Strongbow Read online

  DOUBLE AWARD-WINNER

  Bisto Book of the Year

  Reading Association of Ireland Award

  ‘The reader is spellbound’ THE IRISH TIMES

  Norman knight and adventurer, Strongbow, has been part of Irish historical lore for centuries. But how many know the real story of his life?

  Aoife is the daughter of a king who is despised by many of his peers – how will her life change after marrying Strongbow?

  STRONGBOW

  The Story of

  RICHARD AND AOIFE

  MORGAN LLYWELYN

  For Slaney and Lucia O’Brien

  John Bowden

  James Langan

  The story is told by the two main characters – Aoife, daughter of Dermot Mac Murrough, and Richard de Clare, who was called Strongbow. They give their account every second chapter.

  Contents

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Aoife A Wild Creature

  2 Richard Preparing for a Hard Life

  3 Aoife An Insult to the King of Brefni

  4 Richard Kings Have Ways of Getting Even

  5 Aoife Urla’s Wedding

  6 Richard Death of a Wife

  7 Aoife Fire!

  8 Richard A Visitor from Ireland

  9 Aoife Promises of Help

  10 Richard A Kingdom of My Own

  11 Aoife Terrible News

  12 Richard Gathering Fighting Men

  13 Aoife A King’s Daughter

  14 Richard Facing King Henry II

  15 Aoife Normans at Baginbun

  16 Richard I’ve Come to Be a King

  17 Aoife Meeting a Future Husband

  18 Richard A Strange Irish Custom

  19 Aoife The Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow

  20 Richard A Golden Land

  21 Aoife Dermot Destroyed

  22 Richard A New King in Leinster

  23 Aoife Waiting for News

  24 Richard Siege at Dublin

  25 Aoife Holding Out

  26 Richard A Rival to Henry II

  27 Aoife The Visit of Henry

  28 Richard Tales of Aoife’s Deeds

  29 Aoife Faded Hopes

  Epilogue Red Eva

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  AOIFE

  A Wild Creature

  When I was a little girl I didn’t know my father was a monster. He wasn’t a monster in those days, he was simply Father, a dark man with a curly beard. His beard tickled my neck when he nuzzled me, pretending to be a bear. In his growly bear-voice he’d say, ‘I’m going to eat you up, Aoife. First your shoulder, then your arm, then every tender little finger. Grrr!’

  This was an old game with us. ‘Help, help!’ I’d cry. ‘Will anyone save me from this savage bear?’

  Then Father would change from his bear-voice to his Father-voice that always made me feel safe and warm. ‘I’ll save you, Aoife,’ he’d promise. ‘No bear will eat you! No harm will come to you! Not while Dermot of Leinster lives.’ And he’d lift me high in his arms and swing me around and around, the two of us laughing and happy together.

  That was Father.

  Dermot Mac Murrough, King of Leinster, must have been a different man, though they lived in the same skin. When my father rode off to do king-things I thought he was making other people happy the way he made me happy. I didn’t know, in those days, that there were people who feared and hated him. I never imagined that in years to come his name would be used to frighten naughty children.

  I never dreamt my father would someday be called a monster.

  I didn’t understand what it meant to be a king. I thought other people lived as we did, in palaces of stone with solar rooms to let in the sun so the women could sew. I thought everyone had warm clothes dyed bright colours, and arm rings of silver and copper, and gold balls to fasten their hair. Just like us.

  When Father had to be away, he always came back with gifts for his families. His first family was that of his senior wife, Mor, of the clan O’Toole. She and her children had the best chambers. Mor’s brother Laurence was an important priest, the Abbot of Glendalough, who would become Archbishop of Dublin one day. Father had held him hostage once, before any of us were born, and they had been friends ever since. That, I suppose, was why Father married his sister.

  Father’s second family was that of Sive, of the clan O’Faolain, who was my mother. Kings needed to have a lot of children, so they could have more than one wife. Father even had a son called Donal whose mother wasn’t a wife of his at all. Donal Mac Murrough Kavanaugh didn’t live with us, but he often came to visit us at Ferns. He was Father’s oldest son, and beloved.

  Father loved me most, though. Once he came back from Dublin with a Norse pony the colour of the sun, with a creamy mane and tail. It was so beautiful we all wanted it, but he gave it to me.

  ‘This is for my merry girl, my Aoife,’ Father said.

  My big sister Urlacam – Urla for short – stuck out her tongue at me behind his back. But she wouldn’t have ridden the pony much anyway. She had grown lazy and stayed indoors most of the time, fussing with her clothes and her hair.

  I was never lazy. I’m sure that Donal and my brothers Enna and Conor never had as many adventures as I did. I went everywhere on my pony. I was awake and out under the Leinster sky almost every morning before the sun was up. I loved to gallop across the damp meadows on a summer morning, feeling the wet grass brush my bare legs. My pony loved it, too. He’d shake his thick mane and toss his head and I’d laugh out loud, I felt so good.

  Once the pony threw me off and broke my arm. It hurt terribly, worse than a giant toothache. I didn’t want Father to see me cry, though, so I set my jaw and tried to smile. He smiled back at me.

  ‘My brave Aoife,’ he said.

  A local bone-setter took care of servants and farmers when they broke bones, but because Father was a king he had his own physician. The man was an ollav, the best of his profession, and he was sent for.

  The ollav tugged and pulled at my arm. White lights flashed in my eyes and my ears began to ring. Father had gone off somewhere by then. No one saw me cry but the ollav and my sister Urla, who was spying on me as always.

  The ollav bound my arm to a board carved with healing symbols, then wrapped it in cloths covered with a thick paste of soot and egg white and pounded comfrey root. It smelled awful.

  ‘Your arm will heal in a moon’s time,’ the ollav promised, patting my cheek. His hands were very soft. ‘Do you know what your name means, Aoife?’ he asked.

  Urla said quickly, ‘It means ugly because she has such big bones, like a horse, and such bright red hair.’

  The ollav frowned at my sister. ‘You’re wrong,’ he told her. ‘Aoife means radiant, beautiful.’

  Father’s physician had called me beautiful, and he should know. He was an educated man, not an ignorant bone-setter with rough hands! That was when I began to understand that being a king made Father special. Kings were surrounded by men like the ollav.

  My arm healed. I forgot the pain. I rode my pony again and didn’t let it throw me off. Father gave me a glass ball the colour of rainbows as a reward. Then he gave me a little wooden box with two leaves hinged together, each holding a tablet of wax.

  ‘Under the law, a king’s daughter may be taught to read and write,’ he told me. ‘You’re to scribe your letters in this.’ He gave me a pointed stick called a stylus and showed me how.

  You see? My father was not a monster. He had become King of Leinster when he was only sixteen years old, and everyone had envied him. He had been through some hard times. But he was respected at home in Ferns, and his families loved him.

  As a child, I played all the t
ime. I played ball and chase-me and all-fall-down with my brothers and my little sister Dervla. I played with the servants’ children too, and they taught me how to fish and to climb trees. My brother Enna, who was often sickly, taught me a song about a blue cow.

  We ate our meals at tables of oak in the great hall. Some of the servants would smile at me when passing the food. I always smiled back. They were like part of the family, in a way. They were members of clans tributary to Father. Tributary means that their clans were not as important in Leinster as Father’s clan, and so had to pay tribute to him. Sometimes that meant sending him servants for his houses. He always took very good care of these people, just as he did of us.

  The servants didn’t dress as well as we did, of course. To keep our feet warm in cold weather we wore cuarans of soft leather, with pointed toes. But servants went barefoot in all weathers.

  So did I – when my mother wasn’t watching. I loved to run barefoot with my long hair blowing behind me. When Mother caught me she would cluck her tongue and shake her head, and fasten my hair into horrible thick plaits that hung down my back like ropes.

  But I found a way to enjoy those plaits. I loved playing rough games with the boys, because I hated to sit in the solar, sewing, like Urla. Once when my brothers and the servants’ sons were playing a game of war, I picked up some long, narrow, sharp stones. I ran them through the plaits of my hair. When I spun around, the weighted plaits swung around me in a wide circle. No one dared come close to me, for fear of being hit in the face with them. A grand weapon!

  My mother came outside and saw me, and shouted, ‘You could hurt someone, Aoife!’

  ‘I’m not trying to hurt anyone, we’re just having fun.’

  Mother put her hands on her hips and scowled. ‘Really, Aoife, I don’t know what will become of you. Sometimes you’re like a wild creature.’

  But when she told Father the story, he laughed.

  Chapter 2

  RICHARD

  Preparing for a Hard Life

  I was christened Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, and my father had every reason to expect I would one day hold his title as Earl of Pembroke. But I was born into a hard time.

  My earliest memories are of battle tales. Every detail of war was discussed in my father’s hall until the firelight seemed to reflect blood-red on the walls. I had bad dreams at night, and thought the world was filled with death and killing. I never felt safe.

  ‘You still don’t look much like a warrior,’ my father said after my legs lengthened and I became tall. ‘You have a womanish face. And all those freckles. Your skin should be hard and brown from being out in all weathers, not dappled like an egg. Like a child’s. And your voice! Why hasn’t your voice changed? Why am I cursed with a son who has a high voice?’

  ‘I can’t make my voice change,’ I told him. ‘I would if I could, but I can’t.’

  ‘You do it to annoy me,’ he said coldly.

  It was important to my father that I be a warrior like himself. ‘Our family won their lands fighting against the savage Welsh,’ he often reminded me. ‘We proved to be better warriors, we Normans. Your ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror, remember that, Richard. You bear a proud name. Your great-grandfather fought with William against the Saxons, and won. Now we fight in the king’s name against the Welsh, and we win. We always win. Remember that, Richard. We are Normans, we always win.’ His voice was as hard as flint. He believed what he was telling me.

  ‘How can anyone win all the time?’ I wondered.

  But he didn’t answer my question.

  For a while, we did win against the Welsh. Fighting them was my father’s whole life. My mother explained it to me. ‘The King of England, King Stephen, has made your father Earl of Pembroke as a reward for his services in holding this land against the Welsh,’ she told me. ‘With the title, your father has been given a large grant of land, making us very wealthy.’

  ‘But didn’t that land belong to the Welsh before?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘It did, and they still want it back. The Welsh are strange people, Richard. They are Celts, and like the Irish Celts, they love the land for its own sake. To us it is property. To them it is something more than that.’

  As Earl of Pembroke, my father was one of the Marcher lords, sworn to defend the western borders in the king’s name. The western borderland was called the Welsh Marches.

  ‘The name even sounds like soldiers and battle,’ I said once to my father.

  ‘Don’t be fanciful,’ he snapped.

  I never said anything like that to him again.

  My father had to fight more than the wild Welsh. The nobles of England were always fighting among themselves, too. Everyone wanted more power. It wasn’t easy, choosing sides. If you chose the wrong side you could lose everything.

  When I was only ten years old my father began saying to me, ‘If I am ever killed in battle, Richard, it will be up to you to defend our property and our name. Remember that!’

  Long before I was fifteen, which was the usual age for a boy to take up arms, he said to me, ‘I made my name with the Welsh longbow. It’s time you learned to use the same weapon. I am called Strongbow and you must be Strongbow after me, Richard.’

  He didn’t ask me if I wanted to be Strongbow. He was, so I must be.

  ‘Can’t I have a nickname of my own?’ I asked my mother. It was easier to ask my mother things than to talk to my father. She listened to me.

  ‘You must be proud to bear his name,’ she told me. ‘His family belongs to him, you know. I do, you do, we all do. Like his lands,’ she added. ‘That is the law.’

  For the first time, I heard a sadness in my mother’s voice. I wondered if she liked belonging to my father, like his lands and his horse. She was so gentle. Was it hard for her, being a warrior’s wife?

  But I couldn’t ask her that.

  Learning to use the longbow was very hard. I was too young, and didn’t have enough strength. I did my best, but it wasn’t good enough.

  ‘You aren’t trying, Richard!’ my father yelled at me. ‘You disgrace me!’

  ‘I am trying,’ I insisted. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  ‘Then your best isn’t good enough,’ he said coldly. He turned his back and walked away. That hurt worse than his yelling at me.

  I tried harder.

  Sometimes the bowstring tore the skin from my fingers. It felt as if I had put my hand into fire. I sucked my fingers to draw out the pain, and ran to my mother. ‘Poor little lad,’ she always said. If my father wasn’t around, she would take me into her arms and comfort me.

  ‘I’ll sing you a song about Normandy,’ she said. ‘A song about warm summers and blue skies, the way Normandy was in my girlhood. Would you like that, my little lad?’ She kissed my hurt fingers and stroked my hair and sang, and the pain eased.

  Our castle was cold and dark, with thick stone walls and narrow slits for shooting arrows out at the enemy. The castle wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. It was built to defend us, to defend England from the wild Welsh. It was one of the Marcher castles that were set all along the border with Wales. My mother hated it.

  ‘There are no flowers here,’ she’d say.

  But Father wouldn’t let her have gardens. ‘To tend gardens you would have to be in the open,’ he said, ‘and it isn’t safe to be in the open. A spear could come over even the highest wall.’

  Our castle had a keep, a safe place, in its centre, with a hall and chambers where we slept. It had high walls and towers where soldiers took turns day and night, watching for the enemy. We all learned to think about the enemy more than we thought about each other. Every day I imagined the eyes of the wild Welsh, watching us from the mountains.

  I was told terrible stories about them. ‘The Celtic people are savages,’ my father said many times. ‘They should all be slain to make the land safe for civilised people.’

  But my mother told me, ‘The Welsh are not monsters, Richard. The maidservant wh
o takes care of my clothing is half Welsh, and you couldn’t find a sweeter girl.’

  She summoned the maidservant. ‘Sing for Richard,’ she said.

  The girl blushed and stared at her feet. ‘I can only sing a little, but I can say poetry.’

  ‘Say it then,’ my mother ordered.

  And so I heard for the first time the language of the wild Welsh, and it was sweet and beautiful, like water running over stones.

  My mother was proud of her servant. ‘She can read and write,’ she told me.

  ‘Read? And write?’ I was astonished. I didn’t know anyone who could read and write, except the priests. It seemed a magical thing to me, a gift from God. My mother thought so too. ‘I wish I could read a little, so I could read my prayer book,’ she confided in me.

  ‘Would Father let you learn?’

  She was shocked. ‘Your father cannot read. He would certainly not want me to. That’s not a woman’s place.’

  Yet a Welsh servant could do it. I puzzled over this. Perhaps, I thought in my bed at night, God was on the side of the Welsh. Perhaps that was why they were beginning to win against the Marcher lords from time to time.

  When they had some small victory my father despised them more than ever.

  Not all of the Normans hated the Welsh as much as my father did. Some Normans even married Welsh women. But when Father saw me talking to mother’s maidservant he took me out into the courtyard and beat me.

  ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ he shouted at me. ‘They’re savages. You’re better than they are.’

  Then he got rid of the woman. I never knew how. He owned her, he could do anything he liked with her.

  Afterwards, my mother began to fade away. Her face got very thin and there were dark rings under her eyes. Then they kept her shut up in her chamber and I wasn’t allowed to see her, though I waited outside all day in the cold passageway.