Sylvia Read Free

fornicate and be seen a generous fellow among the village men. He gave my mother none of his earnings but expected food on the table, a fire in the hearth and to receive all the attendant duties of an obedient and submissive wife. He was also a consummate liar and his outrageous tales of derring-do, if not for one minute true, were well told and worth the listening for the laughter and entertainment they brought. Is it not so that a coward’s stories of heroism are always more valiant than those modestly related by a true hero?
    Whereas the ale contained in my father’s krug foamed with merriment among his drunken fellow villagers, the very same substance turned to bile in his stomach by the time he arrived home from the inn. My mother and I would hear him cursing and shouting abuse, sometimes crying out in pain as his peg leg jarred against a rut or entered into a hole in the uneven surface of the dark road. In the summer we would escape to the woods where we would pass the time singing.
    We would return when the moon was halfway high in the summer sky, knowing that he would have collapsed into a drunken stupor, and we always drew comfort from the sound of snoring as we approached from the pigsty beside the cottage. But in the bitter winter snow there was no place to hide lest we freeze to death. While I cowered under the bed, my mother accepted an inevitable beating, dodging most of the clumsy blows my father, far from nimble on a wooden leg, aimed at her.
    I was eight years old or thereabouts, in the winter of 1204, when at the age of twenty-eight my mother died of pleurisy. She was a woman of great character and resilience who took much pride in the fact that she came from free peasant stock and was not subject to tenure to the count who, together with the monastery, owned most of the land hereabouts. She was an only child and her parents, mindful of their precious daughter, had unknowingly caused her to be betrothed to a young carpenter, Peter of Pulheim, who was said to have excellent prospects. Thinking that his trade and diligence would allow their only child to prosper in her married life they were beguiled by his greedy parents and her father forewent the munt , the compensation due to him from the groom’s parents, thinking that to have his daughter well matched and safe was sufficient reward. It was soon apparent that my father was indolent, a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard who spent his days fighting and carousing and who used what little money he earned to support a life of profligacy.
    Those were, as they still are, hard times, but my mother was a woman proficient in most things concerning the peasant way of life. With the death of both her mother and father scarce three years after her marriage she inherited a small cottage and half an acre of land. The land she worked assiduously, growing corn and cabbages, onions and turnips for sale at the village market and a few vegetables for our own use. She also kept six hens and a rooster and three pigs of a good breed, a boar and two sows that grew fat on the spoilt cabbage leaves and turnip tops.
    The black boar was a splendid animal and my mother took great pride in him as his seed was plentiful; both sows were good mothers and every teat was occupied with robust piglets that she would fatten and sell for a good price. She would always donate one piglet to the Church, which put her greatly into favour with the priest, Father Pietrus. If all she touched in husbandry was blessed with fecundity this was not true of herself, and like her own mother she too seemed barren in the first years of her marriage. This gave my father the right in the eyes of the Church to divorce her. But if he was a wastrel he was by no means stupid. She gave him a fire in the hearth, his food and a warm bed and even money for drink, and kept her thoughts to herself while demanding nothing in return. She was barren and therefore in the eyes of men, the law and the Church she was