A ravening lion

On March 26th, 1199, Richard Coeur de Lion’s fabled luck finally ran out. He rashly ventured out to inspect the siege of Chalus Castle without armor, and was struck by a crossbow bolt. He’d been watching a man up on the battlements who was using a large frying pan as a shield and that amused him greatly; he was laughing and cheering the man on when he was hit. He gave no indication of it (it was dusk at the time) and returned to his own quarters, where he attempted and failed to remove the bolt. A doctor summoned by his mercenary captain Mercadier had no better luck and apparently made the injury much worse in his ineffective attempts to extract it. Richard had enough experience with battle wounds to realize that he was doomed and sent for his mother as his condition worsened; she arrived in time to be with him when he died. By all accounts, it was a very painful death, but he endured it with his usual stoicism. Here is a passage from the chronicle of Ralph de Coggeshall; the translation comes courtesy of my fellow historical novelist and friend, Sharan Newman.
“Therefore the king was wounded, as usual through his well-known reckless behavior. He gave no heartfelt sigh, no mournful cry, nor did he show any sign of pain by expression or gesture to those present, nor show his sadness or fear so that his enemies might not report how severe the wound was. Afterwards, he endured the pain to the end as if it were a trifle, so that there were many who were ignorant of the calamity that had occurred.”
Here is a more cheerful document, a letter written by Richard himself to his good friend, the Bishop of Durham, who’d been with him in the Holy Land and during his German captivity. Richard describes how he won a victory over the French king in September of 1198. Richard had captured the castle of Courcelles and Philippe marched from Mantes to relieve it, not knowing that it had already fallen. When Richard’s scouts reported the movement of the French army, he assumed they were massing to attack his own troops. But when he saw that they were heading north toward Courcelles, he determined to attack them even though he only had a small band of knights with him.
In his letter to the bishop, which was widely circulated, Richard describes how the French fled before his men, a retreat turning into a rout, with so many knights crowding the bridge over the River Epte that “the bridge broke down beneath them, and the King of France, as we have heard say, had to drink of the water, and several knights, about twenty in number, were drowned. Three also, with a single lance, we unhorsed, Matthew de Montmorency, Alan de Rusci, and Fulk de Gilveral, and have them as our prisoners. There were also valiantly captured as many as one hundred knights of his….and Mercadier has taken as many as thirty. Men-at-arms, also, both horse and foot, were taken; also two hundred chargers were captured, of which one hundred forty were covered with iron armor. This have we defeated the King of France at Gisors. But it is not we who have done the same, but rather God, and our right, by our means, and in so doing, we have put our life in peril, and our kingdom, contrary to the advice of all our people. These things we signify unto you, that you may share in our joy as to the same. Witness ourselves at Anjou.”
The “we” he employs is the royal we, so when he says “we unhorsed” those French lords, he is referring to his own derring-do. Ironically, Matthew de Montmorency was one of the men who’d fought beside Richard in the Holy Land; readers may remember him from Lionheart. Even down through eight centuries, Richard’s glee at the humiliation of the French king, who “drank of the water” of the river, comes through loud and clear. Buried in the last sentence of the letter is the admission that he’d launched this attack against the advice of his men, counting upon surprise and the ferocity of the attack to carry the day; William Marshal colorfully described him that day as a “ravening lion, starved for food.”
William Marshal also gives us the name of the man who rescued Philippe from drowning, saying “When they pulled the king out of the water—he had been extremely frightened for his life—he declined to stay in Gisors, even though it had a very strong castle, for he feared his enemies so much that he feared he would be besieged inside the town.” The Marshal did not have much respect for Philippe, as you can tell.
As you’ll read in Ransom, Richard inflicted some very humiliating defeats upon the French king in the years 1194-1199, and the English chroniclers reveled in them. Richard had also drawn a diplomatic noose around Philippe by 1198, having lured away Philippe’s major allies and vassals, so that the French king’s position was looking more and more precarious in the spring of 1199. But as Uthred, Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful, conflicted hero in his magnificent Saxon series, often says, “Fate is inexorable,” and a crossbowman at Chalus would do what the French king could not, bring down a lion.