Runnymede and Lincoln Fair: A Story of the Great Charter

by John G. Edgar

As for Oliver Icingla, he almost felt that he was content with his condition. It would be too much to say that if his prison doors had been opened he would have said with the heroine of the ballad of “The Spanish Lady’s Love”—

“Full woe is me:
Oh, let me still sustain this kind captivity!”—

but certainly he did find his prison infinitely less intolerable than it had been when he first entered it, cursing the fate that had sent him thither. At times, however, the old spirit seized him, and he stamped about like a caged lion, and startled the sullen gaoler by his explosions of rage.

“On my faith,” said he to himself one day in April, after having worn himself out by the intensity of his ravings, “never did the hart pant for the water-brook more than I pant for freedom and air and exercise, and yet the chance seems as far away from me as ever. I marvel how long I have been here. Ha! I have lost count. By St. Edward, I fear me that ere long I shall lose my senses!”

As Oliver thus soliloquised he went to the window, and, seating himself on the broad sill of stone, looked out on meadows and woodlands which spring, “that great painter of the earth,” had once more robed in green, and on the ploughed fields to which, in spite of war and rumours of war, the husbandmen were committing the seeds, with every hope of reaping in due season. Almost as he did so, his ear caught the sound of a musical instrument and of a voice singing a Castilian ballad in very indifferent Spanish, but in accents which were so familiar that his heart leaped within him. Oliver listened, and as he listened the singer sang—

“They have carried afar into Navarre the great Count of Castile,
And they have bound him sorely, they have bound him hand and heel;
The tidings up the mountains go, and down among the valleys—
To the rescue! to the rescue, ho! they have ta’en Fernan Gonsalez!”

Interrupting without ceremony, and taking the ballad out of the singer’s mouth, Oliver repeated the verse at the top of his voice, so emphasising several of the words as to leave little room for mistake as to his meaning. As he did so he observed a figure climb slowly but without difficulty up a parapet, at such a distance from him that there was no possibility of communicating by words; but the figure, on reaching the top of the parapet, reared itself and stood in the form of a boy dressed in crimson, holding some musical instrument in his hand, and looking scrutinously from window to window, and from casement to casement, apparently with the object of discovering from which had come the voice of the person who had caught up his song. Oliver, to aid him, took his cap, put his hand between the bars of the window, and dexterously tossed the cap in the air. The signal was observed and had the desired effect. The singer returned it, and having dropped nimbly to the ground disappeared, while Oliver, withdrawing into the interior of his chamber, began to marvel what consequences would flow from this unexpected incident.

But days and weeks elapsed, and nothing came to alter his situation; and Oliver, thinking he was forgotten by those on whom he had been relying, was musing over the song that had raised his hopes, and ever and anon asking himself with a smile whether or not it would be possible to persuade De Moreville’s daughter to play the part of the infanta who bribed the alcaydé with her jewels to set free the great Count of Castile, and who then fled with him to his own land, when there occurred an event which changed the aspect of his affairs.

It was somewhere about the middle of May, 1216, and Oliver had been nearly eleven months in captivity, and Hugh de Moreville, with Ralph Hornmouth in attendance, had been many months absent from Chas-Chateil, being, in fact at the court of Paris; and the castle, which was well garrisoned, was under the command of a Norman knight who had seen about fifty winters, and who rejoiced in the name of Anthony Waledger. He was a man of courage and prudence, Sir Anthony Waledger, and had married the “lady governess” of Beatrix de Moreville, she being a distant kinswoman of the house. And Hugh de Moreville had the most implicit confidence in her husband’s fidelity and discretion. It is true that the old knight was a man of violent temper and intemperate habits, and much given to brimming goblets and foaming tankards. Besides, he had the character of having sometimes in moments of danger shown too much of the discretion which is the better part of valour. But De Moreville overlooked his weaknesses, believing him to be incapable of betraying his trust or failing in his duty. Moreover, the knight had faith in his garrison, and felt so secure that he would readily have staked his head on holding out Chas-Chateil against any army in England till the arrival of succour; and his confidence was all the greater because he knew that he had the means—no matter how closely the castle might be invested—of communicating with the baronial party in time to be rescued, for there was a subterranean passage, the existence of which Waledger believed to be known to none save himself and the baron whom he served. In this he was partly wrong, inasmuch as Styr, the Anglo-Saxon, from his residence at Chas-Chateil in the days of Edric Icingla, was aware that there was this underground passage, and even knew the chamber that communicated with it. But he knew no more, and if put into it could no more have guessed where it was to lead or where it was to terminate than De Moreville’s horse-boy, Clem the Bold Rider, or Richard de Moreville, the baron’s nephew, who were equally ignorant that such a passage existed. Everything, however, tended to inspire the governor of Chas-Chateil with a feeling of security. Indeed, over his cups he was in the habit of talking big to De Moreville’s knights and squires, and especially to De Moreville’s nephew Richard, about his engines of war, and what he could do with their aid.

“Sirs,” he was wont to say at such moments, “let who will tremble at a false tyrant’s frown, I defy his malice. Let him do his worst, and, by the head of St. Anthony, if King John makes his appearance before the castle of Chas-Chateil, the said king will be the luckiest of Johns if he can escape from before it alive and at liberty.”