The Wolf Cub by David Pilling

Author:David Pilling [Pilling, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 151475844X
Amazon: B010O5BFN6
Published: 2015-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

17.

The King had won his battle of wills against the Dauphin, but the citizens of Rouen proved harder to break. Inspired or intimidated by their hard-nosed captains, they put up fierce resistance.

Henry did all he could to starve and isolate the city. He set up camps at all the roads that to Rouen, cutting off any hope of relief by land. As at Caen, where we had seized the Abbaye de Saint-Étienne, he ordered Clarence to garrison the abbey at Mont-St-Katherine and mount cannon on the roof. The town of Pont de l’Arche, upstream from Rouen, was taken to prevent the French sending supplies by river. As an extra precaution Henry had chains thrown across the river, barring access to boats.

He deployed bands of Irishmen to patrol the nearest villages and sniff out French partisans. These bloodthirsty savages, armed with darts and javelins and great knives, were free to forage the land as they pleased, and slit the throat of any Frenchman (or woman) they found bearing arms. Their chief was the Earl of Kilmaine, a shaggy-bearded savage who wore furs and skins over his mail, more like the captain of a band of starving routiers than a high-born nobleman.

Kilmaine’s wild Irishmen did their work well, and there was no interruption to the vital flow of food and other supplies sent to us from England via Harfleur.

Meanwhile the people of Rouen began to starve. By mid-December the poorer citizens were said to be reduced to eating horseflesh, and then rats, dogs and cats after the horses ran out. Supplies of bread ran dangerously low, and food prices increased so rapidly the poor could not afford to eat, but had to beg or steal to stay alive.

“Meat and drink and other victuals,

In the city began to fail.

The bread was full-nigh gone,

And of flesh, save horse-saddle, they had none...”

I scrawled these lines while sat cross-legged on the frosted ground before my tent. A chaplain had given me some parchment and writing materials in exchange for a few pennies, and I had just eaten a good breakfast of salted bacon and rye bread, washed down with ale brewed in England.

Like many of our men, I was getting fat. We had done little for months on end save dice, drink, eat and argue, with some occasional excitement provided by sorties from the city. The French weren’t content to sit on their backsides and starve, and every so often a band of mounted soldiers would erupt out of the gates, to wreak as much havoc as possible before they withdrew.

It was after one such sortie, in which the French slew a number of the Duke of Gloucester’s men, that Henry showed a glimpse of impatience. Still reluctant to fire on the city, he ordered teams of workmen and engineers to undermine part of the western wall.

The miners worked under the shelter of timber mantlets, draped with animal hide to guard against them being set alight by fire arrows. My lord Clarence had his camp outside

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.