We rode. Riding through a swamp on a hot autumn day in armour is unpleasant, but I can’t say I noticed.
The sound of cheers and war cries grew louder and louder.
As we emerged from the reeds, I could hear the French and feel the movement of their horses. I was shaking with fear and excitement. I thought we might have lost the battle by the time we got through the swamp, although when I went over it later, we rode only about 200 paces through the marsh.
Where we came out, at the base of the ridge, we were below the fighting. The French had crashed into Warwick’s division at the hedge. The hedge saved us — nothing can stop a French knight with a lance on open ground, as I have reason to know — but even with the hedge, the first contact had pushed Lord Warwick and his men-at-arms back, and back again. His archers had shot their quivers empty — a good man can loose fifteen arrows in a minute. There was a handful of French men-at-arms or their horses lying like butterflies after a storm, dead and feathered, on the slope.
As soon as the head of our column was clear of the reeds, the master archers took over. The archer’s pages — their servants — appeared out of the column and took their horses — one boy for each six horses. The archers walked forward about twenty paces. Their bows were ready strung. They all looked at Master Peter like musicians look at their conductor. He was watching the French chivalry on the ridge.
He had an arrow in his hand. He pointed it. ‘Shoot for the rumps and backs,’ he said. We’d come out of the reeds on the flank of the French, of course — and even in Milanese plate, man is far more vulnerable from the back then the front. I’ve seen a man shot through armour by a heavy bow, but not often.
Master Peter nocked his arrow. He didn’t appear to aim. He drew and loosed.
His arrow vanished into the melee.
The hundred or so archers around him began to draw and loose, even as the first light-armed archers began to emerge from the marsh. The Earl sent them off further to the left, further around the flank of the French. I saw Monk John trot by, his eyes on the French. He gave his horse to a boy and sprinted along the dry ground, headed to the left.
The Earl’s retinue of archers — 120 men, remember — filled the sky with arrows. The volume of their shafts was incredible. It’s one thing to watch a few men at the butts on a hot Sunday after Mass; it’s another thing entirely to watch a hundred men, every one of whom was probably his village champion. Their arrows were big and heavy — four or five to the pound, with the heads on. They cost a fortune.
They made a sound in the air like a woman beating pots when they struck.
The French at the top of the hill were scarcely annihilated. They were, as we later found, the picked men of 12,000 men-at-arms — the best armed and armoured — but their horses took a great many hits.
Even as I watched, a grey-bearded archer known as Gospel Mark shouted, ‘Horse killers!’ and drew from his quiver a misshapen thing like a child’s drawing of an arrow. Some men emulated him. The big-headed arrows could knock down a horse. The fine bodkin-point arrows that were supplied by the government were better for penetrating chain and leather — if they were well tempered, which they were not always.
The French recoiled from the arrow storm. Then one of them turned his horse, and suddenly fifty of them — they looked to me like a thousand — angled their horses across the hill and came for us.
They had the hill behind them, and as soon as they put their horse’s heads at us, instead of away from us, they stopped falling. The war bow isn’t so powerful as to drive through the three or four layers a French knight wore in front.
Again, they made the earth shake.
The Earl walked back into the marsh until he was standing on a tussock, about thirty yards into the morass.
Master Peter turned and, leg armour and all, his veterans ran back, shouting, cursing and making the black mud fly.
The army servants — of whom, had things gone otherwise, I might have been accounted one — appeared as if by one of Merlin’s spells and began to hand out sheaves of arrows. The veterans had already shot their quivers empty, and they couldn’t go forward to retrieve their shafts.
Battles, my friends, are won and lost by brave men, but also by boys with sheaves of arrows, and the clerks who counted the arrows and made sure that the boys did their work. That was Bishop Burghersh. A mediocre man-at-arms, but a fine administrator. Because of him, and because of an order he’d issued fifteen minutes before, the boys came with the arrows, brought in a cart to the far side of the marsh. The boys were barefoot and quick.
The French knights crossed the open ground in about the time it takes to say a paternoster.
They came up to the edge of the marsh and kept coming. Many horses baulked at the reeds, because horses are smarter than men, sometimes. And the horses that baulked turned broadside to the archers.
Monk John and the lighter-armed archers were just now forming, still further to the left, so that the new French attack was once more caught in the flank by our heavy bows.
It was close, my friends. It was all a matter of heartbeats and inches.
The lead French knight put his head down, and shafts whanged off his helmet so hard that his whole body rocked. His lance caught one of Master Peter’s archers and killed him, punching all the way through his body. The man screamed and blood shot from his mouth.
The French knight dropped his lance and drew his sword. He was about two horse-lengths from me, and once again I thought we had lost. I was still on my little riding horse, and I had my looted French sword in my hand. And I thought something like, Jesus Fuck, because the French bastard was a foot higher than me or more on a gigantic horse, and his sword was five-feet long.
He killed a second archer, even as Master Peter swung his bow and loosed at the knight, who was practically at the point of his arrow.
The arrow slammed into the man’s chest armour and stuck, but the knight didn’t seem affected. He didn’t want to kill archers; he wanted to fight knights, and he saw the Earl and the Earl’s standard, and he turned to go for them. Unfortunately, my horse and I sat between him and the Earl.
My horse was not a war horse.
His was.
His stallion bit my horse savagely in the neck and bore it down, and my little gelding collapsed, half reared, threw me into the muck of the marsh and ran, bleeding, from the stallion’s bite.
So much for my first encounter at Poitiers.
I lay, half-stunned, in the mud — nice, soft mud, which, if you must be thrown, is the very nicest landing — and watched as the Frenchmen went sword to sword with John Hawkwood. John was still mounted — it is possible the French knight thought he was the Earl — and they both cut one handed. It was curious to lie and watch them above me, like birds in the sky — I had time to see things I’d never have seen if I’d been fighting. Neither guarded himself at all. They both cut hard, high, sweeping blows meant to stun or injure right through armour. One of those blows would have split an unarmoured man in half.
Slam, slam, bang.
Like an armourer’s shop in Cheapside.
Another French knight appeared, and another, plunging into the marsh.
The Earl had sent his war horse to the rear. I don’t know why Hawkwood hadn’t, but the Earl shouted his war cry and appeared at Hawkwood’s stirrup with a poleaxe. He thrust up, and caught the first French knight in the aventail at the base of the helmet, throwing him from the saddle.