Fields of Glory Read online

  Also by Michael Jecks

  The Last Templar

  The Merchant’s Partner

  A Moorland Hanging

  The Crediton Killings

  The Abbot’s Gibbet

  The Leper’s Return

  Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

  Belladonna at Belstone

  The Traitor of St Giles

  The Boy Bishop’s Glovemaker

  The Tournament of Blood

  The Sticklepath Strangler

  The Devil’s Acolyte

  The Mad Monk of Gidleigh

  The Templar’s Penance

  The Outlaws of Ennor

  The Tolls of Death

  The Chapel of Bones

  The Butcher of St Peter’s

  A Friar’s Bloodfeud

  The Death Ship of Dartmouth

  The Malice of Unnatural Death

  Dispensation of Death

  The Templar, the Queen and Her Lover

  The Prophecy of Death

  The King of Thieves

  The Bishop Must Die

  The Oath

  King’s Gold

  City of Fiends

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Michael Jecks 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Michael Jecks to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN: 978-1-47111-106-8

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-47111-107-5

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47111-109-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  For my parents, Beryl and Peter,

  with much love.

  A new direction . . .

  And

  For Andy and Mandy

  in the hope this may distract you both from

  the events of the last horrible couple of years.

  Lots of love.

  Sir John de Sully

  Knight Banneret from Devon

  Richard Bakere

  Esquire to Sir John

  Grandarse

  under Sir John, the Centener: leader of a hundred men

  Berenger Fripper

  the leader of one vintaine of twenty men under Grandarse

  Members of Berenger’s vintaine:

  Clip

  Eliot

  Jack Fletcher

  Jon Furrier

  Gilbert ‘Gil’

  Luke

  Matt

  Geoff atte Mill

  Oliver

  Walt

  Will ‘The Wisp’

  Ed ‘The Donkey’

  orphan found by the vintaine in Portsmouth

  Roger

  vintener of the second vintaine

  Mark Tyler/Mark of London

  Roger’s most recent recruit

  Archibald Tanner

  a ‘gynour’ trained in gunpowder and cannon

  Erbin

  leader of a party of Welsh fighters

  Dewi and Owain

  Welshmen under Erbin

  King Edward III

  King of England

  King Edward II

  the King’s predecessor, rumoured to have died in Berkeley Castle

  King Philippe VI

  King of France

  Edward of Woodstock

  son of Edward III, later known as ‘the Black Prince’

  Earl Thomas of Warwick

  a noted peer of the realm and Marshal of England

  Béatrice Pouillet

  daughter of a gunpowder merchant in France

  In those far-off days when I was still at school, I was a member of a book club that was devoted to non-fiction books on warfare, and bought vast numbers from them. They remain on my bookshelves, the greater part of them very well-thumbed and yellowed, but all offering a haven of peace whenever I need it. Lyn MacDonald’s They Called It Passchendaele (which I read when only eleven), books on the Somme, Max Hastings’ The Korean War, and books about the Das Reich Panzer Division and Bomber Command – they are still there in front of me as I type this.

  But one in particular, sadly, is missing. It was a title I enjoyed so much that I kept offering it to other people to read. One of them took it – and lost it. I have mourned the loss of that book for many years. It was The Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward, first published by Constable in 1978. I must have bought my copy in about 1983 or so, and I read it twice, back to back, in my cottage in Oxted, Surrey.

  The book is a gem of concise, undramatic but enthralling writing. So much so that I was forced to buy a new copy as soon as I was able to do so. Of course, it’s not the only book on the Hundred Years War, and, if I’m brutally honest, it’s probably not the best. There are many other titles, from Jonathan Sumption’s superb studies of the same subject to books by experts like Terry Jones (I have sung his praises many times before, but I’ll do it again: if you haven’t read Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary it is high time you did) – but it was Seward’s book that fired my imagination in the first place. It was his book that persuaded me to find out more about this terrible time, and his book that inspired me to write about the Battle of Crécy.

  It is difficult to write a book that includes the lives of real people.

  In Medieval Murderers, the performance group I founded more than a decade ago, we have had many debates about whether or not to use real characters from history. When I set out to create my medieval world, I was determined not to look at matters from the point of view of real characters, because I had a secret dread of someone doing that to me. I could all too easily envisage a time when someone read an article on their . . . what will it be in a few hundred years? On their wall? In their retina? Well, no matter where they would see it, they would read about this fellow Jecks who was alive in the early twenty-first century, and might want to write about him. They would have him as a witty, clever fellow, no doubt. Fair enough. And a criminal investigator. And they would state that I was vegan, teetotal, a cat-loving, anti-hunting, football-supporting campaigner for the European Union. In short, I would have to give up my proud disdain for all things psychic and take up haunting the foul blighter for his or her calumnies.

  You can see why I did not want to take a real person and infuse them with my own feelings, beliefs and prejudices. It just wouldn’t be fair. A kind of ‘post-mortem slander’. That is why, in my earlier books, although I make some use of characters like Walter Stapledon, I don’t look at the world through his eyes. He is simply included because he was there, in Exeter, at the time. I couldn’t ignore him.

  However, over time my attitude has changed. There are some situations which do need the perspective of key players. And for this book, I chose a man who has fascinated me for many years: Sir John de Sully.

  If you look him up on the internet, you will find his life documented at the website for
the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him Who Hung Thereon in Crediton (http://www.creditonparishchurch.org.uk/Sully.html).

  An extraordinary man, Sir John was questioned in his one hundred and sixth year, because of a dispute between two other knights about the arms they were allowed to display. He died, apparently, the following year. But in his long life, he had survived battles all through the Edwardian period, from (probably) Bannockburn through to Najera. That means that the last time he went to war in armour, he was some eighty-six years old.

  His character can only be guessed at. In reality, of course, he was probably a hugely aggressive man, arrogant, proud and independent: a terrible enemy. But he came from Devon, too, and I have deliberately made him a more complex fellow and not a mere brute.

  Above all, this is the story of a vintaine. A small group of Englishmen in a foreign land, fighting and killing and dying for a cause which they only dimly understood. But they knew that there was money to be looted, that there were women, and there was wine. They were not saints. Soldiers rarely are. But what they achieved was astonishing, and for that, if nothing else, they deserve admiration.

  The Battle of Crécy has always been a source of argument. Firstly because most historians find it inconceivable that the commander of such a relatively small force could have deliberately sought to meet the full might of the massive French army in battle; secondly because there has been hot debate over the precise battle-formation used by the English during that battle.

  I do not presume to argue the cases either way. You can find the arguments marvellously summarised in War Cruel and Sharp by Clifford J. Rogers, Boydell Press, 2000. In Chapter 10 ‘Invasion of 1346: Strategic Options and Historiography’, he goes through them on both sides in some detail. However, it seems clear to me that the English King Edward III would have known that he ran the significant risk of battle by taking war to the north of France. He had tweaked the French King’s tail too often already to think he would escape unhindered once more. The prestige of Philippe VI was at stake.

  For my story, I have assumed that the argument from Rogers’s book is correct: that the English King knew he would force the French to battle and was confident nonetheless, convinced that his massed archers would be so overwhelming that the French must be crushed. He suffered setbacks, true, especially on the long march to the Somme, but I believe he had a strategic ambition to draw the French to him on well-prepared ground in a planned manner.

  The second issue has given me a great deal more heartache than the simple question of whether the English intended to fight. How did King Edward dispose his troops?

  I have resorted to many books in researching the battle, from Jonathan Sumption’s superb Trial By Battle, Rogers’s War Cruel and Sharp mentioned above, J.F. Verbruggen’s The Art of Warfare in Western Europe, Maurice Keen’s Medieval Warfare, Kelly DeVries’s Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century . . . all the way to Ian Mortimer’s The Perfect King: The Life of King Edward III, with stop-offs at Froissart and other chroniclers.

  Some think that there were three battles (groups of fighting men, in modern terms ‘Battalions’ is the nearest word), with English soldiers spread side-by-side over the top of the hill, with groups of archers between these groups of men, and more archers at either side. I disagree, and side with those who consider the next scenario more likely: that the English had the three battles one placed before the other, and with two large groups of archers at either flank with cannon, so as to keep up a withering fire both on the killing ground before them on the plains, and, as the enemy grew nearer, launching their weapons and missiles directly into the flanks of the French advance. Not only is this the most likely formation to have achieved the victory won at such low cost to the English – but also it was the formation practised and rehearsed in so many prior battles.

  But after all my research, there is still a margin for error. I have occasionally guessed at mysteries such as, where precisely was Sir John in the battle-line? – and where my guesses have missed their mark, I can only apologise. Any errors are my own.

  This story, then, is the story of soldiers through the centuries, and I have unashamedly used scenes as described by George MacDonald Fraser in his magnificent autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here, as well as many contemporary accounts. The story of fighting men, and their experiences in battle, has not changed all that much. Their lives are full of fear, boredom, misery and sudden horror. But they also enjoy making jokes at each others’ expense, and gradually they learn to trust and rely on one another.

  Finally, I should say that when I was writing this, I had in my mind the young men and women who are fighting with the British Army in Afghanistan.

  May they all return safe and well.

  Michael Jecks

  North Dartmoor

  January 2013

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  St-Vaast-la-Hogue, 12 July 1346

  Berenger Fripper, vintener of this pox-ridden mob of sixteen men under Sir John de Sully, ducked as another wave splashed over the gunwale and drenched him.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he muttered, wiping a hand over his face to clear it of water. White foam was everywhere, and he was already frozen to the marrow in the bitter wind. He cursed the day he’d agreed to lead the men on this raid.

  Grandarse, his centener, and leader of four more vintaines, bellowed, ‘Get ready!’ near his ear, and Berenger felt like snapping back that they were all ready – they had been ready this past hour or more – but he swallowed his resentment. Discipline was all-important in the army. Any diminution of respect weakened a fighting force, which was why punishment for insubordination was so savage, and rightly so.

  Grandarse shouldered his way past. The older man was built like a barrel, with a belly that declared his love of ale and food. His eyes were blue like the sky, his skin leathery from living rough, marching for his King. He was a hard man, used to the ways of war, but the Yorkshireman was honest enough, and kindly to men he trusted. He respected Berenger’s men: such fellows were the backbone of the King’s army, and Grandarse knew it.

  Another big wave, another wipe of his fac
e. Berenger hated ships. This was no way to go to war. The rolling decks and constant spray, the sound of horses whinnying, almost screaming in fear belowdecks, the constant taste of sickness in his throat and the smell of vomit all about him . . . it all reminded him of Sluys, two years before. Christ’s ballocks, that had been a fight! He was an old man now. Already six and thirty, and a fighter for his King for the last eleven years. He knew he shouldn’t feel such trepidation at the prospect of battle.

  Yet he did.

  He shifted the strap of his pack where it had rubbed a sore patch at his collarbone. The salt in the air was making it sting. Another wave crashed at the side of the ship, spume exploding into his face and beard, and he swore viciously.

  Beside him, young Ed was kneeling and retching, his belly emptied many long hours before.

  ‘Get up, boy!’ Berenger snarled. ‘You want to kneel when the French come and beat you all about your bleeding head?’

  He hauled on the boy’s arm until Ed was up and could lean on the wale himself, his fist clenched in white determination about a rope.

  An odd boy. Too young for this kind of fight, Berenger told himself again. The lads had thought he’d make them a good mascot if nothing else.

  They had found him lying in the gutter outside a Portsmouth tavern, dazed from the blow that had broken his tooth and bloodied his face. If he was the victim of a robbery, the thief had poor judgement in selecting his victims. A lad that old could have little indeed worth taking. Clip had wanted to see if he had any money, but Geoff shouldered him aside and picked up the pathetic bundle, carrying Ed back to their lodgings with a gentleness that surprised the other men. With luck, Geoff said defensively, the boy’d earn his keep by fetching and carrying. They could do with a lad to bring arrows or water in battle, and bear food on the march.

  Well, that was as may be. As far as Berenger was concerned, Ed was a waste of space. He was a boy, and they needed men. Grandarse didn’t care: he would get money for the extra head, and that was all he cared about; but Berenger felt responsible for the fellow. Just now the boy’s head hung low, drool trailing from his chin. How, in God’s name, the son of a fisherman could be so useless and pukey on board a ship, he didn’t know. The lad was the most cack-handed prick he had ever met. He wouldn’t meet Berenger’s eyes but stood shivering, staring miserably at the land ahead, as did all the others.