by Ed West
One reason for the growth of tourneys was the excess of otherwise unemployed aristocrats with little in the way of skill sets other than violence. It was these “free lances” who were often at the forefront of any army or colonizing force, across the British Isles, down into Iberia at the expense of the Muslims, and in Eastern Europe, Sicily, and the Middle East. The term “freelance” was coined by Walter Scott, the nineteenth century historical novelist also responsible for “War of the Roses,” and would become applied to any trade in which people pursued their trade independent of any employer.
Many young aristocratic men died in these events, which had fatality rates that only early motor racing has in modern times come anything close to approaching. In Westeros at the great melee at Last Hearth in “170AC” some eighteen men died and another nine were maimed during a tournament, but real-life casualty figures were far worse. In 1241 in Germany some eighty knights were killed in one tournament, although many died from heatstroke caused by wearing armour on a very hot day. The previous year at a tourney in Dusseldorf around sixty knights were slaughtered, mostly hacked to death. Even the royal family of France lost members; in 1279 the king’s brother Robert sustained terrible head injuries and was an invalid for life afterwards. Numerous high-ranking families lost members to the games, but this was a risk they were prepared to face, for as Varys says, these events “give the great a chance of glory and the lowly a respite from their woes.”
Injuries were also common, and even a relatively minor one sustained at a tournament could kill if not treated. In Westeros the Hound pours boiling wine on a wound, a technique used by the ancient Greeks, and alcohol is still used today to clean wounds. However, by the middle ages medical technology had hardly improved in Europe, and there was little that could be done if an artery was struck or a wound became infected. Cauterisation had been introduced by this time, but the odds of survival were not fantastic. In this procedure red hot irons were applied to wounds to stop blood loss and infection; there was no anaesthetic, so people used alternatives such as a “concoction of lettuce juice, gall from a castrated boar, briony, opium, henbane, hemlock juice and vinegar,” mixed with wine before given to the patient.1 This wildly unsafe medicine was called dwale, pronounced “dwaluh” and the hemlock often killed the patient—although without it the victim might also die of shock. Opium is the real “milk of the poppy,” coming from the Papaver somniferum plant, or opium poppy. Its use as a pain killer probably dates back to at least the Sumerians—its use on a clay tablet from 2100BC—and it was widely used in the Near East in the Middle Ages, although it only became common in Europe from about the sixteenth century. Opium is also, of course, addictive and chemically modified synthetic forms such as heroin far more so.
Other, more desperate methods, such as trepanning—drilling a hole in the head to release a build-up of blood—were even more likely to end badly. Although occasionally people got lucky; a body from England dating to 1100 was found to have been hit with a heavy, blunt object and to have survived trepanning. It healed at any rate, although what kind of quality of life he enjoyed afterwards we can’t tell.
The Church soon grew hostile to the tourneys, refusing burial to those who died in them, although it abandoned this stance in 1316 when Pope John XXII concluded they were good training for crusaders. The Annals of Dunstable records that “tourneyers, their aiders and abettors, and those who carried merchandise or provisions to tournaments were ordered to be excommunicated, all together, regularly every Sunday.”2 That this had to be a regular proclamation each Sunday suggests that the Church ruling was widely ignored by the young. Fines were also issued for those organizing the events, with huge penalties of one hundred marks handed out—and yet “neither the sight of one’s own blood, nor the cracking of one’s teeth, nor the wordy moralizing of the clergy, nor the interference of royal administrators could check the ‘beautiful horror’ of the tournament.”3
SIGILS
These games led to the development of heraldry, partly because men needed to know whom they were fighting during huge melees. Families began to adopt badges to identify themselves, and, in particular who their ancestors were (sigils as they’re called in Westeros). Each symbol had a meaning and their place on a coat of arms a significance, and as rules developed men were employed to determine what went where. A coat of arms was a bold claim about one’s right, and a dangerous one—Henry VIII had a relative executed for changing his coat of arms in a way that seemed to make claims on the throne.
Badges of sorts go back to antiquity, and boar-crested helmets are mentioned as early as Beowulf, while the Song of Roland tells of shields with “many cognizances” (badges). However, heraldry, a system with formal rules about who can display what, is first mentioned in England in 1140, the same year as the tournaments reached the country.
Heraldic badges usually carried messages about a man’s ancestry, often including the animals their ancestors had displayed as their symbols—both Mowbray and Arundel had lions on their arms. Warwick’s was of a gold bar between six crosses, while Woodstock and Derby both displayed the quartered lions of England and fleur-de-lis of France, as their royal blood gave them a right to. Arms might be quartered to illustrate an illustrious pedigree, and further subdivided if there were yet more prestigious ancestors, and so there was heraldry inflation as people attempted to fit more distinguished forbearers onto their coats of arms. By the fifteenth century one knight rode into battle with a coat displaying thirty-two different coat-of-arms, all of which must have been impossible for anyone to make out anyway.4
Carrying a banner was a great privilege and losing it in battle was tremendously bad for morale. At Verneuil in 1424, a Norman soldier jumped into the thick of the French forces in order to take back King Henry’s banner, possibly turning the tide of the battle.
Tournaments had great symbolism. During the reign of Henry II, a story was told of a melee between Normans and Bretons in which Henry’s father Count Geoffrey of Anjou fought for the Celts, the story deliberately aimed at linking Henry with the land of King Arthur. After the melee ended without victory, the two sides nominated a champion for single combat, the Normans choosing an enormous English warrior, with Geoffrey representing the Bretons; Geoffrey unhorsed his giant opponent before cutting off his head.
The legend of King Arthur went hand in hand with the growth of this world. Arthur was seen as the pinnacle of chivalry, and of particular fascination to people in more advanced regions like France and southern England, who were drawn to the more mystical, misty Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales. It was a fantasy world, a sort of Wild West and Hobbiton roled into one, and poets and their patrons were obsessed by the legends preserved in oral Celtic poetry. And so from the time of Edward I, tournaments would often re-enact scenes from the life of King Arthur, Roger Mortimer being among the most obsessed with dressing up like the hero of Camelot.
The Arthur legend instructed knights on how to behave, but also affirmed that they were good men in a world riddled with evil. As Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur put it, being a knight meant being bound “never to do outrageously, nor murder and always to flee treason, also by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy . . . and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen succour upon pain of death.”
The Arthur story was hugely anachronistic, implanting a high medieval idea of chivalry onto the earlier dark ages, not to mention much later technology and fashion. Likewise, Samwell Tarley says the same of stories about knights who supposedly lived hundreds of years before knights could even have existed, but then implanting more recent mores and codes onto a distant past is almost a universal human cultural habit.
The tournament summed up what it meant to be a knight, but of course there were other motivations for young men. Modern screen depictions of jousting almost invariably feature heavily-bosomed damsels in attendance, and toward the later medieval period this was indeed a feature. Knights fought for their ladies, or just a
s often other people’s ladies. Chrétien de Troyes’s late twelfth century romance Erec et Enide tells the story of a man called Erec who vows to take part in the tournament to honor Enide, whom he loves, even though she’s wearing an old, tattered dress. Erec beats the mighty Yder and gives him a serious injury, and the hero wins his heroine after acquiring a sparrowhawk as a prize: “That day she had won much honor, joy and dignity. Her heart was full of gladness for her bird and for her lord: her joy could not have been greater.” It also features a dwarf who “has insulted the queen by striking her damsel,” disabilities and disfigurements being associated with evil and even witchcraft.5
Chretein was a sort of prototype of the romantic novelist and also created the character of Lancelot. He was a court poet for the count of Champagne, a job that involved praising the patron and his ancestors and giving “spiritually edifying” stories revolving around the saints. By the period he was writing in, the 1160s, courtoisie (courtesy) and fin’amor (courtly love), chevalerie (chivalry) and clergie (learnedness) had come to be held as ideals among the French-speaking aristocracy of France and England, and later Germany. Old Celtic tales of Arthur, Tristan and others were used to emphasises these ideals, but also explored the gap between fantasy and reality.6
French court poets chose from three subject areas: the history of France, British legends such as Arthur, and Greco-Roman mythology—also known as the Matter of France, the Matter of Britain, and the Matter of Rome—the former celebrating the courage of Charlemagne and his knights, a type of epic poem called the chansons de geste, the “song of heroic deeds.” Chretien’s other works, such as Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and Perceval, the Story of the Grail, all follow a similar theme, singing of knights performing deeds of daring do, and this culture influenced the games, which were still at this time brutal. Tournaments became a chance to show off in front of women, and so became somewhat less violent, since women tended to be less impressed by men gouging each other’s eyes out than other men were.
Druerie—love—was an incentive to chevalerie, as the romantic poems of the time emphasized. The French poem Lai du Lecheoir, the Lay (Poem) of the Lecher, features eight ladies in a Breton court, “wise and learned,” discussing why knights fight in tournaments. Why do they like gallantry? Why do they refrain from doing evil? Why do they dress in new clothes? The answer, they conclude, is con—or the “solaces of the lower part.”7
These romantic ideals changed the nature of the tournaments, which by the late medieval period were less brutal, although by the standards of modern sports still very dangerous. It was during this era when heavily armed knights would charge at each other with a barrier separating them—an innovation introduced in the fourteenth century—and women in attendance giving out prizes afterwards, with knights winning favor with ladies by dedicating their victory to them.*
And yet, despite all the romance, the reality of knighthood was that it was underpinned by violence and a sword with pretty ribbons would still kill you. One tale, Yvain, had a description of a fight between two men: “never were there two knights so intent upon each other’s death . . . At last my lord Yvain crushed the helmet of the knight . . . Beneath his kerchief his head was split to the very brains.”
And the thirteenth-century romance Havelok the Dane illustrates the violence of knighthood:
He broke their arms, he broke their knees,
He broke their shanks, he broke their thighs.
He made the blood come running down
To the feet right from the crown;
For there was not a head he spared.8
And yet beneath the squalid violence the ideal did matter to some. No doubt many knights did live up to the romanticized code of honor, as epitomized by Brienne of Tarth, serving Renley and his Rainbow Guard despite the taunts and setbacks. Indeed, there was one such knight in particular, a man famed for heroic deeds and loyalty to those he served even in the face of daunting odds, who ended up having a huge impact on all our lives. His story begins during a horrific civil war known as the Anarchy.
*And so the mad king Aerys angers his wife by naming Lyanna Stark as his “Queen of Love and Beauty” after a tournament.
25
THE CURSE OF THE KINGSLAYER
The north is a place for warriors, not knights.
—JAIME LANNISTER
The Norman monarchs had prevented great magnates from holding large amounts of adjoining territory so that they did not develop a regional powerbase, the exceptions being the marches and the borders with Scotland and Wales, where the barons had to be strong to protect the realm. Just as the Starks are Wardens of the North in Westeros, so leading families in medieval England held military positions in which they enforced the monarch’s law on the northern border but with some degree of autonomy. And yet it was these marcher lords in the north and west who would always provide the greatest threat; for Edward II it was the lord of the West, Roger Mortimer; for the king-killer Henry of Lancaster it would be the lords of the North.*
Wales was mountainous and hard to conquer, but its people showed no interest in threatening their neighbors; in contrast only three English monarchs between 1040 and 1745 did not endure invasion from Scotland, or invaded them in turn.1 And so the North had a military system much more like Anglo-Saxon England, which had a fyrd or militia of men ready to be called up to defend the realm; many northern men would also have had axes and swords for use, even if they were not trained soldiers.
Life in the North was tough, and the Percy land in Cumberland was described in 1570 as “consyst[ing] most in wast grounds and ys very cold hard and barren for the wynter.”2 It “bredyth tall men and hard of nature, whose habitaciouns are most in the valleys and dales . . . they have but little tillage, by reason whereof they lyve hardly at ease, which makyth them tall of personage and hable of endure hardnes when necessute requyryth.”3 When Ned Stark arrives in King’s Landing, he’s asked whether he wants to wear something “more appropriate,” his clothes appearing rough and coarse to southern eyes. At the time, northern aristocrats in London really would have looked far poorer and less elegant, the region further away from the sophisticated courtly centers of France and northern Italy. Likewise, in Westeros “Northern fighters use the older style of interlinked chain mail . . . rather than the heavy and limiting plate armour of the southern knights, or they may wear leather breastplates.”4 Northern horses were also cheaper, so that only seven out of 304 Percy horses were worth more than £15, compared to a quarter of the southern Earl of Salisbury’s. Percy’s own mount was valued at between £20 and £25 while Salisbury had mere knights riding £50 horses.5
Much of the poverty was down to sheer geography, the North being rockier, with poorer farm land, and further away from the rich markets of the continent. In the 1440s the future Pope Pius II, Aeneas Piccolomini, was journeying through the borderland in Northumberland on his way to Scotland, close to “a river, flowing from its source on a high mountain, which determines the boundary between the two countries.” The Italian ate with a local priest and witnessed the immense poverty of the region, so alien to his native Tuscany.
“Afterwards, all the men and women of the village came running as if to some unusual spectacle, and just as we wonder at Ethiopians or Indians, so they stared in astonishment at Aeneas,”6 he wrote, describing himself in the third person. He produced bread and wine, which the local people had never even seen, and “the feast went on until the second hour after sunset, when the priest, host and all the men and boys together left Aeneas and hurried out, explaining that they were fleeing to a tower a safe distance away. This they did, they said, out of fear of the Scots, who often crossed the river when the tide was low and came marauding at night.” They left the women to their fate, the Italian was surprised to learn, as they didn’t consider rape a crime, or presumably at least less of an ordeal than the murder the men might face. “After much of the night had passed, two girls led Aeneas, who was heavy with sleep, into a chamber strewn with
straw. They would sleep with him, such was the custom in their part of the world, if they were asked,” but he had other things on his mind. When he arrived back in Newcastle “there for the first time he felt he was returning to a recognizable world and a habitable country again. For Scotland, and the part of England which borders it, has nothing in common with the country in which we live, being as it is rough, uncultivated and inaccessible to winter sun.”
The North had by the turn of the century become ever more militarized. In the 1390s, there were seventy-nine fortress towers in Northumberland between Alnwick and Berwick, which also acted as shelters for villagers. However, as they could fit many men and also forty cattle in the basement, raiding clans often used the pele towers as bases.
Despite the hostility, the northern English also had a great deal in common with the Scots, divided by a wall and border but sharing a comman culture. The two sides of the wall spoke the same language, albeit diverging dialects, and such were the simularties in speech that battles often involved what today would be called friendly fire; when the two sides fought in the dark at Otterburn in 1388, with Percy’s son Harry Hotspur leading the fight against a Scottish force led by James Douglas, a large number of Englishmen were killed by their own side. Because of the cultural similarities between the two people, spying was also routine; a John Hardyng worked as a spy for the Earl of Northumberland in Scotland from 1418, and was there for several years, still alive despite numerous beatings by suspicious locals.
The Northumbrians had never been happy with southern rule, and there had been uprisings ever since English unification; back in the tenth century northern men had risen up and declared “that their country has been wont to have a king of its own and to be tributary to none of the south Angles.”7 English kings rarely spent much time in the north; Edward the Confessor never went once, and Richard the Lionheart only got as far as Nottingham in the midlands. Without kings of their own, naturally the Percys came to win men’s loyalty more than any southern ruler.
