SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, miles anglicus, 1320-1394: Born near Colchester in Essex, the younger son of a rich tanner who owned the manor of Sible Hedingham, Sir John Hawkwood died a citizen and freeman of Florence, where Uccello’s equestrian fresco portrays him in the Duomo. He was, said Froissart, a poor knight owning nothing but his spurs, though he came to possess estates in the Romagna and Tuscany. A classic example of the younger son without inheritance who goes for a soldier, Hawkwood fought at Crécy and Poitiers, where he was knighted, early in the long English depredations in France of what was not yet called the Hundred Years’ War.

Under the Black Prince, Hawkwood learned the tactics he was later to employ in Italy: mobility, forward intelligence and knowledge of the terrain, the devastating use of the longbow (a good bowman fired six shafts a minute, the sixth in the air before the first found its target), and the dismounting of the lance, transforming the cavalry weapon of the mounted knight and squire into a two-man infantry weapon, a third man holding the horses for swift pursuit or withdrawal.

In 1360 the Treaty of Bretigny suspended hostilities between England and France, the armies were paid off in the field, and the free companies turned to plunder. Sixty thousand of these routiers went down the Rhône to Avignon to visit the Pope and have some of his money. They were known as skinners. Gascons, Bretons, Burgundians, Germans, Scots, Irish, Dutch, Flemings, Welsh, Cornish, French and English, they were those villains commonly called English, who wasted all the country without cause, and robbed without sparing all that ever they could get, and violated and defiled women, old and young, and slew men, women and children without mercy. After their passing, it was said, the forests came back.

Hawkwood was amongst them, and appears in Italy in 1364 as the elected captain of the White Company, so called for the brightness of their armour, fighting for Pisa against Florence. Like most campaigns it was short: the Florentines bought off most of the Pisan mercenaries, including the bulk of Hawkwood’s men, and the White Company disintegrated. Hawkwood himself would not be bribed to ignore his contract. He was, by all accounts, very particular on this principle.

Over the next 30 years Hawkwood was a mercenary and fought variously as a condottiere, a contractor providing his own forces for one side or another amongst the Pisans, the Milanese, the Papal States, Padua, Naples, and Florence. For the latter half of this period he was on contract to Florence, while free to undertake other commissions.

Many of his victories were gained by stealth and deception; he was as adept at avoiding conflict as at entering it, as efficient in the timely withdrawal as in advance or ambush. His reputation in an age of cruel men was said to be brave, fair, merciful and honest in his dealings, and little of the wealth that came his way stayed with him. His reputation rested on his military skill and on his principle that a contract was a contract.

In 1376 while in the employ of the Papal States and under the orders of Robert of Geneva, Papal Legate in Rome and later Clement VII, first of the Anti-Popes, Hawkwood was instructed to administer justice on the city of Cesena. Asked for clarification, the representative of Christ’s representative on Earth replied he wanted sangue et sangue: blood and more blood. Whether in fulfilment of his contract (‘obeying orders’), or whether as a means of paying his men in loot what his paymaster stood in arrears of, or whether had he refused his men would merely have elected a new commander, Hawkwood obeyed. The citizens having first been persuaded to surrender their arms, for three days the people of Cesena were systematically slaughtered, the town looted, and what could not be carried off destroyed.

In our terms, Hawkwood was a war criminal, responsible for an atrocity. Shortly thereafter he left papal service and began his long association with Florence.

He was twice married, the second time to Donnina, one of the many offspring of Bernabo Visconti. For some years he lived the life of a country squire such as he might have lived in Essex, though at the age of 70 he was still campaigning.

In 1387, fighting for Padua against Verona, he scored a decisive victory at Castagnaro, and in 1389 he undertook a forced march from Naples when summoned back to Florence. When he died in 1394 he was buried not in the tomb prepared for him in Florence and subsequently memorialised by Uccello, but at the request of Richard II in Sible Hedingham, the village where he was born, in a grave that has now been lost.

 

Seated, a man with the tools of his trade,

solitary in the company of weapons,

always the warrior, apart,

etched into metal in a moment of brooding.

Mostly he sleeps sound till first light,

by day lives the life of his time:

fighting to live he will fight

for cash money or credit. Or not fight.

At his ease when he may be,

who can never go home now,

his landscape the blunt northerly speech

glimpsed through the window to his left

where the hills are already going to sleep,

the road hatched away into more shadow

always closing round him. In the foreground

a single candle he has lit against the night.

*

Messer Giovanni condottiere

I thinke this worlde a boke

and wolde rede it

turning back the pages

chapter by century

into the distant background

where all that’s certain now

has already happened –

an argument for lawyers,

each day’s skin

stitched to another day’s drum,

another season of wheat,

another year of tramped corpses,

some words falling away

for instance brother, victim.

Who knows what any of it was now?

I move between the dead and the dead,

always erudite and fractious,

in their different speech the same:

the same dangerous commonwealth, men

totting up loot, stacked heads,

the harvest of scrap metal

at the engagement’s end, some thrush

puncturing the heavy noon air.

Thereafter come the keening women,

gulls to pick out eyes,

the broken citizenry in halters.

A long tale the same again sir

repeating itself o misere misere,

burning what we could not steal.

*

In truth sirs

I merely disable myself

in this condotta with words,

so many flags

under conflicting allegiance,

meanings that dodge

across factions and borders,

lights over the marshland,

smoke or the shiftings of water.

Men’s speech is all cunning,

bragging and grief.

We must make some agreement.

And honour it,

clause by condition,

down to the letter.

At the eye of all shadow

if I sleep by the tallow’s grace

I sleep wretchedly. My heart

flies out of my mouth and away.

She is perched singing all alone

in the plane trees by the river,

all thought of this quick planet

sweet even in war snuffed out.

One wall of fire sweeps the vineyards.

All men are with women instantly angels

vapoured in swift rising air,

their bodies shriven in sharp metal.

This is my skull’s dream. Meanwhile

my heart stretches wings over woods

singing out of our childhood once

in the abrupt speech of my own land.

*

And this I do is my dreamwork

late and unwilling, the watch

posted alert, rattle of irons,

long death cry of some creature

caught in the hedgeback alone, stars

and the moon’s pale face over all.

My heart goes away, flying north

to the snowy passes she will die in.

Night by night she is fainter,

further and colder, her voice

in the star maze at the far range

of my hearing.

                       Where I

What am I but a vicious labourer,

the iron grub that kills for pay?

What I am now so you will be.

What you are now so I once was.

*

Awake and sweating in my flesh,

my heart gone off without my leave

perhaps for better pay elsewhere.

Or she must beg her way

through warring neighbourhoods alone,

and like me sell her only skin.

Or limp a penitent to Rome

whose bishop is one of two great lechers

and I but one of his butchers.

Between the birthstool and the planks.

Between the slippery dialects:

Auti, Auguto, Giovanni Awkward

sharpen your good blade, shine

in your beaten armour, get horse

and a good ship ready and go home.

*

I am a blank slate on which is set

menace and oblivion. I sit

witness to the witch’s wick

studied in the candle’s hiss.

I make war because there is no work in England

and profit from necessity.

I who have privatised war,

I have made of my life great industry.

all mine now. I who reap stones

from a seedcorn of ashes,

I who grind out the future

between millstone and millstone address you.

*

You who live between knife and cut

and hone the blade, dragging wood

across a muddy evening home,

another day with nowt to show.

You will come to the harvest of swords

the same. You who nurse the heart

in its ladle of blood and sing

lullabies to the love you lost, you also

to the pit’s rim, tar hissing and the devils

delighting in your misery, all fire

suddenly upon you, the preliminary routine

of rape and mutilation done, they will kill you.

Your moment in the sunlight will be over,

the sparrow fleeting at the yard end,

some field you walked beside the river

between the willows and the ripened wheat.

*

I mark the changes: none and none.

Some day between some years of peace

we hear fighting break out in the valley

and the unending warfare comes home.

A river known by many names: The War

or The Rocking Horse Expedition,

The Campaign of the Seven Brown Loaves,

it is the same miserable waterway

in a three-day butchery at Cesena

a nun I halved from neck to waist

from worse between squabbling soldiers.

I, Giovanni Haukkuode, did this.

*

Who might have been anyone,

a tanner yellow with the lifelong stink

of burning dog muck, a pilgrim

limping to Jerusalem and back.

I might have lived my days

in some slope of the hills,

a man reckoning fleece,

hides for the Lowlands, wineskins.

I am a man becoming an emblem,

inscribing the book of his name

who must shift across ploughlands

because no one will have him at home.

I chart the cries of other sleepers:

one a fat drunk cherub must have sangue sangue,

another has designed an engine

to flatten cities and will use it.

Another weeps he is the King of France

and mad and made of clear glass

and will break. His cry

a wounded man’s, a pierced bird’s.

*

Some nights the blood rush at my temple

hammers you will die you will die.

I see white images of the ditch

at Castagnaro heaving maggots.

My enemy sends a caged fox for taunt.

I let him go. I take hawk and horse

and ride to inspect the fortifications.

Later I will rally all with my cry

Carne Carne, given to the meatwork.

And where’s my heart? Friend,

I dream she is in a far country,

her message fading as it finds me.

*

Persistent as the rust in unused iron,

from The Serene Republic of Slaughtered Innocents

and The Most Royal Kingdom of Branded Thieves

my heart sends greetings.

My heart sends coin to pay for all,

meat and the red sleepy wine of Genoa,

bed and a fresh horse at sunrise:

Signor sithee take cash

in fair dealing or have none.

I have made a proposal to my heart

that if she will come back to me

I will declare war over and go home.

It will be a long night’s parley.

In short she writes I cease delight

in fighting, end my part first, withdraw

into the country but I can’t see how.

How may a man lay down his weapons

before others who envy him?

Merely for living I have enemies.

Useless to say I made them so.

And there it ends: in failure.

My heart won’t come back now.

I draw the long wine from its leather.

I see the long night to its close.

Because of my kind nothing.

Issuant of me the long war

centuried and worse weaponed

than any wedge of longbow.

And finis. These cities

kindling to one furnace,

one tangle of astronomies,

one burn across the campagna.

Goodbye my heart. We fade

in different directions.

There will be less and less

we ever shared: the woods,

the distant terrafirma,

the cypress and the silver olive,

blue sky, white cattle,

measured out in fire,

all counted out in one

and time since Adam ashes

in the time it takes to read

and in the time it takes to tell.

*

It has already happened, the flash

winked out its message to the other stars,

the ink burned in the engraving, such record

as survived now in dispute.

Already pain has eaten through the page,

so many words gone into air

and we no longer here who dream

over and over the whistle at the finish.

the centuries of hate bloom there,

the paper in your hands is ash.

So goodbye to the voices in the alley.

So goodbye to the spiders in the wall.

*

So now I must step smartly

yet with long circumspection

through the last of the landscape

before the century collapses:

a tangle of cut limbs

burning on some bloody hill

where all ends in carnage

and pray God I’ve an advantage.

Pray I’ve taken the measure right

of the land’s lie in my favour

and last in my skull as I die there

some mapwork of hedge and ditches.

I cheat none but a worse death

in some ratslicked dungeon

or dropped in the pesthole,

death’s shilling in my armpit.

*

I shut the devils in their book,

I set the hellfire back into its star.

I plan to cross the littoral in good order,

swiftly and without my enemy knowing.

Between daybreak and candle sput,

a first blue light around the poplars,

between nightingale and cockcrow

dreaming I’m awake I dream my heart’s dream.

And the wars over, the harvests

taken in order, history a meaculpa

not much happens, the images

of troops and weapons fading in the stone.

*

Thereafter little to report:

the business of good women,

tradesmen sleeping on their takings,

flags fading in cathedrals,

farmers and journeymen along the road

of the never ending landscape,

the continent at peace their country,

its government a distant rumour.

In the text known as Where I failed,

in the addendum But we tried,

directions to this place are fanciful,

the maps white terra incognita, or lost.

Etcetera etcetera. The ways of men

are combative, each locked in his defence,

his territory forever in himself

he carries in dispute, less space

than this the candle lit, a thing

no larger than his name he calls

his own true sovereign republic –

on the move, sharp, tough, and hungry.

*

My heart’s caught in a thicket.

She has forgot to fly

and plays the lapwing’s game.

like me fading in the other lives.

Soon little will be known of us,

she with her dream of peace,

I hearing blood more blood in my ears,

still hunting for what bird

she’s taken for her shape now.

There will be two seasons –

war then long winter.

There the tale ends.

I shall leave this place,

for choice without wailing

or fuss in the Italian manner.

*

Say of me if you can: a man

that kept his word at any cost,

trusted nothing less.

Goodbye England, that nest of singing birds,

tall ladders of the hearth smoke

climbing on the valley air.

Somewhere’s an end to it,

the landscape leaning skyward,

the slow oncoming to the sea’s edge.

And then the last page turned,

the candle finger thumbed into a smut,

the book shut and I tell no more.