He let go my arm, slammed a short punch into my broken ribs, and we stumbled apart.
Remember that the priest had broken his jaw?
I pounced, despite the pain, stepped in close, took a blow on my shoulder and another on my cheek and punched over his arms into his jaw, using the advantage of my size. I broke it, and he stumbled and threw a clumsy right-handed punch to back me off.
I had fought other boys all my life.
I caught his right arm in my right hand at the wrist and pulled, jerking him off balance so that he stumbled half a step towards me, then I got my left hand up on his elbow and broke his arm with a snap.
He screamed like a cow giving birth, and I dragged him by his broken arm.
Abelard pulled me off him. I hit Beauchamp more than a few times after he was helpless. Now, I’m ashamed of that, but then. .
Then it was as sweet as a girl’s kiss.
We rode back to the army, leaving a dead man and a desperately injured woman in a looted house.
That’s the way it was.
We never mentioned what had happened in the yard again.
While I heard the truth said many times — that the Prince was waiting for word from Lancaster up in Brittany — I didn’t believe it, because I didn’t know enough about France to realize how close we were to the Duke and his army. Because the plan — in as much as the Prince had a plan — was that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Lancaster would march towards each other, join forces and face the King of France, or, if he refused battle, devastate his lands.
Take it as you will, in early August, the Prince held a great council, and there he divided his army. He gave the Lord of Albret — a right bastard, and one of the hardest men and worst knights I’ve ever known, though I didn’t know that then — about 2,000 men, most of the arrayed archers and some of the English men-at-arms and many Gascons. They were to hold Gascony against Armagnac and raid his demesne lands if they could.
The mounted men — the Prince would have no man who was not well-mounted — were to go with the Prince. Nothing was said about leaving cooks behind, or boys. A farrier looked at my little horse and pronounced him fit and ready for war, so I was going to war with my Prince.
It still makes me smile.
We marched the next day. We marched fast — faster, if anything, than we had on the way to Bergerac. I stuck by Abelard, because the looks I got from some of the squires were not just vengeful, but murderous, and we went north to Perigueux, a rich town, part of which was still French, but in territories we considered part of Gascony, and hence ours. We were not allowed to loot, and we paid hard silver for wine, which was growing harder, as no one had been paid for some time.
When we left Perigueux after a day of rest, we moved even faster. I was in the saddle all day, and I remember little except the morning, when I found I had fallen asleep by my horse without taking his saddle off. He was none too fond of me that day, and I felt bad — as bad as being beaten by squires.
We raced across south-western France, and it was all wonderful to me — steep hills, rich farms, often overgrown. A generation of farmers had been destroyed by a generation of war. You could hear wolves at night, and of course the plague had been through not ten years before.
Indeed, as I’ve heard peasants say a hundred times, you’d be hard put to decide which was worse if you were a Frenchman: the English or the plague.
We emerged from this near-wilderness at the great abbey of La Peruse, a few leagues from Limoges. I won’t weary you with details, except to say that when we left Bordeaux I was a raw boy, and by Limoges I was a seasoned campaigner. I could find food and I could make a fire. I could help Abelard choose a campsite, based on local fresh water, wind protection, security and having a place to tether horses — there are a hundred factors that made one campsite better than another. Sometimes the pickings were slim and we all slept on rocks — 7,000 men is a great number, and if they have 15,000 horses, you have a fair number of bodies to feed, water and sleep.
At the abbey, the Prince held a ceremony I had never seen before. He unfurled his banner. It was a formal, chivalric declaration of war, and Sir John Chandos, his standard bearer, held it forth, snapping like three angry leopards over his head. The Prince made a speech about his rights and how just our campaign was.
I felt as if I was going to cry, I was so proud to be there, on horseback, with a sword at my side. Even as a cook’s boy. In an army that murdered and raped peasants.
There was nothing chivalrous about what followed. We were now formally at war, in the domain of the King of France. We proceeded with banners unfurled, burning everything as we went. Abbeys, great houses and farms — all were sacked and burned.
It was stunning. I was, to be frank, horrified at first. I watched a dozen archers rape a pair of sisters and leave them weeping — later one of the men told me they were lucky not to have been killed. I saw children cut down for screaming too loudly; older men butchered by laughing Gascon brigands, and nuns stripped naked and sold to a pimp as whores.
Because that’s what war is, friends, and everyone here knows what I’m saying.
It was an orgy. The land was rich and untouched, and old soldiers, archers who’d been at Crecy or Sluys, laughed and said they’d never seen the like. We took so much money as we went that when we were ordered to leave the farms and great houses of the Countess of Pembroke — an Englishwoman with holdings in France — we did. We went around them.
We spread across the country like a swarm of locusts, and with us went fire and sword, cutting and burning like a farmer clearing land. We ate what we liked, drank free wine, and forced the women to our will, killing the men. This was the land of the King of France, and the message we left was that he was too weak to protect his own.
Mind you, French peasants are no more foolish than English peasants, and most of them, when they had even a little warning, burned their crops, took their womenfolk and ran for the strong walled towns. But they left their sausages hanging from their roof beams, and we burned their cottages and made our meals from their hoarded savings of food, cooked on their carefully built homes.
When we took them by surprise, with our horses and rapid marching, we got everything.
I’d like to say that I neither stole nor burned, but the only sin from which I was free was rape, and that was only because of my sister.
A boy of fifteen does what the men he’s with do. I took what I wanted, and that included Marie, a girl of my age or perhaps a little less. She’d been raped and hurt, and I took her in, carried her on my horse, cleaned her up and then used her myself.
The only difference I can offer is that I fed and kept her.
We were deep in the heart of France by this time. We were shadowed by French knights on horseback — in fact, several times the Earl of Oxford rode out to make them fight, but they slipped away like Turks. We were almost at the Loire — the famous Loire, a name even a boy like me knew — when we sacked a town for the first time.
Here’s how we got in. I was far across the fields, looking for a spot to set up camp for the Earl, when I saw dust, which I knew signalled horsemen moving fast. By mid-morning, we learned from some of Warwick’s men moving from our right towards the town that the Prince had ordered the town be stormed. I was determined to be there.
Abelard was less interested in the fighting. ‘If we can be among the first into the town,’ he said, ‘we’ll be rich.’
I liked the idea of that!
Don’t imagine there was an order given or trumpets blared. It wasn’t like that at all. We followed some of Warwick’s men, and by noon we’d met up with our own Earl, abandoned any notion of camping to the north of the town, and instead were riding at a fast trot along the high road to Issoudun.