2
The first years following young William Marshal’s release from captivity passed in relative peace, as England finally moved beyond the destructive era of civil war. The truce agreed at Winchester held and, for a brief time, King Stephen was able to reassert some semblance of royal authority within his realm. Nearing sixty, Stephen was an old man by the standards of the day, yet even so, his death came unexpectedly. On 25 October 1154, he was struck down by what one contemporary described as ‘a violent pain in his gut, followed by a flow of blood’, and passed away that same night. The duke of Normandy’s accession followed as planned, with the twenty-one-year-old Angevin crowned and anointed as King Henry II on 19 December 1154.
Possessed of boundless energy and ambition, Henry would become one of medieval England’s greatest monarchs, and a central figure in William Marshal’s life. Henry was said to have been a man of medium height, with close-cropped red hair (which lightened over the years) and piercing blue-grey eyes that were ‘dove-like when he [was] at peace’, but which gleamed ‘like fire when his temper [was] aroused’. The young king founded a new royal line – the Angevin dynasty – and the majesty and magnitude of his realm eclipsed that of his Anglo-Norman predecessors.* This Angevin world, likened by some to a new empire stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees, would be the setting for William’s extraordinary career.
Virtually nothing is known of William’s remaining childhood years. Having recounted the intense drama of Newbury’s siege, the History passed over the rest of the 1150s in silence. But young Marshal must have settled back into life in England’s West Country, alongside his family. By 1160, William was growing into the man he would become. His biographer later declared that ‘it did not take long before [he developed] into a tall boy’ (though, given that the average adult male height in the twelfth century has been estimated at five-foot-seven, he is unlikely to have stood above six feet) and added that ‘his body was so well-fashioned that, even if he had been created by the sculptor’s chisel, his limbs would not have been so handsome’. William was said to have had ‘fine feet and hands’, brown hair, a swarthy complexion and ‘a crotch so large . . . that no noble could be his peer’, though, almost certainly, this referred to the width of his hips and natural predisposition for the horse saddle. In short, the Marshal could easily have been mistaken for a noble Roman emperor of old. Seemingly conscious that the accuracy of this grandiose description might be doubted, the History’s author added that ‘I can tell you this because I saw [William’s features] and remember them well’, though in truth he can only have encountered Marshal as a much older man.
Regardless of his appearance and physique, there can have been little expectation that young William would enjoy a storied future, filled with fame, glory and fortune. As the lesser son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, he might hope to live a relatively comfortable life (by the standards of the day), but achieve little distinction. William’s lowly position within his own family’s hierarchy was made painfully apparent in a legal document drafted in 1158. In this charter, detailing the sale of Marshal land in Somerset, he was named alongside his mother, two half-brothers and his elder brother John. William appeared at the bottom of this list, and while his siblings gained certain benefits as part of the arrangement – a horse or some coin – he received nothing. It was John, the first-born child from the marriage to Sybil of Salisbury, who was expected to inherit his father’s lands and the office of royal master-marshal (though by this stage the marshalcy was merely an honorific title, with the real work at court performed by a paid administrator).
Unusually for this period, the one thing William did take from his family was the appellation ‘Marshal’, even though the formal title would be held by his brother for decades to come. ‘Marshal’ seems to have been adopted as an early form of surname – a rare occurrence in an era when most were identified either by their place of birth, residence or lordship; through their relationship to a parent (King Henry II actually styled himself as Henry FitzEmpress, meaning ‘son of the Empress’, for most of his life); or through some notable physical characteristic (hence the famously corpulent King Louis VI of France became widely known as Louis the Fat).
With little more than his name to fall back on, William’s prospects depended on his education. Some living in the twelfth century argued that an individual’s fate and future were sealed at birth, with no chance of alteration. The famous holy woman Hildegard of Bingen maintained, for example, that a boy conceived on the twentieth day after a full moon was destined to become a robber and a murderer. But most placed increasing emphasis on the value of learning, training and apprenticeship. It became common in this period for noble-born boys to be purposefully removed from the comforts of home and packed off to live with a distant relative – a practice akin to toughening up children by dispatching them to a distant boarding school. As a boy, King Henry II himself had spent two years in Bristol under the tutelage of his half-uncle Earl Robert of Gloucester. The normal age for this separation was around eight, yet William Marshal was twelve or thirteen before any arrangements were made on his behalf. Some of this delay may be explained by a waning in his father John Marshal’s fortunes. The end of the civil war curtailed John’s ability to manoeuvre for advantage, and he failed to find lasting favour under the new monarch Henry II. John retained his marshalcy, but the cornerstone of his power in the West Country, the guardianship of Marlborough Castle, was reapportioned in 1158.
Eventually, in around 1160, John secured a position for his son in Normandy with the notable baron, William of Tancarville, though Sybil’s maternal influence may well have been at work given that the lord of Tancarville was her kinsman. So it was that, as William Marshal entered his teenage years, he set off for northern France, seeking in the words of the History ‘to win an honourable reputation’. On the day of his departure, William’s family gathered together to say their farewells (though, as always, his father was absent). There was no elaborate and richly endowed entourage to accompany him on his way, just a solitary servant. According to his biographer, William’s ‘mother wept tears of distress’ at this parting, as did his siblings. This journey away from the familiar world of his birth and childhood must have been unsettling – in the intensely localised society of medieval Europe, many lived out their days without ever travelling more than a day’s journey from home. Yet William’s future now lay in Normandy, some 150 miles to the south, and the journey there required him to cross the English Channel.
WITH THE ‘FATHER OF KNIGHTS’
William Marshal lived through the era of the great Anglo-Norman and Angevin realms, in which English kings and their leading subjects held land on both sides of the Channel. This made travel between England and the Continent a frequent necessity of life and, in the years to come, William would sail over the Channel dozens of times. Yet the voyage remained a dangerous and unpredictable affair. It often involved navigating more than seventy miles across open water (between the likes of Portsmouth and Barfleur), a far cry from the meagre twenty-one miles needed to traverse the Channel at its narrowest point between Dover and medieval French ports like Wissant (near modern-day Calais). The relatively rudimentary nature of medieval ship and sail design also meant that seafarers routinely found themselves at the mercy of the elements, praying for calm seas and favourable winds. Shipwrecks were alarmingly common – indeed, it has been estimated that, in the mid-twelfth century, more royal courtiers died from drowning than through fighting for the crown – so few made this journey without a degree of trepidation. On this first occasion, Marshal’s crossing passed without incident, but he would not always be so fortunate.
William thus arrived in Normandy: a land far from home, but also the land of his forefathers. Despite his upbringing, there is little chance that he thought of himself – in terms of culture, identity and loyalty – as English. By birth, Marshal was a Norman. Certainly his first language would have been a Norman dialect of medieval northern French, though it is possible that his West Country heritage left a mark on his accent.* Much of his career, from this point forward, would be spent in Normandy, and he developed a deep affinity for the region and a particular familiarity with the area north and east of the River Seine, known as Upper Normandy, where the open, rolling terrain was not dissimilar to that of Wiltshire.
It was there that Marshal found the imposing Norman castle at Tancarville, perched on a rocky bluff above the northern banks of the Seine estuary. Today this is the site of a sprawling, derelict French château, its crumbling structures accumulated over the centuries, through many disparate stages of building, but when William arrived it boasted a formidable stone keep. Its lord, William of Tancarville, was a figure of considerable standing and reputation – described by one contemporary as ‘a man noble in race, unique in war-craft, splendid in strength, in worth a very death to the envious’, He possessed two further strongholds in the duchy and held the office of chamberlain of Normandy in hereditary right.
William Marshal came to join his household with one particular purpose in mind. As a younger son, William might perhaps have followed the path set by the likes of King Stephen’s brother, Henry of Blois, and pursued a career in the Church. The course set before young William led in a different direction. He had arrived at Tancarville, aged around thirteen, to acquire skill at arms: to learn the business of war and ultimately to join the ranks of Europe’s new military elite by becoming a knight.
The evolution of medieval knighthood
Knights are central to our popular conception of the Middle Ages. The iconic image of a noble warrior, clad in resplendent armour, racing astride his charger to rescue an imperilled damsel is the classic medieval cliché. It would be easy to imagine then, that knights were an essential, constant and unchanging feature of this distant era; that everyone living in Western Europe 1,000 years ago understood exactly what a knight was, and knew precisely how one should behave.
Knights did play a crucial role in shaping this period of history, and some, though not all, of their practices and beliefs conformed to modern expectations. But the concept of knighthood only began to emerge in the second half of the eleventh century and it remained in its infancy even as William Marshal arrived at Tancarville and grew towards manhood. William lived through the precise period in which the ideas, rituals and customs of knighthood coalesced. Indeed, his own celebrated career as one of Europe’s greatest knights helped to mould this warrior class.
In its most basic form, a medieval knight was simply a mounted warrior. Men had fought on horseback for more than a millennium, but in the course of the early Middle Ages, horsemanship came to be regarded as an essential aristocratic pastime – the badge of nobility. From the ninth century onwards, as the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (Charles the Great) and his successors sought to re-forge the Roman Empire in the West, men of power were expected to own and to ride horses. By around the year 1000 CE, the speed and manoeuvrability of horse-borne soldiers started to play an increasingly decisive role in warfare, and a more distinctive breed of fighter slowly emerged through the eleventh century.
Typically, these horsemen joined the military entourages of warlords, counts, dukes, even kings. At first most came simply for pay, but over time they began to hope for greater rewards for their service, including land. Written sources of the time reflected the appearance of these first ‘knights’ through the use of more specific language, though the terminology employed to identify these warriors was frustratingly vague and inconsistent. In Latin they might be described either as ‘equites’ (horsemen) or ‘milites’ (soldiers), in French as ‘ chevaliers’ (horsemen) and in German and Anglo-Saxon as ‘knecht’ or ‘cnihtas’ (servants), from which the modern English word ‘knight’ was derived. Such imprecision reflected the embryonic nature of this military cadre. By the start of the twelfth century, the two concepts – of horsemen as aristocratic and of mounted warriors as a martial elite – were thoroughly intermingled. Certainly there was a natural assumption that any male noble (other than a cleric) would fight as a mounted warrior or ‘knight’, and by extension, an emerging sense that the very practice of knighthood might imbue a degree of nobility upon an individual. Nonetheless, aristocratic birth was not a prerequisite for entry into this warrior class.
Throughout the early twelfth century the essential markers of knighthood remained practical. These elite warriors were readily identified by their use of a specific range of equipment and weaponry. Every knight possessed a horse and a sword, but the majority also used a lance, armour and a shield. By the time William Marshal arrived in Normandy, knighthood was becoming an increasingly rarefied profession. The fundamental tools of the trade cost a small fortune to buy and maintain. Warhorses in particular were cripplingly expensive, with an initial outlay of around four or five times what an average knight might live on in a year.
Learning to ride a mount in battle and to wield weaponry with a measure of proficiency also took hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours of practice – time not available to all. Not surprisingly, knighthood became the preserve of the privileged few. One had to be born to wealth or find a generous patron. By and large, William Marshal fitted into the second category. He came to Normandy seeking education and training, but also the patronage of a wealthy noble willing to bankroll his endeavours. Luckily for him, the lord of Tancarville was renowned for the size and the quality of his military retinue and known to contemporaries as a ‘father of knights’, and he welcomed William into the fold.
By the mid-twelfth century, Western society was developing a clearer sense of the rituals and obligations associated with knighthood. Two fundamental concepts would already have been at the forefront of William’s mind when he set foot in Tancarville Castle. The nature and full significance of these ideas are not easily explained, because the two medieval French terms used to denote them – mesnie and preudhomme – have no exact translation in modern English. But these notions were at the forefront of William’s mind through his teenage years and beyond.
The mesnie was the retinue of knights who gathered around a lord – the tightknit group of warriors serving as elite troops and trusted bodyguards. In many cases the knights in a noble’s mesnie became like members of his extended family – steadfast supporters and valued advisors. The sense of an intimate community was conveyed by the word mesnie because it derived from the Latin term mansio (household) and could be used interchangeably with another Latin word familia (military household). Crucially, the concept of the mesnie imposed a degree of obligation on both parties involved. Knights served their lord, fighting in the field, showing allegiance and fidelity, but in return a noble was expected to shelter his warriors, protecting their status and advancing their careers. In real terms, this meant not only paying for a knight’s living costs and funding the upkeep of their equipment, arms and horses; it could also involve rewards of land and title, even the arrangement of an advantageous marriage. This reciprocity also extended into the sphere of status. A knight’s standing naturally was increased by entering the mesnie of a mighty baron or a member of a royal dynasty. But in the course of the twelfth century, increasing emphasis was placed upon the public display of military retinues as markers of power. In William’s day, the size of your mesnie mattered and great nobles vied to be seen surrounded by tens, even hundreds of knights.
William harboured potent memories of his father’s own mesnie. The History of William Marshal recalled that John Marshal ‘surrounded himself with many worthy men’, noting that the knights in his mesnie were ‘in his pay’, but adding that they were also ‘all wearing livery supplied by him’ and their mounts had ‘horseshoes, nails, livery [all] paid for by him’. The History concluded that ‘[John] was able to do this’ even though he was no mighty baron, because he understood the value of generosity and so ‘knew how to attract and hold on to valiant knights’. The concept of themesnie would play a crucial role in William Marshal’s career as he served first in a number of retinues and then assembled his own.
His notion of knighthood, and that entertained by the society around him, was also profoundly shaped by the archetype of the preudhomme – the ideal warrior, literally the ‘best kind of a man’. By the mid-twelfth century, worthy knights were increasingly expected to display the ‘right stuff’, to conform to an evolving code of behaviour. An admirable and respected warrior – a preudhomme – was skilled in combat and courageous, faithful, wise and able to give good counsel, but also canny, even wily, in war when necessary. He was the exact opposite of the type of serpent-tongued deceivers (or losengiers) who had tried to persuade King Stephen to execute young William back in 1152 – men of dubious loyalty and questionable judgement. William arrived at Tancarville hoping to become a preudhomme. Indeed, in many respects his life served to define that archetype.
The history of knighthood – real and imagined
William Marshal’s sense of what might be expected of a knight, and how such a warrior might behave, were also informed both by actual recent history and an imaginary pseudo-historical past, woven out of myth and half-remembered fact. A century earlier, the knights who were his Norman forebears had been little more than mercenaries: men who used their martial skill to accrue wealth and land in the service of lords such as William the Conqueror, and whose conduct was primarily conditioned by self-interest. In the course of the eleventh century, however, the Roman (or Latin) Church became increasingly concerned by the violence and disorder caused by well-armed, mobile, mounted warriors across Western Europe. As a result, the papacy began to consider how the life of a knight might intersect with the Christian faith.
William lived in a medieval world that was almost universally Christian, where many aspects of daily existence were informed by religious doctrine. The Latin Church taught that every human soul would be judged at the moment of death, and either rewarded for Christian purity with the joys of heavenly paradise, or condemned for sin through an eternity of hellish torment. The notion that transgressive behaviour endangered the spirit exerted a powerful influence over the society into which Marshal was born. Knights were particularly prone to anxiety, being forced by their profession to fight and shed blood, yet conscious that this violence was inherently sinful in the eyes of the Church. The Latin papacy and clergy made some attempts to control and condition the behaviour of the warrior class, but at first these enjoyed only limited success.
In 1095, however, Pope Urban II alighted upon a potent idea: he issued a call to arms for a new form of holy war, in which Christian knights would redirect their aggression beyond the confines of Latin Europe, fighting instead to recover the sacred city of Jerusalem from Islam. When Urban proclaimed that participation in this expedition would actually earn spiritual merit, helping to cleanse the soul of sin, his words met with a rapturous response. Thousands of warriors set out for the Holy Land on this First Crusade, many of them – like Robert, duke of Normandy – drawn from the Anglo-Norman world. After long years of campaigning, and against all expectations, these crusaders achieved a near-miraculous victory in 1099.
The advent of the crusades had a powerful effect upon the concept and practice of knighthood, and this impact was still being felt in the 1160s. Through the twelfth century, there was a strong expectation that warriors would participate in a crusade, mirroring the ‘glorious’ achievements of their forbears; becoming not just milites (soldiers), but militia Christi (knights of Christ). In time, William himself would feel the call of this ‘higher cause’. But these holy wars also prompted many to question how Christian knights should live and behave back in the West, encouraging the gradual evolution of codes of conduct. This sense that knights should aspire to be more than mere mounted mercenaries accelerated when Christian knightly orders sprang up in the wake of the First Crusade. Movements such as the Templar Order fused the ideals of knighthood and monasticism, and actively derided the existing paradigm of Europe’s warrior class, literally branding themselves as the ‘New Knighthood’. They proved to be extraordinarily popular, attracting thousands of recruits and a tide of charitable donations from nobles throughout Europe. Indeed, William’s own father, John Marshal, gave the Templars a manor at Rockley, in Wiltshire, in 1157.
William Marshal arrived in Normandy, therefore, with a certain sense of the past achievements of the knightly class, and some awareness of the elevated standards to which this elite cadre might now be held. However, stories and sources that fused myth and reality must have exerted a powerful influence over his ideas. He had been brought up in an aristocratic culture that commemorated the great deeds of warriors in epic songs – the ‘chansons de geste’ (literally the ‘songs of deeds’). These publically performed, medieval French poems wove tales of daring bravery and wondrous martial prowess around real historical events and figures. The popular Chanson d’Antioche, for example, offered a fictionalised account of the First Crusaders’ siege of Antioch, in which the greatest knights cleaved their Muslim foes in two with a single sword blow. The most famous chanson of this period – the Chanson de Roland – drew upon the more distant Carolingian past of the eighth century, and immortalised the valorous death of Charlemagne’s commander, Roland, during an ill-fated attempt to conquer Iberia from the Moors.
William also lived through the exact period in which Western Europe first developed an abiding fascination with the stories of King Arthur and his knights. The medieval legend of Arthur was constructed in the 1130s by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a monk of Celtic-Norman birth. His History of the Kings of Britain blended thin traces of reality with a fantastical, romanticised vision of the past: one that presented Arthur as a fabled hero to rival Charlemagne, traced the lineage of the first Britons back to Troy and incorporated the supposed prophecies of Merlin. Learned historians of the later twelfth century, like William of Newburgh, would deride Geoffrey’s work as a ‘laughable web of fiction’ that was packed with ‘wanton and shameful lying’, but that did nothing to stop it becoming a medieval bestseller. His Latin text was soon adapted, embroidered and translated into vernacular languages – most notably in Wace’s Roman de Brut – and an obsession with the Arthurian world spread like wildfire through royal and aristocratic circles.* Knights of Marshal’s generation were undoubtedly influenced by these myth-historic stories: Richard the Lionheart would carry a sword that he named Excalibur on the Third Crusade (though he soon sold it when running short of cash), and great emphasis was placed on the ‘discovery’ of Arthur’s and Guinevere’s supposed tomb at Glastonbury in 1191.
TO BECOME A KNIGHT
William Marshal arrived at Tancarville around 1160, a young adolescent ready to start his education. His biographer offered only the barest details of the six or seven years that William spent training in Normandy, probably as a result of Marshal’s own vague recollection of this distant period. He seems to have pictured himself as a rather lazy teenager whose main delights were food and sleeping. The History noted that ‘people thought it a great pity that he retired to bed so early and yet slept so late’, adding that many considered that William ‘ate and drank too much’ during his time at Tancarville. He even acquired the nickname ‘gasteviande’, or ‘greedy guts’ – hardly the soubriquet of a hero-in-the-making; and though the lord of Tancarville supposedly predicted that Marshal would ‘set the world alight’, this looks like an attempt on the biographer’s part to polish an otherwise underwhelming image.
Nonetheless, it was in this formative phase of his career that William first developed many of the skills that would set him apart in later life – the abilities that enabled him to rise through the ranks to become a distinguished warrior – so it is probably safe to assume that not all of his time was spent eating or asleep; and while the precise details of his transformation from untutored boy to adult knight may be lost, it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his experiences.*
A noble life
William’s schooling in Normandy would not have focused solely upon the hard grind of military training, but included broader instruction in a range of skills. Like any noble-born boy of this era, William had to learn how to fit into aristocratic society, assimilating the bluff etiquette of Anglo-Norman martial culture, while trying to grasp the subtle nuances of its mores. The hub of any aristocratic community, including that of Tancarville Castle, was the great hall. This was where a noble’s household would gather each day for a communal meal, paid for and provided by the lord in affirmation of his patronage and largesse. These assemblies could be crowded, noisy, even chaotic, with a smoky chamber packed full of men, women and animals (dogs, birds of prey, even horses might be welcomed in the hall, though pigs and cats were frowned upon). In this setting, young Marshal received some favour, for his biographer wrote that William ‘partook of the choicest dishes placed before his lord’ – the equivalent of being seated at the top table.
A remarkable treatise on manners dating from the late twelfth century – Daniel of Beccles’ Book of the Civilised Man – gives some insight into how nobles were expected to behave in a medieval great hall. In this public milieu, a measure of decorum was advised. Nobles were warned not to comb their hair, clean their nails, scratch themselves or look for fleas in their breeches. As a rule, shoes should not be removed and urinating was to be avoided, unless of course you were a lord in his own hall, in which case it was permissible.
The process of communal eating demanded particular etiquette. Some 200 years before the widespread use of the fork, knives were employed as the main utensil. Food was delivered to the table on shared ‘messes’, then picked up from these platters and placed on an individual ‘trencher’, though if one sought to appear polite, this action would be performed with only the thumb and the forefinger. Beccles’ treatise counselled nobles to sit up straight when eating, refrain from placing their elbows on the table and face their superiors. Speaking with a full mouth, picking your teeth or nose were all frowned upon, and a cultured diner who wished to spit should turn away from the table, or look to the ceiling if they needed to belch.
As a member of the aristocracy, William enjoyed a richer and more varied diet than many of his contemporaries, though rough-ground bread, eggs, cheese and common vegetables like peas and beans, would still have been mainstays. Ale was drunk as a matter of course, because the fermentation process killed off germs (making it safer than water) and wine was likewise popular in more affluent circles. A noble of the lord of Tancarville’s standing could afford to serve meat – such as mutton, pork, chicken and beef – and fish in his great hall on a regular basis, though the natural flavours of such fare were often overwhelmed by the heavily seasoned sauces favoured by medieval cooks. These employed the likes of sage, garlic, mustard and coriander, and might also include more exotic spices, such as pepper, nutmeg and saffron.
Alongside his experiences in the great hall, it is likely that the teenage William was exposed to aristocratic fashion. Given the localism of medieval society, trends in dress and hair were relatively slow to change, but styles came in and out of vogue nonetheless. The core elements of a male noble’s wardrobe were stockings or hose, fashioned from silk or wool, a shirt, often with detachable sleeves, usually worn under a tunic, with variations on a coat or surcoat (sometimes furlined) worn outdoors, topped off with a mantle or cloak. Popular fads of the day covered everything from the tightness and hue of one’s sleeves to the precise length of cloak and the snugness of one’s shoes – for a time the most fashionable footwear was so close-fitting that they could hardly be pulled on. Like the rich and powerful in any era, twelfth-century European nobles used clothing as markers of status, favouring expensive fabrics, coloured with rare dyes. But in the course of William’s life it became increasingly popular for individual lords and families to sport distinctive colour schemes when in public, and before long these were adopted as a kind of uniform by a noble’smesnie – brightly visible symbols of collective identity.
Hair was another potent marker of status and identity in the medieval world. Centuries earlier, the Merovingian kings of Francia had been revered for the remarkable length of their locks, while monks used the tonsure (in which a section of the scalp was shaved) to indicate their dedication to religious life. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, the prevalent fashion among the Normans had been to shave a large swathe of the back of one’s head – a distinctive style much in evidence in the Bayeux Tapestry – while a generation later a craze for centre-partings that left the forehead scandalously exposed briefly took hold. By the 1160s the new Angevin royal dynasty was setting the pace, and Henry II was said to have preferred a simple, close-cropped hairstyle. Most of William’s Anglo-Norman and Angevin peers would have been clean-shaven, though some may have sported moustaches. Many regarded a beardless face as an indicator of Frankish (or French) identity. Stories abound from the crusading world of Muslims cutting off their beards to disguise themselves as Franks, or of scruffy crusaders neglecting to shave during a long siege only to be mistaken for bearded-Turks and accidently butchered.
William Marshal’s education
Alongside coaching in manners and dress, boys of William’s status were routinely schooled in a range of aristocratic skills and pursuits. Most learnt to read, perhaps even to write, practising on wax tablets. Knowledge of Latin – the language of law, governance and the Church – was valued and cultivated. Henry II’s famous son Richard the Lionheart was a remarkably skilled Latinist, able to crack jokes in the language at the expense of less fluent clerics. In this regard, William Marshal was unusual, as he never acquired a proper knowledge of Latin, though he may have achieved a very basic level of literacy.
Nobles were also expected to develop some proficiency in swimming, dancing and singing, and many gave over long hours to the day’s game of choice: a simplified version of chess involving betting. Perhaps the most emblematic of all medieval aristocratic pursuits was hunting. This was one of the ultimate symbols of social status, because certain species of quarry and hunting grounds were reserved for the nobility or royalty. The sport was also deemed to provide valuable training for war, as it honed martial skills, including horse riding and archery. Most hunts were conducted from horseback, using dogs, falcons and hawks, and targeted the likes of deer, wild boar or wolves.
Many of the kings that William Marshal met during his life were obsessed with hunting. Henry II was described by one of his courtiers as ‘a great connoisseur of hounds and hawks, and most greedy of that vain sport [of hunting]’, though rumour had it he engaged in this rigorous pursuit so regularly only because he feared becoming fat. Of course, hunting was not without its dangers. Henry I’s brother, William Rufus, had died in a hunting ‘accident’ in southern England’s New Forest in 1100, supposedly struck by a stray arrow (though Henry’s presence on the hunt and his seizure of the crown just three days later have caused some to question whether this was regicide).
Marshal himself appears to have shown only limited interest in the likes of dancing, music or even hunting. His first passion was for the art of war and, through the six years he spent at Tancarville, most of his time, day after day, would have been spent in arduous military training, hardening his mind and body, developing the raw physical strength and endurance necessary to function as a professional warrior in the Middle Ages. As one of William’s contemporaries explained, a man had to learn to deal with the brutish rigours of combat. It was only after he had ‘taken blows’, seen ‘his blood flow’ and felt ‘his teeth crack under the fist of his foe’, yet still managed to fight on, that a man could ‘engage in battle confidently’. On its own, though, sheer toughness was not enough. To enter the ranks of Europe’s knightly elite, William also had to master three essential, interlocking skills: martial horsemanship, hand-to-hand combat and the ability to fight in medieval armour.
Medieval horses, arms and armour
In the twelfth century, successful knights were incredibly adept horsemen. Most of these medieval warriors had a natural affinity for horses – their daily lives were filled with the sounds and pungent smells of horse and stable, and many of their waking hours were spent in the saddle. The horse was a primary marker of knightly status, but also an intimate companion in combat, an animal in whom the rider placed his trust, perhaps even his life. Not surprisingly, favoured mounts were pampered, treasured, sometimes even named.
Men like William Marshal knew only too well that not all horses were born equal. Knights typically were expected to own at least three different types of horses – each bred and trained with a specific role in mind. In terms of cost and function, a vast gulf separated these various categories. For general riding and travel, William used a light ‘palfrey’, while a stout and stocky ‘sumpter’ carried baggage, weapons and armour. However, Marshal’s most valuable mount was his destrier or warhorse – the animal ridden in combat. These cost anywhere from £40 to £100, sometimes even more. Working from the rates current in the 1160s, for the average price of one destrier William could have purchased either 40 palfreys, 200 packhorses, 500 oxen or a staggering 4,500 sheep.
Most twelfth-century warhorses measured between fifteen and sixteen hands (five feet to five-feet-four) and were bred not for straight-line speed, but a balance of fleet-footed agility, strength, endurance and martial temperament. The best stock was deemed to be Arabian, often imported via Spain or Italy, and mounts of this type were carefully reared and conditioned. Through such training, the finest destriers could be expected to respond to a rider’s every command, even without the use of reins (as hands might be needed for shield and sword in combat). Crucially, they would also be inured to the raucous tumult and terrifying violence of a medieval battlefield. Horse armour was not yet common, though it was in use by the end of the century, but a destrier might be cloaked in cloth covering or caparison, decked out in a knightly household’s chosen colours.
By the time William Marshal reached the age of twenty, he must already have spent thousands of hours in the saddle. Certainly, he achieved a high level of skill in the art of horsemanship and, in the course of his later career, proved able to deftly control and manoeuvre his mount, outclassing many an opponent. Much of Marshal’s fortune, both on the tournament field and in actual battle, would be founded on this equestrian expertise. But William also had to learn how to fight from horseback, handling a range of weapons.
The most important of these was the sword – the totemic weapon of knighthood. It played a central role in the ritual of knighting, and both the carrying of a sword, and the ability to show skill in its use, came to be intimately associated with this elite warrior class. In William’s lifetime, the typical sword was single-handed, with a double-edged blade of around thirty-four inches, a broad point and an overall weight of some two-and-a-half pounds. Swords could be mass-produced for huge campaigns, like the crusades of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the finest weapons were masterpieces of metallurgy and smithcraft: wrought from a precise mixture of iron and steel to yield the perfect blend of strength and flexibility, capable of holding a razor-sharp edge that might slice through un-armoured limbs with a single stroke and extraordinarily well-balanced in the hand.
The first surviving manuals of European swordsmanship date from the early fourteenth century, so it is impossible to know precisely how William trained and fought with this weapon, but it is clear that he honed his ability to wield his sword both while mounted and on foot. This must have required the daily repetition of practice sword strokes through his teenage years and beyond – so as to develop strength and acquire muscle memory – and regular sparring to refine coordination and agility. By the time he became a knight, Marshal was an effective swordsman, but so far as theHistory was concerned, his primary gift was not flashy technique, but the brutish physicality that enabled him to deliver crushing blows. With sword in hand, William was, in the words of his biographer, a man who ‘hammered like a blacksmith on iron’.
Marshal probably also trained with a number of other mêlée weapons popular with twelfth-century knights, including the dagger, axe, mace and war-hammer, but much of his time would have been devoted to mastering the lance. By construction this was a fairly rudimentary weapon – often simply a ten- to twelve-foot-long straight spar of hewn wood, usually of ash – but it was fiendishly difficult to use from horseback. The lance would be held under the arm (or couched) during a charge, and directing its point towards a target with any accuracy required immense skill. Lances often broke after one or two uses, but a successful strike could cause devastating damage to an opponent. In the course of his career, William would witness the lethal potential of this weapon with his own eyes and he would also be called upon to charge down one of the greatest warriors of the age, Richard the Lionheart, with lance in hand.
In addition, Marshal had to learn how to ride and fight while using the distinctive range of armour employed by twelfth-century knights. In the 1160s, most warriors wore a mail hauberk (or coat), formed of around 30,000 tightly packed, interlocking iron rings. This typically weighed in the region of thirty-five pounds, covered the upper body and arms, reached down to the knees, but was split-skirted both back and front, to enable use on horseback. William would have worn a padded jerkin (‘aketon’) underneath his hauberk – crucial for absorbing the blunt trauma of blows – and probably used mail leggings (‘chausses’). Hauberks with sleeves that ended in mail mittens (or mufflers) were also becoming popular. As Marshal aged, military technology advanced, such that by the early thirteenth century, fitted plates of metal were beginning to be worn alongside or atop mail, but it would be another two hundred years before full plate (the classic ‘knight in shining armour’) became the norm.
In battle, William’s head was protected by three layers of armour: a quilted, padded cap; a mail hood (that might be an integral part of his hauberk, or a separate ‘coif’), often including a section of mail that could be raised and tied in place to cover the face (the ‘ventail’); and an iron helm. While at Tancarville, Marshal likely used the basic conical helmets with central nosepieces that were still popular in the mid-twelfth century. But over time, these gave way to larger, more enclosing cylindrical great helms – flat topped, with a full face plate and perforated visor – that offered a high level of protection, but restricted vision and were intensely uncomfortable to wear over long periods of time. William’s last piece of defensive equipment was a curved, triangular wooden shield, usually strengthened with either hardened leather or metal plating. This could be hung from the neck or shoulder using a leash, to free the arms and shelter the back.
Trying to move and fight while decked out in this bewildering array of gear – clad head-to-toe in mail, bearing shield, helmet, sword and lance – was no simple matter. Much of the weight of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century armour was distributed across the body, so Marshal would not have been desperately encumbered. He was able to walk, mount his horse unaided and certainly was capable of getting back to his feet if knocked over; but adapting to the load and feel of all of this equipment required years of training and physical development. William acquired the necessary strength and endurance, yet like any knight in this period, he only wore full armour when necessary, and generally travelled in much lighter gear.
Burdensome though mail, helm and shield may have been, they rendered William and his peers virtually invulnerable. Most sword and arrow strikes could not penetrate through these layers of defence, though lethal blows to the face and eyes were possible, and broken bones (especially from crushing lance attacks) were more common. Only crossbow bolts had the puncturing force to pierce mail and the padding beneath to reach flesh, and this helps to explain why the papacy sought to ban their use against Christians from 1139 onwards. In the majority of settings, however, knights could wage war with relative impunity, and for fully equipped members of this warrior class death in battle was a relatively rare, even shocking, occurrence.
The ritual of knighting
In 1166, when William Marshal was around twenty years old, he reached the end of his training and apprenticeship. The time had come for him to undergo the ritual of knighting. By the mid-twelfth century this ceremony was becoming increasingly formalised and elaborate – at least for those in the upper echelons of the aristocracy – and its conventions had been imbued with symbolism and meaning. In William’s day, publically witnessed rituals were an essential part of the fabric of medieval society, and their power and efficacy were implicitly accepted. It was understood that the human soul might be purified through rites of Mass or penance, that a king or emperor could be created by coronation; and likewise, the ceremony of knightly ‘dubbing’ was believed to transform a young man into a different breed of warrior. Most rituals in the Middle Ages had a devotional or sacred dimension, and thus required the involvement of the Church. But despite the persistent attempts of the medieval clergy to intrude into the process of knighting by encouraging the likes of sword blessing, as yet the actual role of churchmen remained inconsistent and muted. For now, at least, knights were made, or invested, only by other knights.
For members of the wealthiest noble or royal families, the ritual of knighting could involve a high degree of pomp, pageantry and display. King Henry II’s father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, reportedly underwent just such a lavish and elaborate rite in 1128. He was knighted at the age of fifteen, along with a small group of his peers, ‘amid regal festivities’. The ceremony was held at Rouen – the capital of Normandy – as part of the preparations for Geoffrey’s imminent marriage to King Henry I’s daughter Empress Matilda. On the appointed day, Geoffrey began with a ‘solemn bath’ – an act of physical and spiritual cleansing – and his body was then clothed in the most opulent apparel. A ‘crisp linen undershirt’ was followed by ‘a ceremonial robe interwoven with gold’ and rich red in colour. Geoffrey then donned a ‘cloak, dyed purple in the blood of oyster and murex’ and pulled on a pair of luxurious silken shoes decorated with ‘lion cubs’. His fellow aspirants were ‘likewise dressed in linen and purple’. Decked out in their finery, the young men now emerged ‘from a secret chamber into public view’. An awestruck crowd looked on as Geoffrey received a magnificent Spanish horse ‘reputed to outpace many birds when it ran’, as well as gifts of arms and armour, including a sword drawn from the royal treasury that was said to have been ‘crafted by that master Wayland’. The ritual was followed by seven days of feasting, celebration and military games.
Of course, the vast majority of knighting ceremonies were neither so extravagant, nor so glamorous, though many did follow this pattern of group participation, and most involved an element of public witness. It was common for a gift (or gifts) to be given to a new knight, but often this was limited to a single new cloak – a piece of clothing that seemed to indicate an elevation in status. The only core element of the ritual that was virtually universal in the twelfth century was dubbing. Derived from the French word ‘adouber’ (to arm), this meant literally to invest someone with a weapon, in most cases by belting (or girding) a sword to his body. For men like William, it seems to have been the receipt of these two objects, the knightly belt and sword, which signified their transformation into knights. The dubbing might be followed by one final act – the ‘collée’ – a form of ritualised blow to the body that could vary from a light, almost genteel, tap on the shoulder, to a forceful cuff to the head. Its origins and meaning remain obscure, one theory suggesting that the strike was supposed to remind a warrior of his duties, another arguing that this symbolised the last blow a knight would receive without retaliation. It would be a century before the ‘collée’ was typically delivered to the shoulder with the flat of a sword blade – the classic image of ‘dubbing’, now immortalised in modern imagination and still enacted by the English monarchy when conferring a knighthood.
Marshal’s own elevation seems to have been a rough-and-ready affair. In what amounted to a battlefield commission, William ‘was dubbed a knight’ by his patron, the lord of Tancarville, in a simple ceremony held at Neufchâtel in north-eastern Normandy. The chamberlain gifted William a fine new cloak and then ‘girded on his sword, with which he was to deal many a blow’. With this short, unadorned ritual, Marshal joined the ranks of Europe’s martial elite. The speed and suddenness of his knighting seem to have been a direct result of events on the ground. For in 1166 Normandy was under threat and war was on the horizon. Thus, William of Tancarville called his young trainee to arms for a first taste of real battle.
‘MIGHTY BLOWS AND FINE DEEDS’
In 1166 a heated border dispute broke out between the duchy and its eastern neighbours in the counties of Flanders, Ponthieu and Boulogne. The precise background to this conflict is disputable, but it led Upper Normandy to be placed on a war footing. The lord of Tancarville led Marshal and the rest of his troops fifty-five miles east to Neufchâtel-en-Bray, to join up with a number of other nobles, including the constable of Normandy. This may have been William’s first visit to this border zone, but in the course of his career he would fight numerous campaigns in this area. The fortress of Neufchâtel was surrounded by a small town, and lay beside the River Béthune, some fifteen miles back from the duchy’s main frontier at the River Bresle. The original intention seems to have been to assemble a war-band there, before moving forward en masse to counter an attempted invasion. In the event, enemy troops led a sudden, piercing raid into Norman territory and almost caught the lord of Tancarville and his allies off-guard. They were still billeted in Neufchâtel when news arrived that a direct attack on their position was imminent.
Showing a cool head, the chamberlain calmly gathered his men – said to number twenty-eight knights including William Marshal – and moved to intercept the enemy near a bridge on the town’s outskirts. Marshal’s blood was racing at the prospect of the coming fight and, as the Tancarville retinue rode through the streets, he tried to push to the front. The chamberlain was having none of it. Scolding William’s youthful impetuosity, he apparently shouted ‘get back . . . let these knights pass’. Marshal ‘withdrew a few paces, downcast and ashamed, his face the picture of gloom,’ according to the History, ‘since he thought he was indeed a knight’, though he soon started edging forward again nonetheless.
Thoughts of rank were put to one side when a group of enemy knights were sighted up ahead, advancing along a street lined with houses and farmsteads. Both sides charged immediately and as ‘they struck one another with great force’ a frenzied mêlée began. Most medieval warfare was like a maelstrom – barely contained or ordered – with a hectic scrum of mounted knights wrestling their horses, each trying to plant a telling blow. In the first shock of contact ‘lances were broken and shattered, shields were holed and crushed’ and as a result, ‘all they had to strike each other with were the stumps’ of their lances, or their swords. A deafening wave of sound erupted, as the ‘din and uproar created by the blows of combat’ assaulted the senses, and the noise was such ‘that you would not have heard God’s thunder resounding’. As William’s biographer remarked, ‘the idle threats and boasts made back home’ were forgotten in these moments, as the real fighting began.
Marshal proved his mettle that day. He was not thrown into hysterical panic by the first onslaught, nor paralysed by fear. Instead, ‘having broken his lance’, he was said to have drawn his sword and rushed ‘right into the fray to lay about him’. Not surprisingly, the History’s author used this first military encounter to highlight his hero’s martial prowess, and so William was depicted in grand terms, cutting ‘a swathe through the throng’ and ‘dealing violent blows [that] were greatly feared’. When the dust settled, everyone on both sides of the fray supposedly agreed that he had shown himself to be the finest warrior present. But this was Marshal unashamedly painted as the ‘valiant knight’ – the man he would become – not William, the twenty-year-old, untested warrior, tasting war for the first time. Even so, it is possible to piece together some sense of how the fighting played out in Neufchâtel.
For much of this extended skirmish, Norman fortunes ebbed and flowed. On four separate occasions the enemy was driven back, only for them to regroup or be reinforced. At one point William became separated from the main party of Tancarville knights, having ridden into a small enclosure attached to a roadside farmhouse just as the Norman forces fell back. Seconds ticked by, yet no one seemed to notice the lone knight, isolated from his comrades. This dangerous moment could easily have ended in William’s capture. As it was, he snatched up a discarded lance and charged back out into the street, unhorsing an unsuspecting foe while bellowing ‘Tancarville! Tancarville!’ for all he was worth. The Normans swept forward once again to answer this rallying cry and the fracas continued. Marshal had learnt the value of a surprise flank attack.
Later on, as the engagement drew to a close, he attempted to play the same trick again, but this time it had disastrous consequences. William charged back into the same enclosure only to find it filled with thirteen Flemish foot soldiers. Under normal circumstances this might have posed little problem. Even outnumbered and surrounded, Marshal was still in full armour and astride his warhorse. But things quickly took a turn for the worse when an enterprising Fleming grabbed a long, hook-tipped pole (normally used for pulling burning thatch from roofs) and began trying to rip William from his saddle. Caught on his shoulder, the iron hook began to bite and, clinging on as best he could, Marshal spurred his mount to make a hasty escape. The force of this sudden movement caused the hook to shred a section of William’s mail hauberk, leaving a nasty gash below, but he managed to pull free. It was only as he retreated down the street that he realised his horse had been gravely wounded. With blood streaming from its body, ‘its death was inevitable’. Not long after, the forces of Flanders, Ponthieu and Boulogne withdrew, leaving the Normans in control of Neufchâtel. William had survived his first day of fighting, but it had cost him his prized warhorse.
That evening, the lord of Tancarville threw a sumptuous feast to celebrate the Norman victory. No expense was spared, and even knights from other retinues were welcomed. The tables were laden with food and, out of gratitude for their salvation, the townspeople supplied ‘valuable wines and very fine fruit’. On this evening of boisterous merriment William learnt an essential lesson – one that he would heed for the rest of his life. Still smarting at the death of his horse, he was nonetheless proud of his performance in the field. The hall was full of banter as knights traded tales of ‘mighty blows and fine deeds’, and William seems to have been well praised for his exploits. But then a knight apparently called out: ‘Marshal, make me a gift out of friendship; [give me] a harness or failing that an old horse-collar.’ Not realising that he was being set up for a joke, William innocently replied that he had never owned such things. ‘What’s that you say?’ the knight replied. ‘It is a trifling thing you refuse me’, and then went on to recount how he had seen Marshal best numerous warriors that day. How could it be that William had no spoils to share? At this everyone broke into laughter. They understood that feats of arms were all well and good, but a knight making his way in the real world had also to accrue more practical, financial gains. William had fought with some skill and courage at Neufchâtel, but took neither booty, nor valued prisoners who could later be ransomed for cash. All he had to show for his efforts was damaged armour and a dead horse.
William’s crisis
The conflict on Normandy’s border soon petered out and, before long, northern France returned to a state of relative peace. The chamberlain duly brought his household knights back to Tancarville, but with no sign of any impending military action, he seems to have taken a decision to reduce the size of his mesnie. Much to William Marshal’s horror, he now discovered that he had fallen out of favour. The cause of this rift remains unclear; the History skirted around the affair, noting only that the chamberlain ‘showed little kindness towards [William], and the latter was very ashamed’, but it must be likely that, as a junior knight of limited experience, Marshal was simply deemed surplus to requirements. He was not cast out of Tancarville exactly – his family connection to the chamberlain probably made such a brusque move unconscionable – but the patronage and shelter he had once enjoyed in the castle were withdrawn. Most critically of all, the chamberlain refused to furnish William with a new warhorse. He was a professional warrior without the most fundamental tool of his trade.
This was the first crisis of Marshal’s adult life. He may have been a high-born knight, but he was also penniless and, as his biographer remarked, ‘poverty has brought dishonour on many a nobleman and been the ruin of them’. William was left with only a light palfrey for riding and a single servant willing to follow him. He could have considered returning to England. By this stage both of his elder half-brothers had died and, in 1165, his father, John Marshal, had also passed away. As a result, William’s elder brother John had inherited the remaining Marshal lands and his father’s office. William might have begged for a permanent position in the Marshal household, but this would have meant a career lived firmly in his brother’s shadow, awaiting John’s grace and favour. That was not the life that William wanted. He chose instead to forge his own path. The precious cloak received at his knighting was sold for the rather paltry sum of twenty-two Angevin shillings (the equivalent of five-and-a-half shillings sterling), and with this money William was able to buy a ‘hack’ to serve as a packhorse. Swallowing his pride, Marshal strapped his arms and armour to his new mount and prepared to seek his fortune.