Hodd Read online

  I asked once the whereabouts of my father, in my childish way, whom I had no memory of, and my mother told me (as she was to do many times), how one day the army of King John passed by and put the village to the torch, for it lay in the area controlled by one of the rebel barons;99 the inhabitants who had not fled were pitlessly slaughtered. ‘Alas,’ quoth she, ‘your father was among them!’ Chased over the baron’s ploughland, whose thick acres he had been tilling with oxen,100 he was shot down like a hart, and lay unburied. ‘I carried thee upon my back into the wood beside the village, but some servants in the king’s retinue spied us and harried us between the trees, shouting and hallooing as though we were hares. Yet of a sudden our pursuers thereupon disappeared as if swallowed by the ground, and a silence fell upon the winter wood.

  ‘A man then appeared, walking slowly, and I was led to the sea-cave you know, some few miles’ walk from there, for the man was none other than the good hermit. After a few days in that dismal sanctuary, I returned with you to the village, where those who had fled were beginning already to rebuild their homes.’ And enquiring after my slaughtered father, I would receive an answer thus: ‘Alas, his body vanished, I know not where.’

  We were very poor and there was oft a murrain of sheep and too much moistness in our meagre valley. Yet was I nesh101 of flesh and quick to learn, and suffered little from fever or rheum (that had took all my siblings),102 and was as careless and evil-mannered and vain as most children are.

  At the insistence of the holy man, he became all my school, and thus I learned my education from him, else I would have remained an unlettered peasant. I was taught by him to read and write, to sing and to play music. And soon I could say which city lies where the sun goeth to rest (’tis clept Sarica); how long Adam was in Paradise (seven years, before his trespass with the apple on a Friday); of what height is Our Lady (six foot and eight inches, which is five inches more than her Beloved Son); and which herbs God loveth best (the rose and the lily): and many another answer vital to us.

  At first my mother went with me to the hermit’s cell, and I would stay one night each week in the cave, and then she would fetch me the following noon with bread for the holy man; later I walked the few bare and windy miles alone, e’en with unshod feet.

  The sand of the beach was my tablet, and a pebble or stick my pen. At first I approached my letters as I might have approached the coast of Fennonia,103 with mute ignorance and awe. I would draw them on the nesh sand, [copying] what he had written, until the beach was covered in words. My ears would be full of the sea-surge – and even now when I read, with my failing sight, the sound I hear is not that faint roar of the present sea upon our cliffs, but that of the past, louder still: for all my letters were learned in the rude voice of the waves, the wind flailing our cloaks like sails – making my blood strong and more boisterous still, as I think it now, in my extreme old age that is the strongest proof [firmissimum hoc afferri videtur].104

  In the early days I would write, not words, but only letters, the same letter over and over until I could form it naturally and almost as beautifully as my master could, my hand scuttling sideways like a crab. My delight in the forming of these letters over and over was so complete that today I feel a shiver of it, e’en down in my shamefast loins, when I recall those times. Yet I inwardly curse my writing [hand], for it is so stiff with hard use and age that the crack of its fingers [digitorum crepitus] stirs me from my old man’s slumber; and my eyes and all my senses, e’en that of speech, are weary; and even when the swealewe105 swoops above the cloister, I cannot hear its screams.

  * * *

  None of this did I tell a hair of, to Robert Hode. Instead, I was already bound fast like a boat to its painter, for his admiration of me was my own doing, and built upon a lie; thus the Devil had twisted the rope. Indeed, there was also profit in’t for me, for Hod blew upon the embers of my poor pride, that the hermit had last stoked; I cannot say that my second master, brother Thomas, puffed up that sin, for he would strike me before praising me, which I now see as being a surer way to God, for no man walks upon rose petals to the Lord.

  Why did the Heavenly Maker grant us bodily pain, if it was not to strip us of the luxury of self-pride costumed by the Arch-fiend and return us, in our sufferings, to recognising the blinding effulgency of His pure Light instead of the miserable taper of our turpitude, or the false glitter that gold radiates from its substance, unless it be leaved upon the sacred walls of Heaven … ?106

  Hodde had a wild way of talking that at first I could not understand, for his phrases seemed to lack meaning, though I knew all the words. He was fond of sermonising to the assembled felons, and the first I ever heard was on the evening – e’en after dark – of that very same day my five companions fled through the bramble-thicket.

  He began under a rising moon, after the camp had glutted itself upon roasting meat; talking loud enough for the whole clearing to hear, yet he did not quite shout. The felons sat upon the ground, or upon logs or the lower branches of the great trees, like a flock of the Arch-fiend’s angels. Their master talked in a grimly voice of treachery and injustice and the foulness and greed of the lords, merchants and bishops, and of the blood on the head of the sheryffs of the kingdom, and that a golden age was to come when all evil customs would be ended and all land would be free.107 Not intently did these wild men listen to him, though pretending to, like schoolboys fearful of a beating. Yet the outlaw clept lyte John,108 who had held the knife to brother Thomas’s throat on the road, and was of great stature with a blacksmith’s shoulders, called out, ‘No man be so free that he may not plough and carry [qui non debeat arare et ferre];’ which Hodd answered by saying, ‘Thou speak’st like a charter, John!’ – making all present laugh.

  As for myself, I felt that as long as I sat mute at his right hand, as bidden, I was safe and would soon be released unharmed, or find a means to escape with my harp without detection, for the latter would be fatal to me. Meanwhile, upon the heights of the tree above, the quack or tregetour was making sounds something like a pigeon of the woods, that was horrible to hear; for it was evident that not only was the arrow in his hand piercing his mind with the agony of the battlefield, enticing a host of ants and suchlike in its wound, but thirst and hunger were needly working in him, and all he could do was whimper, yet not fall. And once or twice a terrible screech was let out, e’en during the sermon, but all Hode said was, in a great voice: ‘Let us see if the leech can grow wings, as he maintained to us, and tear himself away as ’tis said men shall travel to the after-life!’

  And all the assembled felons howled like dogs before a chase, as no one there had a peck of Christian beliefs, nor even pagan or infidel, but something that denied e’en the son of darkness; for Hodde believed neither in the Maker, nor in the Antichrist, but only that he himself was more than the Maker, for the Maker existed not – as a flea is perforce greater than something that does not exist. And because he was but one of very few who knew this awful truth, he was of great power, and might follow his will without fear.

  Yet at other times he did talk of himself as greater than God, for God did not intend to give him so much power; this was because he needed a plinth to his power, for as I said e’en a flea can be great compared to nothing, or to a mote of dust that is almost nothing. And Hodd most feared being of small weight, or weighing of naught as a dead leaf does (that makes no report when it strikes the ground); so that he used God as a necessary comparison, as be a coin in the scales.109

  Yet already, despite the vile nature of these idolatries and heresies, the Arch-fiend was hurling his long javelins over my tender walls, for there was something in Hodd’s vicious talk that drew me. I was a youth, and knew nothing, forgetting the lessons of both my previous masters as if they were so many straws in a gust. The fiends that slumbered in me awoke, and outside the holy influence of the brothers’ house, they felt at ease to creep up in my veins and mine my heart and mind with their secret workings, as if every syllable
of Hodde’s was their steel-forged pickaxe [dolabra]. For Hod talked now of a great truth that would come with full understanding, and banish the clouds of ignorance, wherewith the dreadful fear of both God and the Devil would vanish within the twinkling of an eye, and all men be free, and not tethered to that which ’tis said be most proper to man, but not to the animals – that being sin.

  And he went on: ‘Lo, that world in which it is not possible to sin – for sin is like a property made of paste, as a shield or sword is in a myracle [play] – shall blind us with its glory, and we shall be as naked as the beasts!’ And he cried out, as doth an emperor before a battle: ‘All spirits shall be free in a state of nameless wildness, as I alone already am! And all things created shall be the property of the free spirit, whether living or inanimate; and so the poor shall be made rich, and the present and horribly covetous rich be slain and cast into ditches, and every great house or abbey or palace burned, and no man’s wife or daughter be any more his and his alone, for lechery and adultery are vices only in the fallen world, and the world of the free spirit is unfallen!’110

  After this there fell a great silence, as if the last words of the sermon that still hurried through the depths on the backs of fiends had silenced e’en the creatures of the yellow-hued wood. A great roar then went up, and I saw how all Hod’s men had been lit and made merry [by this speech], as if pitchers of wine had flowed instead, and some of them danced. For it is well known that heretics and idolaters dance, which is why the Church looks severely upon it, and in dancing they give off a stench like that of a hog-stye, and grunt like swine, as any man who has entered an ale-house during a dance must know well: and so they become loosened further from God.

  One felon struck a great drum of stretched ox-hide, and another blew upon a hunter’s horn, and yet another a pipe, and a cask of the carters’ ale flowed into every throat. I also was made to drink, though of tender years. Meanwhile the fire blazed ferociously into the night, illuminating those savage faces and twisting the trees about into horrible shapes. And thus have I seen Hell many times repeated on this earth.

  But the worst was to come; for having sieved the sins of pride and gluttony, lust yet remained to be plucked. There stood a large hut, like a hall, with a thatch of bracken and crude walls of oaken planks laid vertically, down a thorny but well-trodden way from the clearing, in which those women either fleeing justice or cruel husbands, or taken by force from the road in their beggars’ rags, were kept as in a stewe, though without the freedom to leave when they wished.

  A wicker fence surrounded the whole, of the height of a man, thus both hiding its filthy activities and rendering some chance of air and exercise to the unfortunates within.111 The rough place was made more civilised by thick pelts of bear and sheep and a window that opened on a wooden hinge; there were raised areas either side on which lay pallets of straw, hidden behind fine, hung cloths robbed from merchants’ carts. The hearth in the middle was kept alight always. The hut was called many filthy names such as Cockepallisse and Prikksdelite but mostly (and most blasphemously) ‘The Nonnerye’, and was guarded by two bowmen.

  The women numbered four or five, and did not ever stay longer than two or three months. None were diseased, for if they were seen to scratch themselves or bore red pustules or other unclean matter, they were cast out of the camp; and likewise if they were seen to be heavy with child. If they were maidens and comely enough, then Hodde had his will with them first, for he was greater than God and all was of his own essence.

  I told him I had never e’en touched a woman. He laughed and told me that this bawdy-house was to prevent vice among his followers, for if a man lie with a man, then that is unnatural and damaging to the free spirit as blight is to a tree, and he did hate catamites as he hated monks, and thereby made loathsome accusations against the holy [brothers], such as … [matter erased]. In this I understood that he was no different to St Augustine or other great Christians, and not like a heretic.112

  And he showed me the great hole dug out long before for marl at the edge of the wood, that they called the dragouns pitte or sometimes deork pitte; here were felons cast (as sinners be into the infernal regions), for this or that transgression, until Hodd saw fit to release them. And the sinner being tied at the wrists, and the crater being the depth of three men and of a sucking mud at the bottom, it was truly a horrible punishment e’en for a day, let alone a week – and thus would I fare if I were to touch any of the women, or steal, or otherwise displease my new master.

  All this I discovered in the first days of my captivity; indeed, I had been led to the Nonerrye by Robert Hod himself, although no fornication took place. The fire glowed hotly on its stone cushion [pulvino?],113 and the women were half naked on pelts around it, and there was perfume mixed with the smoky air. Their round breasts did not surprise me, for while the Lord Our Maker had permitted me to see mothers suckling, and the withered dugs of a madwoman dancing naked before a church door, the Devil had also enticed me to watch, through a chink in a certain wall, the practice of foul lechery.

  Permit me to explain! Our abbey at that time made great profit from two [bath-houses] that it owned in Dancaster, of great size and comfort, to which it was said that certain wives, married to elderly and respectable burghers, did repair to satisfy their lusts among the clients of the proper bawds, who were regularly inspected in their secret places on the body since the day one was found to be a leper, caught from an unclean customer.114 And right up to the time of good Abbot Gerald, sad to tell, I would accompany my master [brother Thomas] to that lewd place, waiting outside with his horse whilst his thirst was satisfied within.

  My curiosity inflamed by a whispering fiend, I did not resist through prayer but crept up a stinking back alley, slippery with gutter-dung filling the ruts as deep as my shins, that ran behind the stewe.115

  There I pressed my eye to the hole and saw my master in a tub, his tonsured pate gleaming … and the girls about him comely and pliant and white as whale-bone, and one of them [in the water?] also, its steam moistening [contingens]116 the flesh … so that I was driven to the solitary [vice] and felt the hot breath of the aforesaid fiends upon my neck, drowning my reason. Miserable youth! For that one lone [self-]fornication, shall I soon pay with a thousand thousand suitable torments … [when] the long catalogue of my sins is over, and only this single one [remains]? And thus be parted longer from the true eternal bliss, of which lust’s momentary pleasure is but a glint in the sewer?

  2

  I shall tell you yet more of my very earliest years, for this be a necessary part of my full confession set down on this date of [blank in MS].

  So much of what was written by my first master the hermit upon the sand, or shown to me in the one book of his library (this being the Holy Gospels, stained and swollen with straws), I could not comprehend in the early days; and even the simplest of phrases I skipped over or dragged in my reading, as so many priests now do with the sacred psalms. And we were not always alone, for though it was an isolated place and even the gatherers of glaseworte117 and such like rarely ventured there, yet my saintly master’s reputation had spread, and many came to give him food; and some of these being the type of pilgrim who sings and dances foolishly and even lecherously instead of praising God, he was eventually forced to leave instructions upon the cliff that the victuals be placed in a basket, and lowered down, that he be left in peace – though the pilgrims were still blessed by the act, and by touching the basket that the hermit touched. And soon a simple, low chapel was built with a roof of reeds, that three or four [at a time] might sleep therein and pray, though it was barely distinguishable from the rough grass and rocks upon the top of the cliff.

  My earliest lesson was the setting down of an abc, as it is to be found on a board in any school: three rows of letters ending in est amen. My master wrote that for me, then bade me copy it. My efforts were painfully poor, each row entangled with the next, for at that time these letters that now sound their shape in my h
ead and on my lips were mere marks scratched on sand, no more than the worm scribbles that lay between the weed’s wrack. Yet during the scratching of it on my humble parchment, I felt a great excitement and pride, though pride opens the portal to the Devil. So when, after that good hour’s work, my master swept all into oblivion with his naked foot, my portal was also shut with a clac.

  ‘And again,’ was all he said. Then after many a further hour of work the tide took it all, as time has taken both my masters and my mother and my foster-mother, and the accursed felons and their villainous leader and all those I knew then, and all my friends and brothers of mine own age, or even younger, so that I am stranded as on a spit, and have understood one lesson: that the good are good, and the evil are evil, and the evil are now greater in number among us, for the final Judgement approacheth like a storm felt at first only with a sudden gust, that claps the door in the room wherein we slumber from our vain ignorance, but does not wake us. For to fill his bags is all man’s aim in these covetous days, while the poor drop in the fields, dead of hunger; and five thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine years after the first [murder] was committed, Cain’s brethren are faithful to his memory, and do multiply his example, though he himself be tormented for eternity in Hell’s heat, and they shall follow him down beyond the pit of slime forthwith.

  By translating with my master from the Gospels and so forth,118 I mastered a simple Latin in two years, so that I could both read and write. The salt wind that at times beat on my child’s face as I worked hardened my resolve, and I would feel like a seafarer, bound for unknown shores. And my love of letters and the making of them over and over, e’en before I had fashioned words, was deeper than I can describe: I was as a hungry man who cometh upon a feast of dainty fare, or a poor man entering a castle, who is told that all its possessions and rooms are his.