Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

by Alan Ereira

  In one of these, Yvain, there is a description of a set-to between two knights:

  Never were there two knights so intent upon each other’s death . . . they drive the sword-point at the face . . . both are possessed of such courage that one would not for aught retreat afoot before his adversary until he had wounded him to death.

  But the tale stresses that this was honourable, elegant murderous violence:

  They were very honourable in not trying or deigning to strike or harm their steeds in any way; but they sat astride their steeds without putting foot to earth, which made the fight more elegant. At last my lord Yvain crushed the helmet of the knight . . . Beneath his kerchief his head was split to the very brains.

  Elegant indeed.

  Knights saw chivalry in terms of fighting, gaining honour and getting rich. But there were others who were trying to define the concept of chivalry in their own interests.

  THE CHURCH’S CHIVALRY

  There was obviously a bit of a contradiction between the demands of Christianity and a knight’s job – which was based on professional killing. Meekness, turning the other cheek, regarding killing as a sin, weren’t really subjects that were taken very seriously at knight school. This was a problem at the very heart of feudal life.

  At first the Church had seen its role as one of simple restraint. In 1023 it declared it would not give warriors its protection if they fought during Lent. In 1027 a council at Toulouges, in south-west France, imposed a general truce on Sundays. Soon the Truce of God was extended to run from Thursday morning to Monday morning. Then the Church added the more important saint’s days and Advent to its list. And at a church council in Narbonne in 1054 it was declared that ‘no Christian should kill another Christian, for whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ’.

  William the Conqueror had invaded England with the blessing of the Pope, and flying a Papal banner, but was obliged to do penance for the sin of killing people at the Battle of Hastings.

  For knights, this raised the obvious question: ‘Well, given that killing is what we do, who should we be killing, then?’

  The Church had the sensible idea of diverting their energies. In 1095, Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade and reversed centuries of Christian doctrine by announcing that it was fine for violent young men to butcher people, so long as the victims were folk of whom the Church disapproved (more specifically, those of whom the pope disapproved). Hitherto knights had had to do penance for those whom they killed in battle. But crusading was now defined as a penance in itself: a knight could save his soul by slaughter.

  Crusaders, the supposed defenders of pilgrims, scourge of the heathen Saracens, were the Church’s own warriors. In this context the Christian knight needed to show very little restraint, and all over Europe warriors committed themselves to crusading with enthusiasm. They flocked to the cause, and at the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 they were able to boast of wading in ‘infidel’ blood up to their knees. It is true that there were limits to the permissible violence, even on crusade, but these were at the outer limits of savagery – some knights who took part in the First Crusade did have to seek papal forgiveness for eating the bodies of their enemies. It was granted.

  Christian chivalry – fighting at the behest of the Church – became a system of sanctified slaughter. The pope’s enemies, after all, were not restricted to Muslims in faraway lands. Popes had enemies all over the place, and they were prepared to hurl crusades against them whenever this looked like a practical proposition.

  When Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the ‘heretics’ of the Languedoc in 1208 he handed out their lands to men from northern France; all they had to do was take them. Simon de Montfort was granted control of the area encompassing Carcassonne, Albi and Béziers, and set about slaughtering its inhabitants. He and his troops butchered around 18,000 people in Béziers without a second thought. When soldiers asked the pope’s representative at the slaughter whether they should separate believers from heretics he told them not to bother: when the souls of the slaughtered came to be judged, ‘God will know his own’.

  Christian chivalry was not particularly lovely but it was the Church’s attempt to harness the destructive power of knight-hood, to advance its own ends and at the same time introduce a more benign code of behaviour amongst the warrior class.

  In 1276, the Catalan knight-turned-ecclesiastic-and-philosopher, Ramon Lull, laid down some ethical guidelines for knights in his Book on the Order of Chivalry. It’s a curious list.

  The first duty of the proper chivalric knight, according to Lull, is to defend ‘the Holy Catholic Faith’. His second is to maintain and defend his temporal lord. His third duty (more surprisingly) is to go hunting, give lavish dinners and fight in tournaments: ‘Knights ought to take horses to joust and to go tourneying, to hold open table and to hunt at harts, at bores and other wild beasts.’*2

  Rather more ominously, the knight’s fourth duty, according to Lull, is to scare the peasantry into working the land: ‘For because of the dread that the common people have of the knights, they labour and cultivate the earth, for fear lest they be destroyed.’ Slightly contrarily, his next duty is to defend ‘women, widows and orphans and diseased men and the weak’ and ‘those that labour the land’. He should found cities and punish thieves and robbers, and should avoid swearing . . .

  For Lull, even the knight’s equipment was full of religious significance. The sword is made in the semblance of the cross to signify that ‘our lord vanquished death upon the cross’. The spear is truth, the helmet is the dread of shame, the coat of mail represents his defence against vice. His leg harness is to keep his feet on the straight and narrow, his spurs signify diligence and swiftness. The gorget that protects his throat represents obedience, the mace: strength, the dagger: trust in God, and so on and so forth.

  The Church provided knights with a religious vocabulary for violence and, at the same time, imported knightly terms into its own usage: ‘Soldiers of Christ’ could mean either knights or monks.

  It also did its best to take over the ceremonies of knighthood – in particular, the ritual involved in dubbing a knight. A fourteenth-century book describing the ceremonies to be performed by a bishop records the form the Church would have liked this to take. The would-be knight is bathed in rose water on the eve of his knighthood. He spends the night in vigil in a church and hears Mass the next morning. The priest then gives him the collée (the light blow on the shoulder that ‘dubs’ him knight). The only role allowed the laity in all this is that a nobleman gives the knight his spurs.

  But in general this was wishful thinking on the part of the Church – how it would have liked to run things. The ceremony of dubbing a knight remained predominantly non-religious. Lords were not going to give up the power of creating their own followers, and dubbing remained a secular event with enough sacerdotal overtones to provide religious legitimatization – but not enough to allow for priestly control.

  In the long run, knights took from the Church what they needed to justify themselves and their way of life, without letting the Church take over in the way it would have liked.

  ROYAL CHIVALRY

  Royalty also wanted to control chivalry. Kings and princes naturally wanted to harness the aggressive instincts of knights to further their own interests. If the Church encouraged these men to wrap their violent way of life in robes of piety, the king provided them with robes of an altogether more tangible variety.

  The Arthurian fantasy that was acted out at Le Hem (as interval entertainment between jousts) was a deliberate response to the revival of an Arthurian cult at the court of Edward I – it had been expected that the English king and some of his knights would attend, but they failed to show up. In the account of what happened, the Lady of Courtesy specifically associated the heroes of Camelot with English knights, and with King Edward.*3

  Romantic fantasy was a useful way of ensuring men’s allegiance. Once the Norman helmet (an
iron hat with a nose covering) had given way to one that covered the full face, knighthood could easily be turned into a dressing-up game, and royalty played on that.

  Nowadays we recognize famous people by their faces because we have seen countless pictures of them. But back in the Middle Ages you would not know what anyone looked like unless you had met them. Most people living in the twelfth century would have had as little idea of what Richard the Lionheart looked like as we have now. They would have had even less idea when his head was inside a bucket with eye-slits.

  So the rich and famous needed a way of announcing who they were. That is why they had coats of arms.

  Going into battle with your coat of arms emblazoned on your shield, your surcoat and your horse cloth, and with a crest on your helmet that would identify you in the thick of the fighting, was a kind of dare. A well-marked knight was fighting for his family honour as well for his own life: if he ran away everyone would know. But the fact that he could be recognized was also a potential life-saver. His coat of arms and equipment signalled that he was wealthy and therefore worth keeping alive in order to be held hostage.

  One mercenary captain took this to its logical extreme. It’s said that Sir Robert Knolles used to ride into battle with an inscription on his helmet that read: ‘Whoever captures Sir Robert Knolles will gain 100,000 moutons.’ (The mouton d’or was a gold coin worth one-third of a pound of silver.)

  But coats of arms and other heraldic symbols also had a ceremonial side, and lent themselves to pageantry at tournaments. Arthurian themes, fictitious but well known from the romances of the time, provided a wonderful way of identifying chivalric valour with loyalty to the king, and the English Crown latched on to this with enthusiasm.

  St George’s Chapel, in Windsor, is the physical architecture of Chivalry. This magnificent Gothic building is hung with the banners of the knights of the Order of the Garter. This is the highest order of Chivalry in England, a reincarnation of knights of the Round Table, dedicated to St George the dragon slayer. The Order of the Garter is a true medieval chivalric invention.

  The top of a ‘Round Table’, supposedly Arthur’s, had hung in Windsor Castle since the time of Edward I – it now hangs in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle. It seems that Edward III had a new version constructed, and built the Round Tower at Windsor to house it. In 1344 he held a tournament after which the knights feasted around the table, the first of a series of Round Table gatherings in the castle. Between October 1347 and the end of 1348, following military successes in the Hundred Years War with France, Edward held a further series of tournaments, and in June 1348 the first ceremony of the Order of the Garter was held at Windsor. The castle was to be the new Camelot.

  On 10 August 1348, while the Black Death ravaged England, the 26 founder knights, including Edward III and his son the Black Prince, filed into St George’s Chapel in pairs for their first investiture. The lines parted as they sat themselves opposite each other, the king and 12 knights on one side and the prince and 12 knights on the other. They faced each other as two opposing tournament teams, the very soul of Christian chivalry at the royal court.

  This was chivalry as pure pageantry. Nowhere in the code of the Order of the Garter was there anything about protecting the weak or vulnerable.

  In 1356, after the Battle of Poitiers, the Black Prince hosted a banquet of his own. He was 26 years old. The guest of honour was his most important prisoner, the King of France. Jean Froissart, a contemporary chronicler, described the scene:

  The same day of the battle at night the prince made a supper in his lodging to the French king and to the most part of the great lords that were prisoners . . . the prince served before the king as humbly as he could, and would not sit at the king’s board for any desire that the king could make, but he said he was not sufficient to sit at the table with so great a prince as the king was. But then he said to the king: . . . ‘sir, methinks ye ought to rejoice, though the day be not as ye would have had it, for this day ye have won the high renown of prowess and have passed this day in valiantness all other of your party. Sir, I say not this to mock you, for all that be on our party, that saw every man’s deeds, are plainly accorded by true sentence to give you the prize.’*4

  The Chronicles of Froissart

  That was royal chivalry in action – the honour due to a man was related to his rank. Fourteen years later, at Limoges, the Black Prince provided an object lesson in what that meant.

  LIMOGES

  In 1370, Limoges was a border town, on the uncertain frontier between the King of England’s possessions and the lands of the King of France. It was an old town, with Roman roots; its bridge was ancient, but its cathedral was new, a tribute to the town’s wealth. That wealth was based on the secret skills of its artisans, who produced fabulous enamelled objects that could not be imitated anywhere else in the world.

  Enamel is a thin layer of coloured glass that has been melted and fused on to a metal surface. Normally, small enamel panels were surrounded by copper wire to prevent the golds, deep blues, rich reds and profound greens from running into each other, and to hold each piece of enamel in place as the underlying metal expanded and contracted. Otherwise, as the piece warmed and cooled over the course of a day, the enamel would simply fall off. But in Limoges, uniquely, artisans had discovered how to produce enamel that expanded at the same rate as copper, and could butt different enamels against each other. This produced work of astonishing clarity and detail. The enamels were enormously prized throughout Europe, and small enamelled Limoges coffers were precisely the equivalent of the Fabergé Easter eggs that later delighted nineteenth-century Europe.

  The enamel works were factories that employed a dozen or more experts in a range of highly skilled crafts. Each one was the home of the rather wealthy family who directed and controlled the work. It was also, of course, a showroom and shop. This part of the building was impressive and elegant as customers for Limoges enamels came from all over Europe, and were themselves wealthy connoisseurs. The works were in vigorous competition with each other and, although most pieces were unsigned, those in the know would have had little problem identifying the work of individual masters.

  The factories were down by the river Charente as its strongly acid water was used to purify the coloured glass before it was laid in place for fusing. They were sheltered within a strong city wall and the town citadel towered over them.

  LIMOGES UNDER SIEGE

  The English territory of Aquitaine expanded and contracted with the changing fortunes of war. In 1369, the French king, Charles V, announced that he was confiscating it. When his forces reached Limoges and besieged it, its bishop decided it was clear which way the wind was blowing and surrendered. The Black Prince, the ruler of Aquitaine, was enraged. He marched to Limoges bent on revenge, and arrived outside its walls with 1200 knights, squires and men carrying long lances, 1000 archers and 1000 foot soldiers.

  The prince was not a man to mess with. He was now 40 years old, and was one of the most experienced and capable warriors in Europe. His father had knighted him when he was 15, just before the Battle of Crécy and, according to legend, he had dressed in black armour for the battle. This seems to be why he was known as the Black Prince. He had spent his time since then engaged in war in France on King Edward’s behalf, devoting himself in the few years of peace to the war-sport of tournament.

  The prince was a sick man, who had to travel in a litter, but he still knew how to conduct a war. The bishop of Limoges, pressed by the frightened businessmen of the town, realized he had made a serious mistake in surrendering, but control was no longer in his hands. Limoges was now ruled by Charles’s men, from the citadel.

  Sir John de Villemur, Sir Hugo de la Roche and Roger de Beaufort, who commanded in it, did all they could to comfort them by saying, ‘Gentlemen, do not be alarmed: we are sufficiently strong to hold out against the army of the prince: he cannot take us by assault, nor greatly hurt us, for we are well supplied with artillery.
’ (Froissart)

  The siege was a pretty thing, seen from a distance. The besieging army, with its coloured tents and attractive banners, was commanded by knights in literally shining armour, astride horses caparisoned in the heraldic symbols of their riders. With nothing to do all day except wait, the knights spent their time practising their skills, engaging in play-fights or happily plundering and burning the farms that dotted the charming Limousin countryside.

  The white stone walls of the town and citadel were topped with wooden roofs, from which fluttered the pennants of the defending knights. This attractive scene was unspoiled by the smallest taint of blood, because the real struggle was being fought underground. The Black Prince had a team of miners digging under the city walls. Eventually they were ready and, setting the mines on fire, they brought a large part of the walls crashing down. In a few minutes, Limoges was wide open.

  THE CHIVALRIC LEADERS OF LIMOGES

  The three commanders of the citadel realized that the game was over and there followed a series of scenes that epitomize the very essence of late fourteenth-century chivalry. Knowing they were about to engage in a famous battle, their first concern was that only two of them had actually been dubbed knights. Sir John de Villemur immediately proposed that they should knight Roger de Beaufort (who was a mere gentleman). He replied, ‘Sir, I have not as yet distinguished myself sufficiently for that honour, but I thank you for your good opinion in suggesting it to me.’

  There was no time to continue this elegant discussion, as it was time to fight.

  What mattered to Froissart, the chronicler of these scenes, was how the three principal characters acquitted themselves in single combat against suitable opponents under the rules of chivalry:

  The Duke of Lancaster was engaged for a long time with Sir John de Villemur, who was a hardy knight, strong and well made. The Earl of Cambridge singled out Sir Hugo de la Roche, and the Earl of Pembroke Roger de Beaufort, who was but a simple esquire. These three Frenchmen did many valorous deeds of arms, as all allowed, and ill did it betide those who approached too near.