wait in the hall’s antechamber. Thus we were not privy to what was said next, but the echoes of the King’s invective rang long and loud. Duke Richard lent his fair share to the din, and the arguments went on for many minutes.
Suddenly, the door to the hall opened and a sergeant-at-arms gestured to us to enter. I looked at Father Alun. He was not in the slightest overawed, and signalled to me to go first. We had hardly entered the hall when King Henry bellowed at us.
‘Step forward, Earl Harold’s disciples, and let me see who presumes to be my son’s guardians.’
As we drew near, and the light of the fire illuminated our faces, the King – who was as imposing as ever, but now in his mid-forties with his long red mane streaked with grey – recognized me.
‘I had heard that the Earl of Huntingdon had chosen one of my Westminster captains as Duke Richard’s counsel. I remember you; tell me your name.’
‘Ranulf of Lancaster, my Lord King.’
‘Yes, I dubbed you knight. The Earl has made a good choice. And you, priest, you are going to save my son’s soul?’
Father Alun did not hesitate with his response.
‘My Lord King, just as the safekeeping of the Duke’s corporeal self is Sir Ranulf’s area of expertise, mine is the well-being of his soul. But where his spirit will rest at the end of his days will be determined by his actions, not mine.’
The King looked at Father Alun sternly.
‘I am told that you are a very astute man. I don’t like clever men; be careful with your riddles.’
Father Alun bowed deeply. Again, he did not seem in the slightest perturbed. It was as if he was playing a game of chess against a good opponent who had just made an aggressive move.
The Duke now intervened.
‘If I may interrupt, Father. You are right, the priest came to me with a formidable reputation. Indeed, he may be useful to us in offering a solution to our current impasse. If I am to be punished by being denied a domain of my own until you think I merit it, and if you will not grant me any funds to recruit a new army, he has a proposal.’
Duke Richard then nodded to Father Alun, who recognized his cue and took it without hesitating.
‘Sire, I have asked your son to take a pilgrimage to cleanse his soul, not a journey to the relics of a long- dead saint, but to a living one: Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg, at Bingen on the Rhine.’
The King looked surprised.
‘The Old Crow of the Rhine, who preaches to emperors and popes and teaches girls to sing? She must be dead by now!’
‘On the contrary, sire, she is alive and well and perfectly capable of dispensing wisdom to popes and emperors… and also to kings and dukes.’
I expected the worst at that moment, but King Henry’s ire was not stirred by Father Alun’s sarcasm. He just smiled.
‘You will go far, priest. You remind me of a certain Archbishop of Canterbury, who was also dubbed the cleverest man in England. But remember, Becket met a grisly end thanks to his sharp mind and ready insolence.’
Again, Father Alun just nodded in acknowledgement of another powerful riposte in their verbal sparring. The King then turned to his son.
‘So, do you want to make this pilgrimage to see the old witch?’
‘Yes, Father, I do. But I want your promise that upon my return you will let me resume my ducal sovereignty in Aquitaine with the resources to defend it properly.’
The King looked at him intently and thought for a while before answering.
‘So be it. Sir Ranulf, keep a watchful eye on my son and bring him home in one piece. Priest, redeem his soul, but don’t inhibit his spirit.’
The King then left amidst the same flurry that had announced his arrival, leaving the three of us to collect our thoughts.
Duke Richard spoke first.
‘Father Alun, your ridiculous suggestion about the nun suddenly became very fortuitous. The King had wanted me to take the cross and go to the Holy Land, but that is even further away than England. I am not ready for the Outremer just yet; I haven’t committed anywhere near enough sins to need the redemption afforded to a crusader. So, a short excursion to the Rhine is much more appealing – and I’m out of sight and out of mind, as far as my father’s concerned.’
Father Alun grinned from ear to ear.
‘I will make the arrangements, my Lord.’
Wily Father Alun had been either very shrewd, or very lucky. But either way, he had got what he wanted.
So, the son of the great Plantagenet King, who was an emperor in all but name, was to venture into the domain of the mighty Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a man sanctified by the equally impressive Pope Alexander III, God’s Emperor on Earth.
Barbarossa, despite being in his fifties, was in Lombardy trying to stop his Italian princes from forging an alliance with Manuel I, the Emperor of Byzantium. Fortunately, this meant we did not need to make a detour to his imperial palace in Aachen to offer our respects.
We travelled light. The Duke had sent all but five of the twenty-five members of his conroi back to Poitiers. We avoided Paris, so as not to provoke King Louis, and travelled through Rheims, Metz and Trier, before reaching the Rhine at Bingen. Hildegard’s Benedictine foundation was close to Bingen, nestling in the forests, high on the left bank of the Nahe River, where it met a dramatically sharp elbow in the Rhine. I marvelled at the rivers I had seen since leaving Westminster; they made the rivers of England seem like brooks in a hay meadow. Where the Nahe met the Rhine, the vast river was over 500 yards wide and yet it still had to journey over 250 miles to reach the sea.
Hildegard had chosen the ground at Rupertsberg because it was the resting place of the physician and alchemist St Rupertus, who had built a chapel there hundreds of years before. She hoped he would be an inspiration for her own work and had arrived thirty years ago, with eighteen other women from the nearby foundation at Disibodenberg.
Rupertsberg flourished and, in 1158, Archbishop Arnold of Mainz granted it official recognition. Five years later, it was guaranteed protection by the Emperor Barbarossa himself. Soon afterwards, both men began to seek guidance and advice from the ‘Oracle of the Rhine’.
As we climbed towards the monastery, I was struck by the large number of people in the fields and vineyards and the orderly way in which they were working. They seemed properly fed and comfortable, their humble houses in neat rows and well maintained, each with its own patch of market garden. There were no monks to be seen; all the supervision was being done by nuns, impeccable in their dark-brown habits and black scapulars. Their fresh, earnest faces were framed by clean white wimples, their only ostentations being the silver crucifixes around their necks and the plain silver bands on their ring fingers, demonstrating their marriage to Christ.
The most dramatic aspect of our arrival drifted across the valley of the Rhine like a chorus of angels. I had never experienced anything like it before. I had heard plainsong every day at old King Edward’s abbey at Westminster, sung by men and young boys. But this chanting was different. It was sung by women and girls but it was also a new sound, something I had never heard before, not just one layer of song but a series of them, each one rising above the other. I turned to Father Alun who, with his head thrown back and his eyes closed reverentially, was wallowing in the sounds.
‘Her music?’
‘Yes, isn’t it marvellous? She says that when she composes, she is performing the Rituals of the Virtues, and she writes her songs in praise of God. She calls them her Symphonies, her Harmonies of Heavenly Revelation.’
‘Do the nuns sing all the time?’
