Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (20 page)

Tree of Battles

But had the golden age of chivalry ever existed at all?

WHAT WAS A KNIGHT?

Anglo-Saxon knights did not fight on horseback. But Europe's nobility did and after the Norman conquest in England the word ‘knight' was also understood to mean a horse-warrior.

William the Conqueror rewarded his victorious followers with grants of the land they had just conquered. They did not own the land – the ownership was still in William's hot and sticky hands. Every one of those whom he rewarded simply held their land directly or indirectly from him, and the price they paid was military service. His immediate companions became hereditary ‘tenants-in-chief'; eight of them held half the land in England. They were obliged to provide a total of about 5000 warriors when called on by the king, and these warriors were men ‘enfoeffed' as their sub-tenants.

Sub-tenants held their land as a ‘knight's fee' and had to serve on campaign under their feudal superior for a fixed term each year. A knight was ‘dubbed' – made into a knight – by being presented with his weapon and baring his neck to his feudal superior, who declined to behead him and instead briefly rested a sword on his shoulder. As in the rest of western Europe, the knights formed a military caste, whose rights of lordship were paid for with the duty of military service. They were required to finance the cost of the horses, armour and entourage for that service, conventionally understood to be for forty days a year. William's particular contribution to the practice of feudalism was to ensure that all landholders swore fealty directly to him, rather than just to their immediate overlord. This put the King of England directly at the head of all the military tenants of the land.

It took two more generations for ‘knighthood' to signify the profession of arms. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
says when William wanted to dub his son Henry a
chevalier
, horse-warrior, in 1085 he made him a
ridere.
Henry's coronation charter speaks of tenants holding land not as knights but ‘
per loricam
', as wearers of chain mail.

This was a kingdom designed as a machine for war, its warriors sustained by the obligatory service of the peasantry.

The main thing knights had to have in common was the ability to fight. They were warriors first and foremost, and violence was, for them, a way of life. They listened to stories of exciting brutality, a genre that continued for centuries in tales like the thirteenth-century romance
Havelok the Dane
:

There might men well see boys all beaten

And the ribs broken in their sides

And Havelock on them well avenged.

He broke their arms, he broke their knees
,

He broke their shanks, he broke their thighs.

He made the blood come running down

To the feet right from the crown;

For there was not a head he spared

The ability to beat another man to a pulp or cut him to bloody pieces was not only a requirement of knighthood – it was one of its ideals. Richard the Lionheart, for example, was celebrated amongst the knightly class for his ability to chop his victims' skulls down to the teeth. For everyone who was not a knight, this was a bit of a problem. How could you control these dangerous young men – especially now they were in charge? How could you channel their testosterone culture into areas that were less destructive to society? The answer that emerged was to try to invent a code of behaviour by which the knightly class must govern themselves – or, rather, to adapt the code of behaviour that the knights themselves were already developing.

Men on horseback,
chevaliers
, now dominated much of Europe. And the code of conduct of these men – and indeed their whole culture – became known as ‘chivalry'.

The snag was that chivalry meant different things to different people.

KNIGHTS' CHIVALRY

Knights themselves had no doubts what chivalry meant. It meant learning how to fight, making money, and winning fame and honour. For Anglo-Norman knights of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the perfect role-model was William Marshal. He was the first medieval layman (other than a king) to be the subject of a biography, which was completed some seven years after his death in 1219. Unlike the biographies of saints, it was not in Latin but in French, to be understood by men like himself.

William became hardened to the perils of battle at the ripe old age of five. His father, John the Marshal, had rebelled against King Stephen in 1152, and the king had laid siege to his castle. During the siege William's father handed him over as a hostage. Stephen had no scruples about using five-year-old hostages, and at one point put the boy into a siege catapult and threatened to shoot him over the castle walls, unless John the Marshal gave himself up.

William's father is reported to have shouted back that he didn't give a hoot about the boy since he possessed ‘the hammer and the anvils to make more and better sons'. William clearly knew what it was to have a tender, loving man as a father. Stephen, his bluff called, let the boy live.

John died when William was about 16, and didn't leave him a penny. William was thus faced with the familiar dilemma of every younger son from a landed English family: join the Church or learn to become a knight.

We do not know how long William struggled with his problem, but the time could probably have been measured in seconds rather than hours. He had a cousin in the town of Tancarville in Normandy who ran a sort of military academy. The prospect of free tuition and board and lodging was too good to resist. William removed to Normandy and spent the next three years training for the military life. Horsemanship, handling weapons, getting fit, learning how to kill and make money – it was all part of the soldier's calling.

William was eventually dubbed a knight by his cousin, and was at last equipped to earn a bit of ready cash. The neat thing was that he didn't even have to go to war to do this. There was plenty of money to be made on the tournament circuit.

He teamed up with a business partner, Roger de Caugie, and together they embarked on the tourneying circuit, agreeing to split the proceeds between them. They were spectacularly successful. In one ten-month period the Marshal-Caugie team captured and put to ransom 103 knights. This was, of course, education in the school of hard knocks – after one tournament William's helmet was so battered he couldn't take it off. He was awarded the prize but no-one could find him. Eventually he was discovered with his head on the blacksmith's anvil having the dents hammered out of his helmet, and there a woman of noble birth presented him with his prize: a wondrous fish – a pike over 6 feet long!

William Marshal didn't just get rich; he also achieved that other aim of chivalry: fame. In fact, he went about this quite methodically and employed a servant by the name of Henry Norreis to go around promoting his celebrity. Indeed, it has been suggested that William's biography itself was all part of what became a family programme of self-aggrandizement. The cost of the biography was underwritten by William's eldest son, and the author (a certain ‘John') ‘might well have been one of those heralds-of-arms who arranged the jousts on the tournament grounds, identified the protagonists by their insignia, and by singing their exploits boosted the reputation of the champions.'
*1
William's own skill at self-promotion was clearly considerable. Like many a young knight he caught the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was generous enough to ransom him when he was captured and imprisoned by a nobleman who had killed his uncle. William then served Eleanor's husband, Henry II.

His biographer stresses first and foremost William's dedication to ‘prowess', skill and courage in fighting. Secondly he emphasizes William's loyalty – dutifully serving Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, King John and the child-king Henry III.

As a young man William did the proper knightly thing and went on crusade, during which he somehow managed to greatly magnify his reputation – even though in July 1187, about two months before William came back from Palestine, Saladin destroyed the entire fighting force of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

He then returned to Henry's service, and his loyalty certainly paid off. The king rewarded him with the hand of Isabelle de Clare, the most eligible heiress in the country with oodles of land and her very own castle! William generously took it over for her – nowadays it's called Chepstow.

The landless William had become a man of property. It was every knight's dream come true. He was famous as a warrior and was one of the richest men in England. At his funeral, the archbishop of Canterbury himself described him as ‘the best knight in the world'. Fame, money and God's approval – chivalry could not get better than that if you were a knight.

However, we must never forget that what medieval knights meant by chivalry was not what we might mean. For them, the key thing was that it ennobled the cult of violence that they pursued. Chivalry introduced an etiquette for violent contact between knights that is reflected in the stories they loved to listen to in the twelfth century.

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.