Concluding Remarks

In the final scene of Henry V, which dramatises the Battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415), a key turning point of the Hundred Years War, Shakespeare has the duke of Burgundy speak of the havoc wreaked upon France.

Cosmo (ed.), Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

20 Patricia Ebrey, ‘State-Forced Relocations in China, 900-1300', in Patrica Ebrey and P.J. Smith (eds.), State Power in China, 900-1325 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), pp. 307-40.

And as our vineyards, fallows, meadows, meads, and hedges, Defective in their natures, grow to wilderness, Even so our houses, and ourselves, and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time The sciences that should become our country But grow like savages - as soldiers will That nothing do but mediate in blood.^[20]

These words recall how violence in the Middle Millennium took on new degrees of intensity - warfare inflicted death on ever greater numbers of common people, caused enormous destruction of vital resources, and left territories bereft of any kind of governance. The play has Henry, following the battle, in which 40 per cent of the French nobility were killed, order the slaughter of the remaining captive French soldiers, the number of whom was greater than his entire army. More even than battle, the tactic of ravaging an enemy territory brought widespread violence to those whom we would today call non-combatants through arson, pillage and rape.

Shakespeare, writing well over two centuries after the clash at Agincourt, offers a reminder that depictions of violence, which form the fifth and last part of our volume, are integral to understanding the significance of indivi­dual and group acts of violence: how societies experience violence in the record of their development is reflected in the visual and literary works they produce.

How should the twenty-first-century observer reckon with the intellectual or material attraction to violence as recorded in literature and visual repre­sentation: the sculptural and ceramic magnificence of Mayan artefacts commemorating grand spectacles of bloodletting and human sacrifice; the portrayal of ghost armies and violent eschatology in Daoist literature; and Buddhist tales of self-sacrifice, parricide and, not least, fighting monks who fostered the much-valued martial arts of East Asia? Why would one create beauty out of violence? The question - why generate depictions of violence, either visual or literary? - treats a major consequence of violence, the terrible and frightening expression of dehumanisation. While one may be horrified by violence in whatever form - warfare, massacre, torture, cataclysm - one may also see the need to resurrect or mediate what lies beneath its ugly smear on life, or after-life, and thereby humanise such ‘bold and vigorous action' into something memorable, but not necessarily desirable.

Attempts to control or reduce violence during the Middle Millennium likewise call for attention. Motive and agency emerged as urbanisation and trade increased, as urban, provincial, royal and imperial governance devel­oped strength, and as religious ideas gained form and audience. Yet tensions obviously remained in a world suffused with the ethos of various warrior elites. Although governing agencies sought a reduction in violence that complicated their duties within their jurisdictions, they vigorously practised the violence of war beyond their borders and sought economic dominance. Even at home they utilised brutal public punishments to enforce the legal systems they created.