Another case was fought out at Valenciennes in 1455 and brought out of obscurity by Huizinga who uses the contemporary Burgundian chronicler Chastellain as his source.27 This time the adversaries were burghers, the plaintiff Jacotin Plouvier and the defendant Mahuot. Both had their heads shaved and both were sewn up in cordwain dresses of a single piece that did not provide a hold. Both were accompanied into the arena by their fencing masters, and the chronicler notes that both were very pale. Both saluted the old duke, Philip the Good, who had insisted on being present. Servants came up and smeared them with grease. They rubbed their hands with ashes and took sugar in their mouths. Armed with staffs and bucklers, which were painted with the images of saints, they went for each other. Mahuot, the smaller man, used his buckler to throw sand in Plouvier’s face. Plouvier seized him, filled his eyes and mouth with sand, and thrust his thumb into Mahuot’s eye to make him let go one of his fingers which the latter was biting. Next Plouvier twisted Mahuot’s arms, jumped on his back, and tried to break it. Mahuot appealed to the duke for mercy; though some pages are missing from the manuscript at this point, his cries do not seem to have availed him since he ended up half dead and in the hands of the executioner.
By this time, the middle years of the fifteenth century, the custom of trial by combat had already been in existence for over nine hundred years – counting from Gundobald’s decree, which formalized it but almost certainly did not mark its beginning. Throughout that period it had met with opposition. As early as 713–35 the Lombard chieftain Liutprand tried to limit it: possibly this reflected the fact that northern Italy was already beginning to draw ahead of the rest of Europe, that literacy was spreading, and that other methods of proof were becoming available.28 In England attempts to do so started during the twelfth century under Henry I (reigned 1100–35). While leaving criminal justice alone, the king ordained that in civil cases combat would be limited to disputes with a value of ten shillings or more. Later, during the thirteenth century, it became established that parties to a civil dispute who were challenged to a duel might decline and entrust the matter to a jury made up of his neighbors.29 Throughout the later Middle Ages the kind of crime or dispute for which trial by combat was available kept being restricted. After 1250 or so criminals caught red-handed – “mainour,” to use the pidgin French expression that was current at the time – were denied the right to fight. A hundred years later Scottish law still allowed them to do so, but only in case of capital offenses secretly or treacherously committed.
As one would expect, many objections came from the church. Some of the earliest on record were voiced by Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, probably at some time between AD 800 and 840.30 Still the church’s opposition was not always as strong or consistent as the written protests of some ecclesiastics would suggest. Most clergymen understandably made use of their right to exemption. Some, however, preferred to hire champions, and there were even occasions when they fought in person. To mention a few episodes only, in 1165 Pope Alexander III ruled that a priest who had lost part of a finger in a duel should not be disqualified but could continue to celebrate mass. Though individuals might express their scruples, there was seldom any problem finding a priest who would administer oaths before the fight started and grant a participant absolution after it was over. Cases are even known when trial by combat was used to settle points of Christian doctrine. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 denounced the custom, to little effect. In 1251 we find the Abbot of Meaux, east of Paris, hiring no fewer than seven champions, presumably in an effort to prevent them from serving his enemies.31 As late as 1404 Pope Innocent VII was requested to adjudicate in a duel between two kings, an offer he graciously declined. Throughout the combat between Plouvier and Mahuot the church bells kept ringing.
Another factor working against judicial combat was the revival of Roman law which began during the twelfth century. This particular opposition centered in the universities, which were located in the towns, which were inhabited by burghers who did not like the custom very much. The first English town to gain exemption, presumably after having paid King Henry II a suitable sum, was Bury St. Edmunds in 1182. It was followed by Norwich (1193), Lincoln (1194), London (1199), Northampton (1200), Rochester (1227), Warenmouth (1247), Canterbury (1256), Melcombe (1280), Devizes (1331) and Bedford (1394). Ireland and Scotland, though more backward than England, followed a similar pattern.32 As both church and towns gradually turned their faces against it, trial by battle was increasingly confined to the upper classes whose privilege, as well as duty, it long remained. Much later the same was true of the duel, the difference between the two being that duels, instead of being part of a formal process of law, acted as a substitute for it, and to some extent against it.
Across the Channel in France things were moving in the same direction. A significant step was taken in 1256 when Enguerrand IV, Sieur de Coucy and one of the greatest nobles of the realm, was accused of having hanged three squires whom he had caught as they engaged in poaching game. Appearing before King Louis IX, Enguerrand insisted on his right to challenge his accuser to trial by battle, but was rebuffed. After a long and complicated investigation Enguerrand was tried and found guilty. If he was not executed then this was due solely to the intervention of some of his peers who sensed a threat to their own privileges and advised the king against such a step.33 In the event, the decisive move towards restricting trial by combat was made by Philip the Handsome in 1306. Under his laws, it could only take place provided (1) the crime, whether homicide or treason, was “notorious and certain”; (2) it carried the death sentence; (3) combat was the only means of obtaining conviction and punishment; and (4) the accused was notoriously suspected of having committed the deed. To make sure his wishes were respected Philip reserved the right to authorize it to his own person, which of course meant added bureaucratic difficulties and long delays.
In Germany, criticism of the custom may have surfaced for the first time in Heinrich von dem Tuerlin’s Diu Crône (“The Crown”), which was written around 1230.34 The poem deals with the court of King Arthur and may have been intended as a satire on it; if this interpretation is correct, then the author objected to trial by combat precisely because, in his view, it was disrespectful of the noble ideals of chivalry. In any case such a deeply rooted custom could not be eradicated at once. Throughout the fourteenth century, knights continued to receive safe conducts in case they wanted to fight other noblemen with whom their own lords were at war. That was especially true in the borderlands between England and Scotland where judicial combats were more frequent than anywhere else.35 In 1380 Sir John Annesley, an English knight, accused his squire, Thomas Katrington, of having committed treason. When the trial by battle took place at Tothill Field, far more people came to watch it than had turned out to witness the coronation of Richard II three years earlier. Approvers are still occasionally referred to even during the fifteenth century. In 1487, so many persons accused of murder were waiting for their trials that the period during which they were allowed to demand the right to clear themselves by combat had to be extended.36
The last judicial duel fought on English soil took place in 1492 in the presence of Henry VII, victor of the Wars of the Roses and founder of the Tudor dynasty.37 For Scotland, Spain, and France the dates are 1426, 1522, and 1547 respectively. The French case even gave the language a new phrase, the “coup de Journac.” It was named after a combatant who delivered the underhand blow that decided the last licensed fight in that country. Just two years earlier, the Council of Trent had still seen fit to rain fire and brimstone on rulers and magistrates who authorized the encounters. In fact, trials that had the epithet “the last” applied to them are as numerous as pieces of the True Cross. In England in 1631 trial by combat was reintroduced in cases involving treason. Seven years later judges confirmed it as a legitimate procedure even in disputes over property.38 By that time combats that were not only announced but actually fought had become rare indeed. Nevertheless two attempts, m
ade in 1770 and in 1774 respectively, to make Parliament legislate the institution out of existence did not succeed.
This not so benign neglect made possible what may truly have been “the last” challenge of all. It took place in 1818 when the violated body of a young woman named Mary Ashford was found in a pit near Edinburgh where she had been drowned. The putative murderer, Abraham Thornton, was quickly arrested, but a jury believed his alibi and acquitted him. Mary’s brother William would not accept the verdict and launched an appeal. Thornton was rearrested, whereupon he demanded trial by battle as his right. Seeing that it had never been formally terminated, the responsible court had no choice but to grant his request. In the event Ashford refused the challenge so that the battle never took place. Well knowing that public opinion was against him, Thornton left the country to start a new life in the United States. The next year Parliament finally took action and abolished the custom once and for all.39
The exercise of justice has always been closely bound up with ritual, and this was no less true during the Middle Ages than in any other historical period before or since.40 Then as now, litigants and their representatives who did not play by the rules or use the correct formulae were not even allowed to submit their case, let alone argue it. As with any other trial, there was an accuser and a defender. Once the legal problems had been resolved and a trial by combat decided upon, it was scheduled to be fought at the designated time and place. The fight went on in deadly earnest with the best weapons the parties could afford until one side was either killed or called it quits. Yet this seriousness did not prevent the event from being preceded, accompanied, and concluded by elaborate ceremonies that marked it as a special occasion, clearly and carefully separated from “ordinary” life. Precisely because it was a question of life and death, perhaps more than in many other kinds of games everything was done to ensure equity and transparency. Steps were also taken to rule out any possibility of interference on the part of spectators, gods, and devils. But for all these rituals and rules, the trials would have counted as skirmishing at best and as murder at worst. As it was, throngs of spectators regarded them as entertainment pure and simple, discussing the proceedings, carefully studying every move and every gesture, and placing bets.
As the special regulations concerning the Jews show only too clearly, trial by combat was considered both a privilege and a duty. Certainly from the beginning of the twelfth century, and quite possibly earlier too, there were always persons and organizations who expressed their doubts about the system. Either they opposed it as a matter of principle, as the church sometimes did; or else they did what they could to have the powers that be grant them exemption from it. Following its demise, which for practical purposes occurred between about 1450 and 1550, historians seeking to show just how “rude,” “superstitious,” “weak,” and “barbarous” our ancestors were have often referred to the custom as proof par excellence.41 As one of them wrote, “well it is that those days have gone forever!”42 Yet human nature has not changed. False claims and counterclaims are no less easily made, no less frequent, and no easier to refute at the present time than in Gundobald’s day. Nor do courts find it easier to get at the truth, especially but by no means exclusively when it is a case of the word of one person against that of another. In view of that fact, as well as the lighthearted way in which certain heads of state with no judge above them occasionally send their troops to fight and die for nothing at all, one sometimes wishes it still persisted.
The rise and fall of the tournament
Like so much else in the Middle Ages, the origin of the tournament (hastilude, “lance game,” in Latin) is unknown. Writing some two centuries after the events he describes, Theophanes the Confessor, a Byzantine chronicler, says that the Emperor Herakleios (reigned, 610–43) trained his cavalry by dividing it into two groups which collided with each other and fought without danger. However, the text is cryptic and does not explain how it was done.43 In the ninth century Nithart, as well as Widukind of Corvey a hundred years after him, tells of cavalry exercises held in the courts of Charlemagne (whose grandson Nithart was) and King Henry I of Germany respectively.44 Since sharp weapons were not used, the exercises may have resembled maneuvers – known, in the late Middle Ages, as behourds – more than they did tournaments proper.45
To confuse matters still further, some behourds did have victors, entailing competition of some sort. Some authorities believe they were designed to demonstrate equestrian skill, including the kind of skill needed to maintain formation, use weapons, etc. Others assume that they were scripted to replicate historical events. Either method would explain why care was not always taken to have equal numbers on each side, but it is hard to be sure. Nor does it matter much, since many behourds seem to have got out of hand to the point where they involved fighting and resembled tournaments in all but name.46 As if to emphasize the ever-present danger of escalation, the same also applies to the vesprii that were sometimes held on the eve of the “real” combat.
In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal, an early thirteenth-century source, so ferociously did the knights go after each other during the vesprii that the tournament proper had to be cancelled. The issue is further confused by the fact that many chroniclers, who are our chief source of information, worked for members of the nobility. In this capacity they sometimes antedated “the first” tournaments so as to enable their patrons’ ancestors to take part in them and garner the glory of doing so: as a result, the question is unlikely to ever receive a definite answer. Different sources do not even agree as to whether the first fatal casualty was one Arnold, brother-in-law to Roger, Count of Sicily (1066), or Count Henry III of Louvain (1095). The latter, we are told, “was hit in the heart by a lance and died instantly” in the course of a militaris ludus.47
One modern authority has suggested that tournaments grew out of the previously described single combats and combats of champions: in other words that they turned the business of war into the pleasures of peace.48 However that may be, it is clear that around 1100 the custom had become firmly established. As expressions such as “French combat,” “fighting in the French manner,” and the word “tournament” itself testify, it first took hold in northern France. From there it spread into the Low Countries and Germany, helping turn French into the language of war and chivalry, a position it retained for some eight hundred years. Tournaments were not entirely unknown in England either; however, kings Henry I and Henry II (1154–89) seem to have been fairly successful in suppressing them so that English knights who wished to participate had to travel across the Channel. Richard I (the Lionheart) (1189–99) permitted them, but only if they were held at certain designated locations and only if the organizers paid a fee to the royal exchequer. We even know the name of the person who was appointed to collect the money in question.49 By that time they had developed into a real craze so that the career of no knight, real or imaginary, was complete without him having participated in them. By and large, the more active a man’s military career the more numerous the tournaments in which he participated.
Early tournaments were spontaneous occasions, organized by individuals who invited their friends to come and play. To some extent this remained the case later too; in particular, sieges, which were often long and boring, were enlivened by tournaments. Both sides would agree to temporarily put their hostility aside and have a little fun instead. Sometimes it was a question of celebrating some special event such as a noble birth, wedding, knighting, or anniversary. For example, in 1284 Edward I held a tournament at Caernarvon in order to celebrate the birth of the first English Prince of Wales, later to reign as Edward II. However, that was by no means always the case. Invitations were sent out three to six weeks ahead of time. Either a circular was published or people were invited by name. One letter dating to 1215, written by a group of English barons addressed to the German knight William von Albine, read as follows: “We greet you and strongly urge that you will present yourself at the tournament in ques
tion, complete with horses and weapons, in such a manner that you may leave with your honor intact.”50 Froissart quotes a similar letter that went out in 1390, i.e. in the middle of the Hundred Years War:
we [three French knights] . . . beg all those noble knights and foreign [including English] squires who are willing to come not to imagine for a moment that we are doing this [i.e. issuing the invitation] out of pride, hatred or malice, but in order to have the honor of their company and to get to know them better, a thing which we desire with our whole hearts. And none of our shields shall be covered with iron or steel, nor shall there be any unfair advantage, fraud, trickery, or evil design, nor anything not approved by those appointed by both sides to guard the lists.51
One cannot help recalling the alleged motto of modern soldiers of fortune: “meet interesting people – and kill them.”
Another area that often saw tournaments held between knights belonging to different nations and involved in campaigning against each other was the border between England and Scotland, a region well known for the intermittent warfare that took place there. The men’s motives for taking up the challenge and responding to the invitations varied. Partly it was the simple desire to compete and excel in an approximation of what was, after all, the calling of the class to which they belonged. Especially in England, they sometimes acted under the influence of Arthurian legends, trying to imitate the deeds of a Lancelot, a Galahad, or the Green Knight.52 The larger and more important tournaments also served as a sort of labor exchange. In them military skills would be demonstrated, compared, and evaluated under the critical eyes of grandees. Most of the latter were themselves knights. They had participated in tournaments during their youth, and some kept doing so even when reaching an advanced age. The male members of some baronial families did so generation in, generation out. With a bit of luck they might notice this or that fighter, take him on as a retainer, launch his career, and, in case he proved his prowess and his usefulness, end up by promoting him and finding him some rich heiress to marry, as Henry II of England did with William the Marshal. Some grandees attended tournaments with the specific intention of recruiting retainers or else sent their representatives to do so for them.53 Even the church, for all its dislike for the sport, sometimes made its representatives attend in the hope of finding warriors who would take up the cross.
Wargames Page 18