by Will Durant
Procedure in feudal law largely followed the barbarian codes, and extended their efforts to substitute public penalties for private revenge. Churches, market places, “towns of refuge” were endowed with the right of sanctuary; by such restrictions vengeance might be stayed till the law could supervene. Manorial courts tried cases between tenant and tenant, or between tenant and lord; contests between lord and vassal, or lord and lord, were submitted to a jury of “peers of the barony”—men of at least equal standing, and of the same fief,47 with the complainant, and sitting in some baronial hall; episcopal or abbey courts tried cases involving persons in orders; while the highest appeals were heard by a royal court composed of peers of the realm, and sometimes presided over by the king. In the manorial courts plaintiff as well as defendant was imprisoned till judgment was pronounced. In all courts the plaintiff who lost was subject to the same penalty that would have been visited upon the defendant if guilty. Bribery was popular in all courts.48
Trial by ordeal continued throughout the feudal period. About the year 1215 some heretics at Cambrai were subjected to the hot iron test; suffering burns, they were led to the stake; but, we are told, one was spared when, upon confessing his errors, his hand immediately healed, leaving no trace of the burn. The growth of philosophy through the twelfth century, and the renewed study of Roman law, begot a distaste for these “ordeals of God.” Pope Innocent III secured their complete prohibition by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1216; Henry III adopted this prohibition into English law (1219), Frederick II into the Neapolitan Code (1231). In Germany the old tests persisted into the fourteenth century; Savonarola underwent the ordeal by fire at Florence in 1498; it was revived in the trial of witches in the sixteenth century.49
Feudalism encouraged the old Germanic trial by combat, partly as a mode of proof, partly in lieu of private revenge. The Normans re-established it in Britain after its disuse by the Anglo-Saxons, and it remained on the English statute book till the nineteenth century.50 In 1127 a knight named Guy was accused by another named Hermann of complicity in the assassination of Charles the Good of Flanders; on Guy denying it, Hermann challenged him to a judicial duel; they fought for hours, till they were both unhorsed and weaponless; they passed from fencing to wrestling, and Hermann demonstrated the justice of his charge by tearing Guy’s testicles from his body; whereupon Guy expired.51 Perhaps ashamed of such barbarities, feudal custom accumulated restrictions on the right to challenge. The accuser, to acquire such a right, was required to make out a probable case; the defendant might refuse to fight if he had proved an alibi; a serf could not challenge a freeman, nor a leper a sound man, nor a bastard a man of legitimate birth; in general one might challenge only a person of equal rank with himself. The laws of several communities gave the court the right to forbid any judicial duel at its discretion. Women, ecclesiastics, and persons suffering physical disability were exempt from challenge, but they might choose “champions”—professionally skilled duelists—to represent them. As early as the tenth century we find paid champions used as substitutes even by able-bodied males; since God would decide the issue according to the justice of the accusation, the identity of the combatants seemed irrelevant. Otto I submitted to duel by champions the question of his daughter’s chastity, and the disputed succession to certain estates;52 and in the thirteenth century King Alfonso X of Castile had recourse to such a duel to decide whether he should introduce Roman law into his kingdom.53 Embassies were sometimes supplied with champions in case diplomatic quarrels should admit of resolution by duels. Until 1821 such a champion figured in the coronation ceremony of English kings; he was by that date a picturesque relic; but in the Middle Ages he was supposed to fling his gauntlet upon the ground and loudly proclaim his readiness to defend in duel against any man the divine right of the new monarch to the crown.54
The use of champions cast discredit upon trial by combat; the rising bourgeoisie outlawed it in communal legislation; Roman law replaced it in southern Europe in the thirteenth century. The Church repeatedly denounced it, and Innocent III made the prohibition absolute (1215). Frederick II excluded it from his Neapolitan dominions; Louis IX abolished it in the regions directly subject to his rule (1260); and Philip the Fair (1303) forbade it anywhere in France. The duel derives not so much from judicial combat as from the ancient right of private revenge.
Feudal penalties were barbarously severe. Fines were innumerable. Imprisonment was used as a detention for trial, rather than as a punishment; but it could be a torture in itself when the cell was infested with vermin, rats, or snakes.55Men and women might be condemned to the public pillory or stocks, and be a target for public ridicule, decayed food, or stones. The ducking stool was used for minor crimes, and as a discouragement to gossips and shrews; the condemned person was strapped to a chair which was fastened to a long lever and was thereby submerged in a stream or a pond. Tougher convicts could be sentenced to serve as galley slaves: half naked and poorly fed, they were chained to the benches and compelled, on penalty of the severest flogging, to row to exhaustion. Flogging with lash or rod was a common punishment. Flesh—sometimes the face—might be branded with a letter symbolizing the crime; perjury and blasphemy could be punished by piercing the tongue with a hot iron. Mutilation was common; hands or feet, ears or nose, were cut off, eyes were gouged out; and William the Conqueror, to deter crime, decreed “that no one shall be killed or hanged for any misdeeds, but rather that his eyes be plucked out, and his hands, feet, and testicles cut off, so that whatever part of his body remains will be a living sign to all of his crime and iniquity.”56 Torture was little used in feudalism; Roman and ecclesiastical law revived it in the thirteenth century. Theft or murder was punished sometimes with exile, more often with beheading or hanging; women murderers were buried alive.57 An animal that had killed a human being might also be buried alive or hanged. Christianity preached mercy, but ecclesiastical courts decreed the same penalties as lay courts for similar crimes. The abbey court of St. Geneviève buried seven women alive for theft.58 Perhaps in a rude age barbarous punishments were needed to deter lawless men. But these barbarities continued till the eighteenth century; and the worst tortures were practiced not upon murderers by barons but upon pious heretics by Christian monks.
IV. FEUDAL WAR
Feudalism arose as the military organization of a harassed agricultural society; its virtues were martial rather than economic; its vassals and lords were expected to train themselves for war, and be ready at any moment to leave the plowshare for the sword.
The feudal army was the feudal hierarchy organized by ties of feudal allegiance, and strictly stratified according to grades of nobility. Princes, dukes, marquises, counts, and archbishops were generals; barons, seigneurs, bishops, and abbots were captains; knights or chevaliers were cavalrymen; squires were servitors to barons or knights; “men-at-arms”—the militia of communes or villages—fought as infantry. Behind the feudal army, as we see it in the Crusades, a crowd of “varlets” followed on foot, without officers or discipline; they helped to despoil the conquered, and eased the suffering of fallen and wounded enemies by despatching them with battle-axes or clubs.59But essentially the feudal army was the man on horseback multiplied. Infantry, insufficiently mobile, had lost its pre-eminence since Hadrianople (378), and would not regain it till the fourteenth century. Cavalry was the battle arm of chivalry; they and the cavalier, the chevalier, and the caballero took their names from the horse.
The feudal warrior used lance and sword or bow and arrow. The knight enlarged his ego to include his sword, and gave it an affectionate name; though doubtless it was the trouvères who called Charlemagne’s sword Joyeuse, Roland’s Durandel, and Arthur’s Excalibur. The bow had many forms: it might be a simple short bow, drawn at the breast; or a longbow aimed from the eye and ear; or a crossbow, in which the cord, drawn taut in the groove of a stock, was suddenly released, sometimes by a trigger, and propelled a missile of iron or stone. The crossbow was old; the longbow was f
irst prominently used by Edward I (1272-1307) in his wars with the Welsh. In England archery was the main element in military training, and a leading element in sport. The development of the bow began the military debacle of feudalism; the knight scorned to fight on foot, but the archers killed his horse, and forced him to uncongenial ground. The final blow to feudal military power would come in the fourteenth century with gunpowder and cannon, which, from a safe distance, killed the armored knight and shattered his castle.
Having a horse to carry him, the feudal warrior could afford to burden himself with armor. In the twelfth century the fully accoutered knight covered his body from neck to knees with a hauberk—a coat of chain mail with sleeves for the arms—and an iron hood that covered all the head except eyes, nose, and mouth; his legs and feet were housed in greaves of mail. In combat he further capped himself with a steel helmet whose “nasal”—a projecting iron blade—guarded the nose. The visored casque and armor of metal plates appeared in the fourteenth century as defense against the long- or crossbow, and continued till the seventeenth; then nearly all armor was abandoned for the advantages of mobility. As a shield the knight suspended from his neck, and grasped by inner straps with his left hand, a buckler made of wood, leather, and iron bands, and adorned at the center with a buckle of gilded iron. The medieval knight was a mobile fort.
Fortification was the chief and usually adequate defense in feudal war. An army defeated in the field might find refuge within manor walls, and a last stand could be made in the donjon tower. The science of siege declined in the Middle Ages; the complex organization and equipment for battering down enemy walls proved too costly or laborious for dignified knights; but the art of the sapper or military miner held its own. Navies, too, were reduced in a world whose will to war outran its means. War galleys remained like those of the ancients—armed with battle towers on the decks, and propelled by freemen or galley slaves. What was lacking in power was made up in ornament, on the ship as on the man. Over a coat of pitch that preserved the wood of the vessel from water and air, medieval shipwrights and artists painted brilliant colors mixed with wax—white, vermilion, ultramarine blue; they gilded the prow and rails, and sculptured figures of men, beasts, and gods on prow and stern. Sails were gaily tinted, some in purple, some in gold; and a seigneur’s ship was emblazoned with his coat of arms.
Feudal war differed from both ancient and modern war in greater frequency and less mortality and cost. Every baron claimed the right of private war against any man not bound to him by feudal ties, and every king was free to embark at any time upon honorable robbery of another ruler’s lands. When king or baron went to war, all his vassals and relatives to the seventh degree were pledged to follow and fight for him for forty days. There was scarce a day in the twelfth century when some part of what is now France was not at war. To be a good warrior was the crown of a knight’s development; he was expected to give or take hard blows with relish or fortitude; his last ambition was a warrior’s death on “the field of honor,” not a “cow’s death” in bed.60 Berthold of Ratisbon complained that “so few great lords reach their right age or die a right death”;61 but Berthold was a monk.
The game was not too dangerous. Ordericus Vitalis, describing the battle of Brémule (1119), reports that “of the 900 knights who fought, only three were killed.”62 At the battle of Tinchebrai (1106), where Henry I of England won all Normandy, 400 knights were captured, but not one of Henry’s knights was slain. At Bouvines (1214), one of the most bloody and decisive battles of the Middle Ages, 170 of 1500 knights engaged lost their lives.63Armor and fortress gave advantage to the defense; a fully armored man could hardly be killed except by cutting his throat as he lay on the ground; and this was discountenanced by chivalry. Moreover it was wiser to capture a knight and accept ransom for him than to slay him and invite feud revenge. Froissart mourned the slaughter, at one battle, of “as many good prisoners as would well have brought 400,000 francs.”64 Knightly rules and reciprocal prudence counseled courtesy to prisoners, and moderation in ransoms asked. Usually a prisoner was released on his word of honor to return with his ransom by a given date, and rare was the knight who broke such a pledge.65 It was the peasantry that suffered most from feudal wars. In France, Germany, and Italy each army raided the lands and pillaged the houses of the vassals and serfs of the enemy, and captured or killed all cattle not gathered within defensive walls. After such a war many peasants drew their own plows, and many starved to death for lack of grain.
Kings and princes strove to maintain some interludes of internal peace. The Norman dukes succeeded in Normandy, England, and Sicily; the count of Flanders in his realm, the count of Barcelona in Catalonia, Henry III for a generation in Germany. For the rest it was the Church that led in limiting war. From 989 to 1050 various Church councils in France decreed a Pax Dei, or Peace of God, and promised excommunication to all who should use violence upon noncombatants in war. The French Church organized a peace movement in various centers, and persuaded many nobles not only to forgo private war but to join in outlawing it. Bishop Fulbert of Chartres (960?-1028), in a famous hymn, gave thanks to God for the unaccustomed peace. The movement was enthusiastically acclaimed by the common people, and good souls prophesied that within five years the peace program would be accepted by all Christendom.66 French Church councils, from 1027 on, proclaimed the Treuga Dei, or Truce of God, perhaps recalling the Moslem prohibition of war in time of pilgrimage: all were to abstain from violence during Lent, in season of harvest or vintage (August 15 to November 11), on specified holydays, and for a part of each week—usually from Wednesday evening to Monday morning; in its final form the Truce allowed eighty days in the year for private or feudal war. These appeals and fulminations helped; private war was gradually ended by the co-operation of the Church, the growing strength of the monarchies, the rise of the towns and bourgeoisie, and the absorption of martial energies in the Crusades. In the twelfth century the Truce of God became part of civil, as well as of canon, law in western Europe. The Second Lateran Council (1139) forbade the use of military engines against men.67 In 1190 Gerhoh of Reichersburg proposed that the pope should forbid all wars among Christians, and that all disputes among Christian rulers should be submitted to papal arbitration.68 The kings thought this a bit too advanced; they waged international wars more abundantly as private wars decreased; and in the thirteenth century the popes themselves, playing the royal game of power with human pawns, used war as an instrument of policy.
V. CHIVALRY
Out of old Germanic customs of military initiation, crossed with Saracen influences from Persia, Syria, and Spain, and Christian ideas of devotion and sacrament, flowered the imperfect but generous reality of chivalry.
A knight was a person of aristocratic birth—i.e., of titled and landowning family—who had been formally received into the order of knighthood. Not all “gentle” men (i.e., men distinguished by their gens or ancestry) were eligible to knighthood or title; younger sons, except of royal blood, were normally confined to modest properties that precluded the expensive appurtenances of chivalry; such men remained squires unless they carved out new lands and titles of their own.
The youth who aimed at knighthood submitted to long and arduous discipline. At seven or eight he entered as a page, at twelve or fourteen as a squire, into the service of a lord; waited upon him at table, in the bedchamber, on the manor, in joust or battle; fortified his own flesh and spirit with dangerous exercises and sports; learned by imitation and trial to handle the weapons of feudal war. When his apprenticeship was finished he was received into the knightly order by a ritual of sacramental awe. The candidate began with a bath as a symbol of spiritual, perhaps as a guarantee of physical, purification; hence he could be called a “knight of the bath,” as distinguished from those “knights of the sword” who had received their accolade on some battlefield as immediate reward for bravery. He was clothed in white tunic, red robe, and black coat, representing respectively the hoped-for purity of
his morals, the blood he might shed for honor or God, and the death he must be prepared to meet unflinchingly. For a day he fasted; he passed a night at church in prayer, confessed his sins to a priest, attended Mass, received communion, heard a sermon on the moral, religious, social, and military duties of a knight, and solemnly promised to fulfill them. He then advanced to the altar with a sword hanging from his neck; the priest removed the sword, blessed it, and replaced it upon his neck. The candidate turned to the seated lord from whom he sought knighthood, and was met with a stern question: “For what purpose do you desire to enter the order? If to be rich, to take your ease, and be held in honor without doing honor to knighthood, you are unworthy of it, and would be to the order of knighthood what the simoniacal clerk is to the prelacy.” The candidate was prepared with a reassuring reply. Knights or ladies then clothed him in knightly array of hauberk, cuirass or breastplate, armlets, gauntlets (armored gloves), sword, and spurs.* The lord, rising, gave him the accolade (i.e., on the neck)—three blows with the flat of the sword upon the neck or shoulder, and sometimes a slap on the cheek, as symbols of the last affronts that he might accept without redress; and “dubbed” him with the formula, “In the name of God, St. Michael, and St. George I make thee knight.” The new knight received a lance, a helmet, and a horse; he adjusted his helmet, leaped upon his horse, brandished his lance, flourished his sword, rode out from the church, distributed gifts to his attendants, and gave a feast for his friends.
