The Ill-Made Knight
Page 56
And a word about the martial arts of the period. The world sees knights as illiterate thugs swinging heavy weapons and wearing hundreds of pounds of armour. In fact, the professionals wore armour that fitted like a tailored steel suit to the individual, and with weight evenly distributed over the body. We have several manuals of arms from this period, the most famous of which is by a character in this series – Fiore di Liberi, a northern Italian master who left us a magnificently illustrated step-by-step guide to the way to fight in and out of armour, unarmed, with a dagger, with a stick, with a sword, with a two-handed sword, with a spear, with a poleax, and mounted with a lance. The techniques are brutal, elegant and effective. They also pre-date any clear, unambiguous martial manual from the east, and are directly tied to combat, not remote reflections of it. I recommend their study, and the whole of Fiore’s work in the Getty collection is available to your inspection at http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fior_di_Battaglia_MS_Ludwig_XV_13. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend the works of Rob Charrette and Guy Windsor. Guy’s School is at http://swordschool.com/ and Rob Charrette’s superb examination of Fiore’s techniques is available at http://www.fireelanceacademypress.com/. Fiore Di Liberi was a real man, and his passion for his art shines through the pages of his book.
Finally, Sir William Gold, like Arimnestos, was a real person. He was a lieutenant of the White Company and often, but not always, followed Sir John Hawkwood. He had a fascinating career, and I suspect I’ll render it more exciting yet – but the events described, whether Poitiers and the dismemberment of France in the middle of the century, the Italian wars, or the Green Count’s Crusade – all of them are real events. Most of the characters are real people, and when I’ve created characters, I’ve used sources like Chaucer’s remarkable Canterbury Tales to make them live. Geoffrey Chaucer was a squire and a member of the Prince Lionel’s household. He really was captured in France. He was, I think, the acerbic young man I describe, and I have tried to be faithful to what is known about his life. I hope that I have been faithful to the period and to the lives of these great men and women (great and terrible – Hawkwood was no man’s hero) and I do hope that my readers learn things. I think a good historical novel should teach, and I’m unabashed to say it.
But I remain a novelist first, and I hope that I have taken the bones of history and made a good story.
Acknowledgements
My greatest thanks have to go, first and foremost, to the man to whom this work is dedicated – Richard Kaeuper of the University of Rochester. The finest professor I ever had – the most passionate, the most clear, the most brilliant – Dr Kaeuper’s works on chivalry and the role of violence in society makes him, I think, the preeminent medievalist working today, and I have been lucky to be able to get his opinions and the wealth of his knowledge on many subjects great and small. Where I have gone astray, the fault is all mine.
Not far behind, I need to thank Guy Windsor, who introduced me to the Armizare of Fiore di Liberi and profoundly informed my notions of what late-Medieval warfare was like among the skilled. Guy runs a school in Finland and I recommend his books and his research and offer my thanks. I’d also like to thank all the people with whom I train and spar – the Companions of Saint Eustachios in Greece and Canada. Reenacting the Middle Ages has many faces, and immersion in that world may not ever be a perfectly authentic experience – but inasmuch as I have gotten ‘right’ the clothes, the armour, the food or the weapons – it is due to all my reenacting friends, including Chris Verwijmeren, master archer, and Leo Todeschini and JT Palikko and Peter Fuller, master craftsmen.
Throughout the writing of this series, I have used, as my standard reference to names, dates, and events, the works of Jonathan Sumption, whose books are, I think, the best unbiased summation of the causes, events and consequences of the war. I’ve never met him, but I’d like to offer him my thanks by suggesting that anyone who wants to follow the real events should buy Sumption’s books!
As Dick Kaueper once suggested in a seminar, there would have been no Middle Ages as we know them without two things – the horse and Christianity. I owe my horsemanship skills largely to two people – Ridgely and Georgine Davis of Pennsylvania, both of whom are endlessly patient with teaching and with horseflesh in getting me to understand even the basics of mounted combat. And for my understanding of the church, I’d like first thank all the theologians I know – I’m virtually surrounded by people with degrees in theology – and second, the work of F. C. Copleston, whose work, A History of Medieval Philosophy, was essential to my writing and understanding of the period – as essential, in fact, as the writings of Chaucer and Boccaccio.
My sister-in-law, Nancy Watt, provided early comments, criticism, and copy-editing while I worked my way through the historical problems – and she worked her way through lung cancer. I very much value her commitment.
And, finally, I’d like to thank my friends who support my odd passions and my wife and child, who are tolerant, mocking, justly puzzled, delighted, and gracious by turns as I drag them from battlefield to castle and as we sew like fiends for a tournament in Italy.
William Gold is, I think, my favourite character. I hope you like him. He has a long way to go.
Christian Cameron
Toronto, 2013
An Orion eBook
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books
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