perfection in the white heat of contention following William II's decision to extend the dubious benefits of his reign beyond the March. It was a decision which sparked a conflict that was to sputter and flare for the next two hundred years or more, and provided the fertile ground from which sprang the legends featuring that shrewd archer, Robin Hood.
Wily Welsh archers were not the only plague in William's life, however; he also suffered from that acute affliction of his time: fear of purgatory.
Like a great many prominent men,William Rufus found himself in continual debt to the church, paying out huge sums of money for prayers to be said for the departed under his purview. All throughout the Middle Ages, abbeys and monasteries large and small did a roaring trade in penitential prayer, employing their priests on a perpetual, round-the-clock basis. The holy brothers prayed for their patrons and their patrons' families, of course, and also for the souls of those unfortunates their patrons might have killed. For the right fee, the local abbot could guarantee that the requisite time in purgatory would be shortened, or even excused altogether, and no one would have to suffer eternal damnation.
Quaint as it might seem today, buying and selling prayers for cash was a business conducted in dead earnest at the time. For it would be difficult to overestimate the fear of hell and its attendant horrors for the medieval mind. As tangible proof of this deep-seated and widespread phobia, the abbeys rose stone by ornately carved stone to dominate the medieval landscape of Europe. These beautifully wrought works of art can still be visited a thousand years later: belief made physically manifest.
Though greatly reduced in every way now, all through the Middle Ages the monasteries amassed enormous wealth on the exchange of prayer for silver, becoming ever more powerful, extending their influence into all areas of medieval life and commerce. It was to be their downfall in the end. For when the wealth and power grew so massive as to exceed that of the monarchy, the threatened kings fought back.
For William II, bucking the trend was not an option. He was caught in the stifling embrace of a system he could neither control nor ignore. He was not the last monarch to discover that the need for money to pay his debt to the church would intrude on, if not dictate, his political agenda. Decisions of polity often bowed before the expediency of keeping the clergy cheerful-even in weightier matters such as war and peace. The medieval king might not like it, but more often than not he swallowed his resentment and did what was necessary to pay up. Whoever said heaven would come cheap?
Keep Reading for an Excerpt of The Paradise War, Book One in the Song of Albion Trilogy
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Chapter 1
It all began with the aurochs.
We were having breakfast in our rooms at college. Simon was presiding over the table with his accustomed critique on the world as evidenced by the morning's paper.
'Oh, splendid,' he sniffed. 'It looks as if we have been invaded by a pack of free-loading foreign photographers keen on exposing their film-and who knows what else-to the exotic delights of Dear Old Blighty. Lock up your daughters, Bognor Regis! European paparazzi are loose in the land!'
He rambled on awhile, and then announced: 'Hold on! Have a gawk at this!' He snapped the paper sharp and sat up straight-an uncommon posture for Simon.
'Gawk at what?' I asked idly. This thing of his-reading the paper aloud to a running commentary of facile contempt, scorn, and sarcasm, well mixed and peppered with his own unique blend of cynicism-had long since ceased to amuse me. I had learned to grunt agreeably while eating my egg and toast. This saved having to pay attention to his tirades, eloquent though they often were.
'Some bewildered Scotsman has found an aurochs in his patch.'
'You don't say.' I dipped a corner of toast triangle into the molten center of a soft-boiled egg and read an item about a disgruntled driver on the London Underground refusing to stop to let off passengers, thereby compelling a train full of frantic commuters to ride the Circle Line for over five hours. 'That's interesting.'
'Apparently the beast wandered out of a nearby wood and collapsed in the middle of a hay field twenty miles or so east of Inverness.' Simon lowered the paper and gazed at me over the top. 'Did you hear what I just said?'
'Every word. Wandered out of the forest and fell down next to Inverness-probably from boredom,' I replied. 'I know just how he felt.'
Simon stared at me. 'Don't you realize what this means?'
'It means that the local branch of the RSPCA gets a phone call. Big deal.' I took a sip of coffee and returned to the sports page before me. 'I wouldn't call it news exactly.'
'You don't know what an aurochs is, do you?' he accused. 'You haven't a clue.'
'A beast of some sort-you said so yourself just now,' I protested.
'Really, Simon, the papers you read-' I flicked his upraised tabloid with a disdainful finger. 'Look at these so- called headlines: 'Princess Linked to Alien Sex Scheme!' and 'Shock Horror Weekend for Bishop with Massage Parlor Turk!' Honestly, you only read those rags to fuel your pessimism.'
He was not moved. 'You haven't the slightest notion what an aurochs is. Go on, Lewis, admit it.'
I took a wild stab. 'It's a breed of pig.'
'Nice try!' Simon tossed his head back and laughed. He had a nasty little fox-bark that he used when he wanted to deride someone's ignorance. Simon was extremely adept at derision-a master of disdain, mockery, and ridicule in general.
I refused to be drawn. I returned to my paper and stuffed the toast into my mouth.
'A pig? Is that what you said?' He laughed again.
'Okay, okay! What, pray tell, is an aurochs, Professor Rawnson?'
Simon folded the paper in half and then in quarters. He creased it and held it before me. 'An aurochs is a sort of ox.'
'Why, think of that,' I gasped in feigned astonishment. 'An ox, you say? It fell down? Oh my, what won't they think of next?' I yawned. 'Give me a break.'
'Put like that it doesn't sound like much,' Simon allowed. Then he added, 'Only it just so happens that this particular ox is an ice-age creature which has been extinct for the last two thousand years.'
'Extinct.' I shook my head slowly. 'Where do they get this malarkey? If you ask me, the only thing that's extinct around here is your native skepticism.'
'It seems the last aurochs died out in Britain sometime before the Romans landed-although a few may have survived on the continent into the sixth century or so.'
'Fascinating,' I replied.
Simon shoved the folded paper under my nose. I saw a grainy, badly printed photo of a huge black mound that might or might not have been mammalian in nature. Standing next to this ill-defined mass was a grimlooking middle-aged man holding a very long, curved object in his hands, roughly the size and shape of an old-fashioned scythe. The object appeared to be attached in some way to the black bulk beside him.
'How bucolic! A man standing next to a manure heap with a farm implement in his hands. How utterly homespun,' I scoffed in a fair imitation of Simon himself.
'That manure heap, as you call it, is the aurochs, and the implement in the farmer's hands is one of the animal's horns.'
I looked at the photo again and could almost make out the animal's head below the great slope of its shoulders. Judging by the size of the horn, the animal would have been enormous-easily three or four times the size of a normal cow. 'Trick photography,' I declared.
Simon clucked his tongue. 'I am disappointed in you, Lewis. So cynical for one so young.'
