What can be learned by turning to contemporary writings which, in one way or another, touched on the theme of war? If we regard literature as a mirror, we see reflected in it something of the growing awareness of what war was, what it was doing to society, and how change was coming about.1 It was through literature that society thought aloud, commented on changing moral and political values, and reacted to developments of which it disapproved. No one writer could be the common voice on all matters which concerned the public; his importance might lie in him being a voice in the wilderness. But some notice of what people wrote, how, and when they did so, can give the historian an idea of reactions to events and developments.
There are at least two ways of recounting the same event: in war these reflect the points of view of the attacker and of the attacked. Chroniclers (like football correspondents today) tended to describe the events of war from the point of view of the attacker, but for whom there would have been no action to report. It was upon action that the greatest of the late medieval war correspondents, Jean Froissart, depended. Not over-concerned with seeking explanations for the causes of war, Froissart’s prime interest was to report action in terms which would evoke the spirit of chivalry among his readers, making them wish that they themselves had taken part in the actions described. Seen through his eyes, and through those of his successors who wrote not so well but in a similar chivalric tradition, war was noble because it brought out the best in those men, mostly knights, whose exploits came to fill his pages. Courage, honour, perseverence, and loyalty were among the military virtues to which Froissart wished to draw attention through his writings. He was less concerned with the outcome of a battle than with the way in which individuals or groups fought. This was so because his purpose was didactic: he wanted the episodes which he described to serve as examples for others to follow.
Froissart’s message caught on. ‘One good man’, wrote the anonymous recorder of the deeds of Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, about 1410, ‘is worth a thousand who are not’, his stated aim being to praise chivalry by describing the life and military career of one such man.2 Both Froissart and the Bouciquaut author were writers who saw war through the eyes of the individual whose deeds (‘Faits’ or ‘Gesta’) were in the mainstream of chivalric literature. Hardly less so was the text of the deeds of Henry V, written by a clerical member of his household. In this work the king, striving for justice through war, is confronted by the forces of evil (the heresy and social dangers of Lollardy, and the treason of some of his closest associates) over which he triumphs (the very vocabulary used has a military ring about it) before winning an even greater victory at Agincourt. Adjectives such as ‘epic’ and ‘heroic’ are not out of place in describing this approach to the reporting of war seen through the actions of one or more individuals.
Froissart excelled in the description of the large-scale military encounter, the battle. But he was also aware that war had its other side, less noble and less admirable, in which those who had not chosen to fight, but had none the less got involved, were caught up. France (it was natural that it should be France, on whose land the war was mainly fought) produced a number of writers who depicted that less-than-admirable side of war. One such was Jean de Venette, who could not refrain from describing the campaigns fought in the war’s first decades in terms of the physical sufferings imposed upon society by unlicensed soldiery. The priest in Venette saw many of the acts carried out under the guise of war as little other than sin; what sticks in the reader’s mind is the bitterness behind so much of what the chronicler wrote.
There was bitterness, too, in the personal record of events kept by an anonymous Parisian clerk for almost the whole of the first half of the fifteenth century; but it was a bitterness which differed a little from that of Venette in that it reflected a deep disappointment at the political failure of those at the head of French society to save their country from the unfavourable effects of war. In other ways the war reflected through the pages of this disillusioned Parisian is of very great interest. He was not concerned with analysing political events, which he merely recorded as having taken place, although he sometimes added a comment on their consequences and effects. The real importance of the work lies in other fields. The author had much sympathy for those who suffered the physical and moral effects of war (he underlined the futility of wholesale destruction of crops and property, and the effects of this upon the poor in days of rising prices), but he was also mindful of the degrading effects which war had upon the soldier. It was one thing for men from one country to fight those from another. But the war in Fance was a civil war, an act of treason by one section of the community against another, a point of view which made him reflect that while the nobility might have wished for war, the common people, desiring only peace, had never done so. It was here that his criticism of the nation’s leadership was expressed most vigorously; far from uniting the country, it had only divided it.
The historian, then, can search the texts of chronicles for reflections of opinion regarding war and what it was doing to society. But more useful, and certainly more significant, are those works, difficult to place in a particular category, written more specifically as contributions to an on-going public debate about the effects of war, particularly upon French society. By 1390 the war, after half a century, had seen the growth to adulthood of two generations. It is not surprising that the most significant works of this nature should have been produced during the long generation which began in the 1380s and ended in the 1410s. Between them, these works represent some of the worries and concerns of literate people who looked about them and did not wholly like what they saw.
Nor are the views of certain well-known Englishmen without significance in this respect. To John Wyclif war was an evil thing. To his contemporary, John Gower, the poet, it was motivated largely by greed and was not properly justified even if waged against the Saracens: how could a man kill another whose very face his own reflected?3 Geoffrey Chaucer, although no pacifist, expressed doubts about the war which, by the late fourteenth century, had lasted so long with seemingly so little result. Two generations later, in 1436, when the conflict still seemed no nearer being resolved, John Lydgate, one-time court poet and monk of Bury St Edmunds, who was not in principle against war (‘withouten werre be-forn as I yow told / We may nat save nor keepe wele our right’) could none the less plead that ‘al wer & striff be sett a-side’. In his Debate of the Horse, Goose and Sheep, a dispute between the three as to which was the most useful and important, the horse emphasised his role in war. So did the goose, as the provider of feathers for arrows. The sheep, by contrast, has appeared to critics as the representative of peace.4 That is so. But an interpretation of the poem also allows us to see in the sheep Lydgate’s vision of the meek and uncomplaining non-combatant who is the chief sufferer in time of conflict, and whose enemies are the more aggressive horse and goose.
What had the poets to say on the subject of war? There was nothing new in the fact that, like the troubadours, poets should comment upon war as they might upon any matter of public interest. Their task was to enquire what was wrong with the world, to express their feelings with truth, and thus to improve the lot of mankind in general. Just as poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, and Geoffrey Chaucer (in his Tale of Melibee) wrote about the proper exercise of power by the ruler, so they also voiced criticisms (often those of an increasingly vocal and literate middle class) against war which can be seen as part of a wider literature of complaint.
Two themes, particularly in French poetry, stand out. One was the need to pursue the war with vigour and proper organisation, so as to protect the people from death, a frequent and favourite theme in the poetry of the day. In this way there could be peace, and the public good could be achieved. The second was criticism of those who ignored or abandoned their responsibilities to that good, and of the consequent need of the king to take a firm lead to ensure the achievement and maintenance of peace. As Lydgate wrote, ‘Rem publicam ye must of riht preferre / Alwey consideryng that pees is bet than were’.5
How were the themes treated in literature other than poetry? There can be no doubt that, by the late fourteenth century, a general desire for peace was manifesting itself very clearly in both France and England. John Gower, Christine de Pisan, John Lydgate, and Alain Chartier all wrote works in which the word ‘Peace’ or ‘Paix’ appeared in the title, while in 1395 Philippe de Mézières addressed a plea to Richard II to bring the war against France to an end. Half a century later Jean Juvenal des Ursins could urge his sovereign, Charles VII, along the ‘road to peace’ (‘la voye de paix’); the war against England, he claimed, had gone on for too long. How did these men envisage peace? All wanted the fighting to stop; at the same time all recognised that, in itself, such a cessation of hostilities would not necessarily bring true and lasting peace. What Mézières, Pisan, and des Ursins had in common (besides their Frenchness) was their recognition that it was the responsibility of the crown to achieve peace. It is evident that to them peace meant not merely an absence of war; it involved a proper balance in the social structure, the abolition of abuses both legal and fiscal (critics still had a very long way to travel along this particular road) and the curbing of the tyranny of the soldier whose activities neither the crown nor anybody else was any longer able to control. In his plea for peace, Mézières described his vision of an orchard surrounded by a wall, called Tuition, a kind of Eden ruled by a King of Peace (‘rex pacificus’) who ‘stood for authority and the common good… so loved and looked up to that he might have been the father of each and all’.6 To Christine de Pisan, too, the need for good rule was paramount; it would bring the orders of society together in harmony and peace (‘well ioyned and assembled all in on[e]’).7To des Ursins, writing in the war’s declining years, something must be done (the fact that he still needed to write on this theme shows how unsuccessful earlier efforts had been); even if it required the making of territorial concessions, the calamities of war must be ended so that the people (des Ursins wrote as a bishop with experience of a diocese on a ‘frontier’ area) should suffer no more. Justice and peace, he exclaimed in the vein of the psalmist, should embrace; as the attributes of God, they were a king’s best gift to his people.8
Lydgate’s other theme was that of the res publica, or common good. Appeal to the concept went back a very long way in the Middle Ages, in particular in works on government, in which it was often placed against that of the particular interest, or tyranny. Whom did men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries regard as tyrants? In England and France it was not the king (whatever could be said of Richard II) but the soldier who was seen as the main public malefactor, who sought the fulfilment of his own interest at the cost of that of others. How had this come about?
The most important attempt to face up to this question, with its implications for all groups of society, was undoubtedly that of Honoré Bouvet, prior of Selonnet, a Benedictine monastery in the south of France, who wrote his Tree of Battles in the 1380s. Bouvet had a good working knowledge of civil and, in particular, canon law, and it was to the law that he turned for a solution to the problem. War, he argued, was not wrong when used for legitimate ends, nor when it was initiated and controlled by a prince. It was wrong, however, when it degenerated into a private affair fought without proper authority, as was too often the case at a time when the Companies roamed in France, and in particular the south, seeking their private advantage. It was this development in war which Bouvet condemned so strongly. The knight, with his love of the individual exploit, who was, at exactly the same moment, receiving the praise of Froissart, also came in for criticism. So, too, did the merchant who, attacked and deprived of his cargo upon the high seas, procured letters of marque from his sovereign which enabled him to seek compensation by seizing the lawful property of a fellow national of his attacker, either at sea or in port. According to the law of arms and common practice, such acts of retribution were legitimate. Yet, Bouvet argued, was it just that an innocent merchant, whose only association with the original miscreant was a shared nationality, should suffer the consequences of another’s illegal act? Was the cause of justice and peace well served if such a practice were allowed to continue, for the issue of letters of marque did little more than legalise piracy?
Aware of the implications of his criticisms, Bouvet asked what rights the non-combatant, whether woman, child, farmer, priest, or student travelling to his place of study, had in time of war? The purpose of discussing such questions was obvious. Bouvet was trying to limit the physical effects of war to those who actively took part in it; as far as possible the bystanders should remain innocent of those effects. In his view, the soldier was allowed too much freedom, and was too little subject to the discipline of the law. For the law under which the soldier acted, the law of arms, although intended to give some protection to all parties, none the less gave the soldier a privileged position by emphasising his rights over those of others. A soldier must be within society, not outside it.
Bouvet, ‘one of the first to argue for the rights of non-combatants’,9 was standing up for the overwhelming majority whom many saw as the victims of the soldiery. It was their good which he equated with the public good, the good which knighthood should be defending, not abusing under cover of the law of arms. Only the person who exercised sovereignty over both the soldier and the general community should apply the laws of war: and he should do so with vigour, to see justice done in the name of the public interest. The emphasis which emerges from Bouvet’s Tree is of the law being strongly administered by the ruler for the benefit of all, not simply for a few, and of a vision of the soldier as a servant, not as a master, of the community. In this way, as Lydgate pleaded, and as Mézières had done before him, the common good (‘le bien du peuple’) would be preferred to a particular one.
In essence what Bouvet was advocating was not new. ‘The name of knight is an honour, but it involves hard work’, John of Salisbury had written in the twelfth century, and some three hundred years later his view was to be quoted with approval by Jean Juvénal des Ursins.10 A country’s chivalry, he wrote, must defend its other members, and even its king, in the name of the public good. The knight and, by implication, even the common soldier, was the servant of that good; both, too, should be ready to submit to the discipline of the law. The alternative was that a particular interest, a form of tyranny, might prevail. The firm attitude of the Romans of old was much read about and praised at the end of the Middle Ages. The Bouciquaut author stressed how far Jean le Maingre had applied the rules and discipline of chivalry as the ancients had done, and Jean de Waurin was to praise Henry V’s discipline in the very same terms. Medieval society felt it had much to learn from the ancient world in matters military.
Nowhere is this better seen than in the popularity in this period of the late fourth-century handbook on war, the De re militari of Vegetius. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries had witnessed an increasingly intellectual approach to war: the knight must be not only a fighter but a thinker endowed, above all, with foresight (‘prudence’). He must always be ready for whatever might happen, in particular the unexpected, and he could prepare himself for this in several ways. He could read about the science of war in a work such as that of Vegetius, which told him how to organise a fighting force, how to succeed in certain situations such as sieges, and how, through training, to make himself ready to fight. The popularity of Vegetius’s manual was undoubted, many manuscript copies surviving to this day.11 Beginning with that made into Anglo-Norman for the future Edward I in the mid-thirteenth century, translations were made into the growing vernacular languages, Italian, German, French (four), Catalan and, finally, English. Some have chosen to regard the De re militari primarily as a handbook for war, to be kept within reach for ease of rapid consultation in battle or siege. Be that as it may, the work is much more than that. It is the expression of a basic philosophy on the waging of war, intended as much as food for thought as directive to action. Not only do the works (military, philosophical and religious) with which it is bound tell us something of how it was regarded by men of the Middle Ages; the names of the work’s owners, which include those of bishops and monks, as well as kings, princes and soldiers, reveal to us who may have read it and been influenced by its content.
What did Vegetius have to teach the late Middle Ages on the waging of war? Rather than the details of techniques or organisation, we should be seeking generalities and principles; it is these which were important. Crucial was the understanding that war was fought to achieve a political end. The need to achieve victory was, therefore, paramount, so that a soldier’s value was to be judged by his effectiveness rather than by the fine deeds, however notable, which he carried out. Victory, too, should be won in as brief a time as possible, with a minimum of effort and the least possible loss of life. Advance information of the enemy’s plans and movements would enable commanders to act with foresight, and if spies could tell them what they needed to know, then they should be used, a point endorsed by Philippe de Mézières.12 It is clear that, in the system advocated by Vegetius, the commander who planned in advance, and who used his experience of war to the best effect, would be at an advantage over the enemy. Henry V was admired for the elaborate preparations which he carried out before invading France. Equally, and to the contrary, Philippe de Commynes criticised the failure of Duke Charles of Burgundy to capture Beauvais in the summer of 1472 not because God was on the side of the defenders (which Commynes thought he was) but because Charles had come to the siege with ladders which were too short for scaling the town’s walls and with an insufficiency of cannon shot with which he could easily have battered down the defences. As Commynes commented wryly, the duke ‘had not come prepared or equipped for such an eventuality’, so that success was rightly denied him.13
Nor would numbers necessarily ensure victory. Men had constantly before them the success in battle of Judas Maccabeus, who did not rely on the size of his army to defeat the enemy. What mattered were other factors. One was the quality of leadership. The recurrence of the theme of the Nine Worthies (great military leaders of the past, of whom Maccabeus had been one) serves as a reminder of the importance attached to this factor. As we saw earlier, men were coming to recognise that the ability to lead was not always an attribute of birth. Authority in an army, commented the Bouciquaut author, should be given to only the most sensible, the most expert in arms, and the most experienced (‘les plus sages et les plus expars aux armes et les plus acoustumez’).14 The intention was not to deny the nobility its traditional position of command, but rather to ensure a reasonable chance of victory through having armies led by men of above-average military ability to exercise effective discipline and leadership over them.
To present a commander with at least a sporting chance, the army placed under him must be composed, as far as possible, of troops who were properly prepared to fight. Training, an important theme in the Roman war canon, could lead to the soldier facing battle both better prepared in the use of his arm and psychologically at an advantage over an enemy less well trained. The insistence of Edward III that Englishmen should train at the butts suggests that the teachings of Vegetius were in the process of taking effect. William Worcester, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, had clearly learned the message (which he probably got from Christine de Pisan who, in her turn, had taken it from Honoré Bouvet) when he wrote ‘that there is none erthely thing more forto be allowed than a countre or region whiche be furnisshed and stored withe good men of armes well lerned and exercited’, by which he meant trained.15 Indeed, in another passage in the same work, Worcester attributed the English loss of Normandy to the fact that the army was not properly prepared to face the French who, in such conditions, were the natural victors in the contest.
One final, and all important, lesson was to be learned from Vegetius and other classical writers. Since war was waged for the general good, defence should be a common obligation. In Italy, notably in Florence in the first years of the fifteenth century, the classical view of civic obligation in matters touching the common welfare, which stressed the citizen’s duty to help his state in moments of danger, was gaining ground. With its implied rejection of the mercenary, the soldier temporarily hired from outside to fulfil a particular military objective, and its stress on the need for self-sufficiency, the view was also to find greater acceptance north of the Alps, particularly in France. The story, recalled by Alain Chartier in his Quadrilogue invectif of 1422, of the women of Rome who helped in the defence of the Capitol by allowing their hair to be cut and twisted into ropes ‘to help the public necessity’ had its broad parallel in the role played by the women of Beauvais against the Burgundian besiegers in 1472, a role which was to win them social and civic privileges from the king.16
In the context of a growing awareness of national consciousness, the obligation to take part in the protection of a town or city was easily extended to the defence of the wider common interest, the country. Taxation for war, after all, had been justified by that very argument, and constituted one form of national response to a military crisis, the severity of which would be judged by the king. ‘If you ask your people for money for reform’, Jean Juvénal des Ursins told Charles VII in 1440, ‘they will vote it very willingly’ (‘tres voulentiers le vous octroyent’). Des Ursins was certainly not against taxation; far from it. The king, he was to write a few years later, can take part of his people’s possessions required to maintain the public good, since the raising of money to satisfy public necessity is legitimate. But as both Philippe de Mézières and Jean de Montreuil before him had emphasised, no more than was really necessary should be demanded, and taxes levied for war should be used for that purpose alone.17 Mézières’s comments on royal fiscal practice show him to have been much concerned with contemporary developments. Taxes, he wrote more than once, were high, if not insupportable, and were having a devastating social and economic effect, draining the country’s well-being. At a period of truce, when God had temporarily ceased to punish his people, the king should also show mercy. The invitation not to impose taxation during that period was all too obvious.
Although the anonymous author of the poem Against the King’s Taxes (c.1340), taking the part of the English rural community, had stressed the evil effects of taxation, what emerged from the works of these commentators was not opposition to taxation but deep hostility to misappropriation and misuse. In the England of 1340 it was being said that ‘not half the tribute raised in the land reaches the king’.18 Fifty years later in France, Mézières could voice much the same criticism: money was not being properly collected, but was being diverted into the wrong hands. What he meant by this is clear. Writing like a fourteenth-century Jeremiah, Mézières could point out that the life of luxury being led at court was swallowing up the money intended for defence and reconquest, in a word for the public good. Gifts, pensions, buildings and other forms of expensive living were draining the funds needed for war. The theme was thus already familiar when it was taken up by Jean Juvénal des Ursins in 1452. In a moral tone he pointed out how John II may have been punished (by defeat and capture) in 1356 because wrongful use had been made of taxes, a thing which a king, in all conscience, should not allow to happen. More recently, he admonished Charles VII, money raised for war had been used to pay for jousting and luxury in a period of truce, something which was bringing no advantage to the public welfare. Both critics were indignant about a phenomenon developing before their very eyes, but which they were powerless to stop, namely the levying of taxes when there was no war to justify them.
A second matter troubled them. Mézières, Montreuil, and des Ursins were united in their indictment of the growing body of royal officials needed to administer the collection and expenditure of public money. Describing them as extravagant upstarts whose corrupt ways and practices enabled them to become rich to the point when they could buy the lands of knights impoverished by the rising costs of war, Mézières denounced their abuses and demanded that they should give proper account of their stewardship. The theme was again to find a place in the writings of des Ursins: money, he wrote, which had been raised for purposes of war was being spent on high living and building by royal administrators who were, in any case, far too numerous and grossly overpaid from public funds which, very significantly, he termed the ‘blood of the people’ (‘le sane du peuple’).
Reform was needed. Let royal officers, both Mézières and des Ursins wrote, be made regularly accountable not to one another, but to the king himself. Mézières favoured a large measure of decentralisation in the collection and redistribution of war taxes: people would be more ready to pay if they knew that collectors had been chosen locally and if they could see how the money was being spent. Besides, the number of officials could thus be considerably reduced. And, in order to re-establish public confidence, each locality should appoint a suitable person to hear disputes regarding the levying of such taxes with, of course, right of appeal from his decisions. Such proposals, Mézières thought, would find general approval; the only persons to object would be the royal officers and a few others who had hitherto controlled the use of taxes, and who stood to lose from any change to a system whose development they had turned to their advantage over a period of half a century or so.
Some literature could be a vehicle of criticism and complaint, intended to show what was wrong with a society heavily involved in war over a long period of years. Other literature was, in the widest meaning of the word, didactic: it was a spur to action, a guide to ensure that things were done – and well done – for the good of society. Victory in battle might be won with divine favour; equally, God helped those who helped themselves. There were ‘reasonable’ lessons to be considered about the conduct of war which, at worst, could help avoid defeat, at best, might bring victory. Man was learning to break out of a fatalistic spirit and to make his own contribution to events more positively and powerfully.
The military and historical literature of the period helped him do this. Just as the Bouciquaut author wrote (in much the same vein as Froissart and others had done) ‘to recall to mind the acts of good men so that they may give courage and inspiration to noblemen who hear them to try to follow them and do likewise’, so he reported that Jean le Maingre liked to hear readings from books about God and the saints ‘and from the Fais des rommains and authentic histories’.19 This work, which dated from the early thirteenth century, and had originally been planned as a history of Rome, proved to be a best seller, drawing upon some of the main historical writers of Rome, and presenting history as a series of deeds with, as might be expected of a work intended for a chivalric audience, warlike action taking the limelight. Three other works concerned with war were also popular. The Facta et dicta memorabilia of the first-century writer, Valerius Maximus, like the Fais des rommains, was much used as a source of good stories and didactic points; while the Stratagemata of Frontinus, of the same period, was a compilation of military maxims illustrated by reference to historical events culled from a wide group of classical writers. The last and, as has been suggested, the most influential was Vegetius’s De re militari of the late fourth century, a book whose philosophical message was at least as important as its military one.
All four works were translated into the developing vernacular languages, and thus came to be read in their own right. Jean Gerson recommended that the dauphin should have copies of Valerius Maximus, Frontinus, and Vegetius in his library, while rulers such as Edward I, Edward III, and Charles V owned manuscripts of Vegetius. The first French translation was commissioned late in the thirteenth century by the knight, Jean de Brienne, count of Eu, and the English one was prepared for Thomas, Lord Berkeley, in 1408; while among the other military owners of Vegetius’s work were Sir John Fastolf and Antonio da Marsciano, the fifteenth-century Italian condottiere, who had a good collection of military books.20
But it was not necessary to own the works themselves to appreciate the main points they were making. In the twelfth century John of Salisbury, who owned a copy of Vegetius, had incorporated substantial extracts from his work into his own Policraticus; Vincent of Beauvais was to do the same, and their example was followed by Giles of Rome, whose De regimine principum, written late in the thirteenth century, was perhaps the most popular contribution to the large and still developing ‘Mirror’ (or ‘How to be a Good Prince’) literature of the Middle Ages. As Aquinas had pointed out, a ruler had to defend his people; to do so he must be able and ready to fight, and it was in the provision of advice as how best to fulfil this obligation that the work of Giles of Rome was so useful. When Christine de Pisan wrote her Livre du corps de policie in the same tradition early in the fifteenth century, she also quoted Valerius Maximus and Vegetius frequently, while in her very popular Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie, destined to be translated into English by William Caxton, she relied on the same two authors, adding to them Frontinus and, most significantly, Honoré Bouvet, whose ideas thus reached a wider public.
In this way war literature, whether of ancient or more recent times, whether it consisted of whole texts or ‘moralised’ ones, in which the distilled wisdom of past historians or writers on war, significantly termed ‘the seyng of the masters of philosophie’, was incorporated into updated works, came to have a practical influence. In all cases the aim was unashamedly didactic: people read or were read to (as Charles the Bold, in camp before Neuss in 1474, had read to him, ‘Valerius Maximus, Livy or some book about Alexander the Great or of battles’) partly for distraction, partly for what they could learn.21
Learn what? About the art of war? It has to be recognised that since the examples which they read came from the very distant past, it was more the generalities of military experience than the niceties of military art, the general rather than the particular, which they could obtain from books. But since, too, the popular form of didactic literature for princes contained much advice on the place of war in the polity, there were things here which the ruler, as well as the soldier, might usefully learn. Much of this literature was ultimately about the good of the state, its rule, and its defence against outside enemies. It was ‘les choses pourfitables pour le royaume et la chose publique d’icellui’ which concerned writers such as Mézières and, in particular, Bouvet. The title of Bouvet’s work, theTree of Battles, suggests a more than passing interest in war. Yet, in the final analysis, his greater concern was with peace, a peace in which the soldier was not allowed to practise violence for his own end, but used his strength and training for the good of the whole community.
1 See L. R. Muir, Literature and society in medieval France. The mirror and the image, 1100–1500 (London, 1985).
2 Le livre des fais du bon messire Jean le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, mareschal de France et gouverneur de Jennes, ed. D. Lalande (Paris: Geneva, 1985), p. 238.
3 Gower, Confessio amantis, trans. Tiller, p. 148.
4 Minor poems of John Lydgate, ed. H. N. MacCracken (E.E.T.S., London, 1934). II, 539–66.
5 Ibid., II, 556.
6 Letter to King Richard II. A plea made in 1395 for peace between England and France, ed. and trans. G. W. Coopland, (Liverpool, 1975), pp. 54–6.
7 The middle English translation of Christine de Pisan’s ‘Livre du corps de policie’, ed. D. Bornstein (Heidelberg, 1977), p. 165.
8 Ecrits politiques de Jean Juvénal des Ursins, ed. P. S. Lewis (S.H.F., 2 vols., Paris, 1978–85), II, 166.
9 R. L. Kilgour, The decline of chivalry as shown in the French literature of the late Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), p. 168.
10 Ecrits politiques, ed. Lewis, II, 240–1. See also ‘iste nomen militis est nomen honoris et laboris’ (Sermons of Thomas Brinton, ed. Devlin, I, 167).
11 C. R. Shrader, ‘A handlist of extant manuscripts containing the De re militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus’, Scriptorium, 33 (1979), 280–305.
12 J. R. Alban and C. T. Allmand, ‘Spies and spying in the fourteenth century’, War, literature and politics in the late Middle Ages, ed. C. T. Allmand (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 73–101.
13 Philippe de Commynes, Memoirs. The reign of Louis XI, 1461–83, trans. M. Jones (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 208.
14 Bouciquaut, ed. Lalande, p. 402.
15 William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse addressed to King Edward IV on his invasion of France in 1475, ed. J. G. Nichols (Roxburghe Club, 1860), p. 27.
16 Quadrilogue invectif, ed. Droz, p. 31; R. Vaughan, Valois Burgundy (London, 1975). P-156.
17 Ecrits politiques, ed. Lewis, I, 320–1: Philippe de Mézières, Le songe du vieil pèlerin, ed. G. W. Coopland (Cambridge, 1969), II, 66; Jean de Montreuil, Opera. II. L’oeuvre historique et polémique, ed. N. Grévy-Pons, E. Ornato, and G. Ouy (Turin, 1975), 220/424.
18 J. Coleman, English literature in history, 1350–1400. Medieval readers and writers (London, 1981).
19 Bouciquaut, ed. Lalande, pp. 410, 416.
20 M. Mallett, ‘Some notes on a fifteenth-century condottiere and his library: Count Antonio da Marsciano’, Cultural aspects of the Italian Renaissance. Essays in honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. C. H. Clough (Manchester: New York, 1976), pp. 202–15.
21 Cited by R. Vaughan, Charles the Bold (London, 1973), p. 163.