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9 - New Blood for an Old Religion
Despite C.L. Ewen's contemptuous dismissal of Margaret Murray's theories as 'vapid balderdash' (1) - an opinion echoed with approbation by H.R. Trevor-Roper, (2) Dr Murray's writings on the history of the Old Religion brought an originality to the treatment of the subject to which such self-approving critics as Ewen and Trevor-Roper have made no comparable contribution.
The late Dr G.B. Gardner, the eminent Mr T.C. Lethbridge - one of the greatest authorities on the Old Religion in Britain - Eric Maple, Colin Wilson, and many another authority on the ancient Fertility Cult: all these have accepted, more or less wholly, the theories first advanced by Dr Murray in her now famous The Witch-cult in Western Europe.
For those who are still unacquainted with Dr Murray's theories, let me here give the briefest resume, since it will be necessary frequently to refer to Dr Murray's ideas in the pages to come.
I shall quote the summary; at once admirably brief, yet admirably complete; from Mr Eric Maple's The Dark World of Witches: (3)
[Dr Murray] put forward the theory that witchcraft was possibly a surviving element of Palaeolithic worship which had continued into historical times and that the great persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in fact, a determined effort to suppress these practices once and for all. She suggested that the witches were organised in covens under the leadership of magician priests and that among their activities were fertility rites which had been handed down from the remote past.
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[1] Some Witchcraft Criticisms, 1938.
[2] The European Witch-Craze of the i6th and 17th Centuries, 1969.
[3] London: Robert Hale, 1962. Also available in paperback. Pan Books, 1965.
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To this should be added that in her later The God of the Witches and The Divine King in England, Dr Murray enunciated and developed a theory, derived from the theories expressed in her first book, that many of the English sovereigns, both pre- and post-Conquest, were not Christian at all, but more or less secret adherents of the Old Religion. She expressed the view that the Norman kings were of a race traditionally 'pagan', and that, despite an association with, and a formal submission to, the Roman Church, they were never members of it. Dr Murray goes further, and suggests, with much impressive evidence to support her contention, that the tradition of 'paganism' in the English Royal Family outlasted the pure Norman blood, and has survived, as the 'royal religion', until very recent times.
She puts forward the theory that an essential element of the ancient Fertility rites, the 'Divine King', was chosen as the earthly representative of the vis omnipotens Natures, and held his office for (originally) seven years, a term which was later, in some places, extended to the Pythagorean 'square number', nine; a number which may have been selected through Druidical influence, since an odd number (seven), in Pythagorean estimation, is 'male'; but a still odd number (nine) with 'square' characteristics, is androgyne or hermaphrodite. (One may imagine that the Divine King, respited for a further two years, was in hearty agreement with this mathematico-mystical reasoning!)
At the end of his seven or nine years' reign, the Divine King (he had merely a year's 'reign' in Aztec Mexico) was killed, his body being partly eaten by his people and partly burned ceremonially; the remains were given as 'food' to the Earth whence he came.
Dr Murray argues that, from perhaps the remotest period, a beneficent or patently 'lucky' King could be granted an extension of his reign - consonant to the wishes of those subjects enjoying unusual prosperity - through his finding a substitute willing to act as the Royal surrogate, and endure the ritual death properly the destiny of the King.
In the view of Dr Murray, the presence and availability of such a substitute became traditional through the centuries following the collapse of Roman imperial rule; and that some of the most eminent 'martyrs' of the Middle Ages were, in fact, rather 'martyrs' of the Old Religion than of the New - and that such persons as Thomas Becket, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, were Divine Victims; one Divine King who had accepted his fate without having sought out a substitute Divine Victim being William Rufus.
William the Bastard, Duke (4) of Normandy, came of a Pagan family, and was himself a pagan. His father's nickname, 'Robert the Devil', is usually taken in a metaphorical sense; it should be taken - as it was originally meant to be taken - in a strictly literal sense. The Norman rulers were 'devils', in the sense that they were pagans. They made no secret of the fact, and the fact was admitted by their contemporaries.
The 'devil' family was a law unto itself. '... principles which governed the political association of longer-established peoples could still be defied in eleventh-century Normandy. The recognition of Duke Robert's illegitimate son as heir to his father's lordship would have been impossible in any country where the church, and the theory of the state for which it stood, had their accustomed influence.' (5)
Much has been written of the events preceding William's conquest of England in 1066: the escape of the English royal family to Normandy, flying from the Normans' blood-brethren, the Danes; the promise supposed to have been given to William by Edward the Confessor that William should have the reversion of the English throne on Edward's death (an unlikely story, seeing that, of all contemporary kings, Edward was the most besottedly Christian!), the alternate risings and fallings of Earl Godwine; the rise of Harold to influence at Edward's court - and so on.
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[4] The Norman (Norsemen) rulers of Normandy seemed quite indifferent to titles, and bore them only because such marks of distinction were employed by the more cultured French and English who were now the Normans' neighbours. In early Norman charters, the 'Duke' is known variously as 'Count', 'Marquis' or 'Prince' (Latin, Princeps, literally 'first head', i.e. 'first man,' and so 'leader, ruler, prince').
[5] Stenton, op. cit. My italics - M.H.
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Who yet has asked the pertinent and important question: why did William covet the throne of England?
'Ambition' is the usual answer— but 'ambition' is no answer at all. Having set his mind on gaining England, William's ambition, backed by a most powerful will, inevitably drove him on; but why did he set his mind on England in the first place?
The answer surely lies in the facts of William's religious beliefs: because England was a great deal more Pagan, a great deal less under the domination of the Roman Church, than was France. It was as a Pagan that William gathered his forces - pagan Normans, dubiously Christian Bretons (joining William to recover 'their' country from the Saxons!), definitely Old Religion Basques, eager to see a land where the members of the Old Religion still spoke (or, at any rate, ritually used) their own immeasurably old language; with some odd elements from the Belgic territories where the most important fact of life was the duhin, the non-human forest-dweller, in name and character so like the Scottish drow or trow that there can be no doubt that both names (as well as the German troll) are linked with the root of 'druid' - perhaps the Greek, drus, 'oak'.
William could not afford to purchase a large army; those who volunteered to accompany him did so on a 'commission only' basis; and the bulk of his invading force was made up, not only of the rootless soldiers-of-fortune, but also those whom unstable social conditions had driven out to find fortune elsewhere than at home. Thus, the Normans who had gone to chase success with their swords in Saracen Sicily or in other parts of the Mediterranean, now returned, on the hunt for loot and power somewhat nearer to Normandy.
The civil war in Anjou had sent many Angevins flocking to the banner that Pope Gregory VII (Abbot Hildebrand) had 'blessed' and presented to William as a sacred luck-piece - but with sinister implications which have an important bearing on the Conqueror's later relations with the Church.
William's 'reason' for the invasion of England was that Harold, whilst staying with William at Bayeux as a sort of prisoner-guest, had sworn to forfeit the inheritance of the English crown in favour of William, who had been 'promised' that crown by the saintly Edward the Confessor, who had no 'heirs of the body'.
William's relationship with the Roman Church had always been traditionally Norman, and as traditionally ambiguous.
Wishing to strengthen his position by allying himself to some more powerful family, William chose as wife the daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders: Matilda. On the grounds that the proposed marriage would be within that degree of consanguinity forbidden by the laws of the Church, Pope Leo IX, at the Council of Rheims in 1049, peremptorily forbade the union. By 1053, in contemptuous defiance of the Papal ban, William had married Matilda.
But, like many a potential or actual dictator before him and after him, William was always prepared to avail himself of the political advantages that well-organised, well-established religion may offer to the ambitious power-seeker. Just as Henry IV, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Bismarck, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were later to do, William did: made a deal with the society-regulating forces of the Church. In 1066, after Harold had 'broken his sacred oath by accepting the crown of England, William submitted his own claim to the Papal curia, thus accepting 'a position which superficially was that of a litigant maintaining his right in the court of a superior.' (6)
The Pope was not slow to point out the implications of William's appeal to the highest European ecclesiastical authority.
[William] afterwards denied that he had made any offer of fealty to the pope, and there is no reason to doubt, that the papal decision in his favour was given honestly on the facts as they were understood at Rome. But it was inevitable that the Hildebrandine papacy, in the interest of its claim to secular domination, should make a political use of William's application, and although it was never put forward as the pretext, it was certainly the ultimate basis of the demand for fealty which Alexander II and Gregory VII made upon him.
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[6] Stenton, op. cit.
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As presented by Alexander II, the demand was supported by a tendentious piece of reconstructed history, which asserted that the English state had formerly been subject to the Roman see, that Peter's Pence had been its tribute, but that evil men had lately seduced it from the pope's obedience. (7)
William's reply to Pope Alexander has not been preserved, but to Gregory VII, who renewed the demand, apparently in 1080, he addressed a masterly letter defining his position. On the feudal question he refused fealty outright, saying that he had never promised it, and that none of his predecessors had entered into such a relationship with any former pope. On the question of Peter's Pence, acknowledging that its collection had been interrupted while he was in Normandy, he assured the pope, that arrears should be sent to Rome as soon as possible. No statesman has ever settled a major issue in fewer words, or more conclusively. (8)
The reference to William and his loot-bribed accomplices as 'Frenchmen' has blurred and obscured the perception of historical fact. William was a Teuton, with not only the traditional Teuton ruthlessness, but with that superior organising ability so often to be found in the Teuton (think of the powerful organising quartet of Schacht, Speer, Hitler and Goering, before and during World War II).
And William was a superb organiser. It has been remarked upon that the Norman dukes brought nothing new to the science of war; that they took what had already been invented by others and merely used the already invented things well. They employed the tried opportunist's trick of profiting by the quarrels of neighbours; setting laggard quarrellers by the ears, so as to promote profitable animosities.
Perhaps even today, but certainly in my boyhood, Norfolk children used to cadge for what they called 'largesse'. Nine centuries ago, in a Norfolk systematically as well as ruthlessly laid waste by the Conqueror, those who were left learnt to beg in the tongue of the invader - 'largesse!', as little Arab boys at Cairo or Alexandria or Port Said used to learn to cry, 'Penny please, Mister!', in the tongue of the invader.
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[7] My italics. That the Pope should complain that England, formerly, as he claimed, subject to the Papal See, had been wrested from its allegiance by 'evil men' is a statement of the greatest importance.It seems to declare openly what the pattern of events in the tenth and eleventh centuries reveal only by somewhat vague hints: that there had been a major secession from the Roman Church's authority, and that the gainer by that wholesale secession could have been only the Old Religion ('evil men').
[8] Stenton, op. cit.
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Once the general register of English inhabitants, English land-holdings and English wealth had been compiled, and into Domesday Book had been written all which was to be known of the country with the exception of the northern counties, William felt that he had fastened the Norman yoke securely on the necks of the English people. (He died in the year after Domesday was completed.)
He did not, as is too often claimed, oust the English from all employments of profit, and replace them by Normans or the allies of Normans. Those who did their work efficiently and were prepared to continue under the more exacting conditions imposed by William's 'New Order', could be assured of 'continuity of employment'.
The ingenious Teutonic ability to control private enterprise is well shewn by William's device for securing absolute authority over the moneyers - producers of the nation's coinage. They were permitted to continue to produce the coins, as in Saxon England, but the dies from which they worked, and which might not be replaced by 'home-made' substitutes, were a Royal monopoly. Only the King might supply them, and only the King's dies might be used.
Bullion could be sold to, and coinage issued only from, the exchange (cambium) established at every town of borough status. As the cambium was the only channel through which the licensed moneyer could circulate his coins, the warden of the exchange (custos cambii) was the watch-dog who checked the moneyer's output for true weight, fineness of metal, and use of the authorised dies. The penalty for malfeasance on the moneyer's part was punishable by mayhem (mutilatio hominum). The moneyers, though, were apparently willing to risk the savage penalties in the noble cause of forbidden profit: no fewer than ninety-six moneyers had their right hands cut off even as late as the reign of the third Norman king.
But the list of just over four hundred moneyers licensed under William I and William II shew not one name which is patently non-Old English. There are some names familiar to us from Norman nominal rolls, but the holders of such names could have emigrated to England - or their ancestors could have done - long before the Conquest. It is obvious that the skilled English worker or craftsman was not deprived of his living simply because of his race.
With so single-minded a dictator as William shewed himself to be, no one escaped the payment of some tribute to his power. His use of the Roman Church to serve his sordidly money-grubbing purposes is well illustrated by his forcing a commission of Norman bishops, held in 1070, to impose 'a set of penances on all ranks of the Conqueror's army'. The contemporary old sweats must have been more astonished by this order than any more recent soldier getting a long-overdue and quite unaccountable demand for cash from the Army Pay Corps.
The 'penances' covered everyone - the commission had made sure of that. For every warrior who had fought at Hastings, a penance of one year for each man killed by that warrior; the order even punished clerks who had fought in, or merely armed themselves for, the battle 'as if they had sinned in their own country'.
The far-ranging gather-up of these warrior 'criminals' even succeeded in including men who had fought for William in Normandy: a year's penance for the death of a man killed by a Williamite soldier whilst resisting the seizure of food (even though William had invaded England whilst desperately short of stores); three years for a death caused to one resisting wanton plunderers.
All 'penances' in those days might be discharged on the payment of a fine; and, as possibly as many as 10,000 'criminals' were indicted in the commission's order, the fines helped greatly to build the churches and cathedrals which, today, remain to give so mistaken an idea of William's 'piety' and 'generosity' to an unlearned generation.
The English Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, who had been appointed to the Primacy of England when popular agitation had sent the Edward-appointed Norman, Robert de Jumieges, flying for his life, was kicked out by William, and Lanfranc, (9) an Italian from Pavia, appointed to the now vacant see. For different - and far less 'pious' - reasons, William was content to follow the policy of Edward the Confessor, and appoint foreigners (mostly, but not exclusively, Normans) to English sees. But many English bishops - including Leofric of Exeter, Siward of Rochester and Wulfstan of Worcester - were permitted to retain their sees.
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[9] Real name: dei Lanfranchi.
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William's feelings were not hidden; even a Pope who had 'obliged' the King by regularising his forbidden marriage with Matilda of Flanders (through Lanfranc's diplomacy) got from William no more than the formal recognition of the debt; the Pope certainly never managed to inspire William with a sense of gratitude. Thus, when Gregory VII was expelled from Rome, and the Anti-Pope, Clement III, was consecrated as Gregory's successor, William not only stood aside, but ordered all members of the English church to maintain a strict neutrality in the Papal struggle. William saw, in the troubles at Rome, nothing but his own opportunity of freeing the English church from the too ambitious and too demanding authority of the Papacy.
As Stenton says, 'The Conqueror's need of papal support ended with the disposition of Stigand and the establishment of Lanfranc's primacy. For the claim of Gregory VII to universal dominion, William had no respect, and the whole tendency of his later government was to emphasise his own supremacy over the English church. According to a writer of the next generation he insisted that no pope should be recognised and no papal letters received in England without his command or permission; that no legislation should be proposed without his approval in any council of the English church; and that no bishop should implead or excommunicate any of his barons or ministers without his leave. As a further safeguard, he forbade his bishops to go to Rome, even when summoned by the Pope; an infrangible rule that even Lanfranc dared not attempt to break'.
With that cynicism that we are to meet later in the relationship of dictators with the Roman Church, William let Rome's appointees grab the best sees, build themselves churches and cathedrals, monasteries and nunneries; let Rome enrich itself in her own way. For William, as Napoleon, Hitler and the rest, warmly appreciated the Church's capacity to impose opinion and order upon the Faithful; and for the same reasons that Hitler confirmed Bismarck's arrangement with the Roman Church in Germany that it should receive its 440,000,000 marks annual income from the Reich, (10) William permitted the Roman Empire - phoenix-resurgent now as a Church reverting to a secular empire - to enrich itself in a land that William's avowedly pagan arms had conquered.
When Margaret Murray produced her (to me impressive) evidence of William Rufus's adherence to the Old Religion, she overlooked the strong evidence in favour of his father's no less loyal membership of that same ancient creed.
I have mentioned the fact that the 'Divine King' of many a primitive faith, from China to Mexico, enjoyed all the privileges of royal rank until, at the end of a one-, seven- or nine-year period, he was sacrificed to the World-Spirit of Fertility (however he was named by so many different tribes across the earth's surface); his body burned, and partly eaten by his late 'subjects', and part buried, to be 'eaten' by Mother Earth, to Whom all things must, in the fullness of time, return. ('Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die!')
William, no matter what he was to the Roman Church; no matter what he seemed to the Old English Roman Catholics and the surviving members of that much more ancient British Christian Church against which Rome had battled so long, so bitterly and so cruelly; William was, to those members of the Old Religion possibly superior in numbers to the members of the Roman Church in England, their Incarnate King - come to uphold the Ancient Mystery and extirpate the New.
In Britain and in its successor, England, the Divine King must have had a seven-year rather than a nine-year 'reign'. Or, to be more precise, an Incarnate King's reign, however long it might be, was never more than an extension of a basic seven-year period. And each extension had to be purchased by the death of a volunteer Divine Victim. William gained - or demanded and was granted - two such seven-year extensions of the original reign. Assuming that his reign as Incarnate King began in 1066, the first seven-year period would have ended in 1073, the second in 1080, the third - which will be most diligently examined - in 1087. Let us also remember that William's reign probably began, by his estimation, on the night of Friday, October 13, 1066 - a day that all chroniclers are agreed was chosen by William despite the fact that in hurrying to open battle on this day he deprived himself of important advantages as a military commander.
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[10] Diligently and scrupulously paid by Hitler's government up to the somewhat abrupt end of the Fuehrer's regime.
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I have not yet been able to trace the two Divine Victims who substituted for William in the years 1073 and 1080, though it is possible that a victim was found at the time of the rebellion in the Norman possession of Maine.
To regain Maine for Normandy, William had to fight Fulk 'le Rechin', Count of Anjou, and did not succeed in regaining Maine until 1073 - a fact which may provide the reason for William's asking an extension of his reign as Incarnate King. There is something mysterious about the period immediately before the end of the first extension. William seems to have been absent from England between 1077 and 1080, and what he was doing cannot yet be stated with certainty.
Was he having difficulty in arranging to provide a second Divine Victim, to extend his own reign from 1080 for a further seven years? One cannot say, but that there was no Divine Victim forthcoming for a third extension is clear; and knowing that he himself must now play the part of the Divine Victim, William prepared for the end.
It is possible that the second Divine Victim available to gain William a further seven years extension of life was Walcher, Bishop of Durham, who was cut down by a party of anonymous Englishmen as he came out of the church at Gates-head, set on fire by the English who awaited him. There is much in the circumstances of Walcher's death which "is more familiar from the well-known story of Thomas Becket, another Divine Victim. (The presence of fire in the episode at Gates-head is also reminiscent of the ritual killing of Joan (11) of Arc, yet another Divine Victim.)
But, as I said above, there was no Victim forthcoming for the year 1087 - and so William began to settle his affairs, in ways that historians still find inexplicable, since the explanation that William behaved as he did because he was a member of the Old Religion is not yet considered a reason by orthodox historians.
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[11] Note the 'Witch' name.
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On August 1 - the Eve of Lammas, one of the Four Great Sabbats of the Fertility Cult year - William held a council at Salisbury, at which, so the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells, 'all the landowners of any account in England, whosoever men they were, did him homage, became his men, and swore him fealty that they would be faithful to him against all other men'. 'The nature of this assembly', says Stenton, 'has been much debated. It is obvious that while it cannot have included all the freeholders of substance in England, it was a gathering of wholly exceptional size and importance.' (12)
It was; it was William's leave-taking of the principal members of the Old Religion. He was due to die in the following year; both he and all the assembled company knew that. And in the following year, 1087, exactly twenty-one years after he had assumed the crown, both as 'earthly' and Divine King, he did die, in circumstances whose reporting is sufficiently vague that we may know that we have here, once again, a Divine Victim's death.
William attacked Mantes, in the Vexin-Francais; set fire to the town - the flames again - and, as he rode through the burning town, 'received an internal injury', which caused him to be taken, first to Rouen (obviously a holy place of the Old Faith, seeing that it was there that Joan of Arc met her ritual death), and then to the monastery of St Gervais. He lived long enough to bequeath England to his openly pagan son, William Rufus, who was to reign, as Incarnate King, for two seven-year periods, and to shew himself a loyal and liberal member of that ancient Faith which, in his reign, was to emerge from hiding.
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[12] My italics - M.H.
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