The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  Clouds of late autumn leaves, blown and scattered by strong winds sweeping in from the sea, swirled about the hoofs of our horses as we rode that last stretch of road. By this time I had even managed to gain some vague control over my rouncey, whom I named Bastard after her temperament and the murderous fool of Somerton who almost got me hanged.

  For our last night on English soil Calveley condescended to speak to us as we set up our tents.

  “When we reach Calais, you will begin your training,” he told me, Ralph and Richard, “you think you are soldiers, because you learned the basics of arms in some rustic garrison. You are not. You are boys, mere novices, but I will turn you into soldiers. I will turn you into men!”

  We listened to his words in grave silence, and when he turned his back Ralph spat in derision. I was coming to realise that Will Calvely was something of a buffoon. He lacked self-awareness, and seemed to have no idea that his men laughed at him behind his back, mocking his arrogance and pompous attitudes.

  I became O Neill’s shadow, absorbing everything he had to say about soldiers and soldiering. He could also be a fool, in his boastful way, and reckless when in his cups.

  “You might be wondering,” he whispered to me that evening, “why an experienced soldier like me has chosen to serve under a dolt like Will Calveley.”

  “I had wondered,” I replied, and he leered and tipped more cider down his throat.

  “We all have our secrets, Page, and I’ll not tell you any more than is necessary. But I will tell you something.”

  He leaned in closer, breathing fumes over me. “We have sworn a covenant, me and some of the other boys. Even Cheney, that whore’s melt, is in. We have agreed to follow Calveley until something better comes along, but until that time we are keeping a close eye on him. If he tries to play the hero in France, if he orders us to charge some unbeatable foe or storm some unassailable position, then he is a dead man.”

  He half-drew his dirk. “I will cut his throat, or one of the bowmen will put an arrow in him. None of us will die for his ambitions. Are you with us?”

  I was reluctant. The last pact I entered into had ended with my neck in a noose, and I was wary of taking such a risk again. It smacked of dicing with the Devil, and you cannot hope to beat him twice.

  O Neill tried to press me into joining his covenant, I steadfastly refused, and tempers were just beginning to smoulder when we were distracted by shouts from the trees beyond the camp.

  I snatched up my sword, and my heart broke into a gallop as I thought we were about to be attacked. The forests around London are always thick with robbers and outlaws, though they usually gave bands of well-armed soldiers like us a wide berth.

  “No need for panic,” the distinctive high-pitched Welsh tones of Uriens sounded through the camp, “it’s just the watch.”

  First on watch that night was Peter Angreton, another Cheshire forester who had grown bored of chasing poachers and decided to try his hand at soldiering. He was a tall, rangy fellow, a superb shot with the war bow, as most of these Cheshire men are, and blessed with catlike night vision. Someone had been foolish enough to try and creep up on his picket, and quickly regretted it.

  He came striding out of the darkness with one hand gripping the back of a much smaller man’s neck, and the other holding a knife to his throat.

  “Look what I’ve got, lads,” he cried cheerfully, “a little night-owl, who thought he could swoop on a mouse.”

  I recognised his prisoner immediately. John Heym was much thinner than when I last saw him, white-faced under a matted beard and thick coating of grime, his jerkin and hose reduced to indescribably filthy rags, toes sticking out of the perished leather of his boots.

  “Nice evening, Tom,” he said, grinning weakly under the grime, “Ralph, Richard, you too.”

  “You know this man?” demanded Calveley, frowning as Peter dumped him on the ground.

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly, “he’s one of our comrades from the Warwick garrison.”

  “I caught him sneaking about in the bushes,” said Peter, placing his foot on John’s back as he sprawled in the mud, “making enough noise to wake the dead. He’s got a knife, and tried to use it when I grabbed him, but didn’t know how to do that properly either.”

  Calveley sniffed. “Well, fellow,” he said, “explain yourself, if you can, and remember that your life depends on your next few words. I have a short walk and a long rope for thieves.”

  “I wasn’t trying to rob anyone,” said John, showing no fear as he looked up at Calveley, “I’ve been following you since Warwick, though you didn’t notice me. I want to join up.”

  There was a hiss of steel on leather as Calveley drew his sword.

  “You want to be a soldier,” he said scornfully, “but soldiers don’t grovel and skulk in the woods. The Company of the Calf is for men, not cut-purses and cowards.”

  John Heym’s sharp features twisted in contempt. “Go to Hell, you one-eyed clown,” he said, and folded his arms carelessly, waiting for the killing blow.

  I expected Calveley to chop him down, but he surprised me.

  “Some defiance there, at least,” he said, sliding his sword back into its sheath, “perhaps you can be knocked into shape. Uriens, take this one away, give him some food and a fresh set of clothes. And also give him the indenture to sign, or make his mark if the brute can’t write.”

  John rose, relief flooding over his filthy face, but Calveley hadn’t finished. “Wait,” he said, holding up his hand, “you had the courage to insult me, but insulting your captain is a breach of discipline. Once you have rested and eaten, Uriens will give you three strokes of the whip and dock your first week’s wages.”

  Uriens placed a heavy hand on John’s shoulder, who was too astonished to object as he was led away.

  “Twenty-four men,” I overheard O Neill remark to Cheyne, “that’s eight lances.”

  “Still the smallest Company in Europe,” Cheyne replied. I had no idea what they meant, and was reluctant to show my ignorance by asking.

  Once he had got over his flogging, John Heym slotted easily into our ranks. There was no spare horse for him, so he had to run alongside the column as we rode the last few miles to Southampton.

  I took the opportunity to speak to him as he stumbled along the uneven road on his short legs. “What became of James Russell?” I asked.

  “Our families refused to take us in, so we tried our luck as highway robbers,” he said, puffing, “and turned out to be very bad at it. We ambushed a lone merchant on the highway, thinking him easy prey, but the bastard carried a knife. He laughed at our threats, and stuck his knife in James when we tried to lay hands on him.”

  John hesitated before telling me what came next. “I lost my nerve and ran away. I left James bleeding his life out in the road, and when I came back, hours later, he was dead.”

  The story made my gorge rise, and I spurred on, too angry to speak with him further.

  Soon Southampton came into view, my first sight of the famous walled port and its fleets of cogs, galleys and smaller fishing vessels clustered in the docks or bobbing out to sea. It was a grey, blustery day with heavy winds blowing in from the Channel, and the sea echoed like distant thunder as we cantered down the highway towards the suburbs outside the eastern gate.

  7.

  Calais, August 1362

  The whining Glamorgan accent cut through the air, loud, raw and grating.

  “You can count, can’t you?” shouted Uriens, holding up three fingers, “then count these. Three fingers. That’s how our Company is divided, in trios, and each trio is called a lance. Got that, you ignorant Saes bastards?”

  “Yes, sir,” we chorused wearily.

  Uriens was instructing me, Ralph, Richard and John, in the basic arts of war. We were exhausted from too little sleep, and still suffering from the sea-sickness that had ravaged us on the mercifully brief voyage over the Channel.

  Calveley had hired a cog in Southampton
, a leaky little tub called the St Thomas, and I spent much of my first sea-voyage clinging to a hogshead and vomiting my guts into the churning waters. By the time we arrived in Calais, the jewel in King Edward’s French dominions, I was in no condition to do anything but sleep for a week. Calveley and Uriens, however, had other ideas, and were determined to knock their raw recruits into shape.

  Uriens had roused the whole Company from their warm beds, save Calveley, and led us through the narrow streets of the town, wreathed in sea mist, to a field outside the walls which the Calais garrison used as an exercise ground.

  “You, Page,” said Uriens, dragging me out of line by the arm, “you’re with O Neill and Angreton. Go and stand beside them.”

  I took my place next to the little Irishman and the big Cheshire archer. Peter Angreton winked at me as he leaned negligently on his bow, which was almost as tall as him.

  “This one is a man-at-arms,” Uriens went on, jabbing his finger at O Neill, “a trained fighter, if you can believe it, and his job is to stand in the front line. For this reason he and his mates get the best equipment and the best food. They have to be strong, see?”

  O Neill gave us a mock salute. He and the other men-at-arms wore bascinets and brigandines over their padded gambesons. The Irishman wore a great helm over his bascinet. His helm had a long, sharp snout, which he claimed made for a useful extra weapon in a fight.

  “The likes of Angreton are bowmen,” said Uriens, “the best damned archers in the whole of England, though obviously they can’t hold a candle to any in Wales. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  Peter and the rest of the bowmen, all Cheshire men, yawned out a sarcastic cheer. They carried falchions and daggers, but their main weapon was the six-foot length of yew or ash that had made English armies feared across Europe. This was the famous war bow that each of them had trained to use since childhood.

  You can always pick out an English (or Welsh) archer in a crowd, for they tend to have over-developed shoulders, slightly twisted spines and an unnatural thickness of muscle in their draw arms. Constant practice at the butts and the war bow’s fearsome draw weight deform their bodies, but they bear their disfigurements with pride, as marks of their feared profession.

  Terrible stories were told of the deadly killing abilities of the war bow. I had heard that a truly expert archer could drive a bodkin-tipped arrow through iron, leather and flesh at a distance of two hundred yards, puncturing the armour of the most heavily-clad knight. This was nonsense. Arrows can only pierce steel plate at exceptionally close range, and archers don’t win battles on their own. King Edward’s genius, and the reason his armies won so many battles, was that he trained archers and dismounted men-at-arms to work in tandem.

  Still, a mythos had grown up around the war bow, and after the massacres of their chivalry at Crécy, Poitiers and other places the French were mortally afraid of it. To counter its perceived effects they took to lumbering into battle on foot in heavier and heavier armour, sheathed in layers of steel, like so many massive tortoises.

  Uriens picked up a spare lance from the pile behind him, long ash spears about twelve feet long, and thrust it into my hand.

  I glanced to my left and saw that Calveley had at last deigned to join us, no doubt after enjoying a leisurely breakfast. He was dressed all in black and sitting on his horse, idly strumming his harp as he watched us drill.

  “Show him how to receive a charge,” Uriens ordered O Neill. The Irishman went down on his left knee, holding his lance at an angle with the butt resting on the ground.

  Uriens turned to me. “Imagine you’re out hunting, and the boar charges you. You let him run onto the spear, yes? Well, that’s how you spit a man on a charging horse. Same principle.”

  I copied O Neill’s stance, and received an ironic round of applause from the archers.

  “Now advance, in your best Swiss style!” barked Uriens. O Neill stood up smartly, shifting his grip on the lance so his right hand cupped the butt and his left held it straight, and advanced three measured steps. I mimicked him, and once again got some scattered applause.

  “And that’s all there is to soldiering,” said Uriens, and for once even he was smiling.

  It wasn’t, of course. Uriens kept us hard at it, for he was grimly determined to knock the basics of manoeuvres and discipline into our heads. He didn’t have much time to get us up to scratch, since Calveley was keen to leave Calais in search of glory.

  “It doesn’t mean much, all this drill,” said O Neill as we rested during a much-needed break, “the real test comes in the heat of battle. Strutting about a practice field is all very well, but how will you cope on a muddy battlefield when it’s tipping with rain? When you’re cold and hungry and shit-scared and the ground is trembling under your feet as the heavy horse come charging at your thin wall of spears? What then? That’s when you find out if you’ve got the right stuff or not.”

  The ‘lance’ Uriens spoke of was a unit of three men, usually a man-at-arms, squire and archer. Other Companies arranged their lances differently, with an unarmed page instead of a squire, but the Company of the Calf didn’t have the numbers for such luxuries. Our twenty-four men amounted to eight lances, pitifully few, though Calveley was apparently straining every sinew to find recruits in the barracks and ale-houses of Calais.

  From somewhere he had acquired a drummer boy, a hideous little street urchin with an evil goblin face and green teeth who gave his name as Eudes. The archers nicknamed him Snatcher, after his habit of stealing anything edible or valuable that he could lay his nimble, bird-like hands on.

  Uriens hammered into us that we had to move to the tap of Snatcher’s drum. He was obsessed with what he termed ‘the Swiss method’, and had us fight any number of imaginary battles to learn it.

  To receive a charge our eight men-at-arms knelt in a staggered line, presenting their lances diagonally. We squires stood in the gaps behind them, holding our lances at shoulder height, presenting a double line of points. The archers were arranged on our flanks in two groups of four. Their job was to direct their arrows at the enemy’s flanks, forcing them inward to be spitted on the lances.

  The Company would then advance to the tap of Snatcher’s drum. The men-at-arms rose to their feet, holding their lances at waist height as they moved forward at a slow walk. We advanced behind them while the archers ran behind us and formed up to shoot volleys of arrows over our heads and rain bodkin-tipped death on the hypothetical foe.

  The drum would skip faster, and Uriens’ voice, hoarse with shouting, bellowed over the beat. “Now! Thrust!”

  Sixteen lance-heads thrust more or less as one, and a great heap of sacks stuffed with straw, set up to stand in for the enemy, had cause to regret they had ever been born.

  That was the theory, at least, but even the basic act of marching in a double line requires some sense of rhythm and alertness, and poor slow-witted Richard Kelleshull was sadly lacking in both. Uriens broke several sticks across his broad back, lashing him relentlessly every time he dropped his lance or moved out of step with the rest of us.

  “The Ancient Greeks mastered this,” the captain would yell, his words punctuated by the crack of his stick on Richard’s flesh, “even the Scots can do it, after a fashion. If you’re going to be outdone by a lot of dead sodomites and unwashed bare-legged savages, what are you? God’s own idiot, that’s what!”

  Richard would stand there like an ox in the furrow, never flinching as he took his punishment. In an effort to get him to learn his drill, Uriens matched him with two of the most experienced veterans in the Company, William Clayton and Nicholas Pasmore, hard-bitten men in their forties whose scarred faces were like maps of all the countries they had soldiered in. Ralph, meanwhile, was given over to the care of Edmund Cheyne and Richard Hook.

  The days turned into weeks while Calveley drafted more men into his Company and tried to learn the whereabouts of his famous cousin. Captain-General Hugh Calveley was rumoured to be in several places at
once, France, Brittany, Spain and Italy, leaving trails of burning castles, ransacked villages and butchered peasants. But there was no reliable word of him.

  By late September, when we had been in Calais for a month, our numbers had swollen to over fifty men: English and Gascons, mostly, all with some experience in soldiering. If nothing else, Calveley had a good eye for fighting men.

  The Company needed secretaries and treasurers as well as soldiers, and Calveley managed to find a couple of broken-down French clerks. Thierry was an ageing scribbler with a bent spine and ink-spotted fingers, and Julien a defrocked monk permanently pickled on cheap wine and brandy. Their job was to keep the indentures, sign on new men, dole out the Company’s wages and ensure that any plunder was shared fairly. Responsible tasks, but I would not have trusted either man to dig a latrine pit.

  One cold autumn morning, as we were in the field sparring in pairs with wooden swords and bucklers, Calveley sauntered into view. He coughed and raised his hand for everyone to stop and listen.

  “Last night I learned that my kinsman, Sir Hugh, is in Spain,” he announced in his most pompous style, “where he has the honour of commanding a contingent of troops in the service of King Pedro of Castile, who is supporting Mohammed V, King of Granada, in that monarch’s war against Abu Saïd.”

  He might as well have informed us that Hugh had gone to fight on behalf of the Man in the Moon, but Will Calveley never missed an opportunity to remind his men of their ignorance. I expected him to say he intended to lead us to Spain, but was mistaken.

  “Therefore,” he said, “since my kinsman is so far away, we will seek service with the Free Companies in Burgundy.”

  8.

  Burgundy lies roughly three hundred miles south from Calais, which meant a dangerous march through lawless, war-torn country. Despite the risks, most of Calveley’s men approved his decision, and rubbed their hands at the prospect of rich pickings in the French heartland.