Glendalough Fair Read Online Free Page A

Anyone standing by the placid water and looking out at the green rolling land above could see there was something eternal and mystical there. For two centuries since pilgrims had flocked to that holy place.
    Glendalough had boasted no more than a simple clay and wattle church in the beginning, but it had become home to one of the great monasteries of Ireland, one of the strongholds of faith and learning that had preserved the cumulative knowledge of civilization when the unifying power of Rome had crumbled into warring chaos. Glendalough, rich in the monastic spirit, was now fat with wealth from the herds of cattle that grazed the surrounding fields and the gold and silver and the jewel-encrusted reliquaries that adorned the massive stone cathedral.
    The church was Glendalough’s physical and spiritual center. As solid as a granite outcropping, it rose fifty feet above the trampled ground and stretched for one hundred feet on a line running east to west. The lesser buildings that supported the monastery, monastic cells and guest houses, a cloister made of heavy oak beams roofed with thatch, a library of sorts, the abbot’s house, gathered around the great church like courtiers around a king. The whole was enclosed by a vallum , a low wall meant not for defense but rather to mark the boundary of the sanctuary offered by the monastic community.
    A second low stone wall, two hundred feet from the vallum, encircled the rest of the land that made up the monastery. Within its confines stood the more secular and prosaic of the monastic buildings: the bakery, the kitchen, the creamery, the stables. This outer wall was higher and more substantial than the vallum, but in terms of defense it was only marginally more impressive.
    Beyond the outer wall and huddled up against it was the town that had grown in the shadow of the monastery at Glendalough, a town at least by Irish standards. A few dirt streets – mud now in the incessant rain – ran off like spokes and were crossed here and there by others that met them at various odd angles. Scattered along the streets were sundry small homes with their workshops attached, the blacksmiths and glass workers and butchers and leatherworkers and weavers, all the commerce that clung to the monastery and flourished like moss on a boulder.
    Just as the church was the heart of the monastic site, so the town square formed the center of the outlying community. One hundred perches on each side, the square was filled with people and stalls on market day, and even more so on feast days and fairs. The wealthy merchants and landowners who chose to live in Glendalough enjoyed homes that looked out over the square. The best of those bordered the monastery’s outer wall which put them closer to the church and the sanctuary to be found there.
    It was in one of those homes, the finest of them all, the biggest in Glendalough, that Louis de Roumois found himself. It was wattle and daub built, the construction no different than the miserable homes of the craftsmen, but it was well made with a high, steep-pitched thatch roof. It boasted a stone hearth and kitchen walled off from the main room and bed chambers in a loft overhead that took up half the length of the building. It had two small windows, high up, with glass in them. The front door opened onto the town square. A door in the back opened onto an alley that ran along the monastery wall and offered a fine view of the church on the far side.
    Louis was a young man, twenty-two, and unlike most men in Glendalough he did not think the house particularly impressive.
    This would be a fine place , he thought, if it were a sheep herd’s hut or some peasant farmer’s hovel. But it was, in fact, the finest home in all that miserable town, and to Louis that was laughable. Still he continued to go there, and frequently, a thing he was strongly motivated to do.
    The streets of Glendalough were crowded and busy that morning, and growing more so despite the rain that