Bernard Cornwell - 1356 (Special Edition)

‘Then we’ll have to put some backbone into the bloody man, won’t we?’

Scotland had known little but disaster in the last few years. The pestilence had come and emptied the valleys of souls, but almost ten years before, at Durham, a Scottish army had been defeated and the King of Scotland had been taken prisoner by the hated English. King David was now a prisoner in London’s Tower, and the Scots, to get him back, were expected to pay a ransom so vast that it would impoverish the kingdom for years.

But the Lord of Douglas reckoned the king could be restored in a different way, a soldier’s way, and that was the main reason he had brought his men to France. In the spring the Prince of Wales would probably lead another army out of Gascony, and that army would do what English armies always did, rape and burn and pillage and destroy, and the purpose of that chevauchée was to force the French to bring an army against them, and then the dreaded English archers would go to work and France would suffer another defeat. Its great men would be taken prisoner and England would get even wealthier on their ransoms.

But the Lord of Douglas knew how to defeat archers, and that was the gift he brought to France, and if he could persuade the French king to oppose the boy Edward then he saw the chance of a great victory, and in that victory he planned to capture the prince. He would hold the prince to ransom, a ransom equal to that of the King of Scotland. It could be done, he thought, if only the King of France would fight.

‘And you, Robbie? You’ll fight?’

Robbie coloured. ‘I took an oath.’

‘Damn your bloody oath!’

‘I took an oath,’ Robbie persisted. He had been a prisoner of the English, but he had been released and his ransom paid on a promise not to fight the English ever again. The promise had been extracted and the ransom had been paid by his friend, Thomas of Hookton, and for eight years Robbie had kept the promise, but now his uncle was pushing him to break the oath.

‘What money do you have, boy?’

‘Your money, uncle.’

‘And do you have any left?’ Douglas waited, saw his nephew’s sheepishness. ‘So you’ve gambled it away?’

‘Yes.’

‘In debt?’

Robbie nodded.

‘If you want more, boy, you fight. You strip off that whore’s jacket and put on mail. For Christ’s sake, Robbie, you’re a good fighter! I want you! Have you no pride?’

‘I took an oath,’ Robbie repeated stubbornly.

‘Then you can untake the bloody thing. Or become a pauper. See if I care. Now take that skinny bitch and prove you’re a man, and I’ll see you at supper.’

When the Lord of Douglas would try to make the King of France into a man.

The archers lined the woods. Their horses were picketed a hundred yards away, guarded by two men, but the bowmen hurried to the edge of the trees and, when the leading horsemen of the Count of Labrouillade’s straggling column were less than one hundred yards away, they loosed their arrows.

The Hellequin had become rich on two things. The first was their leader, Thomas of Hookton, who was a good soldier, a supple thinker, and clever in battle, but there were plenty of men in southern France who could match le Bâtard ’s cleverness. What they could not do was deploy the Hellequin’s second advantage, the English war bow, and it was that which had made Thomas and his men wealthy.

It was a simple thing. A stave of yew, a little longer than the height of a man and preferably cut from one of the lands close to the Mediterranean. The bowyer would take the stave and shape it, keeping the dense heartwood on one side and the springy sapwood on the other, and he would paint it to keep the moisture trapped in the stave, then nock it with two tips of horn that held the cord, which was woven from fibres of hemp. Some archers liked to add strands of their woman’s hair to the cord, claiming that it stopped the strings from breaking, but Thomas, in twelve years of fighting, had found no difference. The cord was whipped where the arrow rested on the string, and that was the war bow. A peasant’s weapon of yew, hemp and horn, shooting an arrow made from ash, hornbeam or birch, tipped with a steel point and fledged with feathers taken from the wing of a goose, and always taken from the same wing so that the feathers curved in the same direction.

The war bow was cheap and it was lethal. Brother Michael was not a weak man, but he could not draw a bow’s cord more than a hand’s breadth, but Thomas’s archers hauled the string back to their ears and did it sixteen or seventeen times a minute. They had muscles like steel, humps of muscle on their backs, broad chests, thick arms, and the bow was useless without the muscles. Any man could shoot a crossbow, and a good crossbow outranged the yew bow, but it cost a hundred times as much to manufacture and it took five times longer to reload, and, while the crossbowman was winding the ratchet to haul back his cord, the English archer would close the range and shoot a half-dozen points. It was the English and the Welsh archers who had the muscle, and they began training as children, just as Hugh, Thomas’s son, was training now. He had a small bow and his father expected him to shoot three hundred arrows a day. He must shoot and shoot and shoot until he no longer had to think about where the arrow would go, but would simply loose in the knowledge that the arrow would speed where he intended, and every day the muscle grew until, in ten years’ time, Hugh would be ready to stand in the archers’ line and loose goose-feathered death from a great war bow.

Thomas had thirty archers at the edge of the wood and in the first half-minute they launched more than one hundred and fifty arrows, and it was not war, but massacre. An arrow could pierce chain mail at two hundred paces, but none of the Count of Labrouillade’s men were wearing armour or carrying shields, all of which they had loaded onto packhorses. Some of the men had leather coats, but all had taken off their heavy plate or mail, and so the arrows slashed into them, wounding men and horses, driving them to instant chaos. The crossbowmen were on foot and a long way behind the count’s horsemen, and anyway they were cumbered with their sacks of plunder. It would take minutes for them to ready for battle, and Thomas did not give them the minutes. Instead, as the arrows plunged into the screaming horses and fallen riders, Thomas led his twenty-two men-at-arms out of the woods onto the count’s flank.

Thomas’s men were mounted on destriers, the great stallions that could carry the weight of man, armour and weapons. They had not brought lances, for those weapons were heavy and would have slowed their march; instead they drew their swords or wielded axes and maces. Many carried a shield on which the black-barred badge of le Bâtard was painted, and Thomas, once they were out of the trees, turned the line to face the enemy and swung his sword blade down as a signal to advance.

They trotted forward, knee to knee. Rocks studded the high grassland and the line would divide around them, then rejoin. The men were in mail. Some had added pieces of plate armour, a breastplate or perhaps an espalier to protect the shoulders, and all wore bascinets, the simple open-faced helmet that let a man see in battle. The arrows continued to fall. Some of the count’s horsemen were trying to escape, wrenching their reins to ride back northwards, but the thrashing of the wounded horses obstructed them and they could see the black line of Hellequin men-at-arms coming from the side, and some, in desperation, hauled out their swords. A handful broke clear and raced back towards the northern woods where the crossbowmen might be found, while another handful gathered around their lord, the count, who had one arrow in his thigh despite Thomas’s orders that the count was not to be killed. ‘A dead man can’t pay his debts,’ Thomas had said, ‘so shoot anyone else, but make certain Labrouillade lives.’ Now the count was trying to turn his horse, but his weight was too great and the horse was wounded, and he could not turn, and then the Hellequin spurred into the canter, the swords were lowered to the lunge position, and the arrows stopped.