Not like these Norman vermin-call them what you like: Franks, Ffreinc, or Normans, they're all the same. Lords of the Earth, they trow. Lords of Perdition, more like. Hold themselves precious as stardust and fine as diamonds. Dressed in their gold-crusted rags, they flounce about the land, their bloody minds scheming mischief all the while. From the moment a Norman noble opens his eye on the day until that same eye closes at night, the highborn Frankish man is, in Aelred's words, "a walking scittesturm" for anyone unlucky enough to cross his path.
A Norman knight lives only for hunting and whoring, preening and warring. And their toad-licking priests are just as bad. Even the best of their clerics are no better than they should be. I wouldn't spare the contents of my nose on a rainy day to save the lot of them… Sorry, Odo, but that is God's own truth, groan as you will to hear it. Write it down all the same.
"If it please you, what is scittesturm?" Odo wants to know.
"Ask a Saxon," I tell him. "If bloody Baron de Braose hasn't killed them all yet, you'll learn quick enough." But there we are. Aelred is gone now. He had the great misfortune to believe the land his father had given him-land owned and worked by his father's father, and the father's father before that-belonged to him and his forever. A dangerous delusion, as it turns out.
For when William the Conqueror snatched the throne of England and made himself the Law of the Land, he set to work uprooting the deep-grown offices and traditions that time and the stump-solid Saxons had planted and maintained since their arrival on these fair shores-offices and traditions which bound lord and vassal in a lockstep dance of loyalty and service, sure, but also kept the high and mighty above from devouring the weak and poorly below.