Topics

16

Background / Ballistic Machines.

« on: June 28, 2012, 03:27:01 PM »

Hopefully this piece from the same book will follow on well from the earlier one on sieges.


Ballistic Machines
Machines that threw projectiles were known by many names in their time, although today we refer to them all as catapults.  There are a few simple forces that can provide ballistic power without explosives or motors. Levers and gravity can be harnessed to provide flinging power, while the power of both tension and torsion derive from a material being bent so that it will spring or unwind back to its original state.     

Tension engines worked by bending wood; it would spring back to shape when the tension was released, thus flinging a projectile with the force of its movement.  Crossbows and longbows work on this principle, and some larger forms of crossbows could act as siege weapons, throwing larger projectiles.

These great crossbows were built on a frame and used a windlass at the back of the frame to wind the bolt on its string far back.  When the windlass was released, the wooden bows tension thrust its heavy bolt forward with speed and great force.  But wood’s ability to bend and snap back is limited by its tendency to crack. Wooden bows could not throw anything larger than a bolt and could not take aim at walls, but only at people.

Torsion is the force exerted by a rope that has been twisted tightly and tries to untwist.  It is the principle of a child’s toy boat or aeroplane that uses a rubber band wound up tight to drive paddles or propellers as it unwinds.

Torsion had been used to drive throwing machines since ancient times.  The Romans had a throwing machine called an “onager,” a wild donkey.  It used a very thick band of rope, highly resistant to being twisted, as the torsion spring.  When a lever was inserted into the torsion spring and cranked back so that the rope was forced to twist, on release it sprang into the air.  The lever had a sling on the end with a heavy stone.  As it sprang into the air, it struck a bar that stopped its movement, and the stone flew out of the sling. The onager’s simple torsion spring provided great velocity and force.

Medieval uses of the torsion spring are not as clear.  There is evidence that torsion machines of this kind were known in the time of Charlemagne.  Artists’ illustrations show a machine similar to the Roman onager, but instead of a sling at the end of the lever, there is a spoon-shaped cup for the rock to be placed in.  It was probably called a mangonel.  Turkish medieval sources picture a device similar to the Roman one, called a manjaniq, used by Muslim armies.

In the 14th century, there were large crossbows that did not use bent wood, but rather had two separate arms with torsion springs.  Different types were known variously as ballistae and espringals (and in other languages, springarda or springolf ).  They were more often used by a fortress’s defenders, since they shot bolts at individuals, rather than rocks at walls.

The espringal was built into a wooden frame, mounted on a tower.  On each side, the frame had a torsion spring made of very thick horsehair rope that was resistant to twisting.  Levers inserted into each spring were pulled back by ropes attached to the fi ring mechanism.  The espringal’s firing system was like a crossbow, with a long groove for a bolt.  The operator cranked the bolt back, pulling on the levers and the torsion springs.  Released, the torsion springs untwisted and the levers shot the bolt forward, through the groove and out toward the target.  The bolts were long and heavy.  They could be expected to pierce wooden shields, steel armour, and sometimes more than one body.

The third type of throwing machine used levers and gravity.  Since ancient times, people had known that if a lever is put over a fulcrum, like a see-saw, and the lengths are not equal, it takes a much heavier weight on the short end to balance a lighter weight on the long end.  If the short end is suddenly weighted, the long end will fly into the air very fast.  Unlike tension and torsion, which depend on the strength of bent wood or twisted rope, lever-based machines can throw very heavy objects with relative ease.  As long as the lever’s arm and the stand with the fulcrum hinge are strong enough, there is no load limit.

The perrier used only the lever to fling large stones.  The perrier depended on a sudden downward pull by men or horses.  Its frame lifted the lever’s short arm above the men’s heads, with a rope dangling down, and the long end rested on the ground with a sling.  They could load a heavy rock into the sling.  When the payload was in place, men with ropes pulled the short end down, as hard as they could, and the long arm with its rope swung upward suddenly, flinging the projectile into the air.  In order to achieve significant force, the pull had to be both sudden and hard.  Many ropes attached to a bar allowed many men or horses to pull.  Sudden pull could be achieved by having the throwing arm restrained by a latch as the men began pulling, so the latch could suddenly be released. The perrier may have been in use by the 11th century.

The trebuchet used a lever with a very heavy counterweight on its short end.  The long arm, with a sling on the end, was winched to the ground, forcing the boxy counterweight to lift into the air.  Men loaded a large stone into the sling as the long end was held down firmly.  When the long arm was released, the counterweight fell to the ground, suddenly lifting the long throwing arm and releasing its sling-propelled payload into the air.  Because the machine’s power depended on gravity to pull the counterweight down, not on men or horses to tug it hard, the trebuchet was the strongest of the throwing machines.

Trebuchets could be built larger and stronger to throw ever-larger payloads.  Instead of a windlass, the winching could be accomplished by one or two wheels, the way the tallest cranes raised loads.  Several men stood inside the wheel and walked on its steps, using their weight and a pulley system to magnify the force. The counterweight, perhaps by now a large wooden bucket filled with many large stones, slowly lifted into the air.  The throwing arm was lashed down, the men got out of the wheels, and the counterweight could be released.

Rocks are the best-known catapult payload, and they were the most commonly used.  A machine could deliver a series of rocks to the same spot on a wall if the rocks were the same weight and the machine had not been moved.  This pounded the wall over and over, increasingly weakening it. Iron shot was even better than stone shot, but it was more expensive.

As a siege went on, trebuchets were loaded with new payloads that were intended to frighten or harm the people inside.  The trebuchet was now aimed to fling over the wall, not at it.  Most often, armies threw dead animals or even dead human body parts.  Severed heads were a common payload. Corpses spread disease, a deadlier attack than any rock.  An assault with corpses was also a psychological terror weapon, especially if the heads or other body parts belonged to people known to those inside.  Trebuchets could also fling manure.

A shrapnel effect came from “beehives”—clay pots packed with rocks.  They burst open on contact, and the rocks flew into the town to smash windows and injure people.  Armies also threw incendiary mixes, such as hot tar and quicklime.  Incendiary mixes were often called naphtha; there are a few existing recipes. Quicklime was the key ingredient, because water causes combustion on contact.  Other ingredients were flammable substances: pine pitch, tar, oil, animal fat, and dung.

Greek fire was the most famous incendiary compound of the time.  The name “Greek fire” caught on because it was invented in Constantinople, after they had lost territory to the invading Muslims.  Byzantine soldiers used catapults to fling pots of Greek fire at besieging Muslim armies.  It caught fire on contact, and even water did not put it out.  They could pump it at attacking ships and burn up whole fleets; in this way, they saved Constantinople in the seventh century when other cities were conquered by the invading Arabs. 

The secret composition of Greek fire was carefully guarded for a long time, but eventually first Muslims and then Christian Europeans learned how to make it.  It became a component of trebuchet attacks during sieges.  However, there is no surviving account of what was in Greek fire. Many scholars speculate that it must have contained quicklime or saltpeter, and others believe it had to use petroleum as a main ingredient.  The use of petroleum in some form seems very likely, since Greek fire was described as a liquid that burned even on top of water.

17

Background / Sieges. (pt 1, 2 & 3)

« on: June 24, 2012, 05:29:39 PM »

I thought I'd use the opportunity of work being far less hectic then usual to begin posting a few pieces from another new tomb I've just got,
(Johnston, Ruth A, -All Things Medieval~An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World-) as while of course impossible go into as much detail as books which deal specifically with each of the topics, it nevertheless not only gives a remarkably interesting, accurate description/explanation of each one, but also in a very concise way considering.

Sieges. (pt1)

In ancient times, cities often had strong walls around them, and warfare against these cities had always involved the basic tasks of breaking the walls, going over or under the walls, or starving the defenders into surrender.

In the Middle Ages, Europe’s decentralized political structure put a new twist on the siege by planting heavily fortified castles all over the landscape. Constantinople’s thick city walls were similar to the fortresses of Roman, Greek, and more ancient times.  Northern Europe, on the other hand, had several hundred small fortresses that were designed to hold off disproportionately larger attackers.  In order to capture a region, an invader would need to besiege more than one fortress.

After the period of the First Crusade, knights returned with much grander ideas of defensive fortification. They had seen Byzantine fortress designs and had participated in attacks on Antioch, Acre, Jerusalem, and Tyre.  Crusaders had built their own fortresses to hold the new territory, and they had used local engineering and labor to build much larger stone fortresses than Europe had at the time.  When they came home, many rebuilt their family castles to incorporate the new defensive features.  Castles became harder to capture by direct assault.

Sieges, attacks that stretched out over a long period of time, were the only way of capturing a castle unless it was taken by surprise.  Sieges were expensive for both sides. The attackers had to sustain an army in hostile territory for a number of months, while the defenders had to make their food and water last.  Both sides worked hard to attack or defend the walls.  Walls could be broken down or surmounted by going over or under the walls.  Siege machinery falls into three basic types.  Catapults threw projectiles over the castle walls, either into the castle or from the castle toward the attackers.  Rams battered the walls to make them fall down.  Siege towers lifted attackers to the top of the wall so that they could enter.

Because of the high stakes and expense, sieges were not governed by the polite rules of chivalry.  No trick was too dirty, gross, or savage.  Treachery was one of the best ways of breaking a siege, if an insider could be bribed to open the gates or tell of a secret weak point.  Poison or bacterial contamination of food or water was a popular way to break a siege.

Climbing, Ramming, and Digging

The simplest siege weapon was the ladder.  The attackers wanted to get into the fortress, and one way was to go over the walls. Siege ladders had been used against city and fortress walls since ancient times. Basic facts that governed the construction of siege ladders began with length: if a ladder was too short, it would not allow the attacker to go over the top, but if it was too long, its top would stick up where defenders could shove it away. The ladder had to lean enough to be stable, but it had to be vertical enough to be strong.  The ideal siege ladder came to just below the top of the wall, and its foot was placed at a distance from the wall equal to about half its length.  Since the walls of a town or castle were of varying heights, and were surrounded by varying terrain, the attackers had to build custom siege ladders for each position.

A refinement on the simple ladder was a ladder with a bridge. The bridge was a sturdy plank hinged at the top of the ladder, raised by ropes.  The ladder had to be somewhat freestanding, like a platform, since it could not lean against the wall.  Some engineers designed folding ladders that could be made in advance and carried with the army or ladders that could be assembled from short sections.  Some sieges also used ladders made of rope or leather, with hooks at the top.  These ladders were for quiet night attacks, when the ladders could suddenly appear hooked on top of the walls by long poles without the defenders having seen any ladders.

Defenders tried to repel attackers on ladders by using the force of gravity.  Standing at a higher level, they could drop harmful substances on the climbers.  Most often, they threw large rocks to knock the attackers off the ladders or force them to cover their heads.  Sometimes they threw or poured boiling water, oil, or any other hot substances they had on hand, such as tar.  They could also throw quicklime, a highly caustic, alkaline material that burned on contact.  In sandy places, they could heat sand to red-hot and fling it down. In some cases, they could fling nets onto the attackers when they reached the top and trap them.

To protect against all these defences, attackers used heavy shields.  Since classical times there had been siege shields made, tall, curved back, or with a small roof, and at times on wheels.  Many shields were large enough for more than one man.  Medieval sieges used all forms of wooden shields, covered with leather.  In the 15th century, the tall siege shield was called a pavis.  It often had a spike to drive into the ground and a pole to hold it up.

Of course, the first defence against siege ladders had been put in place before the siege began, when the fortress was designed.  Most fortresses used a ditch or moat that came as close as possible to the outer walls. Attackers had to fill in the ditch with sacks or barrels of rocks and earth.  In some cases, they resorted to using catapults to land rocks and dirt in the moat.  Unless the ground was reasonably level approaching the wall, their use of siege machines would be limited.

If the attackers continued to try to go over the walls, but needed more than ladders, the next logical step was to make portable sheds.  Sheds could be made fire resistant with water and fresh skins.  Sheds could also disguise or protect structural attacks, such as digging or battering rams.  The purpose of a ram is simple.  It is a strong tree trunk that hits a wall, gate, or door repeatedly until the object is smashed. 


The next 2 parts will be dealing with the Battering ram in proper detail, as likewise siege towers and undermining.

18

Background / city life, a small insight.

« on: May 29, 2012, 07:33:50 PM »

I thought I'd post some snippets out of a new book I've just got (The Medieval City, Norman Pounds) as some might find them interesting.


DOCUMENT 10
Street Life
Life on the streets of a medieval city is best seen through the records of the city’s courts. It was violent; assault and murder were commonplace, and public control of urban development was at best spasmodic and ineffective. Citizens extended their properties into the street, narrowing it until traffic could no longer pass. Steps were cut in the highway to gain access to cellars and basements to the grave danger of pedestrians, and animals were slaughtered and even forges erected in the midst of the highway. Safety precautions, which would today have been normal, were ignored, and the loss of life, especially of the young, was horrendous. The following extracts from the London Eyre of 1244 throws some light on these conditions.

HOMICIDE
 John Black “courector” was found strangled in his shop, and Thomas le Custurer who strangled him because of a wound John had dealt him, fled to the hospital of St. Thomas the Martyr across the Bridge, where he died of the wound. The value of Thomas’s chattels is 12 d. [a deodand].

 Robert of St. Osith struck Thomas de Haldham on the head with a staff, and killed him.  He fled to a church [i.e., sought sanctuary] and acknowledged the deed and abjured the realm.* . . . He had chattels worth 4s.

 Honorius le Rumunger killed Roger de Vilers with a knife, and fled to the church of St. Bartholomew, where he acknowledged the death and abjured the realm. He had no chattels and was in frankpledge in the ward of Joce fitz Peter.

*Left the country, swearing never to return.


ACCIDENT

 William son of Adam le Cost was crushed by a stone wall which fell upon him, and was killed. Judgment: misadventure. No one is suspected. Value of the wall 1 mark.

 [A] woman named Juliana of Camberwell fell from a solar in the house of John de Exeport, and was crushed by the beams of the solar which fell upon her, so that she died. No one is suspected. Judgment: misadventure. Value of the planks 3s.

[A] man named William Aubyn fell into the Thames, pulled in by a bucket which he had in his hand for drawing water, and was drowned. No one is suspected. Judgment: misadventure. Value of the bucket 4d.

STREET OBSTRUCTIONS
A forge stands in the middle of the king’s highway [in Farrington Ward] opposite the New Temple and renders yearly to the king 12d.

Another forge stands in the king’s highway opposite Shoe Lane which renders to the king yearly 6d. by the hands of the same brethren.

 Stephen of Bocking has a cellar and a pentice* above the steps of his cellar to the nuisance [of the public]. Let it be demolished.

Andrew the Draper has a cellar the steps of which stand 3 ft. in the king’s highway. The same Andrew has a porch which is to the nuisance
[of the public]. Let them be amended.

*Pentice, a lean-to shelter.


LONDON BRIDGE
The justices ask by what warrant the citizens of the London built upon London Bridge. The City answered that for the most part the fabric of the bridge was maintained by the alms of the citizens of London, and the wardens and brethren of the bridge built mostly from those alms upon the same bridge shops for the maintenance and improvement of the fabric; this did not however cause the deterioration of the street which is sufficiently wide everywhere and those crossing by the bridge do so the more securely and boldly for the buildings built thereon.

DOCUMENT 11

Urban Finances
Most larger towns had an official in charge of its finances. He rendered an account to the city council every year, but the amount of money that he handled was usually very small. There was as a general rule no urban taxation, though there might have been a levy to cover an exceptional expenditure such as the building of the town walls. Maintenance of the streets was the obligation of those who lived along them. Many of the duties which were later to be discharged by the municipal authorities were performed by the parishes of which the city was made up. The chief source of municipal income was the property which it owned and from which it received a rent. Also important were the tolls received for the use of the market and the fines imposed for breaches of urban “laws.” Below is the earliest treasurer’s account for the borough of Cambridge for the year 1347. It shows how petty were the sources of income and how trifling the matters on which it was spent.

RECEIPTS

20s. 9d. received of the old treasurers . . . [i.e., carried over from the previous year]
71s. received of the shops near the wall of the Augustine friars
20s. received of the new shops opposite the Gildhall
£5. 16. [sic] received of divers [various] men purchasing their freedom . . .
66s. 8d. received for divers fines in the Court

PAYMENTS
To the sheriff, for the new gift to him that he would not take victuals, £3; to the undersheriff, half mark*
To Sir Richard de Kelleshall for the new gift to him, 20s.; to his clerk, half mark; to his esquire, 2s.
To Sir William de Tjorp, justice, 40s.; to his clerk, 2s.
To Master John de Thoresby, for his fee, 20s.; in other expenses, 20s.; to the keepers of the horses of the Lord the King, half mark; in wine for the same, 31⁄₂ d.; to John Tayllefor, messenger of the Lord the King, 2s.
To the messenger of the Lord the King, coming for the armed men, 40d.
To a page carrying the writ for the said armed men**
To a messenger carrying the writ for a ship, 2s. [meaning not clear]
Paid the mayor and the bailiffs for their fee, 30s.
To William de Horwood, clerk, for his fee, half mark.
To the same William for a tallage tenth, half mark; to the same William from the tallage of wool, half mark.
Paid William de Lolleworth and Thomas de Cottenham going to London for the Parliament, 20s.
In one cup sent to Matthew Hardy, 54s.
To John de Steping for three gaol deliveries, 18d.***
Paid John de Hilton for the write for the archers, 1 mark
In expenses of Thomas Wyth and William de Horwoode to Ely with the commission for having a ship, 2s. 2d.
In ale for the archers, 6d.
In clay bought for the Great Bridge, 2s.
In wine for the King’s ministers, 8d.
In timber for the pillory,**** and divers expenses for the same, 12s. 9d.
To Johnde Hilton going to the admiral, 1 mark; in expenses of the same then and one horse for his esquire, 3s. 7d.; in expenses of the said John returningfrom the admiral, 14d.; paid the same John for his labor, 2 marks; to his esquire, 40d.

*A mark was 6s. 8d., or two-thirds of a pound. It was a unit of value very commonly
used.
**A legal writ authorizing the conscription of soldiers.
***A gaol delivery; the king’s judges toured the royal prisons and heard the cases against all the prisoners being held there, thus “delivering” or emptying the gaols. Hanging was almost the only penalty inflicted on the guilty.
****Pillory, a wooden structure in which the guilty were fastened by the neck and hands to a wooden cross and held up to the ridicule of the crowd.


DOCUMENT 12

Citizenship
62. Be it known . . . that no one may be in the City as a citizen, and stay there and enjoy the law of the City for more than three nights, unless he finds two pledges [guarantors of his good behavior] and thus is in frankpledge; and if he stays one night longer in the City . . . and commits a felony or does anything in breach of the king’s peace, and does not stand his trial, the alderman in whose ward he was, ought to be in
mercy for harbouring him . . . when he was not in frankpledge.

209. The mayor and sheriffs are ordered to take into the king’s hand all the houses and buildings which belonged to Bernard de Salette in the City of London, because he was a stranger [alien?] and not in lot and scot, and did not belong to the liberty of the City; and they are to enquire concerning the chattels which the said Bernard had and to answer for them.

19

Background / The Role of Largesse

« on: March 20, 2012, 11:05:18 PM »

With Largesse seemingly likely play a part in the new system I thought I'd post something about it for those not sure what it actually meant.

Apologies in advance for it's length.

The Role of Largesse

Even as the knights soared far beyond any fear of identification with mere rustics, they still had to close ranks and watch another flank as well. Significant social and economic change, as always, created problems with an existing hierarchy: noble or knightly rank did not always equate with wealth. 

Given the commercial and urban boom that so marked the High Middle Ages, knights became more keenly aware of the need to establish distance between themselves and the elite townsmen.   For the bourgeois were most anxious to join them on the social summits and would take on identifying characteristics of chivalry as swiftly as they were able. It proved impossible to keep them from holding tournaments of their own, from showing coats of arms, from marriage alliances with proud but impecunious knights.  What could prevent them from reading chivalric literature and imitating fine manners?

Perhaps it was all the more necessary to stress chivalric distance from such folk, as knights actually broke the code themselves, mingled with the middling classes, relied on their loans, their commercial expertise and management, and married their daughters.

The great chivalric exemplar William Marshal worked at profitable urban development on his estates and was no stranger to London moneylenders. The family of Ramon Llull, author of the most popular vernacular treatise on chivalry—which emphasized the link between nobility and chivalry—was only a few decades away from bourgeois origins in Barcelona.

Of course the knights raised as many barriers as they could. The distance between their exclusive, chivalrous life and the lives of the sub-chivalric bourgeoisie could be clearly established by a quality tirelessly praised in all chivalric literature: only they could truly display the magnificent, great-hearted generosity known as largesse.

This great virtue could then, especially in France, appear in sharpest contrast to the mean-spirited acquisitiveness of the merchants. On this line, moreover, chevalerie and clergie could join forces. Images of the bourgeoisie tainted by disgusting avarice and sinful usury appear frequently in medieval art, as Lester Little has shown. All those with noble bloodlines could agree, whether clerics or knights: Avarice looks like a merchant; he counts and hoards his coins (when he is not depicted defecating them); he has assuredly not learned to broadcast his wealth to the deserving with grand gesture, confident that valour can always replenish the supply.

The southern French poet Bertran de Born sings the praises of largesse and links it with prowess and love. All these traits necessarily connect; they all separate the one who possesses them in his eternal youthfulness from ordinary folk:

Young is a man who pawns his property, and he’s young when he’s really poor. He stays young while hospitality costs him a lot, and he’s young when he makes extravagant gifts. He stays young when he burns his chest and coffer, and holds combats and tourneys and ambushes. He stays young when he likes to flirt, and he’s young when minstrels like him well.

No miserly merchant need apply. In fact, townsmen are often pictured in chivalric literature as fair game for the knightly lions, who will put the booty to nobler use. The biography of the great William Marshal passes over his father’s career as a robber baron, it is true, and paints no scene of William looting merchants in glad war; but it does picture him taking money from a priest who is running off with a lady of good family. The money which the priest intended to put to usury William spends more nobly, as his biographer proudly tells us, on a feast for a circle of knightly friends. His friends’ only dissatisfaction with William is that he failed to take the horses as well.

Largesse pointedly reinforces high social status in the early life of Lancelot. Out of innate nobility he gives his own horse to a young man of noble birth who has been ambushed, his horse incapacitated: without Lancelot’s gift he would miss a chance to confront a traitor in court. Lancelot’s generosity preserves him from shame.

Meeting an aged vavasour shortly after, Lancelot politely offers him some of the meat of a roebuck he has shot. The man, who has had poorer luck in his own hunting, had been trying to put food on the wedding table of his daughter. Lancelot, learning that he is talking to a knight, tells him that the meat ‘could not [be] put to better use than to let it be eaten at the wedding of a knight’s daughter’. He graciously accepts the gift of one of the vavasour’s greyhounds in return. But Lancelot’s tutor—one of the sub-knightly, insensible to such fine points of generosity—refuses to believe Lancelot’s truthful account; he slaps the lad, and whips the greyhound. In a rage, Lancelot drives off the man (and his three subordinates), promising to kill him, if he can catch him outside the household of his patroness, the Lady of the Lake.

The young Arthur gives another case in point. As claimant to the throne (having pulled the sword from the stone), Arthur is shown ‘all kingly things and things that a man might lust after or love, to test whether his heart was greedy or grasping’. But he treats all these things nobly, giving them all away appropriately. His actions win him regard and support: ‘They all whispered behind their hands that he was surely of high birth, for they found no greed in him: as soon as anything of worth came his way, he put it to good uses, and all his gifts were fair according to what each one deserved.’

Clearly, this virtue sets men like Arthur apart from the grasping, retentive, bourgeois, or—God forbid—from any among the nobles who might stoop to such base behaviour. It is interesting to note that the scruffy townsmen and their money appear only faintly and in the background in this literature, almost as part of the scenery. They now and then put up knights for a tournament or house the overflow crowd gathered for a colourful royal occasions; they are called forth by the author to cheer when a hero frees a town from some evil custom through his magnificent prowess.

Of course largesse not only keeps the ambitious townsmen out of the club, in the hands of a great lord or king it becomes a crucial buttress to dominance, a tool of governance. Repeatedly in The Story of Merlin Arthur’s largesse to poor, young knights secures their loyalty and provides him with armed force.

Early in his career, ‘[h]e sought out fighting men everywhere he knew them to be and bestowed on them clothing, money, and horses, and the poor knights throughout the country took him in such love that they swore never to fail him even in the face of death.’ After his forces have been joined by those of King Ban and King Bors, ‘King Arthur bestowed gifts of great worth on those in the two kings’ households according to their rank, and he gave them warhorses, saddle horses, and beautiful, costly arms . . . and they swore that never, ever in their lives, would they let him down.

Ideally, it was warfare, not simply the income from one’s own vast estates, that produced the wherewithal for such lavish generosity.  After a great battle with the Saxons, Arthur hands out all of the wealth garnered from them, and he let it be known throughout the army that if there were any young knights who wanted to win booty and would go with him wherever he would lead them, he would give them so much when they came back that they would never be poor another day in their lives. And so many of them came forward from here and there that it was nothing short of a wonder, for many wished always to be in his company because of his open-handedness.

In his great encounter with Galehaut, an alarmed Arthur finds his knights deserting him. The Wise Man explains the causes of this crisis and presents a list of reforms which features a return to generosity: Arthur is to ride a splendid horse up to the poor knight and ‘give him the horse in consideration of his prowess and the money so that he may spend freely’; the social hierarchy must be reaffirmed by a downward flow of largesse producing an upward flow of loyalty; the queen and her ladies and maidens must likewise cheerfully show largesse; all are to remember that ‘none was ever destroyed by generosity, but many have been destroyed by avarice. Always give generously and you will always have enough.’

This advice in romance reappeared in a bold motto on the wall of the Painted Chamber in Westminster Hall during the reign of Henry III: ‘He who does not give what he has will not get what he wants.’

In romance the goods were given out according to two scales, which, we are not surprised to find, always smoothly merged: high status and exemplary prowess. Asked to distribute the loot taken from the Saxons at one point in The Story of Merlin, Gawain defers to Doon of Carduel, explaining that ‘he can divide it up and distribute it better than I can, for he knows better than I do who the leading men are and the worthiest’.

Sometimes the pious fiction of funding knighthood with booty snatched from the unworthy hands of pagans slips a bit.  In the Lancelot do Lac Claudas’s son Dorin looks remarkably like one of the disruptive ‘youths’ whose role in French society Georges Duby analysed so tellingly.  Like these young men, Dorin admits no check on his vigour and will, and spends with even less restraint:

The only child [Claudas] had was a very handsome, fair boy almost fifteen years old, named Dorin. He was so arrogant and strong that his father did not yet dare make him a knight, lest he rebel against him as soon as he was able; and the boy spent so freely that no one would fail to rally to him.

Claudas, moreover, learns from his own brother by what means Dorin has acquired the wealth he dispenses so grandly: ‘Dorin had caused great harm in the land, damaging towns, seizing livestock, and killing and wounding men.’ Yet Claudas plays the great chivalric lord even more than the indulgent father in his response: ‘I am not troubled by all that. . . . He has the right, for a king’s son must not be prevented from being as generous as he may like, and royalty cannot allow itself to be impoverished by giving.’

The attitude was, of course, not limited to royalty, as many villagers and merchants in many centuries of medieval European history could testify. Knightly prowess and largesse went hand in hand throughout the countryside. Some feud, skirmish, or war could regularly be counted on to provide opportunity for despoiling the wealth available in fields or villages, or hoarded in merchants’ town houses.

One of the five villages attacked in a private war by Gilles de Busigny in 1298 lost (Robert Fossier estimated) the equivalent of 40,000 man hours of work by a labourer such as a mason, roofer, or harvester. Loot from such raids could be distributed grandly, and according to well-established rules, as Maurice Keen has shown.

Thus the great virtue of largesse is enabled by the great virtue of prowess. Knights know how to get money and how to spend it. ‘Lords, pawn your castles and towns and cities before you stop making war!’ Bertran de Born cries out in one of his poems.  Largesse falls like ripe fruit from the tree of prowess into the strong hands of the worthy.

Might these two great chivalric qualities prove rivals? Competition usually turns thin and unconvincing on close inspection. Largesse wins high formal praise, for example, early in Chrétien’s Cligés where it appears as the queen of virtues enhancing all others; largesse by itself can make a man worthy, the old Emperor of Constantinople tells the young hero Alexander, though nothing else can (rank, courtesy, knowledge, strength, chivalry, valour, lordship).

Yet in this romance, as in so many others, the glittering prizes are won by prowess. Not by largesse does Alexander win the battle outside Windsor, seize the castle itself, and earn the love of Soredamor; nor does his son Cligés by largesse defeat the nephew of the Duke of Saxony (and kill him in a later encounter), unhorse and behead the Duke’s most vigorous knight, foil the Saxon ambush of the Greeks, rescue Fenice from her captors, defeat the Duke of Saxony in single combat, carry off the prize in King Arthur’s great four-day tournament (fighting even Gawain to a draw), and range all over Britain doing feats of chivalry, before returning to the Eastern Empire and a final triumph.

In the reception that Arthur’s knights give Cligés after he has won the great tournament at Oxford, near the end of the story, they crowd around him in great joy, telling him how much they value him, declaring that his prowess outshines theirs as the sun outshines little stars.

20

Background / Amphibious warfare, Medieval style.

« on: February 23, 2012, 05:39:01 PM »

I thought I'd post this because although the plan was never put into operation, due to the King choosing a more economic means of solving the problem, it nevertheless gives a clear indication into just how tactically and strategically astute they could be in the medieval times, as likewise how prepared to be innovative and "think out of ye oldie box"       



The plan of Benedict Zaccaria for the war at sea against England

Between August and November 1297, Benedict Zaccaria, the admiral of Castile, was studying the state of the French fleet.  He then made certain proposals to Philip the Fair for the war against England.  A fleet of transport ships and galleys was to be fitted out for the transport of knights and their horses, and foot-soldiers consisting of crossbowmen, lancers and spearmen.  This would mean that they were fitted to fight the enemy in different ways:

1. In sea-battles.

2. By burning or capturing the enemy's ships in harbour, by attacking with the fleet or with soldiers who had been landed.

3. The fleet should land knights and other soldiers. These could undertake plundering raids, in which towns, villages and entire districts could be destroyed and burned.  Only really well-fortified enemy towns could offer resistance to this sort of surprise attack.  After its plundering the army would withdraw, re-embark and make another raid in another area.  The enemy would not know where such an attack would come.  It would be impossible for them to defend all parts of the country efficiently, and after a few such raids they would be worried and scared.  If this army could take a town close to the coast, within easy reach of the fleet, it should then pretend to set about fortifying this town as if intending to occupy it.  The enemy would have to raise an army to recapture the town, which would be both troublesome and expensive.  As soon as the enemy had made a serious attempt to do this, the town should be set on fire, the army re-embark, and the fleet sail off to do the same elsewhere.

4. The enemy would have to spend a great deal of money.  He would also become uneasy and be afraid that Scotland and Wales would help the French invaders.

Zaccaria was reckoning on 20 huissiers or transport ships, 4 galleys and 24 other ships.  At the moment the king had 13: 7 were in harbour at Rouen, 5 at La Rochelle and La Réole, and the last at Calais.  Zaccaria himself had 2.  At La Rochelle, a big transport ship belonging to a merchant could be used on payment of a reasonable charge.  Four of the royal galleys could be made higher, wider and longer aft, to turn them into transport ships.  Each one could transport 20 men and their horses.  400 foot-soldiers or more would also be taken to help the knights. There would be 4,800 seamen in the fleet of 40 ships, so that there would be a total of 5,200 foot-soldiers and 400 knights.


Two of the four galleys of the fleet should always follow the transport to protect it, and give support to the knights while they were landing. The other galleys could regularly bring up supplies for the army and the horses, so that it always had what it needed, and would not have to search for provisions in enemy country, but could keep on attacking.  If the knights and the foot-soldiers were well-supplied there would be enough of them to do a lot of damage to the enemy.

The knights' leader would have to be a man of experience, ready to stand up to great hardships and to play a very active part.  His knights would have to be well-disciplined, skilled in the use of weapons, persevering and tough, because this sort of warfare makes tremendous demands physically.  The best possible seamen must be recruited, 'paying efficient seamen brings good returns, paying inefficient ones is money thrown away'.  Both knights and sailors were to be paid for four months. This would enable them to find good knights and sailors, and in the end the best is the cheapest.  If they were well paid, they could bring their equipment and arms themselves, so that the king would not have to buy it for them.  Also it would not be necessary to return to get the money for pay, for this means great loss of time, because during that time no one can be attacking, and the king would have to support the army for longer.

Then Zaccaria estimates the cost of these expeditions.  The pay for 4,800 sailors cost 40 sous tournois per man.  They can be had for 35 sous, but at 40 sous better men are available.  To economise Zaccaria would only give them bread, water, beans and peas as food, while the men would have to provide their wine, meat and other foodstuffs.  This would save a lot of work, and the king much expense, and the sailors would not be able to grumble about the food.  These expenses would amount to 9,600 pounds tournois a month, i.e. 38,400 pounds for four months.  The bread, beans and peas cost 15 sous tournois per month per man.  Altogether this comes to 3,600 pounds tournois, or 14,400 for four months.  Fitting out the ships would cost 3,000 pounds: Zaccaria estimates the cost of masts, sails, ropes, caulking, and so on, at 5,000 pounds.  Galleys would have to be brought from Gascony and Poitou in Rouen, which would cost another 3,000 pounds.  His figure came to 63,800 pounds tournois.

In order to get this fleet ready immediately, someone would have to be chosen secretly to be in command of the knights.  An advance of 20,000 pounds would be needed for fitting out the ships, and the same sum would be needed again in January to mass the ships at Rouen and recruit the men.  The rest of the money would have to be on hand by the beginning of March: everything would have to be ready by April.  The king would have to forbid anyone from putting to sea from March to the end of June, to make it easy to recruit sailors without having to pay more than the normal rate.

Zaccaria's proposed attacks on England had much to offer.  It was very difficult to intercept the invaders, as they would never stay anywhere long.  Only the English fleet might react violently, but it was doubtful whether it was powerful enough and could get there quickly enough to intercept the enemy.  Of course, this possibility could not be excluded, but it did not alter the fact that this admiral, a man of considerable experience, had thought up a good plan.  If the king of England were to organize the coastal defence of his whole country, it would cost an appalling sum.  The Christian leaders hoped in the same way to inflict enormous damage and great losses on the sultan of Egypt.

Before the French fleet was ready, in 1295, Philip the Fair protected the French coast with troops to prevent a landing by Edward I.  This cost 600,000 pounds tournois. The fitting out of a great fleet in 1295 cost a great deal more: 1,579,250 pounds tournois, and brought no important result.

21

Background / A look at small businesses in a Medieval City, Circa 1200's

« on: February 03, 2012, 03:05:56 PM »

An extract from "Life in a Medieval City" by Frances and Joseph Gies, a book in which they concentrate mostly on the City of Troyes in the 13th century.

Almost every craftsman in Troyes is simultaneously a merchant.  The typical master craftsman alternately manufactures a product and waits on trade in his small shop, which is also his house. Sometimes he belongs to a guild, although in Troyes only a fraction of the hundred and twenty guilds of Paris are represented.  Many crafts stand in no need of protective federation or have too few members to form a guild.

Each shop on the city street is essentially a stall, with a pair of horizontal shutters that open upward and downward, top and bottom.  The upper shutter, opening upward, is supported by two posts that convert it into an awning; the lower shutter drops to rest on two short legs and acts as a display counter.  At night the shutters are closed and bolted from within.  Inside the shop master and apprentice and a male relative or two, or the master’s wife, work at the craft.

In a tailor’s shop, the tailor sits inside, cutting and sewing in clear view of the public, an arrangement that simultaneously permits the customer to inspect the work and the tailor to display his skill.  When the buying public arrives—even if it is only a single housewife—tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers and the rest desert their benches and hurry outside, metamorphosing into salesmen who are so aggressive that they must be restrained by guild rules—for example, from addressing a customer who has stopped at a neighbor’s stall.


Related crafts tend to congregate, often giving their name to a street.  Crafts also give their names to craftsmen—Thomas le Potier (“Potter”), Richarte le Barbier (“Barber”), Benoît le Peletier (“Skinner”), Henri Taillebois (“Woodman”), Jehan Taille-Fer (“Smith”).  With the rise of the towns, surnames are becoming important; the tax collector must be able to draw up a list.   But neither in the case of the man nor the street is the name a reliable guide to the occupation.  Just as a grocer’s son may be a chandler, so the Street of the Grocers may be populated by leather merchants and shoemakers.

Not far from the helmetmakers, armorers, and swordmakers one may be sure to find the smiths, who not only produce horseshoes and other finished hardware for retail sale, but supply the armorers with their wrought iron and steel. Ore is obtained almost entirely from alluvial deposits—“bog iron”—and only rarely by digging.  Though coal is mined in England, Scotland, the Saar, Liège, Aix-la-Chapelle, Anjou, and other districts, iron ore is smelted almost exclusively by charcoal.   A pit is dug on a windy hilltop, drains inserted to allow the molten iron to be drawn off, and charcoal and ore layered in the hole, which is sealed at the top with earth.  The advantage of this method is that the iron drawn off has some carbon in it; in other words, it is steel of a sort.  Medieval metallurgists do not really understand how this happens.  This “mild steel” is taken in lumps to the smithy.

The blacksmith’s furnace is table-high, with a back and a hood, and like those of the smelters, burns charcoal.  The smith’s apprentice plies a pair of leather bellows while the smith turns the glowing bloom with a long pair of tongs. When it is sufficiently heated, the two men drag it out of the furnace to the floor, where they break off a chunk and take it to the anvil, which is mounted on an oak stump.  They pound, then return the chunk to the fire, then back to the anvil for more pounding, then back to the fire.

Hour after hour the two swing their heavy hammers in rhythmic alternation, their energy slowly converting the intractable metal mass.  This metal may vary considerably in character, depending on the accident of carbon-mixing at the smelter.  If the smith is fabricating wire, the next step will be to draw a piece of the hot metal through a hole with pincers.  Several such drawings, each time through a smaller hole in a plate, accomplished with patience and much labor, produce a wire of the correct diameter, which is retempered and cut into short lengths. 

These are sold to the armorer up the street, who pounds them around a bar into links, the basis of chain mail.  The sages believe iron is a derivative of quicksilver (mercury) and brimstone (sulfur).  The smith and the armorer know only that the material they get from the smelter sometimes is too soft to make good weapons or good chain mail, in which case they consign it to peaceful uses—plowshares, nails, bolts, wheel rims, cooking utensils.

Other craftsmen who use the products of the forge include cutlers, nail makers, pin makers, tinkers, and needlemakers.  But the great use of iron, the one that ennobles the crafts of smith and armorer, is for war, either real or tournamentstyle. There are also metalworkers on a more refined plane: goldsmiths and silversmiths.

Since the twelfth century those of Troyes have enjoyed a wide reputation.  The beautifully worked decoration of the tomb of Henry the Generous and the silver statue of the same count are justly famous.  Goldsmiths are the aristocrats of handicraft, though not all are rich.  Some goldsmiths scrape along working alone, making and selling silver ornaments, with hardly a thread of gold to their name.  But most have an apprentice and a small store of gold, and fabricate an occasional gold paternoster or silver cup.  The most prosperous have well equipped shops with two workbenches, a small furnace, an array of little anvils of varying sizes, a supply of gold, and two or three apprentices. 

One holds the workpiece on the anvil while the master hammers it to the desired shape and thickness, wielding his small hammer with incredible speed.  Gold’s value lies not merely in its rarity and its glitter but in its wonderful malleability.  It is said that a goldsmith can reduce gold leaf by hammering to a thickness of one ten-thousandth of an inch.  Thin gold leaf embellishes the pages of the illuminated manuscripts over which monks and copyists labor. Hours of labor, tens of thousands of blows, with the final passage of the hammer effacing the hammer marks themselves—these are the ingredients of goldsmithing, a craft of infinite patience and considerable artistry.

But the bulk of even a prosperous goldsmith’s work is in silver, the second softest metal. Sometimes a smith makes a whole series of identical paternosters or ornaments.  To do this he first creates a mold or die of hardwood or copper and transfers the shape and design to successive pieces of silver by hammering.  For repair jobs he keeps on hand a quantity of gold and silver wire, made in the same way the blacksmith makes his iron wire.

As the armorer depends on the smith, the shoemaker depends on the tanner, though he prefers to have his shop at a distance from his supplier’s operation.  The numerous tanners of Troyes occupy two streets southeast of the church of St.-Jean.  Hide-curing, either by tanning or the ancient alternative method of tawing, creates a pungent atmosphere.  Masters and apprentices may be seen outdoors, scraping away hair and epidermis from the skins over a “beam” (a horizontal section of treetrunk) with a blunt-edged concave tool.  The flesh adhering to the underside is scraped off with a sharp concave blade.  Next the hide is softened by rubbing it with cold poultry or pigeon dung, or warm dog dung, then soaked in mildly acid liquid produced by fermenting bran, to wash off the traces of lime left by the dung.

For extra soft leather—shoe uppers, coverings of coffers, scabbards, bagpipes, bellows—the leather is returned to the beam to be shaved down with a two handled currier’s knife.  Then it goes to the pit, which is filled and drained with a succession of liquid baths.  The first is old and mellow, the last fresh and green, their flavor imparted by oak bark, oak galls, acacia pods, and other sources of tannin. In the final stages the hides lie flat in the pit of liquid for several weeks, with crushed bark between the layers. The whole process of tanning takes months usually, in fact, over a year. A new quicker process, employing hot water, will appear later in the century, taking as little as ten days. Tanning an oxhide is a laborious process, but it multiplies the skin’s value. Whitened oxhide and horsehide are even more expensive.

Footwear is insubstantial—little better than slippers. Ladies of fashion wear goatskin leather, or cordwain (from “cordovan,” a fine leather originally made by the Moors of Cordova), even less sturdy than ordinary cowhide.  The shoemaker is not only a skilled craftsman, but a merchant of some status, capable of acquiring modest wealth.  A shoemaker of Troyes named Pantaléon has given his son Jacques an education in the Church.  Jacques is today a canon at Lyons, soon will be bishop of Verdun, and will eventually become Pope Urban IV.

Besides shoemakers, hatmakers, candlestick makers, and other craftsmen, there are the practitioners of the service trades: food purveyors, oil merchants, pastrycooks, wine sellers, and beer sellers.  In addition there is the wine crier, who is also an inspector.  Each morning he goes into the first tavern he can find that has not yet hired a crier for the day; the tavern keeper must accept him.  He oversees the drawing of the wine, or draws it himself, and tastes. Then, furnished with a cup and a leather flagon stoppered with a bit of hemp, he goes out to cry the wine and offer samples of it to the public.  Before setting out he may ask those in the tavern how much the tavern keeper charged them, in order to check on the prices. Customers are served directly from the barrel; glass bottles are almost nonexistent.

There are some fifty vintages in thirteenth-century France.  Among the favorites are Marly, Beaune, Epernay, Montpellier, Narbonne, Sancerre, Carcassonne, Auxerre, Soissons, Orléans, and, most highly regarded, Pierrefitte.  Burgundy is already famous and northern Champagne produces excellent wine, though not the sparkling variety with which the province will centuries later become identified.  Cider is unknown except in Normandy, and outsiders who have tasted it consider it to be a curse God has visited on the Normans.  One observant chronicler reports that the French prefer white wine, the Burgundians red, the Germans “aromatic wines,” and the English beer.

Another trade associated with the taverns is prostitution. The girls of the Champagne Fair cities are famous throughout Europe. When the fair is on, servant girls, laundresses, tradeswomen, and many others find a profitable sideline. Child labor being the rule, prostitution begins at an early age.

Taverns are the chief setting for another vice—gaming. The dicemakers’ guild has strict laws against making fraudulent dice, which nevertheless find their way into the hands of professional sharpers.  The fine for making such dice is heavy, so the sharpers pay a high price for them. Poor light in the taverns facilitates trickery.

Others engaged in service trades include the coal sellers, hay merchants, barbers, furniture menders, dish menders, and clothes menders—these latter three being the leading itinerants, whose peculiar rhymed gibberish echoes daily through the streets.

An ancient trade of the countryside, recently urbanized, is that of the miller.  The numerous mills of Troyes are owned by the count, the bishop, the abbeys, the hospital, and various other proprietors. Most are situated on canals, with a few on the Seine below the city, mounted on floating hulls, the wheel over the side and the millstones seated on a cupola-shaped platform amidships.  Sacks of grain are brought by boat to the miller, who pours the grain into the funnel over an opening in the upper stone.  The current turns the wheel, which activates the stone, and the milled flour trickles into a sack beneath the platform.

Both millers and mills have other functions besides grinding grain.  In slack periods the millers fish or spear eels.  Mill wheels furnish power for a growing variety of businesses, notably tanning and fulling.  The old undershot wheel, pushed lazily around by the current flowing against the lower paddles, is being supplanted by the overshot wheel, which is turned by water flowing over the top.  Either type of wheel can be used when a weir or dam is constructed that creates a narrow, rapid current.  The power of this current can be multiplied by guiding it to the midpoint of a waterwheel, so that the wheel’s turn starts underneath, or by guiding it to the top of the wheel, so that the wheel’s turn starts at the top.  Although water mills are important, old-fashioned mills worked by horses and cattle still hold their own, because animals can work in all weather, whereas river and millrace currents may freeze in winter or dry up in summer.

From time to time the horse market is held in the Corterie-aux-Chevaux, near the Porte de la Madeleine.  Nervous colts, sedate palfreys, powerful chargers, mares with foals trotting at their heels, broad-shouldered oxen, pack-asses, pack-mules, pigs, hogs, cows, chickens, ducks, and geese noisily crowd the market place. Knights, ladies, burghers and peasants bargain, argue, examine animals, turn back horses’ lips, feel coats and muscles, and now and then mount a palfrey or a charger.

Only nobles and rich burghers ride horses; everyone else rides donkeys or walks.  A pregnant lady or wounded knight may be carried in a litter (carriages are far in the future).  The knights who come to the horse mart sometimes take prospective mounts outside the city walls to try out. Often there are races, with the noisy assistance of the boys and young men.

Saddle makers display their work at the market, and it is worthy of display. Bows of saddles are wooden, often ornamented with plates of ivory, hammered metal, or elaborately painted leather, with semiprecious stones soldered into the surface of the pommel and cantle. The saddle-cloth is richly embroidered.  Sidesaddles are manufactured for ladies, but not all ladies use them.

Farm implements, fashioned by the city’s blacksmiths, are on display too.  These include sickles for harvesting grain, long-handled scythes with lateral grips added for efficient haymaking, sharp-bladed felling axes.  Wooden spades have iron cutting edges.  There are also farm machines—many-toothed harrows and wheeled plows, with coulter, plowshare and mould board for turning the earth to left or right.

The development of heavier breeds of horses has greatly augmented their value.  They bring much higher prices than a mule or an ordinary draft horse.  If Julius Caesar could wander through the horse market of Troyes, he would be startled far less by the wheeled plow and the new, heavily padded, rigid horse collar than by the size of the horses.  Neither the Romans nor their foes ever rode anything like these.  The Parthians and Byzantine Greeks began the development of the big warhorse, now completed in this area of northern France and Flanders.  It is no accident that this is par excellence the region of feudal chivalry.


 1 the hundred and twenty guilds of Paris:

In 1268, 120 crafts registered and wrote out their statutes at the invitation of Etienne Boileau, provost of Paris.  Preserved in the taille (tax list) of Paris for the year 1292 are the numbers of practitioners of the regulated crafts, by then totalling 130.

The principal ones:

366 shoemakers,  214 furriers, 199 maidservants, 197 tailors, 151 barbers, 131 jewellers, 130 restaurateurs, 121 old-clothes dealers, 106 pastrycooks, 104 masons,  95 carpenters,  86 weavers, 71 chandlers, 70 mercers, 70 coopers, 62 bakers, 58 water carriers, 58 scabbard makers, 56 wine sellers, 54 hat-makers, 51 saddler’s, 51 chicken butchers, 45 purse makers, 43 laundresses, 43 oil merchants, 42 porters, 42 meat butchers, 41 fish merchants, 37 beer sellers, 36 buckle makers, 36 plasterers, 35 spice merchants, 34 blacksmiths, 33 painters, 29 doctors
28 roofers, 27 locksmiths, 26 bathers, 26 ropemakers, 24 innkeepers, 24 tanners, 24 copyists, 24 sculptors, 24 rugmakers, 24 harness makers, 23 bleachers, 22 hay merchants, 22 cutlers, 21 glovemakers, 21 wood sellers, 21 woodcarvers

22

Background / Chivalric Self-Criticism and Reform. Last part.

« on: January 24, 2012, 10:34:46 PM »

Geoffroi de Charny, Livre de chevalerie

Author of a major vernacular text on chivalry and ranked among the most renowned knights of his age, his Livre de chevalerie (Book of Chivalry), written about 1350, upholds the glittering goal of fine chivalry no less eagerly than Marshal’s biography, and presents it as embodied no less clearly in and effected by martial deeds. 

The leitmotif of Charny’s book is ‘he who does more is of greater worth’.  Though he is at pains to emphasize that all feats of arms are honourable, he calibrates an ascending scale of knightly prowess: those who fight in individual jousts deserve great honour; those who fight in the more vigorous mêlée merit yet more praise; but those who engage in warfare win highest praise, since war combines joust and mêlée in the most demanding circumstances.  It seems to Charny ‘that in the practice of arms in war it is possible to perform in one day all the three different kinds of military art, that is jousting, tourneying and waging war’. William Marshal would surely have loved this scale; he lived by it.

In Marshal’s case the all-important pursuit of honour through prowess even subordinated love as a major component in the knightly life.  We saw in Chapter 10 that Charny finds romantic love a spur to prowess, stating, for example, that ‘men should love secretly, protect, serve and honour all those ladies and damsels who inspire knights, men-at-arms and squires to undertake worthy deeds which bring them honour and increase their renown’.  These ‘activities of love and of arms’ overlap easily in his prose; they ‘should be engaged in with the true and pure gaiety of heart which brings the will to achieve honour’.  Yet this acceptance and validation of love, joyful and worldly as it is, does not form the centre of Charny’s book.  As one admired choice, rather than the sole path for the knight, it is not the single great goal for which prowess exists.  Romantic love is wonderful because it promotes prowess and striving for honour; yet the prowess and the striving take first rank.

But Charny is willing to qualify his praise of prowess in the best reform manner.  The finest laymen will combine the very best of three types not only of prowess, but of worth and intelligence as well.  Worth may begin with a kind of innocence, and progress to pious formalities such as giving alms and attending mass, but its peak is loyally serving God and the Virgin.  Likewise, intelligence involves only malicious cleverness at the lowest level, progresses to the ingenious but overly subtle, and appears at its best in the truly wise.  Prowess is seen initially in those with courage and skill who are, however, thoughtless; it appears to better advantage in those who perform great deeds of arms personally, but do not act as leaders or advisers; and it is best found in those brave men who also command and direct other knights.

Charny’s omnipresent piety shows as he gives thumbnail sketches of great men from the past who have missed the highest status because they failed to recognize their debt to God.  But he presents ‘the excellent knight’ Judas Maccabaeus from the Old Testament as the model.  Those who want to reach such high honours, ‘which they must achieve by force of arms and by good works (par force d’armes et par bonnes euvres)’, should pattern themselves on him. Thus Charny’s book is much more explicitly a work of reform than Marshal’s biography.  He knows that he must address real problems, however carefully he coats every suggestion for improvement with the gleaming whitewash of generous praise.

Reform is absolutely necessary, Charny knows, because the chief problem is of such central importance: he fears that French knights of his day have lost their vital commitment to prowess; and with this centre weakened the entire arch of chivalry threatens to fall about the heads of all. 

At the time Charny wrote, the English and their allies had defeated French knights repeatedly, and were threatening further devastating incursions.  When they most needed to risk all and bear all hardships, the knights of France, incredible as it seemed to Charny, appeared to prefer the soft life and the safe life, blind to the grand vision of an existence vested in vigorous deeds, come what may, a life of honour blessed by divine favour.

For a few pages of his book Charny puts aside the whitewash pot and brush altogether and speaks with curled lip of the timid, cowardly men who call themselves knights, but who really care only for bodily comforts and safety:

As soon as they leave their abode, if they see a stone jutting out of the wall a little further than the others, they will never dare to pass beneath it, for it would always seem to them that it would fall on their heads.  If they come to a river which is a little big or too fast flowing, it always seems to them, so great is their fear of dying, that they will fall into it.  If they cross a bridge which may seem a little too high or too low, they dismount and are still terrified lest the bridge collapse under them, so great is their fear of dying. . . .

If they are threatened by anyone, they fear greatly for their physical safety and dread the loss of the riches they have amassed in such a discreditable way.  And if they see anyone with a wound, they dare not look at it because of their feeble spirit. . . . Furthermore, when these feeble wretches are on horseback, they do not dare to use their spurs lest their horses should start to gallop, so afraid are they lest their horses should stumble and they should fall to the ground with them. .

Now you can see that these wretched people who are so fainthearted will never feel secure from living in greater fear and dread of losing their lives than do those good men-at-arms who have exposed themselves to so many physical dangers and perilous adventures in order to achieve honour.

Later he denounces a second group, those unworthy of the great calling of bearing arms ‘because of their very dishonest and disordered behaviour under these arms’.  If one set of men utterly lack the foundation of prowess, these men possess that great gift, but misuse it: ‘it is these men who want to wage war without good reason, who seize other people without prior warning and without any good cause and rob and steal from them, wound and kill them.’  He knows what to call such men: they are ‘cowards and traitors’. It does not matter if they maintain formal proprieties by abstaining from such behaviour themselves, only sending their men to do the dirty work. 

Whether doers or consenters, such men, in Charny’s view, ‘are not worthy to live or to be in the company of men of worth’.  They ‘have no regard for themselves’, and so, Charny asks rhetorically, ‘how could they hold others in regard?’  It seems he would agree with the assessment of V. G. Kiernan that ‘All military élites face opposite risks: some of their members cannot stop fighting, others—far more, probably—lapse too readily into sloth.’

If a failure or misuse of prowess is the chief issue for Charny, it comes as no surprise to find this critical problem redoubled by the absence of its essential companion, loyalty.  As prowess withers or mutates, loyalty likewise declines; faction and treachery seem to flourish in their place.  Any sentient observer could already have seen what so troubled Charny: ambition, regionalism, and anti-royal politics were already at work in mid-fourteenth century France; they ensured that the Hundred Years War would become a veritable civil war.

Charny’s book was apparently a part of a royal campaign for reform of governance in the interest of unity, a campaign in which chivalry in general and the king’s new royal chivalric order, the Company of the Star, in particular, were to play a role of obvious importance.  In his book Charny dedicated three chapters specifically to outlining the nature of true princely rule.  Here were reform ideas modern historians might call ‘top down’: kings must act for the common profit through vigorous good governance.

Yet the crisis showed with painful clarity how much the chivalric ethos was needed.  Charny thus offered a set of ideas we might characterize as ‘bottom up’, understanding that the flooring here rests under the knights and men-at-arms and is in effect a ceiling for the great mass of Frenchmen. 

Charny’s solution is direct and uncomplicated: the code must simply be followed. The knightly—indeed, all men living by the honourable profession of arms—must do their duty manfully, even joyously, knowing the rewards awaiting them when they next walk into a court to a murmur of praise, followed by the soft eyes of the ladies, as in time they will know the rewards awaiting them as they are welcomed into the court of heaven by the God of battles.

The answer seems so obvious to him: practice prowess, show loyalty.  This is what God wants; this is what God will reward.  Charny seems almost to exhaust even his immense energy, telling the essentials to his audience time and again, in the hope that even the obvious slackers of his own generation will finally see the plain truth.

In a time of crisis, as disaster threatened the very kingdom of France, Jean II and his great knight saw eye to eye on reform of the chief military force in the realm.  But we, for our part, need to see that if chevalerie and royauté travelled the same path here (as they often could and did), the reform suggested by Charny is, in fact, much more elementary, much slighter than the ideas for reform which royauté generally thrust at chivalry. 

Charny’s plan is something different, the standard knightly view, understandably recommending itself powerfully at this moment to the French king.  In mid-fourteenth century France a clarion call for an augmented display of prowess and loyalty, buttressed by the certitude of divine favour, could sound like a fine reform programme to a monarch facing a military and political crisis.

Charny closes his great effort with (to borrow Maurice Keen’s characterization once again) a combination prayer and war cry: ‘Pray to God for him who is the author of this book . . . Charni, Charny.’  The statement recalls Marshal’s war cry, which likewise sounded his own name and called confidently upon God’s aid. 

Charny’s piety is more explicit and certainly more voluble.  Yet the basic assumptions are similar.  Knights who do their hard duty with loyalty and honesty can be assured of divine favour.  God will receive them into an eternity of blissful reward.  There can be no question whether or not a man can save his soul by the profession of arms; there can be no danger to the soul in fighting for the right causes—in just wars, to protect one’s kin and their estates, to protect helpless maidens, widows, and orphans, to protect one’s own land and inheritance, to defend Holy Church.  The list is generous, and accepts no cavils or criticisms.  The divine blessing on reformed chivalry is clear.

Even Charny’s statement of clerical superiority has a somewhat formal ring; he soon betrays his sense that the great role that chivalry must play in the world gives it a special status.  Like William Marshal a century before, he is happiest when religion comes heavily blended with chivalry; again in company with the Marshal, he most heartily endorses clerics who perform all the needed rites and then stand aside for the magnificent work with sword and lance.

23

Background / Chivalric Self-Criticism and Reform, Pt 3

« on: January 17, 2012, 10:43:17 PM »

Useful as Llull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry and his other works are, we can draw on texts by other authors that seem even closer to the world of knighthood, less altered by a clerical programme.  Two works—both written in effect by practising knights—can best show us the impulse for reform among the knights themselves. They can remind us of the great investment in an enduring ideal in whose service such reform was to work.  We will turn first to the biography of William Marshal, the greatest knight of the late twelfth century, then to another of the vernacular manuals, the Book of Chivalry written by Geoffroi de Charny, one of the greatest knights of the mid-fourteenth century.

As we will see, the chivalric ideal held by these knights maintains a programme of its own. The changing settings in which the ideal was to work, however, required adjustments in the particular emphases of reform in order to fit basic ideals to new circumstances.


L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal

William Marshal died in 1219.  His biography was completed at least seven years later, after information had been carefully collected, by a man known to us only as John (Jean); the cost was underwritten by his oldest son.  This John, Georges Duby suggests, ‘might well be one of those heralds-of-arms who arranged the jousts on the tournament grounds, identified the protagonists by their insignia, and by singing their exploits boosted the reputation of the champions’. 

John tells us that his raw material came from his own knowledge and that of two others: the Marshal’s eldest son, and especially his companion John of Earley.  Some information may already have been set down in writing, some household documents may have been available; the rest came from living memory.  Georges Duby argues that from this evidence we hear William Marshal’s own memories, that we read, in essence, an autobiography.  David Crouch reminds us that this is the first biography of a layman below the rank of king.

This text shows the ideal of chivalry in its spring colours.  Yet it is a very pragmatic, quotidian notion of chivalry that we find in the Histoire, not something abstract.  Criticism or reform figures in this story only indirectly, by setting out an ideal working model for those who would follow the great exemplar, by embodying an ideal of chivalry in a life lived grandly and with success.  The rewards of this good life are implicit: all things are possible to the knight who will dare all—a great fief, royal patronage, a good lady, seemingly endless admiration.

The key quality is in no doubt: William’s life-story unfolds as a ceaseless hymn to prowess, the demi-god.  The reader learns that William never gave in to idleness but followed prowess all his life, and is admonished that ‘a long rest is a cause for shame in a young man (lonc sejor honist giemble homme)’, that men know that you must look among the horses’ legs for the brave (who, in their boldness, will sometimes be unhorsed).  Like a hero in a romance, William goes off seeking ‘pris et aventure’, especially in the tournament circuit available only on the continent. 

Page after page of the text details feats of enviable prowess done primarily in war—the war of raid and counter-raid, of siege and manoeuvre—and secondarily in the tourney.  William is given the honour of knighting King Henry’s eldest son even though he is landless and ‘has nothing but his chivalry’.  He becomes what the text calls the ‘lord and master’ of the young king; this position was appropriate, we learn, since he increased the lad’s prowess.

Loyalty is also praised by the Histoire as a defining quality of the Marshal, and thus of the ideal chivalric hero.  William appears time and again as the steady, reliable, and stalwart warrior, directing his great prowess in honourable and predictable causes.  That one of these causes was his own advancement and that of his family is accepted.  If ambition leads William (as it had led his father) away from loyalty sketched out in bold black and white, and into the grey, the text goes murky or silent.

Of course, because he is primarily an Anglo-Norman knight, baron, and earl, an account of his loyalty must also be a story of touchy relations with the lord king—of whom it could be said, as of a yet greater ruler, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.

William managed to earn all his rewards with his sword and his loyal counsel, despite the complicated politics dominated by Henry II and his sons Richard and John.  If William’s masterful negotiations over fiefs on both sides of the Channel add a shaded note of realism, the Histoire completely obscures what Crouch terms John Marshal’s ‘quicksilver loyalties’ during the civil war of Stephen’s reign. 

Yet the message of the text is clear: William’s prowess and his careful and prudent loyalty, continually proved, earned him essential royal patronage.  In the last stage of his active life, blessed by the papal legate, William acted as no less than guardian of the young Henry III and of his realm (tutor regis et regni).

Through this young Henry’s wonderful largesse to valiant young knights, the poet assures his readers, chivalry will be revived.  Much admired by poets and writers who lived on its fruits, the quality of largesse, in fact, frequently appears among the signature qualities of chivalry displayed by the Marshal and the young king, son of King Henry.  Gentility, we read, was nourished in the household of largesse.  As his prowess and loyalty won him prize after prize on the tournament field, the battlefield, and the council chamber, William did the right thing and gave generously, openly, and with a sense of style.

William’s piety is likewise manifest, though it is sketched rather quickly and with broad brush strokes.  We see him knighted in a ceremony without ecclesiastical overtones.  He goes on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Three Kings of Cologne.  He goes on crusade, but we are left without the detail we would expect.  On his deathbed he is accepted into the Order of the Temple.  A note or two of anticlericalism surfaces: we hear of Saints Silver and Gold who are much honoured at the court of Rome.  But William has no doubts about the relationship between God and chivalry: on the tourney field and on the battlefield, his cry was ‘On! God help the Marshal (Ça! Dex aie al Maréchal).’  Piety and prowess merge in the same battlecry.

Even as the great Marshal waited out his final days, the deeply rooted sense of lay independence is apparent.  On his deathbed he confidently denied the validity of clerical criticisms of knightly practice—specifically of the profit from tourneying:

"Listen to me for a while.  The clerks are too hard on us.  They shave us too closely.  I have captured five hundred knights and have appropriated their arms, horses, and their entire equipment.  If for this reason the kingdom of God is closed to me, I can do nothing about it, for I cannot return my booty.  I can do no more for God than to give myself to him, repenting all my sins.  Unless the clergy desire my damnation, they must ask no more.  But their teaching is false—else no one could be saved".

With eternity stretching before him from the foot of his deathbed, the greatest knight of his age calmly brushed aside clerical strictures on the career that had given him so pleasing a combination of wealth and honour.  In this same conversation he likewise rejected the pious advice that he sell all the fine robes kept in his household and give alms to secure forgiveness for his sins.  First, he ordered, let each member of his household have his robes in the accustomed manner; then those left over could go to the poor.

Women usually appear only on the margins of this masculine story.  According to Georges Duby, ‘[t]he word love, throughout the entire chanson, never intervenes except between men.  ’ Rumours circulated, it is true, that William was the lover of Margaret, wife of the young king Henry, son of Henry II.  In a confrontation at court, William offered to fight any three accusers in turn, even to cut off a finger from his right hand—his sword hand—and fight any accuser with that handicap. 

Here in life—or at least in the written Histoire patronized by his heirs—the great knight plays Lancelot from the pages of romance.  The coincidence is hardly surprising.  This biography of the Marshal and the great prose romances spinning out the life of Lancelot may be separated by only a decade and a half.  Rival knights in this scene from life are as prudent as those who remained silent in the face of Lancelot’s challenges in the imagined courts of romance. Though William knows he must leave the court, since the prince’s love has vanished, he is soon recalled in order to get on with the real work of prowess, serving in his master’s team for the tournament.  The biography of the Marshal does not focus on women; the Marshal himself does not look like a devotee of ‘courtly love’.

On the whole this biography takes an optimistic tone with regard to chivalry.  There are no problems—at least no problems are openly recognized. The great example of chivalry simply must be followed.  Even John Marshal, William’s father, who at times played as ruthless and unprincipled a robber baron as ever wore armour, is praised by the author as ‘a worthy man, courteous and wise (preudome corteis e sage)’, who was ‘animated by prowess and loyalty.

The work is, of course, what moderns would call an authorized biography.  The appearance of the standard virtue words may, however, interest us as much as their sometimes problematic attribution to John or even William; showing prowess and courtesy, piety, largesse and loyalty are the ideals.  Great successes won by the key quality of prowess covers any gaps in the ideal framework, even if they are wide enough for a mounted knight to ride through.  The father did what he had to do; the son did all. Be advised.

24

Background / Chivalric Self-Criticism and Reform, pt2

« on: January 12, 2012, 02:08:11 AM »

Apologies in advance for the length of this part.

The Book of the Order of Chivalry
Ramon Llull wrote the most popular handbook, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, probably between 1279 and 1283.  It reached a wide readership in its original Catalan (Libre qui es de l’ordre de cavalleria); in French translation (Livre de l’ordre de chevalerie) it reached an even wider audience, before being translated into English and transcribed into print by Caxton (The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry) in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.

Llull was the ideal person to write a handbook for knights.  He began his adult life as a knight himself and was thoroughly immersed in chivalric culture and literature before experiencing the great conversion, probably in 1263, that sent him on a radically new course.   After recurrent divine visitations he became a mystic, a systematic and prolific philosopher, a missionary for the conversion of Muslims and Jews, and one of the founding figures of Catalan literature.  But he apparently never became a cleric, however close he was to the Franciscans in thought and life.

The showy, easily remembered, and often quoted statements in his book are all in praise of knighthood, even of the sort of knighthood that clerical critics might view through narrowed eyes as merely ‘earthly chivalry’.  Llull likes and praises it all: jousts and tournaments, war in defence of one’s lord, the liberal life of hall and hunting.  The thin story frame for his treatise is built around that stock figure the wise old hermit who—we learn with no surprise—turns out to be a former knight.

A young seeker after chivalry encounters him by his fountain, asks questions, and receives not only a lecture but also a reading assignment, a little book that he will take to court for the instruction of all.  It is, of course, the very book the reader holds.  The hermit, now pale and ascetic, had formerly been the sort of hero with whom any knight could identify: ‘[He] had long maintained the order of chivalry and done so by the force and nobleness of his high courage and wisdom and in adventuring his body had maintained just wars, jousts and tourneys and in many battles had many noble and glorious victories.’

On such honourable men Llull can scarcely lavish enough praise.  They form an ordo alongside that of the clerics and rank only a little lower than those whose hands produce God’s body on the altar.  If only these two high orders could be free of error, Llull says, the world would be all but free from error.

The knights, if anything, ought to be advanced in honour.  Ideally, each knight should have a kingdom or province to rule, an honour prevented only by the unfortunate shortage of suitable territories.  Certainly, knights would make excellent judges, if only they were learned, and chivalry is, in itself, so high a subject that it ought to be taught in schools.  There can be no doubt that knights are the natural counsellors for kings and princes; to advance the nonknightly to such positions is an offence against chivalry, which produces the men best qualified for rule, best fit for distributing justice.  In his Ars Brevis, Llull in fact defines chivalry as ‘the disposition with which the knight helps the prince maintain justice’.

Llull introduces his general theme by telling a myth of origins.  It is a story of a fall and a redemption through chivalry.  At issue are all the basic matters concerned with securing right order in the world.  The myth relates that at some point in the swirling mists of the past the great virtues—charity, loyalty, truth, justice, and verity—had fallen, producing injuries, disloyalty, and falseness, with social consequences of error and trouble in the world. 

Fearing disorder and injustice, the populace divided itself into thousands and from each chose the best man to be a knight; they likewise selected the horse as the best beast to carry him in his work.  From that time forward the knight has carried out a high and essential mission: he secures order in the world.  For fear of him the common people hesitate to do wrongs to each other; for fear of him they till the soil.  Just as the clerks (who are brought into the myth without explanation, since it is not their myth) incline the people to devotion and the good life, the knights ensure the order that makes civilized life possible.

Llull makes this same point in slightly different terms in his Felix (though here he reverses the roles of hermit and knight).  In response to the hermit’s quizzing him about what a knight is, ‘the knight replied that a knight was a man chosen to ride on horseback to carry out justice and to protect and safeguard the king and his people so that the king could reign in such a manner
that his subjects could love and know God’.  Yet such praise is only half the picture.

Although Llull nearly worshipped chivalry as an ideal, his first-hand knowledge of knighthood as it worked in the world shaped everything he says about it.  In fact, his love for chivalry as it might be never eradicates his deep fear of chivalry as social fact.  In the Book of Contemplation, for example, he refers to knights as ‘the Devil’s ministers’, and asks pointedly, ‘Who is there in the world who does as much harm as knights?’ 

At one point in the Tree of Science he pictures a hermit asking a knight if he understands the order of chivalry.  The knight explains that in the absence of a book on the subject he does not, in fact, understand chivalry. Were there such a book, the knight adds, ‘many knights would be humble who are prideful, and just who are criminal [injurioses], and chaste who are licentious, and brave who are cowardly, and rich who are poor, and honourable who are dishonourable’.

 Llull here, of course, clearly if indirectly announces a rationale for the book on chivalry which he himself wrote; in the process, he explicitly establishes the reforming nature of his book.  Knights can and must be made better in basic categories of their lives.

Llull knows that he is in a sense whistling past the graveyard in The Book of the Order of Chivalry.  It will be difficult to refashion the men who cause so much disorder into effective upholders of order.  Each gilded wine goblet that Llull raises to toast knighthood thus contains a bitter residue of criticism.  The basic dichotomy appears in advice given by the hermit within the very myth of origins:

Beware, squire, who would enter into the order of chivalry what you shall do.  For if you become a knight you receive honour and the servitude due to the friends of chivalry.  For of so much as you have more noble beginnings and more honour, just so much are you more bound to be good and agreeable to God and also to the people. And if you are wicked you are the enemy of chivalry and contrary to its commandments and honours.

Following this pattern, Llull’s discussion of each chivalric virtue so lauded in the book quickly inverts to become a sermonette against the vice it corrects.  The virtues of the body (such as jousting, tourneying, hunting) must not be exercised at the expense of the virtues of the soul.  A knight must protect women, widows, orphans, and weak men; to force women and widows, to rob and destroy the feeble, to injure the poor, is to stand outside the high order of chivalry.  A knight must have castle and horse so that he can patrol the roads, deliver justice in towns and cities, and encourage useful crafts there; to play the highway robber, to destroy castles, cities, towns, to burn houses, cut down trees, slay beasts, is disloyal to chivalry.  A knight must seek out and punish robbers and the wicked; to thieve himself or to sustain other robber knights is to miss the basic point that honour is the supreme good, infinitely more valuable than mere silver and gold.

The list runs on in this vein, one worry after another balanced on the knife edge of reform which stands between fulsome praise and dark warnings.  Llull does, it is true, move at one point beyond the undifferentiated company of knighthood to stress the importance of hierarchy. He opens his treatise with the familiar parallel between social and political hierarchy in human society and natural hierarchy in the created world.  As God rules the planets which in turn control the earth, so beneath God the kings, princes, and great lords rule the knights, who, in their turn, rule the common people.

On the whole, however, the thrust of his book is to reform chivalry by enlightening individual knights, by changing the way they think, rather than by stressing the exterior force of any institutions or by placing them in a distinctly subordinate layer in the hierarchy.  In some instances he specifically urges the body of right-thinking knights to act as a policing agency themselves, admonishing them even to be willing to kill those knights who dishonour the order of chivalry, as in the case (which so obviously troubles him) of knights who are thieves and robbers, wicked and traitorous.  His formal hope, whatever his private estimate, remains the correction of each knight through education, reason, and exhortation.

The prominence of clerical ideas will be as striking to the reader as the total absence of any idea of clerical institutional power.  Many pages of the treatise are filled with what most modern readers will consider tenuous moral meanings attributed to each piece of the knightly equipment, with summary accounts of the theological and cardinal virtues, with warnings against the seven deadly sins.

Yet the treatise preserves a character that is not, finally, clerical.  It accepts too many aspects of the chivalric life that were questioned or even condemned by ecclesiastics.  Though it formally sets up the clerical ordo as highest, it edges chivalry nearly to the same mark.  The hermit who dispenses wisdom is apparently a layman and former knight, not a cleric; and he is found at a forest fountain, not in any church.  Llull’s reform draws on the ideas of clergie, in other words, without compromising the degree of lay independence so essential to the knightly self-conception.

Likewise, although he portrays knights as the chief props and active agents of royal power, his book is not really royalist.  If only the earth were big enough, after all, each of his idealized and reformed knights would properly be a king, or something very close to that high rank.  He never fully confronts the tension between the formal statement of hierarchy which opens his book and his continued portrayal thereafter of an idealized society of knightly equals—powerful and busy men, carving away evil from the world with their broadswords and even doing away with the rotters who give chivalry a bad name.  The earthly social hierarchy which parallels that of the heavens seems quickly to recede and to become almost a backdrop; it certainly does not function as the key mechanism for providing ordered life.

In short, like the men for whom he wrote, Llull was deeply immersed in the contradictions chivalry brought to the complex and difficult issues of public order.  He wanted to be a reformer of chivalry, not merely a singer of its praises.  Yet he was a pragmatic man; his popular book urged reform that came wrapped in gold leaf and that argued its case along lines that most in his audience could find tolerable.  We can take instruction both from the book’s popularity and from Llull’s mixed hopes and fears.

NB I'll post the rest looking at the last two major books in a couple of later posts.

25

Background / Chivalric Self-Criticism and Reform. Pt 1

« on: January 08, 2012, 09:44:26 PM »

I thought I'd follow my earlier post by adding something else from the same book.

CHIVALRIC SELF-CRITICISM AND REFORM

PREVIOUS chapters have shown knights absorbing ideas and cooperating with practices from the spheres of clergie and royauté, while filtering through their own high sense of power, privilege, and calling any ideas and practices that seemed constricting or intrusive.  Yet reform was not simply forced upon knighthood from outside, by those who were not knights or not primarily knights.  The knights themselves clearly had ideals.   Even had clerics and royal career administrators ceased to direct a steady stream of exhortations, some of the chivalrous would have found a continual reform programme necessary and desirable.

Many knights knew that the great ideal could be better implemented in the world and, to the extent that it was, that the world would be a better, nobler place. The warriors themselves agreed that there was, in other words, ideal chivalry,  that although they might have debated the details; they thought that difficult and imperfect men must try to do better.  Clergie or royauté, of course, held that chivalry would still need reform even if it were practised according to the ideals sketched in this chapter.

We can best discover the ideals of the knights themselves in works written by them or by those quite close to them.   The vernacular manuals or handbooks written to instruct knights provide a classic source.  The Book of Chivalry by Geoffroi de Charny and The Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramon Llull are especially important.   But before considering these it will be helpful to glance at the programme in an earlier work.

The Romance of the Wings
The Romance of the Wings (Le Roman des Eles), written by Raoul de Hodenc in about 1210, shows a clear reforming intent from its opening page, even if this intent is wrapped, as always, in extravagant praise of chivalry as an ideal.

Raoul says that the very name chevalerie is full of ‘such loftiness and dignity’, that, ‘rightly speaking, [it] is the true name of nobility’.  Only knights drink from the inexhaustible, divine fountain of courtesy: ‘it came from God and knights possess it’ (ll. 11–15, 25).

Because of its very loftiness, it stands so far above all other lofty names, that if they were to recognize its lofty nature, they would not dare to do some things they now do.—Why?—Out of shame.  But they are not aware of the exigencies of their name, for a man may take himself for a knight though he know not what appertains to the name, save only ‘I am a knight’. (ll. 40–9)

He thinks it ‘indisputably true that they should be such as their name says’.  Yet ‘many have no understanding of knighthood’.  He is specifically worried that the dominance of prowess in the thinking of knights will drive out two other qualities that he wants to see held in great esteem: liberality and courtesy.  He tries to be careful, but his enthusiasm carries him along:

Do I mean to say that there is such a thing as a wicked knight?  By no means, but some are at the least worth more than the others, whatever the case; and there are many such who are so superior in prowess that they do not deign to exercise liberality, but rather trust so much to their prowess that pride strikes them at once.’ (ll. 27–8, 116–26)

He imaginatively recreates the thinking of such a man: ‘Why give?  What can they say about me?  Am I not he of the great shield?  I am he who has conquered all, I am the best of my kind, I have surpassed Gavain in arms’ (ll. 128–34). 

To such prideful knights, obsessed with prowess, Raoul responds:

Ah, lords, whatever anyone may say, it is no part of knighthood for a knight to despise liberality on account of his prowess, for to tell the truth, no-one can rise to lofty esteem by means of prowess unless that prowess has two wings; and I will tell you what the matter and manner of those two wings ought to be. (ll. 135–43)

The treatise does just that, providing detailed explanations of seven feathers on the right wing of liberality, seven on the left wing of courtesy.

Raoul fears that an excessive belief in prowess in his own time will reduce the largesse so important to chivalry; significantly, his great enemy is the miser, where Geoffroi de Charny’s is the cowardly and inactive man.  From the right wing the knight learns that he must be courageous in liberality, give to rich and poor alike, spend without care for landed wealth (saying, ‘A knight, God protect me, will not rise to great heights if he enquires of the value of corn’), give what is promised, promptly and liberally, and provide fine feasts.

The left wing is also composed of seven feathers, each a specific component of courtesy.  The knight must honour and guard Holy Church, avoid pride; refrain from boasting (he should ‘strike high and talk low’), enjoy good entertainment, avoid envy, avoid slander (since simultaneous physical and verbal feats are an impossibility), and be a lover and love truly for love’s sake (ll. 144–end).

As Keith Busby, the editor of the text, has suggested, the message is ‘largely social, and it concentrates on telling knights how to behave rather than elaborating on the symbolic significance of knighthood’.  Though the poem makes its case in religious and moral terms, it ‘could not be called essentially religious’.  So close is its link with topics we have discussed that we might safely call the poem reformist.

NB I'll add the rest involving the other books in some later posts.

26

Background / Was looting ect widely looked upon as unchivalrous behaviour?

« on: January 02, 2012, 06:14:36 PM »

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.

27

Background / The Battle at Mons-En-Pavele.

« on: December 29, 2011, 10:04:40 PM »

The last part of the look at Fleming infantry in action.

The Battle at Mons-En-Pévèle, 18 August 1304

In 1304 king Philip the Fair of France raised a mighty army and advanced against the southern border of Flanders.  This border was well defended by the Flemings, and Philip was forced to make a long detour by way of Tournai in order to invade Flanders.  On 13 August, the Flemings proposed to do battle in so favourable a position that the king did not dare attack them.  Negotiations followed, on the 14, 15 and 16 August, but without result.  On 17 August, the Flemings advanced again and pitched camp at Mons-en-Pévèle, so close to the royal army that Philip had to stay where he was.

On the morning of the 18th the Flemings again advanced toward the royal army and this time forced a battle to the south of the village of Mons-en-Pévèle.

About six in the morning the Flemings armed themselves, after a meagre breakfast and attending Mass.  They took down their tents and left them behind in the camp on the hill.  The nobles and rich citizens left their horses there, for every man was to fight on foot.  The communal soldiers then advanced, and chose a site south of the village, sloping north to south.  They protected the back of their long battle array with their wagons.  The carts were securely fastened together, and one wheel of each was removed.  There were narrow passages left between the ranks of wagons, and soldiers guarded the wagons. 

The troops stood shoulder to shoulder in dense battle array, making a front of 1,000 to 1,200 metres.  The left wing stretched out to the village hedge.  The right wing stretched out to a brook, the 'courant de Coutiches', and was partly protected by a ditch.  The Flemish army was probably between 12,500 and 15,000 men strong.  The dense battle array was protected by big shields, such as the crossbowmen used.  The leaders told them to keep their ranks closed, so that no knight could break through.  The men of Bruges and from the Franc of Bruges formed the right wing, commanded by Philip of Chieti, the men of Ghent and their local comrades were on the left wing, under John of Namur; William of Jülich with the men of Ypres, the men of Courtrai, the troops from Lille and its neighborhood under Robert of Nevers were placed between the men of Ghent and those of Bruges.

In the French army a watch was kept during the night, and early the next morning they observed the Flemings' preparations and sounded the alarm in the royal camp.  Each man took up his arms, and put on a white scarf as a distinctive mark.  The Grand Master of the crossbowmen, Thibault de Chepoix, assembled his troops and advanced right up to the Flemings, with the crossbowmen and bidauts in front.  The knights also formed up in the meantime, making with 3,000 heavy cavalry a front which was broader but less deep than the Flemings.  The king had first knighted three hundred squires.

Fighting between the crossbowmen started just after nine o'clock.  On the left wing, Thibault realized that he had little chance of breaking through the powerful Flemish battle formation, and began an outflanking movement.  Both the count of St Pol and the two marshals did the same.  On the French right wing, Gaucher de Châtillon began a similar manoeuvre, in which the 'battles' of Charles of Valois, Louis of France and the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy took part.  Six knightly 'battles' began the outflanking movement, as well as the foot of the Grand Master of the crossbowmen, and there were still six 'battles' in front of the Flemings, while the king followed in the second line with the rearguard.  Five catapults were set up under the protection of the count of Boulogne's men to bombard the Flemings.

Philip's knights were firmly resolved to fight this time with finesse.  The main attack was to fall on the back and flanks of the Flemish army.  There was to be no frontal attack, for this could too easily go disastrously wrong.  On the Flemish side the battle was fought, as usual, defensively, but in contrast with Courtrai no reserve waited behind the phalanx: the famous commander John of Renesse had in fact been killed two days earlier in Holland.  But there were soldiers on the wagons to defend them.

The skirmishing of the crossbowmen along the entire front did not last long, for the French commanders recalled their light foot-soldiers and the cavalry units which were in front of the Flemings attacked them at a trot.  All the Flemish archers, except those from the Franc of Bruges and Bruges itself, cut their bowstrings and threw their weapons on the ground, and quickly moved off toward the main body.  There the communal soldiers confidently awaited the charge, which they hoped to withstand with their long pikes and lances, while the men with the goedendags stood at the ready. 

But the French nobles did not press their charge home to hand-to-hand fighting, and just before they reached the wall of pikes they drew rein and sat motionless.  It was simply a feigned charge, made to frighten the Flemings and to put their archers out of action.  But the Brugeois archers shot several volleys which drove the knights back beyond range of the bows.  The French archers and bidauts were sent forward again.

At the same time the French began shooting at the Flemings with the five catapults.  But the men of Ypres made a sortie with a strong corps.  The French light foot-soldiers tried vainly to halt them. The men of Ypres suffered but marched bravely on and captured the catapults, which they put out of action.  Then they turned back to the main formation, still in good order.

Meanwhile the men of Ghent and those of Ypres took part in a series of small engagements, such as often took place in the years 1302–1304.  Only small parties of both sides were involved.  The French knights tried to lure these Flemings out of their battle-order and then to ride them down.  The Flemings hoped to inflict heavy losses on their adversaries without moving too far away from the protecting line of waggons, since they feared attacks on the flank and rear.

While there was not very much going on along the Flemish front, there was very heavy fighting in progress behind the main battle-order round the protecting carts.  Eight French units out of fourteen attempted a strong attack.  The French foot-soldiers stormed the barricade and tried to haul away the wagons, in order to clear the way for the nobles.  A few French knights managed to get among the three rows of wagons, but there was too little space, and they were killed.  On the right wing about thirty to forty heavy French cavalry got in between the carts and the Brugeois, but were killed also. The attack by the French foot-soldiers, supported by the knights, was a complete failure, and they were driven back by the Flemings.

The French foot-soldiers noticed the Flemish camp at Mons-en-Pévèle, shortly after noon, and advanced towards it at once.  The Flemish wagoners and the servants and grooms who looked after the horses of the nobles and rich burghers, and the carts, were not well enough armed to defend the camp.  They fled with the animals in the direction of Lille.  The tents and a large quantity of booty thus fell into the hands of the French, who carried off the goods at once to their own camp. When Thibault de Chepoix's foot-soldiers saw this, they left their Grand Master in the lurch and also set off to the camp.  The plunderers sold their booty at once in the French camp, and went on a drinking spree. Only a few of them took any further part in the battle.


In the meantime the situation in both armies was terrible.  It was stiflingly hot, and everyone was suffering from fearful thirst.  The men of Ghent and Ypres exhausted themselves in small fights, which caused them heavy casualties and rather less to the French.  In both armies warriors died of sunstroke.  The situation was even worse in the Flemish army, since they were surrounded.  Only the men of Bruges, who were near the Coutiches brook, could now and then go to the watercourse to let the soldiers drink, but first they had to drive off Chepoix's soldiers, until the latter went off to plunder the camp. Troops of both armies suffered agonies of thirst the whole afternoon.

There was talk of an armistice, and the negotiations were favourably received in both armies.  While negotiators went over to the Flemish army, the French knights went to drink and refresh themselves. Opposite the Flemings they posted a unit of bidauts, the best French foot of the day.  Even king Philip dismounted and relaxed.  He called the count of St Pol's men back from behind the wagons, and posted them in front of the Flemish front line.  But while the French enjoyed such freedom of action, things were not so comfortable for the Flemings.  They could not so easily refresh themselves, since they could not leave their position.  The negotiations came to nothing. 

Just before sunset the Flemish leaders held a council.  John of Namur pointed out that the men of Ghent were exhausted.  Philip of Chieti, William of Jülich and Robert of Nevers decided on a general attack.  The whole army was to advance, leave the wagons and storm the enemy lines. Hand-to-hand fighting, which the French had been so anxious to avoid, was to be the answer.

William of Jülich attacked first.  The bidauts tried to block this advance, but were thrown back, and driven from the battlefield.  The French army was taken completely by surprise: many of the nobles were not ready for battle, and mounting their horses took to flight, which degenerated into panic. William's corps was followed by a strong formation under Philip of Chieti and Robert of Nevers. The Flemings advanced with banners unfurled, shouting their war-cries.  The French knights fled in whole companies, and the Flemings slaughtered anyone they could catch.  This panic created a stir throughout the kingdom, and Geoffrey of Paris even accused the nobility of treason.

While the right wing, with William at their head, drove off the French, the left wing took no part in the attack.  John of Namur, who was not physically a strong man, left the battlefield with the exhausted men from Ghent, Ypres and Courtrai, and marched off towards Lille. William of
Jülich, Philip of Chieti, and Robert of Nevers pursued the French with the men from Bruges and the neighborhood, strengthened with the bravest Flemings from other corps.  Many knights whose horses were tired fell into the pits and ditches which dotted the battlefield and the neighborhood of the French camp.  Some Flemings fell into them too, but not so many.

The Flemish attack took Philip the Fair by surprise.  He was sitting on the ground, and his first attempt to remount failed, but he was more successful the second time.  He had only a small following with him, but even though he saw his troops fleeing, he resumed the unequal battle.  He was scarcely in the saddle when William's men came up.  The king's horse was killed, his faithful knights perished, but Philip defended himself stoutly.  At one moment he lost his weapon, but a butcher gave him a gigantic battle-axe, with which the king felled several of the enemy.  Luckily for him he was not recognized, for his knights had ripped off the royal lilies.  The oriflamme lay on the ground in shreds.  William went on with his men towards the French camp.

Philip of Chieti and Robert of Nevers followed with their strong formation.  Meanwhile Philip the Fair was trying to mount another horse, but because of his weight, and after his heavy fall, this was even more difficult than before.  Then one of his knights dismounted, and kneeling, offered the king his back as a mounting block.  Philip had scarcely mounted when the other Flemings attacked.  The French knight who had sacrificed himself was killed instantly, and his head rolled in front of the hooves of the horse he had given up to his sovereign.  A Flemish knight then sprang upon the king and dealt the horse such a blow with his goedendag that the animal bolted, and thus brought the king in safety to a group of nobles who had been watching the result of the encounter anxiously. The knights who had helped the king to remount were killed.  Some knights hastened to the king's help: his brother Charles of Valois came up first with Gautier de Brienne, Louis of France and Louis de Clermont followed with their knights. 

The Bretons and Picards re-grouped their units.  These bands of knights had been re-formed out of reach of the Flemings, and together with those of the constable, the two marshals and the Burgundian nobles they attacked William's little band.  William had only a few men with him - perhaps 700 when he set out but their numbers had been weakened during the attack - and he tried in vain to ward off this counterattack.  The French knights were more numerous and charged from all directions: William tried once more to organize a crown-shaped defensive formation, but it was too late.  His companions on all sides were overwhelmed, and they died to the last man.

Then this band of knights rushed to the help of the king, and heavy fighting followed between these nobles and the large formation of men under Philip of Chieti.  According to the French chronicler Guiart, the French broke up the Flemish formations, but he had to concede that the Brugeois triumphantly pushed through the French camp.  The victorious Flemings found some wine and food in the royal tent and elsewhere.  They saw that the rest of the army had not followed, but that the French knights were still about: it had grown completely dark, the moon had risen, and theyfeared attacks from all directions in the moonlight. 

They took council and decided to move off.  They returned in smart formation along the Coutiches brook to the camp on the hill at Pévèle, their banners flying.  They picked up their scattered comrades on the way.  The French debated whether to attack them, but decided not to risk it because of the darkness, and the retreat went on without incident to the camp.

There the Flemings sounded victorious trumpets, and looked on themselves as the winners.  They were joined on the hill by more men who had got scattered, but they found neither food, drink, nor tents, and returned out of sheer necessity to Lille, leaving the battlefield in the hands of the king, who rightly proclaimed himself the victor. 

But the engagement had been so hotly contested, and so indecisive, that the men from the triumphant Flemish army still felt they had won.  The losses on both sides were heavy, about 300 nobles in the French army, and perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 foot-soldiers.  The Flemings had lost as many men, or very nearly so, but they had many wounded as well, and had lost their wagons and tents.

28

Background / The Battle of Arques.

« on: December 23, 2011, 09:02:13 PM »

The second part of the look at Flemish infantry in action.

The Battle of Arques, 4 April 1303
The war between the Flemish insurgents and the French continued after the French defeat at Courtrai.  In March 1303 William of Jülich had raised an army in the Westhoek of Flanders, and assembled the troops at Cassel.  On 3 April, he advanced to a point close to the border near Arques, not far from St Omer. 

The Flemish offensive against St Omer began on Maundy Thursday, 4 April. The Flemings marched in five divisions: first came the men from Ypres, dressed all in red, then two units from St Winoksbergen and its neighbourhood, finally two corps under William of Jülich, consisting of contingents from the Cassel and Furnes district.  There was a considerable space between each of these units.  The Ypres men crossed the Neuf-fossé and the river Aa and immediately stormed the village of Arques.

The French garrison, which consisted of only sixty bidauts, could not stand up for long against the assault and was killed and the fortress set on fire.  The French commander at St Omer, Jacques de Bayonne, summoned his heavy cavalry with a trumpet signal, which started a panic in the fortress. The French nobles were afraid of the Flemings, and hastened to confession before the fight.  Priests at the crossroads granted absolution to all who would fight against the Flemings. 

Jacques de Bayonne commanded more than 1,300 heavy cavalry, accompanied by foot-soldiers.  The dense units of cavalry left the market-square, their banners flying, and advanced against the Flemings.  When the French leaders came outside the city, they saw that the men of Ypres were already very close, so they summoned the rest of their foot-soldiers out of the city and drew them up in front of the hospital outside the city walls.

In the French garrison of St Omer there were many leliaarts, Flemish partisans of the king, who knew the district where they formerly lived very well.  They knew all about the marching order of the five Flemish detachments.  While part of their foot-soldiers had to hold off the men of Ypres in front of the hospital, and could retreat into the city if they had to, the knights of Jacques de Bayonne and the rest of the foot-soldiers left this Flemish unit on their left, and advanced towards Blendecques. 

There they turned northwards, crossed the watercourses, and prepared themselves for an attack on the two St Winoksbergen detachments.  At the same time, they noticed a whole column of Flemish army waggons.  The two Flemish corps thought themselves securely protected by the Ypres men, and had taken no precautions against a French raid.  While the French nobles were preparing their formations for an attack, a good number of their foot-soldiers went off to attack the column of Flemish waggons.

These were unprotected, and the men in charge were usually not combatant troops.  These poorly equipped men were soon put to flight or killed, and the rapacious French foot-soldiers went straight back to St Omer, with the booty they had seized.  The French nobles meanwhile formed up in five units.  They were reinforced by 300 heavy cavalry under the burgrave Jean de Lens and Jean de Vervins, so that the total of the French nobles was 1,600.

The French nobles deployed their units opposite the second of the corps from St Winoksbergen, which they hoped to take by surprise.  When these French 'battles' appeared out of the wood where they had been hiding, the Flemings drew themselves up at once in battle order. 

Jacques de Bayonne had briefed his cavalry about his plan: he meant to destroy the men from St Winoksbergen before the other Flemish corps, which were on both sides of him, could rush to their aid.  With his 1,600 heavy cavalry he could risk attacking a rather weak detachment of the Flemish army.  At a trumpet signal two 'battles' made a frontal attack on the Flemings, while another 'battle' charged the left and the fourth 'battle' the right.   Oudart de Maubuisson stayed in reserve, ready to check or delay the Flemish units that might come to help.

The men of St Winoksbergen were thus attacked by nearly 1,300 heavy cavalry.  They defended themselves bravely, so stoutly that one of the French sources says that they fought as if they were all Rolands from the chanson de geste. They laid about them with their pikes and goedendags and wounded many horses.  But the French cavalry pressed home their attack with overwhelming force, and thanks to their attacks on both the Flemish flanks they succeeded in more or less surrounding the little detachment.  They rode their heavy chargers into the ranks of the foot-soldiers, and made them gradually give way.  The Flemings hoped help would come quickly.


The second detachment from St Winoksbergen came to their aid at once.  Oudart de Maubuisson was afraid that this corps might surround the French nobles, and he decided to attack forthwith. With their standard-bearer in front, the 300 heavy cavalry turned to the left and charged the Flemings.  The cavalry on the heavy chargers rode down the Flemish soldiers, and French foot followed and killed the trampled Flemings or took them prisoner.  This Flemish detachment was thrown back, but they managed to take refuge in a garden and there to re-form their ranks. 

Maubuisson however got reinforcements, for the lord of Pickigny rushed to his side from the other band of French knights with about sixty heavy cavalry.  The two units from St Winoksbergen emerged with heavy casualties.  According to the Franciscan friar from Ghent whom we have quoted before, they lost 1,000 men, of whom the majority were servants and waggoners: luckily for them the French heavy cavalry were unable to pursue them, for William of Jülich hastened up with two powerful corps.

Since the prince had only a few knights with him, he gave the order for every man to fight on foot.  He made his two groups into a single strong formation, which he drew up in the form of a crown.  On the outer edge he stationed his bravest and best-equipped men.  Meanwhile the French nobles had regrouped, and were advancing against new opponents.  They succeeded in capturing William of Jülich's horse, which was led away too late, but they did not manage to press home their attack to the point of hand-to-hand fighting.  They realized that there was no hope of success against the powerful and tightly packed units of William.

Then they tried to lure the Flemings out of their formation in order to ride down individual men, and they sought at the same time to find a weak spot in the crown-formation.  But those cavalrymen who came too close to the Flemings were knocked down and killed, and those stout-hearted Flemings who attacked them in small groups were also killed.

The opponents stood their ground, facing each other for nearly two hours. Then the French leaders decided to retreat, for their horses were tired, and many of them had been wounded in the first fighting.  They carried out an orderly and methodical retreat, one formation of knights moving out behind another, each under the protection of part of the army, standing ready to charge.

But when William saw this, he advanced to attack the enemy.  Then the French troops halted, and made ready for a general charge.  As soon as the Flemings halted, the French advanced once more: in this way William forced the enemy to halt five or six times.

The French nobility had some uncomfortable moments as they approached the Neuf-fossé.  They hoped to cross this obstacle at Arques, and then the river Aa, in order to return to St Omer by the shortest way, but their retreat was cut off by the men of Ypres, who blocked the crossing of both watercourses.

The men of Ypres had drawn themselves up in crown formation, and seemed unassailable.  The French cavalry therefore quickly went to Blendecques, and from there back to St Omer, where the inhabitants were awaiting the outcome of the fighting with fearful apprehension. The French foot-soldiers who had plundered the waggons, were intercepted by the men of Ypres on their way back to St Omer, and suffered heavy losses. William continued his advance up to the city walls of St Omer, remaining there till the next day, but the French cavalry did not appear outside the city till the Flemings had gone away again.

Arques is a very interesting example of warfare in the period 1302–1304 in that we can assess the strength and weaknesses of the French heavy cavalry in one and the same battle.  These armored noblemen were able to encircle average or comparatively weak Flemish units and destroy them, but they dared not make heavy charges against powerful and densely packed troops.  They had the great advantage of mobility, and could therefore fight the battle whenever and wherever they chose.  The Flemish foot on the other hand had to fight defensive battle continually and their success depended on whether the French cavalry dared make a big attack, followed by a violent mêlée.  Guiart gives a loss of 300 men in the French army for the battle of Arques, we do not know how many heavy cavalry that involved, but we can assume that it was probably a large number, while as we have heard the Flemings lost around 1,000 men.

The battle of Arques was a Flemish victory in that William of Jülich remained in charge of the battlefield, and this counted as a victory in the Middle Ages.  He managed to drive off the enemy, but at enormous cost to the Flemish army, and the victory thus gained yielded little result.  William was criticized in Flanders in view of the fact that the losses were so enormous: the Franciscan friar reproached him for having left too much space between the corps of his army, and because he came too late to help the men from St Winoksbergen, who advanced without due care.

29

Background / The Battle of Courtrai.

« on: December 16, 2011, 05:27:02 PM »

The first part of a look at three battles involving the Flemish infantry.



As remarkable examples of pure tactics of foot-soldiers, let us now turn to a brief discussion of the two important battles of Courtrai and Mons-en-Pévèle, and a less important but nevertheless interesting battle of Arques. They give an excellent picture of the possibilities and limitations of the tactics of the Flemish foot-soldiers.

The Battle of Courtrai, 11 July 1302
Guy of Namur assembled the Flemish army at Courtrai.  With shrewd strategical and tactical insight the Flemish leaders had chosen the best site: the road to Ghent, a city which was not co-operating with the insurgents, as well as the one to Bruges, was blocked by them and that to Ypres was protected.  The French garrison was illsupplied and could not hold out for any length of time.  The royal army appeared outside the walls of Courtrai on 8 July.  On the 9th, the French commander ordered an attack on the Tournai Gate, and on the 10th on the Lille Gate, but neither was successful; on the 11th he decided to advance against the Groeningekouter, where the Flemish leaders had taken up a favourable position.

About 6 a.m. the call to arms was sounded in the French camp.  Ten big units of knights and squires were formed, and contained about 2,500 nobles, supported by foot-soldiers, crossbowmen and bidauts, light foot-soldiers armed with javelins.  The Flemish army was rather larger.  It consisted of 8,000 well-armed foot-soldiers, perhaps even 10,500, including several hundred knights and squires.  But the royal army included the flower of the French nobility, and 100 such cavalrymen were considered the equal of 1,000 foot-soldiers, so that qualitatively speaking the count of Artois had a very considerable advantage.

But the Flemings had selected a very good position which enabled them to protect their flanks.  At their back flowed the Lys, and in front of their left wing was the Groeningebeek, while the Grote Beek, or Great Brook, protected their right wing.  Both brooks severely hampered the knights' charge.  The site which had been so well chosen from a tactical point of view showed also serious drawbacks: flight was impossible, defeat risked total annihilation.  But the determination of the rebels drew new strength from the situation; they had to win or die.

When the French marshals had completed their reconnaissance, they must have appreciated this situation.  Artois decided to hold a council of war to discuss the tactical problem of an attack on that terrain.  Raoul de Nesle pointed out the grave dangers which threatened the knights once they were fighting on the far side of the brooks. If the French nobles then had to give way, those brooks could prove disastrous, since it would be impossible to recross them.  He suggested luring the Flemings out of their good position. Jean de Burlats, Grand Master of the crossbowmen, wanted to harass the Flemings with his light foot-soldiers, hoping to inflict such great losses on them that they would
have to give way. Then the moment would come for the knights to deliver the coup de grâce.  Godfrey of Brabant thought it was wiser not to attack at all, but rather to wear the Flemings down by making them stand all day in battle order with their heavy equipment on, without food or drink on a hot July day, so that they would not dare to fight on the following day.  But the majority of the council thought that the battle should be fought at once.

William of Jüilich, Guy of Namur and John of Renesse placed their heavy foot-soldiers far enough away from the brooks to minimize the effect of the French crossbowmen's attack, at the same time leaving only a small space in which the French knights could develop their assaults on the Flemish side of the brooks.  The Flemings had to await their opponents in a motionless defensive position.  On the Flemish right wing the men of Bruges stood behind the Grote Beek under the command of William of Jülich, in the centre were the men from the Franc of Bruges and West-Flanders, partly behind the Grote Beek and partly behind the Groeninge Beek, and on the left wing Guy of Namur commanded the men of the region of Alost, Oudenaarde and Courtrai, and the men of Ghent.  The right flank was protected by the Lage Vijver, or Lower Moat, the left flank by the monastery of Groeninge.  John of Renesse waited with a reserve corps behind the centre.  The communal army from Ypres had to keep the castle garrison in check, and guard the rear of the Flemish formation.

They waited a long time for the enemy.  The Flemings were nervous, restless, and apprehensive, for they knew that the royal army had the reputation of being the best in Western Europe.   But as soon as the French moved, it was impossible to leave the battle-field.  The insurgents were encouraged by their noble leaders, who had sent away their horses and were fighting on foot to share the lot of the common man.  All the nobles were volunteers, and still had an account to settle with their enemies.  The peasants too had a grudge against their opponents, and the men of Bruges were fighting for their lives.  William of Jülich and Guy of Namur encouraged their men, and together with the nobles and the heads of the guilds they drew up their men in battle array.

At last Guy of Namur and William of Jülich addressed the troops, and John of Renesse, commander of the reserve, explaining how he was to rush to the help of the long battle formation, gave excellent advice: 'Do not allow the enemy to break through your ranks.  Do not be afraid.  Kill both man and horse.  The ''Lion of Flanders" is our battle cry.  When the enemy attacks the corps of Lord Guy, we shall come to your help from behind.  Anyone who breaks into your ranks, or gets through them, will be killed.'  It was given out that no one should collect booty, and that anyone who did so, or who surrendered or fled, would be killed at once.  No prisoners were to be taken.  Guy of Namur knighted Pieter de Coninc and his two sons in front of the Flemish army, together with about thirty of the leading citizens of Bruges.  Then the two princes sent their horses away, and armed like the rebels, with the visorless helmet of the communal soldiers, they took their place in the front rank, grasping a pike or goedendag. 

Fighting broke out between crossbowmen a little before noon.  The Flemish archers slowly gave way under pressure from the numerically superior enemy, who were followed at some distance by the units of knights.  The French foot-soldiers advanced, and their arrows reached the front ranks of the main Flemish lines, but without serious effect.  As soon as they reached the Groeninge and Grote brooks, they were called back by Artois, who was afraid that they would be overwhelmed on the far side by the Flemish heavy foot-soldiers, while the French knights could not support their own soldiers.

In this case the Flemings would advance right up to the brooks, which would make an attack by the French knights practically impossible.  Besides, the French foot-soldiers would get in the way of the armoured cavalry on the far side of the brooks.  By beginning the assault quickly with the nobles, they would at the same time profit by the preparatory shooting of the crossbowmen.  Artois then gave the order: 'Foot-soldiers, come back', while the banners were moved to the front of the knights.  Then came the word 'Forward!' and seven French cavalry units rode to the brooks with the banners unfurled.

The left wing, commanded by Raoul de Nesle, attacked across the Grote brook.  It consisted of four bands of knights.  The right wing had three bands of knights and advanced to the Groeninge.  The foot-soldiers managed to get out of the way of the cavalry, but some men had not heard the order, or else stumbled in their haste; others were trampled by the armoured knights, but most of them were able to retreat through the spaces between the knights' units, or along the flanks.  The knights quickly began to cross the ditches.  They made haste, so as not to be surprised by the counter-attack by the Flemish heavy foot-soldiers.  Some horses missed their jump or stumbled, others refused, and had to be forced to jump.  Knights fell from their saddles into both brooks, but on the whole the crossing was successful.  The left wing was the first unit ready for attack on the opposite side of the Grote Beek. 

After quickly reorganizing the formations, the constable charged the right wing and part of the Flemish centre with his four units of knights.  The Flemish archers flung their bows away and hurriedly took refuge behind the main battle line.  Under Jean de Burlats, Godfrey of Brabant, Raoul de Nesle and the two marshals, the French knights rode at a quick trot with couched lances toward the Flemings.  This awe-inspiring and terrible drama was accompanied by a most fearful din.  Never in their lives had the Flemings experienced anything like it: never had they known such critical and nerve-racking moments.  They pressed closer and closer together, their hearts pounding.  They held their pikes firmly planted in the ground, and the men with the goedendags raised their weapons, ready to strike.  There was a bitter surprise in store for the French.

The living wall of pikes, lances, and goedendags did not flinch.  The French nobles had never seen anything like it in their long and glorious career.   The weavers and fullers, the artisans and peasants, did not flee but stayed courageously at their posts.  Then the bravest knights had to ride their horses at the Flemish lines.  Some hesitated and slackened their pace, but the majority were swept along in their close formations, or bravely carried on the attack.  Then came the frightful impact against the heavy pikes, with earsplitting noise, but on the Flemish right the men of Bruges withstood the charge, and inflicted heavy losses on the French nobles.  Godfrey of Brabant knocked down William of Jülich and hurled the prince's banner to the ground.  But after breaking into the Brugeois ranks he was brought down and killed.  Raoul de Nesle also fell in the initial charge.  A stubborn hand-to-hand mêlée ensued, and the fearful goedendags crashed down heavily on men and horses.

In the centre, the French knights drove deep into the ranks of the men from the Franc of Bruges.  Some of these yielded, but others manfully stood their ground.  The heavy cavalry carried on their attack and penetrated deeper into the Flemish lines, where a breakthrough seemed likely.  A number of foot-soldiers took to their heels.  Meanwhile the French right wing charged across the Groeninge Beek.  The charge was made in dense units, and with less commotion than on the French left wing.  With tremendous force the formations of knights hurled themselves against the East Flemings, but the Flemings resisted stoutly and the cavalry were checked.  This in turn was followed by violent hand-to-hand fighting.

While heavy fighting now developed along the whole front, Jean de Lens made a sortie from Courtrai castle to attack the Flemings from the rear.  First he sought to divert the attention of the men of Ypres by setting fire to a fine house on the market square.  But they remained on the alert near the castle gate, and successfully beat off the attack.  Meanwhile the mêlée continued along the entire front.  Most of the royal army was involved in the fighting.  At one point the situation looked critical for the Flemings, especially in the centre where the men of the Franc of Bruges fought bravely but ran into difficulties.  John of Renesse hastened to help with the reserve.  The French knights were driven back in the centre.

This success encouraged the Flemish centre to go over to the attack, followed by both wings, and a general Flemish counterattack developed, in which the rebels were at a considerable advantage.  Three or four thousand Flemings were attacking 1,600 heavy cavalry with weapons that were longer than those of the nobles.  The French knights were forced to give ground, and were driven back towards the two brooks. Robert of Artois, who had not taken part in the general charge, realized at once that his army would be defeated if it were thrown back into either of the brooks.  He ordered the rearguard to advance and personally went into action with his knights. Artois and his men, with a flourish of trumpets, charged the troops of Guy of Namur. The ranks of the East Flemings had become much less compact in the counter-attack.  Artois drove deep into their ranks and reached the standard, where he tore off part of the banner. 

His charge, coupled with the approach of the French rearguard, started panic in the ranks of Guy's troops, some of whom fled.  In the meantime Artois was being fiercely attacked by other Flemings.  He defended himself splendidly, but Willem van Saaftinge, a lay brother of Ter Doest, felled the horse of the commander-in-chief.  Artois was dragged off in the fall, and perished, covered with wounds.  On the banks of the brooks the knights and squires defended themselves with desperate courage, and a horrible slaughter ensued.  Many of them fell into the water and were drowned, nor were the horses spared.  The French losses were appalling: only one leader of all the cavalry units who had taken part was captured, all the rest were killed.

As soon as they had defeated the enemy on the banks of the brooks, the Flemings crossed over themselves, to attack the rearguard of the French.  These two cavalry units acted as though they intended to make an attack in their turn, but made no move; they were trying to gain time for the retreat of the baggage.  But no sooner did the Flemings advance, than the heavy cavalry fled in panic, and headed hell-for-leather towards Lille and Tournai, while the French foot-soldiers also took to their heels.  The Flemings chased them as far as Zwevegem, St Denijs, and Dottenijs, eleven kilometers from the battlefield.

By evening the fleeing Frenchmen reached Tournai exhausted, where they bartered their equipment for bread, though some of them were still too shocked to eat.

Between noon and three o'clock in the afternoon the Flemings had achieved a great victory, which cost the lives of more than a thousand French noblemen.  Half of the attacking knights had perished—an appallingly high proportion.  The victors amassed enormously valuable booty, and at least five hundred golden spurs and many banners were picked up on the battlefield; these were preserved in the church of Our Lady in Courtrai, whence the French removed them eighty years later, after the battle of Westrozebeke.  The victors lost only a few hundred dead.



I'll attempt post the other two battles at a later time.

30

Background / Infantry Tactics.

« on: November 26, 2011, 06:13:58 PM »

I've come across a sub-chapter in a book I think might be of use concerning how pikes became the infantry's primary mainstay against cavalry at this time. (Apologies in advance for it's length  )

Taken from “The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages” by J F Verbruggen


Tactics of the Foot-soldiers
1. Formations and Positions of the Foot-soldiers on the Battlefields

Although the Flemings, Scots and Swiss were more or less similarly armed, their tactics were not the same.   The Flemings liked to fight on a broad front, in the manner of the phalanx of antiquity.  The Scots used circular formations or schiltrons, while the Swiss were famous for their deep formations.

Before the battle began, the front of the battle-order was protected from a short distance away by crossbowmen or ordinary archers.  These men had to cover the deployment of the main battle order and then start the fighting by skirmishing.   They established contact with the enemy and no decisive action was expected of them, since the part they played had normally no effect on the course of the battle.   The archers could also be used to protect the flanks of the battle order, in which case the protection was merely temporary, since they could be driven off by the enemy. 

For this reason the foot-soldiers usually sought to cover their flanks by natural obstacles, such as ditches, rivers, hills, woods, and so on.   If a defensive battle was being fought, the foot also tried to protect its front: at Courtrai the front and flanks of the Flemings were protected by ditches.   At Mons-en-Pévèle one wing was supported by the village hedge, and the other was up against a brook.  At Falkirk the Scots had a marsh in front of their battle order, and archers on the wings were stationed to cover the flanks.   At Bannockburn their front was protected by artificial pits, and the main battle order was drawn up in a wood.   The Swiss also made good use of the terrain as a protection for their flanks
in battle.

The formations of the foot-soldiers became increasingly closely packed, so that enemy knights could not penetrate them.   If the terrain and the army's size permitted, a reserve corps was placed behind the front.  Whereas in general knights could not break through the solid units of the footsoldiers, it was occasionally thought unnecessary to keep the troops in reserve behind the strong main force.  Thus the Flemings had no unit in reserve at Mons-en-Pévèle, but their rear was protected by the army waggons, and foot-soldiers were posted on top of these.

Among the Flemings, Scots and Swiss the battle order consisted of two, three, or more large units which could operate independently if necessary, but in a defensive action they could merge into a single tightly closed formation.  Among the Flemings each of these units had its own large banner, usually that of an important city.   The whole army was drawn up under the standard of the principality. The little formations of the guilds each had their own banner, which served as a rallying point on the march and in battle.  This banner could of course be used to convey orders, and to maintain direction both in attack and retreat.   The Flemish foot-soldiers also used trumpets, the Scots horns and other instruments, and the Swiss used drums, whose beat helped the marching men. Certain orders, such as assembly, march, and so on, could be sounded with these instruments.

Among the Swiss each village and city had its banner or standard, but these were usually collected together in the middle of one large formation, thus they were no use to indicate direction. By virtue of the fact that the Swiss usually operated on narrow fronts however it was easier to maintain direction during the advance than it was in units which, like those of the Flemings, marched on a broad front. 

Later in the fourteenth century the Swiss used a rectangular formation in which there was an equal number of men abreast in each rank, packed shoulder to shoulder, and at a greater distance apart in depth. The Germanic peoples had used this type of narrow and deep column, and it is possible that the Swiss had retained it from the early Middle Ages. 

For fighting in the narrow Alpine valleys such formations were particularly useful, in that they moved on so narrow a front. They were also better able to withstand the charges of the mailed cavalry against the flanks. In such a case the footsoldiers always had to halt and make a front in the direction of the threat, but the Swiss could offer resistance along a broad front since their flank, turned to make this front, had great width.

Later the Swiss usually fought in three large units, each supporting the other, the second and third not marching level with the first, but following at a certain distance.  The first unit, for example, would form the left wing, the second unit rather further back would be the centre, and the third even further back was the right wing. Thus it was possible for the second formation to protect a flank of the first, while its own flank was covered by the third.  Sometimes the leading formation, serving as the centre, pushed forward, while the second and third advanced to the left and right of it. In that case both flanks of the first unit were protected by the second and third. 

It was enough for the Swiss to choose the battlefield so that one of their flanks was naturally protected, the other could then be protected by the units marching further behind.  The third formation in the meantime kept its freedom of operation, and if need arose, could outflank the enemy and attack him both in the flank and rear. 

If the knights charged two units in the flank, the third formation could carry out its own attack and break through the front of the enemy knights.  Once this was accomplished, the victorious unit rescued the two formations which had been checked, and defeated the enemy. It was understandably very difficult for the knights to attack one of these Swiss units in the flank, since they always had to remember the other units coming up behind.

The more powerful the units of the foot-soldiers were, the greater their chance of beating a mounted enemy army. However in order to keep the requisite flexibility it was necessary to split the army into three or four units.  If one of these units was threatened by the enemy on all sides, they assumed a circular formation, like a crown, in order to be able to resist the charges of the armoured cavalry from all directions.  The Swiss used these crown-formations for defence, as for example the men of Bern in 1271, who were drawn up in closely serried ranks, with grounded pikes.  The Habsburg knights hesitated, for the foot-soldiers seemed very stubborn and resolute. No one thought it wise to charge.  Then one brave knight boldly made up his mind to attack. He was caught by the Swiss pikes and killed.

 In 1289 the army of a son of king Rudolf of Habsburg surprised the men of Bern on the Schlosshalde.  Count Louis of Homberg-Rapperswyl managed to penetrate into the formation, which was defeated. The same thing was done in 1332 by the Austrian knight Stülinger of
Regensburg in a battle against the men of Bern and Solothurn. He penetrated the formation of the foot-soldiers and was killed, but had done enough to bring victory for his comrades.

We have already seen that the Scots used these crown-formations regularly.  Between 1302 and 1304, and during the battle of Cassel in 1328, the Flemings also often formed a crown, even during the actual battle, so as to be able to fight off attacks from any direction.  Small corps of Flemish footsoldiers were annihilated in such battles, or heavily defeated, as happened for example to two units at Arques in 1303.  This was partly due to the fact that owing to their small numbers they did not have their normal confidence in a successful defence, for the proportionate strengths were greatly in the enemy's favour. 

There was an interesting battle in 1325 in which 800 rebels of the Franc of Bruges fought against the men of Ghent, who were on the side of count Louis of Nevers.  The men of Ghent were led by the knights Zeger of Courtrai and Hector Vilain, who also commanded a small unit of heavy cavalry.  The rebels drew themselves up in crown formation, with the bravest and best equipped men in the outer ranks, and the rest of the soldiers behind them.  The leaders of the men of Ghent first rode round the crown with their cavalry, seeking a weak spot, and making a few attacks for this purpose, but they were beaten off. Then Hector Vilain made a great charge with forty picked cavalrymen, specially devoted to him.  He rushed at the rebels with loud war-cries, while his own foot-soldiers apparently attacked as well. His charge carried him right through the formation, and the little body of rebels was destroyed.

When the surprise attack on the French camp at Cassel in 1328 was unsuccessful, Zannekin drew up his largest unit in the shape of a crown, which was violently attacked by the French king and his knights, both sides suffering heavy losses.  The Flemings were completely surrounded and defended themselves with the courage of despair.   Many French nobles lost their horses in the tremendous charges.  The Flemish formation stood firm however, and drove off the attacks, and the French barons saw that they could not destroy this unit by force.  They retreated, leaving the road to Cassel open to the Flemings, and the latter were captured by a trick. 

Perhaps they thought that the French armoured cavalry were being obliged to retreat, or perhaps they hoped to retreat in good order with their whole unit, but it was a desperate flight, during which the French cavalry pursued them relentlessly.  In this battle the peasants from the Westhoek abandoned the traditional Flemish tactics, and marched resolutely to attack the enemy instead of waiting in motionless defence.  They chose the courageous solution to the great problem of the foot-soldiers of that time—to offer a defensive or to give an offensive battle.

2. Defence or Attack in Battle?

We have already seen that the foot-soldiers usually operated defensively.   This was absolutely necessary as long as they were inexperienced, and could not produce flexible formations which would remain in good order during an attack.   Even as late as the fifteenth century the outstanding authority on tactics of the day, Jean de Bueil, prescribed defensive tactics for the foot-soldiers.   This French nobleman was the real victor over the Swiss in 1444 at the battle of St Jacob-en-Birs.  He was convinced that the Swiss defeat was due to their taking the offensive in the battle.

Up to the beginning of the fourteenth century it was rare for the foot-soldiers to dare to attack enemy knightly formations.  Great battles like Falkirk, Courtrai, Mons-en-Pévèle and Bannockburn were started with foot-soldiers playing a motionless defensive role.

But it was possible to exploit the exhaustion of the knights after the failure of their charges.  As soon as the armoured cavalry were worn out by the stubborn defence of the foot-soldiers, the latter went over to the offensive with a strong counter-attack.  Those cautious tactics brought the Flemings victory at Courtrai, and might have helped them to win at Mons-en-Pévèle, where their counter-attack was almost successful.

During the second day of the battle of Bannockburn the Scots forced the English to attack at once, when they were not yet ready for battle.  It is possible that the Scots then attacked in their turn, but this is not quite certain.   In any case, Robert Bruce systematically avoided major battles after his victory, and had evidently not come to the conclusion that his foot-soldiers could attack and defeat mailed cavalry in the open field.

He made surprise attacks in favourable circumstances, and in these he was always successful.   In 1327, the Scots acted defensively, and chose such favourable positions that the English knights could not attack them.  At Dupplin Moor in 1332, and the following year at Halidon Hill, the Scots took the offensive, and in both cases they were heavily defeated.   They also had to reckon with excellent English defensive tactics.

After the victory at Courtrai in 1302 there was a growing demand among the Flemish communal armies to abandon the defensive in battle and go over to the attack.   Although William of Jülich was a strong advocate of attack in the open field, the more cautious commanders succeeded in having his plans rejected. 

The powerful counter-attack on the battlefield at Mons-en-Pévèle, and offensive operations in small groups during the battle, like the successful sortie of the men of Ypres against the French missiles, encouraged the communal armies to adopt new methods.   They wanted in future to attack by night, by the light of the full moon.   If this was not possible, they thought of attacking by day immediately the battle was joined, in order to make the French knights fight hand-to-hand at once, for in such close fighting larger armies enjoyed great advantages, as we shall soon see from our account of the battle of Courtrai, and from the general picture of battles of foot-soldiers. 

Against a very powerful royal army, and in far less favourable circumstances, the peasants from the Westhoek came to attack at Cassel in 1328.   They hoped to surprise the enemy at nightfall, but the raid failed and ended in frightful disaster for the Flemish insurgents.   When the men of Ghent and their allies attacked another mighty royal army just as bravely at Westrozebeke in 1382, they in their turn were crushingly defeated. 

The offensive tactics of the Flemings miscarried just as miserably as those of the Scots.   In both cases the foot-soldiers were attacked by heavy cavalry on the flank and in the rear, and could not break out of the encirclement.  The Flemish formations were unwieldy, and not flexible enough.  They seemed capable of transforming their phalanx quickly into a crown formation, but this was a defensive position and made further attack impossible.  In the beginning of the fourteenth century the Flemings lacked the indispensable experience to give offensive battle successfully.

The Swiss had considerable luck in the development of their foot-soldiers.  They not only acquired the necessary experience, but their armies grew stronger as well, owing to the expansion of their confederation.   Their formations were also better adapted to attack than the broad formations of the Flemings, who were forced to fight on their open plains against the armies of the French knights. The Swiss military system was to attain a very high standard by the end of the Middle Ages, and to revolutionize the art of war, but in the period just covered, their tactics were in an early stage of development and were as yet no better than the Flemish and Scottish tactics.