To the River (14 page)

The document the barons produced, the Provisions of Oxford, was the first real attempt to establish a national constitution. It set out rules for a council of barons and for fair and regular courts, as well as attempting to reduce corruption among the nobility and clergy. More importantly, it tried to limit the spending and legislative powers of the king, and to banish the foreign advisers on whose influence he depended. The barons presented the Provisions to Henry in full armour. The message was unequivocal: swear to uphold them or risk civil war. And the king, coward that he was, took up the quill and signed.

This sounds like a place to end a story, and so it might have proved had the king been either honest or wise. Since he was neither, dissent rumbled on. The business of establishing the Provisions across the country foundered, and for the next few years the majority of the barons drifted uneasily between the goal of reform and loyalty to the king, while Simon himself spent much of the time in France. Matters came to a head in 1263. The armies of both sides roamed the country, seizing land and raising funds by extortion and violence. According to the royalist chronicler William of Rishanger, the savagery of the rebels was such that the year:

. . . trembled with the horrors of war; and as every one strove to defend his castles, they ravaged the whole neighbourhood, laying waste the fields, carrying off the cattle, and sparing neither churches nor cemeteries. Moreover, the houses of the poor rustics were rummaged and plundered, even to the straw of the beds.

As for the royals, Prince Edward gained entrance to the treasury at Temple one day at dusk and under the pretext of wishing to view his mother’s jewels stole up to £1,000 from the coffers there, using crowbars to crack the chests. A few weeks later, the Londoners pelted Queen Eleanor with eggs and stones as she attempted to flee for Windsor by boat, an incident that would have significant consequences the following summer.

At the end of the year, there was a last-ditch attempt at peace. The two sides agreed to turn for arbitration to Louis IX, king of France, and both swore to uphold his verdict. The Mise of Amiens was announced in January 1264, and turned out to be almost entirely in favour of the king. It was not what the barons expected. Despite their promises, they refused to commit to a document that in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost swore to
annul and make void the Oxford Statutes
. The only avenue left was to make war upon the king.

It is at this point that the story begins to approach the Ouse. On 6 May 1264, the Montfortian army left London for Fletching, the village where I’d spent Midsummer Eve. If they hoped to defeat the royalists, it would have to be in the south, where their own support was strongest. When news of the move reached Henry, who was billeted then at Battle Abbey, he turned at once for Lewes and the castle of his ally John de Warenne, a royalist so staunch that he’d signed the Provisions of Oxford after even the king himself. Both armies came up through the woods of the Weald, Henry from the east and Simon from the north, and the king lost his cook Thomas to the canny forest-bred archers, who made travel so dangerous for the royalist troops that they were forced to ride in full armour. At Lewes they were billeted in the great Cluniac priory on the edge of the town, separated from the castle by a tribu-tary of the Ouse called the Winterbourne. Behind the priory lands was the marsh that only a long time later became the fertile grazing land of the Brooks; in the thirteenth century it must have a sinister, shifting place, the province of waterfowl and eels rather than rabbits and sheep.

There was one final round of bargaining before the battle began. On 12 May, Simon and his troops, who’d by now passed through the woods to a valley beneath Mount Harry, a few miles shy of Lewes, sent two parties of bishops to negotiate with the king. The first asked for the Provisions to be reaffirmed; the second promised what amounted to a sweetener of some £30,000 to compensate for damage suffered during the preceding months. This was particularly aimed at the king’s irascible brother, Richard of Cornwall, whose manor at Isleworth had been destroyed, his orchards chopped down and his expensive new fishpond drained by a mob of London rebels. The proposals were rejected, and Prince Edward – later Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, who would brutalise the north and father Edward II, the doomed homosexual king – sent back the message that the Montfortians ‘shall have no peace whatsoever, unless they put halters round their necks and surrender themselves for us to hang them up or drag them down, as we please’.

A last rush of letters, equally defiant, was exchanged the following day, by which time de Montfort had crept a little further south, to what’s been calculated by the historian David Carpenter to be the land between Offham and Hamsey. I could see the hills above their camp from where I stood, furred with trees, a white scar showing the place where some of the soldiers’ corpses were later buried. Before dawn on 14 May the rebel army rose and climbed into the Downs, slogging up Blackcap and working their way south until they reached the high point of land that overlooked Lewes. There they made their confessions and donned the white crosses that crusaders wore above their soldiers’ mail. Then the troops assembled into three blocks, a left, a right and a centre, with a reserve wing under the command of de Montfort set a little higher up, where the progress of the battle could be observed.

In the town below, the king and his troops were woken by a returning foraging party out hunting for hay, who’d seen the baronial army massing on the hill. The story most often told is that they came in great disorder, after a night of women and wine, with Edward ahead and the king and his brother Richard lagging behind, though the fact that a document was signed by all three that morning makes this tale seem unlikely. Either way, Edward didn’t ride with the main army, who came out under the famous red dragon standard that was supposed to put fear into men, perhaps because, by some contrivance, its tongue was perpetually in motion. Instead, his division came up from the castle in the company of deWarenne, climbing up through what’s now the Wallands estate to come face to face with the third division of the baronial army. Though this wing was fronted by knights on horses, it was made up largely of untrained London foot soldiers: ‘bran-dealers, soap boilers, and clowns’, as one royalist chronicler dismissively described them.

It was a rout. Edward’s men smashed straight into the enemy, taking several nobles prisoner and putting the Londoners – poorly armed and in at best haphazard armour – to flight. The matter of his mother’s undignified egging was evidently still embittering him, for here he made a great tactical error. Having scattered the Londoners, he gave chase, and so it is that we come to the first bodies in the Ouse, for the chronicle of Guisborough claims sixty knights were drowned as they tried to cross the river and escape pursuit. According to the least reliable of sources the chase went all the way to Croydon, though since it is a distance that today takes almost an hour by train it seems unlikely that a man, no matter how frightened, would have run so far.

In the absence of Edward, Henry and Richard rode up from the priory towards where the prison now stands. There they met the right and centre of the Montfortian army plunging down from the summit and there between the hours of prime and noon they were defeated, though Simon’s army was smaller and the left had been scattered or fled. It’s hard to know how many were killed in the fighting, by mace or sword or lance. The estimate given in the chronicle of the monks of Lewes is two thousand, and judging by the number of skeletons that have subsequently been found in mass graves hereabouts it seems a reasonable guess. Few knights would have been among their number, for knights more commonly surrendered and were taken hostage, to be bartered back by their families. As for the royals, King Henry had two horses killed beneath him and took refuge in the priory, accompanied by his servants, while poor Richard of Cornwall, who had recently gained the right to be called King of the Romans, had to make do with barricading himself in a windmill.
Come out, you bad miller
, the people called, and at dusk he did, and was led away by his enemies, a sorry comedown for the
King of the Romans, always August
, as he liked to sign himself.

By the time Edward returned the fighting was done and the town choked with fleeing soldiers. According to the chronicle of Lanercost Abbey, which was supposedly based on an eyewitness report, the soldiers fled out of Lewes by way of the Ouse, crossing the bridge at Cliffe that was then the way out to the east. There:

. . . the mixed crowd of fugitives and pursuers became so great, that many in their anxiety to escape, leaped into the river, whilst others fled confusedly into the adjoining marshes, then a resort for sea fowl. Numbers were drowned and others suffocated in the pits of mud, while from the swampy nature of the ground, many knights who perished there, were discovered, after the battle, still sitting on their horses in complete armour, and with drawn swords in their lifeless hands. Quantities of arms were found in this quarter for many years afterwards.

The coincidence of men and horses dying simultaneously in the mud, without even a moment to lower their sword-arms, has been much remarked upon by later, less credulous writers, though many accounts agree that a mass of bodies and armour was later dredged from the water.

Simon might have won the battle, but he’d yet to capture the king, who was by this time barricaded in the priory with his son. For a while he tried to burn them out, using
spryngelles of fyre
– pellets of tow dipped in bitumen, naphtha and sulphur – to set alight the wooden houses of the town. Lewes is claustrophobic even now, with narrow twittens dropping away from the high street, and it must that night have been a place of horror, strewn with the bodies of dead and dying men and horses, the church of the priory lit up in flames, so that the author of the chronicle of Oxenede was moved to write: ‘It was there seen that the life of man was as the grasses of heaven; a great multitude, unknown to me, was slain.’ But most of the dead would have been the common foot soldiers, the
bran-dealers, soap boilers and clowns
, who had borne the brunt of a battle that would barely change their lot.

In the end, by threatening the execution of three royalist prisoners, Simon de Montfort won the king’s surrender and an agreement to uphold the Provisions, subject to whatever amendment was required. He became the
de facto
ruler of England, though support rapidly ebbed away from the baronial cause, not helped by Simon’s habit of helping himself to the country’s treasures. For a year Longshanks and Henry were held as hostages, though they were neither manacled nor locked in a tower. By May 1265, the inevitable had occurred. Edward escaped, an army was raised and in August, after a punishing series of sorties, the great set-piece battle of Lewes was reprised at Evesham, with entirely different results. The baronial army was by then small and exhausted; it no longer had the upper hand. On seeing Edward’s troops ride towards him, Simon is said to have cried out, with characteristic arrogance: ‘By the arm of St James, they come on well. They learned that order from me.’ A little later, and perhaps more quietly, he added: ‘God take our souls, for they will have our bodies.’

The battle that followed was savage and brief, conducted on a hill near the river Avon during a sudden thunderstorm. Henry III was on the field, still a prisoner and dressed in Montfortian armour. More than one contemporary source describes him wandering between the soldiers in the pouring rain, crying out at intervals, ‘I am Henry of Winchester your king, do not kill me,’ and ‘I am too old to fight,’ until he was recognised and removed by royalists from the fray. As for Simon, his horse was killed beneath him and his armour dragged from his body. Then he was stabbed to death, and his body mutilated, though a knight was never usually killed in cold blood.

There is a strange drawing now in the British Museum that shows some of what took place. Simon’s head, his hands, his feet and his genitals were lopped off. In the drawing they lie by his side, his head topped with curls, his neck gushing blood. His balls – but this the picture doesn’t show – were draped across the bridge of his nose and stuffed into his mouth, and this desecrated relic was wrapped in a cloth and sent to the wife of Roger Mortimore, a royalist knight, who is said to have received it as she prayed in church.

The sea trout were no longer visible. The water was unpitted now; it caught the sky lightly and tossed it back. I’d begun to feel sick as I stood by the pool, and for the rest of the day I felt that I’d taken in some poison, though whether it had seeped from the dark water or fallen with the sun I couldn’t tell. It was time to get going. I crossed the road by Pikes Cottage and ducked through a gap in the hedge. My skin had dried as if it had been varnished, and all the cuts on my legs and wrists were smarting. It had been very hot, this proto-summer; perhaps the concentration of phosphates in that little stream had been too strong. From the road the path climbed up above the river, curving through dusty fields and across the dry, chalk-crusted beds of streams. I passed through a field of maize and one of wheat. Mayweed grew between the stones, and as I walked I kicked up circlets of dust from the dead ground. There was not a soul in sight, and in the distance I could make out Mount Harry and beside it the glaring white mark of the chalkpit at Offham, where skeletons of the fleeing Londoners had been found buried in groups of four or five.

The past seemed to have fallen across the landscape like a body that though voiceless somehow still leaked or bled its language without pause. The horror of what had happened here had seeped into the soil as rain will do, waiting in the hidden interstitial spaces like groundwater before a flood. ‘The past only comes back,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her unfinished memoir, ‘when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.’ I wondered if the river itself was holding it, for some things are drawn to water and behave differently when they are near it. I’ve watched mist gather on the surface of a stream where there is none elsewhere, and seen those little circling courts of flies that dance all evening above a single kink in a current. Voices travel further by water too, as if the air’s been pulled so taut it carries impressions that would elsewhere be too subtle to perceive.