by Dan Davis
There was a great rustling and stomping from the thick undergrowth all around on both sides of the road. I was shocked to see more than a score of men push their way through the bushes and stride into the road.
The twenty men wore gambesons and iron caps. A couple had mail coifs. Some were armed with spears, a handful swords and every one of them carried a huge bow and a quiver of arrows. They simply stood and looked at us, many of them smiling at our discomfort.
Jocelyn and I shared a look. We were surrounded and outnumbered but I did not feel as though we were being threatened. But they were certainly enjoying themselves at our expense, the damned commoners.
“Perhaps you’d be good enough to point me toward Cassingham,” I said. “Can we reach it before nightfall?”
“You probably could,” the fellow said walking toward me. He seemed relaxed, amused even, so I let him come close. “But William of Cassingham ain’t there.”
“Where is he then?” I asked and the men around us chuckled.
“Why, he’s right here, sir,” the man said, indicating himself.
I was not expecting a great knight but still I was surprised. The stocky fellow was young, in his early twenties perhaps, with big eyes, a huge nose, and a wide mouth. Although his features were too large, it was not an unattractive face. The man was unarmoured, even less so than his men and his clothes were of poor quality. Strange attire for a man who was supposed to be a squire but then again, a landed country gentleman was one step above a wealthy peasant. At least he wore a sword at his hip, though the scabbard was battered.
“You’re William of Cassingham?” I said. “I am Sir Richard of Ashbury. The Archbishop of York sent me to you.”
Cassingham stared at me for a moment then laughed. His men laughed with him.
I ground my teeth and fought my anger back down. “Something amuses you about that information?”
“My apologies, Sir Richard,” Cassingham said. He reached up under his cap to scratch his head, sighing. “I am not mocking you. I wrote to the king, to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. I wrote to the Marshal. I begged for help in facing the French. They have thousands of knights and they are destroying this land. My land. Our land. We have held out in the hope of making a fight of it here, of throwing them back into the sea. But it has been more than a fortnight, waiting for more men. We have fallen back from them, this far into the wood. All the while, we have been praying that an army was heading this way.” He looked at me and my small group and laughed loudly. “And then we get two knights, their squires, and their wives. If I say that I wished for more, you will forgive me, sir, that I take refuge in bitter jest.”
Jocelyn shook with anger at the man’s disrespect but he managed to hold his tongue.
I fought my own anger down and looked closer at the young man called William of Cassingham.
He was filthy, unshaven. His men were lean and their faces were drawn. He had bravely stayed and stood ready to fight. Had no doubt been fending off French raiding forces.
“You wished for more,” I said to them, nodding and they nodded with me. “Of course you did. And I wish I was an army of English knights come to save you. I wish that I were here two weeks before now. And I wish I was a great lord in his castle, as rich as the Marshal and married to an Iberian princess who squirts the finest wine from her tits.” They laughed, so I scowled at them.
“Wishes are for children. The king is occupied with conquering the rest of his kingdom from the rebel barons. You asked for help. Here I am. And here I will stay and here I will fight with you. We cannot win the war. We cannot take back Kent. But perhaps we can kill a few wagonloads of the bastards before they kill us. Now. Where are those bloody bastard French, eh?”
“In London,” William Cassingham said, beside my horse. “In London, where Prince Louis of France has been proclaimed King of England.”
Chapter Seven – The Poison Plot
“How long do you mean to keep this up before we can go home?” Jocelyn whispered into my ear in the darkness. “We have been here in the Weald, testing God’s will for weeks. For how long do you expect us to get away with this? Look, the guards are even staying awake all night now.”
“Precisely,” I whispered to his shadow. “So be quiet before the French hear you.”
Jocelyn and I lay in the sheep shit and long grass at the edge of a pasture, looking down into the French encampment outside the town and castle at Dover.
Dover was and is the closest part of England to France. The narrowest point of the English Channel at just twenty miles. On a clear day, it is perfectly possible to look from England across the water to the coast of France. Fishing boats bobbed always out there, along with the bigger, fat bellied trading ships running along both coasts.
On that morning, the sun was not yet up so all we could see were shadows in the blackness but the sky to our left was taking on the blue of a clear summer morning and all was becoming clearer.
Jocelyn was quite right. We had been harrying the French for weeks. Most of the summer, in fact. The French camp outside Dover was the largest target we had taken aim at. But Prince Louis and his large, well-equipped forces had taken the royal castles at Rochester and Canterbury, and all the towns of Kent, in a matter of days. London, always siding with the rebel barons, had thrown open the gates to him and welcomed him as the new King of England.
Yet for the entire summer, and despite taking the whole southeast of England, the French had simply avoided the castle of Dover.
The castle was said to be the key to the Kingdom of England and it had been since the dawn of time. Since the Saxons, King Arthur and the Romans, there had been a castle atop those white cliffs. In 1216, though, Dover Castle was vast, modern and well supplied with men and stores.
It was designed to bar the way to any French assault and yet Louis had made a mockery of the whole idea and simply ignored it for the summer. The loyal men inside Dover were enough to guard the walls but not to present a challenge if they ventured outside of them.
Then, when Louis was sure that King John was not coming for him, he had finally invested in Dover. Or, at least, he had sent his men to do so while Louis languished in John’s palace in London.
“There must be thousands of men down there,” Jocelyn said softly.
“Possibly,” I said.
“Hundreds, at least.”
“Let us go back to the men,” I whispered and we slithered back down the hill and into the trees. It was so dark in the scrubby wood that I saw little more than outlines and shadow and my eyes saw better in darkness than most.
We had forty men waiting for us, led by William of Cassingham.
Each man was an archer and each had a pony. The beasts stood dozing, a few chomping quietly and there was the occasional gushing patter of horse piss on the leaf litter.
“All is quiet in the camp,” I said to Cassingham, seeing the glint of his open-faced, old-fashioned helmet. “This is your last chance to call off this raid. We cannot be sure our man will come out to me. And the chances are your men will be caught.”
Cassingham laughed in the darkness. “They have not caught us yet.”
His men laughed quietly.
In the middle of June, Prince Louis had marched his army all the way across southern England to the ancient and royal city of Winchester and captured it. After not contesting London, King John had declared Winchester to be his capital, the seat of his authority.
John had fled rather than fight a battle he would lose. It was probably a sound military decision, based on the reality of the situation over his personal pride.
But it had greatly disheartened the men of the Weald.
“What do you reckon on our chances, lads?” Cassingham said, half turning to the shadowy men near him. They chuckled again. A good sign of their trust in their leader.
William of Cassingham had rallied the men of the Weald and called them to him when their lords had gone over to the rebels or the French or simply fled
. And Cassingham alone had organised the defence of the villages from the roaming bands of foraging French forces.
His band of archers could see off all but the strongest of French groups. The men were mostly freemen farmers but there were villagers and tradesmen too. But they were all skilled with the bow and many with sword and dagger. A dozen had fought in the Holy Land or claimed to have done.
Few on either side were ever killed in those first scraps with the French and rebel soldiers because no man in his right mind stands to be shot when archers are shooting at him. And why attack a defended village when there were plenty that stood defenceless and deserted?
When the French had landed, Cassingham’s men drove sheep and cattle away from the edges of the Weald and deeper into the wooded hills and valley pastures, away from the roads and off the trackways. They carried and carted off sacks of grain and barrels of ale to hidden stores or places that could be better defended.
And it had worked. Cassingham and his men were by the middle of summer already confident of keeping their families fed in the coming winter.
But the fear was that the French would overrun the Weald. And they could, if they wished. But the men were outraged by the invasions of the French into their homelands. Villages were emptied, farms abandoned and the people came to Cassingham’s places, looking for protection.
None were turned away.
Cassingham was nobody. A country squire barely out of boyhood. Too poor to equip himself properly. Too beloved in his parish to feel able to leave to it to the ravages of the French.
And yet his legend was already growing.
When all men of noble birth had fled, he alone had stayed and led.
By the end of July, the French had returned to the southeast corner of England. They would take Dover, and then they would be free to receive all the reinforcements that France could send, completely unopposed and unthreatened. Then, no matter how many rebel barons King John brought back under his banner he would never have enough men to stand. King John’s Flemish mercenaries would stay with him only as long as he had the coin to pay them.
All Prince Louis had to do was take Dover and then wait for John to run out of money.
And then the French would rule England forever.
“The most important thing is speed,” I said to Cassingham and to the rest. “We must be in and out before they know they are being attacked. We need our head start or their superior horses will overtake ours.”
“There is no need to say it again,” Cassingham replied. “We all know what to do.”
His confidence was reassuring and I did not doubt him but I found his disregard of my advice irritating.
“I pray that you do,” I said and called for Swein, who brought my horse and my armour. Anselm brought to Jocelyn his and we shrugged ourselves into them.
Cassingham had his men kneel and pray with his priest. I stood to the side. Jocelyn kneeled with Anselm.
For all their talk and quiet laughter, the men were tense. Cassingham was quite right that they all knew what to do. It did not change the fact that they had never done anything quite like this before.
“The French were sleeping?” Swein whispered to me while the priest babbled on about faith and protection.
“A few guards, I believe. But the camp was quiet.”
“Sir Jocelyn thinks this attack is a mistake,” Swein said, his voice low.
“He does. What does Anselm think?”
“He thinks that whatever you decide to do is the right choice.”
I smiled in the dark. “What do you think?”
“I think I should be in Sherwood.”
“As do I,” I said. “We will return very soon. Tuck is almost recovered enough to talk. If he can tell me what I need to know and if this raid goes well then I might consider my task complete and return to Nottingham. As long as Cassingham does well.”
“He will,” Swein said. “They all will.”
“Oh?” I was amused by his certainty. “So you are an expert in warfare now, Swein?”
“I know archers,” he said, defiantly. “I’ve seen these men shoot. And Cassingham leads them well.”
I thought the same thing but then I had seen twenty-five years of war, on and off, and I had seen the best and the worst of leaders.
“Why do you think Cassingham leads well?” I asked Swein. The priest was finishing his prolonged prayer, asking God to bless their dutiful service for the king.
“When he talks, it seems like he knows what he is doing,” Swein said slowly, struggling to put his thoughts into words. “And when he does something, you know that he has done the right thing. In the right way.”
It was a garbled but fair assessment. “And do you think that Cassingham relies on what other men think?”
“He listens when his men suggest something or ask a question,” Swein said, pondering it. “But he seems like he always knows what to do anyway.”
The men murmured an Amen and stood to prepare themselves.
I clapped Swein on the back. “Good,” I said to him. “Be sure to remember that when you are a leader.”
“Me?” he said.
Cassingham returned with Jocelyn and Anselm. “Sir Richard,” Cassingham said. “My men will be in their positions by the time you and Sir Jocelyn get to the camp.”
It grew lighter with every moment. Colour coming into the world.
I mounted my horse. Jocelyn and Anselm climbed upon theirs and I nodded to Cassingham and Swein, who would fight with the other archers, him being close to useless on horseback. I hoped he would be able to cling on to the back of one as we fled.
I walked the horse from the clearing to the road that wound up and then down toward the camp. It was dark. My heart raced. Like Jocelyn, I was not convinced that an attack on a heavily fortified enemy camp with thousands of men was a good idea. I was afraid that I would be captured. I was afraid that Anselm would be killed and that his mighty father would punish me, or at least, never forgive me. The Marshal was the one man whose opinion I respected. And the most powerful man in England, aside from the two kings.
The French camp already stank. The wind blew the cold salt smell of the sea to keep the excrement stench from overwhelming the senses. And even though only a fraction of their forces had arrived at Dover to begin the siege, it never took long for thousands of bodies to befoul the land and air for miles around.
The light wooded hillocks at the landward border of the camp would no doubt be cleared and occupied when the rest of the French arrived. But for now, it would cover our forty archers as they crept within long bow range and would protect our coming retreat.
It was light enough to see the silhouette of the vast castle, a dark shape on the brightening sky. The castle occupied a high mound of chalk that ended in the famous white cliffs on the seaward side. The land descended down to the town on the right, built on lower ground with easier access to the beach.
Between the castle and us stretched the edges of tents and frames of shelters and the siege engines they were quickly throwing up. It was a warm night, despite the cool sea breeze.
It was less than three hundred yards from the shadows to the camp but it felt like the dark moment stretched out like a black cloak, on and on, to the sound of hooves drumming on the thin soil covering the chalk trackway.
The first challenge came out of the dark.
“Stop there. Who are you?”
“Friends,” I said in French, pulling to a halt.
“But who?” Two men approached in the gloom. “Name?” They seemed rather bored, which was good.
They also held spears, which was unfortunate.
“Sir Richard of Ashbury,” I said,
“English?”
“A knight loyal to King Louis of England,” I said. “As are my squires.”
I dismounted slowly, groaning and sighing as if I had been riding all night.
They backed away from me, their spears held ready. I wished I could see their faces but
they were clearly wary.
“Why are you here?” the closest man asked. He was a seasoned man-at-arms who could be trusted with gate duty.
“I have ridden hard to bring you news of King John’s army.”
They stiffened. “Tell me, now.”
“How dare you speak to me in such a way,” I said, feigning anger. “Bring me Sir Geoffrey and I will speak to him here.”
The spear-bearing man-at-arms was becoming visible as the dawn grew. He glanced at his fellow spearman.
“Hurry, man,” I said. “Come on. If I am an enemy, then how do I know that it is the steadfast Sir Geoffrey that is captain of the gate tonight?”
That appeased the senior man-at-arms somewhat. “Very well. You will come with us, Sir Richard and we shall rouse Sir Geoffrey.”
I was certainly not going to walk into the French camp. “I do not obey your orders. You will bring Sir Geoffrey to me here and I will gladly speak to him.”
They were confused and suspicious, as they had every right to be. What tired man would refuse shelter and refreshment after a long ride? But their natural deference to their betters asserted itself and the man-at-arms went to find Sir Geoffrey, leaving just the one to watch over my two men and me.
There were other French moving just inside the entrance. Rough ditches had been dug either side of the road and a bank thrown up as the beginning of a defensive palisade. They need not have bothered, for King John had neither the men nor the inclination to contest the south.
Jocelyn and Anselm dismounted, likewise making a show of easing their aching bones. Anselm walked our horses back and forth along the road. He was supposed to ensure they were ready for when we had to make our escape.
It grew lighter. More men woke in the camp and I cursed the man-at-arms for taking his time to grab the knight on watch. Jocelyn was tense beside me, attempting to appear nonchalant.
“What if Sir Geoffrey is not coming?” Jocelyn muttered.
“Any knight will do,” I said.
Jocelyn nodded at the camp entrance, the gap in the ditch and palisaded bank stretching away ever clearer in the predawn light.