‘Well, gentlemen,’ said the King. ‘It is quite clear what we must do: we must go north, to Nottingham, and dispossess this Murdac creature of my castle — and perhaps I shall hang him from the nearest gallows, too, just to please you, Locksley!’
Robin smiled again, and made the King a deep, graceful bow.
King Richard was clearly a happy man — after a year of humiliating and frustrating inactivity, he was back in the saddle with loyal companions at his side, and a bloody campaign to fight to restore his kingdom. More than anything in this world, our King loved a good fight, and his enthusiasm and confidence lifted our hearts. We rode out from Canterbury the next day, some four hundred souls: barons, knights, menat-arms, bishops, priests, royal servants, huntsmen, whores and hangers-on. The men were boasting of the great deeds they would do in battle and jesting crudely with each other. The whole column was in tearing high spirits, eager for a fight, and from time to time snatches of song would break out and spread down the lines of men, growing, blossoming like a forest fire until we were all bawling our hearts out in time with the stamp of marching boots. We were still badly outnumbered by Prince John’s forces, but we knew, you see, we knew in our very bones that we would be victorious when we reached Nottingham. After all, we had King Richard to lead us, and with the finest warrior in Christendom as our lord, who could possibly prevail against us?
The whole country seemed to realize this, too. As we made our way north from Canterbury, to Rochester, then London for a brief stop of one day, and on again to Bury St Edmunds, we were joined by a constant stream of men-at-arms: country knights rallying to the royal standard, tough young lads looking for a bit of adventure, and canny barons, smelling Richard’s victory on the wind and wanting to renew their allegiance to him before his ultimate success.
At Huntingdon, we were met by William the Marshal and a hundred well-equipped men-at-arms from Pembroke. The Marshal’s brother had only recently died but William had chosen to forgo attending his funeral to meet us, just to demonstrate his loyalty to the King. It was a touching scene: this thick-set, grizzled veteran of scores of bloody contests embracing our thin, pale King. Both men were in chain-mail under their surcoats, but while William was clad from big toe to fingertip in heavy links, I saw that Richard was wearing only a much lighter, shorter, sleeveless mail coat, of the kind some men had worn in Outremer. It was easier to bear if you were weak, wounded or suffering from the sun’s oriental heat — but it was not as strong as the heavy chain-mail in deflecting a blow. And I wondered privately whether Richard, after his inactive year in captivity, was truly fit for a bruising battlefield.
By the time we made our camp outside Nottingham, pitching our tents in the deer park to the west of the castle, we were a thousand men strong — and our numbers were boosted by another four hundred when we linked up with Ranulph, Earl of Chester, who had been watching the castle from the high ground to its north, and David, Earl of Huntingdon. The latter had been sent by his father — the Scottish King, William the Lion — who was a great friend of Richard’s and determined to support him in the struggle against Prince John. David, who also happened to hold the English honour of Huntingdon, brought with him a powerful force of knights. And we were glad to have them.
At a meeting in his royal pavilion in the deer park, in a space packed with loud, eager, armoured men, Richard gave a rapid series of orders to his barons. The whole of Nottingham Castle was to be encircled by our troops immediately, this night. Now.
‘He wants it sewn up as tight as a mouse’s arse,’ said Little John to me after we had met in an alehouse in the eastern part of Nottingham town. Little John had been in command of Robin’s contingent of a hundred or so archers who had been left in the north, with the Earl of Chester’s men, to keep an eye on Ralph Murdac. ‘Nothing is to go in or out,’ said my giant blond friend, as we sat at a rough bench sharing a gallon of weak ale, a big bowl of watery turnip soup and half a loaf of stale rye bread.
I had been shocked when I rode into Nottingham that afternoon. A swathe of the town some hundred and fifty paces across, just to the east of the castle, had been completely destroyed. Streets that I had known well, indeed, that I had walked down just a few months ago, were gone, along with the shops and taverns, peasant hovels and workshops that had once lined them. All that remained now were smouldering ruins and piles of grey ash.
John told me how a force of two hundred knights and menat-arms had ridden out of Nottingham Castle under cover of darkness two nights before and, using ropes and the muscle power of their big destriers, they had pulled down all the buildings, tearing them quite literally apart. Then, without a thought for the ordinary men, women and children who might be trapped inside their dwellings or trying to salvage their meagre possessions or save their beasts, Murdac’s men had set fire to the wreckage of straw-thatched roofs and broken timber beams, tumbled beds and furniture. It was only by God’s grace and the hard work of Little John and his archers, who fought the fire all night, that the whole of Nottingham town had not burnt down. As it was, John’s blond eyebrows had been singed off, which gave him a slightly surprised look. And three of his archers had been badly roasted and would be unable to fight.
And the point of all this cruel and wanton destruction? To create an open space which would allow the crossbowmen on the eastern wall and in the big gatehouse of the outer bailey to see what they were shooting at, and to deny cover to an attacking enemy.
Cruel, it might have been, but it was also the wise, the clever thing to have done. As Robin had said, Sir Ralph Murdac was no fool.
Nottingham Castle’s fortifications followed the contours of the massive sandstone outcrop on which it was built. The castle proper — that is, the upper bailey, the great tower and the middle bailey — sat on the highest part of the outcrop, protected on its western and southern flanks by unscalable hundred-foot-high cliffs topped with thick twenty-foot-high stone walls. There was no way in from that direction.
Below this, and to the east and north of it, was the outer bailey: the largest, most open part of the castle, housing stables and workshops, as well as the new brewhouse, a cookhouse and a bakery. This outer area did not have the luxury of stone walls but, in truth, it did not need them, for it was ringed by a ditch and an earthen rampart, six foot high, on which was entrenched a heavy wooden palisade another twelve foot in height. And now it looked down on the town across a huge smouldering scar of empty space.
Standing in the ditch on the outside of the outer bailey walls, a man would have to jump — or fly — more than twenty foot up in the air to clear the defences. And while he was attempting that impossibility, he would be continually assailed by the crossbow bolts, spears, rocks and arrows of the defending men-at-arms. Even if the attacker managed to get over the twenty-foot-high defences, he could only be supported on the other side by any of his fellows who had managed the same incredible feat — and there would be few enough of them alive after charging through a blizzard of crossbow bolts across the hundred and fifty yards of scorched and emptied land on the castle’s eastern side.
King Richard had ridden once around the whole circuit of Nottingham Castle when he arrived that afternoon, the twenty-fourth day of March, by Tuck’s reckoning, eleven hundred and ninety-four years after the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The King was accompanied by a dozen knights and the royal standard, with its two golden lions on a red background, was proudly displayed for the benefit of the hundreds of enemy heads that peered at him over the battlements. Afterwards, at a meeting of his senior commanders in his pavilion in the deer park, Richard declared succinctly: ‘It’s the gatehouse. That is truly the only way in. We take that and we can flood the outer bailey with our men. With God’s help, and given a bit of battle chaos, we can follow them, get right in amongst them when they retreat, and take the barbican of the middle bailey next. If we take that, the castle is as good as ours. So, first we take the gatehouse.’