Master of War

30




Barber-surgeons cut, sawed and stitched the wounded. It seemed to Blackstone that more blood flowed from their hands than had been let by the enemy. They took cutters and snapped the bolt below the fletchings. He wished the infirmarian from the monastery, Brother Simon, was with them. His care for the sick and wounded would keep a man in this world rather than punish him into the next. The barber-surgeon used an arrow spoon to draw out the bolt and prepared his cautery iron.

‘Let the blood run,’ Blackstone insisted. Another lesson from the old monk was to let blood flow and carry with it any impurity before sealing the wound. Finally they pushed the steel wire needle, its eyelet threaded with gut, into the wound. Gaillard brought the sack that hung from his horse’s pommel and handed him the small clay jar, sealed with beeswax, prepared by the old monk. The balm was the colour of lemons and very fragrant, which in itself gave a sense of healing. Blackstone used it on his wound and made sure that others smeared it across their injuries. He and his men were kept two weeks within the city walls, attended to and fed. Despite their injuries they buried their dead themselves, caring little for strangers who threw corpses into pits.

Matthew Hampton had rushed between Blackstone and the crossbowmen and now the veteran English archer lay cradled by the earth. Prayers were said and blessings given, and then Blackstone went among his men. They had come off lightly, but losing two archers was a grievous loss to Blackstone. He knew, though, that in time, others would come.

‘Talpin was a good soldier,’ Meulon told him, nursing a cut to his arm. ‘Still, better him than me, is how you have to look at it. I think you pissed off your English Prince, though, Master Thomas. He was counting on keeping the French leaders alive.’

‘He wasn’t on my mind at the time,’ Blackstone answered.

Blackstone had lost fifteen of his seventy-five men, and a dozen others were wounded, including himself. It was a time for prayer and giving thanks, and he kneeled with his company at the men’s graveside. There was a sombre place in his heart for those who had died at his side on the battlefields of France, and he knew the memory of them would ride with him forever.

Blackstone and his men were quartered in the town, but kept close to the stables and the garrison’s quarters. The seneschal of Calais had ordered de Beauchamp to keep fighting men well away from the merchants and inns. A battle won beyond the walls could soon be lost within them. Gold- and silversmiths offered more temptations than tavern whores.

By the third week after the battle he could ride without seeping blood. It was time to go home. He shared a cooked meal with the men, who were given fresh bread for their efforts. If nothing else, the King and the Prince fed their men well.

Gaillard sucked the broth’s juice from the bread. The lump on his head had risen to a mighty bruise that made wearing a helmet painful. A couple of weeks of letting the lice escape would do no harm, was the common consensus. ‘I hear that Italian, whatsisname… the one who did the deal, he got paid. One of the garrison guards said he overheard that he’d taken a holiday to Rome, said it was a Jubilee year. If there were a few spare coins to be had I’d travel through Avignon and see the Pope myself.’

‘Gaillard, the Pope would choke on his fine cuts if you showed up. He would have to take a year off his duties to confess you,’ said Perinne, lifting the men’s mood.

There had been some booty, but not enough to make the fight worthwhile, though it made little difference to most of them, because they would soon be back home where raiding gave them modest but acceptable pay under Blackstone’s command.

Blackstone stood and wiped his hands on his leather jerkin. He could smell his own stench and longed for a bath, promising himself to bathe when they came across the first freshwater stream.

‘We leave tomorrow after matins,’ he said and then made his way to where William de Fossat lay, resting in surroundings more fitting for a Norman baron who had decided to throw in his lot with the English. He had taken the fourth crossbow quarrel in those deadly moments when Hampton died and Blackstone was wounded. It had punched through his armour and embedded itself in his shoulder. He looked gaunt behind the dark beard because the surgeons had bled him even more than the wound itself.

‘Butchers. That’s what you English are. I ask for a French surgeon and I get an Englishman who stutters my language, and farts while he stitches me,’ said de Fossat.

‘I’m told that was because you held a knife to his throat in case he took your arm.’

William de Fossat grunted indifferently.

‘What will you do now? Edward can’t grant you protection here. Will you go to England?’ Blackstone asked.

‘No. Did you not hear? I found myself a rich widow with estates that need looking after. And I think she’s some connection to a long-forgotten bastard of the royal family. He will leave us alone – and besides, I hear he’s ailing. He’ll be dead before I give myself to the worms. That’s if your English butchers haven’t done for me.’

‘I came to thank you,’ Blackstone said.

‘Don’t be a fool, Blackstone. I didn’t do what I did for you. Louis de Vitry betrayed us. Had I confronted him he would have surrendered to me. He needed to be dead.’ He smiled. ‘You were – convenient. You’re the one who mocked our code of chivalry, Thomas, but it’s a code nonetheless. Surrender only to a man of equal rank.’

‘Which I am not.’

‘Which you most definitely are not. And he wanted badly to kill you. You humiliated a Norman lord. Sweet Jesus! Did you think he would ever forget?’

‘No,’ said Blackstone. ‘But I doubted you. For a moment only. But I doubted.’

‘That I was coming to kill you,’ he said

‘Aye. You had the perfect opportunity out there. And now I am in your debt.’

‘I gave my word that I would stand at your shoulder against a common enemy,’ de Fossat said quietly, adding weight to his sincerity.

‘A pledge can be broken,’ Blackstone replied.

‘It depends who you give it to,’ said the Norman lord.


John de Beauchamp strode at the head of a company of pikemen, who outnumbered Blackstone’s men two to one. They stopped where Blackstone and his men were garrisoned.

‘Is this trouble?’ Meulon asked as he saw the men outside form up as escort.

Before Blackstone could answer, the Captain of Calais made himself known. ‘Sir Thomas Blackstone, you and your men are summoned to the market square. I am sent to escort you there now.’

‘By whose orders?’ Blackstone asked, knowing his men were wary of the English.

‘Your Prince,’ de Beauchamp answered.

Meulon muttered beneath his breath. ‘Disobeying a sovereign Prince is a hanging offence. Maybe they’ve already got the scaffolds built in the square.’

‘Because I killed de Vitry?’ Blackstone asked him.

‘How would I know? He’s your Prince.’

The soldiers marched as Blackstone’s men shambled between them. There had been no command to disarm but to be taken like this into the confines of the town created suspicion. They turned into the market square and saw it was boxed by troops, keeping the townspeople at bay as they gawked at the assembly of noblemen and their rich tapestry of banners. The Prince of Wales, resplendent in armour and unsullied surcoat, was in conversation with his entourage. It seemed that he and his household were preparing to leave for England. John de Beauchamp halted the men.

‘Sir Thomas, you will accompany me,’ he commanded, and went forward to where the Prince spoke with his seneschal and other officers of state who controlled Calais.

Blackstone stayed a respectful two paces behind de Beauchamp, who waited until an officer approached him. The Prince of Wales looked up and nodded and the officer indicated that they should move forward. Once close enough, both Blackstone and de Beauchamp went down on one knee and then stood before him.

The Captain of Calais stepped away, leaving Blackstone to face the stern-faced Prince alone.

‘We leave on the tide, Thomas. Back to England. Our King has already sailed,’ he said.

Blackstone could not determine why he had been summoned. Thoughts dashed through his mind. Was punishment due? Surely the Prince did not want him to return to England, abandoning his territory, his wife and child?

‘You hold towns in your King’s name, Thomas. Come the day we will no doubt have need of them.’

‘They’re yours to command, my Prince,’ Blackstone answered.

A frown of irritation crossed Prince Edward’s face. ‘Do you always have to kill so readily, Thomas? Count Louis de Vitry was a Norman we could have used in our favour.’

Blackstone remained silent. To answer might stir a hornet’s nest of recrimination.

The heir to the throne of England let the moment pass. ‘What’s done is done,’ he went on. ‘Your action drove a wedge through the enemy centre. It was… helpful… to us. Has the yeoman archer become a military tactician as well as a knight?’

‘I do as I see best, my Prince,’ Blackstone said, watching Edward’s movements as he made a barely noticeable gesture and a nod of his head to no one in particular, but it was enough for a knight in full armour and a groom on the periphery of the square to take hold of a pack horse’s bridle and begin its swayback gait towards them.

‘Then make sure that you continue to do so,’ the Prince said and carried on, indicating that he did not expect a response. ‘Did you know we have given the wool Staple to Calais, that our Flemish allies to the north are almost within hailing distance? Their looms hum with trade from the wool off our sheep’s backs. It makes no difference whether you do or not, Thomas, there was strategic and political importance in holding this town.’

Blackstone saw that the approaching knight and groom wore the royal livery, so whatever was packed onto that palfrey had something to do with the Prince’s household.

‘And hold it we did. And you would have stood alone in our name had we not known of the plot to throw open the gates. Your action deserves to be honoured. And Thomas, you are making a habit of this!’

The rebuke seemed genuine and Blackstone bowed his head.

‘We jest. For God’s sake, Thomas, we are not an ogre, we are your Prince and we value you. Did they cut away your English humour at Crécy as well as your face?’ he said, and with another flick of his wrist the knight responded by taking something from the side of the horse. He held up a plain woven surcoat, its sanguine dye as rich as blood. The outline of a shield was sewn onto the left breast and it bore the black stitched image of Wolf Sword, pommel and grip distinct above the curved-down crossguard. The narrowing blade was held in a gauntleted fist. Blackstone remembered meeting his Prince’s eyes across the sword when both men grasped its blade before the battle.

‘If you are to be known as other than that face of yours then you need a coat of arms. Our King thought this appropriate,’ he said and nodded to the groom to give it to Blackstone.

‘There are sufficient to clothe your ruffians, and more for those who will no doubt seek you out. And five hundred pounds a year will come from the treasury to sustain your efforts,’ he said.

The honour had surprised and embarrassed Blackstone and he stuttered his gratitude.

‘You are too generous, lord.’

‘Yes. We know. But honouring you reflects well on us. We bathe in the warmth of your name and success – and we would wish it were more fragrant,’ he said and smiled.

Impatiently he looked to the groom, who fumbled with something on the blind side of the horse. The knight quickly took over and unlaced a shield. The Prince stepped forward and took it from him. He turned the shield and the same blazon of sword and gauntlet faced Blackstone.

‘We chose the motto ourself,’ he said. ‘You were close to death that night, and yet you would not yield to it. The King, our father, uttered the words that you were defiant unto death.’

Blackstone looked at the words written beneath the gauntlet: Défiant à la Mort.

He took the shield from Prince Edward’s hands.

‘Thomas, go home and stay alive; we will have need of you again. Now show your men their coat of arms.’

Blackstone hooked his bent arm into the shield and raised it to his men.

They saw it and roared their pleasure.

‘Thomas,’ the Prince beckoned, and spoke a few final words despite the deafening cheers that the crowd now saw fit to share.


Blackstone rejoined his men as the Prince’s entourage left the city gates. Within the hour, wearing their new coat of arms, they clattered across the drawbridge. The solemn look on Blackstone’s scarred face prompted Meulon to question him.

‘We’ve been honoured, Sir Thomas. Have no regrets about the men we lost – they look down on us and share our pride. They’re beyond harm and our time has yet to come. Is that such a bad thing?’

Blackstone remained silent as they drew away from the citadel.

‘Did your Prince chastise you for killing de Vitry? Is that what happened?’

‘Killing de Vitry was little more than an inconvenience to him. And we’ll mourn the men in our own way. No, what the Prince told me was that King Philip and his son John, Duke of Normandy, have quarrelled. Some of the Norman lords will side with him and no matter who becomes the strongest they’ll want revenge against those of us who stay and fight here.’


Behind them wind-filled sails pushed the Prince’s ship towards England as Blackstone spurred the horse forward and galloped for home.


THE END





Historical Notes




When King Edward III invaded France – a country twice as large, far wealthier and more densely populated than his own – it was the leading military power in the West. Edward’s army, men from poor families as well as members of the nobility, had opportunities to secure wealth and status through plunder and ransom – if they survived the savagery of battle. But what happened to those men once these great battles had been fought and they were discharged from service? Their skills were in high demand by those who had no armies of their own – most notably the Italian city-states. Before they reached the Italian paymasters they had to have proved themselves in warfare, and it was the lead-up to the day when these hardened men were contracted that I wanted to explore, and discover how a humble boy from an English village could become a Master of War. I discovered that many independent captains who fought as mercenaries would have themselves knighted by their fellow routiers. But there were some men from a lowly station in life who were honoured because of their bravery and who seemed to have a natural talent for war. And I set Thomas Blackstone off on his journey so that he could earn such honour.

English and Welsh bowmen dominated King Edward’s major battles in the fourteenth century. Young men practised at their village butts, a unique army, trained for service in war, that could not be matched by any other European monarch. One such young man was Thomas Blackstone, who would overcome his fear of killing and the terror of a heavy cavalry charge in battle, and whose courage would create an opportunity for recognition that went beyond the usual reward of war booty.

To begin my acquaintance with that violent period I reached for my well-worn copy of Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. The brutality of the age and, in particular, the appalling savagery of its mercenaries made it difficult to find any redeeming features for Blackstone. At that time there was a great desire to behave in a chivalrous manner, especially for those of noble rank, but a knight’s word of honour to a peasant counted for nothing. Chivalric endeavour was an insistent ghost from the days of old, most notably the Arthurian legends and The Song of Roland, the mid-twelfth-century heroic poem that celebrated the deeds of Charlemagne. The sheer demands of fighting and the necessities of war usually swept away any semblance of compassion. Despite going to war to gain riches and honour and carrying the ideal of chivalrous behaviour, prisoners were massacred, churches pillaged and women raped.

But many of the knightly classes and nobility were literate and accomplished in poetry and courtship, so perhaps there was a chink in their armour. There were instances where courtly and gentle manners won the day – especially with women. A routier, Andrew Belmont, fell in love while serving in Italy and stopped the destruction of the town where his beloved lived.

Modern society can barely comprehend the privations and culture of a contemporary army at war, so a true grasp of the experience of those who fought in a medieval conflict can lie only in our imagination. It was a cruel and savage time. Children were working at hard physical labour by the age of seven. The offspring of craftsmen might be apprenticed if there was money to pay the master whose skills were to be acquired. A boy of noble birth would be sent to another family and trained as a page from the time he was nine years old and then, from his early teens, would serve as a knight’s esquire, already trained in swordsmanship. Men-at-arms, strapped into sixty to eighty pounds of armour, could fight for hours on end in hand-to-hand combat, which might seem superhuman to us today, but the medieval capacity for absorbing and shrugging off pain appears to have been extraordinary. One knight who had his helm and nose pierced by a crossbow bolt, which stayed embedded in his face, fought on, suffering some ‘discomfort’ each time a blow was delivered against him that struck the offending quarrel. The medieval man’s strength and endurance is unlikely to be replicated today. There are accounts of knights, clad in full armour, who could somersault, and run and leap into the saddle of a war horse.

Many of the events in Master of War took place. There are few names known of the common men who fought during that invasion, but two archers who are recorded, Henry Torpoleye and Richard Whet, fell during the street fighting at Caen. Few incidents of resistance from the local peasants against the heavily armed English and Welsh invaders are recorded, but one such event took place at the village of Cormalain when English troops sheltered in a barn. That night locals blocked its entrance and burned it down. The troops suffocated and died – an event I used and which resulted (in the story) in the execution of young John Nightingale.

King Edward’s son, Prince Edward of Woodstock, fought as a sixteen-year-old in the vanguard at the Battle of Crécy. He had experienced commanders at his side, but his youth, like many of the common men in the ranks, was no impediment to his aggressive defence of his position. He would later be known as the Black Prince, but that sobriquet did not appear until several centuries after the events in this book. The two most decisive battles fought against the French, which gave the English prestige, wealth and territory, were Crécy and Poitiers. The English and Welsh archers inflicted arguably an even greater defeat on French nobility at Crécy than at Agincourt nearly seventy years later. The killing field at Crécy meant that the flower of French knighthood faced a terrifying storm of arrows that fell at sixteen thousand a minute – nearly three hundred per second.

Medieval women of the nobility had clearly defined roles to play but there were some remarkable women who shouldered the whole burden of being the heads of their households when their husbands were killed in war. One such stalwart was Blanche de Ponthieu, a noblewoman in her own right, and married to Jean V, Count of Harcourt. The Harcourts of France played a dangerous game. The family was divided between those who supported the French King and those who did not. History records that after recovering from his wounds suffered at Crécy, Jean became embroiled in a plot to kill, or at least replace, the King.

The outcome of this conspiracy forms a turning point for Thomas Blackstone in the second book of this series – The Savage Priest.

As Castle d’Harcourt – to use the correct French spelling – itself plays quite a substantial role in Master of War I include a link to a few photos I took during my research trip: http://ven.so/masterofwarphotos.

Historical novelists, in particular, are dependent on many fine scholars whose diligent research and knowledge allow an author to place his characters in a more vivid setting than would otherwise be possible. I acquired (or, as a routier, plundered) many historical articles for this novel, but continually returned to an informed and brilliant work that covers the Hundred Years War, Jonathan Sumption’s Trial by Battle and its companion volume, Trial by Fire. It’s a work of enormous appeal and information and is possibly the most comprehensible account of the war. The Road to Crécy, a more recent book by Marilyn Livingstone and Morgen Witzel, is an excellent read and an invaluable source of information. The two authors list more names of those who fought in the invasion and their book gives an insight into the day-to-day conditions experienced by Edward’s army, from food and logistics to weaponry. Its narrative history gives a very vivid and close-up account of what happened from pre-invasion to the Battle of Crécy. I first discovered the brilliance and courage of King Edward III in Ian Mortimer’s The Perfect King. This author offers a wonderful portrait of one of England’s greatest founders. There are contentious, though fascinating, issues discussed in his book that fell outside the scope of research required for Master of War.


For personal weapons of combat, and especially in determining the origin of Wolf Sword, I turned to Ewart Oakeshott and two of his books: A Knight and his Weapons and, more particularly, The Sword in the Age of Chivalry (revised edition). When it came to understanding that most lethal weapon on the field of battle – the war bow used by the English and Welsh archers – there were many articles available, but the book Longbow – A Social and Military History, by the actor and author Robert Hardy, is probably the definitive work on the subject.

Medieval surgical procedures were taken from various articles, most notably from the Annals of The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The Great Pestilence that became known as the Black Death is a fascinating study in itself and I can recommend that any interested readers or researchers pick up a copy of The Black Death by Philip Ziegler.

Wherever I have deviated from any expert’s view it is either from choice, to allow me to tell the story the way I wish to tell it, or because, at times, the experts themselves offer different explanations of events that took place.


David Gilman

Devonshire

2013