‘And what of that ill-born dog Mercadier? Surely you did not suffer him to live and prosper in peace?’
‘Oh, he certainly died,’ I said. ‘He did not prosper, and he died quite soon after the King.’
‘But how did he die, Grandpa? What were the circumstances of his death? Did you kill him in battle? Did you fight him in a duel? Did you kill the Master, too? The “man you cannot refuse”? And the Grail — what became of that? Did you ever find it? Was it really the blessed vessel that once held Our Saviour’s blood?’
‘Hush now, my boy,’ I said. ‘Too many questions for this time of night. All that passed after Richard’s death is a story for another day.’ And I dismissed him to his bed. But his questions stayed with me: my dead memories called to me silently from the dark corners of the hall, and in my half-waking dreams at dawn they danced through my mind. So perhaps my aching hand will, with rest, recover its suppleness in a few days, and perhaps I will pick up my quill once more and write one last tale of Robin and myself, of our friends and enemies, of Nur and Prince John, of Mercadier and the Master — and our quest for that most wondrous, tantalizing, blood-tainted object, the Holy Grail.
Historical Note
At my parents’ house the other day, I was sorting through some childhood possessions when I came across a slim, hardback book, written by Lawrence Du Garde Peach, illustrated by John Kenney and published in 1965 by Wills amp; Hepworth Ltd of Loughborough. On the cover is a tall, commanding medieval knight in a full suit of mail with a white crusader’s surcoat over the top. His domed helmet is adorned with a golden crown; a red shield is slung across his broad back; his left hand rests casually on the pommel of the scabbarded sword at his waist; he gazes into the distance at an unfolding but unseen battle. On the cover of the book are the words: Richard the Lion Heart — A Ladybird Book — An Adventure from History. Holding it in my hand, I experienced a great flood of half- forgotten happy memories. This little book, which I must have read some forty years ago is, I believe, responsible for my lifelong interest in Richard the Lionheart. In language suitable for a six-year-old child, it encapsulated his aristocratic arrogance, his love of battle and his generosity of spirit; and while I have done a good deal of grown-up reading about the subject since then, my mental image of Richard remains that of the imperious knight on the cover of that slim volume.
Most people are familiar, from novels, films and plays, with the highlights of Richard’s career — the warrior king who led the Third Crusade, and was then captured, imprisoned and held for ransom on his way home — but storytellers seldom focus on the last five years of his life. I think this is because, to modern eyes, the half-decade before his death in April 1199 was rather a confused period — it was a time of intermittent warfare against Philip of France, with few clear victories or defeats and very little glory. Bands of knights and mercenaries ravaged the lands from Boulogne to Bordeaux, thousands of peasants perished from hunger, towns were burned, castles were captured, retaken, destroyed, rebuilt — and there were frequent truces between the warring sides while everyone wielding a sword and wearing armour took a breath and planned their next move. And that is partly why I wanted to write about this chapter of history — I felt that few other novelists had explored it and I wanted to get across a sense of the destructiveness of medieval war, and the appalling impact it had on the landscape and on people’s livelihoods — as well as on the minds of the combatants. But I also discovered why this period of the Lionheart’s life is seldom written about: it is rather difficult to shape into a recognizably heroic narrative structure — it ends without any significant military triumphs and with King Richard’s almost random death at the hands of a nobody in a minor battle at an obscure castle. Such is real life; even great heroes sometimes die pointlessly.
At the time, or shortly afterwards, many of the chroniclers of the Lionheart’s exploits were also slightly bemused and deflated by his anticlimactic demise and various attempts were made to give the facts of his death more meaning. To the medieval mind, the lives of great men must have a pattern; they must demonstrate God’s purpose in some way, as chaotic chance was surely the work of the Devil. Accordingly, some historians of the day happily used their imagination when describing Richard’s end: they claimed that the Lionheart had been seeking a valuable treasure at Chateau Chalus-Chabrol, which had been discovered by the Viscount of Limoges, and which Richard wished to lay his hands on. This turned the hero’s death into a parable about greed — the mighty lion slain by an insignificant ant as a punishment for avarice.
However, I was quite delighted to discover this fantastic tale of a hidden treasure when I was researching King Richard’s death — even though it was unlikely to have any basis in fact: it made my job a little easier. I had been wanting to include the story of the Holy Grail — a hugely influential contemporary legend made popular by the trouvere Chretien de Troyes and others — as an element in my Robin Hood stories for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. And so, in my novel, my fictional heroes Robin and Alan persuade Richard to come south to punish Viscount Aimar with the lure of a wondrous treasure, the Holy Grail. The Grail storyline continues in the next book in this series — indeed, it is the main theme — and I will say more about that fabulous object then. But the point of this note is to help the reader understand which parts of my books are based on historical fact, and which parts are not. So, there was no Holy Grail at Chateau Chalus-Chabrol when Richard died there on 6 April 1199, and probably no hidden treasure either — but there are many other parts of my story that might sound equally incredible but which do happen to be true.
The episode with Alan at Verneuil at the beginning of the book is based on a real battle. The Castle of Verneuil was being besieged by King Philip with a huge army and, on Richard’s arrival in Normandy in May 1194, he sent a small contingent of men to break through the French lines and stiffen the resolve of the defenders. This they did, bravely holding off their attackers until King Philip and more than half his force suddenly departed to take revenge for the massacre of the civilians by Prince John at Evreux. Verneuil was saved, and when Richard arrived with his army a day or so later, he captured the King of France’s siege train from his fleeing enemies. Richard was so delighted by the successful defence of Verneuil that he kissed all the surviving defenders and rewarded them generously. History does not record what the King thought of the mocking chalk drawing on the front of the castle gate of a mace-bearing Philip — although that weapon was probably in his hands, not ‘springing from his loins’, which is an exercise of literary licence by me designed to make the insulting cartoon more comprehensible to modern eyes. Jokes don’t travel well over the centuries.
After Verneuil, on his way south to pacify Aquitaine, King Richard’s army terrified the citizens of Tours — who had been involved in disloyal negotiations with the French — into handing over a ‘gift’ of two thousand marks to appease the royal anger; but Robin’s involvement in the arrangement of this bribe is, of course, my own invention. The taking of Loches was a notable victory for Richard — the castle was widely seen as impregnable, but the Lionheart captured it in a single day (13 June 1194) in one fierce and prolonged assault. Outside Vendome, a couple of weeks later, Richard prepared for a pitched battle with Philip, but after one skirmish the French retreated towards Chateaudun; the Lionheart’s cavalry, in hot pursuit, caught up with the rearguard and captured their entire wagon train. The haul of booty was enormous, including much of Philip’s treasure and the royal archives, which provided the names of those of Richard’s knightly subjects who had made plans to defect to the enemy.
The Truce of Tillieres (23 July 1194) was the first of several accords that were signed during the period before Richard’s death. It was intended to last until 1 November 1195, and like all truces was based on the status quo — which meant that Alan’s fictional manor of Clermont-sur-Andelle would remain in the hands of its French usurpers. This brief window of peace made Alan’s visit to Paris possible, and the city was indeed in the midst of a building boom in the summer and autumn of 1194, as I have described. King Philip was busy surrounding Paris with a great defensive wall, which was at that time only half-completed, but which was meant to protect his capital from the depredations of Richard’s marauders. Bishop Maurice de Sully — a powerful but beloved prelate who had nothing to do with the Holy Grail or my fictional Master’s gangs of bandits, and who died at the Abbey of St Victor in 1196 — was building the magnificent Notre-Dame cathedral for the glory of God and the Virgin Mary. The cathedral, which was not completed until the middle of the thirteenth century, still summons pilgrims from the far corners of Christendom.
The Knights Templar were also busily engaged in the construction of a formidable new base to the north-east of the city. Incidentally, Sir Gilbert Horal, 12th Grand Master of the Knights Templar, did indeed fight against the Moors of Spain, and his personal device was a blue cross, but he never formed a separate sub-order of Templar knights dedicated to the Queen of Heaven. He was, though, as Sir Aymeric de St Maur (a real Anglo-Norman Templar) comments, genuinely in favour of making peace with the Muslims in the Holy Land.
Paris, then as now, was a magnet for students from all over Europe — and the war between Richard and
