WARFARE IN CHIVALROUS TIMES.
_Voi m’avete fatto tornare quest’arte del soldo quasi che nulla, ed
io ne l’aveva presupposta la più eccellente e la più onorevole che
si facesse._--MACHIAVELLI, _Dell’Arte della Guerra_.
Delusion about character of war in days of chivalry--The common
slaughter of women and children--The Earl of Derby’s sack of
Poitiers--The massacres of Grammont and Gravelines--The old poem
of the Vow of the Heron--The massacre of Limoges by Edward the
Black Prince--The imprisonment of ladies for ransom--Prisoners
of war starved to death; or massacred, if no prospect of ransom;
or blinded or otherwise mutilated--The meaning of a surrender at
discretion, as illustrated by Edward III. at Calais; and by several
instances in the same and the next century--The practice of burning
in aid of war; and of destroying sacred buildings--The practice of
poisoning the air--The use of barbarous weapons--The influence of
religion on war--The Church in vain on the side of peace--Curious
vows of the knights--The slight personal danger incurred in war by
them--The explanation of their magnificent costume--Field-sports
in war-time--The desire of gain the chief motive to war--The
identity of soldiers and brigands--The career and character of the
Black Prince--The place of money in the history of chivalry--Its
influence as a war-motive between England and France--General low
character of chivalrous warfare.
For an impartial estimate of the custom of war, the best preparation
is a study of its leading features in the days of chivalry. Not only
are most of our modern military usages directly descended from that
period, though many claim a far remoter ancestry, and go back to the
days of primitive savagery, but it is the tradition of chivalry that
chiefly keeps alive the delusion that it is possible for warfare to be
conducted with humanity, generosity, and courtesy.
Hallam, for instance, observes that in the wars of our Edward III.,
‘the spirit of honourable as well as courteous behaviour towards
the foe seems to have arrived at its highest point;’ and he refers
especially to the custom of ransoming a prisoner on his parole, and to
the generous treatment by the Black Prince of the French king taken
captive at Poitiers.
In order to demonstrate the extreme exaggeration of this view, and to
show that with war, as with the greater crimes, moral greatness is only
connected accidentally, occasionally, or in romance, it is necessary
to examine somewhat closely the warfare of the fourteenth century.
Chivalry, according to certain historians, was during that century in
process of decline; but the decline, if any, was rather in the nature
of its forms and ceremonies than of its spirit or essence. It was
the century of the most illustrious names in chivalry, in France of
Bertrand du Guesclin, in England of the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny,
Sir John Chandos. It was the century of the battles of Crecy, Poitiers,
Avray, and Navarette. It was the century of the Order of the Star in
France, of the Garter and the Bath in England. Above all, it was the
century of Froissart, who painted its manners and thoughts with a
vividness so surpassing that to read his pages is almost to live in his
time. So that the fourteenth century may fairly be taken as the period
in which chivalry reached its highest perfection, and in which the
military type of life and character attained its noblest development.
It is the century of which we instinctively think when we would imagine
a time when the rivalry of brave deeds gave birth to heroism, and the
rivalry of military generosity invested even the cruelties of the
battle-field with the halo of romance.
Imagination, however, plays us false here as elsewhere. Froissart
himself, who described wars and battles and noble feats of arms
with a candour equal to his honest delight in them, is alone proof
enough that there seldom was a period when war was more ferociously
conducted; when the laws in restraint of it, imposed by the voice
of morality or religion, were less felt; when the motives for it as
well as the incentives of personal courage, were more mercenary; or
when the demoralisation consequent upon it were more widely or more
fatally spread. The facts that follow in support of this conclusion
come, in default of any other special reference, solely from that
charming chronicler; allusions to other sources being only necessary
to prove the existence of a common usage, and to leave no room for the
theory that the cases gathered from Froissart were but occasional or
accidental occurrences.
Even savage tribes, like the Zulus, spare the lives of women and
children in war, and such a restraint is the first test of any warfare
claiming to rank above the most barbarous. But in the fourteenth
century such indiscriminate slaughter was the commonest episode of
war: a fact not among the least surprising when we remember that the
protection of women and the defenceless was one of the special clauses
of the oath taken by knights at the ceremony of investiture. Five
days after the death of Edward III., and actually during negotiations
between France and England, the admirals of France and Spain, at the
command of the King of France, sailed for Rye, which they burnt,
slaying the inhabitants, whether men or women (1377); and it is a
reasonable supposition that the same conduct marked their further
progress of pillage and incendiarism in the Isle of Wight.
Nor were such acts only the incidents of maritime warfare, and
perpetrated merely by the pirates of either country; for they occurred
as frequently in hostilities by land, and in connection with the
noblest names of Christendom. At Taillebourg, in Saintonge, the Earl
of Derby had all the inhabitants put to the sword, in reprisals for
the death of one knight, who during the assault on the town had met
with his death. So it fared during the same campaign with three other
places in Poitou, the chronicler giving us more details with reference
to the fate of Poitiers. There were no knights in the town accustomed
to war and capable of organising a defence; and it was only people of
the poorer sort who offered a brave but futile resistance to the army.
When the town was won, 700 people were massacred; ‘for the Earl’s
people put every one to the sword, men, women, and little children.’
The Earl of Derby took no steps to stop the slaughter, but after many
churches and houses had been destroyed, he forbade under pain of death
any further incendiarism, apparently for no other reason than that he
wished to stay there for ten or twelve days. A few years later, when
the French had recovered Poitiers, the English knights, who had been
there, marched away to Niort, which, on the refusal of the inhabitants
to admit them, they forthwith attacked and speedily won, owing to the
absence, as at Poitiers, of any knights to direct the defence. The male
and female inhabitants alike were put to the sword. All these instances
occur in one short chapter of Froissart.
Sometimes this promiscuous slaughter even raised its perpetrators to
higher esteem. An episode of this sort occurred in the famous war
between the citizens of Ghent and the Earl of Flanders. The Lord
d’Enghien, with 4,000 cavaliers and a large force of foot, besieged the
town of Grammont, which was attached to Ghent. About four o’clock one
fine Sunday in June, the besiegers gained the town, and the slaughter,
says Froissart, was very great of men, women, and children, for to
none was mercy shown. Upwards of 500 of the inhabitants were killed;
numbers of old people and women were burnt in their beds; and the town
being then set on fire in more than two hundred places, was speedily
reduced to ashes. ‘Fair son,’ said the Earl of Flanders, greeting his
returning relative, ‘you are a valiant man, and if it please God will
be a gallant knight, for you have made a handsome beginning.’ History,
however, may rejoice that so promising a career was checked in the bud;
for the young nobleman’s death in a skirmish within a few days made his
first feat of arms also his last.
A similar story is connected with the memory of the fighting Bishop of
Norwich, famous in those days. Having been authorised by Pope Urban
VI. to make war on Pope Clement VII., he went and besieged the town of
Gravelines with shot and wild-fire, ‘till in the end our men entered
the town with their Bishop, when they at his commandment destroying
both man, woman, and child, left not one alive of all those who
remained in the town.’[36] This was in 1383; and it will be observed
how then, just as in later days, the excuse of superior orders served
as an excuse for the perpetration of any crime, provided only it were
committed in war.
It would be an error to suppose that these things were the mere
accident of war, due to the passion of the moment, or to the feeble
control of leaders over their men. In a very curious old French poem,
called ‘The Vow of the Heron,’ indisputable evidence exists that the
slaughter of women and children was not only often premeditated before
the opening of hostilities, but that an oath binding a man to it was
sometimes given and accepted as a token of commendable bravery. The
poem in question deals with historical events and persons; and if not
to be taken as literal history, undoubtedly keeps within the limits
of probability, as proved by other testimony of the manners of those
times. Robert, Count of Artois, exiled from France, comes to England,
and bringing a roasted heron before Edward III. and his court, prays
them to make vows by it before eating of it (in accordance with the
custom which attached to such oaths peculiar sanctity) concerning the
deeds of war they would undertake against the kingdom of France. Edward
III., the Earl of Salisbury, Sir Walter Manny, the Earl of Derby,
Lord Suffolk, having all sworn according to the Count’s wishes, Sir
Fauquemont, striving to outdo them in the profession of military zeal,
swore that if the king would cross the sea to invade France, he would
always appear in the van of his troops, carrying devastation and fire
and slaughter, and sparing not altars, nor relations, nor friends,
neither helpless women nor children.[37]
Let the reader reflect that these things occurred in war, not of
Christians against infidels, but of Christians with one another, and
in a period commonly belauded for its advance in chivalrous humanity.
The incidents related were of too common occurrence to call for special
remark by their chronicler; but the peculiar atrocities of the famous
sack of Limoges, by the express orders of Edward the Black Prince,
were too much even for Froissart. It is best to let him tell his own
story from the moment of the entry of the besieging force: ‘The Prince,
the Duke of Lancaster, the Earls of Cambridge and of Pembroke, Sir
Guiscard d’Angle, and the others, with their men, rushed into the town.
You would then have seen pillagers active to do mischief, running
through the town, slaying men, women, and children, according to their
commands. It was a most melancholy business, for all ranks, ages, and
sexes cast themselves on their knees before the Prince, begging for
mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened
to none, but all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found,
even those who were not guilty; for, I know not why, the poor were
not spared, who could not have had any part in this treason; but they
suffered for it, and indeed more than those who had been the leaders
of the treachery. There was not that day in the city of Limoges any
heart so hardened or that had any sense of religion, who did not deeply
bewail the unfortunate events passing before their eyes; for upwards
of 3,000 men, women, and children were put to death that day. God have
mercy on their souls, for they were veritable martyrs.’ Yet the man
whose memory is stained with this crime, among the blackest in history,
was he whom not his own country alone, but the Europe of his day,
dubbed the Mirror of Knighthood; and those who blindly but (according
to the still prevalent sophistry of militarism) rightly carried out
his orders counted among them at least three of the noblest names in
England.
The absence in chivalry of any feeling strong enough to save the lives
of women from the sword of the warrior renders improbable _à priori_
any keen scruples against making them prisoners of war. In France such
scruples were stronger than in England. The soldiers of the Black
Prince took captive the Duchess of Bourbon, mother to the King of
France, and imprisoned her in the castle of Belleperche; whence she was
afterwards conducted into Guyenne, and ransom exacted for her liberty.
Similar facts mark the whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth
century. When the Crusaders under Richard I. took Messina by assault,
they carried off with their other lawful spoils all the noblest women
belonging to the Sicilians.[38] Edward I. made prisoners of the queen
of Robert Bruce and her ladies, and of the Countess of Buchan, who had
crowned Bruce. The latter, he said, as she had not used the sword,
should not perish by it; but for her lawless conspiracy she should be
shut up in a chamber of stone and iron, circular as the crown she gave;
and at Berwick she should be suspended in the open air, a spectacle to
travellers, and for her everlasting infamy. Accordingly, a turret was
fitted up for her with a strong cage of lattice-work, made of strong
posts and bars of iron.[39] In the fifteenth century, the English, in
their war upon the French frontier, according to Monstrelet, ‘made many
prisoners, and even carried off women, as well noble as not, whom they
kept in close confinement until they ransomed themselves.’[40] The
notion, therefore, that in those times any special courtesy was shown
in war to the weaker sex must be received with extreme latitude. In
1194, Henry, Emperor of the Romans, having taken Salerno in Apulia by
storm, actually put up for auction to his troops the wives and children
of the chief citizens whom he had slain and exiled.
To pass to the treatment of prisoners of war, who, be it remembered,
were only those who could promise ransom. The old historian Hoveden,
speaking of a battle that was fought in 1173, says that there fell in
it more than 10,000 Flemings; the remainder, who were taken captive,
being thrown into prison in irons, and there starved to death. There
is no evidence whether, or for how long, starving remained in vogue;
but the iron chains were habitual, down even to the fourteenth century
or later, among the Germans and Spaniards, the extortion of a heavier
ransom being the motive for increasing the weight of chain and the
general discomfort of prison. To let a prisoner go at large on parole
for his ransom was an advance initiated by the French, that sprang
naturally out of a state of hostilities in which most of the combatants
became personally acquainted, but it was still conduct so exceptional
that Froissart always speaks of it in terms of high eulogy. It was also
an advance that often sprang out of the plainest necessities of the
case, as when, after the battle of Poitiers, the English found their
prisoners to be double their own numbers, wherefore in consideration of
the risk they ran, they either received ransom from them on the spot
or gave them their liberty in exchange for a promise to bring their
ransom-money at Christmas to Bordeaux. Bertrand du Guesclin did the
same by the English knights after their defeat at Pontvalin; and it was
in reference to this last occasion that Froissart calls attention to
the superiority of the French over the Germans in not shackling their
prisoners with a view to a heavier ransom. ‘Curses on them for it,’ he
exclaims of the Germans; ‘they are a people without pity or honour,
and they ought never to receive quarter. The French entertained their
prisoners well and ransomed them courteously, without being too hard
upon them.’
Nevertheless we must suspect that this sort of courtesy was rather
occasional than habitual. Of this same Du Guesclin, whom St.-Palaye
calls the flower of chivalry,[41] two stories are told that throw a
different but curious light on the manners of those times. Having on
one occasion defeated the English and taken many of them prisoners,
Du Guesclin tried to observe the rules of distributive justice in
the partition of the captives, but failing of success and unable to
discover to whom the prisoners really belonged, he and Clisson (who
were brothers in arms) in order to terminate the differences which the
victorious French had with one another on the subject, conceived that
the only fair solution was to have them all massacred, and accordingly
more than 500 Englishmen were put to death in cold blood outside the
gates of Bressière.[42] So, on a second occasion, such a quantity
of English were taken that ‘there was not, down to the commonest
soldier, anyone who had not some prisoner of whom he counted to win a
good ransom; but as there was a dispute between the French to know to
whom each prisoner belonged, Du Guesclin, to put them all on a level,
ordered them to put all to the sword, and only the English chiefs were
spared.’[43] This ferocious warrior, the product and pride of his
time, and the favourite hero of French chivalry, was hideous in face
and figure; and if we think of him, with his round brown face, his
flat nose, his green eyes, his crisp hair, his short neck, his broad
shoulders, his long arms, short body, and badly made legs, we have
evidently one of the worst specimens of that type which was for so long
the curse of humanity, the warrior of mediæval Europe.
In respect, therefore, of Hallam’s statement that the courtesy of
chivalry gradually introduced an indulgent treatment of prisoners which
was almost unknown to antiquity, it is clear that it would be unwise to
press too closely the comparison on this head between pre-Christian and
post-Christian warfare. At the siege of Toledo, the Besque de Vilaines,
a fellow-soldier of Du Guesclin in the Spanish war, in order to
intimidate the besieged into a surrender, had as many gallows erected
in front of the city as he had taken prisoners, and actually had more
than two dozen hung by the executioner with that object. In the pages
of Livy or Thucydides there may be many a bad deed recorded, but at
least there is nothing worse than the deeds of the Besque de Vilaines,
or of Du Guesclin, Constable of France, or of Edward the Black Prince
of England.
There is another point besides the fettering of prisoners in which
attention is drawn in Froissart to the exceptional barbarity of
the Spaniards; and in no estimate of the military type of life in
the palmiest days of chivalry would it be reasonable to omit all
consideration of Spain. In the war between Castile and Portugal,
the forces under Don John of Castile laid siege to Lisbon, closely
investing it; and if any Portuguese were taken prisoners in a skirmish
or otherwise, their eyes were put out, their legs, arms, or other
members torn off, and in such plight they were sent back to Lisbon with
the message that when the town was taken mercy would be shown to none.
Such was the story told by the Portuguese ambassador to the Duke of
Lancaster, and repeated on his authority by Froissart. For the credit
of humanity, to say nothing of chivalry, one would fain disbelieve
the tale altogether, or regard it as an episode that stood by itself
and apart from the general practice of the age, since it is the only
one of the kind related by Froissart. But the frequency as much as
the rarity of a practice may account for the silence of an annalist,
and there is little doubt that mutilation of the kind described was
common in the chivalrous period, even if obsolete or nearly so in the
fourteenth century. Blinding and castration were not only punishments
inflicted for offences against the forest laws of the Norman kings of
England, but were the common fate of captive enemies in arms throughout
Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This, for instance, was
the treatment of their Welsh prisoners by the Earls of Shrewsbury
and Chester in 1098; as also of William III., King of Sicily, at the
hands of Henry, Emperor of the Romans, in 1194. At the close of the
twelfth century, in the war between Richard I. of England and Philip
Augustus of France, blinding was resorted to on both sides; for Hoveden
expressly says: ‘The King of France had the eyes put out of many of the
English king’s subjects whom he had made prisoners, and this provoked
the King of England, unwilling as he was, to similar acts of impiety.’
And to take a last instance, in 1225, the Milanese having taken
prisoners 500 Genoese crossbowmen, deprived each of them of an eye and
an arm, in revenge for the injury done by their bows.[44] So that it
would be interesting, if possible, to learn from some historian the
date and cause of the cessation of customs so profoundly barbarous and
brutal.
By the rules, again, of chivalrous warfare all persons found within
a town taken by assault were liable, and all the male adults likely,
to be killed. Bertrand du Guesclin made it a maxim before attacking a
place to threaten its commander with the alternative of surrender or
death; a military custom perhaps as old as war itself, and one that
has descended unchanged to our own times. Only by a timely surrender
could the besieged cherish any hope for their lives or fortunes; and
even the offer of a surrender might be refused, and an unconditional
surrender be insisted upon instead. This is proved by the well-known
story of Edward III. at the siege of Calais, a story sometimes called
in doubt merely for resting solely on the authority of Froissart. The
governor of Calais offered to surrender the town and all things in it,
in return for a simple permission to leave it in safety. Sir Walter
Manny replied that the king was resolved that they should surrender
themselves solely to his will, to ransom or kill them as he pleased.
The Frenchman retorted that they would suffer the direst extremities
rather than submit to the smallest boy in Calais faring worse than the
rest. The king obstinately refused to change his mind, till Sir Walter
Manny, pressing upon him the reluctance of his officers to garrison his
castles with the prospect of reprisals which such an exercise of his
war-right would render probable, Edward so far relented as to insist
on having six citizens of Calais left to the absolute disposal of his
revenge. When the six who offered themselves as a sacrifice for the
rest of their fellow-citizens reached the presence of the king, the
latter, though all the knights around him were moved even to tears,
gave instant orders to behead them. All who were present pleaded for
them, and above all, Sir Walter Manny, in accordance with his promise
to the French governor; but it was all in vain, and but for the
entreaties of the queen, those six citizens would have fallen victims
to the savage wrath of the pitiless Edward.
Two facts support the probable truth of the above narrative from
Froissart. In the first place, it is in perfect keeping with the
conduct of the same warrior at the taking of Caen. When the king heard
what mischief the inhabitants had inflicted on his army by their
vigorous defence, he gave orders that all the rest of the inhabitants
should be slain and the town burnt;[45] and had it not been for the
remonstrances of Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, there is little reason to
doubt but that he would thus have glutted, as he craved to do, the
intense native savagery of his soul. In the second place, the story is
in perfect keeping with the common war-rule of that and later times, by
virtue of which a conqueror might always avail himself of the distress
of his enemy to insist upon a surrender at discretion, which of course
was equivalent to a surrender to death or anything else.
How commonly death was inflicted in such cases may be shown from
some narratives of capitulations given by Monstrelet. When Meaux
surrendered to Henry V., six of the defenders were reserved by name to
be delivered up to justice (such was the common expression), and four
were shortly after beheaded at Paris.[46] When Meulan surrendered to
the regent, the Duke of Bedford, numbers were specially excepted from
those to whom the Duke granted their lives, ‘to remain at the disposal
of the lord regent.’[47] When some French soldiers having taken refuge
in a fort were so closely besieged by the Earl Marshal of England as to
be obliged to surrender at discretion, many of them were hanged.[48]
When the garrison of Guise capitulated to Sir John de Luxembourg, a
general pardon was granted to all, except to certain who were to be
delivered up to justice.[49] When the same captain, with about one
thousand men, besieged the castle of Guetron, wherein were some sixty
or eighty Frenchmen, the latter proposed to surrender on condition
of the safety of their lives and fortunes; ‘they were told they must
surrender at discretion. In the end, however, it was agreed to by the
governor that from four to six of his men should be spared by Sir
John. When this agreement had been settled and pledges given for its
performance, the governor re-entered the castle, and was careful not to
tell his companions the whole that had passed at the conference, giving
them to understand in general that they were to march away in safety;
but when the castle was surrendered all within it were made prisoners.
On the morrow, by the orders of Sir John de Luxembourg, they were all
strangled and hung on trees hard by, except the four or six before
mentioned--one of their companions serving for the executioner.’[50]
One more of these black acts, so common among the warriors of chivalry,
and this point perhaps will be accepted as proved. The French had
gained possession of the castle of Rouen, but after twelve days were
obliged to surrender at discretion to the English; ‘they were all made
prisoners, and put under a good guard; and shortly after, one hundred
and fifty were beheaded at Rouen.’[51]
Let us pass next from the animate to the inanimate world as affected
by warfare. The setting on fire of Grammont in more than two hundred
places is a fair sample of the normal use of arson as a military weapon
in the chivalrous period. To burn an undefended town or village was
accounted no meanness; and was as frequent as the destruction of crops,
fruit trees, or other sources of human subsistence. The custom of
tearing up vines or fruit trees contrasts strongly with the command of
Xerxes to his forces to spare the groves of trees upon their march; and
any reader of ancient history will acknowledge the vast deterioration
from the pagan laws of war which every page of the history of Christian
chivalry reveals and exposes.
But little as was the forbearance displayed in war towards defenceless
women and children, or to the crops and houses that gave them food and
shelter, it might perhaps have been expected that, at a time when no
serious dissent had come to divide Christianity, and when the defence
of religion and religious ceremonies were among the professed duties of
knighthood, churches and sacred buildings should have enjoyed especial
immunity from the ravages of war. Even in pagan warfare the temples
of the enemy as a rule were spared; such an act as the destruction of
the sacred edifices of the Marsi by the Romans under Germanicus being
contrary to the better traditions of Roman military precedent.
Permissible as it was by the rules of war, says Polybius, to destroy
an enemy’s garrisons, cities, or crops, or anything else by which his
power might be weakened, it was the part of mere rage and madness to
destroy such things as their statues or temples, by which no benefit
or injury accrued to one side or the other; nor are allusions to
violations of this rule numerous in pre-Christian warfare.[52] The
practice of the Romans and Macedonians to meet peaceably together in
time of war on the island of Delos, on account of its sanctity as
the reputed birthplace of Apollo,[53] has no parallel in the history
of war among the nations of Christendom. The most that can be said
for the fourteenth century in this respect is that slightly stronger
scruples protected churches and monasteries than the lives of women and
children. This is implied in Froissart’s account of the storming of
Guerrande: ‘Men, women, and children were put to the sword, and fine
churches sacrilegiously burnt; at which the Lord Lewis was so much
enraged, that he immediately ordered twenty-four of the most active to
be hanged on the spot.’
But the slightest embitterment of feeling removed all scruples
in favour of sacred buildings. Richard II., having with his army
crossed the Tweed, took up his quarters in the beautiful abbey of
Melrose; after which the monastery, though spared in all previous
wars with Scotland, was burnt, because the English had determined,
says Froissart, to ruin everything in Scotland before returning home,
in revenge for the recent alliance entered into by that country with
France. The abbey of Dunfermline, where the Scotch kings used to be
buried, was also burnt in the same campaign; and so it fared with all
other parts of Scotland that the English overran; for they ‘spared
neither monasteries nor churches, but put all to fire and flame.’
Neither did any greater degree of chivalry display itself in the
matter of the modes and weapons of warfare. Although reason can urge
no valid objection against the means of destruction resorted to
by hostile forces, whether poisoned arrows, explosive bullets, or
dynamite, yet certain things have been generally excluded from the
category of fair military practices, as for example the poisoning of
an enemy’s water. But the warriors of the fourteenth century, even if
they stand acquitted of poisoning rivers and wells, had no scruples
about poisoning the air: which perhaps is nearly equivalent. The great
engines they called Sows or Muttons, like that one, 120 feet wide and
40 feet long, from which Philip von Artefeld and the men of Ghent cast
heavy stones, beams of wood, or bars of hot copper into Oudenarde, must
have made life inside such a place unpleasant enough; but worse things
could be injected than copper bars or missiles of wood. The Duke of
Normandy, besieging the English garrison at Thin-l’Evêque, had dead
horses and other carrion flung into the castle, to poison the garrison
by the smell; and since the air was hot as in midsummer, it is small
wonder that the dictates of reason soon triumphed over the spirit of
resistance. And at the siege of Grave the chivalry of Brabant made a
similar use of carrion to empoison the garrison into a surrender.
Even in weapons different degrees of barbarity are clearly discernible,
according as they are intended to effect a disabling wound, or a wound
that will cause needless laceration and pain by the difficulty of their
removal. A barbed arrow or spear betokens of course the latter object,
and it is worth visiting the multi-barbed weapons in Kensington Museum
from different parts of the world, to learn to what lengths military
ingenuity may go in this direction. The spear heads of the Crusaders
were barbed;[54] and so were the arrows used at Crecy and elsewhere,
as may be seen on reference to the manuscript pictures, the object
being to make it impossible to extract them without laceration of
the flesh. The sarbacane or long hollow tube was in use for shooting
poisoned arrows at the enemy;[55] and pictures remain of the vials
of combustibles that were often attached to the end of arrows and
lances.[56]
The above facts clearly show the manner and spirit with which our
ancestors waged war in the days of what Hallam calls chivalrous virtue:
one of the most stupendous historical impostures that has ever become
an accepted article of popular belief. The military usages of the
Greeks and Romans were mild and polished, compared to the immeasurable
savagery which marked those of the Christians of Froissart’s day. As
for the redeeming features, the rare generosity or courtesy to a foe,
they might be cited in almost equal abundance from the warfare of the
Red Indians; but what sheds a peculiar stain on that of the Chevaliers
is the ostentatious connection of religion with the atrocities of
those blood-seeking marauders. The Church by a peculiar religious
service blessed and sanctified both the knight and his sword; and the
most solemn rite of the Christian faith was profaned to the level of
a preliminary of battle. At Easter and Christmas, the great religious
festivals of a professedly peace-loving worship, the Psalm that was
deemed most appropriate to be sung in the chapels of the Pope and the
King of France was that beginning, ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus meus, qui
docet manus meas ad bellum et digitos meos ad prœlia.’
It was a curious feature of this religion of war that, when Edward
III.’s forces invaded France, so strict was the superstition that led
them to observe the fast of Lent, that among other things conveyed
into the country were vessels and boats of leather wherewith to obtain
supplies of fish from the lakes and ponds of the enemy.
It is indeed passing strange that Christianity, which could command so
strict an observance of its ordinances as is implied in the transport
of boats to catch fish for Lent, should have been powerless to place
any check whatever on the ferocious militarism of the time; and the
very little that was ever done by the Church to check or humanise
warfare is an eternal reflection on the so-called conversion of Europe
to Christianity. Nevertheless the Church, to do her justice, used what
influence she possessed on the side of peace in a manner she has long
since lost sight of; nor was the Papacy in its most distracted days
ever so indifferent to the evils of war as the Protestant Church has
been since, and is still. Clement VI. succeeded in making peace between
France and England, just as Alexander III. averted a war between the
two countries in 1161. Innocent VI. tried to do the same; and Urban V.
returned from Rome to Avignon, hoping to effect the same good object.
Gregory XI. was keenly distressed at the failure of efforts similar to
those of his predecessors. The Popes indeed endeavoured to stop wars,
as they endeavoured to stop tournaments, or the use of the crossbow;
but they were defeated by the intense barbarism of chivalry; nor can it
be laid to the charge of the Church of Rome, as it can to that of the
Church of the Reformation, that she ever folded her hands in despairful
apathy before a custom she admitted to be evil. The cardinals and
archbishops of those days were constantly engaged in pacific, nor
always futile, embassies. And the prelates would frequently preach to
either side arguments of peace: a fact that contrasts badly with the
almost universal silence and impotence of the modern pulpit, either to
stay a war or to mitigate its barbarities.
But it is true that they knew equally well how to play on the martial
as on the pacific chord in their audiences; for the eloquence of an
Archbishop of Toulouse turned sixty towns and castles to the interest
and rights of the French king in his quarrel with England; and the
preaching of prelates and lawyers in Picardy had a similar effect in
other large towns. Nor were the English clergy slower than the French
to assert the rights of their king and country, for Simon Tibald,
Bishop of London, made several long and fine sermons to demonstrate (as
always is demonstrated in such cases) that the King of France had acted
most unjustly in renewing the war, and that his conduct was at total
variance both with equity and reason.
But these appeals to the judgment of their congregations by the clergy
are also a proof that in the fourteenth century the opinion of the
people did not count for so little as is often supposed in the making
of peace and war. Yet the power of the people in this respect was
doubtless as insignificant as it still is in our own days: nothing
being more remarkable, even in the free government of modern England,
than the influence of the people in theory and their influence in fact
on the most important question that regards their destinies.
Nor are the moral causes difficult to trace which in those times made
wars break out so frequently and last so long, that those who now read
of them can only marvel how civilisation ever emerged at all, even to
the imperfect degree to which it is given to us to enjoy it. The love
of adventure and the hope of fame were of course among the principal
motives. The saying of Adam Smith, that the great secret of education
is the direction of personal vanity to proper objects, contains the
key to all advance that has ever been made in civilisation, and to
every shortcoming. The savagery of the middle ages was due to the
direction of personal vanity exclusively into military channels, so
that the desire for distinction often displayed itself in forms of
perfect absurdity, as in the case of the young English knights who went
abroad with one eye veiled, binding themselves by a vow to their ladies
neither to see with their eyes nor to reply to anything asked of them
till they had signalised themselves by the performance of some wondrous
deed in France. The gradual opening up in later days of other paths to
distinction than that of arms has very much diminished the danger to
the public peace involved in the worthless education of our ancestors.
Nor was the personal distinction of the warrior gained at any great
risk of personal danger. The personal danger in war decreased in
exact ratio with the rank of the combatant, and it was only the lower
orders of the social hierarchy who unreservedly risked their lives.
In case of defeat they had no ransom to offer for mercy, and appear
almost habitually to have been slain without any. If it was a common
thing for either side to settle before a battle the names of those on
the other who should be admitted to ransom, it was no uncommon thing
to determine, as the English did before Crecy, to give no quarter to
the enemy at all. But as a rule the battle-field was of little more
peril to the knight than the tournament; and though many perished when
powerless to avert the long thin dagger, called the _miséricorde_, from
the interstices of their armour or the vizor of their helmets, yet the
striking fact in Froissart is the great number of battles, skirmishes,
and sieges in which the same names occur, proving how seldom their
bearers were wounded, disabled, or killed. This of course was due
mainly to the marvellous defensive armour they wore, which justifies
the wonder not merely how they fought but even how they moved. Whether
encased in coats of mail, sewn upon or worn over the gambeson or thick
undergarment of cloth or leather, or in plates of solid steel, at first
worn over the mail and then instead of it, and often with the plastron
or breastplate of forged iron beneath both hauberk and gambeson, they
evidently had little to fear from arrow, sword, or lance, unless
when they neglected to let down the vizor of the helmet, as Sir John
Chandos did, when he met with his death from a lance wound in the eye
(1370). Their chief danger lay in the hammering of battle-axes on their
helmets, which stunned or wounded, but seldom killed them. But the foot
soldiers and light cavalry, though generally well equipped, were less
well protected by armour than the knights, the hauberk or coat of mail
being allowed in France only to persons possessed of a certain estate;
so that the knights were formidable less to one another than to those
who by the conditions of the combat could not be so formidable to
themselves.
The surcoat was also a defence to the knight, as indicating the ransom
he could pay for his life. Otherwise it is impossible to account for
his readiness to go into action with this long robe flowing over his
plate of steel and all his other accoutrements. Had Sir John Chandos
not been entangled in his long surcoat when he slipped, he might have
lived to fight many another battle to the honour of English chivalry.
Richness of armour served also the same purpose as the surcoat. At
the battle of Nicopoli, when the flower of the French nobility met
with so disastrous a defeat at the hands of the Turks, the lords of
France were, says Froissart, so richly dressed out in their emblazoned
surcoats as to look like little kings, and many for a time owed their
lives to the extreme richness of their armour, which led the Saracens
to suppose them greater lords than they could really boast to be. So
again the elaborate gold necklaces worn by distinguished officers in
the seventeenth century were probably rather symbols of the ransom
their wearers could pay, than worn merely for ostentation and vanity.
It was to carelessness on this score that the Scotch owed their great
losses at the battle of Musselborough in 1548: for (to put the words of
Patin in modern dress) their ‘vileness of port was the cause that so
many of the great men and gentlemen were killed and so few saved. The
outward show, the semblance and sign whereby a stranger might discern a
villain from a gentleman, was not among them to be seen.’
War under these conditions chiefly affected the lives of the great by
pleasantly relieving the monotony of peaceful days. In time of peace
they had few occupations but hawking, hunting, and tilting, and during
hostilities those amusements continued. Field sports, sometimes spoken
of by their eulogists as the image of war, were not absent during its
reality. Edward III. hunted and fished daily during his campaign in
France, having with him thirty falconers on horseback, sixty couples
of staghounds, and as many greyhounds. And many of his nobles followed
his example in taking their hawks and hounds across the Channel.
But the preceding causes of the frequency of war in the days of
chivalry are quite insignificant when compared with that motive
which nowadays mainly finds vent in the peaceful channels of
commerce--namely, the common desire of gain. The desire for glory had
far less to do with it than the desire of lucre; nor is anything from
the beginning to the end of Froissart more conspicuously displayed
than the merely mercenary motive for war. The ransom of prisoners
or of towns, or even ransom for the slain,[57] afforded a short and
royal road to wealth, and was the chief incentive, as it was also the
chief reward of bravery. The Chevalier Bayard made by ransoms in the
course of his life a sum equal to 4,000_l._, which in those days must
have been a fortune;[58] and Sir Walter Manny in a single campaign
enriched himself by 8,000_l._ in the same way.[59] So that the story is
perfectly credible of the old Scotch knight, who in a year of universal
peace prayed, ‘Lord, turn the world upside down that gentlemen may make
bread of it.’ Loot and rapine, the modern attractions of the brigand,
were then in fact the main temptations of the knight or soldier; and
the distinction between the latter and the brigand was far less than
it had been in the pre-Christian period, or than it is in more modern
times. Indeed the very word _brigand_ meant, originally, merely a
foot-soldier who fought in a brigade, in which sense it was used by
Froissart; and it was only the constant addiction of the former to
the occupations of the highwayman that lent to the word brigand its
subsequent evil connotation.
But it was not merely the common soldier to whom the first question in
a case of war was the profit to be gained by it; for men of the best
families of the aristocracy were no less addicted to the land piracy
which then constituted war, as is proved by such names as Calverly,
Gournay, Albret, Hawkwood, and Guesclin. The noble who was a soldier
in war often continued to fight as a robber after peace was made, nor
thought it beneath him to make wretched villagers compound for their
lives; and in spite of truces and treaties, pillage and ransom afforded
his chief and often his sole source of livelihood. The story of Charles
de Beaumont dying of regret for the ransom he had lost, because by
mistake he had slain instead of capturing the Duke of Burgundy at the
battle of Nancy, is a fair illustration of the dominion then exercised
by the lowest mercenary feelings over the nobility of Europe.
This mercenary side of chivalrous warfare has been so lost sight of in
the conventional descriptions of it, that it is worth while to bring
into prominence how very little the cause of war really concerned those
who took part in it, and how unfounded is the idea that men troubled to
fight for the weak or the oppressed under fine impulses of chivalry,
and not simply in any place or for any object that held out to them
the prospect of gain. How otherwise is it possible to account for the
conduct of the Black Prince, in fighting to restore Pedro the Cruel
to the throne of Castile, from which he had been displaced in favour
of Henry of Trastamare not merely by the arms of Du Guesclin and the
French freebooters, but by the wishes and consent of the people? Any
thought for the people concerned, or of sympathy for their liberation,
as little entered into the mind of the Black Prince as if the question
had concerned toads or rabbits. Provided it afforded an occasion for
fighting, it mattered nothing that Pedro had ruled oppressively; that
he had murdered, or at least was believed to have murdered, his wife,
the sister of the reigning King of France: nor that he had even been
condemned by the Pope as an enemy to the Christian Church. Yet before
the battle of Navarette (1367), in which Henry was completely defeated,
the Prince did not hesitate in his prayers for victory to assert that
he was waging war solely in the interests of justice and reason; and it
was for his success in this iniquitous exploit (a success which only
awaited his departure from the country to be followed by a rising in
favour of the monarch he had deposed) that the Prince won his chief
title to fame; that London exhausted itself in shows, triumphs, and
festivals in his honour; and that Germans, English, and Flemish with
one accord entitled him ‘the mirror of knighthood.’ The Prince was only
thirteen when he fought at Crecy, and he fought with courage: he was
only ten years older when he won the battle of Poitiers, and he behaved
with courtesy to the captive French king, from whom he looked for an
extortionate ransom: but the extravagant eulogies commonly heaped upon
him prove how little exalted in reality was the military ideal of his
age. His sack of Limoges, famous among military atrocities, has already
been spoken of; nor should it be forgotten, as another indication of
his character, that when two messengers brought him a summons from the
King of France to answer the appeal of the Gascons of Aquitaine, he
actually imprisoned them, showing himself however in this superior to
his nobles and barons, who actually advised capital punishment as the
fittest salary to the envoys for their pains.
The Free Companies, or hordes of robbers, who ravaged Europe through
all the period of chivalry and constituted the greatest social
difficulty of the time, were simply formed of knights and men-at-arms,
who, when a public war no longer justified them in robbing and
murdering on behalf of the State, turned robbers and murderers on their
own account. After the treaty of Bretigny had put a stop to hostilities
between France and England (1360), 12,000 of these men, men of rank
and family as well as needy adventurers, and under leaders of every
nationality, resolved sooner than lay down their arms to march into
Burgundy, there to relieve by the ransoms they might levy the poverty
they could not otherwise avert. Many a war had no other justification
than the liberation of one people from their outrages by turning them
upon another. Thus Du Guesclin led his White Company into Spain on
behalf of Henry the Bastard, less to avenge the cruelties of Pedro than
to free France from the curse of her unemployed chivalry; and Henry the
Bastard, when by such help he had wrested the kingdom of Castile from
his brother Pedro, designed an invasion of Granada simply to divert
from his own territories the allies who had placed him in possession of
them. This was a constant source of war in those days, just as in our
own the existence of large armies leads of necessity to wars for their
employment; and even the Crusades derive some explanation from the
operation of the motive indicated.
No historical microscope, indeed, will detect any difference between
the Free Companies and the regular troops, since not only the latter
merged into the former, but both were actuated by the sole pursuit
of gain, and equally indifferent to ideas of honour or patriotism.
The creed of both was summed up in the following regretful speech,
attributed to Aymerigot Marcel, a great captain of the pillaging
bands: ‘There is no pleasure in the world like that which men such as
ourselves enjoyed. How happy were we when, riding out in search of
adventures, we met a rich abbot, a merchant, or a string of mules, well
laden with draperies, furs, or spices, from Montpellier, Beziers, and
other places! All was our own, or ransomed according to our will. Every
day we gained money, ... we lived like kings, and when we went abroad
the country trembled; everything was ours both in going and returning.’
In the days of chivalry, this desire of gain, however gotten, pervaded
and vitiated all classes of men from the lowest to the highest. Charles
IV. of France, when his sister Isabella, queen of Edward II., fled to
him, promised to help her with gold and silver, but secretly, lest
it should bring him into war; and then when messengers from England
came with gold and silver and jewels for himself and his ministers,
both he and his council became in a short time as cold to the cause
of Isabella as they had been warm, the king even going so far as to
forbid any of his subjects under pain of banishment to help his sister
in her projected return. And again, when Edward III. was about to make
war with France, was he not told that his allies were men who loved to
gain wealth, and whom it was necessary to pay beforehand? And did he
not find that a judicious distribution of florins was as effective in
winning over to his interests a duke, a marquis, an archbishop, and the
lords of Germany, as the poorer citizens of the towns of Flanders?
Money, therefore, or its equivalent, and not the title to the crown of
France, was at the root of the wars waged abroad by the English under
Edward III. The question of title simply served as pretext, covering
the baser objects of the invasion. No historical fact is clearer,
ignored though it has been in the popular histories of England, than
that the unpopularity of his successor, Richard II., arose from his
marriage with the daughter of the King of France, and from his desire
for peace between the two kingdoms, of which the marriage was the
proof and the security. When his wish for peace led to the formation
of a war and a peace party among the English nobility, Froissart says:
‘The poorer knights and archers were of course for war, as their sole
livelihood depended upon it.[60] They had learnt idleness and looked to
war as a means of support.’ In reference to the great peace conference
held at Amiens in 1391, he observes: ‘Many persons will not readily
believe what I am about to say, though it is strictly true, that the
English are fonder of war than of peace. During the reign of Edward, of
happy memory, and in the lifetime of his son the Prince of Wales, they
made such grand conquests in France, and by their victories and ransoms
of towns, castles, and men gained such wealth, that the poorest knights
became rich; and those who were not gentlemen by birth, by gallantly
hazarding themselves in these wars, were ennobled by their valour and
worth. Those who came after them were desirous of following the same
road.... Even the Duke of Gloucester, son of King Edward, inclined to
the opinion of the commons, as did many other knights and squires who
were desirous of war to enable them to support their state.’[61]
No other country, indeed, pleased these English brigand knights so well
as France for the purpose of military plunder. Hence the English who
returned from the expedition to Castile complained bitterly that in the
large towns where they expected to find everything, there was nothing
but wines, lard, and empty coffers; but that it was quite otherwise
in France, where they had often found in the cities taken in war such
wealth and riches as astonished them; it was in a war with France
therefore that it behoved them to hazard their lives, for it was very
profitable, not in a war with Castile or Portugal, where there was
nothing but poverty and loss to be suffered.[62]
With this evidence from Froissart may be compared a passage from Philip
de Commines, where he says, in speaking of Louis XI. towards the end of
the following century: ‘Our master was well aware that the nobility,
clergy, and commons of England are always ready to enter upon a war
with France, not only on account of their old title to its crown, but
by the desire of gain, for it pleased God to permit their predecessors
to win several memorable battles in this kingdom, and to remain in
possession of Normandy and Guienne for the space of 350 years, ...
during which time they carried over enormous booty into England. Not
only in plunder which they had taken in the several towns, but in the
richness and quality of their prisoners, who were most of them great
princes and lords, and paid them vast ransoms for their liberty; so
that every Englishman afterwards hoped to do the same thereby and
return home laden with spoils.’[63]
Such, then, were the antecedents of the evil custom of war which has
descended to our own time; and we shall have taken the first step to
its abolition when we have thus learnt to read its real descent and
place in history, and to reject as pure hallucination the idea that
in the warfare of the past any more than of the present there was
anything noble or great or glorious. That brave deeds were often done
and noble conduct sometimes displayed in it must not blind us to its
other and darker features. It was a warfare in which not even women and
children were safe from the sword or lance of the knight or soldier;
nor sacred buildings exempt from their rage. It was a warfare in
which the occasional mercy shown had a mercenary taint; in which the
defeated were only spared for their ransom; and in which prisoners were
constantly liable to torture, mutilation, and fetters. Above all, it
was a warfare in which men fought more from a sordid greed of gain than
from any love or attachment to their king or country, so that all sense
of loyalty would speedily evaporate if a king like Richard II. chanced
to wish to live peaceably with his neighbours.
It is not unimportant to have thus shown the warfare of chivalry in its
true light. For it is the delusion with regard to it, which more than
anything else keeps alive those romantic notions about war and warriors
that are the most fatal hindrance to removing both from the face of the
earth. We clearly drive militarism to its last defences, if we deprive
it of every period and of almost every name on which it is wont to rely
as entitling it to our admiration or esteem.