Quest of Hope(83)

Heinrich stood by his doorstep where he waited for the birth to be announced. A dog barked in the distant wood and Marta cried out in pain. He listened as the midwife calmed her, and then he waited some more. Heinrich grimaced as Marta screamed again, and then again. At long last, a baby’s cry was heard and in moments the midwife came out of the doorway wiping her hands on a blood-stained apron. She was weary but relieved. “He’d be a strong-lookin’lad and has a good cry. All is well, Heinrich. He can wait till the morn for the baptism.”

So, soon after the bells of prime, a beaming Heinrich and his household stood once again in Weyer’s church as Father Pious claimed another soul for Christendom. The babe was baptized Johann Wilhelm.





Soon after the snowy days of the Epiphany in the year 1196, Heinrich’s father-in-law, Dietrich the miller, was elected the reeve of Weyer. He had not particularly wanted the job but Arnold thought it would be of strategic value. Dietrich was not a popular candidate, and his election was secured only by the threats of Woodward Arnold. Dietrich’s reputation for cunning and for deception was renown, and he was not the sort of man the monks wished to have in charge of one of their manors. But Villmar left such matters in the hands of their Volk; it was wise and prudent and helped keep the order of things despite the dubious tenure of any one man.

Dietrich’s election cast a pall upon the village and scorn upon its elders. It was feared to be an omen of more troubles yet to come. So the coming of planting was greeted with a mixture of tension and hope. In such a state it was fear that always ruled the day, however. News of mad Lord Tomas’s death added a portion of dread. He, of course, had held the lands along the abbey’s eastern and southeastern borders. His heir was Conrad, Tomas’s second-born son who resided at the family estate in Thurungia. The young knight was thought to be ambitious, and all eyes were turned eastward. The first aggressive act of the new lord was to arrest a roving clan of Lord Klothar’s shepherds who had been caught stealing sheep near Kummenau along the Lahn. Lord Tomas had complained to Lord Klothar for years that his subjects were crossing the border to raid flocks, but his entreaties had fallen on disinterested ears. Young Conrad would have none of it. His soldiers snared their prey in early April, hanging nine men and capturing numbers of women and children who were sold into exile in the marshes of Poland.

For Arnold, the news was devastating. “Gunnars!” Indeed, it was so. The family for whom Arnold had borne such hatred was gone and with it all purpose for the woodward’s miserable life.

“Audacious!” roared Klothar. “Conrad is as mad as his father. Next he’ll encroach on Villmar’s lands; I can smell it!”

It was true. The concerns of the abbey at Villmar and its ally in Runkel were not unfounded, though perhaps overstated. Nevertheless, the abbot and his prior spent urgent hours in council with Lord Klothar’s steward and captains. A plan of defense was hastily drawn and Klothar was forced to hire mercenaries to support his knights in the expected attack. However, while they prepared themselves for Lord Conrad in the east, their allies in the west, the Templars, had plans of their own.

The preceptor of the Templars’ holding in Lauken was Brother Phillipe de Blanqfort. He had received orders from his master in Paris to claim the manors that bordered the Emsbach, including the villages of Lindenholz and Eschoffen currently under control of the abbey. These lands, it was argued, had been the rightful, legal property of Emperor Heinrich IV many years prior and had been illegally seized by the Archbishop of Mainz. To further their claim, a papal legate presented the archbishop and the abbot in Villmar with a directive demanding the release of these manors to the Templars.

The news was a blow to the abbot. The contested wedge of land was blessed with rich soil and wide fields. It was part of the “Golden Ground” necessary to sustain the abbey, and its loss would reduce Villmar’s income by at least fifteen percent, just at a time when the treasury was badly depleted by the flood. Abbot Stephen might be able to negotiate for lands elsewhere—his vision could not possibly be limited to the confines of a shrinking manor—but he would not yield this land easily. He dispatched his prior to Mainz with a biting letter of consent to be delivered to the papal legate. Then he turned to Klothar and reduced his pledged fees by twenty percent, “for it is likely you shall have less to protect and defend,” he wrote.

The furious lord raged about his castle in Runkel and ordered the withdrawal of the mercenaries so recently sent to defend the abbey’s lands in the east. “Less to protect and defend? You’d be right in those words!” So, by early June, Weyer and its neighbors along the Laubusbach were left with little more than a handful of grumbling sergeants, one knight of Runkel, and the watchful eyes of a few Templars.