Knight with Armour

by Alfred Duggan

  “Thank you,” said Osbert. “I am sorry to hear that Romania is not such a rich land as I had been led to believe. Still, you may not have seen the best parts, for surely there is money somewhere in the Emperor’s dominions. Now this son of mine is going out there, with the great pilgrimage. He wants to know all he can of the dangers of the way; tell us about how they fight in those parts.”

  “Yes, sir, he ought to know that; but it isn’t easy to tell, for we met so many different peoples, and each had their own way of fighting. You see, the Greeks are not warriors themselves, so they hire soldiers to do their work for them. Let’s see, first there were the axemen of the Emperor’s guard; they fought on foot in mail shirts, like Count Harold’s men here.”

  “I charged in that battle,” said Osbert. “They fought well, but knights and archers together will always beat men on foot.”

  “You are a true warrior, sir, if you fought in that battle. As you say, we Normans can always beat foot. Some of these guardsmen were Saxons, too; men who had been chased out of England, and gone to serve the Emperor as soldiers. Of course, we had crossbows, that’s new since your time, and we could shoot harder than ordinary archers. The knights threatened to charge and made them stand still, and we shot them down as safely as though we were shooting at a mark. But the Greeks had other warriors too, horse-archers mostly. There were Bulgarians, Turks, Cumans, Patzinaks, tribes and tribes of them, and very awkward they were to deal with. You can chase horse-archers away, but you can’t very easily kill them.”

  “I have never heard of a horseman using a bow,” Roger put in.

  “You have seen Warrenne and his foresters out hunting,” said his father sharply.

  “Yes, but their arrows from horseback would never kill a man,” Roger insisted. “It doesn’t sound very dangerous to me.”

  “It is dangerous, all the same,” Odo replied. “It is true their arrows are not shot hard enough to kill a man, especially a man in armour. But they get you in the legs, or in the face, and they cripple the horses.”

  “What happened when you met them hand to hand?” asked Osbert.

  “This!” replied the lay brother, lifting the stumps of his missing fingers to where his ear had been. “The Cumans, at least, carried light, sharp swords, with a curve in the blade, and sometimes they would pluck up their courage and charge home. One day, about fifty of us crossbow-men, with half a dozen knights, were on our way back to the main army after plundering a village, when a party of Cumans came galloping round a spur of the hill. Our crossbows were unwound, and they dashed straight into us with their swords. But their horses are so small that they don’t try to ride you down. One reined up beside me, and cut at my head. I ducked, and he got me in the ear; then I caught his sword with my left hand, and stuck the knife I had drawn with my right hand into his horses’s shoulder. He shied away, and then our six knights drove them off. They won’t stand up to mailed knights.”

  Brother Odo had little more to tell them. It was dear that he had never seen a Greek, except when looking along the stock of his crossbow, and it was impossible to get anything out of him about their manners and customs. The Abbot had never met anyone who had been to Constantinople, though one of the choir-monks had once read somewhere the unkind remarks that Bishop Luitprand had written about it over a hundred years ago. It was a very large, strong city, where all the gold money came from, and nothing else was known about it.

  All over England knights were preparing for this pilgrimage. It was considered unwise for the English pilgrims to set out in a body; King William was nervous on his unstable throne, and would not let armed men gather together, for fear of another rebellion. As no great leader came forward in England to head the pilgrimage, and they did not all intend to follow the same lord, they crossed the Channel independently.

  On the 1st of August 1096, the Feast of Saint Peter ad Vincula, Roger was ready to go. He and his two followers had taken the pilgrim’s vow in the Abbey Church at Battle, and had sewn crosses of red cloth on the shoulders of their mantles as a visible sign of it.

  The horses were in good condition. Jack, the warhorse, was ten years old, and considerably past his prime; but he was perfectly trained, ran straight at the mark without guidance from his rider, and, above all, could be trusted not to bolt in the charge, the most dangerous fault in a knight’s warhorse. He was fat, but not too fat, and his wind and legs were still perfectly sound; he was a handsome, strong horse, chestnut with a white forehead and white socks, and his tail was long and flowing; that would have to be knotted up in battle, lest a, footman catch hold of it to hamstring him, but it enhanced his appearance on the march. His fore-feet were shod, more as a weapon than as a protection against hard ground, but his hindfeet were bare. He led easily, was quiet with other horses, and knew both his rider and his groom. Of course, he was a stallion. On the march he would always wear his bridle, and the heavily-padded warsaddle, with its semicircular guardboards rising in front and behind to protect the rider’s loins and waist. The heavy five-foot triangular shield would hang by its straps on the near side of the saddle; it was made of leather, stretched over a wooden frame-work, with a central boss of iron, and iron binding on the edges. It was a massive affair, much too heavy to be wielded by the left arm alone, and in action most of the weight was taken by a strap over the wearer’s right shoulder, though he could direct it a little by movements of his bridle arm. Properly worn, it covered him from neck to ankle on the left side, and was proof against spears and arrows. Peter the Fleming, who led the warhorse, also carried the knightly lance, eight feet long and tipped with a sharp steel point. Lances had not yet become battering-rams, and the knight still tried to pierce his enemy in a vulnerable spot.

  Godric led the baggage-horse. It was a sturdy pony from Devonshire, and carried its load in two large leather-covered panniers; these contained the best clothes of all three pilgrims, and Roger’s supply of fresh linen. Balanced on top of the load was a light wooden cross the height of a man; the crosspiece was threaded through the sleeves of the mail shirt, and the hauberk and helm were fixed to the top. Godric carried a satchel for food and another for odds-and-ends, but he had to be watched lest he add these to the pony’s load, or, worse still, climb on its back himself.

  Roger rode the hackney, a common-looking brown beast, touched in the wind, but sound in all four legs; a verderer from Ashdown Forest had given it to him, as a personal contribution to the pilgrimage; it was quiet, with good paces, a comfortable ride for a long journey. Both hackney and baggage-horse were geldings, for greater ease of management in the crowd that was to be expected. Roger rode unarmed, in his second-best blue tunic, and thick blue cloth chausses, cross-gartered, but he wore his heavy, double-edged, blunt-ended sword, to show that he was a knight.

  So, on this first of August, they heard Mass and took Communion in the parish church of Ewhurst, and after breakfast set out on the dusty pack-road for Rye. Roger embraced his father and brother in the little cobbled courtyard of the hall, then mounted, with an unfamiliar tug at his left hip from the unaccustomed sword, and rode downhill to the long pile bridge over the tidal Rother. He knew that whatever happened in the future, whether he ruled as a rich baron in the unknown East, or died in vain among the mountains of the Sclavonians with nothing accomplished, he would never see Bodeham manor again, or any of his family. It was a depressing thought, but young men of eighteen look forward to the unknown, and he reflected that he was following the tradition of his race. Generations ago, his ancestors had left the barren heaths of the north, and, after years of wandering, had settled under the great Rollo by the fertile estuary of the Seine. His own father had sold his little patch of ground to buy horse and arms, and crossed the Channel to win a new home; his cousins had wandered into the rich and enchanted land of Italy, and prospered there. Everywhere the Normans went they became the ruling class; in Scotland and Wales they were expanding now, and every jongleur from the south told how in Italy and Sicily they were setting up
a mighty kingdom. Why should they not rule the rich and mysterious East? If those Greeks wouldn’t fight themselves, and hired soldiers to defend them, they would be better off under Norman protection. He began to sing as they dropped into the valley of the Brede River, and saw on the horizon the flats of Rye.

  After a night in the town, they took passage on a big Sandwich ship, and after a smooth crossing marched towards Rouen by easy stages. They were well fed and lodged by the inhabitants on the way, who refused any payment; for all the world was going on this pilgrimage, and those who stayed behind suffered from a feeling of guilt. They reached the mustering-place outside the city walls on the evening of the 14th, a day too soon, but Roger was eager to celebrate the Assumption of Our Lady in the cathedral church, and some of his father’s worldly-wise counsel had already faded from his mind.

  There was a crowded encampment outside the city walls; burgesses had run up little timber huts for letting to the pilgrims, and every wandering pedlar, beggarman, jongleur and whore between the Loire and the Somme had gathered to give them a good send-off. Roger had no tent, but he did not mind sleeping in the open air on a fine summer night, and rolled up in his blankets by a fire of brushwood.

  Next morning, after Mass, he bought dinner in a cookshop of the town (the first money he had spent since leaving home), and after his meal inquired for the chancellery of the Duke’s clerks. He was directed to a pavilion outside the walls, for the Duke had lost Rouen to his brother in the last war, and King William had a garrison in town and castle. With some nervousness he joined the crowd that waited outside, and tried to remember his father’s sound advice; but he had never spoken to a royal clerk at home in England, so that it was with trembling knees that at last he pushed aside the curtains and went in; for to him, as to all true Normans, the Duke was a more important man than his younger brother.

  Inside, he found himself before a long, cloth-covered trestle table, with a row of clerks sitting on the opposite side. In the middle sat a young man, whose face was lined with wrinkles of bad temper, though he smiled politely at his visitor. Roger stated his business, in a stammering voice that sounded unnaturally loud, and the other listened coolly, playing with a penknife. When he had finished, there was a pause; at last the clerk cleared his throat and spoke:

  “Messer Roger de Bodeham (I have your name right?), you have come very late. To-day is the Feast of the Assumption, and the Council which was called by his Holiness the Pope fixed this day for our departure. As a matter of fact, unforeseen circumstances will delay our start until the end of the month; but you could not know that, and it is unmannerly of you to apply to serve the Duke at such a late date.”

  Roger braced his knees to stop them trembling, and swallowed the first symptoms of nausea. But the clerk went on, after a pause and a stare:

  “Yet it is not quite too late, and we must make allowances, for England is a long way off. You have a horse and full armour, but no followers except two unarmed servants? Hardly a very great reinforcement. Is your mount a trained warhorse? Ah, that is good. And you have mail shirt, helm, hauberk, sword, lance and shield, but no mail breeches? H’m, that puts you among the knights of the second rank. If you had mail breeches, you could have ridden with the counts and great lords, but that is the best I can do for you. Still, even the lesser knights are worthy men of good birth; this pilgrimage hasn’t attracted the soldiers. You will dine at the second table, and the Duke will provide food for your servants, and forage for your animals. Be at the pavilion next to this, the dining tent, in three hours’ time, and you can take the oath when the Duke sits down to supper. You will find criers going round the camp who will tell you when to be ready to march. Now have you any question? There is a great deal of business waiting for me.”

  This was the time to raise the question of the terms of the oath, but Roger felt himself tongue-tied. If he argued about conditions, this busy and bad-tempered clerk might tell him to go home again, and that would be the end of his vow. He bowed and withdrew.

  When the horns blew for suppertime he was standing just inside the entrance of the dining-tent, trying to keep out of the way of the servants. The Duke entered with a train of counts and courtiers, and all stood while Grace was sung. Then the household sat down at table, and the Duke emptied his winecup and called for more. He was a short man, broad-shouldered, active and in the prime of life; his black hair was cropped close, and from his red face and bushy eyebrows his grey eyes stared fiercely; his dress was shabby, and his hands, with their bitten fingernails, not over-clean. But he looked what he was, the Conqueror’s eldest son, and with the Conqueror’s fiery temper also. Roger shuffled his feet by the entrance to the pavilion, and realized the impossibility of haggling about his oath of service with such a great lord. Presently the same official whom he had met that afternoon came hurrying down to him.

  “Ah, there you are, Messer de Bodeham. The Duke will take your oath now. Do you know the procedure? Go up to the table opposite his place, kneel on the right knee, place both your hands in his, and repeat the words after me.”

  In a daze of shyness Roger walked forward. He realized that this hand-clasping meant that he was to take the full oath of homage and fealty; but he could not possibly back out of it in front of all these people. He lurched unsteadily on to one knee, and stretched out his joined hands, as the Duke rose to clasp them. From a great distance he heard the voice of the clerk, and repeated his words.

  “I, Roger de Bodeham in Sussex in England, a free man, not holding any land from any lord, swear by Almighty God, by Mary His Blessed Mother, by all the company of Saints in Heaven, and particularly by Saint Michael patron of warriors, that I will true allegiance bear, and true homage do, in field and court, to Robert, Duke of Normandy, my true lord; and this I shall do for the pilgrimage to the Eastern parts of the world, as long as he is out of his dominions. All this I swear on the faith of a true knight; and all you here present are my witnesses.”

  Two knights standing by repeated: “And all here present are his witnesses.” The Duke released his hands, and sat down again. Roger rose, bowed, and walked out of the tent, no longer his own master, but the servant of the Duke until his lord returned from the pilgrimage.

  His father’s advice had not helped him a bit, and altogether it seemed a good occasion to get drunk.

  II. Nicaea 1097.

  Roger was riding in his place, in the rear of the column of horse. He was mounted on his warhorse, Jack, for they were in enemy territory now, and he was fully armed. The day was very hot and the discomfort almost unbearable. The thick leather of his mail shirt was airtight, and the thinner backing of his hauberk was stinking with old sweat and clammy with new. Below the waist, the padded cloth of his riding-chausses brought runnels of sweat which collected behind his knees, and made them yet more tender for the saddle. The two straps, for sword and shield, pressed his wet clothes against his body, and caused twinges of rheumatism in his sword-arm. The burnished helm, crammed firmly on the hood of the hauberk, glowed from the reflected rays of the sun, and a regular succession of drops fell from his noseguard to the saddlehom. A blinding cloud of dust enveloped the column, save for the leading files, where rode the Duke of Normandy, the Count of Blois, and the Count of Boulogne. There was a smell of woodsmoke, ordure and putrefaction on the south-east wind. They were obviously catching up with the main army at last.

  The head of the column halted when they reached the crest of a small-saddle in the hills, and the rear hastily pulled up in a series of jerks, for fear of being kicked by the warhorses in front. Evidently the leaders were having one of their long and inconclusive conferences about where to go next. The dust blew away, for the wind was in their faces, and Roger looked about him for the first time for an hour.