by Sean McGlynn
Against such an unstable background, it is not unexpected that when a man of power had the ability to affect the course of events by force he did so. The popular literature of the time was no discouragement, being excessively bloodthirsty, the endless feuding and warmaking in the widely read Raoul de Cambrai, for example, ending only with the deaths of all the protagonists. The only potential curb to violent anarchy was royal authority, which attempted to control aristocratic aggression, acting not out of altruistic motives but out of self-preservation. As Richard Kaeuper has perceptively noted, ‘When lords at all levels, and townsmen as well, sallied forth in arms to settle their own grievances, a long tradition of private rights buttressed by the ethos of chivalry ran headlong against a developing theory of public authority vested in kingship for the common weal.’8
With society so often in a febrile and precarious state, it did not take much to spark off major incidents. Much of the kindling for blood feuds came from the family tree. Most families defined themselves through both immediate kin and in-laws, making for a large grouping, widened further still by frequent remarriages. When just one member of this extended family fell into a dispute, the collective familial group could easily be sucked into an escalating imbroglio. Fiery male youths, accountable for most violent crimes and acting on violent impulses, would often initiate a bitter dispute; but just as often they were acting on the cynical orders of family greybeards, the latter deliberately creating an incident ex nihilo from which they foresaw political or financial gain.
In recent years, feuds have spilt as much ink as blood. The efforts of many scholars to neatly categorize and define feud as separate from various forms of private war and public disorder should not distract us from the fact that all such terms can blur into one; what concerned the medieval ruler was the ever present danger and likelihood that a feud would escalate beyond family neighbourhoods to engulf entire regions. One thesis for the origins of the Wars of the Roses in England lays the blame on baronial factionalism and feuding. Although the modern consensus inculpates Henry VI’s incompetence as the cause of the wars, the telling point is that this incompetence was most clearly manifest in Henry’s inability to suppress the various regional feuds in the first instance, and so prevent them from escalating into something altogether larger. In Germany, the long-running feud between the archbishops of Cologne with their secular neighbours culminated spectacularly and bloodily with the Battle of Worringen in 1288. The inevitability of spiralling, reciprocal violence was increased by medieval theories, first propounded by St Augustine, that a war waged to avenge an injury was just, thus actually encouraging a war to develop from a feud. None of this was conducive to the king’s peace; feuding, for all its acceptance in culture as a justifiable process in many disputes, did not make the king look good.
A brief look at some blood feuds throughout medieval Europe will show how the image of feud as being the result of impulsive, hot-blooded men in pursuit of swift vengeance and honour covers just one corner of the canvas. Instead, it shows how frequently and readily was the recourse to violence by men in pursuit of coldly calculated aims, with self-aggrandizement usually the goal. Benjamin Arnold’s study of the dynamics of princely power, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (1991), clearly reveals how feuds were manipulated towards land-grabbing or well-tuned checks to opponents and competitors. ‘Feuds amongst the lords were so prevalent that it is tempting to subordinate all the institutional, dynastic, and judicial explanations for the evolution of princely command to the insistent political rhythms of intestine conflict … Nearly every prince inherited a set of quarrels, which had to be prosecuted by armed force as a virtual normal function of regional politics.’9
In the 1140s, Bishop Otto of Freising complained that things were now so serious that men plundered and burned all year round. Long-lasting disputes among the powerful included: the dukes of Bavaria with the archbishops of Salzburg; the counts of Tirol with the bishops of Bixen and Trent; the counts of Holland and Guelders with the bishops of Osnabrück; the margraves of Brandenberg with the archbishops of Magdeburg; and the dukes of Brunswick with the bishops of Bremen, Hildesheim and Halberstadt. (Given this level of secular – ecclesiastical conflict, it is hardly surprising that the Reformation began in Germany.) A lesser but still serious feud in the 1150s between the Counts Widekind and Folkin of Schwalenberg with Abbot Wibald of Corvey was raised in the royal court. The counts had attacked the abbot’s town of Höxter, destroying its defences, sacking it, and then demanding a large ransom. Royal authority ordered the Abbot and town to take their vengeance. The feud lingered on until a leading vassal of the Abbot was murdered, for which Count Widekind was exiled by Duke Henry the Lion, having first paid compensation and having lost his ducal castle. The prevalence of feuding in Germany can be linked to the lack of strong, central authority; levels of feuding were not so high in England, where monarchy had a stronger grip.
Lay and religious feuds were also common in France (although to a lesser extent than in Germany) where the protagonists habitually vied with each other over financial rights, such as tolls and tallages. In these disputes, monasteries could find their lands and people plundered, livestock stolen, crops and houses burned; sometimes monks were killed. As elsewhere and in Germany, lords and lesser knights latched on to any pretext for pillaging their neighbours’ lands. With the Crown, the Church was the biggest institutional landowner in medieval Europe, and hence its lands were contiguous to those of any number of lords who enviously eyed ecclesiastical property and wealth. Germany, with its hundreds of principalities and mini-statelets, was far harder to govern than the more centralized kingdoms such as England and France, where there were more successful attempts at limiting and formalizing feuds, as through ordeal and trial by battle. Malcolm Vale recounts a case from Valenciennes in northern France in 1455 when an incident of insult to a personal reputation led to a trial by combat before Philip the Good of Burgundy. Although it was fought according to strict regulations, the outcome was nevertheless gruesome: the loser ‘was beaten senseless with a staff by his assailant, his eyes were gouged out, and he was drawn on a hurdle – still alive – to be hanged from the gibbet by the public executioner of the town’.10
Such trials had evolved from royal limitations on feuding in France, stemming primarily from Louis IX’s ordinance of 1258 which restricted the rights of nobility to engage in private wars, tournaments and even single combats. In 1304, Philip the Fair issued a further ordinance, at Toulouse, a region of southern France notorious for its incessant private wars; he felt compelled to moderate it only two years later in acknowledgement of the nobility’s determination to settle differences through violence. Eventually, through royal regulations of sanctioned combats, the French monarchy was at least seen as exercising some form of control while limiting the possibilities of disputes growing out of control. The nobility did not lightly relinquish what they considered to be their birthright to wage private war; the king would not relinquish his God-given duty to preserve peace in his lands. In 1323, Charles IV the Fair had the opprobrious Jourdain, Lord of Casaubon, executed for pursuing private war. Jourdain admitted to the killing of men, women and children, the destruction of crops and properties, and robbing churches and abbeys; but he attempted to defend himself by declaring it was all done on his own territory to help his war effort. Feud and private war were often invoked to cover a multitude of sins and excesses.
The weaker the central authority, then, the greater the propensity to indulge in private wars and feuds. Before William the Conqueror established his dynasty on the English throne in 1066, he had first to survive a perilous period through his minority as the duke of Normandy. During his minority ducal power was understandably weak, and the duchy was riven with feuds against a background of numerous power struggles. In this near state of anarchy, many atrocities were committed. One occurred at a wedding feast held by William de Bellême; invited by his lord, William Giroie attended, only to leave without his eyes,
ears or genitals.
As a relatively closely controlled kingdom, England generally saw less in the way of vicious, large-scale feuds, these being more prominent in the early and late medieval periods when royal authority was compromised. Richard Fletcher’s recent study of blood feud in late Anglo-Saxon England reveals how feuding could intensify and extend to encompass political ambitions, chief amongst which was, paradoxically, the preservation and perpetuation of dynasties. The feud that Fletcher analyses began in 1016 and lasted three generations. In the year it started, Earl Uhtred and forty of his retainers, under a passage of safe conduct, were murdered, the Earl dying in a royal hall when Thurbrand the Hold leapt upon him from his hiding place behind a wall hanging. Ealdred, Uthred’s son, avenged his father but was himself killed in 1038 at the hands of Thurbrand’s son Carl; the pair’s attempt at reconciliation was dashed when a night of drink was followed by a morning of murder. (Note the resemblance to the feud between Sichar and Austregisel.) The feud ended only in 1073 when most of Thurbrand’s grandsons and great-grandsons were massacred by Earl Waltheof, great-grandson of Uhtred. Waltheof may have used the pretext of the blood feud to make a pre-emptive strike against his dynastic enemy, whom he feared was on the point of rising in rebellion. Waltheof himself rebelled against William the Conqueror in 1075, for which he was publicly decapitated. The Crown had the last word.
Feuds could be ended by the complete annihilation of the foe; more often they were settled by compensation and royal intervention. In the early medieval period, financial recompense was the less honourable path, symbolizing an inability or disinclination to pay the full debt of honour, which could be cancelled only by the shedding of blood. As the Middle Ages progressed, royal restrictions on blood feuds tended to reverse this situation. Even when royal authority was diminished in fifteenth-century England – a time which saw the violent feuds of Poynings against Percies, Wydvilles against Nevilles, and Staffords against Harcourts – bastard feudalism permitted avenues that allowed for financial settlements to end disputes, as happened in the private arrangements between Henry Pierpont, Thomas Hastings and Henry Ferrers in 1458. As private warmaking continued, so did private peacemaking.
Any sizeable violent activity in a kingdom was a dangerous distraction for a ruler; large-scale unrest could attract unwanted attentions as a focus of discontent and divert valuable time and sources away from the ruler’s own military plans. For any prince, the most iniquitous form of war came in the shape of domestic uprisings. Treason and rebellion against the king was not lightly undertaken, not just because of the military resources the king had at hand, but also because it was an act against the Lord’s anointed. In England, where, as we have seen, the idea of theocratic kingship was not held as highly as in Europe, rebellions were so frequent very few English monarchs escaped them. Before the further development of treason laws in Edward I’s time, every reign from 1066 to 1272 suffered rebellions to dethrone the king. A ruler had to play his hand carefully against potential threats, for although he was ruler by the grace of God, he could lose his temporal authority if he acted against the law as a tyrant. Some political treatises held that tyrants should be overthrown by their subjects, others that this should be left to God. In the earlier medieval period, this second view was often held by the Church, which anathematized rebellions against God’s appointed representative; later, however, the Church was just as likely to label an oppressive king (i.e. one that taxed them heavily or failed to protect Church property) as a tyrant. Condemnation or approbation could depend largely on the prevailing political situation and anticipation of which side was likely to win.
The danger of violent unrest did not lie exclusively with the aristocracy, as events in fourteenth-century England and France were to show dramatically. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, retold in Alistair Dunn’s revealing book The Great Rising of 1381 (2002), actually comprised as many discontents from the lower middle classes as the lower ones; it also involved some rich Londoners. Their demands for social reforms – including the abolition of serfdom – were coupled with political ones. When they marched on London they decapitated the Chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury and the Lord Treasurer, Robert Hales. In Suffolk the same fate befell Sir John Cavendish, Chancellor of Cambridge University and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and John Cambridge, Prior of Bury St Edmunds; their heads were spiked on lances and made to perform a macabre puppet show, in which they chatted and kissed each other. When Richard II’s government retook control of the situation, its response was uncompromising: on London Bridge, as elsewhere, the heads of royal ministers and lawyers were replaced by those of Wat Tyler and other rebel commanders; where rebels had been buried at St Albans, Richard personally supervised the exhumation of the bodies and had them re-strung up on the gibbet in classic warning mode.
The Jacquerie of 1358 in France makes the Peasants’ Revolt mild by comparison. The uprising was named somewhat ironically after ‘Jacques Bonhomme’, the familiar and genial French nickname for a peasant. Peasant unrest was endemic in France in the confusion of war and military defeats for the French; it was heightened by heavy taxation, one of the main causes of the revolt in England. The French problem was exacerbated further by the weakness of the Crown at this stage, unlike England under Edward III basking united in the afterglow of great victories in France. The acute sufferings of the French peasantry from plague, deprivation and war erupted in the Jacquerie, the most murderous of all fourteenth-century risings. It was truly a revolutionary class struggle at its most bitter.
Ordinary people blamed those who ruled them for total failure. It was barely two years since their king, John II, had been captured by the English at Poitiers; recovery from the Black Death was slow; and companies of mercenaries and brigands rode at will across the land. Law and order had broken down most calamitously of all in the regions worst afflicted by the Hundred Years War, but it was about to collapse completely. Froissart wrote of the Jacques, ‘These evil men, who had come together without leaders or arms, pillaged and burned everything and violated and killed all the ladies and girls without mercy, like mad dogs.’11 He tells of how one knight was bound to a post while his pregnant wife and daughter were gang-raped and killed before his eyes; he himself was then murdered in the most sadistic fashion. Another knight was roasted alive on a spit while the members of his family were forced to watch before their own deaths. They elected their own king, Jacques Bonhomme, to lead them in their inchoate struggle.
Though it was just a fortnight in duration, the backlash under Charles of Navarre was felt for years. This shocking inversion of the social order prompted a response of solidarity amongst the aristocratic classes beyond the boundaries of France in a savage repression of a savage revolt. Charles himself was credited with the execution of three thousand rebels in one day; elsewhere, claims Froissart with even greater exaggeration, seven thousand were despatched in a few hours. The (no doubt) inflated figures give an indication of the level of punitive slaughter; so many were executed they had to be strung up in bunches. A concatenation of crushing factors conspired to launch the Jacquerie, but it is surely relevant that it burst out at a time when France was, in effect, without its king.
The aristocracy posed a greater threat to the Crown. Robert Bartlett has identified three main types of aristocratic rebellion. One form was individual, instinctive and visceral, a hot-blooded response to royal encroachment or denial of patronage or expected reward. More threatening was a general aristocratic movement agitating in support of a rival ruler, usually a member of the ruling dynasty. Most hazardous of all, perhaps, was a rebel movement with an aristocratic programme of reform, of the type that led to Magna Carta in 1215. Open rebellions gradually decreased as medieval rulers increasingly stamped out private wars by impressing their authority; the weaker the ruler, the greater the threat of revolt. In the earlier period, fighting against the king was not always considered treasonable so long as formal defiance (diffidatio) had been declared. But from lega
l and political developments emerged the notion that warring against the king connoted warring against the public realm and its good, thereby denying rebels the cover of fighting a private war.
In England, all taking up of arms against the king became treasonous during Edward I’s reign. Initially, executions for treason were carried out against only Welsh and Scots who were considered rebels in England, but by Edward II’s reign political executions were becoming common for the first time since the eleventh century. Indeed, unlike Europe, for nearly two centuries not a single member of the nobility was punished by death or mutilation for political crimes, so benign was royal policy. Undoubtedly, the extensive ties of kinship amongst the hierarchy helped stay the king’s avenging hand. Lesser ranks were not so privileged: rebellious garrisons were hanged by Stephen at Shrewsbury in 1138 and by Henry III in 1224 at Bedford.
Edward II’s disastrous reign dramatically altered this culture of clemency towards the nobility, when an orgy of high-ranking political executions transformed politics in England. In 1322, there were no less than twenty political hangings and decapitations. Of Edwardian executions, the most famous were: Piers Gaveston, run through and decapitated in 1312, his body not receiving final burial until 1315; the Younger Despenser who, in 1326, was hung from a fifty-foot-high gibbet, disembowelled alive, and then beheaded; and King Edward II himself, in 1327, tradition claiming that he was murdered by thrusting a red-hot poker up his anus, a comment on his alleged homosexuality.
Such executions would not have surprised the Scottish and Welsh. English imperialist attitudes towards the Celtic fringe fostered the enforcement of harsh measures against rebels from an early stage, reinforced by Edward I’s new treason laws. It is from this time that we become familiar with some of the most gruesome and famous executions in England. In 1282, Prince David of Wales was drawn, hung and quartered, and his internal organs burned in a fire. William Wallace’s execution was another ritualized death. Drawn by a horse’s tail to his place of execution, he was inflicted with different punishments for different crimes (treason tended to attract to the guilty party a plethora of other wrongs). For felony, robbery and murder, Wallace was hanged until nearly dead, and then disembowelled; for sacrilege, his viscera were burned; for treason, his body was dismembered and displayed throughout the north: his head was impaled on a spike on London Bridge, his right arm was exhibited in Newcastle, his left at Berwick, his right foot at Perth, his left at Stirling. Edward I – the Leopard, the Hammer of Scots – considered even mockery as a form of lèse-majesté. One medieval chronicle implies that his sack of Berwick on the Scottish border in 1296 was in response to the insults that he suffered from the town’s ramparts: jibes, gestures and buttock-baring. In its laws on treason, France trailed England by a few decades. Following his victory against the Flemish at Cassel in 1328, Philip VI treated the enemy as traitors in true bloody Edwardian style.
