The Archers Lady

Introduction and cast of characters

This story is a continuation of two previous historical romance stories, the first a short Novell the other a novel, entitled "The Archer" and "The Archer's Apprentice".

Familiar characters, some are fictional (the real ones can easily be found online)

The year is 1125

Robert "Robin" Archer of Oaklea, was born in February 1103, now 22

Lady Elinor, born March 1103, also age 22

Sir William Archer, father of Robin, Sheriff of Bartonshire, born in Wales 1086, now 39

Alwen, half-sister of Robin and wife of Will Archer born 1091, now 34

Father Andrew, parish priest of Oaklea born 1060, now 65

Hugh Smith, one of the bastards of Oaklea, born November 1102, now 22

Count Gervaise the Short, Lady Elinor's husband, born 1077, now 48

King Henry I of England, youngest son of The Conqueror, born 1068, now 57

Rebecca of the Red Hand, 1094, now 31, Jewish banker, daughter of the late Jacob, born in Bristol, long-time family friend of the Archers and banker to Kings and Abbots.

New characters

Empress Matilda "Maudie", daughter of Henry I, widow of Henry V Holy Roman Emperor (1086-1125) born 1102: age 23, widowed, childless

Queen Adeliza "Adele" of Louvain, Queen of England, devoted wife of Henry I, married 1120, born 1103 now 22, childless

Margrett Lady Pitstone, Common Law wife of Henry I, Mother of Elinor, born 1076, now 49

The Black Knights, an order of about 150 black shielded knights who guard and support King Henry on a rotation basis; after some time in service they are granted arms and manors in gratitude by the King.

Squires Alain, Gilbert, Giles, Jaimes are Breton Squires who lost their knights in battle, were abandoned, but Lady Elinor has just taken them into her service.

Black Friars, are conventional monks from monasteries who work with Rebecca to maintain and protect trade, paying bills and passing on deposits and loans and use her banking services for insurance and finance. Usury (charging bank interest) was forbidden by Canon Law and both Christians and Mohammedans used Jewish bankers for guaranteeing payment in international trade and financing investments, as did Cathedrals, Monasteries, Convents, Royal and Duchal governments.

September 1125 England, Flanders and Normandy

The state of the world in which this work of fiction is woven: It is Michaelmastide, late September, 1125. Lady Elinor's half-sister Empress Matilda is a few months older than Elinor and presently in mourning for her husband Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who died of cancer in May four months earlier. Betrothed when she was 8 and Henry 24, she married age 12, was widowed at 23, and will eventually be married again at 28 in another arranged marriage to a husband she will learn to despise.

In 1118/1119 the Empress was regent Queen of Italy, and it is a title she still aspires to. She sold up her lands in Germany and moved to Normandy in 1125 to rejoin King Henry of England's court, but she is young and not keen to remarry until the squabble over the dissolving Empire, including the vacant and disputed kingdoms of Germany and Italy are resolved. King Henry has no male heir to either the Throne of England or the Duchy of Normandy, his only son William Adeline having died by misadventure in 1120.

In order to have a new son, King Henry quickly married young bride Adeliza of Louvain, a descendant of Emperor Charlemagne, but has still not produced a child after four years and, at age 57, time is running out. King Henry has still to proclaim his eldest daughter Matilda as his heir, and has spoken to her about the possibilities while her husband the Holy Roman Emperor was still dying of cancer with no legitimate heir.

The barons of England are being sounded out about Henry's succession plans in secret and some have voiced their objections to the Holy Roman Empress Matilda ascending to the throne of England as Queen upon her father's eventual demise. Eligible noble bachelors are pushing their suit on the recently widowed Empress but to no avail. Usually with no son as heir, the next in line would be a male nephew but the nearest possibility is Henry's brother Robert's son William Cato, a long-time enemy of Henry, who is in the pocket of Louis VI the King of France.

Prologue

Almost dawn, in February 1125.

Robin Archer knew that when he reached the end of his long vigil and night of reflection and prayer, he would be dubbed by his liege King Henry as Sir Robert of Oaklea.

Right now, though, he slightly shifted his weight from one knee to the other. It had been a long night and the cold sucked up from the stone flags was biting hungrily into his young bones. He steeled himself to control an involuntary shiver that threatened to shake loose every tooth in his head. He opened his eyes briefly, but closed them again as it was still quite dark within the closed and private stone chapel, with not even the welcome risen moon to provide any hint of a glow off the gilded and painted statue of The Blessed Virgin, now unseen in the gloom ahead of him.

His eyes had been closed for hours, engaged as he had been in his devotions to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in whose dedicated chapel he had kneeled away the dark lonely night. Not all his long night of knightly vigil had been spent in devotion, by prayers for wisdom and strength to the Virgin, but he used this opportunity to endeavour to confront his own secular demons too.

The beautiful Lady Elinor of Pitstone, had finally been excised from his constant thoughts, he firmly believed. He wanted to believe there was an end to that particular torment. The Lady was the love of his life. Of that he had no doubt at all but that thought was now pushed firmly into the past forever. She had been and always would be 'his Lady', but he had now been forced to accept that Elinor, the happily married Countess of large estates in Flanders and Picardy, was bound for life to her husband, the Count Gervaise, and thereby the Lady could never love a humble archer such as he, from a rude village in the West Midlands of the Old English Kingdom of Mercia. Not even an archer about to be knighted by her father, Henry the First, King of All England and Lord of the Duchy of Normandy, had the power to change what God had ordained for the beating heart of such a noble Lady.

But now it was but three years since he had first refused the knighthood offered by the King, on the day he had by the skill of his bow saved his Sovereign's life. He was not yet a man then, an archer's apprentice, and his father and master was but a year himself into life as a reluctant knight and shire reeve himself. Now Robin, as he was known by all his liegemen, was serving his knight's nightlong vigil after a tough day of testing his worthiness as a potential knight, not only of the realm, but of Henry's personal Order of Black Knights.

He supposed it must have been by reason that he had never served hitherto as a Knight's Bound Esquire, that he had been tested so completely this past day, and rather painfully, in the arts of the sword, lance and horsemanship, in a private tourney staged for the Royal Court's appreciative entertainment.

He had received the Summons to the Court on a parchment roll, tightly tied in scarlet silk and bearing the King's Great Seal of two lions pressed into bright red beeswax, while he was competing in the archery contest at Great Minlow At The Marsh. The morose and strictly formal Herald of the King's Household, who bore the King's summons, was accompanied by a burly pair of Knights, and they had insisted he leave with them in haste, the Court sitting not five leagues distant. This time the journeyman archer and bow smith would not be given leave to decline the wishes of his Liege Majesty to knight him at last.

The band of four travellers camped by the roadside overnight and the Knights had taken pains to instruct him in the duties expected of a Knight, chief among their advice being that no-one who still lived, and with both his eyes and all his limbs intact, had refused the King's knighthood twice and, to their knowledge this same impudent Robin of Oaklea was still the only English subject known to have refused the King's dub at even the first time it was intended to be bestowed.

The Herald discussed the arms that Sir Robert of Oaklea, he blankly refused to address Robin as "Robin", might bear, and immediately discarded both the red dragon and the head of barleycorn that Robin would have chosen for himself had he truly been given any real choice in the matter.

A red or Gules shield as a warrior tested in battle in defence of his King and homeland, a blue Azure chevron denoting his steadfastness, strength, truth and loyalty, and a gold Or circle below the chevron referencing his archery target and the gold reflecting his respect and virtue, was the coat of arms the Herald persuaded him to accept. The Herald made it clear that he would countenance nothing else, but he would like the soon-to-be Sir Robert's mark upon his vellum scrip to confirm the design. So Robin scrawled his full name "Robert Archer" as instructed in charcoal in the margin of the Herald's parchment.

Upon the morrow they arrived at the manor where Court was being held. Then, from the early aforenoon, the audience of nobles and their ladies bore witness to his prowess in trial battle, successively with serfs, squires, men-at-arms, and later full Knights, using staffs, maces, swords and, latterly, mounted ahorse wearing an uncomfortable helm and wielding a weighty lance. In the afternoon those same Knight taskmasters had him tested for his madrigal playing, noting that, while the timing of his plucking was woefully short of practice, he had a pleasant natural melodic voice inherited, Robin trusted, from his Welch forebears.

And though he was unrealistic in his request for cause, such as why the King, so oft absent from his English realm, had yet sought him out to confer him this knightly honour, the Knights appointed to test his mettle had no convincing answer to offer, in fact they ventured no answer at all. For them, the orders were theirs to follow, not to question their Majesty's motives or whim, however strange the orders might seem. One senior Knight, at least, had slapped Robin on the back before he started his night's ordeal saying, with the respect of one who had suffered the same initiation into the Order, that he had done quite well for an unpracticed lad.

The door behind him creaked open, putting an end to his long reflections, and flooding The Lady Mary's Chapel with daylight. The day was dawned alast, and Robin, an extraordinary archer and ordinary man, was about to become an ordinary young man no longer.

Yet, who but the members of this Royal Court, more oft held in the Duchy of Normandy than England's large domain in this fair and fertile isle, would know of his elevation to uninherited knighthood? None, he felt, and he resolved to continue to keep his silent vigil instead of public announcement, and to be a knight in unmarked black only when required to serve his liege King if he was ever called upon to do so.

Let us now, manuscript readers or troubadour listeners, let Robin Archer himself take up his story.

Chapter 1

The Smooth Field

I stiffen as the black cloaked friar passes me. Although I have never met this particular monk, it appears he knoweth me, or knoweth enough of who I be to recognise me as distinct from Adam or any other ordinary man.

Our eyes meet briefly, his head almost bobbing, before he casts his look downward. My eyes follow where his own eyes alight. He flashes the palm of his left hand to me briefly. It is completely overpainted in red ochre.

It is a sign, and not one I would expect to find exposed to me so far from my accustomed paths in the middle regions of the English shires.

The monk moves on without a backward glance, without even a single break in the determined stride of a cleric with divine purpose. Soon he is lost in the human tumult, assembling eagerly to witness the archery event on a place the locals hereabout London Town call the Smooth Field, one set aside for citizens' entertainment just outside the ancient north walls of the City.

I make no sudden movements after the departure of the friar, but continue to stand where I be, waiting for a time to pass.

No one observing me must know I have received any message. I kick at the ground in apparent boredom. Slowly, I fade a step back into the shadow of the London Wall behind me, forsaking the noonday sun which has been gently warming the night's chill out of me. There, from the dark shadows I feel more free to inquisite my surroundings, but see no-one obviously about betraying their observation of me and my movements. Still vigilant, I strap both my bulging quivers of target arrows to my waist, gather up my bag and longbow, before striding out into the sunshine, heading away from the newly-built walls of the St Bartholomew's Priory next to the London Wall, close to the crowded Aldersgate, which disgorges its folk into the countryside and commons surrounding England's primary city.

Within moments I am onto the Smooth Field, joining the mass of unwashed humanity heading onto the grassland, where the final rounds of the richest archery tournament in the realm, the highlight of the week-long Michaelmastide Fayre, was to be held.

I wonder why I was warned by that messenger, for surely that was what the red hand message implied, and why I would be under some observation, and by whom, as I walk to the field.

I am nobody in these parts, of course, merely a humble archer from the far distant West Midlands. One who talks with an accent that London folk find as strange and amusing, no doubt, as I find their's be to my rude country ears.

If I am to be attacked and robbed, it will not be now. Presently, I have very few coins to rub together and am even relying on my winnings at the tournament to pay the tariff that I have built on credit with the landlord of The Goat Inn in Long Lane, where I have stayed alone but in good comfort in a small single room away from the noisy street, and dined quite acceptably these last three days. The landlord had accepted me with a nod on accepting the scrap of scrip with the red hand quill-scratched on the worn palimpsest I had been given as a token by a Black Friar a few days before. The landlord escorted me without a word to the quiet empty room that had thus been reserved for my use, even though the inn was otherwise heaving with crowded guests, doubled and tripled up mostly, attracted by the last great Fayre of the summer season, before the grinding malaise in winter.

I regularly encounter Rebecca's red hand sign and her black cowled Friars. They have insinuated their presence into my travels ever since I resumed touring the tourneys last year, after completing my bowmaker apprenticeship, trained in the fine arts of the Welsh longbow by my father these last five years. The first Black Friar that I saw upon the road was Brother Cleric Michael, the huge red-haired friar I knew already from our adventure at the Battle of Oaklea. He joined me on the road after I won my first tournament travelling on my own, there without the guiding advice or protection of my father. With Michael I exchanged most of my fat prize purse for a scrip of parchment.

I knew him, Brother Cleric Michael, a former brother in arms. I trusted him with my life, so why not the larger part of my coin when he advised that I do so? I remember him saying that it was unwise for a lone man on the road with so heavy a pocket, and I saith the truth of the same back to him if he did indeed carry off my prize as he had requested.

"Ha! And what makes thee think I am alone, Master Robin?" Brother Michael had replied with a twinkle in his eye.

And it is true, monasteries and convents abound wherever, whether they be in city, town or countryside, with well-trod trade routes betwixt them. Nor do you ever see a poor abbey or monastery, nor ever yet a skinny monk.

But how odd, though, the strange marriage of the holy cross, the rosary beads and the red hand symbol of the Jewish banker? A harmony among mortal man may be desired in the Heavens of the same shared God, no doubt, but Christian and Jewish fellowship is vigorously denied within our earthly shires and the great schism of two great religions worshipping the same one God is preached as sacrilege to the simple-minded congregations from chapel pulpits. But under the red hand, there is a sense of peace and harmony, no doubt to the profit and prosperity of both sides of the worship divide.

From time to time a Friar, known or unknown to me, will hand me a sealed parchment from Rebecca, informing me of the growing value of my investments, made up from the monks' regular and perfectly timely collections. They seem to know where I will be before I decide where to go!

As at Lincoln City the week before last, word came that I now owned a virgate of land in Sherborne, Dorsetshire, sited convenient betwixt priory and the manor which will one day become more valuable as that portion was being desired for future expansion by both parties. Also, I recently came to own two oxgangs in the outer environs of the City of York, fresh planted with beans and oats by my new tenants and set for a fair return for all involved in the venture by harvest time.

Perhaps that was the redhanded monk's warning, that I was to be relieved of the larger part of my winnings by a trusted monk and render myself safe from predation, and be noted in due time that my accounts have been settled and the balances invested for my old age.

Such things are not that important to me, though, a once boy, now a recent man of 22 years of age. It has been a long spell away from my home manor and I am as eager for pleasant family company as any deprived child might be. I so wish to be home in Oaklea before Lucifer's Day dawns and the trees shed their summer cloaks of green in brittle sheets of red and gold. I hope these present attentions do naught to delay me in my intentions and keep me away from the half-siblings that I miss so much, especially since they grow like weeds in the fertile tilth of the loving family of my father and half-sister.

This tournament is the biggest I have ever been involved in. Usually dozens of archers might participate in the tourneys of towns and larger villages. But here, so close to the mighty city of London that the drawn crowds' applause echoes off its very walls, there must be a thousand or more bowmen who started their darts to fly at the commencement of competition three days thence. In the early rounds I was pitted agin eleven other archers at the same time, all dozen of us aline, each firing off a dozen arrows apiece at once. Only one of the twelve, the one with the least misses, found himself through into the next round. Then eight archers, again all afiring side by side; then be six competitors; and yesterday we were in ranks of four bowyers, when bulls were far more the common score even than outer rings.

Today, the final day, we are down to the very last eight archers left of the tumult that began, each of us unbested by those we've been matched with in the prior two morns. Now we are to be paired off, one opposed one other, loosening twelve shafts apiece to decide the best of each pairing. And only the best of those eight proceeds to the final four, before the last pair of would-be champions settle betwixt them who claims the fattest archery purse prize in all the realm.

I daresay it will be enough for the burliest Black Friar to haul away and deposit in the Red Hand Bank on my behest. At least this day I will have a purse of some sorts, for all those who reach the last eight will win some bright glint of silver, but whether t'will be enough to satisfy the landlord of The Goat Inn's tally for my three day stay in a private chamber, is another matter, city prices being so exorbitant.