7

FORMING THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

THE WHITE COMPANY

THERE IS ANOTHER important genre that informs our understanding of the medieval world: the adventure story. The typical reader is a teenage boy, but books of this nature occasionally make it briefly on to the best-seller lists. Romance novels (typically with a sexy picture on the cover) and mystery novels (with dour monks) are subspecies worthy of investigation. But not here.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ADVENTURE NOVEL

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) practically invented the historical novel. His Ivanhoe (1819) was so well done that the story even survived Robert Taylor’s wooden acting in the 1952 movie. Scott’s Robin Hood swiftly evolved into the best-known figure from the Middle Ages, and the subject of more movies than Richard the Lionheart. Many of his themes – Saxon versus Norman, poor versus rich, Jews versus Christian, knights sworn to chastity struggling with carnal desires – were set in the world of chivalry. There was suffering, the duty to resist evil, and the lust for power; pride versus courtesy; true love sacrificing itself. In short, great stories by a master storyteller. Many writers across Europe and America imitated him, and the public rushed to buy and read their works.

Audiences also attended lectures on history, much like educated Americans watching C-Span’s Booknotes on television today, but in greater numbers and with more applause. It was such a popular lecture in 1889, a talk on the Middle Ages, that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, to imagine a novel set in the Middle Ages. He had just finished Micah Clark, a piece of historical fiction that was selling well, and was looking for a theme with potential for action. The Hundred Years War beckoned.

Doyle had already learned that grounding a plot in current politics was an effective device. His Sherlock Holmes stories were set in the context of the Afghan War, the romantic intrigues of the high nobility, the contrasts of poverty and wealth, city and country. Knowing that readers would need more familiarity with the politics and society of the fourteenth century, he provided the necessary background bit by bit as he introduced his characters.

Doyle also picked a great title.

The White Company jumps out at us. Although educated nineteenth-century readers might be expected to recognise it as a reference to the Hundred Years War, even in the twentieth century, when few outside England and France can even tell you who fought in it or why, the title comes across as inspired. A medieval Band of Brothers. Not A White Company, but a specific one.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Arthur Conan Doyle was also inspired by Scott’s reputation. Scott had become a national treasure. Doyle, in contrast, was famous only for popular magazine stories far removed from the tradition of thick novels bound in leather. This irritated him so much that he sent Sherlock Holmes to his death at Reichenbach Falls, falling to doom in the clutches of the master criminal, Professor Moriarty. Doyle’s ambition, like other contemporaries such as Sir Arthur Sullivan, was to be known for serious endeavours. It was not enough that his contemporaries praised his short stories, his star-quality play in contact sports, his sturdy patriotism (including service as a military doctor during the Boer war – without pay – and later writing a strong defence of the British policies), and his unflappable good humour. Late in life, his advocacy of spiritualism made him a laughing-stock among his peers (except those who saw contact with the dead as an attractive alternative to the quarrelling varieties of Christianity). Fame remained just out of reach, except for Sherlock Holmes, who didn’t even require spiritualism to rise from the dead.

Doyle worked hard for respectability, but his Irish extraction stood in the way. His mother had pushed him into medicine, a profession that paid well for doctors with wealthy patrons; but Doyle’s friends were all in the literary world, not society. He could have ridden his family’s rock-solid Roman Catholic reputation straight to the top of his ethnic community, but he was too rigorously honest not to tell each and everyone that he could not accept without reservations the stern and uncompromising beliefs of the contemporary Church; this guaranteed that no true Catholic would choose him as a physician. Protestants, of course, mistrusted anyone educated by Jesuits. Almost by accident, or perhaps because he had too few patients to keep himself busy, Doyle had begun writing. Soon he was earning more scribbling serials than writing prescriptions, and, once famous, he began to abandon his medical practice. Then he sought to win a reputation as a serious author.

‘THE WHITE COMPANY’

The best of Doyle’s novels, in his own opinion, was loosely based on an actual free company. A major figure, Nigel Loring, is most likely drawn from Sir Neil Loring, the chamberlain of the Black Prince, who participated in the expedition into Spain:

Chapter 33 – How The Army Made The Passage Of Roncesvalles

The whole vast plain of Gascony and of Languedoc is an arid and profitless expanse in winter save where the swift-flowing Adour and her snow-fed tributaries, the Louts, the Oloron and the Pau, run down to the sea of Biscay. South of the Adour the jagged line of mountains which fringe the sky-line send out long granite claws, running down into the lowlands and dividing them into ‘gaves’ or stretches of valley. Hillocks grow into hills, and hills into mountains, each range overlying its neighbour, until they soar up in the giant chain which raises its spotless and untrodden peaks, white and dazzling, against the pale blue wintry sky.

…The keys of the mountain passes still lay in the hands of the shifty and ignoble Charles of Navarre, who had chaffered and bargained both with the English and with the Spanish, taking money from the one side to hold them open and from the other to keep them sealed. The mallet hand of Edward, however, had shattered all the schemes and wiles of the plotter. Neither entreaty nor courtly remonstrance came from the English prince; but Sir Hugh Calverley passed silently over the border with his company, and the blazing walls of the two cities of Miranda and Puenta della Reyna warned the unfaithful monarch that there were other metals besides gold, and that he was dealing with a man to whom it was unsafe to lie. His price was paid, his objections silenced, and the mountain gorges lay open to the invaders. From the Feast of the Epiphany there was mustering and massing, until, in the first week of February – three days after the White Company joined the army – the word was given for a general advance through the defile of Roncesvalles. At five in the cold winter’s morning the bugles were blowing in the hamlet of St Jean Pied-du-Port, and by six Sir Nigel’s Company, three hundred strong, were on their way for the defile, pushing swiftly in the dim light up the steep curving road; for it was the prince’s order that they should be the first to pass through, and that they should remain on guard at the further end until the whole army had emerged from the mountains. Day was already breaking in the east, and the summits of the great peaks had turned rosy red, while the valleys still lay in the shadow, when they found themselves with the cliffs on either hand and the long, rugged pass stretching away before them.

This is much better writing than Froissart’s original text. Doyle’s descriptions of landscape and daily life are solid, but his dialogue is awkwardly filled with outdated words: hath, forsooth. Although the gratifying sales of The White Company proved that strong plot lines and vivid characters can overcome even artificial dialogue, the novel was quickly pigeon-holed as a ‘boy’s book’. This frustrated Doyle greatly, but the chapter titles indicate why:

Chapter 1 – How The Black Sheep Came Forth From The Fold

Chapter 2 – How Alleyne Edricson Came Out Into The World

Chapter 3 – How Hordle John Cozened The Fuller Of Lymington

Chapter 4 – How The Bailiff Of Southampton Slew The Two Masterless Men

Chapter 5 – How A Strange Company Gathered At The ‘Pied Merlin’

Chapter 6 – How Samkin Aylward Wagered His Feather-Bed

Chapter 7 – How The Three Comrades Journeyed Through The Woodlands

And so forth

Still, Doyle had made one of the best efforts to recreate for a British audience the world in which their ancestors had first demonstrated the deadliness of English arms. Military efficiency was a widespread concern in the British Empire of Doyle’s day, a fact certainly not lost on patriots who had reasons to distrust the French (the Entente – the understandings that led to the close alliance in the Great War against Germany – was still thirteen years in the future, in 1904). Moreover, The White Company was based on the incredible feats of real Englishmen who had lived in a transitional era – the close of the Middle Ages and the appearance of the Renaissance.

THE WHITE COMPANY IN ITALY

There were actually two White Companies. The most famous was composed of mercenaries who went from France to Italy in 1361. The count of Montferrat, desperately pressed by the duke of Milan, was willing to pay very, very well for their services; and nobody else was willing to take on the Milanese Great Company, universally held to be the best army of the era. Although not entirely English, the majority of the White Company was. After routing Milan’s German mercenaries in 1363, saving central Italy from Duke Galeazzo (1355–78), the company divided, most of the soldiers entering the employ of Pisa in its war against Florence. Unlike most Italian mercenaries, they fought on foot. This spared their valuable horses from danger until needed. To protect themselves from missile fire, they wore shining plate armour that led to their nickname, the White Company. For missile power of their own, they had English archers skilled in the use of the most formidable weapon of the day, the longbow.

This weapon, so named because it was taller than the widely used short bow, could, like Odysseus’ bow, only be drawn by exceptionally powerful men. Moreover, it was such a difficult instrument to use that no other people were able to master it. Accuracy may not have been important for raining down masses of arrows upon an enemy, but there were moments when the difference between a good shot and a poor one was equivalent to life and death; any archer who doubted his skill might trust his legs more than his arms. Accuracy required years of instruction and practice, years that most employers of mercenary armies did not have.

The longbow’s devastating penetrating power and range had costs – the weapon was expensive and the bowstring had to be kept dry. Also no archer could station himself on a crowded battlement, watching the wiggling ladder in front of him, waiting for a face to appear, and then blow it away with an iron quarrel between the eyes. A crossbowman could also thrust his weapon over the wall and fire down without endangering himself much, while an archer had to expose himself completely. As a battlefield weapon, however, the longbow was without peer.

As a result, wherever the White Company appeared, its foes usually retreated back into fortifications, as did the Florentines in 1364. The English weakness being a love of money, when the Florentines offered a huge ransom, most of the mercenaries took it, together with an immense amount of booty, and left Tuscany. That part of the army, which now called itself the Company of the Star, followed Albert Sterz south toward Siena and the Papal States. A smaller part remained in Pisan pay under the command of John Hawkwood.

DOYLE WRITES HIS NOVEL

The White Company first appeared in 1891 as a serial in Cornhill Magazine, the most prestigious popular publication of the time. A fabulously talented and congenial man, Doyle loved that combination of honesty, intelligence, humour and valour that marked the Victorian gentleman. This shows clearly in The White Company, a story set in the age of Edward III, when soldiers seemed to be least characterised by honesty, intelligence and humour. Valour we can grant them, and a few other virtues, but most armed men in the Hundred Years War were not gentlemen. Perhaps that was what made Froissart’s heroes so attractive – they were at one and the same time both representative of their age and exceptions to it. Doyle was living in the industrial revolution. Perhaps the values of the machine age contrasted so strongly with knightly honour, that Doyle was right in holding chivalry up as a standard wherever he could find it.

Doyle fended off requests for more Sherlock Holmes stories in order to find time for research into the free companies of the Hundred Years War. His reliance on Froissart led him to emphasise heroic figures, balancing their individual exploits with praise of the English yeomen who had made the longbow dominant on the battlefield. The most charismatic of these heroes was John Hawkwood, who spent most of his career in Florence; as it happened, every Englishman of Doyle’s era who aspired to culture also had to make a pilgrimage to Florence, or spend summers in the lovely Tuscan countryside around that fabulous city.

THE WHITE COMPANY IN SPAIN

Hawkwood was, unfortunately, not a good subject for the novel Doyle conceived. He was employed in Italy, not in France – where English heroism shone most brightly – and he married into the aristocracy and never returned home. Moreover, as Sumption says of his men, ‘They set new standards of savagery in war.’

The second White Company in France was less well known, but older and largely French-speaking. It had accompanied du Guesclin into Spain in 1366, then dispersed. Some troops returned to English employ and, when Pedro the Cruel fled to the Black Prince, became part of the army raised to return the despicable but useful monarch to power.

DOYLE’S CHARACTERS

Doyle built his story around three memorable fictional characters, fellows who could be easily identified by readers. The first was a defrocked monk, who was introduced thus:

Charges brought upon the second Thursday after the Feast of the Assumption, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-six, against brother John, formerly known as Hordle John, or John of Hordle, but now a novice in the holy monastic order of the Cistercians. Read upon the same day at the Abbey of Beaulieu in the presence of the most reverend Abbot Berghersh and of the assembled order.

The charges against the said brother John are the following, namely, to wit:

‘First, that on the above-mentioned Feast of the Assumption, small beer having been served to the novices in the proportion of one quart to each four, the said brother John did drain the pot at one draught to the detriment of brother Paul, brother Porphyry and brother Ambrose, who could scarce eat their none-meat of salted stock-fish on account of their exceeding dryness,’ …

‘Item, that having been told by the master of the novices that he should restrict his food for two days to a single three-pound loaf of bran and beans, for the greater honoring and glorifying of St. Monica, mother of the holy Augustine, he was heard by brother Ambrose and others to say that he wished twenty thousand devils would fly away with the said Monica, mother of the holy Augustine, or any other saint who came between a man and his meat. Item, that upon brother Ambrose reproving him for this blasphemous wish, he did hold the said brother face downwards over the piscatorium or fish-pond for a space during which the said brother was able to repeat a pater and four aves for the better fortifying of his soul against impending death.’

To make matters worse, it was next revealed that Hordle John had been seen in conversation with a local wench of low reputation, then had carried her off, physically, into the woods, in the plain sight of three brother monks! The verdict was inescapable, but not so the punishment. Hordle John was not about to allow himself to be scourged from the premises. Accepting punishment without argument might be proper monkish behaviour, but Hordle John was not a proper monk.

The second figure was Alleyne Edrichson, a young man who was happy with convent life:

He was a thin-faced, yellow-haired youth, rather above the middle size, comely and well shapen, with straight, lithe figure and eager, boyish features. His clear, pensive gray eyes, and quick, delicate expression, spoke of a nature which had unfolded far from the boisterous joys and sorrows of the world. Yet there was a set of the mouth and a prominence of the chin which relieved him of any trace of effeminacy. Impulsive he might be, enthusiastic, sensitive, with something sympathetic and adaptive in his disposition; but an observer of nature’s tokens would have confidently pledged himself that there was native firmness and strength underlying his gentle, monk-bred ways.

Alleyne had been ready to take up the life of a cleric, but the abbot was sending him away. When Alleyne’s father had died, twenty years before, he had left land to the monastery on the condition that the abbot would raise the child to manhood, then return him to the world. It was a wise choice – Alleyne’s elder brother, who would inherit the estate, had already demonstrated that he was unfit to be a guardian.

Alleyne resisted leaving the monastery, but the abbot insisted that there was more to learning than books. He may know of France and Spain by reading, of the pope in Avignon, of the pagans in Lithuania, and the Muslims who hold Jerusalem and of Prester John and the Great Khan, but there is much knowledge that can only be acquired by experience. Therefore, Alleyne must leave. If he later decides to return to the convent, he will be welcomed back, but now is the time to enter the world. A man by years and stature, Alleyne was still a boy in many ways. It is his journey of discovery that becomes the central narrative of the book.

Doyle’s third character was Samkin Aylward, a mercenary soldier just back from France. Subsequent generations of Englishmen pointed to such typical bowmen as proof that the common man was the equal of nobles in arms and intelligence, and thus deserved to share in the full rights of Englishmen, meaning a prominent role in the government. Doyle, aware that democracy was increasing in his own England, used Samkin to say that the common man was England.*

Many critics acclaimed The White Company superior to anything written since Walter Scott, but they praised it as an adventure story. This was not Doyle’s intent. He had wanted a monument to English patriotism and military valour – a celebration of the combination of yeoman virtues and noble ideals. Alas, what the public really wanted was more Sherlock Holmes. (For a medieval detective we had to wait for Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose).

One cannot help but wonder what kind of a book Doyle would have written if he had sent his characters off to join John Hawkwood in Italy. After all, when Chaucer met Hawkwood in Milan in 1378, he was impressed sufficiently to mention him in ‘The Monk’s Tale’ of The Canterbury Tales.

THE PROTAGONIST IGNORED: JOHN HAWKWOOD

When Hawkwood went from France to Italy, he found a political landscape that was awaiting a person with his skills and ambitions. By 1350 Italy was a complicated peninsula divided into relatively small states ruled by kings, powerful nobles, prelates, abbots, cities and the pope. The kings were confined to the extreme south, the nobles had long since ceased to be important figures, as had most clerics. The large towns had the population and the revenues to build ships, raise armies, and hire soldiers, but the weakness of the cities was a tendency to let political disputes to get out of control, leading to intrigues, mob action and assassinations. Dominant factions often sent their enemies into exile, sometimes confiscating their properties. The exiles naturally sought foreign assistance to return home and exact revenge on their enemies. This foreign assistance could be readily found in those cities which were political or trade rivals.

The pope. Well, each pope was out to protect or increase the prestige and property of his office, which each believed was tied closely to absolute power in first the Papal States, then Italy, and finally all of Christendom. But also to further the interest of his family and friends. However, since Pope Urban V was living in Avignon, his influence on Italian politics was less than it could have been.

In practice, party alignments were complicated, usually reflecting traditional rivalries rather than ideological positions. Shakespeare knew that any audience of Romeo and Juliet would understand why an ancient feud could exist between Montagues and Capulets; it was not necessary for him to state which family belonged to which party.

Italians had learned to avoid bloodshed and bad blood by keeping all powerful families out of power. Rather than trust to elections or drawing lots, which would eventually give authority to one’s enemies, each family represented on the city councils preferred the city hiring foreigners, usually nobles, to serve as police chief and judge rather than to risk having a rival selected. This official, the podestá, would serve for a fixed term – usually a year – for a reasonable salary. If the city council was satisfied with his performance, they could renew his contract; if he was too high-handed or arrogant, they could replace him. It was an arrangement that suited everyone.

Not surprisingly, the podestá almost always recruited a police force from out of town. This police force was composed of mercenaries of a sort.

But who guards the guardian? There was much concern that the podestá would make his job permanent by simply seizing power, eliminating the nobles and merchants who objected, and beginning a campaign to conquer neighbouring towns – it was easy to win local support for war against traditional commercial rivals. Cities had little choice but to hire a general with experienced mercenaries and make him podestá. City councils, aware of this, did their best to seek out men who were unlikely to become dangerous – someone honest, if possible, and, if not, at least lowly born or a foreigner.

Hawkwood, for example.

SAMKIN: AN ENGLISHMAN TOO LONG IN FRANCE

Hordle John and Alleyne Edrichson were listening to a conversation at an English inn, the Pied Merlin, which was frequented by a collection of characters suitable for The Canterbury Tales, when Samkin made a dramatic appearance:

‘Ha!’ he cried, blinking like an owl in the sudden glare. ‘Good even to you, comrades! Holà! a woman, by my soul!’ and in an instant he had clipped Dame Eliza round the waist and was kissing her violently. His eye happening to wander upon the maid, however, he instantly abandoned the mistress and danced off after the other, who scurried in confusion up one of the ladders, and dropped the heavy trap-door upon her pursuer. He then turned back and saluted the landlady once more with the utmost relish and satisfaction.

‘La petite is frightened,’ said he. ‘Ah, c’est l’amour, l’amour! Curse this trick of French, which will stick to my throat. I must wash it out with some good English ale. By my hilt! camarades, there is no drop of French blood in my body, and I am a true English bowman, Samkin Aylward by name; and I tell you, mes amis, that it warms my very heart-roots to set my feet on the dear old land once more. When I came off the galley at Hythe, this very day, I down on my bones, and I kissed the good brown earth, as I kiss thee now, ma belle, for it was eight long years since I had seen it. The very smell of it seemed life to me. But where are my six rascals? Holà, there! En avant!’

At the order, six men, dressed as common drudges, marched solemnly into the room, each bearing a huge bundle upon his head. They formed in military line, while the soldier stood in front of them with stern eyes, checking off their several packages.

‘Number one – a French feather-bed with the two counterpanes of white sandell,’ said he.

‘Here, worthy sir,’ answered the first of the bearers, laying a great package down in the corner’.

‘Number two – seven ells of red Turkey cloth and nine ells of cloth of gold. Put it down by the other. Good dame, I prythee give each of these men a bottrine of wine or a jack of ale. Three – a full piece of white Genoan velvet with twelve ells of purple silk. Thou rascal, there is dirt on the hem! Thou hast brushed it against some wall, coquin!’

The conversation becomes instantly more lively. Wine, Women and Song are present in abundance, and nobody knew any of the three better than Samkin Aylward – his language was larded with French phrases, his banter with the serving women was that of a Continental gallant, and his knowledge of poetry and ballads far superior to anyone else present.

Clearly, the life of a mercenary had its lighter moments. Rape and rapine are hinted at here, but the emphasis is on getting rich, and the women obviously liked the unusually ardent and polite attention.* When the conversation eventually got around to politics, and to John Hawkwood, Samkin Aylward became serious, telling his listeners that he has been sent back to England to recruit men for the much-reduced White Company:

Know then that though there may be peace between our own provinces and the French, yet within the marches of France there is always war, for the country is much divided against itself, and is furthermore harried by bands of flayers, skinners, Brabaçons, tardvenus, and the rest of them. When every man’s grip is on his neighbour’s throat, and every five-sous-piece of a baron is marching with tuck of drum to fight whom he will, it would be a strange thing if five hundred brave English boys could not pick up a living. Now that Sir John Hawkwood hath gone with the East Anglian lads and the Nottingham woodmen into the service of the Marquis of Montferrat to fight against the Lord of Milan, there are but ten score of us left, yet I trust that I may be able to bring some back with me to fill the ranks of the White Company. By the tooth of Peter! it would be a bad thing if I could not muster many a Hamptonshire man who would be ready to strike in under the red flag of St George, and the more so if Sir Nigel Loring, of Christchurch, should don hauberk once more and take the lead of us.

It is at this point that Hordle John, a bear of a man, called him a liar and challenged him to a wrestling match. Samkin accepted and almost lost the French feather bed that he had put up as a wager – Hordle John was a formidable wrestler, far stronger than his opponent and totally unscrupulous, a man who despised rules and codes of moral conduct. Of course, had Samkin lost, the novel would have been over. But better training, better conditioning and greater self-confidence won the day. And Samkin Aylward had won over two recruits for the White Company.

The journey through time, space and exotic encounters then began in earnest. At one point early in their travels the pious Alleyne asked,

‘Your Company has been, then, to bow knee before our holy father, the Pope Urban, the prop and centre of Christendom?’ asked Alleyne, much interested. ‘Perchance you have yourself set eyes upon his august face?’

‘Twice I saw him,’ said the archer. ‘He was a lean little rat of a man, with a scab on his chin. The first time we had five thousand crowns out of him, though he made much ado about it. The second time we asked ten thousand, but it was three days before we could come to terms, and I am of opinion myself that we might have done better by plundering the palace. His chamberlain and cardinals came forth, as I remember, to ask whether we would take seven thousand crowns with his blessing and a plenary absolution, or the ten thousand with his solemn ban by bell, book and candle. We were all of one mind that it was best to have the ten thousand with the curse; but in some way they prevailed upon Sir John, so that we were blest and shriven against our will. Perchance it is as well, for the Company were in need of it about that time.’

When Hordle John asks about the Scots, Samkin answered:

‘For axemen and for spearmen I have not seen their match,’ the archer answered. ‘They can travel, too, with bag of meal and gridiron slung to their sword-belt, so that it is ill to follow them. There are scant crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other. On the other hand, they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the long-bow. Again, they are mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who can buy as good a brigandine of chain-mail as that which I am wearing, and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry the price of five Scotch farms upon their chest and shoulders. Man for man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be found in the whole of Christendom.’

Alleyne then asked about the French:

‘The French are also very worthy men. We have had great good fortune in France, and it hath led to much bobance and camp-fire talk, but I have ever noticed that those who know the most have the least to say about it. I have seen Frenchmen fight both in open field, in the intaking and the defending of towns or castlewicks, in escalados, camisades, night forays, bushments, sallies, outfalls, and knightly spear-runnings. Their knights and squires, lad, are every whit as good as ours, and I could pick out a score of those who ride behind Du Guesclin who would hold the lists with sharpened lances against the best men in the army of England. On the other hand, their common folk are so crushed down with gabelle, and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage, that the spirit has passed right out of them. It is a fool’s plan to teach a man to be a cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war. Fleece them like sheep and sheep they will remain.’

ALLEYNE’S ADVENTURES

When Alleyne left his new friends to visit his brother, he encountered the king, Edward III, on a hunt. The king could not even speak English, and the impression he left was highly unfavourable. Nor was Alleyne’s encounter with his own brother any better – bloodshed or leaving the country were the two alternatives left open to him. He chose to continue his wanderings and eventually met his two companions again. Doyle now occasionally called Alleyne’s friends Sam and John, but reverted to the longer names quickly, sometimes the first name, sometimes the last. Shortly afterward they encountered a diminutive but experienced warrior, Sir Nigel Loring, who was, as it were, less fearsome than his wife.

Alleyne’s companions had doubts about their new commander but eventually John conceded, ‘I must crave your pardon, comrade… I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow’. Sir Nigel would become commander of the roughest group of English brigands around, the White Company. But that was later. Sir Nigel’s immediate problem was where to find employment for the men he had recruited. Fortunately for him, welcome news arrived soon: WAR WITH FRANCE.

THE RAISING OF MERCENARY ARMIES

AND now there came a time of stir and bustle, of furbishing of arms and clang of hammer from all the southland counties. Fast spread the tidings from thorpe to thorpe and from castle to castle, that the old game was afoot once more, and the lions and lilies to be in the field with the early spring. Great news this for that fierce old country, whose trade for a generation had been war, her exports archers and her imports prisoners. For six years her sons had chafed under an unwonted peace. Now they flew to their arms as to their birthright. The old soldiers of Crécy, of Nogent, and of Poictiers were glad to think that they might hear the war-trumpet once more, and gladder still were the hot youth who had chafed for years under the martial tales of their sires. To pierce the great mountains of the south, to fight the tawners of the fiery Moors, to follow the greatest captain of the age, to find sunny cornfields and vineyards, when the marches of Picardy and Normandy were as rare and bleak as the Jedburgh forests – here was a golden prospect for a race of warriors. From sea to sea there was stringing of bows in the cottage and clang of steel in the castle.

Then there was the mustering of armies, leaders recruiting skilled warriors for their companies, and the march to the port cities. Clearly, Doyle felt that the Englishmen of the nineteenth century had become deficient in such matters. Not only were they less warlike, but incapable to doing anything on time. Ah, what would he have said about the twenty-first century!

Doyle gave his answer indirectly in the form of a pirate attack on his unpractised heroes’ transport:

Down they swooped, one on the right, one on the left, the sides and shrouds black with men and bristling with weapons. In heavy clusters they hung upon the forecastle all ready for a spring – faces white, faces brown, faces yellow, and faces black, fair Norsemen, swarthy Italians, fierce rovers from the Levant, and fiery Moors from the Barbary States, of all hues and countries, and marked solely by the common stamp of a wild-beast ferocity. Rasping up on either side, with oars trailing to save them from snapping, they poured in a living torrent with horrid yell and shrill whoop upon the defenceless merchantman.

Defenceless? It only appeared so. The bowmen had hidden themselves in order to lure the pirate ships in closer:

… wilder yet was the cry, and shriller still the scream, when there rose up from the shadow of those silent bulwarks the long lines of the English bowmen, and the arrows whizzed in a deadly sleet among the unprepared masses upon the pirate decks. From the higher sides of the cog the bowmen could shoot straight down, at a range which was so short as to enable a cloth-yard shaft to pierce through mail-coats or to transfix a shield, though it were an inch thick of toughened wood. One moment Alleyne saw the galley’s poop crowded with rushing figures, waving arms, exultant faces; the next it was a blood-smeared shambles, with bodies piled three deep upon each other, the living cowering behind the dead to shelter themselves from that sudden storm-blast of death.

The hand-to-hand fighting ended, the ships continued on to Gascony, the last English stronghold in France. Once on land, Sir Nigel leads his men to join an old friend, Sir John Chandos:

He was tall and straight as a lance, though of a great age, for his hair, which curled from under his velvet cap of maintenance, was as white as the new-fallen snow. Yet, from the swing of his stride and the spring of his step, it was clear that he had not yet lost the fire and activity of his youth. His fierce hawk-like face was clean shaven like that of a priest, save for a long thin wisp of white moustache which drooped down half way to his shoulder. That he had been handsome might be easily judged from his high aquiline nose and clear-cut chin; but his features had been so distorted by the seams and scars of old wounds, and by the loss of one eye which had been torn from the socket, that there was little left to remind one of the dashing young knight who had been fifty years ago the fairest as well as the boldest of the English chivalry. Yet what knight was there in that hall of St Andrews who would not have gladly laid down youth, beauty, and all that he possessed to win the fame of this man? For who could be named with Chandos, the stainless knight, the wise councillor, the valiant warrior, the hero of Crécy, of Winchelsea, of Poictiers, of Auray, and of as many other battles as there were years to his life?

THE REALITY OF WAR

As the company moved inland Alleyne proved himself both a warrior and a gentleman. When he rescued an Italian merchant, and his attractive daughter, from mishandling by the rough warriors of the company, the merchant had no good words for Alleyne’s comrades: ‘But those English! Ach! Take a Goth, a Hun, and a Vandal, mix them together and add a Barbary rover; then take this creature and make him drunk – and you have an Englishman’. The English were everywhere, he complained, even in Italy: ‘Everywhere you will find them, except in heaven.’

Indeed, the English did seem to be everywhere. The three companions were able to enjoy the great tournament at Bordeaux, where the greatest champions of the era entered the lists against each other. Their first desperate combat was not against French knights, but as a companion-in-arms with Bertrand du Guesclin against French peasants whose desperate condition had driven them to attack their noble masters.

Subsequent adventures along the road to war brought the companions face to face with the horrors inflicted on the civilian population:

From time to time as they advanced they saw strange lean figures scraping and scratching amid the weeds and thistles, who, on sight of the band of horsemen, threw up their arms and dived in among the brushwood, as shy and as swift as wild animals. More than once, however, they came on families by the wayside, who were too weak from hunger and disease to fly, so that they could but sit like hares on a tussock, with panting chests and terror in their eyes. So gaunt were these poor folk, so worn and spent – with bent and knotted frames, and sullen, hopeless, mutinous faces – that it made the young Englishman heart-sick to look upon them. Indeed, it seemed as though all hope and light had gone so far from them that it was not to be brought back; for when Sir Nigel threw down a handful of silver among them there came no softening of their lined faces, but they clutched greedily at the coins, peering questioningly at him, and champing with their animal jaws.

After helping suppress the peasant rebellion Sir Nigel heard that the Black Prince was recruiting troops for a campaign into Spain. But when he suggested marching south, he was told by a scoffing Gascon: ‘These are not hired slaves, but free companions, who will do nothing save by their own good wills. In very sooth, my Lord Loring, they are ill men to trifle with, and it were easier to pluck a bone from a hungry bear than to lead a bowman out of a land of plenty and of pleasure’. Apparently, France was not altogether impoverished yet.

PATRIOTISM OVER PROFIT

The soldiers were divided. Many wished to continue the life of ease and plenty in France, and one mentioned the rewards that Hawkwood and his men were gathering in Italy. But the majority chose to go to the rescue of their prince and country. Victoria would have been proud! Gilbert and Sullivan could not have staged it better, and, in fact, The Pirates of Penzance had been staged in London in 1880, eleven years before Doyle wrote The White Company.

At length Sir Nigel and the 300 men, in the company of the duke of Lancaster, arrive at their destination:

In front of them there lay a broad plain, watered by two winding streams and covered with grass, stretching away to where, in the furthest distance, the towers of Burgos bristled up against the light blue morning sky. Over all this vast meadow there lay a great city of tents – thousands upon thousands of them, laid out in streets and in squares like a well-ordered town. High silken pavilions or coloured marquees, shooting up from among the crowd of meaner dwellings, marked where the great lords and barons of Leon and Castile displayed their standards, while over the white roofs, as far as eye could reach, the waving of ancients, pavons, pensils, and banderoles, with flash of gold and glow of colours, proclaimed that all the chivalry of Iberia were mustered in the plain beneath them. Far off, in the centre of the camp, a huge palace of red and white silk, with the royal arms of Castile waiving from the summit, announced that the gallant Henry lay there in the midst of his warriors.

After many ‘sooths’ and ‘roods’ and ‘by my hilts’, they managed to surprise the camp and carry away a prisoner dressed in the royal colours. Only later did they discover that nine knights had dressed in the royal garb to confuse bounty-hunters. A short time later the English met the enemy in the field:

As the mist parted, and the sun broke through, it gleamed and shimmered with dazzling brightness upon the armor and headpieces of a vast body of horsemen who stretched across the barranca from one cliff to the other, and extended backwards until their rear guard were far out upon the plain beyond. Line after line, and rank after rank, they choked the neck of the valley with a long vista of tossing pennons, twinkling lances, waving plumes and streaming banderoles, while the curvets and gambades of the chargers lent a constant motion and shimmer to the glittering, many-coloured mass. A yell of exultation, and a forest of waving steel through the length and breadth of their column, announced that they could at last see their entrapped enemies, while the swelling notes of a hundred bugles and drums, mixed with the clash of Moorish cymbals, broke forth into a proud peal of martial triumph. Strange it was to these gallant and sparkling cavaliers of Spain to look upon this handful of men upon the hill, the thin lines of bowmen, the knots of knights and men-at-arms with armour rusted and discoloured from long service, and to learn that these were indeed the soldiers whose fame and prowess had been the camp-fire talk of every army in Christendom. Very still and silent they stood, leaning upon their bows, while their leaders took counsel together in front of them. No clang of bugle rose from their stern ranks, but in the centre waved the leopards of England, on the right the ensign of their Company with the roses of Loring, and on the left, over three score of Welsh bowmen, there floated the red banner of Merlin with the boars’-heads of the Buttesthorns. Gravely and sedately they stood beneath the morning sun waiting for the onslaught of their foemen.

Then came the great battle the reader has been waiting for some 350 pages. The outcome bore no resemblance to reality – no brilliant flanking movement, no capture of du Guesclin, no rout of the Spanish, no unhappy realisation that the war had been foolish. Instead, there is a medieval version of the Charge of the Light Brigade in which almost the entire White Company perished, surrounded by piles of Spanish, Moorish and French dead. Doyle’s three heroes were among the few survivors. Wisely taking their wages, they returned home, to be honoured by their countrymen, to marry, and to spend evenings at the Pied Merlin remembering their days of glory. Doyle concluded:

So they lived, these men, in their own lusty, cheery fashion – rude and rough, but honest, kindly and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. The sky may darken, and the clouds may gather, and again the day may come when Britain may have sore need of her children, on whatever shore of the sea they be found. Shall they not muster at her call?

IS ‘THE WHITE COMPANY’ A BOOK WORTH READING?

Doyle obviously enjoyed writing The White Company, and he was greatly disappointed that the public did not clamour for a sequel instead of a revived Sherlock Holmes. If it is true that ‘history unread is history wasted’, Doyle at least made a good try at getting people to read it. His successors, authors like Michael Crichton, Sharon Kay Penman and Ellis Peters, prove that that medieval history offers great potential for the novelist.

There was a widespread pacifist movement at the end of nineteenth century that argued that no good can come from any war. Doyle disagreed. He was a strong supporter of military training, of contact sports, and of the British government, which stubbornly protected commerce, the freedom to travel, the Christian religion, the honour of women, home and hearth, and the sanctity of treaties and unspoken obligations. Doyle believed that all British wars were justified. The government repaid the favour, subsidising reprints of his books in both world wars.

After the trauma of the Boer War, Doyle wrote Sir Nigel (1905), a prequel to The White Company that described Sir Nigel Loring’s service in France under Sir John Chandos. Doyle wrote, ‘The fantastic graces of Chivalry lay upon the surface of life, but beneath it was a half-savage population, fierce and animal, with little ruth or mercy. It was a raw, rude England, full of elemental passions, and redeemed only by elemental virtues.’

Although Doyle avoided Hollywood’s glorification of thuggery and brutality, he described the combination of rootlessness, adventure, fighting spirit, greed, boredom and ambition that drove Englishmen into the life of a professional soldier. Some were good men, some good for nothing, and some capable of rising beyond themselves. But in the end, as Doyle says at the conclusion of Sir Nigel:

So lie the dead leaves; but they and such as they nourish forever that great old trunk of England, which still sheds forth another crop and another, each as strong and as fair as the last. The body may lie in moldering chancel, or in crumbling vault, but the rumor of noble lives, the record of valour and truth, can never die, but lives on in the soul of the people. Our own work lies ready to our hands; and yet our strength may be the greater and our faith the firmer if we spare an hour from present toils to look back upon the women who were gentle and strong, or the men who loved honour more than life, on this green stage of England where for a few short years we play our little part.

 

* Ellis Peters, a modern author of murder mysteries set in the medieval past, introduced into her highly popular Cadfael series a young man who resembled Alleyne in many ways. Allan, who had been away from his monastery for many years, was contemplating returning.

* It is clear that gentlemen were not always ‘gentlemanly’; it was assumed, even in the nineteenth century, that it was not as important what a gentleman said or did, but whether or not he did it with style.