I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince

by Rosanne E. Lortz

  Chandos sent me to the stables to seek accommodation for our horses. The abbot’s words had reached the Benedictine ostler before me, and I had little to do but bid him make ready to stable our mounts. I besought another errand, but Chandos had none for me, and with my time my own, I crossed the cloister with rapid strides to explore the interior of the church.

  The closest door to the church opened into the transept. On either side of me stood small chapels, full of paintings and carvings, one of them housing lit candles before an ornamented tomb. I wondered briefly whose body the chapel housed but was distracted by my desire to see the full prospect of the church. I walked forward to where the arm of the transept joined with the body of the nave. Behind me the rounded arcade shot up straight and simple, with columns that reached toward a vaulted heaven. Before me the altarpiece stood stately and substantial, demarcating the holy of holies from the pews of the lowly worshipers. Above me the light from the clerestory windows sifted down gently, a glory cloud of golden dust that bathed the stone in color and set my face alight.

  “The only thing wanting is a heavenly choir,” said a voice beside me, and turning I saw that his highness had come in beside me with footfalls too noiseless to notice.

  “Aye, highness,” I said and bowed a little awestruck, for I had never had private conversation with the prince before this time. He was tall, of his full stature then at sixteen years of age, whereas I would not reach my height for another four years. He was still in battle dress, as was I, and the cascading light from the clerestory illuminated his armor while his face appeared dark.

  “Shall we explore the apse?” the prince asked. I mumbled a quick assent, and following his easy stride, circumambulated the altar piece. Here the windows clustered thickly like a bunch of ripe berries. The ornate moldings and rose windows proclaimed that the apse had been constructed later than the main body of the building, perhaps as recently as twenty years ago. The prince led the way, examining the carvings. I followed a step behind in respectful silence. He did not walk aimlessly, however, and as we peered into each vaulted corner he looked about sharply as if he were searching for some especial treasure.

  “It is not here,” said the prince shaking his head.

  “What do you seek, highness?” asked I.

  “The Conqueror’s tomb. This was his church, you know. He built it with the same stones as that citadel yonder. And he came here to be buried when he met his final hour.”

  “It was an inauspicious funeral, if I remember the story aright,” said I.

  “Aye,” said the prince, and he caught my eye with something of a smile. “The monks could barely lift the great man’s corpse, he had grown so corpulent in later years. And the mourners had no sooner begun to wet their eyes, than cries of ‘Fire! Fire!’ filled the air. So all the citizens of Caen went out to save their city from flames, and King William might bury himself for all they cared.”

  “But the monks stayed behind!” I reminded him. “They stayed behind to put him in his coffin.”

  “Pity the coffin was so small!” said the prince, and at that we both laughed aloud, for we both knew the story—that when the monks had gone to place the Conqueror in his stone sarcophagus, they found that his bulk had not been reckoned with, and the box had been hewn too small. The fire put them in a great hurry, however, and instead of taking the sensible course of waiting for a stonemason to mend matters, they tried to force the body into the opening. William’s flaccid body had burst open, sending out such a great stench that it chased away all whom the fire had not frightened. Thus was the ignominious end of the lord of England and Normandy.

  But though we might laugh at the crass nature of his departure, it did nothing to diminish the achievements of his life in our eyes.

  “There was a small chapel off the transept,” said I, remembering where I had first come into the church, “with candles and a stone box. Perhaps his tomb lies there.”

  We retraced our steps and found the place; the inscription on the tomb confirmed my supposition.

  HIC SEPULTUS EST

  INVICTISSIMUS

  GUILLELMUS

  CONQUESTOR,

  NORMANNIAE DUX,

  ET ANGLIAE REX,

  HUJUSCE DOMUS,

  CONDITOR,

  QUI OBIIT ANNO

  MLXXXVII 1

  The words proclaimed that we had found the Conqueror at last. The box was bare besides this, no effigy, no scrollwork, no evidence of his greatness besides this simple listing of his titles and achievements.

  “He is as alone now as at his burial,” said I. “A pity his lady could not be buried nearby so that at least his tomb might have company.”

  “Ah, but she is!” said the prince. “This whole abbey is his tomb, and the sister abbey, the Abbaye-aux-Dames that lies across the way, is the tomb of his lady Matilda. They were cousins, you know, on his father’s side. Some say he bullied her into marrying him, and threw her to the ground by her hair until she consented. But others say she chose him of her own accord, and it was her father who disliked the match.”

  “Cousins?” said I. “I wonder that the pope did not forbid it. If they had lived now, ‘Consanguinity!’ would be all the cry in Avignon and a king’s ransom required before the ban could be lifted and the banns pronounced.”

  “It was the same in William’s day,” said the prince, “though at that time Peter still ruled from Rome instead of Avignon. The pope tried to negate the nuptials, but William was a determined man. He would have whom he would have, be she cousin or no. When the pope insisted on the mortality of such a sin, he paid the pope a princely price. You are standing in the portals of his penance. This abbey for him, that abbey for her. And with these two edifices their sin of marriage was effectually effaced. If we step over yonder to l’Abbaye-aux-Dames, you may see where she lies buried.”

  Before we could pursue this course, however, a messenger strode swiftly in and fell on one knee before the prince. “His Majesty is encamped outside the town, your highness, and bids you attend him at a council of war.”

  “Send him my compliments and assure him of my prompt arrival,” replied the prince, and almost before the messenger had departed, the prince disappeared as noiselessly as he had entered leaving me alone in the great vaulted tomb of Guillelmus Conquestor. I did not stay long by myself in the church. There was still a battle to be fought and a city to be taken. And when Caen had capitulated, there was the rest of France. King William might lie at peace in this church, but King Edward and all his men would remain at war until France finally yielded to her rightful king and lord.

  *****

  The inhabitants on our side of the Orne had fled, but the Caen on the easterly side of the river showed no signs of yielding. Word trickled over that the Comte d’Eu had recruited militia from the surrounding countryside. These raw locals along with a small company of knights were prepared to wage bitter resistance against our troops. As Constable of France, the Comte d’Eu was a powerful noble, second-in-command only to the king. Philip of Valois had finally taken our invasion seriously enough to raise something of a defense, for Caen was too rich a plum to let fall into English hands undisputed.

  The attack was slated for sunrise. I had spent the evening furbishing Chandos’s harness and inspecting the gear for ourselves and our mounts. The blackness passed anxiously, for myself and others in the camp, and it was still night when we rose to meet the day. The king and all his nobles heard mass before the sun showed its florid face, and the army, which had encamped in the fields outside Caen, drew up in marching order. Our greatest impediment was the river, and we expected to struggle hard to gain the crossing points before we could engage the enemy within Caen.

  To our surprise, however, the enemy was not in Caen, but had come over the bridge to meet us. Ranged in battle formation on the western side of the Orne, there stood nearly four thousand men; no more than a thousand looked to be knights or trained men at arms. Our men numbered four times their total force,
and as we saw their motley band, our formation grew tighter, our pennants waved higher, and our spirits rose.

  We were still three furlongs away when their line began to waver. A shout went up from our men, and their line disintegrated completely. A frantic Frenchman wearing blue with golden stars—presumably the Constable—rode up and down their fleeing ranks. He cursed them roundly and adjured them to hold fast, but it was to no avail. These French were no soldiers; they were farmers, shepherds, and vinedressers. Their spirits had shriveled within them at the first sight of us, and now they dispersed in a crazed rush to cross the river and return to the eastern half of the town.

  Our own commanders gave us free rein. We charged forward trying to reach the head of the bridge and cut the fugitives off from the gatehouse. Knights, archers, and men-at-arms rushed madly into the fray, hacking down the fleeing French with indiscriminate blows. Separated from Chandos by the swirling mob, I dismounted my horse in the melee. Once on the ground the tide of moving bodies swept me along. My eyes focused in on the blue surcoat with golden stars; I pushed toward it dealing blows to the right and left. Before I knew where I was headed, the blue surcoat had disappeared and I found myself at the foot of the gatehouse.

  The bottom of a tower is a good place to be as long as there are no archers above. I set my back against the wall and held my ground against all comers. To my left stood a big Englishman with a neck like a bull. He had one eye with a jagged scar across the lid and nothing but the white of the eyeball inside. His shield showed the map of England surrounded by a silver border. A troop of a dozen men or so ranged themselves round about him, and I saw that he must be a baron of some small standing.

  The fugitives were frantic now, with passage across the bridge being their only hope of survival. I blocked blow after blow with my shield, slicing at men who came too close or beating them down with the pommel of my sword. “Have at them, boy!” grunted the man with one eye. “Skewer the bastards!” He lunged and panted like a mastiff, snarling all the while out of the corners of his mouth.

  The battle was all in our favor. As more and more of our men reached the gatehouse, the sloping banks of the river ran red with blood. “Shall we give them quarter?” I asked, seeing a few Frenchmen fall to their knees with their hands above their head.

  “Quarter?” bellowed the big man. “We give no quarter!” He spat as he said this, tripped a fleeing Frenchman, and sliced cleanly through the back of his neck. I shrugged wearily and hitched up my shield, anxious for the butchery to end.

  “Sir Thomas!” said a voice from a place above.

  “Eh?” said the big man, looking about him in bewilderment. His men shook their heads in confusion. None of them had called his name.

  “Sir Thomas!” sang the voice again.

  “There, in the tower window!” said I, and a flash of blue and gold peeked out.

  “Who knows my name?” bellowed the big man. “Who calls me?”

  “It is I, the Comte d’Eu,” said the man in blue.

  “And I, the Comte de Tancarville,” said another voice, slightly higher pitched, from within the recesses of the window.”

  “You are Sir Thomas Holland, are you not?” said the Comte d’Eu. “We fought with you in Prussia. You were with the Teutonic Order then.”

  “Aye, in Prussia!” replied Holland, dropping his jaw in amazement. “I recognize your voice. You are Raoul of Brienne. You saved my skin more than once from the infidel.”

  “And now I’m asking you to save our skins from your infidels,” replied the Comte d’Eu, the honored Constable of France. “They seem resolved to slaughter us all without regard for rank or quality. Come up to us in the tower so that we may surrender to you and save ourselves alive. For even prison is better than the dishonorable death that awaits us below.”

  “It shall be done!” said Holland, saluting the window with exaggerated courtesy. He ordered his men to cut a path to the tower door, and once there to guard the door below while he ascended. “Let no one pass, either French or English. These counts will fetch a pretty penny, and I’ll share their ransom with no man.”

  I watched Sir Thomas Holland bludgeon his way through the crowd till he reached the door of the tower. Then he climbed its uneven stairs to secure his captives while the struggle slowed to a halt on the ground below.

  *****

  I will not describe in full the remaining efforts we English made to gain Caen, but suffice it to say that the burghers were stubborn and our efforts were considerable. The city was unfortified on the outside, but each house was its own fortress. The door of every home became a barricade, and the upper story a battlement from which women and children could hurl makeshift gunstones. Our men suffered more from the French citizens in the streets than we had from the French soldiery in the field.

  In one irate moment, His Majesty stormily ordered that the entire population be put to the sword, but a few choice words from his counselors dissuaded him from this purpose. This grudging clemency, and also the futility of their cause, eventually convinced the citizens to open their doors. The town was plundered with grim determination. The soldiers entered every house, questioned the inhabitants, examined the cupboards, and stripped the walls bare of their trinkets. The king issued a new edict forbidding the citizenry to be harmed, but edicts were not a language that soldiers understood; I heard the screams of many women that day.

  Sir Chandos and I scoured the city in the company of the prince. His highness had charge of his own detachment of soldiers, and he sent them systematically through the riverside streets to search each house from top to bottom. The prince always treated the citizenry courteously, but his will was inflexible and he took all that he found despite their pleading. In our company most of the plunder was designated for his highness’s coffers. It was no small thing to pay the wages and supply the food of such a large expedition. The prince himself was required to bear the expense of the men levied from his own estates. The forced contributions of the French would defray some expenses.

  In one rich burgher’s house we came across an ornamental vase, covered in gold and brilliant blue enamel. The rim was scalloped evenly all around like the petals of a flower. The vase was the size of an infant child and just as fragile in its constitution.

  “This vase is very old,” said Chandos reverentially, “and of Byzantine origin. These French folk must have purchased it from a Crusader.”

  “It is exquisite,” said the prince, and he raised it gently in his hands. “Everything else must go into the common pot, and the merchants will stir it up into money for the men. But this beauty, this I shall keep. She shall be an heirloom in my family, a keepsake of my first campaign.”

  Our fleet, as I told you, was anchored upstream on the Orne. Glad to hear that we had obtained the town, several ships put in at the docks where they were loaded stem to stern with plunder. The prince had the vase wrapped carefully and sent aboard, and with it the other loot our company had secured. Our takings from the city of Caen were so extensive that the hulls of our ships could barely encompass all the treasure. Edward ordered the fleet back to England to unload the booty. The army spent five days in Caen to make sure we had licked the platter clean, and then we too abandoned the city to continue our eastern march.

  The luxurious spoils of Caen whetted our appetite for more. Many hoped that Paris would be our next conquest, but the king, as we learned later, had set his sights north of that on the city of Rouen. We had been in France well over a fortnight now and had yet received no word of French Philip’s intentions. He had lain very quietly, waiting like a thrush in the hedge till the hounds pass by. But as we neared l’Ile de France and nosed about his nest a little, Philip began to rouse himself.

  The first sign we received that Philip had bestirred himself was an embassy from the pope. For over fifty years now, the pope has had his seat at Avignon, and for over fifty years, the English have mistrusted whether Peter’s successor still holds the keys. The rock upon which the churc
h was built has sat in Rome for over a millennium, and it cannot be carted over the Alps like a cask of wine or a wheel of cheese. The removal of the papacy to France effected the removal of the pope’s independent judgment. Your French pope sits in the French king’s pocket, and this our king knows well enough. But though he might wish to, the English king cannot disregard the pope entirely; though his spiritual authority is dubious, his temporal authority is indisputable. An English king who disregarded the mandates of the pope would face the wrath of the Holy Roman Emperor as well as the wrath of France.

  Edward received the cardinals courteously and just as courteously refused their offers to broker a peace. Their embassage gained nothing for us but the delay of a day; but for Philip of Valois, this delay was a boon from heaven. Guessing our plan of cutting north, Philip set spurs into the sides of his royal army and reached Rouen before us.

  When our scouts realized Philip’s position, Edward ordered us to fall back. Our troops numbered just over fifteen thousand and Philip’s at least four times that many. The reports of the French strength began to dishearten our men, and the enthusiasm from the sack of Caen disappeared entirely. But although the men had fears, there was no talk of retreat the way we came. We had burned such a wide swath of land in Normandy that there would be no supplying our army on a return march. Only two pathways lay open to us. We could plunder Paris in Philip’s absence, or we could cross the river Somme and unite with our Flemish allies in Picardy.

  At first, His Majesty seemed to have settled on the former stratagem. With Philip patrolling the ramparts of Rouen, our army strode southwest, paving a highway of burned fields into Paris. The French army proved as mobile as our own, however, and we had no sooner reached Poissy, on the outskirts of Paris, than we received word that Philip had returned to his capital.

  To hunt a lion in his own lair is a dangerous undertaking for the hunter, and Edward was not unmindful of the perils. Paris could not be taken with Philip there. Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, we hurriedly crossed the Seine and went northward on winged feet. The prospect of uniting with our Flemish friends seemed more and more inviting. But Philip, by now, was accustomed to sniffing at our heels. The Seine was an easy stream for him to leap, and he brought his army northward, dogging our steps for ten days and sending challenge after challenge to bid us turn and fight.