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thick skirts of boiled leather, carrying men in full armour, and ploughing through the marsh that bordered the river. That marsh slowed them, their weight slowed them, and Thomas saw an arrow slide by a horse’s head, streak past the rider’s knee and strike the destrier’s rump and the horse sheered away from the pain. The armour was all in front!
    ‘Hellequin! Follow me!’ he shouted. ‘Hellequin! Follow me!’
    He snatched up his arrows and ran to his left. He floundered in the mud and muck of the swampland, but he forced himself on. Get to the side, he told himself, get to the side. ‘Follow me!’ he repeated and snatched a look back to see his men obeying. ‘Run!’ he shouted, and hoped to God that no one thought they were running away.
    He went forty, perhaps fifty paces, and thrust the arrows back into the marsh, plucked up a flesh arrow, laid it on the stave, pulled the bow up and drew the cord, aiming again at the horse with the red heart on its gaudy trapper. Now he was aiming at the horse’s flank, just behind the front leg and in front of the saddle. He did not think. He looked where he wanted the arrow to go and his muscles obeyed his look and his two fingers released the string and the arrow slashed across the bog and vanished into the horse and the horse reared, and now more arrows were flying across the marsh and the arrows were biting at last and the horses were falling. The Earl of Warwick’s archers had understood. The enemy’s horses had all their armour in front and none on the
flanks and backsides of the horses. A rider wearing a jupon
quartered in red and yellow with a white star in one corner was shouting at the earl’s archers to join Thomas’s men. ‘Go to the flank! Go, fellows, go, go, go!’
    But the French were close. Their visors were down so their faces could not be seen, but Thomas could see where the trappers had been ripped and bloodied by their spurs. They were urging their horses on, and he loosed again and this time slapped a bodkin through the overlapping scales of a horse’s neck armour. The beast stumbled to its fore knees, and its rider, trapped by the high pommel and cantle of his saddle, desperately tried to kick his feet from the stirrups before the horse rolled. The beast was still on its back legs, tilted forward, and the rider was falling onto its neck when two arrows struck his breastplate. One crumpled, the other pierced it and the man jerked back under the impact of the blows. He started falling forward again and was hit again. Archers jeered. Back and forward he went, tormented until a man-at-arms wearing the lion of Warwick stepped forward and swung an axe that cracked through the helmet to spray blood. A horseman tried to cut the Englishman down, but the arrows were flying thick from the flank now, striking the horses’ unarmoured sides, and the rider’s horse was hit in the belly by three arrows and the horse screamed, reared and bolted.
    ‘Sweet Christ, kill them! Saint George!’ The horseman with the white star on his jupon was just behind Thomas. ‘Kill them!’
    And the archers obeyed. They had been scared by the failure of their first arrows, but now they were vengeful. They could each loose fifteen arrows in a minute, and by now there were over two hundred archers on the French flank and those French were defeated. The leading riders were all down, their horses dying or dead, and some horses had turned and fled, screaming as they tried to escape the awful pain beside the river. The Earl of Warwick’s men-at-arms were advancing into the chaos to hammer axes and maces on fallen riders. The horsemen at the rear were turning away. Two of Warwick’s men-at-arms were leading a prisoner back to the ford, and Thomas saw that the man was wearing a jupon of bright blue and white stripes. Then he looked for the red heart of Douglas and saw the horse had fallen, trapping the man, and he sent a bodkin at the rider and saw it pierce the man’s rerebrace. He shot again, driving an arrow into the man’s side, just under the armpit, but before he could loose a third arrow three men, all dismounted, seized the fallen rider and dragged him out from under his horse. Arrows slapped at them, but two of them lived, and Thomas recognised Sculley. He was wearing a visored helmet, but his long hair with its yellowing bones hung beneath its rim. Thomas drew his bow, but two wounded horses galloped between him and Sculley, who had managed to heave the fallen