A ripple of unrest went around the hall and the baron held up his palms to quell it.
‘I do not suggest King Henry has knowledge of this. There are men high in his court who could broker a deal, who could arrange treason without the king’s knowledge.’ The noise grew to a clamour and the baron raised his voice over them. ‘Well, what else would you call it but treason, when English landowners have their property stolen out from under them? I bought the rights to my holding in good faith, gentlemen. I pay my tithe to the king’s men each year. Half of you here were soldiers with the good sense to use your bounties to buy land and sheep. Our land, gentlemen! Will you meekly hand your deeds to some poxed French soldier? Land and property you have sweated and bled for a hundred times over?’
A roar of anger was the response and Thomas looked thoughtfully around him. Strange knew the right strings to pull, but the truth was a little more complex. It was King Henry who truly owned the land, from the smallest hamlet in England and Wales, to half of France. His earls and barons administered vast reaches, collecting tithes and taxes in return for providing the king with soldiers. The truth might sit like a stone in the throats of all the men there, but when the bluster was stripped away, they were all tenants of the king.
Thomas rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling weary. He played no part in the politics of Maine, preferring to spend his time on his holding and returning to town only for the markets and supplies. He’d heard about the clerks infesting every market town with their warnings and threats of eviction. Like the others, Thomas felt a slow-burning anger at lords who had apparently betrayed him while he worked for his family. He’d heard the rumours from Anjou weeks before, but it seemed they’d all been confirmed.
‘They could be here by Christmas, gentlemen,’ Baron Strange said as the noise began to ease. ‘If it’s true that the price of this truce was Anjou and Maine, we’ll be joining the evicted families on the road by the end of the year.’ He cracked his knuckles viciously, as if he wished for a throat to hold and crush between his hands. ‘Either we walk away from everything we have built here, or we defend it. I will tell you all, in this place, I will defend my land. I have …’
He had to stop as a bellow of agreement came from the farmers and landowners on the benches.
‘I have sixty-eight family men working my fields: old soldiers who will stand with me. I can add another two dozen horsemen and I have the coin to send for more from English Normandy. If you pool your gold with mine, it may be we can hire men-at-arms to come south and stand with us.’
That idea brought a hush to the crowd, as they considered giving up their hard-earned gold for a cause that might already be lost.
Thomas rose to his feet and Baron Strange frowned at him.
‘You’ll speak, Woodchurch? I thought you held yourself apart from the rest of us?’
‘I have a holding, baron, same as you. It’s my right to speak.’
He wondered how the baron would react when he discovered he had six fewer men-at-arms than he thought. Not for the first time, Thomas regretted his action earlier that day.
With ill grace, Strange gestured stiffly and Thomas stepped forward and turned to face them. For all his love of solitude, he had come to know the English, Welsh and Scots in that hall and more than a few called a greeting or a welcome.
‘Thank you,’ Thomas said. ‘Now then. I’ve heard more rumours in the last week than in the year before it and I need to know the solid truth of them. If the French are pushing north this year, where is our army to smack their heads and send them home? This talk of a truce is just wind. Why isn’t York here, or Somerset, or Suffolk? We have three high-ranking nobles in France who can send men into a battle line and I don’t see hide nor hair of any of them. Have we sent messengers into Normandy? Anyone?’
‘I have,’ Strange replied for them. His mouth twisted in irritation at the memory. ‘I’ve heard nothing from the Duke of York, no word at all. They’ve abandoned us to fend for ourselves.’
He would have gone on, but Thomas spoke again, his deep, slow voice rolling over the group. He’d already made his decision. It galled him to support the baron, but there was no choice, not for him. Everything he had was in his land. If he abandoned his holding, he and his family would be reduced to begging on the streets of Portsmouth or London.
‘I’ll send my girls back to England, while we take a measure of the trouble to come. I suggest you all do the same, if you have family there still. Even if you don’t, you have funds enough to put them up in inns, in Normandy or England. We can’t stay clear-headed with women to protect.’
‘You’ll join me then?’ Baron Strange asked. ‘You’ll put aside our differences and stand with me?’
‘Jesus, baron, I was going to ask you to stand with me,’ Thomas replied, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth. The men in the room laughed and the baron flushed. ‘Either way, I won’t give up my farm, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll add my gold to yours to hire soldiers, but we’ll need a veteran officer or two as well. Better still would be to get a battle-seasoned lord to lend his name to our little rebellion.’
The word stole away some of the humour in the room. Thomas looked around at them all, seeing solid farmers with rough, red hands from work.
‘That’s all it will be, if the French army comes hammering on our doors. Oh, I’ve seen Englishmen rout larger French forces. I’ve seen the backs of a few French soldiers running away from me in my time.’ He paused for a ripple of laughter to die down. ‘But we can’t hold the land with what we have. All we can do is make them pay a price for it.’
‘What?’ Baron Strange demanded incredulously. ‘You’d talk defeat before the fighting’s even begun?’
‘I talk as I see it,’ Thomas said with a shrug. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ll still stand and send my arrows into them when they come. I’ll fight, even if I’m on my own. I don’t have any choices left but one, not the way I see it. But you know, I was an archer before I was a farmer — and an English archer at that. We don’t run just because the odds are against us.’ He paused in thought. ‘It might be that if we hold them, if we knock them back, the English lords will have to support us. I know one man who’ll tell me straight if we have a chance, if there’ll be help from the north. He has the ear of the king himself and he’ll tell us what we need to know.’
‘Who is it?’ Strange asked. He was accustomed to being the one with connections, or at least the claim of them. To hear Thomas Woodchurch talk of friends in high places was strangely unsettling to him.
‘You won’t know the name, baron, and he wouldn’t like me to use it. He and I fought side by side years ago. He’ll tell me true, for the debt he owes me.’
‘Keep your secrets then, Woodchurch. You’ll bring me news if you hear from him?’
‘I will. Give me a month at most. If I can’t reach him by then, it’s because he doesn’t want to be reached and we’re on our own.’
Baron Strange chewed at his lower lip while he listened. He didn’t like Thomas Woodchurch, not even a little. There was something in the way the man smiled whenever he heard his title that irked the baron like a cold key down his back. Yet he knew the man’s word was good.
‘I’ll send letters to those I know as well,’ the baron replied. ‘Any of you with friends in the army should do the same. We’ll come back here one month from today and we’ll know by then where we stand.’
Thomas felt a hand clap him on the shoulder and he looked round into the face of old Bernard, one of the few men there that he’d have called a friend.