The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  Down in the reeds, I could see the hillside behind me, but I couldn’t see anything happening except the shouting of some of the men – mostly retinue archers – at the top of the ridge. They were pointing behind them.

  ‘Go see,’ the Earl said. I think he meant to send Beauchamp, but I had my horse turned out of the column and picking his way across the reeds before Beauchamp or Amble got the idea. In fact, I didn’t go back along the column – the horses were chewing the trail to a morass – but laboured across the marsh a few paces, then rode straight up the ridge.

  The moment my head was clear of the reeds, I saw it all.

  The French had attacked. Fast and hard, and well led. Their chivalry were coming straight as an arrow across the low valley that separated the Prince’s army from the ridge where Talleyrand had held his peace talk. They were mounted on armoured horses the size of dragons, and they made the earth shake, even from where I was.

  Warwick was with the tail of our column and had seen the threat immediately. Whether by bad fortune or cunning plan, the French were attacking in two deep battles of cavalry, one aimed at the Prince, the other aimed at the gap where we’d left the line. So Warwick was dismounting his own retinue archers and all his men-at-arms to form a hasty line at the top of the ridge, slightly back to form a shallow ‘L’, with the Prince’s battle to cover our now naked left flank.

  It takes a half a cup of wine to explain, but I saw it in one glance.

  I rode back down the ridge to the Earl, who had already picked his way clear of the morass. I reined in, but my horse fidgeted – curvets, bites.

  ‘The French are attacking the ground we quit,’ I said. ‘My lord, Lord Warwick is forming a battle from the rear of our division. He will be hard pressed, and—’

  The Earl was a young man, but old in war, and he didn’t need any more of his fifteen-year-old squire’s views. He raised his hand for silence and looked up the hill – he stood in his stirrups and looked at his column.

  I watched him, and I watched John Hawkwood, who tugged his beard, reached down and loosened his sword in its scabbard.

  The truth is, I was green as grass. It looked to me as if we were beaten, and I was on the edge of panic. But neither the young Earl nor the middle-aged professional seemed flustered. Rather, both of them wore the looks of men in a good game of chess – the Earl might have said ‘good move’ aloud.

  My horse stopped fidgeting. You know why? Because I stopped fidgeting.

  ‘On me,’ the Earl shouted. He turned his horse’s head and began picking his way along the marsh, not up the hill.

  As it was – certainly by the Earl’s intent – he had his picked men about him, but we were at the head of his elite archers, men who wore his livery. Men like Master Peter wore as much harness as a man-at-arms – Peter wore leg armour, a brigantine covered in red and yellow leather with rose-head rivets, a fine German basinet with a mail aventail. Most of his mates – the veteran archers – wore the same. The Earl had 120 of these men, and he had placed himself at their head when he called, ‘Follow me.’

  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 mêlée.

  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 jus
t 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.

  Two more French knights joined the fight. Every one of them was going for the Earl, who was now obvious in his bright Italian plate armour and his red and yellow arms and coronet. Remember that he’d come across the marsh with his standard bearer and a few picked men, as well as his archers.

  Sir Edward, my cousin, appeared by his side.

  The French knights circled for the kill. They were close.

  I levered myself to my feet. I won’t say it was the bravest moment of my life. I’ll only say that I didn’t have to.

  But I did.

  I got to my feet and the world changed, and after that point I can only tell you what I remember.

  First, about the time I got to my feet, the French knight the Earl had put down bounced to his. Christ, he was eager. Or angry.

  And, once again, I was in his way.

  This time, I didn’t have an old gelding between my knees. I had my buckler off my hip and on my hand, and when he swung his sword, I didn’t flinch, even though it was the longest sword I’d ever faced.

  Fighting in mud is horrible, because everything is wrong. I wanted to close with him and get inside his absurdly long blade, but my legs were literally trapped. It was worse for him, though, in sabatons and leg armour, the mud just sort of ate you. I had on good high boots, and although one was full of water – the things you remember – I got one foot clear of the mud. He hit my buckler hard enough to dent the steel boss, and I lost my balance and was back where I started. We must have looked like antics.

  I wasn’t even afraid.

  I finally got my left leg out of the mud and forward, and I cut. His blow cut the rim of my buckler and lightly cut my arm, while my blow rang on his helmet. A perfect cut.

  Unfortunately, my blade snapped and he was unhurt, because he was wearing a fine helmet. The bastard.

  Now I had a four-inch sword stump and a buckler against an armoured knight.

  I’d love to tell you how I wrestled him to the ground and took him, but the truth is that one of the archers put a quarter-pounder arrow into his arse, and down he went.

  I just stood there.

  Alive.

  He was trying to get up.

  Then I took his sword. It was a magical thing – long, curiously heavy and yet marvellously light. He was face down in mud, and I stepped, hard, on the back of his helmet, and pushed his face down. His thigh and groin were pouring blood. I sat on his backplate, drew my dagger, and thrust it deep. Up. From the bottom, so to speak.

  He died.

  I took his steel gauntlets. Right there. With another man coming for me.

  I got the right one on, and then I was using the longsword to parry, again and again, as a mounted Frenchmen – three bars gules on a field d’or – cut at me over and over as his horse pushed against me. The horse was desperate, locked in the mud’s embrace. The French were churning it into the foam, and the horses were sinking further and further, but the first French knights had ridden in, and the sight of them encouraged more and more of them to try.

  The blows rained down from over my head.

  I can’t remember what happened to three bars gules. That fight seemed to go on for ever, but it can’t have been that long, because then I was standing by the Earl, thrusting my new longsword up at an eagle argent on a field azure, who had a war hammer and had just put John Hawkwood down with a blow to the helmet. After three failed thrusts, I changed tactics and thrust my sword into the horse, up from under the jaw, right into the brain, and the monster died instantly and fell.

  The Earl’s poleaxe cured the eagle knight of his attempt to get to his feet.

  I bent over and sucked humid air. The world smelled of swamp and blood.

  I straightened up, painfully aware that my cousin Edward and the Earl were only an arm’s length away. My heroes. It took me three breaths to realize there was no one to fight.

  No one.

  In ten heartbeats, we went from desperate mêlée that might have won the battle for the King of France, to complete victory in our corner of the swamp. I’ve heard men say we won because the French couldn’t get at the archers. Crap. We won because the French knights didn’t want to kill archers; they wanted ransoms and chivalrous contests, so they all went for the Earl’s banner. Had just three or four of those monsters gone off to kill archers . . .

  But they didn’t. And Sir Edward and John Hawkwood, Sir Gareth Crawford, William Rose and I stopped them.

  Heh.

  The Earl started issuing orders. I did something absolutely brilliant for a raw soldier: I went and looked in the mud for the other steel gauntlet. They were a fine fit, and I knew what I wanted.

  I wanted armour. I wanted to be able to go toe-to-toe with the French. I had learned a lot in one fight. I had learned that if you want to fight mounted, you need a good horse, and that if you want to fight on foot, you have to wear gauntlets.

  See?

  I got the second gauntlet out of the mud. It had a fancy engraved brass cuff, and that was just above the muck. I spent three or four very long minutes cleaning the muck out, and when I put it on my hand, the leather glove, a nice German chamois, was like slime, or the inside of a dead man’s entrails.

  I didn’t care.

  All over the edge of the marsh, archers were looting the dead or taking the wounded for ransoms. We’d cut down sixty of the richest men in France – just sixty, of 12,000 – but we broke the back of the French Marshal Audreham’s attack. The
great man himself was taken prisoner a few horse lengths from where I was cleaning a dead man’s gauntlets, and brought to the Earl.

  Again, being green, I thought we’d won.

  But being halfway to canny, I looked around and saw that everyone older than me was either combing the ground for arrows or looting, and all of them looked like we weren’t done.

  I drew the right conclusion.

  A page boy emerged from the mud and now-trampled reeds and handed me the reins of my gelding, who didn’t even have the grace to look sorry. I thanked the boy – even then thinking that might have been me, holding the horses – and walked my horse to the edge of the marsh, where Oxford was drinking water from a cup and looking up the ridge to where the rest of the English Army was straightening itself out. The bulk of the French knights had fallen on Warwick and the old Earl of Salisbury. They’d all failed, although they’d probably come closest against us.

  But by our saviour, the plain – from the top of the next ridge, where Cardinal Talleyrand had held his peace conference, all the way to the place where the Noailles Road crossed the Poitiers Road – was full of French soldiers.

  For a moment I couldn’t breathe, and I’m pretty sure every Englishman there felt the same.

  How could there be so much armour in one place?

  It was as if the fields of Noailles had grown a crop of iron and steel.

  The French chivalry had dismounted.

  And now they were coming.

  They were in six great divisions, with banners prominently displayed. I knew a few. In the centre of the rear was the great red blot that was the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of St Denis and France. Under it would be Geoffrey de Charny, the best knight in the world, and the King of France.

  I could see the Dauphin’s banner in the front. I was too green to know who the others were, but every great lord in France was present – I hadn’t known there were that many knights in the world – and they started up the valley at the Prince and Salisbury.