by Sean McGlynn
So far, we have observed medieval perspectives on violence in society without reference to wars. This facilitates a point of reference for atrocities in warfare, what today we would call war crimes. It has been seen how even in times of normality, medieval society was constantly exposed to exemplary violence in many brutal forms which society itself demanded. Torture was seldom public, except in executions where it was designed to prolong the killing process and maximize the death agonies (anticipating by centuries the draconian pamphlet from London in 1701, Hanging Not Punishment Enough), but it existed primarily as a widely utilized judicial measure. These levels of violence jumped exponentially in times of war, not just on the obvious field of battle but wherever troops marched. Violent crime also increased in the wake of war, a feature noted in most societies in most times, whether it be English soldiers returning from defeat in France at the end of the Hundred Years War in the early 1450s, or when they returned again at the close of the wars of William III and Queen Anne 250 years later. War does more than provide a cloak for the criminal activity of soldiers; it offers a time of opportunity for all, and not just for those with base motives. During the Scottish invasions of northern England in the early fourteenth century, large numbers of animals and amounts of grain were stolen in thefts designed and timed to look as if Scottish raiders were responsible. In a subsistence economy at the best of times the loss of an ox or horse could have a dire effect on a household. Unsurprisingly, then, these raids ‘did not merely furnish people with the opportunity to take advantage of disturbed local conditions in order to engage in criminal activities; they must have also provided strong incentives to those who had been deprived of their goods to replace animals and foodstuffs that had been carried off, and crops that had been burned’.26
Conditions of war imposed great strains on vulnerable elements in society, leaving them exposed to an environment in which the rule of law counted for little. In times of peace, visual exemplary violence was condoned, brutal and widespread; but it was as nothing compared to times of war, when the lessons of violence were applied on an altogether grander scale.
2
WAR
THE KING AS JUDGE AND EXECUTIONER
At the head of the medieval system of justice and government stood the king. With him lay the ultimate sanctions of power: the authority to make war or peace, and the authority to order death or grant life to his subjects, from the lowest to the highest of them. He was encouraged – expected – to wield his sword to protect his people from criminals and from enemies. He was the foremost knight and the final arbiter of justice; in both forms, he was the most powerful life giver or life taker in the land. He was warrior, judge and executioner.
The peace of the realm was the king’s peace. The severity of a monarch was praised if it rendered his kingdom safe. Much like today or any time when there are perceptions of ruptures in the social fabric of society, medieval folk looked back to earlier times as periods of lawabiding order, a golden age secured by a ruler who respected tradition and who did not stay his hand in meting out fatal justice to lawbreakers. To defend his nation from enemies, a monarch’s legislative and judicial ability had to be matched by his martial prowess, for not only was he head of the country’s judiciary, he was also the commander-in-chief of that country’s army. These two elements – the legal and military – combined with a third: sacerdotalism, or the priestly nature of kingship. Medieval (and later) theory deemed a ruler to have inherited his temporal authority from God, and so he reigned by divine right. His duty to uphold the laws of the land, maintain the peace and protect his people from mortal enemies was therefore a sacred one. Breaking the king’s peace offended people, king and God; it was up to the monarch to prevent such inversions of the natural order of society. Thus the king’s responsibility was not just to his people but directly to God. This divine hierarchy granted the monarch heightened powers both politically and mystically, the latter including miraculous healing capabilities. The first lines of a royal letter or command reminded all that the monarch was king ‘by grace of God’; this was no empty formula, but a phrase pregnant with unbounded authority, claiming God as the ultimate source of royal power. Whatever the king did, in theory he could do so in God’s name.
This sacerdotal element of kingship was established at the coronation. Drawing on Old Testament precedents, the ceremony imbued the king with dual authority in both the lay and clerical spheres. The papacy attempted to play down the resemblance of a coronation to the sacrament of Holy Orders, but without success. In England and France, the crowning ceremony involved anointment with chrism, the holy oil employed in episcopal consecrations. French coronations also saw the administering of an oil, conveniently ‘sent’ from Heaven, and used at Clovis’s baptism in 496. Not to be outdone, in the fourteenth century the English wondrously ‘discovered’ a phial of oil that St Thomas Becket had received from the Virgin Mary; the oil became a feature of English coronations thereafter. This fusion of powers dominated medieval ideas of kingship and has been much studied since (most notably in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology). It was a short step for medieval theologians and political observers, raised on belief in the Holy Trinity, to articulate the king as two forms in one: the body corporeal (mortal), and the body politic (immortal and divine). The emperor Frederick II was not alone in contending that failure to perform royal wishes amounted to blasphemy, something that should be borne in mind when we encounter soldiers carrying out their king’s orders to massacre prisoners or indulging in other atrocities.
As Vicar of Christ (a title also taken by Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century at a time of competition between temporal and spiritual influences), and as a viceregent of theocratic government, the monarch’s primary objective was maintaining the king’s peace, not least so that the faithful could concentrate on serving their God. If a crime was not directed simply against the people or the king but against God as well, then this implied that upon the king was imposed the onerous duty of ensuring that peace was enforced for God. It therefore followed that the application of violent royal justice was divinely sanctioned. A king with blood on his hands could raise them to his people as proof of his efforts on their, and God’s, behalf; he could expect acclamation in return.
Henry I of England received such praise. Henry does not have a martial reputation. Not for him a colourful royal sobriquet such as ‘Lionheart’, ‘Hammer’ or ‘Conqueror’; instead he must settle for ‘Beauclerc’, a testament to the efficiency of his administration and bureaucracy. However, as Warren Hollister has shown, amongst contemporaries and following generations he earned renown as a fierce lawkeeper, keeping his subjects safe by harsh measures against malefactors. To modern eyes these measures are extreme; various historical opinions have condemned Henry as a ‘savage, ruthless man’ with a ‘reputation for brutality’, his ‘reign of calculated terror’ being ‘terrible and barbaric’; but in twelfth-century England his divinely inspired policy of zero tolerance was greeted much more favourably. Henry was merely fulfilling his coronation promise to keep peace throughout his domain. Two centuries later, Edward II’s failure to do likewise was highlighted clearly and shamefully in the deposition articles set out against him.
Henry I’s policy of ‘tough on crime, and a whole lot tougher on criminals’, met with a hugely popular and supportive press, at complete variance with modern condemnation of his brutal methods. Leading churchmen of Henry’s day were fulsome in their praise of Henry’s policies: Eadmer declared that ‘great good immediately resulted’; Robert of Torigny lauded the King for keeping the peace ‘by the point of the sword’; a monk from Peterborough in central England uses the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to voice his approval of Henry’s mutilations of moneyers, as ‘it was done very justly’.1 Henry’s constituency was truly a flog ’em and hang ’em one.
Henry’s great protagonist, the larger-than-life (in all respects) Louis the Fat of France, was not to be o
utdone in upholding law and order in his own realm. When, in 1109, Guy of la Roche-Guyon and his children were murdered by his brother-in-law William, Louis was swift in striking with the sword of justice. His friend and biographer Abbot Suger tells us how the King ordered that William and his followers be punished ‘by a carefully chosen and shameful death’. When William and his men were seized, their fate was terrible.
Attacking them with swords, they piously slaughtered the impious, mutilated the limbs of some, disembowelled others with great pleasure, and piled even greater cruelty upon them, considering it still too kind. No one should doubt that the hand of God sped so swift a revenge when both the living and the dead were thrown through the windows. Bristling with countless arrows like hedgehogs, their bodies stopped short in the air, vibrating on the sharp points of lances as if the ground itself rejected them. The French hit upon the following unusual revenge for William’s unusual deed. When alive he lacked a brain, and now that he was dead he lacked a heart, for they ripped it from his entrails and impaled it upon a stake, swollen as it was with fraud and evil. They left it set up in a conspicuous place for many days to make public their revenge for this wickedness.
The corpses of William and several of his companions were then tied with ropes to harrows and pieces of fences, which had been fitted for this purpose, and were cast upon the river Seine. And if nothing managed to keep them from floating all the way to Rouen, they would exhibit there how treachery had been avenged.2
Here we see coming together many of the elements already discussed: the emphasis on highly visual and gruesome punishment as a warning; the encouragement of extreme brutality by the king; and an abbot of the Church’s approbatory applause for the ‘hand of God’ in ‘piously’ slaughtering the guilty. There is also here the presence of xenophobia, as the men killed were Normans and not Frenchmen. This was not some spur-of-the-moment act of bestial madness, but something ordained from on high. How easy, then, in the chaos and heat of war, for appalling acts of savagery to be perpetrated.
The reactionary similarities between Henry and Louis disguise a growing divergence between English and continental ideas on kingship. In France, Germany and elsewhere, theocratic monarchy exercised much greater influence than in England, paving the way for later absolutism. This in part explains why anti-heretical measures against the Cathars in southern France received such strong royal support, as these formed another facet of divine law and order. It also helps to account for the relative (to England) lack of active political opposition against French kings in particular; although the French baronage failed to unite sufficiently to offer a common front and programme against royal encroachments, when serious rebellions did occur their intention was largely to change government policy rather than to threaten the king himself. The French looked on horrified at later medieval England’s penchant for killing its kings, they themselves not acquiring the taste for judicial regicide until later in their history.
In England, rising against the monarch, although acutely serious, was rendered less shocking by the slightly less theocratic and more feudal nature of kingship there. Feudalism, for all its emasculation by modern deconstructionism, remains a useful term to designate the essential contract at the heart of hierarchical society. ‘Good faith’ (bona fides) was required on both sides of the personal, political covenant between lord and master. Thus if a king, especially in a state like England, failed to uphold his end of the bargain – law and order, good governance, defence of the realm, etc. – he risked being brought to account in the most practical of ways for not maintaining his side of the bargain. When an English king confused his theocratic and feudal roles it fostered crisis within his realm. Even when feudalism was on the wane, in later medieval England, theocratic monarchy was still exercised under limits, as the reign of Richard II shows.
Theory is one thing, reality another. What really mattered to a ruler was preservation of power; for this he had to employ violence widely but intelligently. Weakness sent out all the wrong signals. This late medieval passage from England warns rulers to remember
How kings [who] kept neither law nor peace
Went soon away in many different ways
Without thanks of God at their decease.3
Plentiful violence well directed by the king was approved; arbitrary, inconsistent violence was not. Philippa Maddern has categorized three areas of justifiable violence as used by the king in his role as a judge. First, his position of established authority, especially in respect of that authority bestowed upon him by God, sanctioned his acts of punitive force. Secondly, this violence had to be directed in pursuit of a good cause – peace and order, for example. Thirdly, this violence could also be directed only against certain people, namely the criminal and wicked.
The king was permitted – indeed, encouraged – to express emotional outrage in his judgement: ‘The king’s anger was as unquestioned as the wrath of God; it could be coupled with it.’4 But he had to channel his fury appropriately. As the deity’s representative, the king’s anger (ira regis) was meant to reflect God’s anger (ira Dei) in its projection, accuracy and proportion. This also applied to God’s mercy, the dispensing of justice allowing for displays of clemency. Just as the king’s ruthlessness could be praised, so too could be his mercy. When Philip II of France defeated his enemies at Bouvines near Lille in 1214, Roman law and French custom sanctioned his use of the death penalty for those guilty of rebellion and lèse-majesté; but Philip refrained from implementing the death penalty. His royal biographer, the sycophantic panegyrist William the Breton, records Philip’s humane mercy to his prisoners and applauds his astonishing forgiveness and pity. Of course, such acts of leniency could be promoted as much as public executions; they were frequently driven by political or propaganda considerations. For a king, it was good to be feared; but being loved and respected was also a source of political capital. As Pope Clement IV advised Henry III in a letter from 1265, after the King’s success against the baronial revolt, ‘Human forgiveness will entice more of your men back to love than harsh punishment would, since the lust for revenge sates the hatred of a few but irritates that of the many.’5
Female intercession was another route to mitigating justifiable kingly anger. The most famous example of such an intervention is that of the Burghers of Calais, related by Froissart in his colourful, bloody chronicle of the early stages of the Hundred Years War. In 1346–7, Edward besieged and took Calais in northern France. Edward, a hardened and successful warrior, wanted a general massacre of the citizens as a warning to any towns that might consider resistance in the future. His war council advised against such a move, echoing the similar advice given to King John over a century earlier at the siege of Rochester in 1215, alerting him to the danger that the English might receive similar treatment at the hands of the French should the campaign later suffer any reversal in fortune. Edward was only partially placated. In return for sparing the majority, he demanded a sacrifice by a minority; six men from Calais were to be offered up for execution. The bells of Calais rang out, calling its citizens to a general assembly. Six burghers from the town’s hierarchical elite, including its richest man, Eustace de Sainte-Pierre, stepped forward as the town’s sacrificial victims to appease the wrath of the English king. Stripped to their shirts and breeches, and roped together by their necks, they advanced from the town towards Edward. They knelt before him, imploring him to spare their lives. Edward, however, was resolute and ordered that their heads be struck off. Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, moved to pity by the wretched spectacle, threw herself on her knees before her husband, despite her advanced pregnancy, and tearfully beseeched his mercy for the men, in the name of the love he bore for her. Of course, Edward relented, and the men were freed. The episode did Edward’s fierce reputation no harm: his propagandists saw to that. Edifying as this tale of emollience is, it was not typical: one medieval commander who, out of pity, permitted an enemy garrison to escape, was beheaded. Such measures did not encour
age battlefield restraint towards one’s enemies.
In his account of the Burghers of Calais, Froissart throughout emphasizes Edward’s great anger, stoked not least by the losses that his own men had incurred at the siege; thus his wrath was both justifiable and understandable. The God of the Old Testament furnished an abundance of examples displaying how angry retribution was directed for the good of men; as kings and lords represented legitimate authority in the world, rulers could dispense violent retribution against those who sinfully flouted their will. Society presumed on witnessing manifestations of violent anger from its rulers, understanding, as Richard Barton has shown in his study of aristocratic anger, that ‘they might grow righteously angry when evil threatened their positions or the areas under their protection’, and those that resisted their authority ‘would come to be seen as sinful, as deserving recipients of zealous rage’.6 Such an understanding has clear military implications; from here it is but a short step to brutal battlefield actions mandated by medieval generals. The expression of anger and violence was accepted in the course of executing hierarchical authority; this being so, it was reserved for the bellatores and denied the laboratores, the lower orders thereby relying on the upper ones to wield the sword, rather than the pitchfork, of justice.
Keeping the masses under the thumb was one strand of control; maintaining the peace amongst the nobility was another, altogether weaker, one. Recourse to violence amongst the higher ranks was an early option in any dispute, and moved beyond crime and punishment in its scope. The threat to greater disorder was always present as arguments readily escalated from individual acts to feuding and private war. In his famous work Feudal Society (1940), Marc Bloch argued that medieval people were subjected to ‘ungovernable forces’; living so ‘close to nature’, they had little control over it. ‘Behind all social life, there was a background of the primitive, of submission to uncontrollable forces, of unrelieved physical contrasts’; epidemics, famines and ‘constant acts of violence’ led to a state of ‘perpetual insecurity’.7