Blood Cries Afar (43 page)

There are, however, problems with parts of this account. Des Roches would already have been aware of the gate on his approach from the city and from the garrison; he could have seen the gate easily from the castle battlements; it would have been problematic to say the least to tear down the wall amidst the Anglo-French troops besieging the castle; and it would have been all but impossible to wander through besieging forces around the castle at will. The last difficulty has been met with the suggestion that des Roches disguised himself as an ordinary townsperson about his everyday business – highly unlikely in the midst of a full-scale military engagement in a confined area.
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The biographer then reports that Falkes’s men attempted to storm their way through the opened gate but were repelled savagely and had to retreat to their own lines. The Bishop reported disappointedly to the Marshal: ‘Upon my soul, these men of ours did badly,’ claiming that they had not found the ‘right gate’ he had made ready for them. But as the poet admirably admits here: ‘those who have given me my subject matter do not agree unanimously, and I cannot follow all of them.’

Wendover is less ambiguous, omitting the des Roches story altogether, and provides a clearer account. The biographer of William Marshal may have confused the role of Falkes’s men with the more likely events described here. As the royalist army launched their main assault on the northern gate (while still applying pressure elsewhere around the walls), the rebels and French fought them off while behind them the besiegers pounded away at the castle. With this intense action taking place, Falkes and a company of his troops, including crossbowmen, were able to enter surreptitiously on foot into the castle via its western postern gate; it is possible that des Roches went with them. At a stroke, the garrison was greatly inflated in size. Falkes positioned his crossbowmen on the ramparts and roofs of the buildings. ‘In the twinkling of an eye’, the battlements were suddenly bristling with fresh soldiers. Suddenly, the rebel forces prosecuting the siege and defending the north gate came under a hail of heavy, concentrated missiles raining down on them. (It is possible, if unlikely, that this covering fire allowed des Roches’s men to unblock the western gate.) Knights and horses were felled to the ground; as the warhorses were killed, many cavalry had to fight on as infantry. This dramatic development caused great disruption and confusion among the French and the barons. Falkes, ever the experienced opportunist, took advantage of the disarray to sortie in the city and into the enemy ranks. It is likely that either he was hoping that this moment of crisis could be developed into a tipping point for the rebels and French in which chaos would lead to flight, or that he was providing a shield for his men to unblock the western gate. However, the rebel and French troops did not break and instead turned on Falkes with vigour. A furious mêlée ensued as the two sides, no longer separated by the walls of the castle or city, battled with each other hand-to-hand. Falkes was captured but quickly rescued by the valour of some of his men. It seems probable this is the incident to which des Roches refers to in the
History of William Marshal
when he talks of Falkes’s actions.

Rather than be blamed by des Roches, Falkes played an important part by his brave and aggressive tactics. He successfully diverted many of the French and rebels away from the north gate to deal with the immediate threat he posed them and also possibly protected his soldiers dismantling the blocked western gate, too. The Dunstable annalist records that the besiegers had to take men from the walls to deal with Falkes. This weakened resistance at the gates and allowed the main royalist division to force its way through them and into the city.
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The Marshal’s biographer then devotes his attention to the bravery of his patron, as all such medieval panegyrists did. He portrays the aged regent as rushing to enter the city without stopping to place his helmet on and impatient at des Roches’s advice that they should first send men to ensure the way was secure. Lambasting any soldier leaving the scene of battle, the Marshal urgently exhorted his men to ‘Ride on! For you will see them beaten in a short while.’ With his war cry ‘God is with the Marshal!’ ringing out, he stormed into the city like a ‘ravenous lion’ and into the thick of the foe, clearing the way before him. Undoubtedly this is exaggerated, but it may have the ring of truth as the old warrior relished one final, glorious combat. With the city gates opened, the royalist army poured into the city and rushed on the enemy. The mêlée in the city became a desperate, full-scale battle.

The French and baronial forces were now assailed from the irruption through the gates, Falkes’s men from the castle, and the crossbowmen from the battlements. Many were cornered. The main battleground was the crowded space between the castle and cathedral; here the day would be decided. Wendover dramatically tells of sparks and thunder from clashing metal and the sound of swords against helmets, and of how the barons suffered grievously from the shooting of the crossbowmen, ‘by whose skill the barons’ horses were mown down and killed like pigs’. This greatly weakened the barons and the French as the riders were then easily taken prisoner in the press of combat without anyone to ride into the enemy and rescue them. An early casualty reported by the Marshal’s biographer was a catapult operator, the barons’ ‘most expert stonethrower’; he mistook approaching royalist knights for his own side. He therefore continued loading his catapult with a stone when they fell upon him and took his head off.

The
History of William Marshal
falls partly into the convention of portraying the battle as a series of individual combats between the great men of the day; certainly the great and the good receive his closest attention. We therefore have to be careful at taking his account too literally, even if it makes for exciting reading. Thus William Marshal the Younger also comes in for some special treatment, courtesy of the family’s patronage. He is seen wading into the enemy, like father like son, entering the city through a breach in the wall (the unblocked western gate?). In no time at all he has inflicted great damage on his enemies. Then galloping along comes his father with the ‘worthy’ Earl of Salisbury. They wheeled rightwards into enemy.
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The Earl was confronted by Robert of Ropsley who picked up a lance to joust with William Longsword; he struck the Earl so hard his lance broke into pieces. Riding on past, Ropsley was struck hard between the shoulders by the regent, a blow that nearly knocked him to the ground. It is possible that such an encounter took place, but opportunities for jousting in such a packed and confined space must have been very rare indeed. More realistic is what happened afterwards: Ropsley, fearing defeat as his comrades were being pushed downhill, slinked off to take refuge in an upper room of a nearby building.

The fate of the Count of Perche is clearer, and supported by different sources. As the Franco-baronial forces were pressed southwards into the lower city, the Count held his position on the flat ground before the imposing west front of the cathedral. This was probably intended to rally his French troops rather than as a last stand. The Count, the young, 22-year-old Thomas came from a notable family with extensive lands – and claims to land – in England. The Marshal’s biographer depicts him as ‘looking very arrogant and proud; he was a very tall, handsome, fine-looking man,’ echoing other accounts of him. Perhaps valour got the better of discretion for this chivalrous, relatively inexperienced knight. He was quickly surrounded by the king’s knights pressing all around him. They called on him to surrender to save his life but he refused point blank, disdaining to be taken by men disloyal to their true King and his: Louis. The royalists rushed on him and his men and many ‘were wounded and maimed, trampled on and beaten, and many taken captive’, says the biographer in a realistic depiction of the combat that took place ‘in the very close of the cathedral’, says the Barnwell chronicler. The royalists were in danger of being driven from the higher ground when Reginald Croc, a knight from Falkes’s household, lunged forward with either his sword or dagger and thrust it through the eyehole of the Count’s helmet and into his eye, inflicting a mortal wound. According to the Marshal’s biographer, the young Count attacked the Marshal, his first cousin, in his death throes, taking his sword in both hands and striking the Marshal’s helmet three times, and with such force that marks were left on it. He then slumped down and fell from his horse. Wendover says the wound pierced his brain and he fell to the ground without a word. The biographer reports that this caused great sadness all round and that ‘it was a great pity that he had died in this manner.’ By the end of the battle Croc was named as another fatality; it is likely that he was struck down after killing the Count.

The felling of their leader caused dismay among the French, who, says the Marshal’s biographer in the only account of the following action, ‘could no longer stand and resist’. Those that could retreated rapidly southwards down the hill to the lower city to join their comrades who already made their way there. They rallied in an open space at the top of the well-named Steep Hill; any further down and the incline would have made an upward counter-attack almost impossible, especially after the exertions of the hard-fought battle. Thus regrouped, the Anglo-French soldiers ‘came riding uphill in tight battle formation’. Before they reached the top they were engaged by the royalists, who had the great advantage of fighting downhill. At this juncture, the Earl of Chester appears on the scene to the right of the rebel forces. This leads to speculation that he had been assaulting the city from the east and had broken in through the east gate. Not only did he assail them, but attack also came from the rear led by the brothers Alan and Thomas Basset. The French and rebels quickly realised that there was no hope of regaining control of the city and that the battle was lost. A rearguard was hastily formed as they undertook a fighting retreat downhill until they were pushed through the southern gate and out of the city itself.

Once outside, the
History of William Marshal
reports a stand of the French and rebels at Wigford Bridge. Although some historians have seen this as a last stand it is more likely that it was the rearguard providing protection while the rest of the army still at liberty crossed over the bridge to attempt flight and escape on the other side. Here the bar gate was a peculiar mechanism, something about which Wendover offers considerable detail. It seems to have been a swing-door design that compelled riders to dismount and pass through one at a time, closing again after each person had passed through. This was naturally a great hindrance to the escape and would have necessitated the rearguard stand to cover the slow crossing. The Marshal’s biographer less convincingly blames a cow for blocking the exit. It was apparently swiftly dispatched.

Here, during the final encounter of the battle, the Marshal’s biographer takes a particularly poetical turn and waxes lyrical over chivalry and the fighting that took place. ‘What is armed combat? … It is much nobler work. What, then, is chivalry? Such a difficult, tough, and very costly thing to learn, that no coward ventures to take it on … Had you been there, you would have seen great blows dealt, heard helmets clanging and resounding, seen lances fly in splinters in the air, saddles vacated by riders, knights taken prisoner.’ Swords and maces delivered their blows. Horses were targets; ‘their protective covering was not worth a fig’ against the knives and daggers drawn against them (as at Bouvines). Amidst all this William Bloet, the banner holder of William Marshal the Younger, got carried away. He launched himself into the press of the enemy ‘so heavily and head on he fell over the side of the bridge, he and his horse with him’. This bathetic episode is the last recorded action of the engagement. The battle was over.

The congestion at the bridge might have been a slaughtering ground for the French and rebels, or at least a mass corralling of prisoners. That it was neither was due to three factors. The first is that the battle had been waged over six hours; the men on both sides involved in the combat were exhausted. The second is that the nature of the war did not lend itself to massacre of fellow knights. The third was that, as Wendover puts it, ‘the King’s men only pretended to pursue them, and if it had not been for the effect of relationship and blood, not a single one of them would have escaped.’ The Marshal’s biographer, however, says that Peter des Roches energetically pursued the defeated and caught many. Only three to five fatalities are recorded for the whole battle. Wendover says these were the Count of Perche, his slayer Reginald de Croc and an unknown soldier in the baron’s party. Matthew Paris later added two of the Count’s knights.
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Reginald was buried honourably at Croxton monastery. Perche, being excommunicated, was not buried in consecrated ground, but allowance was made for his position and he was laid to rest in the ground of the hospital. The unknown soldier’s fate was less considerate: he was buried outside the city at a crossroads. The marked lack of recorded casualties (the figures were unlikely to cover lowly infantry deaths) earned the battle the title of ‘The Tournament’ or ‘The Fair of Lincoln’.

Those that could fled south, Simon de Poissy and Hugh d’Arras chief among them. If the biographer of William Marshal is to be believed, so desperate was their flight that when they came to a broken bridge they killed their horses to ford the river over their bodies. Robert of Sandford, fleeing with his wife, was told by another knight: ‘Leave her, you will not carry her off.’ Robert turned abruptly around and, disgusted and angered, knocked the man to the floor with his lance. He and his wife reached safety. Those who made their escape ‘rested neither by night or day in any house or any town’.

The magnitude of the victory is marked by the astonishing roll call of prisoners. ‘No knight eager,’ says the Marshal’s biographer, ‘to capture knights could fail to do so that day,’ John Marshal bagging no less than seven barons. The baronial party had been decapitated and eviscerated as nearly all the barons who fought for Louis were taken prisoner: the Earls of Hereford, Winchester and Hertford; Gilbert de Gant, Robert Fitzwalter, William de Ros, ‘and many others too tedious to mention,’ says Wendover. The Barnwell chronicler records 380 knights taken prisoner, and numberless soldiers and townspeople. The Anonymous of Béthune says some barons escaped, ‘but they were few’.
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Three hundred knights were also captured and only three of the leading French captains escaped: de Poissy, Arras and Eustace de Merlinghem with about 200 knights. The ransom from the prisoners would have made many a victorious knight rich, or, in the case of the leading barons such as the Marshal family laying claim to their generous share, even richer. However, riches were also to be had elsewhere.