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

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duel between a certain Earl of Salisbury and a Bishop of Salisbury, under the supposed King Edward III,
found that the bishop's champion had prayers and incantations sewn all over him, under bis armourтАФ
which was almost as bad as a boxer biding a horse-shoe in his glove. Below the window-ledge a pair of
constipated papal nuncios might have been riding gloomily back to Rome. Such a pair were once sent
with bulls to excommunicate Barnabas Visconti, but Barnabas only made them eat their bullsтАФ
parchment, ribbons, leaden seals and all. Following closely behind them perhaps there would have
strode a professional pilgrim, supporting himself on a stout knobbed staff shod like an alpenstock and
weighed down with blessed medals, relics, shells, vernicles and so forth. He would have called himself a
palmer and, if he were a well-travelled one, his relics might have included a feather from the Angel
Gabriel, some of the coals on which St. Lawrence was grilled, a finger of the Holy Ghost "whole and
sound as ever it was," "a vial of the sweat of St. Michael whereas he fought with the devil," a little of
"the bush in which the Lord spake to Moses," a vest of St. Peter's, or some of the Blessed Virgin's milk
preserved at Walsingham. After the palmer perhaps there would have prowled a rather more sinister
figure: one of those who "sleep by day and watch by night, eat well and drink well, but possess nothing."
He would be an outlaw, of whom they wrote:
"For an outlawe this is the lawe, that men hym take and binde
Wythout pytee, hanged to bee, and waver with the wynde."
But before he came to his last wavering in the wind, he would have lived a free life. His mate would be
marching sturdily beside him, also with a price on her headтАФher hair shaven off before she took to the
woods, and known as a weyve. She would glance back occasionally, alert for the hue and cry with which
they might be hunted.
Here might come a baron with a hot pie carried carefully before him, because he had to bring such a pie
to the King once a year, so as to let King Arthur sniff it in payment of his feudal dues. There might go
another baron at full tilt after some dragon or other, and bump! down he might come, while the horse
cantered away. But if he did so, one of his attendants would immediately mount him again on bis own
horseтАФjust as we would do to a master-of-hounds todayтАФbecause that was the feudal law. In the
distance of the north, under the fading sunset, there might spring up the cottage light of some busy witch
who was not only making a wax image of somebody she disapproved of, but also getting the image
baptisedтАФthis was the operative factorтАФbefore she stuck some pins into it. One of her priestly friends,
by the way, who had gone to the Little Master, might be willing to say a Requiem Mass against anybody
you wanted to dispose ofтАФand, when he came to the "Requim aetemum dona ei, Domine," he would
mean it, although the man was alive. Equally distant in the west, under the same sunset, you might have


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seen Enguerrand de Marigny, who built the enormous gallows at Mountfalcon, himself rotting and
clanking on the same gallows, because he had been found guilty of Black Magic. The Dukes of Berry
and Brittany, two decent men, might have been trotting along the road, in satin cuirasses which imitated
steel. These two did not like to accept the advantage of armour, and, finding the satin cooler to wear,
they were determined to be ordinary and brave. Lancelot might have done the same sort of thing. Above
them on the hillside, but unobserved by them, might have sat Joly Joly Wat, with his tar-box beside him.
He was the most typical figure of Gramarye, his tar being the antiseptic of his sheep. If you had said to
him, "Don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar," he would have agreed with you at onceтАФfor it was he