In January the Fairy Host left York and rode south. At the Trent they halted. So it was at Newark on the banks of the Trent that King Henry and his army met the Daoine Sidhe in battle.

Before the battle a magic wind blew through the ranks of King Henry’s army and a sweet sound of pipe music was heard, which caused a great number of the horses to break free and flee to the fairy side, many taking their unlucky riders with them. Next, every man heard the voices of his loved ones – mothers, fathers, children, lovers – call out to him to come home. A host of ravens descended from the sky, pecking at the faces of the English and blinding them with a chaos of black wings. The English soldiers not only had the skill and ferocity of the Sidhe to contend with, but also their own fear in the face of such eerie magic. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the battle was short and that King Henry lost. At the moment when all fell silent and it became clear beyond any doubt that King Henry had been defeated the birds for miles around began singing as if for joy.

The King and his counsellors waited for some chieftain or king to step forward. The ranks of the Daoine Sidhe parted and someone appeared.

He was rather less than fifteen years old. Like the Daoine Sidhe he was dressed in ragged clothes of coarse black wool. Like them his dark hair was long and straight. Like them, he spoke neither English nor French – the two languages current in England at that time – but only a dialect of Faerie.1 He was pale and handsome and solemn-faced, yet it was clear to everyone present that he was human, not fairy.

By the standards of the Norman and English earls and knights, who saw him that day for the first time, he was scarcely civilized. He had never seen a spoon before, nor a chair, nor an iron kettle, nor a silver penny, nor a wax candle. No fairy clan or kingdom of the period possessed any such fine things. When King Henry and the boy met to divide England between them, Henry sat upon a wooden bench and drank wine from a silver goblet, the boy sat upon the floor and drank ewe’s milk from a stone cup. The chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, writing some thirty years later, describes the shock felt by King Henry’s court when they saw, in the midst of all these important proceedings, a Daoine Sidhe warrior lean across and begin solicitously plucking lice out of the boy’s filthy hair.

There was among the Fairy Host a young Norman knight called Thomas of Dundale.2 Though he had been a captive in Faerie for many years he remembered enough of his own language (French) to make the boy and King Henry understand each other.