by Sean McGlynn
There are a number of main reasons. First, there is the necessary tendency to question medieval writers, especially when they are monastic. If one moment a monk is writing incredulous, plainly ridiculous miracle stories, such as Wendover’s cautionary tale, mentioned earlier (above), of a little black suckling pig draining a washer-woman dry for taking in laundry on a Sunday, and in the next paragraph he recounts an atrocity, then there is a natural tendency towards scepticism. Secondly, many writers are dismissed as hysterical monks given to hyperbole, especially when their monastic lands suffer some minor, relatively inconsequential damage by soldiers, or have their horses and grain taken. Thirdly, writers primarily wrote to please their patrons, and so their bias has to be accommodated when interpreting and filtering their texts. Fourthly, there is too much credence given to religious and chivalric texts and to the laws of war that were so often only intermittently applied. Most historians recognize that these ideals and laws were arbitrarily applied, and then not often to non-combatants, but the continuing influence and knowledge of these texts sometimes still disproportionately informs viewpoints. Fifthly, there is a natural and understandable tendency for a reader not to want to believe the horrors being related, sometimes partly from a misplaced or unconsciously displaced notion that these things simply do not happen now, and therefore they did not then; and if they did, they are exceptions. Finally for our purposes of summary here, there is no evidence in the form of film, photographs or the reporting of prize-winning and trusted journalists to indisputably fix an atrocity in a definite time and place, and with real people as the victims. Technology permits us to have libraries of atrocity evidence for modern wars; medieval society had to rely on writers to record them – and that usually meant monks.
The atrocity stories from medieval chronicles are too readily discounted or diluted because they do not conform to modern standards of evidence-gathering. Yet so often the sensationalism of medieval reports is the reality of modern ones. The parallels are striking. The killing of prisoners is also a feature of recent warfare. We have seen this for the First World War; in the Second World War, a ‘no prisoner’ policy was often employed by Americans fighting in the Far East, and German prisoners were killed during the D-Day landings; many prisoners were similarly despatched in Vietnam. Civilians are targeted, whether in bombing raids or in direct attacks on villages and towns. The British dropped chemical bombs in Iraq in the 1920s; Saddam Hussein later used chemical weapons on the Kurds. The Germans had a policy of burning villages and towns when entering and leaving Russia; villages were torched in Vietnam and, at My Lai, inhabitants massacred. In the Middle Ages peasants took to the hills and forests to avoid princes on punitive expeditions; Greek men did the same in the Second World War to avoid expected German reprisals. Useless mouths were expelled from Paris in 1870, and were cited by defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Prisoners in the Second World War who died on marches in the Far East and on the German retreat form Eastern Europe are not so dissimilar to those non-combatants caught in the Scottish raids and whipped forward into slavery, or expiring along the way; and the slaying of those who might impede the slave drive is affirmed by a nineteenth-century Nigerian slave who has said that the old and very young had to flee or be cut down.
What of the most shocking medieval cases, the ones most likely to be met with disbelief? Monks writing of priests being beheaded at the altar might suggest special pleading, but the clergy were marked for horrific torture and death in the Spanish Civil War. Henry of Huntingdon’s gruesome account of troops entertaining themselves by swapping around severed heads was replayed with revolting imagination by Japanese troops during the Rape of Nanking. Photographs from Italy in the Second World War show civilian militia joyfully parading the head of a partisan on a pole. In Vietnam, sunglasses, cigarettes and excrement were carefully placed on the head of a North Vietnamese corpse. In Spanish Morocco, troops in Franco’s forces rode around with heads swinging from their bridles.
What of cannibalism at Château Gaillard, Rouen and other sieges and campaigns? Again, this has been widely reported and verified whenever famine or starvation threatens: remember the survivors of the Essex, found still clutching the gnawed bones of their dead crewmates? In the Second World War starving Japanese soldiers were permitted to eat the flesh of prisoners. But even stories like these are routinely dismissed. The siege of Leningrad produced many stories of cannibalism. ‘Such nightmarish circumstances’, notes the authority John Erickson, ‘long discounted and disbelieved, require some substantiation.’ He offers this by citing a top-secret Soviet report form February 1942 which details ‘886 investigated cases between early December 1941 and February 15, 1942, alone’.11 No wonder children were warned not to venture down alleyways.
War does not change much when men are operating in the field. In parts of the developing world, especially in Africa, the nature of warfare is pretty much the same as in early medieval Europe. It is also worth repeating my impressions at the opening of this book: watching the post-Yugoslavian war unfold on the news in the 1990s, I was struck by how much even European warfare resembled that of the Middle Ages: donkeys transporting supplies up hills to the Serbian forces during the long siege of Sarajevo; burning villages and ethnic cleansing; and atrocities like the massacre of seven to eight thousand Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the purpose of which was to reduce the manpower available to the opposing army. Everywhere, terror and atrocity are present as a manifestation of the military imperative.
It has always been this way. Besieged by Julius Caesar at Alesia in 52 BC, Vercingetorix expelled his useless mouths, wives, children and parents, and saw them die slowly in front of the walls as Caesar refused to allow them to pass or be taken into slavery. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars tells of whole islands having their men massacred. Going back three thousand years, the inscription on the Moabite stone tells of King Moab’s wars against the Israelites. He boasts of slaughtering all in the cities he wins: ‘I took it and killed them all – 7,000 men, boys, women, girls and female slaves.’12
Atrocities still abound in our world in recent years: Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, the Congo, to name the best known. The Middle Ages were no different. As a recent study of medieval genocide thinking concludes: ‘Modern ethnic slaughter does not necessarily depend for its occurrence upon the governmental and technological resources usually associated with modernity; when popular moods and mentalities favour extreme action, the most basic means often suffice.’13 As this book has attempted to show, medieval warfare favoured extreme actions. But their medieval barbarities were far from unique. Medieval commanders would have approved of General ‘Bloody Eyes’ Skobelev’s belief expressed in the late nineteenth-century when, after slaughtering thousands (perhaps as many as fifteen thousand) Turks, he declared: ‘The duration of peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict on the enemy.’
Gerald of Wales was well aware of the cruelties of war. Sadly, his call for a more humane type of warfare was not heeded: ‘When the turmoil of battle is over and [the warrior] has laid aside his arms, ferocity too should be laid aside, a human code of behaviour should be once more adopted, and feelings of mercy and clemency should be revived in the spirit that is truly noble.’14 War is always with us, and so this call remains just as pertinent in the twenty-first century as it was in the Middle Ages. Sadly, it is unlikely to be heard above the gunfire and exploding bombs forever claiming their victims in execution of the military imperative.
NOTES
(Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated)
CHAPTER 1: VIOLENCE
1
Brian Holden Reid, ‘Rationality and Irrationality in Union Strategy, April 1861–March 1862’, War in History, 1 (1) (1994), 23.
2
G. N. Garmonsway (ed. and trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1972), 135.
3
Henry of Huntingdon, The History of the English People, 1000–1154, ed. and trans. Dia
na Greenway (Oxford, 2002), 7.
4
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York, 1949; original edn 1919), 11, 12, 24.
5
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), 134–5.
6
Suger, The Deeds of Louis the Fat, ed. and trans. Richard Cusimano and John Moorhead (Washington, 1992), 116.
7
John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta, (1996), 74. The following three paragraphs draw heavily on this important survey.
8
Henry Summerson, ‘Attitudes to Capital Punishment in England, 1200–1350’, in Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell and Robin Frame (eds), Thirteenth Century England 8 (Woodbridge, 2001), 25.
9
Cynthia Neville, ‘Homicide in the Ecclesiastical Court of Fourteenth-Century Durham’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), Fourteenth-Century England 1 (Woodbridge, 2000), 14.
10
Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe (2001), 16. A number of the following examples are to be found in this book.
11
Henry Moore, The History of the Persecutions of the Church of Rome and Complete Protestant Martyrology; (1809), 256–7. As the title may suggest, this is not an unbiased work; it heavily utilizes John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of 1563, more popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
12
Richard Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (1997 edn; originally Oxford, 1996), 28. This massive scholarly work, though taking the Early Modern period as its starting point, can hardly be bettered for its discussion of the role of capital punishment in society, its observations holding true for the medieval world.
13
George Scott, A History of Torture, (1940), 246. My thanks to Ian Grant for locating this and other books on torture. I have been unable to determine whether goats have a particular liking for brine, although farmer John Booth informs me that goats do enjoy salt-licks.
14
Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, (Oxford), 2000, 185.
15
Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 125.
16
Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 31.
17
Ibid., 28.
18
Claude Gauvard, ‘Justification and Theory of the Death Penalty at the Parlement of Paris in the Late Middle Ages’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool, 2000), 198.
19
Philipa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford, 1992), 232.
20
Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 81. See also the findings in Nancy Wicher, ‘Selective Female Infanticide as Partial Explanation for the Dearth of Women in Viking Age Scandinavia’, in Guy Halsall (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998).
21
Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Violence in the Domestic Milieu of Late Medieval England’, in Richard Kaeuper (ed.), Violence in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 2000), 201.
22
Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 82.
23
Summerson, ‘Attitudes to Capital Punishment’, 133.
24
Hudson, Formation of the English Common Law, 160.
25
Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1995), 155.
26
Cynthia Neville, ‘War, Women and Crime in the Northern Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages’, in Donald Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds), The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Woodbridge, 1998), 169.
CHAPTER 2: WAR
1
C. Warren Hollister, ‘Royal Acts of Mutilation: The Case Against Henry I’, in Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World (1986), 296–7.
2
Suger, 79–80. Other translations substitute ‘mutilation’ with ‘castration’.
3
H. Ellis (ed.), The Chronicle of John Hardyng (1812). I have modernized the Old English.
4
J. E. A. Joliffe, Angevin Kingship (1963), 98.
5
Paul Hyams, ‘What Did Henry III of England Think in Bed and in French about Kingship and Anger?’, in Barbara Hanawalt (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998), 123. I have translated the Latin.
6
Richard Barton, ‘Zealous Anger and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relations in 11th- and 12th-Century France’, in ibid.; 159.
7
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago, 1961), passim.
8
Richard Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), 226.
9
Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (Cambridge, 1991), 235.
10
Malcolm Vale, ‘Trial by Battle in the Later Middle Ages’, in Richard Kaeuper (ed.), Violence in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 2000), 164.
11
Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth, 1978), 151.
12
Suger, 141.
13
Ibid.
14
Kelly de Vries, ‘Harold Godwinson in Wales: Military Legitimacy in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Richard Abels (ed.), The Normans and Their Adversaries (Woodbridge, 2001), 85.
15
Matthew Strickland, ‘Against the Lord’s Anointed: Aspects of Warfare and Baronial Rebellion in England and Normandy, 1075–1265’, in George Garnett and John Hudson (eds), Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy (Cambridge, 1994), 60.
16
A. L. Brown, The Governance of Late Medieval England (1989), 18.
17
Maddern, Violence and Social Order, 12. I have modernized the Old English.
18
John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion (1994), 95, 101 and passim for these and many other similar examples.
19
W. Paden, T. Sankovitch and P. Stalen (eds and trans.), The Poems of Bertran de Born (Los Angeles, 1986), 392, 380.
20
Helen Nicholson (ed. and trans.), Chronicle of the Third Crusade (Aldershot, 1997), 163.
21
Ibid.
22
Francesco Gabrieli (ed. and trans.), Arab Historians of the Crusades (1969), 213.
23
Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 204.
24
Peter Edbury (ed. and trans.), The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (Aldershot, 1996), 105.
25
John Appleby (ed. and trans.), The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes (1963), 78.
26
Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 223.
27
Cited in Sean McGlynn, ‘Philip Augustus: Too Soft a King?’, Medieval Life, 7 (1997), 24.
28
Ibid. 25.
29
Simeon of Durham, A History of the Kings of England, ed. and trans. J. Stevenson (Lampeter, 1987), 43.
30
Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge, 1996), 90.
31
Walter Ullman, Medieval Political Thought (1975), 157.
32
H. E. J. Cowdrey, Popes, Monks and Crusaders (1984), VII, 44.
33
Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order, 146.
34
Blaise Pascal, cited in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich (2000), frontispiece.
35
John Beeler, Warfare in Feudal Europe (Ithaca, 1971), xii.
36
Timothy Reuter, ‘Episcopi cum sua militia: The Prelate as Warrior in the
Early Staufer Era’, in Timothy Reuter (ed.), Warriors and Churchmen in the Middle Ages (1992), 85.
37
W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto, 1980), 212.
38
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 186.
39
Gillian Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (2001) (cited in London Review of Books, 9 May, 2002, 32).
40
J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘War and Peace in the Earlier Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 25 (1975), 162.
41
Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (1965), 8.
42
Ibid., 64–5.
43
Frederick Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1976), 306, 308.
44
Guy Halsall, ‘Playing By Whose Rules? A Further Look at Viking Atrocity in the Ninth Century’, Medieval History, 2 (2) (1992), 2.
45
Ibid., 7.
46
Matthew Strickland, ‘Slaughter, Slavery or Ransom: The Impact of the Conquest on Conduct in Warfare’, in Carola Hicks (ed.), England in the Eleventh Century (Stamford, 1992), 43.
47
John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Politics (Woodbridge, 2000), 209–10.
48
Keen, Laws of War, 180.
49
Hyams, ‘What Did Henry III Think …’, 107.
50
Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1969–81), vi, 240.
51
Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, ed. and trans. J. A. Giles (Lampeter, 1996), ii, 397. I have slightly modernized the translation.
52
Ibid., 397–8.
53
Robert Stacey, ‘The Age of Chivalry’, in Michael Howard, George Andreopoulis and Mark Shulman (eds), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, 1994), 33.