The Fourteenth of October

The year is 1066 and the fyrds, Harold Godwinson's levies, drawn chiefly from the peasants of England, are called the King's standard. They come straggling and uncertain towards a vague rendezvous, some confident, some fanatical, some questioning and some plainly dubious: they are thinking of their harvest, left to be gathered by only a few. Under the spell of Bryher's writing the reader becomes a dweller in this troubled countryside, a sharer in its people's passions, concerned with the great issues that are to be settled finally at Hastings. The story of Wulf, the Saxon boy, begins eight years before, when his father's Yorkshire home is destroyed by raiding Danes, his father and friends killed, and himself swept away as a hostage. It ends when he has to face the terrible choice between freedom in exile or the acceptance of subjugation. Wulf's predicament is vivid and tragic, for the authoress has expressed in him her own passion for freedom. And she has lovingly conjured up a picture of a country still absorbed in legend and ancient lore- a country which, after the fourteenth of October, was bound to a sterner destiny.