The Siege of Swayne Castle, page 1
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Contents
R. C. Sherriff
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
R C Sherriff
The Siege of Swayne Castle
R. C. Sherriff
On his return from the First World War, R. C. Sherriff settled in London, working as an insurance agent and writing plays in the evening. Journey’s End, inspired by Sherriff’s own experience of fighting, was his sixth play but the first to be given a professional production. It was an immediate, outstanding and phenomenal success. Thirty-one separate productions ran concurrently around the world and it was translated into twenty six languages. Its success, however, was both a boon and a burden – while it allowed him to give up the day job and devote himself full-time to writing, it often overshadowed his later work or was used as the yardstick against which it was measured unfavourably.
Fortunately for Sherriff he was not only a playwright but also a novelist and a screenwriter. He wrote a bestselling novel, A Fortnight In September in 1931, and the screenplays for The Invisible Man (1933), The Four Feathers (1939) and classic films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and The Dambusters (1955).
Although Sherriff was occupied as a playwright and screenwriter he did not lose his urge to write novels and he followed the success of his first novel with The Hopkins Manuscript, Chedworth, Another Year and others. Now, while Journey’s End continues to define Sherriff’s reputation, much of his work remains ripe for rediscovery.
Chapter One
All day the woodlands around the castle had echoed to the thud of axes and the crash of falling trees.
Fires were blazing where brushwood had been piled; wagons loaded with timber had made ceaseless journeys to the castle, stacking the trunks behind the ramparts for winter fuel.
Beyond the woodlands they were scything the green corn. In a few weeks it would have made a fine harvest. It was useless now except as fodder for the cattle to be kept in the enclosure behind the walls.
Hogs had been slaughtered, the meat dried and salted and stored in the vaults. The skins had been dressed and set aside for warmth if bitter weather came. The marshes had been scoured for the hard-stemmed reeds used for arrow shafts. From the nearby beach had come the smooth round stones for the catapults.
Away in the distance they could see dust clouds rising from the slow advancing army. It would be a long and pitiless siege. Lord Swayne and his men had no delusions about that. The Earl had sworn to smash the castle to the ground; to hang the garrison amidst its ruins and wipe the pestilent Swaynes off the face of the earth.
Lord Swayne had returned the compliment by declaring that the Earl, with all his massive strength, would never take the castle: not if he beat his head against its walls until the crack of doom.
For the sake of his men he had to fling defiance in good measure, but he was too realistic for wishful thinking. When it came to open conflict with the Earl it was David against Goliath, and he knew it.
He had no personal quarrel with the Earl. The seeds were planted years before, when Duke William of Normandy had come with his invading army and the Island had fallen into his hands like a ripe plum.
The Conqueror had less to fear from the defeated English than from his own Norman barons who had pledged their support in return for English plunder. He had to reward them with large estates without making them over-powerful.
His most dangerous supporter had been Count Godfrey of Valmont. His contribution had been a massive one. Apart from a large contingent of mounted men he had supplied seven ships. In return he had received a fine estate in East Anglia, but it was landlocked, and for his own special reasons Count Godfrey wanted an outlet to the sea.
A few miles from the Count’s estate was a harbour and a stretch of sea coast that would suit him perfectly. It was in the hands of a small settlement of English called the Swaynes: farmers and fishermen who had built themselves a town and a few fishing villages along the coast. They were peaceful people who only wanted to be left alone.
Count Godfrey asked the Conqueror to grant him this small property. Now that the invasion was successfully completed he wanted his seven ships back.
‘I can keep them in that harbour,’ he explained. ‘From there it will be an easy journey to my estates in Normandy, and I can go to and fro whenever I find it necessary.’
He wanted the harbour badly, but the Conqueror wasn’t fool enough to let him have it. Count Godfrey had powerful friends in the Low Countries hostile to Duke William. The harbour would be an open door to any mischief that he contemplated. In alliance with his friends he could plan a new invasion. With the harbour as a beach-head he could build up a massive army to conquer the Island for himself.
The Conqueror accordingly told the Count that he had decided to make the Swayne property a Royal domain. The Count, he said, could keep his seven ships at Dover and sail from there whenever he wanted to visit his estates in Normandy. This was safe enough because Dover was securely under Royal control.
Count Godfrey was beside himself with rage and indignation. To allow this splendid harbour to remain in the hands of despised, defeated ‘natives’ was an insult to a Norman aristocrat, but there was nothing he could do about it. To take a Royal domain by force would be rebellion, and Count Godfrey, by himself, could not risk a conflict with his powerful master.
It left a wound that festered through the years. Hatred for the Swaynes became an obsession with the Valmont family. Passed on from father to son was the conviction that the Swayne property was theirs by right: but they had been cheated out of it by the Conqueror.
They were powerless so long as the Crown was strong enough to protect its Royal domain, but they bided their time. One day the chance would come, and they would use it without mercy.
It came at last when John was King, when the Island was torn by civil war: some barons for the King, some against.
The Valmont family was now an Earldom, and the head of it was a crafty man. He had sided with the King, and saw a heaven-sent chance to get hold of the Swayne property.
The barons hostile to the King had given the Earl a hand of trumps when they had offered the English crown to the son of the King of France. He went to King John and played his cards with excellent results.
‘We all know,’ he said, ‘that your enemies have offered your crown to the French Dauphin who is preparing a strong army to invade. Dover and the south coast are secure, but there is a harbour on the east coast open to invasion with a castle in the hands of one of your enemies. Lord Swayne is dangerous. He has made no declaration of loyalty to you in your present troubles. On the contrary he has talked openly of his sympathy with those who want to overthrow you. A word from them, and he will throw his harbour and castle wide open to the French.
‘We must act quickly. The Swaynes themselves are a small community but they have the means to give your enemies everything they need. I have the resources to prevent it. If you give me a Royal warrant, I will soon hold that harbour and castle securely in your name.’
King John was grateful to the Earl for drawing his attention to this wide-open door for a French invasion and he welcomed having it firmly shut by such a stalwart and dependable loyalist.
‘Very well, my good friend,’ he said. ‘Take the castle and the harbour and hold them safely for the Crown. When my present troubles are over you may rest assured that your services will not go unrewarded.’
And he gave the Earl the warrant that he needed.
The Earl was delighted. He had got the best of both worlds. To have taken the Swayne territory under cover of a civil war was to risk being called to account when peace returned: when the re-established King, or future King, would want to know by what authority he had invaded a Royal domain.
But a Royal warrant covered everything. He could wipe out the Swaynes and take their castle by Royal command, and the King’s promise that his services ‘would not go unrewarded’ could surely mean that the Swayne territory would be his for the asking.
There was another asset in that priceless warrant.
By feudal law the tenants of a great baron were obliged to give military service for a specified period each year. This usually meant their support in ‘private wars’, baron against baron, but tenants disliked getting mixed up in family feuds that didn’t concern them. If a baron could collect half his retainers he was lucky and even those would be half-hearted.
But it was different when their overlord produced a warrant to conduct a campaign by order of the King himself. Refusal to serve the King was mutiny, and the Earl lost no time in sending copies of the warrant to every important tenant on his wide estates.
He made it plain that the campaign would be a short and victorious one, and hinted at valuable rewards. The Swayne settlement would be broken up and everything worth having would be divided among his men as spoils of war.
His retainers needed no further inducement, and the meadows around the Earl’s castle began to assume the appearance of a great armed camp.
Lord Swayne soon got to know what was going on.
It came as no surprise to him. For a long time he had seen that Royal power crumbling. He knew that the day was not far off when his people would have to face this onslaught. His first impulse had been to go to the King and tell him that he was no traitor: that as custodian of a Royal domain he would gladly hold the castle with all his power against a foreign invasion. But he knew that the Earl had poisoned the King’s mind against him. The suspicious King would clap him into prison and leave the Earl to take his land without resistance.
The only course was to fight it out, with little enough to pin his hopes on. They were a small community, without the equipment or the manpower toface the Earl in open warfare. He staked his chances on the castle built by Henry Plantagenet to protect the harbour from invasion. It was a solid, stone-built, moated fortress on open land; as good for defence against the Earl as for its original purpose against invasion from the sea.
He chose forty of his best men for its garrison.
There was the problem of the older people and children who lived in the town. It was customary, in a mediaeval siege, for an honourable assailant to leave the civilians alone and concentrate upon the castle. But Swayne put no trust in the Earl’s good faith, and arranged to evacuate his people to the outlying farms and fishing villages.
He had to think more carefully about his own family: his wife and daughter, and Roger his son. If the Earl could lay hands on them he would make good use of them as hostages – if in fact he allowed them to survive. Swayne had arranged to send them to the safety of a monastery near Norwich. Not even the Earl would dare to violate a sanctuary, but his son had flatly refused to go.
Roger was fourteen, tall and strong for his age, and had begged his father to let him remain as one of the castle garrison. For a long time Swayne had insisted that Roger should go. He had no delusions about the Earl’s main purpose. He wanted the Swayne property and would only achieve half his purpose if he killed Swayne but failed to kill his heir as well. The laws of inheritance were strictly enforced. King John might grant the property to the Earl, but if an heir remained, and came of age, there was every chance of his regaining the property from a future King.
He tried to explain this to his son, but Roger dug his heels in.
‘I won’t go!’ he declared. ‘If you tied me up and sent me to that monastery by force, I’d escape and come back here!’
Swayne stood firm, but he was breaking the boy’s heart.
‘There’s lots I can do,’ Roger said. ‘Carry messages, clean weapons, stand guard with the men, take duty on the watch tower. When it comes to a fight I can draw a bow as strongly as any of the men. And what’s more, I know the castle better than anybody – I could find my way around it blindfold.’
On that he was no doubt right. Since his earliest boyhood he had been leader of a small gang of boys who had held the deserted castle against all manner of ferocious imaginary enemies. They had manned the ramparts, shouted orders through the dark empty corridors of the keep and made fierce sorties across the drawbridge. Roger loved the castle; to him it was a fortress of enchantment, and now that it was to be defended in reality, nothing on God’s earth would make him leave it.
Swayne finally gave way. He knew the deadly risk. How delighted the Earl would be when he heard that he had both Swayne and his only son cornered in the castle! Against this he measured the harm it would do Roger: the shame and humiliation of being shut up for safety in a monastery while the garrison was fighting for the castle.
So one night he called Roger to him and said, ‘I’ve decided to let you be one of the garrison. There’ll be hard work for you, and I’m trusting you to do it well.’
And Roger went to bed in a seventh heaven.
Chapter Two
The Earl was a bulky man beyond the usual age for riding out to war, but two good reasons urged him on. The first, of course, was the conquest of a fine coastal property that his family had wanted for years. His second was to prove himself a warrior. He had always longed for military renown, but so far his ambitions had been unfulfilled.
As a young man he had fought under King Richard in the Holy Land. He was proud to call himself a Crusader: never tired of talking about his exploits. But the other Barons, who knew the facts, said it was nothing but hot air. Whenever King Richard had ordered an assault, they said, the Earl had succumbed to an acute attack of fever which laid him low until the assault was over.
These stories stuck. He had never had a chance to redeem himself, but now at last he could show what he was made of. The Swaynes were not a powerful enemy, but they had a castle, and castles were notoriously difficult to capture by assault. Usually the besiegers sat down outside and starved the garrison out, but that wasn’t the Earl’s idea at all. He would show the military world that a castle could be cracked open and destroyed like a nut beneath a hammer. It would be a spectacular assault with siege weapons of his own creation: a classic campaign, perfectly organized and carried out with immaculate precision. Above all it would silence the critics who called him a fatuous windbag.
His tenants, attracted by the promise of a short campaign with a bountiful share of loot, were providing men in gratifying numbers. The levies they brought in were amateur soldiers, mainly workers in the fields, useful for little more than guard duties and work around the camp. For his ‘shock troops’, the spearhead of the assault, he was depending upon professionals: mercenary soldiers who hired themselves out to any magnate who could afford to pay them.
In those days, when wars were nearly always going on, it was good business for an enterprising young man to raise his own Company. There was a young Captain named Raymond of Bethune who was known on the Continent as a skilled and courageous leader. The Earl, who was a wealthy man determined to hire the best, sent word to Raymond: offering to engage him with three hundred men for a guaranteed two months – ample time, he reckoned, to prepare the campaign and capture Swayne Castle.
Raymond was free. The money was good, so he enrolled his men, took ship for England, and reported to the Earl for duty.
Things didn’t turn out as smoothly as the Earl expected. Had he hired a second-rate bunch of unemployed soldiers in England he could have made them do exactly what he wanted, but he had engaged the best young mercenary Captain in Europe, and Raymond soon made it clear that he expected to be given entire control of the campaign. This was the last thing that the Earl intended. He had cast himself for the leading role and wasn’t going to sit back and let Raymond steal the thunder.
‘I am by no means an inexperienced soldier,’ he said, and went on to describe his exploits in the Holy Land. ‘King Richard,’ he said, ‘employed siege weapons, but open to improvement. I am now constructing something of my own design that will be a revelation. In the hands of trained soldiers, under your control, it will be irresistible, and you, my dear Raymond, will gain great prestige as the soldier who first made use of it. But I must, of course, retain overall command.’
Raymond listened in silence. He was a handsome young man with a deep scar down one cheek and two fingers from his right hand missing. Vigour and command were written all over him. He had already summed up the Earl for what he was, but he had his own business to consider. The campaigning season on the Continent was over. He kept his best men together during the winter by paying them a retaining fee, and the Earl’s money would come in very useful.
‘I will agree to serve under your command,’ he said, ‘providing I am satisfied with this siege machine of yours. So first you must show it to me.’
