by Angus Donald
De Burgh was now the constable of Dover Castle, which, with Windsor, was one of the last major fortresses holding out against the French in the south-east. It soon became clear he intended to hold it for the King to the last man. It was in this cause that he and his three knights had made the perilous journey to Cassingham through French-held territory to seek us out.
‘The King is pleased with you, Locksley,’ said de Burgh. ‘He likes what you have been doing in these parts. And you, too, Cassingham. He boasts that no man-at-arms of Prince Louis’s is safe anywhere on the roads of Kent.’
Cass was red-faced with pride, beaming at Hubert de Burgh as if he were a favourite uncle. ‘We do try to do our duty, sir,’ the squire mumbled.
‘Well, you are doing that and more, William,’ said de Burgh. ‘The King even has a nickname for you: he calls you Willikin of the Weald. He asks why there are not more like you fighting the good fight in the other counties.’
Robin gave a snort of derision. I could tell what he was thinking: we were only behaving here as we had for years in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, only then we had been outside the law.
‘It is on the King’s instructions that I come to you today,’ de Burgh continued. ‘As I’m sure you know, Dover has been beset by Louis’s men these past few weeks. We have been attacked repeatedly and until now have been able to hold them off, even to inflict significant damage. But our scouts tell us a new commander has been appointed, a fellow recently arrived from France, and he has vowed to take Dover and’ – here Hubert de Burgh paused significantly to make sure we were paying attention – ‘to eradicate all resistance to Prince Louis’s reign in southern England. This Comte du Perche, as he is titled, is a rather odd fellow by all accounts. He has particularly boasted that he will sniff out any brigands and outlaws in the Weald and strip the living skin from their flesh to make an example of them.’
Thomas, Comte du Perche, the White Count, the Tanner, that pasty-faced cat-torturing bastard from the Tower. He had done that terrible thing to the two captured bowmen from Penshurst. And he was coming for us. Well, let him. I’d gladly face him with Fidelity in hand and briskly send him to Hell where he belonged.
‘The Comte du Perche has since tightened his grip around Dover,’ de Burgh was saying. ‘The siege is being pursued in earnest and his men are encamped around our walls. Yet they have neglected, thus far, to dig their own protective walls around the camp. This is why I come to you now. The King commands you – of course, I merely ask you, of your kindness – to attack the French in their lines around Dover. My men and I will guide you and accompany you in the assault, and I have left instructions in the castle for a powerful sortie to be made when our attack goes in. Between us, with your brave men attacking from the woods and my own folk coming over the walls, we can crush the enemy like … like …’
‘Like a walnut between two stones?’ I said helpfully.
‘Exactly,’ said Hubert de Burgh.
‘If the King commands it, we must certainly obey,’ said Cass fervently.
I saw Robin looking at him sideways. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes … well, this does seem like a good opportunity to bloody this new fellow’s nose. The Comte du Perche, you say. And he is threatening to cut the skin from all our bones. Yes, we’ll do it. I’d be more than happy to teach this particular Frenchman a lesson.’
We spent an hour or two discussing the attack on Dover, and then Robin insisted we make plans to break up the training camp and disperse the men not coming with us to the coast. Hubert de Burgh had suggested that the attack on the Dover camp be a hit-and-run affair, undertaken by cavalry alone, with archers in support, of course. We had more than four hundred men under arms at that time but most were farming men and few were trained to fight on horseback.
We decided to take with us sixty trained cavalry and sixty of the best archers, which left just shy of three hundred fighting men of various levels of skill at arms at Cassingham. The young lord of the manor divided them in to ten groups of about thirty men – conrois, he jokingly called them, although they were men on foot armed with a motley collection of swords, spears, clubs and bows, rather than an elite squad of highly trained cavalry. Each of the ten groups was to be sent to a different part of the Weald and commanded by a man familiar with that part, and their task was simple: to kill any Frenchman they could lay their hands on. The manor of Cassingham would be returned to its condition as a sleepy backwater, with just a handful of men-at-arms, but it would act as a clearing house for news. The ten ‘conrois’ would report to the manor on a weekly basis and could be alerted to any threats in their areas, or summoned to form a small army if required, at Cass’s command.
Much to the young man’s chagrin, Robin insisted he not accompany the assault on the lines of Dover.
‘I want to kill Frenchmen,’ he said almost petulantly.
‘We cannot risk losing you,’ Robin said. ‘If this attack fails and we all fall, who would carry on the fight against the French? England needs you, William!’
Cass reluctantly agreed and he and Robin summoned the men to give them their orders. I went off to find Mastin, who was to command the sixty archers, and found him in the graveyard of the little church of Cassingham in a small forest clearing half a mile from the walls of the manor. The big bald fellow was on his knees, beside the mounded earth of the freshly dug graves of the two Penshurst bowmen, praying hard, with tears glistening on his heavily bearded cheeks.
I got down on my knees in the dirt beside him and joined him in prayer, asking God to receive their eternal souls in Heaven and to grant me the strength to take my vengeance on the White Count, who was the author of their final agonies.
‘They was a pair of useless buggers,’ said Mastin. ‘Couldn’t shoot a bow for shit. Never would bend their elbows properly. They talked a deal too much as well. Cheeky to me. I told them they were born to hang. And they were. But they didn’t deserve to die like that, inch by bloody inch. Peeled like a fucking apple.’
He sniffed, cuffed at his dripping nose and got to his feet.
I stood too and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘We’re going to have a chance to pay the French back for what they did,’ I said.
The burly archer nodded at the pair of graves. ‘Won’t bring them back, though, will it?’
Before we left, after breakfast at dawn the next morning, Robin took me aside. He seemed embarrassed and he was holding a linen-wrapped parcel.
‘I’ve been waiting for the right moment to give this to you,’ he said. ‘And this moment is not it, I’m afraid. But I’m giving it to you anyway. So …’
I looked in puzzlement at the long bundle in his hand. He made no move to give it to me. ‘I got Savary de Mauléon to find this for you,’ he said. ‘I wrote to him about it when we were leaving Corfe. Apparently, it was among the piles of loot taken after Rochester fell and Savary had to buy it off a Flemish knight who had claimed it. Cost him a pretty penny, he says. Anyway, here you are. Think of it as a saint’s day gift or a reward for long service, or a token of friendship or whatever you like …’
I took the bundle in my hand and unwrapped it eagerly. To my exquisite joy, inside was a lace-up leather bracer with long black steel scabbard attached holding a slim steel cruciform blade. It was my misericorde. Tears formed under my eyelids as I felt the weight of it in my hands.
It seemed to whisper to me as I slipped it out of its sheath in all its black gleaming beauty. I looked up at Robin, groping for the words to thank him and tell him how much this slim weapon meant to me – and coming up empty.
‘Don’t go all womanish on me, Alan,’ said my lord. ‘I’m giving this to you for a very good reason.’
I nodded without understanding.
‘Be very clear on this: you do not under any circumstances want to be captured by this Comte du Perche; and I do not wish to fall into his hands either. So I charge you with this grave duty. Are you listening? I charge you, Sir Alan Dale, with administering
my death. If I fall and you cannot get me away alive. I want you to use this blade on me. At the end of the game, I would rather die at your hand than any other. I will not be slowly torn apart, my living skin stripped piece by piece for a French fop’s amusement. Swear this to me. Give me your solemn word.’
So I swore that I would take my friend’s life if it was necessary, with the very gift he had just bestowed on me. I also privately swore that I’d take my own, if all else failed. I had no wish to be torn apart piece by piece either.
The French occupied Dover and the busy port, which was to the west of the great castle built by King Henry a generation past, a hundred feet below it and in its deep shadow. To the east and north of the castle, in a great sweeping curve that straddled the road heading to Sandwich, their thousand-odd fighting men were encamped. They lived in grubby white canvas tents, fine pavilions, turf-roofed wooden huts, or just huddled in cloaks in shallow scrapes in the ground under the double-sized crossbowmen’s shields known as pavises. It was not a tidy ground: campfires, portable ovens, stacks of spears, piles of leather gear, saddles, tack and bales of hay and so on were placed wherever their owners wished in a joyous abandonment of good discipline. This encircling French army had made no headway at all against the massive walls, ditches and lines of fortification that protected one of the greatest fortresses in England. Yet they had little to fear from the local English knights. King John was hundreds of miles away, lying low in the West Country as Prince Louis’s men captured town after town and accepted the surrender of castle after castle. Apart from a few hundred men now cowering inside Dover Castle, and the lawless thieves skulking in the dank forests of the Weald, the whole of the south-east of England belonged to Prince Louis and his victorious French invaders. They had nothing to fear here.
Or so they thought.
We blew no trumpets. We uttered no war cries. But just before dawn on the twentieth day of July in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixteen, sixty-six iron-mailed English horsemen came out of the tree line half a mile east of Dover Castle with absolutely no warning and tore into the French encampment like a mailed fist punching through a rotten pumpkin.
Hubert de Burgh led the charge. During the night the Norman lord had steered us unerringly around the enemy lines, crossing both the Canterbury road to the west and the one to Sandwich to the east of the castle, so that by the small hours we were positioned in a wood above the famous white cliffs. With his three knights, de Burgh made up the narrow front rank, the spear point, of our column. They were armed with twelve-foot steel-tipped lances, as well as sword and mace. Three horse-lengths behind them, also wielding lances, came Robin and myself and a dozen of our best cavalry – mostly men Robin had trained himself at Kirkton. Behind our rank came the rest of our force: more than two score riders, well mailed and helmed and eager for the fray, armed with swords, shields, long axes and burning pine-tar torches. They were mostly new recruits, farmers from the Wealden lands whom I had tried to form into an effective fighting unit in less than two months. In truth, I had not made them particularly skilful, but I was proud of them. They might not stand a chance against a conroi of fully trained French knights but now they could all ride and wield their weapons from the back of a horse with some degree of competence and, more importantly, without injuring either themselves or their horses – harder to do than you might think – and they had no lack of one of the most important qualities of a warrior: raw courage.
We took the sleeping French camp almost entirely by surprise, the only sound the pounding thuds of our horses’ hooves. In the grey light before true dawn, the tents and shacks of the enemy seemed like monstrous black shapes and the dull glow of the scattered campfires like the eyes of huge wild beasts hidden by the darkness. I saw Hubert de Burgh, galloping half a dozen yards ahead of me, draw first blood. He burst out of the night like a dream-demon and plunged his lance into the belly of a man standing outside his pavilion on the edge of the encampment, yawning and stretching his arms to the lightening sky. The fellow screamed, curled around the lance as it punctured his half-naked body, and de Burgh hurled the shaft away, swiftly drawing his sword as he thundered past.
The quiet spell was broken by the man’s appalling death shrieks and we began to sing out our own war cries – I was pleased to hear the men giving the screams they had practised so long with wild enthusiasm. I guided my galloping horse between two tents and found myself facing a man with a long dagger in his hand, staring stupidly up as I thundered down upon him. He shouted: À l’armes! À l’armes. Les Anglais …’ Yelling ‘Westbury!’, I thrust the lance hard into his chest, smashing through his ribs, knocking him off his feet, silencing him for good.
I hauled out Fidelity and began chopping at a line of guy-ropes holding up a tent to my right. Robin had been clear in his instructions: our objective was to cause fear and mayhem – to kill and maim as many as we could, of course, but to sow confusion as much as anything. It would safeguard us, he said, for in the chaos of battle who knows who is an enemy and who a friend? And that would help us to withdraw from the field in due course. We were just three score men, he said, attacking more than a thousand. We could not hope to win a proper battle. But we could cause them serious harm and shatter their sense of safety and confidence.
I could smell smoke now and burning canvas. Here and there I saw dark horsemen flitting between the tents, blazing torches in hand, leaving a trail of red fire behind them. The new recruits had been told to set alight anything that would burn and as I rode into an open area before a circle of gold-and-black-striped pavilions, I saw that the whole eastern edge of the camp was now merrily aflame. A French squire, crouched with laced hands, was hoisting his man into the saddle, and the knight, armoured in helm and coif but without his mail hauberk or leggings, saw me and began hallooing to summon his compatriots.
I rode straight at him but before my horse had taken more than three strides, the knight kicked back his heels and, leaving his astounded squire with fingers still interlaced, cantered his horse around the back of his gaudy pavilion to escape me.
The coward.
Now two men-at-arms on foot were rushing at me from my shield side. The squire – who had more courage than his master – snatched up the knight’s sword and ran at me from the right. Enemies on both sides, I spurred straight forward, forcing my horse to charge into the side of the pavilion, which thank God sagged and then collapsed under its high stepping forefeet.
The squire seemed outraged at the destruction of his master’s property and slashed at my horse’s rump with his blade. I flicked Fidelity backwards, caught the blow and at the same time took one of the men-at-arms’ sword hack on the front on my shield. I urged the horse forward, trampling through thick folds of black-and-gold canvas as the tent billowed and sank before me. A tricky overhand blow, across my line, cracked the helmet of one of the men-at-arms to my left, dropping him like a sack of meal, but the squire behind was readying for another double-handed swipe at my horse’s rump, so I swivelled in the saddle to slice at his face. I missed by inches but he jumped back, tripped over a guy-rope and fell hard on his behind. I urged the horse on again and we were free and clear of the trampled tent and in space. I spurred onwards, away from the wreckage. We had to keep moving, Robin had said.
I caught a glimpse of Hubert de Burgh, nearer the centre of the camp, laying about a crowd of footmen on both sides of him with a long sword, doing terrible destruction, clots of blood and matter flying with every stroke. I rode down a spearman and neatly lopped the wrist off a swordsman who ran at me swinging from my right. A riderless horse ran across my path, followed incongruously by three bleating sheep. A scarlet, pure silk pavilion took fire twenty yards from my horse’s nose and was burned to nothing but wisps before I got within spitting distance. Then Robin was shouting from my left: ‘Push on to the road, Alan. That way! Follow me! Don’t stop for anything!’
The whole camp was wide awake now and men were emerging from their tents, armed,
alert and as ready for battle as any man can be who has been asleep a handful of moments earlier. I ran Fidelity’s steel through the side of a naked fat man’s stomach just as he stepped blinking out of his pointed ash-pole shelter, and ripped the blade free, spilling his blue-white guts around his ankles. He fell to his knees, soundless with shock and then, keening, desperately began trying to scoop his innards back into his ripped belly.
By sheer chance, a few instants later I lifted my left arm to check my horse with the reins and caught an unseen crossbow bolt in the top of my shield – it would have pierced my cheek, had I not. I charged the man who had loosed it and he fled. Following him at the canter around an abandoned trebuchet, I caught him against its side and hacked through his face, slicing off the jaw in a spray of red while he desperately tried to fend me off with his unloaded bow.
I pushed onwards, north-west mostly, as best I could, heading towards the Canterbury road, as Robin had commanded. Men ran at me, I cut them down. Others ran from me and, mostly, I left them alone. The encampment was filled with noise. The shouts, the war cries, screams of pain from men and beasts. Laughter sometimes. Howls of rage. The crackle of flames. The shrill clash of steel and thud of wood on iron. Once I heard the sound of a man singing, a filthy French ballad, I think. My sword was dripping. And sweat oozed from under my helmet into my eyes, stingingly salty. A mounted knight shouted a challenge and came at me. I blocked his strike with Fidelity, swung back at him as he passed, but missed and was dangerously unbalanced as a spearman charged in and lunged at my face with his pole arm. I just got my head out of the line of attack and as my horse stepped forward towards him, I hacked down, cutting deeply into his shoulder. He screamed and fell.
It was much lighter now and I could see men running everywhere. Occasionally though, through gaps between the tents, I saw my comrades fighting, men whose faces I knew well, chopping into their foes, trampling tents, firing wooden structures, hooting with joy. These Wealden men were simple folk, suddenly unleashed from the shackles of family, community, law – from their humanity even. They were free to kill – and die – like wild animals. I saw two of them walking their horses over a Frenchman, stabbing down again and again with their swords. Then they were surrounded by a mob, a score at least, of angry Frenchmen on foot: knights, men-at-arms, servants, too, I think. Too far away for me to help them. Their beasts were hamstrung and both were pulled down into a scrum of flashing knives, screaming faces, spraying gore.