By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Battle-seeking strategies are clearly evident in certain campaigns on the continent, as in the little-known wars between the Salians and the Saxons fought in late eleventh- and early twelfth-century Germany. When disputing territory in the relatively uncastellated region between East Saxony and Thuringia, the antagonists Henry IV and Henry V clashed in a series of major engagements; the ‘war was decided not by capturing strongpoints but by winning battles’.2 Simon de Montfort’s success during the Albigensian Crusade was in large part owed to his determination to force events in the field. In 1211 he concentrated his small army in the weakened fortifications of Castle-naudary, situated south-west of Toulouse in southern France, which was soon besieged by his opponent, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. De Montfort’s men took the initiative, sallying forth to engage the enemy and rout them. De Montfort reprised this tactic at nearby Muret in 1213 with even greater success. Battle was risky, but fortune frequently favoured the brave.

  Despite the dominance of the castle in medieval warfare, sieges were not always a commander’s first choice. In southern Italy, Charles of Anjou conducted his military campaign based on battles; his victories at Benevento (1266) and Tagliacozzo (1268) gave him Sicily. A provocative book on the wars of Edward III by Clifford Rogers claims that Edward, contrary to long-held opinion, was an active battle seeker. Rogers puts forward the controversial case that Edward and later his son the Black Prince, better known for their famous hit-and-run chevauchées (fast-moving ravaging expeditions), had learned from his early wars with the Scots (as when he forced them to fight at Berwick in 1333) that tactical superiority on the battlefield was the most efficacious way to achieve his ends; his sieges of Tournai in 1340 and Calais in 1347 were undertaken with the design to provoke the French into battle.

  The examples of Charles of Anjou and William the Conqueror reveal how high the stakes of battle could be; a single battle could determine the future of an entire country. Philip Augustus’s spectacular victory at Bouvines in 1214 secured France under the Capetians from imperial domination, while Henry Tudor’s triumph in central England at Bos-worth in 1485 meant a new dynasty on the throne of England and 120 years of Tudor rule. R. C. Smail, a leading authority on crusading warfare, declared that the defeat of the Latin army at Hattin in 1187 decided the fate of the kingdom of Jerusalem. And, as with the judicial trial by combat, success in battle also conveyed to the victor the blessing of God’s judgement; Fulk le Réquin attributed his victory over his brother at Brissac in 1167 to God’s grace. Conversely, of course, defeat on the battlefield could incur the highest price, even for kings: Harold was killed at Hastings; Richard III at Bosworth; and, in 1213, Peter II of Aragon at Muret. Even when monarchs or princes were not specifically targeted for death, as Philip Augustus was at Bouvines, their capture meant not only the collapse of their army, but a huge political and financial cost. The Battle of Lewes in 1264 delivered King Henry III and England (temporarily) to Simon de Montfort and the baronial rebels.

  Captivity was something of an occupational hazard for French monarchs, for whom a king’s ransom was more than a figure of speech: Louis IX was taken prisoner on the Seventh Crusade (1248); John II of France was captured after the defeat at Poitiers in 1356; and Francis I was seized at the battle of Pavia in 1525. Little wonder, then, that in the late medieval period the French kings Charles V, Charles VIII and Louis XI ordered their armies to avoid engaging the enemy on the battlefield. After all, the French had suffered battlefield defeats for over sixty years, losing major engagements at Crécy, Poitiers, Nájera and Agincourt – but they still won the war. Lest this seem somewhat pusillanimous, it should be remembered that Richard the Lionheart, one of the greatest military commanders of the Middle Ages, fought only two or three pitched battles during his lifetime of active and dedicated belligerence. Richard’s father, Henry II, was a renowned war commander, likened to Charlemagne by the chronicler Jordan of Fantosme; yet he never led his forces onto the battlefield once.

  Another pressing reason for avoiding battle existed when a commander was uncertain of the loyalty of either his troops or his allies. At Bosworth in 1485, Richard III’s forces outnumbered Henry Tudor’s by a margin as great as two to one; however, at a crucial juncture in the battle, the defection of Lord Stanley from the royalist cause to the Tudor one ensured defeat for Richard, and the King was killed by Stanley’s men. This fear of treachery was an ever-present anxiety for generals. When campaigning in Normandy in 1117–18 against a background of baronial unrest, Henry I was unwilling to commit his men to lengthy operations because of the very real danger of split loyalties. At Hastings in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Harold was supported only by ‘those men that wished to stand by him’.3 Attempts at securing allegiances were prudently made before a planned or expected outbreak of conflict. Blandishments, privileges, promises of land and booty all played their role in this, as did the sanctions, punishments and threats discussed in chapter one. A politically inept king was therefore likely to be a militarily inept one, too. Both failings are perfectly encapsulated in King John, whose reign was punctuated by a spectacular procession of both political and military disasters. Rarely had a monarch inspired less confidence: not only did a high proportion of his magnates wisely not trust him on a personal level; they were also so alarmed at his incompetence they could see little self-interest in serving him faithfully. There was a high price to pay for John, both financially and militarily, as he came increasingly to rely on overseas troops.

  In 1216 he was faced with his greatest threat: a French invasion of England led by Prince Louis. Rather than meet the invaders in battle and drive them back into the sea, John declined battle and instead permitted the French army to establish itself in the country and hence gain vital momentum. Roger of Wendover records events: ‘As King John was surrounded with foreign mercenaries and knights from the continental provinces, he did not venture to attack Louis on his landing, lest in the battle they might all leave him and go over to the side of Louis; he therefore chose to retreat for a time, rather than to give battle on an uncertainty.’4 The French went on to occupy one-third of the country. They were driven out after John’s death following two substantial battles in 1217, those of Lincoln and the naval engagement off the south-eastern coast at Sandwich.

  BATTLES IN MEDIEVAL WARFARE

  Whether sought or not, battles were a feature of medieval warfare. Contemporaries were keen to write about them, often with great vigour and zeal. Then, as now, they represented the climactic drama of knightly combat, with all its chivalric glory and heroics. The role of the knight in battle is a matter for much scholarly debate. Revisionist historians in the eighties and nineties played down the role of heavy cavalry, emphasizing instead the central part played by infantry, long neglected by historians not least because most chroniclers concentrated instead on the prowess of their patrons and princes. More recently, John France has led the counter-revisionist charge, convincingly arguing that some commentators have gone too far in drastically reducing the importance of cavalry; its great strength, he asserts, always lay in its mobility. Certainly, despite the fuss made over an alleged ‘Military Revolution’ in the late Middle Ages, the mounted warrior remained an essential component of armies throughout the period: when Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494, half of his army comprised heavy cavalry. The enormous expense of such a move tends to reveal the high premium still set on knights.

  The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the two extremes; infantry and cavalry were both vital elements within an army. The history of medieval warfare notches up plenty of victories for both over the other. Heavy cavalry decided the day at Hastings in 1066; at Jaffa in 1192 it took less than a dozen knights to see off the Muslim enemy; and it was Muslim heavy cavalry (spahis) that led to the mass surrender of the French at Nicopolis in Bulgaria in 1396. The Military Revolution thesis is supported by the increasing frequency of infantry battles over cavalry as the Middle Ages moved into the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies: Courtrai, 1302; Crécy, 1346; and Murten in Switzerland in 1476, when Charles the Bold’s cavalry could not prevent his forces from being massacred by Swiss pikemen. But infantry was defeating cavalry much earlier. In 1176, long before any ‘revolution’, Frederick’s imperial cavalry were defeated by the infantry of the Lombard League at Legnano, near Milan. A decade later, in 1188, an encounter at Gisors in Normandy saw English foot soldiers beat off two charges by French cavalry, considered Europe’s elite. The History of William Marshal records how the French ‘launched into the press’ and were met by Angevin infantry ‘who did not evade this onslaught’ and who ‘received them with their pikes’. Apparently, not one foot soldier was lost.5

  Even more instructive, perhaps, are early twelfth-century engagements like Brémule, fought in 1119, when Henry I dismounted his knights and combined them with his infantry to defeat French cavalry. William of Tyre reports that during the Second Crusade in the late 1140s, German knights followed their custom of dismounting to fight. Sources tell of Frankish cavalry fighting on foot as far back as 891 at Dyle in Belgium. The point here is that knights were flexible; they were formidable, professional fighting machines who could adapt to fight just as well either on foot or on horseback.

  The debate over infantry or cavalry supremacy is a misleading one. Very few battles were purely foot-versus-horse affairs; rarely did one arm exclusively defeat another. In the vast majority of battles, as in those highlighted above, it was the tactical deployment and ability of the cavalry, infantry and archers combined that settled a battle (if, indeed, the battle had a clear outcome). The different forces had established roles, but these could be changed according to circumstances. Heavy cavalry was designed to launch a shock charge that would break up infantry and enemy cavalry formations, or, as at Hastings, it would feign flight to draw the infantry out; but as mentioned above, they could just as easily fight defensively on foot. Archers and missile men similarly used a barrage to achieve the same effect, softening the target up for cavalry; of course, they were also used to break up cavalry charges. Infantry provided a shield wall for cavalry; but they also were used offensively, especially when following up after mounted charges. And knights would even advance on foot (something the French still did not quite have the knack of by 1415, as Agincourt shows). There were many other varying and diverse factors that determined the outcome of an engagement: leadership, morale, use of terrain, training and discipline, to name some of the most salient.

  The last of these – discipline – merits attention here, as command structures, and breakdowns of these structures, often influence our understanding of atrocities committed in warfare. Effectiveness in combat situations often depends on a disciplined force operating under strict orders. Although there is an element of truth in the concept of medieval armies composed contrastingly of nervous peasants, ever on the point of fleeing into the distance, and knights sometimes straining at the bit to get at the enemy, the view fostered by Charles Oman that knights were Hooray Henry amateurs piling into the fray in a disorganized mess at the first smell of blood is a parody that sadly remains potent to this day. In a recent essay on military lust for glory, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg writes of ‘foolishness on a scale that even medieval knights might find implausible’.6 Keeping formation was vital for cavalry; a successful charge depended on the enormous weight of a mounted force moving in serried ranks. Commanders and writers alike recognized the importance of this. A youthful Edward III, fighting on his Weardale campaign in 1327, informed his men that he would kill anyone who advanced before being ordered to do so. Joinville offers an example from the early thirteenth century: during St Louis’s first crusade in Egypt, Gautier d’Autrèche broke ranks against strict orders and was mortally wounded; neither writer nor king expressed any sympathy for him.

  Naturally, spur-of-the-moment bravery had its place in battle. On his march south to Jaffa in the Holy Land in 1192, Richard the Lionheart’s crusading army was sorely tried by Saladin’s forces shadowing them. Richard had issued firm instructions that, despite the severe provocations of the Muslims, his men were to maintain tight formation at all costs. The Hospitallers, bearing the brunt of the Muslim assault in the rearguard, were incurring more casualties and losing more horses than anyone else, mainly to archery. Unable to wait for the designated signal to counter-attack, two of the Order, one of whom was the Marshal, cracked under the strain and charged. They were immediately followed by the rest of the Hospitaller cavalry. Seeing this, Richard also committed his knights. Had he not done so, disaster would have ensued. However, the surprise of the counter-attack and, crucially, its size, resulted in a tremendous victory for the crusaders. Richard himself famously led from the front as an inspiration to his troops. (Such bravado had its limits; Richard died conducting a siege in 1199.)

  Orders were not merely verbal affairs and hence more easily misinterpreted; they were regularly written down in careful detail. Roger of Howden records Richard’s draconian navy regulations for the maintenance of discipline during the voyage to the Holy Land:

  Any man who kills another shall be bound to the dead man and, if at sea, be thrown overboard, if on land, buried with him. If it be proved by lawful witnesses that any man has drawn his knife against another, his hand shall be cut off. If any man shall punch another without drawing blood he shall be plunged in the sea three times. Abusive or blasphemous language shall be punished by fines according to the number of offences. A convicted thief shall be shaved like a champion, tarred and feathered and put ashore at the first opportunity.7

  Such ordinances were not exclusive to Richard. Any soldier in the crusading army found guilty of gambling was to be whipped naked for three days through the army camp. (Sailors got off more lightly, being plunged into the sea first thing in the morning instead.) Ordinances for conduct in war were common throughout the Middle Ages: Richard II issued his in 1385 at Durham; Henry V his at Harfleur in 1415. These afforded protection to non-combatants and religious, and restricted ravaging. In Henry’s case, the desire was to win over the population of Normandy as his loyal and trusting subjects. But not all such directives were so considerate. Twenty years later, Sir John Fastolf was giving orders for extreme, unrestrained warfare, guerre mortelle, in a vicious effort to suppress French rebels. Massacres and savagery were just as likely to be officially sanctioned as to be the result of a collapse in discipline.

  Loss of discipline on the battlefield could precipitate a rout. This was the most dangerous part of any battle, when the killing fields were the domain of cavalry mopping up scattered infantry, and foot soldiers following up despatching the wounded and worthless. Here is William of Poitiers’s account of the aftermath of Hastings. The English

  turned to flight and made off as soon as they got the chance, some on looted horses, many on foot; some along the roads, many across country. Those who struggled but on rising lacked the strength to flee lay in their own blood. The sheer will to survive gave strength to others. Many left their corpses in the depths of the forests, many collapsed in the path of their pursuers along the way. The Normans … pursued them keenly slaughtering the guilty fugitives and bringing matters to a fitting end, while the hooves of the horses exacted punishment from the dead as they were ridden over.8

  We have seen how chivalry afforded substantial protection to the knight; it was the poor bloody infantry who tended to get it in the neck. But this was not always the case: the nature of the war being fought, the attitudes of the enemy, class hatred, religious beliefs, ethnic and national identity – all could seriously affect the casualty rate. Philippe Contamine examines the relative degree of risk in his classic book War in the Middle Ages. In the West, he notes, inter-communal warfare, even when involving the nobility, could be particularly deadly; in such cases, it was rare to take captives for ransom. The great chronicler Froissart writes disapprovingly of the unchivalrous Frisians in their conflict against English, French and Lowland troops in 1396: they refuse to surrender, preferring
to die as free Frisians; they do not take prisoners for ransom; as for the few prisoners they do seize, these are not exchanged for their own men taken captive; the Frisians leave ‘to die one after another in prison’; and ‘if they think none of their own men are prisoners, they will certainly put all their prisoners to death’. Little wonder, then, as Froissart claims, that ‘it is a general rule that the greatest losses occur on the side of the vanquished’.9

  Detailed casualty rates are usually hard to ascertain, especially when they are high, and corroboration of sources is relatively rare. Thus the dead at the Scottish Battle of Dunbar in 1296 have been numbered by four contemporary chronicles at 30,000, 22,000 and 10,000 (two agree on the lowest figure). Once again, it is the nobility amongst the fallen who are newsworthy, and for this reason their mortality rates are better known. The combination of chivalric codes and armour usually kept their death rate down, so when nearly forty English knights were killed at Bannockburn in 1314 it was considered a rare and major event. The mortality rate for both knights and common soldiers was increasing by the early fourteenth century. At the French defeat at Poitiers (1356), nineteen leading members of the nobility were killed, along with over 2,000 men-at-arms; the slaughter at Agincourt saw the deaths of nearly one hundred leading nobility (including three dukes), 1,500 knights, and perhaps 4,000 gentlemen, all on the French side. This amounts in both cases to a loss rate for French cavalry of approximately forty per cent. Compare this to Brémule in 1119, where Orderic Vitalis recorded only three knights being killed out of 900 who fought in the battle. Overall, it has been estimated for the medieval period that defeated armies lost between twenty and fifty per cent of their men.