Author Topic: Was looting ect widely looked upon as unchivalrous behaviour?  (Read 8251 times)

Longmane

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Taken from "Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe", (Richard  W Kaeuper)

Looting and Destruction

If chivalry made warfare better for knights, what of everyone else?  Historians have long been tempted to believe that knights tried to limit damage to noncombatants; some have attributed the horrors of medieval warfare to common soldiers who could simply not be regulated by their social superiors in brighter armour.  What does the ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ evidence show?

In the second half of the twelfth century the poetry of Bertran de Born glories in the very opportunities for looting non-combatants that war brings the knightly.  Hoping that strained relations between Richard the Lion-Heart and Alfonso de Castile will bring war in the late twelfth century, he writes, in words that have become well known:

Trumpets, drums, standards and pennons and ensigns and horses white and black we soon shall see, and the world will be good.  We’ll take the usurers’ money, and never a mule-driver will travel the roads in safety, nor a burgher without fear, nor a merchant coming from France.  He who gladly takes will be rich.

His poetry joins other works that show the knight’s hand holding the torch that fires peasant homes, bourgeois shops, even churches.  Bertrand declared that ‘War is no noble word when it’s waged without fire and blood’.  The English king Henry V agreed; speaking three centuries later he declared that ‘War without fire is like sausages without mustard.’   This sentiment was far from theoretical: accounts of one fourteenth-century English chevauchée after another show that English commanders seldom denied themselves their mustard while campaigning in the French countryside.  We also know that the royal fleet which carried Edward III and his army to Brabant in 1338 indiscriminately plundered merchant shipping in the Channel.

Private wars in all ages regularly caused widespread arson. This association of warfare with destruction by fire appears as a commonplace in many chansons.  Near the end of the twelfth-century in the Coronation of Louis, William of Orange hopes that his seemingly endless fighting for king and Christendom may be over: ‘But that was not to be for as long as he lived, for the Frenchmen took to rebelling again, making war against each other and acting like madmen, burning down towns and laying waste the countryside.  They would not restrain themselves at all on Louis’s account.’ 

In the Chanson d’Aspremont, Girart, Duke of Burgundy, refers to such local warfare almost casually in a speech to his knights:

If my neighbor starts a quarrel with me,
With fire burns my land to cinders;
And I, his, on all sides;
If he steals my castles or keeps,
Then so it goes until we come to terms,
Or he puts me or I put him in prison;

‘Then so it goes.’ Girart is simply recalling the facts of raid, arson, and counter raid at home, as a contrast to the great battle to the death they are facing now, against a pagan host.

The language of Raoul de Cambrai speaks to the same subject with characteristically brutal clarity:  ‘Then they cross the boundary of Vermandois; they seize the herds and take the herdsmen prisoners; they burn the crops and set fire to the farms.’

Girart de Roussillon, another chanson, presents the same picture, although with greater epic exaggeration.  When Fouque, speaking for Girart, warns King Charles that his baronial style of war is to burn every town, hang every knight, and devastate every land taken, the royal response is to promise even worse by way of revenge.   When the sage Fouque stays in an abbey while on a mission to the king, he is so pleased with their hospitality that he gives the monks a revealing promise: the bourg where the monastic house is located will not be destroyed or ruined in the coming war. 

As warfare goes on for years in this chanson, the knights cut down vines and trees, destroy wells, and turn the land into a desert; they pillage and destroy even churches and monasteries. One monastery goes up in flames with a thousand royalist refugees inside.  Those captured in the war, the poet tells us, are hanged or mutilated.

Charles later claims that Girart has killed or wounded 100,000 of his men and that he has ravaged and devastated his realm:  ‘His great valour is only wickedness (mauvaistez).’ Merchants who hear a false report of Girart’s death respond with joy, since his war always heaped evils upon them. 

Fleeing from the victorious king at the nadir of his fortunes, Girart and his wife must endure similar maledictions from a widow and daughter in a household which lost knightly father and son in Girart’s war.   Even Girart’s wife tells him that he has killed and despoiled more men than he can reckon, earning the rebuke of God. 

King Charles is not spared criticism himself, however; the Bishop of Saint-Sauveur rebukes the king for having burned 10,000 churches on his own, causing monks and priests to flee.  In his sermon denouncing the war, late in the poem, the pope tells the warriors that God is angry; they have burned churches and their clergy; they have caused great suffering among simple folk; they have destroyed towns and caused great sorrows.  They must make restitution for their own souls and those of their ancestors.

At the end of his life, Girart, thinking about making final amends, proposes grants to support 500 poor people and 1,000 monks; but he hears that it is not enough, for he has driven 100,000 people from their homes and his father’s earlier warfare has actually killed no fewer.

Epic exaggeration, of course.  Yet the knightly role in warfare appears much the same in works traditionally classified as romance.  Despite its fashionably classical setting, the Eneas attributes knightly warfare to imagined Trojans and Latins.  The Trojan knights ‘dispersed the peasantry, who were not trained for battle,’ sacked a nearby castle, and ‘set out for home, gathering booty from the countryside.  They plundered and seized everything and they burdened a thousand sumpter horses with wheat.’

Two knights in William of England enthusiastically conduct war against the lady whose lands border those of their lord, not knowing that this lady is their mother.  Confronting them before she learns of their identity, the mother curses the two knights, damning the day they were born.  They have, she claims, killed her men or held them for ransom, harassed her to the point of death, ravaged her land so that nothing worth six pennies remains standing outside fortified spots.  ‘They waged the entire war.  They are the most evil on earth.’  Of course, once she learns the two are her sons, all is forgiven.  William, her husband, has already told them that their warfare has been at once treacherous (to their mother) and loyal (to their lord).  The contradictions in knightly warfare could scarcely be presented more starkly.

Such estimates of the warfare conducted by knights are common.  In the Didot Perceval Arthur’s men land in France ‘and ran through the land and took men and women and booty and you may be sure that never before had a land been so dolorous.’   In the Chevalier du Papegau we encounter ‘a great cry and noise made by people fleeing before a knight who was laying waste to all the district’.

The language itself can be instructive, in the continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval by Gerbert de Montreuil, and in the Perlesvaus, the dread Knight of the Dragon besieges his enemies, ‘destroying castles and cities and knights and whatever he can attack’, not only with a mortal army, but with a shield which features a fire-spewing dragon’s head as a boss; he consumes his opponents with this sulphurous medieval forerunner of a flame thrower, supplied, we find it no surprise to learn, from the arsenal of Hell.

This popular Perceval legend connects war to a haunting and socially comprehensive image—the terre gaste, the land laid waste.  In his Perceval, Chrétien pictures entire regions desolated by knightly warfare.  The beautiful Blancheflor tells Perceval, who seeks lodging in her castle, that she has been besieged ‘one winter and one whole summer’.  Her garrison of 310 knights has been cut down by violent death and capture to 50.  This terror is the work of ‘one knight: Clamadeu of the Isles’ cruel seneschal Anguingueron’.  His siege has produced a veritable wasteland in this region:

"For if, without, the youth had found the fields were barren, empty ground, within there was impoverishment; he found, no matter where he went, the streets were empty in the town.  He saw the houses tumbled down without a man or woman there.. . . The town was wholly desolate".

The initial setting of the poem lies in the forest soutaine, the ‘lone and wild forest’, to which Perceval’s mother has fled from the chaos and warfare that swept the land following the death of Uther Pendragon, the future King Arthur’s father.  With her husband badly wounded and Perceval’s two elder brothers both slain on the very day they were made knights, Perceval’s mother hopes to keep him from the world of knightly combat.  The first time he utters the word knight she falls in a faint.

Chivalric biography is even less reticent about the realities of knightly warfare.  The Chandos Herald, writing the life of the Black Prince late in the fourteenth century, tells his readers how his master’s host behaved between the Seine and the Somme during their invasion: ‘the English to disport themselves put everything to fire and flame.  There they made many a widowed lady and many a poor child orphan’.   It is helpful to remember that this passage appears in a laudatory life, setting forth the prowess and piety of Edward, the Black Prince, son of Edward III.

Nearly two centuries earlier, the biographer of William Marshal, it is true, pictured William, during the burning of Le Mans, helping a woman drag her possessions from her flaming home; William nearly suffocated on the smoke which entered his helmet.  But the action was scarcely typical of the times or even of the hero’s life.  The biography tells us that the mature William advised Henry II to delude the French king into thinking he had disbanded his army, but then to carry devastation into French territory.   Of warfare between Henry II and his sons, the biographer observed that many places in his day still showed the scars of that war.  These scars, in other words, had yet to heal after forty years.

Chronicles, less concerned with the mix of prescription and description than imaginative literature, point specifically and repeatedly to knights as the bane of their author’s hopes for a more orderly life.  The historian Matthew Paris tells a striking story of Hubert de Burgh leading a troop harrying the lands belonging to King John’s enemies in England; looting as thoroughly as they could and destroying what they could not carry off, even churches seemed fair game.  But then Christ himself appeared to Hubert in a dream, admonishing him to spare and worship the crucifix when next he saw it.  The very next day a priest whose church was being looted ran up to Hubert carrying a large crucifix.  Remembering the warning, Hubert fell to his knees, adored the cross, and restored the looted goods to the priest.

Such worthy restraint led to the telling of the story; the common practice, of course, looms in the background.

Orderic Vitalis tells an even more striking story in Book XII of his Ecclesiastical History.  His account deserves quotation in full, for the unforgettable picture it paints is worth many words of more abstract analysis.  On a raiding expedition which yielded an important prisoner and much booty, Richer de Laigle ‘did something that deserves to be remembered for ever’:

While country people from Grace and the villages around were following the raiders and were planning to buy back their stock or recover it somehow, the spirited knights (animosi milites) wheeled round and charged them, and when they turned tail and fled continued in pursuit.  The peasants had no means of defending themselves against a mailed squadron and were not near any stronghold where they could fly for refuge, but they saw a wooden crucifix by the side of the road and all flung themselves down together on the ground in front of it.  At the sight Richer was moved by the fear of God, and for sweet love of his Saviour dutifully respected his cross.  He commanded his men to spare all the terrified peasants and to turn back . . . for fear of being hindered in some way.  So the honourable man, in awe of his Creator, spared about a hundred villagers, from whom he might have extorted a great price if he had been so irreverent as to capture them.

Not seizing the bodies of the peasants whose homes he has already looted (out of respect for the potent symbol of the cross) earns him the adjective honourable or noble (nobilis); indirectly, Orderic speaks volumes about ordinary practice. 

Not that he is reluctant to speak his mind directly.  Often he describes casual brutality outright.  In the course of feudal warfare carried on right through the holy season of Lent, Count Waleran, ‘raging like a mad boar, entered the forest of Bretonne, took prisoner many of the peasants he found cutting wood in the thickets, and crippled them by cutting off their feet.  In this way he desecrated the celebration of the holy festival rashly, but not with impunity.’   Orderic describes the followers of Robert, the future Duke of Normandy, as ‘of noble birth and knightly prowess, men of diabolical pride and ferocity terrible to their neighbours, always far too ready to plunge into acts of lawlessness’.   Of lords such as Robert of Bellême and William of Mortain, he writes, ‘It is impossible to describe the destruction wrought by vicious men of the region; they scarred the whole province with slaughter and rapine and, after carrying off booty and butchering men, they burnt down houses everywhere.  Peasants fled to France with their wives and children.’

When this same Robert fought with a neighbour, Rotrou, over the boundaries of their lands, Orderic says:

"they fought each other ferociously, looting and burning in each other’s territories and adding crime to crime.  They plundered poor and helpless people, constantly made them suffer losses or live in fear of losses, and brought distress to their dependants, knights and peasants alike, who endured many disasters".

Knightly ferocity and brutal acquisitiveness likewise appear when we cross the Channel. Outright private war was less likely in England, where it was formally forbidden by law, but some English knights took every opportunity that crown weakness presented and did what they could at other times.

William Marshal’s father, to take a well-known example, was during the civil war as thorough going a robber baron as any lord denounced by Orderic.  William’s Histoire praises John Marshal as ‘a worthy man, courtly, wise, loyal, full of prowess (preudome corteis e sage . . . proz e loials)’; it also shows him collaborating with a Flemish mercenary, dividing up regions of southern England for exploitation like any Mafioso; it further tells us that at this time England knew great sadness, great war, great strife, because there was no truce, no agreement, no justice while the warfare lasted.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle similarly evaluated conditions in another part of the country, East Anglia:

For every man built him castles and held them against the king; and they filled the land with these castles. They sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on these castles; and when the castles were built they filled them with devils and wicked men.  By night and day they seized those whom they believed to have any wealth, whether they were men or women; and in order to get their gold and silver they put them into prison and tortured them with unspeakable tortures. . . . When the wretched people had no more to give, they plundered and burnt all the villages, so that you could easily go a day’s journey without ever finding a village inhabited or field cultivated. . . and men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.

At the end of the fourteenth century even Froissart was still inserting into his narratives admonitory tales of what happened to church violators.  An English squire who seized a chalice from a priest’s hands at the altar in a raid on the village of Ronay (and then gave the celebrant a backhanded blow to the face) soon whirled out of control on the road and, screaming madly, fell with broken neck and was reduced to ashes.  His fearful companions swore never to rob or violate a church again. ‘I do not know whether they kept their promise’, comments Froissart.

His contemporary, Honoré Bonet, knew.  In his famous Tree of Battles he tells the French king that ‘nowadays . . . the man who does not know how to set places on fire, to rob churches and usurp their rights and to imprison the priests, is not fit to carry on war’.   Far from protecting the helpless, the warriors loot them without mercy, ‘for in these days all wars are directed against the poor labouring people and against their goods and chattels.  I do not call that war, but it seems to me to be pillage and robbery.’

 One is reminded of Merigold Marches, the routier leader executed in Paris in 1391.  He had seized people for ransom, burned and looted in wartime France; his claim that he had acted as one should in a just war was brushed aside; his crime was not the activities themselves, however, but simply that he, a mere mercenary, had lacked proper status and authority.

Chivalry brought no radical transformation in medieval warfare, as it touched the population as a whole; above all, it imposed no serious check on the looting, widespread destruction, and loss of non-combatant lives that seem to have been the constant companions of warfare.  Recent historical scholarship suggests that we have no reason to think that chivalry should have transformed war in this broad sense, nor that knights were somehow unchivalrous cads for not attempting it.  As a code, chivalry had next to nothing to do with ordinary people at all.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.  "Albert Einstein"

egamma

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Jenred will be so disappointed...

Bedwyr

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Jenred will be so disappointed...

Not in the slightest.  He's trying to change things, and any statement of his about established rules or customs is bull!@#$ to try and build up mystique around the changes.

Longmane, these are really, really awesome by the way.
"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here!"

Shizzle

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I'll read it tomorrow, it's quite lengthy :)

Longmane

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I'm hoping some of the other things I post out this book are also found interesting, (and with luck enjoyably contentious  ;) ) as it's a veritable gold mine of info on the subject.


I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.  "Albert Einstein"

songqu88@gmail.com

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And to think that hundreds of years later Francis Drake would be knighted for burning a bunch of Spanish ships.

And hundreds of years after him Nathan Drake found a bunch of gold and Spanish fish zombies, then went to the Himalayas and found some fountain of immortality and a bunch of Yeti people, then went to the Arabian desert and fought fire demons and drank LSD water, and...well, he didn't get knighted or get any awards, so the combo broke.