The Death of Robin Hood (27 page)

I could do no more. It was time to run. My right shoulder was shrieking in agony. As I galloped my overexcited horse west, desperately trying to control it with one hand, I looked behind and saw that somehow Hubert de Burgh had won free of the mêlée in the centre and he and a handful of English knights were going hell for leather back towards the barbican and the safety of the castle. The French camp was a trampled muddy mess, alight in more than a dozen places, smoke drifting in fleecy layers, and with dead and wounded scattered all over the bloodied turf. Other horsemen were, like me, heading for the road and I recognised many of their tight-screwed faces as they urged their horses to take them to safety. I looked behind my comrades and saw, with the sun rising behind him, the White Count. He was trying to rally his scattered knights for a pursuit of the fleeing Wealden recruits. We had stormed through the camp like a whirlwind, killed or wounded scores of men and destroyed many of their possessions – but in no sense had we defeated them. We had stung them, that was all, perhaps dented their confidence, but their numbers still massively overmatched ours. Angry and bloodied, wide awake, fully armed and ready for battle, led by their dazzling-white nobleman, the French were coming after us to take their revenge.

I reined in for a few moments when my horse’s hooves hit the Canterbury road, turning in the saddle for a proper look. The White Count had mustered nearly two hundred men on the brow of the hill a few hundred yards above, the various horsemen all mixed together, knights, mounted squires and men-at-arms, milling around, eager to charge but not sure in which direction. The Count was haranguing them, holding them together with the force of his
voice, riding up and down their front in his shining white cloak, his right hand held high in the air as he declaimed like a Roman emperor of old.

I heard Robin’s voice shouting behind me. ‘Alan, Alan, come on – don’t dally there like a simpleton. We are all over here, man!’

I turned and trotted my horse the fifty yards up the road to where Robin and Mastin and a dozen horsemen were waiting by a narrow bridlepath that led away from the main road into the fastness of woodland.

‘Most of us have already got away,’ Robin was saying. Then he stopped and reached forward and plucked out a crossbow bolt hanging from a rent in my mail, the last, close-range shot that had smashed into my shoulder.

‘Are you fit? Can you still fight?’ he said, looking into my face.

‘I can’t raise my arm. It’s the joint. The same one I injured at Rochester. I think, I think it has come out of the damn socket again.’

‘Let me see that fucking thing,’ said Mastin, moving his horse close to mine. He grasped my shoulder in one hand and my elbow in the other and he seemed to be twisting them against each other. I had to bite my lip to stop myself crying aloud like a girl.

‘Yes, it’s popped out all right. But I’ll have you right as fucking rain, Sir Alan, just give me one shake of a lamb’s little bum,’ said the bowman.

‘Alan,’ Robin said urgently, ‘look down the road yonder, will you? Tell me what you see down there.’

I turned my head to where Robin was pointing. ‘That black-haired fellow in the pretty white cloak is the Comte du Perche. He has his men across the road, they are properly formed now and I think they are almost ready to—
aaaargggghhhh!
’

Pain like a sheet of white lightning exploded in my shoulder joint. It blossomed like a gigantic rose but then faded within moments into
a bearable background hum. I glared at Mastin who had now released me from his grip and whose grinning bearded face was inches from mine. I lifted my right hand to my left sleeve and touched the hilt of the misericorde. That bloody man was going to get the full length of its slim blade through his throat if he didn’t stop smirking at me.

‘There we go,’ said the hairy archer smugly. ‘Right as fucking rain!’

‘All better?’ said Robin.

‘All better? That cretin has just mangled my shoulder with his filthy great paws!’ I realised I was shouting in Robin’s face, spraying him with spittle.

‘What I actually meant by “all better”,’ said my lord, cool as a trout at the bottom of a frozen lake, ‘is can you use your sword now? Because I suspect it really would be quite an advantage if you could.’

I lifted my right arm. It hurt like sin but I could move it. I could hear the clatter of hooves on the flint surface of the road and looked back towards the camp. The White Count’s men were surging forwards in a disciplined column, no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.

‘Right, everybody off the road and into the trees,’ said Robin. ‘Mastin, my dear fellow, if you wouldn’t mind doing the honours?’

At Mastin’s brisk hand signal, sixty of the finest archers in England stood up from the tangled undergrowth on the western side of the Canterbury road and calmly, methodically, without the slightest fuss, demonstrated their appalling killing power to the oncoming cavalry.

For
the sake of brevity, I shall say only that we slaughtered the French attackers on the Canterbury road. After a short and bloody encounter, in which at least four dozen of their men were flicked out of the saddle by the shafts of our superb Wealden archers, and in which not a single horseman got closer than fifty yards to our positions, the White Count was wise enough to withdraw his men out of bowshot and regroup. We were wise enough to withdraw completely, heading west along the bridlepath into the woods and away – the sixty archers and our surviving cavalry, some forty-five men, many of them wounded – before the White Count could muster his own crossbowmen and send them in on foot down the road against us.

I was very happy that I did not have to test my sword arm that morning after Mastin’s brutal ministrations. I had been grouped to the side with Robin and a dozen other experienced horsemen while the archers plied their trade, ready to counterattack if the White Count’s men looked like endangering our line of bowmen. My shoulder did feel a little better and might even have been serviceable in
a crisis, but I doubt I would have given of my best in the mêlée.

I was even happier to be back at Cassingham late that night, and to slide off my horse and not long afterwards into a tub of hot water in the bathhouse.

The manor, now largely empty of troops, except for the returning heroes of the Dover expedition, felt odd and a little alien. The continuous jolly hubbub of the past two months was gone; the sea of cheerful champing faces at mealtimes was no more; the bustle of men in the courtyard was absent. The double-winged hall felt too big, the hearth fire too large for the handful of stern-faced men gathered around it, sipping mugs of warmed ale. Cassingham’s very air, its ambience, had changed. The battle at Dover had demonstrated, not least to us as well as the French, that we were a force to be reckoned with in the south of England. Ambushing convoys of food and killing a handful of foes at a time was all very well, but it was a frivolous game compared with an all-out attack on the enemy’s encampment. We’d shown our mettle. Few Frenchmen outside Dover, or anywhere else in southern England, would sleep well henceforth.

Cass, although disappointed not to have taken part, was delighted by the success of the attack. And a success it was, for while we had not lifted the siege of Dover, and we had probably lost more than a score of men including de Burgh’s knights, we had achieved our aim of disrupting the enemy and causing havoc in his lines: and we reckoned we had killed or wounded more than two hundred men-at-arms, although such tallies after a battle are always a little inflated. However, when Cass suggested a return match, another slap at the enemy outside Dover, Robin firmly said no.

‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘They had not bothered to set proper sentries, nor had they built the usual outer earth walls to protect them from
attack. We caught them napping. But you can be certain the White Count will not allow that to happen again.’

After a long discussion at the depleted dinner table that night, Robin persuaded Cass that the manor had to be abandoned. The young lord was extremely reluctant to leave his ancestral home, but Robin’s logic won through. The manor must surely be compromised by now and it was only safe to assume the French would be seeking revenge.

Cass did manage to wring two concessions from the Earl of Locksley: first that the hall should continue to be occupied but only by the servants – local men and women whom, it was felt, would be able to flee into the woods to hide if Cassingham were attacked; and second that the manor should be monitored. Other bands of archers were operating in the Weald, under Cass’s command, and the squire had told them to leave messages at Cassingham if they needed help. And so Mastin volunteered to come by the place at least once a week.

As Robin had planned, the rest of us would scatter to all parts of the Weald and operate as roving bands to harass the French. It was a good plan. While I was loath to leave the comforts of Cassingham and return, at my advancing age, to sleeping on hard ground in inhospitable woods, I knew it was the right thing to do in the circumstances.

Robin and I and twenty-eight men from Kirkton rode out the next morning, heading north towards Tonbridge. The castle itself was, of course, occupied by a new French lord, a vassal of Prince Louis’s, but Robin and I felt we knew the area a little – better than the wilder parts of the Weald anyway – and we believed we could cause a good deal of trouble to the garrison when it tried to move men, goods or war materiel along the roads or up and down the Medway. We would strike, kill as many as we could, plunder the wagon trains or boats and then retreat back into the fastness to the south before the men of Tonbridge knew what had hit them.
We chose that location for another reason, too. Robin wished, if possible, to be close to London – not only because Miles and Sir Thomas Blood were there and he hoped to effect a reconciliation, but also because he was in regular communication with his cousin Henry, who kept him informed about happenings in the outside world.

For more than a month, most of the time in gloriously warm summer sunshine, we waylaid wagons carrying goods to Rochester in the east and Winchester in the west; our technique was very similar to the first ambush that Robin and Cass had laid just outside Winchelsea. Robin and his archers lay in wait, shot the wagon guards full of arrows, then I rode out with the cavalry or men on foot and finished off any who had survived the arrow storm. As a system it worked very well. The Tonbridge garrison soon realised that a band was operating in their vicinity and responded by doubling, then quadrupling the guard on each wagon convoy – but that proved fruitless. We reconnoitred very carefully before an attack, and if our scouts looked half a mile down the road and spied half a hundred men-at-arms guarding a single ox-wagon piled with goods, we simply melted back into the woods and allowed the wagon to pass without molestation.

The French tried subterfuge next. For example, there might be much talk in and around the ale-houses of Tonbridge of a fat wagon train – loaded with gold and silver, precious jewels, furs, exotic spices and the like – that would be leaving on such and such a day and going to such and such a place. And yet, these well-paid gossips would say wonderingly, this train of miraculous riches would be only lightly guarded for the men-at-arms were all needed elsewhere. Of course, if this tempting plum were to be attacked, the ambushers would find that instead of holding all the riches of Solomon, the wagons carried a dozen tough French crossbowmen crouching under a canvas sheet with their weapons ready and murder in their hearts.

These crude
tricks never troubled us. Not once. Robin was an old hand at this ‘frivolous game’ and he could smell a sheriff’s trap a mile away. He had been robbing folk from ambush in Sherwood since he was a stripling.

Yet things did not always go our way: we attempted to seize a well-laden barge on the River Medway that was heading up to Rochester with a load of wine for the castle there. But when we attacked from the south bank of the river, the bargemen merely poled their craft away to the north side and took cover from our arrows behind the stout wooden walls of their boat as they drifted swiftly away downstream. We were left standing flat-footed on the bank, feeling like fools. That was the first and last time we tried to tackle the river craft.

One day, hearing of a haul of expensive spices from the Saracen lands that had been landed at Newhaven and was coming up to London by road in a convoy, we lay in ambush at a spot near the village of Crowborough. It was the perfect site for an attack: the main road turned suddenly and passed between steep banks on either side, and our archers had plenty of foliage and undergrowth in which to take cover. We heard the approach of the wagons clearly and just as Robin was about to give the signal to loose, a storm of arrows burst from the woods slightly further down and on the other side of the road. We joined in the barrage, of course, and when all the guards were dead, each stuck like a hedgehog with arrows from both sides, we cautiously emerged to find ourselves face to face with another of Cass’s ‘
conrois
’, led by a big ugly bowman called Ralph.

We laughed and shared the loot – Ralph was an admirer of Robin’s – and once we were all safely away from the site of the robbery we pooled our food and drink and, making good use of the captured spices to flavour our ale, made merry into the night under the stars.

Robin was as happy as an apprentice on a holy day. He was reliving his
youthful adventures, leaping out from cover, slaughtering his enemies and disappearing back into the forest laden with booty. He also kept up his new practice in those weeks of giving money away like a drink-addled sailor in port and this ensured that he received a steady stream of information from the local inhabitants and that he was not once betrayed.

The hammer blow fell when we were returning to our temporary camp near Goudhurst with a wagon full of grain sacks taken from a poorly guarded French convoy. I heard the pounding of hooves behind and, fearing attack, Robin had everyone off the road and into the scrubby woodland beside in a trice, weapons drawn, ready to flee or fight. A single rider on a sweat-splattered dun horse came tearing round a bend in the road and Robin stepped into its path, stopping it with an upheld palm. It was a strapping young man named Frank, one of Ralph’s men whom we had met a week or so before at the comical double ambush at Crowborough. There was nothing amusing about this meeting. The man slid exhausted from his horse and Robin had to support his considerable weight to stop him crashing to the ground.