By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Successful ravaging was an economically efficient way of waging war, while imposing onerous expenses on the enemy. The raider could hope to reimburse the costs of his campaign through plunder, protection money and ransom; to the defender fell the heavy cost of lost productivity and lost taxes with the simultaneous need for vast outlays of capital on defences (town walls did not come cheap). The ultimate objective of major campaigns was political. Ravaging was part of the process in the pursuit of political gains. It intended to show the subjects of an enemy ruler how unprotected they were, and how much better they would be under a lord who could wield real power. Hence the Black Prince raided the Languedoc when King John of France was politically weakened. Christopher Allmand has neatly summarized the purpose of ravaging thus: ‘A war of successful raids might shake confidence further by showing that, as kings, they lacked the power to fulfil one of their prime roles, the defence of their people…. In this way, their credibility would be undermined and weakened.’90 Ravaging subverted the whole basis of the contract between a lord and his people. As the thirteenth-century Schwabenspiegel states: ‘We should serve our lords for they protect us; if they do not protect us, justice does not oblige us to serve them’.91

  When they were not protected, they generally took to the hills and forests with what they could carry or drive before them; as one fourteenth-century Frenchman put it, he joined the ‘country people who were fleeing to the fields, ditches, caves and woods like desperate men’.92 Sometimes, they simply joined in, looking for their share of spoils: victims as perpetrators. This happened on a relatively small scale in John’s winter campaign of 1215–16, but it went much further in the Hundred Years War. When caught, these people would justify their actions through necessity. Nicholas Wright offers examples of this in his studies on the effect of the war on the French countryside. In the late fourteenth century, Jean le Jeusne explained that he was forced into joining a company of twelve men who lived by brigandage because it was the only way to survive. When the fighting calmed down, he returned to his peaceful occupation as a labourer. When two armed men entered the village of St Romain in 1373 with the purpose of forcing money from its inhabitants, the whole village was evacuated and took refuge in woods. Ten of their bravest men returned after a week and discovered three pillagers in one of their houses. After a violent struggle, they took the three men to the river and drowned them.

  But vigilante action was not encouraged: it undermined what remained of the authority of the justice system. In 1375 a poor weaver of Vernon was kept in a small wicker basket for ten days and forced to pay a huge sum of sixty gold francs for having taken part in the killing of a pillager. However, involvement was welcomed when it contributed to the war effort. On their hurried retreat to London in 1217, the French soldiers defeated at Lincoln passed through towns where the inhabitants ambushed them with bludgeons, killing many. No doubt the French were plundered just as they had plundered the townspeople. But opportunism in war was nothing new, as we saw in chapter two, with the case in 1050 of two serfs who joined those plundering their lord’s lands. They were captured and blinded.

  It has been suggested by some historians that the killing of non-combatants rose with the demise of slavery, as people lost their value. Non-combatant men were often killed on ravaging expeditions simply to deny the enemy any chance of recruiting them as soldiers; and anyone might be killed, for reasons already discussed. But on most occasions, non-combatants were just as likely to be taken hostage, as John’s 1215 campaign reveals. The ransoms from non-combatants were not inconsiderable. Philippe Contamine provides evidence of this in a paper on ransom and booty in English Normandy towards the end of the Hundred Years War, in which he notes: ‘Certainly, it is striking to see that the ransoms of supposed non-combatants are not very inferior to those of soldiers.’93 They were frequently comparable. Contamine cites the case of the unfortunate Jean Guérard, a poor man of thirty-four years, married and with a child. He was taken by French soldiers in 1419, and again in 1420; he was made to pay twenty moutons d’or on both occasions. In 1425 he was taken for a third time, this time by English soldiers, and ransomed for twenty écus.

  Even in death, it could be hard to avoid the clutches of soldiers. As mentioned, corpses could be ransomed at half the price of a living person, if they were to be ransomed at all. The Scottish invasion of Ireland coincided with the Great Famine of 1317. Foraging was understandably very poor. As a consequence, one chronicler tells us that the soldiers were ‘so destroyed with hunger that they raised the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries’.94 No wonder the banners of an approaching army on campaign so terrified non-combatants.

  6

  MEDIEVAL SAVAGERY?

  Modern research has devoted much time to examining man’s ability to act cruelly. Investigations such as the infamous Stanford experiment reveal how quickly people can adapt to violent and sadistic modes of behaviour. The modern military, struggling in the twentieth century with the natural reluctance of man to kill, has funded research which has led to combat training that develops a conditional reflex to killing the enemy, or ‘targets’. Chemical reactions triggered in sequence in the brain also play their part, prompting responses that enable a man to end the life of another. This library of research can shed useful light on the soldier’s role in atrocities in both our age and the Middle Ages, but it can have only a limited application to the earlier time. Yes, medieval soldiers were conditioned in a fashion – that is what training and propaganda have always done since civilization began – but it goes deeper than that, and is more basic. The eminent psychologist Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame, has examined the psychology of evil in his recent book The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil, in which he wisely concludes that research ‘might be as thick as a phone book’, but to really comprehend what happens, ‘we have to understand the person in the situation’.1

  The situation is all-important. If a medieval soldier was ordered to kill a non-combatant, it was unlikely that he would refuse, lest he become a victim too. (The sources do not attest to there having been many conscientious objectors.) The basis of this book has been to explain atrocities in the light of the military imperative, the calculated decision that acts of savagery and mass executions would further military objectives. But on plenty of occasions, individual acts of atrocity were committed without express commands. In many cases there has been a tacit – or at least unrecorded – understanding that soldiers would behave in this way; certainly, the expectation of such behaviour was never remote. King David of Scotland may not have encouraged the chivalrous knights of his royal household to behave in the same way as his brutal infantry, but that does not mean he did not appreciate the military effect of rampaging footsoldiers. In this book we have come across events where the matter of life and death was at the whim of the soldier. Killing could be quite arbitrary: a soldier might strike down a non-combatant one day, but not the next. It could all depend on whether a campaign had been gruelling or not; whether a comrade had been killed by disease or combat; whether booty and opportunity had been good so far; or any number of other factors too myriad to explore.

  The very nature of a war was a significant determinant. Those fought in border regions, as on the Celtic fringe in England, the Reconquista in Spain, or the crusades in the Holy Land or Baltic, were particularly marked by a harshness that became endemic and ingrained. Even a conflict like that between England and France – paragons of chivalry – could become more brutalized over time, as the Hundred Years War shows. Ideas of chivalry evolved accordingly: although many writers still decried the treatment of non-combatants, many others, especially self-justifying literary warriors, simply chose to accept that targeting non-combatants was an acceptable part of chivalrous warfare. However, whatever the theatre of war, there were always exceptions to the savagery – examples of civilized behaviour and tolerance – indicating that the conflict need not be the way it is, and challenging the justification for certain a
cts. The fact that atrocities could spark a wave of reciprocation and a downward spiral of violence occasionally stayed the hand of a commander; but in any given situation he might determine that a display of power and brutality was what was needed to help him win his objectives. Sadly, more often than not he would have been right in this assessment.

  For the ordinary soldier, belonging to a larger group of his contingent within an army was usually of great importance. Often far from home and, of course, in hostile territory, his immediate combat unit, however loosely defined or organized, constituted his comrades and support. Research on soldiers in combat shows that in the wars of recent history, men have fought not so much for their country or a cause, but for their fellow soldiers. This ‘primary-group cohesion’, a bonding strengthened by experiences in war, is an important part in understanding soldiers’ behaviour. In the American Civil War one southern corporal wrote that a soldier on leave was always anxious to get back: ‘There is a feeling of love – a strong attachment for those with whom one has shared common dangers, that is never felt … under any other circumstances.’ An officer who fought at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, reflected that those ‘who had stood shoulder to shoulder during the terrible days of that bloody battle were hooped with steel, with bands stronger than steel’.2 Every modern conflict reaffirms these attitudes.

  Unfortunately, this noble and honourable aspect of soldiering has its dark side. Primary group cohesion can also lead troops into committing atrocities. The terrible Russian advance into Berlin in 1945 resulted in rape on a massive scale; it is an easy task to fold a thousand years of history to place the following passage in the medieval period: ‘Marauders and rapists acted as a rule under the influence of alcohol, and they acted in bands, and thus under peer pressure – venting a collective rage pent-up from years of oppression … One can well imagine the taunts at those unwilling to engage in a virile attack on German women…. Officers stood by passively during gang-rapes, or made sure every man had his turn.’3

  Christopher Browning’s seminal study of a German death squad, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, disturbingly shows how unexceptional men would actively choose to participate in the execution of civilians, men, women and children: ‘Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous peer pressure and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?’4 As with the Russians in Berlin, so men wanted to join in with their mates and not risk being taunted as weaklings. The sordid monetary interest was also always present. The Russians, like the Germans before them, plundered as they advanced. Executed Jews often meant clothes, jewellery and other property for the killers; careerist officers saw opportunities for promotion.

  Hard as it is to understand for those of us lucky enough not to have fought in war, many soldiers have found the experience of combat an enjoyable one. Another soldier who took part in the Battle of Shiloh declared: ‘I never felt before, the excitement which makes a man want to rush into the fight, but I did that day.’5 Ernest Jung, a modern, Prussian version of Bertran de Born, wrote of his time at war in books such as Storm of Steel, celebrating the First World War as a fundamental element to be experienced and enjoyed. In her important book An Intimate History of Killing, Joanna Bourke devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Pleasures of War’, describing this phenomenon in modern warfare and how it has contributed to atrocity. Bloodlust becomes an urge to sate. Niall Ferguson has also helped dispel the myth that the industrial carnage of the First World War was mitigated by the civilized – chivalrous, we could say – behaviour of troops and officers. A sergeant on the Somme wrote that combat left a man ‘half-mad with excitement … when you start a man killing, you can’t turn him off again like an engine’; another soldier spoke of ‘the swift thrill of approaching death … a wonderful sensation not to be missed’. The execution of German prisoners was often officially sanctioned. One bloodthirsty English colonel instructed his men: ‘You may meet a German who says, “Mercy! I have ten children!” Kill him! He may have ten more.’ Another officer told his sergeant to ‘blood his men’ by executing some German prisoners. After the massacre began, the sergeant looked around and asked: ‘Where’s ‘Arry? … ‘Arry ‘asn’t ‘ad a go yet.’ After Harry, ‘a timid boy’, was ‘given his man to kill’, he became ‘like a man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood’.6

  These impulses were – and are – experienced by many soldiers in all wars. Some war correspondents witness all manner of horrors and yet become addicted to war and acknowledge the enjoyment, or thrill, that they and soldiers derive from it, ‘the shared and terrible love of it all’, as one puts it.7 It would be strange to single out the Middle Ages as being any different. In a predominantly illiterate society, there are no thoughts recorded by the common soldier. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We do, however, have plenty of testimony to what we would recognize as primary-group cohesion among the knightly classes; bonding was part of the process of chivalry. Jean of Bueil wrote in the fifteenth century that ‘war is a joyous thing’:

  You love your comrade so much in war … A great feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of the Creator. And then you are prepared to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such a delectation, that he who has not experienced it is not fit to say what delight it is … A man who does that feels so strengthened, so elated, that he does not know where he is.8

  The sentiments expressed are strikingly similar to the modern quotes above, and many other modern recollections of comradeship in war. Such bonding is evident in ancient Greek epics and was a major literary theme of medieval chivalric works, as exemplified in the relationship between Roland and Oliver in The Song of Roland. By the twelfth century, ‘military friendship transcends all others’.9 It seems to me that this enjoyment of war, its compulsion, is sometimes masked by the appeal to higher motives of country, cause or religion. Such an appeal is, of course, similarly used to justify atrocities or more mundane mercenary motives. Freud believed that war strips us of the accretions of civilization and lays bare the primal man in each of us. War is co-eternal with man’s nature.

  Why, then, should the Middle Ages be regarded any differently? Why should the medieval soldier behave any differently from the modern one? Historians have to treat medieval sources with great care, allowing for the influences of bigotry, patronage, ignorance of events, religion and literary devices. Many medieval military historians will allow, as it is so often put, ‘a kernel of truth’ in atrocity stories but stress the undoubtedly exaggerated nature of the reports, and that individual acts are inflated into generalities. So if one chronicle hears of an especially gruesome act – say, taking a real example from one medieval writer, the cutting off of women’s breasts (one of Edward I’s complaints to the Pope about Scottish atrocities) – then others copy it and it escalates into a typical action of other soldiers on any given occasion. But in reality, there were relatively few writers, especially in the earlier part of the Middle Ages. If a writer hears of one gruesome event, how many other non-writers have heard it, too, and at different times and in different places? What are the odds that the atrocity chanced to occur just once, near to a monastery where a monk was just happening to write a chronicle at the same time, and whose writings have just happened to survive to the present day? Some of these accounts took on biblical descriptions (St Agatha had her breasts cut off) and others became repeated literary themes (topoi) which historians are always on the look-out for, but these may be an expression of limitation for writers who did not witness the important event, or who wished to embellish it.

  The medieval example just given of cutting off women’s breasts rings warning bells of such extreme, almost gratuitous writing. Yet here is a marine from Vietnam who used to sport a neckl
ace of ears: ‘We used to cut their ears off. We had a trophy. If a guy would have a necklace of ears, he was a good killer, a good trooper. It was encouraged to cut ears off, to cut the nose off, to cut the guy’s penis off. A female, you cut her breasts off. It was encouraged to do these things. The officers expected you to do it or something was wrong with you.’10 Similar stories are repeated from Europe at the very end of the twentieth century, in the Serbian wars. Again, these are modern examples that can explain medieval atrocities, so why are the medieval ones so readily dismissed, qualified or watered down?