"Speak, man, I conjure thee! Thou hast heard aught?"
"Speech is just what is forbidden to me," replied John. "My lips are sealed. All the message I have for thee is: 'Haste, or it may be too late!' Ask me no more."
CHAPTER XVIII.
HEARD UNDERGROUND.
On the twenty-second of June 1224, the king arrived at Bedford, and the siege of the castle commenced almost immediately. Outside the town, on the Northampton road, pavilions were pitched for himself, for Hubert de Burgh the justiciary, and other great officers, while the troops and their officers, Ralph de Beauchamp among them, were quartered in rude shelters near the castle, or billeted upon the townsfolk, that they might be ready to repel any sortie which the besieged might make with a view of burning the engines of war. Close to these latter were encamped the men who worked them, together with the miners, carpenters, and other artificers ready for their respective turn of duty.
Before any hostile movement was commenced, however, the king, in due form, summoned the castle to surrender. An ecclesiastic was detailed for the purpose; for priests in those days often performed strange functions.
It was but an empty form, for no one expected that the king's command would be obeyed. Moreover, Sir Fulke de Breauté himself was not in the castle. With the astute craftiness which pervaded all his actions, he had gone away some little while before, leaving his brother in command. He took himself off into Wales, where he joined the Earl of Chester, who, though siding for some time with the king, had left him, in conjunction with some other barons, under somewhat suspicious circumstances.
As was to be expected, William de Breauté made answer to the archdeacon--for such was the office of the king's messenger--that he had received no orders from his brother to surrender the castle, and that he certainly should not do so without authority from him. So the siege was begun without delay.
The method of taking a castle in those days was much the same as that which continued in vogue till, long afterwards, stone walls gave place to earthworks. The walls were first battered by stones thrown from the petraria, and when a breach had been made a storming-party rushed in. The only change consequent upon the introduction of gunpowder was that cannon then took the place of the stone-throwing engines.
The machines were placed one or two on each side of the castle, and they must have been of considerable size and strength, as one of them projected stones right across the river. The men who worked them were protected against the quarrels, arrows, and other missiles directed at them from the walls, by screens made of ox and horse hides. Two lofty erections, which towered far above the fortifications of the castle, were manned by slingers and cross-bowmen, who thence shot down upon the garrison on the walls and in the baileys below them.