Whether you’re male, female, nonbinary, or an amoeba that reproduces by splitting in half, sometimes flirting with the barmaid is just a plain old bad idea. If good ol’ Jacques is any indication, that family will do what it must to protect its own.
So, about that bar fight.
4. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, The Dedicated Spiritual Life of Upper Rhine Noblewomen: A Study and Translation of a Fourteenth-Century Spiritual Biography of Gertrude Rickeldey of Ortenberg and Heilke of Staufenberg (Brepols, 2017), 131.
HOW to WIN the BAR FIGHT
Cerball was drunk. Drunk, drunk, drunk. This was a problem because it was 860, and he was king of Osraige, and the Vikings were attacking. As in, attacking his home. As in, right now. As in, they were right outside. And as his nobles informed him, “Drunkenness is the enemy of valor.”
But Cerball seized his sword anyway. As the Old Irish chronicle puts it: “This is how Cerball came out of his chamber: with a huge royal candle before him, and the light of that candle shone far in every direction. Great terror seized the Norwegians, and they fled to the nearby mountains and to the woods. Those who stayed behind out of valor, moreover, were all killed.”5
Oh, that’s not what you meant by “bar fight”?
No matter. Medieval court records can fill up any rogue’s book of tricks.
1. LONDON, NOVEMBER 1321
Michael le Gaugeour (“le” was common in medieval English surnames) and John Faukes were playing a dice game called “hasard”—supposedly invented by worn-out Crusaders between battles—in an Abbechirchelane inn. Something happened, for sure, because John didn’t go home. He lay in wait outside the tavern. And when Michael emerged, John stabbed him in the heart with a sword. The coroner reported that the wound was nearly six inches deep.
John found temporary sanctuary with some monks, and then vanished from the city altogether. So that’s a pretty good way to win a bar fight.
2. LONDON, DECEMBER 1323
Stephen de Lenne (“de” was also common in medieval English surnames) and Arcus de Rikelinge had placed bets on the outcome of their game of backgammon, and Stephen won handily. The two men left the inn together, walking and chatting. Until Arcus drew a knife and stabbed Stephen in the stomach. Twice. Including a four-inch wound.
Arcus escaped.
3. MEUNG-SUR-LOIRE, 1341
Agnes la Paganam (actually French for once) had sworn the field was Guerin le Pioner’s to harvest. But she had gathered a group and gotten there first. And all Guerin did was storm into her tavern, call her a lying whore, and threaten to burn it down.
Oh, until he sued her, and won, and she had to cough up 100 livres. Winning a bar fight in your opponent’s own bar is some next-level skill.
4. LONDON, MARCH 1301
Robert de Exeter, Roger de Lincoln, Henry de Lincoln, and the barmaid Leticia were very much not playing checkers. But Thomas de Bristoll and Joice de Cornwall were. And either Robert, Roger, or Henry decided the checkerboard looked like the perfect place for sex. One of the men sprawled on the bench with Leticia, scattering the checker pieces everywhere.
Subsequent events are rather murky, but somehow it was Thomas who ended up stripped down to his underwear and hiding upstairs. Robert ended up with Thomas’s hidden dagger, while Joice ended up dead in the street.
Robert, Roger, and Henry escaped, and Thomas learned a valuable lesson about carrying a concealed weapon.
5. WESTMINSTER, 1397
Visiting priest Simon Helgey probably had more on his mind than thirst when he stepped into the Cock Inn. Owner Alice atte Hethe also had more on her mind. As soon as she lured Helgey into her inn, her friends pounced on him. Simon was left ring-less, purse-less, coat-less, and penniless.
Simon probably learned to try harder at his celibacy vow.
6. OXFORD, 1306
Elyas of Wales and two other men tried to vandalize a private inn and rape its owner, Margery de la Marche. She screamed for help so loudly that it could be heard in the street and inside nearby houses. The two friends fled into the street, but neighbor John cornered Elyas in the basement. Elyas tried to fight his way free, breaking John’s forearm, but John just kept blocking the stairs—and punching him in the face.
While everyone lost in that bar fight, Margery and John had the last laugh. The local jailer was John’s father.
7. MUNICH, 1513
One moment, Jorg Rigler and an unnamed servant of famous knight Caspar Wintzer were sharing a cup of wine. The next moment, they were making a pact to leave the tavern and murder the first person they met.
As the sun faded from the sky, that first unfortunate man begged for his life. He’d done nothing wrong—he wasn’t a threat—look, he’d lost a hand in a previous accident and couldn’t be a threat! So Rigler and the servant killed the second man they saw instead. The servant was arrested, blamed Rigler, and was executed. Rigler may have been arrested, definitely blamed the servant, and definitely escaped.
But you can rarely escape divine justice. Two years later, Rigler was drunk, fell down some stairs, and died.
* * *
And then there’s one final trick, deployed only by the bravest of souls in the most fearsome of circumstances. Like, say, the morning after Cerball fended off the Vikings with a candle and his sword. Because at dawn, the surviving Vikings came back. Cerball led the charge against them. And as the chronicle says: “Cerball himself fought hard in this battle, and the amount he had drunk the night before hampered him greatly, and he vomited much, and that gave him immense strength.”6 He returned home laden with glory and spoils.
Scratch all of the above. That is how you win a bar fight.
5. Joan N. Radner (trans.), Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (University College Cork CELT Project, 2004, 2008), https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T100017.html, FA 277.
6. Fragmentary Annals, FA 277.
HOW to ESCAPE the INN
In twelfth-century Genoa, the leading families built tall, graceful towers next to their homes. The towers illustrated the city’s power and wealth, its dominance of so much of the lucrative trans-Mediterranean trade.
Then the families built catapults on top of the towers, so they could fling large rocks at the other towers and knock them down.
It was the endgame of a centuries-old war among shifting family alliances that had included, among other things, a murder in the middle of a city council meeting. In the Middle Ages, memories were long and feuds did not mess around.
Which is to say: so, about that bar fight.
ESCAPING THE CITY: WHO
Yes, people are going to find out about your bar fight. And no, their discovery is not going to go well for you. Win or lose (and with instructions like mine, how could you lose?), you’ll be the one escaping the city.
In later medieval Europe, “word on the street” had a formal Latin name (fama), so you can already tell it’s a big deal. Far more than just potential evidence in court or a bad time in grammar school, fama could be both judge and jury.
The core of fama was having a “good name” or a “bad name.” Which is to say, the legal consequences of your fight could depend on who had an established good reputation—which is a preestablished bad thing for you as an out-of-towner.
One French law textbook offered a sample case directly relevant to your present circumstance. The theoretical victim is staying at an inn, and their belongings vanish. If the innkeeper has a bad reputation, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they had stolen the guest’s property. But if the innkeeper had good fama… had there even been a crime in the first place?
This case was just theoretical, and things may not have been so extreme in reality. But who are you to be so lucky?
ESCAPING THE CITY: WHY
Nothing says “tavern” like violence. In fact, if you found a room in one of those inns whose regulars were bandits plotting a robbery, they might be more suspicious of a lack of bar fighting. (On the other hand, if you’re in that tavern, you probably fought one
of those bandits. You definitely don’t want to stick around.)
Those court cases, though, show that medieval Europeans were mostly (mostly) opposed to violence even in its most expected environments. The Genoans only flung rocks at other towers sometimes. This dedication to mostly preventing violence played out in both law and practice. In some places, neighbors and bystanders who didn’t throw themselves into stopping a fight or chasing down a bad guy could be charged with a crime themselves.
Just as relevant for you, people sometimes went to impressive lengths to prevent violence before it began, even at risk to their own lives. In 1565 Frankfurt am Main, resolutely middle-class Hans Heckpecher rode his donkey through a narrow gate into the city at the exact moment one of the city’s wealthy residents wished to leave. Philipp Weiss von Limburg suddenly decided he wasn’t in so much of a rush after all. He yanked the other man off his donkey and brandished a knife.
The sources aren’t clear whether the city guards maintained their stony watch over the town gate or rubbernecked the fight. The point is that they didn’t get involved. The random Frankfurters in that street, however, did. One of them stepped between Heckpecher and Weiss with his own knife, yelling at them to calm down. You can imagine the extent of his success.
But he wasn’t alone—other bystanders jumped in to try to hold Heckpecher and Weiss back from jumping at each other. In fact, after a brief burst of surprised curse words when Weiss first pulled him off his donkey, even Heckpecher (supposedly) tried to approach Weiss unarmed with an appeal to keep the peace. Even with guards right there, ordinary townspeople played major roles in the situation, ending with neither party dead. Weiss tried to stab one of them, and still they kept trying.
So even if your onlookers expected a bar fight, they probably didn’t want a bar fight.
Suddenly this inn and this city aren’t looking so welcoming after all.
ESCAPING THE CITY: WHEN
Don’t be daft.
Now.
ESCAPING THE CITY: HOW
You’ll have an easier time if it’s daylight (which it’s likely not). First, you have to get ahead of the gossip. News of a crime and a criminal could technically travel at the speed of horse. In practice, medieval cities had “speed limits” consisting of “not almost trampling small children” and enforced by other townspeople. So for the most part, fama traveled at the speed of human feet or comprehensible yelling. And lest you think of hiding out until people forget, consider that medieval Parisians, at least, were known to track down criminals well after the fact.
To avoid provoking general suspicion, you’ll need to either blend in or stand out in the right way. The first option was mostly a matter of wearing clothing with the appropriate local touches. The riskier option was to dress up in a different city’s twist on current upscale clothing—and it was vital to pick the right city. By 1500, quite a few towns had agreements with each other that merchants from one were covered by their home laws even in the other city (as long as there was no murder or arson involved, which in your case, hmm).
Since the sun has already set at a time appropriate to your latitude, you’ve got some additional problems.
The first is straight-up getting to where you’re going. Even if you magically know the city’s layout, there’s the minor glitch of not being able to see whether you’re going in the right direction. The multistory buildings lining narrow streets may well overshadow any moonlight. Cities at constant risk of enemy infiltration or attack, like in the Iberian interior, often passed laws declaring that only city watchmen could carry torches at night.
Your easiest solution is to pretend to be a town guard. Since guard duty was often assigned as a temporary rotation with new faces all the time, impersonating a guard was surprisingly plausible.
Unfortunately, this solution was also all too plausible to the city’s militia leaders. They developed—I’m not kidding—a rotation of code words that guards would recite to each other as they passed in the streets during their rounds, or if someone had reason to leave through the gate.
If absolutely all else fails for you, your final, scorched-earth option is to start a fire as a distraction. There was almost no greater danger to a medieval city than fire, and no faster way to draw the attention and involvement of anyone nearby.
But put this tactic out of your mind. Setting a fire as a weapon against the city makes you guilty of arson and treason immediately, not to mention murder for any deaths that might result. Which means that you’re looking at two death-penalty crimes right from the start. And law codes tended to dictate specific types of execution for the various capital crimes. Most important, you’re a hero. Heroes are accused of arson and murder. They don’t actually commit them.
But if all else fails, you can still break into one of those Italian family towers, load up the catapult, and get to work. If flinging rocks from a tower to smash apart your rivals’ palaces won’t be enough of a distraction to help you escape and get you back on the road, nothing will.
ON the ROAD
ON the (LITERAL) ROAD
When you’re being chased down the road by the angry mother of that barmaid and eventually also an army of evil made manifest, you’d better hope you’re nowhere near the abbey of Chertsey in the 1380s. If a traveler needed one last overnight stop on the road to London, sure, the monks would welcome them gladly. But their hospitality definitely came with a caveat. For instance, there was that one road away from the monastery that they hadn’t built yet. On the road they did build, there was that one part by the river where, when the river flooded, it overflowed its banks and turned the road into a lake. There was also that other part of the road where the abbey had sunk a well in the middle. And that other part of the road where the abbey had just so happened to sink another well in the middle, but one that any traveler wouldn’t see coming. So sure enough, in 1386 one traveler fell right down into it and drowned.
And then the abbot claimed all his money and possessions for the monastery.
Don’t worry, though—not every hidden trap was malicious. Traveling through the Low Countries? That lovely dusting of snow on the road might disguise a ditch deep enough to bury a man and his horse alive. In this case, at least, the nearby abbey was less interested in stealing a traveler’s money and more interested in claiming its abbot had worked a miracle to rescue the rider and look like a saint—a saint whose reputation might bring the monastery far more money than the traveler carried.
(Don’t worry. The abbot saved the horse, too.)
But you really don’t want to blow your party’s first dramatic rescue or tragic accident on a ditch. So it’s good to know that Chertsey Abbey’s failures to build and maintain roads were only lawsuit-worthy because roads in the Middle Ages were not usually so theoretical.
Given that your travel experience has been limited to not nearly enough trips between your village and a market town or a saint’s shrine, you probably think there are three varieties of medieval road: dirty, muddy, and deadly. But with the growth of population and regrowth of trade over the course of the Middle Ages, it became increasingly necessary and increasingly profitable to improve road quality along more traveled routes.
Building up small barrows as a roadbed could help prevent the pond problem. If you were lucky enough to be Charlemagne around 800, you could order your underlings to travel ahead of you, smoothing out the road and trimming back tree branches just itching to smack you in the face. (You are not lucky enough to be Charlemagne.)
If the wheels of the (very) occasional cart created ankle-breaking ruts, the local landlord could lay wooden slats across the surface. Or they could just be the engineers of Marlborough, who made the roadbed wider each time it was too torn up. It eventually stretched nearly a kilometer across. That’s some serious commitment to mud.
For the mud, just wash your clothes already.
You’ll know when you’re approaching a city when the roads start getting better. Western Europeans were already paving ro
ads with tamped-down gravel in the high Middle Ages, and not just in cities. If you’re really lucky, once in the city, you’ll eventually get to deal with cobblestones. There was certainly no slog through mud in 1301 London, where a bystander yelled at Thomas atte Chirch for riding too fast.
Pro tip: Don’t mess with premodern road rage. The pedestrian ended up dead, and Thomas ended up with a very good reason to be at church.
Meanwhile, the Arabized cultures of the Near East snorted at European “pavement” and “wheels.” They took their cue from the Berbers powering the gold and ivory trade from and to Mali and switched from dealing with cart-drawing-oxen excrement to goods-carrying-camel excrement. (Arab and European sources alike are oddly silent on comparative poop studies.)
Essentially, people across the medieval world were excellent at adapting roads to meet their living and traveling needs, and subsequently adapting their living situations to match road conditions. Peasants preferred to live in central villages instead of isolated farmsteads in order to limit road maintenance; the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia trained reindeer to pull sleds. Berbers rode camels, Nurembergers laid cobblestones, and some people just hoped you’d fall down a well. You’ll want roads (or, rather, you’ll want the bridges and mountain passes they lead to), and you’ll have them.
Of course, you’ll also pay for them. No city or lord or king is going to fling money at your travel comfort. Cities went about it simply enough—tax every resident worth taxing (probably about half the population), and tax incoming visitors even more. Lords, on the other hand, compensated for their road budget by erecting toll castles—often just a single tower—to ensure no traveler made it past a crossroads or over a bridge without paying up.
How to Slay a Dragon Page 6