"The Haystack in the Floods" is an account of the death of an English knight, Robert, in a roadside ambush during the Hundred Years' War, seen from the perspective of his French mistress, Jehane.
The action takes place after the Battle of Poitiers. This battle was a decisive victory for the English; however, after the battle, Robert and his small retinue of soldiers are left behind enemy lines. He, his men, and Jehane are fleeing French-held territory for the English province of Gascony. They have been riding for several days through a rain-drenched late-autumn landscape, and everyone is cold, exhausted, and soaked through, tense with the expectation of a French attack.
The reader sees all this from Jehane's point of view: the "dripping leafless woods," the "mud [which] splash'd wretchedly," the anxious "murmuring from [Robert's] men." She is numb with cold and fatigue, and
often for pure doubt and dreadShe [sobs], made giddy in the headBy the swift riding.
Robert tries to rally his small company with promises that they will soon reach safety, but their hopes are dashed and their fears are realized when they are ambushed by the Frenchman Godmar, who has thirty soldiers to assist him. Robert's company is outnumbered two to one, and Jehane "[sees] at once the wretched end" that awaits them all. Robert tries to encourage her, reminding her of the English victory at Poitiers to make the ambush seem less threatening and promising again that safety is near:
Nay, love, 'tis scarcely two to one,At Poictiers where we made them runSo fast—why, sweet my love, good cheer,The Gascon frontier is so near.Naught after this.
Jehane is not at all convinced by this. She knows that if Robert dies, she, a Frenchwoman, will be taken to Paris to be executed as a traitor. "Would God that this next hour were past!" she prays. Robert has no answer for her fears but shouts a battle cry for his men to charge Godmar's soldiers. His men do not respond; instead, one of them ties Robert up and takes him to Godmar, perhaps hoping for safe passage if he turns over their leader.
Godmar tells Jehane that she must have sex with him or he'll kill Robert:
Now, Jehane,Your lover's life is on the waneSo fast, that, if this very hourYou yield not as my paramour,He will not see the rain leave off.
Jehane is horrified and immediately refuses. Godmar is furious; he demands to know why she has refused when she knows very well that he could murder Robert this instant and rape her anyway:
What hinders me from taking you,And doing that I list to doTo your fair wilful body, whileYour knight lies dead?
Jehane smiles grimly and replies that if he does this, she will kill him in his sleep; she will rip out his throat with her teeth, so help her God. Godmar retorts that if she does not submit to rape, he will "tell/All that [he] know[s]" to the French and Jehane will be executed as a traitor—either drowned or burnt at the stake:
Do you know, Jehane, [the French] cry for you:"Jehane the brown! Jehane the brown!Give us Jehane to burn or drown!"
He tells Jehane she has one hour to decide whether she will have sex with him or not. The price of refusing is Robert's death and her own. Jehane, overwhelmed, staggers over to "the haystack in the floods" and lies down, but she is so exhausted and numbed with horror she cannot consider her decision; she simply passes out and sleeps the full hour.
When she awakens, she goes to Godmar and again refuses to be raped. Godmar is stunned:
[She] strangely childlike came, and said:"I will not." Straightway Godmar's head,As though it hung on strong wires, turn'dMost sharply round, and his face burn'd.
Robert says nothing but looks deeply into Jehane's eyes, and they reach out to each other one last time. Godmar, furious, pulls them apart and hacks Robert's head off on the spot. He tells Jehane that her "way/Lies backwards towards the Chatelet," back into French territory, where she will meet a horrible death. Jehane is silent:
She shook her head and gazed awhileAt her cold hands with a rueful smile,As though this thing had made her mad.
She no longer cares what happens to her now that Robert is dead.
"The Haystack in the Floods," Morris’s stark, 160-line poem, which takes place against the backdrop of the Hundred Years’ War in mid-14th century France, is a fictional account of Sir Robert de Marny, an English knight, and his mistress, Jehane.
While en-route to Gascony, an English safe-hold in France, the two are intercepted by enemy troops. The sense of foreboding, established in the first five lines of the poem, indicates that their fate at the hands of enemy leader Godmar will not be a happy one. The descriptions in further passages, vividly detailing the dreariness of both weather/landscape and its effects on Jehane, further underscore the pitiless, bleak mood of Morris’s work: the skeletal woods, the rain and tears that stain Jehane’s face, her heavy hair, and the mud that splatters as much as it impedes forward progress, for instance. The lovers seemed doomed from the outset.
Nor does much improve for the couple after Godmar’s arrival. Like two haystacks in the rain, the traitors stand, naked and exposed. After a brief but pointed exchange, Godmar decapitates Robert and takes Jehane prisoner. Her fate awaits in Paris, where she will either burn at the stake or suffer a trial by water.
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