The Medieval Murderers - King Arthur's Bones

Eifion, the landlord, kept an anxious eye on the wooden screen behind the great oak door. He had stationed his unfortunate pot-boy outside, a lad of ten who, though wrapped from head to toe in a smelly sheepskin, would have to be called in soon before he perished from cold. The lad’s task was to scan the moonlit track outside and warn of any strangers on the road from Abergavenny to Hereford, though this seemed unlikely this late on such a freezing, blustery night, three days before the eve of Christ’s Mass. A warning was vital, as the group of men in the bleak taproom were all former Welsh soldiers, and their assembly could well be considered treasonous if the Sergeant of the Hundred or one of the lordship’s servants from Grosmont took it into his head to visit the Skirrid Inn that night. Even though this was geographically Wales, the Norman-English Marcher lords and their client landholders considered it their territory. Even the Welsh name ‘Erging’, for the area of what was rapidly becoming south-west Herefordshire, had been eradicated by the English, who now called it ‘Archenfield’. It was true that many folk, even some English, accepted that the little river Monnow marked the border in this area, but the endless to and fro of frequent Welsh raids and relentless English acquisition made the idea of a frontier meaningless.

The black-haired man broke the silence. ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ he growled. ‘If we could gather enough support, I’m willing to lead a party through the mountains to reach Dafydd in Eryri.’ [1]

Out of the muttering that this provoked, another voice dissented. ‘You may well say that, Owain ap Hywel! You have no wife or children left to starve while you go off to be killed.’

Then Dewi, the scar-faced man, added his own caution. ‘Before you do anything rash, Owain, you had best take your father’s advice. He fought alongside our prince many times, though it was twenty years past.’

‘And got a spear through his chest for his trouble,’ added the inn-keeper. ‘You said Hywel was dying, Owain? This awful news must be breaking his heart?’

The black-haired man nodded sadly. ‘My father has been sickening all autumn; his cough gets worse each day. I knew he could not last the winter, but this tragedy will kill him before Christ’s Mass.’

He got to his feet and swallowed what was left in his pot. ‘I promised to call in on him tonight.There may not be many more chances before God takes him.’ He pulled a shoulder-cape of dark leather over the belted tunic of coarse brown wool that reached to his thighs, covering serge breeches pushed into thick boots. The cape had a hood, which he pulled up over his head as he made for the door.

‘I’ll see what my father has to say and we’ll meet here again on the eve of Christ’s Mass,’ he promised, passing behind the draught screens and tugging open the massive iron-banded front door.

A blast of icy wind swirled a few flakes of snow past him, as he pushed the freezing pot-boy inside and heaved the creaking door shut behind him. For a moment he stood in the bright moonlight, checking that the road of frozen mud that went past the hamlet of Llanfihangel Crucorney was empty in both directions. The Black Mountains, the edge of Wales, loomed close behind him and a mile or two to the south he could see the strange silhouette of the Holy Mountain, Ysgyrid Fawr, the English corruption of which gave its name to the ‘Skirrid Inn’. The great cleft in its side was said to have been caused by an earthquake that occurred at the hour of Christ’s Crucifixion. Owain wondered bitterly what earthly disaster might have occurred somewhere in Wales at the dreadful hour of Prince Llewelyn’s ambush and assassination.

His father lived a mile up the road at Pandy, a cluster of cottages around the fulling mill, whose wheel was driven by the Honddu stream. He was looked after by his daughter Rhiannon, whose husband also worked at the mill, which treated all woollen cloth woven in the surrounding area.

Owain was a self-employed carter who carried much of the mill’s produce around the neighbourhood and often further afield. His two patient oxen were tethered out of the wind in the lee of the tavern and, huddling against the cold on the driving board, he drove the plodding beasts and his empty cart up to Pandy, where he left them in the shelter of the mill yard.

His sister’s bwthyn was a hundred paces further, on the banks of the millstream. It was a two-roomed cottage built of cob, a mixture of clay, straw and dung plastered on wattle panels between oak frames, the walls capped by a steep thatched roof.

Rhiannon was expecting him, late as it was, but her husband was asleep in the inner room, snoring in the box-bed with their two small children cuddled under blankets on the wide shelf above him. There were glowing logs in the fire-pit in the centre of the main room, the wispy smoke being lost beneath the high ceiling of plaited hazel twigs that supported the thatch.

‘How is he tonight?’ murmured Owain, as his sister opened the door for him.

‘Weaker than ever, poor man. He can hardly catch his breath.’

Propped against the far wall, slumped on a hessian mattress stuffed with raw wool and goose feathers, was their father, Hywel ap Gruffydd. At seventy, he looked a score of years older, a gaunt skeleton of a man, unable to lie down because of shortness of breath. His old chest wound had collapsed one lung and now the other was giving up as well. His sparse white hair overhung a cadaveric face, the same deep eye sockets that his son possessed being like dark pits above sunken cheeks and blue-tinged lips.

Owain went across and knelt on the floor rushes alongside the pallet. He took his father’s hand in his, feeling the coldness of the claw-like fingers, in spite of the profusion of blankets that lay on the bed and around his shoulders.

‘I’ve no more than a day or two left, my son,’ he whispered between heaving breaths that drew air into what little remained of his lungs. ‘But there’s nothing to live for now that our last prince has gone.’

His son gently stroked the bony fingers. ‘Don’t strain your voice, Tâd ,’ he said. ‘We’ll all come to see you in turn, the whole family.’

Briefly the old man’s eyes flashed. ‘Idwal’s sons are most welcome,’ he hissed between gasps. ‘But is it likely that Ralph and his brood care much if I live or die?’

Rhiannon, standing on the other side of the bed, clucked in disapproval. ‘Now, Tâd , that’s not true. They’ll be here tomorrow, no doubt.’

Hywel had had three sons, as well as a daughter. The eldest, Idwal, had been killed many years before, during Llewelyn’s attack on Caerphilly in ’68. Idwal left two sons and when, later, their mother had died, Owain had looked after them until they were old enough to fend for themselves.

Hywel’s remaining elder son was Ralph, though he had been baptised Rhodri. Now a prosperous man in his forties, he had ‘gone over to the English’, as his father put it bitterly. He had abandoned his patronymic of ‘ap Hywel’ and become ‘Ralph Merrick’, a common anglicization of one of his forebears, ‘Meurig! As a youth, he had entered the service of the Scudamores, a notable Norman family, and had risen to be their bailiff at nearby Kentchurch Court, one of the Scudamores’ main estates. Ralph had married an Englishwoman from Hereford town and their three children were John, William and Rosamund, all thoroughly English names.

Relations between the two parts of the family were cool and, though there had never been any outright enmity, Ralph and his family looked down on the others as rude yokels who had failed to make the best of their lives by siding with the invincible invaders who were inexorably pushing the Welsh border further westwards.