Victory in the East

by John France

  However, their military function was very demanding for the technology of the age demanded leadership by a military élite. In a relatively poor agricultural society only a few could afford to clothe themselves in iron, with the pointed helmet, the hauberk or chain mail shirt (with or without coif) and the heavy wooden kite-shaped shield which covered the horseman on his left side from thigh to shoulder. The weapons of attack remained largely what they had always been: the sword, the bow, the axe, the club in its various forms and the spear, though perhaps they were better made and more often of iron than ever before. To handle all these successfully, the soldier needed not merely muscles, but an athletic musculature. Only the well-to-do had both the leisure to train their sons from an early age and the wealth to equip them. In the Mâconnais in the eleventh century a horse cost between twenty and fifty sous, five times the price of an ox which was probably the most valuable possession of a peasant, while a hauberk cost 100 sous, the price of a good manse.16 Godfrey de Bouillon was only sixteen when his uncle Godfrey the Hunchback designated him as heir, but Lambert of Hersfeld describes him as being already active in military matters.17 Ordericus gives us an interesting insight into the risks of knightly status in his account of the seven sons of Giroie, one of the benefactors of his abbey of St Evroul. Arnold, the eldest, was in a ‘friendly wrestling match’, when he was thrown against the edge of a step, and with three ribs broken, died within three days. Hugh, the sixth son, was killed by a carelessly thrown lance while he, his brothers and friends were practising. Giroie, the youngest, died of madness returning from a raid, while Fulk, the third son, was killed fighting in the retinue of Gilbert of Brionne. The exercises for war, it seems, were as lethal as the thing itself.18 The use of weapons was itself demanding, but so was the learning of horsemanship. War-horses were specially bred and trained animals, but even so the rider must have had to master his beast ruthlessly to make it face the horrors of battle. The war for which these young men trained was primarily a war of close combat – the killing ground was literally the length of a man’s arm. The Frankish sword of this age was primarily a hacking weapon with a relatively blunt point. It tended to be about 76–83 centimetres long and to have a shallow valley running down its length. Such weapons were expensive and individually crafted, and in surviving cases balance remarkably well so their 1.5-kilogram weight could be easily swung.19 The spear might be thrown, as is seen in the Bayeux tapestry, but in the hands of both footmen and cavalry it was a weapon for the thrust. The knight’s hauberk probably could not turn a solid thrust from a spear or a cut of the sword which landed squarely, but it seems to have been worn over a padded garment and so may have been fairly effective against glancing blows which must have been common at close quarters in the flailing scrum of battle when the shield would be relied on for protection. Its split skirt fell over the thighs giving them some protection. The conical steel helmet looks a precarious affair, but it was probably provided with a lining for security. Commonly it had a nasal to protect the face, and sometimes a metal bar at the rear. Again it was probably little protection against a direct blow such as that which fell upon Robert Fitzhamon at the siege of Falaise in 1106 leaving him lingering as an idiot for a while before he died. But it was evidently well secured and especially when worn over the mail hood or coif could be effective against the glancing blow; such a combination saved Henry I from a heavy blow at Brémule in 1119.20 Medieval fighting must have looked like a cross between a primitive football mêlée, Afghan polo and a butcher’s yard, as men, mounted and on foot, hacked and jabbed at one another.21 The very close nature of the conflict explains much about the warrior ethic which underlies chivalry – the emphasis upon personal combat, personal bravery and comradeship. It was a very intimate affair. At the battle of Elster in 1080 where Godfrey de Bouillon probably fought, the soldiers of Henry IV jeered at the troops of the anti-king Rudolf who were unable to cross marshy land to attack.22 The young knight who could afford all the panoply of war was well equipped, well protected and mobile – but the limitations of his equipment are all too evident. He needed spare horses, for to ride his destrier all the time was an obvious folly. To feed and arm him he needed servants, squires as they would later be called, who would have to have horses to be mobile. His mobility was thus hampered by his supports. To ride alone was of course folly – knights worked with others in the business of war. In close woodland or broken ground his advantages of height and weight were largely nullified. A century after the First Crusade Gerald of Wales would comment: ‘When one is fighting only in the hills, woods or marshes … with a complicated armour and high curved saddles, it is difficult to dismount from a horse, even more difficult to mount and yet more difficult to get around on foot when necessary’.23 The Welsh about whom Gerald was talking were, of course, pre-eminent as archers who appear to have been an element in almost all forces at this time.

  Archers formed a very important part of the ‘other ranks’ of an eleventh-century army. Our sources tend to focus on the armoured knights, whose clerical relatives were after all the authors of the history of the age. The Bayeux Tapestry, an invaluable source for the military history of the period, shows the battle as essentially one between heavily armoured men, on the Norman side mounted. It was almost certainly commissioned by Odo of Bayeux and such an expensive undertaking must have been directed to the influential – the upper class. Their taste in literature – Chanson de Roland – gives us some idea of how they liked to see themselves, and to some extent the tapestry is an epic strip cartoon.24 But the executors knew that archers played an important part, and they portrayed no fewer than twenty-nine. But of these only six are in the main strip. They appear to be better equipped than those in the lower margin, but this may be simply a function of scale; a lot of the marginal figures are mere sketches. Of the six major representations one is English, a pigmy beside the armoured men, whose small size probably is an indication of low social status. Only one Norman archer is shown mounted and it has been suggested that he had probably seized a horse for the pursuit.25 But one of the archers is well equipped with the same helmet and hauberk as the knights, and this introduces the possibility that he was of that status. The bow was the weapon of the poor man because it was cheap, a simple stave which at this time was probably not much shorter than the classic six-foot English longbow of the later middle ages.26 But we know that the Conqueror was a formidable bowman, as was Robert Curthose.27 These references may be to the bow’s use for hunting, but at the siege of Jerusalem Godfrey himself did not hesitate to seize a bow and use it accurately. In 1103 his brother, Baldwin king of Jerusalem, had a magister sagittariorum, one Reinoldus who is explicitly referred to as a miles Regis, and who was himself a notable archer.28 The knight was not yet a member of an exclusive social caste with characteristic weaponry. Wace speaks of the archers at the battle of Varaville in 1057, and later during the campaign of 1066, as specialists, but this may reflect the conditions of the time in which he was writing, a century later.29 The bow was a fearsome weapon, deadly even to the best equipped knights. Henry I was saved from an arrow strike by his mail, but perhaps his armour was of unusually high quality.30 In the Bayeux Tapestry we have ample testimony to its effectiveness – mailed bodies stuck with arrows. Interestingly, bodies with arrows in them occur in the margin only in those sections where the action in the main part shows arrows in shields, though there are no marginal bodies in the pasage where Harold falls. This appears to be an effort to convey the episodic use of archers between attacks by others.31 All these figures are armed with the simple stave-bow, perhaps a little shorter than the classic six-foot longbow. It is puzzling that the tapestry never depicts a crossbow, for both William of Poitiers and the Carmen de Hastingae proelio say they were used at Hastings. This mechanical bow with its short four-sided heavy-tipped quarrels must have been a very expensive weapon and seems to have been much less common than the ordinary stavebow.32 But contemporaries commented upon its effectiveness, notably Anna Comnena,
who, however, was writing long after the First Crusade.33 Its mentioned frequently in the sources for the First Crusade. The crossbow had many distinguished victims. In 1106 at Candé Count Geoffrey of Anjou was killed by a crossbow, and in the same year Roger of Gloucester fell victim at the siege of Falaise while Theobald of Blois was wounded by one at Alençon in 1118. But Richard I of England who was struck by a bolt at Chalus in 1199 is the best known of all.34 Bows of all kinds could be used with considerable accuracy. At Bourgthéroulde in 1124 Henry I’s archers successfully executed orders to cut down horses rather than knights, and William Crispin’s charge at Brémule in 1119 seems to have been destroyed by archery which killed his horse and those of eighty-six others. Such events explain Ordericus’s comment ‘the unarmed horse was a surer target than the armoured knight’. They also explain the savagery with which victorious knights often treated defeated archers, massacring them indiscriminately.35 The church’s ban on the use of such weapons against Christians at the Second Lateran Council in 1139 is a testimony both to the effectiveness of archery, and the ineffectiveness of such ecclesiastical legislation. But the effectiveness of the archer was also circumscribed. In attack archers needed to be protected against sallies for they were lightly protected and vulnerable in the open. They were at their best in defence, and most particularly in defence of fortifications.

  The bow was very valuable but it was usually necessary to close with a determined enemy to destroy him. It is this which explains the dominant role of fortifications in war on the eve of the First Crusade, for the attacker was exposed to missiles on his approach and then had to fight at a disadvantage. In 892 a major Danish army landed in Kent and stormed a half-completed burh even though it was manned only by a few peasants.36 Clearly this burh was not very formidable – heaped earth, perhaps with a walkway and palisade, like so many of the similar structures which Alfred began to build across southern England. Yet the Danes thought it worthy of attack, for it could form a base for operations against them, inhibiting them from spreading across the countryside in raids searching for food. When we think of fortifications we think of walled cities or castles whose crumbling remains are such a feature of the European landscape. But fortifications were often much humbler things. A study of a small part of Normandy covering an area of 12 kilometres by twenty kilometres, has revealed three or four stone castles and no fewer than twenty-eight earthwork strongholds. This multiplicity of defences in the feudal age explains the wide vocabulary, so puzzling to historians, used to describe strongpoints.37 What is important to realise here is how difficult it was for troops to take even a modest fortification. Any castle could be blockaded, but this exposed the attackers to starvation especially if the garrison had had enough warning to devastate the countryside. On the other hand if it came to assault the attackers had other problems. The medieval soldier, even equipped with full armour, was not massively weighed down by it. The hauberk probably weighed about eleven kilograms and the sword about one and a half kilograms. If we add to that a few kilograms (say two) for the helmet, padded undergarment etc., weight was not excessive. But the shield must have been much heavier: it was made of wood and metal with leather straps and, with its long kite shape, was difficult to manipulate. No examples have survived, but a fair guess about weight would be fourteen kilograms. A total of twenty-seven to thirty-two kilograms for equipment would seem very modest, especially when we consider that a modern infantryman will carry into battle fifty-five to sixty-five kilograms including his rifle.38 However, negotiating any sharp slope in this rather clumsy clothing must have been a difficult business, especially in wet weather, so that even a modest earthwork, especially if crowned with a palisade and a level platform for the defenders, would find the attacker at a disadvantage. A ditch at the foot of the slope would enhance the defender’s position enormously. Of course those assaulting could throw missiles and deploy archers, but so could the defenders and they could hide behind their palisade while the attacker had to expose himself. All this may seem a little elementary, but this kind of reality does not often figure in books about war. A simple earthwork protected by a ditch is an insurmountable obstacle to a horseman, who must descend for an attack on foot in which he is at a disadvantage. Of course a strong and determined attacker could always take a minor fort, as the Danes proved in 892, but at what cost, and how often had it to be repeated? The burhs of Alfred were, for the most part, quite minor, but there were a lot of them and the same system may have been used by Henry the Fowler in Germany in the early tenth century.39 A precisely similar situation arose in Normandy out of quite different circumstances almost on the eve of the First Crusade. After the death of the Conqueror in 1087 William Rufus, king of England, disputed his brother Robert Curthose’s possession of Normandy in a war which exacerbated the already poor situation of the duchy caused by the weakness of Robert’s rule. In 1091 the two brothers reached an uneasy modus vivendi and set about restoring ducal rights in a Council at Caen which insisted that ‘No-one in Normandy may dig a ditch in open country unless from the bottom of this ditch the earth can be thrown out of it without the aid of a ladder, nor may he set up more than a palisade which must have neither redan nor rampart-walk’. Clearly it is the problem of the well-built earthwork circle which could be erected easily by anyone with access to labour which the two rulers had in mind. When the Conqueror landed at Hastings in 1066 almost his first act, as shown in the Bayeux tapestry, was to throw up an earthwork crowned by a wooden palisade. Such constructions needed no skilled architect, no masons, and evidently could be built quickly provided there was labour and a modicum of supervision available.40 A stone-built castle was much more formidable than such simple structures. In the document already quoted William and Robert went on to deal with these. ‘Nor may anyone build a fortification on a rock or on an island, nor raise a castle in Normandy, nor may anyone in Normandy refuse to deliver his castle to the lord of Normandy should he wish to take it into his own hands.’41

  The first stone castles date from the later tenth century but, for long, wooden structures remained the norm, like that at Dinan portrayed in the Bayeux tapestry.42 He who controlled a castle controlled the land about it, and in the course of the tenth century in much of France and Lorraine many strongpoints, formerly in the hands of the public authority, the duke or count, were increasingly falling into the private hands of the Domini – Lords who used them for their own ends. Others were being built by these same people and it was the right of the public authority to control the process which Robert and William were reasserting in 1091. In a violent and competitive society the castle-holder could defy even a powerful overlord and could enjoy the profits of lordship over the countryside. For a castellan to lose his castle was a disaster. Robert Giroie was out raiding when Robert of Bellême appeared outside his castle of St Céneri panicking the troops within. Robert of Bellême then burned the castle causing Robert Giroie to despair, ‘So at one blow the noble knight was utterly disinherited and forced to live in exile in the houses of strangers’.43 Even a king had to worry about the power of the castle. Late in life Phillip I of France (1060–1108) confessed to his son that the struggle to grasp Montlhéry had made him old before his time, a consequence of the disloyalty of its holders.44 The castellan dominated the landscape and drew the middling groups into his mouvance, above all the knights who served him and provided castleguard. The community of the castle served to draw such men together in a common military discipline which would serve them well in the field. For it seems that the vassals grouped around their lord were a basic unit of war at this time. Ordericus comments on Gilbert of Auffay that he was ‘kinsman of the duke, fighting at his side surrounded by his companions in all the principal battles of the English war’.45 But the existence of castles conditioned war in a number of ways. The castle was the key to the land and warfare in the feudal age was largely about landholding. Since an attack upon a well-held strongpoint was hazardous, the constant experience of contemporary warfare, so often
private quarrels over possession of lands and rights, was ravaging, perhaps accompanied by attacks on unsuspecting, unprepared or demoralised garrisons. On the death of the Conqueror in 1087 Robert of Bellême seized Alençon and other ducal castles and imposed himself upon his neighbours as well. In the conflicts which characterised Normandy during the feeble and disputed reign of Curthose the pursuit of private feuds was a norm manipulated by the competing brothers, William Rufus, Robert and Henry, in their struggle for the inheritance from their father. In November 1090 William of Evreux and Ralph of Conches fell to feuding and William Rufus supported Ralph, thereby weakening Robert Curthose as overlord. Although the duke of Normandy and the king of England became involved, this was essentially a private war caused by the quarrels of the two men’s wives.46 All over the face of France, except in places and at times when overlords were exceptionally strong, such squabbles were the small change of war and the common experience of those who participated in the First Crusade.