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
AN AUROCHS IN THE WORKS
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.