"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

below them, under the level rays of sunset.
It was the Gramarye of the Middle Ages, which some people are accustomed to think of as the Dark
Ages, and Arthur had made it what it was. When the old King came to his throne it had been an England
of armoured barons, and of famine, and of war. It had been the country of trial by ordeal with red-hot
irons, of the Law of Englishry, and of the sad, wordless song of Morfa-Rhuddlan. Then, on the sea-
coast, within a foreign vessel's reach, not an animal, not a fruit tree, had been left. Then, in the fens and
the vast forests, the last of the Saxons had defended thelmselves against the bitter rule of Uther the
Conqueror; then the words "Norman" and "Baron" had been equivalent to the modern word of "Sahib";
then Llewellyn ap Griffith's head, in its crown of ivy, had mouldered on the clustered spikes of the

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Tower; then you would have met the mendicants by the roadside, mutilated men who carried their right
hands in their left, and the forest dogs would have trotted beside them, also mutilated by the removal of
one toeтАФso that they could not hunt in the woodlands of the lord. When Arthur first came, the country
people had been accustomed to bar thelmselves in their cottages every night as if for siege, and had
prayed to God for peace during darkness, the goodman of the house repeating the prayers used at sea on
the approach of storm and ending with the plea "the Lord bless us and help us," to which all present had
replied "Amen." In the baron's castle, in the early days, you would have found the poor men being
disembowelledтАФand their living bowels burned before themтАФmen being slit open to see if they had
swallowed their gold, men gagged with notched iron bits, men hanging upside down with their heads in
smoke, others in snake pits or with leather tourniquets round their heads, or crammed into stone-filled
boxes which would break their bones. You have only to turn to the literature of the period, with its
stones of the mythological families such as Plantagenets, Capets and so forth, to see how the land lay.
Legendary kings like John had been, accustomed to hang twenty-eight hostages before dinner; or, like
Philip, had been defended by "sergeants-at-mace," a kind of storm troopers who guarded their lord with
maces; or, like Louis, had decapitated their enemies on scaffolds under the blood of which the children
of the enemy had been forced to stand. This, at all events, is what Ingulf of Croyland used to tell us, until
he was discovered to be a forgery. Then there had been Archbishops nicknamed "Skin-villain," and
churches used as fortsтАФwith trenches in the graveyards among the bonesтАФand price-lists for fining
murderers, and bodies of the excommunicated lying unburied, and famishing peasants eating grass or
tree-bark or one another, (One of them ate forty-eight.) There had been roasting heretics on the one hand
тАФforty-five Templars had been burned in one dayтАФand the heads of captives being thrown into
besieged castles from catapults on the other. Here a leader of the Jacquerie had been writhing in his
chains, as he was crowned with a red-hot tripod. There a Pope had been complaining, as he was held to
ransom, or another one had been wriggling, as he was poisoned. Treasure had been cemented into castle
walls, in the form of gold bars, and the builders had been executed afterwards. Children playing in the
streets of Paris had frolicked with the dead body of a Constable, and others, with the women and old
men, had starved outside the walls of beleaguered towns, yet inside the ring of the besiegers. Hus and
Jerome, with the mitres of apostasy upon their heads, had flamed and fizzled at the stake. The hamstrung
imbeciles of Jumi├иges had floated down the Seine. Giles de Retz had been found to have no less than a
ton of children's bones, calcined, in his castle, after having murdered them at the rate of twelve score a
year for nine years. The Duke of Berry had lost a kingdom through the unpopularity which he earned by
feeling sorry for eight hundred foot soldiers who had been killed in a battle. The youthful count of St.
Pol had been taught the arts of war by being given twenty-four living prisoners to slaughter in various


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