A Presentment of Englishry

Under the Norman Kings in the late 11th and early 12th Century a Presentment of Englishry was a legal process which involved the formal offering of proof that a murdered man was English, in order to escape the fine that would be levied on township or hundred if the dead man were ‘Norman’ or ‘French’. 
The book retells stories from ‘The Legendary History of Britain’; from the prehistoric tin trade to the end of the twelfth century.

 Are you English? It’s never a neutral question. There’s never a simple answer. 

Presentment of Englishry 

(Mumchancing it, while the question takes a hike
past dark satanic mills and pleasant (Enclosed) pastures
where we do tug a forelock as m’lady rides to hounds.
Us folks below the stairs do know our place,
stunned in the underground while bombs fall overhead. 

We stood our ground at Ethendun, Stamford Bridge and Senlac hill
then bartered, buggered, battered ground into the soil 
from Agincourt to Waterloo; we fell in well-drilled rows
in Somme slime screaming there is a corner of some foreign 
field that is forever foreign. Smashed scorched and sunk
for Drake to Jellicoe. Hatred handed down amongst the people
we defeated, and we reviled by those we did the fighting for. 

Prosperity rode misery to market, past sullen tenements
street maggot urchins breeding in the gutters while
the gin-sunk stench of slack jawed women at the gallows
slumping towards oblivion, transported, (not to joy) their men folk
beaten dogs, looking anywhere but up. By what grounds English? 
West Midlands, I. Not mercenary, prat, a Mercian! Of Penda’s folk.) 

Gehyrest þu?

In the twelfth century the priest Laȝamon turned the ‘Matter of Britain’ into English.  His  story begins after the fall of Troy. Although there is no reason to believe that Trojan refugees reached Britain, there was a prehistoric tin trade.

 ‘The Red Queen’ tells the story of one trading visit. The following extracts are from the second section:

From The Red Queen

Part 2

Over the watershed, risking the winter crossing.
It was so cold that language froze. 
High on the pass, around their campfires
lips moved but no words cracked that silence. 
Slaves perished. Some turned back.
But sure-footed guides, their confidence a mystery,
stepped into fog on the nebulous path.
Their animals fearful, reluctant
but leading down, out of the clouds,
into the wooded valley.
The river still frozen. Ice on the rocks.
They shook with the fierce elation 
of surviving terror. 

Huddled around inadequate fires at night
remembering sunlight, but holding to the line
drawn on the rough wooden table
by a grubby finger.  

To reach the unfamiliar coast,
where the light comes off grey water.
Here the wind carries the smell of recent rain 
and the fading taste of winter.
Wood smoke stings the nostrils
cutting the dull stench of wool that never dries.
Here men huddle along the wharves 
shivering for the sailing season.
For the storms to cease, 
for the wind to die and turn.  

How to choose a captain and a crew?
Athena does not guide his steps
nudge his elbow or whisper in his ear.

How to tell a brave man from the reckless fool?
The expert from the actor? Easy in a crisis, 
but that’s a bad time to learn that you were wrong.  

This captain was no different to the others.
He had been to the Amber coast
and was ready to try the dash to Ictus.
Intrigued by the challenge, 
willing to step off the edge of the world
to see what lies over the lip. 
Deal done. The sailing explained, 
the course outlined in detail

The rules of trade remembered and rehearsed 
but then a softer voice, ‘There are strange things 
that happen there. Strange, gentle things, 
you will remember and yet not believe.’ 

‘Swift black ships on a wine dark sea’,
My calloused arse, my cracked and bleeding hands.
Whoever sang that line never foundered
on the wrong side of a headland
with the wind onshore, a sludging swell
the colour of a hangover trying to retch them up 
onto the rocks. All hands to fend her off, and pray
to whatever God was listening
to shift the wind around before her timbers stove.
Or moved, sun starved and shivering, 
when holding a course was wishful thinking
through the ash-grey fog, each oar dip amplified
by the dense and sodden silence they were clawing through.

Laȝamon's story begins with Brutus ‘last of the Trojans’ who removed some inconvenient native giants and settled Britain. In the middle ages it was thought that Britain was named after Brutus. But Laȝamon's poem, which is over 16 thousand lines long, takes off when he tells the story of Locrin, son of Brutus and of Locrin’s tangled relationships with Gwendoline, her father Corineus, slayer of Giants, and the captive German princess, Aestrild.

from Fathers.

This is from part 6

The ‘He’ is Locrin. 

Night, the cold dark, his clothes soaked.
To his left; the persistent bloated river
hurrying past, To his right; the ridge 
rising, like a shadow on the wall of darkness.
No stars, only the darker folding of the clouds
the guide certain, the torch inadequate
his horse stumbles, finding its feet,
complains. 

Build me an earth house hidden away.
Make the doors of whalebone.
Guard her well and hide her there. 
He would keep her safe until
he could return her to her country
with gold and rings 
befitting the daughter of a king. 

Build me an earth house.
They had found a hidden cave. 
‘A man should always do his lord’s behest
even when he knows it’s wrong.’
Our Poet’s strangest comment, if it’s not ironic. 

Dark rider on the riverbank at dusk,
he can smell how cold the water is. 
Listening to it hurry past, a pale stain
between the overhanging trees.
A whale bone door in the cliff face,
a stale moon behind sick clouds. 
The flickering army on the other bank
dead ancestors, mustering against his crossing. 
Go forward or go back? Dame Fortune
cranked her wheel to bring him here,
and being here means everything has changed.
Better to die knowing than on the frontier of a mystery? 

He stood outside the cave door.
He would send her home,
with gold and rings. 
But the daughter of a dead king
becomes a mattress for the unworthy[1].
She would be safer here.

 If only he could meet himself
going in and coming out
and ask, well, was she worth it?

A Presentment of Englishry ends with ‘Fragments from the fall of Roman Britain’, a series of short poems about the arrival of ‘The English’ as settlers and raiders. This section points towards the next story, which will be Voritgern’s.

Three extracts.  from ‘Fragments from the fall of Roman Britain’

Memorial Stone. 

(Western Britain, late fourth century AD)
Blank, from the something legion?
Erected by, I’m guessing here, his wife? 

1

The Successful Man  
(late fourth century) 

The way you hold your hand, 
like this,
reveals the fine imported cloth along your sleeve
and draws attention to the mosaic floor,
the hypocaust, the bath house;
the roses you brought all the way from Gaul,
the library, ‘expensive, but essential,
where would we be without our poets?’
The wife whose pedigree’s beyond reproach.
(Perhaps your Roman guests will laugh
behind your back, ‘She’s so provincial’
but her jewels will dazzle them).
Armed thugs ‘to keep the scum in line’,
slaves who greet your guests
will later pander to their private greeds. 

Your guided tours omit to name
the dead, the disappointed and betrayed; 
old friends you left beyond the Wall.
The price those nameless others paid
so you could ape the Roman lord 
in townhouse, villa and estate.

2 

The Landowner
(circa 400 AD)

 The first incomers that we met?  
Perhaps two families;  
birds out of season on a barren field 
scratching a bit of land nobody wanted.
Nothing to sell, too poor to trade.
We did not offer them advice or aid.
Planted late their crops all failed.
When winter started, they began to starve.  

A dumb show in the door way: 
a pregnant girl in rags against the cold
another, tall, erect, but clothed in filth
four dirt creased shriveled claws
opened, shaking, reaching up for food.
We beat them to the boundaries. 
When their men did not come, 
armed against the insult, 
we called our neighbours, 
took up weapons, killed them all. 

 3
The Friesian Coast
(winter, 409 AD)  

On the edge of this flat land
sky and sea can be confused.
Gaze slides over surface
snagging on a clump 
of wind-stripped grass,
almost missing ships
hauled above high water
hummocked under snow
and the wind rattled shanties
scattered though the dunes. 

Here men gather
in the long winter, in the stale
smoked fug of themselves,
talk, boast, bicker
watching the grey, 
snow-crusted waves
slushing the beach.  

The heroic past has faded into poetry.
Their fathers’ stories 
will not keep them fed or warm. 

This man has lost his family and his farm.
This one fought for Rome, or so he says.
The quiet boy is running from the fear
he will become his father. They say
this man has raided down the Saxon Shore. 

But a shield and a spear
earns a place at the oars.
A willingness to die
pays long odds on a future.

[1]This is a variation on Lopez D’ Aguirre’s reported comment that he shot his daughter to prevent her becoming ‘a mattress for the unworthy’.