For the first time in years, I thought of my branding as a thief. Of how men who knew perfectly well I was innocent stood by and watched. I sat by the fire and hated. Now there would be no money. Nothing for my sister. Nothing for me.
But to tell the truth, messieurs, it sat easier on me than on Richard. I’d had my doubts about princes. I had tasted the bile before. Richard, despite slavery, believed that if he served loyally, he would be rewarded, and he took it very hard.
Richard shook his head. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said, with the tone of every young man who makes this discovery. ‘We have spent a year — your pardon, my lord — but a year in the saddle for the Prince.’
Jean de Grailly shook his head. ‘You did run a brothel,’ he said. ‘Save your protests! I’m not against you. Listen, if you don’t ride to Sir John Cheverston, he can’t arrest you and you won’t be degraded. I’ll see to this, I give you my word. Give me your sauvegardes and I’ll pass them to Sir John. I have influence with the Prince. In time. .’
‘By God, we don’t have time!’ I said. ‘We beggared ourselves to make this trip. What are we to do, my lord?’
De Grailly spread his hands. ‘I say you remind me of Gascons,’ he said. ‘Go be Gascons. Join the companies.’
The companies. The men who raped and murdered for money. Like organized brigands or pirates under a false flag.
‘Seguin de Badefol is recruiting,’ De Grailly said. ‘I can give you lads a letter.’
Richard spat. ‘I will be the Black squire indeed,’ he said. ‘God’s curse on them all.’
Brignais, 1362
Taken by surprise, and frightened by the terrible cries, the French lost heart, and although they ran for their arms, the companies already pressed so hard upon them that they gave them no time to arm themselves. An army which included so many barons and valiant knights thus had the misfortune to be routed and put to flight, and many were killed and wounded. Those who were able to mount their horses and don their armour nearly all fell into the hands of that vassal of the King of France, Petit Meschin. So great were the ransoms and the booty that all the Companions became rich. Their victory made them so confident and daring that the court of the Pope of Rome, which had experience of being fleeced by the companies, feared that it would see them arrive in Avignon.
Aye, messieurs, I was at Brignais, although there were damned few English left with the routiers by then. It was a fine fight, and a rich day for most of us.
Richard and I had ridden away from Bordeaux in the late winter of 1358. Sam Bibbo thought for three days about leaving us — he said he was done fighting — but in the end he came, and John Hughes came with him. Perkin had nowhere else to go, but he made no secret of his dissatisfaction at my being reduced to what he called, with some accuracy, banditry. By then, Charles of Navarre had tried, and failed, to make himself King of France. He would continue trying for some years, but by the summer of 1358, the banner of Navarre was nothing but a flag of convenience for every brigand, bandit and rapist from the Loire to Provence. Sir John Hawkwood was there, in the Auxerre, and so was Sir Robert Knolles and Jean de Grailly and the Bourc Camus and a great many other professional men-at-arms.
Richard didn’t want to go to Sir John Hawkwood. It was never stated between us, but I think we both felt that if we were going to be bandits, we’d be bandits where John Hawkwood couldn’t see us. Auxerre was big, and we were small men.
Those were the days in which the companies formed. The first ‘Great Company’ was that of the archpriest, Arnaud de Cervole. He grouped many of the Breton and Gascon mercenaries into one mass of killers in 1358 and tried to take Marseille. Richard and I were there. We failed, but we made some gold, covered our debts and drank a great deal. Jamais sold me a new war horse, who was never a patch on Goldie. He was a big brute and I called him Alexander. Mostly he liked to bite other horses and make trouble; he didn’t know the hundred fighting tricks that Goldie had known, and he was brutal to ride in a joust as he’d flinch from the spear point.
Not that I did a lot of jousting in those years. We rode, but seldom fought. When we did fight, it was to raid and counter-raid — a war of ambush and nerves, of convoys on roads and sudden descents.
In 1359, we went north with Sir Robert Knolles. There was a rumour that the King’s peace was falling apart and that the King would make a campaign in person. By one of the ironies of the profession of arms, my captain from the year before was now my adversary; we faced the archpriest as we skirmished among the ruined crops and devastated country of the upper Loire Valley. He was as incompetent facing us as he had been leading us, and Knolles took us to good booty.
It was brutal. Mostly we plundered peasants. We’d form a company of adventure — a group of men who made an oath about sharing plunder and standing by each other — these agreements were usually made between wolves at inns. The better captains employed spies to watch the roads and to visit towns that might have a weak wall or an undefended gate. The less professional, or simply temporary, companies were formed for a single ‘adventure’ based on the whim of the most famous ‘knight’. Oh, my friends, the language of chivalry was maintained at all times. We fought a ‘passage of arms’ with the desperate defenders of small towns, and then we ‘took them by storm’ in a ‘feat of arms’ that left a lot of peasants dead and their wives and daughters raped and sold. When we took a town, we plundered it down to the plate on the altars and the coins in old women’s money-boxes. Only after we’d sacked a town for a few days would we rally the surviving principal citizens and inform them of the patis they owed us — sometimes with individual ransoms for the richer men. If we chose to stay, we charged tolls on the road and exacted taxes from the same peasants we’d brutalized in the sack, and when the French sent an army against us, we faded away, split into small parties and ran for the safety of Gascony or Normandy, where we met up again — to plan the next raid.
Richard and I served with Knolles in the hope of being reinstated with the Prince’s household. We were never formally humiliated, but my reputation was very dark — a pimp, a thief and perhaps an unchivalrous lover. I led a lance, and Richard led another, but neither of us was trusted with a command, and as the campaign wore on, it seemed less and less likely that Knolles intended to unite with the King’s army landing at Calais, than that he was plundering France for his own benefit. I ended up in the garrison of Champlay in the Auxerre, bored, mildly prosperous and no closer to serving my Prince or cleansing my reputation, and every town from which I exacted patis made me dream of the ringing bell and the village of the dead.
I drank a lot.
I had found one way to salve my conscience. The Italian bankers followed us like vultures and wolves, and I put my money into their books and began to purchase my sister’s elevation. I wrote a letter on her behalf.
It was late in 1359 — September or October.
I sat on a well-built oak stool that had once belonged to a prosperous peasant, and I penned the letter by the light of his burning farm. I wrote to the prior of the commandery at Clerkenwell. I styled myself ‘William Gold, Squire’ and requested that the money go to a religious dowry for my sister.
I paid in almost everything I took. My sister probably needed 1,000 ducats. After I paid my lance and fed my horse and paid Perkin, I had perhaps forty ducats a month — for a life of utmost violence. But I paid it out, and every payment seemed to make me a little less black. I began to go to Mass for the first time in years.