On the 26th of July 1265, at Vespers, a small boy named Henry, the son of John de Briteville of Great Barford, went into his father’s courtyard to play, fell into a ditch, and drowned. His father searched for him at once, found him, lifted him from the water, and thought to save him, but could not, and the child died where he had been pulled out. The coroner’s clerk, writing in abbreviated Latin, left the boy’s age a blank, never filled in. A jury of the neighboring townships stood around the ditch and swore it was misadventure.
The family went home to a house that still had the water around it. Nobody suggested filling it in. That ditch, almost certainly, was the moat of a manor house, a square of standing water that thousands of families across England had dug around their homes for reasons none of them ever wrote down. The people who dug them did not think they needed explaining.
Before the convicts dug up Alfred the Great at Winchester in 1788, before an arrow took a king in the New Forest, before a boy vanished into the river at Rouen, there is the oldest mystery of all: the question of what those ditches were for, and what they kept. The men who could have answered are dead. The ditches remain, thousands of them, and the water keeps its own counsel. Alfred died in the autumn of 899, somewhere around fifty years old, and he had been ill for most of his life.
His Welsh biographer, Bishop Asser, wrote a life of the king in 893, and Asser was not shy about Alfred’s insides. As a young man, Alfred suffered from something Asser calls ficus, the word for fig, which medieval writers used for piles or sores in that region. The prince prayed to be rid of them and asked God to swap the affliction for something less humiliating, something that would not show and would not make him useless. According to Asser, the ficus went away.
Then at his own wedding feast, after a day and a night of celebration, he was struck in front of the whole gathering by a pain nobody in the room had ever seen before. The bride was a Mercian noblewoman named Ealhswith. The year was 868. From that feast onwards, Asser says, the king had scarcely a single hour of peace in which he was not either in pain or in dread of its return.
Doctors have argued ever since about what it was. A physician named Craig, writing in 1991, went through Asser’s account line by line and came out thinking Crohn’s disease. Others have seen hemorrhoidal disease, epilepsy, something psychosomatic, or a piece of pious storytelling. What is more telling than the diagnosis is a medical book from the period, Bald’s Leech Book, which contains treatments said to have been sent to King Alfred by the patriarch of Jerusalem.
Remedies for constipation, for diarrhea, for pain of the spleen, for what the book calls inward tenderness. Somebody at Alfred’s court was writing to the far end of the Mediterranean asking for help with the king’s bowels. You do not do that for a man who is occasionally uncomfortable. The last decade of his life was a war.
In 892, two Danish fleets came into Kent, one under a commander named Hastein, and for four years the king, his son Edward, and his son-in-law Æthelred of Mercia chased the armies up and down the country, building forts, cutting off river routes, starving the Danes out of their camps, until in 896 the chronicle says the enemy divided, some going to East Anglia and Northumbria, the rest across the sea to the Seine. That same year Alfred had a new class of warship built to his own design, longer than the Danish boats and higher in the water, and the chronicle admits with unusual candor that some of them ran aground on their first outing. Three years after that, he was dead. The man who went into the Old Minster in October 899 had spent the whole of his forties at war while, on Asser’s account, rarely free of pain for an hour together.
He left a will, and it survives. It divides his lands and his money among his sons and daughters, his nephews and his wife, sets aside sums for the poor and the churches where he expected to be prayed for, makes provision for masses for his soul, and frees men he owned, telling them they may choose whatever lord they wish. Every clause assumes a settled grave and a community of monks around it who would remember him. He got two hundred years.
The chronicle’s note on Alfred’s death is a single sentence: “In this year died Alfred, son of Æthelwulf, six nights before All Saints’ Day. He was king over all the English people except that part which was under Danish rule, and he had held the kingdom for twenty-eight and a half years. ” No cause of death, nothing about the deathbed or the funeral. He did not stay long in the Old Minster.
His son Edward was building a new royal monastery right alongside it, the New Minster, and Alfred’s body was taken out and re-interred there. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, passes on the explanation that was going round the monks of his day: the canons of the Old Minster claimed the dead king’s spirit kept returning to its corpse and wandering the buildings at night, and that this was why the body had to be taken somewhere else. Malmesbury thought that was nonsense and said so. Ealhswith joined him in the New Minster when she died, and Edward himself in 924.
For nearly two centuries the family lay there together. Then the Normans arrived. The two minsters had been built so close together that their bells clashed and the chanting from one church interfered with the services in the other. In 1110 the whole community of the New Minster packed up and left the city, processing out through the north gate carrying their relics, their books, their treasures, and their royal dead, to a brand new abbey built for them just beyond the walls at a place called Hyde.
Alfred, Ealhswith, and Edward went with them and were re-interred in front of the high altar. Hyde Abbey did not have a peaceful life. In 1141, during the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, the two sides fought their way through Winchester. Matilda was holding the royal castle; her enemy in the city was the king’s brother, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, who held the bishop’s palace at Wolvesey.
Matilda’s men besieged the palace. The bishop’s men inside threw fire over the walls into the streets, the wind took it, and most of Winchester burned. The annals of Winchester record that Hyde burned. Among the treasures lost was a great cross given to the monks by King Cnut, so heavy with gold and silver and set with so many gems that it was among the most valuable things the monks owned.
The annals say Bishop Henry’s men took the metal out of the ashes, something like five hundred marks of silver and thirty of gold, and the bishop kept it. The kings lying under the floor in front of the altar were spared, so far as anyone knows. The really catastrophic blow came four centuries later, from Henry VIII. His commissioners took the surrender of Hyde Abbey in 1538 or 1539, and after that the place was simply demolished for its materials.
The antiquary John Leland walked the site around 1542 and wrote down what he had been told: that the bones of Alfred and his son Edward had been laid in a tomb before the high altar at Hyde, and that in that tomb had lately been found two small tablets of metal with their names on them. Found. Somebody had already been inside the royal tomb by the time Leland arrived. Whether that was the commissioners looking for valuables, workmen breaking up the church, or thieves in the night, nobody wrote down.
After Leland, the plates vanish from the record for good. The east end of the church where the altar had stood collapsed into rubble, then into soil, then into somebody’s garden. People grew vegetables over Alfred the Great for two hundred and fifty years. Then in 1788, the county authorities decided they needed a new house of correction, a small prison for vagrants and petty criminals, and they chose the site of the old abbey to build it on.
They set the prisoners to dig the foundations. The convicts of Hampshire were marched out to Hyde with mattocks and spades and told to dig, and what they were digging through was the east end of the abbey church. The priest who watched the digging, John Milner, wrote it all down in a history of Winchester that came out ten years later, and he never softened a word of it. “Miscreants,” he wrote, “now couch amidst the ashes of our Alfreds and Edwards.
” In digging for the foundations, at almost every stroke of the mattock or spade some ancient sepulchre was violated. He listed what he saw come up: stone coffins, chalices and patens, rings and buckles, the leather of shoes and boots still recognizable after six or seven hundred years in the clay, the velvet and gold thread of vestments. The bones were another matter. Ten years later, an army officer named Captain Henry Howard visited the site and talked to the keeper of the bridewell, a Mr.
Page, who had been there when the foundations went in. Howard published the account in Archaeologia in 1800, and it is the closest thing we have to an eyewitness account of what was done to Alfred the Great. A great stone coffin was found, Page said, cased with metal both inside and out, with some bones in it and the remains of garments. The metal casing, in its decayed state, sold for two guineas.
The bones were thrown about. The stone coffin was broken into pieces. Two other coffins were found in the same part of the site, and those were broken up too for the sake of the garden that was going to be laid out there, and the fragments were buried, in Page’s words, as low as the spring, meaning down to the water table. Three coffins in front of the high altar, exactly where the records place Alfred and his queen and his son, one of them larger than the others and sheathed in metal inside and out, the way you would bury a king.
The metal fetched two guineas, a couple of weeks’ wages for a laborer, and the bones were thrown about by convicts across a building site and then trodden into the mud with everything else. The prison stood on top of all that until it closed in 1849. Then the buildings were pulled down and the land sold off in plots for houses. In 1866, an amateur antiquary named John Mellor dug on the site and announced he had found the remains of the royal household.
He then sold them, for ten shillings, to the rector of the little church of St. Bartholomew in Hyde, a man named William Williams, who had them placed in a brick-lined vault in his churchyard under two stone slabs and a ledger stone carved with a plain cross. No name was cut into it. For the best part of a hundred and fifty years, people in Hyde left flowers on that unmarked grave on the understanding that Alfred the Great might be under it.
Mellor’s own account of what he had found was, by the standards of the time, a performance rather than a report. He does not seem to have kept any record of where in the ground the bones had come from or in what arrangement, the one thing that would have allowed anyone afterwards to judge his claim. In 1901, the country decided it wanted to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of Alfred’s death, though the Victorians had convinced themselves he died in 901, a year late. A huge bronze statue was commissioned from Hamo Thornycroft, and on the twentieth of September 1901, Lord Rosebery, recently prime minister, unveiled it in front of enormous crowds.
Alfred, far larger than life, with his sword held up hilt first so that it makes a cross, looks down the high street. Ten minutes’ walk from the platform where the speeches were made, the greatest Englishman who ever lived was somewhere under a former prison garden in pieces, or in a churchyard vault with a plain cross on it. Nobody dug. The archaeologists got to Winchester in the 1960s, when Martin Biddle spent the best part of a decade excavating beside the cathedral and found the foundations of the Old Minster and the outline of the New Minster hard up against it.
At Hyde, the only building still standing was the Abbey Gatehouse, and the ground where the church had been was gardens and a car park and the back plots of Victorian houses. That is where the community dig of the 1990s went in with local volunteers under professional supervision. Over five seasons they found the east end of the church, the bases of the great pillars, the line of the apse behind the altar, and cut right across the place where the altar had stood, the bridewell pit. When the dig was finished, the site was laid out as a small public garden, and in the garden are three stone slabs set into the ground on the spot where the excavators believe the graves lay.
One for Alfred, one for Ealhswith, one for Edward. They mark places. What was in those places was thrown across a prison yard two centuries earlier. Then in 2012, a team in Leicester dug up a car park and found Richard III, and suddenly the idea of testing an old grave for a lost king stopped sounding like a crank’s hobby.
In March 2013, an osteoarchaeologist named Katie Tucker and a small team lifted the slabs at St. Bartholomew and took out what was inside. The remains were in poor condition, mixed, incomplete: at least five or six people of different ages jumbled together, the way you’d expect if somebody had scooped bone out of a monastic cemetery in a hurry. When the radiocarbon dates came back, most of the bone fell between 1300 and 1400, with a smaller group between 1050 and 1150, centuries too late.
Mellor’s royal household was in all likelihood a handful of monks and townspeople from the later Middle Ages scooped up out of the abbey cemetery by a man who wanted ten shillings. Tucker did not stop. Instead of going back to the drawing board, she went back to the museum store. The Winchester Museum Service was holding all the human bone that had come out of the community dig on the abbey site between 1995 and 1999, and she asked to look through it.
Most of what had been recovered from around the high altar was in a wretched state, single fragments, all of it churned up over the centuries. But one of those fragments, part of a pelvis, had come out of a Victorian pit right in the area where the altar had stood, and it looked older than the rest. She sent it to the radiocarbon unit at Oxford. Tom Higham ran the analysis, and the date came back 895 to 1017.
His phrase for it was “bang on the money. ” The bone belonged to a man. He had been between his mid-twenties and his mid-forties or older when he died. The stable isotopes in the bone showed his diet had been different from other people buried in Winchester at the time, richer, or at least different.
Hyde Abbey was not founded until 1110; nobody was buried there before that because the place did not exist. The only bodies that could have arrived there already old were the ones the monks carried out of the city that year, the royal family and a few other relics. She calculated that there was much less than a one percent chance that the true date of the bone was as late as 1110. So a bone this old at this site, right by the altar, has to have come from someone who was dead long before the abbey was built and brought there afterwards.
The list of men who fit that description is very short: Alfred, his son Edward the Elder, and Edward’s brother Æthelweard, who was also moved to Hyde, though only Alfred and Edward are recorded before the high altar. On the seventeenth of January 2014, the university held a press conference, and Tucker put the question to the room: who else could it be? The announcement was carefully worded. The fragment was very likely to be part of the remains of King Alfred the Great or of his son Edward.
The next step, the one that would settle it, is hard. Alfred’s granddaughter Edith married a German king and was buried in Magdeburg Cathedral, and her remains were identified there in 2008. In principle, you could try to match ancient DNA between a fragment of pelvis in Winchester and a queen in Saxony. Nobody has announced a result.
Hyde 900 has kept digging in back gardens around the abbey site, most recently with a trench in 2025, and their own summary of the search for the king still uses the words “as yet unsuccessful. ” So that is where Alfred is, if he is anywhere: a broken hipbone that might be him or might be his son, in a museum box, with a date range and a diet. And he is not even the worst-treated king in the city. A short walk from Hyde, inside Winchester Cathedral, six painted wooden chests sit high on the stone screens along either side of the presbytery.
They have names on them: Cynegils, Cenwalh, Egbert, and Æthelwulf, Alfred’s father, and Edred and Edmund, and Cnut the Dane, and William Rufus, and two bishops, and Queen Emma of Normandy. The chests were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to hold bones gathered up from older tombs when the cathedral was rebuilt. On the fourteenth of December 1642, early in the Civil War, Parliamentarian soldiers stormed Winchester and went into the cathedral. The stained glass was very high up, so they pulled down the mortuary chests, tipped out the bones of the kings of Wessex and the Queen of England, and threw them at the windows.
Thigh bones and skulls and vertebrae a thousand years old, hurled across a cathedral at colored glass by men who thought they were doing God’s work. When it was over, the floor was a litter of broken glass and broken kings. The bones were gathered and shoved back into the chests that had survived with no possible way of telling which had belonged to whom. The great west window of Winchester today is a mosaic of thousands of fragments of medieval glass put back in no particular order after the war, because nobody could work out the original pattern.
In 2012, the cathedral launched a project to examine what was in the chests. The team counted more than thirteen hundred bones. By 2019, they had reassembled twenty-three partial skeletons, and one of them was the only mature woman in the entire collection, a strong candidate for Emma. The same year the chests were plundered, another king of England lay dead in the New Forest.
On the afternoon of Thursday, the second of August 1100, William II, called Rufus, rode out of Winchester to hunt. By nightfall he was dead with an arrow through his chest, and the men who had ridden out with him had scattered, and his body was lying where it had fallen. William of Malmesbury, born a few years before the king died, describes a thick-set man, not tall, with a belly that stuck out, of astonishing physical strength, with yellow hair and a red face and eyes of two different colors, flecked with glittering specks. He stammered, and the stammer got worse when he was angry, and he was angry a great deal.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, not a source given to strong language, says that at his death he was hated by almost all his people and abhorrent to God. His chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, ran the royal finances with a creativity that made him one of the most loathed men in the kingdom. When a bishop or abbot died, the king simply did not appoint a successor, and for as long as the post stayed empty, its revenues went into the royal treasury. Rufus let sees and abbeys sit vacant for years.
The quarrel with Anselm, whom he appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, ran through all of it. In the spring of 1093, Rufus fell seriously ill and was convinced he was dying, and he did all the things a dying king needed to do: promised to reform the government, keep the laws, fill the vacant churches, release prisoners, forgive debts, and appointed Anselm to Canterbury. Then he got better, and as soon as he was on his feet, he took all of it back. When someone reminded him of what he had sworn on his sickbed, he is supposed to have said that God would never see him a good man; he had suffered too much at God’s hands for that.
The night of Wednesday, the first of August 1100, the king was at a hunting lodge in the forest, probably near Brockenhurst. By Malmesbury’s account he did not sleep well. He dreamed that he was being bled, that a surgeon had opened a vein, and that the stream of blood rose up into the sky and blotted out the sun, and the day went dark. He woke shouting for the Virgin Mary.
In the morning, a messenger arrived from Abbot Serlo of Gloucester with news of another dream: a monk had dreamed he saw the king enter a church, look around at the crucifix with contempt, and the figure of Christ had kicked him, and out of the king’s mouth came a stream of flame and smoke so thick it hid the stars. Rufus laughed. He asked whether they took him for an Englishman, one of those people who put off a journey because an old woman had sneezed. He gave the messenger a hundred shillings.
The whole summer had been full of signs. At Pentecost, blood was seen welling up out of the earth at Finchampstead. On the first of August, the very day before the hunt, Abbot Fulchered of Shrewsbury preached a sermon at Gloucester: “The bow of God’s wrath is bent against the wicked, and the arrow swift to wound is drawn from the quiver. It will strike suddenly.
” That was on the Wednesday. On the Thursday, the arrow struck. He did not go out that morning. He stayed inside, dealt with business, and sat down to dinner, and at dinner Malmesbury says he drank more heavily than was his custom.
While the king was at table, a smith came in with six new arrows, which the king admired. He kept four for himself and handed two to the man standing nearest him, a French knight named Walter Tirel, with the words: “Bon archer, bonnes flèches. To the good archer, the good arrows; do justice by them. ” The whole party rode out of the lodge sometime in the afternoon and into the forest, and as huntsmen did, they split up, each man taking his stand at a station where the beaters would drive the deer past him.
The sun was already getting low. By Malmesbury’s account, only Tirel stayed with the king. A stag came past the king’s station, and Rufus drew and shot and wounded it slightly, and the animal ran on, and the king stood watching it go with his hand up over his eyes, because the low sun was in his face. At that moment another stag came through, and Tirel at his station drew on it and loosed, and the arrow, in Malmesbury’s words, unknowingly and without power to prevent it, went through the king’s breast.
Rufus said nothing. He reached down and broke off the shaft of the arrow where it stood out of his chest, and then he fell forward onto the stump of it and drove it the rest of the way in, which accelerated his death. Tirel ran to him and found him senseless. Then Tirel got back on his horse, and with good help from his spurs, as the chronicler puts it, got clean away.
What happened in the next few hours is the part people cannot leave alone. Nobody went after Tirel. He rode for the coast, crossed to France, and no one lifted a finger to stop him. The other nobles scattered, some to secure their own castles.
And the king’s brother Henry did not go to the body. He turned his horse and rode for Winchester, where the royal treasury was kept, as fast as it would carry him. At Winchester he found William de Breteuil, who had ridden just as hard because he knew exactly what Henry was doing. De Breteuil stood in front of the treasury and argued the crown belonged to their elder brother Robert, who was on his way home from the crusade.
Henry drew his sword. The argument ended there. Henry took the keys and the treasury, and the next day a hastily assembled group of magnates chose him as king, and on Sunday the fifth of August, three days after the arrow, he was crowned at Westminster with a coronation charter already drafted in which he promised to undo every abuse of his brother’s reign. The charter promised that the church would no longer be robbed during vacancies, that barons would not be charged extortionate sums to inherit, that the forest laws his father had made would stand but his brother’s additions would go, and that the good laws of King Edward the Confessor would be restored.
Every clause of it was an accusation against the dead man in the cart. A little over a century later, when the barons of England were looking for a stick to beat King John with, Archbishop Stephen Langton is said to have produced a copy of Henry’s coronation charter. The document that came out of that in 1215 was Magna Carta. While all of this was happening, the king of England was still lying where he had fallen.
The nobles had left him. The body of the anointed king lay on the ground in the forest in the August heat with a broken arrow shaft in its chest, and the men who found it were peasants. Tradition names one of them, a charcoal burner called Purkis, and says he loaded the king onto his cart, the one he used for hauling charcoal, and set off for Winchester. It was a long way, twenty miles or so on forest tracks, and the corpse had not been prepared in any way.
Malmesbury records what the road looked like afterwards: blood dripped from the body the whole way, so that you could have followed the king to Winchester by the trail he left. At Winchester he was buried under the central tower of the cathedral with very little ceremony. Many churchmen refused outright to give the king the rites of the church on the grounds that he had died unconfessed and unshriven. The bells were not rung for him.
In 1107, the tower fell down on top of him. People at the time said God had looked at who was lying under that tower and made his views known. Orderic, describing the burial, uses a phrase that has stuck: the king was buried in the presence of many magnates but few mourners. Walter Tirel lived another thirty-five years or so and spent them insisting he had not done it.
Suger, Abbot of Saint-Denis, chief minister to King Louis VI of France, knew Tirel personally and wrote about him in the 1140s. “It was laid to the charge of a certain noble, Walter Tirel, that he had shot the king with an arrow. But I have often heard him, when he had nothing to fear nor to hope, solemnly swear that on the day in question he was not in the part of the forest where the king was hunting, nor ever saw him in the forest at all. ” Tirel was never punished, and his lands were never taken.
What people have made of that depends on the person. Frank Barlow, who wrote the standard modern biography, came down on the side of caution. Warren Hollister pointed out the practical problem with a plot: nobody can arrange for a stray arrow to find a particular chest in a wood full of moving men. Emma Mason argued for assassination but pointed the finger towards France, suggesting a man in Tirel’s own household might have been acting for the French king, and noting that an English army had been gathering on the Solent that summer for an invasion of France.
Barlow concluded, more or less, that a historian cannot get past the fact that every single person who could have told us what happened either fled the country or became king. That is a description of the evidence rather than a verdict. And it is why the argument has never ended. A king shot in a hunting reserve is one sort of loss.
What happened to a boy in Normandy three hundred years after Alfred died is a different sort altogether. The men who made him disappear knew exactly who he was. Arthur of Brittany was born at Nantes on the twenty-ninth of March 1187, and his father had been dead for seven months. Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Brittany, fourth son of Henry II, had gone to Paris the previous summer and took part in a tournament there, came off his horse, and was trampled to death under the hooves of the other riders.
He was twenty-seven. Geoffrey’s widow, Constance, was already pregnant, and when the child came and it was a boy, the Bretons named him Arthur, after the king in the old stories, the once and future one. Henry II had wanted the boy named Henry. The Bretons ignored him.
He was a grandson of Henry II through a son who was older than John, and everything that follows hangs on that. When Richard the Lionheart died, the question of who came next had two answers depending on which set of customs you followed. In some parts of the Plantagenet lands, the son of a dead elder brother stood ahead of a living younger brother, which made Arthur the heir. In Normandy and broadly in England, a living brother of the dead king had the stronger claim, which made it John.
In April 1199, lying in a tent with a crossbow bolt wound in his shoulder that had turned gangrenous, Richard named John. Or that is what John’s supporters said he did. By the time Richard died, Arthur was twelve years old, a Breton duke who had been raised partly in France. The barons of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine recognized him.
He did homage to Philip for those lands, and Philip, who had been trying to prise the Plantagenet Empire apart for twenty years, suddenly had a Plantagenet of his own to do it with. John moved faster. He had himself invested as Duke of Normandy at Rouen within weeks of Richard’s death and crowned at Westminster on Ascension Day. The peace lasted two years, and what broke it was a marriage that had nothing to do with Arthur at all.
Isabella of Angoulême was the heiress to a county that sat right across the roads between John’s northern and southern French lands, and she had been formally betrothed to a Poitevin lord named Hugh de Lusignan precisely so that the Lusignans, a large and dangerous family, would control those roads. John, on a progress through the region in the summer of 1200, married her himself within weeks at Angoulême without any word to Hugh. The Lusignans appealed to Philip as John’s overlord. Philip summoned John to answer the complaint in Paris.
John did not go, and in April 1202 Philip declared all of John’s French lands forfeit, knighted the fifteen-year-old Arthur with his own hands, betrothed him to his small daughter Marie, gave him two hundred knights, and sent him south. Arthur rode into Poitou to take what he believed was his, and the first thing he did was lay siege to his grandmother. Eleanor of Aquitaine was around eighty years old in the summer of 1202. When the news came that Arthur and the Lusignans were on the move, she left Fontevraud and set out for Poitiers with a small escort.
On the way she stopped at the castle of Mirebeau, and Arthur’s army caught her there. They broke into the town and took the outer bailey. Eleanor withdrew into the keep with her handful of men and sent riders galloping north to find her son. The attackers were so confident of taking the keep that they threw down all the gates of the town but one, to make it easier to move about, and settled in.
On the morning of the first of August, one of the Lusignans, Geoffrey, was sitting down to a breakfast of pigeons. John was at Le Mans when Eleanor’s messenger reached him, roughly eighty miles away. He marched his army the whole distance in about forty-eight hours, men and horses on the road through the July heat with almost no rest, and arrived outside Mirebeau at dawn on the first of August, coming in through the one gate the besiegers had left standing. The besiegers were still in their beds or at their breakfast.
It was over in an hour or two. John wrote to his barons in England with obvious satisfaction: “We hurried there as fast as we could, and there we captured Arthur and Geoffrey de Lusignan and Hugh le Brun and all our other Poitevin enemies, and none escaped. ” He also named the man who had physically handed his nephew over to him: Arthur, John wrote, was delivered to us by William de Briouze. The de Briouze family is going to be at the center of the worst thing in this whole story.
John then did what he did with almost every victory he ever had, which was to waste it. The captured knights were loaded into carts, chained, and displayed in that condition as they were driven through the country, contrary to custom. Some of the prisoners ended up at Corfe Castle, one of the strongest castles in England. Ralph of Coggeshall says that some of the knights there broke out of their cell and seized the keep, and when they could not hold it and knew what John would do to them when it fell, they chose to starve rather than surrender, and twenty-two of them died.
Others, he implies, were simply not fed. And at Falaise, in the autumn or early winter of 1202, the king went to see his nephew. Roger of Wendover, writing a generation later, gives the only account of that meeting. John had Arthur brought before him and spoke to him kindly, promised him honors if he would abandon Philip.
And the fifteen-year-old answered with what the chronicler calls indignation and threats. He demanded England. He demanded the whole inheritance that had belonged to King Richard. All of it.
And he told John that unless he handed it over, John would never have a moment’s peace for the rest of his life. John had him taken back to his cell. Ralph of Coggeshall says that the king’s counselors, seeing that the Breton would never give John any peace as long as Arthur was alive and whole, advised him to have the boy blinded and castrated, and John agreed. Coggeshall says he sent three of his servants to Falaise to do it.
Two of the three ran away rather than carry out the order. The third got to Falaise and presented himself to Hubert de Burgh, who had the boy in custody, and Hubert refused. Coggeshall says he acted out of regard for the king’s honor and reputation and in the expectation of being forgiven, a very diplomatic way of saying that he looked at the instructions and could not do it. Then Hubert did something strange: he put out the story that Arthur was dead.
The Bretons went mad with grief and rage, and the situation got so much worse that Hubert had to let it be known the boy was alive after all. Early in 1203, Arthur was moved. Falaise was too close to Brittany, and Hubert de Burgh had shown he had a conscience. The boy was taken to Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and put into the new tower of the castle there.
The tower stood close to the river. And then around Easter of 1203, Arthur of Brittany stops appearing in the record. His death is never announced. His body is never displayed.
Nobody builds him a tomb. Philip demanded that John produce Arthur alive, and John could not or would not. And in the years that followed, the chroniclers filled the silence with what they had heard, and what they had heard does not agree. The account from the annals of Margam Abbey, a Cistercian house in South Wales, is the only one that gives a date, and the one that has stuck.
“After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time, at length in the castle of Rouen, after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew him with his own hand, and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net and being dragged to the bank and recognized was taken for secret burial, in fear of the tyrant, to the priory of Bec, called St. Mary of the Meadow. ” Maundy Thursday in 1203 fell on the third of April.
The record of the king’s own movements has John in Rouen in the first days of April 1203. That does not prove anything about what he did there. It does mean that when the Margam annalist puts the king in the castle on the Thursday before Easter, he is putting him somewhere the king’s own paperwork says he was. Now, why would a monastery in Glamorgan know any of this?
Margam Abbey was closely connected to the de Briouze family, who held enormous lands in South Wales and were the abbey’s neighbors and patrons. William de Briouze had been at Mirebeau. He had personally handed Arthur to John. He was in and around Rouen in the spring of 1203, and by some accounts, he had the boy in his charge.
If anyone outside the room knew what had happened in it, it was him. And within a few years, de Briouze and the king would fall out so violently that he would have every reason in the world to make sure the story got told. What nobody disputes is that Arthur went into that tower in good health and was never seen alive again. William the Breton, Philip’s court poet, has a scene in which John takes his nephew out alone in a small boat on the Seine at night, runs him through with a sword, and heaves the body over the side.
Notice what the two accounts agree on: both put the king personally in the room or the boat, and both put the body in the Seine. The river, at least, seems to be where he went. The Bretons accused John of the murder of their duke and took the accusation to Philip as overlord. The duchy of Brittany passed through Arthur’s half-sister Alix, and that was the end of the Plantagenets in Brittany for good.
Thirteen years later, when Philip’s son Louis invaded England, his envoys argued that John had forfeited his kingdom long ago because the court of France had tried him for the murder of his nephew and condemned him, and that a condemned murderer had no right to a throne. What Arthur’s disappearance did to John was fatal to his empire. Norman barons who had been wavering stopped wavering and went over to Philip, and many of them said openly that they would not fight for a man who had killed his own nephew. Château Gaillard fell in March 1204.
Normandy was going, and by midsummer it was gone. Early in December 1203, John rode out of Rouen, took ship at Barfleur, and crossed to England. He never set foot in Normandy again. William de Briouze came out of 1203 richer than he went in.
John showered him with lands and offices. And then in 1208 it all went wrong. John demanded hostages from the family as a guarantee of good behavior, and the hostages he wanted were William’s sons. William’s wife said no.
Her name was Matilda, and she was a formidable woman by every account. When the king’s messengers came for her sons, Roger of Wendover says she told them in front of witnesses that she would not deliver her children to a king who had murdered his own nephew Arthur, whom he ought to have kept in honorable custody. Her husband, who was standing there, tried to smooth it over. It was too late.
The family fled first to Ireland, and then when John crossed to Ireland in 1210 with an army specifically to hunt them, they split up. William got to France. Matilda and her eldest son tried to reach Scotland and were caught in Galloway and handed over to the king. William de Briouze offered forty thousand marks for his wife and son and could not pay it, and died in exile at Corbeil the following year.
Matilda and her son were put in a room in one of John’s castles, Corfe or Windsor, and the door was locked. The account of what was found when it was opened comes from a French chronicle written within a few years. The king imprisoned them with a sheaf of oats and a flitch of raw bacon. That was all the food they were given.
On the eleventh day, the door was opened, and the mother was found dead, sitting upright between her son’s legs, with her head fallen back against his chest. The son was dead too, in the same position, except that he was leaning back against the wall, and his cheeks had been gnawed. His mother, in her last days, out of her mind with hunger, had eaten the flesh of her son’s face. The chronicler does not say whether the boy was already dead when she did it.
Matilda de Briouze had said out loud what everyone believed about Arthur. This was her answer. Arthur had a sister, and her story is quieter than any of this, and in its own way harder to take. Eleanor of Brittany, called the Fair Maid of Brittany, was two or three years older than her brother, and she was taken into John’s custody in 1202 at the same time he was.
Once Arthur was gone, she carried his claim, and any man who married her would marry the claim, and any child she bore would be born with it. So she was too dangerous to free and too innocent to try. John kept her. She was held at Corfe in the Gloriette Tower, where the records show she was allowed to walk on the walls, and at other castles, and for the longest stretch at Bristol.
The royal accounts survive, and they are strangely intimate: cloth for her gowns, a saddle, gifts of clothing at Christmas, money for her chaplain and for the women who served her, wine sent from the king’s own table. She was kept in the comfort due to a duke’s daughter, and she was never for one day free. Magna Carta in 1215 ordered the release of hostages, and she stayed where she was. John, dying at Newark in 1216, is said to have given instructions that she must never be let go.
His son Henry III, who was nine when he inherited her, kept her exactly as his father had. She died in Bristol Castle on the tenth of August 1241 at about fifty-seven, after thirty-nine years as a prisoner, never charged with anything, never tried, and never married. Nobody ever wrote down that she was a prisoner, and nobody ever let her out. A boy in a river, a king in the bracken, a king in a convict’s pit.
Four stories, and in every case, the people who could have told us what happened either died without writing it down or had very good reasons to keep quiet. The moats are the same. Thousands of people spent tens of thousands of days in the mud with spades, and the reasons went into the ground with them. What the moats certainly did, whatever they were for, was drown people.
The medieval coroner’s rolls are full of it. A small boy out to play in his own courtyard, his father pulling him out of the water still alive, dying there. A child of three and a half drowned in a ditch while his mother had gone into a house to buy ale. And the law asked its strangest question: anything that caused a death was forfeit to the crown as a deodand, a thing given to God.
A cart that crushed a man, a horse that threw him, a boat he fell out of—all of those appear in the rolls with a price beside them. A ditch could not be forfeited. So the entries for the moat drownings end without a deodand, a blank where the value would go, and the family went home to a house that still had the water around it. Nobody suggested filling it in.
Some moats were worse than that. At Middleton Hall in Warwickshire, the moat was lined with brick and stone in the 1500s, giving it steep vertical sides so that anything that went in had nothing to climb out by. In the 1850s, the tenant had the moat drained, and the workmen who went down into the mud found the remains of a knight in full armor, and beside him the remains of his horse, also in armor. How a man in full armor on a horse in full armor came to go into that water, nobody has ever explained.
At Ightham Mote in Kent, a moated house called by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner the most complete small medieval manor house in the country, people have been telling for a hundred and fifty years the story of a young woman found in 1872, walled in alive in a sealed space behind a bricked-up cupboard, sitting upright in a chair, left to die in the dark. The paper trail is less obliging, and the National Trust has found voids that date from nineteenth-century building work rather than from the age of the Stuarts. Whether a workman opened a wall and found a woman in a chair, or whether a cold passage and a famous name grew a skeleton between them over a century of retelling, the record does not say. At Baddesley Clinton, no ghost is needed.
In 1483, a man named Nicholas Brome came into a moated manor near the edge of the old Forest of Arden. Years before, his father had been stabbed to death by the Earl of Warwick’s steward, John Herthill, and Nicholas had waited three years and then caught Herthill on the road and killed him. Some years after he came into Baddesley, he came home one day and found the parish priest in the parlor with his wife. The account comes from Nicholas’s own descendant, Henry Ferrers, an Elizabethan antiquary who lived in the house and wrote down the family stories, and the phrase he uses is that the priest was chucking his wife under the chin.
Nicholas drew his sword and killed him where he stood. Killing a priest was sacrilege as well as murder, and it needed two pardons, one from the Pope and one from the king, and Nicholas got both. As penance he raised the height of the nave and built the towers of two parish churches, which local people still call the Towers of Atonement. In his will he asked to be buried standing upright in the doorway of the church so that everyone who came in would have to walk over him, and his grave is still there under the mat just inside the entrance.
At Woodcroft Castle near Peterborough, a moated manor house of the 1200s, in June 1648 a royalist clergyman named Michael Hudson was holding it with a handful of men against a parliamentary force. They got in. Hudson retreated up onto the roof, and when the position was hopeless, he asked for quarter and was refused. They drove him to the edge of the battlements and over, and he caught hold of a spout and hung there above the moat by his hands.
Somebody hacked through his wrists. He fell into the water, still alive, and struggled to the edge, and a soldier waded in and beat his skull in with the butt of a musket while he clung to the bank. Then they cut out his tongue and carried it round the district as a trophy. A moat is a fine thing for keeping men out.
It is also, once they are in, a very good place to drop what is left of you. One moat in Leicestershire was still being dug when its owner’s head came off. Kirby Muxloe Castle was begun in 1480 by William Lord Hastings, the closest friend of King Edward IV, as a great brick house on an island in a broad rectangular moat, and the building accounts survive week by week. Then in April 1483, Edward died, and his brother Richard took charge of the young king, and on the thirteenth of June Richard accused Hastings of treason at a council meeting in the Tower of London and had him dragged out and beheaded on a log in the yard that same hour without a trial.
The accounts at Kirby Muxloe simply stop a few weeks later. The moat was full. One tower and the gatehouse were more or less finished. The rest of the house was never built.
And the water has sat around the empty island for five and a half centuries, the most expensive thing on the site, guarding nothing. Not every moat that has a story attached to it has a corpse in it. Some of them stopped a corpse from being made. At Scotney Castle in Kent, at Christmas 1598, a Jesuit priest named Richard Blount was hiding there when the pursuivants came.
He and a servant went into a hiding place built into the thickness of a wall, and the searchers stayed in the house for days. On the last night, Blount decided the hole would be found by morning, and he and the servant crept out, got to the edge of the island, lowered themselves into the moat, and swam across it in the freezing dark to the far bank, and got away. The account is in the Jesuit records from Blount’s own circle and has the detail of a thing that happened: a man in his thirties in December, in water that would stop your breath, swimming for his life across a ditch somebody had dug three hundred years earlier for reasons nobody could remember. Blount lived another forty years and ended as the head of the entire Jesuit mission in England.
He never, as far as the records show, went back. The hiding place he stood in for days is still in the wall, and the moat he crossed is still round the island, full of water lilies in summer, the most peaceful place in Kent, which in a sense it is now. At the end of the coroner’s roll for Bedfordshire, a small boy named Henry de Briteville is remembered because his county kept its paperwork. His moat is still there at Buryfield Farm, a scheduled monument now, part of it wet and part of it dry, with the platform in the middle where the hall stood.
Nobody lives on the island. Go back to Great Barford and to the evening of the twenty-sixth of July 1265. Vespers, somewhere around six o’clock. A lord of the manor in his courtyard, and a small boy whose age the clerk did not bother to write down, out to play by the water, because the water was right there, as it was at thousands of houses across the country, dug by his grandfather or his great-grandfather for a reason nobody in the family could have told you by then.
The roll says the father searched for him at once, found him, lifted him out, and in its words, thought to save him, but could not. The coroner came and wrote it down. The moat stayed where it was. Four graves, and not one of them where it should be.
The water keeps the rest.
