Baron Edmund Bellmere of Crowferry

Baron of Crowferry, a lesser peer with unusually immediate power: ferry, toll, marsh road, levy and local fear all meet at his one wet crossing, and he keeps its guard under his own roof.

Baron Edmund Bellmere holds a smaller dignity than the earls and magnates of the southern counties, and a far more immediate one. At Crowferry, ferry, toll, marsh road, levy and local fear all meet at one wet crossing, and Bellmere lives beside its fortifications with the ferry guard under his own roof. Where other lords of fortified places divide ownership from command, at Crowferry lordship and daily command almost coincide; whoever asks for the keys is usually asking the baron.

His importance reaches well beyond the marsh. Bellmere’s people hold the ferry and its approaches on one of the roads that feed London, and he can make a wet crossing easy or slow by that fact alone. The capital consumes what passes over his water without thereby commanding him, and metropolitan parties arriving with a capital warrant have discovered at Crowferry that they brought authority of the wrong kind.

The wet country around the crossing keeps older habits, and old practice survives there under Bellmere’s eye. Old men still say that Bellmere riders once had to bargain with the west reeds before the passage could be taxed honestly, and the cautions of Reeve Geraint Mere on flood, weather and trespass are treated with more seriousness than newer clerks would prefer. The baron is past seventy, weather-beaten and still physically imposing, and his tenants speak of him less as a peer than as the man who is present when the water rises.

Companies meet him as an employer. Bellmere pays for ferry security, missing cargo, toll disputes and the recovery of people or goods taken into the wet country, and he expects such work to be done on Crowferry’s terms rather than London’s.

In person

Bellmere is a man past seventy with long grey-white hair, a full white beard and a deeply lined, weather-beaten face — rugged rather than courtly, yet unmistakably lordly. His pale steel-grey eyes and sturdy, still imposing build belong to someone who has spent more of his life at the water’s edge than in drawing rooms. He goes about in a heavy dark marsh cloak over mail, with gloves, old but well-kept boots, a sword, and the ferry keys and toll books never far away.