by Joseph Gies
Many years later William Marshal, as regent for young Henry III, defeated Prince Louis of France and rebel English barons at Lincoln. Roger of Wendover, in his chronicle Flowers of History, reports that William allowed his men to do much more than seize enemy horses and treasure-laden wagons:
The whole city was plundered to the last farthing, and then they proceeded to rob all the churches throughout the city, breaking open all the chests and cupboards with hatchets and hammers, and seizing gold and silver, cloth of all colors, women’s ornaments, gold rings, goblets, and precious stones. When at last they had carried off all kinds of merchandise so that nothing remained untouched in any corner of the houses, they all returned to their own lords rich men. When the peace of King Henry had been proclaimed throughout the city by all, they feasted and drank and made merry.
The Provençal poet Bertrand de Born wrote lyrically about war—its pageantry, its excitement, and its booty:
…I love to see,
Amid the meadows, tents and pavilions spread out,
And it gives me great joy to see
Drawn up on the field
Knights and horses in battle array,
And it delights me when the scouts
Scatter people and herds in their path…
Maces, swords, helms of different colors,
Shields that will be riven and shattered
When the fight begins;
Many vassals struck down together,
And the horses of the dead and wounded
Roving at random…
I tell you I find no such savor
In food, or in wine, or in sleep,
As in hearing the shout “On! On!”
From both sides, and the neighing of steeds
That have lost their riders,
And the cries of “Help! Help!”
In seeing men great and small go down
On the grass beyond the castle moat;
In seeing at last the dead,
The pennoned stumps of lances
Still in their sides.
Bertrand, who personally stirred up so much strife between great feudal lords that Dante awarded him a special place in Hell, with his head permanently severed from his body, was explicit about the material reasons for “finding no pleasure in peace”:
Why do I want
The rich to hate each other?
Because a rich man is much more
Noble, generous and affable
In war than in peace.
And again:
We are going to have some fun.
For the barons will make much of us…
If they want us to remain with them,
They will give us money.
To the soldier’s pay will be added loot:
Trumpet, drums, flags and pennons,
Standards of horses white and black—
This is what we shall shortly see.
And it will be a happy day,
For we shall seize the usurers’ goods,
And pack animals will no longer pass in safety,
Or the burgher journey without fear,
Or the merchant on his way to France,
But the man full of courage will be rich.
Addressing himself to the count of Poitiers, Bertrand offered his services: “I can help you. I have already a shield at my neck and a helm on my head…Nevertheless, how can I put myself in the field without money?”
A similarly enthusiastic attitude toward war was expressed by a Welsh chronicler describing a campaign of Prince Llywelyn in 1220 in which he stormed and razed two castles, burned the town of Haverford, and “went round Rhos and Deugleddyv in five days, making vast slaughter of the people of the country. And after making a truce…he returned home happy and joyful.”
Of all sources of knightly enrichment, the ransom of wealthy prisoners was the foremost. Following a battle in the chanson of Girart de Roussillon, Girart and his followers casually put to the sword all their penniless prisoners, but spared the “owners of castles.” Ransom of an important personage could reach astronomical figures—like the “king’s ransom” of Richard I when he was captured by Leopold of Austria and turned over to Emperor Henry VI: 150,000 marks (several million dollars in twentieth-century American currency), which had to be raised by special taxes levied in both England and Normandy, on knights, laymen, clergy, churches, monasteries. The sum could not be raised, and when Richard was freed, he had to give hostages for the remaining debt.
In France the peace established in the thirteenth century under Louis IX left many knights without a field of action. Numbers of them went to the East as members of the two Crusading orders, the Temple and the Hospital; others went to Spain and Portugal. Their intention was, of course, to fight the Saracen infidels, but it did not always work out that way. Even the Cid, epic hero of Spanish chivalry, spent considerable time in the employ of the infidels, leading expeditions for the Moorish king of Saragossa against Christian princes. For poor knights dependent on their swords for their livelihood, one employer was as good as another. Girart de Roussillon paints a sad picture of the knight when peace has come—his income cut off, and the moneylender after him. Girart and his wife, roaming the countryside, meet some merchants restored to prosperity by the peace that has ruined Girart. They find it prudent to conceal Girart’s identity, and his wife tells the merchants he is dead. “God be praised,” says one, “for he was always making war and through him we have suffered many ills.” Frustrated Girart wishes he could cut the fellow down with one blow of his good sword, but he no longer has it.
In the lean times of peace there remained one source of action and possible gain: the tournament. Historically an outgrowth of old pagan games, taken over like so many other pagan institutions by the early Middle Ages and accorded a Christian coloration, the tournament had by the thirteenth century evolved its own rules and formalities. Great lords and princes organized tournaments for their own entertainment and that of their friends, and to show off their wealth. The principal feature was a mock battle between groups of knights from different regions. Heralds were sent around the countryside to proclaim the tournament, and on the appointed day the knights donned their armor, mounted their horses, and lined up at opposite ends of a level meadow. At a flourish from a herald, the two bands of horsemen charged at each other. The field was open-ended, because when one team was defeated and sought to retreat, the other, exactly as in real war, pursued it through wood and dale to capture prisoners. When it was all over, the defeated knights had to arrange with their captors for their ransom, usually the value of horse and armor, redeemed by a money payment. William Marshal and another knight made a two-year tour of France attending tournaments, in one ten-month period capturing 103 knights and doing a profitable business in ransoms.
There were also prizes, sometimes for several categories of prowess. William Marshal once won a fish, a pike of unusual size. The knights who delivered it found William at the blacksmith’s, down on his knees, his head on the anvil, while the smith labored to release him from his helmet, which had gotten turned around backwards from a lance’s blow.
Until the latter part of the fourteenth century, there was little individual jousting. The tournament was essentially training for war, and the mass melee intentionally resembled a real battle. The combative ardor of the participants was often very akin to the spirit of genuine war, especially if knightly loyalties were enlisted. Serious and even fatal injuries were common. At one tournament William Marshal’s son Gilbert was exhibiting his skill at horsemanship when the bridle broke. Gilbert was tumbled from the saddle and, catching one foot in the stirrup, was dragged across the field and fatally injured. After the accident, the tournament degenerated into a brawl in which one of Gilbert’s retainers was killed and many knights and squires were badly wounded. A decade later a tournament near Rochester ended with English squires belaboring the defeated French knights with sticks and clubs.
The earliest English tournaments h
ad been licensed by the king, but Henry III consistently opposed them. William Marshal forbade one in Henry’s name in 1217, and thereafter the prohibitions multiplied, but they were so ineffectual that according to the monastic chronicler of the Annals of Dunstable, “tourneyers, their aiders and abettors, and those who carried merchandise or provisions to tournaments were ordered to be excommunicated, all together, regularly every Sunday.”
The tournament at which Gilbert Marshal was killed had been forbidden by the king—a fact which Henry pointed out to Walter Marshal when the latter claimed his brother’s inheritance: “And you too, Walter, who against my wish and notwithstanding my prohibition, and in contempt of me, were present at the tournament…on what grounds do you demand your inheritance?” Walter’s protests that he could not leave his brother did not soften the king’s anger, but the intercession of the bishop of Durham finally brought about a reconciliation.
Aside from the fear that the king expressed when he canceled two tournaments in 1247 between knights of his own French province of Poitou and those of his English domain (he was afraid, in the words of Matthew Paris, that “after the spears were shivered, bloody swords might flash forth”), Henry III regarded tournaments as pretexts for conspiracy by the barons. In several cases these mock wars were closely connected with baronial uprisings. On the occasion of an abortive rising at Stamford in 1229 after Henry’s coming of age, the barons involved rode off to Chepstow with William Marshal II for a tournament, only to be confronted with a writ by the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, forbidding the meeting. Seventy-three more prohibitions were recorded in the ensuing three decades. Several times knights holding tournaments had their lands seized. On one occasion the king’s brother, William de Valence, urged his knightly companions to defy the king’s order and hold a tournament, which was only prevented by a heavy fall of snow. A little later William staged the tournament and succeeded in severely wounding a fellow knight.
The Church joined Henry in its opposition, not only because of the violence of the combats and the danger of sedition. Besides such innocent auxiliary sports as wrestling, dart shooting, lance hurling, and stone throwing, the tournaments were famous for eating, drinking, and lovemaking. Jacques de Vitry, the Paris preacher renowned for the acerbity of his sermons, liked to use the tournament to illustrate all seven of the deadly sins. The Church’s strictures were not very effective. Jocelin of Brakelond records how Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds forbade a band of young knights to hold a tournament and went so far as to lock the town gates to keep them from the field. Next day, on the Feast of Peter and Paul, the young men foreswore combat and came to dine with the abbot. But after dinner, sending for more wine, they caroused, sang, ruined the abbot’s afternoon nap, and finally marched out, broke open the town gates, and held their tournament. The abbot excommunicated the lot.
In the 1250s a milder form of combat, known in England as a Round Table (named after King Arthur’s assemblies), anticipated the tournaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, replacing the mass melee with adversaries in single combat with blunted weapons. Such meetings were usually preceded by feasting and games. But even the Round Tables could be lethal. In 1252 Matthew Paris recorded the death of Arnold de Montigny in a joust with Roger de Lemburn, which brought suspicion of murder because the iron point of Roger’s lance, when drawn from the dead man’s throat, was found not to have been blunted as it should have been. Further, Roger had previously wounded Arnold in a tournament. Matthew concluded, “But God only knows the truth of this, who alone searches into the secrets of men’s hearts.”
At another Round Table in 1256, held at Blyth, the seventeen-year-old Prince Edward fought in armor of linen cloth and with light weapons; but the meeting, like the mass melees, ended in turmoil, with the participants beaten and trampled on. According to Matthew Paris, a number of nobles, including Earl Marshal Roger Bigod of Chepstow, “never afterwards recovered their health.” Prince Edward, as Edward I, sought to regulate rather than ban tournaments and Round Tables. His statute of 1267 aimed at preventing riots by limiting the number of squires and specifying the weapons carried by knights, squires, grooms, footmen, heralds, and spectators. At Edward’s own royal tourneys, there were no casualties.
In France the melee gave way to the joust even earlier. Tournaments of the later type are depicted by the authors of the romances as brave and colorful pageants. In the Castellan of Coucy, the heralds appeared at an early hour to awaken the many guests who had arrived at the castle:
Mass sung and the ladies installed in the pavilions, the jousts began without delay. The first was between the Duke of Limbourg and a bachelor named Gautier de Soul, who broke three lances apiece without losing the stirrups…The seventh was one of the most powerful shows of arms and the most pleasant to see: the first champion wore a sleeve [a token of his lady] on his right arm, and when he went to his station, the heralds cried, “Coucy, Coucy, the brave man, the valiant bachelor, the Castellan of Coucy!” Against him appeared successively Gaucher of Chatillon and Count Louis of Blois…Two more jousts took place; then night fell and the assembly separated to La Fère and Vendeuil…The next day the jousts continued [until] only three knights were left, the others all being wounded…At the first pass the Castellan knocked down his adversary’s helmet into the dust, and blood ran from his mouth and nose…On the third try both men were disarmed and fell unconscious to the ground. Valets, sergeants and squires laid them on their shields and carried them from the field…But it was only, thank God, a passing unconsciousness; neither man was dead. Everyone thanked God and the saints.
Then the Sire de Coucy invited the knights and ladies to dine…More than twenty tents were set up between the Oise and the forest, in fields full of flowers. The Sire de Coucy and all the Vermandois were dressed in green samite studded with golden eagles; they came to the tents leading by the finger the ladies of their country. The men of Hainaut and their ladies were dressed in gold embroidered with black lions; they arrived singing, two by two. The Champenois, the Burgundians, the men of Berri, were also in uniform, scarlet samite decorated with golden leopards.
The tournament gave an impetus to one of the best-known traditions of feudalism and knighthood—the art of heraldry, which took its name from the fact that tournament heralds became experts in the design of heraldic devices. Symbols on banners and shields to distinguish leaders in the melee of a feudal battle were common as early as the eleventh century. The Bayeux Tapestry shows such devices for both Harold and William. In the twelfth century the custom grew of passing on the device from father to son, like the shield with the golden lions which Geoffrey of Anjou received at his knighting from his father-in-law, Henry I, an emblem inherited by Geoffrey’s grandson William Longespée, earl of Salisbury. Another early device was that of the Clare family, lords of Chepstow; in about 1140 Gilbert de Clare adopted three chevrons, similar to those later used in military insignia. The Clare arms appeared on the lord’s shield, and probably flew from Chepstow to signal the owner’s presence in his castle. Crests, in the form of three-dimensional figures—a boar, a lion, a hawk—were added to the helmet as early as the end of the twelfth century.
In the thirteenth century, the functional value of the heraldic device, or coat of arms, as it came to be called from its use on surcoats, was strongly reinforced as chivalric ideology became popular and affluence encouraged the decorative arts. Even more important was its character as a badge of nobility, visually setting its owner apart from the common people (although wealthy townsmen continued to acquire knightly status and coats of arms to authenticate it). From art, heraldry progressed to become a science, with its own rigid rules and its own jargon. Shields could be partitioned into segments only in certain specified ways, such as tierced in fesse (divided into three horizontally) or in saltire (cut into four portions by a diagonal cross). Dragons, lions, leopards, eagles, fish, and many other animals, including mythological ones, were used, besides stars, moons, trees, bushes, flowers, and
other objects both natural and man-made. The addition of a motto came into fashion, like the French kings’ Montjoye, the rallying cry and standard of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland. All the elements of the arms—crest, helmet, shield, and motto—were finally assembled in a standardized form of heraldic device.
A custom of English nobles that may date to the thirteenth century, that of hanging their heraldic banners outside inns where they were staying, led to the inn sign of later times: the White Hart from the badge of Richard II, the Swan from that of the earls of Hereford, the Rose and Crown from the badge of England.
In the thirteenth century the institution of knighthood, closely related to the life of the castle, was perhaps at its zenith. Already, in fact, signs of decadence were evident in the growing sophistication of attitudes. The Chanson de Roland, written at about the time of the First Crusade, and in which the word “chivalrous” makes its first appearance, breathes a spirit of rugged Christian naiveté. Roland brings disaster on Charlemagne’s rear guard by refusing to sound his horn and let Charlemagne know the Saracens are attacking, because to call for help would be cowardly. “Better death than dishonor,” is Roland’s view. His strategy is simple: “Strike with your lance,” he tells Oliver, “and I will smite with Durendal, my good sword which the emperor gave me. If I die, he who shall inherit it will say: it was the sword of a noble vassal.” Durendal contains in its hilt, among other sacred relics, a scrap of the Virgin’s garment. After a terrific battle in which Saracens are cut down in windrows while the French knights drop one by one, the dying Roland is left alone on the corpse-strewn field, his last thoughts of his two lords. Charlemagne and God, to whom he holds his glove aloft as he expires.