He looked over to the window. A pool was spreading on the flags where rain was oozing between two badly-set panes. Dudley leaned forward on the bench.
‘You’re saying the merchants and the clothiers
‘He’s here to scratch a twenty-year-old itch, is what it is. Quick trial, nice long hanging.’
‘Itch?’
I recalled what Bishop Scory had said about the biggest hanging party he’d seen hereabouts. Vaughan blinked.
‘You do know, I take it, why the Sessions came to Presteigne?’
‘Should we?’ I said.
Preparing myself. Seemed to me that the Welsh border was like to a clinging midden, rotting history into legend so the twain could not easily be separated.
‘Twenty years ago,’ Vaughan said, ‘all the courts were held at Rhayader. Out west.’
He looked at me in query. I’d never been to Rhayader, but knew of it. A town on the edge of the bandit- riddled wilderness which Vaughan said now had been more or less ruled by the brigand gang, Plant Mat.
There had been some resentment, it seemed, over the way justice was administered by the English judiciary, with only English spoken in court.
Plant Mat fed upon it.
Vaughan talked about the year 1540, four years after the Act of Union, when Plant Mat, lodged in the neighbouring county of Cardigan, were extorting regular payments from landowners to the west of Rhayader.
‘If you didn’t pay up they’d burn your winter straw. And if that didn’t work it’d come to blood. Your stock then your family.’
I marked the suppressed rage roiling in Dudley’s eyes as Vaughan talked about a judge sent to Rhayader for the Sessions. An old man and devout. He’d ride to church before taking his seat in the court. One morning they were waiting for him in an oak grove by the river.
Plant Mat.
‘Took him down,’ Vaughan said. ‘Murdered him.’
‘
‘They knew where to hide, Master Roberts. It’s their country. There may’ve been a hanging or two, but no one knew if they’d got the judge’s killer. After that, it was deemed unsafe for judges to sit at Rhayader.’
‘Driven out? Bowing to this scum?’
‘So that was why the court was moved here. To the softer lands on the edge of England.’
‘And this man Gethin is the leader of Plant Mat. Where’s he caged?’
‘A dungeon at New Radnor Castle. Not much left of the castle since the Glyndwr wars, but still the safest prison we have.’
‘About an hour’s ride?’ I said.
‘If that. But they en’t gonner do it in this weather. They’ll want to see where they’re going, and who else is on the road. Or in the hills. If the rain en’t over well before nightfall, they’ll fetch him on the morrow. Won’t please Sir Christopher if it prolongs his stay, but what can they do?’
‘The Queen’s judiciary running in fear of petty outlaws?’ Dudley sat shaking his head in disgust. ‘Am I alone here in finding that a complete humiliation?’
‘This place might look like England, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said. ‘But it en’t.’
‘Give us time, Vaughan.’
Dudley smiled, and I sighed and poured more beer for us all.
‘Prys Gethin, Master Vaughan… Prys the Terrible, Prys the Fierce… is that his real name?’
‘Probably some puny little turd with a withered arm,’ Dudley said.
‘Two good arms, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said, ‘but only the one eye. His real name… well, who can say? But clearly he’s too young to be the son or even the grandson of Rhys Gethin.’
Dudley looked blank-faced for a moment as the association of names registered upon him.
‘Prys, Mr Roberts.
‘Christ’s blood, Vaughan…’ Dudley slammed down his beermug. ‘The Battle of Pilleth?
I didn’t share Dudley’s fascination with all manner of mortal conflict, human and animal, but I knew that an army hurriedly raised by Edmund Mortimer, the Marcher Lord, had been outwitted and crushed by the Welsh, with terrible carnage.
But all this was a century and a half ago.
‘They’re yet finding the remains of the Pilleth dead,’ Vaughan said. ‘Turned up by the plough. A dark place, it is. Holds terrors yet. I don’t much like where
‘And which side,’ Dudley asked me, head atilt, ‘was your father’s family supporting, John? I do believe the Dees were there at the time?’
Oh yes, they must have been there. But, God help me, I didn’t know which side they’d been on or if any of them had died in the Battle of Pilleth.
‘Hill of ghosts,’ Vaughan said. ‘I’ve heard it called that.’
I wondered which side
‘Beg mercy,’ I said, ‘but I don’t yet understand how this is linked with Prys Gethin. Glyndwr’s long gone. There’s no Welsh army any more.’
‘Not as such, no.’ Vaughan drank some beer, wiped his mouth. ‘But the ole Welsh families who ran with Glyndwr… they still dream. And some still hate the English. And don’t feel obliged to live by English laws. Plant Mat, see, the first of them were likely men who ran with Glyndwr’s army and, for them, it was never gonner be over. And as Glyndwr’s general – the man leading the Welsh in the rout of the English on Brynglas – as his name was Rhys Gethin. See?’
The cold rain rolled down the panes, and only Dudley laughed.
‘Small-time outlaw affecting the name of a famous warlord? Shrouding himself in old myth to frighten the peasants?’
No smile from Vaughan. The boy sat silent, watching the unceasing violence of water on ill-fitting glass. Me? I understood at once what local superstition this would arouse and didn’t feel it misplaced. The land remembers. Only wished now that I’d listened harder to my father’s tales, asked a few more questions. But then, I never thought I’d ever come here. I sought to quench it, all the same.
‘One hundred and fifty years ago. This man must needs be… what… a
‘Or no relation at all, more like. Just a man who wants folk to think him possessed of a vengeful and still- active spirit.’ Vaughan fingered his sparse gingery beard as if there was more he might say about active spirits. ‘The thought of Gethin returned to the place where he slaughtered a thousand English – even if he’s in chains – is bound to cause unrest among the local folk. Not that it frightens the wool merchants. But they weren’t raised yere.’
‘And the judges from Ludlow and Shrewsbury fear only for their lives,’ I said. ‘After what happened twenty years ago.’
‘Legge, however,’ Dudley said, ‘comes with sixty armed guards and has no fear that can’t be overridden by his ambition. But you’re right, only a good hanging can end this.’
Vaughan slumped in a corner of the parlour settle.
‘You think?’
A cattle raid one full-moon night in the Irfon Valley, the other side of Radnor Forest. This was how they’d caught him.
Been a few raids, and all the talk was of Plant Mat, so the local squires banded together and had all their men out – farm hands and shepherds, pigmen and rickmen. Long nights waiting in the woods, all armed with axes and pitchforks and clubs. The Plant Mat raiders, when they came, were badly outnumbered and taken by surprise, for once, and fled into the hills.
