3
Peter Burkholder
Historians often give poor evaluations to the accuracy of medieval films, usually because such media fail to live up to traditional academic assessments. But dramatic movies operate according to their own standards. This is similar to medieval cultural artifacts, which likewise did not aim for strict accuracy. This study evaluates a selection of well-known films depicting medieval combat and compares their renditions against literature and art dating from the Middle Ages. Qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that these artifacts show striking similarities to each other, thus complicating accusations of films’ inaccuracies, and showing that there is value in Hollywood recreations of medieval warfare.
In May 1995, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart opened on screens across the United States, introducing millions of viewers to a little-known medieval Scotsman and his timeless struggle against tyranny. The film was a wild box-office success, pulling in nearly $10 million on its opening weekend alone, and easily recouping its production costs of around $72 million. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was equally impressed: Braveheart garnered five Oscars, including one for Best Picture. Even now, the film ranks seventy-eighth on the IMDB.com all-time best movies list, and enjoys a healthy artistic afterlife, having been referenced, featured, or spoofed in over five hundred other productions.2
The film’s reception by medievalists, who often default to assessments of popular media based on historical fidelity, was decidedly chillier. Writing for the American Historical Review, Elizabeth Ewan critiqued Braveheart’s “disregard for historical context” and “grating inaccuracies.”3 A later assessment identified eighteen factual errors in just the first two minutes of the movie, concluding that “[e]very bit and every aspect of these introductory scenes are, to put it bluntly, wrong. And the rest of the film follows the same pattern.”4 Such appraisals were not lost on film historian Robert Rosenstone when he came across lists of the “best” and “worst” movies on Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Due to its “massively inaccurate portrayal of the life of the thirteenth-century hero William Wallace,” Braveheart fell ignominiously into the latter category.5
Not even ten years after Gibson’s picture debuted, Jerry Bruckheimer and Antoine Fuqua teamed up to retell another very old story to a new generation. Their 2004 film, King Arthur, was markedly less successful than Braveheart. It received no Academy Award nominations, though it, too, ultimately managed to earn back its $120 million production expenditures. King Arthur failed to enjoy much of a cinematic Nachleben, being referenced or featured in other titles a mere twenty-six times.6 Yet the film’s relative lack of commercial success did not translate to disregard at the hands of medievalists. King Arthur was criticized for its false claims to historical veracity, its radical departure from aspects of Arthurian legends, and its troubling portrayal of a superficially strong Guinevere character, among other transgressions. Arthurian and film scholar Kevin Harty rated it an uninspiring five stars out of ten.7
These two films’ portrayals of medieval history in general, and of combat in particular, set up an interesting situation for researchers and educators. On the one hand, it cannot be disputed that these movies take tremendous liberties with history, often distorting or even fabricating bygone peoples and events. On the other hand, Braveheart and King Arthur, like so many other cinematic representations of the past, merely follow in a long narrative tradition of misleading and inventing, a tradition reaching back to the Middle Ages themselves and beyond. It is thus the position of this study that these films’ depictions of medieval combat are, in fact, quite faithful to the representations of warfare in analogous sources from the Middle Ages – and largely for the same reason. None of them are strictly “accurate” portrayals of the reality of medieval warfare, because that was and is not the goal of the artists and filmmakers. Yet, to appreciate the parallels requires a mode of “reading” historical films that is too often overlooked or unfamiliar to historians.8
The cultural representations selected for examination here are illustrative, not exhaustive. That said, they are not arbitrary. The Song of Roland is a celebrated epic of medieval French history, its pages bursting with vivid portrayals of combat.9 The Morgan Picture Bible (hereafter MPB) is one of the most well-known artistic representations of warfare from the Middle Ages, the work of dozens of artists of the highest caliber.10 Moreover, those artists are known to have consulted the earlier Roland, translating elements of the text into the MPB’s panels.11 Both Braveheart and King Arthur enjoyed hefty budgets to reimagine medieval worlds targeted toward the broadest audiences possible. Both films likewise made claims to historical veracity, helping reinforce the notion that their depictions of combat should be taken seriously. Comparing the medieval sources against the modern yields threads of continuity across time and medium alike, thereby complicating accusations of historical inaccuracies while suggesting cultural value in all of the accounts.
“Reading” Cultural Representations of Medieval Warfare
A common feature binding the four artifacts under consideration here is the symbolic nature of the stories they tell. All of them were created long after the events they portray, suggesting that much of the significance they convey is presentist in nature. Although loosely based on real events of Charlemagne’s activities in Spain and the battle of Roncesvalles in 778, Roland is a product of the late eleventh or early twelfth century. One can thus read it as a crusades allegory, as a Trinitarian text, or as a satire designed to resonate with Norman audiences, to list but a few possibilities.12 Even the classification of the Roland text as a “song,” performed by minstrels to enraptured audiences, is debatable.13 So many are historians’ interpretations of the epic that Sharon Kinoshita quips, “to be a medievalist is to take a stand on the Chanson de Roland.”14 In analyzing this or any text profitably, Sam Wineburg’s studies have found that historians deploy a bevy of heuristics, including sourcing the material, cross-checking it against other relevant information, and empathetically imagining the setting for plausibility and purpose. Basic facts and matters of accuracy always loom large, of course. But professionals’ highly nuanced reading habits allow them to go far deeper than raw content to pull out meaning that an author only hints at, or perhaps never even means to divulge.15 This is the so-called “unwitting testimony” yielding implicit information crucial to a fuller understanding of the past.16
Created after Roland, the MPB depicts 340 episodes from the Old Testament, but does so in the material and political setting of the early thirteenth century, freely inventing events in the process.17 It tells a meta-story that is flattering to crusaders, possibly casting King Louis IX (r. 1226–70) as a biblical king of old.18 Although many physical details are reasonably accurate from a thirteenth-century perspective, a profitable reading of the MPB, like Roland, is performed using heuristics similar to those described above for texts. Art historian Sara Lipton warns against literal interpretations of medieval illustrations, saying that “scholars have learned to see images not as ‘illustration’ but as ‘representation,’” and that one must “be wary of assuming that they depict ‘reality.”’19 Pamela Porter echoes this advice for images of medieval warfare, in particular. “As sources of accurate information they need to be treated with a certain amount of caution,” she writes, adding that “medieval illuminators tended not to show the same concerns for historical accuracy as those we would expect from a modern book illustrator.”20 Similar to the “unwitting testimony” of texts, the “visual signs and conventions” of medieval artwork provide the viewer “access to the art’s deeper meaning and purpose.”21
Unfortunately, those same techniques and admonitions rarely carry over to historians’ evaluations of the cinematic past. Instead, academics often expect dramatic film to reflect state-of-the-question research, engaging in much chest-thumping and hyperventilating when errors appear on screen. “Let’s be honest and admit it,” writes Rosenstone. “Historical films trouble and disturb professional historians – have troubled and disturbed historians for a long time.”22
Examples of this sentiment reach the highest levels of the academy. John McNeill, then-president of the American Historical Association, wrote disapprovingly of how a young Stephen Hawking describes his feelings as “All good” in The Theory of Everything (dir. James Marsh, 2014). Scolds McNeill, “No one in the UK in the 1960s would have said that.” He follows up by calling for filmmakers to hire more historical consultants, under the assumption that academics all agree on the past, and presumably on how it should be translated to the screen for a dramatic retelling.23
Nor are historians the only professionals to voice such condemnation. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the well-known astrophysicist, railed against improper star positions on the night the ship went down in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), as if this were a matter of great import. Always the perfectionist, Cameron went back and digitally moved the heavens years later to placate the scientist.24 The production designer for the Watergate-era All the President’s Men (dir. Alan Pakula, 1976) went to extreme lengths to head off such nitpicking, even having actual garbage from Washington Post reporters’ trash cans flown in for the Los Angeles film set.25
Such expert ire as McNeill’s and Tyson’s is not reserved for films: traditional scholarship is likewise susceptible to attacking brash disciplinary interlopers. Jared Diamond, an ornithologist and geographer by training, precipitated a backlash from an array of fields when he produced best-selling explanations for the dominance or collapse of past societies, earning a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. Anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee gave voice to the frustrations of their discipline, writing that “Diamond is probably the best-known writer of anthropology even though he is not an anthropologist!”26
As satisfying as they may be to make, such critiques largely miss the mark. This is especially true for film because it grew out of much older art and narrative mediums, borrowing from and modifying elements to fulfill cinematic goals. Filmmakers cannot reproduce the past in a Rankean sense – but then again, neither could their artistic forebears nor even professional historians today.27 Like other artists, movie producers, especially those behind big-budget pictures needing to appeal to the broadest viewership possible, subscribe to tried-and-true cinematic practices for storytelling. These techniques are far more concerned with appealing to audience expectations, meaning an aura of authenticity trumps scholastic accuracy.28 Moviemakers are free to disregard proven industry conventions, but they run serious financial risks in doing so. Warns veteran screenwriter Cindy Davis, “In order for the film to make money, the story needs to connect with millions of people. Not thousands. Millions.”29
Accuracy vs. Authenticity
The distinction between authenticity and accuracy is critical. Through industry standards and repetition, movies instill ideas and images in the minds of audiences that become assumed features for subsequent productions. As film specialist Charles Tashiro writes, producers “must conform to expectations about the past raised by other films.”30 This results in a well-attested cinematic “feedback loop” where, with accumulating exposures, factually questionable or stereotypical representations become not just normalized but expected.31 The “Disneyfication” of princesses in film is a better-known example, with studies revealing worldwide beliefs for what a princess on screen should look like.32 Paul Sturtevant’s interviews of British movie viewers expose strongly held notions that the Middle Ages were decidedly dirty, and that heroic men were especially aggressive and macho.33 Films both reflect and reinforce such stereotypes.
Some movie elements have become so frequent and accepted as to be labeled “historicons,” or features that are iconically linked with certain eras, persons, or places.34 Thus, the Colosseum appears in ancient Roman cinema, even if the structure did not yet exist at the time of the film’s storyline.35 The “flat earth myth” necessarily attaches to medieval seafaring titles as a defining belief of the era.36 Actors playing Scotsmen of the thirteenth century wear tartan kilts not because the clothing is historically accurate, but because audiences harbor an expectation of such attire for Scots of any past context.37 For movies pitched to American audiences, on-screen dialogue in just about any pre-modern European setting is in fully intelligible English, though likely with pseudo-archaic discourse markers and a British accent of some sort.38
Film producers commit these “errors” not necessarily because they are historically ignorant, but because such portrayals and practices have been well established and accepted over time. Nor are historical films the sole genre in which this occurs. Ornithologists surely cringe every time they see a bald eagle on screen accompanied by the screech of a red-tailed hawk, but the inaccurate sound effect is too firmly entrenched to uproot.39 Similarly, the overlapping double circles representing the view through binoculars, so prevalent in movies and television, are obviously incorrect, but have become the standard, if not dictated, mode of illustration. Historians and other subject-matter specialists are free to point out such factual errors, but the utility of doing so is questionable when the cinematic conventions underlying the offences go unappreciated.
Even films that are considered “good history” are guilty of such transgressions. No less an authority on the American Civil War than James McPherson called Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989) “one of the most powerful and historically accurate movies ever made about that war.”40 Yet, Rosenstone observes that inaccuracies in the film abound. To list but a few: the archival letters narrated by the movie’s protagonist, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, were heavily rewritten or even fabricated for the screen; Shaw’s adjutant, Major Cabot Forbes, is a completely invented character, as are the core Black soldiers Shaw commands; Frederick Douglass appears not as he would have looked in 1862, but as he does in his iconic photograph from twenty years later; the direction of the Union attack on Fort Wagner is incorrect; and the watermelons the colonel slices during February sabre practice in Massachusetts are hopelessly out-of-season.41
Rosenstone makes these observations not to deprecate what he, too, believes is an excellent film, but to point out that such inaccuracies inevitably accompany even good history on screen. One might reasonably place other grievous filmic errors of fact in the same category. Braveheart’s battle of Stirling transpires with no bridge or body of water in sight. Gibson was aware of the omission, but said in the DVD commentary that the historical event was “not cinematically compelling.” For the sake of the movie, William Wallace needed to meet the enemy as an equal on the battlefield, not as an opportunist ambushing a bridgehead.42 The more recent Outlaw King (dir. David Mackenzie, 2018) prematurely kills off King Edward I before events at Loudon Hill in May 1307, then further distorts history by placing Edward II at the battle. The production team knew this was all wrong, but even the film’s historical consultant, Tony Pollard, admits that the inventions made dramatic sense. Edward II and Robert the Bruce needed to go head to head in combat “to bring the sparring between the two, which had punctuated the film up until then, to a satisfactory conclusion.” With Robert having allowed his nemesis to flee the battlefield, these screen transgressions permitted Edward “to live on for a possible sequel” featuring events at Bannockburn.43
But what about when films make overt claims to historical accuracy? Do such assertions not call for examination, even condemnation, by historians? Both Braveheart and King Arthur cloak themselves in an aura of historicity by making “truth claims” in their opening scenes. By way of a retrospective narration delivered by Robert the Bruce, Braveheart asserts that it tells a suppressed history, one based not on accounts of “historians from England” who brand the storyteller a liar, but on a purer oral tradition.44 King Arthur’s truth claim is even more egregious: written text asserting that “historians agree” on the historicity of Arthur, further bolstered by “recently discovered archeological evidence” giving details on his “true identity.” A seemingly historical narration follows, telling how Arthur’s knights were descended from steppe-dwelling Sarmatians, pledging to serve their Roman conquerors in perpetuity. Although pure moonshine, average viewers would have no basis for questioning these types of statements, even if audiences are on record as skeptical of the film medium’s truthfulness.45
Such dubious assertions as appear in Braveheart and King Arthur are not rare in movies. The sibling directorial team of Joel and Ethan Coen fronted their critically acclaimed Fargo (1996) with a similar claim, falsely stating that the story was based on actual events.46 Nor is film the only medium that partakes in this kind of creative dishonesty. Vladimir Nabokov preceded his classic novel Lolita with a “foreword,” ostensibly written by a John Ray, Ph.D., who says the whole book is a detailed confession by an author who died in prison.47 The prolific novelist Michael Crichton likewise deceived readers in his medieval-set stories. His Eaters of the Dead, presented as the actual account of the Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan and bolstered by pseudo-references, is actually a mash-up of Fadlan’s writings, Beowulf, and artistic license.48 Crichton took a similar approach in Timeline by including a seemingly scholarly introduction on the viability of teleporting back to the Middle Ages. Complete with footnotes to academic studies and a bibliography, Crichton wove science and history into the imaginary to give his story’s research company, ITC, a believable basis.49 Deceptive or patently untrue claims like these are not only a way of storytellers having fun with their audiences, but of drawing viewers and readers in, making them believe they are about to be privy to actual, perhaps heretofore unknown events.50 In this way, Braveheart and King Arthur merely follow in a successful tradition of more tightly bonding with their viewers through deception.51
Despite that bonding, the general public voices strong skepticism about cinematic history, ranking its trustworthiness dead last among various sources of information about the past.52 Yet, lacking anything else to fill a knowledge void – an especially likely state concerning the distant and unfamiliar Middle Ages – films occupy that space to become the sole source of understanding. Wineburg calls this “collective occlusion,” where cinematic history serves as the only means of familiarity with the past.53 Due to their mass appeal, observes film critic Ann Hornaday, movies, with their attendant baggage, then “become our consensus version of history itself.”54 A recent national survey lends added weight to this stance, confirming that the American public’s preferred sources of information about the past are the very films and television programs it distrusts.55
The foregoing discussion emphasizes that historical films, like written and artistic artifacts, must be read in ways that are sympathetic to the medium. Demanding that a dramatic movie be faithful to academic standards is akin to expecting a historical monograph to feature remarkable special effects. Like in art and literature, the conventions of cinematic storytelling virtually ensure that inaccuracies and inventions occur, but movies can elicit a far stronger emotional connection while revealing deeper truths. In addition, movies have a cumulative effect on viewers, often serving as default knowledge of the past. Common forms and features of storytelling trace back centuries, as evidenced by the similarities in Roland’s literary characteristics and the basic devices of the historical film genre.56 But the means by which those stories are told have evolved. The epic poem gave way to the novel in the seventeenth century, for example, and novels in turn have changed since the nineteenth century.57 Because the film medium is heir to these older narrative practices, it has borrowed and modified features of written and artistic history to tell compelling stories in new ways. How this determines cinematic depictions of medieval warfare constitutes the remainder of the present investigation.
The methods for analyzing the artifacts under consideration here are both qualitative and quantitative. They consisted of systematically coding textual and visual materials according to prescribed variables, when possible, then quantifying the results for comparative purposes. Such an approach follows well-established qualitative research methods.58 Indeed, examination of the MPB based on coding precepts has already been carried out by Richard Abels, though a new analysis has been conducted for the present study.59 Medieval and Renaissance texts have been subjected to similar treatment, while coding for targeted features of film and television is likewise a standard research practice.60
Modes of Combat
How is combat portrayed to the audience in the four sources under consideration here? In particular, what is the relative frequency of battles to sieges? How do armies conduct themselves when contact between forces is made? And do certain military systems present themselves as especially important or even dominant?
At first glance, combat in Roland may appear to be restricted to battles, its stanzas replete with the clash of Christian and Muslim armies in the open field. Yet, closer inspection shows that attacks on cities and other fortified sites lurk in the background. The capture of Muslim-held Saragossa looms large, but there are additional references to operations against Noples, Commibles, Valterne, Balaguer, Tudela, Sezile, and Galne, as well as sieges before multiple unnamed castles and cities during Charlemagne’s seven-year campaign in Spain. Meanwhile, a mere two battles occur in quick succession – Roland’s rear-guard action, then Charlemagne’s revenge – followed by a judicial duel to bring the traitor Ganelon to justice.
Despite the apparent operational tilt of Charlemagne’s forces toward sieges, the great majority of the epic itself focuses on set-piece battles: of the 298 stanzas (laisses) in the poem, eighty-four of them (28% of the total) are devoted to Roland’s combat at Roncesvalles.61 This is followed by Charlemagne’s retribution against a Muslim army outside of Saragossa (twenty-five stanzas, or 8% of the epic), and then six stanzas of individual trial by combat (2%).62 In sum, 38% of the stanzas in Roland focus on battles, while only 5% (fourteen stanzas) contain references to siege operations, none of which are described in anything beyond token detail.63 Thus, in terms of the literary space provided to them, the medieval epic presents a world dominated by battles over sieges by a nearly eight-to-one ratio.
Battle is likewise the predominant form of warfare in the MPB. My own analysis concludes that, of the ninety-two extant folios of the MPB, twenty-four of them (26% of the total) depict a battle or single combat. This is well over twice the number of siege illustrations, which number just ten (11%), though some panels combine battle and siege operations.64 Perhaps not surprisingly, when sieges are shown, they depict active storming tactics as opposed to passive methods, mimicking the action that is the hallmark of set-piece operations and thereby blurring distinction between the two combat modes. The key takeaway is that the MPB tracks Roland in its heavy tilt toward battles as the principal form of medieval conflict. Concludes Abels, “warfare was virtually synonymous with battle” for the MPB artists.65
Despite the centuries separating the popular films Braveheart and King Arthur from the two medieval sources discussed above, the movies reflect pre-modern depictions of combat in many ways. Braveheart portrays two attacks on fortified positions: one a makeshift assault on an English outpost in Scotland, the other a full-scale (though invented) siege of King Edward I’s city of York. The screen time allotted to these actions is a telling indicator of their importance to the storyline, as well as their potential impact on viewers’ takeaways regarding medieval warfare. Omitting opening and closing credits, Braveheart has a runtime of 10,191 seconds.66 The assault on the outpost clocks in at 420 seconds (4% of total), while the siege at York comprises 146 seconds (1%). Thus, a meager 5% of the film depicts siege warfare, the same figure as in Roland. And even though medieval commanders had a range of options for how to press or defend against a siege, both examples here feature storming tactics – perhaps not surprising, given the film medium’s strength in presenting action.67 In this sense, the movie echoes the MPB’s earlier noted preference for action even in siege operations.
Compare that with the screen time devoted to field combat, of which there are four examples in Braveheart. The first, consisting of pell-mell action as Wallace attempts to save his wife from English depredations, runs a mere sixty-four seconds (0.4% of film total). This is followed by the movie’s longest combat scene, the battle of Stirling, which commands 1,231 seconds (12%). Thereafter, the battle of Falkirk takes 657 seconds (6%), while the film ends with the opening to combat at Bannockburn (226 seconds, or 2% of total). In sum, battle scenes comprise 20% of the picture, meaning there is a four-to-one screen time preference for battles to sieges in Braveheart.
Lacking any siege warfare at all, combat in King Arthur is strictly confined to field operations. Of the film’s 8,768 seconds, 390 of them (4% of total) are taken up by an ambush on a bishop’s wagon train; 318 seconds (4%) portray the “battle on the ice” sequence, an overt tribute to a similar scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938); while the final super-battle, ostensibly depicting Badon Hill, consumes 1,478 seconds (17%), bringing the total to 2,186 seconds or 25% of the film. This is very close to the total time devoted to combat in Braveheart, indicating that film, like Roland and the MPB, shows strong predilections for battles over sieges as the mainstay of medieval warfare. If there is a notable difference between the medieval and modern sources, it is that the overall space devoted to combat in any form has diminished somewhat over time. Nevertheless, if today’s audiences are predisposed to believing that battles were relatively common in the Middle Ages, it should come as little surprise. Filmmakers are merely following a long tradition of portraying warfare that way.
Figure 1 Forms and frequencies of medieval combat in four sources, showing a strong preference for depicting battles over sieges. Roland data derived from stanza counts; MPB from panel scenes; Braveheart and King Arthur from screen time.
The actual frequency of these two modes of combat across the Middle Ages could vary substantially by campaign, but there has been a historiographical trend away from a focus on battles, and towards recognizing sieges as the more frequent, and conceivably even more important, form of warfare. That argument was made forcefully by Jim Bradbury, who described a medieval world where fortifications and their defense or capture were central and common, while battles were peripheral and few. By the eleventh century, he says, “warfare consisted of perhaps one per cent battles and ninety-nine per cent sieges.”68 Although this may seem a hyperbolic statement, Bradbury provides instances where entire campaigns revolved around sieges without any serious battles transpiring.69
Bradbury’s stance has been steadily reinforced by Bernard Bachrach, who provides abundant evidence of a military landscape dominated not by the romance of mounted knights but by the hard realities of building, attacking, and defending fortified positions. Much of this was out of the hands of commanders: economic and labor constraints dictated that walls, and the attack or defense thereof, would be the mainstay of military operations in the medieval West.70 According to Kelly DeVries, the value afforded to preserving human life also played a role in favoring passive sieges over the more risky fortunes of field engagements.71 Battles certainly occurred and they could even be decisive, but when they did transpire, it was often due to a siege in progress or the threat thereof.72 The long military career of Charlemagne (r. 768–814), Roland’s protagonist, is a telling indicator of this dynamic. Despite being almost constantly at war, the Frankish king’s personal military résumé boasts a mere three battles, with few additional field engagements transpiring in his absence. Meanwhile, the Carolingians systematically reduced or built myriad fortifications to subdue their enemies.73
The even longer tenure of Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou (r. 987–1040), is similar: only three battles over his fifty-three-year career, but fifteen sieges, a five-to-one ratio in favor of the latter. The count was such a prolific castle-builder that he has earned the sobriquet “le grand bâtisseur” among French historians, while the Angevins’ strategy of battle avoidance is well attested.74 John Gillingham’s research on conflict in the High Middle Ages likewise demonstrates a conspicuous lack of battles, balanced by a reliance on fortifications to impede and reduce ravaging armies.75 What these data points and models reveal is a full inversion of cultural representations of warfare, be they medieval or modern, compared with historical scholarship. For films like Braveheart and King Arthur, the implications are clear: to appear authentic to viewers, the relative film-space devoted to battles and sieges must clash with historical reality. More recent studies of combat in medieval film have made this point as well.76
As Sean McGlynn observes, “The central importance of sieges in medieval warfare cannot be overstressed.”77 This is not to say that all historians are in full agreement on this matter: either for selected campaigns or even more generally, some researchers will support more battle-centric models of combat in the Middle Ages.78 Such dissonance is yet another example of how history remains an unsettled arena, while underscoring how difficult it would be for a filmmaker to present a version of the past to the satisfaction of all viewers, academics or not.79
Battles, Real to Reel
The actual conduct of troops engaged in battle is another case where dramatized depictions, medieval or modern, are consistent with each other, but differ from academic assessments. Historical descriptions of battles give us varying amounts of information that must be evaluated with caution. Even if chronicles and eyewitness accounts could be fully trusted – and this most certainly is not the case – there is much about the ground-level realities of combat that will always be a matter of speculation.80 John Keegan famously grappled with this fact in his attempt to delineate the “face of battle” for Agincourt in 1415. How did opposing armies approach each other? What was the moment of impact like? How would a large battle sound, and how would commanders communicate with their troops amidst the tumult? Lacking definitive evidence for such matters, Keegan based his answers on thought experiments, known physical limits, and comparative history, but he ultimately admitted that numerous details are unknowable, lost forever in the mists of time.81
Realizing that many of the same unknowns apply to the ancient world, Philip Sabin followed Keegan’s approach to reconstructing the experience of Roman field combat. Sabin proposed three possible modes of fighting. First is the “shoving match,” in which massed phalanxes pushed against each other, potentially resulting in mass “mutual kebabs.” The second is the “mêlée,” where fighting devolved into individual duels. Although they surely occurred, neither of these models satisfactorily accommodates the evidence, leading Sabin to propose the most plausible construct: the “tentative engagement/mutual dread” scenario, marked by tense standoffs and punctuated by moments of aggression until one side broke.82 This model is consistent with Pollard’s recent assessment of medieval combat, where armies were unlikely to crash headlong into one another and devolve into mêlées, despite the film industry’s penchant to portray it as such.83
The two medieval artifacts examined here show greater or lesser tendencies toward mêlée combat as normative. Roland proffers little evidence of soldiers acting in coordination with one another or of making only halting contact with the enemy. Its long battle sequences mostly consist of individual jousts between social equals, emphasizing individual bravery, feats of arms, and the expensive nature of military equipment. Absent is any hint of Sabin’s tentative engagement/mutual dread model, as Roland’s adversaries throw themselves at one another with suicidal abandon. The MPB likewise depicts soldiers of high social station finding and killing each other amidst the chaos of battle, with scant indication of training or tactics beyond personal bravado. Considering that the principal source of the MPB artists’ understandings of warfare may have been tournaments, as well as the Roland epic itself, the similar depictions are not unexpected.84 Such sources serve as fodder to the myth that knights “[fought] much as they pleased in search of wealth, honor, and personal aggrandizement.”85
The battle scenes in Braveheart and King Arthur examined here both end up as mêlées. In fact, film’s tendency toward the mêlée is so strong that Sabin identifies it as the default Hollywood image for pre-modern combat.86 That said, the two movies’ mêlée segments are preceded by planning, either explicit or implied, and by unit coordination. At Stirling, the audience sees Wallace conferring with the Scottish horse, instructing them to feign flight, then circle back, flank the English, and take out their archers, thus employing a modicum of military-speak to lend himself credibility.87 In the face of a seemingly irresistible English cavalry charge, Wallace’s foot-soldiers become an immovable object, bravely holding their position and raising horse-stopping stakes at the last moment. With the attack thwarted, the Scots rush headlong into the advancing English infantry, whereupon the one-on-one carnage begins and carries through to the event’s bloody conclusion.
Before his climactic battle, Arthur delivers a predictable, rousing speech aimed primarily at the audience – another recurring feature of medieval war films – but he issues no orders.88 Still, coordination between his forces is hinted at. Utilizing a combined-arms approach, his Woad allies loose arrows at the Saxon lines, followed by cavalry charges by Arthur and his knights. The Woads’ traction trebuchets add further mayhem, launching incendiaries. But the cinematic pull of the mêlée is too strong. Before long, the inevitable duels between the film’s principals play out in serial fashion, much like the series of individual jousts in Roland. That the main protagonists and antagonists will find each other amidst all the chaos is a given: Arthur spars with and ultimately kills his Saxon counterpart, Cerdic, while Braveheart’s Wallace decapitates the English noble who mocked him at their pre-battle parley. It is a feature as old as The Iliad’s single combat between Hector and Achilles before the walls of Troy.
The lopsided casualties described in accounts of ancient and medieval battles alike are a tell-tale sign that troops fought mostly in formation. In such cases, the defeated army could expect to take outsized losses when its cohesion broke and its soldiers ran, presenting their pursuers with easy targets of undefended backsides. In contrast, a series of one-on-one combats would result in much closer loss rates, putting the mêlée model at odds with the evidence.89
Mediated portrayals of the human experience such as the ones under consideration here are limited in their perspectives. What a literary work or film portrays is at the discretion of the storyteller. Nevertheless, the combat loss ratios they depict are revealing. Differentiating friend from foe is often difficult or even impossible in the MPB, especially so in cases of severed body parts littering the ground. But the other three sources examined here are more straightforward. As noted earlier, Roland’s fighting consists of stanza after stanza of individual jousts, meaning a roughly even casualty rate would be expected. Yet, losses in Roland are nearly twice as high for the antagonists (thirty cases, or 65% of total) as they are for protagonists (sixteen cases, or 35%). The numbers are even more skewed in Braveheart’s Stirling battle segment, which features a long series of one-on-one encounters. The audience sees the Scots experience only sixteen casualties (17% of total), while the English suffer nearly five times that number (seventy-eight, or 83%). The figures are somewhat less tilted for the battle of Badon Hill in King Arthur, though even here, the viewer sees the Saxons lose more than three times more soldiers (seventy-six in total) than Arthur and his allies (twenty-four casualties). As historically problematic as these portrayals may be, they are nonetheless consistent across time and medium.
Although equated with Hollywood-style combat, there is nothing saying that cinema must default to the mêlée. A prime example of a film daring to depict pre-modern battle as something approaching Sabin’s likely combat model is the opening scene in HBO’s first season of Rome (“The Stolen Eagle,” dirs. Michael Apted and Mikael Salomon, 2005). Here, a skirmish during Julius Caesar’s siege of Alesia in 52 BCE exposes viewers to a very different type of combat, one where highly disciplined Roman soldiers maintain unit cohesion in a defensive stance against their Celtic assailants. Of especial interest is a brief overhead shot showing legionaries performing a complicated line change in the heat of battle, preserving their formation all the while. It is a fascinating representation of what battle might have looked like, though the scene’s deviation from typical studio depictions may have confused or disappointed viewers. Although a very laudable portrayal, its attention to the “latest geeky research” would have gone unnoticed by most laypersons. One can hardly blame other producers for not bothering to go to such lengths more often.90
Cavalry Riding Roughshod
The mêlée is not the only noteworthy feature of battle in the two medieval sources. Equally remarkable is the cavalry-centric nature of the combat. To take but one measure: of the forty-six injuries or kills detailed in Roland (see below), thirty-two of them (70% of total) occur in the context of horse-based combat. An additional 13% are probable cavalry injuries, while 7% more begin as mounted fights before transitioning to foot. All told, this amounts to 90% of wounds in Roland being inflicted on or proximate to horseback. Meanwhile, only 4% of injuries occur solely from fighting on foot, with the remainder being unknown. Infantry would have played crucial roles in the many sieges cited earlier, but the impossibly massive armies of Charlemagne and his foe are repeatedly described as being mounted.91 Turning to the MPB, of the thirty panels depicting preparation for, or actual occurrence of, battles and sieges, 60% show foot-soldiers, while 83% feature mounted troops. Even that discrepancy is misleading: considering the numbers of soldiers shown and their centrality to any given panel, 70% of MPB combat depictions can be safely classified as cavalry focused.92
The importance, even dominance of cavalry is likewise on full display in Braveheart and King Arthur, though how this is conveyed varies by film. Braveheart’s cavalry at Stirling is arguably the more complicated portrayal: the scene is carefully prefaced with reinforcing dialogue and images of the superiority of mounted troops over foot-soldiers. In their pre-battle parley, an English commander reminds Wallace – and, more importantly, the audience – that cavalry has lorded over infantry for centuries, a line of mounted knights standing menacingly in the background to reinforce the point. The Scots’ successful stand against the ensuing cavalry charge is all the more inspiring to an audience primed to expect a Scottish disaster.93 Meanwhile, cavalry assaults by Arthur and his knights against Saxon infantry at Badon Hill follow a well-worn “medieval tank” pattern that is all too familiar on screen.94 The horsemen repeatedly crash through the barbarians’ testudo formations before the protagonists transition to fighting their principal adversaries on foot, a transition similar to Charlemagne’s fight against the emir in Roland.95 The fact that the most popular medieval history textbook likewise presents heavy cavalry as a doomsday weapon, to say nothing of the mounted knight’s centrality on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, shows how films are not the only source of this stereotype.96
Figure 2 Cavalry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. These heavily armored figures and their mounts dominate the European Arms and Armor exhibit as much as they do the popular imagination of war in the Middle Ages. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Of course, trained foot-soldiers were perfectly capable of prevailing against cavalry throughout the Middle Ages. Charles Martel’s troops successfully stood like “a bulwark of ice” against Muslim horsemen at Tours in 732. A later Carolingian cavalry force, perhaps believing its own rhetoric of invincibility, charged recklessly into a prepared Saxon battle line in 782 and paid for it with their lives. Cavalry charges at Hastings in 1066 succeeded, but only as planned feints, drawing Anglo-Saxon footmen out of their strong hilltop position.97 Moreover, such feints were very complex maneuvers, requiring much practice and unit coordination to carry out.98 Later events such as Courtrai (1302) and Crécy (1346) witnessed cavalry roundly defeated by foot-soldiers.99 And so the cavalry-infantry dynamic continued throughout the era. “Disciplined and resolute infantry proved, on many occasions, to be more than a match for heavy cavalry on the battlefield,” writes Andrew Ayton.100 In addition to foot-soldiers’ discipline and resolve, preparing a battlefield with ditches and stakes, or strewing it with horse-crippling caltrops, were fairly simple and low-cost countermeasures against even the most skilled horsemen.101 Historians may have come around to recognizing the myth of the mounted knight for what it is, but it remains too useful a weapon in the movie producer’s arsenal to surrender just yet.102
Wound Sites, Imagined and Actual
Medieval soldiers could be wounded in just about any part of the body, depending on their defensive armaments, the weapons used against them, individual skills, and sheer luck. That said, the four sources examined here display noticeable overlapping patterns of injury locations. Roland is especially graphic in its descriptions of combat, allowing us to determine wound placements on soldiers in forty-six cases. A salient point is that injuries in the epic are exclusively from the waist up. Trauma to the front torso is the most prevalent, numbering twenty-four examples or 52% of the total. Of those, four (9% of total) are specifically to the chest, one (2%) to the abdomen, while the remaining nineteen front torso cases (41%) cannot be more specifically located. The head is the next most-targeted area, at 28% frequency. Things fall off precipitously from there, with 4% of injuries to the neck, and 2% each to the face, back, and hand. Conspicuously absent are any wounds to the arms.
Figure 3 Above-waist vs. below-waist wounds by source. Roland N = 46; MPB N = 311; Braveheart N = 94 (battle of Stirling only); King Arthur N = 100 (battle of Badon Hill only).
In the twenty-seven folios of the MPB illustrating injuries to soldiers, there are 311 identifiable wounds.103 Like Roland, injuries are graphic in the MPB. “The main impression one receives is of unrelenting brutality,” writes Abels of the source. “Blood and gore is everywhere.”104 Also similar to Roland, the sites of these injuries are almost exclusively above victims’ midsections. With ninety-five examples, the most common wound site is the head (31% of total). Nearly as prevalent, but at odds with Roland, are the 29% of injuries to arms. These are followed by trauma to the front torso (16%), where 10% is to the abdomen, 6% to the chest. Injuries to the neck come next (12%), primarily in the form of decapitations. None of the remaining wound areas reach 10% of the total: back (5%), collarbone (2%), and multiple regions above the chest from a falling object (0.3%). A mere two wounds occur below the waist, including one to the buttocks and one to the leg (0.3% each).
Identifying wound patterns in the two cinematic depictions of medieval combat is more challenging, due to the fast cutting and editing techniques used by filmmakers to emphasize the violence of battle, sometimes inserting the viewer directly into the chaos. Nevertheless, repeated screenings and slow motion allow for the systematic classification of injuries akin to those for the medieval sources above. The long battle of Stirling sequence in Braveheart features ninety-four discrete, identifiable injuries. Similar to the medieval sources, the great majority of trauma (77%) is sustained above the waistline. Of these, the most common injuries are to the front torso: 19% are to the abdomen, 7% to the chest, with another 10% ambiguously to the torso region, thus constituting 36% of all combat injuries at Stirling. These are followed by trauma to the face (12%), to wide areas of the body (primarily through being crushed or beaten; 11%), to the head (8%), neck (7%), back (6%), arms (5%), and hand (1%). A minority of injuries (13%) occur below the waist: 10% to legs, and 1% each to the groin region, buttocks, and foot. Like Roland and the MPB, Braveheart combat features copious amounts of blood, amputation, and horrendous injury. “Pain is itself a primary authenticating feature,” writes William Woods. And “pain in medieval movies is physical and bloody,” thus linking the violence in film with pre-modern artistic renderings of combat.105
Figure 4 Detail of the lower panel from the MPB, folio 24v, in which Saul unhorses the Amalekite king Agag. Twelve injuries, all delivered to armor-protected sites, are boxed and numbered from upper left to lower right. Injury sites as follows: 1–3, 7, 11 = head; 4 = chest; 5, 9 = neck; 6, 8, 12 = arm; 10 = back. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
Upper-body wounds are even more prevalent in King Arthur’s longest combat sequence, the climactic battle of Badon Hill, where 88% of the one hundred total injuries are above the waist. The front torso is targeted nearly half the time, while wounds to the face and head comprise 20% of the total. The only remaining area reaching double digits is the back (14%), with just a smattering of injuries to other areas (e.g. 7% to the legs, 5% to broad regions). Though violence is on full display, the PG-13 King Arthur is necessarily less graphic and bloody than the R-rated Braveheart and the two medieval forebears.
Table 1 Combat wound locations by source. Data for Braveheart is for battle of Stirling only; data for King Arthur is for battle of Badon Hill only.
|
Wound Site |
Roland (#/%) |
MPB (#/%) |
Braveheart (#/%) |
King Arthur (#/%) |
|
|
Head |
13/28 |
95/31 |
8/9 |
1/1 |
Upper Body |
|
Face |
1/2 |
15/5 |
11/12 |
19/19 |
|
|
Neck |
2/4 |
37/12 |
7/7 |
3/3 |
|
|
Collarbone |
0/0 |
6/2 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
|
|
Torso (front) |
24/52 |
50/16 |
34/36 |
48/48 |
|
|
Torso (back) |
1/2 |
14/5 |
6/6 |
14/14 |
|
|
Arm |
0/0 |
91/29 |
5/5 |
3/3 |
|
|
Hand |
1/2 |
0/0 |
1/1 |
0/0 |
|
|
Subtotals |
42/91 |
308/99 |
72/77 |
88/88 |
|
|
Groin |
0/0 |
0/0 |
1/1 |
0/0 |
Lower Body |
|
Buttocks |
0/0 |
1/0.3 |
1/1 |
0/0 |
|
|
Leg |
0/0 |
1/0.3 |
9/10 |
7/7 |
|
|
Foot |
0/0 |
0/0 |
1/1 |
0/0 |
|
|
Subtotals |
0/0 |
2/0.6 |
12/13 |
7/7 |
|
|
Other |
0/0 |
1/0.3 |
10/11 |
5/5 |
|
|
Unknown |
4/9 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
0/0 |
|
|
Subtotals |
4/9 |
1/0.3 |
10/11 |
5/5 |
|
|
TOTALS (#/%) |
46/100 |
311/100 |
94/100 |
100/100 |
In sum, although there are variations, the two cinematic recreations examined here largely reflect the wound patterns showcased in Roland and the MPB. The vast majority of wounds, no matter the source, are from the waist up. Injuries to the front torso and the face/head regions constitute over half of all examples, while trauma below the waist is either exceedingly rare or even non-existent. The stark outlier is the MPB’s many depictions of arm wounds, including full amputations, which are unusual or utterly absent in the other three sources. It is thus tempting to believe that, in contrast to Roland, the MPB made an effort to highlight the frequency of arm injuries as a nod to the realities of medieval combat. This is tempered by the myriad other flights of fancy appearing in the MPB, so that a genuine attempt at realism in this one instance is an unsatisfactory explanation. It might be that it was a simple matter to depict arm wounds, thus making them injuries of artistic opportunity. But such an argument fails to explain the MPB’s lack of wounds to the legs. This suggests that the “broken clock rule” attaches: even a non-functioning analog timepiece is correct twice a day, so the MPB artists’ intersection with reality here seems to be entirely coincidental.
Comparing the wounding patterns in Roland, the MPB, Braveheart, and King Arthur reveals overlapping features as well as trends away from skeletal findings of trauma to medieval soldiers. Granted, skeletal evidence is far from perfect: grave finds are uneven and haphazard, and they are mute on wounds to soft-tissue areas. The exact locations, let alone mass burials, of many battles even from the late Middle Ages such as Agincourt (1415) remain unknown.106 Large numbers of victims, such as those recovered from the battles of Visby (1361) and Aljubarrota (1385), are invaluable, but may not be representative of other events for which there are few or no osteological remains. Moreover, even when skeletal signs of trauma are clear, it can be impossible to say what the circumstances of injury were, or even to distinguish between combat and non-combat wounds. In fact, over-interpretation and excessively creative wounding scenarios are a real problem.107 Nevertheless, enough evidence has surfaced to provide some broad outlines of how medieval soldiers met their fate, minus the hyperbole endemic to many contemporary written sources.108
Skeletal finds reveal a preponderance of wounds to the skull, forearms, and lower legs, thus showing marked inconsistency with the four artistic and literary sources examined above. Trauma locations presumably could vary by soldier type, with foot soldiers, including those in line formations, fighting right-handed opponents suffering more wounds to the left sides of their bodies, while mounted troops engaging infantry could expect more frequent injuries to their lower legs.109 At the same time, leg injuries have been variously construed as incapacitating wounds, irrespective of soldier type and bearing in mind the problem of over-interpretation of the evidence.110 There is confirmation of broken or cut ribs and breastbones, possibly caused by spears or cutting weapons, though as will be discussed later, torso injuries are rare.111 Damage to soldiers’ backsides, especially when multiple bodies exhibit such signs, can indicate an individual or entire force breaking and running, thereby exposing vulnerable areas to pursuers.112 Full amputations occurred, but appear to have been infrequent or more likely the result of extra-combat punishment.113
Injury locations on bodies recovered from the battles of Visby and Aljubarrota serve as illustrative cases. For the first event, excavations carried out in the early twentieth century unearthed 1,185 victims who were killed by an invading Danish army. The majority of wounds were to arms and legs, followed by cranial injuries. Despite evidence of a mix of current and obsolescent armor, there is scant evidence of trauma to Visby defenders’ torsos.114 This is similar to the second case, where more than four hundred bodies from the Portuguese battle showed predominant trauma to the arms, legs, and head.115
All four cultural representations examined here show similarities in wound locations, suggesting that sources created during the Middle Ages drew upon earlier accounts for inspiration, while exerting an influence on modern film portrayals of medieval combat. Meanwhile, they depart from osteological evidence, creating their own realities of battle injuries. In this sense, they repeat earlier patterns found for modes of combat and dominant weapon system depictions. Those influences across time and medium become even more pronounced when considering the role of armor in dramatic recreations.
The (In)Utility of Armor
If there is a strong thread of continuity between all four artifacts studied here, it is in their depictions of armor’s protective qualities. Roland gives thirty-seven examples (80% of total casualties) of protective gear utterly failing to protect its wearer, while offering no clear instances of wounds dealt to unarmored bodily regions. Armor failure is nothing short of spectacular in Roland, with swords cleaving through helmet and hauberk, and spears puncturing byrnies with apparent ease. While it is impossible to determine whether armor failed in the remaining 20% of cases, 7% mention a shield breaking in the course of inflicting injuries, thus further underscoring the superiority of weapons over defensive measures in the epic.116
That trend translates directly to the MPB. Of the 311 combat injuries, 84% of them are inflicted on armored sites, while only 16% are to exposed regions. Also like Roland, the defeat of protective gear is often quite dramatic: swords slice clean through helmets, edged weapons cleave armored bodies nearly in two, spears penetrate mailed torsos and emerge on the other side, while various severed body parts, still clad in armor, frequently litter the ground.117 Overall, both medieval sources stress the inefficacy of armor, revealing it as a recurring literary and artistic topos of the combat genre. Bearing in mind that the MPB’s artists had access to Roland, even incorporating some of its elements into their combat panels, the influence of the earlier epic on the later artwork becomes apparent.118
Akin to both Roland and the MBP, protective gear appears worthless in Braveheart. Worn exclusively by the English, armor is defeated in fifty-eight instances (62% of total casualties) at Stirling, the remaining 38% of injuries being to unprotected regions of protagonists and antagonists alike. Although some shields are depicted as “working” in a utilitarian sense, in no case does armor effectively guard its wearer against a weapon strike. Fighting as outnumbered and highly vulnerable longshots, the Scots are able to skewer, slice, and bash their opponents into defeat, despite the latter soldiers’ protective advantages. Indeed, it would appear that a lack of protective gear is a decided advantage to Wallace’s forces, given their ability to subdue their better-equipped foes. Armor’s inefficacy likewise features at Badon Hill in King Arthur. Most of the injuries (68%) are sustained to protected sites of protagonists and antagonists, while only one-third afflict exposed flesh. Like Wallace’s Scots, Arthur’s Woad allies conspicuously lack protective gear, yet are the equals to their armored Saxon adversaries in fierce hand-to-hand combat.
Figure 5 Armor vs. no armor at wound site. Data for Braveheart is for battle of Stirling only; data for King Arthur is for battle of Badon Hill only. Roland N = 46; MPB N = 311; Braveheart N = 94; King Arthur N = 100.
Thus, whether the source is medieval or modern, whether it is written or pictorial or cinematic, armor’s complete inability to protect its wearer is perhaps the strongest connection across time and medium. In all cases examined here, armor is decisively defeated by the weapons deployed against it. Audiences, both past and present, could be forgiven for wondering why soldiers even bothered with protective equipment, given its consistent failure to guard against harm. Modern viewers are predisposed to imagining armored knights as lumbering robots, so overburdened as to be unable to mount their horses without the assistance of a crane, as depicted in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).119 That they could be routed on screen by fleet-footed soldiers unencumbered by mail and plate weighs against the simultaneous myth of the mounted knight’s invincibility – a myth that filmmakers likewise leverage.
Much of this is at stark odds with the evidence of medieval armor’s actual protective attributes. Admittedly, arrows and crossbow bolts were capable of penetrating mail, sometimes even turning their armor-bearing targets into veritable “hedgehogs.” But such injuries were often survivable, due not only to the armor but to its complementary padded undergarment, which offered additional protection.120 Heavy lance thrusts could also defeat mail and padding, though with more lethality than missiles.121 What stands out in the skeletal remains is how many severe injuries actually proved non-lethal, as evidenced by bone healing at trauma sites. This would have been a function both of quality medical care and of armor’s efficacy.
Assessing armor over the course of the Middle Ages, DeVries concludes that “[n]ever in military history have armies been so uniformly well armored.” Not only that: “this armor was effective.”122 The driving force for this protection, argues DeVries, was a deep concern for preserving human life. Hence, Charlemagne’s requirement for his troops to wear standardized, torso-protecting byrnies, and his proscription against selling them to foreign soldiers or merchants. Other peoples copied Carolingian designs, strongly suggesting this armor’s utility and ensuring that efforts to protect all medieval combatants, not just elites, became widespread.123
Injury sites on skeletons become especially significant in this context. The preponderance of wounds to the limbs can be partly traced to the relative difficulty of protecting those areas with armor, while recent tests reveal just how effective mail and plate were, especially when worn by a moving target with padded undergarment.124 When trauma to the ribs, vertebrae, and pelvis did occur, it is more indicative of the dangers faced by foregoing protective gear in battle, or of massacres inflicted on unarmored victims.125 Yet, as seen above, even outmoded armor such as that worn by some of Visby’s defenders was capable of protecting torsos.
The high frequency of skull injuries in grave findings presents something of a conundrum. The head would have been a prime target to combatants, resulting in special efforts to protect it with helmets of various designs.126 Richard Gabriel calculates that even a modest metal head covering with padding would have rendered the skull impervious to serious injury from any pre-modern weapon besides a large axe.127 Medieval chronicles cite axes cleaving headgear, though akin to Roland and the MPB, this may be more of a literary trope than a reflection of reality.128 Modern experiments demonstrate that swords could not cut through helmets, but that severe concussions could result from well-delivered blows.129
Despite the benefits of head protection, bone trauma suggests that many injuries were dealt to unhelmeted victims. Woosnam-Savage and DeVries speculate that the need to open visors during battle, or the discarding of helmets by fleeing troops, meant that unprotected heads could present easy targets.130 The late Roman Imperial writer Vegetius complained that troops of his day had gotten lax about wearing armor in general, and helmets in particular,131 while evidence from early medieval grave finds in southern Germany indicate that helmet use had fallen out of fashion. Even then, researchers identify ample signs of skull surgery and bone healing, proving that severe head wounds were survivable.132
The cultural representations are once again consistent here. Irrespective of whether the source is medieval or modern, of whether it is written, artistic, or cinematic, the utter failure of armor to protect wearers is a constant. Helmets are routinely defeated by all manner of weapons, despite empirical evidence militating against these depictions. Torso areas, which historically were well protected and for which skeletal remains indicate comparatively few battle injuries, are prime regions for attack, their protective gear doing nothing to shield them from danger. In fact, fatal slashes to armored torsos are so common in movies as to qualify for trope status. Although serious injuries caused by such actions would be highly unlikely, it all makes for wonderful visuals. As was the case with the nature of medieval combat and wound locations, cinematic authenticity pushes filmmakers toward a complete inversion of armor’s genuine life-saving abilities. That this reflects depictions of combat created during the Middle Ages themselves shows how long this has been a storytelling motif, while reinforcing the notion that cinema faithfully portrays medieval sources, even if the accuracy of those sources is problematic.
Conclusion
If people watch medieval-set films closely, they might notice something interesting about weaponry. Namely, it is almost exclusively antagonists who utilize crossbows. King Arthur is but one prime example where this is the case. According to arguments laid out above, the partisan use of a historicon is attributable to film industry conventions and strengthened by a feedback loop, becoming an expectation of audiences. Movie producers can harness the association of the crossbow with evil to great effect, obviating the need to explain characterizations, because viewers subliminally “know” that medieval bad guys use the weapon.
That alone would be a worthwhile finding, an example of how the movie industry distorts and fabricates the past for its own benefit. But as it turns out, the association between crossbows and evil is not just a cinematic invention. Anna Comnena’s well-known condemnation of the crossbow as a “devilish invention” became tangible in the form of demons spanning the weapon atop a twelfth-century church pillar at Saint Sernin in Toulouse. The reality, of course, is that forces across medieval Europe armed themselves with crossbows, meaning there is not only a disconnect between real and reel history, but dissonance within medieval Europe itself. The past is a complicated arena, and modern films oftentimes mirror that past, as well as mold our understandings of it.133
What is true of the crossbow dynamic also holds valid for many aspects of cinematic medieval warfare. Sieges appear in the movies, but their importance tends to be dwarfed by the screen time allotted to epic battles. Those battles are predicated on the centrality, even assumed dominance, of cavalry over foot soldiers, and on disorganized mêlée combat as hallmarks. Wounds inflicted on soldiers are nearly always from the waist up, with armor being incapable of deflecting weapon strikes, even to well-protected torsos. Much of this is at odds with historians’ assessments – in fact, the films sometimes completely invert reality as academics have come to know it. But in doing so, Hollywood follows in the footsteps of writers and artists from the Middle Ages, thereby placing filmmakers in the enigmatic position of being simultaneously accurate and inaccurate in their portrayals.
Does this mean that cinematic renditions of medieval warfare are just a curious oddity or, at best, addictive “gateway drugs” to lure in viewers, who then rely on academics to ween them off by pointing out the many factual errors?134 Movies thereby become expedient detritus in the learning process, but there are serious problems with this approach. First, it ignores the long history of film industry standards that necessitate invention and factual transgression. Second, it suggests that strict accuracy or lack thereof is the only interesting aspect of historical films, a notion that is belied by the multi-layered evidentiary nature of other artifacts from the medieval past.135 Third, it posits that traditional historians and their scholarly writings are the only entities capable of conveying a worthwhile account of the past, one that is necessarily at odds with dramatic film recreations.136 Finally, it reinforces the public’s documented belief that “history” is just a static assemblage of facts, as opposed to the dynamic field it truly is.137
Not for nothing does Robert Toplin subtitle his study of history and film, In Defense of Hollywood. This does not mean he gives a free pass to any and all cinematic depictions of the past;138 rather, it is to emphasize that filmmakers work according to standards that often do not align with those of academics. With such conventions in mind, it is up to readers to determine whether Braveheart, King Arthur, and other medieval cinema are any good as movies, let alone quality portrayals of warfare of the time. Do they go too far in their historical manipulations, in their creative license, in their departures from traditional scholarship? Even if the answer is yes, such films can find good company with The Song of Roland and the Morgan Picture Bible, which have been doing those very things for centuries.
1 I offer my sincerest thanks to Prof. Richard Abels, who generously discussed this topic with me and provided helpful feedback on a draft of the manuscript. I am also indebted to the anonymous reader for JMMH and to Prof. Clifford Rogers, both of whom offered many useful suggestions. »
2 Statistics available at “Braveheart,” IMDB.com: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112573/ (accessed 1 December 2020). The “afterlife” figures are at “Braveheart Connections,” IMDB.com: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112573/movieconnections (accessed 22 February 2021). »
3 Elizabeth Ewan, review of Braveheart and Rob Roy, in American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1219–21, with quotes at p. 1220. »
4 Sharon Krossa, “Braveheart Errors: An Illustration of Scale,” Medieval Scotland (2 October 2008): http://medievalscotland.org/scotbiblio/bravehearterrors.shtml (accessed 6 August 2020). »
5 Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, 3rd ed. (New York, 2018), pp. 29–30. The “worst” films were determined by discussants on the Mediev-l listserve in the 1990s; the “best” films are in the estimation of the website creator, Paul Halsall; see Internet Medieval Sourcebook: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medfilms.asp#lists (accessed 21 February 2021). »
6 “King Arthur,” IMDB.com: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349683/ (accessed 6 July 2020). For “afterlife” references, “King Arthur Connections,” IMDB.com: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349683/movieconnections (accessed 22 February 2021). »
7 A sampling of reviews and scholarship includes Caroline Jewers, “Mission Historical, or: ‘[T]here Were a Hell of A Lot of Knights’: Ethnicity and Alterity in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur,” in Race, Class and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh (New York, 2007), pp. 91–106; Tom Shippey, “Fuqua’s King Arthur: More Myth-Making in America,” Exemplaria 19 (2007), 310–26; Virginia Blanton, “‘Don’t worry, I won’t let them rape you’: Guinevere’s Agency in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur,” Arthuriana 15 (2005), 91–111; Kevin Harty, review of King Arthur, Arthuriana 14 (2004), 121–23; Alan Lupack, review of King Arthur, Arthuriana 14 (2004), 123–25. »
8 The basic study on productively reading film is James Monaco, How to Read a Film, 4th ed. (Oxford, 2009). On reading historical film, Peter Burkholder, “How to Read a Historical Film,” World History Connected 16 (2019), 1–14: https://tinyurl.com/r4l3xp6; and Robert Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence, 2002), ch. 1: “Cinematic History as Genre.” »
9 The Song of Roland, trans. Glyn Burgess (New York, 1990). »
10 Scanned panels of the MPB, also known as the Maciejowski Bible, are readily available via The Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Crusader-Bible/thumbs. The scans include translations of the accompanying text, which was added to the artwork only later. Additional panels can be found at the J. Paul Getty Museum (MS Ludwig I 6 [83.MA.55]) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS Lat. Nouv. Acq. 2294). »
11 Named weapons from Roland such as “Durendal” (Roland’s sword) and “Joiuse” (Charlemagne’s sword) show up in MPB panels; C. Griffith Mann, “Picturing the Bible in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, ed. William Noel and Daniel Weiss (London, 2002), pp. 38–59 at pp. 55–56. »
12 Translations of Roland often place it in crusades context; see David Staines’ “Introduction,” The Song of Roland, trans. John DuVal (Indianapolis, 2012), pp. ix–xvii at p. x; and Burgess’s “Introduction,” Song of Roland, pp. 7–25 at pp. 8–9. As Trinitarian text, Adrian McClure, “In the Name of Charlemagne, Roland, and Turpin: Reading the Oxford Roland as a Trinitarian Text,” Speculum 94 (2019), 420–66; as satire, Bernard Bachrach, “Is the Song of Roland’s Roncesvalles a Medieval Satire?” in Prowess, Piety, and Public Order in Medieval Society, eds. Craig Nakashian and Daniel Franke (Leiden, 2017), pp. 15–35. »
13 Andrew Taylor, “Was There a Song of Roland?” Speculum 76 (2001), 28–65. »
14 Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Differences in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, 2006), p. 15. »
15 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, 2001), ch. 3: “On the Reading of Historical Texts”; more recently, Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (Chicago, 2018), part 2: “Historical Thinking ≠ An Amazing Memory.” On the problems and potentialities of learning these techniques, Peter Burkholder, “Teaching Historical Literacy within a SOTL Framework,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 44 (2019), 44–50. »
16 Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (London, 2001), pp. 172–73. »
17 On the dating, see Richard Abels, “Cultural Representations of Warfare in the High Middle Ages: The Morgan Picture Bible,” in Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages, eds. Simon John and Nicholas Morton (Farnham, 2014), pp. 13–35 at pp. 14–18. »
18 Daniel Weiss, “Portraying the Past, Illuminating the Present: The Art of the Morgan Library Picture Bible,” Book of Kings, pp. 11–35 at pp. 14–16, 31; Mann, “Picturing the Bible,” p. 39. Abels accepts the MPB as a “crusader Bible,” but disputes its attribution to St. Louis; “Cultural Representations,” p. 17. »
19 Sara Lipton, “Images and Objects as Sources for Medieval History,” in Understanding Medieval Primary Sources, ed. Joel Rosenthal (London, 2012), pp. 225–42 at p. 226. »
20 Pamela Porter, Warfare in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2018), pp. 10–11. »
21 Wendy Stein, How to Read Medieval Art (New York, 2016), p. 9. »
22 Robert Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001), pp. 50–66 at p. 50. »
23 John McNeill, “Historians Go to the Movies,” Perspectives on History 57 (2019), 5–6. On the misguided assumption that adding more historians to film production would result in greater accuracy, see Toplin’s description of his involvement in the making of A House Divided: Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (dir. Stan Lathan, 1982), Reel History, ch. 4: “Screening History: A Case Study”; and Kathleen Coleman’s experience as historical consultant to Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000), “The Pedant Goes to Hollywood: The Role of the Historical Consultant,” in Gladiator: Film and History, ed. Martin Winkler (Malden, 2005), pp. 45–52. »
24 Simon Brew, “How Neil deGrasse Tyson Got James Cameron to Edit Titanic – 15 Years Later,” Mental Floss UK (16 September 2015): http://mentalfloss.com/article/68595/how-neil-degrasse-tyson-got-james-cameron-edit-titanic-15-years-later [accessed 12 February 2022]. Cameron’s attention to detail is seen in James Delgado, “Titanic,” in Box Office Archaeology, ed. Julie Schablitsky (Walnut Creek, 2007), pp. 70–87, and Toplin, Reel History, pp. 62–69. »
25 Ann Hornaday, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies (New York, 2017), p. 184. »
26 Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, “Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire,” in Questioning Collapse, ed. McAnany and Yoffee (Cambridge, UK, 2010), pp. 1–17 at p. 4. Diamond’s key works here are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005). For a recent defense of Diamond’s methods and findings, see Alex Rosenberg, How History Gets Things Wrong (Cambridge, MA, 2018), ch. 12: “Guns, Germs, Steel – and All That.” »
27 On these important interstitial points, see Monaco, How to Read a Film, pp. 31, 44–45; Rosenstone, History on Film, p. 120. A broad indictment of historians’ ability to convey meaningful truths is Rosenberg, How History Gets Things Wrong. »
28 There is much scholarship to this point. Generally, see Toplin, Reel History, ch. 1: “Cinematic History as Genre”; and Rosenstone, History on Film, ch. 1: “History on Film.” For medieval film in particular, Bettina Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge, UK, 2016), pp. 45–59 at pp. 49–52; Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London, 2013), ch. 6: “Movie Medievalisms”; Andrew Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson, 2011), ch. 9: “Authenticity and Accuracy in Medieval Worlds”; Laura Finke and Martin Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, 2010), pp. 36–39; and William Woods, “Authenticating Realism in Medieval Film,” in The Medieval Hero on Screen, eds. Martha Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, 2004), pp. 38–51. »
29 Cindy Davis, “Building Characters,” in Cut to the Chase: Writing Feature Films with the Pros at UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, ed. Linda Venis (New York, 2013), pp. 75–98 at p. 83 (emphasis in original). »
30 Charles Tashiro, “Passing for the Past,” Cineaste 29 (2004), 40–44 at p. 42. »
31 Daniel Franklin, Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States (Lanham, 2006), pp. 15–17; Tashiro, “Passing for the Past,” p. 41; Bildhauer, “Medievalism and Cinema,” p. 45. »
32 Charu Uppal, “Over Time and Beyond Disney – Visualizing Princesses through a Comparative Study in India, Fiji, and Sweden,” Social Sciences 8 (2019): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/4/105 [accessed 12 February 2022]; see also Susie Neilson, “How Disney Princesses Influence Girls around the World,” NPR (24 May 2019): https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/05/24/726129132/how-disney-princesses-influence-girls-around-the-world [accessed 12 February 2022]. »
33 Paul Sturtevant, The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination: Memory, Film and Medievalism (London, 2018), pp. 210–15. »
34 Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages, p. 224. »
35 Martin Winkler, “Gladiator and the Colosseum: Ambiguities of Spectacle,” in Gladiator, ed. Winkler (London, 2004), pp. 87–110 at pp. 87–89. »
36 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Westport, 1991), p. 77; Louise Bishop, “The Myth of the Flat Earth,” in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, eds. Stephen Harris and Bryon Grigsby (New York, 2008), pp. 97–101. Vikings and Christopher Columbus films often invoke the myth. »
37 Ewan, review of Rob Roy and Braveheart, p. 1220. For general conventions on costuming, Richard LaMotte, “Designing Costumes for the Historical Film,” Cineaste 29 (2004), 50–54. »
38 Monika Kirner-Ludwig, “Adapting Scripture to (Trans)script: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach to Cinematic Studies of Evoking Pseudo-Medieval Frames,” in Telecinematic Stylistics, eds. Christian Hoffmann and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (London, 2020), pp. 223–61; Edward English and Carol Lansing, “The Idea of a Middle Ages,” in A Companion to the Medieval World, eds. Lansing and English (Malden, 2009), pp. 3–6 at p. 4. »
39 Hornaday, Talking Pictures, p. 184. »
40 James McPherson, “Glory,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark Carnes (New York, 1995), pp. 128–31 at p. 128. »
41 Rosenstone, History on Film, pp. 36–41; Rosenstone, “The Historical Film,” pp. 60–61. »
42 A historical overview of the battle is Michael Prestwich, “The Battle of Stirling Bridge: An English Perspective,” in The Wallace Book, ed. Edward Cowan (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 64–76. This volume contains several essays on William Wallace, his milieu and legacy. »
43 Tony Pollard, “Shooting Arrows: Cinematic Representations of Medieval Battles,” in Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, eds. Rory Naismith and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe (London, 2020), pp. 177–206 at p. 195. »
44 A. E. Christa Canitz, “‘Historians… Will Say I Am a Liar’: The Ideology of False Truth Claims in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Luc Besson’s The Messenger,” Studies in Medievalism 23 (2005), 127–42. »
45 See note 52 below. »
46 See the Coens’ facetious explanation in Bill Bradley, “The Coen Brothers Reveal Fargo Is Based on a True Story After All,” Huffington Post (8 March 2016): https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/coen-brothers-fargo-true-story_us_56de2c53e4b0ffe6f8ea78c4 [accessed 12 February 2022]. The recent television series Fargo (various dirs., 2014–present), executive produced by the Coen brothers, continues the tradition, textually stating at the beginning of each episode that actual events are depicted. »
47 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955; repr. New York, 1997), pp. 3–6. »
48 Michael Crichton, Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, Relating His Experiences with Northmen in A.D. 922 (New York, 1976), which was the basis of the film, The 13th Warrior (dir. John McTiernan, 1999). An actual translation of Fadlan’s travels is Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (New York, 2012). »
49 Michael Crichton, Timeline (New York, 1999), which went to the screen as Timeline (dir. Richard Donner, 2003). On Crichton’s scholarly undercurrents, see Jenny Adams, “Marketing the Medieval: The Quest for Authentic History in Michael Crichton’s Timeline,” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2003), 704–23. »
50 On the powerful effects these tactics can have on readers, see Sol Stein, Stein on Writing (New York, 1995), pp. 22–23. »
51 Filmmakers’ clever uses of visuals, written text, and spoken word in prologues are analyzed by Richard Burt, “Getting Schmedieval: Of Manuscript and Film Prologues, Paratexts, and Parodies,” Exemplaria 19 (2007), 217–42; and Burt, “Re-embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry in Film and Media: The Flip Side of History in Opening and End Title Sequences,” Exemplaria 19 (2007), 327–50. »
52 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998), pp. 20–21. »
53 Wineburg, Historical Thinking, p. 242. »
54 Hornaday, Talking Pictures, p. 249. »
55 Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Humanities in American Life: Insights from a Survey of the Public’s Attitudes and Engagement (Cambridge, MA, 2020), pp. 8, 17–19. »
56 Burkholder, “How to Read a Historical Film,” pp. 3–7. »
57 Stein, Stein on Writing, p. 42; Monaco, How to Read a Film, p. 62. »
58 Carol Warren and Tracy Karner, Discovering Qualitative Methods, 3rd ed. (New York, 2015), pp. 210–15. On the resurgence of quantitative approaches to historical research, see Steven Ruggles and Diana Magnuson, “The History of Quantification in History: The JIH as a Case Study,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 50 (2020), 363–81. »
59 Abels, “Cultural Representations,” p. 29. »
60 For the texts, see Peter Burkholder, “History by the Numbers: A Quantitative Approach to Teaching the Importance of Conflicting Evidence,” The History Teacher 54 (2020), 69–106; for film and television, see USC’s Color of Change, Normalizing Injustice: The Dangerous Misrepresentations that Define Television’s Scripted Crime Genre (Los Angeles, 2020), p. 24; and Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York, 2005), pp. 65–72. »
61 Stanzas 93–176. Note that the number of stanzas in modern editions/translations of Roland can vary. The Burgess translation used here follows the stanza divisions of the 1946 Frederick Whitehead second edition, but other versions often have 291 stanzas. »
62 Charlemagne’s battle is stanzas 246–70; the trial by combat is stanzas 288–93. »
63 For sieges, which typically take up only a line or two of text, see stanzas 1, 5, 8, 14, 16, 36, 53, 55, 119, 134, 189, 198, 271, 298. »
64 Battle/single combat panels are 3v, 9v, 10r, 10v, 11r, 12r, 13r, 14v, 16v, 21r, 22r, 23v, 24r, 24v, 28v, 29v, 30v, 33r, 34v, 36v, 39r, 40r, 41r, and the Getty Museum’s 83.MA.55v. Siege panels are 10v, 11r, 14r, 15r, 15v, 16v, 23v, 40r, 42r, 43v. Panels combining a battle and siege are 10v, 11r, 23v, 40r. »
65 Abels, “Cultural Representations,” p. 19. »
66 That is, 2:49:51. For percentage purposes, it is far easier to convert to seconds. »
67 A convenient shorthand for siege techniques is the “six S’s of attack”: suborning defenders, scaring the garrison, sapping the fortifications, starving the population, storming the walls, shelling the besieged; see Bernard Bachrach, “Medieval Siege Warfare: A Reconnaissance,” Journal of Military History 58 (1994), 119–33 at p. 125. There is likewise a “six S’s of defense” (ibid.). »
68 Jim Bradbury, The Medieval Siege (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 71. »
69 Some examples include Count Geoffrey le Bel’s 1135–45 conquest of Normandy, and the rebellion against Henry II from 1173–74 (p. 73). Charles VII’s 1449–50 reconquest of French possessions saw around sixty sieges, the battle of Formigny being “almost a foregone conclusion” since the surrounding towns had already been captured (p. 176). »
70 Bachrach, “The Cost of Castle Building: The Case of the Tower at Langeais, 992–994,” in The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality, eds. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe (Dubuque, 1984), pp. 47–62. Bachrach’s position informs Jurgen Brauer and Hubert Van Tuyll, Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (Chicago, 2008), ch. 2: “The High Middle Ages, 1000–1300: The Case of the Medieval Castle and the Opportunity Cost of Warfare.” »
71 Kelly DeVries, “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life,” in Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, eds. Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi (Leiden, 2006), pp. 27–55 at pp. 32–33, 39–43. »
72 Bradbury, Medieval Siege, pp. 71–72. »
73 Nicholas Hooper and Matthew Bennett, The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK, 1996), p. 16; Bachrach, “Charlemagne’s Cavalry: Myth and Reality,” Military Affairs 47 (1983), 1–20; reprinted in Bachrach, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (London, 1993), XIV, pp. 1–20. »
74 On “the great builder,” Louis Halphen, Le Comté d’Anjou au XIe siècle (1906; repr. Geneva, 1974), p. 153; on Angevin battle avoidance, Bachrach, “L’art de la guerre angevin,” in Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages, ed. Martin Aurell and Noël-Yves Tonnerre (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 267–84 at pp. 280–83. »
75 John Gillingham, “William the Bastard at War,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. Allen Brown, eds. Christopher Harper-Bill, Christopher Holdsworth, and Janet Nelson (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 141–58; John Gillingham, “Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages,” in War and Government in the Middle Ages, eds. John Gillingham and J. C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1984), pp. 194–207. »
76 Pollard, “Shooting Arrows,” pp. 179, 204 (note 62); Peter Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” History Compass 5 (2007), 507–24 at pp. 512–13. »
77 Sean McGlynn, “Siege Warfare: Tactics and Technology,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, ed. Clifford Rogers, 3 vols. (New York, 2010), 3:265–70 at p. 265. »
78 Clifford J. Rogers, “Carolingian Cavalry in Battle: The Evidence Reconsidered,” in Crusading and Warfare, eds. John and Morton, pp. 1–11; Stephen Morillo, “Battle Seeking: The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy,” Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), 21–41; Kelly DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1996). See also Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare (New York, 2004), p. 135, for a brief overview of this debate. »
79 More generally on this point, Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages, ch. 1: “History, Historiography and Film.” »
80 On the inherent problems of eyewitness accounts, see Marcus Bull, Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third, and Fourth Crusades (Woodbridge, 2018). See also the case of the single combat between Anthony Woodville and the Bastard of Burgundy in 1467: four eyewitnesses give conflicting accounts of the same event; M. R. Geldof, “‘And Describe the Shapes of the Dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” in Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, eds. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries (Leiden, 2015), pp. 57–80 at p. 61. Eyewitness problems plague the legal profession even today; see “Eyewitness Identification Reform,” The Innocence Project: https://www.innocenceproject.org/eyewitness-identification-reform/ (accessed 3 August 2020). »
81 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), ch. 2: “Agincourt,” with reference to “unanswerable” questions at p. 93. »
82 Philip Sabin, “The Face of Roman Battle,” Journal of Roman History 90 (2000), 1–17, with “mutual kebabs” at p. 9. More recently, see Jeremiah McCall, Swords and Cinema: Hollywood vs. the Reality of Ancient Warfare (Barnsley, 2014), pp. 23–61. »
83 Pollard, “Shooting Arrows,” pp. 184–85. »
84 Abels, “Cultural Representations,” pp. 31–32; Mann, “Picturing the Bible,” pp. 55–56. »
85 Bachrach, “Medieval Siege Warfare,” p. 122. »
86 Sabin, “Face of Roman Battle,” p. 10. Pollard, “Shooting Arrows,” p. 185, corroborates this dynamic, adding that the mêlée “is often, for this writer, the least satisfying element of any medieval battle in film.” »
87 The explanation of military iconography is a common authenticator in World War II films, though is less prevalent and seemingly less necessary in medieval cinema; see Jeanine Basinger, “Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan,” Perspectives on History (1 October 1998): https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-1998/translating-war-the-combat-film-genre-and-saving-private-ryan [accessed 12 February 2022]. »
88 Peter Burkholder, Christopher Caldiero, and Jonathan Godsall, “The King’s Speech: Battle Orations in Medieval Film,” Studies in Medievalism 28 (2019), 105–31. As this study observes, such harangues have a historical basis, but their content and purpose in real versus reel history vary considerably. »
89 Sabin, “Face of Roman Battle,” pp. 5–6, 10; and Clifford J. Rogers, Soldiers’ Live through History: The Middle Ages (Westport, 2007), pp. 214–16. »
90 Lee Brice, “The Fog of War: The Army in Rome,” in Rome, Season One: History Makes Television, ed. Monica Cyrino (Malden, 2008), pp. 61–77 at pp. 65–67; Burkholder, “How to Read a Historical Film,” pp. 12–13. The “latest geeky research” quote is from the DVD commentary to the episode. »
91 See stanzas 220–27, where the different nationalities comprising Charlemagne’s army are described as having tens of thousands of knights and horses each. Stanza 236 indicates that the Muslim forces were made up of thirty divisions of at least fifty thousand men each, for a total of 1.5 million, minimum. »
92 Cavalry are featured in the following panels; bolded entries are considered cavalry-centric portrayals: 3v, 9v, 10r, 10v, 11r, 12r, 13r, 16v, 20v, 21r, 22r, 23v, 24r, 24v, 29v, 30v, 33r, 34v, 36v, 39r, 40r, 41r, 42r, 43v, 55r. Foot-soldiers appear in folios 3v, 10r, 10v, 11r, 12r, 14r, 14v, 15r, 15v, 16v, 21r, 23v, 28v, 34v, 36v, 40r, 42r, 43v. »
93 Pollard, “Shooting Arrows,” p. 195, remarks on this surprise element in Braveheart and Outlaw King “to satisfy the viewer who… will usually appreciate the unexpected.” »
94 Several such examples punctuate Peter Jackson’s medieval-inspired, massively successful The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–03). See Aragorn and Théoden’s mounted sally into massed troops at Helm’s Deep (The Two Towers), Gandalf’s cavalry charge into Uruk-hai lines at the same battle, and Théoden’s horseback relief of the siege of Minas Tirith (Return of the King). Faramir’s charge against archers at Osgiliath (Return of the King) fails, but that failure is carefully constructed via lead-up dialogue, repeated long faces, gloomy soundtrack, and intercuts to Pippin’s singing of a funeral dirge while the charge unfolds. That Jackson had to layer on such foreshadowing shows how acculturated audiences are to successful cavalry attacks against foot-soldiers. »
95 Roland, stanzas 264–68. »
96 The textbook is Judith Bennett and Sandy Bardsley, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 12th ed. (New York, 2021), featuring an illustration of a mounted knight with the caption, “human tank” (p. 207). A work originally written by C. Warren Hollister, the publisher’s website claims Medieval Europe has been the best-selling medieval history text for the past five decades. The importance of four mounted knights’ centrality to the European Arms and Armor display at the MMA is reinforced by Rosenzweig and Thelen’s finding that museums are seen by the general public as the “most trustworthy” source of history: Presence of the Past, pp. 21–22. »
97 The feigned retreat was already an old tactic by the time of Hastings. The Byzantine general Narses had used the same technique to defeat the Franks at Rimini in 554. For this case and the others cited here, see Bernard Bachrach and David Bachrach, Warfare in Medieval Europe, c.40–c.1453 (London, 2017), pp. 277–79; and B. Bachrach, “Charlemagne’s Cavalry,” XIV, p. 9. The Norman cavalry at Hastings was also quite effective against their disordered adversaries, who fled on foot. »
98 Carroll Gillmor, “Practical Chivalry: The Training of Horses for Tournaments and Warfare,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 13 (1992), 7–29. »
99 DeVries, Infantry Warfare, pp. 9–22 (Courtrai), pp. 155–75 (Crécy). »
100 Andrew Ayton, “Arms, Armour, and Horses,” in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford, 1999), pp. 186–208 at p. 186. »
101 Pollard, “Shooting Arrows,” pp. 193–97, discusses the importance of preparing the battlefield before combat. »
102 James Patterson, “The Myth of the Mounted Knight,” in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, eds. Harris and Grigsby, pp. 90–94; Burkholder, “Popular [Mis]conceptions,” pp. 508–14. »
103 Those twenty-seven folios are: 3v, 10r, 10v, 11r, 12r, 14r, 14v, 15v, 16v, 21r, 22r, 23v, 24r, 24v, 28v, 29v, 30v, 33r, 34v, 35r, 36v, 39r, 40r, 41r, 42r, 43v, 55v. Note that some additional folios depict combat, but without injuries. »
104 Abels, “Cultural Representations,” p. 22. »
105 Woods, “Authenticating Realism,” pp. 44–45 (emphasis in original). »
106 Anne Curry, Agincourt (Oxford, 2015), pp. 196–205. »
107 Geldof, “And Describe the Shapes of the Dead,” pp. 57–80. »
108 On the problematic nature of written sources of battle injuries or military affairs, see Robert Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in Wounds and Wound Repair, eds. Tracy and DeVries, pp. 27–56 at p. 34; DeVries, “The Use of Chronicles in Recreating Medieval Military History,” Journal of Medieval Military History 2 (2004), 1–15; Piers Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades (Cambridge, UK, 2004), pp. 108, 138–40. These should be balanced against Iain MacInness, “‘One Man Slashes, One Slays, One Warns, One Wounds’. Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403,” in Killing and Being Killed: Bodies in Battle, ed. Jörg Rogge (Mainz, 2017), pp. 61–77, which argues that literary sources can be read more reliably than often thought. »
109 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, pp. 112, 117. »
110 Ibid., p. 116. »
111 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, p. 113; Richard Gabriel, Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Washington, DC, 2012), p. 23. »
112 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, pp. 116–17; Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” p. 44, discussing skeletons from the battle of Towton in 1461. »
113 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, pp. 112–14; Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” p. 43. »
114 Those armors consisted of coats of plates, which were modern by mid-fourteenth century standards, and lamellar armor, which was going out of date by then. See Bengt Thordeman, Armour from the Battle of Wisby, 1361, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1939), 1:225, and the archeological documentary, “Last Stand at Visby,” Medieval Dead, season 1, episode 2 (2013). »
115 Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” pp. 41–43; Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, pp. 110–11; Eugénia Cunha and Ana Maria Silva, “War Lesions from the Famous Portuguese Medieval Battle of Aljubarrota,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7 (1997), 595–99. »
116 Roland’s armor, though “broken,” “smashed,” “pierced” and “torn,” apparently protects him against a flurry of Muslim projectiles (“they failed to get through to his body”), but his horse is killed in the process (stanza 160). Charlemagne’s armor does much the same in his fight against the emir (stanzas 264–65); and Thierry’s injury from armor failure while fighting Pinabel in a judicial duel is averted only by divine intervention (stanza 292). These exceptions serve to highlight the general rule that protective gear does not work throughout the epic. »
117 See Figure 4 above for examples. »
118 See note 11 above. »
119 For the interesting, though historically inaccurate, use of a crane to hoist knights in the film, see Robert C. Woosnam-Savage, “Olivier’s Henry V (1944): How a Movie Defined the Image of the Battle of Agincourt for Generations,” in The Battle of Agincourt, eds. Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer (New Haven, 2015), pp. 250–62 at pp. 253–54. »
120 On the hedgehog phenomenon, both in history and film, see Scott Manning, “Warriors ‘Hedgehogged’ in Arrows: Crusaders, Samurai, and Wolverine in Medieval Chronicles and Popular Culture,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 33 (2018), 62–77. »
121 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, pp. 156, 177; Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c.1296–c.1403,” in Wound and Wound Repair, eds. Tracy and DeVries, pp. 102–27 at pp. 103–4. »
122 DeVries, “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life,” p. 36. He and Woosnam-Savage make much the same remark in “Battle Trauma,” p. 54. »
123 DeVries, “Value of a Human Life,” p. 36. »
124 Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” p. 54; DeVries, “Value of a Human Life,” pp. 38–39. »
125 Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, p. 112; Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” p. 54. »
126 T. Philip Blackburn, David Edge, Alan Williams, and Christopher Adams, “Head Protection in England before the First World War,” Neurosurgery 47 (2000), 1261–86. »
127 Gabriel, Man and Wound, pp. 6–7, which is largely corroborated by Blackburn et al., “Head Protection,” pp. 1280–81. »
128 MacInnes, “One Man Slashes,” p. 66. An example of a cut helmet, possibly as a result of a heavy axe blow, is the German bascinet, dated to around 1350, at the Glasgow Museums, Robert Lyons Scott Collection, E.1939.65.aj, viewable at http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/. »
129 Abels, “Cultural Representations,” p. 23, and the studies cited in his note 26. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades, p. 164, contends that a sword could slice through a helmet, but he gives only one possible example. Even then, the case appears to show a sword cutting a helmet’s nose-guard. The proliferation of studies showing brain injury to NFL players in the U.S. demonstrates the dangerous reality of blunt-force head trauma, even among those protected by state-of-the-art helmets. See Alex Pew and Danielle Shapiro, “Football and Brain Injuries: What You Need to Know,” National Center for Health Research: http://www.center4research.org/football-brain-injuries-need-know/ (accessed 15 February 2021). »
130 Woosnam-Savage and DeVries, “Battle Trauma,” p. 55. »
131 Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, trans. N. P. Milner (Liverpool, 2001), pp. 19–20. »
132 Piers Mitchell, “Medicine, Military: Medical Treatment,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare, ed. Clifford Rogers, 2:585–89 at p. 585. »
133 Peter Burkholder, “X Marks the Plot: Crossbows in Medieval Film,” Studies in Popular Culture 38 (2015), 19–40, with quote and demon reference at pp. 27–28. »
134 See for example John Leazer, “History and the Movies: Some Thoughts on Using Film in Class,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 39 (2014), 72–77. »
135 A better approach deals with film as film, and not just its historical content; see Peter Burkholder, “From Passive Viewer to Active Learner: Strategies for Teaching Medieval Film,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 24 (2017), 61–78. »
136 See for instance the “History vs. Hollywood” website: https://www.historyvshollywood.com/, and the former History Channel series of the same name which ran from 2001–05. »
137 Theresa Miller, Emilie L’Hôte, and Andrew Volmert, Communicating about History: Challenges, Opportunities, and Emerging Recommendations (Washington, D.C., 2020), pp. 7, 9; Peter Burkholder and Krista Jenkins, “What Are Our Fields About? Survey Suggests Disconnect between Professionals and the Public,” The Teaching Professor (November 2019): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/what-are-our-fields-about/ [accessed 12 February 2022]. »
138 See Toplin, Reel History, ch. 2: “Judging Cinematic History,” and ch. 3: “Awarding the Harry and the Brooks.” »