Three Lions of England

by Cinnamond, Patrick

  III

  ‘There must be forty thousand of the Kentish bastards,’ Serjeant Hunter said. ‘More than all who live behind these bleeding walls put together.’

  A grim-faced Serjeant Grindcobbe watched on as the massed ranks of the Kenitshmen marched through Southwark, up London Bridge, towards Traitor’s Gate. Drums beat time, doom-doom they went, and after the beats, feet followed. Great banners of St George flew over their heads. Shrill horns blared, rams horns, blown by a bunch of friars in the fore. Cheers and jeers reached his old ears, and snatches of songs. Doom-doom. He laughed to himself. The fools could blow, beat, sing, jeer all they liked! So what! Doom-doom. They had no siege engines. No battering ram to breach the gate. No trebuchets to sunder the walls. No canons to obliterate bastions. Sharp words were all they had to hurl, and words were not swords, could do no real harm to a man-at-arms.

  ‘What are we supposed to do, boss?’ asked Serjeant Hunter. ‘They are too many. Even with these men from the wards to reinforce us, we can’t defend the city.’

  ‘We will hold the ruddy gates, as ordered.’ Master Serjeant Grindcobbe shrugged. The drawbridge was raised. The gate barred. The brave Alderman of the Bridge, Walter Sybyle, had come to reinforce them, full-mustered with the two hundred men of his ward, East Cheap and Billingsgate. They would hold, and on the thirteenth span of the bridge the rebels would have to halt on the brink of the drawn bridge … or fall into the Thames and drown.

  Serjeant Hunter leaned out jittery over the battlements again – to witness the flotilla of barges and boats landing more archers on this side of the river. Down on the wharf by the Tower. Unopposed by the garrison. ‘This isn’t looking good.’

  ‘At ease, Hunter. The walls are high. They can’t get in.’

  This didn’t calm Serjeant Hunter’s nerves one bit. Bitter bile burnt his throat. The rebels had broken the prison of the Marshal of England – the Marshalsea, and let loose all the debtors, dissenters and felons. ‘What if the threats are true and this Tyler fires Southwark?’

  ‘Rumours. The bridge would burn. The whole city would burn. The cunts would roast themselves and know it.’

  ‘This is fucked.’ Serjeant Hunter sighed. ‘I don’t know about you, boss, but I didn’t join up to fight Englishmen.’

  Master Serjeant Grindcobbe leaned into the man, then thrust a finger up at the traitors’ spikes on the bridge above the tower. ‘You will fight anyone I tell you to lad, or your head will be up there sooner than I can say “Execution!”. and let me tell you I can say “Execution!” quick as hell.’

  Struck dumb, Serjeant Hunter went to the wall and ears full of blaring horns, watched the mounted, plate-armoured vanguard of the rebels – flying the King’s colours and a yellow banner with a blue chevron and three blue bugle horns – canter up to the gate of London. Was that Wat Tyler himself at the head of things? Rebels flying the King’s colours? The van looked like the knights who had left the city in a hurry the previous morning …?

  The horns stopped. The drumming ceased.

  ‘Open the gates!’ cried the lead rider. ‘I am Alderman Horn. Open the gates in the name of the King!’

  Master Serjeant Grindcobbe went to the wall and leaned over to show his worst angry face. ‘The King has ordered the gates shut, so Alderman or not, you aren’t getting in here!’

  ‘He’s flying the King’s colours, boss.’

  ‘Open the gates – I am acting under royal commission,’ Alderman Horn yelled.

  ‘This is so fucked.’ Serjeant Hunter worried at his lip with the back of his hand.

  Master Serjeant Grindcobbe considered this, and yelled back. ‘Bollocks to your commission, we have our orders!’

  ‘I recognise you,’ came the cry from below, ‘Master Serjeant Grindcobbe?’

  Master Serjeant Grindcobbe reeled a step back from the wall, as if shot. ‘That fucker said my name. That … fucker … said … my … name! That utter fucker.’

  ‘You are William Grindcobbe. Aren’t you? Of East Cheap.’

  The threat to Master Serjeant Grindcobbe and his kin was as clear as day. From an Alderman, a baron of the city no less. He regained his courage, leant over the wall, and bawled at the top of his lungs: ‘Alderman Horn. I know your fucking name too. So, go blow yourself, Horn!’

  ‘I will only tell you once more, Grindcobbe. Lower the drawbridge and open the blasted gates – in the name of the King and the True Commons!’

  ‘And I will tell you only once more: go … fucking … blow … yourself!’ Master Serjeant Grindcobbe yelled.

  Serjeant Hunter was first to hear the unmistakable noise: clank-clank-clank … The chains on the rollers of the drawbridge, being let out! Clank-clank-clank … The drawbridge was being lowered! ‘The ruddy gatekeeper. Boss! He’s only letting the friggers in.’

  Serjeant Grindcobbe rushed over to the other side of the tower, to see the gates being cranked open unopposed, by the men of the wards. Directed by … none other than the Alderman of the Bridge, William Sybyle … so that thousands of rustics could rush through Traitor’s Gate, into the city. ‘Fucking, cunting, shitting politicians!’ he spat, and knew his time had come; he would not end up a beggar after all, he would go out fighting like a King’s Man should.

  IV

  Glittering gold. The streets of London were not paved with gold. They were caked in shit. All manner of stinking shit and air swirled with shit and the sourness and spices of cooking smoke. Wat marched his Kentishmen in through all the shit and smoke and set them to the work of freedom: breaking the prisons, smashing the pillories, setting free all those who would or could not pay the poll tax, and everyone else who had suffered an injustice.

  Bridge Street pillory was raised, the stocks set on a platform a man’s height, so that folk could see punishment being meted out, and do some meting if they so wished. All the wood was littered with bits of rotting vegetables, fish, shit, and it, and the poor folk locked on it, stank to high heaven.

  Wat hacked at the rusted lock on the stocks with Harry’s baselarde. The steel blade bit into the old iron like an axe and the lock split away, releasing a shit-splattered, bearded man. The man was frozen in a hunched position.

  ‘You are free to go, mate.’ Wat tried to help him rise, but he was so cramped he just slumped to the wooden boards like a drunkard.

  ‘You are free!’ Nick said, helping the groaning man to his feet.

  Wat and Nick tried to help the bearded man to stand straight but he couldn’t. He was reduced to being a hunchback, a free hunchback. With an agonised ‘Thank you, kind sirs,’ the fellow staggered down the stairs and flopped into the muck of the street at the hundreds of feet of the Kentishmen tramping past.

  ‘You can lead a horse to water,’ Harry said.

  Wat held his arms up to heaven. ‘I’m done helping him.’

  Sophia and Jack helped a heavily pregnant woman out of the foot stocks. She was hysterical, covered head-to-foot in rotting vegetables and stank to low hell, ranker than the cesspit stench of the city. The pillory was a heartless place. The poor woman had lost more than her pride under the barrage of rottenness from passers-by – she had lost her senses. Sophia had heard many a salutary tale of captive women being abused by men at the pillory. Of wardens and the night-watchmen turning a blind eye. What kind of world was this? It made her sick thinking about it.

  From the raised platform of the pillory Wat looked out over the faces of the thousands of laughing, dancing Kentish folk surging up Lombard Street onto West Cheap. Everyone was in high spirits, despite the eye-watering fetor of London’s shit-covered streets, which everyone was moaning about.

  ‘We stormed London, mate!’ Jack said. ‘I cannot believe it. Not a pick of resistance. It’s a shitting miracle.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ Wat nodded. ‘It wasn’t much of a storm though.’

  ‘Well, King Tyler,’ Jack laughed. ‘Your Majesty, Lord of East and West Cheap, Dowgate and Billingsgate – what would you have your subjects do next?’


  ‘Any more of that treasonous talk, you’ll be for the chop,’ Wat said sternly.

  Jack shrugged. ‘If there’s no killing to be done, may I suggest visiting a tavern or two?’

  ‘Good idea!’ Harry said.

  ‘We’ll have a scoop later,’ Wat said. ‘Now – sober as judges – we’ll go break the Fleet.’

  ‘What is the Fleet?’ Nick shrugged. He had never been to London before. To him the city was like a strange warren with all the country folk rabbits, lost in its stinking, crap-infested tunnels.

  ‘It’s Hell,’ Jack said. ‘The fiery pit which the nobles throw the damned into.’

  ‘Really?’ Nick was wide-eyed.

  ‘Prison, lad!’ Wat said. ‘Prison. Ask Jack about it – he’s been to Hell and back many a time.’

  ‘I can well believe that,’ Nick said, laughing.

  ‘You’re not going to Hell, you three,’ Wat said.

  ‘Father!’ Sophia protested.

  ‘No arguments. This will be a bloody business. I want you to hang back from the van, keep the standards in line of sight, but stay well back.’

  Sophia reddened, furious. ‘You promised!’

  ‘I cannot fight if I’m worrying about you.’

  The terrible fierceness in her father’s eyes made Sophia cower away from him: this was his final word.

  V

  Dilan the royal lion snarled, and a cave of fangs opened up as he roared.

  ‘Here you are, boy!’ The burly, almost ape-like keeper tossed in bloody gobbets of prime rump through the bars of the cage.

  King Richard loved to come down to the menagerie, kept in the Lion’s Tower courtyard, and watch the animals at feeding time. He especially liked the Swedish black bear, which was baited with dogs for sport now and then and had killed all-comers.

  The three wolves from the dark forests of Bavaria were entertaining – one could make them howl for their supper.

  The monkeys from Africa were cheeky and funny, but had a bad habit of throwing their excrement at visitors, so one had to wear old clothes and be wary to duck.

  The great python, gift from the late King of Castile to his grandfather was a sinister, crushing reminder that the Devil could take many shapes.

  Of all these wonders of the known world, his favourite was Dilan, the ferocious, dark-maned, amber-eyed king of the beasts. Dilan had been here four years and yet his spirit was unbroken. He had mauled his first keeper, causing the man to lose an arm. He endlessly paced his cage, up and down, looking for a way out. Captivity was not an end to his savage nobility.

  ‘Cousin! How goes it in these times of trouble?’

  King Richard turned from the lion to face Henry Bolingbroke, cousin, childhood play-friend, fellow lover of the Tower’s beasts, and rival to the crown. ‘I do not want to think of court intrigues, or speak of the siege, Bolly. I am tired of manoeuvres, contingencies, the never-ending machinations of state.’

  ‘The King bears a heavy burden.’

  ‘I wish I was a lion, Bolly,’ King Richard said. ‘A free one. In Africa. Roaming the plains.’

  ‘You are a lion, Ricky.’ Henry Bolingbroke laughed, full of good hale, and then said: ‘All English kings are lions.’

  ‘Roar!’ joked King Richard.

  ‘Roar!’ Henry Bolingbroke roared at the lion.

  King Richard envied Bolly his roar. He had a hearty roar. The sort of roar a warrior king should have. For battle. For life.

  Dilan hissed and spat back, clawing protective of his meat.

  ‘Less of that, Dilan!’ yelled the keeper.

  ‘How is your good lady coping with her circumstances?’ asked King Richard. It was somehow hard to believe Bolly was sixteen, and married to the heavily pregnant Mary Bohun when it seemed like only yesterday they were boys happy playing Nine Men’s Morris together.

  ‘The Bohun is faring well, or so father’s idiot physic tells me. She, on the other hand, never stops complaining.’

  King Richard laughed. ‘That is the way of women. They are happiest talking about being unhappy.’

  Henry Bolingbroke stopped to pick some slops out of the keeper’s bucket and threw them into Dilan’s cage. ‘Have some more dinner, Dilan!’

  King Richard laughed as Dilan snarled, left the meat he was chewing and went to claim Bolly’s slops from near its dung-pile.

  ‘Has your mother not found you a tormentor yet?’ asked Henry Bolingbroke.

  ‘She has been trying.’ King Richard sighed. ‘Her latest choice is Anne of Bohemia.’

  ‘The daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor would come with a hefty dowry, no?’

  ‘On the contrary, Bolly, she comes at a high price. Hence the protracted negotiations.’

  ‘I see,’ said Henry Bolingbroke. ‘Ricky – could we feed Berserker now? I’ve lost two of the finest Gascon mastiffs to the bugger, not to mention the wager of five nobles. I should pay my respects.’

  ‘Yes, let us go feed the bear now,’ King Richard told the keeper, who grunted assent.

  ‘Majesty!’ A gangly herald – a low-born squire a year older than his king – pelted into the courtyard up to them, halted, and bowed low. ‘Your Majesty?’

  ‘Speak, man?’ King Richard said.

  ‘Majesty. I was sent to tell you the rebels have stormed the gates!’

  ‘How could they have stormed the gates?’ Henry Bolingbroke demanded.

  ‘They say it was treachery from within, my Lord. They have overrun the city. Majesty – the Queen sent me to fetch you to her chambers.’

  ‘Her chambers? Why, in God’s name?’

  ‘She did not say.’

  King Richard sighed. ‘Berserker will have to wait, Bolly.’

  VI

  The surging joy of breaching Traitor’s Gate without an arrow loosed or a Kentishman lost had since disappeared into the maze of shadowy streets.

  All the doors were barricaded, or nailed shut. Pale white faces, whole families, stared down at them, mouths agog, from upper storey windows, terrified by this demon horde that had invaded the city.

  Herring gulls soared and wheeled overhead, shrieking their unearthly calls that echoed down alleys so narrow the three-storey high tenements seemed to be man-made cliffs toppling in on the men of Tonbridge and Hadlow and heaving throng of Kentish pressing up behind them.

  In the vanguard, Ed Smith felt the loss of the horizon, the whole sky, keen as a whetted blade, did not like being so enclosed, especially not when ambush might lie in wait round every street corner. He led his men along the streets, warily, heading for the Temple to join John Ball, who had rushed on ahead with his band of horn-blowing Franciscans. The city could easily become a giant trap, the tight spaces made archers much less of a threat, and favoured men-at-arms.

  In more innocent times, Ed had been in the city to buy ore and bone for smelting steel, trade his wares, drink some ale, eat some stinky Frenchie cheeses, but the grind-you-down-bastards wouldn’t let him work metal here, ply his trade. A freeman from elsewhere couldn’t find work in the smithies here. A bondman who had been born here could work metal, or an in-comer who agreed to serve seven years as an apprentice, but a freemason from Kent with years of experience – no. It used to be a masonic man could earn his right to trade by working one year in the city, but that was only in the days right after the Black Death struck; these days a Kentishman would never become a citizen – unless his trade was robbery and he had a flair for it. With the Statute of Labour in force, the Guilds had the labour market locked down tighter than a flea’s arse. The city was a shitty place for country boys.

  Up ahead, Elder Abel returned from his scouting, turban on, face covered. ‘There’s a bunch of fifty armed men up on the right, demolishing a tenement. If we want to get to the Temple there’s no way to avoid them.’

  ‘Are they ours or King’s Men?’ Ed asked.

  ‘I didn’t stop to ask the watchword,’ Abel said. ‘Fifty-to-one is bad odds.’

  Ed turned, looked back
at the jostling host marching up behind, wedged in between the thin, tall, white-washed, wooden-frame houses. He had never seen so many people acting as one – it was like God had become a river, thrown Himself into reverse, attempting to channel the sea back up into the mountains along its narrow course. There seemed no stopping this vast flow. ‘There’s nowhere else to go but onwards, come what may.’

  ‘Fuck it. We came for a fight.’ Abel fell in beside his mate, war-axe at the ready, and together they led Tonbridge up the street.

  The armed men were indeed demolishing a tenement in earnest, boys hurling slates from the rooftops. The white front walls were being hammered out, the wattle and daub falling to the street in bits, the tar-black beams sundered by axe-strokes. The wreckers were cheering their work as they smashed holes in the face of the house. A rough-looking man at the back of the mob of onlookers, thrust a long, thin skinning knife in the air and yelled: ‘Fuck all bailiffs!’

  ‘Looks like London justice being done,’ Ed said, heaving a sigh of relief.

  ‘Not a good time to be a Lawman,’ Abel said, and laughed.

  ‘With whom do you hold?’ cried Ed.

  ‘With King Richard and the True Commons!’ came the reply from the Londoners, followed by ale-merry cheers.

  ‘Long live John Ball. John Ball for Archbishop of Canterbury!’ Abel yelled like a town crier as the Kentishmen marched up to the Londoners.

  ‘Are you Wat Tyler then?’ asked the rough-looking sort wielding the skinning knife like a toy.

  ‘No,’ said Abel. ‘That’d be Ed here.’

  The rough sort nodded, and then caught himself on, and laughed.

  Ed smiled. He suddenly felt like Adam was back on his shoulders, and he was standing in Tyler’s farmyard. It warmed him, that fatherly feeling of being part of something bigger than himself, and gave him courage.

  Abel spotted a young lad flitting from the open cellar door of the tenement two doors down from the scene of deconstruction. The boy was chewing on a leg of chicken. ‘Stay here,’ he told Ed.