The Death of Robin Hood

by Angus Donald

  I spurred onwards into an open space. And there I found my anger. A square platform had been set up in the centre of the circle and a long cross bar set above it. I saw the forms of two men hanging by their arms from ropes tied to the cross beam. Both were naked. One was covered in blood and, though it was barely dawn, the flies were already crawling over his red, glistening body. Only one arm and part of his left side remained untouched, the skin horribly white. Beside him, at about knee height, a box-like frame had been set up, like the contraptions washerwomen use to dry laundry on the march. But the thick strips of material stretched over the bars of the frame were not wool or linen. They were his peeled skin.

  I felt my stomach squeeze and hot bile shot up my throat. With my anger, the world became sharper, more real. The noise of the embattled camp became louder. This was why I fought. To end this sort of barbarity. To stand against a man who thought that he could do this to anyone – friend or foe.

  The second man hanging by his arms was completely untouched but had clearly been driven mad with fear as he watched the torture of his friend. He was babbling, ‘Christ our Saviour, Christ our Saviour – a saviour with a blood red shield,’ as I sliced through the ropes holding him to the beam. He collapsed in a heap on the platform and began praying and calling on God Almighty and all the saints.

  ‘Run, you fool,’ I said. ‘Run while you can.’

  I cut down his companion, the flayed man, but by the way he landed in a boneless heap, I knew his soul had already departed from his body. Thank God.

  Horns sounded to my left and behind me. I looked and saw the big gates of a powerful stone barbican at the northern end of Dover Castle swinging open. Wider, wider, the doors gaped. Now cavalry was coming out at the trot in a neat column of twos in perfect formation. A sortie. The trumpets sounded again and these men – a heavy conroi of at least forty knights, all comrades of Hubert de Burgh and probably some of the best men the castle had to offer – burst into a gallop and hurtled towards the French encampment. They smashed into a knot of a dozen French men-at-arms who were either trying feebly to oppose them or just too slow to run, scattering them and leaving at least four bodies lying on the ground.

  The cavalry roared into the heart of the camp. I heard them shouting ‘England! For England!’ and ‘God save the King!’ as they took their swords to the foe. Their timing was flawless: the impetus of our attack from the east was dying, almost extinguished; our Wealden men were scattered, many dead or wounded, and the rest were trying desperately to extricate themselves from the fight, escape the overwhelming number of their enemies and make for the Canterbury road. Still the French were not yet organised; indeed many newly awakened men had no idea what was happening and I had seen some of the more faint-hearted scrambling into the saddle, panicked, and riding away hard north-east.

  The battle raged in the middle of the camp. I saw Hubert de Burgh greet his comrades with a cheer, join up with a dozen of them and charge a perfectly formed wall of mounted French knights as if they were at a tournament.

  Then I saw him. The White Count. The man who had flayed the two men from Penshurst and the two I had just cut down from their gibbet; the man my cousin Roland had warned me about. He was bare-headed, mounted on a huge black stallion and clad in a long silvery-white woollen cloak over his mail that reflected the first rays of the rising sun like a mirror. And he was entirely in command of the situation. He was gathering mounted men around him, many in various states of undress, yet all armed with lance and sword. He had a dozen about him now, then a score, and he was moving to tackle the English knights who had made the bold sortie from the castle.

  It crossed my mind that I would be doing a great service to mankind if I spurred at the White Count and took his head off this instant – and I might well have attempted it, despite the crowd of knights around him, solely because of the rage washing through my belly from encountering the flayed man and his crazed companion.

  Whatever I might think about the White Count, he was a soldier and his knights were equally of the first rank. They were fifty yards distant now and heading away from me. But they had formed a line at the canter, at the canter by God, twenty men on charging horses, and they swept into the surging mêlée in the centre of the camp.

  I was tempted to follow them but I recalled Robin’s orders. Besides, I had my own problems. A pair of crossbowmen, fifty yards downhill on the northern edge of the encampment, had picked me as their target. The first loosed and the quarrel glanced off my shield and snagged harmlessly in the bunched mail around my neck. He then ducked behind an upright pavise to reload while his mate popped out with a spanned bow ready to take another shot at me. I was moving by then, galloping down the slope away from the tents, closing the distance and fast, but the second man was not intimidated. He waited until I was ten yards from him, put his crossbow to his shoulder almost slowly and loosed. The bolt cracked a corner of my shield, snapping off a triangular piece the size of an apple, and smashed painfully into my right shoulder. My whole right arm went numb. I couldn’t raise Fidelity, let alone strike with it. The man cast away his bow and dived out of my path. I let the horse do the work my arm could not, charging straight into the pavise that sheltered the first man, who was now reloading, knocking the big shield flat with momentum alone and clattering over it and the screaming man underneath. I did not stop to engage the second sprawling bowman but carried straight on, my itching back anticipating a bolt, making as fast as I could for the Canterbury road now some two hundred yards ahead of me due west.

  I could do no more. It was time to run. My right shoulder was shrieking in agony. As I galloped my overexcited horse west, desperately trying to control it with one hand, I looked behind and saw that somehow Hubert de Burgh had won free of the mêlée in the centre and he and a handful of English knights were going hell for leather back towards the barbican and the safety of the castle. The French camp was a trampled muddy mess, alight in more than a dozen places, smoke drifting in fleecy layers, and with dead and wounded scattered all over the bloodied turf. Other horsemen were, like me, heading for the road and I recognised many of their tight-screwed faces as they urged their horses to take them to safety. I looked behind my comrades and saw, with the sun rising behind him, the White Count. He was trying to rally his scattered knights for a pursuit of the fleeing Wealden recruits. We had stormed through the camp like a whirlwind, killed or wounded scores of men and destroyed many of their possessions – but in no sense had we defeated them. We had stung them, that was all, perhaps dented their confidence, but their numbers still massively overmatched ours. Angry and bloodied, wide awake, fully armed and ready for battle, led by their dazzling-white nobleman, the French were coming after us to take their revenge.

  I reined in for a few moments when my horse’s hooves hit the Canterbury road, turning in the saddle for a proper look. The White Count had mustered nearly two hundred men on the brow of the hill a few hundred yards above, the various horsemen all mixed together, knights, mounted squires and men-at-arms, milling around, eager to charge but not sure in which direction. The Count was haranguing them, holding them together with the force of his voice, riding up and down their front in his shining white cloak, his right hand held high in the air as he declaimed like a Roman emperor of old.

  I heard Robin’s voice shouting behind me. ‘Alan, Alan, come on – don’t dally there like a simpleton. We are all over here, man!’

  I turned and trotted my horse the fifty yards up the road to where Robin and Mastin and a dozen horsemen were waiting by a narrow bridlepath that led away from the main road into the fastness of woodland.

  ‘Most of us have already got away,’ Robin was saying. Then he stopped and reached forward and plucked out a crossbow bolt hanging from a rent in my mail, the last, close-range shot that had smashed into my shoulder.

  ‘Are you fit? Can you still fight?’ he said, looking into my face.

  ‘I can’t raise my arm. It’s the joint. The same one I injured a
t Rochester. I think, I think it has come out of the damn socket again.’

  ‘Let me see that fucking thing,’ said Mastin, moving his horse close to mine. He grasped my shoulder in one hand and my elbow in the other and he seemed to be twisting them against each other. I had to bite my lip to stop myself crying aloud like a girl.

  ‘Yes, it’s popped out all right. But I’ll have you right as fucking rain, Sir Alan, just give me one shake of a lamb’s little bum,’ said the bowman.

  ‘Alan,’ Robin said urgently, ‘look down the road yonder, will you? Tell me what you see down there.’

  I turned my head to where Robin was pointing. ‘That black-haired fellow in the pretty white cloak is the Comte du Perche. He has his men across the road, they are properly formed now and I think they are almost ready to— aaaargggghhhh!’

  Pain like a sheet of white lightning exploded in my shoulder joint. It blossomed like a gigantic rose but then faded within moments into a bearable background hum. I glared at Mastin who had now released me from his grip and whose grinning bearded face was inches from mine. I lifted my right hand to my left sleeve and touched the hilt of the misericorde. That bloody man was going to get the full length of its slim blade through his throat if he didn’t stop smirking at me.

  ‘There we go,’ said the hairy archer smugly. ‘Right as fucking rain!’

  ‘All better?’ said Robin.

  ‘All better? That cretin has just mangled my shoulder with his filthy great paws!’ I realised I was shouting in Robin’s face, spraying him with spittle.

  ‘What I actually meant by “all better”,’ said my lord, cool as a trout at the bottom of a frozen lake, ‘is can you use your sword now? Because I suspect it really would be quite an advantage if you could.’

  I lifted my right arm. It hurt like sin but I could move it. I could hear the clatter of hooves on the flint surface of the road and looked back towards the camp. The White Count’s men were surging forwards in a disciplined column, no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.

  ‘Right, everybody off the road and into the trees,’ said Robin. ‘Mastin, my dear fellow, if you wouldn’t mind doing the honours?’

  At Mastin’s brisk hand signal, sixty of the finest archers in England stood up from the tangled undergrowth on the western side of the Canterbury road and calmly, methodically, without the slightest fuss, demonstrated their appalling killing power to the oncoming cavalry.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  For the sake of brevity, I shall say only that we slaughtered the French attackers on the Canterbury road. After a short and bloody encounter, in which at least four dozen of their men were flicked out of the saddle by the shafts of our superb Wealden archers, and in which not a single horseman got closer than fifty yards to our positions, the White Count was wise enough to withdraw his men out of bowshot and regroup. We were wise enough to withdraw completely, heading west along the bridlepath into the woods and away – the sixty archers and our surviving cavalry, some forty-five men, many of them wounded – before the White Count could muster his own crossbowmen and send them in on foot down the road against us.

  I was very happy that I did not have to test my sword arm that morning after Mastin’s brutal ministrations. I had been grouped to the side with Robin and a dozen other experienced horsemen while the archers plied their trade, ready to counterattack if the White Count’s men looked like endangering our line of bowmen. My shoulder did feel a little better and might even have been serviceable in a crisis, but I doubt I would have given of my best in the mêlée.

  I was even happier to be back at Cassingham late that night, and to slide off my horse and not long afterwards into a tub of hot water in the bathhouse.

  The manor, now largely empty of troops, except for the returning heroes of the Dover expedition, felt odd and a little alien. The continuous jolly hubbub of the past two months was gone; the sea of cheerful champing faces at mealtimes was no more; the bustle of men in the courtyard was absent. The double-winged hall felt too big, the hearth fire too large for the handful of stern-faced men gathered around it, sipping mugs of warmed ale. Cassingham’s very air, its ambience, had changed. The battle at Dover had demonstrated, not least to us as well as the French, that we were a force to be reckoned with in the south of England. Ambushing convoys of food and killing a handful of foes at a time was all very well, but it was a frivolous game compared with an all-out attack on the enemy’s encampment. We’d shown our mettle. Few Frenchmen outside Dover, or anywhere else in southern England, would sleep well henceforth.

  Cass, although disappointed not to have taken part, was delighted by the success of the attack. And a success it was, for while we had not lifted the siege of Dover, and we had probably lost more than a score of men including de Burgh’s knights, we had achieved our aim of disrupting the enemy and causing havoc in his lines: and we reckoned we had killed or wounded more than two hundred men-at-arms, although such tallies after a battle are always a little inflated. However, when Cass suggested a return match, another slap at the enemy outside Dover, Robin firmly said no.

  ‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘They had not bothered to set proper sentries, nor had they built the usual outer earth walls to protect them from attack. We caught them napping. But you can be certain the White Count will not allow that to happen again.’

  After a long discussion at the depleted dinner table that night, Robin persuaded Cass that the manor had to be abandoned. The young lord was extremely reluctant to leave his ancestral home, but Robin’s logic won through. The manor must surely be compromised by now and it was only safe to assume the French would be seeking revenge.

  Cass did manage to wring two concessions from the Earl of Locksley: first that the hall should continue to be occupied but only by the servants – local men and women whom, it was felt, would be able to flee into the woods to hide if Cassingham were attacked; and second that the manor should be monitored. Other bands of archers were operating in the Weald, under Cass’s command, and the squire had told them to leave messages at Cassingham if they needed help. And so Mastin volunteered to come by the place at least once a week.

  As Robin had planned, the rest of us would scatter to all parts of the Weald and operate as roving bands to harass the French. It was a good plan. While I was loath to leave the comforts of Cassingham and return, at my advancing age, to sleeping on hard ground in inhospitable woods, I knew it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.

  Robin and I and twenty-eight men from Kirkton rode out the next morning, heading north towards Tonbridge. The castle itself was, of course, occupied by a new French lord, a vassal of Prince Louis’s, but Robin and I felt we knew the area a little – better than the wilder parts of the Weald anyway – and we believed we could cause a good deal of trouble to the garrison when it tried to move men, goods or war materiel along the roads or up and down the Medway. We would strike, kill as many as we could, plunder the wagon trains or boats and then retreat back into the fastness to the south before the men of Tonbridge knew what had hit them. We chose that location for another reason, too. Robin wished, if possible, to be close to London – not only because Miles and Sir Thomas Blood were there and he hoped to effect a reconciliation, but also because he was in regular communication with his cousin Henry, who kept him informed about happenings in the outside world.

  For more than a month, most of the time in gloriously warm summer sunshine, we waylaid wagons carrying goods to Rochester in the east and Winchester in the west; our technique was very similar to the first ambush that Robin and Cass had laid just outside Winchelsea. Robin and his archers lay in wait, shot the wagon guards full of arrows, then I rode out with the cavalry or men on foot and finished off any who had survived the arrow storm. As a system it worked very well. The Tonbridge garrison soon realised that a band was operating in their vicinity and responded by doubling, then quadrupling the guard on each wagon convoy – but that proved fruitless. We reconnoitred very carefully before an attack, and i
f our scouts looked half a mile down the road and spied half a hundred men-at-arms guarding a single ox-wagon piled with goods, we simply melted back into the woods and allowed the wagon to pass without molestation.

  The French tried subterfuge next. For example, there might be much talk in and around the ale-houses of Tonbridge of a fat wagon train – loaded with gold and silver, precious jewels, furs, exotic spices and the like – that would be leaving on such and such a day and going to such and such a place. And yet, these well-paid gossips would say wonderingly, this train of miraculous riches would be only lightly guarded for the men-at-arms were all needed elsewhere. Of course, if this tempting plum were to be attacked, the ambushers would find that instead of holding all the riches of Solomon, the wagons carried a dozen tough French crossbowmen crouching under a canvas sheet with their weapons ready and murder in their hearts.

  These crude tricks never troubled us. Not once. Robin was an old hand at this ‘frivolous game’ and he could smell a sheriff’s trap a mile away. He had been robbing folk from ambush in Sherwood since he was a stripling.

  Yet things did not always go our way: we attempted to seize a well-laden barge on the River Medway that was heading up to Rochester with a load of wine for the castle there. But when we attacked from the south bank of the river, the bargemen merely poled their craft away to the north side and took cover from our arrows behind the stout wooden walls of their boat as they drifted swiftly away downstream. We were left standing flat-footed on the bank, feeling like fools. That was the first and last time we tried to tackle the river craft.