The Archer's Marines: The First Marines - Medieval fiction action story about Marines, naval warfare, and knights after King Richard's crusade in Syria, ... times (The Company of Archers Book 5) Read online

  Book Five

  The Archer’s Marines

  By Martin Archer

  PREFACE

  This is the fifth of the great medieval tales taken from the parchments written by an unknown monk of the Priory of St. Frideswide in Oxford. That’s the monastery Cardinal Wolsey dissolved and Henry the Eighth subsequently re-founded as the College of Christ Church after he broke with Rome in order to divorce his wife and wed the Boleyn girl.

  The parchments with the monk’s writings were found in a trunk under a pile of rubble in the Bodleian library basement some years ago. The monk’s assignment, as he describes it in his own hand, is to piece together personal stories from what’s left of some earlier parchments into one great history of the kingdom.

  Whoever commissioned the history wants something similar to that which the great Livy wrote for Rome so many years ago with both its use of the current idiom to make it more readable and its emphasis both on what actually happened and, most importantly, what everyone is actually thinking when they are doing and saying whatever it is that they are doing and saying.

  Among the problems the monk says he has to overcome, of course, is that the exciting tales in the earlier parchments contain so many surprises and often have missing parts where the mice have eaten them.

  Another problem is that the parchments are written in various languages. Some are written in Latin and Greek while others are in various versions of what is now called Middle English and Old French – which means he must both piece them together and rewrite them into today’s English just as Livy did for Rome when the Latin spoken by the city’s aristocracy gave way to the Italian spoken elsewhere in the civilized world.

  What follows is mostly taken from the writings of the scribe Yoram of Damascus. Almost all of what survived of Yoram’s writings are related to his friend, William, the Yorkshire serf who rose as a result of deaths in its ranks to become the captain of what was left of a company of English archers.

  One hundred and ninety two archers were in the company when it left to go crusading with King Richard; William ended up captaining the company and its 18 survivors during their desperate efforts to return to England years later.

  The position of the Church is that the changes and excitement William and his surviving archers caused in England and the Holy Land with their newfangled longbows and modified Swiss pikes are God’s Will. The unknown monk is obviously not so sure. According to him, strong arms and ambitious men are a much more likely explanation.

  This particular tale, the fifth the unknown monk completed, is a combination of the various parchments the monk and his assistants, presumably other monks, have been able to translate and piece together. It describes the lives and experiences of William and his brother and his company of archers in the fateful years of 1194 and 1195. Those are the years when William and his archers return to Cornwall from their second voyage to the Holy Land and the recently ransomed King Richard returns to England to reclaim his realm from Prince John - and raise the coins necessary to wage yet another war to reclaim his French possessions.

  It’s an important tale for a very different and perhaps even more significant reason although it is less well known – it is the story of the beginning of what will spread across the world to become one of the world’s most fearsome military forces, the English-speaking Marines.

  This then is the story of how a handful of English archers, and a girl the leader of the archers received as a gift and freed from slavery, brought the Marines into being - and how they changed the world by allowing a handful of English speaking fighting men to learn to dominate and civilize it - because they were the very first to actually be trained to fight both on land and at sea.

  What the monk’s translations continue to make obvious is that life in medieval England is short and brutal and crude - even if you are a former serf who becomes rich as a result of taking coins off a murderous bishop and making desperate refugees pay dearly for your assistance in escaping from the Saracens.

  What causes the events in this tale and leads to the creation of the Marines begins in 1192 when Richard is shipwrecked on his way home from his crusade. Leopold of Austria captures the shipwrecked Richard and sells him a few months later to the German Emperor of what the Germans call “the Holy Roman Empire” - even though it is neither holy nor Roman.

  In 1193 the German Emperor, following the custom of the day, offers to free Richard in exchange for a huge ransom of sixty five thousand pounds of silver. Some of Richard’s supporters and vassals, particularly those in France who won’t be taxed to pay the ransom, consider it a harsh but just amount, particularly since Richard himself levied a similar ransom on the Saracens; those in England whom the French and the King’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, want to tax to pay it are neither so sure nor very happy.

  Severe complications and upheaval result in England when Richard’s French mother and his French supporters attempt to levy huge taxes on England to raise the ransom money. It occurs because Richard’s estranged and rebellious younger brother, Prince John, who has been reigning in England ever since Richard left for the crusades, tries to prevent the money for Richard’s ransom from being collected – so he can continue on the throne. The result, according to the parchments the unknown monk has translated and pieced together, is great upheaval and conflict throughout the land.

  Normally Cornwall would not have been involved. It is so isolated from the rest of England and its lands so poor that even the Romans did not bother to extend their road system beyond Exeter, forty miles short of the River Tamar where Cornwall begins.

  However, as explained in the four histories the monk released earlier, William and the survivors of his company of archers initially landed in Cornwall to inform Lord Edmund’s wife of his death in battle in the Holy Land – though not the actual details of his death which had been by William’s own hand as a soldier’s mercy after Lord Edmund’s grievous wounding by the Saracens.

  William, a serf until his priestly older brother Thomas left the monastery to rescue him and take him crusading as an archer, lands in Cornwall as the captain of the company’s few surviving archers and somewhat of a lord as a result of a patent of nobility his priestly brother purchased for him a few months earlier from the king of Cyprus - with some of the coins William had taken from the Bishop of Damascus when the bishop died with a knife in his hand while trying to murder Thomas.

  Baldwin, the Earl of Cornwall, hears about Edmund’s death and makes the fatal mistake of trying to take Edmund’s fief at Trematon. Unfortunately for Baldwin, he arrives at Trematon Castle when Thomas, the archer company’s priest and William’s older brother, is visiting to inform Edmund’s widow of his death. That’s when the Earl and his brother discover the fearsome power of the new English longbows wielded by trained archers – by promptly getting themselves and most of the handful of knights in Cornwall killed despite the chain mail they are wearing as armor.

  William wants to use Cornwall’s mostly idle and worthless lands as a safe place to raise his young son and as a training base for what he has come to call “Marines” – the longbow equipped archers who are trained to fight on both land and sea. Accordingly, Thomas rushes to London to find England’s ruler, Prince John, and buy the nearly worthless but suddenly vacant Cornwall earldom for William. What Tho
mas does not know is that an ambitious minor nobleman claiming to be a distant relative of Baldwin’s is similarly buying the earldom from King Richard’ chamberlain who accepts his coins to help pay for Richard’s ransom.

  When Richard is finally ransomed and returns to England 1194 he ends up deciding to let William and the other claimant, Lord Cornell, fight it out so that “God’s will” determines the rightful earl. Richard doesn’t care much who holds the title because Cornwall has so little value as a source of taxes that even the Romans didn’t bother to build a road to it.

  God smiles on William when Cornell’s army falls apart after Cornell gets himself killed in a skirmish at the River Tamar as he tries to lead his men into Cornwall. News travels slowly so that several weeks later, long after Cornell is dead, Thomas is in Derbyshire leading a company of itinerant Scotch mercenaries against Cornell’s fief at Hathersage Castle. He’s doing so in an effort to draw Cornell and his men back from their attack on Cornwall before it succeeds.

  This is how the monk pieces together the various parchment stories and personal recollections of what happens to William and the Marines of the company of archers in the year 1195 after they kill Cornell and all but a handful of Cornwall’s knights and nobles.

  Chapter One

  Lord Cornell is in Devon preparing to invade Cornwall and our efforts to divide his forces by using mercenaries to lay a siege on his castle in Derbyshire are almost two weeks old. So far our siege seems to be going well with no serious losses on either side. No one has gotten in or out of Hathersage Castle and our only casualty is one of Leslie’s mercenaries who took a crossbow quarrel in the shoulder when the damn fool got too close to the ramparts on the castle’s outer wall.

  We’ve been expecting some sort of a sortie by the castle’s defenders ever since we arrived but so far there has been nothing. Not a peep. It probably means Cornell took most of his men to Cornwall and left only a skeleton force of guards to hold the castle.

  A small force of men is enough to hold Hathersage, unfortunately for us, because it’s a strong castle with a moat, high stone walls, and a gate house with ramparts and archer slits. What’s particularly unfortunate about Cornell only leaving a few men to guard the castle is it means it will take the defenders longer to eat up the castle’s food reserves and be starved into surrender.

  We are not about to launch a direct attack against such a strong castle. That would be suicidal. It would also be stupid both because the attack would probably fail and because the resulting losses would likely turn Leslie and his mercenaries against us.

  When we first arrive we find the village and mill next to the castle deserted and the fields around it empty of sheep and cattle. The wooden shutters on the village houses are shut and the doors unbarred.

  Most tellingly, there are no animals about except for quite a number of very hungry dogs and some cats and a handful of chickens. The villagers either moved into the castle with their pigs and sheep or took them off to more distant fields.

  The villagers obviously left in a hurry and intend to return – every house has at least one spinning wheel or a weaver’s loom and most of them have their owners’ wooden plates and bowls. What’s missing from almost every house in the village is its bedding and food supplies.

  Not having the villagers’ food to eat is a bit of a problem because it means we’ll have to send out foraging parties to buy or steal some from the more distant villages beyond Hathersage’s lands and manors. It’s also a problem if the villagers and their livestock and grain are in the castle because it means the castle will have a bigger defensive force and be able to hold out longer before we can starve them out.

  I think the villagers and their livestock are in the castle bailey because of all the stray dogs – they would helping herd the sheep and cattle if the livestock had been moved to distant fields; they would be left to fend for themselves in the village if the livestock had been moved into the castle so they aren’t needed.

  We may be here a long time so it’s an easy decision to decide we’ll buy our food and ale, not just take it. If we buy our supplies and pay well it will come in to us from the villages beyond Hathersage’s lands; if we try to take the food it will surely be hidden away and we’ll end being forced to end our siege before we starve out Cornell’s people.

  Worse, if we try to confiscate food from the surrounding manors the villeins and franklins will be distressed and we’ll lose access to information as to who is in the castle and their fighting abilities. Even more worse, our foraging parties might mistakenly take sheep and cattle that belong to a neighboring lord and cause him to rise against us instead of staying away in lordly disdain because he’s like the king - he doesn’t really care who wins so long as he’s not bothered.

  Fortunately we bought food and animals along the way and arrive with a substantial flock of sheep, wagons full of sacks of grain, and a few beeves we can slaughter whenever we want.

  In reality both the mercenaries I’ve hired and Cornell’s people in the castle are waiting to see what happens in Cornwall. If Cornell wins he will bring his men back to Derbyshire to relieve our siege; if we win in Cornwall the siege will continue until the defenders are starved out and surrender.

  There are various other possibilities, of course. The worst would be if the Derbyshire and other lords raise a force to assist Cornell and try to lift the siege. William and I don’t think it likely because Cornell owes his liege directly to the King who sold him the Cornwall earldom. If anything, the local lords will want Cornell dead and gone so they can take his lands and serfs for themselves.

  Cornell’s vassalage direct to the king is important. It means the region’s other lords have nothing to gain except casualties if they fight for us or against us. Besides, they probably know of the king’s decision to let “God’s Will” determine the outcome and will not want to risk the king’s displeasure by involving themselves in a decision he wants left to God.

  The most worrisome possibility is that there is no clear winner in Cornwall such that Cornell abandons his efforts in Cornwall and returns to Hathersage with a force strong enough to defeat us here and lift the siege. Should that happen William will have to decide whether or not to follow Cornwall back to Derbyshire and bring him to battle even if it means fighting Cornell on ground that is neither friendly nor favorable – and I will have to decide whether or not to call off the siege so that our mercenaries and archers can join and William’s pursuing forces and strengthen them.

  Our basic problem is the same as Cornell’s - neither of us can afford to let the other remain alive and neither of us can afford to let the other possess strongholds from which he can rebuild his forces and start again. Whether we like it or not we’re in a war that will go on until either Cornell or William are dead – and their heirs such as my nephew George along with them.

  Our reality, however, is different from Cornell’s – we need to settle the matter as soon as possible so our fighting men can embark for the Holy Land and start earning their pay by carrying refugees to safety and taking Moorish prizes. We can’t risk sending them off to earn the coins needed to pay them until Cornell and his heirs, if he has any, are dead.

  The good news, of course, is that there apparently has been some kind of battle in Cornwall and Cornell may already be dead. At least that is the rumor that reached us last week and swept through our ranks like a wildfire.

  In the meantime Leslie’s mercenaries and their families are taking advantage of the empty village and moving into the villagers’ empty hovels. Even more important, they seem quite content with the way things are going – and that’s significant when dealing with mercenaries. That will change, of course, when they start taking casualties.

  @@@@@

  Robert Leslie, the commander of our band of Scottish mercenaries, and I are once again sitting together on a log bench in front one of the village hovels and speculating about how long Hathersage can hold out. An old dog has come up and flopped over on his s
ide at my feet. This is probably his home.

  Leslie is interested in William and how he started as a serf and got to be the Earl of Cornwall and why I am helping him. I don’t tell him all the many details including that I’m his older brother. What I do tell him is that William is smart and loyal to a fault and fully supportive of my goal of establishing a school for young lads as the Greeks and Romans once had.

  “William’s been crusading in the east to the Holy Land as I have. He knows how hard it is to find dependable men who can scribe and sum to work with the merchants we deal with.”

  I try to explain why William wants his son George, and the likely lads we’ve found to study with George, to learn scribing and summing - so they can take over from us when they grow up and we’re too old to sail from port to port sorting out problems and seizing opportunities.” And lead our sailors and Marines.

  The boys, I try to explain to Leslie, are my students at Restormel and not a one of them is from the gentry - so it’s a great opportunity for them to advance themselves and prosper.

  Leslie doesn’t get it. I can see from the look on his face that he doesn’t understand why we’re trying to educate the boys and isn’t interested. He’s just trying to be friendly and make conversation. So I stop trying to explain and we just sit quietly for a few minutes looking at Hathersage.

  After a while, at Leslie’s request, I’m once again regaling him with a description of my encounter with Cornell’s Belgian mercenaries in Sarum down in Wiltshire when they were traveling to join Cornell. It’s something he can understand. And as you might imagine, we both begin speculating and laughing about what might have happened in the city that night and how the mercenaries from Flanders might have responded to being gulled out of their weapons and horses.

  Leslie is particularly interested. He knows all about his fellow mercenary captain and had even served with him in the same army a few years ago. That was when they had both contracted for their mercenary companies to fight for old King Henry in one of his campaigns against the Capetian king in Paris.