Sea Warriors

by Martin Archer

  Chapter Three

  Prize money is paid and we gull the King.

  The next morning, my lieutenants and I woke up as the dark of night ended, visited the shite nest, and ate bread and cheese with our men. Then I put on my mail shirt and George and Thomas and I walked through the morning fog to make a brief visit to our London post. I wanted to make sure everything was ready for the King’s visit sometime today, meaning primarily, of course, that the entrance to the escape tunnel had been properly concealed from the prying eyes of any of the men the King brings with him. Yoram and Harold and their apprentice sergeants began organising the distribution of the prize monies whilst we were off to visit the post.

  The quay was already covered with people despite the early morning hour. Some of the pedlars and women had obviously spent the night and been providing their wares on credit in anticipation of today’s pay-out of prize monies.

  ******

  We began handing out the prize coins to our men about three hours after daybreak. Harold had the coin sacks carried across the moored galleys between his galley and the quay and stacked on the quay. Whilst he was supervising the movement of the coins to the quay, he had everyone who was not wearing one of our tunics moved off the quay. The pedlars and women were not happy about being told to leave, but they had no choice and they did. Dinghies continued to make trips back and forth to our anchored prizes to bring in their crews.

  Soon there was a long line of happy and excited archers and sailors snaking up and down the quay—lieutenants and senior sergeants in the front, then sergeant captains, sergeants, chosen men, archers and sailors, and finally the apprentice archers, landsmen, and rowers without stripes. There must have been several thousand men in all, and it was a jolly bunch indeed.

  Yoram sat on a chest and recorded each man’s name, his ship or shore assignment, and the number of coins he was paid. Thomas and George and my other lieutenants and the young students who are their apprentice sergeants and scribes stood around them wearing mail and carrying swords and shields just in case. I bantered with each man as I handed his coin or coins, shook his hand, and thanked him for his service. There were no problems.

  Passing out the coins seemed to go on forever and many of those who were paid stayed to talk with old friends afterwards and watch the others receive their coins. Others hurried off to the women and taverns. Once I got a mighty roar of laughter and bantering calls when I held up both hands with a big smile and hurried to the edge of the quay to lift my long tunic and piss in the harbour.

  ******

  We had finished paying the two-stripe chosen men and had started on the one-stripe archers and sailors when there was a great commotion at the north end of the quay and the crowd parted to admit the King and his guards. William Marshal and a number of courtiers were with him and they were on horseback; the King’s household guards were walking behind him and looked a bit out of breath. They had heard we were here on the quay and had come here instead of to our London post.

  The King was wearing a crown and looked quite regal and kingly. He was beaming and seemed quite pleased with his reception.

  I made much of effusively bowing and kneeling as did my lieutenants around me. Of course, I did; last night, Thomas, who has had much more experience dealing with the high and mighty, had reminded me that kings expect this sort of thing to remind everyone of their power.

  The men saw me do it and, in response to Yoram and Thomas’s frantic motioning to them, got down on their knees and copied me as best they could. It was the first time most of them had ever seen the King or, for that matter, even knew we had one.

  Except for being in attendance at the King’s coronation, I myself had only seen King John one other time. That was in France when I had killed someone’s arrogant second son right after getting the King’s approval. Thomas, however, had met him several times during Thomas’s visits to Windsor to bribe him and his courtiers for titles and lands and things like that. William Marshal I knew from several meetings, and particularly from our meeting at Okehampton with the late and unlamented Brereton.

  “Welcome, Your Majesty, your loyal subjects welcome you most warmly; Your Majesty has inspired them to a great victory over the French,” I said as I knelt and swept my hand to indicate the men who were kneeling all around us.

  Always lay it on with trowel when dealing with royalty and great nobles had been Thomas’s advice when we discussed the King’s visit. It seems to mean a lot to them. On the other hand, many of my men came straight from the villages and didn’t even know they lived in England let alone that England had a King named John.

  ******

  King John graciously lifted his hands to acknowledge the awkward men who were kneeling and bowing for the first time in their lives. Then, as he dismounted he waved his hand for me to rise and my men rose with me.

  “I heard the joyous news and came to see for myself,” said the King.

  “It is true, Majesty, it is true indeed. These fine men were inspired by you. They have taken the French armada from Harfleur and are here receiving the prize monies they are rightly due.”

  I said it loudly so my men could hear and with more than a little pride in my voice as I waved my hand around to call the King’s attention to the men.

  “Pray then, carry on; I would see it for myself,” said the King.

  So I resumed paying the men their coins. After a while, I could sense the King was getting bored from not being the centre of attention so I had Thomas take my place and offered to take the King out in a galley to inspect the French transports we’d taken as prizes. He declined most graciously and then surprised me by asking if it was true that I had borrowed coins from London’s money lenders in order to pay my men. William Marshal and a couple of courtiers listened intently as I answered.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I regret to say that it’s true. Unfortunately, borrowing coins to pay my men had to be done because Cornwall’s lands are too poor to yield any revenues that might be used to pay them. I had no choice but to promptly pay the men to keep them available for your use, particularly since they have not yet been granted the same rights and freedoms as the men of the Cinque Ports.” I emphasised the word “yet.”

  The King raised his eyes at my words so I explained further.

  “Those of your loyal subjects who live and fight on the sea, as the men of Cornwall do, expect to receive prize money and recognitions for their services in addition to their food and clothing; it’s specified in the articles of the Company of Archers on which they make their marks. If I were to not pay them, they would undoubtedly leave and seek service elsewhere—and then they wouldn’t be available to fight for you against the next French armada.”

  Actually, that was mostly true but not exactly. There was nothing in the articles of the company that required an advance to be paid to each man for his share of the prize money before the prizes were sold.

  The King nodded sagely, gave a good scratch to settle the lice in his crotch, and wandered over to the edge of the quay to look down at the galleys moored to it. He pondered them for a while. Then he looked again at the long line of men in line to be handed their prize coins and announced his departure.

  “We are ready to leave now. You have our thanks, Earl William.”

  So “we” mounted his horse and trotted off the quay without looking back. Marshal and his retinue hurried along behind him.

  ******

  “Well done,” Thomas said to me with a smile as the last of the King’s men double-timed off the quay in an effort to keep up with the King and his horsemen. “I’ll draft a decree for John to sign extending the privileges of the Cinque Ports to Cornwall. I know just the man to get him to sign it. I heard a rumour that the services of the Keeper of John’s Wardrobe are cheap to buy these days. It won’t cost much because we’ve got such a fine argument and the King is in such a good mood.”

  Thomas thought for a moment, and then continued with a smile.

  “I’ll put
a ‘whereas’ in the parchment I draft to the effect that there are no revenues for the King to lose from Cornwall since the land outside the monasteries isn’t good enough to generate revenues—so extending the privileges of the Cinque Ports to Cornwall as a limb of, ... ahh, let us say Dover, which I heard is silting up, … will cost the King nothing and get him access to more transports and … ahh, let us say, … thirty days use of a war galley each year whenever he needs one in the future.”

  It sounded like a good thing; little did we know it would almost lead to a disaster.

  We agreed that when they return to London from visiting the Keeper, Thomas and George would take one of our galleys and sail for Rome to deliver the prayer coins needed to buy another year of the Pope’s support. George was going with Thomas so he could visit Rome for the first time and learn how to pay the annual prayer coins that were the key to maintaining our good relationship with the Pope and his church.

  ******

  Whilst George and Thomas were off to Windsor to get the King’s approval via the Keeper of the Wardrobe, Yoram and I, with the help of David and his sons, sold some of the French prizes for almost enough to fully pay the moneylenders.

  At the suggestion of Harold and Yoram, I agreed to keep a number of the larger prizes for our own use. We’ll take some of them into the company’s service as pirate-takers and some as armed merchantmen with archer-heavy crews capable of fighting off pirates. The rest we’ll send east to sell in the Holy Land ports and along the way.

  Properly armed merchantmen would be something new for the Mediterranean cargo trade. It was a good idea. We thought the merchants would like it because it would reduce their losses to pirates; our men would like it as well because it meant additional promotions since each merchantman’s archers would need a sergeant and a chosen man. It also meant we’d need to recruit more sailors and train more archers for duty at sea.

  Harold really liked the idea of our operating merchantmen armed with a force of archers strong enough to fight off pirates. It would, he claimed, let us earn more coins for each cargo we carry and increase the number of prizes we take—because a single galley of pirates waving their swords without really knowing how to use them was much more likely to be taken by the archers on such a merchantman than the pirates on the galley would be to defeat our archers and take the merchantman.

  At the very least, according to Harold, it would force the pirates to use multiple galleys to take one of our transports as a prize, and even then they might not be successful.

  “It would damn hard, don’t you know, to climb up a grapple rope to the deck of a cargo transport when one of our archers is shooting arrows down at you or stabbing at you with one of our long-handled bladed pikes.”

  Harold immediately began thinking about how many archers each armed transport would need and how many arrows and bladed pikes and such each should carry. Strangely enough, he thought the bigger ships would need fewer archers since their decks sit higher off the water above the pirate galleys.

  “They’d have to climb further to get aboard, don’t you see?”

  The thought of more coins from carrying more cargos was enough to convince me and all of my lieutenants and senior sergeants. We’d keep the bigger prizes, the three-masted ships and some of larger two-masted cogs, because they sit higher in the water, and sell the smaller ones. And that was what we set out to do with the aid of David Levi and his sons.

  ******

  The days that followed whilst Thomas and George were away to Windsor were quite busy. Merchants, moneylenders, and idle gentry were constantly rowing out to inspect the French prizes we were willing to sell and climbing aboard those we were able to bring in and moor against the quay. Yoram handled the negotiations to sell them and was quite good at it. It turned out that many of the prizes also had stores aboard them that had been intended for Phillip’s army. We transferred those we wanted to the ships and cogs we decided to keep and sold the rest.

  It was good to be alive, and we spent almost every evening in the White Horse sampling all of its fare except the women. I’d no wish for the French pox or the drips; I’d never hear the end of it from Helen and her sisters—and I most sternly spoke to George and reminded him that the fear of the French pox and the drips was why we fetched the smith’s daughters for him.

  “It looks as though I will have to report to the King’s men that you couldn’t sell your prizes for enough to totally repay us,” David had said with a big smile one evening when Yoram and I joined him at his favourite tavern. “I’m jealous.” Yes, now I’m sure he knows we are trying to pretend to be poor so we’ll be left alone.

  Chapter Four

  The King requests a favour and we leave London.

  Thomas and George returned from Windsor four days later with, as we’d hoped, the King’s seal on the decree extending the privileges of the Cinque Ports to Cornwall. It cost twenty bezants. They also brought an unexpected task—King John had “asked” Thomas to carry a private parchment to the Pope when he and George sail for Rome. Thomas didn’t read the King’s message himself, of course, but from the gossip he heard at court he was certain it asked the Pope to restore King John to the Church’s good graces and remove the Pope’s approval of the barons’ refusal to submit to John as England’s King.

  According to the courtiers, the King and the Pope had fallen out over the question of who should have the power to appoint England’s bishops, the King or the Pope. They are lucrative appointments as we well know; Thomas’s crozier and mitre were quite pricey. I wonder what John promised the Pope this time.

  “It’s a good time for John to try to reconcile with the Pope,” Thomas had explained to us. “The defeat of Phillip’s armada has pulled the teeth from the barons’ revolt, at least for this year, and the court thinks William Marshal has arranged a tentative peace with Devon and the other barons. If the Pope agrees to bless a meeting between the King and the barons, they’ll meet next year and try to work out their differences.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” I agreed. “But a peace between the King and the barons is bad for us. We need an excuse to kill Devon and take Exeter before Devon can get some of his friends together and try to take Cornwall. We’d be in real trouble if he managed to get a big enough force together when most of our archers were in the east. Can you lose the king’s message or change it so the King and the barons stay at each other’s throats?”

  “I dare not. Are you daft? It would be the end of us if John or the Pope found out, which they surely would. The King would almost certainly order our titles and lands forfeit and the Pope would agree. I don’t know about you, but I like being a bishop.”

  ******

  Our final week in London was a busy week. We spent it selling a few more of our smaller and older prizes, recruiting sailors, and arranging cargos—and endlessly going over our lists of sailors and archers to put together crews for the galleys and the French transports we had decided to keep or take east to sell.

  London was full of sailors and pilots because of all the shipping. They were easy to recruit because it was increasingly known in the ports that our company provided opportunities for prize monies, fed our sailors decent food, and wouldn’t try to cheat them. What we really needed were more useful longbow archers, and they were few and far between. Accordingly, whilst we were in London we sent recruiting parties out to the villages to search for likely lads willing to come to Cornwall and make their marks as archer apprentices.

  ******

  Finally, it was time for us to leave. The transports and galleys sailing for Lisbon and Malta will not even attempt to stay all together as an armada. There was no need since our cogs and ships are sailing with archers on board to defend them. After they reached Ibiza, George and Thomas would move to another galley and sail for Rome whilst Yoram and Harold went on to Cyprus with most of our galleys and transports. Yoram and Harold were clearly anxious to get home to their wives and children and, truth to tell, so was I.

 
Everyone going east was quite optimistic about returning to Cyprus and the Holy Land ports. They would all sail separately and try to pick up any prizes that they might run across. The rumour among the London merchants and on the London docks was that the Moorish pirates have become active again, so perhaps some of our galleys and pirate-taking cogs will run into some pirates or Moorish transports and get lucky.

  I almost wished I was going with them instead of returning to Cornwall to spend the rest of the summer there. The French prizes and their prize monies have whetted everyone’s appetite, including mine.

  ******

  I stood on the quay with John Farmer, my apprentice sergeant and scribe, and watched as Thomas and George sailed off for Rome in Harold’s galley. Martin Archer went with them to once again take up the command of our post in Rome. Martin and most of our men stationed at posts outside of Cornwall had come in when I recalled our galleys and archers for our attack on the French armada.

  Now they were sailing off to return to their regular stations and posts in Cyprus, Constantinople, and along the Holy Land coast. Every able-bodied English sailor man and pilot we could recruit in London was going with them to help crew our prizes. I’d join them after I returned to Cornwall to spend a few months with my family and finish the summer season of construction and the training of our archer apprentices.

  It had been a day of farewells when our armada and most of my lieutenants and archers sailed for Lisbon and the east. A surprisingly large number of people had come to the quay to see them off, including more than a few distraught girls and women. John Farmer and I would have gone down the Thames with them to sail for Cornwall but for the last-minute discovery of a rotten plank in the hull of Jeffrey’s galley. The rotted plank was allowing far too much water to leak in and would probably worsen. It had to be repaired before we sailed.