as she sat on the stool – but there was no trace of red and no scar, as sometimes the divine touch leaves on even ordinary mortals, so that the flesh blisters or erupts with the force of holiness, yet without pain or dolour. My mother was always disappointed and [would maintain that] she felt a tingling on her spine as of a saint’s anointing finger. (And I also suffer from a tingling in my spine, but it be in no wise a saint’s finger, rather that of this labour and travail, that pricks like a dagger.)97

  Our simple cot having two rooms, the holy beggar was lodged alone for several nights where e’en the hens and our two pigs were shut out. When he left, he followed the guidance of a voice, walking until he came to the sea. Our village was but five or so miles from a wild, rocky part of the northern coast, uninhabited and seldom visited even by fishermen, though lying but two or three hours [on foot] from the holy abbey of Whittby.98 There he found a cave in a great crag or cliff and lived on seaweed and fish and gulls’ eggs, his whereabouts unknown to anyone else.