CHAPTER 6
Immediately after concluding peace, we will remove from the kingdom all alien knights, crossbowmen, sergeants and mercenary soldiers who have come with horses and arms to the hurt of the realm.
Magna Carta, Clause 51
In 1215 the ethos of the English nobility and gentry was military. Their houses were often designed to look far more defensible than they really were. Fencing masters and weapons instructors trained young aristocrats to handle weapons, and these skills were much admired. A model knight such as Tristan ‘learned to ride nimbly with shield and lance, to spur his mount skilfully on either flank, put it to the gallop with dash, wheel and give it free rein, and urge it on with his knees, all in strict accordance with the chivalric art’. The knightly art of fighting on horseback was extremely difficult to master – for horse as well as rider. Hunting helped to hone some of the necessary skills, but for real training in the art of chivalric combat, you had to go to the tournament, a serious war-game devised in the twelfth century.
A long poem written in French verse in England in the 1220s provides a superb insight into the aristocratic lifestyle, particularly tournaments: L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (The History of William the Marshal). William was the fourth son of a Wiltshire baron so although he had been born into aristocratic circles, as a fourth son he could not rely on inheriting an estate and would have to make his own way in the world. He made his way so successfully that he ended his life as earl of Pembroke, a great landowner with estates in Normandy, England, Wales and Ireland, and as regent of England during the minority of John’s son, Henry III. The path he took began with tournaments, and it was here that he first made his mark. Not surprisingly the verse biography, composed soon after William’s death, tells the story of his career on the tournament field with loving detail.
The tournament was, indeed, training for real war, not the formalised jousting of the later Middle Ages that film-makers have made so familiar. In the joust, knights carrying lances charged at each other. Each knight had to swerve at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision with his opponent, while at the same time couch his lance tightly to his side so that the blow was struck with all the weight and momentum of his horse behind it. If, in swerving aside, he moved his head or used his arm to thrust at his opponent, the blow had little or no effect. It was a technique that required split-second timing and horsemanship of the highest order – an ideal exercise for an exhibitionist knight.
In real war, lances might be used during the pursuit of a defeated enemy or during the opening stage – the joust, as it was called at the time – of a battle, but they soon splintered or were dropped. Most charges were delivered as flank attacks, not head-on as in the lists. In any event, very few battles were won by a massed charge of heavily armoured knights. The charge almost never worked against well-disciplined infantry. Horses are too sensible to risk impaling themselves on a hedge of spears. Battles nearly always turned into a series of mêlées in which both cavalry and infantry were involved, with victory going to the side that better co-ordinated the two arms. Consequently the mêlée was at the heart of the tournament. In major tournaments, foot soldiers armed with spears and bows could be used as a screen behind which the knights could withdraw and wait until they saw an opportunity to make another attack. Tournaments were not confined within enclosed lists but ranged over several square miles of ground, taking in villages, woods and vineyards, all of which were likely to suffer collateral damage.
In mêlées between knights, whether in battle or in the tournament, the overwhelming bulk of the fighting was done with sword and mace. It was William the Marshal’s ability to take literally resounding blows on his helmet and return them with interest, like a woodcutter chopping down oaks, wrote the author of the History, that started him on the road to being a tournament champion. After one tournament he was found at the blacksmith’s, kneeling with his head on the anvil while the smith beat his helmet back into shape so that it could be removed.
The kind of fighting that took place in tournaments and war was determined by the type of armour the combatants wore, in particular the expensive armour of the well-heeled knight. He wore a knee-length mail shirt, known as a hauberk, made of interlinked metal rings, slit back and front to facilitate riding and worn over a padded undergarment, with mail mittens and mail leggings, known as chausses. On his head he wore a padded cap; and over this, to protect his neck, a mail hood and a helmet. If he was technologically up to date this would be the great helm, cylindrical and flat-topped. It had only a few narrow slits for seeing and breathing, but gave the head much better protection against missile weapons – above all arrows and crossbow bolts – than did the old conical form of helmet familiar from the Bayeux Tapestry. High-quality body armour was becoming more widely available in the twelfth century and it is this that explains the rise of the tournament. Without such armour it would have been an impossibly dangerous war-game.
Although the knight was carrying a heavy weight of metal, it was so well distributed that he could move freely – at any rate, for a while. It did not take much exertion, however, tightly encased as he was, for body heat and sweat in his eyes to take their toll. Battles and tournaments tended to be fought in bursts of activity, with long pauses for the participants to catch their breath and plan what they might do next. It was almost impossible to kill or even wound a really well-armoured knight. The only way to do it was with a sword or knife thrust through the eyehole of the helmet or some other chink in the armour. In battle soldiers used narrow killer-knives; in tournaments they did not. That apart, the arms and armour used in twelfth century tournaments and battles were virtually identical. It was not until the later Middle Ages that specially designed weapons for tournament and joust became available. Despite all the high-quality armour though, the tournament was a desperately bruising business and the knight who participated was, like a motor racing driver today, taking grave risks. If his horse fell in a mêlée or he was knocked off by a rain of blows, he was in danger of being dragged or trampled to death. This was how King John’s brother, Geoffrey of Brittany, was said to have died at a tournament in Paris in 1186. There were other risks in tournaments too. As in war, you might be captured, and if you were then you lost your horse and armour to the victorious knight. You might even have to pay a ransom as well. It was thanks to his tournament winnings that the thick-skulled William Marshal won fortune as well as fame.
But success in tournaments depended upon more than good armour and a strong right arm. William was a master-player in a team game. Victory and prizes were won not so much by the jouster’s display of individual prowess as by groups of knights learning to fight together as a unit. As in battle, the more knights in your team the more likely you were to win. All was fair in the tournament, as in war. If one knight became separated from the rest of his team he might find four or five opponents bearing down on him at once, and one of them might knock him down with a blow from behind. If thrown from his horse, there was no nonsense about letting him remount. It was thought to be extremely clever tactics when one team pretended not to be taking part in the tournament, and only joined in late in the day when all the other knights, having played on and off since soon after sunrise, were exhausted. William became so skilful a team leader that he was taken on as the player-manager of the team nominally captained by Henry the Young King (as Henry II’s eldest son was known).
Such strenuous war-games when so much was at stake could easily degenerate into hot-tempered battles fought in deadly earnest. Some kings worried about plotting and rebellion when they saw knights meeting together in arms. Henry II banned tournaments in England as a threat to public order, so knights who wanted the exercise had to go to the continent, to the borders of Normandy and beyond, where there was reckoned to be a good tournament about once a fortnight. In England, during King John’s youth, the only sorts of tournaments were the pseudo-jousts arranged every Sunday in Lent outside the gates of London. Here the young citizens, on horseback and armed with shields and blunted lances, could play at being knights. If the court was in residence at Westminster, then young courtiers, men attached to aristocratic households but not yet knighted, joined in, seeking every opportunity to show off. After Easter there came, according to William FitzStephen, another chance to break a lance.
A strong pole is set mid-stream and a shield tied to it. A young man with a lance stands at the prow of a boat which, powered by oars and the river’s flow, is driven at the pole. If the lance splinters on the shield, he keeps his footing and has triumphed. But if his lance strikes the shield without breaking he is thrown into the river as his boat speeds on by. Although two rescue boats are on station to save him from drowning, his misfortune causes great mirth to the crowds watching from the galleries on the bridge.
In a cold winter, too, Londoners grabbed the chance to stage an impromptu joust on ice. Two youths, armed with poles, ran head-on at each other over the ice, to be sent spinning and sliding away by the force of their collision, lucky if they escaped with scrapes and bruises. Real knights probably watched such townsmen’s entertainments with amusement – yet they may have contributed to London’s ability to muster a substantial military force, of which William FitzStephen was justly proud.
When Richard I became king he encouraged the real thing in England. He designated five places as official tournament sites: the fields between Salisbury and Wilton in Wiltshire, between Warwick and Kenilworth in Warwickshire, between Brackley and Mixbury in Northamptonshire, between Stamford and Warinford (probably in Suffolk), and between Blyth and Tickhill in Nottinghamshire. According to William of Newburgh, ‘the famous king Richard, observing that the extra training of the French knights made them more fearsome in war, decided that English knights should be able to learn from tourneying the art and customs of real war so that the French would no longer be able to insult them as crude and lacking in skill’.
Tournaments were repeatedly condemned by popes and other churchmen, but in Newburgh’s words, ‘knights were keen to acquire military fame and the favour of kings so they treated the Church’s prohibitions with contempt.’ When William Marshal was on his death-bed, in 1219, he was told by a priest that he would get to heaven only if he restored all his ill-gotten tournament winnings. The old warrior – he was now in his seventies – retorted that that was impossible: ‘If because of this the kingdom of heaven is closed to me, I can do nothing about it, for I can’t return those things. I can only commend myself to God, repenting my sins. Unless the clergy want my damnation they can ask for no more than that. But their teaching must be false, or else no one would be saved.’
The most famous battle of the age was fought in north-east France in 1214 at Bouvines, between Lille and Tournai. On one side there was an allied army composed of English troops commanded by John’s half-brother, William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, with German and Flemish troops led by the German king and emperor, John’s nephew Otto IV, and by the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. On the other side was the French army led by Philip Augustus. The allies had about 1400 knights and 7000 or so infantry. Philip had about as many knights and a thousand or two fewer foot-soldiers. In these circumstances a battle was the last thing Philip had wanted, but he was intercepted in a tactical situation which gave him very little choice. Reluctantly he decided to stand and fight.
As soon as the battle horns announced that fighting had started, King Philip’s chaplain William the Breton and another royal clerk began to chant the psalm Benedictus dominus deus meus qui docet manus meas ad proelium. Other clerks took a more active part. On Philip’s side the cleverest soldier and in effect the French battle commander was Guérin, the bishop-elect of Senlis. Philip’s cousin, the bishop of Beauvais, was also present – by chance, said William the Breton. He happened – also quite by chance, William reiterated – to have a mace in his hand, and he used it to good effect. It was against canon law for a churchman to shed blood, so a mace was the ‘clever’ weapon to use. The bishop was a famously enthusiastic warrior, but as a churchman he should not have fought at all – hence William’s insistence that his participation in the battle was entirely fortuitous.
Arms and armour were similar on both sides. Together with the mace, the beautifully balanced, tapered sword was the knight’s main weapon. From the time the armies were within bowshot, both sides moved so quickly to engage hand to hand that there was little space or time for the archers to exercise their customary skills. Although not yet employed in the numbers that the English would later in the Hundred Years War, many of the bowmen of 1200 had bows as long and as powerful as those used to such devastating effect by their successors on the field of Agincourt (1415). At Bouvines the infantry used chiefly spears and knives, although William the Breton complained about the ‘hooks’ (presumably something like billhooks on long poles) used by some Flemish and German infantrymen to pull knights off their horses. Both armies used the skills and disciplines practised in tournaments. Cavalry contingents riding in close order under the banners of their lords charged the enemy lines whenever and wherever they saw an opportunity to disrupt them.
Because it was almost impossible to kill a well-armoured man, there were few fatalities among the knights at Bouvines. One, Stephen of Longchamp, was regarded as very unlucky when a knife thrust through the eyehole of his helmet pierced his brain. William the Breton accused the enemy of employing long, slender knives of a new design. In fact, both sides used them. It was difficult, though, to get close enough to your enemy to find the chinks in his armour. This is how William saw the killing of one Flemish knight, Eustace of Malenghin: ‘The French surrounded him. One man grabbed his head holding it between his arm and chest, then ripped off his helmet, while another knifed him under the chin.’ To kill a wealthy knight it was often necessary to wrestle him to the ground first – and then, naturally, you might prefer to spare his life in return for a fat ransom. At times indeed, as William the Breton makes clear, there would be moments of chaos as your own soldiers, almost oblivious to the battle going on around them, fought each other for possession of a rich prize.
The crisis of Bouvines came when a large force of German infantry, armed with spears and iron hooks, crashed into Philip’s own division, fighting under the royal standard, golden fleur-de-lis on an azure field. The king was pulled to the ground. If it had not been for the superb quality of his armour, said William, he would have been killed then and there. One of his knights, Peter Tristan, jumped off his horse and covered the king with his own body, until more knights of the royal household arrived to kill the relatively poorly armoured German infantrymen. Then in a French counter-attack, Otto IV was nearly taken. A French knight grabbed the bridle of his horse. Another lunged at him with a knife. His first blow rebounded off Otto’s armour; the second, as the emperor’s horse reared up, went through the horse’s eye. In its agony the horse broke away, carrying Otto to safety, before it collapsed. In this kind of fighting, and even though expensive war horses were now provided with armour, far more horses than knights were killed. According to one account, Otto had three horses killed under him during a ferocious mêlée.
The allied army, made up of its three separate contingents under their own commanders, was more easily driven into disarray than the French under unified royal command, and it was probably the better co-ordination of the French forces that decided the outcome of a bitterly fought battle. With great difficulty Otto managed to escape, but William Longsword and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne did not. They and dozens of other nobles on the losing side were carted off as prisoners. The count of Flanders was placed in the Louvre, Philip’s newly completed great tower just outside the city walls of Paris.
The battle of Bouvines was an extraordinary event. Pitched battles such as this were very rare indeed. Although few knights were killed in battle, the king who committed his cause to battle was putting himself in jeopardy. William the Breton claimed that the allied leaders had sworn to kill Philip and had aimed their assaults directly at him. Since everyone knew that the surest way to win was to kill or capture the opposing commander, it must have felt like this. Commanders offered battle only when they were confident of the outcome, and in these circumstances their opponent was almost certain to avoid it. Philip Augustus fled from Richard I in 1194 and again in 1198, preferring the humiliation and the losses incurred in flight to the risk of total disaster that battle entailed. The standard handbook on the art of war in this period was the De re militari written by a late-Roman author, Vegetius. His advice on giving battle was quite simple: don’t. ‘Every plan is to be considered, every expedient tried and every method taken before matters are brought to this last extremity’. Successful commanders such as Philip followed Vegetius’s advice. Battle was too chancy. A few hours, even a few minutes, of confusion or bad luck could undermine the patient work of years. Henry II never risked one. In Europe even so famous a soldier as Richard the Lionheart only fought in one. In a long lifetime of campaigning Philip too fought only one pitched battle, the battle of Bouvines.
Yet these were all kings who went frequently to war. If they were not seeking battle, then what were they doing? Their aim was to win control of enemy territory, and first and foremost that meant capturing castles. Castles were, it was said, ‘the bones of the kingdom’. Had Philip lost Bouvines but escaped, Otto and his allies would still have faced the problem of capturing his fortresses. New and better siege-engines called trebuchets, capable of hurling larger rocks, were being brought into use at this time, but castles remained hard to take. Even after their walls had been breached by artillery bombardment, casualties in a direct assault were so high that it was rare for troops to risk it – despite the incentive of the unrestricted plunder of castle or town that, should they succeed, they were allowed by the customs of war. A better way to win a castle was to take it by surprise. Another way was to capture the enemy commander, forcing him to surrender territory and strongholds in return for his release. But the best way to capture him was to take him by surprise. This was how King William of Scotland was captured at Alnwick in 1174, taken by surprise in the absence of most of his troops. In consequence he had to hand over Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Jedburgh and Berwick to English garrisons. This was how King John himself won his greatest success, at Mirebeau in 1202, when he captured Arthur of Brittany.
There was nothing unchivalrous about taking your enemy by surprise. On the contrary, this was exactly what the heroes of romances, idealised figures, tried to do. In the Romance of Horn many episodes illustrate the hero’s cunning.
Horn led his young warriors into battle, leaving the old men behind on guard, for the old are tough and can endure great hardships when needed. Horn moved quietly along the bottom of a valley. He had ordered his troops to make no sound. The enemy had no inkling of the fight ahead of them. They heard Horn’s battle-cry and were in the thick of it before they realised what had happened.
On another occasion Horn’s skill was to lead the enemy into a trap.
They came on with confidence, heading straight for where Horn’s fleet was anchored. But when they saw it, they lost heart, like men who knew they were doomed. Then they realised that their deaths had been planned by Horn, for they saw that they were outnumbered, a few against many. If they could have found a way out, they would have taken it, but they were now surrounded.
In warfare speed of movement is vital. As Vegetius put it: ‘Courage is worth more than numbers, and speed is worth more than courage.’ But, obviously, you had to know in which direction to move – as Horn’s enemies apparently did not. Good information was equally vital. If enemy forces were anywhere in the vicinity, it was crucial to send out frequent fast-moving reconnaissance patrols. They were so important indeed that the best generals, commanders such as William the Conqueror and Richard Coeur de Lion, chose to go on patrol themselves, despite the risks involved.
If there was no prospect of taking the enemy by surprise, then the tried and tested way of making war against him was to ravage his land – which meant destroying his economic resources, the fields and flocks of his people. According to Vegetius, this was the essence of war. ‘The main and principal point in war is to secure plenty of provisions for oneself and to destroy the enemy by famine. Famine is more terrible than the sword.’ The twelfth-century Chanson des Lorrains includes a vivid description of how it was done:
The march begins. Out in front are the scouts and incendiaries. After them come the foragers whose job it is to collect the spoils and carry them to the great baggage train. Soon all is in tumult. The farmers, having just come out to their fields, turn back, uttering loud cries. The shepherds gather their flocks and drive them towards neighbouring woods in the hope of saving them. The incendiaries set the villages on fire and the foragers sack them. The terrified inhabitants are either burned or led away with their hands tied to be held for ransom. Everywhere bells ring the alarm. A surge of fear sweeps over the countryside. Wherever you look you see helmets glinting in the sun, pennons waving in the breeze, the whole plain covered with horsemen. Money, cattle, mules and sheep are all seized. The smoke billows and spreads, flames crackle. Farmers and shepherds scatter in all directions.
The term for this kind of raid into enemy territory was a chevauchée. Its purpose was well known: in the words of The History of William the Marshal, ‘When the poor can no longer reap the harvest from their fields, then they can no longer pay their rents and this, in turn, impoverishes their lords’. As the description in the Chanson des Lorrains indicates, ravaging and foraging were operations which involved the dispersal of small bodies of troops over a wide area – ‘the whole plain’. Troops so engaged were themselves highly vulnerable to attack, so once again it was essential to be well informed about enemy troop movements. Patrols had to be sent out on reconnaissance and to guard the foragers. In war a clash between opposing patrols, a dog-fight between small bands of cavalry, was the kind of fighting a knight was most likely to engage in. It was here that all his tournament practice paid off.
Even campaigns in which castles were the intended targets began with ravaging, an attack on the castle’s economic base. This is how a late twelfth-century author, Jordan Fantosme, envisaged William of Scotland invading the north of Henry II’s England as the ally of Louis VII.
Let him destroy your foes and lay waste their country
By fire and burning let all be set alight
That nothing be left for them, either in wood or meadow
Of which in the morning they could have a meal.
Then with his united force let him besiege their castles.
Thus should war be begun: such is my advice
First lay waste the land.
The chevauchée alone was not enough. Ultimately wars were decided by sieges. It was in sieges rather than in battle that both archers and crossbowmen really came into their own – and sieges were many times more common than battles. When a siege was laid, some of the besiegers would entrench themselves in siege-works, but others would remain mobile. A rapid response force had to be ready to take immediate advantage of any opening created by a sortie by the defenders. The besiegers also had to send out well-armed patrols to guard their own supply lines and their foraging parties, all the more vital if the siege turned into a long drawn-out blockade intended to starve the defenders into surrender. Even this kind of struggle of attrition remained a war of movement, both in the preliminaries to siege and during the siege itself. In medieval warfare there were few pitched battles, but countless minor skirmishes in which small groups of brave men fought like teams in a tournament. William Marshal, the flower of chivalry, was an acknowledged master of this kind of war.