Terre Nouvelle

Humanity arrived in his world some 888 years ago, if the chronology of the Annals was to be trusted, which a number of respectable scholars doubted. His remote ancestors supposedly came from another world and were already divided into three cultures when they arrived: Francien, Alleman and English. They transmitted to this earth very little of the history and culture of their home world, other than their languages and the Summarium, a compendium of religious and ethical sayings and tales which had been written down from memory, perhaps within two generations of the Landing. The catastrophic discontinuity between pre-Landing and post-Landing humanity must be significant, but significant of what? Then there was the puzzle of the extinction of the third and originally dominant culture, the English.

There were of course prejudices and fictions which obscured his search for historical truth. Evangelicals in particular had put forward an entirely unhistorical myth about the exile of humanity from Heaven due to their sinful rebellion, led by the evil and magical race of the English. They pointed out that the word corresponded to the Francien ‘anges’ and Allemanic ‘engeln’, the winged spirits of Heaven. By their account, the Francien and Alleman humans who lived outside the celestial city of Eu were seduced by the English into a siege so as to seize Eu from God and his seneschal and heir, Jesus Christ. But on their defeat by the loyal legions of seraphs and cherubim all three races were exiled to Earth below, and cursed to live in a state of perpetual warfare. The English were doubly cursed to be the slaves of the other two races, and their extinction was the result of the desire of the good among the Alleman and Francien to escape their evil influence and return once more to Heaven. Such beliefs were rife amongst the poor and illiterate of the Mainland nations, which had suffered more from centuries of warfare than had the peoples of the Islands. ch V.