by Sean McGlynn
Wars between Christians became tempered by the Church’s condemnation of taking Christian slaves and by the growth of chivalric practices in Europe, especially in France. Knightly codes can be discerned by the mid-ninth century; by the early eleventh century we can observe many examples of chivalrous conventions of warfare in northern France and later in England. As duke of Normandy, William the Bastard was careful to take prisoners alive; as king of England, William the Conqueror compensated Dover for the damage done to it by his troops after surrender and protected the defeated city of Exeter from sack. Nevertheless, this is the same William who, by sword and fire, inflicted the most appalling injuries and sufferings on captured enemies and non-combatants. But the knightly class was increasingly exempt from atrocity. ‘This emphasis on capture, as opposed to slaying, stands’, writes Strickland, ‘in stark contrast to Saxon and Viking conduct in regard to enemy warriors.’46 Thus the Normans brought with them to England the chivalrous practices of the continent; but this was not the chivalry of Ivanhoe and the romanticized images of the Victorian era. In an influential study, John Gillingham has defined chivalry as ‘a code in which a key element was the attempt to limit the brutality of conflict by treating prisoners, at any rate when they were men of “gentle” birth, in a relatively humane fashion’. He suggests that ‘the compassionate treatment of defeated high-status enemies is a defining characteristic of chivalry – and entirely compatible with very different treatment being meted out to people regarded as low-status’.47
Chivalry, then, was little more than an insurance policy for the fighting upper classes, who paid their premiums by the acquisition of the expensive arms, armour and, most of all, warhorses, that signified the elite warrior figure of the knight. This attitude was reflected in post-Conquest England in the disparity, discussed above, between the violent punishment suffered by a lowly criminal, and the humane sanctions imposed lightly (by comparison) upon society’s prominent figures. When, in Edward II’s reign, enemies of the Crown once again faced execution, the body politic was shocked to its foundations.
The motivation for a code of chivalry was self-preservation. Ransoming made it work. A live (wealthy) prisoner was worth more than a dead one. Large, sometimes huge and ruinous, sums could be extorted from a captive’s family to secure the return of a prisoner. The principle applied to the greatest in the land. Richard the Lionheart’s release from captivity cost England a staggering 150,000 marks and royal vassalage to Emperor Henry VI; King John II of France, taken prisoner at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, agreed to pay 3 million gold écus for his release (a reduction of one-quarter off the original demand and including sixteen other high-profile French prisoners thrown into the bargain). Chivalry could trickle down to bargain-basement levels for the lower orders as ordinary footsoldiers ransomed lesser folk. The prospect of ransom did not ensure the well-being of a captive, as examples from the Hundred Years War reveal. Jean le Gastelier’s job in Robert Chesnel’s military contingent was to beat the prisoners to extract promises from them of the largest possible ransom. Francois de la Palu imprisoned Henriet Gentian in a dungeon where the captive counted ‘eighteen serpents and other reptiles’ in his dungeon; furthermore, ‘Francois had also sent a letter to the Duke of Bourbon and others amongst Henriet’s connections, warning them that if he was not paid promptly he would pull Henriet’s teeth out. When they did not respond, he knocked out a few with his hammer and circulated them to show that he meant what he said.’48
Ransoming developed into a burgeoning business as warfare opened up this new economic opportunity to be exploited. Orderic Vitalis, our leading source for Anglo-Norman history, informs us of the investment potential of the three-year-long siege (1083–5) of Sainte Suzanne in Maine; large numbers of soldiers were attracted there by the lure of ransoms, many making an ‘honourable fortune’ in this way, and the whole business proved most profitable. Eventually, the whole process of ransoming accrued legal codes and structures, many cases coming to be settled in the Court of Chivalry. Paul Hyams has neatly summed up this new chivalry in warfare:
Previously, accepted dogma had held that it was both prudent and legitimate to deal with defeated enemies by killing them, toute simple. The newer view preferred to spare noble lives in return for a fat ransom. This was in part a declaration of knightly labour union rules. It was comforting to know as one rode off to battle that you and your genteel peers were not expected to go so far as killing each other, that you merely competed for the twin prizes of knightly valour and earthly swag. Victory now brought applause and enrichment without too direct a risk of death.49
The chroniclers testify to the generally satisfactory nature of the chivalric understanding. In a famous example from Orderic Vitalis, we learn of the impressively low mortality rate at the major engagement at Brémule on the Franco-Norman border in 1119, between Henry I of England and Louis VI the Fat of France. Of nine hundred knights involved, only three are reported as killed: ‘They were all dressed in mail and spared each other on both sides, out of fear of God and brotherhood in arms; they were more concerned to capture than to kill the fugitives. As Christian soldiers they did not thirst for the blood of their brothers …’50
A century later at the decisive battle of Lincoln, in 1217, only three deaths are recorded; hence the battle became known as the Fair of Lincoln. Only one of these fatalities is a high-ranking knight, the count of Le Perche, and there is concern even at this; the English commander had explicitly ordered his crossbowmen to aim at the chargers of the French knights and not at the knights themselves. Roger of Wendover numbers the prisoners at three hundred. It is worth noting that many of the French who escaped from Lincoln were ultimately the more unfortunate. As they made their hurried retreat back to their stronghold in London, many of them were slain, ‘for the inhabitants of the towns through which they passed in their flight, went to meet them with the swords and clubs, and, laying traps for them, killed many’.51 Non-combatants and townspeople were not recipients of chivalry, so nor were they its exponents.
The chroniclers frequently make a virtue out of a financial necessity by staying quiet on the matter of ransom and instead, like Orderic in the above passage, stress the fraternal ties between the combatants. Money was paramount, but these ties were important nonetheless. At the Battle of Lincoln, Wendover observes that the King’s troops only pretended to pursue the fleeing enemy, ‘and had it not been for the effect of relationship and blood, not a single one of all of them would have escaped’.52 The ties were deeper than just those tacitly understood and shared by fighting elites; many knights were more than commilitiones who shared the same religion and culture, and often language as well, but also familiars who knew each other intimately. Matthew Bennett’s article on military masculinity in medieval Europe stresses the experiences that knights shared as boys and squires as they trained in arms together in the schools of combat; this fostered strong male bonding (and what psychologists call primary group cohesion). More close links were forged on the tournament circuit, spectacles of violent display that were also integral to a knight’s training, in which opponents could fraternize rather like players from rival football and rugby clubs do today.
It is sometimes said that chivalry came with very real military advantages. The knowledge that a knight’s worst fate was likely to be being taken prisoner would have made him more courageous in the fray and less concerned for his own safety. This sense of security was greatly enhanced by his suit of armour that afforded him a high degree of protection in combat. Muslims labelled crusaders as ‘Iron Men’ because of their chainmail; William the Breton, a keen observer of early thirteenth-century warfare, placed more emphasis on the efficiency of armour than on chivalry as the cause of the dramatic fall in casualties since ancient times, when soldiers were less well protected. Ransoming also seemed to make greater sense in age of castle proliferation; it was easier to exchange a castellan or a lord for a castle than to besiege it. During the wars in England between 1215 and 1217
, King John successfully threatened the garrison at Belvoir in Leicestershire with the shameful death of their lord, in John’s captivity, if they did not surrender the castle to him. In certain circumstances chivalry could proffer military advantages, but reciprocity simply limited these advantages to occasional opportune moments.
In theory, different types of war dictated different norms of conduct and the laws of war were varied accordingly. Four types of war were recognized: guerre mortelle, war to the death, in which a captured enemy could expect either slavery or death; bellum hostile, open or public war, in which Christian princes were ranged against each other and knights could plunder and expect to be ransomed; guerre couverte, feudal or covered war, in which killing and wounding were acceptable, but not burning or the taking of prisoners and spoil; and truce, a momentary hiatus in hostilities. Siege warfare also developed its own set of laws that were more easily enforced than battlefield rules.
War to the death drew no distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. It tended to be characterized by religious wars, in crusades against Muslims and pagans. However, bloody as these wars were, they did not exclude financial incentives and, in the Holy Land, ransoming was common. Amongst Christians, mortal war was rare, but not that rare. As Robert Stacey observes, ‘Only in exceptional circumstances would knights agree to fight under such conditions. It was too dangerous for all involved and not very profitable either, since ransoms were disallowed.’53 As the next chapter demonstrates, the carnage of many medieval battles highlights the frequent exceptions to restraint amongst Christians; that the lower orders had the same religion as Christian knights meant very little except in the avoidance of slavery. The French, rather optimistically, flew the red banner of no quarter at Crécy and Poitiers, two of their worst defeats in the Hundred Years War. Civil wars, as between Simon de Montfort and Henry III in mid-thirteenth-century England, could also see the unfurling of the red flag; but it was popular rebellion especially, such as Flanders fought against the French in the early fourteenth century, and peasant revolts, such as the Jacquerie, that tended to produce the greatest bloodshed.
Knights much preferred to fight under the rules of engagement for bellum hostile, when ‘spoil and plunder were the order of the day’. Despite the strictures of the Peace of God designed to protect peasants, women, children, the elderly and the clergy from looting, ‘in practice, however, neither soldiers nor the lawyers and judges who adjudicated the resulting disputes over plunder paid the slightest attention to such immunities’.54 As chivalry developed into a cultural and literary phenomenon, the vision of the ideal knight came increasingly into conflict with the reality of the battlefield knight, exposing contradictory views held by society that on the one hand praised all the finer aspects of chivalry, but on the other condemned the all too frequent deviations from its ideals, principally in vanity, self-indulgence and incontinent bloodlust. As Richard Kaeuper has shown in his recent book, this contemporary issue gave rise to a debate in which both knights and clergy engaged in seeking reforms to bridge ‘the yawning gap’ between knightly practice ‘and the impossibly high ideals expressed for it in one major text after another’.55 Princes did lay down their own rules to curtail what one medieval writer called ‘evil enterprises’, which he listed as ‘pillage, robbery, murder, sacrilege, violation and raping of women, arson and imprisonment’;56 clearly he did not share the soldier’s attraction towards war. Frederick Barbarossa, Richard I, Henry V and Richard II are just three monarchs who issued ordinances of restraint; in 1385 Richard II stipulated the death penalty for profanity against the Eucharist and its vessels, and for robbery from churches, clergy, women and civilians in general. Evil enterprises, flight from battle and pledge-breaking were also punished by naming and shaming, one particularly dreaded device being to hang a knight’s coat of arms upside down at tournaments or at court, or tying them to a horse’s tail.
Chivalry certainly did not always ensure guaranteed safety for knightly prisoners, as we are about to see; but its socially exclusive application explains why, in the ‘golden’ age of chivalry, warfare was still marked by appalling and widespread atrocities. Theory and practice failed to match each other. The laws of war were, in theory, designed to afford protection to non-combatants as expressed in the Peace of God; in practice, the laws were reserved for the ruling classes. Urban militias, peasant levies and national call-ups often meant that non-combatants were turned temporarily into belligerents, and with little or no choice in the matter; these were particularly vulnerable to slaughter on the battlefield, especially when the bloodlust of battle-enraged knights could not be sated on enemy milites. Caught up in the wars of their masters, chivalry was an alien concept to them.
Chivalry, for what it was worth (and that was never very much), saved the life of many a knight; the poor bloody infantry and everyone else could expect little from it. Through its acceptance of moral hazard (the business term is applicable here), chivalry offered knights the insurance and security to wage war with regard to their own class and safety but with none to the rest. Thus, as Maurice Keen has perceptively observed, the impact of chivalry was not to limit the horrors of war, but ‘rather to help make those horrors endemic’.57 The atrocities in this book (Charlemagne at Verden excepting) all occur in chivalry’s bloody ‘golden’ age. Most are carried out under royal command; and the king was the greatest, most chivalrous knight of all in his realm. Gallant and honourable knights charging at each other with lances on the field of battle was only one, very small part of medieval warfare; it was too important, too all-encompassing for such civilized and restricted practices. As the chroniclers tell us repeatedly, wars were waged with terrible violence ‘by fire and sword’, or sometimes ‘by sword and fire’, directed with devastating consequences against non-combatants and those who tried to escape the path of the Mars juggernaut.58 This book has adopted the lesser-used phrase for its title, ‘by sword and fire’, to give prominence to the sword: the sword is the abiding symbol of chivalry, yet it was responsible for most of the horrors of medieval warfare. By stressing the dominance of the sword, I hope to show how deliberate military policy set the precedent for the atrocities in war.
3
BATTLES
Hastings, Bouvines, Crécy, Agincourt – the Middle Ages seem crowded with famous battles; indeed, for a long while medieval warfare was studied almost exclusively through the battles fought in this period. In fact, full pitched battles were relatively rare; campaigns and sieges were far more prevalent and characterized the warfare of the time. A recent, highly authoritative book on warfare in the Middle Ages, written by a team of experts covering all the major topics and themes, actually has no chapter or even sections on battles. This is perhaps a revision too far and distorts the rarity of full-scale engagements; skirmishes, combats and substantial military encounters far outnumber the Hastings and Agincourts in the medieval world.
The paradox of medieval battles was that they were at the same time both too risky and too indecisive. Thus while some commanders actively adopted a battle-seeking strategy, most pursued a policy of battle avoidance relying instead on campaigns and sieges to win the war. When battle was engaged, a commander had only limited control of his forces once they had been committed. Despite battlefield organization into tactical units (conrois and the larger batailles) with banners, heraldic devices and surcoats to aid recognition, the din and confusion of the combat, the spread of the fighting, communication difficulties, exigencies and unexpected events, surprise tactics by the enemy – all these led to intense confusion and meant that great dependence had to be placed on the training, experience and good sense of a commander’s soldiers and the initiative of his captains. After the dust of battle had settled, it was still not easy to discern what really took place on the field of combat; Wellington’s choreographical allusion – that one might as well write the history of a ball as of a battle – was even more applicable to the Middle Ages than to the nineteenth century. Even with a battle as
renowned as Crécy, we have half a dozen contesting theories as to the disposition of the troops. Sometimes, as with the major battle of Bannockburn in Scotland, not even the actual place of battle can be positively identified.
The outcome of battle was nearly always uncertain. Despite this, many generals actually sought to take their chances with the fortunes of war in a major engagement. When William the Conqueror landed his army in England in 1066 he wanted to entice the English into battle; with Harold and his main forces defeated at Hastings – and better still, with the king killed in battle – the kingdom was more easily subjugated. The chronicler William of Poitiers noted that William had, in effect, conquered all of England in a day. Harold also wanted a decisive battle (like the one fought a few weeks earlier in his crushing defeat of the Danes at Stamford Bridge) and in this he was adhering to a very Anglo-Saxon strategy: the absence of substantial fortifications in pre-Conquest England meant that battles rather than sieges largely determined the result of wars. Duke William’s desire for a conclusive early battle was driven by two overwhelming factors: he was unlikely to be in a position to assemble and maintain such a huge invasion force again; and he knew that the scarcity of castles in England meant not only that battle would settle the outcome of his expedition, but also that this was to his advantage. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis offers a succinct analysis of the Duke’s conquest of England: ‘The fortifications that the French call “castles” were very rare in the English regions and hence, although the English were warlike and bold, they were weaker in resisting their enemies.’1 By the end of the Middle Ages, commanders in England reverted to this form of warfare: long periods of peace had led to the desuetude and hence disrepair of fortifications, forcing the armies to contest in the field rather than at sieges. (It was a different story in the north, which witnessed a number of sieges during the wars; border warfare had ensured the upkeep of strongholds.)
