Pyke was the ultimate peasant, dirty, smelly, scruffy and lazy; he was a liar, a cheat, a bully a coward and a thief. He was also a drunkard.

He prospered because he was a liar and a cheat and survived because he was a coward.

Unusually for a man of his status we know quite a lot about him, partially because of his book but also because he is mentioned by several contemporary scholars.

He was born around 1350. The son of a serving maid and a wandering minstrel. He was brought up by his mother in the castle of Sir Ralph Basset in Drayton. Staring his working life as a kitchen hand he joined his Lords retinue in Scotland in the late 1360's. It was there that he took up the life of a soldier.

We do not have all the details of his career and his book is full of inaccuracies for example claiming he fought at Poitiers in 1356. What is known is that after Scotland he served for several years in the retinue of a German Knight, Otto Von Wilhelm, whom Pyke accompanied around the Holy lands including Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople.

He also spent several years on garrison duty for Richard II in France. Back in England by 1401 he hired himself out as a bodyguard to a wealthy widow whom he eventually married and whose money he soon spent. In 1411, his money all gone, he joined the retinue of Sir Thomas Erpingham and returned to France in 1415 as part of the army under Henry V.

Despite nearly four decades as a soldier, Pyke had managed to avoid any serious engagements by getting himself posted to the wagon train, as far from the fighting as possible.

Things changed at Agincourt. Despite being at the rear of the army, he finally found himself in the thick of the fighting when, late in the day, the train was attacked by the French.

It was this brief action that made him rich and put his name in the history books. He single handedly defended a carriage containing many of the nobles favorite 'mistresses'. For this he was highly praised and well rewarded. No one, it seems, thought to ask what he was doing there in the first place. As well as the financial reward from the grateful Lords, he received a small estate in southern England. Apparently he was a more tyrannical landlord than most, treating his tenants terribly. It was there that he wrote, or rather dictated, his book, "An English Hero Soldier".

He and his wife set out o a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1420.Nothing is known of them after that. They were survived by one legitimate son, Mathew, and who knows how many illegitimate ones.

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