By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  The Church did more than pray for victories and shout from the sidelines; it did more than write in support of one side and condemnation of the other and use its pulpits for propaganda purposes; it did more than provide soldiers, money, transports and provisions for armies: it took an active and very real interest in the conduct and art of warfare, and its personnel often took an active part in the actual fighting itself. What is manifestly evident is that it is wholly inaccurate to say that the only literate class of the day exclusively comprised monks and clergy who ‘had little comprehension of military matters, and even less interest in … strategy and tactics’.35 Just as William of Poitiers, Villehardouin and Joinville were fighting men who took up the quill to write about war, so also did monks such as William the Breton, Roger of Wendover, Orderic Vitalis, Abbot Suger of St Denis and many others. Monastic and ecclesiastic writers came from the same class as their fathers, brothers, cousins and patrons who made up the bellatores, the order of fighters, so it was only natural that they should be familiar with the martial world.

  The Church’s own language was frequently couched in combative terms as the serried ranks of religious fought a spiritual battle against the forces of Satan. Turma, for example, a Latin word denoting a body of troops, is found throughout medieval chronicles; it is also employed for groups of monks, such as those of the monastery of St Maurice at Agaune, who were engaged in the round-the-clock worship that has been considered a powerful ritual weapon. Just as the Church fought on one front, so rulers fought on another. The castle-building Abbot Marcward of Fulda opined, ‘Not that it is proper that monks should inhabit anything but monasteries or fight battles other than spiritual ones; but the evil in the world cannot be defeated except by resistance.’36

  The Church’s interest was more than intellectual and spiritual; as landowners responsible for furnishing their lords with soldiers and as leading players in the world of politics, the Church hierarchy necessarily had a practical understanding of military affairs. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Bishop Hugues of Auxerre would gather knights about him to discuss military lessons from Vegetuis’s De Re Militari, a classical text highly valued as a checklist or handbook on war by some medieval commanders. Many of the Church’s hierarchy came from a background of soldiering while others retired from active service into monasteries. The Church hired mercenaries and had its own military divisions; in its military orders – the Knights Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights – it even had its milites Christi (knights of Christ), highly effective warrior monks. Never had the Church been so militant.

  Clergy came under the nominal protection afforded to non-combatants, but many clergy exempted themselves from this category. Active ecclesiastical participants in warfare ranged from the highest to the lowest, from Bishop Odo of Bayeux vigorously swinging his club over his head at the Battle of Hastings as depicted in his famous tapestry (he wielded a club and not a cutting weapon for as a churchman he was forbidden from spilling Christian blood), to the bald priest who, according to Suger in The Deeds of Louis the Fat, was given a courageous spirit by God enabling him to lead and inspire a successful assault on the castle of Le Puiset. Leading churchmen often found themselves in positions of command in armies: in 1298, Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, was a commander in the English forces at Falkirk; in 1214, Guérin, Bishop Elect of Senlis, as commander of the French rearguard, was instrumental in the victory at Bouvines. In 1346 Archbishop Thoresby of York helped to lead the English in their defeat of the Scottish army at Neville’s Cross; this had no deleterious affect on his reputation as a devout peacemaker who was blameless in his private life, a ‘bishop who took his episcopal duties seriously’.37

  Thomas Hatfield, Bishop of Durham (1345–81), was less circumspect about his military role; his seal portrays him not as a churchman but as a warrior knight mounted on his charger. High-ranking clergy could fall victim to the perils of war. In 1056 in England, Leofgar, who had sported his warrior’s moustache as a priest, after his consecration as bishop of Hereford, ‘forsook his chrism and his cross, his spiritual weapons, and seized his spear and sword, and thus armed went campaigning against Griffith, the Welsh king; and there he and the priests with him were slain’.38 At the Battle of Ashingdon in 1016 Bishop Eadnoth of Dorchester and Abbot Wulfsige of Ramsey were amongst Cnut’s victims.

  The violence of the medieval world did not exempt men of the cloth from being either victims or perpetrators. Within the Church there were many men whose ferocity went beyond inquisitorial methods and actions taken against heretics. In the twelfth century Earl David of Huntingdon’s infant son was killed by a cleric; the cleric was tied to the tails of four horses and torn apart. More commonly, the protection of holy orders permitted violent and criminal religious to hide under the habit and vestments of benefit of clergy and so escape judgment in secular courts. A study of clerical violence during the baronial war in mid-thirteenth-century England reveals the enormous extent of this phenomenon and reinforces the claim that gangs of criminals were often led by churchmen of all ranks. One of the most feared outlaws in Edward I’s reign was Richard de Folville, a rector and leader of the notorious Folville gang. He began his life of crime in Lincolnshire by robbing one of the King’s judges and murdering a magnate. His brothers in the gang had high connections that enabled them to buy royal pardons or escape punishment by joining the army; Richard’s crimes against the King were so great his clerical status was of no benefit to him: armed men dragged him from a church and he was immediately decapitated. A recent book on outlaws and highwaymen from the Middle Ages onwards observes: ‘The records reveal so many thugs in holy orders that … the astute professional malefactor may well have regarded clerical status as a useful qualification.’39 For all its efforts to achieve peace, the medieval Church, with its crusaders, statesmen, inquisitors, criminals and warriors, was no stranger to violence and warfare.

  The Church – and later political theorists – had long concerned its intellect with the problem of what constituted a just war, although it was not until the twelfth century that it truly developed and not until the thirteenth century that an agreed definition was arrived at with the help of St Thomas Aquinas and Pope Innocent IV. The theories of just war laid down that a war was just only if: it was declared by a legitimate authority; it was fought for a just end, such as redressing a wrong or reclaiming one’s possessions or persons; it was motivated by a genuine desire for peace and justice and no alternative means were available; it was undertaken in self-defence.

  The font of all thinking on just war was St Augustine. For Augustine, war was the price of peace and therefore inevitable for a just ruler whose hand would be forced into action by the wickedness of his enemies. The Church fathers did not consider wars to be incompatible with Christianity; Isidore of Seville did not even consider just wars to be regrettable. ‘Provided that the purpose of war was just’, explains J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘it could be waged; and peace, itself the justification for war, was the supreme realization of divine law.’40 Thus a king, charged by God with keeping the peace in his kingdom, would no more shirk from harsh measures in warfare than he would from administering punishment to criminals. Jus in bello, laws concerning the conduct of war, were therefore not as important as jus ad bellum, the just right to declare war. Augustine wrote that ‘war is waged that peace may be had’; thus ‘the justification of war … lay not in the manner in which it was conducted, but in its end’.41 This opinion – that the ends (of peace) justified the means – obviously hampered attempts to restrain excessive acts within a just war. What constituted a crime in any other circumstances could be defended if perpetrated in the cause of a war that was just, as legal theorists essayed to make clear. Raymond of Pennaforte defines arson as a criminal deed, but if an incendiary acts ‘at the command of one who has the power to declare war, then he is not to be judged an incendiary’; conversely, Nicholas of Tudeschi opines that ‘knights who take part in a war without just cause should rather be called
robbers than knights’.42

  The trouble with the theory was the practice; anyone who waged war did so under a self-justifying banner and to the exhortations of apologists and propagandists. All wars were just, and on all sides; therefore all sides were free to prosecute the war in the way they saw fit. In his monograph on the just war in the Middle Ages, Frederick Russell doubts that theories of just war had much effect; ‘might made right’ and for soldiers, ‘when their cause was just, there were only vague moral limits on their conduct’. He concludes:

  [J]ust war theories have had the dual purpose of restraining and justifying violence, essentially a self-contradictory exercise. Either the just war was a moral and religious doctrine, in which it was deprived of coercive but not normative force, or it was a legal concept that served as a cloak for statism. It remains an open question whether just war theories have limited more wars than they have encouraged.43

  The Church’s theories to limit the effects of war were likewise contradicted by its practice. Even though its aims were modest (quite unlike the desperate optimism in 1928 of the Kellogg–Briand Pact in prohibiting war as a solution to disputes), that it failed should only be expected. We have seen the importance of war to medieval society; theories to limit it would not stand up to the Mars juggernaut.

  CHIVALRY AND THE LAWS OF WAR

  Despite the Church’s implementation of the Peace of God, it was less interested in the conduct of warfare; once just war had been declared it was necessary to employ whatever means to hasten its end. The impetus for restraint in war came in equal measure from the Church and the belligerents. Tradition was drawn upon, but there was innovation too, and the phenomenon of chivalry grew to be a cultural definition of the Middle Ages. More recently the study of chivalry has burgeoned into an enormous area of scholarly research. Excellent books on the subject by, amongst others, Maurice Keen, Richard Barber and Richard Kaeuper have placed the reality, as opposed to the myth, of chivalry in its historical context. Here we will briefly touch upon this vast field; its practical aspects – its restraints and abuses – will come to the fore in the following chapters.

  Chivalry was embodied in the person of the knight, the elite soldier of medieval warfare. The stereotypical image of the knight is of an armoured horseman holding fast to values of bravery, mercy and loyalty, one who is ready to lay down his life defending the faith, children and women (especially beautiful women); in fact, when he is described as chivalrous, the adjective is readily understood and sums up the goodness and the nobility of the knight’s character. As a stereotypical image, it is deeply flawed. Undoubtedly there were some ‘verray parfit gentil knyghts’ in the Chaucerian mode, but these were probably given a hard time by their more robust and thick-skinned peers on the military training ground; we do not encounter many such paragons amongst these pages. Huge resources of time, money and equipping were invested in knights not so that they could merely become refined and devout gentlemanly officers, but to render them ruthless killing machines. They were trained not only to possess strength and bravery, but also to develop a calculating intelligence designed to comprehend tactics, strategies, diplomacy, logistics and all matters pertaining to waging effective warfare. Within the constraints of the time, they were trained as professionals just as modern armies train their officer classes. The view of a blundering and gungho knight, charging bravely but foolishly and impetuously into battle at the first whiff of blood is a misleading caricature, but one presented by Charles Oman in his influential works on medieval warfare and accepted by many historians into the second half of the twentieth century.

  Chivalry emerged from warrior codes into a cultural phenomenon of its own, reflected in art, architecture, the music of the troubadours, religion and literature. From these we are familiar with the ideas of battlefield dubbing and the more elaborate preparations for the ceremony of knighthood, imbued with its mystic, religious overtones. Geoffrey de Charny, a famous knight who died in battle at Poitiers in 1356, describes the process in his Book of Chivalry. First the initiate must confess and repent his sins. The day before the ceremony, he takes a long bath, symbolically washing away sin and evil living, and then retires to a bed with freshly laundered linen, this symbolizing peace and reconciliation with God. Other knights come to dress him in new, clean garments, as befits his pristine purity. He is attired with a red tunic to represent the blood he must spill to defend God’s faith and the Holy Church, and with black shoes to remind him as he came from earth so he must return to earth, and be ready to die at any time. Then, in a central part of the ceremony, he puts on a white belt to show that he is enveloped in purity and chastity. When this is done, the knights lead him to a chapel to keep vigil all night. In the morning, he hears Mass and has golden spurs lain at his feet to show he no longer desires this most precious of metals. The ceremony concludes with a presentation of a sword and the fraternal kisses of his brother knights. For some knights this ceremony represented the signing of a spiritual contract to serve God and perform good and valiant deeds; for others it was a licence to rape, burn, plunder and kill.

  Before such refinements and embellishments allowed chivalry to give a veneer of civilized conduct to warfare in the late eleventh century, combat was a much bloodier undertaking for the warrior classes. The excesses of the Vikings have led to heated scholarly debate about the extent to which they perpetrated atrocities and whether these actually exceeded the norms of contemporary warfare; certainly, ‘shock, terror and brutality were employed to the full’.44 A recent examination of Viking atrocities by Guy Halsall explores the indictments against the Vikings and concludes that they were not alone in designing horrible deaths for their enemies. Even if they had used the ‘blood eagle’, it was not so different from some European practices. (The disputed, even discredited, ‘blood eagle’ involved the victim having an eagle traced on his back by a sword, or, alternatively, having his ribcage cut open and his lungs pulled out and spread across his shoulders in imitation of a bloody eagle.) Our discussion of punishment in the High Middle Ages will not leave us surprised to learn of dreadful methods of killing in an earlier age. In seventh-century Europe even the royal great-grandmother Brunechildis did not escape mutilation and being ripped apart by wild horses, just one of many exhibitionist executions throughout the soi-disant Dark Ages. In the pre-chivalric period, political prisoners, whether caught on the battlefield or elsewhere, could expect death from their captors, be they Viking pagans or Christians. The familiar image of Vikings as destroyers of churches and monasteries was not an exclusive trademark then or later; as we have noted above, the movable wealth of the Church attracted armies of all faiths and none. The accusations of Viking barbarity came, naturally, from the helpless religious establishment, but also from the frustration of authorities who could not track down the maritime hit-and-run raiders to carry out reprisals. As Halsall observes, ‘The Vikings were not … deliberately breaking any rules; they were playing to a different rule-book.’45 Chivalry was, ostensibly at least, to create a new rule book in the wars of Christendom in later medieval Europe.

  Chivalry, in conjunction with the Church, did play a part in ending wars as a slave hunt and in sparing some prisoners of war. This is an area that has benefited greatly from the recent researches of Matthew Strickland and John Gillingham, who argue that chivalry was imported into England with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Before chivalry came into widespread practice, the death rates in battle were much higher (they were to rise again in the later Middle Ages). Strickland’s study of pre-Conquest England cites many examples of the slaughter. In 655 at the Battle of Winwaed, nearly all thirty commanders in the Mercian army were killed; in 641, the defeated Oswald of Northumbria was dismembered and his head and arms staked; in 686, King Cadwalla of Wessex paused to baptize his royal captives before having them executed. The Celtic fringe preserved the more barbaric habits of warfare for centuries. The tenth-century Sueno Stone in Scotland depicts the headless corpses of prisoners in rows, their hands ti
ed behind their back. In the early eleventh century, Earl Uhtred arranged for the heads of the Scottish defeated in battle to be cleaned and coiffured before the inevitable staking; the women assigned to this task were paid a cow each. In these wars and many in Europe, the general rule was to slay all men capable of fighting, and to enslave the rest, including women and children; any who attempted to impede the dragging away of slaves or who were too vociferous in their beseeching for exceptions put themselves in mortal danger.

  Chivalric practices developed side by side with continuing atrocities; the Vikings occasionally adopted policies of ransoming captives while continuing to slaughter and enslave whole communities. During the great siege of Paris in 886, a group of Franks surrendered to the Viking besiegers expecting to ransom their freedom, but they were killed, as was the garrison of St Lo a few years later in 890, despite Viking promises to the contrary. Little clemency was shown to defeated Vikings. In 1066, just weeks before his death at Hastings, Harold of England’s crushing defeat of Harald Hardraada’s Viking invasion force ended with the Norwegian army being almost totally wiped out; according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they came in three hundred ships and left in twenty-four.