This week my thoughts are on a certain Mr Busket.
I gave a paper on him at the International Robin Hood Conference on Friday and he’s still nagging me. There’s a vast and deep discrepancy about what we know about his life from documents of the time and the rather fun story written about him after his death. Why did I give a paper about Mr Busket at a Robin Hood conference? Eustace Busket, who was most commonly known as Eustace the Monk, was quite possibly a source of a series of Robin Hood anecdotes. It was very cold the day of the conference, and, although I was at my computer, my brain kept turning “Eustace” into “Useless.” This is hilariously wrong. Eustace was a bunch of things but useless was not one of them.
I described him in my paper as “not merely a once-a-monk. He was also Eustace the pirate or Eustace the traitor or Eustace the genius sailor and courtier and leader of men or Eustace the much-hated.” He lived from around 1170 and died in 1217.
Eustace knew John when John was king of England, and John’s rivals across the channel. He worked for one and then the other and then he swung back again. His moment of greatest glory was probably when he controlled the English Channel through residence on the isle of Sark, and his moment of least glory was when he died. It wasn’t just that he died, you see. A contemporary chronicler explains that he was found hiding in the bilges. Normally one did not execute rich and noble folk captured in battle (one ransomed them for money) but Eustace was not well-loved and it’s quite possible his executioner bore him a personal grudge.
Eustace lived story and his thirteenth century biography doesn’t echo this at all. Historians talk about him as a colourful character, but only a couple have looked into his work at sea. Those few have pointed that that he was an extraordinarily important and skilled naval officer. He was the person Louis (son of the French king) employed for an attempt to invade England.
Understanding Eustace helps me understand two things. One is the nature of politics in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and how the volatility and sometimes sheer craziness of those politics worked. The other is my usual area of how stories told about someone tell us a great deal about the nature of stories and how they work in a given place and time. While this latter statement is true of any story, Eustace’s is special. Because of the fascinating discrepancies between Eustace’s life and the story told about him after his death, and because Eustace faded from popular story when Robin Hood came on the scene, Eustace tells me more than most. In his story he was a trickster, like Merlin and an outlaw, like his contemporary Fulk Fitz-warin. This points to one thing that the real Eustace and the fictional Eustace had in common: they undermined and disrupted others’ lives.
I’m giving my Patreon folk my whole conference paper to cogitate upon, but this is, I suspect not the end of my adventure with Eustace. I don’t have time now, but I will return to him one day.
Seems like there is a lot of material there to be mined for fiction. I am fascinated. I did not know that there were such history and tales that predated Robin Hood.
There are so many! Most of them are in Old French or Latin, but I know about them and can guide people. I offered to run courses n them for writers but everyone told me “We know all we need to know” and so the courses didn’t happen. I’m still happy to run courses, but I’m only willing to teach these days and make it part of my income stream – I wasted so much time doing the organising and time/energy are harder to come by now.