The Death of Robin Hood (23 page)

We rode half a dozen miles north, Robin, Cass and I and a mixed force of sixty-seven cavalrymen and mounted archers. On a bluff overlooking a quiet bay on the Isle of Thanet, we watched as the army of Prince Louis of France disembarked on to the soil of England. We could, I suppose, have crept much closer, loosed a few shafts at them and killed a handful of Frenchmen as they landed, but further out to sea, beyond the first wave of ships containing Louis’s entourage, hundreds more had appeared, vessels packed with men sailing hard for the shore. We few could never have stood against them. But King John and his whole force might well have made mincemeat of them, killing them in detail, a score at a time as they jumped from their ships and waded through the waves to the beach. Robin had spoken the honest truth. King John could have won the war that very day, if only he had had the courage to face his enemies.

We watched in bitter silence as craft after craft crunched on to the shingle in the shallows and the enemy disgorged. Unopposed, they poured ashore – knights, men-at-arms, crossbowmen, servants, priests, camp followers, splashing through the shallow water, some kissing the sand of the beach in their joy at being on
terra firma
, others stopping to pray and give thanks for a safe crossing, yet others comically brandishing swords and challenging the wheeling English seagulls to fight. After an hour or two of watching from a distance, shaking with a mixture of cold from the biting wind and our own impotent rage, we turned our mounts and rode away.

We headed south and west, riding hard with few breaks for food and rest. As Robin posted me at the tail of our small column, I was not privy to the conversations – long discussions – that my lord entered into with Cass at the head of our handful of troops. We rode all day through woodland and stopped at nightfall – but only to rub down our horses, give them a drink and the oat-bag,
and snatch a mouthful of dried beef and a gulp of ale ourselves, before resaddling our mounts and continuing for another four hours in the darkness. I could see nothing ahead but the backs of the men in front, and little around me but the wall of black trees on either side and a sprinkle of stars above. We turned off roads and on to narrower paths and our pace slowed, the branches now brushing at our sides, but still we did not stop. Shy of midnight, with a half-moon overhead, and me nodding in the saddle, we came to a very long palisade in the middle of a huge clearing and, following it round, to a high wooden barbican over a wide gateway of oak planks. We passed through into a courtyard with many darkened buildings around the perimeter and a large hall, lit as bright as day by candles and firelight and torches next to the wide-open door. Even in the half-darkness I could see it was a grand place – much bigger than Westbury – with two storeys on the wide hall, a straw-thatched roof, and two wings jutting forward from the main building like a pair of embracing arms.

‘Welcome to Cassingham,’ said Robin’s squire as he held my bridle and I climbed stiffly from my horse’s back. ‘I am truly honoured to have you as my guest.’

I discovered what Robin and Cass had been discussing during the long ride the next morning – after a welcome night of death-like sleep – as we broke our fasts with Mastin, Robin’s captain of archers, and our host William, the new lord of the manor of Cassingham. We were brought yoghurt and honey, spelt bread, yellow butter and bramble preserves by a beautiful fair-haired serving girl named Sarah, and I ate heartily and washed the food down with several cups of excellent nutty brown ale.

I was feeling perfectly contented when Robin, too, pushed his plate away, brushed the crumbs from his lips and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, we had best get to business.’

‘We are heading homeward, I presume,’ I said, picking at a bramble pip
stuck in my back teeth with a splinter prised from the vast oak table.

‘Not a bit of it, Alan. Heading homeward? With a French army just landed on English soil? I’m surprised at you!’ said Robin, pretending to be shocked. His rage from the previous day had passed and he was in a jovial mood.

‘So, if we are not going home,’ I said, ‘what exactly are we going to do?’

‘His Royal Highness has given us clear orders. King John has personally charged me and my men with fighting the French, resisting the invasion of the sacred soil of England, and that, my dear old friend, is what we shall do.’

Robin was grinning like a happy monkey. His odd grey eyes were alight with a silver flame of sheer glee.

I sat up straight on my stool. ‘By your expression, I take it we are not going to be throwing our handful of men into full-pitched battle with the entire French army. So would you mind very much telling me, how are we going to resist them?’

‘We are going to tap their life-blood, we are going to drain their sustenance, we are going to gnaw at the sinews of war, nibble through its delicate tendons – we are going to take from the enemy that shiny-bright and jingling commodity that sustains every fighting man from a duke to a dung-collector, we are going—’

‘You are going to steal all their money,’ I said. ‘You are going to rob the French army blind!’

‘After all these years, Alan, I think you are finally beginning to understand my methods,’ said Robin, grinning. Although I didn’t much like his teasing tone, I could do nothing but smile in return.

We refrained from outright thievery for a whole month after the arrival of the French forces at the Isle of Thanet, indeed we spent most of that time in recruiting and training men. A good bowman cannot be made overnight, of course. To gain full mastery of that
instrument of war takes a lifetime, starting at the age of seven and training daily, and the physiques of bowmen are quite distinctive, being thick in the chest and particularly brawny in the upper arm and shoulder. But Mastin and Cass between them managed to recruits scores of experienced men from the lands around the manor of Cassingham, and from manors as far as fifty miles away, who were already well versed with a bow; and those volunteers who were not were given into my care to be trained with sword and spear. We would need plenty of ordinary men-at-arms, too, for the scale of the enterprise that Robin was planning.

By mid-June we had about a hundred and eighty skilled bowmen and a similar number of untrained men-at-arms. The promise of licensed larceny, the chance to steal from rich men and never pay the price demanded by the law, was a lure as good as a pot of bramble jam to a wasp. In short, the bold men of the Weald swarmed in. So while Robin busied himself sending out scouts and collecting information about the French movements, and Mastin, his lieutenant Simeon and Cass put the archers through their paces at the butts we set up in the fields around the manor, I took the untrained men under my wing.

After issuing them with weapons made from the surrounding trees – two items each, one a stick with a tied crosspiece to make the shape of a sword, the other a ten-foot pole sharpened at the tip like a spear – I set them to their labours.

In truth, you cannot make a swordsman overnight either, but after a month I had most of them able to make the three basic lateral blows to neck, waist and knees from both left and right, and to block those same blows from an opponent. They knew how to move their feet in the elementary combinations, how to lunge at the body with a spear, how to parry the lunge, sweep at the feet with a spear butt – and how to scream.

Yes, scream. Nothing puts an enemy off his stroke like a sudden hellish scream from a foeman. And I had scores of young men from the
seven hundreds of the Weald screaming like devils as they attacked with their childish wooden swords and long sharpened sticks. They were only moderately fearsome, in truth, but practising the war scream put heart into these simple men – even as it terrified the wildlife for miles around.

Not that we lacked for food. Mastin, when not training the archers, sent out teams of hunters and they came back day after day laden with carcasses: roebuck, red deer, fallow deer, rabbits and hares, even wild boar. He told me – and I passed this glad news on to Robin – that he had actually seen a black bear lumbering through the forest but he had foregone killing it because his father once told him that killing bears was most unlucky. I believed him and Robin was delighted. But the Weald, though in many places as densely forested as Sherwood, also had cleared areas, farmland and villages. We bought sheep and oxen from the manors around Cassingham as far west as Horsham and north up to the high ridge before Sevenoaks, and cheeses and ale and good white bread, and honey and fruit – and how did we pay for it all? Well, I shall tell you.

Robin came to find me one June morning while I was exercising my charges in the courtyard of Cassingham, setting wooden swordsmen against spearmen, tapping men on the shoulder and telling them when they were dead.

‘We need to put some proper steel in these lads’ hands,’ he said. ‘And soon.’

We set out on horseback at dawn the next morning heading south-east. We were a column of only thirty: ten first-rank archers under Mastin, ten under Cass, each man with a full arrow bag of twenty-four shafts, and ten cavalrymen under my command, no long lances but each man armed with a real sword, mace or axe, and shield. Robin rode beside me humming to himself as happily as a man setting out on a saints’ day jaunt in the countryside.

When asked where we were going, he was vague and muttered something about
Winchelsea, which I gathered the French were using as one of their supply ports. I had a fairly good idea what Robin had in mind – I had been riding at his side like this for more than twenty years – and so, if he wanted to be mysterious, I was content to allow him that small pleasure. Instead, I asked him what tidings if any he had of the rest of England and the doings of the King and Prince Louis.

‘It’s not going well, Alan, I can tell you that,’ said my lord rather too cheerfully. ‘John is getting his foolish arse kicked westwards almost daily. Last I heard he was back in Corfe Castle doing his best to avoid Louis and his advancing men. The French main forces have got as far as Winchester, I hear; indeed Louis is winning hands down and is facing almost no opposition. Since he landed, the barons of England have flocked to his banner. The earls of Arundel, Warren and Aumale have gone over – even the Earl of Salisbury, the King’s half-brother, has bent the knee to the French Prince. You remember William Longsword?’

I did. He had commanded us at the disastrous battle of Bouvines two years before. I had liked the man, even admired him for his open-handedness, and was astonished he would turn traitor to his own kin.

‘So is no one but us still fighting for England?’ I said, dismayed at Robin’s news.

‘The West Country remains loyal to the King,’ said Robin. ‘Some folk in the north, too. And here in the south, Dover is holding out against him yet. And Windsor Castle is still held by royalist mercenaries – they won’t crack that. But Louis was received rapturously in London, I heard – Fitzwalter and all the rest acclaimed him King of the English; the mayor of London did homage for the city and they feasted him, petted him and treated him as if he were the Messiah returning to earth for a second visit.’

I bridled a bit at Robin’s blasphemy. Partly to punish him for it, I
said, ‘Talking of London rebels, any news of young Miles – and Sir Thomas Blood?’

Robin frowned and I thought he would not reply. But then he said crossly, ‘Cousin Henry did manage to smuggle a letter out to me, since you ask. Miles and Thomas have been riding through Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk with Fitzwalter and his men, raiding, ravaging and burning the King’s manors, the usual sort of thing – but they are both well. Unharmed and in good spirits. Or at least they were a week ago.’

We rode on in silence for a while and then Robin said, unexpectedly, ‘The war is not lost, you know, Alan. Not by a long country mile. Louis has the momentum, he is conquering all before him, and I know it looks bad, but I’d say he is about to get something of a shock. And we’re the ones to give it to him. This land will not be ruled by Frenchmen, not again – not while I breathe and have my strength. Take heart, Alan. The pendulum will swing the other way. It always does.’

A mile or so later, my lord called the column to a halt.

I knew roughly where we were, having taken the time in the past month to scout a wide area around William of Cassingham’s manor, even as far down as Hastings and the sea. We were, I calculated, about half a mile west of the hamlet of Peasmarch on the broad track that led from Winchelsea to the main road between Hastings and London. We were on flat land, not yet in the coastal marshes, in thick forest, on a road tangled on both sides with ancient greenery that made it hard to penetrate. It was lonely countryside and it might have been specially designed by God for an ambush – and I recalled then Robin’s comparison of this Weald to Sherwood.

He posted three archers up the road to the west and three to the east, leading the remaining fourteen bowmen in a long loose group out of sight behind the wall of foliage, about twenty yards back from the track. My ten cavalrymen were more difficult to hide and
we took up our station well behind Robin’s men, dismounted and holding our horses’ bridles, ready to block their noses with our hands if they started to whinny. Each man had a strip of bright green cloth tied around his upper right arm over his mail coat, if he had one – in the confusion of war it sometimes pays to be easily identified, lest an overexcited bowmen spit you by accident. We were fifty yards back from the road and it would take us time to mount up, force our horses through the thick undergrowth and make an attack, but Robin had decreed it more important for us to be unseen than to get into action swiftly.

‘When we start shooting, make your way to the road as fast as you can and ride down anyone on it who is still alive. I don’t want any of them to escape this affair. No one. Bring all the bodies and mounts back here. Clear?’

William of Cassingham passed out food and well-watered ale and we dispersed and took our allotted places cloaked by the silent forest.

An hour passed, and then another. It was hot even in the deep shade of the woods and I felt a trickle of sweat slide down my thigh under my mail chausses. This was not my first ambush, nor my tenth – I had done this sort of thing with Robin more times than I could count and yet on that day the hours were frozen, locked solid, the day seemed to stand still. I felt an itch on the back of my neck where my iron-link coif was bunched, and fought the urge to scratch it. The more I ignored it, the worse it became. In my head I said a prayer to St Michael, the warrior archangel.
O holy one, guard me in the coming fray and keep my courage high and my name renowned among my fellow men
. A man beside me, one of Cassingham’s few trained riders and a likeable, dull-witted rogue, began to fiddle with the strap on his reins, tightening it and loosening it over and over. I put out a hand to still him and he gave me an apologetic grin.