Armour Wherein He Trusted

Armour Wherein He Trusted was unfinished at the time of Mary Webb’s death, at age forty-six, in October 1927. This surviving fragment of a novel is a medieval romance set in the Welsh border country in the eleventh century, just after the Norman Conquest. The narrator is Sir Gilbert de Polrebec, now the Holy and Pious Abbot of Strata Florida. Sir Gilbert recounts his early life as a young knight, and his struggle as a young man to renounce his carnal and material desires in order to follow the spiritual callings of Christ.

As in Precious Bane, Mary Webb uses the first-person narrative form in Armour Wherein He Trusted. Webb expresses her own thoughts and attitudes through Sir Gilbert, and convincingly portrays the young knight’s carnality and religious devotion. Webb’s use of retrospective narration creates a sense of direct contact with the personality of Sir Gilbert— his relationship with his parents, his tortured love for his young wife, Nesta, and his struggle to give up hearth and home to follow Peter the Hermit on the First Crusade. Through her use of archaic diction and antiquated language, Webb evokes the spirit of the early Middle Ages in much the same way that—by her careful use of regional dialect, folklore, and superstition—she was able to convey a sense of rural Shropshire in her other novels. She deals with medieval themes, such as damnation versus salvation, flesh versus spirit, and good versus evil. Webb also completely controls the authorial philosophizing that sometimes intruded in her earlier novels, and speaks instead through the mind of her protagonist and the action of the story:

For if a thing is too near us, so that we cannot get the measure of it proper, and if it is too dear, so that no word is bright enow, then it is best to tell of some other thing, and in telling of that we shall tell of the dearest thing, though in roundabout fashion, for at such a time we stamp the image of our one thought on everything.

Unlike her other books, which were conceived over months of consideration but then written down quickly and with little revision (her first book, The Golden Arrow, was reputedly put to paper in only three weeks’ time), Armour Wherein He Trusted was written in slow fits and starts. Gladys Mary Coles says in The Flower of Light (1978) that Mary Webb (in her usual method) had worked out in her mind the entire plot and characterization of this novel before starting to write. Although she did not complete the book, from allusions in the fragment we know that Nesta (during the seven years when Sir Gilbert is away on Crusade) will be sought after by many men; that Sir Gilbert’s arch-enemy Ranulph Jorwerth will woo Nesta; that Sir Gilbert (in spite of his hatred for the man) will do some good deed for Jorwerth’s benefit; and that this act will lead to Sir Gilbert’s harm. Nesta’s early death is also intimated. Sir Gilbert tells of his meeting Nesta, who is newly arrived from Wales to be lady-in-waiting to Lady Powys. The twenty-three-year-old Sir Gilbert is bewitched by Nesta’s plaited golden hair and lissome body and falls in love:

I knew it was my love, though I had never seen her afore, and I was bewildered, standing like an oaf looking upon her under the leaves. I mused on her long, struck, as the heron is when he sees his mate imaged in the water. She seemed not troubled at all, to have a great fellow standing there, and by this I was sure she was a faery, since they know not fear.

Nesta is also favored by the King’s escheator (Sir Gilbert’s hated rival), Ranulph Jorwerth. Under questioning by Jorwerth, Nesta associates herself with necromancy and Arthurian legend:

“I come from the Cymru, sir,” she made answer, “and my home is in the waste; and my lineage is elf-lineage.”
“Where, then, is this waste situate?” asked the Escheator, eager as men are when a thing touches their own special business. . . .
“Why, lord, it is faery ground and you cannot measure it nor go round it, for though it is only a narrow piece, times, of the width of three horses head to tail, yet, times, it will widen to eternity and yet again it will shrink to a knife-edge.”
. . . .
“And your lineage?”
“It is from Merlin, lord. . . . Our land is faery copyhold.”

Sir Gilbert ignores numerous spiritual callings to help rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Infidels, and instead courts Nesta. For her part, Nesta initially resists Gilbert’s marriage proposal:

“It would be best for me and thee,” she said, in a strange bewitched voice, “best that I go back to Tochswilla. Nine old witch-women to tend the cooking-pot. Nine wizards to tend the fire. No commands to be given, no love to be given, nought to do or think or feel. With thee, so much heart’s joy, but sorrow and pain and anxious cares. The bread to make and manchets to apportion. Spinning and weaving and the ordering of the house.” . . . “It is thy love, Gilbert, it is lover’s love I am afeard of. My clay likes it not. It is not altogether mortal clay, and nearness frights me.”

Yet Sir Gilbert and Nesta do marry. He brings her as his wife to Castle Polrebec, where they live with Gilbert’s parents and his Aunt Gundrun. At Castle Polrebec, Sir Gilbert and Nesta are ecstatically happy. Sir Gilbert reminisces:

Yet in my garden methought I had security of joy. If God ever thought of any better Paradise than dawn and June and a mountain garden, He hath not showed it to me. . . . It clung like a nest, this my garden, to the grey wall of our castle, and it was grey itself with the quiet greyness of doves. The lavender was all spiked over like a castle guarded by halberd-men, and the maiden pink held up fresh buds, the greyleaved rose bloomed white beneath the heavy dews. There were no citizens of the litel grey garden save Nesta and I, the grey-brown bees and the portly grey pigeons walking in the sun, like abbots. And for me, my joy was as the joy of holy recollected folk, still, with nought in it of the raving of lust. And meseems no joy is sweeter than this.

Sir Gilbert has a premonition that this gladness will not last. “And as I was with Nesta in the litel grey garden I knew well that the hours were glass, bright glass, to crackle inward when God pleased.” A strange hermit-like man, almost at death’s door, calls on a stormy night at the castle. Sir Gilbert’s wife and parents resist the man’s message and protest Gilbert’s separation from them:

“Gilbert Polrebec,” he said, in his strange tongue, mingled of Saxon and some country French, “I come from Peter Hermit. Thou must return with me now, swiftly, for because of his old kindness for thy mother he wills that thou go with him in this first glorious Crusade, walking beside him as his own familiar friend.” . . . So, turning anywhere to save me from his eyes, that caught me and lured me into a spell of terror, I looked toward the Christus on the wall. And behold, a dreadful marvel! For even as I looked, the image shuddered and two tears rolled down the face, and He did bat His eyes at me. And when I saw the Lord God so shuddering and weeping upon our wall, and when, in the manner of some poor babe denied of some sweetmeat or some revel, He did so bat His eyes and droop His head, I knew that I must go, and my heart turned in my side and my soul uttered a cry, and I forgot myself falling on darkness. And so in the grey dawn we departed, leaving the castle all blinded and folded in mist, and the litel grey garden blotted out, and those three beloved ones weeping and groaning at the door where I was to go in and out no more until many a year was fled. But in the wan light of morning I saw that the Christus on the rood wept no more, nor batted His eyes, but seemed more at ease, satisfied as a child at some promise long withheld but, at last given.

As the fragment ends, Sir Gilbert learns news of his family in the first of three letters that he will receive during his time away at the Crusades. Armour Wherein He Trusted is written with restraint and coolness, and lacks the warmth and vigor of Mary Webb’s other five novels. In presenting Sir Gilbert’s struggle to renounce corporeal desire—especially to leave his Nesta, who symbolizes for Sir Gilbert all that is earthly love and loveliness, Webb is allegorizing her own struggles with physical and spiritual desire. Webb may be using this tale to work through her longing for earthly beauty, even as she feels her own imminent death. Sir Gilbert voices his own premonitions:

And He that was and is my friend has said:
“Look long on the apple-blow, for you will not see it agen. Listen well to the mavis, for come a year I shall have invited thee to my house. And leaning from heaven’s wall you will see the white thorn shining deep down, like snow in summer, and you will hear the mavis sing so faint and far away that you must fill up the glats in the song from memory.”

Webb struggled for more than two years with Armour Wherein He Trusted before abandoning it entirely. Arthur St. John Adcock (editor of the Bookman), relates in his memoir, The Glory that was Grub Street (1928), that Webb had telephoned him in early 1927:

. . . in evident distress, [Webb] began saying how unwell she had been, then interrupted herself to say abruptly, “I have destroyed all I had done of the new novel.” There was no immediate reply to my surprised, “Good lord, whatever made you do that?” and I have seldom heard anything more piteous than the subdued, broken sound of her crying at the other end of the line. Presently, when she could speak again, she blamed herself miserably, said she had felt so dissatisfied, felt that she could not finish it, and would never write any more, so, on a sudden impulse, had torn it and put it on the fire.

Hilda Addison, in Mary Webb: Her Life and Work (1931), writes that Webb’s husband Henry saved the manuscript of Armour Wherein He Trusted from the fire.

Armour Wherein He Trusted was published posthumously as a novel fragment by Jonathan Cape in 1929, as part of the seven-volume Collected Works of Mary Webb. The manuscript of Armour Wherein He Trusted is the only known surviving manuscript of Webb’s six novels (cat. 148).