The Iron Castle

by Angus Donald

  Robin had disappeared from my side, and I saw him striding across the courtyard of the middle bailey towards the gatehouse, roaring at the men-at-arms there to open the gates. I looked back at the town of Petit Andely and saw that it was almost completely overrun by the enemy now. Wolves and a few mounted men-at arms were urging the last of the stragglers through the open gates, fending off the bolder foes who menaced them. But, for the most part, the French men-at-arms let the townspeople depart in peace, quite unmolested; they seemed content to revel in their effortless possession of this rich Norman town. For once the fires that invariably accompany the sack had not been kindled, and French could be seen rushing here and there, their arms filled with booty, kicking down doors, no doubt marvelling at what they had captured at so little cost. They had stormed almost undefended walls and earned themselves a town devoid of souls but filled with costly goods: household furniture, fine tableware, rich cloths and draperies, silver pots and copper pans, barrels of wine, dried hams, wheels of cheese and all that could not be easily carried away.

  In contrast, when I next looked down at the middle bailey of Château Gaillard, it was a babbling sea of humanity, packed as tight as a shoal of fish caught in a purse net. Almost all the former denizens of Petit Andely, some two thousand souls, had come to claim their right of protection in their lord’s castle.

  I must tell you a little of the dispositions of the Iron Castle, its precincts and halls, its walls and towers, its tricks and secrets. For in those days I knew it as well as I know Westbury. One must remember that this castle was the pride and joy of King Richard: perhaps the greatest achievement of his short and glorious lifetime. He built it fast, in a little over two years, but he built it well. The lionhearted king lavished more treasure on this one castle than on all the others combined. It was the jewel in his crown; he loved it, and even playfully referred to it as his daughter – and he used all the vast store of military knowledge he had accumulated in thirty years of warfare from Aquitaine to Acre to make it impossible to conquer.

  First, its positioning: it was perched high on a great limestone outcrop, fully three hundred and fifty feet above a broad loop of the Seine. The outcrop ran north-west to south-east, with the wide river below the north-western battlements. There was no attack possible from that side as sheer cliffs dropped from the battlements to the grey waters of the Seine. Indeed, the land fell away from the castle steeply on all sides, but the gentlest slope was at the far end, the south-eastern face, no more than a saddle of land between the walls and a low hill. This being the most obvious point of attack, King Richard had doubly fortified it with an outer bailey roughly triangular in shape and separate from the main castle. This outer bailey had five high towers and eight-foot-thick walls, and just by itself this bastion was as tough a nut to crack as many a fully grown castle. It was connected to the castle by a retractable wooden bridge, the idea being that if this bastion were to fall, the enemy would be no further forward in conquering the rest of the castle. This outer bailey was where Robin and I – and Vim, who arrived grinning and without a scratch after the retreat from Petit Andely – and eighty surviving Wolves had been lodged on our arrival by Roger de Lacy, Château Gaillard’s constable.

  The retractable bridge over a deep dry moat led from the outer bailey to the middle bailey. This formed the defences of the castle proper and was roughly circular in shape, though the circle was a little flattened; again it had been built to take a battering, with thick walls and high towers and a formidable square gatehouse in the east, which formed the main entrance to the castle as a whole. The courtyard of the middle bailey held a well that provided an inexhaustible supply of sweet water; and it had deep and spacious underground storehouses clawed out of the soft limestone, and many wooden buildings erected around the walls to provide shelter and accommodation for a multitude of horses and men-at-arms. There was also a latrine block and, rather scandalously, a small chapel that King John had caused to be built on top of it, as well as blacksmiths’ forges and huts for armourers, fletchers, brewers, a bake house, several kitchens and even a wine seller’s counter under a striped awning that proved popular with off-duty knights.

  If the middle bailey was deemed a difficult fortification to take – and, believe me, it was the envy of the greatest castle-builders of the day – the inner bailey was even more formidable. Set to the rear of the middle bailey, and protected not so much by very thick solid stone walls as by a series of linked D-shaped bastions – so constructed as to shrug off the pounding missiles from enemy petraries like water off a duck’s back – the inner bailey was the kernel of the castle, its core. But even that was not the final redoubt, for inside the inner bailey was a tall, high tower, with the thickest walls of any in the castle: the keep. This was built en bec, that is shaped like a teardrop for extra strength, and it was where the defenders could finally seek shelter if, by some malign trick of fate, the outer bailey, the middle bailey and the inner bailey were all somehow to fall. The keep had its own stock of food and water in casks sealed with lead and wax – enough to keep fifty men alive for three months.

  This was why Château Gaillard was the greatest fortress in Christendom: as well as the great difficulty of attacking the place due to its formidable natural features, it had an astonishing four layers of defence that an enemy had to batter through before it would fall. King Richard was justly proud of it; King Philip justly in awe. You will remember that Philip had boasted he could take it if its walls were made of iron; and Richard had boasted he could hold it if its walls were made of butter. Yet they were not butter, but two layers of vast, well-cut, oblong-shaped limestone blocks, an inner and an outer wall, with the gap between them filled with flint, chalk and rubble, and the whole bound together by a strong sand, lime and clay mortar. The walls of Château Gaillard could easily stand up to months of cruel battering by the mightiest castle-breakers and, more importantly in my view, they were defended by good fighting men who understood their business as well as any.

  Lord de Lacy gathered the inhabitants of the castle together in the open air of the courtyard of the middle bailey the day after Petit Andely was lost. With the massive influx of folk, there was not room enough for every man to find a place to stand and men hung from cresset hoops in the walls and perched on the roofs of the stables, kitchens and barracks to hear his words.

  ‘People of Petit Andely,’ he bawled, to make himself heard over the tumult of the crowd. ‘I bid you welcome to this castle and say this to you all: fear not the anger of the French. Our fighting men are most valiant. Our walls are impregnable. Our storerooms are full. They shall never subdue us – never!’

  He paused to allow the shouts from the multitude to subside a little. And they did become quiet – or as quiet as any crowd of two and a half thousand souls can be.

  ‘We have the strength, we have the will, we have the courage to hold this castle and, by God, we shall hold it until this French rabble before our walls is dispersed.’

  Roger de Lacy raised a hand in the air and pointed a finger north-west. ‘Our sovereign lord, King John himself, will never allow us to be defeated. Even now, he is mustering his armies, gathering his loyal men, and he will ride to our aid and crush our enemies like ants beneath his boot heel. Our task, and the task of every man and woman here, is to stand fast, to keep our courage high. We must keep the faith, keep a good watch from the walls, and put our trust in God and good King John!’

  It was a short speech, plain but powerful – much like its maker. I must admit I was more than a little moved by it. Kit, standing beside me, had tears in his eyes when it was done. I noticed even Robin was smiling quietly as he listened to de Lacy’s stirring words.

  Afterwards de Lacy paid us the honour of a visit in the outer bailey. He strode into the circular hall on the second floor on the big south tower, the largest chamber in the bailey, which Robin had appropriated as his headquarters, and formally bid us welcome before briskly making it quite clear what our duties would be
.

  ‘This bailey is your responsibility, Locksley, you and your rascally Wolves. I can give you a few extra men-at-arms from the garrison, and some engineers for the springald, but you must defend this bastion against all they can throw at you. You must hold it.’ He fixed Robin and me in turn with his hot brown eyes to make sure we understood.

  ‘This, most likely, is where the hammer blow will fall,’ he said. ‘And you must suffer it, and repel them with all your strength. I’m counting on you – both of you. For if we can hold this bailey, if we can hold out here’ – he stamped a mail-shod foot on the wooden floor planks – ‘I truly believe we can hold Château Gaillard for the King until the Heavens fall.’

  The constable’s words were put to the test the next day. For the French, flushed with pride with their victories on the pontoon, against the little fort on the Isle of Andely and by the easy capture of the town itself, came eagerly to attack our walls.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They did not attack the outer bailey, as we expected. Indeed, when they came they did so without science or skill, straight up the path to the main gate in the middle bailey in a sprawling horde. I believe a good many of the men who came against us that day were drunk, either on wine looted from the town or merely on the joy of victory.

  The first I saw of it was a crowd of men-at-arms gathering and being harangued by a pair of energetic young knights in the wide hollow between the river and the gates of the town, at the bottom of the chalk track that led up to the castle. King Philip was not present; I am not certain he even knew about this attempt on our walls, for I could see his banner flying in the French encampment on the far side of the Seine.

  Nonetheless, many hundreds of men-at-arms had been collected together and were milling about at the north-eastern base of Château Gaillard, a mere four hundred paces away as the eagle flies, and a hundred paces beneath us. Many were drinking from looted earthenware jugs and big leather mugs; some quaffed straight from small kegs of wine, splashing their faces red with the liquor. The two knights took turns to speak, standing on a barrel so as to be seen, their arms waving towards the castle but their words indecipherable. Priests and monks passed through the throng, giving out blessings and anointing the men with holy water. I could easily imagine the well-worn message the knights and clergy were delivering – that all the vast riches of the town, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, was now inside the castle; that the English defenders were demoralised, broken and weak after their recent defeats by French prowess; and that God, of course, and all the saints in Heaven were on their side.

  I was looking down on them once again from the north tower of the outer bailey, the tower that guarded the narrow oak door that was the only way into our detached bastion, with Robin, Kit and two dozen archers from the Wolves. Aaron and his engineers had, on Robin’s instructions, dismantled Old Thunderbolt and moved the unwieldy springald and its stand of massive iron bolts to the south tower, which formed the apex of the triangular shape of the outer bailey, so as to make room for the Wolves, who were now stringing their six-foot war bows and selecting their straightest, sharpest and best-fletched arrows.

  After more than an hour, in which I watched the enemy drink and shuffle around each other and shout out threats and curses and occasionally listen briefly to the exhortations of their betters, they began to straggle up the hill towards us around the middle of the afternoon. Drunk or sober, they were still brave men. The two knights came first, with fifty well-mailed followers in a tight pack around them, and then came the rank-and-file men-at-arms in a loose and disorderly mob several hundred strong. Among the foremost of the tight knightly group, I spotted ten men carrying between them a large, iron-capped tree trunk, with crude handles carved into the wood, and six men wielding long axes.

  They began to die a hundred yards from our walls. Before they had even reached halfway up the chalky track, the arrows and crossbow bolts of the garrison were falling thickly upon them in a killing rain. There had been no attempt to disguise the point of attack nor to provide the attackers with any more protection than their armour and the shields they carried, and they died in their scores as the steel-tipped yards of ash from Robin’s bowmen punched through mail as if it were linen, and the quarrels driven by powerful crossbows from de Lacy’s men in the middle bailey sank into arms and legs, piercing torsos and skulls, and nailing fallen men to the earth. From my post, I could clearly see blood gouting from almost every strike, and a handful of men dropping, wounded or dead, at each beat of my heart as they slogged up the steep path, still shouting and waving their weapons, through a dense cloud of destruction. Every half-decent bowman in Château Gaillard, that sunny September afternoon, killed and wounded and maimed to his heart’s content. I even heard Robin’s archers calling out targets to their fellows and wagering on a hit or miss. By the time the French came within thirty yards of the main gate, their numbers had been thinned by perhaps half, and skewered bodies and broken men were sprawled everywhere, and still the black missiles whizzed and thumped home and the running men spun and dropped, coughing blood from pierced lungs, tugging at transfixed limbs and crying out to God. The lead knight, a bold fellow if ever there was one, was thickly feathered, sheeted in his own blood, yet he urged the men onward to attack the gate. The bravest man among brave men. But the gate was narrow, built of foot-thick oaks reinforced with five fat strips of black iron, and de Lacy had more than a hundred men-at-arms on the walls above it, in the gatehouse itself and in the two round towers on either side, hurling javelins and spears and huge rocks down on the unfortunates below. More than a few able-bodied townsmen had joined them, taking revenge for the loss of their homes. Skulls were crushed like dropped eggs, strong backs were impaled by spears, bones snapped and flesh was ripped by spear and quarrel. From the outer bailey, Robin’s archers poured one withering volley after another into their flanks, the destruction truly terrible to see; they nailed enemies’ bodies one to another with their wicked shafts.

  Through a murder hole directly above the main gate a gallon of boiling oil sizzled down on the half-dozen souls below who were desperately battering at the oak with the ram. The men around it screamed like the souls in Hell as oil many times as hot as boiling water splashed down upon them and seeped through their ring-mail to scorch the skin beneath. They dropped their burden, stumbling blindly away, the skin of their faces sloughing off like melted butter from a skillet. Then the French force broke; they ran blindly from the pain and death, falling down the track, jumping, tumbling, down and away, leaving more than a hundred bodies in the lengthening shadows below our walls.

  We lost one man, a young townsman killed by an enemy crossbow at the fiercest pitch of the fight. Another half-dozen took scratches, bruises and minor cuts – some of them inflicted accidentally by comrades in the fever of battle.

  Morale is a strange beast. Before the French assault, I had seen the strain of fear etched on many of the faces of the Petit Andely refugees. After the attack failed, with the French lying in bloody, writhing mounds before our walls, the faces of the townsmen shone with joy and our men-at-arms walked with the swagger of merchant-venturers whose ships had just come safely home.

  Robin did not seem affected one way or another. When I complimented him on the performance of his archers, he shrugged and said, ‘Yes, they did well, kept their discipline. We’ll see how they fight in a real battle.’

  ‘You do not consider that battle to have been real?’ I said, surprised at his dismissal of a bloody action, in which a hundred brave men had uselessly died.

  ‘King Philip is over there,’ he said, pointing across the river to the French encampment. ‘He – the King of France himself, God’s duly appointed prince on Earth – came here to take this castle, and he is not going to let one petty skirmish and the deaths of a handful of his men alter his intent. I think, Alan, you will find that we have many hard months ahead of us; with fighting of such ferocity that this little dust-up will one day seem like a jolly summer
picnic.’

  I looked at the heaps of dead and wounded before the walls, at the crushed heads, staring eyes, broken limbs and puddles of blood, and acknowledged the truth of Robin’s words. This, I knew, was only the beginning.

  ‘Be a good fellow, Alan, and take a squad down there,’ my lord said, nodding at the carnage before the gatehouse, ‘and gather up as many unbroken arrows as you can; cut them out of the bodies, if you have to. We are going to need every one.’

  The French sent a pair of heralds the next morning, and two trumpeters as well, all dressed in blue and yellow and under the banner of the King of France, a gorgeous azure field covered in golden fleurs-de-lis. The party picked their way up the track on horseback, unmolested by our bowmen, and halted at a spot some twenty yards from the main gate, and the trumpeters formally announced their presence with an elegant but unnecessary fanfare – the walls of the castle were already thick with gawping men and Roger de Lacy himself was standing in the roof of the gatehouse, resting his hands on the breast-high parapet and looking out at the advancing foe.

  ‘His Royal Highness, Philip Augustus, King of France, by the Grace of God Almighty, lawful overlord of John, rebellious Duke of Normandy, sends you his greetings,’ intoned one of the heralds.

  ‘And I, Roger de Lacy, Castellan of Château Gaillard, vassal of His Royal Highness King John of England, Duke of Normandy, return them,’ said de Lacy. ‘What is His Highness King Philip’s pleasure this day, my noble lords?’

  ‘The King instructs and commands you to take up your arms and all your goods and chattels, your servants and your animals and to quit this place and surrender it willingly to His Royal Highness by the end of this day. In doing so, you will earn his everlasting gratitude, and the favour of God Almighty for the lives saved and the blood not uselessly spilled over this matter. You will be allowed to ride from this place as free men, untroubled by our forces, with all your arms and your honour intact. But if you refuse, mark this well, the King bids me to tell you that his wrath will know no bounds and he will surely expel you and all your men by force of arms and there shall be no guarantee that any life shall be spared, nor that any man-at-arms however noble or exalted shall go unpunished.’