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  • Martin Monahan (bio)

1.

Baldwin of Étaples (1030–1071) was a vassal to Eustace II of Boulogne. They first fought together against Henry III, and then later at Hastings. He is mentioned in the Gesta Guillelmi by William of Poitiers. Baldwin was present, with Eustace, at the raid (against their own ostensible king, William) on Dover Castle in 1067, but is thought to have been a mole for the Crown due to the leniency shown to him after his capture. He was given land in Sussex where he murdered the local gentry. Five of his children survived to adulthood. The eldest son was Ralph of Étaples.

2.

Ralph of Étaples (1050–1101), overlord of Lowbridge, was a cruel man. Having largely autonomous authority during the post-conflict consolidation of the early ’70s, Ralph tried numerous tenants on trumped-up charges ranging from sedition to “daemonic hand clapping.” He married Mary, daughter of a Saxon house. Three daughters survived to adulthood.

3.

Two of these daughters did not have children. The youngest, of whom there is an extant tapestry portrait, died at twenty-one. The middle daughter, Alceste, married John, overlord of Satham (1077–1099), a deeply religious man who was killed in battle against the Seljuq Turks, during the First Crusade. His sacrifice helped to establish permanent mercantile routes across southeastern Europe. The eldest daughter, Adelaide, became abbess at Barking, and is thought to be the primary contributor to the verse cycle, “A Dream of Water and Red” (c. 1101). It is probable that lines 52–55 refer to the death of her brother-in-law, John Satham, with whom she was in love:

. . . and that was the morning when the keeper of the bread returned you to his house which has a large fire and where you are permitted to sing songs.

trans. Thomas Bosenell

4.

Adelaide had a bastard son by John Satham. The boy, who was raised at the abbey, was named John of Barking (1098–1178). Having received a scholastic [End Page 13] education, he became a scribe working at the house of William of Ypres in Kent. He is the second hand of the Rattingham Codex (f. 120r–f. 333v), of which Welsby, in her seminal study, writes:

. . . the text is spacious, with a number of ligatures; abbreviations are common at the end of lines. The opening of each section of the codex begins with an illuminated rectangular headpiece decorated in leafy patterns. Elaborate initials occur throughout: colourful birds and winged beasts, with feathers outstretched to form the bar or arm of a letter; monkeys and other exotic mammals, splayed or curled around themselves to form letters; serpents or smaller animals hang from plant foliage, dangling into the shape of letters.

John Barking would sit in his cell and daydream of creatures contorting into an infinite alphabet. He had one child.

5.

The child, Alan de Neville (1164–1212), was born to Henrietta Nevill of the manor at Raby (though she was wife to Ogden Nevill). Henrietta had sex with John Barking fourteen times during a week’s stay at William of Ypres’s castle in Kent. She slept with William of Ypres too (who, as a consequence, erroneously believed the child to be his, despite an onanistic ejaculation). Cuckoo-like, Alan de Neville, although one of seven, was the only child to survive into adulthood. Inheriting John Barking’s intellect and Ogden Nevill’s money, he spent his life in secluded prayer and scholarship. His largely sexless marriage to Ida, of Northumberland, nevertheless bore fourteen children. The eldest son, James, resenting his father’s hermitage, swore at a young age to be a man of action.

6.

And so, James de Neville (1194–1258), leaving his lands to corvée labor, went on pilgrimage to Europe, settling for a year in Rome in 1218. He wrote a guide book to Rome, under the pseudonym Rufus Angelus, in which he describes his first impressions of the city: “A noisy place, with lots of people. You are likely to be cut-pursed if you do not immediately hire protection.” He adds, enigmatically, that one should “never buy silk indoors.” Returning to England, he...

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