AD 1401, North Wales, near the English border
“Mam?”1 Seven-year-old Adain Owens lifted her head sleepily. Wooden bars met her eyes, and beyond them, a burning wasteland in the distance. The wasteland was no great surprise—war had long since turned the fertile country into a desert filled with famine and disease.
Adain’s father was a merchant, not a wealthy man by any means, but their home was comfortable. Their small town had suffered since Glendowen’s uprising, but their home was still intact and they had a sense of normalcy in their day-to-day. Her last memory was falling asleep in her bed to her mother’s lullaby.
Being out here under the open sky in the grey dawn, behind bars, with no home in sight came as a shock to the little girl. A camp of rough men surrounded her, or rather a bivouac. There were few tents and the soldiers seemed to be preparing to move on.
“Mam?” she repeated, looking around wide-eyed. Fear shivered up her spine. She was in a caged wagon filled with other children, some awake and silent, others sobbing. A few still slept. At her side, a boy spoke.
“I think your mother will not come, geneth.”2
“Why?” She turned to see him, and for a moment forgot her fear in her curiosity. He was older than her but looked to be a peasant. He was dirty, his clothes torn, and his dark hair unkempt. Adain was blonde, but they shared the blue eyes common among their people.
“They got us as prisoners, don’t you see?” He slammed his hand against the wooden bars, winced, and looked at his hand. A splinter was stuck in it. He pulled it out with his teeth and sucked at the bleeding spot, talking around his hand. “They got you before me. Came at night, burned the house. Dunno what they did to everyone else. I tried to keep ’em back long enough for my brother and sisters to get away. They probably did. I dunno. Hope so.”
Adain stared at him, surprised as much by his nonchalance as the tale he told. “But when will they let us go?”
The boy shrugged. “Who says they will? The English care nothing for us.” He pulled his hand out of his mouth and reached for hers. She hesitated a second, then let him take it. He raised it to his lips gently. “My mam taught me to do that when I greet a lady,” he commented. “My name’s Rhys. Rhys Fletcher.” He gestured to a child-size quiver that hung at his side. “I make arrows and stuff with my tad.”3
“You make them?” She fingered a hole in the sleeve of her dress. “Then can you not make something for us to escape with?”
“I would.” Rhys puffed his small chest out and turned to look out the bars, his face pensive and older than his years. “I would fight them all and get us all free. But they broke my bow when they took me.” His shoulders slumped. “Tad would have never let them take his.”
“He sounds good. Like mine,” Adain said. She shivered in the cold dawn, and her eyes filled with tears. “I miss my mam.”
Rhys pulled his torn cloak off and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Don’t cry, geneth.” He reached into his quiver and pulled out an arrow, snapped it in half, and handed one half to her. “Keep this. If they don’t let us go, I’ll get us free.”
“Promise?” She looked up at him, wiping her damp cheeks.
“Promise.”
A knight walking nearby struck the bars with his spear. “Quiet in there!”
Adain leaned close to Rhys and whispered, “My name’s Adain Owens. So you can find me if they take you somewhere else.”
AD 1444, Romney Marsh, Kent, England
“I still have the arrow my father gave my mother,” Ralph said as the story wound down. He shrugged. “He never did free them. The two were separated for a time, but when they grew up they found each other again. Eventually, they were allowed to marry. There was no leaving with a family in tow. I was born a year after they married, then later my sisters.”
“Born into slavery,” Tiffany whispered.
“Yes.” Ralph had pulled his hood over his face early on in his story, his only movement since he had taken his seat with the others. He sat like a statue, his low, clear voice seeming to echo around them. “Not a hard slavery, usually.”
“What do you define as hard?” Walter asked. He gestured. “You keep your hands wrapped. Old injury?”
“Observant,” Gilbert said, quirking an eyebrow at him approvingly.
“I have my good points,” Walter answered and looked back at Ralph, waiting for an answer. Ralph was curling and uncurling his hands thoughtfully. Hands which, Gil now noticed, were indeed wound with strips of either some kind of cloth or thin leather from his forearm to his palm and around the first two fingers of his right hand.
“Hard . . .” Ralph began. “Hard is when you don’t want to keep going—when you feel like you have to shatter or give up—but,” he sighed. “Giving up is not an option.”
“Ralph.” Tiffany rolled her eyes—characteristic of her, but it seemed forced. “Your hands?”
“Old injury,” he said abruptly. “Scars look awful. The wrapping keeps me warm and serves well as a finger guard when I’m shooting.”
“And they would be recognized, would they not?”
Ralph’s head lifted at Walter’s question. “Yes,” he said simply. “They would.”
Gilbert let out a slow breath. “So, who is after you, Ralph?”
“My master.”
“No, wait,” Walter interrupted, rubbing at his forehead. “Is slavery not illegal in England?”
“What do you think serfs are?” Tiffany snapped.
“Not quite right, Tiff,” Ralph stopped her. “Serfs, villeins, they have a sort of slavery, true, but not the same.”
“Anything to keep from calling it what it is,” Gilbert said under his breath.
“They have rights,” Ralph said flatly. “Maybe not the same as you, but they do have rights. A slave like me does not. I have no protection by the law because I don’t exist according to the law.”
“If the law does not recognize you, how can you be retaken?” Ansel asked.
“In the eyes of the law, thanks to my master’s word, I am a household servant wanted for a theft I did not commit.”
The words were said with irony, but Gilbert’s throat tightened at the pain behind those words. “How are you free, Ralph?”
“Why is a better question.” He shifted in his seat and his hood slipped lower, completely concealing his face. “We had a good life, so far as it goes. My sisters were happy, my parents were happy. They did as they were told. I tried.” Ralph’s volume dropped, and his voice grew husky. “Had to stick up for another slave. Justice. Precious little of it to go around for men on the bottom.”
“What happened?” Ansel asked.
“I was punished. I had crossed my master before; I knew it would happen again. So, I left. Laid low nearby until I was sure my family wouldn’t reap the consequences of my leaving, then I moved on. Had no idea I’d been listed as an outlaw till I was picked up in Portsmouth. Aleric pulled me out of that mess. We dodged trouble until we reached here. I might have gone off again straightaway if I had not met Tiff.”
“Tiffany Agnes Marsden,” she muttered under her breath, but the protest was only halfhearted.
Walter started fidgeting in the silence that followed the end of Ralph’s story, then jumped to his feet suddenly, sending the falcon in his lap fluttering into a tree. He began pacing the patch of firm ground around them.
“’Tisn’t right,” he said, and Gilbert could hear his suppressed fury. “That one man should suffer under another or go through unspeakable tortures.” He looked sharply at Ralph. “For that is what you meant by injury, did you not? The men of our time are not known for their kindness, even toward those they lay no claim to.” Ralph’s hood bobbed once, settling lower as though he had now fixed his eyes on the ground. “If I had but been there!” Walter went on, his voice rising. “I would have put a stop to it. My mother—” he broke off. He continued to pace in silence, and Gilbert found himself counting the steps. One, two, three, four. Turn. One, two, three, four. Turn again. One, two, three—
“I have not been one to do so before,” Walter said at last, his voice heavy and contemplative. “I have ever seen others as dust under my feet, to be trodden upon if it serves my purpose. I would not have ordered it, but neither would I have put a stop to it. I have raved at those who offended me. How would I be expected to lift my voice to protect them?”
“You have had little choice in that, from what I have heard,” Gilbert said mildly.
“You control it,” Walt shot back. “Keep a perfect rein on it—on the rage, the selfishness. It boils, perhaps, but never spills over.”
“I have practiced since childhood so that I rarely feel the urge to ‘spill over,’ as you put it.” Gilbert hesitated, though he knew what he wished to say next, knowing his friend was already agitated. Ansel and Tiffany were watching. Ralph had said nothing since he finished his tale, just kept his head bowed, silent and motionless.
Gilbert spoke slowly, carefully, hoping Walter would hear him. “I would struggle more, no doubt, were it not—”
“If you are about to say anything about God, you can stop now,” Walter interrupted. “I have no wish to hear of a God who would take children from their homes and subject them to living death, them and their children. How can such a God be good?”
In one fluid motion, Ralph stood and threw off his hood. His cheeks glistened with tears, but his eyes glinted like stars reflected in a deep well.
“How can such a God be good? A valid question. Aye, and one I have even pondered myself. Where is His goodness in the darkness? That he is with us in the darkness. As the Psalmist says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’4 Is it so hard to see that He works all things for good? Not always a present good, not always one we can see in the moment. For we are mortal, and the gift of prophecy is not given to all, nor does one word from the Lord encompass every trial we may face. At times, we mmmust walk blindly in the pain, putting one foot in front of the next in the dark and trusting, praying, that we will live to see light on the other side in this life. We wonder how it could be for good, how we will heal. Sometimes we never fully do, other times we are left scarred and changed.”
Ralph’s voice grew louder, seeming to flash about and fill the space around them as the sound bounced between the trees. “But when we look back, then is when we see what we could not before. That though we suffered, we are stronger for it now. That every battle prepared us for something ahead. That every misstep was turned to his plan, and every time we stumbled or turned aside, not only did He see it, lift us from the mire, and set forth again at our sides, but each delay or change in the road brought us to where we stand now. Would I have stepped foot from my parents’ home were I not punished for doing right by another? Would I have come here were I not imprisoned before setting sail for Italy? Would I have stayed and been here to help and guide you if Tiffany had needed no protector—though she detests the fact? That God cares, that He is good, and that He loves us through our lowest times is something I think only those who know suffering can fully know the depth of. It is forgetting Him in the good times that blinds us to His presence in the bad.”
Walter had stopped pacing, facing Ralph with his jaw clenched. The others were on their feet as well.
“If you hear nothing else I say, hear this.” Ralph unwound the long strips from his hands as he spoke and lifted them into the light. An ugly spiderweb of scars spread across them. “The day my hands were broken was the day my faith was forged.”
A Note from the Author
In the year 1401, over a thousand Welsh children were taken by the English.5 England and Northern Wales were at war again, the result of an uprising by Owen Glendower, and the children paid the price. Without becoming an actual expert on the subject in order to write a single chapter of a serial story, I dug into slavery in England just a bit when I came across this. In the story, Walter questioned the legality of slavery. That was a complicated issue at the time. Chattel slavery was frowned upon and had fallen out of general practice after the Norman Conquest, but slavery still went on in England in various ways long before the transatlantic slave trade entered the scene. Prisoners of war, such as the Welsh and the Irish, were common targets of direct slavery, though some of the records put it more delicately, calling them “servants.” (You know, the kind of servants that are unpaid, forced labor with no rights.) One major difference between actual slaves and serfs, however. though both were “forced labor,” was that there were laws about what a lord could do to a serf under him, including that they couldn’t be sold. They were bound to the land, not to the master. Just as a side note, if you don’t know how criminals, prisoners, slaves, serfs, etc. were punished in the Middle Ages . . . maybe don’t look that up needlessly. I think they specialized in inventing cruelty back then. 🫠
Not to give any spoilers about upcoming novels, but this bit of history will be returning in the future. Some characters might also return . . . we’ll see when we get there, eh? 😅
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Until next time,
Blessings!
~Lexi
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Mam: Welsh for mother.
Geneth: Welsh for girl/little girl.
Tad: Welsh for father.
Psalm 23:4, KJV
“In this autumn, Owen Glendower, all North Wales and Cardigan and Powis siding with him, sorely harried with fire and sword the English who dwelt in those parts, and their towns, and specially the town of Pool. Wherefore the English, invading those parts with a strong power, and utterly laying them waste and ravaging them with fire, famine, and sword, left them a desert, not even sparing children or churches, nor the monastery of Strata-florida, wherein the king himself was being lodged, and the church of which and its choir, even up to the high altar, they used as a stable, and pillaged even the patens; and they carried away into England more than a thousand children of both sexes to be their servants. Yet did the same Owen do no small hurt to the English, slaying many of them, and carrying off the arms, horses, and tents of the king’s eldest son, the prince of Wales, and of other lords, which he bare away for his own behoof to the mountain fastnesses of Snowdon.” —Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421 (Linked)
That was so beautiful! 🥺
Girl!!!!! This was SO GOOD!!!!!!!