Tournament and War

Medieval society in the ‘age of chivalry' was clearly obsessed with the range of extreme chivalric sport we simplify as the tournament, though the violent action took numerous forms.

It is important for analysis, once again, to look beneath the polished surface. The forms of tournament evolved over several centuries and only gradually took on the stylised pattern we think of most readily. Early tournament was simply arranged combat with, as in much knightly combat, the goal of overcoming elite opponents and securing valuable captives for ransom and possession of their expensive mounts. It was a wild as well as an exuberant enterprise, with bands of horsemen (and occasional support from foot soldiers) ranging over the countryside to ambush and engage opponents. The strenuous and dangerous group fighting of melee that Charny admired more than individual jousting enjoyed a long lifetime, though individual jousts came to predominate.

Social disruption was always a danger. Verdant fields and hedges might not survive. Even travellers and innkeepers on the roads leading to and from the designated region (originally not a single field) might be victimised. Ordinary agricultural families must have found even greater cause for fear.

Lay and ecclesiastical governing agencies originally viewed the entire business with uneasy muttering and head shaking. Church officials firmly denounced tournaments as a potent source of sin, until they gave up the futile effort. Kings often tried to prohibit or at least to regulate the sport in the interests of public peace and in fear that armed gatherings could cover the beginnings of rebellion.^[860] Finally kings and great lords (and some urban governing bodies) decided the best and most congenial course was to lead rather than to prohibit. The plethora of chivalric orders founded in the later Middle Ages stands in witness to their adoption of this policy.^[861] By the end of the Middle Ages the tournament had come to be more limited to a set tourney ground, where individual jousting in massive plate armour could provide the thrill with less danger to participants and to social order. Tournament had travelled a long road to this point.

If tournament had long been a source of mixed pride and worry as near­war, the question then becomes how the exercise of the knightly profession in full-scale warfare affected society. Whatever idealistic treatises might urge, what was the impact of working ideas of chivalry on the practice of warfare? Beginning students tend to assume that the chivalrous were, above all, concerned with protection of ‘civilian' populations in general, trying man­fully to limit the depredations of ‘the common soldiers', an attitude that makes of the knights the medieval version of idealised elite officers projected by their Victorian or Edwardian contemporaries. Such views are often joined by ideas of knights carefully and self-consciously ‘fighting fair', of their never starting - but always finishing - fights, and of a distinct disinclination on their part to make warfare a source of grubby profit.

Sound evidence leads to a quite different picture. Warriors who knew that they might live or die and their cause triumph or perish adopted many a ruse on campaign and in battle; and their tactics were praised. The admired William Marshal advised Henry II of England, during the endless border war with the king of France, to seem to disband his army, but secretly to keep it in readiness; he need only wait for the opposing king to do the same, and then to strike decisively. King Henry praised this pragmatic advice as mult corteis (wise, or even ‘quite courtly').^[862] More than a century later, Jean le Bel described a ‘brilliant trap' by which many of the knights of the French royal chivalric order were slaughtered.^[863] Likewise, choice of a site for combat favourable to one's own side represented common sense. More than a few castles were taken by a stealthy climb up an unguarded wall on a moonless night; a hefty payment might simply open a key gate.^[864] The protection on offer by the knightly unsurprisingly referred to one's own territory and its people, not the unarmed mass in general.

Of course warfare could not be successfully pursued in utterly chaotic and formless conditions. Basic notions and a broad framework were needed; but they were mainly concerned with warrior relations, rather than warrior relations with civilians. Given the shifting fortunes of war, the men at arms knew that any mistreatment of other elite fighters might someday be turned against them.^[865] The set of questions that Geoffroi de Charny proposed for discussion by the royal French Order of the Star focus pragmatically on distribution of loot and arrangements for ransom.

This pragmatic framework was clearly still emerging in the mid fourteenth century. But basic groundwork had been effected several centuries earlier as martial norms developed. This case has been persuasively argued by Matthew Strickland and John Gillingham.^[866] The era in which chivalric ideas began to emerge saw an end to aspects of warfare that had characterised the earlier Middle Ages, in what is sometimes termed the ‘heroic age' of Germanic and Viking warfare. Significantly, enslavement or even killing of defeated enemies gave way to the widespread and profitable practice of ransoming elite captives. More broadly, rampant slave raiding declined dramatically in western Europe. Such changes seem well documented and of obvious importance. The chivalry which developed in the later eleventh and the twelfth centuries could scarcely have come into being without them. These changes did not, of course, lead to a romanticised view or practice of chivalric warfare. The plain fact remains that this chivalric warfare was conducted, in no small measure, by the ravaging of an opponent's lands and the looting, often the displacement or even the killing of some of its people. The process was, as Strickland notes, the most devastating form of war practised before the advent of massive aerial bombardment in the Second World War.^[867] Ravaging, looting and arson were not exceptional practices promoted by a few exceptionally vicious combatants, but the common method of conducting war, century after medieval century. In this sense, the era of chivalry did not transform war into something much less devastating, nor into a gentler form unique in world history. Elite, well­mounted warriors, wearing good armour and plumes, may not often have dismounted to carry a blazing torch towards the dwellings or waving grain fields of villagers or the shops, bridges or ships of townsmen; but their policies are clear from the actions taken under their leadership.

Major battles did indeed take place, often with decisive results. But commanders knew the risks involved in these throws of the dice and often contented themselves with the torch, rather than the sword. Serious local disputes and border raiding had long followed these tactics, but by the fourteenth century the enhanced state power that could energise and imple­ment war, based on effective apparatus of taxation, brought about the remarkably devastating raids through the French countryside that charac­terised the Hundred Years War. The chronicler Jean le Bel, like Jean Froissart who followed him in his earliest narrative, introduces his detailed account of the early campaigns of seemingly endless Anglo-French war by assuring readers that his admired fighters on land and sea had ‘displayed such valour that they should be deemed worthy men indeed, supremely so'.^[868] What will probably impress readers - almost to the point of numbness - is the tireless account of looting and burning; in parts of his narrative so many villages, towns and surrounding fields are looted or destroyed that even the meticu­lous le Bel confesses he cannot list them all for the reader; detailing one major raid into Normandy, he has to fall back on regional dimensions to designate the region devastated:

I'm mentioning only those towns that were particularly big and wealthy. I couldn't give you the names of all the middling or small towns and ordinary villages - the list would never end. But I tell you this: between the city of Paris and the port of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue in the Cotentin where the king [Edward II] landed, the most direct route would be a journey of five or six days; and over all that distance along a front at least a day's ride wide, that whole rich land was laid waste.^[869]

Of the raging civil war dividing Brittany (1341-65) le Bel says with complete frankness, ‘The countryside was ravaged and laid waste by both parties, and it was the poor people who paid for it.'^[870] Yet successes could be unstintingly praised.

Ravaged and wasted all of Poitou and won many major towns and strong castles such as Lusignan, Saint-Jean d'Angely and the city of Poitiers, and likewise the great land of Brittany; and he personally had destroyed and laid waste the lands of the Cotentin and Normandy and the county of Evreux as far as Paris, and crossed the great River Seine at the bridge of Poissy and ravaged and wasted the country around Amiens and Beauvais and the county of Pontheieu.^[871]

The chronicler continues with praise for the stunning victory won on the battlefield at Crecy and the siege and capture of Calais. Yet he rolls all these aspects of campaigning together in exuberant praise: ‘It seems to me that such great and lofty exploits are not without high honour, and that one cannot praise, esteem or honour too much the very noble king whom God so clearly wished to help.'^[872]

Le Bel sees the entire enterprise as the king's honourable achievement of dominance under divine blessing. There is no trace of a claim that the great battle and successful siege alone are the honourable military work, with the ravaging a regrettable action carried out by common and sadly uncontrol­lable soldiery who lack the elite code and breeding. This point of view appears in an incident related by the contemporary English chronicler Geoffrey le Baker (who may well have been a member of the Carmelite house founded by Edward III). In a dramatic night-time scene, Sir Geoffrey le Scrope, a prominent former justice and current military commander of Edward III, took a visiting cardinal who had come as a papal legate to investigate the damages caused by ravaging in the opening phase of the Hundred Years War, to the top of a tall tower. Proudly, he showed the papal envoy how the fires from burning villages illuminated the entire night sky; they stretched in a blazing ring 15 miles wide all around. In an admoni­tory speech the cardinal had lectured his hosts that the kingdom of France was united, as if tied by a silken cord that could not be severed; now Scrope archly asked if it did not seem evident that this cord had been severed.^[873] Geoffrey le Baker clearly believed that rulers were responsible for the character of their military campaigns. He claimed King David of Scotland, captured by the English, could not assert the knightly privilege of ransom; his ravaging of the north of England with fire and sword reduced him to the status of a ferocious brigand; he had no just cause. The unspoken contrast, of course, was that Edward III had just cause and could lead a ferocious campaign of the same sort; it is the abstract right that mattered, not the effect of the campaign on the society under attack.^[874]

The evidence, in sum, suggests that, contrary to many notions surviving from its post-medieval romantic reinterpretation, chivalry was at minimum as much a part of the problem of violence in the Middle Ages as any solution or serious form of control and diminution of violence (at least once the shift towards ransoming of prisoners and a radical decline in slave raiding had occurred in what Jean Flori would term the prehistory of chivalry).^[875] A law of arms was emerging, even if the details were still under construction; but these norms were largely concerned with the relationship of warriors with other warriors, and were intended to edge their hard and profitable profession away from disabling chaos. These norms were not generally concerned with the security or well-being of the general population of farmers, merchants and local monks and clerics, that is, not concerned with the vast body of non­combatant men and women, the elderly and children. At the core of chivalric beliefs stood not self-restrictive and broadly protective impulses, but a proud, touchy and violent pursuit of prized honour through fully physical violence.