Wessex Tales: "Schelin's Daughter" (Story 14)

This is one among 38 stories in my collection...

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘ Schelin’s Daughter ’

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright Robert Fripp 2013

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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  Cover

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  123RF Stock Photo 8562315

  Cover design: The Design Unit,

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  Wessex Tales stories: ‘Schelin’s Daughter’

  ISBN 978-0-9918575-3-1

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Author’s Note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

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  WESSEX TALES

  ‘ Schelin’s Daughter ’

  Chapter 1

  The year is 1086. William the Conqueror finally paid off his army at Salisbury (Old Sarum) that year. Meanwhile the ink was drying on his survey of all England, the Domesday Book.

  At some point in the twenty years between the Battle of Hastings and that survey of all England known as the Domesday Book, a hamlet at Okeford, in Dorset, hard by the River Stour, was given in perpetuity to a Norman knight whose name appears variously in charter rolls as Azelin, Aschelin, Schelin, Eschelinus, or Exchelines. The Domesday Book puts it this way, ‘Schelin tenet Alfrod’, and who are we to argue? Whatever the actual sound of Schelin’s name, he was a loyal servant to the Norman cause, and Okeford, ‘Alfrod’ seems to have come to him after a series of royal land swaps as his just reward. And a rich reward, too! By the time the great survey was taken, Okeford had sixteen plough lands, eleven teams, and more meadowland than any other estate in Dorset. King William’s surveyors assessed Okeford at an astounding £16, and its mill at one pound three shillings and sixpence.

  Before William’s invasion, the mighty Godwin, Earl of Wessex, had held the manor of Okeford. Godwin, a Saxon grandee, was father-in-law to King Edward the Confessor. The invasion washed that away. The manor’s new lord, Schelin, and his lady were endowed with all the advantages of Norman culture, Norman ways. But very little of that precious commodity had rubbed off on the stolid peasantry of Okeford, who were as irretrievably West Saxon as their hogs. A barrier of language and a gulf of class as storm-tossed and forbidding as the gale-wracked Channel separated Schelin’s hard-won Dorset manor from his Norman ancestry.

  Schelin was a younger son cast out in the world to find his fate, and had done so successfully at Duke William’s side in his hour of need. From the scraps we know, it is clear that Schelin’s family held lands in Dorset at Hampreston, Edmondsham, and Witchampton. But the family’s true ancestral home was surely the manor and estates at Parfura Eskelling, in Normandy.

  Subsequent years had been kind to Schelin, with the exception of arthritis in one shoulder, where a housecarl’s arrow had pierced it to the bone at Hastings. But that was a small price to pay, more than amply rewarded by the gift of Okeford on the Stour, a primitive country to be sure, but well-watered and wooded, the hamlet on its knoll being hemmed about by prime mixed woods of beech, oak, and ash, with, beneath it all, a fine deep soil. A few years of labor with an axe—and chivvying the peasantry—had produced a manor-hall and fine outbuildings, with hovels of hurdles and thatch for the storage of grain and farm carts. New strips had been ploughed, and the valley lowlands tamed of roots and swamp. Even the peasants, impervious to change, had come to convince themselves that just maybe the world had not ended with the death of King Harold in the Year of Three Kings.

  Schelin was now working to build a church, the only stone structure in the village. In those years it was intended as a simple rectangle of a place, a nave constructed of flint, with ashlar stone from across the valley, the thick walls perforated with Norman arrow slits set high to give a little light.

  Schelin and his wife, Matilda, had a son and heir, Robert, and three daughters, whose fortune in marriage had been their parents’ major preoccupation for several years. The two eldest had been placed, after elaborate negotiation: the first, Berenice, as the wife of a squire, a cousin, near Rouen; the second stayed in England, wedded with a wool merchant at Dorchester. But the third daughter—pale creature that she was—the beautiful but seemingly fragile Marguerite, had made the appalling mistake of falling in love with religion, and nothing that her parents could say would change her heart. The young lady had determined that, upon her sixteenth birthday, she would betake herself to the Benedictine abbey at Shaftesbury founded by King Alfred for his daughter, Elgiva, almost exactly two hundred years before. In Elgiva’s Saxon abbey Marguerite would apply herself to becoming a nun.

  This pleased the young lady’s parents not at all, for they had just spent six hard months negotiating with William de Mohun for a match with Lionel, his son. This alliance was desirable to both parties, because outlying parts of their two estates were contiguous. (Readers may recognise the hamlet of de Mohun in the modern name of the village, Hammoon, no more than a mile from Okeford, up the Stour.) Whether Lionel de Mohun was worthy of Marguerite Schelin, or she of him, mattered not a whit: their fathers had come to think of their forthcoming marriage as a very worthy end indeed. The notion that this match would forge a powerful alliance at the southeastern edge of the Blackmore Vale made the prospect no less than a dynastic imperative.

  Marguerite kept to the high moral ground in her quarrel with her father concerning her future, inventing nothing less than the voice of Christ himself to aid her in her cause. She continued to claim, loudly, that whilst taking bread and ale to the workmen at the rising church, the carved stone head of Christ above the newly-finished door-arch had whispered to her as she passed beneath: “Marguerite, I take you for my bride.”

  The moment his wife related this tale, Schelin’s suspicions were aroused. No self-respecting Son of God would ever address a Norman of good birth in a tongue as crude as Anglo-Saxon.

  Diligent enquiry confirmed that there had indeed been a voice; it was that of a mason concealed on the wall above; and the suggestion called down to the pale and precious Marguerite had been rather more blunt than one requiring eternal devotion. Schelin was so relieved by this that he sent the fellow back to work richer by a whole day’s wage, one penny.

  However, Marguerite’s natural bent for religious passion—an all too frequent source of romance for young women in an age which would soon spawn the First Crusade—combined with her disdain for Lionel de Mohun, encouraging her in her obstinacy to stick to her tale of “the voice of Christ” at the very door of His Church. Lionel de Mohun, it is fair to say, was a personable young man with insufficient wit to indulge in any notable vices, who, being somewhat lazy in his courtship as in life, had no great feeling for the match one way or another. Marguerite did not dislike him; she simply disliked the fact that his wretched life was to be imposed on hers.

  Being the youngest sibling she had been spoiled. Her inner mien dictated that the religious life would be the vehicle of her narcissism: it seemed to require less abrupt adjustment than the twists, shocks and turns of the secular world. And if Christ’s voice would help her cause, then her mind would support the notion of his very presence till she was brought to grave. Commitment to a mere man, and the responsibilities of fleshly life as
a wife and mother she considered tedious; and what little she had gleaned about consummation of the marriage bond she found repugnant in the extreme.