Wyl and Raynar had argued many times about Henry's offer of amnesty and employment for any English bowman who swore a blood oath to the King and was recruited into the Royal Archers.
The risks were enormous. What if it were a trap to capture the brotherhood. The Hood had been running micro rebellions against the Normans for some thirty years, and were hated by the land lords. The brothers would have to walk into a Norman castle and offer their services. There could be Norman guards waiting for them along the way. There could be Norman guards waiting for them in the castle. Until the first were recruited, there was no way of knowing if it was a trap or not.
On the other hand, if it was true, and not a trap, the gain for the brothers was huge. Not just an amnesty and employment, but the designation of 'freeman' for them and their families. Entire families would no longer be serfs. For sure any serf families would need to leave the land, for there were few tenant farms to rent anymore. So what. So they had to move to a town. They would be free.
Besides, while the once-serf families were moving to the towns, the bowman would be earning the king's silver. Silver that could be used by the families to set themselves up in a trade. The peasants in the towns of England were much better off than the peasants of the countryside.
For those who were outlawed, it was a once in a lifetime chance to live normal lives again. Their lives would be so much better. Being an outlaw did not just mean that you were a criminal on the run. It meant that you were living outside any law. That meant that you were not protected by the law. It was as if you were exiled, but within the kingdom. You had no recourse if a crime were committed against you. You had no legal protection from violence. Your family had no claim on anyone who maimed or killed you.
The risks were huge, and the possible benefits were huge. What to do, what to do.
"It is not our decision, Ray,” said Wyl. "The decision is with each man. We can tell them of the offer. We can explain it to them, the good and the bad and the risks. But we are just the messengers, nothing more."
"But you and I both know that they will want us to advise them and most will accept that advice. Just because the offer was sent out by us, will mean to them that we endorse it."
"Our thoughts go around in endless circles," replied Wyl, "I don't want to talk about it anymore. Not until we see the actual details."
They didn't have long to wait. A young orderly came with a message from the gate. "There is a Captain Henry of the palace guard to see you. Should I show him in?"
Wyl and Raynar looked at each other with eyes wide. "Yes, bring him and any with him, here immediately. And send for some strong ale, the porter ale." They both jumped up to go and welcome the King.
They motioned to the orderly to serve the porter ale to the four tall guardsmen that the King always seemed to travel with. Wyl made ready to bow, but Raynar held him back from doing so. "Captain Henry. We are pleased by your visit. Please sit and warm yourself around the brazier."
Raynar signaled Henry not to speak until the orderly had shown the four guards to a table in the courtyard with another brazier. They all took chairs and stools and pulled them into a close circle around the brazier.
"Henry, a word of warning," began Raynar, "even though you come in disguise, your four huscarls do not. Everyone in the palace knows them and knows that where you are, so are they. They spoil your own disguise."
"Aye, hmm, I suppose so. I'll be more careful next time I leave the palace," replied the King. "I only came this time because I did not want you to come again to the palace. I am still dealing with the fear and loathing that your last visit caused. I brought these for discussion.” He handed a scroll pipe to Raynar and watched while the contents of the pipe were read by each of the two men.
Wyl smiled despite himself. The pipe contained a draft of a proclamation of amnesty for bowmen who joined the Royal Archers. Attached to it was a draft of a letter to a castellan describing how the bowmen were to be sworn in, and taken care of. Then there was a list of castellan names, and castle names. Then there was a short draft which declared someone to be freeman archer in the service of the King.
"Well?" asked Henry. He was pleased with this work, and he wanted to be complemented on it. It was most frustrating that the two men carefully read each scroll a second time.
"Oh, uh, my apologies for how slowly I read," said Wyl. Although he could read English and columns of numbers faster than almost anyone in London, French made him stumble. "They are in French."
"The proclamation will be in English, French and Latin," replied Henry, "but the other documents need only be in French. Even the paper that the bowman will be given to prove that he is a freeman. The only men who will care to read them will read French, and perhaps not English."
Raynar saw the crestfallen look on Henry's face and said quickly. "I think they are excellent. May I make some suggestions."
"Of course, is there a desk I can use with quill and ink?" Henry said, and then was lead into the Inn's count house. He signaled his guards to stay with their ale.
"The list of castellans?" questioned Raynar. "They are all sheriffs, yes. I would use only sheriffs that you yourself have appointed since your coronation. That means striking Nottingham castle, or appointing a new sheriff there. Sheriffs from before your coronation may be tempted to hang some of these men as soon as they crossed the draw bridge, especially that bastard in Nottingham."
"Nottingham is the only one of the six that I did not appoint. He was Rufus' man. Point taken. To attract bowmen from the Peaks and Sherwood forests we must use Nottingham castle, so I shall replace the Sheriff. I owe a favour to my friend Gotse, so I will appoint his son Richard as the new sheriff. Let me make a note of that. Anything else?"
"Make sure that most copies of the proclamation are in English," Wyl spoke up.
Raynar added, "In your instructions to your sheriffs, tell them to immediately feed the men that arrive and give them a bed. Let them have a full tummy for a day before they are asked for an oath, and then allow them to take their oaths in front of other bowmen. Oh, and don't disarm them, especially not of their longbows. They are more useful with their own longbows than with any bow that the army can supply."
"Slow down so I can write that down,” said Henry out of the corner of his mouth.
"While they are at the recruitment castle, allow them a leave from the castle on the next Sunday,” Wyl suggested.
"Good one, Wyl," Raynar confirmed.
"I don't understand," said Henry. "Is that to go to church, or to visit their mothers?"
"The bowmen will not like having to go into a sheriff's castle to be recruited," replied Wyl, "so they will send just one or two ahead to begin with. No others will approach until they hear back from those two men. If the bowmen are given leave on Sunday, then word will spread from alehouse to alehouse that the proclamation is true. Then the rest will come."
"Hmm," Raynar was not so sure that Wyl should have explained that to Henry. If the proclamation was a trap, then the Normans would know to treat the first men well, so as to trap more men. "Do not put the bowmen under the Sheriff or the Sheriff's men. To each castle send a small squad of existing Royal Archers, with an archery commander. Let him do the recruiting and be responsible for the recruits. Oh, and besides giving each man a helmet, and a tunic, give them a good pair of boots too."
"I can do that,” Henry was scribbling madly. "As the number of recruits grow at each castle, they will be marched in groups here to London. Meanwhile their army training can begin at the castle. Do you think it possible that I may have a few hundred here within the month?"
"It is possible. Yes, a few hundred is quite possible," replied Raynar. "But if you are going to have the army train them, then have them trained as skirmishers, not as volley archers. Volleying the heavy arrows of a longbow would be a waste. And not just a waste of arrows, but a misuse of carefully aimed killing power. A waste of the ability to strike the enemy down from a safe distance. A waste of the opportunity to win a battle before it even begins."
Henry wrote down every word that Raynar had just said. "I'm sorry if I seem to be writing a lot. I was not trained as a warlord, but as a cleric. Still, I have sat with many warlords over the years, and every one of them overestimates the importance of heavy cavalry, and under estimates the importance of heavy bows."
"That is exactly why the Holy Wars have been such an expensive disaster," Raynar pointed out.
"Perhaps I should ask the bowmen recruits to choose men from their own ranks to help with the training. Some of them must have been skirmishers before."
"Oh yes," replied Wyl. "You can wager your life on that."
"I may well be doing that," replied Henry. "and sooner than you think. A few hundred in a month you say. Here in London, ready to fight for me."
"Keep your promises, and their bows are yours," Wyl said. "It is as simple as that."
* * * * *
Wyl and Raynar climbed to the roof to watch the new king ride back down Temple Lane. "It worries me that he likes coming here," muttered Wyl. "I mean, all our neighbours know that something big is going on here even if they think he is just a captain of the palace guard. Hard to miss when his troop block the lane for an hour at a time."
"I don't care a fig about the neighbours," Raynar replied. "I just hope that any assassins that may be watching Temple Lane assume that he is just a captain come to take scrolls back and forth from Gregos to the Palace."
"Come on, we have some writing of our own to do. I think this is all going to work. I can't believe he is going to replace that bastard Sheriff in Nottingham, just on our say so."
It was starting to drizzle so they went back into the Inn's count house to use the desk. Together they composed a message to send out to the brotherhood that was concise, and easy for men who could not read to remember.
"Read what we have so far," said Wyl as he poured them each some mint tea to warm them. He had noticed that as they go older they drank more and more tea and less and less ale.
"It starts with the list of the six castles," began Raynar, "then, Watch these castles for Royal Archers. Send a few men to volunteer to the Royal Archers. Oath to only the king. Then a few more. No outlaws in the first few. Then a few more. They have leave on Sundays to tell the rest. You will be pardoned and proclaimed a freeman, as will your wife and children. Within the month you will be marched to London."
"It's not enough," Wyl complained.
"It's already too long," Raynar replied.
In the end after much discussion, the message stood as it was. As fast as Raynar could create the copies, Wyl was giving them to his young male orderlies, all of whom were related to hoodsmen, and hurrying them off to visit their relatives.
One message to one hoodsman would become five messages to other hoodsmen, and from each of them to another five, so that the message would spread from twenty to a hundred, then to five hundred, and then thousands, and all of this within the time it would take one rider to reach a far corner of the kingdom. A week, or a fortnight at the most.
This was either the start of a new life for the brethren, or a lot of them would be hung. It was a flip of a coin which. When the last of the orderlies had been sent off, the two men stared at each other. Wyl began to laugh.
"What?"
"John in Winchester is going to be right pissed with us," Wyl sputtered. "Most of his carters are outlaws from the North under new names."
"Bah, wool season is over," replied Raynar. "He'll have six months to replace them. If Henry's Coronation Charter becomes law, then there will be so many serfs doing a runner to towns, that he won't miss the hoodsmen." He began to laugh. "He should have his message, when? In a day? Ooh, I wonder how much of Mar's furniture he will smash before she gets him calmed down.” John was a very big man.
* * * * *
The next day was a day of waiting. The injured men were waiting to heal. Wyl and Raynar were waiting for news from the palace. The lads on the roof were waiting for another attack.
Gregos had a cheerful visit with the physician. They chattered away to each other in Greek and discussed the medical writings discovered in the Greek library in Cordoba. After the physician had left, he called for Raynar to sit with him and tell him again of his meeting with Henry and of the latest attack by his enemies. Gregos was bored. His healing time would drag by due to the boredom.
The two men always spoke in Greek to each other when they needed privacy. It meant they could be more open in their discussions without wondering who else would overhear. "Raynar, please continue telling the stories of your youth. They were engaging and I learned much of England and Englishmen and Normans through them."
"It has been weeks since I told you any stories, old friend. What did I tell you last?” Raynar picked up Gregos's hand and just held it. He knew from his own sicknesses over the years that the touch of another’s hand connected two souls even through the fever and the drugs.
Gregos closed his eyes and thought. "You had been running archery competitions as a way of handing Welsh longbows to the best archers around Nottingham. The sheriff's men were looking for you, and had almost caught you. Yes, that was it. You were saved from the Normans by some bowmen in Sherwood forest, and since you left them with all of your bows."
"Ah, yes," Raynar smiled at the fond memory. "I stayed in Sherwood for about a fortnight to meet more of the men and to teach them the craft of carving and using the longbow. Where I had entered Sherwood was in the southern edge of the forest where there are many clearings, and many people working the forest. The further north we went, the thicker grew the forest and the fewer were the people working it.
The forest was different from the forest I knew in the Peaks. The Peaks forest includes steep hills and ridges and valleys. There are many types of trees because of the different heights of the land and different soil and different weather. There is a lot of game and a lot of venison and many high points with views to spot game and to spot men.
In Sherwood, however, the land is quite low. A few types of trees dominate. There is no high land to use for spotting, or for taking one's bearings, so it is easy to get turned around and lost. There is a lot of game but not so much venison. Too many people live around the forest and they keep down the population of venison."
"You preferred the Peaks forest," asked Risto. Risto was awake now and listening. Before when he had listened to these stories they had been in English, because Raynar was trying to teach them more of the language. Now, because Gregos was so week, Raynar was telling them in Greek. This was so much better for him.
"Very much so. I prefer the variations in the Peaks. Sherwood was a dark mass of big trees. For the purposes of resisting the Normans however, they shared a vital feature. You could attack highway traffic and then retreat quickly into the forest. The forest floor was tangled enough that a horse was slower than a man. You could travel across the forest and attack the highways on the other side of it, and then retreat again.
The area of the Peaks forest was much larger and touched more highways, but the highways that ran north and south on both sides of Sherwood were heavily used and critical to the Normans if they were to control the North.
I learned from the men of Sherwood that the Normans were using different tactics for controlling the North than they used in the South. In the South, where so many lords had died with King Harold at the Battle of Hastings Road, their main tactic was to replace the dead English lord with a Norman. Of course they would twist the law, and sometimes do murder, but for the most it was done by forcing the widows to marry Normans."
Risto spoke out, "Yes, I remember your explanation of this. They could contest the inheritance from the dead lord, and thus under the law, the crown would run the land for a year and a day while the courts decided the inheritance. A Norman trustee would be appointed to run the land for that year on behalf of the crown, and he would wed the widow by force, by public rape, and make babies by her. During the year, any other claimants would meet with accidents, especially any sons of the widow. At the end of the year the Norman trustee would have the strongest claim to the land under the law. This is correct, no?"
"Well explained, Risto. More simply put than Raynar ever explained it," commented Gregos.
"Yes, well, in the North we countered the Dead and Wed tactic by making the Norman lords disappear, or by hiding the English widows and their children. It was too little, too late to save the southern widows, but in the North the list of vanished Norman lords was a creeping disaster for the Normans. They had few enough lords willing to live in northern England without losing so many to shallow graves. Worse. It may take months before they realized that the Norman lord was missing and not in control of the land.
For most of 1067 King William was in Normandy or Flanders, so the odious Earl Odo, his half brother, was left in charge of England and also as the Chief Justicar of the court. He had lawyers searching English law for statutes that could be twisted to the Norman's purposes. The Normans started enforcing the ancient law of 'Murdrum', which was a heavy fine on a village for the secret killing of a Norman. The fine was huge, thirty one pounds; so a village usually forfeited and every man was forced into bond slavery.
Odo's lawyers were actually wasting their time. Putting a legal wrapper around an evil was not necessary when any Norman could do whatever he wanted with any Englishman, whether it was by law or not. Despite the Murdrum, in the North they were still losing too many men. The attacks were usually on the road far away from witnesses, but sometimes in an alehouse or a whorehouse. So the Normans changed tactics."
"Normans traveling in big groups?" Risto broke in.
"Not possible," Gregos corrected him. "There were not enough Normans in England to put large groups into every village in the North."
"You are both sort of right," Raynar continued. "They started building castles. Not the stone castles you see today, but wooden forts called baileys built next to or around mounds called mottes and surrounded by the ditch which was the source of the soil for the mound. Building such forts is fast and takes little skill, just a lot of labour.
First, you dig a round ditch and pile the diggings inside the circle to make an earthen wall. As soon as the ditch is complete you already have a fortified camp with an earthwork wall. Then you haul in heavy wooden poles and build a wooden wall called a pale on top of the earthen one. You now have a bailey fortress.
Then you start moving rubble, rock, fill, anything into the center or at one end of the bailey to build a mound. On top of the mound you build a wooden tower. Sometimes there is another wall around the tower. The Normans could hold these forts with very few men. From them, large groups could go out and raid the surround villages, and bring the villages under control one at a time. At the end of each day, they would return to the fort and sleep in safety."
"I have seen these forts along the border of France," said Gregos. "The motte is very steep, too steep for horses or for heavily armoured men to climb. In France, though, they build it on an existing hill rather than move all that earth."
"The same here, Gregos. Many were built on the sites of Roman forts. A good location with lots of rubble."
"I knew it," said Risto, "groups large enough that the village men would be stupid to put up a fight. The Normans could take what they wanted without opposition. A land lord can live safely in his fort. He does not have to live on the land to run it."
"Or to ruin it," said Raynar, "they took what they wanted and left the village hungry and without strong hands or strong animals."
"Without strong hands, then they killed them?" Gregos asked.
"They killed any man that resisted, which usually meant any man with armour. The Normans were building forts everywhere and they needed the healthy and the strong to dig and carry. It takes many backs to build a motte and a bailey in a hurry.
They learned quickly not to anger the town where the fort was built, or the villages close by. Instead, they would raid villages about a half day's march from the fort. They would return from the raid with any draft animals, and any healthy men for building the fort. They would also bring along any healthy women, you know, for the Norman whorehouse. Oh, and they took every horse they could find, whether healthy or not."
Risto whistled. "Tell me of the Norman whorehouses. They must have been big, and the women must have been almost free."
"Yes, big and almost free. Close to every Norman fort there was a whorehouse, so the Norman men did not have to risk the local alehouses. They spent most of their pay there, with the profits going back to their lord for the next month's pay. The women were given nothing but room and board and clothing and, of course, constant company."
"And they took all the horses so that they could increase their range," observed Gregos.
"Not just to increase their range," replied Raynar, "but to deny the horses to English rebels, you know, like me, and Hereward and our brotherhood. The Normans would not risk their costly battle horses against our bowmen, so they needed other mounts for every day riding.
And not just the knights were mounted. They wanted every one of their warriors mounted, so that they could move further than us and faster than us. Instead of having to hide just the rich widows, we were forced to hide the horses as well, and sometimes entire villages of people.
It was a plan that was already well proven in Normandy and in the long suffering counties around Normandy. And it worked in England too, eventually, once they had forts built across the land. With enough forts they never had to camp in the open. All we bowmen could do was to slow the spread of the Norman curse.
A curse on the Bishops that chose the lad Edgar as king after Harold was killed. If they had chosen Earl Edwin, we would have pushed William into the sea in the winter of '66.
Anyway, the next time I saw Sherwood Forest I was guiding the northern Earls to Chester to meet with the Princes of Wales."
* * * * *
* * * * *
The Hoodsman - Frisians of the Fens by Skye Smith Copyright
2010-13