1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (13 page)

A long poem written in French verse in England in the 1220s provides a superb insight into the aristocratic lifestyle, particularly tournaments:
L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal
(The History of William the Marshal). William was the fourth son of a Wiltshire baron so although he had been born into aristocratic circles, as a fourth son he could not rely on inheriting an estate and would have to make his own way in the world. He made his way so successfully that he ended his life as earl of Pembroke, a great landowner with estates in Normandy, England, Wales and Ireland, and as regent of England during the minority of John’s son, Henry III. The path he took began with tournaments, and it was here that he first made his mark. Not surprisingly the verse biography, composed soon after William’s death, tells the story of his career on the tournament field with loving detail.

The tournament was, indeed, training for real war, not the formalised jousting of the later Middle Ages that film-makers have made so familiar. In the joust, knights carrying lances charged at each other. Each knight had to swerve at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision with his opponent, while at the same time couch his lance tightly to his side so that the blow was struck with all the weight and momentum of his horse behind it. If, in swerving aside, he moved his head or used his arm to thrust at his opponent, the blow had little or no effect. It was a technique that required split-second timing and horsemanship of the highest order – an ideal exercise for an exhibitionist knight.

In real war, lances might be used during the pursuit of a defeated enemy or during the opening stage – the joust, as it was called at the time – of a battle, but they soon splintered or were dropped. Most charges were delivered as flank attacks, not head-on as in the lists. In any event, very few battles were won by a massed charge of heavily armoured knights. The charge almost never worked against well-disciplined infantry. Horses are too sensible to risk impaling themselves on a hedge of spears. Battles nearly always turned into a series of mêlées in which both cavalry and infantry were involved, with victory going to the side that better co-ordinated the two arms. Consequently the mêlée was at the heart of the tournament. In major tournaments, foot soldiers armed with spears and bows could be used as a screen behind which the knights could withdraw and wait until they saw an opportunity to make another attack. Tournaments were not confined within enclosed lists but ranged over several square miles of ground, taking in villages, woods and vineyards, all of which were likely to suffer collateral damage.

In mêlées between knights, whether in battle or in the tournament, the overwhelming bulk of the fighting was done with sword and mace. It was William the Marshal’s ability to take literally resounding blows on his helmet and return them with interest, like a woodcutter chopping down oaks, wrote the author of the
History
, that started him on the road to being a tournament champion. After one tournament he was found at the blacksmith’s, kneeling with his head on the anvil while the smith beat his helmet back into shape so that it could be removed.

The kind of fighting that took place in tournaments and war was determined by the type of armour the combatants wore, in particular the expensive armour of the well-heeled knight. He wore a knee-length mail shirt, known as a hauberk, made of interlinked metal rings, slit back and front to facilitate riding and worn over a padded undergarment, with mail mittens and mail leggings, known as
chausses
. On his head he wore a padded cap; and over this, to protect his neck, a mail hood and a helmet. If he was technologically up to date this would be the great helm, cylindrical and flat-topped. It had only a few narrow slits for seeing and breathing, but gave the head much better protection against missile weapons – above all arrows and crossbow bolts – than did the old conical form of helmet familiar from the Bayeux Tapestry. High-quality body armour was becoming more widely available in the twelfth century and it is this that explains the rise of the tournament. Without such armour it would have been an impossibly dangerous war-game.

Although the knight was carrying a heavy weight of metal, it was so well distributed that he could move freely – at any rate, for a while. It did not take much exertion, however, tightly encased as he was, for body heat and sweat in his eyes to take their toll. Battles and tournaments tended to be fought in bursts of activity, with long pauses for the participants to catch their breath and plan what they might do next. It was almost impossible to kill or even wound a really well-armoured knight. The only way to do it was with a sword or knife thrust through the eyehole of the helmet or some other chink in the armour. In battle soldiers used narrow killer-knives; in tournaments they did not. That apart, the arms and armour used in twelfth century tournaments and battles were virtually identical. It was not until the later Middle Ages that specially designed weapons for tournament and joust became available. Despite all the high-quality armour though, the tournament was a desperately bruising business and the knight who participated was, like a motor racing driver today, taking grave risks. If his horse fell in a mêlée or he was knocked off by a rain of blows, he was in danger of being dragged or trampled to death. This was how King John’s brother, Geoffrey of Brittany, was said to have died at a tournament in Paris in 1186. There were other risks in tournaments too. As in war, you might be captured, and if you were then you lost your horse and armour to the victorious knight. You might even have to pay a ransom as well. It was thanks to his tournament winnings that the thick-skulled William Marshal won fortune as well as fame.

But success in tournaments depended upon more than good armour and a strong right arm. William was a master-player in a team game. Victory and prizes were won not so much by the jouster’s display of individual prowess as by groups of knights learning to fight together as a unit. As in battle, the more knights in your team the more likely you were to win. All was fair in the tournament, as in war. If one knight became separated from the rest of his team he might find four or five opponents bearing down on him at once, and one of them might knock him down with a blow from behind. If thrown from his horse, there was no nonsense about letting him remount. It was thought to be extremely clever tactics when one team pretended not to be taking part in the tournament, and only joined in late in the day when all the other knights, having played on and off since soon after sunrise, were exhausted. William became so skilful a team leader that he was taken on as the player-manager of the team nominally captained by Henry the Young King (as Henry II’s eldest son was known).

Such strenuous war-games when so much was at stake could easily degenerate into hot-tempered battles fought in deadly earnest. Some kings worried about plotting and rebellion when they saw knights meeting together in arms. Henry II banned tournaments in England as a threat to public order, so knights who wanted the exercise had to go to the continent, to the borders of Normandy and beyond, where there was reckoned to be a good tournament about once a fortnight. In England, during King John’s youth, the only sorts of tournaments were the pseudo-jousts arranged every Sunday in Lent outside the gates of London. Here the young citizens, on horseback and armed with shields and blunted lances, could play at being knights. If the court was in residence at Westminster, then young courtiers, men attached to aristocratic households but not yet knighted, joined in, seeking every opportunity to show off. After Easter there came, according to William FitzStephen, another chance to break a lance.

In a cold winter, too, Londoners grabbed the chance to stage an impromptu joust on ice. Two youths, armed with poles, ran head-on at each other over the ice, to be sent spinning and sliding away by the force of their collision, lucky if they escaped with scrapes and bruises. Real knights probably watched such townsmen’s entertainments with amusement – yet they may have contributed to London’s ability to muster a substantial military force, of which William FitzStephen was justly proud.

When Richard I became king he encouraged the real thing in England. He designated five places as official tournament sites: the fields between Salisbury and Wilton in Wiltshire, between Warwick and Kenilworth in Warwickshire, between Brackley and Mixbury in Northamptonshire, between Stamford and Warinford (probably in Suffolk), and between Blyth and Tickhill in Nottinghamshire. According to William of Newburgh, ‘the famous king Richard, observing that the extra training of the French knights made them more fearsome in war, decided that English knights should be able to learn from tourneying the art and customs of real war so that the French would no longer be able to insult them as crude and lacking in skill’.

Tournaments were repeatedly condemned by popes and other churchmen, but in Newburgh’s words, ‘knights were keen to acquire military fame and the favour of kings so they treated the Church’s prohibitions with contempt.’ When William Marshal was on his death-bed, in 1219, he was told by a priest that he would get to heaven only if he restored all his ill-gotten tournament winnings. The old warrior – he was now in his seventies – retorted that that was impossible: ‘If because of this the kingdom of heaven is closed to me, I can do nothing about it, for I can’t return those things. I can only commend myself to God, repenting my sins. Unless the clergy want my damnation they can ask for no more than that. But their teaching must be false, or else no one would be saved.’

The most famous battle of the age was fought in north-east France in 1214 at Bouvines, between Lille and Tournai. On one side there was an allied army composed of English troops commanded by John’s half-brother, William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, with German and Flemish troops led by the German king and emperor, John’s nephew Otto IV, and by the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. On the other side was the French army led by Philip Augustus. The allies had about 1400 knights and 7000 or so infantry. Philip had about as many knights and a thousand or two fewer foot-soldiers. In these circumstances a battle was the last thing Philip had wanted, but he was intercepted in a tactical situation which gave him very little choice. Reluctantly he decided to stand and fight.

As soon as the battle horns announced that fighting had started, King Philip’s chaplain William the Breton and another royal clerk began to chant the psalm
Benedictus dominus deus meus qui docet manus meas ad proelium
. Other clerks took a more active part. On Philip’s side the cleverest soldier and in effect the French battle commander was Guérin, the bishop-elect of Senlis. Philip’s cousin, the bishop of Beauvais, was also present – by chance, said William the Breton. He happened – also quite by chance, William reiterated – to have a mace in his hand, and he used it to good effect. It was against canon law for a churchman to shed blood, so a mace was the ‘clever’ weapon to use. The bishop was a famously enthusiastic warrior, but as a churchman he should not have fought at all – hence William’s insistence that his participation in the battle was entirely fortuitous.

Arms and armour were similar on both sides. Together with the mace, the beautifully balanced, tapered sword was the knight’s main weapon. From the time the armies were within bowshot, both sides moved so quickly to engage hand to hand that there was little space or time for the archers to exercise their customary skills. Although not yet employed in the numbers that the English would later in the Hundred Years War, many of the bowmen of 1200 had bows as long and as powerful as those used to such devastating effect by their successors on the field of Agincourt (1415). At Bouvines the infantry used chiefly spears and knives, although William the Breton complained about the ‘hooks’ (presumably something like billhooks on long poles) used by some Flemish and German infantrymen to pull knights off their horses. Both armies used the skills and disciplines practised in tournaments. Cavalry contingents riding in close order under the banners of their lords charged the enemy lines whenever and wherever they saw an opportunity to disrupt them.

Because it was almost impossible to kill a well-armoured man, there were few fatalities among the knights at Bouvines. One, Stephen of Longchamp, was regarded as very unlucky when a knife thrust through the eyehole of his helmet pierced his brain. William the Breton accused the enemy of employing long, slender knives of a new design. In fact, both sides used them. It was difficult, though, to get close enough to your enemy to find the chinks in his armour. This is how William saw the killing of one Flemish knight, Eustace of Malenghin: ‘The French surrounded him. One man grabbed his head holding it between his arm and chest, then ripped off his helmet, while another knifed him under the chin.’ To kill a wealthy knight it was often necessary to wrestle him to the ground first – and then, naturally, you might prefer to spare his life in return for a fat ransom. At times indeed, as William the Breton makes clear, there would be moments of chaos as your own soldiers, almost oblivious to the battle going on around them, fought each other for possession of a rich prize.

The crisis of Bouvines came when a large force of German infantry, armed with spears and iron hooks, crashed into Philip’s own division, fighting under the royal standard, golden fleur-de-lis on an azure field. The king was pulled to the ground. If it had not been for the superb quality of his armour, said William, he would have been killed then and there. One of his knights, Peter Tristan, jumped off his horse and covered the king with his own body, until more knights of the royal household arrived to kill the relatively poorly armoured German infantrymen. Then in a French counter-attack, Otto IV was nearly taken. A French knight grabbed the bridle of his horse. Another lunged at him with a knife. His first blow rebounded off Otto’s armour; the second, as the emperor’s horse reared up, went through the horse’s eye. In its agony the horse broke away, carrying Otto to safety, before it collapsed. In this kind of fighting, and even though expensive war horses were now provided with armour, far more horses than knights were killed. According to one account, Otto had three horses killed under him during a ferocious mêlée.