Blood Cries Afar (41 page)

At first the omens were not good. As his fleet came into view of Dover, Louis could clearly see the buildings of the siege camp – and the smoke coming from them. King John’s son Oliver and the ever reliable William of Kensham and his men had just attacked Dover, firing the camp and killing the soldiers guarding it. In so doing, they succeeded in preventing Louis from joining up with his forces there; Louis’s ships diverted to Sandwich as they feared a barrage of arrows and projectiles from the cliffs at Dover. He landed at Sandwich, despite the attempts of some royal galleys to block him, and took lodging in the town before going to the priory at Dover, as before. Here, having been joined by the Count of Nevers and the few men he brought over the day after the Prince’s arrival, he learned about the sieges of the Earl of Winchester’s castles at Marlborough, Southampton, Winchester and Mountsorrel. He rapidly arranged another truce with Hubert de Burgh, back in command of Dover Castle, and headed for Winchester ‘with a great contingent of carters, soldiers and crossbowmen, mercenaries and riffraff’, says the
History of William Marshal
.
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But before he left, he took his revenge on Sandwich for having broken its oath to him and reverting back to the royalist cause: he burned the town. He also sent some of his troops back to France with orders to return later. On Monday 24 April he was in Canterbury; on Tuesday 25th he was at Malling, near Lewes, staying at the convent there and meeting with the Earl of Winchester, Simon Langton and some others of his English supporters. On the Wednesday he made a full day’s march to Guildford, but his baggage train, presumably falling behind due to Louis’s speed, only made it as far as Reigate, where it was protected by the rearguard under Gérard le Truie. At Guildford, Louis was reinforced by soldiers from the London garrison led by Enguerrand de Coucy. He was mustering his forces to strike at the royalists and retake what had been lost to him. They went into action the next day.

Louis was before Farnham by Thursday 27 April. The regent, alarmed at the advance of the French, ordered Winchester to be slighted and hurried to Marlborough with the young King on the Thursday. They feared the possibility that Louis hoped to capture the King, as Petit-Dutaillis suggests; but if this had been the case, Louis would surely have made straight for Winchester, bypassing Farnham (as, indeed, the biographer of William Marshal says he does; the Anonymous’s chronology is followed here). By this time the losses of Marlborough, Southampton and Winchester had been confirmed to Louis, but his very presence had now chased the garrison out of Winchester Castle before it had time to settle in there. The Anonymous relates that Louis attacked the castle and quickly took its outer bailey, but the keep held out against him. On Friday 28 April, the baggage train and a large force of English knights turned up with Saer de Quincy. The Earl of Winchester asked Louis for a force with which to relieve the garrison at Mountsorrel in Leicestershire. Louis agreed to this. It was a fateful decision to which we will return soon.

Louis left for Winchester on the Saturday. In his rearguard with la Truie were Hugh Tacon, Florent de Hangest, the Seneschal of Flanders and Robert Lord of Béthune with three named knights. There was a real risk of harassment from the Windsor garrison who were trailing them, but the garrison was not looking for an engagement and feared even to be seen by the rearguard. Their purpose was to track the movement of the French and also possibly to capture stragglers and prevent foraging. Louis’s scouts, reconnoitring ahead of the vanguard of the column and looking for lodgings for their Prince, discovered a handful of royalists still in Winchester; these fled as soon as they saw the scouts. Louis remained inWinchester from 30 April to 4 May. The fortifications were in a bad way: they had been damaged by the French assault and miners, then partially destroyed by the regent’s men before they evacuated the place. Louis oversaw the initial repairs of the castle and ditch and he made such a good job of it even William Marshal’s biographer was impressed: ‘within a period of a very few days he had rebuilt the tower and the high walls magnificently, with stone and lime, and had restored all the fallen masonry and repaired the damage to the walls to the point they were fine and solid, just as if they were completely new.’ Before he left he placed Hervé de Donzy, the powerful and faithful Count of Nevers, in charge of the city with a large force. The biographer of William Marshal calls the Count ‘an arrogant and vicious man’ who ‘subsequently committed many a crime which was regarded as shameful on his part’, disappointingly adding ‘but I have no wish to go into that at this point.’ Doubtless the Count conformed to the usual pattern of the conflict and oppressed the area extorting money and seizing supplies for the war effort. Louis returned to London after a remarkably successful short and sharp campaign. The south had been regained and with it greater security for communications with France. The royalist resurgence had achieved very little military advantage in terms of castles and towns; as Nicholas Vincent summarises it: ‘In a matter of only a week, the royalist achievements of the spring were wiped clean away.’
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In essence, Louis had repeated the initial success of his first arrival back in May 1216. With the exception of the defection of some barons and some more rebel places under siege, the military position was not so very different from then. But that was about to change.

Louis’s stay in London was a short one of only two nights. Here news came to him that Hubert de Burgh and Gerard de Sotteghem had broken the truce at Dover in a bloody surprise assault.
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A group of Louis’s men arriving at Dover had been attacked by the garrison and many who could not escape were killed; one of the Count of Nevers’s senior offices only narrowly escaped death by the personal intervention of Hubert de Burgh himself, recognising the value of a high-ranking prisoner. Louis hurried down there, not least because more of his reinforcements were due to arrive, some as instructed nearly a fortnight earlier; these would be endangered by Dover’s formidable garrison. On Friday 12 May Louis set up his prized trebuchet in front of the castle and once again tried to take the key to England.

The siege camp destroyed by the garrison at the previous siege was now rebuilt and the trebuchet performed its duty well in causing considerable damage to the fabric of the castle. The following day, Louis’s reinforcements appeared in the Channel in 40 ships. They attempted to dock in the harbour but high seas and a strong wind prevented all but five from doing so. The others swiftly returned to Calais to reappear two days later, on the 15th. The intervening two days gave the royalist forces the time to prepare for them. The French squadron was met by an English one over twice its size. Around 80 ships had sailed from Romney under Nicholas Haringot and the increasingly important leadership of Philip d’Albini. The ships were of all sizes, but twenty of them were ‘great ships armed for battle’. The smaller French ships had been ambushed: ‘they did not dare wait’ for the English so those that could turned about and made for Calais again. However, this option was not open to the 27 ships in front; these formed a tight formation and hoped that thus grouped they might chance getting through to the harbour. Fortune was with the nineteen that made it; their comrades were not so lucky. The sailors and sergeants aboard the other eight ships were seized and ‘immediately killed’; the knights were thrown into the holds of the English ships in a state of terror. The squadron then sat menacingly out at sea: they ‘weighed anchor before the castle and there they remained silently on guard, so that neither food nor aid could reach Louis from the sea’. Louis wrought his vengeance on Hythe and Romney just as he had done with Sandwich, by burning the towns for siding with the royalists. Willikin and his men, emboldened by the victory at sea, attacked the French on their grim mission in the towns, but were beaten off. The bloody events at Dover point to a darker turn of events; the casualties on land were high enough to be noted, but naval warfare did not accommodate safe conducts as land warfare did, as the poor French sailors and sergeants who were caught discovered. Philip d’Albini’s increasingly signifiant contribution to the royalist war effort points to the substantial emphasis the royalists were placing on maritime defence. They were cutting off Louis’s supply lines and they showed that they had the ships and crew to do it. This was a substantial strategic advantage which they were to exploit later. But the next engagement was to be on land in a decisive battle.

We now return to Louis’s siege camp at Farnham where, it will be remembered, Saer de Quincy, the Earl of Winchester, had his request granted for a large force to relieve his Castle of Mountsorrel, besieged by the Earl of Chester who was pursuing his quarrel with Saer. This was in response to the regent’s earlier dispatch at the end of April from Winchester of a powerful force to besiege the Earl’s castle and raise the rebel siege of Lincoln. Earl Ranulf of Chester, Earl William of Aumale, Earl William of Ferrers (Ferrières or Derby), Robert de Vieuxpont, Brian de Lisle, William de Cantelupe, Philip Mark, Robert de Gaugi and Falkes de Bréauté led a large army collected from royalist garrisons and invested Mountsorrel with carefully positioned siege machines.
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The Earl of Winchester’s garrison comprised ten knights and some sergeants under Henry de Braybrooke. Wendover, geographically close to events, reports how they ‘bravely retuned stone for stone and missile for missile against their enemy’ for several days before sending to the Earl for help; they feared they had insufficient means to withstand such a concentrated force for any length of time. Louis could not refuse the Earl’s request and ordered that an army, predominantly drawn from the London garrison, should follow Saer into Leicestershire to raise the siege and subdue the whole region. The Earl shared joint command of the expedition with the young Count Thomas of Perche and Robert Fitzwalter; with them were a large army and 70 French knights, including Simon de Poissy, Guillaume de Fiennes and others named by the Anonymous. Interestingly, in a sign of the exertions suffered from the intense campaign in the south, some of the French in Louis’s camp refused the Prince’s request to accompany Saer. Robert de Béthune and Gilbert de Copegni expressed a willingness to go, but also their inability to do so owing to the exhaustion of their men who had not had any time to recover. Hugh Tacon, a naval captain who had been a major player in the operation to save Louis at Rye, also cited exhaustion as a reason not to go. Tacon and Béthune instead joined the rearguard of Louis’s army heading for Winchester, which was hardly restful as the Windsor garrison were trailing Louis. Thus Louis had, the biographer of William Marshal observes, ‘divided his mighty army into two large contingents’. While the French Prince had his troubles at Dover, on Monday 30 April the main theatre of operations moved northwards.

Making for St Albans, the relief army set out in the usual manner, ‘pillaging all the places they passed’, records Wendover. ‘These wicked mercenaries and robbers from France went through the surrounding towns, sparing neither churches nor cemeteries, and made prisoners of all ranks, and, having tortured them severely, forced ransoms from them.’ It was all very reminiscent of John’s northern campaign during the winter of 1215–16. And they continued as they had started. But the measured and purposeful violence of plundering, analysed earlier, is seen again here: at St Albans the army restrained itself and stole only meat and wine; seemingly Abbot William’s earlier payment just before Christmas had satisfied Louis and indemnified the abbey from excessive loss. It is hard to assess the losses inflicted by such depredation. In his massive and magisterial biography of Peter des Roches, Nicholas Vincent has examined the damage done to the Bishop of Winchester’s lands across the south in the early part of the war. The records reinforce general accounts of reactions to ravaging from other sources of the Middle Ages. People, livestock and grain were regularly evacuated to nearby churches and abbeys in the hope of avoiding foraging troops; buildings would be erected to accommodate these. Rents from lands were appropriated by local garrisons. Some of the Bishop’s lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire were lucky enough to have avoided any touch of war, while Hampshire was hit hard. Here the taking of livestock, grain and rents was extensive: at Merdon, the French ‘made off with 14 of the manor’s 20 plough horses, 4 of its 12 horses, 21 cows and a bull out of a total of 29 cattle, 225 ewes out of a flock of 253 … 26 out of 29 hogs’; seven manors in the county paid ‘rents for both summer and Michaelmas terms to the Count of Nevers’.
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This coercive requisitioning, to put it euphemistically, reinforces John Gillingham’s point that ‘one man’s foraging is another man’s pillaging’;
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the two went hand-in-hand. By this means both sides fed their troops, supplied their garrisons, and, importantly, had the horses and carts needed to move an army about. Wendover is delighted to tell the edifying tale of a robber of the church of St Amphibalus during this campaign: the man has a fit and foams at the mouth, his punishment for his crime is possession by the devil. The army spent the night at Dunstable, and were sufficiently sated by their hoard to refrain from damage there, as the local annalist reports with some relief.
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The army left the next morning and reached Mountsorrel a few days later, pillaging churches and cemeteries along the way. Royalist scouts informed the Earl of Chester of the approach of ‘the mighty army that was making every effort to attack them’.
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Seeking to avoid an encounter, the Earl destroyed his siege machines and withdrew his forces to Nottingham, there to wait and monitor the rebels’ progress. Ranulf and his commanders believed that Louis himself was at the head of the force. Mountsorrel relieved, the barons were approached by Hugh d’Arras. Hugh had entered the barons’ camp to urge them to join his forces at Lincoln so that they could win the great prize of the castle which, he believed, was now ripe for taking. A council of war was held where differences were aired; a decision was finally made to respond to the pleas and the baronial host moved east to Lincoln. It was a fateful decision that led to the major land engagement of the whole war.