The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  The Prince looked us over. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘with the grace of God and your aid, I will now win this battle.’

  We all bowed. It’s odd to tell that in the midst of a stricken field we bowed, but he was the very Prince of chivalry, that day. We bowed like dirty, dusty courtiers, and then we formed a tight array, and followed the Prince into the very centre of the English line.

  Thirty men-at-arms. In a battle of thousands and tens of thousands, it shouldn’t have been enough.

  We didn’t crash into the French. In fact, I found myself behind a knot of men, too far from the mêlée to fight, but close enough to feel the desperation. I didn’t know what to do. A veteran would have known to wait his moment and then push in, relieving a tired man, but I’d never been in a close press before.

  But luck stayed with me. I was behind an English knight – Sir John Blaunkminster – he thanked me later, and we were friends, so I know his name. At any rate, he took a blow to the side of his helmet from a poleaxe and stumbled back. His stumble took him past me, and I caught the French knight’s poleaxe on my new sword – Good Christ he was strong – and I was fighting.

  I was fighting just to stay alive and not give ground, but the French were desperate, ruthless and very good, and before I’d breathed a hundred times, I had two dagger wounds – it was that close, and many of the French were letting go their shortened spears and poleaxes and using heavy rondel daggers. And wrestling.

  I lost my sword. I don’t even remember being disarmed. Perhaps my hands couldn’t hold it any more. At any rate, I took a hard blow to the head, which rocked me. I chose to stumble forward, not back, and got my opponent around the waist. He pounded the back of my head with his sword pommel, and I bore him back into the crush and down hill, then suddenly he tripped and went down. He was slippery with blood – his limbs were armoured and mine were not, so any blow he threw hurt me. Armour is a weapon.

  But I was on top.

  I tried to open his visor, but his armoured hands were as fast as mine.

  I remembered my dagger and went for it. By this time I was straddling his chest like a child on his father, slamming my armoured left fist into his visor over and over. Because if I let him have a second, I was done for.

  My right hand found my dagger.

  My fist closed.

  I drew it and slammed it into his visor.

  The third downward thrust did the trick, but I’ll wager I stabbed him ten more times.

  That’s a fight I’ll take to my grave.

  The problem with a mêlée is that in the moment after you kill an opponent, you sag, and you are very vulnerable in your moment of triumph. I sagged.

  An armoured foot caught me in the shoulder and kicked me off my victim. I fell on my back. I’ve no idea who kicked me, but it hurt, and I was slow getting up, and when I did, men were cheering all around me.

  The French were giving way.

  There were archers all around the rear of their division, and we were pushing them back down the hill. I saw Sir Edward in the press, and I saw the French backing down the hill, closing in around their King. Men-at-arms near me simply sank to their knees, or sat like chastened dogs.

  But Sir Edward was pressing down the hill with the Prince. The Prince was shouting orders, his faceplate up, and even as he shouted, Sir James Audley began to gather volunteers from the victors – men with horses nearby.

  My horse was not good, and he was far away behind the hill, so I followed Sir Edward down the hill. He was hunting a good ransom.

  We had won. Men were still fighting, but the French were starting to fall apart. Their first retreat had been disciplined, but now the Earl of Oxford’s archers were shooting a few hoarded shafts into their backs, and then throwing down their bows, picking up their bucklers and charging into the rear of the French line. The French flinched away like a wounded animal.

  It must have occurred to every man on that battlefield at the same time that we could . . .

  . . . take the King of France.

  What do you think the King of France is worth as a ransom?

  Friends, in the moment of victory – may you all live to know it – everything falls sway: fatigue, wounds, everything. You are a fresh man. While your enemies are suddenly full of self-doubt and fear. This is when men die.

  Sir Thomas headed for the lilies and the Oriflamme. I was twenty paces behind him. All around us, men were still fighting – I saw a French squire stagger, trip on his own intestines, fall, rise and try to stagger on. I saw a knight with a dagger wedged under his armpit still fighting, and another with three English archers on him, holding him down and trying to finish him while he fought back with fists and feet. But I ran past all these, because Sir Edward was my knight.

  And he was going where I’d have gone anyway.

  Some of the Frenchmen were falling to their knees and asking for quarter. Others were suddenly killing Englishmen – running a few steps and then turning to swing their heavy swords.

  Sir Thomas was just ten strides ahead.

  We were under the Lilies of France. I could just see the King, with twenty men-at-arms around him. We were perhaps five paces from the Oriflamme. Ah, gentlemen, what a fine company you might have formed from the killers who were circling the King of France like sharks around a dying porpoise? There was the Bourc Camus, the evilest knight I ever knew, but a deadly killer; there was John Hawkwood, and Sir John Blaunkminster and Dennis de Moirbeke and Bernard de Troyes; there was John Norbury and Seguin de Badefol. I’ve heard about 600 men claim they were in that fight, and half of them claim to have taken the King. They’re lying.

  I was there.

  There, too, were all the squires from Oxford’s division – Richard Beauchamps and Diccon Ufford and the rest. They’d come the short way, into the rear of the French. But they’d missed the honour we gained following the Prince at the top of the hill, when the day was lost and won.

  Still, there we all were around the King and his son and perhaps thirty desperate French knights.

  And Geoffrey de Charny.

  Sir Thomas plunged in like a young knight bent on errantry, and he led the squires forward to the man who held the Oriflamme. De Charny was so deadly, and so renowned, that there was empty space around him.

  Men were curiously hesitant to strike the King of France or his young son. The fighting had an odd flavour, almost a tournament air, except that they were beyond desperation and we were very, very tired.

  Sir Thomas put himself at our head and led us forward.

  De Charny was not a small man, but nor was he one of the giants who tower over a battlefield, a head taller than other men. He wore a plain steel harness and a red wool cote over it, and he wore a single star on his helmet for the Order of the Star. When he saw Sir Thomas, he raised his spear, saluted Sir Edward, and stepped out of the huddle of men protecting the King—

  And Sir Edward was dead.

  He took the French knight’s spear just under his aventail, through the neck. De Charny was so fast that I don’t think Sir Edward ever knew to parry.

  De Charny pulled the blade free of my knight’s neck like the tongue of an adder wagging and reversed his grip, then he struck down, hard, through Richard Beauchamp’s guard as if his heavy spear were a sword, and then the spear point glided into Beauchamp’s eye and out again as the great knight turned his cut into a thrust in mid-motion. As Beauchamp fell off his spear, he reversed it again and felled Diccon with a simple staff-blow to the temple, delivered with crushing force.

  The next squire to face him was Harry Dearpoint, and he was already panicked, and didn’t set himself to fight before he had the point in under his arm to the lung.

  We were saved by the Bourc Camus. He threw himself on de Charny, pinning the man’s arms. But de Charny flipped the Gascon right over his body and slammed him – in armour – to earth. Camus leaped to his feet, apparently unhurt, and faced the lion, but a blow from the staff broke his nose and he was down.


  The Bourc gave me time to gather myself. I was standing like a fool with only a heavy dagger, and de Charny stepped over the Bourc Camus.

  I tackled him. It had worked on my last opponent, but my last opponent hadn’t been Geoffrey de Charny. I got my arms around him, but he kneed me in the gut with a steel-clad knee, turned me and raked my arms with his spurs. I was trying to hold on, trying to dig my rondel into his side, but he was wearing a complex and very expensive coat of plates and my dagger wouldn’t bite. Then other men were by me. I had his waist with one arm – something had gone wrong with my left – as I slid down into a well of pain. Then I was on the ground, but luck – fortune? The will of God? – put his ankle in my hand. I got his spur and pulled as hard as I could, and somewhere miles above me, a Gascon pushed at him with a poleaxe . . .

  . . . and he fell.

  I’m told that when we brought him down, there were eight of us on him. One – Tancreville, one of the Prince’s squires – was dying from de Charny’s dagger in his bowels, but he had the French knight’s other leg.

  I still had my dagger. I was being pushed into the mud, and another man was standing on my hip. The pain was nothing to the pressure. I got the tip of my dagger in behind his leg armour and pushed.

  To be honest, I think I gave him his death wound, but Seguin de Badefol and John Hawkwood both claim the same thing. Or they did until they died.

  I’ll tell you this, though.

  He faced at least fifteen men-at-arms at once, and killed six, wounded five more and died fighting. I never saw his like.

  But even while I lay in the mud – dry dust mixed with blood – with a broken left arm, two punctures in my left leg, and a bump on my scalp the side of a goose’s egg, I said to myself that that was the knight I wanted to be.

  Christ, he was good.

  God have mercy on his soul, for he lived the life of which we dream, and died better than any man I’ve ever seen.

  I went in and out of consciousness. Thank God, I wasn’t badly wounded, but I had an accumulation of cuts, scrapes, breaks and bruises that lasted me for weeks. I lay by de Charny for over an hour. A few paces away, King John of France was captured. I lay there while the very flower of French chivalry were cut down, killed or taken prisoner by a few hundred Englishmen and Gascons. The archers were loose now, killing or taking men prisoner, and many a tavern and inn house from London to Durham was built on the proceeds of that hour.

  The Prince received the King of France as his prisoner, and treated him as a chivalrous man would treat a King, bowing low and giving him the best of everything. And the Prince knighted a dozen men at the top of the hill. He knighted John Hawkwood, although there are some who dispute it. He might have knighted me, but I was lying in the mud, and no one was collecting the English wounded yet, because everyone was so tired.

  It was thirst, of all things, that drove me to my feet. But I was in some sort of fever dream, and I stumbled about a few paces. Men were looting de Charny’s corpse, and suddenly that seemed unseemly to me. I drove them off, like a lion clearing vultures off a corpse, and they – Gascon brigands, every one – reviled me, but fled.

  Fuck them. He deserved better than to be stripped naked and left to rot.

  In the end, I sat down hard, and I was looking into his face. Was he still alive, even then? I don’t think so.

  But he told me things anyway.

  You laugh.

  A battlefield is the strangest place, friends. So many men have died that the ties that bind this world and the next are frayed, and the other world is close. God send you never lie all night with a desperate wound and no water, listening to the four-footed wolves feed on bodies while the two-footed kind take gold and slit throats.

  He told me, ‘He is worth most who does the most.’

  Eventually, I took his sabatons, his spurs and his dagger, which was clutched in his right hand.

  That’s how it was.

  And then John Hawkwood found me. I was halfway from de Charny’s cooling corpse to the river, lying face down in the dust. Sir John never told me why he found me – I assume he was looting. There’s something there, like a passion play: that Sir John Hawkwood was knighted by the Prince on the battlefield, and went straight back to picking corpses for gold.

  Of course, I had, too.

  He gave me water and helped me to camp. Water restored me to a dramatic degree, and the other world fell away, although as we crossed the field, me supported on his mail-clad arm, I thought that Sir Edward was leaning on one elbow waving to me, while Richard Beauchamp cursed me, and I wept.

  The Earl of Oxford came and sat with me later. He congratulated me on my courage, and told me that my prisoner was still safe and was still mine.

  ‘Sir Edward is dead,’ I blurted.

  A shadow crossed his face. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘De Charny killed him.’ I must have sounded strange. ‘With one blow.’

  Oxford met my eyes and put a hand on my arm. ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  ‘One blow!’ I said, my voice rising. ‘He never even got his guard up!’

  Oxford leaned forward. ‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘Sometimes it is like that.’

  ‘He was a fine knight!’ I said. I remember that I said that, because then I burst into tears.

  Oxford sat with me for a long time. He was a good lord.

  Later, about dark, Hawkwood came back. ‘If you got yourself a full harness, I’m sure the Earl would have you as a man-at-arms,’ he said. Ever the businessman, Sir John.

  ‘I can’t afford a harness,’ I said, or something equally foolish.

  He laughed. His hands were brown with dried blood, and I saw that he had a small pile of iron gauntlets – the most saleable item of armour – on the ground by his tent. ‘It’s free,’ he said, waving at the field. ‘I confess that the process of trying pieces on can be . . . wearing. Come on, Judas. I’ll see you right.’

  He held my hand while a pair of archers splinted my left arm after straightening it, then he led me back onto the darkening battlefield. We didn’t have the time other men had, and many of the choice bodies had been picked clean already, but the corpse of Walter de Brienne was found by the heralds just as we passed into the area the locals now call the Champs de Mars. He’d been lying at the bottom of a pile of bodies, including a horse.

  As soon as Hawkwood saw him, he called to Master Peter, who was busy stripping purses, and a dozen of our archers, including Monk John.

  ‘I’ll pay cash for that corpse,’ he said. ‘Intact.’

  They rolled the horse off Walter de Brienne in no time, and six men pulled him out of the pile. He was in head-to-toe plate, the very latest. And he was my size – a big man. Sir John had seen that immediately.

  His beautiful breast and backplate would never fit me, because he was old and overweight, but his legs and arms fit well enough. I was going to spurn his helmet as he’d vomited blood into it.

  ‘Are you a blushing virgin?’ Hawkwood said. ‘This is a brothel, miss, and this is a man’s prick.’ He shoved the helmet at me. It was far, far better than mine, with a magnificent aventail of fine mail, but the man’s blood and bile was all over it. I turned and heaved, and John laughed.

  Monk John stripped de Brienne’s arm harnesses and stacked them and the upper and lower legs like firewood beside me. I was trying to recover, and he slapped me on the back.

  ‘I owe you, laddy. Here’s the payment. You’ll be a man-at-arms. Who knew, when you were a little thief at the door of the Abbott?’ John laughed. ‘You’ll be a gent. Remember us little archers, eh?’

  I got to my feet, and the archers made a game of it. ‘We’re building a knight,’ they said, laughing. They ran all over the field, squandering their spirit like drunkards – indeed, we were all drunk on victory and fatigue. I got a new-fangled Italian steel frontplate, and a magnificent blue velvet-covered brigantine, and a pair of fine hardened-steel shoulder rondels in the Italian style and several pairs of
gauntlets.

  ‘They like you,’ Hawkwood said. He was sitting by me in the dark as Abelard came and dropped a chain hauberk in my lap. The links were superb – almost white in the moonlight. ‘They like to see one of their own go ahead,’ he added.

  They did, too, because while we sat there, men came and embraced Sir John and complimented him on his knighthood. And men brought us wine. Abelard drank deep. ‘I’m waiting to hear some praise for that shirt,’ he said.

  Hawkwood spotted a hole. ‘Didn’t help the last owner,’ he said.

  Abelard grunted. ‘I carried that fucking mail across the field,’ he said. He grinned at me. ‘The Duke de Bourbon,’ he chortled. ‘Never say I didn’t do anything for you, Judas.’

  And that was the Battle of Poitiers.

  Paris 1357–59

  Paris? Paris was . . . astonishing. Horrible. And damned confusing. When the French tried to rid themselves of their King. Oh, I was there.

  After Poitiers, nothing went as we expected. I spent enough time with the Earl of Oxford and the Prince after the battle to know what they expected, and I was present – carving meat – when Sir Neil Loring came to Bordeaux from King Edward of England. He told us that all we had to do was hold the King of France and wait for all France to fall in our laps like ripe fruit.

  But it didn’t happen.

  What happened was much worse – for France and for us.

  First, Paris declared itself to be the government. Ah, mes frères, that’s purest crap, but it’s true nonetheless. Before Poitiers, there were quite a few Frenchmen – nobles, merchants, peasants and churchmen – who thought King Jean was anything but ‘the good’, and after the battle, such voices were loudest, and instead of ransoming him, they as much as declared they could govern better without him.

  Truth be told, he’d failed them. He’d never beat us in the field, and now he’d failed, lost and been captured. With him went, well, the government, eh? Dead or captured. His cowardly son, the Dauphin, slipped away and tried to govern, but Paris wasn’t having it, and when the parliament was summoned, they voted no money for ransoming the King of France and damned little for war.