Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn: Preamble

Preamble

"The insect tribes of human kind" is a mode of expression we are
familiar with in the poets, moralists and other superior persons, or
beings, who viewing mankind from their own vast elevation see us all
more or less of one size and very, very small. No doubt the comparison
dates back to early, probably Pliocene, times, when some one climbed to
the summit of a very tall cliff, and looking down and seeing his fellows
so diminished in size as to resemble insects, not so gross as beetles
perhaps but rather like emmets, he laughed in the way they laughed then
at the enormous difference between his stature and theirs. Hence the
time-honoured and serviceable metaphor.

Now with me, in this particular instance, it was all the other way
about--from insect to man--seeing that it was when occupied in watching
the small comedies and tragedies of the insect world on its stage that I
stumbled by chance upon a compelling reminder of one of the greatest
tragedies in England's history--greatest, that is to say, in its
consequences. And this is how it happened.

One summer day, prowling in an extensive oak wood, in Hampshire, known
as Harewood Forest, I discovered that it counted among its inhabitants
no fewer than three species of insects of peculiar interest to me, and
from that time I haunted it, going there day after day to spend long
hours in pursuit of my small quarry. Not to kill and preserve their
diminutive corpses in a cabinet, but solely to witness the comedy of
their brilliant little lives. And as I used to take my luncheon in my
pocket I fell into the habit of going to a particular spot, some opening
in the dense wood with a big tree to lean against and give me shade,
where after refreshing myself with food and drink I could smoke my pipe
in solitude and peace. Eventually I came to prefer one spot for my
midday rest in the central part of the wood, where a stone cross,
slender, beautifully proportioned and about eighteen feet high, had been
erected some seventy or eighty years before by the lord of the manor. On
one side of the great stone block on which the cross stood there was an
inscription which told that it was placed there to mark the spot known
from of old as Dead Man's Plack; that, according to tradition, handed
from father to son, it was just here that King Edgar slew his friend and
favourite Earl Athelwold, when hunting in the forest.

I had sat there on many occasions, and had glanced from time to time at
the inscription cut on the stone, once actually reading it, without
having my attention drawn away from the insect world I was living in. It
was not the tradition of the Saxon king nor the beauty of the cross in
that green wilderness which drew me daily to the spot, but its
solitariness and the little open space where I could sit in the shade
and have my rest.

Then something happened. Some friends from town came down to me at the
hamlet I was staying at, and one of the party, the mother of most of
them, was not only older than the rest of us in years, but also in
knowledge and wisdom; and at the same time she was younger than the
youngest of us, since she had the curious mind, the undying interest in
everything on earth--the secret, in fact, of everlasting youth.
Naturally, being of this temperament, she wanted to know what I was
doing and all about what I had seen, even to the minutest detail--the
smallest insect--and in telling her of my days I spoke casually of the
cross placed at a spot called Dead Man's Plack. This at once reminded
her of something she had heard about it before, but long ago, in the
seventies of last century; then presently it all came back to her, and
it proved to me an interesting story.

It chanced that in that far back time she was in correspondence on
certain scientific and literary subjects with a gentleman who was a
native of this part of Hampshire in which we were staying, and that they
got into a discussion about Freeman, the historian, during which he told
her of an incident of his undergraduate days when Freeman was professor
at Oxford. He attended a lecture by that man on the Mythical and
Romantic Elements in Early English History, in which he stated for the
guidance of all who study the past, that they must always bear in mind
the inevitable passion for romance in men, especially the uneducated,
and that when the student comes upon a romantic incident in early
history, even when it accords with the known character of the person it
relates to, he must reject it as false. Then, to rub the lesson in, he
gave an account of the most flagrant of the romantic lies contained in
the history of the Saxon kings. This was the story of King Edgar, and
how his favourite, Earl Athelwold, deceived him as to the reputed beauty
of Elfrida, and how Edgar in revenge slew Athelwold with his own hand
when hunting. Then--to show how false it all was!--Edgar, the chronicles
state, was at Salisbury and rode in one day to Harewood Forest and there
slew Athelwold. Now, said Freeman, as Harewood Forest is in Yorkshire,
Edgar could not have ridden there from Salisbury in one day, nor in two,
nor in three, which was enough to show that the whole story was a
fabrication.

The undergraduate, listening to the lecturer, thought the Professor was
wrong owing to his ignorance of the fact that the Harewood Forest in
which the deed was done was in Hampshire, within a day's ride from
Salisbury, and that local tradition points to the very spot in the
forest where Athelwold was slain. Accordingly he wrote to the Professor
and gave him these facts. His letter was not answered; and the poor
youth felt hurt, as he thought he was doing Professor Freeman a service
by telling him something he didn't know. _He_ didn't know his Professor
Freeman.

This story about Freeman tickled me, because I dislike him, but if any
one were to ask me why I dislike him I should probably have to answer
like a woman: Because I do. Or if stretched on the rack until I could
find or invent a better reason I should perhaps say it was because he
was so infernally cock-sure, so convinced that he and he alone had the
power of distinguishing between the true and false; also that he was so
arbitrary and arrogant and ready to trample on those who doubted his
infallibility.

All this, I confess, would not be much to say against him, seeing that
it is nothing but the ordinary professorial or academic mind, and I
suppose that the only difference between Freeman and the ruck of the
professors was that he was more impulsive or articulate and had a
greater facility in expressing his scorn.

Here I may mention in passing that when this lecture appeared in print
in his _Historical Essays_ he had evidently been put out a little, and
also put on his mettle by that letter from an undergraduate, and had
gone more deeply into the documents relating to the incident, seeing
that he now relied mainly on the discrepancies in half a dozen
chronicles he was able to point out to prove its falsity. His former
main argument now appeared as a "small matter of detail"--a "confusion
of geography" in the different versions of the old historians. But one
tells us, Freeman writes, that Athelwold was killed in the Forest of
Wherwell on his way to York, and then he says: "Now as Wherwell is in
Hampshire, it could not be on the road to York;" and further on he says:
"Now Harewood Forest in Yorkshire is certainly not the same as Wherwell
in Hampshire," and so on, and on, and on, but always careful not to say
that Wherwell Forest and Harewood Forest are two names for one and the
same place, although now the name of Wherwell is confined to the village
on the Test, where it is supposed Athelwold had his castle and lived
with his wife before he was killed, and where Elfrida in her declining
years, when trying to make her peace with God, came and built a Priory
and took the habit herself and there finished her darkened life.

This then was how he juggled with words and documents and chronicles
(his thimble-rigging), making a truth a lie or a lie a truth according
as it suited a froward and prejudicate mind, to quote the expression of
an older and simpler-minded historian--Sir Walter Raleigh.

Finally, to wind up the whole controversy, he says you are to take it as
a positive truth that Edgar married Elfrida, and a positive falsehood
that Edgar killed Athelwold. Why--seeing there is as good authority and
reason for believing the one statement as the other? A foolish question!
Why?--Because I, Professor or Pope Freeman, say so!

The main thing here is the effect the Freeman anecdote had on me, which
was that when I went back to continue my insect-watching and rested at
noon at Dead Man's Plack, the old legend would keep intruding itself on
my mind, until, wishing to have done with it, I said and I swore that it
was true--that the tradition preserved in the neighbourhood, that on
this very spot Athelwold was slain by the king, was better than any
document or history. It was an act which had been witnessed by many
persons, and the memory of it preserved and handed down from father to
son for thirty generations; for it must be borne in mind that the
inhabitants of this district of Andover and the villages on the Test
have never in the last thousand years been exterminated or expelled. And
ten centuries is not so long for an event of so startling a character to
persist in the memory of the people when we consider that such
traditions have come down to us even from prehistoric times and have
proved true. Our arch�ologists, for example, after long study of the
remains, cannot tell us how long ago--centuries or thousands of years--a
warrior with golden armour was buried under the great cairn at Mold in
Flintshire.

And now the curious part of all this matter comes in. Having taken my
side in the controversy and made my pronouncement, I found that I was
not yet free of it. It remained with me, but in a new way--not as an old
story in old books, but as an event, or series of events, now being
re-enacted before my very eyes. I actually saw and heard it all, from
the very beginning to the dreadful end; and this is what I am now going
to relate. But whether or not I shall in my relation be in close accord
with what history tells us I know not, nor does it matter in the least.
For just as the religious mystic is exempt from the study of theology
and the whole body of religious doctrine, and from all the observances
necessary to those who in fear and trembling are seeking their
salvation, even so those who have been brought to the _Gate of
Remembrance_ are independent of written documents, chronicles and
histories, and of the weary task of separating the false from the true.
They have better sources of information. For I am not so vain as to
imagine for one moment that without such external aid I am able to make
shadows breathe, revive the dead, and know what silent mouths once said.

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