There may have been three hundred
of them in all, and we did not count more than fifty men, some of
us ill-armed, together with a mob of aged people and many women and
children. What had become of the other men I do not know, but orders
had been shouted from all quarters, and some had gone this way and some
that. Some, too, I think, had fled, lacking leaders.
The French having climbed the hill, began to attack our ill-fenced
gateways, bringing up beams of timber to force them in. Those of us who
had bows shot some of them, though, their armour being good, for the
most part the arrows glanced. But few had bows. Moreover, whenever we
showed ourselves they poured such a rain of quarrels and other shafts
upon us that we could not face it, lacking mail as we did, and a number
of us were killed or wounded. At last they forced the easternmost gate
which was the weakest, and got in there and over a place in the wall
were it was broken. We fought them as well as we could; myself I cut
down two with the sword, Wave-Flame, hewing right through the helm of
one, for the steel of that sword was good.
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