by Angus Donald
‘Sire, if you hang these men, you will lose this war – it is as simple as that. If you show royal mercy, if you show the gracious mercy that you once showed to me, men who have previously been in opposition to you will come, beg your forgiveness, renew their fealty in the sure knowledge that you will show a similar mercy to them. Think again, my King, I beg you.’
He was a good man Savary de Mauléon, and a wise soul. He had not appealed to John’s good nature – he knew the King did not possess one. He couched his argument in terms of victory or defeat for John’s cause. And the argument was won.
‘Oh, you spoil all my little pleasures, Mauléon, but I know you are a true fellow with our best interests at heart. And I would have more men like you at my side.’ The King turned to the crowd of condemned knights – almost all of whom had been able to follow the conversation.
‘You deserve to hang, every one of you. But my heart has been softened by my noble Poitevin friend here. I have decided to reprieve you. Yet none of you shall be allowed to trouble me again. You will remain in my dungeons until such a time as I see fit, where you may contemplate the folly of your evil deeds against your King.’
He beckoned over a captain of his guard. ‘Take half of these scum to Corfe; half are to come with me north to Nottingham. Now get them all out of my sight.’
Nottingham, I thought. Let us be taken to Nottingham. For even chained in the dark, fetid depths of that royal stronghold, I would be close to Robert and Westbury and many old friends. And who knew? Perhaps something might be managed in the way of an escape or a sly bribe to be let free. My heart was lighter than it had been for days. O God, I prayed earnestly, of your infinite mercy, let them take us to Nottingham.
God was deaf that day. They sent Robin, Sir Thomas and myself to Corfe Castle. First south-west to Tonbridge, which had recently surrendered to the King, then, skirting around south and keeping a healthy distance from rebel-held London, to Windsor. Finally, by slow stages to Silbury, Salisbury and Milton Abbas, and at last Corfe Castle. Those who were able to walked; I was afforded the luxury of a jouncing donkey-cart and it seemed that every rut and bump on the road in that two-hundred-mile journey sent a shrill scream up the whole length of my leg. It was the beginning of December when we set out and I seem to recall that the rain fell every single day. Although I do not remember much more about that hellish journey.
They fed us foully, I believe, just enough old bread, ale and plain oat pottage to allow the captives to march – a straggling line of wet and raggedy men, hacking, coughing, staggering, splashing through the mud, prodded ever onwards by the spears of the Flemish mercenaries, a far cry from the proud knights who had held Rochester in defiance of the might of the King. I spent most of the journey asleep or in some pain-filled fevered place outside my head. But Robin and Thomas marched alongside the cart every step of the way – that I do recall – and made sure I received my full share when the meagre rations were doled out.
I remember my first glimpse of Corfe Castle. We had been force-marched from Milton Abbas, continuing without a halt until long after nightfall in an attempt to reach the castle before the gates were shut for the night. But due to the deteriorating health of the captives – one knight died on his feet that day, just dropping lifeless to the ground as we marched – we did not reach Corfe in time and we collapsed in a small shabby manor about two miles north-west of the royal fortress. We were roughly awoken before dawn and forced to our feet, or in my case roughly slung back into my donkey cart, and were back on the road when the first grey streaks were lightening the east.
It was a cold and misty morning in mid-December and as we came over the brow of a hill I saw Corfe. The castle was built in a gap between two long shoulders of down land that ran roughly east-west, on a smaller hill all of its own. As the sun rose over the eastern hills, turning the heavens a wonderful reddish pink, I saw that the land between the two downs was filled with a pure dense white mist that made the keep of Corfe and its high towers and walls appear as if they were built on an island surrounded by a sea of cloud. The battlements were adorned with flags, now unfurling in a breeze that still held a tang from the sea a couple of miles to the south. It looked a magical place; a romantic palace fit for Guinevere, Lancelot, Arthur and his knights, a noble setting for deeds of arms and tales of illicit love.
In truth, that day I saw little of the romance of the castle. But I may reliably inform you that the dungeons of Corfe were no better than an anteroom to Hell. A damp and stinking rectangular stone box a dozen yards beneath the soaring keep. Twelve men had died on the long march from Rochester, from exhaustion and the effects of their wounds, and of the score or so of men who lived to hear the iron-bound oak door slam shut on their freedom, many might well have wished the King had given them the mercy of a swift death. D’Aubigny was a shadow of his former self. He had taken the defeat at Rochester as a personal failure, a negation of his prowess as a man of arms, and while at least we had not all been hanged out of hand, he was a broken man, silent and prone to bouts of sudden anger and violence.
On our first day at Corfe, at dusk, when we were bedding down for the night on the cold floor, a young knight from Cheshire asked one of his companions, in a spirit of genuine enquiry, I believe, if he thought we could have done anything differently to win that siege. D’Aubigny hurled himself at the man and smashed him across the face with a brawny forearm, and once the man was down proceeded to batter away at him with his fists until a group of knights summoned the will to pull him off. Few spoke to our erstwhile commander after that, or even went near him, and, as he chose not to speak to anyone either, he became an isolated figure. He sat alone in a corner of that foul stone box and brooded day after day, stirring only at dawn and dusk to jostle with the other men with spoon and bowl to get his share of food before slinking back to his corner to glower at us over his bowl and champ at his ration of swill.
Robin, Thomas and I naturally formed our own group on a patch of floor by the high, thickly barred window that was our only source of light. We ate communally, guarded our scant possessions and watched out for each other’s wellbeing – for prison can cruelly change even the noblest of men. When food is scarce, as I knew well, a fine upstanding knight can turn into a beast of prey, willing to kill his companion over a scrap of gristle.
The food was bad, yes, but also monotonous, vegetable pottage made with leeks, or sometimes just thin onion soup and coarse bread, a little watered ale, just enough to keep our immortal souls within the cage of our bodies. But this grim situation did not last for long. Praise God.
The chief turnkey was a tall, austere figure called Winkyn who inhabited a cubbyhole just outside the gaol door. On the second day after our incarceration, I saw him and one of the other gaolers, who looked almost identical to the chief, whispering together and pointing at our group beneath the window. Winkyn came striding across the floor, a heavy blackthorn cudgel in his fist, casually booting men out of his path. He stopped before Robin and glared down at him. ‘You, prisoner,’ he said. ‘Yes, you. What is your name?’
Robin, who had been carefully ignoring him up to this point, rose lithely to his feet. He turned his cool grey eyes on the man and said: ‘I am Robert, Earl of Locksley – when you address me, if you are a man with any claim to courtesy at all, you will call me “my lord”.’
I cringed inside. And prepared myself to fight, as best I could with my broken leg. This was not a sensible way to talk to a man with a thick club who held us in his power.
‘They tell me you are also called Robin Hood? Is that true … my lord?’ said Winkyn.
‘I have been called that,’ admitted Robin.
The turnkey’s face bloomed with happiness. ‘Robin Hood! Bless my soul. Robin Hood. In my own gaol. I never imagined such a thing. My boys will be so proud. Robin Hood! We know all the stories, of course. All of them. How you defeated the three-headed giant in Scotland! How you cut off the head of the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and served it to his
widow for dinner! Robin Hood, well, well, well. It’s an honour to have you here, my lord.’
‘The honour is all mine,’ said Robin.
Winkyn walked to the door, happily muttering, ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, the actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness Robin Hood,’ to himself.
The next day Robin was invited to enjoy a cup of fine wine in Winkyn’s cubbyhole. Vinegary stuff, Robin told me later, but well worth stomaching. Within a week, my lord had come to some sort of arrangement with the awestruck gaoler. He’d persuaded Winkyn to smuggle a message to Kirkton informing them of our whereabouts and received one back telling us that Miles had made it safely home and my son Robert and my household were ensconced there, and that all, for the moment, was well.
All was not well in the rest of the country. Buoyed by his success at Rochester, King John had left his half-brother, William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury, to keep the rebels penned in London and hold the south, while he embarked on a great chevauchée north and east from his new base at St Albans.
This was a terrorising tactic, to be brutally honest, often employed in France and in other foreign lands to weaken a lord by pillaging and destroying his villages and towns. This time King John set his wild Flemish mercenaries loose on his own kingdom and his own people. Those savage warriors burned, raped and plundered their way northwards through the heartlands of England, hitting hardest at the estates owned by the rebel barons, but not always discriminating – it was said afterwards that in those dark days not a man, woman, child or cleric in England was safe. The Flemings used torture a great deal, Robin told us in a flat unemotional voice, applying hot irons or the knife to force folk to reveal where they had hidden valuables. Hearing of their advance, the denizens of York had paid a thousand pounds to one of the Flemish captains to avoid their city being sacked. So far, however, Kirkton had been overlooked by the marauders, for which I thanked God. Yet Robin was confident that Hugh could hold out against them if they did come – and had the funds for a bribe to leave them in peace, if necessary.
Hugh was a good man and a dutiful son and had even managed to send a little money to his father, through the good offices of Winkyn, with which we bought a few luxuries: a flagon of wine from time to time, a piece of cured ham and a wedge of cheese, or some dried sausages, hard-boiled eggs, decent bread.
We began to eat better.
‘It is my money and my meat,’ Robin said to a shame-faced William d’Einford who came over begging for scraps one day. Robin’s attitude had always been that he had an absolute duty to his familia, to his kin and the people who served him, but absolutely none to anyone outside that charmed circle. Yet I saw him slip the hungry knight a slice of cheese later that day when he thought neither Thomas nor I was watching.
The pains in my broken leg grew much worse and then slowly better as I recovered from the journey to Corfe and the bone began to knit itself. Robin unwrapped the bandages and repositioned the splints on the first day in the dungeon, and within a month I was able, just, to hobble to the bucket in the far corner where we held our noses and emptied our bowels.
With the discomfort of my leg and the worst hunger pangs assuaged, the main curse of imprisonment was boredom. Robin and I scratched out a chessboard on the stone floor of the cell and using pieces made from chips of rock and pieces of old bone, we played for hours each day. I managed to beat him from time to time, which pleased me inordinately.
When not playing chess or silently contemplating our sorrows, we talked, openly, honestly, with almost no barriers of shame or pride or privacy. I remember Robin admitting quietly one freezing January evening, as we sat in the gloom of that stinking cell, that since they had been wed, he had never once been unfaithful to Marie-Anne. I was astounded. He, just as I, had been away from home on campaign sometimes for months and even years at a stretch, and in all that time he had never once tumbled a pretty serving girl or kissed a lord’s lovely daughter, or even rutted with one of the tough, squat professional trulls that followed every marching column.
‘Never,’ said Robin, ‘and I will tell you why. I see my fidelity to Marie-Anne as a badge of my honour. I have no doubt she would forgive me if I were to go behind a hedge with some strumpet out of dire necessity. But I choose not to because, if I did, that would make me a liar, an oath-breaker. My honour, not Marie-Anne’s, would be sullied by that meaningless tupping and in all honesty I love my honour more than I wish to honour my lust.’
‘But you do feel it – lust, I mean?’ I said to him. In the dim light of the cell I could not be certain, but I would have sworn my lord was blushing.
‘Of course, all men do.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I have been tempted certainly. And perhaps one day I will forfeit my honour and embrace temptation … if I met someone dark and lissom and lively when all the stars were aligned correctly. But I hope that will never happen. Anyway, Alan, enough of that … shall we have another game?’
‘It’s too dark to see the pieces,’ I said. ‘And this is much more interesting. Have you ever come close – to, ah, giving in to temptation?’
‘Close, yes, several times. There was a woman in Spain, the daughter of a great Saracen lord, fiery and dark-eyed, but … I’ve never yet given in. I love Marie-Anne, Alan, it’s that simple. I love her and no other. I always have. So … if we can’t play chess, shall we sing something?’
We sang. We sang a great deal in those long dull days. We sang all the songs I had ever written, some thirty compositions, we sang all the old English folk tunes that Robin loved so much, indeed we sang almost every tune, canso, ditty, lament, psalm and dirty poem we had ever heard. Robin and I made a tuneful intertwining of different melodies between us and even Thomas, once he had overcome his usual shyness, joined in on the choruses with a deep rolling boom that sounded as if it should have come from a man four times his size.
In the biting cold of February, when a layer of crisp snow lay like a mantel over the hills of Dorset, and at dawn the cell sparkled with frost, Robin arranged to have thick furs and wide blankets delivered from Kirkton. A brazier with a decent amount of fuel was brought in and, at last, praise God, we were warm. My leg was mending well by then and I could walk without too much pain. Thomas, Robin and I began to exercise our limbs, my two friends working out a punishing daily routine, and me bending and stretching as much as my leg allowed. Slowly, slowly, I grew stronger. Robin spent a great deal of time working on the muscles of his arms and chest, and with the better food we were consuming, I began to notice a marked difference in his physique. I asked him why he was doing this and he brushed aside my question, merely muttering something about trying to put on a little beef. One day, I asked him discreetly if he thought Winkyn could be induced to smuggle weapons in to us, a knife or sword apiece, and whether we might try to make an escape. But my lord said no. In fact he’d already sounded out the gaoler about this and, despite the man’s evident regard for Robin, had been rebuffed, with Winkyn primly claiming it would be a foul slur on his professional competence if any man were to escape.
Robin told me to be patient, he was working on a ruse of his own to get us out of Corfe, he said. If I would bide my time and put my trust in him, I would surely find myself a free man in due course. He did arrange a small parcel to be brought in for me, a gift, he said. Winkyn carried it over in person; it was wrapped in a clean piece of linen sheet and the turnkey presented it as if it were a holy relic. I unwrapped it with a rising sense of anticipation.
It was an old vielle and a horsehair bow.
I was delighted. It was not a fine instrument; the varnish had peeled from the wood of the sound box in long yellow strips and the pegs were clumsily carved and loose. Certainly it was not nearly as beautiful as the vielle I had at home in Westbury but, once it was tuned, the sounds it made were perfectly true, even rather charming in a rustic way. Our singing that night took on a deeper, richer dimension. Indeed that cold February night in the depths of Corfe, although you will say
I flatter myself, we made a very fine sound, which no doubt echoed through the whole castle. Let them hear us, I thought. Let our captors know that while they may hold our bodies, our spirits cannot be caged.
The other prisoners gathered around to listen and Robin even conjured a small barrel of red wine, a whole boiled ham and several loaves of good white bread with which to aid our merrymaking. We piled the braziers high with cordwood and served out wine and bread and ham to all. It was not quite a feast but, for once, the dozen surviving knights in that cell went to sleep warm, with music in their ears and a belly full of meat. The gaolers – half a dozen sons of Winkyn who all seemed to be taller, thinner versions of their father – came into the cell and at the end of the night, the turnkey hugged me to his skinny breast and praised me to the moon and back. That night shone like a beacon in the grey sea of tedium that made up most of our time in Corfe.
And it was a night that bore rich fruit.
Two days later, Robin came back from another cosy conference with Winkyn in his cubbyhole and said, ‘We have been summoned.’
I looked at him blankly.
‘The Prince commands us to attend him and we are to amuse his royal ears, and those of his noble mother, with our music.’
Chapter Fourteen
Henry of Winchester, the eldest living legitimate son of King John and Queen Isabella of Angoulême, was a small chubby boy of about eight years, dressed in a purple velvet tunic with a thick sable collar, black silk hose and fine purple kidskin shoes. He had a pleasingly round face, a healthy boyish glow to his cheeks and one eye, the left, over which the lid seemed to droop as if he were always tired. I had never set eyes on him before, yet his greeting to Robin, myself and Thomas was as warm and enthusiastic that afternoon as if we were old and trusted playmates. In contrast, his mother Isabella, could not have been less welcoming. Seated beside him on a pair of thrones at the end of the great hall of Corfe, the Queen was a stiff icy figure in a tall square gilded headdress secured under her chin by a band of cloth.