The period from roughly 950 to 1050 was a fundamentally important age of transition for Latin European civilization. It saw a broad set of linked changes in economic activity and social structure that would have immeasurable consequences for government, military organization, and culture. These changes established patterns that would remain central to western European civilization down to the Industrial Revolution.
The end of the siege of Europe unleashed a vast potential for growth as conditions became somewhat more secure. New peasant settlements began to spread out from the old population centers, eating into the tracts of wilderness within Latin Christendom and pushing this world’s frontiers steadily outward (see Chapter 12 on this external expansion). The population began to rise. A land of more people, less wilderness, and fewer invasions made for easier communications. New towns sprang up, and the pace of economic activity and trade quickened. Rising agricultural and mercantile wealth were resources that beckoned to rulers who could put them to effective use. But it would be locally powerful men, lay and ecclesiastic, who would make first use of the new conditions—would, in fact, decisively shape them— leaving kings and princes to harness the achievements of the strongmen later. For the reconstruction of authority began with the reconstruction of the European aristocracy.
The starting point of this reconstruction was a new technology that had spread rapidly in the disorder of the time of invasions: the private castle. Private castles differed from earlier fortifications in several crucial ways. First, they were much smaller. The area enclosed by the walls and tower of a castle was tiny compared to an Anglo-Saxon burgh or the typical town or city walls. The castle was designed to protect a lord and his household, not the population at large. This is part of what made it private: It was not a communal defense. Even the castles of kings and counts were private in this sense. The small size of castles meant that they could be effectively defended by small forces—well under 100 men. The typical form of early private castles was the motte-and-bailey design, in which a wooden walled enclosure, the bailey, projected from a motte, a steep mound of earth, either natural or more often man-made, topped by a wooden tower. Small size and earth-and-wood construction meant that a motte-and-bailey castle could be built quickly and cheaply, so that even local lords could fortify themselves. Stone construction was slower and more expensive but more secure. Stone construction thus spread more slowly but was widespread in some areas by the mid-eleventh century as new sites were built in stone and old motte-and-bailey castles were rebuilt. (A man-made motte had to settle for several decades before a stone tower could be built on it.)
The Motte-and-Bailey
Castle Their small size and earth-and-wood construction meant that these castles could be built quickly and cheaply.
Castles were often private in another way, aside from not being communal, as local lords built them without (or against) the public authority of kings and counts. Charles the Bald was already issuing edicts against the building of unlicensed castles in the 860s, but the problem simply got worse. A lord with a castle and a group of vassals could with some impunity defy his superior. The spread of castles therefore both accompanied and contributed to the fragmentation of political authority characteristic of this period. The private castle spread as the technology of local lordship, while castles, in turn, stimulated a reconstruction of the social structure of the European aristocracy and transformed the foundations of local and regional governance.
Up to this time, the kinship structure of the European aristocracy had been rather loose. Collateral connections to both maternal and paternal families had been important, and inheritance patterns had been varied and tended toward the division and reshuffling of land within the extended kin group—the Frankish custom of dividing lands among sons has already been noted for its political consequences. But the introduction of the castle as the focus of lordly power began to change this pattern. Local lords who had built up a compact landed estate around their castle in order to supply it with men and provisions became more loath to see their estate divided after their death. Inheritance patterns thus began to evolve toward a more strictly patrilineal system and toward primogeniture—the passing of most if not all of an estate intact to the eldest surviving son, with younger sons left to make their own way. Family names began to appear in the form “of x”, where x was the name of the castle that was the family seat. Lineage and primogeniture have been the structure of European aristocratic families ever since.
In addition to estates, these new “castle lords” gathered to themselves the mechanisms of local governance. Powers of taxation and justice—supposedly public powers—passed widely into the private possession of local strongmen. In the absence of a strong central authority that could dispense wealth and prestige to its adherents, local lords found it necessary to develop their own resources more fully. The close connection between lordship and society as a whole that this fostered turned European governance at the local level even more into a form of estate management and tied political authority firmly to fixed localities.
The structure of aristocratic families was the backbone of the entire social structure, and the transformations of this structure after 950, stimulated at least in part by the spread of the private castle, had enormous consequences for European social, governmental, and military organization. A new system emerged, what we might call a sociomilitary system, that would be a fundamental part of European development for the next 800 years and more. The key elements of this system were castles, knights, and urban or non- knightly soldiers, with each being far more than just a military component.
Castles
The military function of the castle was simple. It provided a place of refuge for the lord and his military followers who controlled it, as well as a secure base of operations for forays into the countryside. A contingent of mounted men based in a castle could control the countryside for up to ten miles around the castle (half a day’s ride out and half a day’s ride back). Such domination gained political expression in the functions gathered in the castle. It was the site of the lord’s court and so of the dispensing of local justice, it could act as a jail, and it could house the lord’s storehouse of provisions and his treasury. The connection between governance and the running of the domestic household of a castle is visible in the domestic origins of the titles of medieval government officials from the local to the royal level: chamberlains, chancellors, marshals, and constables. All ran some aspect of the lord’s house and, by extension, of the polity the lord controlled.
Individual castles were important, but they could control only a limited area and were vulnerable to being isolated. Castles became the foundation of larger political units when a regional ruler could tie a set of castles, newly built or taken over, into a network. This required the regional lord to bind the individual local lords to him in some way that ensured their loyalty, a tricky task given the ease with which a castle holder could resist punishment. Where regional lords failed to tame castle holders, such as in much of southern France, central authority developed slowly. But a regional ruler who could secure a network of castles, each a day’s march from the next for mutual support and domination of all the intervening countryside, created a military foundation for extended rule. Such a network did not seal off borders, but instead created something that combined the characteristics of a defense in depth and a garrison state, guarding against both external threat and internal uprising.
Knights
The second element of the emergent sociomilitary system were knights, a term that requires careful definition. “Knight” is usually used to translate the Latin miles (pl., milites). The classical meaning of this term was simply “soldier,” and it was the word used for the legionnaries of the imperial Roman army—in other words, for heavy infantry. It referred especially to elite soldiers into the eleventh century, but by that time, as we have seen, the elite soldiers of this society rode horses. Ownership of a horse was an essential aspect of being well armed and conveyed elite status socially as well as militarily. Thus, we find that milites began to acquire a second meaning roughly equivalent to equites, or “cavalry,” in distinction to pedites, or “infantry.” Armies are described in the sources as composed of milites peditesque, or cavalry and infantry. Yet it is important to remember that the equivalence was only rough, because milites always retained the connotation of elite status, which was social as much as military. Thus, equites remained in use to describe horsemen who might not be knights or when the cavalry function of a group of soldiers was primary for the author. Similarly, a phrase such as militesgregarii, or “common knights,” could be used to describe soldiers with the arms and equipment of horse soldiers but who were otherwise poor, landless, or of low origin—that is non-elite socially. Further, milites who dismounted became pedites—that is, knights became infantry. There was no medieval equivalent for “dismounted cavalry,” nor for “mounted infantry,” as those terms imply a rigid classification of soldiers into set types that did not exist in medieval armies. We should beware of imposing such rigidities through anachronistic terminology.
Knights, then, were well-armed, mounted warriors. Well armed in this period meant a mail shirt, conical helmet, sword, lance, and shield. Horses gave them the mobility to patrol from castles, to act as armed escorts, and to meet threats rapidly. In the continental tradition, knights were trained to fight from horseback. Anglo-Saxon thegns, the equivalent of continental knights, rode on campaign but always fought on foot. But even continental knights did not have to fight as cavalry; knights often dismounted to fight as infantry, depending on the situation. Knights would usually have more than one horse, riding one on campaign and keeping the best charger for action in battle.
In addition, knights were usually the retainers of aristocratic lords. The aristocracy themselves were knights in the military sense: They were armed in the same way and led their knights in war. But it is important to keep in mind the socially based distinctions among knights. Knights in this period ranged from the sons of great lords to landless adventurers who won a place for themselves through their skill in war— prior to 1050, knights were a functional group, not a closed social class, and talented newcomers could make their fortune with some luck. As a rule, however, since the bond of vassalage was essentially a contract freely entered into by free men with obligations on both parties, unfree men could not become knights. (A peculiar class of unfree knights did arise in Germany, though.)
Terms of service, as we noted above (see the Issues box, p. 126), were correspondingly undefined as yet. Men served for their daily bread at the lord’s table, in the hope of future land grants, and in exchange for land already given. Vassals became “the man of ” a lord for a variety of reasons; military service was only one aspect of the bonds that tied vassals to lords. Kinship connections remained a powerful bond among the knightly and aristocratic segments of society, for instance. And in many areas, men held land from multiple lords, and lords granted land to each other. But military power still lay at the heart of the network of bonds in this period, because lords needed armed followers, and lesser men needed protectors and patrons. So we can imagine that many vassals served their lord far more than forty days a year, with the level depending on a combination of necessity and bargaining. After 1050, the terms and obligations of knighthood became gradually more defined, and, in the process, knights came to be a defined social class (see Chapter 12). But the situation prior to 1050 was more fluid.
As the warriors with the best equipment, training, and connections that this society could provide, knights were the backbone of armed force at the local level and the spearhead of larger armies. Knights also furnished leadership to nonknightly contingents of armies, cavalry and infantry. Knights were not professional soldiers in the sense that Roman legionnaries were—knighthood was not a salaried job with mass training imposed from above by a strong central authority. Large armies of knights and infantry never held regular peacetime maneuvers and drill, and their battlefield capabilities were correspondingly more limited than a professional army could achieve. But knights were as professional as the age could make them. Knights were trained in the skills of horsemanship and weaponry from a young age, and small groups such as a lord’s familia gained experience and cohesion by hunting, fighting, and living together. Warfare was not a knight’s profession so much as his lifestyle. As a result, knightly armies were capable of remarkable feats of bravery, endurance, and skill, and they often exhibited far more discipline than historians have given them credit for.
Urban and Nonknightly Soldiers
The third element of the emergent sociomilitary system was the nonknightly soldiers drawn primarily from urban populations, but also at times from the margins of civilization, such as Wales. Whereas social connections among the ruling class bound knights together, nonknightly soldiers were held together by a variety of forces, including communal solidarity, paid service, and ethnic identity.
Urban soldiers and other outsiders were, first and foremost, nonknights socially. Just as knights could fight on foot as infantry or on horseback as cavalry, urban soldiers were flexible tactically. They normally fought, of economic necessity, on foot, including with missile weapons such as the crossbow, but they did not do so exclusively. Spanish urban militias would come to include substantial mounted elements, and other urban and nonknightly soldiery often included horsed soldiers, especially, as in Italy, where economic development gave a segment of a city’s population the resources to arm themselves to knightly levels. There is no automatic equation of townsmen or other outsiders with the infantry. But, in general, this group was the source of infantry forces in western European armies.
Thus, outside of the Anglo-Scandinavian world, where the elite warriors traditionally fought on foot, most infantry in this period and for centuries to come were urban based (at least in origin—bands of infantry were widely available for hire far from their home bases). The Greek model for infantry effectiveness was still the only one extant, given the rudimentary powers of central governments in this period. But the slow revival of trade and growth of urban life began to revitalize this basis for good infantry, and indeed, one crucial part of the development of European armies over the next eight centuries was to be the steady improvement of infantry skills, first on the Greek model and later on the Roman model. For now, the most effective infantry usually came from the two most urbanized areas of Europe— northern Italy and Flanders.
Given the importance of castles, and thus of siege warfare, infantry had an important role in the system, despite the social dominance of the knights. The connection between infantry and sieges is indicated by the rapid spread in this period of the crossbow. Crossbows of a sort had been around since late Roman times, but only now became a prominent infantry weapon. The crossbow had greater range and penetrating power than the traditional short bow, but it took longer to load. It was thus ideally suited for the defense of castle and town walls, whence crossbowmen could reload in safety and fire at the besiegers. Crossbowmen, in turn, provided covering fire for besieging armies. But heavy infantrymen, mostly spearmen, were regularly used as well. Spearmen were less skilled than crossbowmen and so cheaper, and they could provide a stronger defensive mass against enemy cavalry on a battlefield. Many armies included both types of infantry, as a combination of defensive strength and firepower was valuable in siege work and in battle. But infantry forces were less important to small raiding expeditions in which mounted troops would ravage the countryside.
While nonknightly soldiers were an important part of this military system, we should not think of the system as either designed from the top down or completely harmonious. There was often tension between the towns, with their increasing legal liberties and wealth, and the more rurally based knights. Urban infantry forces existed as much for self-defense against lordly demands as to support knightly forces in a larger system. Where a castle existed as part of a town’s defenses, it acted both to thwart besiegers and to overawe the town itself, standing as a symbol of the dominance of the town’s lord. The combination of castles, knights, and urban forces that began to emerge in the period 950-1050 was a dynamic, tension-filled balance of cooperating and competing interests, with as yet little direction or control from above.
Such a sociomilitary system would prove turbulent but capable of dramatic conquests—as, for example, William of Normandy’s conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 (see the Highlights box “The Campaign and Battle of Hastings”)—as well as significant change and adaptation through time, and would become the foundation of a steady expansion of the frontiers of this civilization, of renewed state building, and of a particular European culture of war. These topics are taken up in Chapter 12.