The Captain's Men Read online

  The Preface

  The Company’s Early Years

  What readers who have followed the saga may already know.

  Scholars at Oxford’s Christ Church College have been trying for many years to determine how the parchments describing the lives and adventures of Cornwall’s Company of Archers got to the Bodleian Library and the significance of them.

  Being the distinguished scholars that they are, they have done what they and countless generations of Oxford scholars before them have always done—they have endlessly discussed the source of the parchments and their significance whilst drinking in Oxford’s pubs. That is important because the pubs of Oxford are where many of the world’s most important ideas and understandings have been born.

  And, of course, scholars being scholars, they have also given numerous fine lectures about the parchments and published many scholarly articles in academic journals in their efforts to gain promotion and tenure. Unfortunately, it is still not known whether any of the parchments are important. On the other hand, Oxford’s pubs and the brews they serve are excellent so there is still hope for a major breakthrough.

  Some things seem to be reasonably certain from the parchments that have already been translated and turned into novels. One is that King Richard had already deserted his army of crusaders and scurried for home when the company’s then-captain accepted a contract with Lord Edmund for the eighty-two men left in the company to help him defend his crusader castle in the Bekka Valley. It was in the region of the Holy Land outside of Jerusalem now known as Lebanon.

  Another almost certainly true fact was that the strength of what had once been King Richard’s company of archers reached its all-time low on the night Saladin’s army fought its way into Lord Edmund’s castle.

  The arrival of the Saracens and the death of Edmund was enough for William, the company’s newly elected captain, and the surviving archers, just eighteen of the company’s original one hundred and ninety-two men. They carried their longbows and William’s young son George over the northern wall of Edmund’s castle and ran for their lives to the nearest port that was still under Christian control.

  With the fall of Edmund’s castle, the eighteen surviving archers and their new captain were finished with crusading. They had had enough; they wanted to collect the coins the company was owed for helping Edmund and return home. Unfortunately, when they finally obtained the coins and reached the nearest port, they found that no one was available to provide them and the other refugees with the galleys and transports necessary to carry them to safety. Or perhaps it was fortunate, as some of the scholars have suggested, for the lack of transportation, despite their willingness to pay dearly for it, gave William and his archers an idea as to how they might both make their fortunes and get home to England.

  According to the stories about the archers which have already been published, it was with great difficulty, and much fighting and many detours along the way, including a stop in Cyprus for more than a year to establish the beginnings of a fortress and shipping post, that most of the company’s eighteen survivors finally got back to England. They reached Cornwall and landed there with a diverse lot of more than a hundred newly recruited men, and some of the war galleys and coins the archers had acquired by taking Moorish prizes and using the galleys they had acquired to carry Christian and Jewish refugees to safety.

  Richard had still been England’s king at the time, although he was still in Austria being held for ransom, when the company and its new recruits finally reached Cornwall—and promptly became embroiled in an all-out war with the Norman knight who was then the earl of Cornwall.

  The fighting began when a party of archers led by William’s priestly older brother and fellow archer, Thomas, came upon the earl and his men trying to seize Lord Edmund’s lands from Edmund’s widow and children. It did not last long. The archers killed the earl, and then used some of their coins to pay Richard’s regent, Prince John who himself later became England’s king, for the right to keep the earl’s title and lands for themselves.

  Cornwall’s lands and the title to its earldom were not very pricey. Perhaps that was because neither the king nor anyone else thought much of Cornwall prospects as a coin producer. And perhaps it was also because, to make up for Cornwall’s lack of value, another man also claiming to represent the missing king, simultaneously sold the lands and the title of earl to someone else, a minor but ambitious nobleman from Derbyshire named Cornell who claimed to be a distant relative in the family of the late and mostly unlamented earl.

  Cornell was a surprise because he already had a castle and lands near Chester, and did not really want Cornwall; he only wanted the title because it would have given him access to a higher standing in the king’s court. Cornell’s reason did not matter, of course; the archers were not in the mood to take chances, so they killed him when he and his followers tried to enter Cornwall.

  Overall, the years that followed the archers’ destruction of Lord Cornell and his army on the approaches to Cornwall were good years for the company and its young captain. The company regained its strength and grew stronger as it recruited more and more Englishmen, and more than a few men from Wales, and equipped them with the most modern of weapons, such as the longbows every man carried and the long-handled hooked and bladed pikes the company’s smiths had begun making on Cyprus.

  And the company also grew very rich, almost as rich as the Templars, by sending its men and galleys back out to the Holy Land to take Moorish galleys and transports as prizes, and to carry Christian and Jewish refugees to safety in exchange for their coins and treasures.

  The company’s great and growing wealth was a fact that its captain and his priestly older brother were careful to conceal, even from their own men. Unlike the Templar knights and the Norman nobles who flaunted their wealth, and in so-doing attracted the jealous attention of others that would ultimately lead to their downfall, William and Thomas and their key lieutenants always forthrightly lied. They claimed that the company was so poor that its commander frequently had to borrow coins from London’s moneylenders in order to pay his men their annual wages.

  They also made much of the fact that Cornwall’s lands and prospects were so limited that even the Romans had not bothered to build a road to it.

  The brothers’ well-meaning lies were mostly effective. Only twice in the company’s early years did an ambitious noble come with an army and try to take Cornwall from the archers. They did so in the belief that the archers were mere commoners and would, therefore, quickly give way before their noble betters with their knights and village levies. Both times, as described in the earlier stories of the saga, the nobles ended up rotting in unmarked ditches and fields along with many of their men.

  The fate of Cornwall’s would-be invaders was similar to that of the dead and wounded men from the Earl of Cornwall’s Launceston Castle who had earlier helped the earl murder Lord Edmund’s wife and young daughters so the earl could also get his hands on Edmund’s Boissney Castle and its lands.

  Dead, wounded, or captured, it did not matter to William and his archers; every man who had helped murder Edmund’s wife and children was tossed into the River Tamar in the middle of the winter so his sins could be washed away. The company, as you might imagine, kept Launceston Castle and its defenders’ weapons and armour.

  When the archers first returned to England it had been a struggle to recruit men to fill the company’s ranks. As a result, some of the archers were sent out as recruiting sergeants to the villages around London and Bristol. It was a problem that did not last very long once the word got out that the company was providing opportunities wherein a man might better himself.

  To the initial surprise of the company’s captain and the rest of
the company’s survivors, new recruits soon became plentiful. Making one’s mark next to whatever name the company’s clerk happen to scribe on the company’s roll to identify him certainly meant choosing a hard and dangerous life. But in many ways going for a soldier was an English villager’s only alternative to a life of grinding poverty and brutality.

  In the Company of Archers, at least, a man had a chance to get ahead. It was a slim chance, but it was real. As a result, a steady stream of men hoping to become apprentice archers, many of them quite young and most of them the runaway sons of serfs and slaves, constantly presented themselves in Cornwall or at the decrepit former draper’s stall and hovel that became the company’s London shipping post. The sons of nobles, knights, and celibate priests rarely applied and were never accepted.

  Book XI.

  The Captain’s Men

  One of the greatest thefts of all time occurred in the year 1204 when Constantinople was under siege and in the process of falling to the crusaders. That was when the captain of a company of English archers and his men made off with two of the gold-covered right hands of Saint John the Baptist which baptized Jesus, the silver-covered head of Saint Paul, and various other priceless relics of the Orthodox Church.

  The archers carried the relics to their company’s base at Cornwall’s Restormel Castle, and put out the story in the taverns and alehouses of Rome and various seaports that the Orthodox priests charged with rescuing the relics had hidden them somewhere along the Greek coast. As a result, the coast was constantly searched without finding them and the relics remained undisturbed in Cornwall until the archers attempted to sell them some years later. That was when the trouble began.

  Chapter One

  The world in chaos.

  The world was a dangerous place in the spring of 1213. It was everywhere in chaos and turmoil. As a result, it was relatively easy for the Church and its churchmen to earn coins by selling prayers for peace and requiring donations of land in exchange for promises of salvation and less time in purgatory after a man or woman died.

  England was still in turmoil even though it had been some years since King Richard had foolishly fallen to a boy’s crossbow bolt and had been replaced as king by his landless and sole surviving brother, Prince John. John had taken the throne after Richard’s death and promptly alienated many of England’s barons—by immediately levying taxes to pay for his wars to regain the family lands in Normandy that Richard had lost to the French. He also distressed the barons with his efforts to make and enforce laws equally throughout England instead of letting each baron make his own, and by prohibiting the barons from collecting tolls on the roads and paths across their lands.

  John refused to back off from the changes he had ordered. As a result, the barons were unhappy with him in 1213 and things looked to be getting worse instead of better—and once again there were rumours of war between John and England’s unhappy barons.

  Similarly in turmoil was Constantinople, until recently the most important city in the world and the former capital of the great Byzantine Empire. The city had fallen a few years earlier to the crusaders who had defied the Pope and attacked it instead of continuing on to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens and free Jerusalem. The winners were now fighting amongst themselves for control of the once-great empire’s lands and revenues.

  Perhaps best of all, if you look at it from the point of view the company of English archers whose heavily-armed cogs and galleys could earn more coins whenever there were refugees willing to pay dearly to be carried to safety, the Islamic armies were making gains throughout the Holy Land and the Moors in Tunis and Algiers were fighting a war of conquest in Spain—and paying for it by capturing and selling Christian slaves and ships.

  There was no doubt about it, the civilized world was in chaos and upheaval, and a brutal and dangerous place to live and die.

  Some bright spots existed despite the brutality and lawlessness of the times. The Templar knights, for instance, were continuing to acquire coins and land by letting people touch the point of the spear that killed Jesus and pray near it.

  The chaos and fighting was similarly enriching the survivors of a company of once-penniless English archers who had gone crusading with King Richard and been left to die when Richard suddenly went home without them. The archers had somehow acquired two old war galleys from a poxed sea captain so they could escape from the Saracens and return to England—and then discovered that they could earn coins for themselves by using them to capture Moorish galleys and transports, and by carrying pilgrims and refugees to and from the ports of the Holy Land.

  Capturing prizes and using their initial galleys and their prizes to carry passengers and cargos to and from the Holy Land and other ports turned out to be so profitable for the company and its surviving archers that William, the one-time serf who had risen to become their captain and led them as they fought their way home, had been able to settle the archers in Cornwall where they had first landed when they returned to England.

  Much more importantly, the coins and prizes earned by their cogs and war galleys enabled William and the surviving archers to recruit and train replacements to refill their company’s ranks and expand their fleet of galleys and cogs. They also enabled the company to equip its men with the latest and most modern weapons and take the time necessary to fully train them in their use.

  As a result of being able to replace the archers who had fallen, and despite his several rather serious wounds, William had been leading his ever-increasing number of archers and galleys back to the Holy Land each year to earn even more coins and expand his fleet by taking Moorish prizes and by carrying passengers and cargo. He even permanently stationed some of the archers in galleys and trading posts serving London and various port cities around the Mediterranean.

  Things were also going quite well in poverty-stricken Cornwall where William had set up a training camp for the archers’ new recruits. Soon after their arrival the archers had killed the murderous Earl of Cornwall and William took his place by buying the earldom from the king; similarly, his priestly brother became the bishop of Cornwall’s two-priest diocese by buying it from the Pope.

  Everything was all done fair and square according to the traditions of the time. The price of each of the titles was cheap because Cornwall had little value to anyone except the archers who needed a place to train their new recruits and did not want to be bothered by interfering lords and greedy priests.

  The conflict between King John and his barons was good for William and the archers. And so were John’s wars with the King of France regarding the ownership of Normandy. They were good because they distracted King John and the barons from paying attention to the growing strength and fighting abilities of the archers whose main quarters and training camp were located far away in Cornwall—and whose relatively small numbers and circumstances had led William and his sergeants to adopt new ways of fighting and train their men to use most modern of weapons such as longbows and long-handled bladed pikes.

  Neither King John nor his military leader, Sir William Marshall, understood the archers or how their harsh experiences had taught them to fight and earn coins. Neither, for that matter, did England’s nobles, such as the Earl of Devon who wanted Cornwall for himself.

  Their ignorance was understandable. None of the archers were knights or attended court, and Cornwall, except for its tin mines which already belonged to the king, was well known to be so poor that even the Romans did not bother to build a road to it. It was little wonder that Cornwall and its archers were unknown and ignored by almost everyone of any consequence in England, and greatly feared and respected everywhere else where people knew them.

  The conflict and chaos, and particularly the fall of Constantinople, provided great opportunities for both the archers and for people outside of England such as the Pope in Rome. The Pope, for example, saw the fall of Constantinople, where the papacy’s great rival, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, had been located for almost a tho
usand years, as an opportunity to acquire more believers for his church and thus more coins and power for himself.

  The Orthodox Patriarch and many of his bishops had abandoned Constantinople and its priests and parishioners to their fates and had fled on galleys hired from the English archers as soon as it looked as if the crusaders’ attack would be successful. They sailed away so quickly in order to save themselves that they also left behind the Orthodox Church’s priceless relics such as the two gold-covered right hands of Saint John the Baptist and the silver-covered head of Saint Paul.

  At first, the Patriarch and his bishops had thought the relics had been lost and probably destroyed when Constantinople fell and was sacked. They had, however, charged a couple of priests with bringing the relics to safety, and were overjoyed when the rumour reached them that the priests had escaped with the relics and hidden them somewhere along the Greek coast.

  The rumour turned out to be true—the English archers confirmed that their galleys had carried the priests and relics to safety and landed them at several places on the Greek coast. Unfortunately, according to the archers, none of them had gone ashore with the priests and they did not know where the relics had been hidden. Now the priests could not be found and no one knew the whereabouts of the priceless relics.

  In Rome, Pope Innocent had heard about the missing relics and desperately wanted them. He wanted them because it was well known that God answered the prayers of believers who prayed in the presence of the relics and made donations to the church in their name. The Pope believed that having the relics in Rome would cause some of the Orthodox believers to switch their prayers and donations to Rome, and away from the Orthodox Patriarch who had been forced to flee from Constantinople and settle in Athens.