Free Holy Warrior by Angus Donald Page B

your manners, Alan, with so many soldiers about. Don’t get into any trouble; don’t provoke anyone to violence.’ As so often when he spoke to me, Robin was half-serious and half-joking.
    Crossing the old bridge over the river, Robin and I moved into single file, and I covered my nose at the stench of the public latrines - wooden shacks that had been set up, their backs extending out over the slow moving brown water so that the townsmen could relieve themselves directly into the Ouse. To my right, a couple of hundred yards away, was the mound and high wooden walls of the King’s Tower, the great keep of York Castle, that glowered over the town as a reminder of the King’s power in the North. On my left, a quarter of a mile away, was the magnificent soaring bulk of the Minster, a huge monument to God’s glory on Earth; and next to it, slightly closer to the river, was the Abbey of St Mary’s, one of the holiest institutions in Yorkshire. Robin I knew had had problems with the Abbot in the past - he had mocked him publicly for his wealth, and robbed his servants as they travelled through Sherwood - and I knew he wanted to avoid the place, if at all possible.
    We headed neither right to the castle nor left to the Minster, but straight up the hill through ranks of squeezed in houses, some of them two or even three storeys high. It was an impressive town. And yet, even though I had never been in York before, I could sense that something was wrong in the place: fellows would scurry about shouting half-heard messages to their fellows; a gang of apprentices crossed our path heading north, and drunkenly singing a song that ended in the chorus ... ‘Ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha, another pint of ale, my boys, ah-ha, ah-ah, ah-ha, and then the Jew shall die, my boys, ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha ...’ It seemed that a great many people were walking up the road with us and towards the market; a tide of humanity all moving in the same direction.
    I felt uneasy and glanced at Robin; he too was frowning but we pushed on up the hill until a space opened up to our left and, by the ripe smell of rotting meat, I knew we were passing the town’s shambles. Robin put a hand on my arm and we reined in at the entrance to the meat market. In a wide space, lined with rough stalls selling bloody cuts of pork and beef, and with row upon row of dead chickens hanging by their feet, a huge crowd had formed. Standing on a box at the back of the market, a short, middle-aged man dressed in a robe like that of a monk - except that it was a grubby off-white colour, instead of the usual brown - was haranguing the multitude. As Robin and I stopped to listen, more and more townspeople joined the throng in front of the monk, straining to hear his message: it soon became clear that his theme was the Great Pilgrimage, and the urgent need to free the Holy Land.
    ‘... and yet their beasts continue to defile our Holy places; the unbelievers’ cattle shitting on the very floors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself; their Satan-black slaves pissing in the font where many a devout Christian babe has been baptised. How long, O Lord, how long will you suffer these Saracen desecrators to live? Where is the strong right arm of the Christian faith? Where is the army of the righteous who will scrub the Holy Land clean of these filthy, Christ-denying wretches?
    ‘I tell you, brothers: the great men of the land are doing their part; even our good King Richard has made his solemn vow to recapture Jerusalem and rid it of these unbelieving lice that swarm on the very stones where Christ preached his blessed ministry. And all the great lords of England and France, too, are doing their part to rid the world of the foul corruption of the paynim: our noble Sheriff, Sir John Marshal, brother to Christendom’s greatest knight, William the Marshal, is summoning his men, brave knights from across the county of Yorkshire, to cross the seas and vanquish these stinking hordes of the