by H A CULLEY
‘If you were bailiff yourself you would be on your own.’
‘Wouldn’t the reeve back me up, if necessary?’
Edgar thought of the reeve at Lamberton, who was a good man and not one who was likely to take advantage of a young and inexperienced bailiff. On the contrary, he was sure that he would help him. Of course, the reeve was elected by the free villagers every year but they normally elected the same man again and again if they thought he was fair and did a good job.
‘Yes, I’m sure the reeve I’m thinking of would.’
‘Then you know of a manor which is in need of a bailiff? Would the lord of the manor consider me? I mean, why would he?’
‘Because he’s my brother.’
Edgar brooded about the sub-prior of Lindisfarne. It wasn’t his problem; the wretched man wasn’t even the same nationality as he was now. Edgar had long since given up thinking of himself as English, though he and Simon still retained the name of their birthplace, Powburn. As he had expected, Simon was prepared to give Geoffrey of Wooler a chance. Sir John’s bailiff had been relieved that he was no longer expected to look after both manors and promised to keep an eye on Geoffrey and help him out, if necessary.
Eventually Edgar hit on a plan but he decided not to confide in Simon, who would only forbid him from doing what he had in mind. He took his ship back to Lindisfarne on a dark night with no moon and anchored it in the same bay where they had fished Geoffrey out of the sea. The ship’s captain wasn’t happy but he respected Edgar and decided not to say anything to Simon. However, he knew he would be in real trouble if anything went wrong.
Edgar and three sailors he trusted to obey him unquestioningly rowed ashore with muffled oars and landed on the beach where the monks had been harvesting shellfish. The priory was locked up for the night but Edgar found climbing over the low wall easy. Once on top, he lowered a rope ladder and the three sailors joined him. Unlike a castle, there was no parapet, so they had to haul the ladder up and drop it down the far side before climbing down.
Geoffrey had explained where the sub-prior’s cell was, at the end of the dormitory where most of the monks slept. The dormitory block was obvious and Edgar soon found the cell at the end. He listened at the door and heard muffled sounds coming from within. He beckoned to one of the sailors and the two of them quietly opened the door and stepped over the threshold together.
A naked man knelt on the bed sodomising a boy of about thirteen or fourteen. The man was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t hear them enter but the boy must have done. He tried to look round at the door and that alerted the man. However, by that time Edgar had reached the bed and, clamping one hand over the sub-prior’s mouth, he stuck the point of his dagger none to gently into the man’s neck, drawing a little blood. At the same time the sailor put his hand over the boy’s mouth and held his finger to his own mouth, warning him to be quiet.
The other two men came into the small cell with rope and a gag and soon had the terrified monk tied up, still naked. The boy was warned to be quiet and released. He immediately went over to where the monk was sitting on the edge of the bed and kneed him hard in the groin. As an indication of his feelings it was eloquent.
‘Go back to your bed now and go to sleep. We’ll deal with the monk.’
‘Can’t I come with you? I hate it here, and not just because of that bugger.’
‘If you want to but grab what you need quickly and be quiet.’
When the novice met Edgar a minute later outside the dormitory he was accompanied by two other boys of about the same age. They were all dressed in habits and sandals and had no other possessions. Getting the monk over the wall was going to be a problem, tied up as he was, so they decided to leave via the main gate. This was always locked at night but the porter slept in a small cell adjacent to it. Five minutes later the odd little party slipped through the gate, leaving the porter trussed up on his bed, and headed back down to the beach.
The small boat was overcrowded on the return trip to the cog and several times Edgar worried that water would slop over the gunwale and swamp it but they made it back safely. Once they were all aboard, the tender was swung inboard. The ship hoisted her sails and slipped out of the bay as quietly as she had arrived.
The next morning the three boys joined the ship’s crew and the naked sub-prior was paraded in front of the grinning crew.
‘This man is accused of abusing his position as sub-prior to forcibly sodomise young boys. What punishment does he deserve?’ he asked the crew, and the boys in particular. He knew that castration was a common punishment for a first offence but when it involved the rape of young boys, death and dismemberment were not uncommon penalties.
The view of the crew was unanimous: castration. Edgar let the man sweat, thinking that the sentence would be carried out, perhaps by the boys he had abused. However, nothing was done to him before they reached Berwick. Once there, Edgar released him but sent him naked through the streets with his hands bound and with a placard around his neck saying ‘sodomiser of young boys’. If he managed to get out of the town alive, he would still have to cross the Tweed and walk all the walk back to the causeway across to Lindisfarne. He didn’t like to think what his reception would be if he arrived at the priory like that. His brother would have a hard job protecting him as the story was certain to reach the ears of the Abbot in Durham.
In the event, the people of Berwick stoned him to death before he reached the town gates and his body was thrown on the midden heap for the dogs to enjoy.
~#~
Simon was finally told in early September that the English fleet was on its way. The captain of the merchantman who brought the news said that King Edward had pressed all the vessels in the Cinque Ports and along the east coast into his service. He estimated that the fleet was at least sixty strong. Against this Simon and Edgar could muster eighteen but they were all fighting cogs, whereas most of Edward’s fleet would be transports carrying troops and supplies.
He decided that the bay on the south coast of Lindisfarne was the place to wait in ambush. He couldn’t take on all sixty enemy vessels, even if many of them were transports, so he decided that he would attack the rear ones first. They would be the heaviest laden and therefore likely to be supply ships, though he could expect a few warships as escorts. His strategy was to send Edgar with six ships across to split the convoy and prevent any ships in the front section of the fleet beating back to interfere whilst he took his other dozen ships to close with, board and scuttle as many of the enemy vessels as he could.
Several of the slower merchant men turned tail when they saw Edgar’s ships emerge from the island and tried to beat back south against the south westerly wind. When Simon’s ships appeared, they were thrown into confusion and tried to turn back. Chaos reigned. A few were left in irons, unable to complete the turn, and came to a stop with sails flapping and two more ran into each other and stove in each other’s hulls.
Simon saw that there were five ships with castles fore and aft, and therefore the escort vessels, so he sent half of his squadron to engage them, whilst he led the other six to board the stationary ships. They were all merchantmen and offered little resistance. Within the half hour all were sinking and Simon looked around for fresh quarry. The ten ships who had managed to go about successfully were heading back south as fast as their sails would take them. All his other ships had closed with the five enemy warships and he could hear the sound of furious fighting from their decks. He sent four of his six to lend a hand and took the other two to reinforce Edgar.
Edgar’s squadron was outnumbered but fighting valiantly against ten English warships. It looked as if one Scottish ship had been captured and the other five were been attacked by two English ships each. Simon ordered the captain of his ship to lay her alongside one of those attacking Edgar’s flagship and sent the other around to the other side to board the second attacker.
Edgar told him later that he was on the point of losing his ship when S
imon came to his rescue. As it was, the three Scottish ships soon overpowered the two English ones and, having scuttled them, cast them adrift to sink whilst they each went to the aid of another Scottish ship.
By the time that the rest of Simon’s squadron had arrived, having sunk their targets, another Scottish ship had been lost but they turned the tide of battle and three more enemy cogs were sent to the bottom. The rest were captured. Although over half of the English fleet had reached the mouth of the Tweed safely, where they could anchor out of range of the Berwick defences, fifteen of their warships had been sunk or captured for the loss of three Scottish cogs and a dozen merchantmen had either been sunk or had turned back.
The main problem Simon now faced, as ever, was lack of manpower. He had lost quite a few killed or seriously wounded and he now had twenty cogs to man. The other problem was that he had lost his base in the river at Berwick. He decided to head for the fishing harbour at Eyemouth where the rocks provided a natural breakwater against heavy seas.
When he had finally sorted the situation out he discovered that he had enough sailors and boys to man fifteen ships and so he reluctantly beached the other five and set off back south again to patrol south of Berwick. Half a day later he had his reward as the ten merchantmen which had escaped south were trying to make a run for the entrance to the Tweed.
Once again they turned tail as soon as they saw the Scots bearing down on them but they were slower than the more lightly laden Scottish ships and gradually Simon started to overhaul them. As each ship was caught, Simon detailed one of his ships to board her and take her back with them to Eyemouth. Finally, as night approached, there were only two ships left ahead of them and Simon still had another five with him. Edgar’s had been one of those who had captured a ship and taken it back to Eyemouth. Simon knew that he would get things organised that end. The priority was to unload the cargo and then load it onto carts to take it to Edinburgh.
Eventually Simon gave up the chase when it became too dark to continue and he started the long haul back up the coast.
~#~
William Keith stood on the ramparts of the walls around Berwick, looking across the estuary to where the English fleet, or what was left of it, were moored. As dusk fell he saw several cogs appear at the mouth of the estuary. Five of them sailed down the river whilst the others turned and beat back to the north. Suddenly, William saw flames licking across the deck of one of the ships and then, slowly, flames started up on the other cogs.
The anchor watches on the moored shipping suddenly spotted the approaching cogs, which were now burning merrily, and to a man they panicked. Anchor cables were cut or chains disconnected from the windlass and thrown over the side, sailors swarmed up the masts to loose their sails and ships began to move. They were in a crowded anchorage and some ships collided, others ran aground and spars got entangled in the rigging of other ships. The only word for it was chaos.
With no-one on board the fire ships they didn’t stay on course. One ran aground and another crashed into an improvised quayside built by King Edward so that ships could unload out of arrow range of the town walls. They set the two ships tied up there alight whilst the other three blazing cogs sailed harmlessly through the English shipping and ran aground further upstream. However, the fact that they hadn’t set more than two other vessels alight didn’t matter, seven ships ran aground near the town and were seized by Scots sallying out from Berwick, five sank having been holed by another ship and several lost their masts as ships drew apart whilst their rigging was still entangled.
King Edward watched the shambles from the south bank of the Tweed in disbelief. What Simon didn’t know was that several of the transports that he had attacked and sunk in the two engagements off the Northumbrian coast had contained most of Edward’s siege train. What was left of it was in the two ships about to be unloaded at the quayside. Now he had an army besieging Berwick with no siege engines. Edward had no option but to wait for a new siege train to arrive from York.
Two weeks later Simon received a report that a supply fleet was approaching Berwick from the south. He didn’t know it but this contained the rest of the trebuchets, mining sows and dismantled siege towers that Edward had assembled at York the previous year. He decided to wait off Lindisfarne for the fleet to approach with eight ships and send the other seven under Edgar’s command off to the east to approach from that direction. The English fleet consisted of eighteen ships, ten merchantmen and eight escorts. Four of the escorts were positioned in the van and two on each wing, with the transports in a huddle in the middle.
Simon sailed through the first four ships, trading arrow fire as they went, and made for the merchantmen. The surprised English escorts in the van went about and started to chase Simon’s squadron. That was when Edgar appeared and attacked both the escorts on the right wing and in the van. His seven ships were soon hotly engaged with the six enemy cogs.
Simon engaged the merchantmen one to one and soon overcame eight of the ten. The remaining two and the other two escorts beat a hasty retreat back to the mouth of the River Humber. Leaving prize crews on each of the eight ships, he then went to the aid of his brother, who was engaged in an evenly matched fight with the other escorts. Edgar had lost two ships but they were soon recaptured when Simon added the weight of his squadron to the fight.
A jubilant Simon laid his cog alongside that of his brother and called across his congratulations. The reply that answered his hail soon sobered him.
‘I’m sorry, Sir Simon, but your brother had been wounded quite badly and is below with the surgeon.’
~#~
King Robert paced up and down the great hall of Jedburgh Castle. He had been disappointed again in the summer when Elizabeth gave birth to yet another daughter, who they called Matilda. Now Edward was trying to recapture Berwick and, if what he was being told was correct, that was only a prelude to another invasion of Scotland.
‘God’s teeth, will the man never give up. Can’t he grasp the simple fact that Scotland is mine, not his?’
James Douglas, Thomas Randolph, Walter Stewart and Richard Keith knew that reply wasn’t called for, so said nothing.
‘We need to think of some way to break the siege.’ Robert stopped pacing and gave his friends a challenging look.
‘Our army isn’t strong enough to attack Edward’s,’ Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, said with a shrug.
‘No but we could launch a diversionary attack to make Edward scuttle back into England,’ James Douglas suggested.
‘What would make him do that?’
‘If, for example, we threatened York, where his queen is at the moment.’
‘I didn’t think he was that bothered about her, only young Despenser.’
‘Don’t be snide, Walter. Whatever his feelings for her, his reputation would suffer if we could capture Queen Isabella, and we would also have a bargaining tool. Is her son, Prince Edward, with her?’
‘I believe so , Sire,’
The fact that the effete Edward had managed to sire a son whilst he, the hero king, had not been able to do so always rankled with Robert. The thought of robbing Edward of his seven year old son was, therefore, doubly attractive.
‘Excellent. Jamie, I want you and Thomas to raise a force of at least two thousand mounted men and make for York post haste. Don’t stop to plunder and raid on the way, you can do that on the way back. I can’t risk Edward taking Berwick.’
‘Oh, I don’t think there’s much danger of that, not in the near future at any rate. The de Powburn brothers have destroyed half of Edward’s fleet at sea and his siege train along with it.’ After the king’s comment about him being snide, Walter felt more than a little satisfaction at knowing more than Robert did, on this matter at any rate.
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m sorry, Sire. I have only just received tidings from my brother in Berwick. I told the High Steward but I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet.’ The Marishal looked apologetic and made a m
ental note not to tell anyone important news before he’d told the king in future.
‘It seems that we owe Sir Simon and his brother a deep debt of gratitude. I must do something more for them when this is over.’
‘It may not be necessary to do anything for Edgar de Powburn, Sire. I gather he is at death’s door from the wounds he received.’
Chapter Eight – The Chapter of Myton
October 1319 to February 1320
James Douglas crossed the border at Carter Bar and rode down Redesdale to meet Thomas Randolph and his men at Corbridge, to the west of Newcastle. Between them they had mustered a force of two thousand knights, serjeants, hobelars and mounted borderers and highlanders from Randolph’s native Moray. The latter were on foot but were used to keeping up with horses moving at a trot. It was second nature for the highlanders and the borderers to loot and pillage but the two leaders managed to keep their men’s depredations to foraging in the main.
Three days later they had reached Fountains Abbey near Ripon, less than thirty miles from York. The next day the abbot was foolish enough to tell Thomas that a great English army under the command of the Archbishop of York was coming to destroy the heathen Scots, as he put it. Thomas knew that Edward had recruited every man he could for the invasion of Scotland, including even the city militia of York, so he was baffled where this great army could have come from.
He and James advanced cautiously to the east with the hobelars thrown out in front of the main body in a wide screen, then the thirty knights and seventy serjeants in a block twenty wide and five rows deep, with the less disciplined borderers and highlanders bringing up the rear.
After two hours of cautious progress, one of the scouts came back to report a vast host drawn up on the banks of the River Swale near the village of Myton. James and Thomas rode forward to see this mighty host for themselves and saw a throng of about several thousand men trying to cross the Swale. As the water was reasonably fast flowing and, even on the narrow ford, it came up to chest level, only a few could attempt to cross at once. Perhaps five hundred had reached the far bank, most of whom appeared to be priests and monks. The Swale at this point had formed an ox-bow bend and the rest of the so-called army had crowded onto the small peninsular of land. There appeared to be about eight thousand of them and, again, quite a few were clerics.