Quest of Hope(7)
Weyer was an ancient community, settled in the shadows of the distant past by wandering Celts and Frankish tribesmen. Lubentius of Trier, a faithful monk who brought the first light of Christianity to the smoky village, had long since chased its pagan gods into the dark forests. Then, in the Year of Grace 790, Charlemagne granted the monks of distant Prüm a large, triangular manor of land marked at its easternmost point by the tiny village. Those monks soon established a new cloister to shepherd the land and its peasant folk.
A soaring hawk would see the haphazard collection of cottages, sheds, barns, and workshops that lay in a narrow flat of land between a stream to the southeast and a slope to the northwest. A clear-flowing stream, the Laubusbach, ambled past Weyer and the nearby village of Oberbrechen, eventually joining the Lahn River at the opposite boundary of the monks’ manorlands. The opposing slope rose rather steeply to form a long ridge, broken by a protruding knoll, atop of which stood the church.
The main road led into the village from the southwest and forked at the base of the church hill. One side bent to the right around the village and led eastward away from the monks’ lands into another lord’s manor and the village of Münster. The other bent left and headed northwest, over the ridge and through the heart of the abbey’s lands to a monastery alongside the village of Villmar.
Little more than an hour’s tramp from Weyer, Villmar was equally ancient and sat peacefully along the northern boundary of the abbey’s manorlands. A small cloister of Prüm’s monks settled there, but soon the see of Mainz took control. In 1165, with additional grants of land from Emperor Friederich Barbarossa, the Benedictine monastery became residence to an abbot, making it the Abbey of Villmar—a fledgling manor of some thirteen thousand hectares and eight villages, including Weyer, with approximately three thousand land-bound residents and a handful of free yeomen.
Wise to the ways of a dangerous world, the Archbishop of Mainz had insisted that his abbot in Villmar negotiate an alliance with the lord of the nearby castle of Runkel. For generations, Runkel’s lords ruled vast holdings of lands adjoining Villmar’s manor and maintained alliances with others. The decision to hire them as the abbey’s protectors had proven to be a shrewd choice.
Forested with beech and oak, pungent spruce and pine, sweet linden and ash, the soil of the abbey’s manor yielded generously, though stubbornly, to the plough, and its virile streams could turn the abbot’s new mills with ease. The region quickly became known as the “Golden Ground,” for it was rich and ripe and profitable. The simple villagers of these manorlands served dutifully, submitting to the seasons and the order of things as they supplied stores of wool, mutton, hides, timber, slate, fruits, grains, and pork to the abbot who ruled them for the good of all.
Perhaps this ground was golden for some, but it was not easy land for the folk born and bound to it. It seemed oft to yield as much stone as grain, and while stone might make a fitting church, it weighs heavily upon the faith of the ploughman. And such labors were not all that bore upon these simple folk. Beset by storm and famine, pestilence and plague, the quick-forgotten souls who filled the abbey’s villages had little choice but to yield themselves to their pitiful place and time. For them the world was but shadows and eventide. And they, like their sluggish oxen, dared not turn against the yoke. Most of these poor and weary wretches spent their days with faces bent toward the earth, ever pressing their aching legs against hard-won furrows. Fenced by fear of both life and death, they dared hope for little else than a secure soul and a few moments of joy before they were returned to darkness just beneath the very earth they sweated and bled upon.
The despair of winter had taken full hold of Weyer by late February of 1174. Baldric blustered about the forests as the woodward’s helper, seeing to the foresters’ harvest of winter timber, keeping a close watch on crews of charcoalers, and giving special heed to poachers culling deer and wolf and fox from his master’s lands.
In this frozen month Baldric was to be wed to a young woman named Hildrun whom his father Jost had chosen a year earlier in exchange for the forgiveness of a debt. Baldric reluctantly pledged her a fair dowry of two shillings, a small gold broach, two rams, and six ewes. Should Baldric die, it would secure her until another husband could be found.
Weyer’s priest had urged Jost to delay the wedding. After all, it was the Season of Lent and the carnal pleasures of marriage were thought unseemly for this time of denial. But Jost, conscious of his own mortality and not wanting to lose his bargain through delay, ignored the priest’s counsel. So, on a cold winter’s morning in late February, Baldric of Weyer and Hildrun of Villmar were wed within a circle of their kin in the snow by the village well. Given the priest’s objections, none dared stand in the doorway of the church according to the new custom. In fact, the priest was asked not to attend and he was happy to oblige. Instead, as in former times, Jost and Hildrun’s father heard the vows and pronounced the matrimony. Baldric then tread his foot upon his bride’s and the deed was done—for better or for worse.