Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [480]
“Never again,” she cried. Looking sternly at Godfrey, she commanded, “Bring all the farm hands at the front door at dawn tomorrow. Tell them to bring whatever weapons they have. We are going to fight.”
Godfrey looked uncertain.
“We?”
“Yes. We are going to fight against the war. I shall lead them.”
The events of the previous day had decided her. Up to now, to hold the family together, she had been neutral, trying not even to consider which cause was the more just.
Now she no longer cared. They had nearly destroyed her child. They had attacked the farm.
“I am at war,” she announced, “with all soldiers.”
Rather to her own surprise, by the end of the next day, she had collected men from two other local farms to add to her little band, swelling her numbers to ten. Three more men appeared from the Forest estate. Forest himself was in the west, though whether he had joined the Royalist or Parliamentary side no one seemed to know. “Which is just what he wants,” Margaret remarked. But his deserted estate workers were glad to find a leader. And by the next morning a force of fifteen appeared.
They were not impressively armed; but soon she had organised each man with either a musket, a sword or a pike. Margaret herself, wearing a breastplate that had belonged to her father and wielding a large, heavy sword, her hair scooped up and stuffed into a tall steel helmet, looked the most impressive of them all.
She drilled the little group, made them stand, charge, and push their pikes together; then she told them:
“I care not which army they be, no soldiers shall enter our farms.”
Samuel was allowed to watch. How splendid his tall sister was: and just how effective the little group was was proved two days later when a dozen soldiers, more than a little drunk, came to the gates of the property and found their way barred. When they tried to push their way in, the farm hands suddenly drew weapons and charged them. To their astonishment the soldiers found themselves in hand to hand fighting – and losing.
The leader of the farm hands was a handsome young fellow in an old-fashioned helmet, who gave such sword blows that two of them were driven back.
It was only when a chance blow knocked her helmet off, and Margaret’s cascade of golden hair fell down that one of the soldiers cried:
“God’s blood, ’tis a woman.”
“Whose side are you on, Amazon?” another cried with a laugh.
“We are against plundering soldiers,” she answered.
And not caring to fight a woman, the surprised soldiers withdrew.
Samuel saw it all, looking over the fields from the top of the house.
The news of Margaret Shockley’s fight was all over the valley in hours. By the next day, it was the talk of the five rivers, and soon she heard of others who were following her example.
“If a woman can do it,” the farmers in the five valleys said, “so can we.”
In fact, Margaret soon discovered her little skirmish in the Avon valley had been part of a much wider movement that was growing independently all over central Wessex.
“The people of Sarum don’t like being disturbed,” she remarked to Godfrey. “Other defence bands will spring up like mushrooms.”
They did. Later in the year, led by a Wessex gentleman, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, they formed an association several hundred strong at Sarum alone. The Clubmen of Wiltshire, as they called themselves, were in action for about a year. They were formidable.