FILMING DIARY DAY #2
A medieval castle… and a cider orchard
This is the second instalment of my letters from France, where I’m spending a week and a bit filming a documentary about the real history behind my novel Essex Dogs. Both are released next month. Please consider pre-ordering a signed copy of the book! Pre-orders really help authors. International delivery here. UK delivery with a 50% discount on rrp here.
‘People think nothing happened in Normandy between William the Conqueror leaving in 1066 and the Allies landing in 1944.’
So says an archaeologist I interviewed this morning on the ramparts of Caen castle. The walls of the old fortress stretch for hundreds of metres, and from them you can see the city’s two magnificent abbeys and a few pretty tasty churches, too.
The geography of the Caen has changed dramatically since the Middle Ages, not least because of the near-annihilation it suffered during the Second World War. But with my expert guide and our high vantage point I can pick out the three main areas of the old medieval settlement: the castle, old town and wealthy merchant’s quarter.
These were the scene of a terrible battle in 1346, when my novel Essex Dogs takes place. We’re here making a film about the real history behind the book. So Caen is a key location. We spend a good two hours up on the walls, and I’m captivated by the signature familiar glint of the Caen stone as it catches the light. (You see a lot of Caen stone in English high medieval monumental architecture - one great example is the Temple Church in London.)
But we can’t hang around up there all day. In the afternoon we strike out into the countryside known as the Pays d’Auge. This is about as classically Norman as the Norman countryside gets. Wonky buildings, pretty little churches, silent millponds, indifferent, soft-eyed cows and abundant orchards, where apples trees are starting to sag with swelling fruit.
We stop in one of those to talk about the chevauchée, Edward III’s war-tactic of sending bands of men roving across the land, burning and destroying everything in their path, maiming and raping and murdering.
The point of the chevauchée was to spread terror. The point of the terror was to convince the population that their current king was hopeless and couldn’t protect them. The Crécy campaign was one big chevauchée. That has been somewhat overshadowed by the battle at the end. But the battle lasted a day and a half. The terror that came before lasted a month and a half. Go figure.
The Essex Dogs, my little platoon of Edward’s soldiers, who are the heroes of my novel, are involved in the rampage in 1346. Not that they are all happy about it. Here’s a little taster:
‘We’ve got a problem.’
Millstone’s face was set firm, but Loveday knew he was troubled. The thickset Kentishman was not one to gabble or panic. He was last of the Dogs to take fright and the first to bring calm to chaos.
When he was worried, Loveday listened. The two men were riding side by side, across open countryside west of Saint-Lô. The chevauchée was under way. Thousands of horsemen and footsoldiers trampled crops and burned anything that would catch. Grass drying for hay in the summer sun was aflame everywhere. The noon sky was a livid orange. Hot, wretched smoke stung Loveday’s lungs. Pismire, Scotsman and the Welsh brothers were a few hundred yards distant, setting fire to a barn. Beyond them Englishmen hewed trees, felling an orchard with their axes. Killing trees ripe with fruit. Trees that had grown for fifty years.
Half a mile away, on one of the web of tiny sunken tracks that crisscrossed the Norman countryside, a subdued Romford was guiding the donkey and cart, laden with stacks of church plate, reams of cloth and two large wine barrels the Dogs had brought up the hill from Saint-Lô after the raid. Tebbe and Thorp balanced on the back of the cart, loosing off arrows at any livestock they saw: sending cows and sheep lurching miserably around until they fell to their forelegs, bellowing and dying.
Romford had Father with him. As Tebbe and Thorp shot and whooped, the old man sat with his knees tucked into his chest. Pismire had stolen a small cage with a songbird inside it. Father fed it grain and muttered to it, but he would say nothing to anyone else.
Later the men fall foul of Edward’s mixed messages around the chevauchée. Ordinances issued in the king’s name in 1346 ordered his men not to harm or molest the people of Normandy - whom he theoretically claimed as his own subjects. Yet the chevauchée was ordered from on high. In other words, men were forbidden to devastate the land and traumatise its people. But that was also what they were expected to do. It’s not far off the sort of thing Joseph Heller described in Catch-22.
And for that matter, the chevauchée is not far off tactics deployed in war in 2022. I had finished edits on Essex Dogs when Russian troops invaded Ukraine. But I was struck when reading reports of the horrors unleashed on that country just how similar many of the tactics deployed by the Russian army were to those developed in the Hundred Years War.
War is hell. And sometimes, using the word medieval as an epithet isn’t completely inappropriate.
Love the thought of a priest being with them during scorched earth raids
Thank you 🙏 I am loving these, keep them coming!