The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  He flattered us, me and Richard, a great deal. And he offered to make us corporals – commanders of a dozen lances.

  Messieurs, I want you to understand. Richard and I, we wanted something better. We had tried to do something well, to act from conviction. And the cardinal branded us felons and published our names at Avignon as traitors to Mother Church. My name! In a scroll against the ‘criminals who serve Satan’! While the Bourc went free!

  By our saviour, messieurs, we had some dark days. Tamworth seemed to offer us salvation. We’d been feasting him for two days when Geoffrey Chaucer rode through the inn yard, dismounted and yelled for wine.

  We didn’t kill him. Firstly, we’d shared too many hard times, and second, it was clear from his beautiful boots and his fine cote that he was a man of some importance – and Tamworth treated him like a lord.

  Richard spat with indignation. ‘He serves the King! While we fight for scraps!’

  As it proved, he served Prince Lionel of Clarence, and we had hundreds of gold florins in bags at our Italian bank. But we both attributed our fall from the Prince’s grace to Chaucer, and he did nothing to dispel our anger. In fact, he pranced about our inn, demanding clean linen and sneering at everything – the girls, the wine, the cleanliness.

  He sat with Tamworth for two hours, drawing on the table in wine, and then he slept a few hours, mounted a girl and tossed a few coins to one of the boys. He tried to avoid me, but I caught him in the barn. He was saddling his horse.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I’m a royal messenger.’

  I leaned against the stall. ‘Richard was your friend,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind you treating me like a leper. But Richard?’

  He had the good grace to look abashed, but he kept saddling his horse. ‘What was I to do?’ he asked. ‘Lie for you? The Prince’s sénéchal – one of your regular customers, may I add – blabbed, and you were done.’

  I grabbed his shoulder.

  He cringed away and drew his dagger. ‘I know what men like you do,’ he said. ‘I hate all of you. By God, if you touch me, I’ll see to it the Prince has you quartered.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. ‘I want to know why you burned us. What have we done to hurt you?’

  He spat. ‘You make me feel dirty,’ he said.

  ‘This from a fucking spy?’ I asked.

  ‘Spy?’ he asked.

  ‘Didn’t you just bring Tamworth his orders from the King?’ I asked.

  He was pulling his horse out of the stall by the bridle. ‘Not your place to ask,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I don’t have the need to know?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t you go kill some peasants?’ he said.

  ‘For the King?’ I asked. ‘Or Good Prince Lionel?’

  He mounted. ‘Keep your foul mouth shut,’ he spat, and rode out our gate.

  The Constable of France picked him up a few hours later and ransomed him. I had nothing to do with it.

  We went into Burgundy. We had sixty men-at-arms and as many archers, and Sam was still with us. We had regular lances by then, as I remember, so Sam was my archer and Perkin was my page. He was sixteen now, and still very small, but I had him in a good haubergeon, a fine steel helmet from Milan and steel gloves. He still seemed to know everything.

  Richard had his own fighting page – more like a squire – named Gwillam, a Welch boy who’d come with the Cheshire men and somehow washed up with us. And we had a pair of Irish horse-boys, too – also the flotsam of the King’s army. They were Seamus and Kenneth, and they were big, they could ride anything, and they loved to fight – like Gascons, really.

  As corporals, we each had a dozen lances – that is, a dozen men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a dozen armed pages or varlets. Each lance shared a fire and a tent. It was becoming a system – the boys entered as servants, grew to be armed pages and then graduated to be men-at-arms. The archers were getting thinner on the ground – there were never really that many of them, and by the winter of ’59, all the good ones were serving the King. All but Sam and John and a few hundred more like them. While we’d held Chantay against the Constable, Knolles had pushed south in Provence and been defeated – aye, it was a complicated year – and most of his good men deserted him.

  I’m off my tale. We rode east and north into Burgundy, and we stormed the castle of Courcelles, which our archers had carefully scouted. It was deep inside Burgundy, and perfectly sighted to base raids. We took it in one assault – I was the first man on my ladder, and that was terrifying. I took a dose of hot sand all down my back, and it burned away all the leather straps on my old breast and back, but I got up the ladder, sent one Burgundian to the devil and the rest threw down their weapons.

  Over the next three days we spread out like a plague. We took manor houses and small castles by storm, at night, killed the inhabitants and stripped the houses. We moved so fast that the locals couldn’t organize a defence, and twice we caught the local baron’s forces on the road, trying to intercept us, and beat them up. The second time, we took him prisoner – that’s the Count of Semur. I sent him along to the Prince of Wales, whose column was nearest to us, with my compliments. I did it with every sign of chivalry, and I know the count found me a good captor as he said as much.

  And then one of the Prince’s squires rode in under a flag of truce and ordered Tamworth to cease making war in Burgundy under the pain of the Prince’s displeasure. King Edward met with the Burgundians at Dijon – an hour away from us, may I add – and they paid him 200,000 moutons for a three-year truce.

  We didn’t see one mouton of it, and we’d done all the fighting. And messieurs, in case you’ve missed the point, this was royal war, not brigandage. Everything Tamworth did, he did on direct orders from King Edward. We were soldiers, not brigands – until the King disowned us.

  To add to our ire, the Burgundians granted Courcelles – the castle I’d stormed – to Nicholas Tamworth. He kept a few men to hold it, but dismissed the rest of us.

  And to crown it all, the Prince of Wales released my prisoner, the Count of Semur. Perhaps it suited his policy, but he stated to his council that the count had been taken ‘by bandits, and not in a regular episode of war’.

  As the last straw, the squire who came to order us to desist also informed me, and Richard, that we should not return to court or to England.

  As a soldier, my fortunes had never looked better. Tamworth praised me to the skies, and said my exile from the Prince was all politics and that he’d ‘look into it’, but the continuing exile stuck in my craw. Twice in one autumn, I had performed a good feat of arms and been punished for it.

  But even then, I might have stayed the course. I might have lasted out the exile.

  Richard came into the house we shared and spat on the floor – something he never did. He collapsed onto a stool, stripped his helmet and aventail off his head before his Welshman could help, and hurled it at the walls so hard it broke the plaster and left a broad patch of willow lathe.

  ‘God’s curse on all of them,’ he said.

  Perkin handed him a cup of wine.

  He looked at it for a while.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t fret, brother,’ I said. ‘Tamworth will see us right.’

  He looked at me, and he didn’t look like himself. He had bright colour in his dark cheeks, and his eyes sparkled as if he was mad. His eyes were wide like a young girl’s.

  ‘Nothing will see this right,’ he spat.

  ‘We’ve lived through all this before,’ I said. ‘We’re good men-at-arms and they’ll bring us back.’

  ‘The Prince of Wales has just accepted the homage of the Bourc Camus,’ he said. ‘The Bourc is to be his liege man for Gascony and command part of his army.’ Richard’s eyes met mine. ‘Think it through, brother.’

  I was pleased when my men chose to come with me. When I went south to find Seguin de Badefol, I took with me ten men-at-arms, including de la Motte, and ten archers and pages,
and Richard did just as well. We were moving up in the world – our own twisted world. Mind you, my armour was a patchwork of rust and old leather, and every fight had left its mark – my leg armour was more dirt and horse sweat than leather and iron. My fine basinet was brown.

  The King of England moved away from Burgundy with his great army and settled down to the siege of Paris. The end was coming – we all knew it. The Dauphin couldn’t hold Paris for long, and Paris had already survived the Plague, the Commune, Etienne Marcel and the King of Navarre. There were no reserves in Paris.

  Then the weather struck. King Edward had campaigned through the winter, and the weather had been merciful; his ‘allies’ in the companies had isolated Paris and Burgundy from the rest of France for the critical time. Even though he’d failed at Reims, he now had Paris under his hand, and he had, in one day of negotiations, knocked Burgundy out of the war.

  All England needed was three weeks of decent weather.

  Instead, we had three weeks that reminded everyone of the passages in the Bible about the flood that cleansed the earth and floated the ark. The English army was tired, and despite the King’s political victories, men weren’t getting rich and the army was too big to feed itself. When they sat down to the siege of Paris, they were sitting on land that the English and Navarrese companies, the Jacques and the French themselves had devastated for four years. If Paris had no reserves, the Isle de France was a desert.

  Seguin de Badefol had offered to take our lances, and he was three days ride from Paris – he had a contract to serve directly under the Prince as Prince of Gascony, and he offered us good rates. We caught up with the Prince’s forces at Gallardon. I saluted de Badefol – we’d been together several times – and bowed to Jean de Grailly, who promised to represent both of us to the Prince.

  By my hope of heaven, I swear that the sky was blue. We could just see the towers of Paris, then a black cloud swept in from the north like the hand of God, and in the time it takes a swift man to run a league, it was dark as late afternoon and driving rain fell, and a great wind blew. The road turned instantly to mud and the carts stuck. Then the rain turned to hail, the temperature fell and things froze. Horses died. Men were soaked through their jupons, the heavy garments holding the freezing water against their skin, and night fell.

  The King’s army wasn’t shattered. English armies had supply trains and remounts, fletchers and armourers – they could, and did, bring food all the way from England – but men and horses died that night, and carts were lost. Men called it ‘Black Monday’ for a generation. Most of us who are there say that Black Monday cost the King Paris, and thus France.

  De Badefol’s men didn’t have regular supplies, so we had to forage, and as the rain fell and our horses starved, we had to go farther and farther into the countryside – up to forty miles from Paris – to forage. The Dauphin had come up with a strategy to avoid facing us and only raid our supplies – du Guesclin’s strategy, whether it was he who mouthed it or not – and we faced fighting every day as we foraged in the rain.

  It was announced that the King was sending representatives to Chartres to arrange a peace.

  At the time, I was almost at the borders of Normandy, trying to find enough grain to feed 200 horses for a few days. France was so badly scarred that it had begun to appear that there simply wasn’t any grain.

  I was sitting on Jack at a crossroads. My archers were all searching the village to the south of us, combing the cellars, literally, for a trap door holding a treasure of grain. And to the north, most of my men-at-arms were plunging their lances into a series of sodden hayricks, looking for anything, or anyone, who could lead us to food. The rain poured down like God’s tears for our sins, and the road under Jack’s forefeet was as soft as mush.

  I had sentries out in each cardinal direction – mounted men at the corners of fields. One was Perkin.

  He sounded the alarm, blowing a small horn, and then bolted towards me.

  I stood in my stirrups and turned Jack. It was hard to see in the rain, but something seemed to be moving across the fields to the north, and also behind me, to the south.

  Richard was laying siege to Paris and I hadn’t seen him in days. This raid was all mine, and something was wrong.

  I had to assume that the force behind me was French.

  I rallied my men-at-arms, who reached me first. I formed them in a tight knot on the road and pointed at de la Motte. ‘Cut your way through them, make a hole for the archers and keep going.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked me.

  I pointed at our two Hainaulters and the younger bastard of Albret, who had stuck with my force since the fall. They all had excellent armour and were good men-at-arms.

  ‘We’ll be the rearguard. Go!’ I shouted.

  Hainaulters are solid men. Antoine and Marcus shrugged, wiped the water off their faces and put on their gauntlets. With Perkin, who was the best mounted page, we had five men-at-arms. We rode along behind the main force, watching the body of French come down from the north like a hammer on an anvil.

  Sam led the archers out of the village and joined de la Motte on the road. He waved at me and I waved back.

  The force from the north was now close enough to count. There were forty of them.

  Marcus whistled between his teeth.

  ‘Please tell me you are not going to fight all of them,’ he said in his clipped, Germanic way.

  I watched as de la Motte’s men-at-arms slammed into the force to the south of us. I saw Sam wave his arms, and I saw my archers ride off into the fields, mud and all.

  ‘My lord,’ Marcus said.

  The Frenchmen behind us were forming for a fight.

  Perkin looked at me.

  I shrugged. ‘We’re going to charge them,’ I said. ‘If we fight well, we can push through and run for it. If not, friends . . . well, I’ll see you in hell.’

  Marcus laughed. ‘We could just throw down our arms,’ he said. But he had his visor down.

  We lowered our lances and charged.

  I had the best horse, so I was in front. My adversary – I knew him immediately – also had the best horse. Jehan le Maingre. Boucicault.

  I knew his coat armour when we were still forty horse lengths apart. I set myself and got two deep breaths.

  As our lances crossed, his dipped slightly and slapped mine to the ground – his lance point caught me in the centre of the breastplate, just above my bridle arm, and slammed me back against my cantle. I lost my lance, but not my seat, and passed him.

  By St George, he was a good lance.

  Jack baulked at the dense mass of the French. Being a very different horse from Alexander, he turned and jumped the stone wall that lined the road, and as I was still trying to recover my seat from the lance strike, I came off.

  My arse hit the wall and my shoulder hit the ground – I went upside down over the wall, and pain lanced through me. Still, I got to my feet, sword in hand, in the mud of the field.

  I could just about stand. The pain in my lower back and hips was as intense as anything I’d ever known.

  Bertrand du Guesclin rode up to the wall on the other side. I raised my sword in salute and he raised his visor. ‘If you’ll come back to the wall of your own free will, I’ll knock a hundred florins off your ransom,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘I don’t think I can climb the wall,’ I admitted. ‘But I yield to you.’ I took a few steps in the mud and fell, and that’s all I remember.

  I returned to my wits in Reims. I’d been hurt badly – I had the black bruises to prove it – and I’d caught something in the cursed rain. But Perkin stayed by me and nursed me, and I lived. I missed about thirty days.

  My ransom was set at 200 florins, which seemed to me unfair. It was a large sum, and I had no estates to pay it. But Boucicault explained to me that it was based on the damage I’d done to the French, which I suppose was flattering, in a way.

  I was surprised to find the very noble Jehan le Maingre
was willing to speak to me, but he sat on my bedside and laughed. He even laughed ruefully.

  ‘De Charny thought you had something, and he was never wrong,’ Boucicault said. He made a face. ‘In ’58, men said you’d raped my cousin, the Dauphine.’ He shook his head. ‘I almost killed you, but now I find that she rather likes you, and you helped defend her castle – bah. I’ll never kill a man for a rumour again. In fact, I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Which didn’t keep you from unhorsing me,’ I said, still smarting from the ease of his strike.

  He held his arms wide. ‘That is war. I am a better knight than you, that is all.’ He saw me writhe and smiled. Jehan le Maingre set an international standard for arrogance. But he was handsome, slim, extremely rich, a fine musician and a brilliant soldier. He and du Guesclin vied to be the ‘best lance in France’. I, on the other hand, was a penniless Englishman, a self-taught man-at-arms, and who was I to resent him?

  ‘Indeed, you are lucky that your service to my cousin is so well known,’ he said. ‘The Dauphin ordered us to kill every routier taken in arms.’ He smiled – a very expressive smile that admitted he was no hypocrite and didn’t see routiers as very different from other kinds of soldiers. ‘Du Guesclin reminded him that you served him at Meaux, and he included you in his cartel. My old friend the Captal is covering your ransom. You have friends.’ He smiled. ‘Really, du Guesclin should have charged more for you.’

  I will confess to you that this sign that some men accepted me as a knight – as a man-at-arms – made it worth being captured.

  He paused in the doorway. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘The Vicomtesse d’Herblay is in Reims. She sends her regards.’

  The name meant nothing to me. ‘I am not acquainted with the vicomtesse,’ I said, trying for my very best Norman French accent.

  He looked down his long nose at me. ‘I think you are mistaken,’ he said. ‘If I were to mention that her baptismal name was Emile . . .’ he added.