Most of the lesser men thought they were fighting for England. Even more of them thought of France as an enemy country to be mined of silver.
To be frank, none of that bothered me unduly, but it was starting to trouble Richard. Twenty leagues west of Paris, we almost had to fight for our lives when Richard accused a tiny garrison — just six men, all drunk as lords — of being ‘thieves and rapists’. Unsurprisingly, free — born Englishmen, even when they are thieves and rapists, resent the term.
Not that criminal behaviour was limited to Englishmen. The Gascons were unbelievably bad, and the Breton and Norman French were, if anything, worse. The whole countryside from Rennes east to Meaux had become a carpet of fire and smoke, and a generation of prosperous Frenchmen watched their carefully horded surplus destroyed in two hideous summers.
It is my observation that beaten men do not revolt. Beaten men lie under the lash and abandon hope.
But men who have had hope, men who have seen a way out of grinding poverty and injustice, men who have the wherewithal to own weapons and use them, they revolt.
Our party was camping in a small hunting lodge — ruined, of course — in a patch of woods close enough to Paris that we could see the haze of smoke Paris cast into the air. Sam said that from the rooftrees he could see spires.
We were there, of course, because Richard had made the ‘garrison’ of the local manor house so angry.
During the middle watch of morning, I was shaken awake by Rob, my page.
‘Fighting, Master Will.’
I was up and out of my cloak. I climbed the old ladder to the roof — or rather the remnants of the roof.
The manor house was on fire. Someone like du Guesclin had just taken out an English garrison less than a mile away.
‘To arms,’ I said.
Rob woke everyone. John and Sam came up, stringing their bows, both still naked from the waist down and looking like frowzled satyrs.
The screams started almost immediately. Richard was arming, but he kept looking up at me — he wanted to ‘do something’. A man was being killed very slowly, perhaps two men.
In the summer of 1358, raids were mostly a matter of a few men — twenty men-at-arms was a big force. Charles of Navarre’s ‘army’ never mustered more than a thousand men, and the Dauphin had about the same. I say this to justify our actions as we therefore assumed that our party would be roughly the size of any enemy we encountered.
Perhaps we should have been warned by the screams.
It took us an hour to arm everyone and pack the camp in the dark. We left a very scared Rob with six pack horses and all our spare gear, and the rest of us struck out cross country, which is difficult at night, and it took us another half an hour to cross the half-mile of farmland that separated us from the manor house.
The two voices kept screaming.
On and on.
You don’t think a man can scream that way for long.
He can.
There was the first light in the sky — the so-called false dawn — when we emerged from the hedgerows to a small, ditched farm road hard by the manor house.
It was crammed with men. Armed men. Perhaps 200 men, perhaps 500.
‘Back!’ I roared. The hedges must have blocked the sound.
They were as shocked as we.
In a glance, I saw the fields around the manor teaming with men, most of them in jacks, or mail, with helmets, but some in smocks, with farm implements. The manor house was burning, and there were two men crucified like our saviour on roof beams, being roasted alive.
I was backing Goldie.
For once, the mad man was Sam. He had his bow strung, and suddenly it was in his hand. He nocked an arrow, and loosed. Nocked again — now the crowd had seen us, and there were shouts, a growing wave of shouts.
He loosed again.
I realized he was killing the men on the crosses.
He feathered one man in mail who was running at us, and then I had to cut down into a crowd, because I’d waited too long and they were coming out of the field to my right.
Goldie was a war horse, and he knew his business. I gave him the touch of the spurs that told him to clear me a space, and his iron-shod hooves went into action like four immensely strong knights wielding maces. He whirled and I hung on. I hit one carl — he had a jack and a skullcap, and my blade bounced off his skullcap, but he went down like a slaughtered pig anyway.
And then I started clearing them off Sam Bibbo, who was trying to put men down with his bowstave. He’d tried to keep loosing arrows, and he, too, had missed the tide of men coming out of the fields.
I couldn’t leave him.
His horse panicked. There were too many men with too many agricultural implements in the dark, and the rouncey reared.
One of our assailants put a pitchfork into the animal, and she screamed and threw Sam — he flew a good horse’s length and hit the ground hard enough to make a noise.
If you want a good idea of your fighting skills, try fighting an endless tide of men in the dark for possession of the unconscious body of a friend.
You want me to talk to you of chivalry and knighthood?
I did not run and leave my friend.
I didn’t know just where he was, but I gave Goldie the spurs again and we leaped forward; he shot out hooves in all directions, and I cut and thrust into the mob. It seemed to go on for ever, but in fact took less time than saying three paternosters, according to Richard.
Who, thanks be to Christ, now appeared, also fully armed and also on a warhorse.
The two of us cleared the space of a small Parish churchyard. And John Hughes, bless him, came up, dismounted between us, and found Sam. Sam’s horse was down and dead. So were ten other men, or more.
We put Sam over John’s saddle, John held my stirrup leather and we rode off into the darkness.
We picked up Rob and our pack animals, and moved from cover to cover all day. We could see the roads full of men — armed men.
Sam was unconscious, and for the first time, Richard and I realized how much we relied on the old archer. We both kept wanting to ask him things.
Like, ‘Who the fuck are those men?’
Richard watched them from a tree. He was still in all his harness. ‘If the Dauphin has this many men, why hasn’t he driven us back to Calais?’ he asked.
I watched them too. ‘They look like Paris militia,’ I said. ‘But they are twenty miles from Paris and there isn’t a hood to be seen.’
‘No cavalry; no knights.’ Richard shook his head.
We climbed a low, wooded ridge and followed it for a few miles.
At evening, we halted. We had no idea where we were. We had moved across France by asking our way — there were no signs and the roads were appalling. Usually Sam knew the way, and when he was wrong, we didn’t comment.
Now, on our own, all ways appeared the same.
However, after a restless night — Richard and I never took off our harnesses — we woke to a beautiful spring day. In the distance, we could see a church tower. The bell was ringing. It was unreal.
Richard and I left the rest with Sam, who seemed better — his colour had improved and he was muttering, whilst his eyes were moving beneath the lids. We cantered along the paths towards the steeple we could see.
There was a town. It wasn’t a big town, but prosperous enough.
It was, in fact, a village of the dead.
They had died a while before — perhaps the October or November of 1357. There were corpses in the door yards, and corpses in the streets. The women mostly still had their hair, and some of the people wore the remnants of clothes. There were children.