The Unknown Warrior (17 page)

The surgeons – presumably members of the monastic orders – used various implements in their medical work, including ‘blood-letting knives'. An example of such a tool was recovered from the base of the medical waste by work at Soutra: a double-bladed knife with a short tang used, according to Moffat, to make ‘incisions of veins in routine blood-letting, without doubt the commonest type of surgical operation' (
ibid.
: 18).

At another Augustinian site, Waltham Abbey in Essex, excavations also revealed 486 seeds, including 448 of black henbane and 31 of hemlock, again to provide a stupefying drink ‘so that one man may sleep while other men may carve him' (Moffat, 1988a: 81). Almost certainly, the experience of monastic houses would have been essential in providing succour to the wounded Medieval soldier, and for tending to their spiritual needs should treatment not be enough to keep them alive.

Further skeletal evidence for humans being able to survive major wounds is present in the form of a skull from Pontefract, Yorkshire. The cranium of an adult male dating from the Medieval period had severe wounds to the frontal and parietal bones, which would have exposed the interior of the skull and rendered the victim unconscious. The edges of these cuts were smooth, indicating a degree of healing, and it is possible that some form of medical care had been administered to enable the individual to live longer than might have been expected (Manchester, 1983a: 60–1 and Plate 32).

Although not the specific remit of this study, evidence for medical practices has been found on sites connected with the crusades, including pharmacy jars which were discovered in excavations of thirteenth-century levels of the Frankish city of Acre (Mitchell, 2004: 13).

THE PRISONER

This is said to have been the ‘Age of Chivalry', of strict codes of conduct and of knightly behaviour, and a halcyon age for the treatment of prisoners. Scratch even a small amount below the surface and this myth is soon dispelled. During the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) it was notionally possible to obtain ransom for noble captives taken in battle, but this did not stop Henry V's army from slaughtering many of these same noblemen captured at Agincourt when they felt in fear of a French rally and counter-attack. Shakespeare was in no doubt why this act of brutality was carried out – the killing of those that were present with the baggage train:

G
OWER
. Tis certain there's not a boy left alive, and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter: besides, they have burned and carried away all that was in the king's tent; wherefore the king most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king! (Shakespeare,
Henry V
,
IV
. vii. 3)

Even if Shakespeare's history was, unwisely, to be taken as gospel, it is clear that those of common origin would have been afforded little mercy when captured. Such niceties were even more uncommon during the often savage Wars of the Roses. Indeed, Pollard and Oliver (2002: 93) go as far as to state that,

By the time of the Wars of the Roses, there was no room for half measures. If chivalry had been a Geneva Convention of its time, then the desperate demands of battles like Barnet [1471] left no room for such courtesy. Indeed, by the time of Barnet it was the noblemen who were the targets for the worst excesses. Throughout the Wars of the Roses, the turning-point in a battle was traditionally met with a cry from the winning leaders of “Spare the commons! Kill the lords!” The ordinary folk were supposedly allowed to return to their humble lives while the opposing nobility, conspicuous in their expensive finery, were hunted down and slaughtered. Whether that is true is clearly hard to say. It is hard to imagine that in the slaughter at Barnet the common man fared any better than his social betters.

Perhaps a couple of the individuals from the Towton burial pit display this. Not only were all those thrown into the pit not afforded the usual burial traditions with an east–west alignment in sacred ground (and ideally as close to the high altar of the local church as possible), there may even be marks to suggest deliberate disfigurement of the corpses or torture of soon-to-die prisoners. The individual known as ‘Towton 32' has a number of small injuries around the left ear, while ‘Towton 12' has cuts to the nose region, suggesting that both of these men had body parts cut off. If one interprets the site as representing that of a rout and, perhaps, of the dispatching of prisoners – albeit wounded ones – then there would seem to be a possible element of what we would now call torture beforehand, or else a deliberate attempt to prevent the deceased achieving resurrection (Knüsel and Boylston, 2000: 186).

Strickland and Hardy (2005: 280) believe that the ‘high incidence of head wounds points rather to the massacre of men deliberately stripped of their defensive armour before being repeatedly hacked at, probably while on the ground'. Of course, as has been mentioned, there are other interpretations of these wounds – perhaps being savage, but standard combat wounds for those fleeing a battle and having discarded head protection.

Visby seems also to illustrate the indiscriminate slaughter of all who fought, presumably including any battlefield prisoners initially taken: ‘Four individuals from Visby had their noses removed by sharp weapons' (Knüsel and Boylston, 2000: 180). This would, most likely, have been done to men incapacitated, captive, or deceased, although it is possible that this was from above and thus by a mounted opponent (Thordeman, 2001: 185). Whatever the case, it seems that there was probably little opportunity for the vanquished of Visby to surrender and that, when felled, their bodies were subject to many blows. Prisoners were also slaughtered in the crusades by the armies of Richard I in 1191.

Documentary evidence linked to the interesting results of work at Soutra hospital, where ingredients for an anaesthetic to be administered prior to surgery involving amputation were recorded, hints at the harsh treatment of prisoners in the Medieval period. Some seven weeks after their rout at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314), the ‘Calendar of Close Records' gives unusual orders from the defeated king, Edward II, for the care of three lowly English soldiers. These orders were sent to the ‘Masters and Brethren' of the hospitals of St John, Oxford; St Mary, Ospringe, Kent; and St John and St James, Brackley, Northamptonshire. The men, William, son of Thomas le Charetter of Grove, Henry le Lounge of Fletewyk, and John de Sheperton were to be provided with ‘maintenance for life' as a result of ‘the Scotch rebels having inhumanly cut off his hand while engaged in the King's Service' (Moffat, 1992: 65a–65b). If, as the document suggests, these men suffered amputation after the battle, were they archers whose mutilation rendered their future service impossible? If so, there could be an element of truth in the tale of origin behind the ‘V-sign' gesture of the English. There are some suggestions that this most insulting of British gestures was originally aimed at the French, to indicate that the two fingers essential for drawing the bowstring were still intact; that the man hadn't been mutilated after capture and that he was still a potent threat to the French forces. After all, a French chronicle of the mid-fifteenth century quotes a speech by Henry V wherein he warns his bowmen that this is the fate that will await them on capture (Wason, 2003: 65). Whether or not this is an urban myth we cannot know; archaeologically we can simply trace the materials required for anaesthetics prior to such amputations.

MEMORIALS AND BURIALS

Although there are many effigies of armoured knights in the churches of Europe, the commemoration of the common dead of the infantry has often been undertaken by later societies. Two of the main sites we have examined, Towton and Visby, both have a later stone cross on the battlefield. The sites of other major engagements, such as Flodden, Bosworth Field and Agincourt, also have memorials either on the field or to mark places of supposed burial sites. It is interesting to note that there are often flowers or tokens of memorial placed on these monuments to this day (see an example at Towton (Fiorato, 2000: fig. 1.16)).

Burial for those killed in Medieval combat was not always immediate, particularly if the deceased was either on the defeated side or not of noble birth. The dead at Visby in 1361 were left decomposing for several days under the heat of the July sun before being thrown into a pit. The slain of Aljubarrota were afforded even less dignity; their bodies lay open to the elements for several years before the disarticulated remains were collected and deposited, making the later tasks of archaeologists that much more difficult (Cunha and Silva, 1997: 596).

In addition to the burial pits that have been found, several from major battles have yet to be traced archaeologically though many were known to have been killed in the engagement. We have already mentioned the example of Agincourt, and the site of the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury was also examined by Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver (2002: 58–63) using both geophysical survey and excavation with little success in locating the graves. Crécy, too, has yet to yield its dead, although chroniclers noted that ‘the dead of both sides were then buried in pits near where they had fallen' (de Vries, 1998: 173).

THE FALLEN

Most of our evidence for combat victims of the Medieval period comes from a series of mass graves, as we shall see. There are some individual bodies that display weapon wounds, including skulls found at Safed, Israel (a Frankish town and castle of the crusades). One of these skulls had an unhealed diamond-shaped lesion on its top indicating an arrow wound (Mitchell, 2004: 113). Others included the skeleton of a 30–40-year-old man from Grenå Sygehus in Denmark, which dated from
c.
1050–1536. This man had suffered a slash wound to his right femur, about 9cm from his knee and about 1.6cm in depth. A similar wound was in place on the other leg. Although these would have resulted in much loss of blood, the individual would not have died as a result of them. What had proved fatal was a vertical blow to the skull (Bennike, 1985: 105–6). Bennike (
ibid.
: 106) was unsure whether this was definite proof of battle wounds and thus the mass graves seem to provide clearer proof of the effects of Medieval combat.

Several mass graves connected to major battles in the Medieval period have been discovered, including those from Aljubarrota in Portugal, Visby in Gotland, and Towton in England. The quality of information recovered from these sites varies, but enables us to derive information on the battles, which is not included in the written histories. The bodies are almost exclusively of men, although it was thought, initially, that female remains were present among the slain at Visby and that there were bones of children in the burials at Aljubarrota (Cunha and Silva, 1997: 597). These graves illustrate the types of weapons used in combat, the presence of men who have experienced combat on more than one occasion, and the nature of the combat encountered. These are not the graves of nobles, for whom burial could be grand and commemorated with reclining effigies. These remains are of the footsoldiers, those in the defeated army.

Archaeological work at the Templar fortification of Jacob's Ford in Galilee, a site stormed by the armies of Saladin in 1179, are starting to yield skeletal elements to point at the levels of violence suffered by combatants and the tactics and weaponry used by the Islamic armies of the crusades. Arrowheads have been found among the bodies of the deceased indicating early wounds, as the same men had suffered blade injuries to the shoulder, face, skull or jaw. One skeleton clearly illustrated that a member of the Frankish garrison had had his arm amputated by a blade injury through the elbow (Mitchell, 2004: 119–20).

Excavations at Lewes hospital revealed the presence of a number of skeletons displaying weapon injuries. ‘The evidence of trauma seen in this sample ranges in severity from unhealed cuts, which are likely to have been the cause of death, to minor well-healed injuries' (Lucy Sibun, pers. comm.). The archaeologists detected unhealed cut-marks to the bones of four males. A fragmentary skull of a middle-aged man (Skeleton 180) showed a total of five blade cuts, ranging in length from 38 to 72mm. Three of the blows had removed a segment of bone, which would have resulted in the death of the individual. The first blow, inflicted to the base of the individual's skull from behind, would have proved fatal, with the other wounds to the top of the head, superfluous and perhaps simply hacks at a prone body (Brown, 2003: 59).

Wounds to other individuals included a skull fragment with two deep cuts and the jaw of another individual (Skeleton 143) which had been sliced in half (Lucy Sibun and Martin Brown, pers. comm.). From the dates of these burials and the fact that they had probable sword wounds it is tempting to postulate that these men were victims of the Battle of Lewes fought from 12 to 14 May 1264 between the Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, and the army of King Henry III. In this engagement de Montfort's forces defeated those of the King and captured the King's son, Prince Edward. As a result, de Montfort gained overall power in England. However, as Sibun has pondered, if these individuals were battle victims, why were they interred at the hospital rather than in mass graves such as those discovered during work on the nearby turnpike road? The severity of some of the trauma wounds indicates they were dead on arrival and so there is no reason for them to have been taken to the hospital for care (Lucy Sibun, pers. comm.). Why, too, were the graves so spatially dispersed in the hospital graveyard? It could mean that these people were not killed in battle and therein lies a problem. Unless bodies are found on known martial sites, or with military equipment, the presence of trauma on the skeleton – even when in the vicinity of a known battle – need not equate with them being war victims. These men could have been killed in domestic disputes or murdered, resulting in them having been buried at different times, in separate areas of the graveyard.