Philip did not prevent clever Englishmen from flocking there to take part in the intellectual flowering of the city. My fictional character, the malodorous Master Fulk, is partly based on a famous English teacher called Adam du Petit- Pont who lived and taught his students on the smaller bridge over the Seine to the south of the Ile de la Cite.
The plot twist at the end of the second part of the book, when Alan apparently gets stabbed in the heart and lives is, I’m reliably informed, quite possible medically. One person in ten thousand — so 700,000 people alive in the world at the moment — is believed to have the condition called situs inversus viscerum, in which their heart and other organs are on the wrong side of the body. However, to be fair, in medieval times Alan would have been extraordinarily lucky to survive that strike as it might well have severed one or many crucial blood vessels in that part of his chest, and, failing that, the risk of fatal infection would have been high: mercifully, Reuben, with his near-miraculous medical skills, was at hand to save his life.
Paris was not the only hive of building activity in northern France: Chateau-Gaillard, the saucy castle, was another extraordinarily energetic feat of construction that took place during this period. It was completed in just two years (1196–1198) and may have cost as much as?20,000 — a staggering sum for the time. In comparison, Dover Castle, which was built between 1179 and 1191 — taking more than a decade to build — cost?7,000. King Richard clearly loved his ‘fair’ castle in Normandy, referring to it as his ‘one-year-old daughter’ on one occasion and remarking that he could defend its walls if they were made of butter.
My descriptions of his campaigns against the occupied part of the duchy are reasonably accurate, although much simplified: Prince John presided over the capture of Milly, and William the Marshal was the first man over the wall after the initial attack faltered. That ageing warrior knocked out the constable of the castle and then sat on his unconscious body to rest his weary limbs. Or, perhaps, to make sure that no one else claimed him as a valuable prisoner of war.
The battle of Gisors (27 September 1198) took place much as I have described it, except that William the Marshal’s charge is my own invention. In fact, some scholars think the Earl of Striguil was not present at the battle at all. Richard, while out scouting with a small group of knights, came across a large French army, some three hundred knights and a similar number of men-at-arms and militia spread out in the line of march, which was advancing north-west towards Courcelles. The Lionheart, with characteristic decisiveness, immediately attacked the French, despite being massively outnumbered, and put them to flight. Richard is said to have used ‘God and my right!’ (Dieu et mon droit), a public denial of his fealty to King Philip, as his battle cry at Gisors, which subsequently became the motto of the British Monarchy. The collapse of the bridge over the River Epte was a notable feature of the battle, and Philip was mocked by his enemies afterwards for being ‘forced to take a drink from the river’. Many prisoners were taken after the battle — Mercadier himself took thirty knights prisoner — and such was the hatred between the two sides at this point in the war that a good many atrocities were committed on the POWs, including blinding. The historian John Gillingham writes in his definitive book on the subject, Richard I: ‘It may be that Howden’s [a contemporary chronicler] comments on the war of 1198, that it was waged more fiercely than ever, with Philip blinding prisoners and Richard, unwillingly, retaliating in kind, applies to the aftermath of the French King’s dip in the river Epte.’
I have no direct evidence that Mercadier did actually blind any of his knightly prisoners after Gisors, but it might have been in keeping with his character — or rather the way his character was perceived by the chroniclers of the day, who usually depict him as a merciless villain. The frying-pan-wielding crossbowman who fatally wounded the King at Chalus-Chabrol, named variously as Bertrand de Gurdon, Peter Basil and Dudo in different accounts of the siege, was said to have been brought to Richard’s deathbed after the castle had fallen. And the Lionheart, knowing he was doomed, repented of his sins and forgave the crossbowman and ordered that he be set free. However, once outside the royal pavilion, Mercadier had the unfortunate man taken up by his men, flayed alive and then hanged.
In my portrayal of the mercenary captain, I may, like the chroniclers of old, be doing him a disservice — and if so, I apologize to his ghost, and to his descendants: he was certainly an effective soldier, much feared by the enemies of his lord, and a man who carried out the brutal tactics of the day with a ruthless efficiency. It is always a mistake to judge the actions of people in the past by the moral standards of the present: in the twenty-first century, Mercadier would doubtless be viewed as a war criminal — but then so too would Richard the Lionheart.
