Chapter One
The Siege of Wrexham Castle
It was a glorious sight.
Mighty Wrexham Castle, one of the largest structures between Windsor and Edinburgh, had finally fallen to the English after almost two months of a horrible and deadly siege. Victory was in the air for the English armies, and relief rippled through the ranks.
The end was in sight.
No one was more relieved than Tristan.
He’d been with it from the start, and it had been an enormous undertaking.
The Welsh, who had enjoyed a somewhat peaceful existence during the reign of King John, had decided upon his demise that they would resume their usual belligerence when it came to English rule.
Led by Prince Llywelyn, the rebellion went in surges, and this was just one more surge in a country with a history of them.
In this case, their target had been the northern end of the Welsh marches and the well-fortified castles that lined the border.
Because Christopher de Lohr and his allies held the southern to the mid marches, the weak point was the northern marches between Chirk Castle and Liverpool.
It was true that there were several castles on the northern end, including Shrewsbury, but those castles hadn’t seen the activity that the castles toward the south had seen.
Since major English properties were in the southern part of Wales, that always seemed to be the flashpoint for most of the rebellions, and the warlords there were forearmed.
But not in the north.
Since John’s passing and the ascension of his nine-year-old son, Henry, the Welsh seemed to think a child on the throne was the perfect time to assert themselves.
About a year after John’s death, they started moving against smaller outposts along the northern marches, a tactic that English warlords soon realized meant they were testing the waters, so to speak.
They were systematically testing the outposts and the reaction of the allies when one of them was attacked to see where the strengths and weaknesses were.
William Marshal, whose major property of Pembroke Castle was deep inside Welsh territory, kept a particularly close eye on what they were doing.
The Welsh usually left Pembroke alone simply because William Marshal could summon thousands of men to crush any manner of attack, so they had learned long ago that Pembroke was not an easy target.
However, there were several outposts along the marches that did make fairly easy targets, and they made a habit of harassing them on a regular basis.
More than two and a half years after John’s death, the Welsh became aggressive on the northern marches, and two months ago, they finally made the big push for the biggest prize.
Wrexham Castle.
Wrexham wasn’t merely impressive. It was positively sublime.
It had been built by a subject of William the Conqueror two hundred years earlier with the purpose of containing the northern marches, protecting Liverpool and Cumbria, and controlling the roads that headed into Anglesey.
There were other castles in the area with similar objectives, but none so mighty as Wrexham.
And the Welsh wanted it.
The Lord of Wrexham was a descendant of the man who built it.
Rufus de Gresford was the last surviving male of the family line, and he’d gotten married late in life to a Welsh warlord’s daughter, Nessa.
Nessa had been very young, and pretty, and Rufus had put great faith in his new wife and her father, who served Llywelyn.
Nessa and her father made a good show of being loyal to de Gresford when the reality was much different.
Llywelyn wanted Wrexham.
The unfortunate necessity was that de Gresford was part of that plan.
The marriage with Nessa had been carefully cultivated, and once she was in Rufus’ bed, the real siege of Wrexham began.
Her father, along with Llywelyn, sent Welsh warriors into the castle disguised as servants, all of them settling in and earning trust, just as Nessa was earning her husband’s trust. Lonely Rufus wanted to make his wife happy, so he allowed her to bring her kinsfolk to live at Wrexham, allowing an influx of Welsh into his castle.
He never even saw it coming.
One night, Nessa slit her husband’s throat, and a rebellion was staged from within the castle.
The de Gresford soldiers were caught off guard, and half of them were dead before they realized what had happened.
Those that remained fought back, but by that time, the gates were open and the castle was overrun.
Some de Gresford soldiers managed to flee, and word soon reached Christopher de Lohr and other marcher lords of what had happened.
William Marshal wasted no time in sending an army to reclaim what was inarguably the largest castle on the northern marches, something he most definitely didn’t want the Welsh to have.
That had been two months ago. Wrexham Castle had been designed by a genius, with enormous curtain walls surrounding what was essentially an island set within a massive moat.
The walls themselves were twenty feet high and several feet thick, built of the gray granite that was so prevalent along the marches.
Rising from within the curtain walls was a keep several stories high, with a parapet on the roof that allowed for skilled Welsh archers to fire the enemy.
The gatehouse was half the size of the keep but still utterly enormous, four stories in height.
Set within that gatehouse were dual portcullises, massive grates of wood that were sheathed in iron so they were nearly impossible to burn.
This was the castle that the Marshal’s army faced.
The siege of Wrexham Castle had been no easy feat from the start.
The moat was so vast and the walls so strategically placed that it made the approach of any army incredibly difficult.
There was no possibility to gain the advantage of surprise, so the Marshal didn’t try.
He had five allied houses with him and an army of close to ten thousand men, including a thousand archers and eighteen siege engines.
The only thing they could do was wheel the engines up to the edge of the moat and anchor them into position.
It made for an awesome sight.
When the siege actually began, Tristan was put in command of those massive war machines.
They began their bombardment, slinging boulders at the walls, trying to break them down.
The archers on the top of the keep and on the wall walk fired at the enemy soldiers, trying to keep them away from the machines, but they weren’t entirely successful.
Although it made the men manning the machines move slower because they had to continually protect themselves, it didn’t stop the siege engines.
Huge boulders were dug up from the rocky hills near the River Clywedog and brought to the siege engines on wagons pulled by oxen.
Those boulders were then loaded into siege engines and slung into the walls.
The first area to be destroyed were the archer positions.
The truth was that the English wanted the castle back but they didn’t want to completely demolish it, so after three days of bombarding the walls and knocking holes into them, they started another tactic.
They began coating smaller boulders with flammable liquid, like fish oil and pig’s grease, lighting them on fire and then tossing them up over the walls.
The purpose of that was to burn anything in the interior of the castle that was worth burning and, hopefully, destroy the food supply.
They weren’t beyond burning the Welsh out.
But the Welsh weren’t easily burned.
The flaming siege engines went on for a couple of weeks before the English returned to simply hurling boulders into the walls.
But what the Welsh didn’t realize was that it was a diversionary tactic, because while the boulders were flying, there were fleets of men in the trees to the west building pontoon bridges with which to cross the moat.
Since the only real access in and out of Wrexham was the gatehouse, they had to get to it before they could actually get into the castle.
Since it was such a large-scale attack, the Marshal had summoned several of his Executioner Knights and the armies who served them.
Most of his senior agents had outposts or garrisons, men with responsibilities other than being an Executioner Knight, and he used that to his advantage.
De Lohr from Lioncross Abbey Castle had come, leaving Alexander behind in command of the castle, while Christopher’s eldest son, Peter, came from his garrison of Ludlow Castle.
From the south, Gart Forbes from Dunstan Castle had brought his army, and Caius d’Avignon from Hawkstone Castle had come also.
But there were more.
From nearby Cloryn Castle, Bretton de Llion and his son, Gareth, had brought a rather compact but heavily armed army.
Gareth, in fact, was an Executioner Knight, but he’d returned to Cloryn to serve his elderly father in the last years of Bretton’s life.
But the last two armies, and big ones that that, were that of the House of de Winter, with Bric MacRohan in command and Maxton of Loxbeare from Chalford Hill Castle.
These were older men, with decades of battle experience, and they had to tap into everything they knew in order to breach Wrexham.
It took two months, but it could have easily taken two years with less experienced men.
On the dawn of the sixty-second day of battle, it was Tristan and his men who finally managed to break through the damaged portcullises.
That was when the fall of Wrexham began.