The Finkenherd of Quedlinburg

In the winter of 918 King Conrad I of East Francia died. On his deathbed, tradition says, he called his brother Eberhard to him and gave him an order that went against all family pride: take the royal insignia — the holy lance, the crown, the mantle — to Duke Henry of Saxony. Only he, said Conrad, can hold Franks and Saxons together.

In the spring of 919 the envoys rode north, to the castle on the Quedlinburg rock. They found the duke neither in the hall nor at table. Down at the foot of the hill, in the scrub where the finches come down, he stood among his snares and nets. He was fowling, as every nobleman of his day did when the season allowed it.

So the most solemn message of the kingdom came to a man with birdlime on his fingers. The envoys knelt in the wet grass and offered him the crown. Henry heard them out with the net still in his hand, the legend says, and when he let it go the finches flew up.

The elevation itself took place at Fritzlar, in May 919, where the magnates of the Franks and Saxons proclaimed him king. When Archbishop Heriger of Mainz offered him anointing and a church coronation, Henry refused. He did not consider himself worthy of that honour, he said; it was enough that men called him king by the grace of God and the choice of the great. He was the only king of his century to leave the holy oil untouched.

What followed proved him right. Henry brought the unruly dukes of Swabia and Bavaria to obedience without humiliating them, concluded a nine-year truce with the Hungarians in 926, and used those years to build fortresses and train horsemen. In 933 he defeated the Hungarian cavalry armies at Riade on the Unstrut.

Quedlinburg remained his heart. The castle on the hill became a royal palace; here he kept Easter, here he received envoys. When he died at Memleben in 936 they carried him back to the hill. His son Otto I made the palace one of the most important places in the realm, and Queen Matilda founded the house of canonesses that was led for centuries by daughters of the imperial family. In the crypt of the collegiate church of St Servatius the graves of the king and of Matilda still lie side by side.

Honesty requires saying that no contemporary wrote a word about bird nets. Widukind of Corvey, the Saxon monk who around 968 recorded the deeds of his people, describes how Eberhard handed over the insignia and how Henry declined the anointing — but about finches, nets or a fowling ground he is entirely silent. The nickname «the Fowler» is attested only from the twelfth century, and the tale of the fowling duke appears first in the Annals of Pöhlde, a good two hundred years after the events.

What may have begun as a learned explanation of an old nickname grew into the best-known image of early German history. In 1835 the Viennese poet Johann Nepomuk Vogl cast it in a ballad, «Herr Heinrich saß am Vogelherd», and when Carl Loewe set it to music a year later half of Germany sang the song. The little square in Quedlinburg took its name, and a memorial plaque there today carries all the verses.

The house itself also speaks a different language from the legend. The narrow half-timbered building on the Finkenherd dates from the sixteenth century, six hundred years after Henry; today it holds rooms of the Feininger Gallery, and coffee is served in the neighbouring houses. Yet the square still beats. Whoever stands there in the shadow of the castle hill understands why people chose this spot: a kingdom that begins not in a throne room but in the undergrowth, with a man who first had to gather in his nets.