by Smith, Skye
"The Frankish world is in upheaval and he is too weak in England to do what he really wants to do, which is to pull his armies out of England and use them to expand the borders of Normandy. He must rue the day he decided to be the King of the English. If not for that decision he would have an empire as large as Charlemagne's by now. Instead he has lost his best fighting men and his warlords shut themselves in their baileys fearing an arrow in the back."
"You say you want Raynar recalled, then you brag about the fear he has brought to the Norman lords. Make up your mind."
"Recall him."
"No," repeated Jarl Osbard. "Now, back to the problem at hand. How can we break this bailey without losing more men?"
"Buy them off. Offer them sweet terms."
"They don't trust our word after what happened in Huntingdon."
Hereward did not trust this Jarl or the Danish intentions, so he was working a ruse to make this new commander of the Danes in Ely think that the roving bands of outlaws were under Ely's command. Hereward looked away so that Jarl Osbard would not see him smirk. The bands of outlaws were being run from Huntingdon and were taking this war to the Normans. Meanwhile Sweyn was slowly withdrawing ships and crews from Ely. There was easy plunder along the coasts of the continent while the Frankish kingdoms were preoccupied with snapping at each other.
Thorold had given Hereward some excellent council when he told him how to use the Jarl and his Danes. The first of these ruses had convinced Jarl Osbard to use the Danish army in Ely to lay siege on Cambridge. This turned Cambridge into a useful decoy to attract any Norman armies away from Huntingdon.
This was keeping both the Danes and the Normans busy and bogged down, and meanwhile Raynar's wolfpacks could get on with pushing the Normans out of the richest farmlands, so that the folk could grow enough food to last the winter. Neither the Danes or the Normans seemed to realize that the wolfpacks were being run and supplied from Huntingdon, not Ely, or that Huntington was a much more strategic crossroad than either of the other towns.
Hereward’s latest ruse with Jarl Osbard hid the truth behind a half truth. Yes Raynar was running wild and slaughtering Normans, but there was not just one band with him as Jarl Osbard was being led to believe. There were now a dozen bands and each of them was raging against the Norman manors and villages and pushing ever outwards from Huntingdon, clearing the land of the plague of Norman land lords and knights.
The axemen knew them as the Hood and they clamoured at the gates of Huntingdon to be trained in bow craft by the man now renown as Little John. John's restriction was not a lack of coin, because Edgar’s coins were still in plenty. It was not a lack of men. Between axemen and oarsmen there were men a plenty. The critical shortage was of seasoned Yew staffs. .
The bows had become a valuable earner for the village folk of the Fens. Every woman in Ely was earning good coin shaping the seasoned staves into bows. Villagers in the fens were earning good coin from harvesting the bog iron used for points and for ships nails to repair the Danish ships. Every smith in the fens was earning good coin shaping the heavy points that made the long arrows so deadly. Without more seasoned staves, this would all come to a halt.
The number of roving bands increased each week. Their adventures were becoming the stuff of legends. Every bowman wanted to join Raynar's band of thirty, but more than thirty was too many to move hidden and move fast. Raynar had split his band time and again. At any time half of his thirty were new recruits and the other half seasoned veterans. Each time he trained a new second, it was just a matter of time before that second became the lead of his own band of thirty.
The farmers knew them as Hereward's men, the axemen that mopped up and kept the peace in the wake of the bowmen knew them as the Hood, but the Normans knew them as Wolfpacks or the Wolfshood.
The Norman lords living north of London had spent three years fortifying their manors and getting rich sending food to the markets of London while their serfs and tenants were beaten and the children went hungry. Now these fortifications were useless. When the Wolfpacks attacked them, the Normans died in a hail of heavy points. As soon as the Normans were dead, either in battle, or as prisoners tried and executed, the Wolfpacks would move on to the next target.
Each bowman was mounted, and they made good use of the Roman streets to move quickly across shires and target more Normans. The Normans were increasingly fleeing towards London, but the streets now belonged to the Wolfpacks. The Norman garrisons feared to leave the safety of their baileys. Patrols sent to secure the highways had been mauled and slaughtered by the wolfpacks.
A thousand or more Danelaw axemen were walking across every field and through every village in groups of ten. They were the housekeepers following the wolfpacks. They rarely had to fight. Normans tended to flee south rather than hide. Hiding was futile. The very folk they had abused would lead the axemen to their hides with glee.
The wolfpacks were mounted and traveled fast and light and they did not burden themselves with prisoners, captured armour, or the belongings left in abandoned manors. That was the role of the axemen who walked in their wake.
The axemen collected the armour and weapons. English theigns that had been forced into serfdom claimed some so they could join the axemen. Any that was not needed or claimed was loaded into carts and sent north on Ermine street to Huntingdon.
Axemen were invited or volunteered or posted to stay at each estate and each village to guard it, and to help get the farmland producing again. If there was no seed corn, they would send to Huntingdon. If there were no breeding pairs they would send to Huntingdon. It they needed a plough team they would send to Huntingdon. Without the plague of useless Norman slave masters stealing everything, life was getting better for the folk, and getting better quickly.
Everyone was being fed, and clothed. The women no long lived in fear for their children or their virtue. Peasant men were standing tall again and working for themselves or their families or their villages, and not for a greedy slave master who had been taking everything to pay for fancy houses and fancy armour and fancy horses. Despite the widening territory held by the walking axemen, their density never thinned. Each village they came to offered new recruits.
The waves of peasant axemen that were zig zagging across the land moving ever closer to London was exactly what the Normans feared the most in all their empire. A peasants revolt. Everywhere the name of Hereward was cheered by the folk, and every cheering brought more recruits.
The axemen and the farmers threw down the fortifications that the Normans had built to secure the manors, and pulled down the watch towers that had become so fashionable for Normans. They converted the manors back into village longhouses. After the winter of shortages and hardship that they had all just survived, waste was considered an evil. There was no waste. No roofs were burned. No food was raided. Few women were raped.
Very few women were raped, and this in a kingdom where for four years almost every woman had been raped, and raped continuously. Fear kept the axemen from giving in to their own lust. The penalties for rape were talked about around every campfire and every pot of ale. The stories of what happened to Norman rapists were becoming legend.
It was said that if a local woman could prove rape against a prisoner, that man was forced to eat his own genitals. Many axemen swore that their friends had seen it with their own eyes. They swore they had seen Normans impaled on posts along the highway with their penises hanging from their teeth. And not just the Normans. An axeman accused of rape could expect a quick death from a black arrow through the eye, if he was lucky.
The ale flowed around endless discussions about what if you were not lucky. The most frightening gossip was of the Norman knights in Huntingdon who had been made slaves to the very women they had raped and how the women had kept them alive and in agony for ten whole days.
The word went out that there was a mountain of silver coins at Huntingdon on Ermine street and that anyone who could deliver supplies north would be p
aid fair coin. The cart traffic of food and goods that was supposed to feed the markets of London slowed, and slowed even more, while the traffic north towards Lincolnshire became heavier and heavier.
Part of this was due to the promise payment in silver coin in Huntingdon, and part was due to the gossip spreading through the carters that the carts with loads heading towards London would be taken away and given to carters willing to drive them north.
The wolfpacks were raiding closer and closer to London, well beyond the range of the axemen. They did this to intercept and destroy the fleeing Normans who were trying to reach the safety of London. They would use the same tactic on every highway. They would ride far south overland and hidden from the streets and then they would find the highway and turn north along it.
This tactic tended to take the fleeing Normans by surprise. They all thought they were being chased from the north and therefore assigned their best warriors as a rear guard. The wolfpack would sweep across their column from the south, or ambush the lead horsemen, but the outcome was almost always the same.
The Normans at the front of the columns were slaughtered while warriors in the rear guard found themselves guarding nothing, and fleeing for their lives north away from London with a wolfpack on their heels. Two or three columns of fleeing Normans could be crushed like this in one day on each highway, and their stolen horses and carts and belongings returned to the north.
Raynar would take no oaths from the leaders of the wolfpacks other than the oath to the Brotherhood of the Arrow. Eventually all these leaders made their oaths to Hereward and their names became legend with the folk. Names like Sir Winter, Sir Wenoth, Ælfric Grugan, Godwine Gille, Wulfric the Black, Wulfric the Heron, Godric of Corby, Tostig of Daveness, Acca Hardy, Leofwine the Sickle, Tunbeorht, Leofwine the Dodger, Yieardus, and Thurcytel Utlamhe were sung about in alehouses and used in stories of adventure and vengeance across the Danelaw.
In the counties north of London the Normans reaped what they had sown in Yorkshire and Northumbria, but there was a difference. The Normans had harrowed the common folk of the Danelaw, and burned their roofs and slaughtered their animals, and left them starving or freezing, and the folk died by the hundreds of thousands.
The wolfpacks harried the Normans and the turncoat huscarls but they protected the folk so they could not be used as hostages or shields or abused by the roving axemen. Few roofs were lit, and the only animals that were taken or killed were the horses of the warriors. The farmers were encouraged to farm, and now had high hopes that they would actual get to harvest and keep their crops and have an easy winter for a change.
This was the knowledge that Hereward was keeping from Jarl Osbard and therefore from King Sweyn. The freemen were taking back the farms and estates where the English landlords had been replaced by the Norman landlords. Knut's in-common laws and Knut's in-common communes were replacing Norman rule by might and feudal tenancy. The nobility was gaining nothing from this, not the English nobility, the Danish nobility, and certainly not the Normans.
Jarl Osbard looked very busy moving his ships along the rivers and fortifying Ely and mithering about the amount of time it took to lay siege to one bailey at Cambridge, a village not even on Ermine street. Meanwhile four hundred mounted English bowmen and well over a thousand English infantry were wrestling control of the shires and the streets of the ancients out of the hands of the Normans.
* * * * *
"We need more staves and more bows," stated John. John never argued. He just stated what was. If you didn't believe him it was your lookout, but no one ever called John a liar because he never lied. And of course, because the accuser would never walk again.
John had quickly become one of the most powerful men in England. Not because of his immense strength, which was now legend, and not because he was a lord or a leader, which he wasn't; but because he had now trained over five hundred men, all axemen or oarsmen, in bow craft.
Every one of those men liked and respected him and would jump to his order, because his orders were always polite, and always made sense. Five hundred immensely strong bowmen carrying Welsh bows and quivers of bodkin arrows was perhaps the mightiest single fighting fight force in all England at that time.
Rodor, Hereward's second, looked at the giant. "And I will bring you staves and bows from Wales, but I need Raynar and his connections to Prince Bleddyn and his gift with tongues to come with me so that I can buy them for a fair price, and not be cut to pieces by the Welsh raiders."
Rodor and the Hoodsmen of Sherwood, and Alan and his Hoodsmen of the Peaks were now at Huntingdon helping John to turn axemen and ships crews into bowmen. Peterburgh was now defended by a band of Hereward’s Lincolnshire Hood.
It was no wonder they were always short of bows and always short of bowmen. Bowmen made the best skirmishers, which was how this war was being taken towards London, but they also made the best garrisons for the baileys, which was how the burghs and baileys were being kept secure.
The baileys had been created with Norman garrisons in mind. They were designed so that the cavalry could ride out on surprise forays, while the infantry and crossbowmen held the walls. With Welsh bows on the walls, the baileys were unassailable. The longer range of the Welsh bows and the heavy arrows meant that it was suicide for enemies to even approach the ditch that surrounded the baileys.
The burgh walls were different. They tended to be too long and too dependent on earthworks. This meant it took a sizable force to hold them, and they would eventually fall to a larger force even if the defenders had Welsh bows.
"I have sent word in all directions to have Raynar come to Huntingdon," said Rapenald, the castellan of Huntingdon bailey. "He must need a rest by now. Surely he has killed enough demons to quell even his need to avenge Anske."
"I wouldn't be too sure of that," replied John. "The way Raynar sees it, when a Norman and an axeman fight, well that is a battle that each entered into. The looser is the one who makes a critical mistake, which is often entering the battle in the first place. But when a woman is brutalized, that is not a battle, and one of the parties did not enter into it willingly. The looser made no mistake, so vengeance is required.
You may think he is avenging one woman, his woman, Anske, but he is not. He is avenging a hundred thousand women. Frankly, I see it the same way. The only Normans who haven't brutalized any English women over these last four years are living in monasteries, and after meeting that Abbot in Peterburgh, I'm not so sure of them either."
* * * * *
* * * * *
The Hoodsman - Ely Wakes by Skye Smith
Chapter 9 - Ambushed by a Wolfpack in Bedfordshire in June 1070
Raynar, or rather, Pip Carter, let the spy buy him another ale. This part of Bedfordshire was more Saxon than Danelaw and enough of the Saxons had oathed to the castellan of the bailey at Bedford to make it dangerous to speak unguarded.
"What a cackle they was," burped Pip as he swilled more of the spy's ale. "Foreign too, the buggers. Looked and sounded funny. Said they was from Shrewsburgh, wherever that is, but that's in England in'it. This lot was foreign." He kept a corner of his eye on the door, the only escape route if this all went wrong. He was pressing the fates to be playing the part of a carter right here in Bedford. The town criers had been shouting his name, description, and the reward offered even as he drove his cart of turnips through the gate.
There were two carters at the bench behind him. "Oy, what do you think about that," he said to them, "I think loads on English highways should be jobs for English carters, not foreign yobos." There was a murmur of agreement. He turned back to the spy. The spy asked him if they were Norman. "Norman, not bloody likely. You ever seen any of them high strutters put their back into any work. No, perhaps from somewhere in the far west. There are other kingdoms in the west you know.
So they takes the wrong turn at Sandieg and were goin south. What fool doesn't know that Huntingdon is north on that street. Not only the wrong turn, but then t
hey turn about and are in such a hurry they split a wheel on those fuckin pot holes in that street. Dumped the load everywhere."
"Yes, yes, yes," said the spy impatiently, "they dumped the load. You were going to tell me what the load was. You said that if I bought you ale, you would tell me something I could sell to the bailiff. The load man, what was the load on that cart."
"It's not going anywhere today, you know. Whatever foreign place they came from uses different wheels from here. They are going to have to fix that wheel, and that will take a day. And them looking around worried like, and in such an 'urry."
"The load, what was the load?" the spy was getting exasperated.
"Ere, I tell you that and then you race off to the bailiff and leave me with an empty jug," said Pip. He had to slow down on the ale. He was feeling a bit fuzzy. It wouldn't do to mix his tongue with a different dialect. Raynar again reminded himself that he was Pip. That was how he kept in character, by living the role he was playing.
The spy swung the barmaid by her arm and plucked a fresh jug from her tray. Instead of complaining she held out her hand for payment. She gave no change.
Pip smiled at the full jug and licked his lips. The spy pulled the jug out of his reach "No more until I know the load."
"Well why didn't you say so. I would have told you a jug ago. That cart was covered so you couldn't see the load." He ducked for he thought the spy would clout him. "But when they broke the wheel, see, some of the load slid off. It was..." He pushed his pot towards the jug and the spy filled it but held on to it. "It was the longest bows I've ever seen. You know," he pantomimed stretching a bow, "bow and arrow bows. But these buggers were as long as me. Longer. There must 'ave been hundreds of 'em in that one cart."
The spy leaped to his feet with greed in his eyes. "And you say it broke a wheel just south of Sandieg on the street."
"Oh yeh. They'll be there still, poor buggers."