I shudder now, looking back after more than forty years, to hear my young self making such rash promises. And I can scarcely bear to remember what happened afterwards - but recall it I shall, as I swore to do so. And perhaps by remembering the past unflinchingly, I shall be granted forgiveness by Our Lord for my sins in those dark days.
I followed Ruth down the spiral staircase in the corner of the Tower, watching with great interest the narrow waist and the way she swayed her hips as she walked, and on the ground floor, we came across a gathering of all the Jewish men of fighting age. They did not look a very formidable force. There were about forty of them, ranging in years from fourteen to fifty, mostly dark or grey haired and with a beaten, hangdog look. They looked ashamed, frightened; no one man wanting to meet another’s eye. Ruth slipped away and I watched as Robin, confidence personified, strode into the centre of the square space and stood on an old wooden box so that everyone could see him. He had an unloaded crossbow held casually over his shoulder, and began, as he had put it, ‘to rally the troops’.
‘My friends, be quiet and listen to me for a moment,’ he said loudly. ‘Give me your ears, my friends, and I will give you the good news, the excellent news about our situation.’ The Jews looked at him curiously, as if they had another madman in their midst. ‘We are fortunate,’ Robin began again, even more loudly, and there was a stirring and muttering in the crowd. ‘I say, we are fortunate because we are here — ’
One man stepped out from the loose circle that had formed around Robin; a big, sturdy man in a dark blue robe with a magnificent bushy red beard. His angry voice cut straight across Robin’s speech. ‘Fortunate, how? Fortunate to be hunted like wild pigs through our own city? Fortunate to be driven from our homes, our friends and family butchered, our silver stolen?’
‘You are fortunate that you are not dead,’ interrupted Robin coolly. ‘Would you not agree?’ He paused for a beat or two, but the red-haired man said nothing. ‘Fortunate that that pack of murderous lunatics’ — Robin flung out an arm and pointed to the door that led outside and down to the bailey — ‘did not tear you apart.’ There were growls of anger from the crowd. ‘But that aside,’ said Robin continuing calmly, ‘at this moment you are fortunate in other matters, too. Firstly, in this Tower; this is a stronghold designed to be held by a handful of warriors against a much bigger army. And we have those warriors. Before me I see men of courage; men who are willing to fight as hard as any knight and, if necessary, to die, in defence of their families, in defence of their pride, and their honour as men.’ I saw a few of the younger Jews nodding.
‘I see men of courage before me, men ready for battle, and in that we are most fortunate,’ Robin went on. ‘With good men such as you, we can hold this Tower until the heavens fall. We have food, we have water and ale, and we have brave men. So, I say, we are fortunate.’ I saw then that the mood had changed subtly; it was something that I had noticed before when Robin spoke. He could command men’s feelings; he had a trick of making them feel that they were better than they truly were. The Jews were standing more erect now, shoulders more square, stomachs pulled in, heads high. There saw themselves as warriors, not sheep to be driven by a hate-filled mob, but hard fighters, men of blood and iron.
‘The second piece of good fortune is that we have these,’ said Robin, lifting the crossbow off his shoulder and holding it up in the air. ‘We have more than three dozen of these weapons, and enough quarrels to send a thousand souls to Hell.’ He took the crossbow and cradled it in his arms. ‘With this weapon, and the others we have here, we can easily hold fast, until this evil sickness which has seized the townspeople releases them. We can keep the Devil at bay until they return to their senses or until help comes. So I say again that we are fortunate. We have the men, we have the weapons, and we have the guts to use them. God smiles on us. We ... are ... fortunate.’
The crowd of Jews actually cheered him. It was an astonishing turnaround: a few moments ago they had been a sullen, frightened herd of persecuted sheep, now they saw themselves as a band of noble warriors ready to do or die.
‘Now listen closely to me, my friends,’ said Robin. ‘These weapons are very simple to use, but quite deadly.’ As I watched him demonstrate how to load the crossbow, I caught his eye and he shot me a surreptitious grin and a wink.
It was indeed a simple weapon to use. The stiff crossbow cord is pulled back using the power of the whole of a man’s body. You put your right foot in the stirrup at the end of the machine and haul back the cord with both hands while extending the right leg, until the cord is locked into place with a pair of iron teeth near the stock. Then you place a quarrel in the groove on the top of the weapon, put the weapon to your shoulder, aim and pull up the trigger, or tickle as it is known, below the stock. The iron teeth are pulled down by the tickle, releasing the bow cord, which springs forward and shoots the quarrel away at man-killing speed. It was quite accurate at close range, and packed enough power to penetrate chainmail at fifty paces.
‘Take off your hood, Alan, and hold it out to the side,’ Robin suddenly addressed me as I lounged against a stack of boxes by the wall, trying to look confident - and I felt my heart sink. I knew what he was in his mind. I sighed but, loyal as ever, I took my headgear off and held it out as far as possible from my body, close to the rough wooden planks of the wall.
There was a twang, and my beautiful hood was snatched from my grasp and pinned to the wood by a foot of steel-tipped oak. ‘Everybody see that?’ said Robin. ‘Right, form a line, everyone gets one shot at the hood,’ he gave me a grin of pure mischief, ‘and then Alan will issue each one of you with a crossbow and a dozen quarrels.’
I passed an uneasy but largely uneventful night, curled up below the battlements and sleeping only fitfully. Without my hood my head was cold. The one excitement during the night was that one of Robin’s bold new warriors had managed to shoot himself in the foot with a crossbow bolt and had to be carried down the stairs, weeping with pain, while his fellows jeered at his ineptitude.
Dawn broke on a dismal scene. More townspeople seemed to have arrived during the night to swell the ranks of the besiegers - there were now perhaps five or six hundred people milling around below the Tower, occasionally shouting up insults and making threatening gestures but largely ignoring us.
There was no sign of the garrison of the castle, or Sir John Marshal, the Sheriff of Yorkshire. One of the young Jewish men had told me that there had been a handful of soldiers when the first refugees arrived at the Tower, but they had departed as soon as the place began to fill with Jews. That made me uneasy. It sounded as if they had orders to leave the Tower to the Jews - why else would they abandon their posts? Had it been somebody’s plan to lure all the Jews into one place where they could more easily be killed? No, surely that was madness.
The sun was high in the sky, about halfway to its zenith, and the bells of York were ringing out for the office of Terce, when Brother Ademar, the mad white monk, began to preach again. As had been the case the night before, the foxy knight Malbête stood beside him, towering over the short monk as he ranted about God and the Devil, the Holy Pilgrimage and the deaths of Jews. I could not actually make out the full sense of the monk’s words, but small snatches caught on the breeze and wafted his hatred to my ears like the smell of rotting filth. His audience, however, seemed to appreciate his speech. At one point, he bade everyone kneel and he blessed them before leading the crowd in the Pater Noster. Then he resumed his hate-filled ranting, thumping the ground with his cross-staff.
Robin had divided his fighting men into three groups, or companies, of about fifteen men, a mix of ages and abilities. At all times, one company would be resting on the ground floor and two would be on duty defending the castle. There were enough crossbows for each man on duty to have one, and several men had found swords and even a spear or two with which to defend themselves.
‘When they come,’ said Robin to the thirty-odd Jewish men, the two companies who were to take first turn at the Tower’s defence, ‘they will be confident. We let them come close, closer than is comfortable and then we smash them. Utterly. With luck we can make them regret they ever challenged us. Does everybody understand?’ There were murmurs of assent.
‘I’m going to repeat it anyway. When they come we let them get close. Nobody is to shoot until I give the order. Is that clear? If anybody shoots before I give the order, I will personally throw him off the walls and feed him to the Christians. Is that clear?’
The man who had interrupted Robin’s speech the night before muttered something inaudible into his big, red bushy beard. But when Robin looked hard at him, he said nothing. I caught Reuben’s eye in the throng of Jewish warriors and we exchanged wry smiles. He looked tired, but he held the crossbow casually as if he had been born with it in his hands.
‘Now it’s just a question of waiting,’ said Robin and he sat down in the shade of the battlements and stretched out his long legs. Pulling his hood over his eyes, he appeared to be readying himself for sleep. He had his long war bow unstrung beside him, and he put one hand on it, lifted up a corner of his hood with the other hand and glanced at me. ‘Keep an eye on things, will you Alan,’ he said, and yawned. ‘Wake me in two hours if nothing has happened.’ And then he fell asleep.
The Jews were mystified by his nonchalance. But they too began to find comfortable places to sit with their backs to the battlements. Food was passed around, and wineskins, and some men even began to sing quietly to themselves, a weird and wonderful tune of the like I had never heard before. Their eerie music did not seem to obey the golden rules of that art that I had so painstakingly learnt from my former music master, the French
trouvère
Bernard de Sezanne, who now served Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the mother of King Richard - and yet it was truly beautiful.
As ancient Jewish music drifted around me, I looked out over the bailey at the crowd of misguided Christian fools listening to the hate-blasted preaching of Brother Ademar, and loosened my blades in their scabbards. My own loaded crossbow was propped against the battlement, and I had a dozen quarrels stuffed in my belt. There were times when I could almost understand Robin’s mistrust of the Christian faith - times like these, when a holy representative of God on earth was exhorting Christians to slaughter their fellow countrymen - but I knew in my heart that it could not be Jesus’s teachings that were at fault. The evil did not come from Him, it must come from the Devil, or from Man’s original sinfulness. Only Christ held the answer, only Christ could rid the world of evil, I was sure. Or almost sure.
The attack came not long after noon. I had been half-listening to the sounds of the crowd as Ademar whipped them with his words, while Robin snored gently at my feet. The crowd sounded like the roar and crash of the sea breaking on a shingle beach; in a strange, horrible way, it was soothing; just a big ceaseless, sound, seemingly unconnected with any evil. Then suddenly there was movement in the bailey; Brother Ademar had ended a long harangue with a great shout, there was a louder that usual roar from the masses and he plunged into the crowd of listeners, and forced his way through the bodies like a man swimming in a sea of humanity. He was followed by Malbête, surging forward through the populace in the wake of the monk, and surrounded by a knot of half a dozen men-at-arms, wearing surcoats in scarlet and sky blue, the colours of the Evil Beast himself.
Ademar emerged from the press at the gate of the bailey, and entrance of the rammed-earth causeway leading up to the Tower. He turned to the packed masses behind him and shouted a last exhortation; at this distance I could hear him clearly, and I swear he bellowed: ‘These Christ-killing lice must be swept from the earth! The earth must be cleansed! God wills it! God wills it!’ And his words were answered by another great roar from the crowd. He raised his six-foot wooden cross and, alone, he charged up the earth ramp, and on to the wooden steps that led the last few yards up to the Tower. And with a crazed howl that froze my heart, the crowd of screaming Christians, the good citizens of York, rushed after him like a river in spate.
I had long since woken Robin and he was passing along the file of Jews lining the parapet, giving encouragement. Each Jew was clutching a crossbow, but many looked terrified. ‘Do not shoot, do not shoot,’ Robin was shouting, his freshly strung war bow in one hand, and it was hard to hear him over the deep booming hatred of the crowd below. ‘When I give the signal, we will crush these vermin, not before, hold your peace until I give the order. Do. Not. Shoot.’
Miraculously, not a Jew fired his crossbow, not a javelin or stone was hurled. ‘Wait for it, wait for it,’ Robin was shouting, and then I noticed him doing a strange thing. He put down his bow and reached for a boulder, one of hundreds that had been piled in heaps around the battlements. He took it in both hands, holding it to his chest. It was about the same size as a man’s head. Then he looked out over the parapet and down at the surging mob below. The white monk was at the iron-bound gate of the Tower; he was hammering at the oak door with the butt end of his cross, ordering the Jews to open it in the name of Christ, and making no discernable impact at all. Robin leaned out over the battlements, lifted the great boulder out over the edge, paused for a second to take aim and then hurled the great lump of stone almost straight downward on to the head of the white monk.
The monk’s head exploded like a smashed egg, splashing glistening blood and brain over the dull wood of the steps. His body collapsed, the feet jerked once and then he was still.
I swear, I swear on Mary the Mother of God that for just an instant, the whole blood-crazed mob stopped, stock still, frozen in shock at the holy man’s death. And then, Richard Malbête, who was in the middle ranks of the mob, raised his sword and bellowed ‘Kill them, kill them all,’ and the crowd screamed as if in terrible pain and surged forward again.