by Angus Donald
The men in our front ranks were shifting, moving forwards and back again, their horses neighing and pawing the earth. Clearly some felt this the moment to launch our charge into their departing ranks, turning an orderly retreat back through the southern gate into a full-fledged rout. But here was the Marshal himself, galloping along our front ranks, shouting: ‘Stand, you eager rascals. Stand your ground. Curb your recklessness!’
The Earl of Pembroke was a dozen yards from me. ‘Gentlemen, let them go!’ he was shouting. ‘You must let the enemy go! We must not enter Lincoln from the south. Our strength would be spent fighting up that damned hill and we would be done before we reached the upper town. There is our target. There!’ He was pointing due east to the castle in the upper town. ‘We go in from the north. By the north gate. The lower town is worthless to us.’
The Marshal’s words steadied his men and, looking along the line of our front, I saw the other two battles had followed orders and remained where they were. Now the Marshal was beckoning to me, calling out: ‘Sir Alan – over here – and you Sir Thomas. On me, if you please.’
I spurred out of the ranks to join the regent of England.
While the royal cavalry dismounted, stood down and began to unhook their ale flasks or dig out chunks of bread or pie, William the Marshal led Thomas and me to the rear of the army to a big red-and-white-striped pavilion, where we were served wine and swiftly joined by Robin and the other commanders: the earls of Chester and Salisbury and Bishop Peter of Winchester.
It was a windy day and the canvas of the tent slapped noisily against the many ropes and poles that held it upright. Lincolnshire rain pattered half-heartedly on the outside and then stopped as if embarrassed by its own impertinence. The Marshal gathered the six men present into a circle.
‘It seems the Comte du Perche is not after all prepared to oblige us by attacking outside the walls,’ he said. ‘I’m not greatly surprised. He always was a bright boy – a bit odd in his tastes, I grant you – but bright as a button. So we are going to have to go in there and take the fight to him. This is the battle, gentlemen, this is the battle for England. Right here, at Lincoln. If we win here, half the French forces will be destroyed. If we win here, England is ours. Remember why we are doing this, gentlemen: we fight for England, for our King, and to drive these upstart Frenchmen from our lands for ever.’
To my surprise, he then addressed Sir Thomas Blood, perhaps the lowliest knight in that circle of powerful lords.
‘I believe you know Lincoln well, young man,’ said the Marshal.
‘Yes, sir, I have been here some weeks,’ said Thomas, looking embarrassed.
‘Good, good – so tell us about the north gate. How may we unlock it?’
And Sir Thomas Blood began to speak.
Two hours later, about mid-morning, I found myself formed up with a reconstituted battle just out of bowshot of the town walls, opposite the castle. The battle contained fifty of Robin’s bowmen, two hundred crossbowmen belonging to Bishop Peter, fifty mounted knights and men-at-arms including Robin who was in command, myself, Sir Thomas and Hugh. My boy Robert and his bodyguard Boot were with us too. I had argued that this was too risky a battle for Robert to blood himself on. But, surprisingly, Robin overruled me. He took me aside, out of earshot of my son and his guardian.
‘If not this fight, then when?’ Robin said. ‘There is never going to be a completely safe battle, Alan. Hugh and Sir Thomas will watch out for him, and Boot, too, of course. We will not let him be killed. He desperately wants to prove himself – look at him!’ I looked at my son; his young face was shining, he was fully armed and armoured, a steel helm on his head, a long lance gripped in his right fist. There was no sign of fear. He was all but bouncing with eagerness.
Robert had been especially pleased to have Sir Thomas Blood back in the fold. My son and the knight had met after the council with William the Marshal, had embraced each other warmly and then repaired to Robin’s tent, where they spent a good hour in conversation about God knows what. I did not enquire. Sir Thomas had trained Robert in arms as he was growing, and had been a stern task master, but there was a great bond between them as a result, and I was glad such a skilled and experienced knight would be beside my boy in the coming storm of battle. God keep them both safe, I prayed.
There was another knight with us, too – a stranger. And once settled in our ranks, we all looked at him sideways, a little oddly, even suspiciously, as if he had just landed from the moon. He told us his name was Geoffrey de Serland. He did not come from the moon. He came from Lincoln. Not the town. He came from inside the castle.
I found out later how he came to be with us. John Marshal, the regent’s nephew, had been reconnoitring the town walls early that morning. Riding up the western side, he had come face to face with Serland who had crept out of the castle hoping to make a link between Nicola de la Haye’s forces inside the stronghold and our royal army outside the town. The castle’s western wall, a hundred and fifty or so yards long, also served as the town boundary. This wall had a broad gate set in it that led directly out to the fields beyond, where our army lay.
That gate was now due east of us, a mere two hundred yards in front of our horses’ noses. All we were waiting for was the signal. I looked to my left, at the town wall stretching northwards, and tried to make out the hole in the blocked-up archway that Thomas and I had squeezed through. But shrubs, bushes and long grass obscured the bottom of the rampart along its length. As hard as I tried, I could not identify the crack from which we had made our escape.
A trumpet sounded, a long high note then three falling ones. It was coming from the castle walls ahead of us.
‘My lord?’ said Geoffrey de Serland diffidently. ‘That is the signal.’
Robin nodded. ‘Right. Let’s go.’
We dug in our heels and surged forward – three hundred mounted men going from stock still to a trot, a canter and then a full gallop in the space of forty yards. We charged towards the castle walls as if we meant to punch through them with the weight of our horses alone.
As we thundered along, clods of turf flying from beneath our horses’ hooves, I heard a shout of alarm from a French sentry on the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a crossbow bolt loosed, at maximum range, coming into the column behind my shoulder – but it either missed, fell short or was caught on someone’s shield, for not a man was hurt, as far as I knew. As de Serland had promised, the big gate in the castle’s western wall opened in front of us, swinging wide, pulled by unseen hands, and within a dozen heartbeats we were clattering up a cobbled slope and through the round arch to find ourselves in the open, familiar space of the bailey of Lincoln Castle.
It had not changed much in the months since we were last here. Even the washerwomen and their bubbling cauldrons of linen occupied the same spot near where I had made my bumbling thanks to Tilda. Yet now it was a good deal more crowded. Our three hundred blowing horses and their panting riders filled the space save for the great hall and a dozen other buildings. To my right was the keep, a tall round stone tower that overlooked the lower town on the far side. As Robin, Hugh, Robert and I dismounted, I saw a tall figure in mail and helm, with a long sword at the waist, come striding across the mud from the keep.
Underneath the helmet was a long lean face with shrewd bright blue eyes and a square chin. ‘Well met, Locksley! I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you,’ said this vision of martial glory in a low husky voice. It took me a moment to understand that Robin was being addressed by none other than the redoubtable Nicola de la Haye herself.
We made our bows, and as my lord and the lady castellan of Lincoln Castle exchanged pleasantries, I tried not to stare at this warrior woman. I had seen her only from a distance last time I was in Lincoln Castle, and then she had been adorned with flimsy silks and costly velvet. Now she looked as fearsome as any fighting man that I had encountered.
‘Unless your men require anything, I’d like to get them up on the walls as
soon as possible,’ said Nicola de la Haye. ‘We can certainly use their help. I’ve been expecting another French assault all morning.’
I looked up at the walls to the north and east, and saw that they had been much mauled by the French artillery. The battlements were cracked and chipped, with many of the crenellations blown away, leaving the fortifications looking like a mouth with several missing teeth. In several places on the north wall largish holes had been knocked in the walls as far down as the walkway. These had been crudely blocked with rocks, masonry, bricks, planks and barrels and large pieces of heavy furniture. Even as I looked on, a mangonel ball struck one of these patched sections of the northern wall near the eastern end and the feeble makeshift barricade exploded, sending sharp splinters of wood and rock everywhere. I saw a man-at-arms struck in the chest by a shard of elm and knocked flying from the walkway to the bailey floor. He lay there, legs and arms convulsing while the blood gushed from his torso.
Nicola de la Haye looked on dispassionately as half a dozen men ran to aid the stricken man. The gap in the wall above him yawned even larger than before.
‘That is where they’ll come, when they come,’ said the lady, nodding at the breach.
‘We will stop them,’ said Robin, ‘and I think we might even manage to do better than that.’ He turned and started issuing orders to the bowmen.
Less than an hour later, I found myself on the flat roof of a horseshoe-shaped tower where the eastern and northern walls met, with a dozen archers, Nicola de la Haye and Robin. My lord had Mastin’s seven-foot bow already strung and hooked over his left shoulder. On the three floors below us were the rest of the Kirkton archers, no doubt now peering out through the arrow slits at the enemy in the town, and about forty crossbowmen. The rest of Robin’s command, with Hugh, Sir Thomas, Robert and Boot, was spread out along the eastern and northern walls – the only practical directions from which the French could attack us – with stern instructions to keep their heads well down and out of sight of the enemy. To my right, a mere two hundred yards away and on the other side of the main street that ran north-south through the whole of Lincoln, was the cathedral. To my front, northwards, I could see three mangonels all being busily served by eager teams of French engineers, and a mass of infantry, spearmen and a few crossbowmen in bright surcoats being marshalled into their attack positions about a hundred and fifty yards away between us and the northern gate that I had come through – was it only last night? – dressed as a mendicant friar.
‘Surely those spearmen are in range of your long yew bows, if not the crossbows,’ said Nicola. ‘Why do you not loose and kill a few?’
‘Your eagerness to spill French blood does you credit, my lady,’ said Robin, ‘but we have larger concerns than merely repulsing this attack. The Marshal has a strategy to take the town as well, and it dictates that we do our best to keep our presence here a secret for as long as possible. Have confidence in us. They’ll not break through these walls.’
Just then a mangonel loosed and a ball arced high in the air and crashed plumb into the lower part of the tower, striking yards below our feet. I felt the tower shake and the air was filled with a choking white dust, and just for a moment I was rigid with terror. I remembered the terrible feeling of falling that I had experienced in Rochester as the tower collapsed beneath my feet. I clamped my teeth, all muscles tense, determined not to show weakness in front of the men.
‘Well, I hope you know what you’re doing,’ said Nicola, casually wiping a veil of dust from her face. ‘I must away and look to my people,’ she said, turning, and then disappeared down the spiral stairs.
Robin came over to my side. He looked at my rigid face, slapped me hard on the shoulder and said jovially, ‘On the other hand, perhaps we should put something of a crimp in those irritating machines, what do you say, Alan?’
I nodded mutely.
‘Right, Simeon – over here,’ said my lord. And the rangy black-haired man with a six-foot-long bow on his shoulder shambled over to Robin’s side.
‘No one else is to loose, hear me,’ said Robin, looking round the circle of archers. ‘Only Simeon. All right, see that fellow by the mangonel, there by the little church, the fellow in the yellow surcoat. Now listen, my friend Sir Alan here has just wagered a mark of silver with me that you, Simeon, cannot hit him in the eye from this distance.’
‘What? A whole mark?’ I was shocked.
Simeon said to me: ‘Which eye? Left or right?’
I stared at the man. The fellow by the mangonel was more than two hundred yards away. ‘Either,’ I said.
Simeon drew his bow, hauling the cord to his ear and loosing in one smooth motion. The arrow sped away, rising, falling and thudding into the man’s chest, knocking him spinning to the ground. The dark-haired archer beside me growled a filthy curse and begged Robin to be allowed another shot.
‘No, you’ve had your turn, Simeon – and mucked it up. You’ve just cost me a sack of silver. Now I’ll show you how it should be done. Alan, if you’d be so good as to choose another target. But from the big machine there, to the left of the main street.’
I looked out at the first mangonel team by the church. They were all gathered around the fallen man, some now looking fearfully up at the castle walls. Work on priming the siege engine had stopped. I switched my gaze to the bigger machine; they looked almost ready to release their missile.
‘Fellow on the right, in the red gambeson, holding the taut rope. Left eye, same wager,’ I said.
Robin nodded as if I had asked him to do the easiest task in the world. This mangonel was a good fifty yards further away than the first. He slipped Mastin’s bow from his shoulder, selected an arrow from the bag at his waist, nocked it and drew the cord back, grunting softly with the effort it cost him. He held for a split moment and loosed. The arrow soared into the sky, descended and plunged straight into the eye of the man in the red gambeson. The right eye. He released the rope and fell to his knees. It was evidently a vital rope for, as he released it, it sped through his fingers in a blur. The mangonel arm swung up and slammed against the padded cross bar – but since the cup was empty, no missile hurtled towards us.
‘You missed,’ I said, grinning at him.
‘I wasn’t quite sure if you meant my left or his left,’ said Robin.
‘You missed, admit it. You owe me two marks.’
‘All right. Two marks. Damn it,’ said Robin. ‘I must be getting old.’
At that moment, the French infantry began their charge.
Two hundred men in red-and-black surcoats, armed with shield and spear and sword, threw themselves at the breach in the northern wall to the left of our tower. They came at a full run, screaming their war cries, with those bearing ladders to the fore, and behind them came two score crossbowmen in yellow and blue.
Robin had our crossbowmen on their feet all along the line of the northern wall and they began to loose at will. His archers on the roof of the tower and the men on the floors below added our fury to the barrage, and I will always remember the sound – the creak of a hundred ill-fitting oak doors opening as the stiff yew was bent back, the swoosh of the arrow in flight, the excited cries from the men who had hit their targets, the far-off screams of those hit. The shafts and quarrels lanced into the oncoming French, lacerating them, shredding them, skewering limbs and torsos, faces and feet, punching them to the ground in gouts of bright blood. Our shafts lashed them like whips, and at every stroke another score of men fell, choking their lives away, clawing at blood-washed, shaft-sprouting chests and bellies punctured by cruel bolts, clasping their shattered limbs, ripped and flapping flesh. No more than half of them made it to the ditch at the bottom of the wall where, through sheer bloody determination, they planted their ladders and began to climb. I looked down and saw white faces, the glittering eyes of desperate men.
We shot them from the ladders, me wielding a crossbow and Robin’s men loosing arrow after arrow almost vertically, scouring them clear like a
terrible broom. We took a few hits ourselves. Their crossbowmen, working in pairs, advanced behind the running infantry, one loading while the other sought out a target and loosed at us. A fellow named Gideon to my left was struck by a bolt in the throat, the black bar punching through his neck; he collapsed at my feet, coughing blood. But they were no match for us. Not a single man made it to the top of the breach and barely a score managed to run back untouched to the safety of a few half-demolished houses that gave them respite from our withering assault.
I heard trumpets calling – oddly distant, for I assumed it was the French recalling their men from the assault. But Robin gripped my arm and pointed over the heads of our fleeing attackers. Beyond the northern gate of the town, out on the green fields beyond, I could see massed horsemen and banners.
‘It’s the Earl of Chester,’ said Robin. He looked up at the sky; the pale sun was high above us. It was noon. ‘He’s timely with his assault. Good – the Marshal’s plan has not altered. That means we need to get ourselves ready, Alan.’
I nodded. ‘Now the real work begins,’ I said.
Chapter Thirty-three
We left all of Bishop Peter’s crossbowmen and half the archers inside the castle to ward against further assaults and to harass unwary French troops inside the town. However, Nicola de la Haye, grimly mailed and armed, and ten of her best knights came with us – Robin, Hugh, Sir Thomas, Robert, Boot and me, along with fifty knights and men-at-arms, and twenty-five Kirkton archers, all of us mounted – as we hurtled out of the east gate and charged into a loose mass of French men-at-arms and knights gathered outside that castle entrance.
This was the sortie, an unexpected rush from inside a besieged castle, with luck taking the enemy completely unawares. It was one of the most dangerous manoeuvres in war, for once outside the safety of the castle walls the men of the sortie had sacrificed the advantage of their defences for the element of surprise. But it could be most effective.
