Ash: The Lost History Part 1

Ash: The Lost History.

By Mary Gentle.

Introduction.

I make no apology for presenting a new translation of these doc.u.ments which are our only contact with the life of that extraordinary woman, Ash (b.l457[?]~ d.1477). One has long been needed.

Charles Mallory Maximillian's 1890 edition, Ash: The Life of a Female Mediaeval Mercenary Captain, begins with a translation from the mediaeval Latin into serviceable Victorian prose, but he admits that he leaves out some of the more explicit episodes; as does Vaughan Davies in his 1939 collection, Ash: A Fifteenth Century Biography. The 'Ash' doc.u.ments badly need a colloquial and complete translation for the new millennium, and one which does not shrink from the brutality of the mediaeval period, as well as its joyfulness. I hope that I have provided one here.

Women have always accompanied armies. Examples of their taking part in actual combat are far too numerous to quote. In AD 1476, it is only two generations since Joan of Arc led the Dauphin's forces in France: one can imagine the grandparents of Ash's soldiers telling war stories about this. To find a mediaeval peasant woman in command, however, without the backing of church or state - and in command of mercenary troops - is almost unique.1 The high glory of mediaeval life and the explosive revolution of the Renaissance meet in this Europe of the second half of the fifteenth century. Wars are endemic - in the Italian city states, in France, Burgundy, Spain and The Germanies, and in England between warring royal houses. Europe itself is in a state of terror over the eastern threat of the Turkish Empire. It is an age of armies, which will grow, and of mercenary companies, which will pa.s.s away with the coming of the Early Modern period.

Much is uncertain about Ash, including the year and place of her birth. Several fifteenth and sixteenth century doc.u.ments claim to be Lives of Ash, and I shall be referring to them later, together with those new discoveries which I have made in the course of my research.

This earliest Latin fragment of the Winchester Codex, a monastic doc.u.ment written around AD 1495, deals with her early experiences as a child, and it is here presented in my own translation, as are subsequent texts.

Any historical personage inevitably acquires a baggage train of tales, anecdotes and romantic stories over and above their actual historical career. These are an entertaining part of the Ash material, but not to be taken seriously as history. I have therefore foot-noted such episodes in the Ash cycle as they occur: the serious reader is free to disregard them.

At the beginning of our millennium, with sophisticated methods of research, it is far easier for me to strip away the false 'legends' around Ash than it would have been for either Charles Maximillian or Vaughan Davies. I have here uncovered the historical woman behind the stories - her real self as, if not more, amazing than her myth.

Pierce Ratcliff, Ph.D. (War Studies), 2001.

NOTE: Addendum to copy found in British Library: pencilled note on loose papers:.

Dr PlERCE RaTCLIFF Ph.D. (War Studies).

Flat I, Rowan Court, 112 Olvera Street, London W14 oab, United Kingdom.

Anna Longman.

Editor.

University Press.

29 September 2000.

Dear Ms Longman, I am returning, with pleasure, the contract for our book. I have signed it as requested.

I enclose a rough draft of the translation of Ash's early life: the Winchester Codex. As you will see, as further doc.u.ments are translated, the seed of everything that happens to her is here.

This is a remarkable occasion for me! Every historian, I suppose, believes that one day he or she will make the discovery, the one that makes their names. And I believe that I have made it here, uncovering the details of the career of this remarkable woman, Ash, and thus uncovering a little-known - no, a forgotten - deeply significant episode in European history.

My theory is one that I first began to piece together as I studied the existing 'Ash' doc.u.ments for my doctoral thesis. I was able to confirm it with the discovery of the 'Fraxinus' doc.u.ment - originally from the collection at Snowshill Manor, in Gloucestershire. A cousin of the late owner, Charles Wade, had been given a sixteenth century German chest before his death and the take-over of Snowshill Manor by the National Trust in 1952. When it was finally opened, the ma.n.u.script was inside. I think it must have sat in there (there is a steel locking mechanism that takes up the entire inside of the chest's lid!), all but unread since the fifteenth century. Charles Wade may not even have known it existed.

Being in mediaeval French and Latin, it had never been translated by Wade, even if he was aware of it - he was one of those 'collectors' who, born in the Victorian age, had far more interest in acquiring than deciphering. The Manor is a wonderful heap of clocks, j.a.panese armour, mediaeval German swords, porcelain, etc.! But that at least one other eye besides mine has seen it, I am certain: some hand has scribbled a rough Latin pun on the outer sheet - fraxinus me fecit: 'Ash made me'. (You may or may not know that the Latin name for the ash tree is fraxinus.) I would guess that this annotation is eighteenth century.

As I first read it, it became clear to me that this was, indeed, an entirely new, previously undiscovered doc.u.ment. A memoir written, or more likely dictated, by the woman Ash herself, at some point before her death in AD 1477(?). It did not take me long to realise that it fits, as it were, in the gaps between recorded history - and there are many, many such gaps. (And, one supposes, it is my discovery of 'Fraxinus' which encouraged your firm to wish to publish this new edition of the Ash Life.) What 'Fraxinus' describes is florid, perhaps, but one must remember that exaggeration, legend, myth, and the chronicler's own prejudices and patriotism, all form a normal part of the average mediaeval ma.n.u.script. Under the dross, there is gold. As you will see.

History is a large net, with a wide mesh, and many things slip through it into oblivion. With the new material I have uncovered, I hope to bring to light, once again, those facts which do not accord with our idea of the past, but which, nonetheless, are factual.

That this will then involve considerable rea.s.sessment of our views of Northern European history is inevitable, and the historians will just have to get used to it!

I look forward to hearing from you, Pierce Ratcliff.

Prologue.

c. AD 1465-1467 [?].

'My soul is among lions'

1.

Chapter One.

It was her scars that made her beautiful.

No one bothered to give her a name until she was two years old. Up until then, as she toddled between the mercenaries' campfires scrounging food, suckling b.i.t.c.h-hounds' teats, and sitting in the dirt, she had been called Mucky-pup, Grubby-face, and Ashy-a.r.s.e. When her hair fined up from a nondescript light brown to a white blonde it was 'Ashy' that stuck. As soon as she could talk, she called herself Ash.

When Ash was eight years old, two of the mercenaries raped her.

She was not a virgin. All the stray children played snuggling games under the smelly sheepskin sleeping rugs, and she had her particular friends. These two mercenaries were not other eight-year-olds, they were grown men. One of them had the grace to be drunk.

Because she cried afterwards, the one who was not drunk heated his dagger in the campfire and drew the knife-tip from below her eye, up her cheekbone in a slant, up to her ear almost.

Because she still cried, he made another petulant slash that opened her cheek parallel under the first cut.

Squalling, she pulled free. Blood ran down the side of her face in sheets. She was not physically big enough to use a sword or an axe, although she had already begun training. She was big enough to pick up his c.o.c.ked crossbow (carelessly left ready on the wagon for perimeter defence) and shoot a bolt through the first man at close quarters.

The third scar neatly opened her other cheekbone, but it came honestly, no sadism involved. The second man's dagger was genuinely trying to kill her.

She could not c.o.c.k the crossbow again on her own. She would not run. She groped among the burst ruins of the first mercenary's body and buried his eating-knife in the upper thigh of the second man, piercing his femoral artery. He bled to death in minutes. Remember that she had already begun to train as a fighter.

Death is nothing strange in mercenary soldier camps. Even so, for an eight-year-old to kill two of their own was something to give them pause.

Ash's first really clear memory came with the day of her trial. It had rained in the night. The sun brought steam rising from field and distant forest, and slanted gold light across tents, rough bashas, cauldrons, carts, goats, washerwomen, wh.o.r.es, captains, stallions and flags. It made the company's colours glow. She gazed up at the big swallow-tailed flag with the cross and beast on it, smelling the cool air on her face.

A bearded man squatted down in front of her to talk to her. She was small, for eight. He wore a breastplate. She saw her face reflected in the curving mirror-shiny metal.

Her face, with her big eyes and ragged long silver hair, and three unhealed scars; two up her cheek under her left eye and one under her right eye. Like the tribal marks of the horse-barbarians of the East.

She smelled gra.s.s-fires and horse dung, and the sweat of the armed man. The cool wind raised the hairs on her arms. She saw herself suddenly as if she were outside of it all - the big kneeling man in armour, and in front of him this small child with spilling white curls, in patched hose and bundled into a ragged doublet far too big for her. Barefoot, wide-eyed, scarred; carrying a broken hunting knife re-ground as a dagger.

It was the first time she saw that she was beautiful.

Blood thundered in her ears with frustration. She could think of no use for that beauty.

The bearded man, the Captain of the company, said, "Have you father or mother living?"

"I don't know. One of them might be my father." She pointed at random at men re-fletching bolts, polishing helmets. "n.o.body says they're my mother."

A much thinner man leaned down beside the Captain and said quietly, "One of the dead men was stupid enough to leave a crossbow spanned with a bolt in it. That's an offence. As to the child, the washerwomen say she's no maid, but no one knows her to be a wh.o.r.e either."

"If she is old enough to kill," the Captain scowled through wiry copper-coloured hair, "she is old enough to take the penalty. Which is to be whipped at the cart-tail around the camp."

"My name is Ash," she said in a small, clear, carrying voice. "They hurt me and I killed them. If anyone else hurts me, I'll kill them too. I'll kill you."

She got the whipping she might have expected, with something added for insolence and discipline's sake. She did not cry. Afterwards, one of the crossbowmen gave her a cut-down jack, a padded cloth jerkin, for armour, and she exercised devotedly in it at weapons practice. For a month or two she pretended the crossbowman was her father, until it became clear that his kindness had been a momentary impulse.

A little later in her ninth year, rumours went through the camp that there had been a Lion born of a Virgin.

Chapter Two.

The child Ash sat with her back to a bare tree, cheering the mummers. Furs kept some of the ground's ice from her backside.

Her scars were not healing well. They stood out red against the extreme pallor of her skin. Visible breath huffed out of her mouth as she screamed, shoulder to shoulder with all the camp strays and b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. The Great Wyrm (a man with a tanned horse's skin flung over his back, and a horse's skull fitted by ties to his head) ramped across the stage. The horse skin still had mane and tail attached. They nailed the freezing afternoon air. The Knight of the Wasteland (played by a company sergeant in better armour than Ash had thought he owned) aimed skilful lance blows very wide.

"Oh, kill it," a girl called Crow called scornfully.

"Stick it up his a.r.s.e!" Ash yelled. The children huddling around her tree screamed laughter and disdain.

Richard, a little black-haired boy with a port-wine stain across his face, whispered, "It'll have to die. The Lion's born. I heard the Lord Captain say."

Ash's scorn faded with the last sentence. "When? Where? When, Richard? When did you hear him?"

"Midday. I took water into the tent." The small boy's voice sounded proud.

Ash ignored his implied unofficial status as page. She rested her nose on her clenched fists and huffed warm breath on her frozen fingers. The Wyrm and the sergeant were having at each other with more vigour. That was because of the cold. She stood up and rubbed hard at her numb b.u.t.tocks through her woollen hose.

"Where's you going, Ashy?" the boy asked.

"I'm going to make water," she announced loftily. "You can't come with me."

"Don't wanna."

"You're not big enough." With that parting shaft, Ash picked her way out of the crowd of children, goats and hounds.

The sky was low, cold, and the same colour as pewter plates. A white mist came up from the river. If it would snow, it would be warmer than this. Ash padded on feet bound with strips of cloth towards the abandoned buildings (probably agricultural) that the company officers had commandeered for winter quarters. A sorry rabble of tents had gone up all around. Armed men were cl.u.s.tered around fire-pits with their fronts to the heat and their a.r.s.es in the cold. She went on past their backs.

Round to the rear of the farm, she heard them coming out of the building in time to duck behind a barrel, in which the frozen cylindrical block of rainwater protruded up a full handspan.

"And go on foot," the Captain finished speaking. A group of men clattered with him out into the yard. The thin company clerk. Two of the Captain's closest lieutenants. The very few, Ash knew, with pretensions (once) to n.o.ble birth.

The Captain wore a close-fitting steel sh.e.l.l that covered all his body. Full harness: from the pauldrons and breastplate enclosing his shoulders and body, the vambraces on his arms, his gauntlets, his ta.s.sets and cuisses and greaves that armoured his legs, down to the metal sabatons that covered his spurred boots. He carried his armet2 under his arm. Winter light dulled the mirrored metal. He stood in the filthy farmyard wearing armour that reflected the sky as white: she had not thought before that this might be why it was called white harness. The only colour shone from his red beard and the red leather of his scabbard.

Ash knelt back on her knees and toes. Her frozen fingers rested against the cold barrel, too numb to feel the wood staves. The strapped and tied metal plates rattled as the man walked. When his two lieutenants thumped down into the yard, also in full armour, it sounded like m.u.f.fled pans. Like a cook's wagon overturning.

Ash wanted such armour. It was that desire, more than curiosity, that made her follow them away from the farm buildings. To walk with that invulnerability.

With that amount of wealth on one's back . . . Ash ran, dazzled.

The sky above yellowed. A few flakes of snow drifted down to lie on top of her untidy hair (less purely white than it) but she took no notice. Her nose and ears shone bright red, and her fingers and toes were blue and purple. This was nothing unusual for her in winter: she thought nothing of it. She did not even pull her doublet tighter over her filthy linen shirt.

The four men - Captain, clerk, two young lieutenants - walked ahead in unusual silence. They pa.s.sed the camp pickets. Ash sneaked past behind while the Captain exchanged a word with them.

She wondered why the men did not ride. They walked up a steep slope to the surrounding woodland. At the wood's border, confronting the thick bowed branches, the brambles and thorn bushes, the deadwood brushfalls built up over more than a man's lifetime, she understood. You couldn't take a horse into this. Even a war-horse.

Now three of the men stopped and put on their armets. The unarmoured clerk fell back a step. Each man kept his visor pinned up, his face visible. The taller of the two lieutenants took his sword out of his scabbard. The bearded Captain shook his head.

The sliding sound of metal on wood echoed in the quiet, as the lieutenant resheathed his blade.

The wood held silence.

All three of the armoured men turned to the company clerk. This thin man wore a velvet-covered brigandine and a war-hat3, and his uncovered face was pinched in the cold air. Ash sneaked closer as the snow fell.

The clerk stepped confidently forward, into the wood.

Ash had not paid much attention to the hills surrounding the valley. The valley had a clean river, and the lone farmhouse and its buildings. It was good for wintering out of campaign season. What else should she know? The leafless woods on the surrounding high hills had been bare of game. If not hunting, what other reason could take her here, away from the fire-pits?

What reason could take them?

There was a path, she decided after some minutes. None of the brambles and thorn bushes on it were more than her own height. Not disused for more than a few seasons.

The armoured men pushed unharmed through the briars. The shorter lieutenant swore, "G.o.d's blood!" and fell silent, as the other three turned and stared at him. Ash snuck under briar stems as thick as her wrist. Little and quick, she could have out-distanced them, protective armour or not, if she had known where the path went.