The Unhappy Medium, page 5
Such a period of trouble descended on England during the twelfth century and when it came, it came in big steaming piles.
In what has become known as the ‘Anarchy’ or the ‘Nineteen-Year Winter’, from 1135 to 1153, the realm was ravaged by civil war, crime and persecution in a wave of mean-spiritedness and frightfulness that drove the normally restrained editorial team at The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to declare the era as the time ‘when Christ and his saints slept’.
Sleeping through the Anarchy may have seemed a good strategy at first, but most likely you’d have just woken up to find your underwear had been stolen or that you’d been bundled into a sack, bartered as a hostage and then thrown down a well.
It was more than sixty five years since the Normans had conquered the land following the punch-up at Hastings. Subjugated, taxed and pacified, the country had calmed under William the Conqueror and his eventual successor Henry the First. From his coronation in 1100, Henry had ruled harshly, nothing unusual for the time, of course, but he had also proven to be skilled and rational in the affairs of state. Taxes were organised and laws were passed, bringing the nation finally under something approaching common sense and fair play. For thirty five years he reformed and organised until in 1135 he suddenly croaked.
It was not your average demise. To quote a contemporary account, Henry died from eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, a river fish very popular at the time. None loved them more than Henry and his passion for this dish was so intense that it killed him. Sadly Henry left more than a bad smell of fish behind him; his succession was terribly ambiguous and as the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a relative. Even as he lay belching to death, the family began bickering about who would take over the number-one spot.
Having lost his only legitimate son William in a boating accident in 1120, Henry had decided that his daughter Matilda, a feisty young woman if ever there was one, should therefore have the crown. But England was not ready for a female monarch, no matter how feisty, and there were many, mostly men, who were therefore quite happy when Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois stole the throne. The usurper had rushed over from France claiming that King Henry had changed his mind as he lay dying, apparently finding it possible to explain in some detail that he would prefer Stephen to have the job instead. Not a bad achievement for a man stuffed end to end with eels at the time. It was a cheap move, but it worked. On 26th December 1135, Stephen was crowned at Westminster Abbey.
This was a very big mistake.
You may expect that the reason things were to go so wrong was that Stephen was yet another historical bad guy, but in fact, the opposite was the case. Stephen was actually a very nice bloke, in fact he was far too nice – that was the problem. The barons had been kept under strict control by King Henry, their natural tendency to steal, loot, fight and murder curbed by punitive justice and instant retribution. Well, Stephen was no Henry. He was affable, eager to please and about as assertive as a ballet dancer on a rugby pitch. He was a good listener, prepared to say he was sorry and reluctant to punish. As a King he was all but useless. He’d only been allowed to have the job because he was A, not a woman, and B, a pushover, given the throne by the very people who were about to run the kingdom into the ground.
The tax system that Henry had spent so long perfecting fell into immediate ruin. Ditto the law, and with nothing to curb them, the robber barons enjoyed a field day. With self-interest sweeping the court like head lice at a primary school, things spun out of control at an alarming rate. As always, it was the hapless general public that got the worst of it in the form of arbitrary, withering taxes and outright theft.
Things went from bad to worse, then to terrible and eventually, bloody awful. Stephen belatedly understood why his uncle had been so good at his job. Frantically, but ineffectually as ever, he tried to put the brakes on, but with no one listening, he found regaining control of the wayward aristocracy far beyond him. As the barons became richer, the state became poorer and what little power King Stephen may have had withered pathetically upon the vine.
Desperate for cash, the hapless Stephen tried to sell off the churches and abbeys, only to find that the barons had got there first, stripping them of all the gold and silver and rendering them worthless empty shells.
For these barons, however, it was a wonderful, golden time. Free from the former King’s governance, they could do pretty much what they felt like, so seizing the opportunity with both chain-mailed hands, they plunged the towns and villages into abject misery and heaped ruin upon the peasantry. Unrestrained by Stephen’s apologetic interventions, they grew rapidly in power, evolving all the classic warlord stereotypes – fighting with each other at the drop of a hat, raiding the shires for food and women, taxing the locals stupid money and murdering anyone rash enough to raise the issue of justice.
It was two minor barons such as these that were to act out one of the lesser-known military engagements in British history, the Battle of Juggin’s Lump.
Lionel, Earl of Weymouth (Lionel the Ugly) and Keith of Swanage (Keith the Small-Minded) were two marginal figures in the unfolding national drama. Their fiefdoms were fairly piss-poor as fiefdoms go, with lousy agricultural land, pestilent marshes and vast tracts of useless acidic heathland, shunned by both wild game and farmers alike. Whereas the huge dark forests to the east had long before been nabbed by William the Conqueror as his personal game reserve, the lands of Lionel and Keith were to remain neglected and unloved, right up until the modern era when they were recognised as a rare, fragile wildlife habitat and an ideal tank training range, though not by the same people and not at the same time. But during the Anarchy, a mess of badly constructed hovels, haunted by a few sickly peasants eking out their sparse living amongst the bogs and gorse, were all that the land could sustain. The paltry manors of the two would-be despots abutted each other along the margins of the far-from-mighty River Snelt, not so much a river as a series of fetid swamps hanging together in a line in an attempt to appear on the map .
At first, the two barons had little reason to fight amongst themselves. In fact, as the fashion for uncontrolled nastiness swept the nation, they had watched together jealously as the bigger landowners had no end of mindless fun with their manors. The wealth of even the smallest of these large-scale estates simply dwarfed the possessions of the two small-scale barons combined and they clung to each other, their chronic bitterness bringing them closer together.
The big players hardly even noticed Lionel and Keith though, unless it was to wince over a banquet as Lionel – Ugly by name and especially ugly by manners – sucked the grey meat off a scrag end of cheval. And while Lionel was pig ugly, Keith was mindlessly petty. His whining nasal voice and unending bitching ensured that, together with his grotesque neighbour, he was never going to be invited to any of the really interesting social events. As a result, the two noblemen hung listlessly together on the margins of the increasingly anarchic court, their bitterness growing as they watched England fall to pieces without them.
Events took a turn in their favour, however, when together they gatecrashed a lavish subjugation organised by Giles, Earl of Lewisham, a first-class robber baron and big hitter in more senses than one. They were both paid a handsome lump sum by the Earl just to go away, a sum that turned out to be enough for both barons to finally upgrade to a more warlordy status, albeit on a somewhat modest scale. Thus financed, the two barons jumped upon their horses and rode back to their respective manors to recruit personal armies from the feckless peasantry. Waving their groats at the men folk, they soon denuded local agriculture of its workforce, and many a wife, mother and daughter soon had cause to curse the barons as they arrogantly led their men away from their homes. Unable to feed the growing ranks of their peasant armies, the two despots were then forced into raiding the self-same hamlets and villages in a bid to stave off starvation, something that went down rather badly with the hard-pressed ladies.
Unhealthy competition soon developed between the two barons. They trailed their armies along the border between the two shires or practised martial skills upon the heathlands, each in full view of the other. It was only a matter of time before the two warlords began to eye each other’s rancid lands with a degree of territorial ambition.
They had foolishly used their private armies to bespoil what little value had existed in the meagre countryside. They’d wantonly burned the churches, selling the gold and silver they contained to buy second-hand siege engines that neither army knew how to operate. The fish and game, such as there had been, were now utterly extinct, and nothing bigger than a rabbit was willing to come above ground in daylight. The crops had all been ravaged and spoiled, generations of inept farming gone in one year of ill-organised pillage.
Famine stalked the land.
In the late spring of 1143, the crops having comprehensively failed before they’d even been planted, Lionel and Keith inevitably found themselves facing each other in battle order across the fetid trickle of the River Snelt. Clouds of flies, perhaps sensing the feast to come, swirled in the humid air, biting at the bare feet of the ramshackle armies and making the men hop and scratch in an unsoldierly manner. Because they’d both started with the same meagre defence budgets, the two armies were evenly matched at some 700 soldiers, archers and general nasties apiece. But these were not the elite formations cast in other epic medieval clashes. The archers would never have made the grade at Agincourt; most would have been hard-pressed to hit a twice-life-sized wood pigeon from two yards, even if it had been tied to a chair. There were no noble knights among the ranks, just a disease-ridden reluctant mob of hunchbacks, cripples and other misshapen military rejects. They did, however, represent the sour cream of local manhood and as the formations closed within hacking distance, the wives and maidens back home had cause to contemplate the imminent collapse of the local gene pool, which had never really been big enough to swim lengths in.
Following the traditions of knightly chivalry, Lionel and Keith sat astride sickly nags on high ground to the rear of their armies. From his vantage point on Gorse Hill, Keith could easily make out his opposite number on the heights of the feature known locally as Juggin’s Lump. Both commanders had mulled their battle plans, the total adding up to a combined strategic preparation of 36 seconds, essentially a vague muddle of inept, ill-informed wishful thinking. There could be no going back. As the weak morning mists began to lift from the scraggy wasteland, the messy little battle commenced.
It fell to the archers on both sides to open the batting, sending a cloud of badly made arrows in all directions, arrows that were soon felling friend and foe alike. They instantly halved the forward echelons, caught fair and square in the back of the head by their own lousy bowmen. A terrible screaming and wailing filled the morning air.
Ignoring the poor start, the warlords urged their remaining men forward over the dead and into close-quarter combat. As the hodgepodge of ragged infantry finally mingled, both formations realised, belatedly, the practical benefits of a decent uniform. Confused and frightened men randomly lashed out at the figures around them, totally in the dark as to where one army ended and the other began. Friend killed foe and friend killed friend in a feckless skirmish more reminiscent of a fight outside a nightclub than the opening minutes of Crécy or Thermopylae.
The confusion over identity greatly compounded the difficulties of battling knee-deep in a foul stream, while the universal lack of soldierly skills across the battlefield made the fight drawn out and at times strangely boring. Having commenced just after sunrise, the hacking, drowning and flailing was still going at teatime. The last hundred or so combatants, drained by hours of aimless slaughter, stumbled wearily towards each other through the slime and gore in one last attempt to resolve the issue in time for dinner. But their fatigue was such a serious impediment to the slaughter that some soldiers found themselves too knackered, even with a prostrate foe at bay beneath them, to deliver that final, lethal stab. In fact, most of the final casualties succumbed to a pitiful death by drowning in the mire of the Snelt, the one exception being Leofrick the Immortal who discovered, unexpectedly, that he had an allergy to wasp stings.
And so, as the sun slowly set on the carnage, the two warlords sat aimlessly upon their ponies, looking down at the slaughter and then over at each other, wondering what on earth to do next.
In so many wars, the sheer pointlessness of the horror and destruction finally dawns upon the hardened warrior, bringing with it a sudden desire to end the suffering – to end the violence once and for all, and extend a hand of peace and reconciliation towards their former foe. And so it was with Keith and Lionel. As they surveyed the carnage in the valley below, it struck both men that the wanton killing must stop and that they must learn to work together in a bid to create a new, kinder world, a bright new upland, where man can finally live in harmony with his fellow man. More importantly, they also had no intention of actually fighting each other with swords because they were both shit-scared. Tentatively, they began to wave at each other across the killing field.
They knew in their dirty little hearts that they were probably going to have to hang out together again at court because, frankly, no one else would have them. They rode slowly towards each other, picking their way past mangled arms and legs. As befitted their class, they feigned not to hear the last desperate pleas from the maimed, dying pathetically on their behalf in the mire around them. Eventually, they faced each other directly across the bloody river.
‘I guess we’d better be friends again,’ said Lionel the Ugly. Keith mulled this sad inevitability briefly, but before he could answer his rival, he had cause to pause. They were both aware of a thin dark line of figures appearing Zulu-like on the gnarly heights of Juggin’s Lump. Avenging womenfolk gathered menacingly above the two barons, their anger and indignation evident even at this distance. Enraged, the furious wave began to tear down the hillsides towards the two noblemen, an eerie banshee-like wail of vengeance filling the air. Lionel and Keith could clearly see the corn threshers and razor-sharp scythes.
‘Uh oh,’ said Keith.
No one is sure anymore what the women actually did to the two warlords. There had been a contemporary illustration of the executions on the wall of the parish church of St Furley, but a badly driven Vickers infantry tank had destroyed that in 1937, sadly before any photographs had been taken. Local legend has it that Keith and Lionel took some considerable time to die, and before doing so, had the rare opportunity so few of us are granted, of seeing ourselves from behind.
With law and order non-existent, and the men’s low standing at court, there would be no retribution for these avenging angels. Quietly and with great dignity, the wives and girlfriends left their mangled menfolk where they were for the dogs and the crows. The piles of savaged skulls and torn limbs sloshed in the filthy brook, soon hidden from view in the mud. In time, they sank deep into the acid soil.
Memory of the battle persisted only in a curious local song, still sung occasionally by Open University lecturers with thick beards and an unhealthy interest in folk music .
Twas sad the day the numpties died,
Fold de roll de roll,
But they had it coming frankly,
Flum de do da dey.
Now they is buried in slime up by Juggin’s Lump,
Flum de bump de dung,
Food for the worm and the river fluke,
Janglo rang de dar.
And so the little battle passed into obscurity. Stephen was finally booted from the throne and Matilda’s son Henry ended up with the Crown, finally a king with a bit of a brain. Henry immediately embarked on a cleanup of the British Isles, which after all the malarkey that had been going on was something of a bloody mess.
People understandably wanted to put the troubles of the Anarchy behind them and as a result, the Battle of Juggin’s Lump was all but forgotten. Centuries later, the heathlands would be a barren playground only to the tanks of the British Army as they practised their clanking manoeuvres amongst the heather and bracken. Then in 2013, as part of a package of swingeing government cutbacks, a diminished Ministry of Defence sold off the land to developers in a futile bid to help reduce the budget deficit.
It was around the same time that a historian from the Battlefields Trust, a charity that endeavours to preserve sites of historic military interest, chanced upon an account of this minor engagement in an ancient church ledger. This yellowed manuscript, together with the lyrics of the obscure old song, gave a very clear indication as to the precise location of the skirmish. An exploratory trench was dug into the bleak heath to see if any evidence of the battle remained.
Thanks to the acid soil and the waterlogged conditions, it transpired that there was still much to be found. Like the bog men of Ireland, some bodies had remained remarkably intact, at least as intact as the battle had left them. Their bewildered leathery faces and flattened grimaces were still as pathetic as they must have been on that sad day in 1143.
But it was also around this time that the site was earmarked for another project – construction of yet more badly designed urban overspill. Legendary estate agents and developers, the McCauley Brothers, had arrived on the scene. Even by their competitors’ standards, the brothers were generally considered the most cold-blooded and insensitive developers in the long, dirty history of real estate. They had developed many a controversial location, building theme parks on the grounds of ancient massacres, schools on plague pits and chemical plants in sites of special scientific interest. They’d caused no end of protest along the way. Looking at the majesty of the former battlefield’s windblown trees and wild purple heathers, they could quickly see that by draining the site and employing bulldozers, they could create some four hundred box-like dwellings with all the personality and charm of a filing cabinet.
