Nova Anglia – Part One
A Synopsis
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The cold rain beat down hard upon the thatched roof of the old and empty hall, which was as dark as the thoughts going through the mind of Æðelmær Eadwines sunu (Athelmar, son of Eadwine). The small fire that a kind woman had kindled for him provided little warmth, but warmth was not what he sought. He was exhausted in body, mind and spirit.
For more than three years, he had fought battles. The first had been with King Harold, against the invading Norwegians in the North. After a successful engagement at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in late September, the Anglo-Saxon troops hurried back south, with no time to rest, to confront the Normans, who in October 1066 would defeat them at the Battle of Hastings. There, his father, Eadwine, a respected thegn under both the late King Edward and then King Harold, was killed, leaving his estate of Hæseltūn, its lands, and the families who lived upon them in the care of his only son: the then thirty-one-year-old Athelmar, himself a widower with one child, a nine-year-old daughter, Eadgyth.
Then there was also a battle with his own soul. At Christmastide of that same year, Athelmar stood with some of the surviving English thegns as they pledged their allegiance to the newly crowned King William I, better known to history as “William the Conqueror.” They hoped that by working within the new order they might retain some measure of local autonomy, protect their holdings, and safeguard the many families for whom they felt a duty of care.
All of this proved futile. In the months following William’s coronation, Athelmar watched as the victors began to divide their spoils. Newly appointed Norman-French barons were awarded the homes and lands of old Anglo-Saxon families. Finally, in early 1069, Athelmar watched in grief as his own family’s halls, lands, and people—his home, Hæseltūn—were awarded to a Norman knight, Raoul de Amiens, a French follower who had fought with William at Hastings.
He saw now that there was to be no accord; no Norman would honor what had been here before. Athelmar was witnessing the sweeping away of his way of life, his family’s place in the world, and the England he had known. Accompanying that loss was an abiding sense of guilt: he could no longer fulfill what he regarded as his sacred duty—to care for his people.
For a time, he joined others in resistance against the Normans and against those Englishmen who would collaborate with them against their own people. He soon came to realize the uselessness of this struggle. The Normans were too strong and too well armed, and they were steadily replacing much of the old government and church hierarchy with men who would support the new order. As Norman rule became more complete, so too did the cruelty with which rebellion was suppressed. Life had become dangerous for men like him.
One day, as he was returning from the farm of one of his former tenants, Athelmar stopped at a spring to drink and rest beneath an ancient beech tree. As he sat there, he heard a stirring in the high grass. Presently, a completely white badger emerged and, seemingly oblivious to Athelmar, made its way to the spring to drink.
Athelmar watched.
The badger then lifted its head and looked directly at him.
As the two creatures regarded one another, Athelmar suddenly remembered something he had learned as a boy, when his father had sent him to Canterbury for three years at St. Augustine’s School, to learn to read and write Englisċ and Latin, to study the law, and to prepare himself for the day when he would succeed his father as thegn of Hæseltūn.
Some four hundred years earlier, the Pope had chosen a monk born in the eastern Roman world to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore, a Greek from Tarsus in Asia Minor—the birthplace of St. Paul—had traveled across the breadth of Christendom to England.
This memory stirred something in Athelmar, a sense that his world wasn’t just contained in this small island, but that England might be established wherever good English men and women carried their homes and way of life.
His own land was slipping away, but the greater imperative remained: the welfare of the people who still looked to him and his family as their lord and protector. He had failed to preserve that role in his own land; opportunities might yet lie beyond Normandy’s sphere of influence.
Far to the east remained the last great vestige of the Eastern Roman Empire and its fabled capital, Constantinople.
Other men from the West had gone there before in search of opportunity, wealth, and new lives. Scandinavians had long sailed eastward across the Baltic, through the lands of the Rus, and down the great Dnieper River to the Black Sea, eventually making their way to Constantinople.
Lost in his reverie, Athelmar suddenly became aware that the white badger had vanished, leaving him alone beside the spring, but with the beginning of a dream.
In the days that followed, he quietly sought out other men: old friends who, like himself, had lost their holdings, their lands, and their place in a society rapidly changing from Anglo-Saxon to Norman-French. Most had reached the same conclusion. They would never recover the England they had known before 1066.
If they wished to preserve something of that world—and to protect what remained of their households and the people still loyal to them—then a great emigration from England was becoming their only course.
Over the coming years, Athelmar and his growing community planned and saved. They acquired provisions, weapons, valuables, and ships, concealing their preparations as best they could. The Normans, however, were not opposed to this band of former nobles leaving England. To them, Anglo-Saxon nobles were a liability, too well placed to lead rebellions. The others, the working classes, the fighting men, the artisans, the husbandmen and some of the clergy were a different matter. So, the extent of their plans had to remain vague and concealed.
Finally, in the autumn of 1074, 235 ships set out from various points along the southern and eastern coasts of England, carrying single men and women, families, priests, artisans and even small trees and plantings from home. They rendezvoused off the coast of Brittany and from there sailed southward, past Galicia and Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar, along Muslim North Africa, past Sicily, and finally through the Greek islands and into the Dardanelles.
Nearly seven thousand souls had entrusted themselves to those ships, to the men who led them, and to the uncertain promise of a new life in the Christian East.
Over the course of nine months, this Anglo-Saxon flotilla endured storms, illness, pirates, internal disputes, and conspiracies. Then, in the summer of 1075, the exiles at last saw rising before them the object of their long journey: the wealthy, powerful, flourishing city of Constantine, the capital of a Roman Empire, now dead in the West, but still very much alive in the East.
Of the 235 ships that had gathered off Brittany nine months before, fewer than two hundred remained. Some were lost to storms at sea, some decided to stay at ports along the route, and some even turned back to an uncertain fate in the England they had only recently left.
But Athelmar had brought most of his people this far.
Now, age forty, with a daughter nearing adulthood beside him and shiploads of frightened, desperate, but hopeful people who still looked to him for leadership, Athelmar had reached the end of one world. The story of Athelmar and his people was just beginning.
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