by Jack Lindsay
In criminal cases they acted as coroners with manifold duties. From the late twelfth century they were given policing duties. A sheriff might commit a prisoner to their custody; they inspected the scene of a crime or a victim’s wounds, which they measured. In trial by battle they kept the ring, acted as seconds, and made records of the fight. Such work had its hazards. They could be fined for wrong pleading or making a bad record of a case before a higher court; if convicted of giving a wrong verdict as jurors or taking a false oath in an assize, they could lose their chattels or spend at least a year in jail. Further, their powers were limited. Some knights astutely followed a band of robbers by noting their horses’ hoofmarks (one horse was unshod on the hind feet); but when they came up, they had to wait for the king’s sergeant, who arrived too late. However, they liked the sense of importance that their duties gave him. Richard Revel, a Somersetshire knight, told the court of his gentilitas, and how he, his father, and his brothers were naturales homines et gentiles de patria.[410]
We know of Revel because of a case going back to 1166 when the abbot of Muchelney enfeoffed him to carry out half the service of a single knight, with a woman for the other half. In 1206 in a Scottish campaign the two tenants failed to provide the service; the abbot was fined a hundred marks and he took proceedings against the defaulting pair; Revel pleaded that he had been ill (he died three years later); the woman (not the same as the one of 1166) had to make good the abbot’s loss and was fined half a mark.
Many factors came together to turn the knight into a noble figure, so that by the early thirteenth century men of noble birth were pleased to define themselves as knight, miles, in documents. Only the rich could afford the arms. Further the Crusades and the advent of the military religious orders, the growth of an idealizing courtly literature, all helped to raise the knightly status and hand it over to the wellborn. ‘Richard de Lucy was well aware of the higher status of those called knights in the later twelfth century, and was contemptuous of those who were not. “It was not the custom in the old days,” he said, “for every petty knight (militulum) you care to name to have a seal.” By the thirteenth century the word knight did not denote a military function; it had become a title with attendant civil duties’ (Harvey).[411]
Two texts from the later twelfth century will show how the chivalric ideal was still proclaimed, and how strongly men felt the failure of the military knight to live up to these ideals. The first passage is from the Policraticus of John of Salisbury; the second from a letter of Peter of Blois to John the archdeacon:
(1) But what is the function of orderly knighthood? To protect the church, to fight against treachery, to reverence the priesthood, to fend off injustice from the poor, to make peace in your own province, to shed your blood for your brethren, and, if needs must, to lay down your life.
(2) I cannot bear the vaunting and vainglory of the knights your nephews...The Order of Knighthood, in these days of ours, is mere disorder. For he whose mouths are defiled with the foulest words, whose oaths are most detestable, who least fears God, who vilifies God’s ministers, who does not fear the church: that man nowadays is reputed bravest and most renowned of the knightly bans...The knights of old were used to bind themselves by an oath to maintain the state, never to flee in battle, and to set the commonweal before their own life. No, even nowadays aspirants receive their swords from the altar so that they may profess themselves sons of the church, acknowledging that they’ve received their weapons for the honour of the priesthood, the defence of the poor, the avenging of wrongs and the freedom of their country. Yet in practice they do the contrary...
These men, who should have used their strength against the enemies of the cross of Christ, contend in wassail and drunkenness. They stagnate in sluggardy and rot in riotous living. Dragging through their degenerate lives in uncleanness, they dishonour the name and order of knighthood...If these knights of ours are sometimes constrained to take the field, then their sumpter-beasts are laden, not with steel but with wine, not with spears but with cheeses, not with swords but with wineskins, not with javelins but with spits. You’d think they were on their way to a feast, not to fight. They bear shields bright with beaten gold, as who should hope for prey rather than for hard fighting; and in truth these same shields (if I may say so) come back intact in their virginity. Still, they embroider their saddles and blazon their shields with scenes of battle and tourney, delighting in a certain imagination of those wars which in very deed they dare not mingle in or behold.[412]
There was no period when the chivalric ideal was lived up to; but when men so clearly felt the hopeless gap between the ideal and the practice, the system in question must have been badly in decay.
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One aspect of the decay of knighthood was the advent of the tournament, a mixture of play-fantasy and hard-headed money making. Devised in France, it appeared in England under Stephen when, in the general disorder, knights were spurred on by boredom and excitement to fight among themselves. Thus, in 1139, the company which Stephen had left to invest Ludlow castle grew ‘so arrogantly active that they couldn’t keep off fighting for a moment’, and arranged a tournament, which drew in a small host of knights. The knights at such gatherings galloped about wildly for days in open fields with no rules; but already we find jousts, with lists, before the Mêlée. Richard I legalized tournaments to raise money and help in training. But the areas where tournaments flourished were France, Flanders, Burgundy and Champagne. Good money could be made by a champion. William the Marshall and his comrade Roger de Gaugi spent two years from 1177 fighting and captured 102 knights within ten months. Henry II whose son Geoffrey was killed thus in France, forbade tournaments; but Edward I, another son and a keen fighter, approved rules which were made statutory in 1294.
The popes objected in vain. In 1179 Alexander III declared that men killed in tournament must be forbidden Christian burial. Celestine III forbade tournaments on the grounds that young men could get better training for war by fighting infidels on crusades. The development of elaborate formal devices on helmet and shield was linked with jousting. Gradually the sport grew less violent, and blunted spears were used. The joust entered into romances as a chivalric activity linked with the devoted love of a lady. The earlier aspects appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia where Arthur jousts with Frollo and in a three-days tournament at his court the knights ‘contrive cavalry games in mimicry of war’. The full fantasy appears in the thirteenth century Fulk fitzWarin where ‘all valiant knights who wished to tourney pur amurs’ were exhorted to turn up and gain as prize a lady’s hand and love. In general the tournament belonged to the period when the knighthood was decaying and the past being glamourized.[413]
This decay can be illustrated from records of the numbers of knights in action in the thirteenth century. In 1230, when Henry III made his main effort in Poitou, he had only some 400 knights with him; and in 1242 he had about the same number. Again in 1265 some 400 knights seem the limit for any campaign. Under Edward I the cavalry consisted at most of one to two thousand lances, and two thirds of these were troopers: servientes, sergeants. In the first Welsh war there were only 228 knights and barons with 294 troopers. In November 1295, when there was fear of invasion, a coastguard in Essex was organized, made up of all the knights in the county; they number 101, of whom 11 were impotens (old or ill) and 66 held land in Essex but did not live there; only 24, fit to fight, were left. When under Edward II knights of the shire were sent to Parliament, half of them turned out not to be knights at all. Earlier, under John, cases in the shire courts at times had to be adjourned as too few knights were present and they could not agree. Though these figures do not give the numbers of men constituting the knightly class, they are significant of what was happening to that class.[414]
As the original class of knights thus decayed or changed in character, the idealization of the knightly role matured, largely the work of the princely courts. There numbers of young people, juvenes both lay and cleric,
were gathered in the ruler’s entourage; and this group ‘was the focal point of rivalry and emulation. The concept of the prize to be gained in military or oratorical competition is fundamental here; and the types of perfection whose characteristics were determined by this emulation were natural points of reference which had to be accepted by all’ (Duby). In these competitions not only was the ideal of each type developed and defined, but also the theme of contrasts or rivalries between the two, perfect knight and perfect clerk, was worked out. Each ideal was thus strengthened and clarified; and by the late twelfth century a major theme in the games played in the lady’s quarters was which man, clerk or knight, was the better one to love.
Already in the eleventh century courts the concept of holiness was taking in elements of heroism, and heroism claiming some elements of holiness. One ideal affected the other. After 1100 the old type of monastic ideal was losing its central force; the avantgarde cleric had to show intellectual expertise as well as skill in prayer. Abelard is the supreme example, seeing himself as a knight of the spirit, his quests in philosophy like conquests of a new land; he opposed his masters in the same challenging way that young knights opposed the established seniores who stood in the way of their reputation; he was a great, if necessarily tragic, lover. The knights themselves now tended to become litterati. The ideas, ideals, and images thus developed in the courts were diffused into all levels of the upper classes, and reached out into the wider world beyond, finally influencing medieval society as a whole. They merged in an extended expression in the final stages of the Arthurian material.
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So far we have been looking at Anglo-Norman society mainly from the angle of military tenures and of the knight’s changing social status. Now we must consider the way in which the army functioned, and the role of the castle. No force in the Middle Ages was actually called the feudal army, exercitus feudale; the term used was simply exercitus or some such general word. Often an army was named after some particular campaign for which it was raised, e.g. the army of Poitou or of Ireland. There was no standing army: the only forces summoned for a particular occasion and made up of the soldiers available at the time. In general, however, what we may call the feudal army consisted of the tenants-in-chief with all the knights in their quotas, household or enfeoffed, but vacancies were filled with mercenaries in varying numbers. Besides knights there were men holding sergeantry tenures: footsoldiers, archers, light horsemen and the like. Inferior to knights, sergeants do not seem to have been included in the quota system, though sergeantry was a tenure of the same general kind as the other fees. They did not fight in a separate host, but went alongside the knights and were responsible for auxiliary services. In later times a mounted sergeant was valued as half a knight. As for the masses of unfree status, they seem to have lacked any military standing.
Knightly duties lay mainly in the host or in castle guard, though a third duty might be added, chevalchia or equitation. Only the heads of feudal hierarchies could summon the host, but lesser lords might call a body of men together for some specific local purpose; chevalchia seems roughly to cover this right and obligation. It was less commonly used in England where there were no private wars; but in the absence of a royal summons a lord might call his vassals up for peaceful activities such as escort. The king, too, might ask chevalchia of his vassals for some minor expedition or perhaps for a formal tour of the countryside.
The king called up the host by means of a writ to the sheriffs, to the tenants-in-chief. The knights were expected to be properly trained and equipped. The commanders might be earls, sheriffs, bishops, abbots, leading barons, members of the king’s familia, foreign princes or mercenary chiefs. Knights tended to fight under their own lords; the units, varying in size, were combined under a man chosen for military skill as well as social rank. The later twelfth century saw units called constabulariae of five hundred men; but we must not antedate such forms. Constable was a term used in the Middle Ages for anyone in a position to command men: from the village constable of thirteenth century peace ordinances to the Constable of England, one of the highest royal household officers, from a ship’s captain to commanders of castle garrisons — this last an early use.
Service had been for forty days in Normandy and two months in England; William seems naturally to have preferred the longer term. A record of 1130 speaks of two months in wartime and forty days in time of peace, ‘as the knights of barons ought reasonably to do’.[415] Perhaps the forty days were used for training. Henry of Huntingdon, dealing with the Battle of the Standard of 1138, contrasted the inexperienced Scottish warriors with the Anglo-Norman knights whose skill was born of many exercises in times of peace. It seems that under Stephen the wartime period also was reduced to forty days, which approximated to the standard duty of the shire infantry in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But in prolonged campaigns disputes could arise. Perhaps the kings avoided too precise a statement of lengths of service; there may have been a duty, explicit or implicit, to continue fighting in an emergency. Later we find long campaigns but also, it seems, reductions of quotas. But such quotas might be used even when there was no threat of long service; a third was called up in 1157 and 1191. Bargains between individual barons and royal officials show the proportion of the full service that might be accepted; a full quota seems unusual, and never summoned for service overseas.
The idea of a geographical limitation to service was found in every feudal state; hence the tendency to fall back on mercenaries for all long, difficult, or distant campaigns. England also had the problem of transport over the sea. The Norman kings seem often to have used the select fyrd for expeditions across the Channel — though on the continent the feudal host of Normandy could be used.[416]
Little is known of the sergeants in Anglo-Norman times. They covered almost every possible service from holding the king’s head when he crossed the Channel (apparently to help in sea-sickness) to finding him three arrows at a hunt on Dartmoor. Henry II enfeoffed his servant Boscher with a manor in Warwickshire that had a mill and appurtenances with £5 a year; Boscher had to keep a white hound with red ears and deliver it to the king at the end of the year, then he got another puppy to rear. Under Henry I a larderer, as well as doing larder service, had to keep prisoners caught for offences in the nearby forest of Galtres, guard the king’s corn measures, and make distraints at York for debts due to the king, then selling the chattels he took. He was also said to be Alderman of the Minstrels. He got 4d for every distraint as well as 5d a day, and in addition:
on Saturday for every window of bakers selling bread a loaf or a halfpenny; of every alewife a gallon of beer or a halfpenny; for every butcher’s window a pennorth of meat or a penny; of every cartload of fish at the bridge over the Foss 4d worth of fish, for which they paid 4d at the price paid at the water’s edge; similarly of every horse-load of fish 1d worth of fish, for which they paid.[417]
One difficulty is that while every military sergeant may have been a serviens, certainly every serviens was not a military sergeant; and the translation of serviens in all documents as sergeant has brought about an inflated notion of the influence of sergeant tenures in medieval armies. There is in fact no precise term for sergeant, as distinct from sergeantry tenure. The earliest known such tenure appears in a charter of about 1082 from Maine, in which, in return for the fee of Mont-Greffier, a pantler is to serve for a month in England or Normandy with one horse, provide the Paschal candle, and be the champion of the granting chapter at Le Mans; the charter was given by order of William I. Mounted sergeants appear again in a charter of Henry I (or II) granting Wilton (Herefordshire) to Hugh de Longchamps for the service of two light horsemen in the Welsh wars. Indeed sergeant tenures are often associated with garrison work in the Welsh marches or in castles such as Porchester; and the information as to the military roles of sergeants in the Pipe Rolls (especially of 1173-4) probably also reflects earlier practices. But by the thirteenth century sergeantry tenures covered all free
tenants not holding by knight-service, frankalmoign or socage. Perhaps they were an invention of royal officials of the later twelfth century, who wanted a category into which to put a large assortment of older services. The precedents seem continental; yet some sergeantry tenures show a link with Anglo-Saxon days; a sergeantry tenant at times led the popular militia or great fyrd of a district. Cornage, a tenure of Anglo-Saxon origin, which involved service in the vanguard of a royal military expedition (into Scotland and Cornwall) and in the rearguard on its return, persisted into the thirteenth century and is later identified with sergeantry tenure.[418] Indeed sergeants were obliged to serve only on war expeditions led by the king.