Love Among the Ruins by Warwick Deeping

The royal host had massed about the walls of Lauretia, and marched southwards to surprise Fulviac at St. Gore. Half the chivalry of the land had gathered under the standard of the King. Sir Simon of Imbrecour had come in from the west with ten thousand spears and five thousand bowmen. The Northerners under Morolt boasted themselves twoscore thousand men, and there were the loyal levies of the midland provinces to march under "The Golden Sun" upon the south. Never had such panoply of war glittered through the listening woods. Their march was as the onrush of a rippling sea; the noise of their trumpets as the cry of a tempest over towering trees.

Chivalry, golden champion of beauty, had much to avenge, much to expurgate. The peasant folk had plunged the land into ruin and red war. Castles smoked under the summer sky; the noble dead lay unburied in the high places of pride. To the wolf cry of the people there could be no answer save the hiss of the sword. Before the high altar at Lauretia, the King had sworn on relics and the Scriptures, to deal such vengeance as should leave the land cowering for centuries in terror of his name.