The Archer's Castle: Exciting medieval novel and historical fiction about an English archer, knights templar, and the crusades during the middle ages in England in feudal times before Thomas Cromwell (9 page)

       All the men except the rowing sailors and the boys walk on the footpath along the river.  We’re quite a crowd – several hundred men - and a ferocious looking lot we are with our beards and weapons.  We meet some walkers on the way and they run for it.  We also meet some monks going from Bodmin to another monastery.  They promise to pray for us in exchange for some of the bread and cheese we are carrying.

       To my surprise we get quite far up the river and can even see the castle in the distance in front of us and off to our right.  But we’re blocked when the river widens and the water spreads out over a sandbar.  Hard shoveling and scrabbling at the ground with sticks and hands cuts a little groove so we get on through with our “cargo.”  We are able to another mile or so and that’s it.  We can go no farther.  Empty we can go further towards the castle, and perhaps all the way; but this is as far as we can go with cargo even if the rowers get out and wade.  

       We’ve gone as far as we can go because we’ve reached a wide patch of rocks with the water flowing over it just inches deep.  We might get even closer if we remove the rocks but it’s getting too cold to do that now – and we have other more important priorities such as training our archers and men at arms and providing them with shelter for the coming winter.

        All in all I’m well satisfied.  Now we know what we know about the Fowey.  So I keep going towards Restormel with the men and Harold and his sailors begin floating back to our galleys to load our coin chests and other cargos bound for Restormel.   They’ll begin rowing them upriver immediately and men from the castle will come down to where they are unloaded and carry them the last few miles.

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       Thomas is absolutely thrilled when he hears we are in sight.  He mounts a horse and gallops down to the river to meet us.  He is particularly pleased to see George and meet the new boys. 

       “Enough for a proper school” is how he puts it.

       Our mood is upbeat even though dark clouds are over us and a chill wind blows as we walk to castle and talk along the way.  Thomas’ tales of the clerics and the tin miners and coiners are quite interesting.  He’s right that we need to know more about them, much more. 

      
Coiners eh?  I wonder how they do it. 

       And he’s also right when he says that his schooling of George and the boys will have to wait because he needs to go to London to carry petitions and gifts to Prince John and the Papal Legate.  He’s concerned because another version of what happened to the dearly departed Earl may have already reached Prince John and his councilors.

       We want Prince John to know of the Earl died fighting to seize property from a widow to sell to help ransom Richard so he can displace John.  Our hope, of course, is that John will see us as allies in his battle to hold England and confirm our possession of the Earl’s lands and castle.  And, of course, we also hope he’ll follow Richard’s practice of selling titles and lands to raise money. 

      
In other words, we hope to do the usual with the nobility and bribe him out of a title.

                              Chapter Six

       Early the next morning Thomas leaves for London to see Prince John and the Papal Legate.  He takes two dozen of our best archers and swordsmen with him “just in case.”  The chests of paste are known to be valuable and London’s merchants and the moneylenders who serve them are well known to be thieves when large amounts of coins are at stake.

       Thomas’ plan is to go down the Fowey and take whichever galley or cog Harold suggests will be the safest in the dangerous early winter waters of the channel.  And that’s exactly what he does.  He and his men sail in the cog loaded with the wooden chests the apothecaries want to buy.

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       It is early November and the London air is thick with smoke when the storm tossed cog carrying me and my seasick men finally ties up at a Southampton dock.  William Sailor and the cog will wait at the dock while I hire a coach to carry me and three of my steadiest men to meet the London apothecaries.  We’re all wearing chain mail under our tunics and carrying swords.

       Not to put too fine a point on it but the apothecary is absolutely astonished when I enter his shop, hold out my ring to be kissed, and announce I have one hundred and sixty five chests of “the soldiers friend” flower paste in the hold of a cog tied up at Southampton for the unbelievably low price of two hundred silver coins per chest. 
We’re holding back twenty chests for ourselves.

            “You really have that many chests?  My God.  Is it safe?  Is it guarded?”  And then, he cautions me, that he and his friends will need time to raise the money to buy so many chests.  He’ll know more, he assures me, if a few hours.  Then he plies me with questions as to how we got it and where the cog is docked.

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       It’s a dismal day and the cobblestones are slick in the thick smoky fog as our apothecary walks us to an inn and I buy a share of two rooms – one for me and one for my men.  I’m hungry and I’ve got time so I order some chops and ale from the inn keeper and settle in to wait. 
I’m ravenous and thirsty after so much barfing at sea.

      
But then I get to worrying.  Somehow I don’t trust the apothecary.  He asked too many questions.  So after I finish eating and pissing I hire a coach and send one of my men to tell William the cog’s sergeant captain to beware of armed robbers and anchor away from the dock.  “And don’t let your men go ashore except two or three at a time in the dinghy.”

      In the morning I wake up scratching after a nice sleep and a lot of bug bites in a bed I share with a couple of Yorkshire merchants.  Everything is okay until I stand up and bang my head on the low ceiling beam.  And then a delegation from the apothecaries’ guild shows up and tries to negotiate a lower price while I’m still feeling poorly from last night’s ale. 

       I’m sorry, I explain over my shoulder to the anxious apothecaries as I piss in the alley next to the inn.  “Lord William authorized me to sell the cargo for two hundred silver coins per chest.  I cannot sell for a single pence less.”

      They grudgingly agree – and then a second problem arises.  They don’t trust me any more than I trust them.  We’re both afraid of being cheated or robbed. 

      
You’d think they’d believe a bishop, wouldn’t you?  But they don’t – probably had too many dealings with them don’t you know.

       Finally we agree on how to proceed - the guild members will come to the dock on horse carts and then come aboard one at a time with their coins.  When each man leaves with his chests the next man will come aboard.  I accept because it sounds safe and I think they really want to buy the chests. 

       We meet on the dock the next morning.  A long line of horse carts arrives with apothecaries and their coins just as our cog is tying up to the dock with our chests of paste. 

       The exchange process takes several hours and turns out to have more value than just the coins we receive - it gives me a chance to talk with the apothecaries who are waiting for their turn to buy chests.  They are a learned group and they have useful information about their upper class customers and the king’s tax collectors - very useful information indeed.

       It seems both the absent Richard and Prince John are operating kingly courts and each is claiming precedence over the other in terms of receiving the kingdom’s revenues.  Richard’s court is run by the man who is his chancellor and supposed to be ruling in his absence, William Longchamp.  Longchamp and his men are trying to raise money to pay Richard’s ransom.  John and his men, on the other hand, are trying to prevent Longchamp from ransoming Richard so they can continue in power. 

      
It’s hard to believe but one of the apothecaries told me the opportunity to enrich one’s self as the chancellor of the realm is such that Longchamp paid three thousand pounds for the right to be Richard’s chancellor and represent his interests while he’s away on his crusade.

       Who is really in control of the kingdom is all quite confusing and no one is more confused than the head of the apothecaries’ guild.  He doesn’t know what to do.  Last week the guild received a demand for the immediate payment of five years of taxes from Chancellor Longchamp to help fund Richard’s ransom – and then it received a visit a few days later from a keeper of Prince John’s wardrobe warning them not to pay it because Richard is dead and the money belongs to Prince John who wants it paid directly to him. 
A keeper of his wardrobe?

      
“What pray tell is a Keeper of his wardrobe?”

       What the guild master tells me is quite interesting.  Apparently a king’s wardrobe is where he stashes his tax collections and the rents from his lands.  It lets him fund his wars and diplomatic initiatives without having to go to Parliament and ask for permission or new taxes.  The men who gather up the taxes and rents and guard the wardrobe where they are stored are the “keepers of the Wardrobe.”  Being a keeper is a very lucrative position as you might imagine because so much treasure and coins pass through your hands.

       What I also learn is that John and the keepers of his wardrobe are embroiled in a great argument with Richard’s Chancellor.  It seems Prince John’s wardrobe keepers are constantly taking the taxes and revenues that are being collected.  The Chancellor is not happy – he says they belong to the king and should be going into the king’s wardrobe, the one he controls.  

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The exchange of money for our flower paste goes well.  And any thought the apothecaries might have entertained about sending thieves to seize the chests evaporates when the cog returns to the dock and they see all of our armed men on its deck. 

        It takes more than an hour but we finally finish and the coins are safely stowed away in the cog’s hold.  Then I hail a horse cart for a ride through London’s smoky and foul smelling streets to Prince John’s court.  It is in one of the towers surrounding London. 

       When I get there I piss once again against the side of the building, give the lice on my balls a good scratch, and then spend almost an hour talking to the Head Keeper of Prince John’s “wardrobe.”  He is mightily impressed that Lord William supports Prince John and prevented one of Richard’s supporters from stealing a poor widow’s castle so he could sell it to raise ransom money.  He is even more impressed when I explain the financial benefits to himself and Prince John if William keeps the castle and replaces the late Earl.

       How do I get in to see him?  All it takes is pushing my way through the crowd of petitioners at the door and slipping a pouch of silver and copper coins (
mostly coppers with a couple of silvers on top
) to one of John’s minor “wardrobe keepers” who is keeping them out.  He bows me in.

       I did what I did because the apothecaries told me that Prince John’s “wardrobe” is like that of Richard’s and our previous kings.  It contains his clothes, armor, and treasures.  He keeps everything separate so it is not under the control of Parliament but rather under the control of the “keepers” of his wardrobe
.

       He keeps his coins in a wardrobe.  Isn’t that something?  I’d never heard of such a thing.

      Initially the Head Keeper of John’s wardrobe, his name is Sir Wilfrid Blunt and his teeth must be rotting his breath is so foul, is quite suspicious.  He calms down a bit when I explain that Richard’s supporter, the late Earl of Cornwall tried to evict Lord Edmund’s widow so he could sell the manor to raise money for Richard’s ransom - and that Lord William is a supporter of Prince John’s and killed the treasonous Earl to save the woman and help prevent the ransom. 

      
The damn fool; if he hadn’t been so belligerent we might have bought Trematon ourselves instead of killing him.
 

      Sir Wilfrid likes my explanation but he is still suspicious.  Why, he wants to know, is Lord William so opposed to Richard and so in favor of Prince John?

       Well, of course, I can’t tell him that we never had a chance to buy Trematon or we probably would have done, can I?  Instead I explain about surrender of Acre.  Richard killing heathen Saracens doesn’t bother Lord William one whit I assure Sir Wilfrid; Richard breaking his word and slaughtering the Saracens after he promises he will let them go if they surrender bothers Lord William considerably. 

       “Because it will make it harder for us to win back Jerusalem if the Saracens feel they cannot safely surrender to honorable gentlemen such as your good self and Lord William.”

       At that point Sir Wilfrid begins giving me a sales pitch like some of the horse traders in the Damascus market - telling me that King Richard is probably dead and that it is the French who are promoting the so-called ransom so Prince John won’t have money to pay mercenaries to fight them.  And other ox shit things like that.  

       I, of course, assure Sir Wilfrid that he is exactly right and those are exactly the reasons why Lord William greatly supports Prince John’s efforts to remain in control of the English throne. 

      “Prince John has to remain in control of England, you know, so he can raise money to fight the horrible French to regain the lands Richard abandoned.” 
Of course Sir Wilfrid knows that.  He just told it to me himself a few seconds ago.