This thread will be concentrating solely on one particular chapter from the book “The Knight Triumphant~The High Middle Ages, 1314 – 1485” by Stephen Turnbull, and which itself involves the life and deeds of a fascinating, brilliant and very colourful, (and very wrongly largely unknown to many) French hero of that time, Bertrand du Guesclin.
I apologise in advance for the fact it'll be a rather long thread to say the least, as likewise that it might be a while before I get the chance complete it, but I'm hopeful that many of you will find it an informative and enjoyable read.
The Ill-made Knight
As victories are better remembered than defeats, Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) is probably the one French name to be well known in England from the Hundred Years' War, but in this chapter I will examine how France performed a similar miracle of recovery in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. This revival stemmed from a number of factors, not the least of which was the service to the French king and the inspiration to the French armies, rendered by a Breton knight called Bertrand du Guesclin.
Unlike the Maid of Orleans, he is practically unknown outside his own country, yet his unconventional style of warfare produced the counter to the terrible chevauchee, so that, although he was of lowly birth du Guesclin rose to the highest office that France could bestow. The reason why du Guesclin's career is so little known outside France lies to some extent in the timing of his appearance on the military scene. While he was winning modest victories for France, his nobler, but less adaptable contemporaries were busy suffering catastrophic defeats, and the popular English chauvinism which tends to close the history books at Poitiers and reopen them at Agincourt dwells little on the years between. This chapter will perhaps make amends.
Bertrand du Guesclin was born in about the year 1320 near Dinan in Brittany. He was the eldest of ten children and apparently a bit of a handful, being boisterous to the point of brutality, his heavy features and incredible strength terrifying his younger brothers and sisters. Only the intervention of a nun, who foretold his future greatness, prevented his distraught parents from disowning him.
His adolescent years were spent, we are told, in organizing the local children in gangs to fight one another, the young Bertrand always playing the part of commander. In 1337, at the age of seventeen, he went to Rennes where a tournament was being held to honour the marriage of Charles de Blois with Jeanne de Penthievre. He rode a carthorse belonging to his father, and was met by jeers from the well-to-do young knights assembled for the joust. His father, apparently, was there in an official capacity, which begs the question of why an impoverished Breton family had been invited to a tournament.
In fact the whole incident is apocryphal, and comes from the pen of du Guesclin's first biographer, Cuvelier. His Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin is a heroic poem composed shortly after du Guesclin's death in 1380, by which time he had already become a legend in his own lifetime. Cuvelier's work is one of the last flourishes of the chanson de geste, written by a man who was effectively one of the last minstrels, an admirer both of the knight who formed his subject, and the tradition of the heroic poets of the eleventh century. The Chronique is, therefore, a dramatic hagiography, embellished by some imagination, but, according to Cuvelier, based on eyewitness accounts by du Guesclin's contemporaries.
The tournament story finishes in suitable style. After his haughty dismissal we find our hero borrowing a horse and armour from one of his cousins who is just leaving, and with a closed visor concealing his identity this unknown knight enters the lists and proceeds to win every joust set against him. After a dozen combatants are unhorsed his own father presents a challenge. To the amazement of the crowd, Bertrand declines, but continues to joust with others, until a Norman knight opens his helmet with the point of his lance, displaying the stranger's identity to the admiring crowd and a delighted father.
Coming soon in part 2 “Du Guesclin Goes To War”
