Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages 9781472599056, 9781852850876

Citation preview

Acknowledgements The author and publisher are grateful to the original publishers for their kind permission to reprint pieces that appeared originally in the following places: 1

War and Peace in the Middle Ages, ed. B.P. McGuire (Copenhagen, 1987), pp.

2

Peritia, 2 (1983), pp. 149-69.

3

History, 47 (1964), pp. 1-17.

4

The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Prestned to R.W. Southern, ed. R.H.C. Davis and J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981), pp. 393-414.

5

Das ritterliche Turnier in Mittelalter Beitrdge zu einer vergleichenden Formenund Verhaltensgeschichte des Rittertums, ed. J. Fleckenstein Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, Gottingen, 1985), pp. 212-28.

6

English Court Culture in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (Duckworth, London, 1983), pp. 45-61.

7

The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 00-00.

8

War and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. J.B. Gillingham and J.C. Holt (Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 1984), pp. 00-00.

9

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 12 (1962), pp. 85-103.

10

Centre d'Histoire de la region du Nord et de 1'Europe du NordOuest, Universite Charles de Gaulle, Lille III, pp. 123-42.

11

Creighton Lecture, 4 November 1985, University of London (1985).

viii 12

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Memory of Denis L.T. Bethell, ed. Marc A. Meyer (Hambledon Press, London and Rio Grande, Ohio, 1993), pp. 257-68.

13 Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G.L. Harriss (Oxford, University Press, Oxford, (1985), pp. 181-99. 14 England and her Neighbours, 1066-1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (Hambledon Press, London and Ronceverte, West Virginia, 1989), pp. 297-311.

Foreword

The essays in this volume were written over a period of more than thirty years. The two earliest were published in 1962, before I had quite finished my doctorate; the most recent appeared just two years ago, in 1993. The military vocation in the time of the Hundred Years War and the late medieval culture of chivalry have through all that time been my principal historical interests, as they still are. If these papers say nothing else, they tell how little my tastes have changed over the years. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing I cannot know. What is more sure is that over the period in question other people's interest in the sort of subjects that have fascinated me has grown. At the time when I started out as a researcher I was more than once given the impression that chivalry was not, among my elders and betters, regarded as a very serious topic for historical study, and I supposed that I might find myself ploughing a lonely furrow. What I did not know (and I doubt whether any of the others knew either) was that at about the same time a whole series of other young, aspirant historians were setting out to research into comparable and related areas; most importantly Philippe Contamine in France, in England Kenneth Fowler, Christopher Allmand, Malcolm Vale, John Palmer, and others as well. Since then their work has made the subject of chivalry what I had not expected it to prove, a lively and vigorous branch of late medieval studies. In the USA. there has even appeared what is in effect a teacher's handbook - and a very good one: The Study of Chivalry, edited by Howard Chickering and Thomas H. Seiler, which appeared in 1988 as a Medieval Institute publication from Kalamazoo. The interest in the subject that has been thus generated must be the justification for bringing these essays of mine together.

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I have not made any serious revisions of the papers here from the form in which they first appeared. Unsurprisingly, those which now seem to me most in need of modification are those which were written longest ago; but the trains of thought, and more importantly the detail of the research that prompted them, have become too remote from me for there to be much prospect of attempts at revision resulting in real improvement. So for better or worse I have left them as they first stood. I have however tried to arrange the essays in an order more rational than that of their chronological appearance. The first seven are all concerned with what I would call the culture of chivalry, with such topics as war and peace, courtly love, heralds and knight errantry. After these I have placed three essays concerned more technically with military and heraldic law, the aspect of the same broad subject that was my earliest preoccupation. These are followed by two essays on nobility, a topic that was of particular interest to the same great medieval jurists as wrote about the laws of war. The last two essays concern the later stages of the Hundred Years War; I have placed them last because the end of that war rings down the curtain on the period — the only period — where my teaching and my research have over the years overlapped. Over those years I have accumulated many debts of scholarly gratitude. The first two that I must achnowledge are to Dr Juliet Barker, co-author of the paper here reprinted on 'The English Kings and the Tournament', and to Dr Michael K. Jones, who read the proofs of this volume and made vital corrections. From both I have learned much more than that says. I must also acknowledge debts to Professor Christopher Allmand, to Malcolm and Juliet Vale, to Mr Peter Lewis, Dr Jonathan Powis, Dr Jeremy Catto and Dr Gerald Harriss, colleagues and friends whose views and advice have been generously given and constantly stimulating. I must especially thank the publisher, Mr Martin Sheppard of the Hambledon Press for suggesting the collection of these essays and for the hard work that went into bringing them into a single format. My deepest debts of all are to my college, Balliol, and to those who in my youth there and elsewhere taught me to be interested in history and encouraged me to follow that interest further. Maurice Keen

1 War, Peace and Chivalry Anna Comnena, in her account of the First Crusade, tells the story of a knight who, when the crusading leaders were taking their oaths to the Emperor Alexius in Constantinople, went and sat down in the emperor's chair. He had been annoyed at the emperor remaining seated when so many brave captains were standing. Alexius noted him, and as the leaders were leaving his presence, he called over this 'haughty minded, audacious Latin', and inquired of him his country and lineage. 'I am a Frank of the purest nobility', the knight replied: All that I know is that at a crossroads in the country whence I come there stands an old sanctuary, to which everyone who desires to fight in single combat goes ready accoutred, and there prays to God for help while he waits in expectation of the man who will dare to fight him. At those crossroads I too have tarried, waiting and longing for an antagonist, but never has one appeared who will dare to fight me.1

In reply to this the emperor said, If you did not find a fight when you sought for it there, now the time has come which will give you your fill of fighting.' Anna tells later how he did get his bellyful of fighting, and was wounded seriously in a rash charge against the Turks in the plains of Dorylaeum.2 I quote this story for two reasons. The first is that it is illustrative of the influence, in the time of the First Crusade, of a cult of war and of belligerence that was deeply embedded in the traditions of the medieval west, being part of its heritage from the warrior ethos of the barbarian 1 2

The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena, trans. E.A.S. Dawes (London, 1967), p. 264. Ibid., p. 270.

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past, and which was fundamental to what we call chivalry. It is emphatically a chivalric story. It offers a vivid glimpse from actual history of what lay behind the many scenes of single combat at appointed spots that we meet in chivalrous romances, of which Chretien de Troyes' account of the encounter of Calogrenaunt and Yvain with the fierce knight Forre at the spring under a tree by an old chapel is perhaps the classic example.3 Calogrenaunt's description of how he came to the chapel 'in quest of some adventure whereby to test my prowess and bravery' echoes neatly Anna's knight's story of how he waited, longing for an antagonist. By the late twelfth century, when Chretien was writing, the cult of chivalry was becoming more formal, more ritualised and more literary; Anna shows one of its rituals in the process of formation. Later texts will speak of 'seeking adventures' or 'chance encounters' as a more or less formal activity, akin to tourneying and, like tourneying, an expression of the martial exuberance of chivalry.4 Her story reminds us that the culture of chivalry had its origin in the violent mores of a violent society. The context of her story is also significant. For the first crusade gave a new edge to the idea of the function of the warrior in Christian society, and its triumph at Jerusalem in 1099 set the standard for what came to be recognised as the highest goal of chivalry, the defence of the Holy Places. The crusade, as has often been laboured, gave a newly specific religious orientation to the role of knighthood, that helped to put the estate of chivalry on a par with the priesthood in its Christian service. 'Behold', wrote the crusader poet Aymer de Pegulhan, 'without renouncing our rich garments, our station in life, all that pleases and charms, we can obtain honour down here and joy in paradise.'5 That is the knightly version of Guibert de Nogent's declaration that 'in our own time God has instituted a Holy War, so that the order of knights . . . may now seek God's grace in their wonted habit, and in the discharge of their own office, and no longer need to be drawn to seek salvation by utterly renouncing the world in the profession of the monk.'6 In course of time, the whole elaborate aristocratic education and apprenticeship to knighthood came to be viewed by writers on courtesy and chivalry as preparation toward the supreme endeavour of the crusade. Thus for 3

Chretien de Troyes, Yvain, lines 269-580, 747-906. These terms are repeatedly employed in, for instance, English royal writs prohibiting tourneying, e.g.: CCR, 1237-42, p. 483; CCR, 1261-64, p. 133; CCR, 1296-1302, pp. 373, 408, 583; CPR, 1232-47, pp. 20, 148, 188. I owe these references to Dr. Juliet Barker. 5 Quoted by S. Painter, French Chivalry (Baltimore, 1940), p. 87. 6 Patrologia Latina, 156, p. 685. 4

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instance Baudouin de Conde, in his Dit dou baceller (written in the late thirteenth century) bids the young knight, starting on his career, to throw all his energies into tourneying — because it is preparatory to higher things; none will be able to call himself a true preudhomme, Baudouin says, until his sword has struck a blow against God's enemies. It behoves the bachelor, he concludes, to mount step by step in price and prowess toward this peak of achievement.7 The idea was a very enduring one. A hundred years after Baudouin's time and more than two hundred after the First Crusade Philippe de Mezieres would still write that 'the first and principal glory of the dignity of true chivalry is to fight for the faith.'8 Anna Comnena's story of the knight who sat in the emperor's seat was not introduced, though, in order to illustrate the holy martial zeal of her Prankish nobleman, but rather his haughty belligerence, and this brings me to my second reason for quoting her story. In the minds of the ecclesiastical propagandists of the First Crusade, the objective of delivering Christian Europe from the miseries which were consequent upon the violent way of life of haughty and belligerent noblemen was at least close to par with the hope of delivering the Holy Places from the infidel. All the sources agree that this pacific goal was a principal theme in Urban IPs great speech at Clermont. These are the words that Robert the Monk puts in his mouth: This land which you [knights] inhabit . . . is too narrow for your large population, nor does it abound in wealth, and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage war and that so frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end . . . take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, and wrest that land from the wicked race.9

Baudry de Dol is perhaps more oracular: You, who await the pay of thieves for the shedding of Christian blood . . . either lay down the girdle of such knighthood, or advance boldly, as knights of Christ, and rush as fast as you may to the defence of the Eastern church.10

7

B. de Conde, Le Dit dou Baceller in A. Jubinal (ed.), Recueil des contes, fabliaux et autres pieces inedites (Paris, 1839), i, p. 327f. 8 P. de Mezieres, De la chevalerie de la passion de Jesus Christ, Arsenal, MS 225, fo. 5r. 9 A.C. Krey, The First Crusade (Princeton, 1921), p. 31. 10 Ibid., p. 35.

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Fulcher of Chartres pictures the pope calling on those 'who have for a long time been robbers to now become soldiers of Christ: let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now fight against barbarians.'11 It was to drive home the need for peace on which all these passages focus that Urban II at Clermont proclaimed anew the Truce of God at the same time that he promised absolution of their sins to those who would make the pilgrimage to fight the Turk.12 The two themes, of canonical truce and of holy war, were inextricably connected in his thinking and in that of those who reported his launching of the First Crusade; and canonical truce was in his mind because it was broken by men of the stamp of Anna's nobleman so often that it seemed that 'peace was altogether discarded by the princes of the world, who were engaged in incessant warlike contention and dispute among themselves.'13 The crusade enduringly focused chivalry's fighting spirit toward an ideally supreme objective, the defence of the holy places. The coupling with that objective of the quest for peace in Christian society also proved a lasting one. Naturally however, shifts of emphasis from the themes of Clermont appeared as, over the course of ensuing times, ideas about the role of the clergy in the political direction of Christendom that were born in the Gregorian age crystallised more clearly. In the thirteenth century particular emphasis came to be given to the role of the clergy, and of the papacy in particular, in encouraging the lay powers and knighthood generally toward the task of establishing within Christendom a good and religious peace, a task which came to be seen as a requisite step on the way to bringing Christendom's full force to bear in the east. In a parallel way, the ideas of knights and of those who, for the benefit of knights, wrote about chivalry in the vernacular, developed more articulate approaches both to crusading and toward knighthood's service to secular authority — which had its own particular role in keeping peace — and about the relation between the two. The resulting shifts of emphasis, in both cases as it seems to me, were such as to underline the moral standing of the warriors' Christian role which the propagandists had stressed in the age of the First Crusade; but their effect was also, I am afraid, to somewhat reduce emphasis on the value of peace, in and for itself, at the human level.

11 12 13

Ibid., p. 30. D. Mansi, Sacrum Conciliorum amplissima collectio (Venice, 1759), xx, p. 816. Fulcher of Chartres, translated in E. Peters, The First Crusade (Philadelphia, 1971), p. 26.

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The so-called 'political crusades' of the thirteenth century offer good illustrations of the presentation of the armed endeavour to impose holy peace in Christendom - and in Italy especially - as the necessary prelude to pressing forward with the Holy War in the Levant. At the very beginning of their history we find Innocent III, when he directed the crusade against the excommunicate Markward, explaining that there would be no hope of recovering the lost lands in Syria if Sicily continued in Markward's hand.14 Urban IV and his successor Clement IV both took the same line in the time of Charles of Anjou's invasion of Italy. In 1263 Urban assured St Louis, who was hesitating over whether he should license his brother's expedition, that the conquest of Sicily would be but the stepping stone to a crusade to the east.15 The main body of the French knights who had come with Charles into Italy to wrest Manfred's kingdom from him intended, once they had achieved this, to proceed in the east, so Clement IV told the Christians of Outremer on the eve of the battle of Benevento.16 Boniface VIII expressed a similar hope in 1300 with regard to Charles of Valois, that when he had settled the disputes of Italy he would go on to lead the crusaders in a 'general passage' to the orient.17 In a comparable way, and perhaps a little more respectably, the Avignon popes linked their efforts to restore peace in Christian Europe by diplomatic means in the period of the Hundred Years War with their hopes of being able to organise a Syrian crusade. On the eve of the Schism, when in 1375 English and French negotiators were debating peace in the presence of papal representatives at Bruges, Gregory XI believed that this long-cherished aim might be on the point of achievement, and that a peace or a solid truce would soon provide the opportunity for a general passage that would have a good chance of success.18 The way in which the association between the ideas of peace and of worthy war was developed in secular chivalric ideology was rather different, and less crusade orientated. Amongst the knighthood, that contrast between the illegitimate violence of secular quarrels and the

14 N. Housley The Papal Angevin Alliance and the Crusades against Christian Lay Powers, 12541343 (Oxford, 1982), p. 66. 15 S. Runciman The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1958), p. 69; E. Jordan, Les origines de la domination Angevin en Italie (Paris, 1896), p. 398. 16 Jordan Les origines de la domination angevin, p. 404 n.3. 17 Housley, The Papal Angevin Alliance, p. 69. 18 N. Housley 'The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades, 1356-78', Traditio, 38 (1982), p. 277.

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justified violence of Holy War, which was laboured by ecclesiastical writers at the time of the First Crusade and by St Bernard in his famous sermon to the Templars, never really took hold. The overwhelming claims of secular lordship on the loyalty of the vassal was a dominant theme in the early chansons de geste, which give us our first glimpse of chivalric culture; even the call to crusade could not quite establish a definitive priority over it then or later. Rather the crusade was seen as offering an alternative of noble and redemptive service — that a vassal, great or small, might hope to discharge in his lord's company, or in times when his lord had no need of him. In the context of peace, it was in consequence the role of chivalry as the armed support of the ruler's magistracy and his commonwealth, rather than crusading, that came to receive the strongest emphasis in manuals of knighthood like Ramon Lull's Order of Chivalry. 'Every knight ought to be a governor', Lull wrote; and again 'the office of a knight is to maintain and defend his worldly lord, for a king or high baron has no power to maintain righteousness in his men without aid and help, and if men go against the commandment of the prince it behoves the knights to aid their lord . . . by the knights ought justice to be maintained and kept'.19 Even the writing of such an enthusiast of crusading as Philippe de Mezieres is permeated with this idea of the role of knighthood. Let the knights of France study the laws of true chivalry; let them stand for justice, for widows and orphans and all the oppressed, and above all and 'singularly for the common weal of the kingdom of France',20 he says. In passages in chivalric writing such as these, it is not so much the peace of Christendom that is associated with the 'laws of true chivalry' as the internal peace of particular Christian kingdoms, the task of upholding which included resistance against the secular violence of national but Christian enemies - in the case of de Mezieres' France, the English. The place to which on this view crusading could easily come to be relegated is nicely illustrated in Guillaume Machaut's advice to King Charles of Navarre in the Comfort de Vami; the time for crusade, he says, is when your kingdom is not at war.21 The implication that the times when there is an opportunity to turn attention to Holy War will only be intervals is very clear.

19

R. Lull, The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry (Caxton's translation), ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS (London, 1926), pp. 27-30. 20 P. de M£zferes,Lesongeduvieilpelerin, ed. G.W. Coopland (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 531-32. 21 G. Machaut, Le confort de I'ami, lines 3272ff, Oeuvres de G. de Machaut, ed. E. Hoepffner (Paris, 1921), vol. iii.

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According to this sort of view, too long a peace might indeed be dangerous, sapping the vigour of the warrior class in slothful prosperity, if they did not use the time of peace to seek adventures — such as crusades — to keep them in trim. The Alliterative Morte Arthure, written at much the same time as Machaut's Comfort, puts into the mouth of Duke Cador of Cornwall a splendid speech welcoming the coming war between Arthur and the Romans, which promises to deliver the Britons from becoming listless and cowardly in their prosperity and forgetting their name for great martial deeds.22 Consistently with this sort of approach, works like those of Lull and Machaut, and secular handbooks of chivalry, tend to give more space to the worldly honour that is due to knights than they do to that crown of salvation that ecclesiastical propaganda held out to the crusader. The effect, I must make clear, was not to displace crusading from its position as the supreme expression of chivalrous virtue and commitment — not as yet anyway. The effect was rather to relate crusading to a kind of scale of precedence among chivalrous activities, whose degrees were measured in terms of the honour that men — and women — should accord to participants in them. This scale is well described by Geoffrey de Charny in his Book of Chivalry, written c. 1350. Young men who distinguish themselves in the joust deserve praise, he says, but those who excel in the more dangerous melee of the tournament deserve higher praise, and these in turn must give way before those who have won renown in the wars of their countries, for war is a graver business and more honourable. Still more to be honoured are those who have seen service in strange and distant lands — which of course included the eastern Mediterranean, where Geoffrey himself served on the crusade of the Dauphin of Vienne in 1347.23 This conception of a scale of chivalrous activities we find expressed again, rather vividly, in the statutes of some of the fourteenth-century secular orders of chivalry. Thus the statutes of the Poitevin Order of the Tiercelet list a series of augmentations that the companions were permitted to add to the claws and dew claws of its falcon badge in what seems to be descending order of precedence; the most dignified being for service against the heathen, the next for service in the king's war, either at a pitched battle or at a royal siege: the next for

22

Morte Arthure, ed. E. Brock, EETS (London, 1871), lines 249ff. G. de Charny Le livre de chevalerie, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. E. Kervyn de Lettenhove, i, pt iii (Brussels, 1873), pp. 464-72. 23

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presence at a skirmish (rencontre) in royal service; then last come augmentations permitted for service under the seigneurs of the province and for emerging victor from a single combat in the lists.24 Charles of Durazzo's Order of the Ship, which had the most complicated augmentation regulations of any order I know of, observed an essentially similar order of value. The humblest augmentation is again for victory in single combat, entitling the companion to add a banner to the castle of the mast of his ship. For every major battle with banners displayed in which he fought as a good knight he might add a rope of rigging — of gold, if more than 700 were engaged on either side, of vermilion if more than 600, of blue for 500, green for 300, grey for 200, and of 'iron' for upwards of 100. For being among the first to enter in the assault of a fortified place he might add an anchor, above the water if the population were Christian, in it if they were Saracen. For a part in a major battle against ^the Saracens he might add a tiller; and if he were among those who took part valorously in the future conquest of Jerusalem, he might add a great tiller of gold.25 In all these texts, Holy War remains for knighthood the supreme service. But the apprenticeship in arms in the lists and in the tournament and that attention to gaining experience in arms that Geoffrey de Charny stressed in his book are related not just to crusade service but to useful war service anywhere, and were seen as likely to be particularly useful — as the Tiercelet's augmentation rules in particular remind us — in 'royal war', in the wars of a knight's own commonwealth. I think these rules should make clear what I had in mind when I spoke earlier of the progressive formalisation and ritualisation of chivalric culture, and perhaps also what I said about a reducing emphasis on the value of peace, in and for itself at the human level. Indeed, in the augmentation rules of the Order of the Ship, the value of peace seems in danger of being suffocated in a welter of dreams of military glory. The two different lines of approach to the association of the role of chivalry and the need for peace that I have been trying to outline — the one relating to the crusade, the other rather to the internal peace and defence of individual Christian communities - are both illuminatingly relevant to reactions to what I think may be called the crisis of chivalry in the fourteenth century, when the overspill of military manpower generated in the wars of Italy and in the Hundred Years War of England and

24 M.G.A. Vale 'A Fourteenth-Century Order of Chivalry: The Tiercelet', English Historical Review, 83 (1967), p. 340-41. 25 D'AJ.D. Boulton, The Knights of the Crown (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 320-22.

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France erupted in the form of the Free Companies. The phrase 'crisis of chivalry' seems to me justified because I think that contemporaries perceived things this way. Writers like de Mezieres and Bonet described the pillaging of the companies and their maltreatment of churchmen and civilians in terms of the abandonment of the law of true chivalry. Chroniclers like Froissart and Du Guesclin's biographer Cuvelier wrote of the companies, and of their deeds both black and noble, using a vocabulary that was essentially chivalric. The companies' most famous leaders, men like Du Guesclin and Hugh Calverley and John Hawkwood, were undoubtedly knights in the fullest sense, dubbed as such; and, though their conduct was often anything but knightly in the ideal sense, these successful leaders won respect and dignity and riches as chivalrous men. But above all, the period can be called a crisis of chivalry because the devastation, misery and social dislocation caused by warfare focused such general and widespread attention on the problem of the violence of the knightly order, and so on the relation between the ideals of chivalry and the value of peace. As Norman Housley has pointed out in a very perceptive article, the papal reaction to the problem of the Free Companies in this age of Urban V was very strongly reminiscent of the reaction to the problem of secular aristocratic violence in the age of Urban II.26 The interlude in the great Hundred Years War of England and France, between the signing of the treaty of Bretigny in 1360 and the reopening of the war in 1369 (which roughly corresponded with Urban V's pontificate), brought to a new climax of prominence the problem of the companies, now deprived of most of the colour of justification in their fighting but still on the rampage. As it happened, it was also a period that seemed to offer serious crusading potentialities, and so a chance of siphoning off the military energy of the routiers into war that would have some relish of salvation in it. Between 1362 and 1365 Peter, king of Cyprus, was in the west, seeking support from the Latin princes for a major crusade that would enable him to follow up his initial success in wresting Adalia from the Turks (1361).27 When, on Good Friday in 1363, John the Good of France took the cross along with Peter in Pope Urban's presence at Avignon, new vistas seemed to be opening.28 Peter's appeals were also

26

N. Housley, 'The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades', pp. 253-80. History of the Crusades, ed. K.M. Selton and H.W. Hazard, iii (Madison, WI, 1975) pp. 354-60. 28 R. Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, ii, pp. 323-24. 27

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sympathetically received by the Count of Savoy and by King Louis of Hungary, and soon after we find the Byzantine emperor putting out tentative feelers in the hope of obtaining western aid in clearing the Turks from Thrace.29 It really did look as if there was a possibility that France and Italy might be delivered from the scourge of the companies by redirecting them to the east in a major crusade, and of so turning these 'heathenish tormentors', as Urban V called them (echoing the phraseology of Clermont), into the 'defenders and prize fighters of mother church'.30 In all and any of the crusade plans in the 1360s, the companies were necessarily a vital element. In the first place, it was clearly otiose to expect King John of France or his nobles or neighbours to be serious about embarking for the east if they would have to leave their patrimonies at the mercy of the free soldiers' ravages. Perhaps more important, the companies seemed to offer a chance of bringing together for a 'general passage' a force that militarily could be really formidable. They were autonomous martial societies, already mustered as miniature standing armies, and internally well organised, with their own governing councils, treasuries and secretariats. Their leaders were experienced captains who had earned reputations in hard fighting and who well understood the business of war. If they could be brought together under cohesive leadership they would undoubtedly be able to give a good account of themselves in the east — or so it seemed. The Catalan companies that earlier in the century had overrun Prankish Greece had shown what soldiers of this stamp could be capable of achieving in a traditional crusading area. The problem was how to persuade the companies to muster to the desired end, when they were making rich and easy pickings nearer home, in Languedoc and Lombardy. I do not need to say that the 1360s witnessed no 'general passage' to the east, in spite of much excited correspondence, the licensing of the preaching of crusade and promises of indulgences. Nevertheless, the efforts of Urban V and others in this period to 'export the brutality of Christian knighthood', as Housley puts it, were by no means entirely without effect, and deserve more appreciation than they have often received. Peter of Cyprus did recruit successfully among the companies for the army at the head of which he took and sacked Alexandria in 1365. Arnaut de Cervole, better known as the Archpriest and famous

29 30

History of the Crusades, ed. Setton and Hazard, iii, p. 74. Housley, 'The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades', p. 270 n.77.

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for his part in putting the Comtat Venaissin to ransom in 1357, mustered a large force which it was intended should march across the Empire to aid the king of Hungary. They got no further than Metz, it is true, and turned back westward when Charles IV, incensed by their ravaging, raised an army to bar their further way;31 but some at least among them were subsequently recruited into the crusading army that Amadeus VI of Savoy, the Green Count, assembled in 1366 and led to Thrace.32 Many more were recruited into another army, that which Du Guesclin under the auspices of Charles V assembled from among the companies and led into Spain, to aid Henry of Trastamare in his bid for the throne of his half brother, Pedro of Castile. Formally at least, at the time when it was gathering, even this expedition had a crusading purpose.33 The justification for the papal taxation that Urban licensed in order to help meet its expenses was that, after passing through Castile, it would go on to fight the Moors in Granada. Indeed, the idea was probably not entirely cynical, at any rate as an ultimate objective. At Burgos in March 1366, soon after his own coronation, Henry of Trastamare conferred the crown of Granada on Du Guesclin;34 and at much the same time Hugh Calverley, commanding the English contingent in the army, was negotiating with the king of Aragon for galleys to support the crusade against the Moors once Castile was effectively conquered.35 Cuvelier, the verse biographer of Du Guesclin, made much of the crusading side of the venture, presenting his hero's bitter disappointment that he was not in the end able to carry on the war into Granada and beyond, to Cyprus and Jerusalem.36 Very likely these dreams were not very sincere; even if they were, the English intervention in Spain, Pedro's brief recovery and the subsequent reopening of the Anglo-French war certainly put paid to them. Under cover of the renewal of the Hundred Years War after 1369 the companies in France recouped their strength anew and in consequence the 1370s and 80s again saw wide areas of southern France subjected to their ravages. The crusading projects of the 1360s had however come 31 Ibid., pp. 274-75; A. Cherest L'Archipretre: episodes de la guerre de cents ans au xive siecle (Paris, 1879), pp. 304-24. 32 E.L. Cox The Green Count of Savoy (Princeton, 1967), p. 204ff. 33 On this see P.E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward HI and Richard //, esp. ch. 2; and R. Delachenal Histoire de Charles V, iii, chs 8, 9, 11. 34 Housley, 'The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades', p. 276; Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, iii, p. 281. 35 Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal, p. 42. 36 Cuvelier, Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclm, ed. E. Charriere (Paris, 1839), i, pp. 240, 270, 411.

12

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

near enough to achieving some measure of success to keep alive the hope that their energy might yet be channelled off into holier war, and to keep alive also projects for crusade to the east, which remained very much to the forefront of European diplomacy continuously down to the great disaster at Nicopolis in 1396, when the largest crusading army raised in the fourteenth century went down before Sultan Bajazet on the border of Hungary.37 Up to that point the same factors - the renewed activities of the companies and the continued discussion of crusading projects — also kept this traditional means of winning a measure of peace for Christendom, by directing the attention of her knighthood to the war against the infidel, in the forefront of the minds of chivalric writers of this period. To this I must return shortly. First, though, I must draw attention to an alternative means of dealing with the problem of the companies that was also tentatively explored in the period, and which related rather to that view of chivalry that stressed the role of knighthood in maintaining domestic peace and defence and laid less emphatic emphasis on crusading. In the period after 1367, Charles V of France made strenuous efforts to reorganise the French royal forces, on the basis of standing companies whose soldiers were paid by the royal treasurers of war out of the proceeds of taxation, and whose leaders were made responsible for the discipline of their men and were liable for the indemnification of those they plundered.38 On these terms, a quite substantial number of leaders of Free Companies were with their troops enrolled into the royal hosts. The appointment of their old leader, Bertrand Du Guesclin, as constable of France no doubt facilitated for many their transfer from free to royal service. The expeditions which, in the 1380s, some of the greater French princes organised, with royal connivance, in order to further their own dynastic ambition, also recruited a good many free soldiers into more regular hosts. Quite substantial numbers for instance joined the army that Duke Louis of Anjou led into Italy in 1384 in his bid to make good his claim to the throne of Naples (an expedition which, in the circumstances of the Schism, was given crusade status by the Avignonese pope, Clement VII).39 The army that the count of Armagnac recruited in 1390 for his campaign in Lombardy against Gian Galeazzo Visconti was very largely

37 On the Crusading projects of the period see also JJ.N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377-99 (London, 1972), esp. chs 8, 10, 11. 38 P. Contamine Guerre, etat et societe a la fin du moyen age (Paris, 1972), pp. 135-50, 162-68. 39 N. Valois, La France et le grand schisme d'Occident, ii (Paris, 1896), pp. 23ff.

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recruited from among the companies; and Froissart tells us that one of his explicit aims in recruiting them was 'so that the country might be at peace'.40 These two approaches to the problem created by the uncontrolled violence of the Free Companies, the one looking to deliverance by means of a 'general passage' on crusade, the other seeking to control their activity by recruitment into regular hosts, appear as twinned themes in the writings of that extraordinary, eccentric and extravagantly verbose figure, Philippe de Mezieres, one time chancellor of Cyprus, counsellor of Charles V and tutor to his son, and self-appointed herald to all Christendom of the crusading cause. The crusading ideal, the desire to deliver the Holy Places, was the driving force behind his writing, indeed in his whole life. His dream was of founding a new crusading order of chivalry of the Passion, in which the princes of Christendom and their chivalries would be enrolled and which would spearhead a campaign to revive Latin fortunes in the east.41 This was a martial dream worthy of one who had been brought up to chivalry and had taken the arms of knighthood at the Holy Sepulchre itself. But de Mezieres was also, and clearly, stirred by the misery and dislocation which he saw everywhere about him and which he recognised as consequent upon the misdirection of chivalry into pillage and tyranny. In a lurid passage in his Letter to King Richard II, he allegorised the woes of this condition in his picture of the horrible garden of war, watered by fifteen foul smelling streams, in which flourished the weed sanguinolence, which the inhabitants ate with all their food, gorging themselves on blood: and further in the said streams were many leeches, large and small, which sucked the blood of those who lived in the garden . . . so much so that many of these leeches burst asunder . . . in this parable the leeches represent the commanders and their men at arms, who suck the blood of the poor, that is to say the substance of their livelihood, by ransom, pillages, taxes, and oppression without measure.

The garden was plagued also with gigantic locusts, which gnawed the corn, the fruit and all the green things of the garden down to the roots, which too represented 'the captains, men at arms and robbers . . . before

40 Froissart, Oeuvres, xiv, pp. 160-62; D.M. Bueno de Mesquita, Grangaleazzo Visconti (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 124-25. 41 On de Mezieres' life and writing generally, see N. Jorga, Philippe de Mezieres et la croisade au XlVesiecle (Paris, 1896).

14

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

whom nothings survives save what is too hot or too heavy'.42 With this garden de Mezieres contrasted the idyllic orchard of peace, 'filled with all manner of trees and plants, bearing fruit and giving out a pleasing scent', where there was no frost or mist or floods or thunder, and the people lived in health and joy 'until they died in God's good time'. De Mezieres' message through these allegories, to the kings of England and France, was that they must first seek the beautiful orchard, shunning the garden of Perilous Guard in which their chivalries had been trained — that is to say that they should establish peace between their two nations, preparatory to leading their hosts to crusade in the east.43 The interlocked ideas, or bringing peace to Europe by means of the crusade, was thus central to de Mezieres' thinking, as it had been to Urban II's, back in the 1090s. De Mezieres' hopes for his Order of the Passion were visionary and chimerical: the conception of a single order bringing together 'from the eight languages of Christendom' such a vast polyglot corps of knights as he envisaged was far too grandiose. But if this special version of the crusading solution to the contemporary problem of military violence was impractical, his diagnosis of what was amiss was in many ways very sure and perceptive. He saw that a major element in the problem was that there were far too many men who had been brought up to the martial calling and to think of it as an honourable one, and who knew no other way of sustaining themselves; men who, as Sir John Chandos put it, 'cannot live without war and do not know how to'.44 He saw, and clearly, the dilemma of those who thought of themselves as chivalrous but 'who by the custom of the land have little or no portion in the inheritance of their fathers and who by poverty are often constrained to follow wars that are unjust and tyrannical so as to sustain their estate of noblesse, since they know no other calling but arms and therein commit so much ill that it would be frightening to tell of all the pillaging and crimes with which they oppress the poor people'.45 He saw the relevance of these practical perceptions to his crusading plans; Any worthy knight who is bound for Outremer will want to know, firstly, how he will be sustained with food and drink and in the natural needs of the body;

42

P. de Mezidres, Letter to King Richard I, ed. and trans. G.W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1975), pp. 56-60. 43 Ibid., pp. 61-63. 44 Froissart, Chroniques, ed. S. Luce, vii, pp. 154-55. 45 Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 865, fo. 423.

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secondly, how he shall be supported with clothing, armour and horses to defend himself and to fight the enemies of the faith: thirdly, he will wish to be assured that in fighting for the faith he will be able to acquire just riches and true honour.46

And these same practical considerations also prompted him, when he turned to the problem of the companies specifically, to offer an answer that was quite independent of his crusading schemes. Many of them [he advised the King of France] are your own subjects and may be brought back to decent behaviour . . . knights and squires who form part of the companies should be taken into your service and given suitable wages . . . the first muster need not be oversearching, but after three or four months it would be possible to dismiss a third or a quarter of them, those who were plainly not soldiers but professional pillagers. Gradually, the chiefs of the companies, to obtain your favour, would reduce the number of their followers, and even become useful soldiers, paid by the taxes of the towns.47

This is, in another form, the same advice that de Mezieres gave elsewhere and that I have already quoted: 'Let the knights of France study the laws of true chivalry, and stand for . . . the common weal of the Kingdom of France.' This second way of reforming the ways of knighthood, not through crusade ideology but rather by imposing better discipline, by arranging for regular payment of wages, and pointing chivalry toward the service of the common weal, was very much in the air in de Mezieres' time. Honore Bonet, in his famous book, the Tree of Battles, was like de Mezieres much concerned with the outrages committed by men at arms, and like him he considered this to be a consequence of the neglect of the rules of 'worthy chivalry' by men seeking not the public good but to enrich themselves by pillaging.48 This he considered to be a reversal of the role of the true soldier, who should remember that 'he does all that he does as the deputy of the king or of the lord in whose pay he is'.49 War is the business of the prince, he says, fought for the common weal which always overrides private interest, and the rights of soldiers in matters of 46

Arsenal, MS 225l,fo.2v. Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin, ed Coopland, ii, pp. 408-09. 48 The Tree of Battles of Honore Bouvet, trans. G.W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1949), p. 189. On the whole question of the attitude to war and chivalry of Bonet (alias Bouvet), see N.A.R. Wright, 'The Tree of Battles of Honore Bouvet and the Laws of War', in C.T. Allmand (ed.), War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 12-31. 49 The Tree of Battles, trans. Coopland, p. 135. 47

16

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

wages, booty, prisoners' ransoms and such like depend on their agreement with this superior lord, not on private right.50 Christine de Pisan echoed Bonet, quoting at length and verbatim from his work in her Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, and extolling the discipline of the Romans, as explained by Vegetius: thus she too firmly placed chivalry in the context of service of the common weal.51 When she treated of peace in her Livre de lapaix, it was of the internal peace of France that she wrote; and she included a passage on the need to maintain its chivalry as a bulwark against outward enemies, a vital aspect of the preservation of its peace.52 Her hero Charles V had sought to forge the unruly chivalry of France into just such a bulwark; and she lived in her old age into the reign of his grandson Charles VII who succeeded more permanently than he did in the same aim. It was this approach, that focused on the interconnection of the martial function of the chivalry and peace in the limited context of the royal and regional commonwealth, which in the end proved to offer the best solution to the problems of the age of the Free Companies, not the crusade. The civil wars of the last decade of Charles VFs unhappy reign, and the confusions of the first decade and a half of that of Charles VII, when there were two governments in France, the Anglo-Burgundian government centred on Paris and the Valois government of the so-called kingdom of Bourges, brought to birth a new generation of free companies, the notorious 'skinners' (ecorcheurs) — so called because it was said that they would leave neither man nor woman with more than a vest upon them.53 The brutal marginalia in the cahiers de doleances which record investigations into their ravaging give a picture of their methods of screwing money out of a miserable civil population: gens crucifiez, femme violee, homme roiy.54 Rodrigue de Villandrando, the Spaniard who was perhaps the ablest and the most infamous of their captains, earned himself the title of 'Emperor of the Pillagers'.55 They fought nominally in the cause of the king of France — Charles VII, king of Bourges, that is:

50

See Wright, The Tree of Battles of Honore Bouvet', esp. pp. 22-23, 28-30. On Christine's debt to Bouvet, see The Tree of Battles, trans. Coopland, pp. 24-25. 52 C. de Pisan Le livre delapaix ed. C.C. Willard (La Haye, 1958), esp. pp. 134-35. 53 La ChroniquedeE. deMonstrelet ed. L. Douet d'Arcq, v (Paris, 1861), pp. 317-18. The fullest treatment of the ecorcheurs is that of A. Tuetey, Les ecorcheurs sous Charles VII, 2 vols (Montb£liard, 1874). 54 These examples come from the report of the excesses of the echorcheurs in Luxueil and Faucogney, 1439; AD de la Cote d'Or, B11881. 55 Contamine, Guerre, etat et societe, p. 446 (quoting from the Marguerites Historiales, BN, MS Fr. 955, ch. 137). On Roderique see also J. Quicherat, Roderigue de Villandrando (Paris, 1879). 51

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but it was his subjects rather than the enemy who suffered most brutally at their hands. There was hardly a province of France that was not exposed to their depredations, and they extended their activities into the borders of the empire, into Alsace, Lorraine and Savoy. The situation in France around 1440 was in fact very similar to that of the 1360s, which I have already described, and Charles VII's efforts to deal with it were very similar to those of his predecessor Charles V — and also to that prescription of Philippe de Mezieres for dealing with the Free Companies that I quoted earlier. This time, however, the crusade does not come into the picture; as a way of ridding the land of robbers it had finally lost conviction. The interlude in the Anglo-French war provided by the truce of Tours in 1444 gave Charles his opportunity. As a first step a large force of rentiers was mustered under the Dauphin Louis who led them out of the country to fight as the allies of Frederick of Hapsburg against the Swiss, much as Du Guesclin had led the Free Companies out of France into Spain in an earlier generation.56 Thereafter Charles VII followed fairly closely the example of his grandfather Charles V and the advice of de Mezieres. Substantial numbers of the old ecorcheurs were mustered in some fifteen compagnies d'ordonnance. Provision was made for their regular payment out of royal taxation, and they were quartered on specific towns. In just the way that de Mezieres had suggested, Charles concentrated on recruiting into his service those captains who were of some solid standing, knights and esquires of noble blood, eschewing the bastards and the men of no means who had risen to command from nothing but their strength and the shrewdness of their pillaging.57 With the aid of these leaders and their soldiers, other companies of men at arms were disbanded and the men - or some at least of them — escorted home to their native provinces. The commanders of the new compagnies d'ordonnance had most of them a rather chequered career behind them; but men like Dunois, La Hire, Anthoine de Chabannes and Robert Floques were sound soldiers, and they became the chivalric heroes of the last campaigns of the Hundred Years War, in 1450 and 1451, when the English were driven first out of Normandy and then out of Gascony. In the mid 1440s when the compagnies d'ordonnance were first mustered, many observers supposed that, when the English war was over they would be disbanded, and that the taxes raised to support them

56 57

Tuetey, Les ecorcheurs, i, pp. 135ff. Contamine, Guerre, etat et societe, p. 401.

18

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

would cease. Charles, however, had it seems at last learnt the lesson that to disband an army is to invite its leaders to remuster on their own account and return to the life of pillage;58 and when the campaigns were over, his army remained in being and the taille continued to be levied. His measures turned out to be the foundation of the royal French standing army of early modern times. That army won its first triumphs against the English; and, in the reign of Charles's grandson, Charles VIII, it marched into Italy, there to fight bloody battles and to win martial glory and to commit untold atrocities. There were still, even then, those who dreamed that perhaps, after victories in Naples, this army would be launched against the infidel in a new general passage, but the dream was a good deal more remote now than it had been in de Mezieres' time. The chivalry of France had become an army that was seen as the bulwark not of Christendom but of the state and of the dynastic interest and ambition of its ruler. As Nicholas Wright has put it, we are entering the age not of chivalry but of national chivalries.59 That did not make the new armies instruments of peace in any meaningful sense. It cannot be denied, though, that in consequence of Charles VII's measures, France was for the time being a good deal more peaceful than she had been in the days of the Free Companies and of the 'skinners'. When I was invited to write this essay, I was asked if I could try to make it in some way relevant to our modern, contemporary concern about world peace. I am afraid that chivalry is not a theme that prompts any very constructive reflections in that direction. Chivalry was quintessentially bellicose, setting the fighting man on a pinnacle of honour. The powerful religious orientation that the crusade gave it did not make it any less ferocious, only suggesting a means of deflecting its honourable ferocity into wars which, if further from home, were not expected to be any less bloody, in physical terms, than more domestic quarrels, only more remote. The alternative secular canalisation of its energies and ethos into the royal standing army was equally unpacific in principle, assuming that no commonwealth was likely to be at peace for very long and concentrating in the hands of the dynastic ruler a weapon, in the form of this standing army, that he could hardly resist using to further expansionist dynastic policies, and also promising rewards in the form of worldly honour and respect to those who would serve him in their furtherance. In fairness to the age of chivalry, it should of course be

58 59

Ibid., p. 403. Wright The Tree of Battles of Honor£ Bouvet', p. 31.

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remembered that men of that time did not suppose that, among fallen men, the kind of universal international peace that we today dream of was feasible; the perfectibility of the human condition is a relatively modern chimera. Terrestrial wars they thought of as ineradicable, being but the human aspect of the universal struggle between good and evil, that could not end this side of Domesday. 'I ask in what place war was first found', asked Bonet, 'and I disclose to you it was in heaven, when our Lord God drove out the wicked angels.'60 Bonet and his contemporaries were, of course, quite as aware as we are that war is a brutalising and degrading business in which the innocent will continually suffer: but that did not shake their confidence that war with all its wrongs could be worthy and justified if it was waged to right a greater wrong. That belief most civilised people accepted, I think, not only in the age of chivalry but right down to 1945. Since then we have been haunted by the fear that war's horrors are not just a very bestial demonstration of the old adage that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that in the cause of right the ravaging of beloved landmarks, and the cost in terms of good young lives and of miseries inflicted on innocent bystanders, have sometimes to be accepted. We have been haunted by the much worse fear that they may mean the total extinction of everything, a cost which nothing can make acceptable. About that sort of prospect and the problems that it poses chivalry has nothing to teach us, because its whole ethos was based on the opposite, foregoing assumption. Perhaps, though, there is one somewhat less negative moral that can be drawn from the story that I have been rehearsing. The middle ages were, throughout, violent and warlike times, and that is why chivalry flourished. But there were certain moments when the violence seemed to be getting out of hand - as it did at what have been the key moments of my story, the eleventh century, the fourteenth-century crisis of the companies, and the anarchy of the ecorcherie in Charles VII's early years. Each of these moments corresponds with a crisis of weakness in governmental authority and governmental morale. The Truce of God movement of the eleventh century in France reflected the abject incapacity of secular royal government; the crises of the companies and of the ecorcherie were symptoms of the same phenomenon. The Truce, the launching of the First Crusade, the crusade plans and the peace making efforts

60

The Tree of Battles, trans. Coopland, p. 81.

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of the Avignon popes and of fourteenth-century diplomats, the determination of Charles VII to bring the 'skinners' to heel, none of these finally solved the problem of military aggressiveness and the misery that it generates, but they did help at least to limit and control its impact. This may, I think, have some sort of moral for an age when hi-jacking, hooliganism, liberation theology and intellectual sniping at the activities of the forces of law and order are none of them entirely unfashionable. I sometimes think they are not much less of a threat to world peace than nuclear fission, and certainly in combination with it render it infinitely more perilous. There is also this: nuclear fission will not go away or be forgotten, but about the disorders in our own houses we may still be able to do something — and so make our nuclear knowledge a little less dangerous, as Charles VII made soldiers less of a scourge to the France of his day.

2

Chivalry and Courtly Love How seriously are we to take the idea of courtly love outside the narrow limits of medieval literature and literary convention, with reference to the world of actuality? And in particular, how seriously are we to take it with reference to the code of chivalry, if that is defined as the social ideal of the secular warrior aristocracy of the west European middle ages? The idea of courtly love, it is generally agreed, was the new creation of the lyric poets of southern France — of Languedoc — in the twelfth century. They were the tutors of the trouveres of northern France and of the Minnesang of Germany, whose poesy was in the same vein, and originally largely inspired by the example of the southern French. As I am no literary scholar, I must be as brief and as uncontroversial as the subject permits in what I shall say of this 'new creation'. What is new about it is the seriousness with which it takes the lover's passion, its endeavour to express the intensity of the psychological experience of love. The emphasis, in troubadour lyric, is heavily upon the feelings inspired in the lover by the contemplation of his beloved, indeed that is part of its definition of love. As Andreas the Chaplain, whose De arte honeste amandi is the text-book of the subject, puts it: 'Love is a certain suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex'.1 This is a very one-sided approach to love, and this is the limitation of this school of love-poetry: its introspective preoccupation with the quest to put longing into words and to convey the inspiration, the adulation and the urge to serve that it has prompted. Walter von der Vogelweide encapsulates this spirit perfectly in his lines:

1

Andreas Capellanus, De arte honesti amandi, trans. J J. Parry (New York, 1941), i, c. 1, p. 28.

22

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages These long days when I've sweetly sighed For my true love are still renewed and endless; And I still marvel how my pride Regrets so little years of service spent and fruitless.2

In the effort to convey adulation this poetry slips easily into a religious or quasi-religious tone: it is in this spirit that Marcabru inveighs furiously against the promiscuous exponents of a false and carnalised love and that Raimon de Miraval becomes almost didactic in his approach to love's service. It was this side of courtly love that enabled Andreas the Chaplain in the first book of his De arte honeste amandi to codify a law of love deduced from the themes of troubadour poetry — a rigorous law, aping that of religion. 'Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her thou lovest', he commands;3 the lover must observe in his love the limits of the same inhibited degrees of kinship that apply to marriage, and his dedication must be total and from the heart, freely given. Just as all our work without charity cannot merit eternal bliss, so it will be unavailing to serve love, unless the prompting be from the heart itself.'4 Thou shalt love with all thy soul and all thy strength, he implies. From my point of view there are two points about this school of love that are of primary importance. The first is its courtliness. Cortesia implies more than just courtesy; it implies a knowledge of the conventions. Courtly love was, in consequence, in tendency aristocratic and exclusive, an understanding of courtesy something reserved to the initiate, and so a defence against the intrusion into the courtly world of the bourgeois and the unrefined. The ideal beloved, addressed as wisdoms 'my lady', and to whom the lover pledged his service in the language of feudal homage, even sometimes of servitude, was of superior rank, but should not, Andreas thought, stand in rank too remote from her lover.5 Indeed already in the mid-twelfth century the pictures of the ideal knight and of the ideal lover were beginning to overlap. Here is the former, as depicted in the Provencal epic Girart: 'Lords, look at the best knight that you have ever seen . . . he is brave and courtly and skilful, and of good lineage, eloquent, handsomely experienced in hunting and falconry, he knows how to play chess and backgammon . . . 2 Quoted by R. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London, 1970), p. 88 (Barber's own translation of the original). 3 Andreas, De arte honesti amandi, i, c. 6, p. 81-82.

4

5

Ibid.,i,c.6,p.91.

C.S. Lewis discusses Andreas's views on this point in The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958), p. 34-35. (In notes 4 and 9 I have used Lewis's vivid translations.)

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his wealth was never denied to any.'6 The lover of the troubadours and of the Minnesang and indeed of Andreas is in the same mould; he too is expected to be brave, eloquent and courteous, knowledgeable in the recreations of the world and of the courts, and above all generous. To avoid avarice like the plague and to embrace its opposite is indeed the first commandment of the God of Love in Andreas's treatise.7 The lover's instructress in all these qualities is his lady, because it is love for her that inspires him to adopt a courtly and noble bearing. Her spiritual superiority is the underlying assumption of the adulation of this love poetry, and it is because she is seen as the source of excellence in the lover that love can be portrayed, as it is, as essentially a spiritually ennobling passion. To ennoble is indeed a part of her function; a lady gains more honour, says Andreas, 'if she takes a man who is none too good, and makes him praiseworthy through her good character, and by her instruction adds him to the court of love, than if she makes some good man better'.8 Thus courtly love renders the biblical message, that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons. It is this emphasis on the capacity of love to inspire its servants to seek to make themselves worthy which is the second feature of the ideology of the troubadours' school of love that I wish to emphasise. It is the more important, too, because it is the one that has embedded in it an active principle — and chivalry was essentially an active ideology, an ethos for men dedicated to the active calling of arms. Therefore it is proper that I should labour the same point that C.S. Lewis did in his treatment of Andreas in his Allegory ofLove\ that love is seen in his treatise, as in so much troubadour poetry, as the source of all things good in this world, in saeculo bonum. 'It is agreed among all men that there is no good thing in this world, and no courtesy, that is not derived from love as from its fountain', says Andreas,9 or, as Pierre d'Auvergne puts it 'a man without love's service is no better than a wretched ear of corn'.10 The significance of the active principle becomes apparent when courtly love is taken out of the contemplative realm of longing and

6 See L. Paterson 'Knights and the Concept of Knighthood in Twelfth-Century Occitan Epic', Forum of Modern Language Studies, 17 (1981), pp. 117-30. (I quote her translation). 7 Andreas Capellanus, De arte honesti amandi, i, c. 2, p. 81. 8 Ibid., i, c. 6, p. 42. 9 Ibid., i, c. 6, p. 68; and Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 34. 10 A. Bonner (trans.), Songs of the Troubadours (London, 1973), p. 77.

24

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

adoring, which is its essential context in troubadour lyric, and transposed into narrative. For it is here that we find chivalry and courtly love really drawing together for the first time. Perhaps the greatest discovery of the northern French narrative poets of the twelfth century was the way in which the amorous culture of the southern troubadours and the traditional type of chivalrous narrative, which in the chansons de geste focused round a succession of martial episodes, could be yoked together, so that an old kind of story could be woven around a new axis of interest. Chretien de Troyes, who knew the Provengal writings well and who was also well steeped in Ovid (who among classical authors was the most powerful single influence on the medieval view of love), led the way. His Chevalier de la charrete, written at the command of Marie de Champagne, is a direct translation of the courtly love ethos into the realm of chivalrous action.11 What binds together the succession of fantastic and mysterious adventures — Guinevere's abduction, Lancelot's strange ride in the cart of shame, the crossing of the sword bridge fashioned from a single blade of steel, his imprisonment and his combats with Meleagaunt — is the single theme of his devotion to Guinevere as the mistress of his heart. His transports of amorous devotion, his raptures on finding by a spring a comb with the gold tresses of his beloved in its teeth, the strength that he draws from his glimpse of her at the window in his first combat with Meleagaunt, his kneeling by her bed and his genuflexion as he leaves her chamber — all these, together with his implicit obedience to her command, even to the point of fleeing in the tournament and so incurring anew the dishonour that he suffered by his ride in the dwarfs tumbril, are faithful to the spirit and principles of the troubadour religion of love. At the same time the story is a story of chivalry, of knight errantry in its fullest sense — of adventure sought actively. And if the adventures are all encountered in the quest to win the esteem of a beloved woman and to live up to the demands of her service, it is still the adventures that fill more lines of the poem than anything else. Chretien de Troyes had the individuality of a truly great master; among those who followed him few had his interest or his insight in the exploration of the inner feelings of the heroes and heroines of their stories. What they could and did understand from him, however, was something with more important potential for influencing the attitudes of the actual, active world of knighthood; that is to say, the potency of

11 C. de Troyes, Chevalier de la charette; all references are to W. Foerster (ed.) Karrienritter (Halle, 1899).

Chivalry and Courtly Love

25

love as a force that can urge a man forward to test himself, to prove his worthiness of his mistress. In this context there was little difference, it should be noted, between the potency of adulterous love, such as that of Lancelot and Guinevere (or of Tristram and Iseult), and of the regulated love that hopes ultimately to make a bride of an adored woman, of which Chretien treated in other romances. Both equally could be a source of inspiration to higher flights of endeavour - for a knight, to higher flights of specifically martial endeavour. Both alike, therefore, permitted the interweaving of martial adventure and amorous dedication as twinned themes of narrative. These two recurrent and twinned themes do in fact dominate a very large part of Arthurian literature - and, indeed, of medieval romance generally. 'Chretien's world', Richard Barber writes, 'is the backbone of all the later medieval versions of the Arthurian romances.'12 In consequence, Arthurian romance became the chief vehicle of that teaching that derives from yoking together the troubadours' conception of the ennobling power of love with the chivalrous conception of the nobility of martial prowess and of acts of valour. In the process the other great love story of the middle ages besides that of Lancelot, that of Tristam and Iseult- which in the earliest versions, those of Beroul and of Gottfried, is much less of a chivalrous history than the story of Lancelot and Guinevere — was drawn more closely into the framework of Arthurian history, with a consequent new emphasis on its hero's specifically knightly quality. The story of the Round Table became at once the story of the greatest company of Christian knights that the world had ever known, and the story of a court of love. It was recognised as the latter as well as the former: 'You should know too', wrote Arnaut Guilhem de Marsan in his Ensenhamen del Cavalher, 'about King Arthur: you will be all the worthier for it. For he did not die, and he never committed a fault and will not commit one as long as the world endures. Always he lived for love with joy and honour, for he knew all that appertained to love and all that God has revealed of the matter.'13 That was in the twelfth century; long after, Boiardo echoed Arnaut Guilhem when he wrote: 'Britain was glorious in her time . . . and after, Charlemagne in France maintained a mighty court. But it was not the like of the former, for the door of Love

12

Barber, Knight and Chivalry, p. 102. R. Lejeune, 'The Troubadours', R.S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959), p. 394. 13

26

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

was closed to it. All there was bent on Holy War alone, and it was not of the same worth or renown as the other.'14 It is worth pausing momentarily over Boiardo's words. By placing Arthur alongside the historical figure of Charlemagne they remind us that the transposition of the ethic of courtly love into the context of Arthurian narrative meant that it was transposed into a context that was, in a degree at least, historical. For few, in the middle ages, doubted the historicity of Arthur. I do not mean to imply that many people accepted as true history the whole gamut of fantastic tales of mystery and magic associated with the Round Table company, but they did believe that a genuine historical tradition underlay them. Arthur's grave was known; his bones and those of his queen were dug up at Glastonbury in Richard Fs time and attracted pilgrims (that was the object of the pious fraud then executed).15 It was as an historical hero that he took his place among the Nine Worthies as the first of the three champions of the Christian law, alongside Charlemagne and Godfrey de Bouillon.16 Because many of the stories of Arthur and his court were recorded as if they were history, from one very important point of view it did not matter whether they were precisely factual. Whether they were factual or not, they could serve a principal purpose of history in medieval eyes, that of furnishing from the past's store of experience didactic examples — models of good living relevant to the present and historical foils to contemporary history,17 illustrating the qualities and failings of the contemporary world. There is no doubt that people expected the Arthurian stories to be read in this way. 'In this book you will learn of things delectable and worthy to be remembered for the exaltation of noblesse and chivalry, and to the edification and example of all men; and above all those whose will it is to achieve in arms the highest honour.'18 That is the introduction to the version of the romance of Lancelot published in 1488. Caxton has much the same to say in his epilogue to his translation of Ramon Lull's Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry — a kind of handbook to the ethics of 14

Boiardo, Orlando innamorato, ii, stanzas 1 and 2 (quoted by Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 24n.). See A. Gransden, 'The Growth of the Glastonbury Tradition and Legends', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), pp. 337-58. 16 On the Nine Worthies see KJ. Holtgen, 'Die Nine Worthies', Anglia, 77 (1959), pp. 279-309 (the most recent and authoritative treatment). 17 I have discussed this point at greater length in 'Chivalry, Heralds and History', below, pp. 63-81. 18 Quoted by C.E. Pickford, L'evolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du moyen age (Paris, 1966), p. 265; compare the introduction to the prose Tristan, ibid., pp. 266-68. 15

Chivalry and Courtly Love

27

knighthood. 'O ye knights of England', he cries, 'where is the custom and usage of noble chivalry that was used in past days? What do ye now but go to the baths and play at dice . . . Leave this, and leave that and read the noble volumes of St Graal, of Lancelot, of Galahad, of Tristram, of Perceforest, of Perceval, of Gawain, and many more. There shall you see manhood, courtesy and gentleness.'19 And then, using these names as a foil, he goes on to rehearse the example of the great captains of recent time who may be compared with them — Sir John Chandos, Sir Walter Manny, Henry V, the earl of Salisbury who fell at Orleans, 'and many others whose names shine gloriously by their virtues, nobleness and acts that they did in honour of the order of chivalry'. In this manner of using the heroes of romance and their achievement as a foil to recent history Caxton was writing in a well-established tradition. Peter Langtoft, 150 years before, had used Arthur's court and conquests as a foil to set off the glories of King Edward I, and not uncritically either; he had a nice aside when he wished to deprecate Edward's fiscal policy, that he fell short of Arthur when it came to generosity to poor knights.20 There is no mention in any of these passages, of course, of courtly love. Ramon Lull's Book of the Ordre ofChyvalry, to which Caxton wrote his eloquent epilogue, has nothing to say of it. Langtoft has the conquests and martial deeds of Edward I in mind, not his languors — if he ever had any. It is not difficult to show that the romances in which courtly loving played such a prominent part were regarded — among other things — as a quarry of examples of virtuous living which had present relevance; but that does not necessarily mean that their amorous passages were considered to have the same kind of contemporary relevance as their tales of martial courage and achievement. They do show how ideals depicted in romance could be related to realities, but they do not therefore prove that courtly love could be related to reality in that way, and that so we should 'believe in it'. But if we have not quite got to that point, we have, I think, been given some help toward finding a way forward with our problem. Since we can see that the ideal pictures of the chivalrous heroes of pseudo-historical fiction were regarded as models, we shall be wise to start by looking further at those contexts in real life to which these

19 William Caxton, The Book of the Ordre ofChyvalry, ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS, original series, 168 (London, 1926), pp. 122-23. 20 T. Wright (ed), Chronicle de Pierre de Langtoft, RS, 2 vols (London, 1868), ii, p. 296; and see J. Vale, Edward HI and Chivalry (London, 1983), ch. 1.

28

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

models were regarded as being particularly relevant, to see if they show us anything about love. We may usefully look back at this point to Chretien's Chevalier de la charrette. One of the great scenes in this romance is the tournament, at which Lancelot first, as an obedient lover, shows himself a coward at Guinevere's command, and then, when she bids him, carries all before him in her presence.21 This tournament had been arranged by the ladies of Noauz and Pomegloi, and the maidens of the court had resolved that they would give themselves in marriage to those who showed most prowess. After Chretien, the tourney scene in which the lover hero performed incredible achievements before his watching lady (often in disguise, so as to give piquancy to the situation) becomes almost a trope of chivalrous romance. It becomes one of the classic means of depicting the hero proving himself worthy of his beloved's affection, under the direct inspiration of her gaze and her beauty. As tournaments were certainly real, here is one specific area in which we can look for signs of the romance model spilling out into actuality. It is unfortunate that although real tournaments were common enough in Chretien's time, we have no equally full descriptions of their incident that are strictly contemporary from historical, as opposed to literary sources (the descriptions in the verse biography of William the Marshal are of tournies fought in Chretien's time, but were actually written some forty years later). It is therefore difficult to know how much his picture is distorted by literary glamorisation. What is clear is that it accords with the way things stood not so long afterwards. Jacques de Vitry in a famous sermon explains how tournaments promoted all the seven deadly sins, and when it comes to the turn of lust, it is quite clear what he is talking about. Tournaments promote lechery, he says, 'because the combatants fight in order that they may please wanton women, if they show prowess in arms, and they even bear tokens of theirs as their banners'.22 Alongside this one might place Ulrich von Lichtenstein's account of his Venusfahrt, his great jousting tour of 1227. Accoutred as Frau Venus (in a splendid costume, with a pair of long blond plaits thrown in), he travelled from Italy to Bohemia, offering a general challenge to all comers to joust in honour of his lady. To each who broke three lances with him he promised a gold ring; but if the challenger was defeated, he was to bow to the four corners of the earth in honour of Ulrich's lady. He

21 22

Karrienritter, lines 5641-6104. J. de Vitry, Exempla (London, 1891), p. cxli.

Chivalry and Courtly Love

29

travelled magnificently attended, and broke three hundred spears in a month's jousting — or so he claimed. It is not quite clear how much of Ulrich's account is really true, but it is clear that there is some substratum of truth underlying it.23 It is also clear that the spirit of courtly love is at the very centre of his story. The same influence is plain once more in Sarasin's poetic account of the great tournament at Hem in 1278, organised by the lords Huart de Bazentin and Aubert de Longueval. This was a marvellous piece of Arthurian theatre; Jeanne, Longueval's sister, played the part of Guinevere; Robert, count of Artois, as Yvain (complete with the lion of Chretien's romance), delivered four girls from the Knight of the White Tower; Kay, as Seneschal, kept up a string of caustic comment in the true vein of his legendary character. Perhaps his best jibe was over the Pucelle flagellee who, when delivered from her master whose dwarf had whipped her before the stands, ran to embrace that same master. 'The more blows you give them, the better they like you', declared Kay. The whole scene here has become suffused with eroticism; nevertheless, the combats were serious. 'The jousts were a fair sight to see, but a dire business to endure', Sarasin sums up.24 Jacques Bretel's account of the tournament held at Chauvency in 1285 gives what is perhaps an even more vivid impression of the way in which the tourney of real life had become coloured with tones of the courtly love of literature. This was not a tournament in literary dress, like Hem; the participants acted out their parts in their own arms, inpropriapersona, and it is the little vignettes of individual scenes that Bretel paints, and the overall atmosphere that he evokes, that bring the point home. There is his picture of two girls running forward, when the lists are opened, to declare the one that she has given her heart to Waleran de Luxembourg, and the other to Wichart d'Amance — and the herald's gruff comment: 'since you prize them so much, they ought to know how to break their necks'.25 There is the herald's cry, before the last combats and as night is falling: 'Where are you now, you amorous bachelors who are out to win sweet kisses by your prowess?'26 And perhaps best of all, in atmospheric terms, is the response of Bretel himself, after supper, to the call of Henry de Brieys, who demanded of him 'by the faith that you owe to the wine of 23 On Ulrich's Venusfahrt, see R. Harvey, Moriz von Craun and the Chivalric World (Oxford, 1961), pp. 101,134, 142,157. 24 A. Henry (ed), Sarasin: le roman du Ham (Paris, 1939), lines 2653ff, 3200ff; and see further J. Vale, Edward III, ch. 1. 25 M. Delbouille (ed) Jacques Bretel: le tournoi de Chauvency (Paris, 1932), lines 1926ff. 26 Ibid., lines 1967ff.

30

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Arbois that you drink' to preach a sermon of arms and love. The theme of the sermon is the manner in which love serves to double prouesse and vaillance in a knight, to illustrate which Bretel cites the examples of Aeneas and Dido, and of Lancelot, Tristram and Palamedes, and he concludes by offering Venus's pardon to all — if they have offended love heretofore, let them amend their ways now and they shall be forgiven.27 Amendment, it is clear, means taking on the service of Venus, and achieving high deeds for love's sake. What Bretel conveys so vividly and skilfully is, it seems to me, the emotionally and erotically charged atmosphere of the tournament. That it is the literary motif of courtly love that has lent his scene that charge there seems to me no doubt. There was a good deal of polite play about what went on at Chauvency, as play was also very much part of the theatre of Hem and of Ulrich's Venusfahrt, but it is hard to think that the love was all make-believe, especially at Chauvency. Bretel, I think, certainly did not see it as such — I have forgotten to mention his story of the gallant exchanges that he overheard on one evening between a knight and a lady, whose names he discreetly suppresses. Moreover, there is no question that there was more than play involved in the tournament in his day. I have deliberately chosen my example at this point from the thirteenth century rather than the fifteenth, from which it would be easy to cull countless examples of tournaments coloured in their staging with literary and amatory overtones. I might for instance have gone into the detail of that great tournament held at Valladolid in 1434, where the presidingjudge spoke as the God of Love as he awarded the prizes, and graciously besought the ladies and sweethearts of those who had shown prowess 'to embrace them and give them good cheer as their recompense and reward for their labours'.28 I have not done so because by then tournaments had got softer and safer and more expensive, and it can be more easily suggested that play was the whole object of the exercise. That cannot be alleged with regard to the thirteenth century. Then tournaments were still very rough. They were usually fought in armour of war and, though bated weapons were commonly used, casualties were frequent. It really was an achievement to show prowess in them. They were serious in another way too. They were viewed, justifiably, as a useful preparation for the real business of war. Most of those who

27 28

Ibid., lines 4305ff; for the sermon itself, lines 4383-443. R. Boase, The Troubadour Revival (London, 1978), pp. 145-47.

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fought at Chauvency fought in teams captained by the same men as would have led them in war. The reason why Richard I licensed tournaments in England was, we are told, because 'he saw that the French were fiercer and better trained for war . . . and did not wish to see them reproach the knights of his kingdom for rudeness and lack of skill'.29 Baudouin de Conde, in his didactic Dit dou baceller, explains how the young man who wants to make his way should throw himself into the tournament, without thought to risk or expense: after making this debut, it will be time in due course for him to arm himself for service against the enemies of the cross.30 There is a clear anticipation here of Dubois's plea a few decades later, for the licensing of tournaments in the interest of preparation for the crusade.31 It is true that Baudouin de Conde does not mention courtly love in this context of the manner in which a young bachelor should seek to mount step by step towards the degree of preudhomme. But Conon de Bethune did, as he turned his eye east on the eve of the Third Crusade: 'there [in Syria] shall the knights great and small do deeds of honour and chivalry: thus a man shall win paradise and honour, and the love and praise of his beloved'.32 The tournament, which came to be a highly ceremonious and carefully regulated exercise, was the principal institutional expression of the ideals of secular chivalry. The tournament apart, the secular orders of chivalry were perhaps the next most striking formal expression of its ideal. On them, too, the ethos of courtly love left its clear imprint, though it is not nearly as sharp as in the case of the tournament. Literary influences marked their institutional shape, and the Round Table of Arthur, that famous court of love which was conceived by many quite literally as a secular order of knighthood, was regarded widely as their historical archetype. In some instances the stories of their foundation had amorous overtones. The story that the emblem of the Garter derived from the garter that the countess of Salisbury dropped at a ball at Calais, and which Edward III bound upon his leg, declaring 'honi soit qui mal y pense', is almost certainly apocryphal. There is, however good

29

R. Hewlett (ed.), Historia rerum Anglicarum of William ofNewburgh, RS, 82, 2 vols (London, 1885), ii, pp. 422-23. 30 B. de Conde, Le Dit dou Baceller, in A. Jubinal (ed.) Recueil des contes, fabliaux et autres pieces inedites (Paris, 1839), lines 340-41. 31 C.V. Langlois 'Une memoire inedite de Pierre Dubois: de justis et torneamentis', Revue historique, 41 (1889). 32 J. B£dier, Les chansons de croisade (Paris, 1909), pp. 32-35.

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reason to think that some such story circulated early.33 There seems no reason, in contrast, to doubt the story about the origin of the emblem of the Bavarian Order of the Tress34 — which is that it represents the trees (in illustrations it looks more like a pigtail)35 that the duke who founded the order cut from the hair of his beloved. The emblems and mottoes of other orders too have a similar amorous tone to them. The emblem of the Seigneur de Listenois's Order of the Golden Apple represented that apple which was the prize of the Judgement of Paris for beauty between the three goddesses of classical legend, as the Order's motto recalls, la plus belle me devoit avoir.36 The prisoner's chains that were the emblem of Jean de Bourbon's Order of the Per de Prisonnier were clearly meant to represent the chains of love, and among the obligations of its members was that they should uphold the honour of all gentlewomen and give succour to any who asked it of them.37 The duty to do honour to all womankind is a recurrent theme of the statutes of secular orders. The first signification of the Order of the Golden Shield, its founder Louis de Bourbon explained, was that those who bore it should live and die together as brothers in noble works of chivalry; the second that they should not abide in any place and hear the name of God blasphemed; the third that they should honour all womankind and not suffer ill to be spoken of them Tor after God great part of the honour of this world comes from them'.38 The honour of womankind and its defence was the chief avowed concern of Marshal Boucicault's Order of the Dame Blanche a VEscu Vert and its companions bound themselves for five years to the service of women, especially the defenceless and disinherited. Their secondary obligation, to deliver from their vows knights who had sworn to perform specific deeds of arms in the lists and could find no opponents to take up their jousting challenges, provides a direct connection with the world of the tournament, since such vows were often — perhaps most usually — taken in order to do honour to a lady. Boucicault himself at least, it would seem, lived up to

33 See M. Galway 'Joan of Kent and the Order of the Garter', University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 1 (1947), pp. 13-50. Miss Galway's contention that the story is not just early but authentic as well is not convincing. 34 M. Letts, The Diary ofJorgvonEhingen (London, 1929), p. 13. 35 A. Schu\tz,DeutschesLebenimXIVundXVJahrhundert(Vienna, 1892), p. 541. 36 See A. Bossuat, 'Un ordre de chevalerie Auvergnat: 1'ordre de la Pomme d'or', Bulletin historique et scientifique de I'Auvergne, 64 (1944), 83ff. 37 Statutes in L. Douet d'Arcq, Choix des pieces inedites relatives au regne de Charles VI (Paris, 1863), i, pp. 370-74. 38 D'Oronville, Chronique du bonDucLoys de Bourbon (Paris, 1876), pp. 12-13.

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the standard of courtliness toward women that his order demanded; his biographer tells us of how, when he was in Genoa and his companion told him that the two ladies whose curtsies he had returned with a salute were prostitutes, his reply came pat: 'Huguenin, I would rather have paid my salutation to ten harlots than have omitted them to one woman worthy of respect/ This is a general statement, just as the obligations imposed by the statutes of his order and of the Order of the Golden Shield and of other orders, too, were towards womankind in general. They remain powerful testimony to the amorous colour that courtly love had given to the traditional, ancient obligation of all knights to come to the defence of the widow, the orphan, the weak and the defenceless — the last two being categories in which womankind has come, under its influence, to be included with a new charged emphasis. There is a rather sharper and more precise amorous emphasis in the preamble to the statutes of one of the earliest of the secular orders of chivalry, the Order of the Band of Castile. Two principal objects inspired King Alfonso XI at its institution, this preamble declares, to honour chivalry and to maintain loyalty. For loyalty, it continues, 'is one of the greatest virtues that can be in any person, and especially in a knight, who ought to keep himself loyal in many ways. But the principal ways are two: first he ought to keep loyalty to his lord, and secondly to love truly her in whom he has placed his heart'.39 There is surely an echo here of the recommendation of Alfonso's predecessor, Alfonso the Wise of Castile, in his great legal collection, the Siete partidas, that knights should name the ladies that they serve 'so that their hearts may be the more encouraged, and that they may be the more ashamed to fail in their duty'.40 There is another interesting parallel as well, with the Court of Love founded by Charles VI and the French princes of the blood in 1401. Though this was a literary society meeting to compose and recite amorous ballads, its statutes are very reminiscent of those of an order of chivalry, and it too was founded to promote two virtues — loyalty again and, in this case, humility. The elected Prince of Love, its sovereign, was obliged to hold jousts, if requested, in honour of the ladies. And it visited the offences of those who blamed or misfamed womankind with the same chivalrous penalties that the chapters of orders of chivalry imposed on defaulting knights — expulsion from the society, and the

39

BN, MS Esp. 33; and see G. Daumet, 'L'ordre castillan de 1'Echarpe (Banda)', Bulletin hispanique, 25 (1923), pp. 21-32. 40 Siete partidas, ii, c. xxi, p. 22, quoted by Boase, Troubadour Revival, p. 36.

34

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public reversal of the arms of the defaulter 'so that the renown and glory of his name shall be shown to be extinct'.41 There is one instance that I have found where a secular order of chivalry is called on to act - almost - as a court of love. Sometime in the early 1350s Geoffrey de Charny, knight, addressed to the companions of King John of France's short-lived Order of the Star a series of questions concerning knotty points in the code of chivalry. Most of them concern martial aspects of the honour to be won in joust, tourney and war — for example, what the precise difference is between a bataille, a rencontre and a besogne, or how a man may leave a battle which is lost without reproach to his honour. Most, but not all, as witness this extraordinary query: Suppose there are two towns that are at war with one another, and that in each there is a garrison of one hundred men-at-arms, and between them there is a third town which is in truce, but there dwell as many fair damsels as in any town one may think of; and so it has fallen out that each man-at-arms of the two towns has found a sweetheart to suit him and each holds his sweetheart to be the best and loveliest of them all. Now it happens that the ladies whose sweethearts are in the one town write to them and bid them come tomorrow to rejoice and dance with them, and so the companions rise early, and spend the day and night feasting, and are well received in the manner that damsels should receive those that are their lovers. And in the morning the ladies will have none arm them but themselves, each him whom she loves best, and kisses him at parting, and bids him do well for the love of her. And meantime the ladies and sweethearts of the companions of the other town, knowing of all this rejoicing, have sent letters each to her lover, bidding them to come and that they shall have such greeting as never. And so the companions of the other town mount all armed, gay and joyful to be going to see their ladies. And as they are coming in the field they see their enemies who are coming from their sweethearts riding against them to combat them. Which party would you rather be in to have the stronger will to acquit yourselves with honour?42

I should add just one point to make clearer the significance of this remarkable question. All the indications are that political motives inspired the foundation of the Order of the Star, which was instituted to match the allure of the recently founded English Order of the Garter and to cement loyalty and commitment among the French nobility in the struggle against the Plantagenet. Many of its companions, including

41

For the regulations see C. Poitvin, 'La charte de la cour-d'amour', Bulletin de la acadevnie royale des sciences, et des lettres et de beaux-arts de Belgique, third series, 12 (1886), pp. 191-220. 42 Brussels, Bibliothfcque Royale, MS 11125, fo. 80.

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Charny himself, fell at Poitiers. In the circumstances it is not surprising that they should be invited to judge on knightly questions such as whether it is fitting for a besieging force to decline battle in the field if a relieving army should appear, and in what circumstances a man may be taken prisoner honourably. It is interesting, to say the least, to find them being invited to act as something very close to a court of love at the same time. Unfortunately no record survives of the answers that the knights of the Star gave to Charny's questions; perhaps they were never given. The real interest of his question, and of the way in which the preamble to the statutes of the Band refers to the obligations of a knight to 'her in whom he has placed his heart' is the context in which they place the obligations of courtly love. The purposes which the secular orders of chivalry were intended to serve were serious purposes, to cement loyalty to the founders and their lineage and so buttress their lordship, and to lend lustre to their lordship. In consequence the standards of conduct expected of the companions were exacting: they must be of noble birth and without reproach to their honour. In some cases the officers of the society were expected to keep records of the high deeds of the companions; in others those companions who had achieved special martial distinction were allowed to make augmentations to their badges and insignia in witness of their valour and worth. In other words, they were elite companies of martial knights.43 If their conduct invited reproach, they ran the risk of being expelled with ignominy from the company, and the sort of reproaches that their statutes mention in this context are real cowardice, real heresy, or real treason. To find the obligations of love being brought into this sort of company, as they are undoubtedly in the regulations of such orders as the Band and the Golden Shield, is very striking. There are a great many literary echoes in the statutes and ceremonial of these secular orders of chivalry. Here at least it would seem that the whole picture of the ideal example of knighthood offered by the romances has been transposed into the context of reality. The courtly, amorous aspect has not been left on one side as a purely literary convention. Andreas the Chaplain saw love as the source of all that was 43 M. Vale, War and Chivalry (London, 1981) discusses lucidly and perceptively the political significance and role of orders of chivalry; see especially ch. 2.1 have briefly discussed books of adventures below, pp. 72-75. For good examples of statutes with rules concerning augmentations see M. Vale, 'A Fourteenth-Century Order of Chivalry: The Tiercelet', English Historical Review, 82 (1967), pp. 332-41; and P.S. Lewis 'Une devise de chevalerie inconnue, cree par un comte de Foix: le Dragon', Annales du Midi, 76 (1964), pp. 77-84.

36

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

in saeculo bonum, good and honourable in this world's terms: the royal founder of the Order of the Band seems to have thought the same, too, and perhaps Geoffrey de Charny did as well. Geoffrey de Charny, besides writing his book of questions to which I have alluded, also wrote what he called a Livre de chevalerie, a serious handbook for the guidance of knights. Its theme is endeavour, for, as he says, 'he who achieves more is the more worthy'.44 He uses the same idea of scales of prowess that Baudouin de Conde has already introduced us to. Young men-at-arms who distinguish themselves in individual jousting deserve praise, he says, but those who distinguish themselves in the riskier melee of the tourney deserve higher praise. These in turn must give way before those who have won honour in war for 'war is a graver business and more honourable than all other manners of arms'. Thus he leads us out of the tourneying world of play into the truly grim real world of warfare. But he does not leave courtly love behind as he traces the way in which each step of martial achievement should lead on to further endeavour. For we must look behind achievement to the motive that inspires it, and that, he says, is why it is good for a man-at-arms to be in love par amours. If he is, he will seek ever higher renown for the honour that it will do to his lady. 'Think what her feelings will be, when the man whom she has chosen in her heart enters a room, and she sees all men, knights, lords and esquires pressing to honour him on account of his bonne renommee, she knowing within herself that his love is hers.'45 Charny's advice, that it is good for a martial man to be in love par amours, does not stand alone; it is given by others too. It was similar advice that his father gave to Jacques de Lalaing, the flower of Philip the Good's knighthood, when he was setting out on his career. 'Know,' said old Guillaume, 'that few gentlemen come to high estate of prowess and good renown, save if they have some lady or damsel of whom they are amorous . . . but take heed, my son, that it be not light love, for so should you be for ever held in great villainy and reproach.'46 'I wot,' declared the lady of Anthoine de La Sale's novel Petit Jehan de Saintre, which was clearly written as a knightly courtier's handbook, 'I wot of many that by being true lovers and right loyally serving their ladies, are come to such 44

G. de Charny, Livre de chevalerie, in K. de Lettenhove (ed.), Oeuvres de Froissart, i, pt iii, (Brussels, 1873), pp. 464, 465, 468, 469. 45 Ibid., pp. 483-85. 46 Le livre desfaits deJacques de Lalaing, in K. de Lettenhove (ed.), Oeuvres de G. Chastellain, viii (Brussels, 1866), p. 15.

Chivalry and Courtly Love

37

high honour that men shall ever tell of their deeds; and save they had been so, they would be of no more account than a simple commoner.'47 'Love is that which chiefly animates young hearts to undertake the honourable pursuit of chivalry . . . love removes fear and makes men bold, causing them to be oblivious of all sorrow and to take pleasure in all the suffering endured for the sake of the loved one' — this from the didactic prologue to the book of the deeds of Marshal Boucicault.48 The question is, therefore, not whether the advice of Charny and these others is typical; it is whether it is more than a genuflexion to literary tradition, whether it was seriously meant and taken seriously outside the world of play and ceremony by men engaged in the hard business of war service. This is a tremendously difficult question to answer, because the historical record — and especially the medieval historical record — is very inadequate when it comes to the gauging of what is here in issue, the impact of emotion and its relation to action. The matter in question is too subjective, too intrinsically personal, to be susceptible in any sort of way to quantitative analysis. We cannot hope for tables, the most we can hope for are glimpses. Moreover, because the ladies that inspired men, or were supposed to have inspired them, were so often not their wives but surreptitious lovers, we are often, in the glimpses that we are offered, denied even a name for the second party. What I want to suggest in the last part of this essay is that even so there are some glimpses, just enough to hint that the sort of advice that we have heard the chivalrous sages giving cannot be written off as nothing more than what I have called a genuflexion to literary convention. It is perhaps unfortunate that the best glimpses come from chivalrous biographies and character sketches — a genre directly influenced by romance, and therefore open to the suspicion of having conventionalised its history. All the same, I think there is just enough there to suggest something genuine in the background, at the least. Boucicault's biographer, as we should expect, is quite clear that his hero was an exemplary lover after the pattern of romance, devoted to the service of a lady. 'We can see,' he adds, 'how love prompts men to high deeds from the stories of Lancelot and Tristram, and we can see the same from those noble men whom the service of love has inspired to valour in France in our

47

A. de La Sale, Le Petit Jehan de Saintre, ch. 3; trans. I. Gray (London, 1931), p. 41. Le livre desfaictz du bon Messire Jehan Le Maingre, dit Boucicaut, M. Petitot (ed.), Collection des memoires relatifs a Vhistoire de France, vi (Paris, 1825), pp. 392-93. 48

38

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

own day, as Sir Othon de Grandson and the good Constable Louis de Sancerre, and many others too/49 The mention of these others, named and unnamed, apart from his hero, gives the author's word here a weight that it might otherwise lack. What he says of Boucicault and these others is very reminiscent of what Thomas of Saluzzo says of the Italian condottiero Galeas of Mantua. Bel,joli, amoureux — that is how he stands as Thomas pictures him, recounting his high deeds; how he was wounded at the siege of Saluzzo, fought for the French in the English wars, and served for a while in the east under the king of Cyprus. All this he undertook, Thomas says, Tor the sake of a lady of high beauty, whom he loved par amours'. 'Know that whatever trial of arms is proposed to him you will always find him ready: if he lives he will be one to compare with the good Sir Tristram of Lyonesse or with Sir Palamedes.'50 The most telling pictures of courtly love at work in the real world in this genre of literature are surely those in Diaz da Gomez's biography of the Spanish hero, Pero Nino the Victorious. Here is the story, for instance, of how, when Pero Nino was embarking at Corcia on his voyage to seek out Saracen pirates, an old lord bid him and his men to dinner, where a peacock was served. 'Young men,' their host said to them, 'I see you are all in love: therefore it is fitting that on this bird you should swear to do deeds of arms in honour of your ladies.' 'I will not write here all the vows that were made', says da Gomez, 'but I can tell you that the captain led his men to places where each could fulfil his vow, and most of them did.'51 Here again is the story of Sir Charles de Savoisy, who served with Pero, and who was exiled for a time from the French court, because, it was said, of the love that he bore for a certain high-born lady.52 Above all, there is the story of Pero's own affair with the lady of Serifontaine, who with her husband entertained the captain while he was sojourning in France, after his raids upon the English in the Channel. There are delightful vignettes of the life of the castle, of the Lady's courtesy to the captain, of the rides on which she and her damsels escorted the Spaniards into the countryside, and of the dancing after supper. That was how the affection between Pero and the lady was founded: then, after

49

Ibid., p. 393. Extract from Thomas of Saluzzo's 'Le chevalier errant' (unpublished MS, BN, MS Fr 12559), printed by C. Legrand d'Aussy, Notes et extraits des MSS de la Bibliotheque nationale, v, p. 576. 3] G. Diaz da Gomez, The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Nino, trans. J. Evans (London, 1928), pp. 53-54. 52 Ibid., pp. 107-8. 50

Chivalry and Courtly Love

39

Pero had left, the news came that her husband, the old Admiral Renaut de Trie, was dead: and it was agreed between them that she would from now on hold him her lover, and he her. When it looked as if Pero must fight in a joust a Voutrance, she wrote anxiously to dissaude him, but 'if it was a matter concerning his honour he should tell her what things he should need and she would furnish him most fully'. 'And here the author says', breaks in da Gomez, who was witness to all this as Pero's companion, 'that if it is true that men in love are most valiant and do greater deeds and are better men for the love of their sweethearts, what must he have been who had such a sweetheart as Jeanette de Bellengues, Madame de Serifontaine?'53 Pero Nino's affair with Jeanette came to no happy ending: time passed, he aspired to a still higher marriage in his homeland; she wrote releasing him from his vows. The echo of lost and forgotten emotions whose genuine ring is hard to deny lingers in the telling of the tale, nevertheless. Let it be an adieu to the world of great knights, and let us for a moment turn to a record of lesser men and less famous names. At the end of the fourteenth century Jacques de Hemricourt, a lawyer, put together in his old age a great genealogical record of the nobility of his homeland, that corner of the Low Countries called Hesbaye, close to Liege. The men that he wrote about lived a good deal closer to the soil than the Boucicaults and Pero Ninos, and he told of them as keepers of sheep and owners of mills as well as warriors. Something of the imprint of courtly love had touched their world too, all the same. One catches an echo of it, for instance, in what he has to say of Gilhes de Many, who loved arms and won renown, so that 'when one meets an old nun, or an aged lady who in her youth loved par amours, one may hear her say, remembering his repute, "A blessing upon the good squire, Gilhes de Many" '.54 One catches the same echo in his notice of Renart de Falcomont, who was the companion in arms of Henry of Batersen, and 'for the beauty and bounty of the sister of the said lord of Batersen and for her bonne amours and company Renart took her to wife: and from them issued the most noble progeny for prowess, beauty and gentle courage from the Meuse to the Rhine'.55 And the same echo is there, once again, in his account of the founding of the lineage of the lords of Warfusez, with which he himself claimed connection: of how the old 53 54

Ibid., p. 149. C. de Borman and A. Bayot (ed.), Oeuvres de Jacques de Hemricourt (Brussels, 1910), i, p.

430.

55

Ibid., p. 159.

40

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

lord, widowed, took orders, but kept up his household and hospitality and raised his daughter, teaching her 'all a noble damsel ought to know, how to work in silk andfil d'or, to read her hours and romances of battles, and to play at chess'.56 And so it was that when the French knight Rasselas alle Barbe came to Huy and came across the old lord and his daughter when he was out hawking, he fell in love with her and married her: and that was the commencement of the new line of Warfusez. Marriages may usually have been arranged in those times: Hemricourt here reminds us that ideally even then a love match was what men dreamt of— as does Chretien de Troyes also in his account of how Erec first met and loved Enide and she him, again in the house of an old knight, without male heirs.57 One can cull a great many glimpses of courtly love in action from the pages of another kind of source, from the chivalrous chronicles, but they are mostly only glimpses. There is Froissart's story of the English knights at Valenciennes in 1340, who each wore a patch over one eye because of the vows they had taken, each to see with only one eye until he had performed some deed of arms worthy of his lady.58 But we do not know any more of them, not even their names, let alone those of their ladies. There is Barbour's story, of Sir John Weberton, who had sworn to guard the castle of Lanark for a year, as a trial sufficiently perilous to be worthy of her he loved (he died within the term, defending the castle against Sir James Douglas).59 Somewhat similar is the story that Sir Thomas Gray tells in his Scalacronica of Sir William Marmion and his gold helmet, which his mistress had given him, bidding him to make it known in the glorious pass of danger. When Alexander Mowbray and his Scots appeared before Norham Castle, Marmion rode in amongst them alone, and very nearly lost his life before Gray's father, the constable of the castle, came out and rescued him.60 These are all stories of real men, running real risks, and whose aspirations seem, in part at least, to have been coloured by an erotic impetus to do homage in chivalrous fashion to a courtly befoved. Other and similar stories could be culled from similar sources, but like these they would be glimpses only — significant glimpses nevertheless, because they do flash across the scene, even if

56

Ibid., pp. 6-9. C. de Troyes, Erec et Enide, lines 393ff. 58 K. de Lettenhove (ed.), Oeuvres de Froissart, ii, p. 372. 59 J. Harbour, The Bruce, ed. W.W. Skeat, Scottish Text Society, 8 (1894; repr. 1966), lines 493ff. 60 T. Gray, Scalacronica, ed. J. Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1836), pp. 145ff. 57

Chivalry and Courtly Love

41

only momentarily, figures who have carried something from romance out into the world of history. They are also significant for the very definite tone that they give to the historical record when they do appear, which is a romantic one. I think that the best brief summary of it that I have found may perhaps be this extract from Navigiero's account of the war of Granada in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella: all the nobility of Spain was there, and each sought to emulate the other and earn more renown . . . In addition to the competitive spirit which spurred each man to do more than he was able, the queen with her court breathed courage into every heart. There was scarce a cavalier who was not in love with one of the queen's ladies. Being present, these ladies were reliable witnesses of each man's achievements, frequently handing them their weapons as they went out to do battle, and frequently offering several of them a token of favour . . . There is surely no man so base, so weak hearted or so lacking in strength who would not have vanquished the stoutest adversary, or who would not sooner have lost his life a thousand times, than have returned dishonoured to the lady of his love.61

For me this quality of tone is important because, as I have said, my object in rehearsing these glimpses and stories has not been to offer statistical proof of a point which, as I see it, defies proof by that means, but rather to offer a tonal impression. The impact, outside literature, of courtly love, and its significance for the historian, are not to be traced in terms of this or that or those individual lives: they cannot be. Its importance has to be traced rather in terms of psychological associations. The role which we have seen love portrayed as playing in the chivalrous context of arms and war is, over and again, that of a spur to virtue and achievement. That is precisely the role that Andreas and the troubadours originally gave it, as a spiritually ennobling force at a secular level — to which the transposition of their ideas into chivalrous romance gave a particular slant, focusing this ennobling role in the active context of martial adventure. The effect, we can now see, was to suffuse a whole aspect of human activity, and a very important one, with strong erotic undercurrents of very considerable psychological potency. The association here established was, I think, a new one, certainly new in its explicit precision. You will not find its direct equivalent in Homer, or in Vergil, or in Germanic lays or in the chansons de geste. It has proved, though, to be powerful and enduring: the link that chivalry and courtly love together forged between the winning of approbation by honourable acts and the

61

Quoted by Boase, Troubadour Revival, p. 115.

42

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

winning of the heart of a beloved woman is one that western culture has never quite shaken free of. It is a conception that has had and still has power outside literature as well as in fiction because it harnesses together two very active and powerful forces in human life, self-esteem and sexuality. Where the influence of courtly love has been most marked is, I think, in the way that it has contributed to that fierce, combative and competitive individualism that has been a particular feature of western culture. Courtly love meant the service of one particular woman by one particular man; that is what distinguishes its service from the service of the state, or thepatria, or of any corporate association — from every form of service except perhaps that of the feudal seigneur which was equally individual and which was so often the poets' analogue for it. Subsequent western culture has been marked by a similarly strong individualistic streak — indeed, no other civilisation has built such an articulate and sophisticated cult about the individual odyssey of the adventurer as has that of western Europe. Courtly love, in the early days, gave a very special and very powerful secular sanction to that form of individualism, and has left it with us, as one of the most remarkable features of our heritage.

3

Brotherhood-in-Arms Modern scientific historians have had very little to say about the curious relationship which in the middle ages existed between men who called one another brothers-in-arms. The reason for this neglect is probably quite simple; the modern historian relies on record evidence, and record evidence has very little indeed to say of them. Most of the references to them which are well known come either from romances of chivalry or from chronicles with a chivalrous bias, and hence in modern times it has been literary scholars who have paid most attention to them. What these literary references show is that brotherhood-in-arms was some sort of very close relationship, established formally between two persons of military status. Because of their nature, it has usually been taken to be a mere piece of chivalrous extravaganza. It is, however, unwise to assume that anything which writers of medieval romance took seriously was a matter of indifference in practice, simply because official records, whose survival is notoriously chancy, do not underline its importance. It will be my contention that the nature of this relationship is illuminating for historians as well as literary scholars, because it throws light not only on the complex situations of chivalrous romances, but also on the kind of personal bonds which, in the later middle ages, men of gentle birth understood and wished to contract. It may nevertheless be wise to start with the literary evidence, for certainly the most famous brothers-in-arms of the middle ages, Palamon and Arcite, as it might be, or Amis and Amiloun, were fictional, not historical characters. Besides, literary description elucidates the contemporary attitude; it tells us what was understood by the relation, which formal records will not indicate and may conceal. I have found two literary descriptions which seem to me to express its meaning for the

44

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

individuals concerned particularly well. One comes from the lips of one of the knights in the romance of Perceforest: We have been brothers-in-arms from the very beginning, and we have been and still are bound to one another in such a way, that each will stand by the other to the death if need be, saving his honour, and thus true affection has brought me to his assistance, to aid him by my body and with all my goods, as he would do the same for me if I had need of him.1

The other is from the story of Amis and Amiloun: On a day the childer war and wight Trewthes togider thai gan plight, While they might live and stond; That both bi day and bi night, In wele and wo, in wrong and right That thai schuld frely fond, To hold togider at everi nede, In word, in werk, in wille, in dede, Where that thai were in lond.2

These two passages gave an initial picture of what was meant by the bond between brothers-in-arms. It was a relation based on the reciprocal oath of knights, upon the faith of their body and their honour, to aid and succour one another in their every enterprise. The stories of Amis and Amiloun and of Palamon and Arcite indicate the all-pervading nature of this oath. It meant implicit trust. Amiloun could quite happily allow his companion to climb into bed with his wife, without a qualm for his own honour or her reputation. He could demand from his brother any abstinence, and any sacrifice, which did not involve dishonour. His association with him took precedence over every other, save those of blood and of liege homage. As his cousin, Arcite in the Knight's Tale might have been Palamon's rival in love without any disparagement; as his brother-in-arms he could not be, for they were sworn upon their knighthood: That never, for to dyen in the peyne, Til that the deeth departe shal us tweyne, Neither of us in love to hindren other, 1

Quoted by La Curne de Ste-Palaye, Memoires de I'ancienne chevalrie, (Paris, 1759), i, p. 276 n.28. 2 Amis and Amiloun, lines 145-53, in Weber, Metrical Romances (Edinburgh, 1810), ii, p. 375.

Brotherhood-in-Arms

45

Ne in non other cas, my leve brother; But that thou sholdest trewely forthren me In every cas, and I shal forthren thee.3

Thus Arcite was sworn of Palamon's counsel, and if he stood in his way he was dishonoured, a traitor to his faith who deserved to die the death. In all matters of arms, he was to all intents the brother of his sworn companion. One must remember here that matters of arms in the middle ages meant a great deal more than is conveyed by the modern adjective 'military'. To be a man's sworn companion in such matters involved one not only in the risks he ran as a soldier, but in all that affected his honour, his fortune and his emotional entanglements. The bond of brotherhood, moreover, did not rest on a mere chivalrous promise; it was a legal bond to which enforceable law gave reality. Under military law the sworn companion genuinely was a brother, and as such he became the heir to his companion's military fortune. When the companion died, he had a legal claim to any of his gains of war (prisoners, booty and so on) which at the time of his death were in re naturae. As Simon, advocate in the parlement of Paris, put it, in the case of Thibaut des Termes, the Bourg de Mascaras and others claiming shares in the ransom of the seigneur de Chateau villain: 'par 1'usage de guerre la part du feu Fort Espice appartient au Bourg de Mascaras, par ce que estoient freres et compagnons d'armes, et ce qu'ils gaignent ensemble vient au survivant'.4 A relationship which creates rights under which one may sue in an ordinary court of law is clearly something more than an artificial pose of chivalrous etiquette. This is in fact what we should expect, seeing the very varied types of person who in their time were known as brothers-inarms. They counted indeed princes, for whom chivalrous extravagances were a daily pastime, but the names of some even of these are surprising. The objects with which Charles the Bold and Louis XI entered on this bond were surely diplomatic rather than merely chivalrous.5 It was the strength and reality of the bond, surely, and not its artificiality, which led peacemakers to encourage John the Fearless and Louis of Orleans,6 or 3

Chaucer, Knight's Tale, lines 275-80. AN, XIa, 4802, fo. 138. 5 For their contract of fraternity see Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', no. 21, 'des adoptions d'honneur en frere', in Glossarium, ed. Favre (1887), x, p. 69, col. 2. 6 See the letter of Charles of Orleans, describing the reconciliation of John the Fearless and Louis, in Jean Juvenel des Ursins, Histoire de Charles VI, ed. Buchon, Choix des chroniques et memoires sur 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1838), v, p. 450, which states that they 'jurerent et promirent solenellement vraye fraternite et compagnie d'armes'. 4

46

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

John of Brittany and Olivier de Clisson,7 to become brothers-in-arms; and warmongers to encourage the dukes of Clarence and Orleans in 1412 to establish the same relation.8 For captains like Du Guesclin and Calverley, or Florimond de PEsparre and the Captal de Buch, as for humble esquires and men-at-arms, the relationship probably appealed because it gave a legal basis to a profitable commercial partnership. For a variety of reasons, and for persons in all walks of the military profession, brotherhood-in-arms was a commonplace connection. It was also a very real one. Two questions therefore arise at this point. Firstly, by what means did men establish this form of association with fellow-soldiers, and secondly, what specific conditions did the association imply? Du Cange, in his dissertation on Joinville, mentions religious ceremonies by which fraternity-in-arms was established. The two future companions heard mass together, and at the solemn moment of the service the host was divided in two and administered to them. The example of this ritual which he quotes from Hugo Falcandus does not actually mention brotherhood-in-arms, but the words suggest at least an essentially similar relationship. 'It is said besides', says Hugo of the two persons involved (Maio and the archbishop of Palermo), 'that they contracted a fraternal bond between them, after the manner of the Sicilians, swearing that each should help the other in every way, and that alike in prosperity and adversity both should be of one mind, one will, and one counsel, and that whoever injured the one should incur the offence of the other.'9 This relation was cemented by their taking the eucharist together in the manner described. Though Du Cange's supporting references are all from Byzantine sources, and their relevance to western practice questionable, the relation described resembles so closely that of brothers-in-arms that it may be taken to be the same. Moreover the self-same ritual seems to have been followed when the reconciliation of John the Fearless and Louis of Orleans was reinforced by their becoming brothers-in-arms. On this occasion, according to Juvenel des Ursins, 'they heard the mass together, and received the body of Our Lord, and before doing this they swore true affection and brotherhood to each other'.10

7 Chronique du Religieux de St-Denis, xiv, ch. 15, Belleguat, Documents in£dits sur 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1840), ii, pp. 114-16. 8 Their contract is printed in L. Douet d'Arq, Prices inedites sur le regne de Charles VI, p. 359, M6moires pour servir a 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1863). 9 Quoted by Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, x, p. 68. 10 Jean Juvenel des Ursins, Historie de Charles VI, p. 437.

Brotherhood-in-Arms

47

An alternative ceremony which sometimes sealed the bond of fraternity seems as purely pagan as this one was purely Christian. The ritual here involved each of the future companions opening a vein, and their drinking together afterwards their mingled blood. This was a primitive and savage ritual; it is attributed by George Pachymeres to the nomads of southern Russia,11 and by Matthew Paris to the native Irish, with whom it is a sign 'that henceforward they shall be coupled by an indissoluble bond, like that of kinship'.12 But it was certainly also used on one or two occasions by crusading princes in contracting alliances with Saracens; the count of Tripoli is for instance said to have gone through this ritual when he allied with Saladin.13 Perhaps more striking is the testimony of a knight who spoke with Joinville in the east. This knight had heard tell of how once the emperor of Constantinople and his people, in order to conquer the emperor of the Greeks, whose name was Vatatzes, allied with a king who was called the king of the Cumans. And this knight said of the Cumans, that when they wish to make an alliance, in order to obtain some surety of the fraternal bond, that each [of the persons involved] has himself bled, and then gives of his blood to his fellow to drink in token of fraternity, and they say they are brothers and of one blood . . . and so our people had to do with the people of this king.14

La Curne de Ste-Palaye takes this further, and finds a reference in one of the romances of Lancelot to three Christian knights who mingled their blood and agreed to stand by one another as brethren.15 Although it would not do to suggest that this ceremony was normal in the compacts of brothers-in-arms in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it has rather more importance than as a mere piece of picturesque ritual. It illustrates the extremely primitive ideas which underlay such compacts. A brother-in-arms really was more than a sworn companion; in idea at least, he was one of one's blood and kin. This explains the strength of the relationship, the oath to help the companion in weal and woe, right and wrong, and its precedence over all other associations, except the genuine ties of blood and the tie of liege homage which

11

Quoted by Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, x, p. 67, col. 1. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora RS (London, ?), iii, p. 365. 13 MS chronicle quoted by Du Cange 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, p. 67, col. 2. 14 Joinville, Histoire de St Louis, ch. 97. 15 La Curne de Ste-Palaye, Memoires de Vancienne chevalrie, i. p. 227. 12

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

overrode even them. The ritual of mingling one's blood with that of a sworn companion takes us back beyond the feudal world of tenurial bonds, into the primitive world where every bond is assimilated with that of kinship, and the lord claims for the death of a companion of his comitatus the wer normally due to his relations, or else inherits the feud which would otherwise be theirs. This primitive ceremony is important as illustrating the ideas underlying the relation between brothers-in-arms, but it was not the normal method, in Christian countries, of establishing such compacts. These were in practice based usually on the verbal assurance of a solemn oath, or were supported by the interchange of sealed letters. As the terms of the former are seldom defined precisely, it is these latter, where they survive, which are really revealing. They are unfortunately extremely rare. Three, however, are actually printed in one place or another, all of them involving famous persons. In one, dating from the time of the treaty of Peronne, Louis XI and Charles the Bold constitute themselves brothers-in-arms;16 another, dating from the time of the Anglo-Armagnac alliance of 1412, establishes the same relation between the dukes of Clarence and Orleans;17 the third is between Du Guesclin and Olivier de Clisson.18 Other agreements may possibly survive, though they are not known, for it is certain that in time past there must have been many letters similar to these I have mentioned.19 The nephew of Guillaume de Flavy, the famous captain of Compiegne, spoke for instance for the lettres defraternite which his uncle had from the marshal de Rieux;20 and Palamon, in the Knight's Tale, speaks of the 'bond and seurtee' of his brother-in-arms Arcite.21 Ordinarily, these letters have disappeared in the course of time; those which do survive, however, will serve as our best guide to the conditions normally imposed by the relationship.

16

Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, p. 69, col. 2. Douet d'Arq, Pieces inedites, p. 359. 18 Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, pp. 69-70. 19 A fourth written agreement, which survives in MS (Magdalen College, Oxford, Southwark Deed, 213). This agreement is between two English esquires, John Winter and Nicholas Molyneux, and was analysed by K.B. MacFarlane in a classic article, 'A Business-Partnership in War and Administration, 1421-1445', English Historical Review, 78 (1963), pp. 290-308; reprinted in idem, England in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1981), pp. 151-74. It was struck during the reign of Henry V. 20 P. Champion, Guillaume de Flavy, capitaine de Compiegne (Paris, 1906), piece justificative, no. 71, p. 219. The agreement between John the Fearless and Louis of Orleans is also said to have been validated by sealed letter, cf. Jean Juvenel des Ursins, p. 450. 21 Chaucer, Knight's Tale, line 476. 17

Brotherhood-in-Arms

49

It is therefore worth giving the full text of one of the agreements mentioned above. I have chosen that between Clarence and Orleans, both because it is the shortest, and because, being persons of different allegiances, it illustrates some of the limitations on the relationship created. It reads as follows: I, Thomas, the king's son, duke of Clarence, swear and promise on the faith of my body, and by all the oaths which a preudhomme can make, that I will be good and true kinsman, brother and companion-in-arms to my very dear and very beloved cousin, Charles duke of Orleans, and that I will serve him, aid him, counsel him, and protect his honour and well-being in all ways and to the best of my powers, saving and excepting my allegiance reserved to my sovereign lord the king. And this oath I promise to keep loyally and fulfil to the utmost of my ability, and never, whatever may happen, will I go against it. And in witness hereof I have written this letter, and signed it with my hand and sealed it with my seal, this twelfth day of November, the year 1412.

Beside this letter should, I think, be set for comparison the only version I know of the terms of a verbal oath between brothers-in-arms. Though it comes from a fictional source, the famous romance of Tiran le Blanc, the formality of its expression suggests known and familiar phraseology. It runs as follows: I, Escariano, by the grace of God King of Ethiopia, as a faithful Christian and a true Catholic, with my hand upon the Holy Gospels swear to you Tiran le Blanc that I will be to you good and loyal brother-in-arms, as long as I live; I will be the friend of your friend and the enemy of your enemy; and for the sake of brotherhood I will share with you all the goods I have now and may acquire. And if by ill fortune you chance to be taken prisoner in war, I will adventure my life and goods for your deliverance. And I put myself on my honour now and henceforth to perform all those things which pure and true brotherhood requires of me, in your behalf.22

The general similarity between these two agreements is clear, though the second is a trifle more precise. That between Louis XI and Charles the Bold is almost the same as the one between Clarence and Orleans, but expressed in more ceremonious language. The agreement between Du Guesclin and Clisson does however add something to this picture. In the first place, in this case we have not just one letter but two, one made out in the name of each man and each expressing identical conditions. In this respect their agreement is similar to an indenture. Further, two 22 Juan

Martorel, Tirante lo Bianco (Vinegia, 1538), fo. 213.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

conditions are set out which are not expressly made in the other two printed contracts, though one is at least implied in the promise of Escariano to Tiran. They are the two final ones. Item, we wish and consent that you shall have the half of all profits and rights which may fall to our lot, both from prisoners taken by us or our men in war, as from lands ransomed. Item, if we obtain knowledge of any matter by which you might incur damage or blame, we will acquaint you of it as quickly as possible. Item [they only add], we will guard and keep you as a brother should.

A few points here require to be added about the general terms of the relation between brothers-in-arms. First, it should be noted that although all four of the agreements so far mentioned were for life, this was not a necessary condition. The association could be established for a given term or even for a particular campaign. For instance, a Luxembourg knight, Philippe de Hernoisez, writing to a relative, the lady of Vermy, who had begged him to release a prisoner of war, replied that he would do his best for him; but she must know that he and Wautier de Warquenheuse were sworn 'compagnons ensemble de la chevauchee qui fut fait ce mercredy prochainement passe' (when the man was taken) and he therefore could not act without the advice and counsel of his fellow.23 This goes some way to explaining how it was that one man could have more than one brother-in-arms. He could even have more than one at a time, presumably on the understanding that the original brother had either consented to the association of a third companion or had abandoned his own connection. Du Guesclin is known to have been the brother-in-arms first of Hugh Calverley,24 then to Olivier de Clisson,25 and then to Louis de Sancerre.26 Fort Espice, the Armagnac routier, was brother-in-arms both to the Bourg de Mascaras27 and to Arnald Guillem le Bourgignan.28 These last three were probably also associated with the other captains with whom they nearly always operated, Thibaut des Termes and Galoby de Panassac. 23

AD, Nord, B 18822, fo. 248. La Curne de Ste-Palaye, Memoires de I'ancienne chevalrie, i, p. 281 (pt iii, n. 31, quoting the prose life of the Constable published by Menard). 25 Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'historie de St Louis'. 26 Chronique duReligieux de St-Denis, xxiii, ch. 14, ed. Belleguat, iii, pp. 64-65. 27 AN, Xla4802, fo. 138. 28 Cf. evidence of Jean L'Eschelleur before the commission investigating the plot to betray Luneville to the Burgundians in 1452 (BN, Collection de Lorraine, 9, fo. HOff). He stated that he had served continuously under Arnald Guillem 'jusqu'a ce que Fort Espice vint ou dit lieu de Montargy devers le dit Arnault Guillaume et qu'il se fit son frere d'armes'. 24

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This reveals the relevance from our point of view of an institution based on an association very similar to that of fraternity in arms. This was the confraternity or league of knights. In certain respects, it is true, these associations seem rather to resemble orders of chivalry. Like them they had drawn up for themselves statutes; they held chapters, and some even adopted devices, as did the fraternity of the Golden Apple, founded by the seigneur de Listenois among his friends in Auvergne in 1395,29 and the fraternity of arms of St George, founded by Philibert de Molans of Rougemont in the 1430s.30 In other respects, however, these confraternities were more like extended brotherhoods-in-arms. In the first place, each member was of equal rank, 'without any regard to dignity, wealth, lineage, knighthood, or any other thing which gives preeminence', as Philibert de Molans' statutes put it. Their oath was to one another, not to the head of the order; to quote from the statutes of the Golden Apple, they promised 'to be good and loyal companions together, and serve one another envers tons et contre tons'. This oath of mutual aid was subject to the usual limitations; it excepted the members' allegiance to the king and his officers, their individual liege lords, and their kindred. The basis of the association, moreover, was not admission, with its obsequious implications, but the reciprocal promises of all the persons incorporated. On closer inspection, what appear to be the statutes of these confraternities seem indeed to be in many ways more like the terms of an alliance. This is suggested, at least, in the last sentence of the orders of a confraternity of Quercy knights founded at Carcassone in 1380: 'and for greater surety, each of the above lords shall seal these present covenants with his proper seal, of which covenants each shall have letters one from another'.31 Their agreement was thus a form of contract, validated by the exchange of sealed letters in the same way as, for instance, an indentured contract of service. The knights of the Golden Apple did not, it is true, exchange letters, but each set his seal

29 The order had originally fourteen members, and was founded at Clermont on New Year's Day 1394. Its statutes are printed in A. Jacotin, Titres de la maison de Poligny (Paris, 1898), ii, p. 172. See also A. Bossuat, 'Un ordre de chevalerie auvergnat: la Pomme d'Or', Bulletin historique et scientifique de I'Auvergne, 64, p. 83f). 30 Gollut, Memoires historiques de la Republique Sequanoise et des princes de la Franche Comte, ed. A. Javel (Arbois, 1864), cols 1455-59. The order was probably founded between 1435 and 1440 (col. 1455, 2). The original statutes are not extant, but from papers which Gollut saw in the sixteenth century he concluded that they were essentially the same as those of 1485 (cols 1440-42). 31 L. d'Alauzier, 'Une alliance de seigneurs de Quercy en 1380', Annales du Midi, 64 (1952), pp. 149-51. The statutes are here printed in full.

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to the original covenant. Going back to the 1380 league, one finds another point made clear, that the bond constituted was to be regarded, as in the case of brothers-in-arms, as fraternal: 'And in all matters, each shall work for the well-being of the others in every way he can, as if they were brothers germane.' This shows clearly that we are here dealing with an association similar to that of brothers-in-arms. So far we have been dealing with conditions which are common to most of the agreements between brothers-in-arms and among the confraternities. We must now turn to those conditions which are mentioned only in certain of the agreements in question, to see how far they can be said to be typical. There are two sorts of condition which seem to be involved here: in the first place there are certain items of a purely military nature; and then there are other obligations of a rather more general kind. I shall take these in turn. Among the military conditions, the first and the most striking is that which occurs in the agreement between Du Guesclin and Clisson, that each shall share equally with the other his gains of war. This appears, among brothers-in-arms proper, to be normal. It is a point raised from time to time in the courts in military cases revolving about ransom and spoil. I have already quoted the case of Thibaut des Termes v. Chateauvillain before the Parlement of Paris in 1439. In another case before the same court in 1448 one Guillame Maillart sued the executors of one Guillaume de Chermont for a half share in all rights acquired by the latter in the ransom of Robert de Vere, which he claimed 'modo fraternitatis et societatis armourum'.32 Much earlier, in 1386, John Harpeden as seneschal of Guienne, had to consider the claim of Florimont de 1'Esparre against the heir of the Captal de Buch, to a half share in the ransom of Roger de Belfort, whom the Captal had taken prisoner while they were brothers-in-arms.33 In 1371 we find Ralph de Rayneval writing to the lady of Dampierre that he cannot release to her Simon Burley, a prisoner in his hands and whom she wished to acquire to exchange against her husband, 'absque consensu Enguerrandi Duedin militis, ipsius Radulphi socii in armis'.34 When, a few years before this, Du Guesclin and Calverley parted in Spain, Calverley is said to have

32

AN, Xla 79, fo. 279 r and v. BN, Collection Doat, 203, fo. 40f. 34 Ralph's letter is mentioned in the parlement proceedings, when he and Enguerrand were disputing with the lady of Dampierre their rights in Simon Burley, who had been her prisoner but had escaped and been retaken by their men, AN, Xla 22, fo. 259f. 33

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offered to submit full accounts of his spoils in order to make a settlement, but Du Guesclin waived this formality, declaring he would trust to his word.35 There seems therefore to be ample evidence that this rule, that all spoil captured during the partnership should be shared equally, was a customary legal condition understood in any compact between brother s-in-arms. It reminds us at the same time forcibly of the element of commercial partnership in such compacts. The terms of the oath of brotherhood given in the romance ofTiran le Blanc lay down a condition reciprocal to this, that the brother shall contribute to his companion's ransom, if he has the misfortune to be taken prisoner. In practice, this would mean that, as the advantages of war were potentially doubled by the connection, the liabilities were also halved. This same condition is found also in the statutes of Philibert de Molan's confraternity of St George; each member is to contribute towards the ransoms of any members who may be prisoners of war. There are signs that this condition, too, was a regular one. Calverley is certainly reported to have assisted Du Guesclin with his ransom after Najera, and the words which the prose life of the constable attributes to the Englishman suggest that he acted here under the obligations of a brother-in-arms. 'Bertran', he says, 'we were companions together in the Spanish adventure in the way of prisoners and spoil, for which I never rendered you any account and I know well that I am your debtor in this, a matter on which I would have counsel; but at least let me assist you now with thirty thousand doblas of gold.'36 Artus de Richemont, again, is noted as having been particularly active in the negotiation of the ransom of Rene of Anjou, taken at the 'journee douleureuse de Bulgneville', 'because he was his brother-in-arms'.37 In any case, even without such substantiation, this condition would seem to be implied as part of the general mutual promise of aid and succour exchanged by brothers-inarms, and which they seem to have taken very seriously. This general promise brings us up against another most interesting condition in one agreement. This is no less than an obligation to maintain at law. The conditions of such maintenance are set out in elaborate detail in the terms of a confraternity established between Jean d'Armagnac, the count of Perdiac, the seigneur de Fimarcon and the 35 La Curne de Ste-Palaye, Memoires de Vancienne chevalrie, pt iii, note 31 (1759 edn, i, p. 281), quoting a life of the Constable printed by Menard in the sixteenth century. 36 Ibid. 37 Gruel, Histoire de Artus III, comte de Richemont, ed. Michaud and Poujoulat (Paris, 1837), p. 209.

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seigneur d'Aure in 1361.38 Each of its members is bound, in any lawsuit to which another is a party, to assist his companion by every means in his power. The party to the suit is to pay the expenses, except that if his opponent is some particularly powerful seigneur, he is entitled to call on the others to make contributions. Each man is to use all his influence to expedite his companions' affairs if they come up in the court of any other lord of his acquaintance. The whole relationship is in fact extended to mean legal and civil, as well as diplomatic and military partnership. These conditions, though they are of a piece with the promise of Amis and Amiloun to sustain each other in weal and woe, right and wrong, might be reckoned to be exceptional and due to the disordered state of Languedoc in the 1360s. There is, however, one rather striking piece of evidence which suggests that they were not entirely so. In 1444 the relatives of the marshal de Rieux instituted criminal proceedings in the parlement of Paris against Guillaume de Flavy,39 who had seized the marshal unlawfully and imprisoned him in his unhealthy tower at Nesles, where the unfortunate man died in a dungeon which was, even by fifteenth-century standards, insanitary. In his defence Flavy alleged, among many other pleas, provocation, because Rieux as his brother-inarms had treacherously failed in his duties.40 A priori, one might be inclined to doubt Flavy's word; de Rieux, *le bon Marechal', is a surprising sworn companion to one of the most degraded specimens of the routier class, a man undoubtedly guilty of fraud and blackmail, the suspected betrayer of Joan of Arc, and who was ultimately murdered by the wife whom he had married as a child and raised to womanhood on a routine of continual abuse and daily beating. De Rieux's counsel, however, did not deny the bond; implicitly, in fact, he recognised it. The allegation was that Rieux had known of the Constable de Richemont's intention to seize and execute Flavy for war crimes, but had failed to warn him of it. To this Rieux's advocate replied first that Rieux had not

38

H. Morel, 'Une association de seigneurs gascons du quatorzieme siecle', Melanges d'histoire du moyen age dedies a Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951), p. 523. This confraternity did not have any device, nor did it hold chapters, as did the Quercy confraternity, which also had no device. Its nature is indicated, however, by the fact that it bound members for life to mutual aid 'pour toutes besognes, necessites, gueres ou proces', that its counsel was secret, that privy warning was to be given of any danger threatening a member, and that only kindred and liege lords had permissible rival claims on members' allegiance. 39 Champion, Guillaume de Flavy, piece justificative, no. 71 (p. 219ff), assembling various references from the registre des plaidoiries, AN, X2a 24. 40 Ibid., plaidoirie of 13 August 1444.

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been present at the king's council when the Constable advised this action, and secondly that 'if he had been there, it could be no offence that he had kept the king's secret counsel'.41 Moreover, he pointed out, the moment he heard that action had been taken, Rieux had gone to work and his maintenance had in fact saved Flavy from execution. The advocate did not suggest that Rieux doubted Flavy's guilt — which was indeed beyond doubt. What he did suggest was that Rieux had fulfilled to the limit his obligations as a brother-in-arms, even to the point of pressing his cousin the Constable to stop the law's execution. I say to the limit, because this case illustrates the implementation of another condition found in some of these contracts besides that of maintenance. Flavy's plea that if he knew of the plan, Rieux should have warned him of the steps which were to be taken against him, seems to tie in exactly with the sentence in the agreement between Du Guesclin and Clisson; 'item, if we obtain knowledge of any matter by which you might incur damage or blame, we will acquaint you of it as soon as possible'. One might add that the reply of Rieux's advocate to this point, that even if he had been present at the council in question, the marshal would not have been bound to reveal the king's secrets, is a perfect example of the implementation of the clause 'saving the allegiance due to my sovereign lord'. This same reservation can be seen taking effect in the regretful parting of Du Guesclin and Calverley in Spain, when the latter's lord, the Black Prince, espoused the cause of Pedro the Cruel, and in the appearance of Clarence and Orleans in arms on opposing sides at Agincourt. Some sort of rough pattern of obligations set up by the compact of brotherhood-in-arms seems now to be appearing. At this point it would seem useful, therefore, to consider the collective nature of these obligations, and to see how far this relationship is comparable to other relations which created bonds between man and man in the middle ages, such as the feudal one. In certain respects the obligations of a brother-in-arms to his companion are clearly comparable to those mutually entered on by lord and vassal. There is the same oath as there would be to a liege lord, to help him envers tons et contre tons. The promises of aid, service and counsel again resemble feudal obligations. The phrase 'saving his honour' recalls the feudal reservation of the right of desavouer, and certainly Arcite's defiance of Palamon in the Knight's Tale would seem to show that brothers-in-arms enjoyed this same right: 41 lbid.,plaidoirie of 11 February 1445.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages For I defye the seurtee and the bond Which that thou seyst that I have made to thee!42

The other saving clause in contracts between brothers-in-arms, reserving faith to a liege lord, again resembles the conditional clause, reserving this allegiance, in charters setting up a feudal relation between a lord and a man who is not a natural liegeman, on the basis of a money fief.43 These general resemblances to a feudal relationship are however only apparent. In essential respects the relation between brothers-in-arms was different. In the first place, the promises of aid, service and counsel are clearly to be interpreted in a far more intimate sense than they would be in the case of a relation based on liege homage. The aid is due not only in customary matters, but in every intimate and private concern. The brother does not merely give counsel, he is of his fellow's secret council. The bond is domestic and familial, not feudal. If one looks for a parallel to Flavy's claim that Rieux as his brother-in-arms was bound to warn him of anything which might be to his prejudice, however he came by this knowledge, one will find it not in feudal history, but in statements such as that of John's knights before the sheriff of Cornwall in 1213, that since they were of the household (de familia regis) they were bound 'if they heard anything to the prejudice of the king, to report it to him'.44 The mutual obligations of brothers-in-arms resemble not those of lord and vassal, but those of a man's affinity, hisfamiliares, or his private retinue. It is the obligation of service, however, rather than those of aid or counsel, that really shows up the difference between the bond of brothers-in-arms and the feudal one, although superficially it looks more feudal than either. For the feudal bond, though contractual, essentially involves ranks and grades; one cannot exchange homage. The companion's promise to serve differs from the corresponding condition of feudal tenure because it means mutual service and carries no suggestion of servility. Once again the parallel is with the family or the household, for within their scheme there is room for both equal and unequal relations. There is the paternal relation which is based on love and obedience, and there is the fraternal relation which is based in love and mutual assistance in common family enterprises. Both relationships are however of the same type, and it is to this class of relationship that that of brothers-in-arms belongs. 42 43 44

Chaucer, Knight's Tale, lines 1603-4. Cf. Bryce D. Lyon, From Fief to Indenture (Cambridge, MA, 1957), p. 45ff. F.W. Maitland, Select Pleas of the Crown, Selden Society (London, 1888), p. 70.

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Further scattered items of evidence bring into clear relief this close, familial nature of their association. It was, for instance, to Oliver de Clisson that John de Montfort entrusted the care of his children, when he was absent from Brittany in 1393,45 just after the two had been reconciled and had become companions. Froissart has a story not unlike this one, of a soldier who left his mistress in the care of his brother-inarms when he was away, though in this case, I am sorry to say, his trust proved to have been misplaced.46 The moral of both stories is however clear: a brother-in-arms was a person on whom one ought to be able to rely for assistance in the discharge of intimate family and personal concerns.47 Another story, based this time on record evidence, is to the same kind of effect. In 1361, a Gascon knight, Bernard de Troye, lay dying in England, and as he lay, 'infirm in body but firm in mind', he drew up his testament. The most important item which he had to bequeath was his quarrel with Denis de Morbek, as to which had captured John the Good on the field of Poitiers, and which he had undertaken on his honour to prove for right upon Denis' body in battle before the king's judges. It was to his brother-in-arms Pelegrin de Cause that he bequeathed his quarrel and the charge on his honour.48 The battle does not seem to have taken place, for Denis de Morbek too was dying. But Pelegrin de Cause did take up the quarrel; and what is more, when five years later he at last obtained a payment on account from Edward III for the capture in question, it was split squarely with Bernard's heirs.49 These examples show how close companions-in-arms stood to one another. They could have from each other sterner inheritances than accumulated gains of war; they assumed after a brother's death his most sacred duties, the prosecution of his just quarrels and the protection of his kin. It was as if they really were of his blood. What the relation meant was a bond of artificial kinship. This is a point of first importance, because it means that other relations which are in other ways similar to that of brotherhood-in-arms may be similar in this respect also. Our next task must therefore be to see what parallel bonds can be found. A close comparison can obviously be drawn with the orders of 45

Chronique du Religieux de St-Denis, xiv, ch. 15 (ed. Belleguat, ii, p. 116). Kervyn de Lettenhove, Oeuvres de Froissart, xi (Brussels, 1870), pp. 123-24 (story of Louis Raimbault and his companion Lymosin). 47 The terms of the Winter-Molyneux agreement (see ante n. 19), which allots certain responsibilities for the care and protection of dependents to the survivor in the event of the death of one party, bear out this point in detail. 48 Kervyn de Lettenhove, Oeuvres de Froissart, xviii, pp. 394-96. 49 Rymer, Foedera (Hague edn), iii, pt ii, pp. 113, 114. 46

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chivalry. This parallel is suggested immediately by the resemblance between the terms of incorporation in confraternities of arms and the statutes of the famous orders. The similarities extend to detailed conditions. The companions of an order were bound to aid one another in every enterprise. Though there was no suggestion that they should share in one another's gains of war, the statutes of the Golden Fleece laid down clearly that a knight of the order was bound to do all his endeavour to obtain the release of a captured companion.50 In the case of companions not subject naturally to the head of the order, allegiance could be reserved without dishonour,51 as it could be in the confraternities and in the case of brothers-in-arms proper. If the members of the orders of chivalry bore devices, so on occasion did those of the confraternities; and brothers-in-arms on occasion exchanged tokens, as did Amis and Amiloun.52 Du Cange states that sometimes they even adopted one another's arms.53 Certainly, where one or both was the head of an order, his fellow was normally incorporated in it; John the Fearless wore the order of Louis of Orleans,54 and Philip the Good and the King of Aragon wore one another's orders.55 If brotherhood-in-arms was not necessarily an association for life, no more was an order of chivalry; John of Bourbon in 1414 founded an order which had a life-span of only two years.56 As in the case of brothers-in-arms, once again, companions of an order of chivalry were bound to report anything they might hear to the prejudice or dishonour of another companion or of the head of the order.57 It is no surprise, therefore, that the relationship between members of an order of chivalry should prove on examination to be of the same close, familial type as that between brothers-in-arms. The order constituted a kind of affinity or family in chivalry. Its chapters were solemn family councils in which the affairs of the companions were reviewed not individually, but as they affected the whole society. The dishonour of one was the dishonour of the whole order; hence the awful ritual of expulsion, implemented for instance against the seigneur de Montagu because he had fled from the battle of Anthonne. Members were known,

50

Lefebvre de St-Remy, Chronique, ed. Morand, Memoires pour servir a 1'histoire de France (1881), p. 218. 51 Cf. statutes of the Golden Fleece, ibid., p. 217. 52 Amis andAmiloun, line 312: Weber, Metrical Romances, ii, p. 382. 53 Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, x, p. 67, col. 2. 54 Jean Juvenel des Ursins, Histoire de Charles VI, p. 450. 55 Monstrelet (Cont.), iii, ch. 86. 56 The order's history is discussed by Bossuat, 'Un ordre de chevalerie auvergnat'. 57 Cf. the statutes of the Golden Fleece, Lefebvre de St-Remy, Chronique, p. 215.

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significantly, as freres or compagnons of an order. The oath which the members of John of Bourbon's order took in 1414 shows how they regarded their relationship, and how similar it was to that of brothers-inarms. Item, we all swear and promise to be on terms of good and loyal affection, and during the terms of this our common enterprise to observe the same bond of loyalty and confraternity as brothers and companions ought to observe towards one another.'58 Here, clearly, the similarity of conditions between the two sorts of association, that of brotherhood-in-arms and that of membership of a chivalrous order, reflects a similarity in the nature of the relationship involved. This suggests we may argue something of the same nature in another relationship whose conditions resemble those of brotherhood-in-arms, the relationship of lord and retainer. This is for the historian a much more important form of association than membership of a chivalrous order. It is one, too, which has received a great deal of attention, and for this reason it seems worth examining the similarities in detail. In the first place, both relations have the same legal or quasi-legal basis. Retainder, like the compacts between brothers-in-arms, was normally based either on a solemn oath, or on the exchange of sealed documents (indentures). In the second place, the general obligations are very similar. Brothers-in-arms swore to stand by one another envers tons et contre tons, their liegance only excepted; retainers made promises in precisely the same spirit. When William Griffith was retained by Lord Hastings in 1461 he swore to be 'true, faithful and diligent unto the said lord, with him for to be and his quarrel for to take against all persons of what estate, degree, or condition they be, his liegance only except'.59 The same obligations of aid, service and counsel, in the intimate sense of shared enterprise and secrecy, were imposed on both the retainer and the brother-in-arms. Certain particular resemblances are even more striking than these. If members of confraternities wore devices, and brothers-in-arms exchanged tokens or even wore each other's arms, so did retainers wear the badge or livery of their lord. The retainers of the White Hart are rightly a good deal better known to history than the companions of the Golden Apple, but in both cases clearly the badge was a sign of being of one affinity. Brothers-in-arms, again, on the ground of such affinity, agreed to share equally their gains of war. Correspond58

Quoted from MS source by Du Cange, 'Dissertations sur 1'histoire de St Louis', in Glossarium, x, p. 69. 59 Indenture printed by W.H. Dunham Jr, Lord Hastings' Indentured Retainers (Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1955), p. 123.

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ingly, one of the commonest conditions in English indentures is the promise of the retainer, in time of war, to pay a third of all his gains of war to his master.60 But the most striking resemblance of all is the obligation, common to both relationships, to maintain causes. In both cases this dangerous condition was hedged with reservations. The brother-in-arms undertook to take his fellow's part in all causes 'saving his honour'; the lord undertook to maintain his man in all things 'as far as law and conscience shall require'. In both cases, however, the abuse was all too frequently honoured in the observance. If ever a flagrantly guilty man was maintained it was Guillaume de Flavy. Amiloun himself, the hero of romance, was to all intents maintaining an unjust quarrel when he took the part of his brother-in-arms against the king's steward, for Amis really had been in bed with the king's daughter when the steward was watching from the closet, just as the latter said he had been.61 This is a good example, because it reminds us, when we speak of maintenance as an abuse, that there are abuses and abuses. The steward was a peeping Tom, he had it in for Amis anyway. There is something to be said for the idea that a bond as close as that of kinship may override the niceties of right and wrong in individual situations. It is perhaps not surprising after this review of their similarities to find that there are contracts which historians describe as retainders, which are not merely similar to contracts between brothers-in-arms but are essentially the same. Among the many indentures made by Lord Hastings in Edward IV's time, there is one struck between him and Lord Mountjoy on 23 February 1480, which reads as follows: This bill indented made at London the xxiii day of February the xixth year of the reign of King Edward the fourth, showeth that I, John Blount, of my free will and motion promise and fully determine myself to be faithful and loving cousin to William Hastings Lord Hastings, and his part take, mine allegiance reserved. And for the same, the said Lord Hastings promises to be good and loving cousin to the said Lord Mountjoy in any matter that he hath or shall have to do as may stand with reason and conscience. And for the surety of the promise upon both parties to be performed and kept, we, the said William Lord Hastings and John Lord Mountjoy, these present indentures interchangeably have subscribed with our own hands.62

60 See for example the indenture of Prince Henry with Walter Devereux (1408), and that of Richard of Warwick (1410), printed ibid., pp. 138-39. 61 This whole incident is the theme of the first part of the romance, covering about a thousand lines, lines 400 (approx.) to 1400. 62 Dunham, Lord Hastings'Indentured Retainers, pp. 133-34.

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The contract which we are faced with here is no agreement between lord and servant. It is a covenant between equals, and its basis is neither in fee nor in livery nor in promise of good lordship, but in the establishment of a bond which shall have the same strength as that of kinship. It is exactly the same sort of bond as that established between brothers-in-arms. This striking similarity between the bond of brotherhood-in-arms and that of lords and retainers seems to me to permit certain general observations. The first is that we should be very cautious in our approach to the comparison frequently drawn between the bond of the retainer to his lord and that of the feudal vassal. The compact of brotherhood-inarms established a relation which was in many ways more similar than the feudal one to that of lord and retainer, and which had nothing even archetypally to do with feudalism, since it was a bond between equals and feudalism posits inequality. In particular, this suggests that we should be careful about accepting any theory which posits a logical development in the forms of medieval social relations, from the feudal relations of an age of natural economy to the more sophisticated contractual relations of an age of wider mercantile development.63 The closest parallel to the association of brotherhood-in-arms is that of the non-feed retainer, bound to his lord by oath only, which W.H. Dunham has described as a 'more refined and sophisticated' relationship than that of either the feed retainer or the feudal vassal.64 If this is right, the relationship of brothers-in-arms should also be of this more refined and subtle nature, but it does not seem to be so. The ritual by which it could be established carries us not forward to civilised contract, but back to the archaic realism of the savage, drinking the blood of a fellow human. No doubt there is a logical development in the forms in which personal bonds were expressed in legal documents. This, however, is to be expected; for professional clerks are seldom men of original mind and instinctively use the terms with which use has familiarised them. What really matters about such personal bonds, at least when one comes to examine their influence on personal conduct, is the psychological force behind them, and it is here that the parallel between fraternity-inarms and the lord-retainer relation is most striking. For no matter whether the association was on equal or unequal terms, in both cases there was the same close, intimate connection, which gave those entering upon it a sense of partnership and of sharing one another's reflected glory. An affinity was created, whose model was the natural relationship 63 64

Lyon, From Fief to Indenture, p. 25 Iff, especially pp. 264-65. Dunham, Lord Hastings'Indentured Retainers, p. 63.

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of the family. This gave such bonds a psychological force which partly made up for their weakness before the law, as compared with the feudal connection (there is no recorded instance of a retainer being sued for breach of contract). In an age which placed the highest possible value on personal loyalty, this gave them great significance. Even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when European society was as near being 'feudal' as it ever was, the men on whom any lord really relied were those who were close to him personally, his kinsmen and hisfamiliares. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the feudal bond was not as important as it had been, close personal ties, such as those between brothers-in-arms and lords and retainers, continued to be influential. There was nothing novel about such relationships then; they had been known and understood from the remote past. It is no accident that the best parallel to Flavy's claim, that Rieux was bound by his compact of brotherhood to warn him of any danger that threatened him, comes from the lips of two of King John's household knights. If anything such relations were more primitive than the feudal connection. They were certainly not more developed or more civilised, and if one is looking for signs of development in the middle ages one will not get very far by comparing different kinds of close personal connections. As long as such connections, whether expressed in feudal or non-feudal terms, were regarded as the first claims on a man's loyalty, the conflicts to which they gave rise made endemic social disorder all but inevitable. It was the slow development of an idea of public authority and of a public weal which curbed the unruly individualism of the medieval upper classes, not the development of new kinds of relation between man and man. Postscript Since this essay first appeared in 1962, a great deal more information has come to light about brotherhood in arms. Were I writing now, I would pay less attention to agreements such as those between John the Fearless and Louis of Orleans (p. 58 above) and between Charles the Bold and Louis XI (p. 48), to which there is a complicated and convoluted politicodiplomatic background that my 1962 essay skims over; and I would devote more attention to references like those that I have discussed in my contribution to S. Dull, A. Luttrell and M. Keen, 'Faithful unto Death; The Tombe Slab of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe'. Antiquaries' Journal, 71 (1991). See also P. Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward H's Adoptive Brother (Oxford, 1994).

4

Chivalry, Heralds and History 'They sought by eloquence to teach men virtue and to stimulate them to right conduct.'1 So writes Professor Wilcox of the historians of the early Italian Renaissance, among whom Bruni's name is perhaps the most famous, who brought a new perspective to the writing of history, fashioned by their studies in classical literature. In context, the word eloquence has special overtones, reminding us of the debt of the Renaissance writers to the rhetorical techniques of antiquity. If, however, we forget about these overtones for a moment, what Professor Wilcox has said would be just about equally true of the chivalrous historians of the later middle ages, of whom Froissart was the doyen. Their didactic intention was similar, and explicit: I sit down to record a history, says Froissart, 'so that the honourable enterprises, noble adventures and deeds of arms performed in the wars between England and France may be properly related . . . to the end that brave men, taking example from them, may be encouraged in their well doing.'2 The object was not lost upon those to whom he addressed himself. 'Read Froissart', urged Caxton in the epilogue to his Ordre of Chyvalry in which he upbraids English knighthood for its laxity, 'and also behold that victorious and noble King Henry Vth, and the captains under him . . . whose names shine gloriously by their virtuous and noble acts'.3 To stimulate men to virtue and right conduct was indeed quite as characteristically the

1 DJ. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1969), p. 29. 2 J. Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. K. de Lettenhove, ii (Brussels, 1867), p. 4. 3 W. Caxton, The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS (London, 1926), p. 123.

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business of the chivalrous chronicler as it was of the Renaissance historian. There were, of course, differences of emphasis, and very important ones, in their respective conceptions of virtue and right conduct. But as Huizinga has reminded us, even here we should not exaggerate the distance separating the two worlds. 'The thirst for honour and glory proper to the men of the Renaissance is essentially the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times . . . ', he writes. 'The passionate desire to find himself praised by contemporaries or by posterity was the source of virtue with the courtly knight of the twelfth century and the rude captain of the fourteenth, no less than with the beaux-esprits of the quattrocento'4 Huizinga here was writing of those men whom history was supposed to inspire, not of historians, and he was a little less generous when he came to treat of the historians of chivalry. Founded in the 'traditional fiction' of chivalry, history as they conceived it becomes, in his view, simply 'a summary of feats of arms and of ceremonies'.5 This conclusion seems rather surprising, if we think about it. If the aspirations of the men of the 'chivalrous' later middle ages foreshadowed those of the Renaissance, should we not expect the historical literature which nurtured their aspirations to amount correspondingly to something a little more than this, to foreshadow, in some related degree, the sophistication of the historical literature which nurtured the aspirations of the early Renaissance? The object of this essay will be to try to explore a little further what sort of historiography could be founded on the 'traditional fiction' of chivalry, the degree of sophistication of which it proved itself capable, and the values which it promoted. Huizinga's use of the word 'fiction' itself poses a problem that must be faced at the outset of our enquiry. Just how sharp a line we are entitled to draw, in the particular context in question, between history and fiction? The quest for the origins of the 'traditional fiction' of chivalry will take us back to stories which, in a literary form, first achieved popularity in the twelfth century, that is to say to the chansons de geste and to the early romances of Troy, of Alexander and of Arthur's court. We nowadays discuss these works as fictions, but their authors assumed at least some substructure of truth underlying them, and seldom made any effort to distinguish the fact from the fantasies that were blended in their poems.

4 5

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924), p. 59. Ibid., p. 59.

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There is, it is true, a formal difference between a chanson de geste and a verse history, the former being written in decasyllabic verse with an assonant weave; the latter in rhyme, sometimes octosyllabic, sometimes decasyllabic, sometimes Alexandrine. The distinction however does not seem to be relevant to the question of whether the content of the verse is factual or fictional. Chretien's verse is more like that of the histories than that of the chansons, and both Wace and Benoit de Ste-Maure moved easily from factual to fictional matter (using the word fictional in a modern sense) without feeling any need to alter their manner of versification. They did not feel the need to do so because they did not see any very significant difference between the sort of matter that was dealt with in the Roman de Brut on the one hand and the Roman de Rou or the Chroniques des dues de Normandie on the other. Those who listened to chansons and histories do not seem to have worried very much about the distinction between them either. Those who did worry seem moreover to have been, as a rule, more concerned on account of the didactically false consequences of allowing fancy too free a hand than on account of its fictitious quality. Be careful of reading too much of the stories of Arthur, great as was his worldly valour, Philippe de Mezieres warned the youthful Charles VI of France: his history is too full of bourdes. But read, he says, 'of the great deeds of the Christian emperors . . . and especially of the great battles and marvellous deeds of your great predecessor, the blessed Charlemagne . . . and read often the fair and true history of the valour of Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, and of his noble and holy chivalry'.6 That 'fair and true history' of Duke Godfrey, in Philippe de Meziere's fourteenth century, meant the cycle of the Chevalier an cygne, the latest of the great heroic cycles, and the only one whose development, from its historical origins into fullblown myth, can be traced in detail.7 The oldest part of the cycle, the Chanson d' Antioche (put together before c. 1130), has a reasonable title to be called an historical work, since the narrative which its minstrel author cast into poetic form for a secular audience tallies well with what we learn

6

P. de Mezieres, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. G.W. Coopland (Cambridge, 1969), ii, p. 222. The Chanson d'Antioche has been edited by P. Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1848): the Chanson de Jerusalem and the Chevalier au cygne by C. Hippeau (Paris, 1868 and 1874-77). None of these editions is wholly satisfactory. On the crusade cycle generally, see H. Pigeonneau, Le cycle de la croisade (St-Cloud, 1877), the first full study of its development; and S. Duparc-Quoic, Le cycle de la croisade (Paris, 1955), an important monograph, incorporating the results of intervening research; her findings are considered in a review article by C. Cahen, 'Le premier cycle de la croisade', Le moyen age, 63 (1957), pp. 311-28. 7

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from the most reputable chronicles of the first crusade. The author of the Chanson de Jerusalem however, who wrote not much later and carried the story forward to the capture of Jerusalem and the battle of Ascalon, clearly did not have a reputable chronicle before him when he was composing his marvellous stories of Godfrey's confrontations with the Moslem prince and hero Cornumarant. The Roman des chetifs, telling of the survivors of the crusade of Walter the Penniless who after extraordinary wanderings miraculously rejoined the crusaders before the capture of the Holy City, has even less basis in fact.8 The stories of Godfrey's youth and descent which were finally woven in as the beginning of the cycle take us clear out of the world of history into that of legend — to the fairy story of the Swan Knight better known as the story of Lohengrin. There is history in the Chevalier au cygne, but there is a lot else besides.9 Nevertheless, and chiefly because it was an edifying story, it was the kind of work which Philippe de Mezieres could recommend as prescribed historical reading, 'fair and true'. Alongside this story de Mezieres singles out specifically for favourable mention the history of Charlemagne, whose deeds, with those of his paladins, formed the matter of the most famous poems among the epic cycles. About their influence on writers of history there can be no question. The debt to the chansons de geste of Geoffrey Villehardouin, who may surely be claimed as the first acknowledged master of historical 8 The historical criticism of the poems which are incorporated into the crusade cycle is complicated. The original version of the Chanson d'Antioche by Richard le Pelerin is lost, and what we have is the revamped version put together by Greindor de Douai about 1200. Something can be learnt of the degree to which the original has been altered by comparing Greindor's text with the surviving fragment of Gr£goire Bachada's Provengal Chanson d'Antioche, published by P. Meyer in Archives de VOrient Latin, ii (1884), pp. 467-509, since Bachada used Richard le PeleYin as a source. Bachada in turn was used by the thirteenth-century Spanish author of La gran conquista de Ultramar, and so more again can be learnt about Richard's poem by comparing Greindor's version with this text: see G. Paris, 'La Chanson d'Antioche provengale et la Gran Conquista de Ultramar', Romania, 17 (1888), pp. 513-42; 19 (1890), pp. 562ff; and S. Duparc-Quioc, 'La composition de la Chanson d'Antioch, Romania, 83 (1962), p. Iff, 21 Off. Opinion remains divided as to whether Richard le Pelerin was an eyewitness of events, or put his account together from the chronicles (principally from Robert the Monk): S. Duparc-Quoic and A. Hatem, Lespoemes epiques des croisades (Paris, 1932), argue the former case; Pigeonneau and Gaston Paris, both cited above, for the latter. Greindor de Douai also reworked the Chanson deJerusalem, and linked the two poems into one whole with some skill: for historical criticism see Duparc-Quioc in Position des theses: Ecole des Chartes (1937), pp. 137-43; and ibid., 'La famille de Coucy et la composition de la Chanson de Jerusalem', Romania, 64 (1938), pp. 245-52. On the historical element in the Roman des chetifs see Cahen, 'Le premier cycle'. 9 See G. Paris's review of H.A. Todd's edition of La naissance du chevalier au cygne (Baltimore, 1889) in Romania, 19 (1890), pp. 314-40; and E. Roy, 'Les poemes Francaises relatifs a la premiere croisade: le poeme de 1356 et ses sources', Romania, 55 (1929), pp. 411-68.

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writing in the chivalrous mode, is generally acknowledged.10 The debt is however even clearer, and much more explicit, in the work of the numerous vernacular historians who wrote in verse between the early twelfth and the late fourteenth centuries, and is only less acclaimed, probably, because they are less often read. The story of Charlemagne in these works becomes virtually the stock historical foil to the history of the more recent past. Things were not like this in the days of Charlemagne and Agolant — or indeed when Antioch was taken — writes Ambroise, lamenting the quarrels of the French and the English on the Third Crusade. In those times all worked together honourably to the one end, regardless of race, and so well that Que hom i peust essample prendre Non pas li uns 1'autre entreprendre.11

It is clear from other things that he says in verses close to this that Ambroise was thoroughly grounded in the poems of the Carolingian cycles,12 and in this he was not singular. On Jordan Fantosme, as R. Bezzola has shown, their influence is deeply impressed.13 The author of the Provengal chanson of the Albigensian crusade knew the story of Charlemagne's seven-year siege of Montessor, and of Raoul de Cambrai's harrying of the church of Origny, and the whole poem is full of references to the emperor, to Roland, and to Oliver.14 At the very beginning of the poem he tells us that he will make his song after the manner and in the measure of the Chanson d'Antioche (not Richard the Pilgrim's French poem, it would seem, but the Provengal version of it).15 Some authors seem indeed to go out of their way to display the width of their reading in chivalrous fiction, as for instance Ambroise does in one passage: as also and later does Cuvelier, the fourteenth-century minstrel biographer of Bertrand du Guesclin, in the splendid speech that he puts

10

See J.M.A. Beer, Villehardouin: Epic Historian (Geneva, 1968), ch. 3. Ambroise, L'estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. G. Paris (Paris, 1897), lines 8517-18. 12 Ibid, lines 8480-96; and compare lines 1388, 4179-92, 4665-66. 13 R. Bezzola, Les origines et la formation de la litterature courtoise en Occident, iii, pt 1 (Paris, 1963), pp. 198-206. 14 La chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, ed. P. Meyer, ii (Paris, 1879), pp. 28, 30,90, 114, 352. I have quoted the modern French translation, as my knowledge of Provengal is inadequate. 15 Ibid., ii, pp. 2-3. Only a fragment of the Provencal poem on Antioch survives; see above, p. 66 n. 8. 11

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into the mouth of the Black Prince as, bound for the Spanish war, he bids farewell to his wife Joan of Kent: Qui veult avoir le non des bon et des vaillans, II doit aler souvent a la pluie et au champs, Et estre en la bataille, ainsi que fist Rolans, Et li bers Olivier, et Ogier li poissans, Les iiii fils Aymon, Charlemains li grans, Li Dues Lion de Bourges, et Guion de Cournans, Perceval le Galois, Lancelot et Tristans, Alixandre et Artus, Godefroi li sachans; De coi cilz menestrelz font ces nobles rommans.16

For this sort of author, the pseudo-history of the chansons and romances was the most familiar and at the same time the most instructive history that was known, after that given in the Bible: and in many of their works it was a history to which they appealed for examples more often than they did to Holy Writ. It must be stressed how often these references to past history in the verse chronicles are not there just for decoration, but to emphasise the author's edifying intent. A great host of references could be put together to show how comparisons with the traditional heroes are used to pin point the chivalrous qualities and standing of more recent warriors — as Ambroise uses them, for instance, to celebrate the prouesse of Geoffrey de Lusignan in the fighting before Acre, where he did so well that Que puis Rodland et Olivier Ne fud tel los de chevalier.17

But the tally would be too long for recital. It is worth noting, though, how the same comparisons can also be used by the minstrel chroniclers to point up the failings even of their heroes. To Peter de Langtoft Edward I was, after Arthur, the flower of chivalry. But he did not always live up to the standard, for he could be mean: En gestes aunciens trovoums nous escrit Quel rays et quels realms ly rays Arthur conquist, Et coment sun purchace largement partyst. . . Li rays Sir Eduard ad done trop petyt.18 16 17 18

Cuve\ier,ChroniqwdeBertmndduGuesclin,ed.E.Charriere,i (Paris, 1839), lines 10711-19. Ambroise, L'estoire de la guerre sainte, lines 4665-6. Chronique de Pierre de Langtoft, ed. T. Wright, RS (London, 1868), ii, p. 296.

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The teaching of virtue by example, which is the object in these passages, is indeed a principal object throughout chronicles of this kind. The references to past heroes put more recent deeds and enterprises into perspective, showing what was important about them, what was worthy of being remembered. In that sense the chivalrous histories teach the same sort of lessons (though not of course quite the same lessons) as does the history of the Renaissance writers, and their authors paid a similar attention to eloquence, though it is eloquence of a different kind. That is what is significant about the explicit statement of the Provengal author of the Chanson de la croisade quoted earlier, that he is taking the Chanson d'Antioche as his model: he is aware of seeking a manner and a poetic measure apposite to the story he proposes, and to the values that it will emphasise. The virtues that these verse histories teach define themselves with clarity. They are the quintessentially chivalrous virtues, for which Gervase Mathew and others have taught us to look in chivalrous literature, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century; prowess, generosity, wisdom, loyalty, courtesy, franchise or debonairete.19 Roger of Comminges waspreux and wise, accomplished in largesse and in all good qualities: that is the picture of the good knight from the song of the Albigensian crusade.20 As they stood by the body of Jacques d'Avesnes, Ambroise tells us: Li un regretoit sa proesce, L'autre retraiot sa largesce.21 The key words and virtues are the same as those in the lament for the young King Henry in the Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal: He Dex! que fera or largesse, E chevalerie e proesce, Qui dedenz lui soloient meindre.22 Bon, loiaux, and hardiz are the words of highest praise for a knight from Cuvelier's hero, Bertrand li cortois. Cortois is another keyword, for courtesy and franchise among equals are the foils to daring and recklessness in battle in the ideal warrior: 19 20 21 22

G. Mathew, The Court of Richard II (London, 1968), ch. 13. Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, ii, p. 295. Ambroise, L'estoire de la guerre sainte, lines 6721-2. L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, ed. P. Meyer, i (Paris, 1891), lines 6941-43.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages Au fait des armes fiers et estouz, En ostel douz et debonnaires.

as the Song of Caerlaverock has it.23 Its praise here of John Hastings underscores precisely qualities of knighthood that the Lady of the Lake in the prose romance explicitly stresses as complementary to one another in her famous advice to her foster child Lancelot.24 Loyalty is another principal value singled out as essential to true chivalry. Honour, overall, is the key note of the aristocratic scale of values which the minstrel chroniclers single out from history's record, just as a place of honour on the roll of those remembered as preudhommes is accepted as the legitimate aspiration for all knighthood — a place, that is to say, alongside the heroes of what we call legend. Both with regard to what they seek to record and with regard to what they seek to impart in the way of values, chivalrous history and chivalrous literature stand, in the verse histories, in a mutually interpenetrative relation. The chivalrous chroniclers of the later middle ages were not for the most part minstrels, like their forerunners with whom we have so far been dealing: and for the most part they wrote in prose. Here history keeps pace with the pattern of the development of letters: the triumph of prose as the medium for vernacular romance is one of the most exciting passages in the literary history of the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. As to the author of romance so to the vernacular historian prose, in the later period, opened new ranges of flexibility and also of precision in the use of language, and some were clearly quite aware of this. Master John, who translated the Latin chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin for Rainald of Dammartin in 1205, was quite clear about the advantage of prose over verse as a medium for historical writing, and says so.25 Jean le Bel makes the same point still more explicitly in the prologue to his chronicle. The passage is interesting, because he puts the point into an historiographical context. The trouble with verse histories, he says, is that they tend to exaggerate (bourdes again), and he sees that this is partly the result of the stresses to which a factual record is exposed by the demands of metre and rhyme. The consequence is that they too often attribute to individuals about 23

The Siege of Carlaverock, ed. N.H. Nicolas (London, 1828), p. 54. H.O. Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, iii (Washington, 1910), pp. 115-16. 25 The Old French Johannes Translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, ed. R.N. Walpole (California, 1976), p. 130. 24

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whom they are writing achievements which are oultrageuses and incredible, which in turn will in the long run serve to demean the hard-won reputations of their heroes, not to enhance them. Strict accuracy is the only way in which a writer of history can do justice properly to the high deeds and enterprises of arms done in the wars between England and France about which he proposes to write.26 Jean le Bel's object remains the same as that of the verse historians, to instil the principles of nobility of conduct by recorded example; and his framework of values is the same as theirs, inherited from them. But his historical sophistication is greater: as a writer of prose history he has become more aware of his obligation to his subject — to Clio as the muse of history. Jean le Bel makes another interesting point in his prologue. From his record of their knightly deeds, he tells us, we shall be able to distinguish those who were entitled to be called proeus, and those who can be called souverains proeus — introducing a distinction between the two.27 The treatment of the chivalric virtues will become in consequence of this added delicacy of standard more elaborate and intricate. In fact a greater elaboration — a more ornate approach — is typical of the later chivalrous chronicles, both in verse and prose. In this mood Froissart tells the story of how Edward III awarded to Eustace de Ribemont 'le pris de la bataille deseure tous aultres' after their fight outside Calais, and of the chaplet of pearls that the king gave him to wear for a year in witness of it.28 Barbour can record Sir Giles d'Argentine that he was known for the third best knight of Christendom.29 The influence of romance and especially of Arthurian story, with its careful record of who it was that won the sovereign prize for prowess at this or that tournament or battle, is no doubt at work here, though it is by no means the sole influence. The whole mythology of chivalry was becoming more intricate by the fourteenth century, and provided richer veins of literary and didactic allusion than before. It is for instance in the early fourteenth century that we first hear of the neuf preux — the nine worthies of chivalry:30 and later, in consequence, we begin to hear of contemporary heroes being hailed as the tenth preux, as Du Guesclin and Robert the 26

Chronique dejean le Bel, ed. J. Viard and E. Deprez (Paris, 1904), i, pp. 1-2. Ibid., p. 3: and compare G. de Charny, Le livre de chevalerie, in J. Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. K. de Lettenhove, i, pt 3 (Brussels, 1873), p. 504: 'Encore en y a d'autres que souverainement Ten doit plus tenir a preux...' 28 Ibid., xvii, p. 269. 29 J. Barbour, The Bruce, ed. W.W. Skeat, EETS (London, 1870), i, p. 318 (book xiii, line 321). 30 On the Nine Worthies see R.L. Wyss, 'Die neun Helden', Zeitschrift fur Schweizerische Archaologie und Kunstgeschichte, 17 (1957), pp. 73-106; and K.J. Holtgen, 'Die Nine Worthies', Anglia, 77 (1959), pp. 279-309. 27

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Bruce were.31 Three of the original nine worthies are heroes already very familiar: Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey de Bouillon. Beside these and the biblical three, Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus — there now stand three pagan heroes, Hector, Alexander and Caesar. More and more, in the later fourteenth and in the fifteenth centuries, we find the chivalrous historians turning to classical history for examples and parallels that will illuminate the significance of more recent achievement. A much wider range of erudition is coming to be expected of the chivalrous historian. In the context of a school of historical writing where the historian is bidden to keep his eye open to award the prize for prowess, one particular development from the contemporary interest in the age of Arthur deserves special mention. A series of references in the Arthurian Vulgate cycle describe Arthur ordering that the adventures of particular knights should be recorded in writing, on the basis of their own sworn statements. It was widely thought that it was from these written records of Arthur's own day that Walter Map had put together the history of Arthur. In one variant version of Merlin this process of recording is actually explicitly connected with the judgement of prowess: [le chevalier jura . . . que] si tost coume il s'en partira de court qu il dira voir au revenir de toutes les choses qui li seront avenues . . . ou soit s'ounour ou soit sa honte. Et par chou porra on connoistre la proueche de chascun.'32 Now the Round Table was, in the later middle ages, taken to be the model for a number of the secular orders of chivalry which were then being founded, notably for the Order of the Garter, which was the first of them to achieve widespread fame.33 The statutes of a number of these 31 Cuvelier, line 9875 (Du Guesclin); and 'Ane Ballet of the Nine Nobles', in The Parlement of the ThreAges, ed. I. Gollancz, Roxburghe Club (London, 1897), p. 134 (Robert the Bruce). 32 Merlin, ed. G. Paris and J. Ulrich, ii (Paris, 1886), p. 98. 33 The date of the foundation of the Order of the Garter is impossible to pin down; the first recorded chapter was that held on St George's Day 1350, see Chronicon Galfridi Le Baker, ed. E.M. Thompson (Oxford, 1889), pp. 108-9. Both Edward III and the Black Prince were displaying Garter insignia before that, however: see G. Beltz, Memorials of the Order of the Garter (London, 1841), appendix I. The Garter emblem itself has no Arthurian echoes, and though Adam Murimuth, Continuatio chronicarum, ed. E.M. Thompson, RS (London, 1889), p. 232, Froissart (Oeuvres, iv, pp. 203-6), and Sir T. Gray (if Leland's notes are a trustworthy guide: Scalacronica, ed. J. Stevenson, Edinburgh, 1838, p. 300) suggest that it was modelled on the Round Table, they have all clearly conflated the stories of the foundation and of the Round Table celebrations held at Windsor in 1344. The Arthurian Round Table was however generally assumed to be the model for the order: see the wording of Jean Werchin's letter to Henry IV, challenging the Garter knights to joust: 'et aussay ay entendu que aucun[s] roys du dit royaume en recompansant la dite ordre [de la Table Ronde] ont establi celle qui s'appelle la Jarretiere' (BL, MS Add. 21370, fo. 1).

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orders (though not those of the Garter) lay down that a record shall be kept in which there shall be entered the deeds and adventures of the companions of the order. The companions of the Order of the Star were supposed to keep such a record, and the same was the case with the order of the Toison d'Or, and with Rene of Anjou's Order of the Croissant.34 Unfortunately, the records in question have not survived, and in the case of the Star at least may well have never been put together. Lost too is the record book of Louis of Naples' Order of the Knot, which we know existed from Boccaccio's jibe at Nicolo Acciaivoli: 'he wrote in French of the deeds of the knights of the Holy Spirit [an alternative title of the order], in the style in which certain others in the past wrote of the Round Table. What laughable and entirely false matters were set down, he himself knows.'55 What a tragedy that no trace of this fascinating book can now be found! However, if we have no surviving book of the adventures of any of the great princely orders of chivalry, we do at least know a good deal about one group of men who must have had something to do with their making, the heralds; we should remember that several of the chief heralds took their titles from their sovereigns' orders, as did Garter and Toison d'Or kings-of-arms.36 Indeed, about the nearest thing we still have to a formal book of adventures is Wrythe's Garter Book, a record compiled late in the fifteenth century by John Wrythe, Garter, of the arms of all the Garter knights, with brief biographical notices of the chivalrous acts and character of a number of them. A couple of entries may give some impression of the flavour of these notices. Sir John Astley a manly man and often did armes on horseback and on foot. In the streete of St Anthony of Paris In the prescence of King Charles Vllth he ran his adversarie thorough the hede and after ther was a Spaniard called Sir

34 Chronique deJean leBel, ii, p. 205 (Star): Chronique dejean Le Fevre, ed. F. Morand, ii (Paris, 1881), pp. 249, 250 (Toison d'Or): and BN, MS Fr. 25204, fos 7v, 16v (Croissant). 35 F. Corazini, Le lettere edite e inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence, 1877), p. 161; and see D'A J.D. Boulton, The Knights of the Crown (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 235-36.1 have found Dr Boulton's views most illuminating. 36 In the case of Toison d'Or and the Croissant, the responsibility of the kings-of-arms for furnishing information which would be enregistered is statutorily defined, see Chronique dejean Le Fevre, ii, p. 250, and BN, MS Fr. 25024, fo. 16v. That Croissant at least commenced his task is clear from the record of Louis de Beauveau's senatorship of the order (22 Sept. 1451 to vespers, 22 Sept, 1452), since we are told it was concluded 'par 1'advis et deliberation de tou les dessusdits [those present at Chapter] que le Roy des Armes les [i.e. les aventures et louenges] meltra par escript bien loyaument et veritablement ainsy que ja il a commence' (BN, MS Clairembault 1241, p. 920). I owe this reference to the kindness of Dr M. Vale.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages Francoys le Arragonais that had desired thorow the realme of France to doe armes at outrance and for lak of Knyghtode of that roylme he came into Englande and this Sir John delivered and wan him in Smithfield. After be fortune of were tan prisonnier into France: paid his rauncon wherefore he contynued after in poverte. Died in London, buried at White freres in Fletstet [fo. 16)]. Sir Edward Wodeville a noble and a coragious knight and without reproche he warred against the Sarrasins in Garnardo. Slain at the recontre of St Aulbin in Bretaigne in the right of the [? duchess] of Bretagne where he lieth also buried. A noble joustour a gentil a free and a liberal knight. . . [fo. 28v].37

Here are, as it were, the bare bones of chivalrous history, awaiting the eloquence of the chronicler to blow life into them. Interestingly there is an Arthurian analogue to this magnificent armorial record. A fifteenthcentury armorial of the arms of the knights of the Round Table survives in a number of MSS versions, and in some of these brief biographical details, put together from the romances, are entered under the arms of each knight.38 It is clearly at least possible that an Arthurian roll of arms similar to one of these was the inspiration behind Wrythe's book. But such a relationship is not necessary to explain its composition. It had in Wrythe's time been long the acknowledged business of heralds 'to inquire in the day of battle who has shown prouesse and courage, in act or in council, and to record the names of the dead and the wounded, and whether they were in the van or the rear. . . that there may be honour to whom honour is due'.39 37 BL, Add. MS 37340, fos 16, 28v. This MS is a facsimile copy of the original (in the possession of the duke of Buccleuch), made for Dugdale: See A.R. Wagner, Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms (Oxford, 1950), pp. xxv, 122-24. 38 The names of the knights, with their shields, are published by E. Sandoz, 'Tourneys in the Arthurian Tradition', Speculum, 19 (1944), pp. 389-420. He also publishes the treatise on the form of the tourney in the time of King Utherpendragon and the form of oath of the knights of the Round Table. These appear together with the Round Table armorial and the biographies of the knights in a number of fifteenth-century MSS. (I have examined BN, MS Fr. 12497, and Lille, BM, MS 329; both virtually identical, it seems, with Sandoz's text.) The collection is dedicated to the Prince de Vienne (probably Gaston de Viane, son of Gaston IV of Foix) and was probably put together by or for Jacques d'Armagnac, due de Nemours (ob. 1477). The illuminations of his splendid copy of the prose Lancelot (BN, MS Fr. 112) reproduce with precision the blazon of the armorial. On MS 112 and Jacques de Nemours see further C.E. Pickford, devolution du roman Arthurien en prose vers la fin du moyen age d'apres le MS 112 (Paris, 1966). 39 BL, MS Stowe 668 fo. 79v; and compare Froissart, Oeuvres, ii, p, 11: 'Afin que . . . li biau fait d'armes . . . soient notablement registre . . . me voel ensonnyer de les mettre en prose . . . selonch la vraie information que je ay eu des vaillans hommes . . . et ausi par auquns rois d'armes nomme hiraus et lors marescaux qui par droit sont et doient estre juste inquisiteur et raporteur de tels besongnes.'

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In Wrythe's time the heralds' interest in legendary matter was of long standing too. In some of the very earliest rolls of arms we find the arms of legendary heroes, as Roland, Arthur and Gawain, and later those of the Neuf Preux, recorded together with those of contemporary aristocrats.40 Such was the interaction of legendary and historical records of prowess that we do not need to look for a specific model from the fictional realm to explain a text that is historical. We have, in any case, one example of a herald's ability as a registrar of the historical record of prowess (though it is not connected with any order of chivalry), from a period well before that of John Wry the. The matter which Claes Haenen, the famous herald Gelre, put into his Lobdichten, a series of short poems celebrating the deeds of a selected group of knights in the mid fourteenth century, was very similar to that which Wrythe put into his little notice of Edward Woodeville, though it is more detailed and cast into a polished literary form. His notice of Rutgher Raets, a vassal of Cologne, is a good example of his style, and an interesting one, since Gelre admitted that he had never met him, and had put together his account from enquiry. Raets was first armed at Cassell, he says, fighting the Frisians, but local wars did not satisfy his chivalrous spirit: 'avonture vast gesocht'. He went on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre and to St Catherine's monastery: he was at Crecy, and saw service for the French in Gascony. At the taking of La Mothe his banner was to the fore: Do he zich ondernam. Des had he eer ind gewin: Siin wimpel was ten eersten in.41

He was at Poitiers, and was taken prisoner there; and he fought repeatedly against the pagans in Prussia: Haet gewandelt ind geroden Twe und dertich winter in Prusen.42

40 The Herald's Roll (late thirteenth century) gives the arms of Roland, Prester John, Bevis of Hampton, and other fictional characters: see N. Denholm-Young, History and Heraldry (Oxford, 1965), p. 52. R.L. Wyss, 'Die neun Helden', pp. 98-102, gives a list of rolls and armorials that blason the arms of the Nine Worthies. 41 'He set himself to the task, and won honour by it. His banner was the first in[to the town]'. Wappenboek ou Armorial. . . par Gelre Heraut d'Armes, ed. V. Bouton (Paris, 1881), i, p. 45. 42 'Thirty-two winters he had campaigned in Prussia.' Ibid., p. 46.

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He died in 1369. He was forty-three years in arms, and all his life he was devoted, says Gelre, to three ladies': Humility (acht), Goodwill (gouste), and Virtue (doghet). Gelre's subjects were historical, but his manner of telling of them cast over their lives the aura of romance. His notice, for instance, of another of his heroes, Adam de Moppertingen, is introduced by the story of how he heard in a wood a maiden lamenting the 'Knight of Lady Honour', whose body is now given over to worms. It was she who gave him the name of one who could be compared to a Roland.43 The literary influence on the historical outlook of a herald, and so on those a herald might serve, is here abundantly clear: so is his anxiety to do justice to virtue through eloquence. In some late medieval texts the heralds are referred to as doctors of knighthood or clercs des armes, a kind of secular priesthood of chivalry.44 A glance at the list of books bequeathed by Thomas Benolt, Clarenceux, in 1534 will give an impression of the range of real erudition in which late medieval heraldic science was grounded (it is incidentally clear that a good number of the books were inherited from his predecessors).45 He had Froissart in four volumes; the history of the fall of Troy; a book of Galahad; a book of the Neuf Preux; Geoffrey de Charny's book of chivalry; a French translation of the Old Testament, and a French translation of Valerius Maximus; Vegetius De re militari; the canonist Bonet's Arbre de Batailles\ and several learned treatises on heraldry, including that of Bartolus. These are just a few items from a long list: they testify eloquently to the development, in the later middle ages, of a specialised and predominantly secular erudition connected with chivalry. With this list before us, the range of chivalrous erudition displayed by the prose chronicles and their elaborately classified treatment of chivalrous acts and events is unsurprising. The same heralds who were the 'doctors' of this learning were indeed among their most valued informants. Froissart, it is clear, obtained a good deal of information from heralds and regarded them as expert witness.46 We know that Lefevre de St-Remy, Toison d'Or king-of-arms, furnished particular information to Chastellain for his chronicle.47 Heralds were the natural

43

Ibid., p. 90. See for example the author's 'excusacion', at the end of Gille's tract on blazon 'Certesje ne suis clerc darmes ne nourris en ceste science' (BN, MS Fr. 1280, fo. 138v—139). 45 A.R. Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages (2nd edn, Oxford, 1956), app. F, p. 150ff. 46 Froissart, Oeuvres, ii, pp. 2, 7, 11. 47 Chronique de jean Le Fevre, ii, pp. xxxviii, Ix. 44

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men to look to for reliable information as to who had shown prowess in which battle, about the arms they bore and their significance, and about the occasions on which additions had been made to them for particular reasons. Their books and their memories had become the repositories of a great store of knowledge about the lore of chivalry, which could be put at the disposal alike of the historian, the aspirant author of romance, and the master of ceremonies charged with the staging of some chivalrous spectacle for a princely banquet or a pas d'armes. It is not in the least surprising to find in the later middle ages a number of heralds themselves turning historian, as did Chandos Herald, the biographer of the Black Prince; Gilles le Bouvier, Berry Herald; Lefevre de St-Remy; and Claes Haenen himself, who put together a substantial chronicle of the counts and dukes of Holland.48 Here we are dealing with a heraldic activity which springs from long-established traditions that take us back into the age of the verse chronicles discussed earlier. References to heralds, from the later twelfth century on, make a very close association between them and the minstrels, whose song was so often of knightly heroes of both the distant and the more recent past. In England in Edward I's time, and indeed after it, the household clerks actually lumped heralds and minstrels together when recording payments to them, under the single heading ministralli.49 And the Song of Caerlaverock shows us a minstrel herald in the act of performing both roles simultaneously, that of the expert in blason and the chivalrous verse historian. In the first part of his poem he lists the captains of the host, showing at the same time how versed he was in chivalrous history, throwing out references to Arthur and Merlin, to Robert de Tony's claim to connection with the Swan Knight, and to the great Marshal's deeds in the east.50 In the second part he describes the siege of Caerlaverock in the manner we should expect of him as a raconteur, telling us who gave and who received the sternest blows and of the brave acts of the men who strove to be first over the wall.51 His poem lacks the more

48

Chandos Hotel, Life of the Black Prince, ed. M.K. Pope and E.G. Lodge (Oxford, 1910); Berry Herald, Le recouvrementdeNormendie, ed. J. Stephenson, RS (London, 1863); Chronique de Jean Le Fevre, ed. F. Morand (Paris, 1876-81). Gelre's chronicle, beautifully illuminated with the armorial bearings of the counts and their connections as far as I know unpublished, is Brussels Bibliotheque Royale, MS 17914. 49 Denholm-Young, History and Heraldry, pp. 54-60; Wagner, History and Heraldry, pp. 27-31. 50 The Siege of Carlaverock, pp. 26, 42, 54, 369-70. 51 Ibid., pp. 74-86.

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consciously erudite manner of the famous chronicles of the later fourteenth century: he is working, as has been said, within established traditions that link him rather with the earlier verse historians. The Song of Caerlaverock foreshadows, however, more clearly than most earlier works, that link between heraldic science and history which was to have such a powerful influence on historians in the next generation and succeeding ones. Peter de Langtoft, whose chronicle is near enough contemporaneous with the Song of Caerlaverock, wrote of Edward I's banquet for the knighting of his eldest son — the Feast of the Swans — that he had heard of nothing like it as a feast of noblesce, unless it was the story of King Arthur's court at Caerleon.52 In its pageantry, purpose, and spirit this Swan feast of 1306 anticipated such occasions as the more famous Burgundian feast of the Pheasant in 1454 and the royal feast at Paris in 1378 when the capture of Jerusalem was elaborately staged as an entremes.53 The concern of later chivalrous chronicles to record the detail of such spectacles and the ornate staging of jousts and pas d'armes, all three matters of particular interest to the heralds and much discussed in their books, is one of the principal grounds on which they have been charged with superficiality in their approach to the historian's task. But their interest in such matters is hardly surprising — it is an accurate reflection of the attitude of an age in which chivalry had become a subject of erudition in its own right — and they were not undiscerning observers of ceremony. Late medieval knights did not confuse the risks to be run and the glory to be achieved in the lists with those of real war: Geoffrey de Charny (whose book the herald Thomas Benolt possessed) was indeed emphatic that they were to be valued differently.54 The chroniclers did not confuse them either, and nor indeed did the literary authors: Malory quite clearly distinguishes Lancelot's elaborately staged pas d'armes in his twelfth book from what he regarded as real adventures.55 Chroniclers and romantic authors did, it is true, see mock war and true war and the prizes won in them as connected rather than contrasted matter. But that is only their way of reminding us that late

52

Chronique de Pierre de Langtoft, ii, p. 368. See Flores historiarum, ed. H.R. Luard, RS (London, 1890), iii, pp. 131-32 (Swan Feast): Chronique deMathieu d'Escouchy, ed. G. Du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris, 1863), ii, pp. 116-237 (Feast of the Pheasant); and Chronique des regnes dejean II et Charles V, ed. R. Delachenal (Paris, 1916), ii, pp. 235-42 (Feast of 1378). 54 G. de Charny, Livre de chevalerie, pp. 464-72. 55 SeeL.D. Benson, Malory's Morte Darthur (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 183-5, 195-201. 53

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medieval chivalrous spectacle and late medieval chivalrous history paid tribute to the same values and used the same historical models to point up their significance. If the age and its authors are in consequence to be charged with superficiality, what must be examined are the values that ceremony and history alike sought to teach and uphold. Values should not be regarded as hollow simply because they are celebrated with ceremony. 'Simplified', 'shallow', 'perhaps rather adolescent', these are the sort of adjectives that have been applied both to chivalrous ceremony and to the chivalrous conception of history. The early verse chronicles are perhaps rather simplistic sometimes, and no doubt there is a touch of adolescence in that cult of youth which Duby has identified in chivalrous writing of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.56 And it cannot be denied that the chivalrous conception of history failed to embrace the wide range of social and economic factors — though in this regard the Renaissance concept of history did not really do much better. Civic humanism did, it is true, recognise a wider scope for virtuous activity in the service of the public weal than was allowed for by the chivalrous idea of virtue, with its narrower emphasis on martial endeavour. Admitting the mercantile patrician into the circle of those who may achieve virtue is not, however, the same as understanding the range of economic factors in history. And the chivalrous historians did have their own ways of classifying and evaluating events and actions, which were based on a far from inconsiderable historical erudition — of its own kind admittedly, yet not for that reason to be treated as lacking in seriousness. We should surely beware of treating as unserious a school of history so consistently concerned with virtue, and the manner of striving after it, as was theirs. Jean le Bel's standards are not our standards: he is for instance, explicitly, less interested in who won a battle than he is in who distinguished himself in it.57 But who are we to call that shallow? It is a reflection of a real interest in human endeavour and the value to be set on it. Certainly the values of Jean le Bel and Froissart and their fellows are aristocratic, and here there is some contrast with the Renaissance, whose attitude is perhaps better described as patrician. But they are not just

56 G. Duby, 'Au Xlle siecle: les "Jeunes" dans la societe aristocratique', Annales, 19 (1964), pp. 835-46. 57 Chronique dejean le Bel, i, p. 3.

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aristocratic: merit, in their system of values, is the overriding consideration. 'Honour is worth more than gold or silver without any comparison', Ramon Lull had written in his much read book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, and the historians reflect that view accurately.58 It was the general view of knights. One of three things awaits the man at arms, wrote Jean de Bueil, the fifteenth-century French captain and memorialist: you may be killed; you may conquer lands and wealth byprouesse et notable gouvernement; or you may live poor and honoured 'et que chascun parlera de vous et des vostres, dont il sera renommee apres vous, comme il a este de messire Bertran de Clayquin, Messire Gadiffer de la Salle et autres bons chevalliers qui sont mors povres'.59 In other words, you may earn by virtue a place in history. Jean de Bueil's book shows already the imprint of the quickening interest in antiquity of the late middle ages and their wider knowledge of its history, but his secular and individualistic ideas about honour and nobility, here indicated, do not need explanation in terms of those developments. Lancelot, in the early thirteenth-century prose romance, was already speaking eloquently of the virtue of nobility (gentillesse), which is achieved by individual effort and should be prized on that account: ne sai ge par quel raison li un ont plus que li autre de gentillece se 1'an ne la conquiert par proesce autresin com Tan fait les terres et les onors. Mais tant sachiez vos bien de voir que se grant cuer faisoient les gentis hommes, ge cuideroie encores estre des plus gentils.60

Jean de Bueil and Lancelot alike talk in terms of a predominantly secular system of honour and values, which already in the thirteenth century was prising history loose from a purely providential framework, and which laid its emphasis on the individual achievement of virtue. That system of values which they both propose provided a way of looking at things equally relevant to the knight, to the author of romance and to the historian. I hope I have done enough to show not only that I believe that

58

The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, p. 50. Lejouvencel, ed. L. Lecestre and C. Favre (Paris, 1887), i, p. 43. Gadifer de la Salle was one of the conquerors of the Canary Islands: for a review of his career see Le Cananen, ed. G. Serra and A. Coiranescu (Tenerife, 1959), i, pp. 163ff. See also below, pp. 121-34. 60 See E. Kennedy, 'Social and Political Ideas in the French Prose Lancelot, Medium Aevum, 26 (1957), pp. 90-106, especially pp. 103-4: and see H.O. Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, iii, p. 89. 59

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Huizinga was right when he said that chivalrous notions anticipated the Renaissance cult of virtue, but that, furthermore, the chivalrous historians had developed a way of looking at their own age in relation to the past that was worthy of that anticipation.

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5 The Medieval English Kings and the Tournament (with Juliet Barker) Matthew Paris refers to the tournament as conflictus Gallicus.1 This description, coming from the first English chronicler to take a real interest in such events, is significant and indicative. The English evidence suggests a very close relation between the history of the tournament in England and France. The references that suggest that tournaments were becoming popular in England in the reign of Stephen come just a little later than those which attest their early popularity in northern France.2 In the thirteenth century, we hear of Round Table tournaments being held abroad, and very soon after of their taking place in England.3In 1278 we hear of a great tournament held at Hem at which the contestants paraded in Arthurian guise (and which English knights attended): a few years later (the date is not clear), we hear of King Edward I holding a tournament at which no less a figure than the Loathly Damsel of Arthurian story herself appeared, in an outfit which gave her an immense nose and Dracula type fangs.4 In the fourteenth century, in England as in France, we witness a striking development in

1

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H.R. Luard, RS, 57 (London, 1872), ii, p. 309. Walter of Hemingburgh, Chronicon, ed. H.C. Hamilton, English Historical Society (1849), i, p. 208; L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal ed. P. Meyer (Paris, 1901), ii, lines 175-78; William Fitzstephen, Descriptio civitatis Londoniae (London, 1772), pp. 75-77. 3 The earliest Round Table on record was held in Cyprus in 1223; in England a Round Table was prohibited in 1232, three years before the great Hesdin Round Table at which the Flemish barons took the Cross. Philippe de Novare, Memoires, 1218-43, ed. C. Kohler (Paris, 1913), p. 7; CPR, 7225-32, p. 492; Albericus Monachus Trium Fontium, Chronica, MGH, SS, 23, p. 937. 4 Sarrasin, Roman du Hem, ed. A. Henry (Brussels, 1939), passim; R.S. Loomis, 'Edward I: Arthurian Enthusiast', Speculum, 28 (1953), pp. 118-21. 2

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the pageantry and ceremony of tournaments. And in the fifteenth century (especially in the Yorkist period and after) the influence of the Burgundian taste for elaborate/HW d'armes leaves a clear mark on English feats of arms, as on that great occasion when Lord Scales met the Bastard of Burgundy in the lists at Smithfield, and, later still, in the sixteenth century, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.5 There is nothing surprising about these connections. The medieval kings of England were also lords of extensive lands in France and many of their most important wars were fought on French soil. They and their magnates spoke French and were conscious of their Norman ancestry and French connections — connections that were regularly renewed in consequence of the numerous alliances of the English kings with great lords of northern France and the adjacent Low Countries. In virtually all matters of chivalry and of chivalric culture the French in consequence set the fashion for the English, throughout the whole period from the Norman Conquest down to the Yorkist age. Just as Malory naturally turned to the Frenshe booke to tell him about the deeds of Arthur and his knights, so Englishmen looked naturally to France to teach them the way to stage tournaments in their own land. The result is that the history of the tournament in England presents a picture that is, in most respects, simply a local variant of its history in the lands across the Channel notwithstanding the undoubted fact that, as Dr Juliet Vale has recently stressed,6 English knights did acquire a high reputation for their skill in the tourney and their enthusiasm for it, on the Continent as well as in their homeland. There is however one aspect of the history of the tournament in England that seems in its way to be unique. There are not true contemporary analogues in France or elsewhere on the Continent to the ordinances that two English kings, Richard I and Edward I, drew up for the regulation of tournaments. We propose therefore to commence this essay with a consideration of these two unique and early English royal ordinances. We will then go on to explore some of the important political and social aspects of the history of the tournament that they help us to understand. Richard's ordinance was in the form of a writ,7 dated 22 August 1194 and addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, informing him that he 5 S. Bentley, Excerpta historica (London, 1831), pp. 238ff, and J.G.R. Russell, The Field of the Cloth of Gold (London, 1969), pp. 105-41. 6 Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (Woodbridge, 1982), pp. 15-24. 7 T. Rymer, Foedera, Record Commission (1816), i, p. 65.

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had licensed tournaments at five places in England: between Salisbury and Wilton, between Warwick and Kenilworth, between Brackley and Mixbury, between Stanford and Warinford, and between Blyth and Tickhill. Three earls were appointed as sureties of the ordinance, Patrick of Salisbury, Gilbert de Clare of Gloucester and Hamelin of Warenne. A graded scale of entry fees was laid down for those wishing to tourney; twenty marks for an earl, ten marks for a baron, four marks for a landed knight, and two marks for a knight without land. The archbishop was bidden to appoint two clerks and two knights to collect these fees from those wishing to tourney (Hoveden tells us that he in fact entrusted the responsibility to his brother, Theobald Walter),8 and to administer an oath to them. The oath bound those coming to tourney not to take food or other necessities on their way to or from the tournament without making payment, to keep the king's peace (especially the peace of the king's forest and of markets), and to give truce in coming and going to anyone with whom they were at feud. It was also stipulated that no foreigner should be admitted to tourney. William of Newburgh says that Richard I's motive in licensing tournaments was that he saw the French 'were keener in battle and more disciplined on account of their training [in tournaments, which had been prohibited in England in Henry II's time], and wished his own knights to be similarly exercised in their own land . . . so that the French should not be able to upbraid the knights of England with rudeness and lack of skill'.9 It is clear that this was by no means the king's sole purpose. The express object of this writ was to maintain the peace and to protect the royal forest (Richard was not going to tolerate tourneyers breaking the forest law that defended vert and venison, and from whose administration he drew a lucrative profit). The location of the sites at which he licensed tournaments is also significant; they all straddled routes to London (which made them more amenable to government control), and lay within the spheres of territorial influence of the earls chosen to form the 'rudimentary court of control'. Only one site, between Blyth and Tickhill, was provided for the whole of England north of the Trent, and there was no site in the stormy Welsh marches, with their concentration of seigneurial armies and castle garrisons. It looks as if King Richard preferred not to encourage gatherings of armed men in areas that were

8

Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs, RS, 51 (London, 1868-71), iii, p. 268. William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Hewlett, RS, 82 (London, 1885), ii, pp. 422-23. 9

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not too susceptible of royal control. A further royal motive, and no doubt an important one, was financial. As Denholm-Young pointed out,10 a modest tournament of say thirty a side could easily bring in 200 marks, and the king was insistent that those wishing to tourney must pay their entry fees in advance. The powers that he granted to imprison those who broke their oaths to keep the peace until they should make amends promised a source of further income, for tournaments were commonly the source of a good deal of unruliness. In 1195 we learn significantly that Robert Mortimer had to seek recovery of his lands, which had been seized into the king's hands because he had tourneyed without licence, and that in 1200 Ralph Fitzstephen had to pay £20 to obtain a royal pardon de perjurio de tornamento,11 presumably because he had broken some part of the oath imposed on those wishing to tourney. Richard himself was a celebrated habitue of the tournament (there is a nice story of his taking part in a tournament fought with sugar canes instead of lances outside the walls of Messina during his journey to the Holy Land).12 In his father's time, Roger of Hoveden tells us, he and his brothers had sought tournaments in France, because they well understood the value of the martial training that they offered. They took with them knights from England as well as from the Angevin dominions overseas, and these no doubt acquired the taste for the sport; the history of William Marshal tells us that when the Young Henry and his men had to return to England after the revolt of 1173 they spent their time ou a bois ou a tourneier — in hunting and tournaments.13 It appears therefore that tournaments were not unknown in England even in Henry IFs time (as is confirmed by the fact that we know that once outside Henry's English realm Strongbow and his companions in Ireland held tournaments 'after the French fashion').14 Richard therefore was not so much introducing the tournament to England, as later chronicles and some modern commentators have suggested, but rather ensuring that in England meetings were kept under control and that he saw a profit from

10

N. Denholm-Young 'The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century', Studies in Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.H. Panton and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), p. 244. 11 Rotuli Curia Regis, ed. F. Palgrave (London, 1835), i, p. 87; Great Roll of the Pipe: Second Year of King John (Michaelmas 1200), ed. D. Stenton (London, 1934), p. 81. 12 Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, iii, p. 93-95. 13 Ibid., ii, p. 166-67; L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, i, line 2394. 14 The Historical Works ofGiraldus Cambrensis, ed. T. Wright (London, 1863), p. 243. See also ibid., pp. 161,274.

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the regulation of an activity highly popular among the martial classes of all parts of his great inheritance, the Angevin empire in France and England. Edward I, like Richard I, had already gained substantial experience (and reputation) in the lists before he came to the throne. He was barely seventeen when he made his debut in a bloody tournament at Blyth. In 1260 he had led a substantial company of knights on a tourneying tour on the Continent;15 and in 1273, while returning from the Holy Land, he and his companions had been present at a tournament at Chalons where things got out of hand and casualties were so heavy that it was christened 'the little battle of Chalons'.16 The experience was perhaps a formative one, for the preoccupations of Edward's ordinance are different from those of Richard's. As a result of Richard's ordinance, the principle of the need for a royal license seems to have become established (in theory if not always in practice): what Edward was primarily concerned with was the maintenance of order among those actually gathered at the tournament. Edward I's Statuta armorum date from 1292. A number of texts of the statute survive which mention, variously, among the members of the tournament control committee that it set up, an Edward fitz le Roy, an Edmund frere le Roy and an Edmund sonfrere.1^ On the basis of the last reading, and of the extreme youth of Prince Edward of Wales in 1292, Denholm Young argued that the true date of the original ordinance was 1267, when, as the chronicler Wykes relates, a number of tournaments took place under the auspices of the Lord Edward (the later Edward I) and his brother Edmund of Lancaster.18 An independent letter patent

15

For the Blyth tournament of 1256 see Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, v, p. 557, 609. For Edward's tourneying tour of 1260-62, see The Metrical Chronicles of Robert of Gloucester, ed. W.A. Wright, RS, 86 (London, 1887), ii, p. 735; Annales Monastici, ed. H.R. Luard, RS, 36 (London, 1864-69), i, p. 499; iii, p. 216-17, 218-19, is highly reminiscent of the tourneying tours undertaken by young nobles of the twelfth century, such as Arnold of Ardres and Henry the Young King. Like them, he was recently knighted and, like them, he led a large mixed company of experienced and new made knights to a number of tournaments on the Continent, with varying success. 16 Nicholas Trivet, Annales, ed. T. Hogg (London, 1845), pp. 285-86; Henry Knighton, Chronicon, ed. J.R. Lumby, RS, 92 (London, 1895), i, pp. 265-66. 17 The most accessible text is that of the Provision upon which the statutes are based, printed in Statutes of the Realm, Public Record Commission (1810), i, pp. 230-31. This gives the alternative readings, but a better and less corrupt version can be found in BL, MS Harleian 69, fo. I7r. The statute itself is enrolled in Rotuli Parliamentorum, i, 85. 18 Denholm—Young, 'The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century', pp. 257f; Annales monastici, ii, p. 212.

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of 5 February 1292,19 giving power to administer the ordinance to Edward 'our son' and Edmund 'our brother', together with William de Valence, Henry Lacy of Lincoln and Gilbert earl of Gloucester (who are all also mentioned in the texts of the statute) precludes this interpretation, however; young as he was, Prince Edward really was a formal member of the committee. The rules that this committee of five were to enforce were these. First that no tourneyer, of any rank, should bring more than three armed knights or squires to the tournament, and they were each to wear a cap of their lord's arms so as to be immediately and clearly identifiable as his men. Second, that knights and esquires serving at the tournament should not be armed with a sharp sword, knife, cudgel or mace, but only with a 'broadsword for tourneying'. Further, that none but these knights and esquires thus armed should be permitted to cast a knight from his horse to the ground; that those coming to watch the tournament should come without weapons and without armour; and specifically that grooms and footmen should not carry swords, daggers, maces nor stones, and that heralds should wear their tabards and have no arms secreted about them. If there were to be a banquet, none were to be admitted to the feast besides the lords who had tourneyed, except for their squires carving personally for them. The problem of turbulent squires, and the dangers arising out of audience participation or out of rancour generated in the engagement, thus seem to be the principal matters that King Edward I, and the 'barons and knights of England' who are said to have requested the statute, had in mind when framing it. Control and the keeping of the peace are thus common principal themes in the ordinances of both Richard I and Edward I (though they focus on rather different aspects of the problem). The reason why these matters should be to the fore is apparent if we turn from their reigns to the story of the tournament during the reigns of kings who were less well-reputed as tourneying champions than they were, notably those of Henry III and Edward II. Tournaments were a notable cause of discord and disorder throughout the reign of Henry III. The king was constantly issuing prohibitions against such assemblies: the prohibitions were, almost as constantly, flouted. The measures that were taken to punish those who had tourneyed without licence — by the temporary seizure of their lands, or by a refusal to pass on to their heirs the inheritance of those who had fallen in such tourneys (as in the case of 19

PRO, DL 10/186. For this reference we are indebted to Dr Paul Brand.

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Gilbert Marshal who fell at the venture at Hertford in 1241) — only served to exacerbate relations between the king and his barons.20 There were ugly incidents even at some of the permitted tournaments. William de Valence and his alien companions were not just defeated but 'beaten up' as well at the tournament at Newbury in March 1248. When they got the better of the natives at Brackley later in the year they took their revenge and 'ill used' many of the English bachelors. At Rochester in 1251 Valence and the aliens again had the worst of it, and were despoiled and beaten up with sticks and clubs by English squires.21 'Thus', says Matthew Paris, 'the hatred grew between the English and the aliens' — the aliens were also, of course, the king's kinsmen and familiars, whom he had rewarded with lands and wealth and influence in England.22 The disorders of these tournaments thus had serious political implications. Indeed, one reason for the issue of prohibitions against tournaments in Henry Ill's time and after was that they were suspected of being a cover for conspiracy, bringing together in company with their supporters parties who might be planning rebellion. The suspicion was well justified. It was under cover of tournaments that in 1215, after the sealing of Magna Carta, King John's enemies assembled their forces in order to resume their rebellion.23 The tournaments held at Brackley in 1219, and at Chepstow in 1228, similarly brought together disaffected barons (though disaffection did not on either of these occasions eventualise in open rebellion); and there were a number of prohibitions on tournaments issued on the eve of the rebellion of Richard the Marshal.24 The case is even clearer in the reign of Edward II. The evidence that it was at the tournament at Dunstable in March 1309 that the leading earls discussed their grievances and framed the petition that led to the reforming ordinance authorised a month later in the parliament at Stamford is not quite conclusive, but it is very suggestive.25 In 1312 there is no doubt that it was under cover of tournaments that the earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Arundel, Hereford and Warwick assembled the 20

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, iv, pp. 135-36, 157-60. The tournament was apparently called a 'venture' (fortunium) in order to evade the penalties for illicit tourneying, but Henry III easily saw through such sophistry. 21 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, v, pp. 17-18 (Newbury), p. 83 (Brackley), p. 265 (Rochester). 22 Ibid., v, p. 265. 23 Annales Monsatici, iii, p. 51. 24 Denholm-Young, 'The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century', pp. 245-50. 25 This argument is put forward and discussed in J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 130722 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 95-102.

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forces that harried Gaveston's lands and finally captured him at Scarborough. A series of individually directed prohibitions in the next year show that the king was fearful of a repetition of these events.26 Earlier, at the very beginning of the reign, we are told that the bad blood generated by Gaveston's victory over the English earls at his tournament at Wallingford in 1308 was an important contributory factor in the growth of resentment against the royal favourite, and the Annales Paulini say that he was so alarmed that his enemies were plotting to use a tournament at Stepney for an attempt against his life that he persuaded the king to prohibit it.27 It is thus abundantly clear that tournaments really could be a danger to the public peace and the good governance of the realm. It is equally clear that they were too popular, and that at least by the thirteenth century tourneying had become too engrained a habit among the English aristocracy for a policy of total prohibition to have any chance of being effective. A policy of control, coupled with a judicious patronage of tourneying, such as was followed by Richard I and Edward I, promised much surer dividends. Patronage of the tournament helped to secure for both these kings respect and reputation in the eyes of the great men of their kingdom and among knighthood at large. The troubadour Gaucelin Faidit lamented King Richard's death because it would bring to an end the feats of arms and great daily tournaments which his reign had witnessed.28 We know much more of the details of King Edward's patronage of the tournament, because the records are more plentiful. The Round Table tournaments that he held at Nefyn in Wales in 1284 and at Falkirk in 1302 celebrated his victories over the Welsh and Scots respectively,29 and gave his warriors the chance, after the rigours of campaigning, to glory in their martial prowess. His victories and this patronage of chivalry and tourney enabled his encomiasts, like John de Howden and Peter de Langtoft, to present him as a new Arthur.30 Thus Richard and Edward were able to put the popularity of tournaments to good use for their own purposes, and to 26

Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957), p. 23. For the individual prohibitions of 1313 addressed to the leading troublemakers see CPR, 1307-13, pp. 520-21. 27 Vita Edwardi Secundi, p. 2; Annales Paulini: Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, RS, 76 (London, 1882), i, pp. 258-59. 28 Florilege des troubadours, ed. A. Berry (Paris, 1930), pp. 248-50. 29 Annales Monastici, ii, p. 402; iii, p. 313; iv, p. 491; Annales Londonienses, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward 1 and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, RS, 76 (London, 1882), i, p. 104. 30 The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. T. Wright, RS, 47 (London, 1866-8), ii, pp. 162, 266, 368, 380: and on Howden, see Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, pp. 20-21.

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show that a measure of control could be accepted under such established patrons of the tournament as they were. All the same, even Edward I was not always able to maintain such effective control as he would have wished, as we shall see. The significance of the story we have so far been tracing, of the attempts of the English kings to regulate tourneying, lies in the light that it sheds upon the martial, social and political importance of tournaments. In England, as in France, the great melee tournaments of the twelfth century and after were fought between teams of knights, operating in a more or less constricted area (less constricted in the early days, when tournaments ranged over the countryside 'between' this township and that, more as time went by and the area of the lists became more closely defined). So far our attention has been concentrated on the leaders of these teams, princes, earls and barons. It is time that we turned some thoughts to the men who at tournaments wheeled their mounts into rank under the banners of these magnates. For this will elucidate further why it was that tournaments seemed so important, politically and socially, to contemporary observers and participants. Who were these men? There was always a leavening, clearly, of chevalier errans, young men going from tournament to tournament, perhaps far from home, in quest of fame and fortune. The reasons why most of the combatants were there were by no means casual, however. The men who formed the core of a tourneying group in the early days were the household knights of the leading men who were present at a tournament. William Fitzstephen describes how, in the mid twelfth century, the young men from the households of the king, bishops, and barons tourneyed in the suburbs of London during Lent.31 It was his household knights who accompanied Henry the Young King to tournaments in the 1170s, under the guidance of his tutor in chivalry, William the Marshal. Henry III, in 1228, ordered all the familia regis, his household men that is, to be present at the tournament at Northampton in 1228 (one of the few that he himself patronised). When Edward I financed the tourneying tour of John of Brittany in 1285-86 John's household knights were accompanying him. The accounts of Lord Berkeley show the same thing happening in a lesser baronial entourage. When he went in 1328 to the jousts at Hertford, Coventry, Exeter and

31

William Fitzstephen, Desriptio civitatis Londiniae, pp. 75-76.

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Bristol his household knights accompanied him, at his expense.32 The knights of the military household, of the king or a magnate, were thus the key figures on the English tourneying scene in the early days. By the early fourteenth century, when Lord Berkeley was riding to the jousts, sufficient evidence survives to enable us, to some degree, to establish the size and composition of magnate retinues. As the earlier references to household knights would lead us to expect, it becomes clear that there was a close association between a lord's military retinue and his tourneying company. The most striking evidence is that of the Dunstable Tournament Roll of 1309, which was carefully analysed some years ago by Mr Tomkinson in an article in the English Historical Review.33 Unlike most heraldic rolls of its kind, the Dunstable Roll does not start by listing the greatest men, the earls, and then continue to blazon, in a rough hierarchical order, the arms of those attending the tournament, but intersperses the earls through the whole list. This arrangement, together with the heading above the name of the earl of Lancaster 'C'est la Retenance del Counte de Lancastre', suggests that the knights whose arms are blazoned in the roll have been grouped according to their position within the retinues of individual leaders, and closer analysis confirms this suggestion. In the case for instance of Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, whose name appears first on the roll, nine of the twentyone knights whose names follow, before we come to the next earl, Humphrey de Bohun of Hereford, had close and direct links with Gilbert, as his kinsmen or as members of his war retinues; a further six had associations, territorially or in blood, with these nine. The same pattern continues throughout the roll.34 This confirms the evidence of early retaining indentures which repeatedly mention service at tournaments among the obligations of a retainer, often in terms which seem to be almost formulaic. When, for instance, Humphrey de Bohun (the

32 Guillaume le Marechal, i, lines 2673ff; OCR, 1227-31, p. 113; Records of the Wardrobe and Household 1285-6, ed. B.F. and C.R. Byerly (London, 1977), pp. 5-7, 20, 22, 26, 34, 47; I.H. Jeayes, Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments. . . at Berkeley Castle (Bristol, 1892), pp. 283-85. 33 A. Tomkinson, 'Retinues at the Tournament of Dunstable, 1309', English Historical Review, 74 (1959), pp. 70-89. 34 The evidence of the Dunstable Tournament Roll must be handled with caution, however. For instance, at least two knights, Roger Bilney and Hamo de Sutton, who are listed under the retinue of Bartholomew de Baddlesmere and the 'commune' respectively, were clearly fighting for Gilbert, earl of Gloucester, who recompensed them for their horses: see PRO, SC6/1109/12. It is clear that groups were sometimes adjusted at the tournament in order to even the sides, Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, p. 10. This is a possible explanation of the confusion.

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same earl that appears as no. 23 on the Dunstable Roll) formally retained Sir Bartholomew de Enfield for life in 1307 for a fee of forty marks per annum, it was stipulated that in time of peace he was to receive hay and oats for four horses and wages for three gar$ons and his chamberlain dining in the hall; but that en temps de guerre etpor le turnoi this allowance was to be increased to cover eight horses, seven gargons and the chamberlain. Almost precisely similar terms appear in two other contracts that the earl made and which survive, with Sir Thomas Mandeville in 1309 and with Sir Peter de Ouvedale in 1318.35 The significant point that these and other similar contracts bring out is the close association between tournament service and war service. The tournament offered an invaluable training in fighting together as a unit to men who could expect and were expected to serve together on campaign in real war. It did rather more than that as well. Tourney service was clearly an important factor in keeping a retinue together, instilling in it a sense of esprit de corps, and making it formidable. Its direct relevance in these ways to the competitive dynamics of 'bastard feudalism' is well attested in the words of the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, describing Gaveston's team at the Wallingford tournament in 1307: 'almost all the younger and more athletic knights of the kingdom, whom persuasion or hope of reward could bring together, assisted him'.36 This was why the tournament was so politically important, and could easily come so close to private war. The Wallingford tournament was not the only occasion when Gaveston with his team (which included knights of the royal household) clashed in the lists with the retinues of the magnates of the 'baronial' party, and as we have noted earlier his triumphs are expressly mentioned as deepening the rift between him and the native English earls. In a similar way, when Simon de Montfort and Richard of Gloucester quarrelled in 1265 their political breach was mirrored in the tournaments organised per invidiam between their families and adherents.37 As we have seen, a little before this, in the 1240s, the court and baronial parties fought in a series of tournaments in opposing teams, and the occasions were distinguished for their violence, their heavy casualties and the theme of revenge. When the earl of Gloucester, who had previously fought against the aliens of the court,

35

Calendar ofMSS Relating to Scotland, 1272-1307, ed. J. Bain (Edinburgh, 1884), ii, p. 505; Bodleian MS Dugdale 18, fo. 39v.; PRO, DL 25/1981. 36 Vita Edwardi Secundi, p. 2. 37 Annales Londonienses, p. 65; Annales Monastici, iv, pp. 161-62.

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joined them against the natives in the tournament at Brackley in 1249 it was considered to be a political betrayal, and an 'enormous injury to his fame and honour'.38 It was for just this reason, that tournaments were so integral to the factious tensions between magnates and their followers which could bring the peace and governance of the realm into jeopardy, that it was important for kings to impose control over them. There was of course a reverse side to the picture. Tournaments could be useful as well as dangerous. They gave training and solidarity to those groups which, in an emergency, formed the vital components of a royal host. That was why Edward I encouraged them, and celebrated his victories by holding great tournaments at which those who had served him well could revel in their chivalrous achievement. Their popularity was such, though, that they could be a trouble even to him. When his army was inactive in Scotland in 1302 he found bored young knights drifting away to England and tournaments.39 It was not the first time he had been faced with the problem. In 1299 he had issued a general prohibition against all 'tourneying, tilting, jousting, seeking adventures or otherwise going in arms without the king's special licence' while the war with the Scots lasted. The prohibition was repeated, and offenders threatened with all the penalties of forfeiture: nevertheless in the years following tournaments were arranged at Warwick, Braintree, Doncaster and Byfleet; for attending the last of which young Giles d'Argentine, later to be renowned as the 'third best knight in all Christendom', found himself facing arrest and forfeiture.40 Tournaments could be a threat to the solidarity of a host as well as a buttress to it, even in Edward I's time. In the fourteenth century rules governing conduct at tournaments became better established, and indeed more numerous, and the heralds came to play the part of masters of ceremonies. The old danger that a tournament would degenerate into a real fight, as had happened at Chalons, was now greatly reduced: but tournaments could still be politically dangerous as the reign of Edward II showed. Edward III is the English king to whom the credit for bringing under control its

38

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, v, p. 83. CCR, 1302-7, p. 66. The same thing happened again at the end of the reign. See CFR, i, p. 543-44. 40 CCR, 1296-1302, pp. 373, 408, 411-12; 1302-7, pp. 433, 459, 535-36; Denholm-Young, 'The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century', p. 267. 39

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disorderly political tendencies must really go, and he achieved this by the effective canalisation of its popularity towards ends useful to the crown. Edward Ill's achievement was by no means entirely the consequence of deliberate design. His 'tourneying policy' was modelled on that of his grandfather, Edward I, which we have already outlined. Great tournaments celebrated his early triumphs in Scotland and the victory of Crecy, just as great tournaments had celebrated Edward I's victories in Wales and Scotland. The captains who distinguished themselves under him were great champions of the tourney, with the king's encouragement. It was a sign that William Montagu, who had played a key role in the downfall of Mortimer in 1330, was a rising man when in 1331 he and his companions rode to the Cheapside tournament dressed splendidly as Tartar horsemen, each leading a damsel by a silver chain (just as it had been a sign that the Mortimers, who had served Edward I well in Wales, were a rising family when a hundred knights and their ladies rode singing to Roger Mortimer's Round Table tournament at Kenilworth in 1279).41 Henry de Grosmont, Edward Ill's greatest captain, was as noted for his love of tournaments as for his skill in war; and it was with Edward's approval that he was named captain for life of a tourneying society of Lincolnshire knights, who met annually to joust at Lincoln on Whit Monday.42 Like Edward I, Edward III sought, for propaganda purposes, to exploit the cult of King Arthur, and to given an Arthurian flavour to some of his great court festivities, including tournaments — the most famous example being the great Round Table held at Windsor in 1344.43 Several of the chroniclers associated this court with the foundation of the Order of the Garter, which was not in fact founded until a few years later. When that order was founded, however, both the seating arrangements in St George's Chapel (with two rows of stalls facing one another, with an equal number on the king's side and the prince's side), and the known connections between the founder members, offer a strong suggestion that the model in the king's mind was the selection of two finely balanced tournament teams — from among those who had distinguished themselves in his recent campaign in France.44 Edward Ill's tourneying policy thus sought to exploit the popularity of this sport for his own advantage in his wars in France and Scotland,

41 42 43 44

Annales Paulini, pp. 354-55; Annales Monastici, iv, p. 281. CPR, 1343-45, pp. 196, 379. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, pp. 15-20, 67-68. Ibid., pp. 76-91. Juliet Vale discusses this subject very comprehensively.

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just as his grandfather had sought to exploit the same popularity to further his martial ends in Scotland and Wales. That Edward III succeeded in making the association much more enduring than his grandfather had was due in part to the simple fact, unforeseeable in the beginning of his reign, that the wars went on for so long — effectively for the rest of the English middle ages. It was also partly a result of changing fashions in the tourneying world. In the later thirteenth century and the fourteenth jousting — the single encounter between individuals as opposed to the team engagement of the tournament proper — wa becoming more and more popular. Against the background of the wars, it was natural that the most prestigious class of joust should be that in which Englishmen took up the challenge of a French or Scottish challenger or group of challengers. The jousts of St Inglevert near Calais in 1390 were the most famous interlude of this kind; the three French challengers, Boucicaut, Sempy and Regnault de Roye engaged in turn with a series of Englishmen, including among others Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV); the earl marshal; Richard II's half brother John Holland; John Beaufort (the future earl of Somerset), and Sir Peter Courtenay, son of the earl of Devon. This however was only one of a number of similar affairs, such as the combat a outrance in 1402 of seven French knights, all of whom bore the device of a diamond, against seven Englishmen who had taken up their challenge, in which Lord Scales was killed; or the feat of arms performed on London Bridge in 1390 between John, Lord Wells, and his Scottish challenger, Sir David Lindsay.45 In the later fourteenth century the Scottish rolls are full of records of licences and letters of safe conduct to individuals going to take up or fulfil challenges of arms on the northern borders, and others went to France for similar purposes.46 Jousting challenges were also frequently issued and taken up in the interludes of campaigns: Froissart eloquently describes a number of such encounters between Frenchmen and Englishmen during Buckingham's expedition to France in 1380.47 There

45 The most detailed accounts of the St-Inglevert jousts are to be found in the Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. M.L. Bellaguet (Paris, 1839), i, pp. 672-82, and in Froissart: see Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. K. de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1870-7), xiv, pp. 55-57, 106-47. For the combat of the diamond in 1402, see Christine de Pisan, Ballade . . . sur le combat de Sept Frangais contre Sept Anglais, Recueil de chants historiques frangais, ed. Leroux de Lincy (Paris, 1841), i, pp. 281-87. The challenges which initiated this feat of arms can be seen in BL, MS Add. 21357, fos Ir, 2r. For the Wells/Lindsay challenge, see Andrew of Wyntoun, Chronicle, ed. FJ. Amours, Scottish Text Society (1914), vi, pp. 359-62. 46 Rotuli Scottiae, ed. Macpherson, (London, 1819), ii, pp. 87, 90, 103, 104, 111, 117, 119. 47 Froissart, Oeuvres, ix, pp. 275-77, 281, 323-30.

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were also some important melee tournaments fought in this manner, like the engagement in 1341 between Henry de Grosmont and eleven of his household knights (or nineteen according to Andrew of Wyntoun) and an equal number of Scots, and, most famous of all, the great Combat of the Thirty between Bamborough and Beaumanoir and their followers in Brittany in 1352.48 Thus changing fashions and circumstances shifted the focus and significance of the tourney for Englishmen. Teams of combatants that represented the military core of the following of a magnate assembled less often; and great occasions came to be dominated rather by groups of prestigious individual combatants and young men seeking in individual jousts and personal encounters a reputation for themselves as individuals. Minor encounters came more and more often to have the character of frontier combats, mirroring in the lists the drawn out struggles of England with France and Scotland. During this same period of the Hundred Years War the rising cost of tourneying and the expense of better armour and of stronger mounts - and above all the lavish expenditure on the festivities that accompanied a great tournament — began to put the staging of a major event beyond the resources of most lords, other than the king. Royal direction and patronage, and a closer association with royal and national causes, thus mark a change of direction in the history of English tourneying, which at the same time in parallel with development in France - became more ceremonious and theatrical. For all these reasons, tournaments ceased to be the storm centres of domestic political life in England that they had once been, and the need to regulate and control them, by ordinances and prohibitions, that had seemed pressing in the days of Henry III and Edward I, abated. That does not mean that tournaments became less important. The sums that kings spent on the staging of tournaments and the festivities attendant on them showed that they did not consider their significance diminished. The increasingly skilful deployment of elaborate pageantry, together with their abiding popularity as a spectator sport, made them more useful than ever for propaganda purposes. The taste for them did not decline among the martial classes. The splendid illustrations in the 'Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick',49 48 Knighton, Chronicon, ii, p. 23. Andrew of Wyntoun, Chronicle, vi, pp. 103-9. For the combat of the Thirty, see H.R. Brush, 'La Bataille de Trente Anglais et de Trente Bretons', Modern Philology, 9 (1912), pp. 511-44; and ibid., 10 (1912), pp. 82-90. 49 Pageant of the Birth, Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, ed. Viscount Dillon and W.H. St John Hope (London, 1914).

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Henry V's great captain, show that he considered his triumphs in the lists as among the high points of his chivalric career. A family rising in political circles in the fifteenth century, like the Woodevilles, thought it important to show their skill and enthusiasm for feats of arms in just the same way as earlier rising families like the Mortimers had done. The son of a rising county family like the young Sir John Paston could equally appreciate the value of taking part in them: 'my hand was hurt at the Tourney at Eltham upon Wednesday last', he wrote to his brother, 'I would that you had been there to see it, for it was the goodliest sight that was seen in England this forty years.'50 Paston's motives were probably largely to be fashionable, but even in this ornate age tournaments were seen as serving more serious purposes than merely the pursuit of fashion and reputation. William Caxton, in his envoi to the translation that he completed in Richard Ill's reign of Roman Lull's Book of the Ordre ofChyvalry, wrote as follows: I would it pleased our sovereign lord that twice or thrice in a year or at the least once he would do cry jousts of peace to the end that every knight should have horse and harness and also the use and craft of a knight, and also to tourney one against one or two against two, and the best to have a prize, a diamond or jewel, such as should please the prince. This should cause gentlemen to resort to the ancient customs of chivalry to great fame and renown, and also to be ready to serve the prince when he shall call them or have need.51

Training and national service were thus the themes of the sort of royal ordinance for the tournament that Caxton envisaged as desirable, not order and restraint as in the days of Richard I and Edward I. His words are a measure of the way in which the context of tourneying and the sense of a need for direction had altered since their day; they are also a measure of the fact that tourneying did not seem, in these later times, to have lost its significance in terms of martial training and social purpose. The history of the tournament in England thus has two broad phases, to some extent overlapping. In the first, the connection of the tournament with what we have called the dynamics of feudalism and bastardfeudalism, with the maintenance of the cohesion of magnate retinues and so with the factious tensions between magnate and magnate and

50

Paston Letter, ed. N. Davis (Oxford, 1971; 1976), i, no. 236; see no. 327 and p. xlvi. William Caxton, The Book of the Ordre ofChyvalry, ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS (London, 1926), p. 124. 51

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magnate and king, is the feature that strikes us most forcibly. In the second the connections are rather with the king's wars and the reputation and fortune to be won in them, with war retinues and the need that those who might be recruited into them as captains or men-at-arms should know how to handle horse and weapons. These respective preoccupations are of course not very far apart, and in both phases tournaments were, very obviously, directly relevant to the king's business of governing and directing his realm. This relation, between tourneying and royal policy, provides a link between the two phases, and is an identifying, individual feature of the history of the tournament in England. This however was not because English kings followed a particularly individual policy (the tourneying policy of the later medieval English kings was highly comparable to that of, for instance, the Valois duke of Burgundy), nor was it because in this matter they were specially perspicacious. The simpler fact was that England was a small, compact and relatively thoroughly governed realm in the middle ages, and as a result their interest in an activity which seemed important and engrossing to their aristocratic subjects stands out in clearer relief than it does in some other monarchies. English royal interest in the tournament does nevertheless bear witness in a very telling way to the importance of tournaments and tourneying in aristocratic political and social life, which is what makes their history worthy of the serious attention of historians.

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6

Chaucer's Knight, the English Aristocracy and the Crusade The question that I hope to look at in this essay is one that was suggested to me a long time ago when I happened to be reading the description of the Knight in Chaucer's prologue to his Canterbury Tales. The lines in question are very familiar ones: A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, That fro the tyme that he first bigan To riden out, he loved chivalrie, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie. Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre, And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre, As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse, And evere honoured for his worthynesse. At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne. Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne Aboven alle nacions in Pruce; In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce, No Cristen man so ofte of his degree. In Gernade at the seege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye. At Lyeys was he and at Satalye, Whan they were wonne; and in the Crete See At many a noble armee hadde he be.1

This litany of battles and voyages done in the cause of Christendom is clearly important in defining what sort of a figure the Knight is. They appear to present him to us as a model of chivalry, and to identify him 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. A.V.C Schmidt (London, 1974), lines 43-60.

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with a particular chivalrous concern, the crusade against the heathen, and in that sense they are striking lines. There is another respect too in which the picture that they draw of the Knight is rather striking. Those who have written footnotes to the Prologue have been able, it is true, to find an English knight who played some part in each of the campaigns and engagements that Chaucer's Knight had a hand in. They have never, though, found a knight who had a hand, as he is supposed to have had, in all of them; and besides, the commitment to the crusade with which his experience identifies him is out of line with what is usually considered to be the tone of English knightly attitudes in the second half of the fourteenth century. If it had been the great battles of the Hundred Years War with France in which the knight had won the sovereign prize for prowess — Sluys, Crecy, Poitiers, Najera — then there would be no cause for surprise. In that war Chaucer had himself made his apprenticeship in arms, along with hosts of his contemporaries, a good many of whom made themselves rich and famous through service in it. But his contemporary generation of knights and esquires is not so often associated with crusading fervour. There were indeed certain socalled crusades in which a good many English knights took part in Richard IPs day, but they were crusades in name only. The Great Schism in the church made it possible for Despenser's expedition to Flanders in 1383 and Gaunt's attempt to conquer Castile in 1386-87 to rank technically as crusades, in that the Roman pope granted indulgences to those who served in these two campaigns against people whom he regarded as schismatic because they obeyed the pope of Avignon. The preaching of these pseudo-crusades and the sale of indulgences to help pay for them roused the wordy anger of John Wycliffe and his Lollard followers (and a number of others too).2 But it is not with this sort of crusade that Chaucer's knight is associated in the Prologue. His crusades were true crusades against the infidel, and were fought in the cause which, according to many historians, was already losing its hold on the commitment of Christian chivalry in the later thirteenth century, in the age which was witness to the collapse of what was then left of Frankish dominion in Syria — a century and more before Chaucer wrote. That is what troubled me, and explains why my question originally arose. Is one to conclude, I asked, that Chaucer in his Prologue introduced with the Knight a figure more stylised than the others, embodying 2

J. Wyclif, Polemical Works, ed. R. Buddensieg, Wyclif Society (London, 1883), ii, pp. 579-632.

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values that already looked antique? Because Chaucer was an expert draughtsman from the life, that cannot be a very satisfactory answer: it would make the knight a very anomalous figure in the pilgrim group. So the problem for me remained, why is the Knight drawn in the particular way that he is? I have found since that I am by no means the only one troubled by it. It has so troubled Mr Terry Jones that he has written a remarkable book, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, suggesting that the difficulties arise from the fact that the traditional view, that the Knight has been portrayed as an ideal figure, is wholly mistaken.3 Chaucer's intention, he thinks, was not to paint a picture of a knight who was truly 'parfit' and 'gentiF, but to indict in a biting satire the kind of professional mercenary who sought to give himself the airs of knighthood while breaking every rule of chivalry. The Knight's farflung military experience is not, in Mr Jones' view, a sign of genuine dedication to the crusade; it is a sign that he represents one of those ruthless and rootless men whose swords were at the disposal of any who could offer them prospects of pay or plunder, and who were more likely to be found in the service of foreign masters in strange lands than in that of their native liege lord. For a number of reasons, some of which will I hope become apparent, I do not myself believe that this view of the Knight will stand up to scrutiny. I do however think that it does have one great virtue: that it underscores the need to relate Chaucer's Knight to the contemporary scene of Chaucer's lifetime. Chaucer was at once too good an artist and too shrewd an observer to have distorted his picture of the Canterbury pilgrims by throwing into their company a type figure symbolising an outdated ideal. Rather than agreeing with Mr Jones, I believe for myself that we need to view the Knight in terms similar to those in which we must view the Parson and the Plowman of the Prologue, figures drawn very definitely from the contemporary scene whose lives indicate patterns of virtuous living that are not outmoded, but which too few, in Chaucer's opinion, made a sufficiently serious effort to follow. This is a view which has a clear historical implication with regard to the Knight. If it is right, then crusading as a practical ideal must have stirred a somewhat more lively interest, and experience of it must have been a little less uncommon than it is usually taken to have been in the age of Chaucer. Since I am an historian and not a Chaucer critic, this implication is more important to me than the question of what Chaucer's real intention was, a question

3

T. Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London, 1980).

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which I am sure I am wiser to leave to the professionals. What I want to investigate is, therefore, what evidence there is that crusading really was a live issue, an ideal to which English knighthood really did pay more than lip service, in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Given this objective, there is one point that is worth making while Chaucer's knight is still in the forefront of our minds. Let us note not only that he fought against the heathen, but where he fought against them. He was in Granada and at the siege of Algeciras, fighting the Moors in Spain. He was at Satalia, and at Alexandria when it was taken by King Peter de Lusignan of Cyprus in 1365. He had also been in Prussia and Lithuania fighting the pagans there, and that more than once: Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne Aboven alle nacions in Pruce.4

Here are three different areas of crusading enterprise, Spain, the eastern Mediterranean, and Prussia; and the nature of crusading enterprise was of course a little different in each one of them, not only in terms of crusading objectives, but also from the point of view of the problems confronting the would-be crusader. One limiting factor affecting participation in crusades to the Orient in the fourteenth century was that there were not very many major expeditions, and that little continuous fighting was conducted against the infidel in the eastern Mediterranean. When I write of continuous fighting I am thinking of the kind of campaigning in which a knight could take an occasional part as a pilgrim visitor, in the way that so many had done in the days when there was a Prankish kingdom in Syria. So with regard to this sphere of operations it is reasonable to concentrate attention on the English contribution to the major expeditions which are well chronicled: the Alexandrian crusade of 1365; the duke of Bourbon's crusade to Tunis in 1390; and the great French expedition against the Turk which came to grief at Nicopolis in 1396. No doubt there were other Englishmen besides those who joined these crusades who saw service in the east in the company of the Knights Hospitaller, joining them perhaps for some minor campaign in the course of making the popular pilgrimage to the Holy Places, but the names of such are not easy to recover. In Spain 4

Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 52-53.

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likewise, crusading activity was intermittent, and there was not sufficiently continuous fighting to offer standing and sure opportunity to the casual crusader, intent on fulfilling an individual commitment to Christian martial endeavour. Henry of Grosmont, earl of Derby, and William Montagu, earl of Salisbury, distinguished themselves in 1343-44 in Alfonso XI's crusade which culminated in the taking of Algeciras.5 But the next reign in Castile saw the beginnings of the internal strife in which Pedro the Cruel, in spite of English backing, ultimately lost his throne to his francophile and bastard half brother Henry of Trastamara, and in their struggles the fight against the infidel was largely forgotten. Plenty of Englishmen went to Spain, but most went to do battle not with the Moors but with the Christian Spaniards (though there is some evidence that those who joined Du Guesclin on his first expedition to Spain expected, once they had settled Pedro's hash, to be led against the Moors; they included a number of Englishmen).6 The conditions of war in the third area of confrontation with the enemies of the cross were markedly different. The wars of the Teutonic Knights against the pagans of Lithuania were much more continuous, and they had an objective that had been lost sight of for more than a century in the Orient, the settlement — and the protection of the settlement — of newly conquered lands. Whenever there were sufficient martial pilgrims in his lands the grand master or his marshal would lead them out on a reise, an expedition into the lands of the pagans. This activity reached its climax during the long mastership of Winrich von Kniprode in the second half of the fourteenth century, and in that time Truce' and 'Lettowe' were the principal areas of crusading activity for the Christian knighthood of western Europe.7 I cannot claim to have sifted exhaustively all the sources which might throw light on English participation in crusading warfare in these three areas. One particular source I have however looked at quite carefully, the records of three great armorial disputes tried before the Court of Chivalry - the court, that is, of the constable of England and the earl

5 K. Fowler, The King's Lieutenant (London, 1969), pp. 45-47; Cronica del Key don Alfonso XI, Biblioteca de autores espanoles, 66 (Madrid, 1875), pp. 360-70. 6 Cuvelier, ChroniquedeBertranddu Guesclin, ed. E. Charriere (Paris, 1839), i, pp. 270,320-22, 349-50. 7 E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (London, 1980), provides an excellent survey of the wars in this area; see especially chapter 6 for the significance of the mastership of Winrich von Kniprode.

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marshal, which was the highest military tribunal of the realm, and had (as indeed it still has) jurisdiction over all pleas concerning armorial bearings. The record of one of these cases, that between Sir Richard Le Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, who in 1385 both claimed the right to the arms azur a bend or, has long been in print.8 Records of two other armorial cases tried before this same court survive in full in manuscripts. These are the cases of Lovell v. Morley over the right to bear the arms argent a lion rampant sable corone et enarme or, and of Grey v. Hastings over the right to the arms or a manche gules.9 In all three cases there was a tremendous effort to bring all the evidence that could be uncovered before the court; and commissioners were sent about the land to view muniments, to inspect sepulchral monuments and armorial glass in churches of which the parties or their ancestors had been benefactors, and above all to gather the evidence of knights and men-at-arms — generosi—about the occasions on which the parties and their kinsmen and ancestors had used the arms to which they laid claim in war and at tournies. The testimony of these witnesses (and in all three cases they were very numerous) is a gold-mine of military biographical detail for the period from approximately 1330 to the end of the fourteenth century. The case of Scrope v. Grosvenor has in addition a particular interest in the present context, since Chaucer himself was called as a witness for the Scropes and gave substantial testimony. It therefore presents to us Chaucer in the company of the knighthood of his time, speaking in propria persona, not as poet or diplomat or controller of the customs but as one who had seen honourable war service and could recall what old knights and esquires worthy of credence in points of chivalry had retailed in his hearing.10 The reason why the records of these three Court of Chivalry cases is useful for my present purpose is simple, and it is also rather striking: it is

8

N.H. Nicolas, The Controversy between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor in the Court of Chivalry (London, 1832), quoted henceforward as Scrope and Grosvenor. 9 PRO, C47/6/1 (Lovell v. Morley)', College of Arms, MS Processus in Curia Marescalli, i-ii, (Grey v. Hastings). This latter is a seventeenth-century transcript of the proceedings in the case; the same volumes also contain a transcript of proceedings in Lovell v. Morley. On the history of the MS see A.R. Wagner, 'A Fifteenth-Century Description of the Brass of Sir Hugh Hastings at Elsing, Norfolk', Antiquaries Journal, 19 (1939), pp. 421-22, and R.I.Jack, 'Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance, 1370 to 1436', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 38 (1965), p. 14 n. 1.1 am deeply indebted to Mr Theobald Mathew, Windsor Herald, and to the Officers of Arms for permitting me to consult this MS. 10 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, pp. 178-79.

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that no less than four out of the six families involved as principals in them prove to have had contemporary or near enough to contemporary crusading experience. Robert Morley, ancestor of the Lord Morley who in Richard IFs reign was challenging the right of Lord Lovell to the arms argent a lion rampant sable etc., had died in Prussia. William Grey, parson of Reydon, deposed that he had been told by one of his ancestors, who had been there, that he had seen in Prussia a glass window depicting a knight in those same arms. He knew (and the testimony of others supported this) that Robert Morley's faithful men had brought back his heart, and had buried it in the church of Reydon — the body lay in Prussia, where he fell. As far as crusading went, though, the Lovells were more than even with the Morleys. John Breux, knight, saw Lord Lovell armed in Prussia — though not in the arms claimed, which had then not yet come to him from the Burnells (or so Lovell asserted). Breux had also seen Lovell armed in his arms beyond the Great Sea — that is to say, in the eastern Mediterranean.11 Hugh Hastings, father of Edward Hastings who in the reign of Henry IV claimed the arms or a manche gules against Lord Grey of Ruthyn, was another crusader. Robert Fishlake had been with him when he travelled to the east, and saw Sir Hugh hang an escutcheon of his arms in the Maison d'Honneur of the Hospitallers at Rhodes: wherever he was armed on his travels, said Robert, Hugh left an escutcheon of his arms.12 Either this Sir Hugh or his father, it would seem, was also in Prussia, for Sir Thomas Erpingham, when he went on the reise in the company of Henry Bolingbroke, saw the arms hung in the Maison de Dome (? the Marienkirche) at Konigsberg, as the arms of Hastings (with a label, for a mark of cadency).13 John Parker, who had served in France in 1359 with Hugh the elder (Edward Hastings' grandfather), had always heard, he said, that Hugh Hastings 'had first raised his banner of the said arms in battle against the Saracen'.14 There is no record, as far as I can make out, of any of the Greys of Ruthyn, Hastings' rivals, playing any part in a crusade in the fourteenth century. But the record of the other three families — Hastings, Lovell and Morley — is impressive. So is the way in which they and those associated with them seem to have looked upon their part in the crusade. The heart

11 PRO, C47/6/1, Morley witnesses nos cli, clii, and (Breux) cii. The evidence of Sir John Breux (no. cii) has been misplaced, and appears out of order on the roll. 12 College of Arms MS, Processus, i, pp. 432-33; see also p. 462. 13 Ibid., i, p. 441. 14 Ibid., i, p. 534.

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brought back from Prussia, the memorials left in Konigsberg and at Rhodes to remind Englishmen who might come after that a Morley or a Hastings had been there in arms, these are expressive of the esteem set upon this kind of enterprise. I do not know of any evidence that any of the Grosvenors went on crusade. They were a Cheshire family, not yet of any great distinction in 1386 when the dispute between Robert Grosvenor and Richard Le Scrope was heard in the Court of Chivalry, and their military experience seems largely to have been in Gascony and in the Scottish border wars. The Scropes, in contrast, had a crusading record beside which those of Morley, Lovell and Hastings alike pale into insignificance. The Scropes were an old Yorkshire family but the men who really put their fortunes on the map were two brothers, both distinguished lawyers of the early fourteenth century.15 Henry, the elder and from whom the line of the Scropes of Bolton descended, was chief baron of the Exchequer from 1330 to 1386; Geoffrey, the cadet and ancestor of the Scropes of Masham, was chief justice of the king's Bench from 1324 to 1340. Richard Le Scrope, the plaintiff of 1386, was Sir Henry's son. He himself never went on crusade, as far as I know, though he was a warrior of note in France. But his son William, who was to rise to be earl of Wiltshire under Richard II, served in Prussia and it is possible that his third son Stephen did also.16 The Scropes of Masham had a still more impressive record. Henry, the son of Chief Justice Geoffrey, seems to have no holy war campaign ribbon, but his brother William certainly went on crusade to the east, and was in the company of the earl of Hereford at Satalia.17 Henry's eldest son, another Geoffrey, died on crusade in Prussia in 1362.18 Stephen, who ultimately succeeded as lord of Masham, served like his brother in France and after 1360 followed his crusading example. He joined the army of Peter of Cyprus, and at the taking of Alexandria he was knighted by the king himself; later he was to serve in Prussia too.19 Another and a younger brother of these two, Henry Le

15

On Sir Henry and Sir Geoffrey Le Scrope see E.L.G. Stones, 'Sir Geoffrey le Scrope, Chief Justice of the King's Bench', English Historical Review, 69 (1954), pp. 1-17. 16 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, p. 172; Die Chronik Wigands von Marburg, ed. T. Hirsch. M. Toppen and E. Strehlke, Scriptores rerum Prussicarum, ii (Leipzig, 1863), p. 653. 17 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, p. 166. 18 Ibid., i, p. 123, 146, 188. 19 Ibid., i, p. 124-25; Chronik Wigands von Marburg, p. 653. It is not clear whether Wigand refers to Stephen of Bolton or Stephen of Masham, but I am inclined to think the latter.

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Scrope, seems to have died on crusade in the east.20 Thus, if one puts the Scropes alongside Chaucer's Knight, one will find a Scrope at 'Satalye', 'at Alisaundre . . . whan it was wonne', and a group of young Scropes playing their part in a whole series of ventures in 'Lettow' and Truce'. As the Chaucerian scholar Manly long ago pointed out, their collective experience could have served Chaucer as a model.21 Chaucer knew of them, and testified in 1386 that, from the time that he was first armed in 1359, it had always been the report that he had heard that the arms azur a bend or had belonged to the Scropes from time immemorial. It is worth mentioning also some of the witnesses whose testimony gives us the evidence that the Scropes were crusaders (and who were therefore themselves crusaders too, having seen the arms displayed against the infidel). They were not all connections of the Scropes and they were by no means all northerners as the Scropes were. Sir Richard Waldegrave told the Court of Chivalry of how 'beyond the Great Sea he saw Sir William Le Scrope armed in the said arms with a label, in the company of the earl of Hereford at Satalia, at a parley that was held between the King of Cyprus and Takka Lord of Satalia'. Waldegrave, who in Hereford's retinue had seen service in Prussia as well as in the east, was a Suffolk knight: he sat for the county many times in parliament and was Speaker of the Commons in 1381.22 Alexander Goldingham, esquire, who also saw William Le Scrope in Hereford's company, was lord of the manner of Chigwell in Essex.23 William de Lucy, who had seen the arms of Scrope displayed both in Prussia and in the east, was a Dorset man.24 Thomas FitzHenry, who saw young Geoffrey Le Scrope buried in Prussia in the family arms, came from

20

Scrope and Grosvenor, i, p. 125. It seems almost certain that young Henry Le Scrope of Masham was the Scrope whose tomb Nicholas Sabraham, the witness here testifying, saw at Messembria in a church. He describes the arms on the tomb as those of Scrope, differenced with a label of three points argent charged with as many besants, gules; in A Roll of Anns of the reign of Richard II, ed. T. Willement (London, 1834), p. 16, Henry Le Scrope appears at no. 146 with the arms of Scrope differenced with a label of three points argent, charged with as many ba. gules. The visual difference is very slight and Sabraham was in any case relying on memory; the identification is the more plausible since all are agreed that Henry, of whom very little is known, must have died young, and this would account for him. I must acknowledge gratefully the advice of Mr Michael Maclagan, Richmond Herald, about the heraldic evidence in this case. 21 Canterbury Tales, ed. J.M. Manly (London, n.d.), p. 500. 22 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, pp. 166. On Waldegrave's career see further J.S. Roskell, 'Sir Richard de Waldegrave of Bures St Mary', Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 27 (1957), pp. 154-75. 23 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, p. 70; ii, p. 227. 24 Ibid.,i, p. 77;ii,p. 261.

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Lincolnshire.25 Here is evidence that crusading experience was spread through knightly society in widely different parts of the country. The background of the crusaders is also interesting. Some were of good genteel stock like Waldegrave: others were much poorer, more or less professional fighting esquires. Nicholas Sabraham, who was present when Peter of Cyprus knighted Stephen Le Scrope before Alexandria, seems to have been a real professional soldier: he had first seen service under Edward de Balliol in Scotland, probably about 1340; he had been at Crecy, at the siege of Calais, and had fought both in Brittany and Spain; besides that, he told the Court of Chivalry, 'he had been armed in Prussia, in Hungary, at Constantinople, at the Bras de St Jorge, and at Messembria'; and one of the Scropes, he knew, was buried at Messembria — it must, I think, have been young Henry Le Scrope of the Masham line. This splendid old soldier, after something like thirty years service in arms, had at the time of the Scrope v. Grosvenor case settled down as the husband of a Northumbrian heiress of moderate fortune.26 Another more or less professional warrior who had seen crusading service (Prussian in this case) was Henry Ferrers, a bastard son of Lord Ferrers of Groby, last heard of before the Scrope v. Grosvenor case as a captain under Bishop Despenser in Flanders who had sold his fortress to the advancing French for a price a little too good to be respectable.27 And among the poorer I must not forget faithful John Ryther, Geoffrey Le Scrope the younger's esquire, who buried his master's body when he died before Piskre in 1362 and stayed in Konigsberg at the end of the reise to see to the placing of a glass panel of the arms of Scrope in the church there.28 Research has (as far as I know) failed to trace precisely what John Ryther esquire of Yorkshire's parentage and connections were but, from the references to him in the testimony of other witnesses in the case, it is clear that he was in his day a figure well enough known among the soldiers, squires and aristocrats of the north country, not for his wealth or power but as one respected for his long and varied martial career. I have not mentioned by any means all those who, by their testimony in the Scrope v. Grosvenor controversy of 1386, revealed their crusading experience. I hope, however, that I have mentioned just enough to give

25 26 27 28

Ibid., i, p. 123; ii, p. 320-21. Ibid., i, pp. 124-25; ii, pp. 323-25. Ibid., i, p. 188; ii, pp. 443-45. Ibid., i, p. 146; ii, pp. 351-52.

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an impression of what a varied group they form, in terms of influence, experience, ancestry and local background. The military careers of a number of them also suggest that, among those who had once gone on crusade, a quite wide, if haphazard, crusading experience was not uncommon. A man like Sabraham, having once-been on a crusading expedition, might think of going on another. The same sort of pattern is illustrated in family terms in the experience both of the Scropes and of the Hastings of Elsyng. Other sources give further evidence of what looks like a crusading tradition in some families. Two particularly notable examples are the Uffords of Suffolk and the Beauchamps of Warwick. The Warwick pageant, commemorating Richard de Beauchamp, the earl who served Henry V so well in France and who died in 1439, tells how as a young man he took his way to 'Russy, Lettowe, Poleyn and Spruse Westvale and other coostes of Almayn toward Englond by such coostes as his auncestry hadde labored in, and specially earl Thomas his grauntfadre that in warre had taken the Kynges son of Lettowe and brought hym into Englond and cristened hym at London namyng hym after hymself Thomas.'29 It would seem that the reference must be to an expedition either of 1361 or of 1365. Certainly this same earl Thomas set out to join Peter of Cyprus in 1364, when we hear of him tourneying at Venice while waiting for the host to assemble. He does not in fact seem to have gone to Alexandria, though, but to have gone to Prussia instead.30 Three years later his son and earl Richard's father, another Thomas, was bound in the same direction, having leave to pass from Dover on his way to Prussia, together with his brothers William and Roger and in their company nine esquires and twenty yeomen.31 The record of the Uffords is a little less detailed, but equally impressive. One of the Uffords, a son of the later earl of Suffolk, was in Prussia in 1331.32 Thomas Ufford was leading a company of Englishmen there in 1348,

29

Pageant of the Birth, Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, 1389-1439, ed. Viscount Dillon and W. St John Hope (London, 1914), p. 44. 30 N. Jorga, Philippe de Mezieres et la croisade au XlVe siecle, Bibliotheque de 1'ecole des Hautes Etudes, ex (Paris, 1896), pp. 205, 243, 254; Chronik Wigands von Marburg, pp. 549, 551. 31 CPR, 1367-70, p. 56. There are a good many references in the CPR to individuals proposing to make the journey to Truce', to the numbers in their company and the sums that they carried for expenses, including CPR, 1361-64, pp. 251-52 (Robert Howard); CPR, 136770, p. 57 (Ivo Fitzwarin); p. 58 (Hugh Despenser); p. 65 (Thomas de Boynton); p. 72 (William de Furnival); p. 127 (Robert Urswyk); CPR, 1381-85, p. 274 (Hugh Despenser); CPR, 1388-92, p. 413 (Lord Despenser). Thomas Beauchamp, William and Roger 'le fitz chivaler' travelled with nine esquires, twenty yeomen and thirty horses, and with 1000 marks for their expenses. 32 Chronik Wigands von Marburg, p. 479.

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and was back in 1362 and in 1365 (like Warwick, he had set out to join Peter of Cyprus but had found preparations going too slowly for his patience, or perhaps his pocket).33 If anyone had ever challenged the arms of Ufford or of Beauchamp in the Court of Chivalry, it looks as if they would have brought to light a body of testimony with crusading experience even more eloquent than that which the challenge to the Scropes elicited. The Beauchamps and the Uffords were families of older blood, richer and of more moment than the Scropes, mere barons whose family had made its way rapidly forward by good marriages and solid service in the professions of law and arms. The crusading record in the fourteenth century of some other comital families will also repay examination. There are some which have no crusading experience in the period that I can uncover; those of Stafford, March, and Arundel for instance.34 But a very high proportion of comital families do prove to have a crusading veteran somewhere in their ranks. Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, saw service in Prussia, and was at Satalia and at the taking of Alexandria.35 Edward Courtenay, the Earl's son of Devonshire, was setting out for Prussia together with two brothers in 1368.36 William Montagu, whom Edward III made earl of Salisbury, was at the siege of Algeciras, and his descendant John Montagu, Richard IFs earl, fought in Prussia.37 Thomas Holland, earl of Kent in right of his marriage to Joan of Kent, Richard IFs mother, was another Prussian veteran, and earned there the love and respect of the French lords who were his companions on the Reise.38 Hotspur, the famous son of the first earl of Northumberland, was in Prussia in 1383.39 His uncle Sir Thomas Percy seems to have served there in 1391,40 and five years later his younger brother Sir Ralph joined the ill-fated crusading host that was overwhelmed by Sultan Bajazeth at Nicopolis.41 One at least of the Nevilles, 33

Ibid., pp. 514, 551; Jorga, Philippe de Mezieres, p. 269; CPR, 1361-64, pp. 251-52. Thomas, earl of Stafford did however embark for Prussia with Gloucester in 1391, but both were turned back by storms in the North Sea; see A. Goodman, The Loyal Conspiracy (London, 1971), pp. 57-58. 35 Jorga, Philippe de Mezieres, pp. 364-66; A.S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1938), p. 518. 36 CPR, 1367-70, p. 128. 37 For William, see above, n. 5; for John, K.B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), p. 178. 38 Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. de Lettenhove, iv, pp. 406, 411. 39 Ibid., x, pp. 243. 40 Chronik Wigands von Marburg, pp. 646, 648. 41 J.J.N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377-99 (London, 1972), p. 240. 34

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the Percy's great rivals, joined Bourbon's crusade to Tunis.42 I am talking here of men who, if they went on crusade, did not go alone. They were captains by birth and their families were those that set the tone of aristocratic mores. Crusading could not look outdated (or disreputable, as Terry Jones hints) as long as their involvement in the enterprise was as active as the record shows it to have been in the fifty or so years that separate the siege of Algeciras in 1343 from the battle of Nicopolis in 1396. It is true that neither Edward III nor any of his sons ever fought the infidel. When Peter of Cyprus came to England to recruit support for his crusade of 1364-65, Edward listened to him but declared he was too old to go on crusade and referred the visitor to his children; they did not respond.43 Among Edward's sons, Thomas of Woodstock was the one who came nearest to being armed against the pagans; he embarked for Prussia in 1391, but was driven home by the storms of the North Sea.44 But the crusading tradition was important in the royal circle. Henry of Grosmont, first duke of Lancaster, was Edward Ill's kinsman, and his daughter and heiress Blanche married the king's son John of Gaunt; he was twice a crusader, at Algecrias in 1343-44 and in Prussia in 1355.45 Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke, went to Prussia, as we have seen, in 1390, and he returned there again in 1392, though on this second occasion he saw no fighting. The men who served with him in Prussia, such as Thomas Erpingham, John Norbury, and John Waterton, were among the inner group of his familiars who made the coup of 1399 work and on whom he relied heavily in his early years of kingship.46 And Gaunt's eldest illegitimate son by his mistress Katherine Swynford, John Beaufort, first earl of Somerset, was a noted crusader. In 1390 he joined the duke of Bourbon's crusade to Tunis: in 1391 he was in Prussia; in 1396 he was at Nicopolis, and he was one of the fortunate few who came home.47 42

Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 408 n. 3, 522. Oeuvres de Froissart, vi, pp. 380-81; and compare T. Johnes' translation of Froissart's Chronicles from the Hafod MS (London, 1842), i, p. 306. 44 On Gloucester's crusading plans see Palmer, England, France and Christendom, p. 198, and Goodman, The Loyal Conspiracy, pp. 57-58, 78, 92. 45 See above, n. 5, and Fowler, The King's Lieutenant, pp. 104-6. 46 L. Toulmin Smith, Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land Made by Henry Earl of Derby, Camden Society, new series, 52 (London, 1894); F.R.H. Du Boulay, 'Henry of Derby's Expeditions to Prussia, 1390-1 and 1392', in F.R.H. Du Boulay and C.M. Barren (eds), The Reign of Richard II (London, 1971), pp. 153-72. 47 Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 408 n. 3, 519; Palmer, England, France and Christendom, pp. 184-85, 239-40. 43

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If things had gone differently in that great battle, the tale might be more impressive still. The expedition that came to grief there had been thought of as the vanguard of a larger expedition, to be organised by the kings of France and England together. The rapprochement and the long truce which they agreed upon in 1395 came as the climax to a sustained diplomatic effort which had long had in view as one of its prime objectives a combined Anglo-French expedition against the Turk.48 Richard II had accepted gracefully the elaborate allegorical letter, urging the need for peace between France and England in the interest of Christendom and the crusade, that Philippe de Mezieres had written for him — de Mezieres was the ex-chancellor of Peter of Cyprus, ex-councillor of Charles V and ex-tutor of Charles VI, and the chief literary propagandist of the crusade in the Latin west. Richard IPs uncles of Lancaster, York and Gloucester all enrolled as associates of de Mezieres Order of the Passion, the new crusading order that he described in his letter to Richard as 'une nouvelle chevalerie du crucefix qui doit estre mandee oultremer'.49 Some of the names of other Englishmen who enrolled in this order at the same time are also striking. They include a number of Richard's close and courtly intimates, like his cousin Rutland, Mowbray the earl marshal and Lord Despenser, together with a number of chamber knights like Richard Adderbury and Lewis Clifford — the last named being also, incidentally, a friend of Chaucer and a fellow poet.50 They also include a number of men whose names I have already mentioned as genuine ex-crusaders, like Ralph Percy and Thomas Erpingham. The crusade was very much in men's minds in England, and was a live issue in political society, among the highest and most influential in the realm, in the late 1380s and the 1390s, which was the very period, as it happens, when Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales. The first conclusion that stems from the evidence that has accumulated thus far seems to me quite clear. Chaucer may have credited to his Knight a wider and longer crusading experience than any known individual of his time could boast, but there is nothing to occasion surprise in his emphasis on the part his Knight had taken in wars against

48

Palmer, England, France and Christendom, pp. 180-210. P. de Mezieres, Letter to King Richard II, ed. G.W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1975), p. 103; M.V Clarke, Fourteenth-Century Studies (Oxford, 1937), p. 286. 50 A. Molinier, 'Description de deux manuscrits contenant la regie de la Militia Passionis Jhesu Christi de Philippe de Mezieres', Archives de VOrient Latin, i (1881), p. 363; G.L. Kittredge, 'Chaucer and Some of his Friends', Modern Philology, 1 (1903), pp. 6-13. 49

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the heathen. To go on crusading expeditions was, it is true, the exception to the common rule of his day — there are many more witnesses in the great armorial disputes whose military experience is limited to the Anglo-French war than there are men who had been further afield — but it was a not uncommon exception. The ideal of the crusade clearly remained a strong one; the question of the organisation of large-scale expeditions remained a live issue as a practical political objective; and a very substantial number of men showed their individual commitment to crusading by taking part in expeditions at their own risk, at their own cost, and on their own initiative. That is one reason why I continue to believe that what Chaucer was trying to portray in his Prologue was the best kind of knight of his time, one who had expressed his love of 'honour' and 'chivalrie' by his dedication to the noblest activity for a knight; a figure idealised somewhat, perhaps, but by no means antiquated in his outlook or remote, in his described life-style and ideals, from the English aristocrats and knights whom Chaucer knew personally about the court of Richard II. The crusaders and would-be crusaders with whom he would have had most contact there and elsewhere belonged, moreover, to the true gentility, not to the mercenary riff-raff of the free companies with whom Terry Jones would like to associate Chaucer's Knight. Plenty of men went on crusade: that in itself does not of course define just why they did, and I am sure Mr Jones is right to approach that question at any rate with some scepticism. It is not easy to believe that an experienced and thoroughly unscrupulous politician like Henry Bolingbroke, or a captain like Henry Ferrers with an eye open for dubiously legitimate war profits, was actuated by simple and single-minded zeal for the cause of the cross. The pressures of conformism, to fall in with the demands of accepted ideals, together with the quest for reputation and perhaps the lure of adventure, were more likely the mainsprings of their enterprise. The case of a man like, say, Bolingbroke's grandfather Henry of Grosmont, is a little different, though. One imagines that the religious significance of holy war — of the 'blessed viage' as it was often called — may have meant rather more to this great captain and diplomat whom we find, in his Livre de seyntz medicines, castigating his personal sins, the blood that he has shed, his love of glory, and the lust that drove him in youth to take more joy in prostitutes than in honest women.51 51 Henry of Lancaster, Le livre de seyntz medicines, ed. E J. Arnould, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2 (Oxford, 1940), pp. 17,43 (anger and bloodshed); pp. 16, 71 (vainglory); pp. 52, 179 (lechery).

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Whether one is looking at a Henry of Grosmont or a Henry Bolingbroke, however, one point is abundantly clear. That is that the motive for crusading in this period had very little to do with the quest for gains of war, for plunder and ransoms, which is the motive that has been so strongly stressed over the last twenty years with regard to English knightly involvement in the Hundred Years War. The lure of crusading had very little indeed to do with that sort of material advantage. In fortunate circumstances there could of course be windfalls. There was a vast booty taken at the capture of Alexandria. The determination of the leaders of the substantial English contingent in the army there to get more than their share of swag seems to have been one of the reasons why the success was not followed up. In contrast, neither Bourbon's expedition nor the Nicopolis crusade brought anyone much profit. More men, moreover, went over the years to Prussia than ever went to the east, and he would have been an ignorant man indeed who went to Prussia in the hope of making a fortune out of winnings of war. The Wilderness was the name men gave to the land of the Samogitians, beyond the river Memel, which was the scene of most of the fighting in which Englishmen took part in the fourteenth century. The terrain here was appalling for campaign purposes, utterly unlike sunny France where men made themselves rich through spoils. Effectively it could only be traversed by cavalry in conditions either of drought or deep frost. The great rivers had to be crossed by ferry, and in the winter floods the perils could be great. If rain or a thaw set in in mid campaign, horses' hooves would sink too deep in the morasses to carry their riders forward. The villages and forts of the pagans seldom offered rich takings in specie. The land could be made rich, but it was the German settlers with whom the Teutonic order colonised its conquests that made it so, once it was secure. In the meantime, country at the edge of the fighting frontier was often reduced to near desert — it was part of the policy of the knights to clear a no man's land beyond the fringe of their settlements. The Teutonic Knights had indeed material gains to win from the wars, for the land securely taken would be theirs, and so would be the labour of those that they subdued, converted forcibly to Christianity and resettled as cultivators. But there was no comparable advantage on the material side for the pilgrim in arms who came to Prussia and experienced the adventure and the risks of a Reise. The aid of the westerners was of course invaluable to the Teutonic Knights, and the manner in which they encouraged pilgrims to their wars is significant, and revealing with regard to crusading motives in the fourteenth century. They did not usually offer wages of war, but they

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did spend money on their visitors, making sure that they were entertained in a manner worthy of heroes, feasting them and taking them hunting for unfamiliar beasts, for elk and bear. They encouraged them to leave a memorial of themselves and their achievement: to judge by the testimony given in the Scrope v. Grosvenor dispute, there must have been a time when a whole history of foreign crusading enterprise could be read in the armorial glass and blazoned memorials of the Marienkirche of Konigsberg. At the beginning sometimes but more often at the end of a reise a great feast was given for the leaders of visiting contingents, called the Eretisch. At a high table places of honour were reserved for those knights who had, by general estimation, performed the most noble and notable deeds of arms. The chronicler d'Oronville gives a vivid picture of one of the brothers of the Teutonic Order distributing to these chosen ones at the end of the feast special badges bearing the motto 'Honneur vainc toutl9.52 Thus a cult of the reise was propagated and began to acquire a mystique of its own, and we can see this sort of mystique acquiring impact outside Prussia, as well as in the lands of the Order. The statutes of a southern French order of chivalry called the Tiercelet for instance permitted any member who had been on a Reise to wear its insignia with a special difference, to show that he had taken part in a very special enterprise.53 There is no parallel provision in the statutes of the one great English order of chivalry of this period, the Garter, but the way that the Warwick pageant looks back to the ancestral achievement of the Beauchamps in the 'coostes of Almayn' makes it quite clear that in England too experience of the Reise had acquired a very special significance in the knightly world. The continuing force of the ideal of chivalry and the appeal of its mystique were clearly key factors in keeping crusading enthusiasm alive. Here we must remember what chivalry, the order of knighthood, was, that is to say an ethic that was at once Christian and martial and aristocratic. Its elitist social and martial overtones undoubtedly contributed much to its enduring force, at least as much as the Christian sanction that it had acquired in an earlier age. That is what I am getting at when I state that in many cases conformist acceptance of established ideals, together with the prospect of winning repute and the lure of 52 Chronique du bon Due Lays de Bourbon, ed. A.M. Chazaud, Soci£t6 de 1'histoire de France (Paris, 1876), pp. 65-66; and see A.S. Cook, 'Beginning the Board in Prussia', Journal of English and German Philology, 14 (1915), pp. 375-88. 53 M.G.A. Vale, 'A Fourteenth-Century Order of Chivalry: The Tiercelet', English Historical Review, 82(1967), p. 340.

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adventure, were probably the mainsprings of crusading motivation. But it is not really my purpose to diagnose just what it was that kept crusading enthusiasm alive in the time of Chaucer, but more simply to show that it did remain alive, that knights did still respond to its promptings and risk body and fortune by so doing, and that it was still widely respected as the highest expression of chivalrous dedication. Whatever Chaucer intended by his description of the Knight in the General Prologue, there seems to me no doubt, in the light of the English response to the call of the crusade, that in his day the knight who was not only worthy in his 'lordes werre' but had also fought far afield for the faith could be held up to the secular aristocracy as a model of virtuous activity in his estate. Certainly that was so on the continent, as the careful record of the crusading exploits of such as Marshal Boucicaut reminds us,54 together with comments such as that of the Soldich de la Trau, that he held to have been present at Bourbon's siege of Tunis, inconclusive a. it was, more honourable than to have been at three mortal battles in the field in ordinary war.55 Still more significant in the present context are the lobdichten of Guelders Herald, his poetic praises of named and actual knights whom he held to have been in his day of the highest prowess. His litanies of the campaigns of such men as the duke of Juliers, Rutger Raets and Adam von Moppertingen emphasise their deeds in Prussia and beyond the 'great sea' in a manner that is not so very distantly reminiscent of Chaucer's record of his own Knight's achievements in the General Prologue.^ Richard Green, in an important essay, reminds us that in the late middle ages he who would be a courtier had to learn also to be a lover, and of the instructions that little Jehan de Saintre received under that head. Later in the same story Anthoine de la Sale describes, with the loving attention to detail of one versed in heraldic lore, the feats of his hero in the lists that did honour to his lady. After that, Saintre's next great exploit was to lead a glorious crusade in Prussia, which was the climax of his career in knighthood.57 Of course a knight is not quite the

54

Le livre desfaicts du bonMessireJean LeMaingre, dit Boucicaut, ed. M. Petitot, Collection des memoires relatifs a 1'histoire de France, VI (Paris, 1825), chs 12, pp. 18, 22-28. 55 Chronique du bon Due Loys de Bourbon, p. 248. 56 Wapenboek ou armorial de 1334 a 1372, par Gelre Heraut d'Armes, ed. V. Bouton (Paris, 1881) i, pp. 41,90-91, 101. 57 Richard Green, 'The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis', in V.J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (eds), Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1983), pp. 87-108. A. de la Sale Le petit Jehan se Saintre (London and Paris, 1911), chs 18-43, 58-63.

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same thing as a courtier, but the story of Saintre reminds us that at the end of the fourteenth century the two ideas were still close to one another. In the days of King Richard II a great many courtiers were knights, and courtesy — the manners fitting to a court — was an essential quality of good knighthood. Richard's court may not have been a centre of the patronage of cultural activity in the most usual sense of the term, but the king was a generous patron to cultured knights like him whom Deschamps hailed as 'the amorous Clifford', — a man who knew how to play the game of courtly love but who had also seen service in the wars, and was a member of the crusading Order of the Passion.58 The Black Prince's influence no doubt had much to do with the strong martial element among the men close to the king. The jousts of St-Inglevert are perhaps not quite part of the history of English court culture, but the great Smithfield tournament where Richard's badge of the White Hart was first displayed was a similar occasion, and much nearer to it;59 and if John Palmer is right about the Wilton Diptych, in which Richard's White Hart emblem is so prominent, it finds part of its context in plans for a great chivalrous enterprise, the crusade against the Turk.60 If the history of the crusading interests and experience of the English aristocracy of Chaucer's day is not strictly court history, it does, I think, tell us a good deal about the atmosphere and preoccupations of the actual court of Richard II.

58 Oeuvres completes de Etistache Deschamps, ed. Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and G. Raynaud (Paris, 1878-1903), iii, pp. 375-76. 59 Historia vitae et regni Ricardi II... a monacho quodam de Evesham, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1729), p. 122. 60 Palmer, England, France and Christendom, pp. 242-44.

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7

Gadifer de La Salle: A Late Medieval Knight Errant There are three ways, Jean de Bueil wrote in his autobiography, the Jouvencel, in which those who follow the noble profession of arms may reap their reward. They may meet death in the field, or they may rise by conquest to riches and lordship, as Francesco Sforza did. Or there is the third way: they may live poor but so honoured 'that each one speaks of you and your deeds, so that their renown will last after you; as has been the case with Sir Bertrand Du Guesclin, Sir Gadifer de La Salle, and other good knights who have died poor'.1 Sforza and Du Guesclin remain household names for the medieval historian: Gadifer de La Salle does not. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that he was, in his day, a figure of some celebrity, and this not from Jean de Bueil only. The chronicler Monstrelet remembers him, as a man at arms 'full of prowess'.2 Eustace Deschamps, in a balade celebrating the good name of the knights of Charles VTs household, hails him as 'Gadifer, que Dieu gart': he assumes everyone will know him.3 Perhaps still more significantly, he makes a brief appearance in Anthoine de la Sale's novel, Le petit Jehan de Saintre, in which a number of celebrated and real-life cavaliers make similar appearances. He is there mentioned, specifically and interestingly, in the account of the great crusade that Saintre led into Prussia. In that host, we are told, the banner of Our Lady was entrusted to Sir Gadifer de La Salle, who had borne it before on other occasions.4 Once again he appears clearly as a figure of some distinction. Who was he, and why was he remembered? 1

J. de Bueil, Lejouvencel, ed. C. Favre and L. Lecestre (Paris, 1887), i, p. 43. Chronique de E. de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douet d'Arq (Paris, 1863), ii, p. 39. 3 E. Deschamps, Oeuvres, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de St-Hilaire (Paris, 1889), vi, p. 54. 4 A. de La Sale, Little John of Saintre, tr. I. Gray (London, 1931), p. 233.

2

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It is, fortunately, very easy to answer this question. In his introduction to the splendid edition of the Canarien which he edited in collaboration with E. Serra Rafols, A. Cioranescu gives a careful biography of Gadifer, and I must make it clear that what I have to say about the details of his career is entirely based on what Cioranescu has established.5 I must, of course, repeat the story in outline, but my principal purpose is not just to repeat the facts, but rather to draw attention to certain aspects of this particular biography which seem to me of interest to the historian of European knighthood. It is, besides, a biography, as I hope will be agreed, that is of singular interest in its own right, and worth repeating, even if unoriginally. Gadifer de La Salle was born probably about the year 1350, perhaps shortly after. He came of a minor noble family of the Thouars region of Poitou. His father was one Ferrand de La Salle, of whom we hear in 1359 — when a grant was made of his lands in Thouars to Etienne Pasteaul, esquire, Ferrand's rights having escheated on his entering the obedience of the English.6 This confiscation and regrant were, of course, entirely formal, and took no effect, since the treaty of Bretigny brought the whole of Poitou into English hands. And it is in the English obedience that we first encounter Gadifer, in a report of an encounter in 1372 between the French king's soldiers under Hardouin de la Jaille and the 'men of Poitou' under Tristan Rouault, Perceval de Couloignes, and Gadifer de La Salle.7 Later in the same year we hear of him again, and by then he had, it is clear, changed sides. For in November 1372 a quittance records the payment to him of 31 francs, which he had won off Duke Philip of Burgundy at chess.8 Philip, with Du Guesclin and Clisson as his lieutenants, was leading the king's forces in the reconquest of Poitou: Gadifer seems to have seen the way the wind was blowing, and moreover to have got close to a very high commander on the French side at a remarkably early stage. His career had begun. In the next year, 1373, we hear of him again, in the service of the duke of Berry who had been made governor of Poitou. In the duke's service

5

Le Canarien, ed. E. Serra Rafols and A. Cioranescu (Las Palmas, 1959-65), referred to henceforward as Canarien. Vol. I contains Cioranescu's introduction; vol. II the chronicle in the (later) text, favourable to Gadifer de la Salle's companion Jean de Bethencourt; vol. Ill the chronicle text favourable to Gadifer, which is the basis of both versions but breaks off at an earlier point. 6 Ibid., i, p. 317-19 (appx, doc. 15). 7 Secousse, Recueil de pieces sur Charles II, roi de Navarre (Paris, 1755), p. 650. 8 Canarien, i, pp. 168, 323 (appx, doc. 21).

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he led a company of five knights and twenty-two esquires,9 a pretty substantial company for a young man of very modest means. He distinguished himself in the reduction of Lusignan.10 It seems clear therefore that he had made a mark early as a military leader of talent. There were, of course, plenty of talented junior commanders of the same stamp about in this golden age of the Free Companies: they were a significant social by-product of the confused conditions in what contemporary sources refer to as 'the frontier of war'. Gadifer, though, seems to have been more successful than most in one particular respect, in establishing himself in the good graces of the high command. We have heard of him winning money, in the very first flush of his French allegiance, off no less a figure than Philip of Burgundy. With the duke of Berry he came to be on closer terms. In 1378 he is described as one of the duke's chamberlains,11 a member therefore of his household, and in October of that year the duke made him a present of 100 livres tournois to aid him to undertake a voyage to Prussia, to take part in the campaign against the heathen in the company of the Teutonic Knights.12 We know nothing of Gadifer's exploits in eastern Europe on this occasion: we do know, though, that he was to be there again in 1390/91, and that he seems also at some time to have been in Rhodes with the Hospitallers (though no date for this can be established).13 Clearly he was, or became, something of an amateur crusader — but more of that later. In fact, when we next hear of him for certain he was home again in Poitou. King Charles V, only weeks before he died in 1380, in consideration of Gadifer's good services, granted him licence to fortify his house at Ligron in the castellany of Thouars, so that it could be a place of resort for the people of the plat pays in the event of military emergency.14 A year later, in 1381, we hear of him again, still at home in Poitou and involved now in a rather intriguing local incident, which involved him in being charged with abduction. On his return from the wars, it appears, his father Ferrand told him how he had arranged a marriage for Philippon de Nueil — seemingly a kinsman — with the daughter of one Jean Garin: Gadifer was asked to fetch her from the house of her guardian, the seigneur de Pouzauges. Gadifer went to Pouzauges in 9

Ibid., i, p. 168 n. 2. P. Margry, Le conquete et les conquerants des lies Canaries (Paris, 1896), pp. 111-12. Canarien, i, p. 168, quoting AN, J 252, fo. 168. 12 Ibid., i, p. 330 (app., doc. 28). 13 Ibid., i, p. 169. 14 Ibid., i, p. 330-31 (app., doc. 29). 10

11

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company with Philippon, his cousin Brandelis de La Salle, and two other knights: and the young woman was carried away, crying and lamenting, on the pommel of Gadifer's horse. There was no overt violence beyond this, and she settled down with Philippon — or such was Gadifer's story: but charges were brought and Philippon's lands were seized by the officers of the duke of Berry. A royal pardon, granted to Gadifer as principal and to the others as his companions, and dated April 1385, put a stop to the proceedings.15 It is hard to know exactly what had happened (all has to be pieced together from the text of the pardon), but some fairly lawless and rather ruthless local scheming seems to have been afoot, gerrymandering rather than philandering. Force was law to the captains of the Free Companies, and it looks rather as if the La Salles had become infected by their attitude, to some extent at the least. The pardon of 1385 refers to Gadifer's good service to the crown, and to 'our well beloved uncle of Anjou'. Gadifer may, Cioranescu thinks, have served under Anjou in his campaign in Guienne in 1377, when Bergerac was taken.16 He certainly joined the army which Duke Louis led into Italy in 1383, in the hopes of making good his title to the kingdom of Naples as the adoptive heir of Queen Joanna. He was among the substantial and distinguished embassy whom Louis despatched to Venice to raise money on the security of jewels, whose galleys were captured by the sailors of the republic of Ragusa and who were handed over to Louis' rival, Charles of Durazzo, as prisoners of war.17 Gadifer had to find a ransom — the sum is not known and it was probably paid by Louis on his behalf. He had not made a fortune in arms, at this stage, as some of the free soldiers did. But he had made his name known to the point where it was familiar to the princes of the French royal house, and where his service was valued by them accordingly, in a much more respectable way than was the case with most of the free soldiery. It was his proven service and the name which he had won, no doubt, that some years after his return from Italy secured to Gadifer what apparently he had sought for some time, an office which would bring in significant financial reward. In August of 1390 he was named seneschal of Bigorre.18 It was a position for which he might be regarded as well suited: Bigorre was a distant province in the frontier of war, fluctuating 15

Ibid., i, p. 172, 344-46 (app., doc. 32). Ibid., i, p. 169. 17 Ibid., i, p. 174-75: and see J. Vieillard and L. Mirot, 'Deux lettres d'un envoye aragonais aupres de la cour pontificate' Bibliotheque de I'ecole de Chartes, 105 (1944), pp. 177-80. 18 Canarien, i, p. 176, 354 (app., doc. 38). 16

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between the obediences of France and England and semi-independence under the counts of Foix, and a man with a martial background might be useful there. There are reasons to think that Gadifer had had his eye on the post for a number of years. These reasons are apparent from the record of a case brought in the parlement of Paris and which for a period laid this preux chevalier under the shadow of a charge of murder. I think an outline of the facts alleged is worth rehearsing, because it gives a flavour of the violence of the times, and because it is a useful reminder that with regard to the late middle ages a contemporary reputation for preudhommie always demands scrutiny — the more pointedly in this case because this charge of murder lies alongside that other charge of abduction that has already been mentioned. The facts in this second case were never fully established, and the case itself, as far as can be made out, was never concluded; but very broadly the story was this.19 Gadifer had sought appointment to the seneschalcy in 1380, no doubt with influential backing; however, he was not named. The seneschal appointed in November of that year was Arnaud Guilhem de Montlezun, a native of the county, and Gadifer believed that the cause of his disappointment was the influence of one Dominique de Vezien, the king's proctor in Bigorre, and swore to be even with him. In 1390, after Arnaud Guilhem's death, Gadifer, as we have seen, was finally appointed, but he did not take up residence at Tarbes for a year or so. The next we hear is that in 1394 he was charged before the parlement by Arnaudon de Vezien, Dominique's son, with his father's murder. The facts that were not in dispute were that the seneschal had arrested Dominique, and placed him under guard in the castle of Campo — because Tarbes was not thought secure. Dominique had been found, some days later, hideously wounded, having dragged himself to a cattle shed, after falling from a tower of the castle. The defence story was that he had fallen while trying to escape; that of the prosecution, with which the king's proctor associated himself, was that Dominique had been pushed — by Gadifer's men. The prosecution alleged that Gadifer had acted in order to silence Dominique, who was threatening to denounce his peculations. The defence, in which the distinguished advocate Jean de Poupaincourt, a future premier president, appeared for Gadifer, alleged that Dominique was a thoroughly unsavoury character, himself

19 The story has to be pieced together from the records of the case in the registres du parlement', Cioranescu ha printed these in the appendix to the Canarien, i, pp. 362-74, 380, 39394 (docs 48-49, 54-55, 62).

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deep in peculation, who was suspected of murdering his wife by means of an engineered accident with a ladder, and who had been arrested in consequence of charges brought against him by one Casalibus. It is quite impossible to disengage fact from fiction in this tale, and it sounds very much as if there is an underlying story of local mafias falling out with one another. There is though enough evidence to hint that Gadifer's upbringing among routiers and his experience of the activities of the free companies had not refined his idea of the role and conduct proper to a royal official with judicial and police duties. In any case, he got away, if not declared innocent, at least scot free, and unencumbered by the demands for damages and for a condign public confession of guilt in the square of Tarbes, which were what his adversary was principally seeking. It may be — indeed, it may probably be — that influence helped to achieve this result. Certainly over the years 1390 to 1402, during which he was formally seneschal, Gadifer seems to have been usually in more interesting places and more elevated company than he would have found in Tarbes. He had become a close associate of the duke of Orleans, to whose influence he probably owed his office as seneschal and a position in the royal household as a chamberlain: he was also a chamberlain of the duke.20 Duke Louis favoured him on several specific occasions. In 1390 he advanced 200 livres tournois towards Gadifer's expenses in the duke of Bourbon's expedition to Tunis (during the course of which the appointment as seneschal came through).21 After his return, he and another of Orlean's retainers, Yves de Vieuxpont, proceeded to Prussia; and in 1391 he was again in Prussia in the company of the great Jean de Boucicault (this is probably the basis for the account of his Prussian service in Le petit Jehan de Saintre).22 We get other glimpses of him in this period, usually in Paris, and there pursuing a stylish, leisured existence in the entourage of his patron. In 1394 the duke bought him a new charger, a bay with a fine tail.23 We also hear of him gambling successfully: in 1394 he won seventy-one ecus off the duke at a single sitting at chess, and another quittance shows him winning thirty ducats of gold off his master in 1396.24 He was in Louis' suite in 1396 when the duke accompanied

20

For Gadifer's chamberlainships see Canarien, i, pp. 354-55, 362 (app., docs 37, 39, 47). Canarien, i, 354 (app., doc. 37). 22 Canarien, i, 176 n. 2; on Vieuxpont see A. Piaget, 'Jean de Garancieres', Romania, 22 (1893), p. 455. 23 Canarien, i. p. 359 (app., doc. 45). 24 Margry, La conquete, pp. 114-15. 21

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Charles VTs daughter Isabella to Calais to her betrothal to Richard II,25 and again when he rode to Coucy in 1400 to meet the duke of Gueldres.26 In that same year he was granted by the duke his gold collar of the Camail, being among the first recipients of this dignified devise.^ Perhaps the most interesting context in which his name appears in this period is, however, among the members of the famous Court of Love of Charles VI, founded (allegedly) by the king and by the dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon on 6 January 1400.28 It is not clear when Gadifer was admitted to this company, which was still apparently flourishing in 1410 and perhaps as late as 1416, since the list of members on which his name appears is undated.29 But since it was a predominantly Burgundian company and he was a noted adherent of the rival Orleans faction, the St Valentine's day festivities of the society in February 1402 seems like the likeliest juncture, since they fall in the period of reconciliation between Philip of Burgundy and Louis of Orleans effected under the auspices of Queen Isabella,30 who with her ladies seems to have played an important part in the affairs of this 'court'. It was a literary society, meeting to compose and recite amorous ballads, but with a strong chivalrous slant to its rituals. The elected Prince of Love, its sovereign, was obliged if requested to hold jousts in honour of the ladies. Its statutes followed the pattern of those of an order of chivalry, visiting those convicted by its chapters of blaming or misfaming womankind with the chivalric penalties of disgrace: expulsion from the society and public defacement of the shield of arms of the offender, 'so that the renown and glory of his name shall be shown to be extinct'.31 Gadifer's inclusion in this company reveals him to be recognised at once as a tried knight and as an established courtier, with an understanding of fashionable style and recognised literary interests.

25

E. Jarry, La vie politique de Louis de France, due d'Orleans (Paris, 1889), p. 180. Margry, La Conquete, p. 118. 27 Ibid., p. 146. 28 On Charles VTs Court of Love see A. Piaget, 'La cour amoureuse de Charles VI', Romania, 20 (1891), pp. 423-46; and R. Green, The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis', in VJ. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne, eds, English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1983), pp. 87-108. 29 The list in question appears in a sixteenth-century armorial MS, BN, MS Fr. 5233, having been copied from an original list which Piaget, Romania, 20 (1891), p. 424, believes to have been drawn up in 1416. 30 Canarien, i, p. 185-86. 31 The statutes are printed by C. Potvin, 'La charte de la cour d'amour', Bulletin de Vacadtmie royale des sciences, des lettres et de beaux-arts de Belgique, 3rd series, 12 (1886), pp. 202-23. 26

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If it is right that it was early in 1402 that Gadifer was elected to this elite band — the names of about 130 companies are recorded — then he was probably already planning what was to be the greatest and also the most disastrous venture of his life, one in which he aspired to make his fortune and in the end lost all. This was nothing less than a plan to conquer and establish a new lordship in the Canary Islands, which had been 'rediscovered' by adventurous seamen in the fourteenth century. Gadifer had in this venture a companion and partner, another retainer of Orleans alongside whom he had served in Italy under Anjou and subsequently on Bourbon's crusade, and with whom common service in the household or Orleans had probably made him intimate. His name was Jean de Bethencourt, and I will content myself with saying of him that he was a good few years younger than Gadifer and that he was a great deal richer, being a substantial seigneur of old stock with wide estates in Normandy.32 It would take too long here to recount all the detail of the story of the expedition of Gadifer and Bethencourt to the Canaries, which Cioranescu has described very fully. It was conceived, formally at least, in a crusading and missionary spirit, 'with the view of converting the islands, and bringing the people to the Christian faith', to quote the Canarien]33 and the companions secured for themselves and their followers a crusading bull of indulgence from Benedict XIII.34 Its true object, no doubt, was gain, and the founding of a rich lordship for the conquerors, Gadifer must have invested in it most of all that all he had; in raising men, purchasing a ship for himself and stocking and victualling for a substantial voyage. He and Bethencourt joined forces at La Rochelle in April 1402,35 and sailed from that port on 1 May on what was, for Gadifer at least, to be a long and sorry story of misfortune, hardship and unsuccess. All went well at first. After some troubles with the Spanish authorities in Seville, who tried to arrest them under colour of reprisals, the expedition landed on the island of Lanzarote in July 1402, and built a fort which they called Rubicon.36 The natives there were friendly and initially listened to the instruction of the priests who had come with the

32 33 34 35

36

On Bethencourt see Canarien, i, pp. 108-62. Ibid., iii, p. 15. Ibid., i, p. 412-15 (app., docs 77-78). Ibid., iii, p. 17. Ibid., iii, p. 25.

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expedition. But when Gadifer and Bethencourt passed over to Fuerteventura their reception was less warm. The Guanches, who had some experience of Spanish slave traders, fled to the hills; provisions began to run short and the sailors began to be mutinous. It was clear that more substantial forces were needed, and it was agreed that Bethencourt should return to Spain to seek help, leaving Gadifer in charge at Rubicon.37 Now trouble began in earnest. While Gadifer was temporarily away, hunting seals for provender and leather on the deserted He des Louppes, his second-in-command, Bertin de Berneval, took affairs into his own hands. His idea was to make a quick profit out of slaving: he succeeded, temporarily, in capturing the native king of Lanzarote whom he had treacherously entertained to a feast, and made off with a cargo of slaves on board a Spanish ship that had put in.38 Gadifer was marooned on the He de Louppes for eight days, since de Berneval had taken all the boats he could. He and those with him were rescued in a small cocket by two of the men who had stayed loyal, famished and having survived largely by drinking the dew that fell on their blankets. They got back to find the natives hostile and provisions precarious, and all their work so far to be done again. Still, all was not lost. Early in the new year a ship despatched from Spain by Bethencourt arrived, with men and provisions: and in the summer of 1403 Gadifer visited Grand Canary, Palma and Fuerteventura, and laid plans for their future conquest on the basis of his survey.39 Then, early in 1404, the king of the Guanches of Lanzarote formally submitted at Rubicon, and all his people adopted the Christian faith.40 So there was a major achievement to report when in April Bethencourt arrived from Spain, with a barge, its crew and fresh provisions. But for Gadifer personally this meant not the opening at last of more ample horizons, but the hour when disaster finally struck. Bethencourt had, in fact, played his partner false. When he had arrived at the Castilian court he had been well received; and the proposition that he put to King Henry, in return for support and permission to recruit, was this. He, Bethencourt, should do homage to the king for the whole archipelago, which he would hold as a fief. As 37

Ibid., iii, p. 29. The chronicle gives a long and lugubrious account of Berneval's treachery; ibid., iii, pp. 37-57. 39 Ibid., ii, pp. 131-61; iii, pp. 65-81. 38

40

Ibid., iii, p. 85.

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lord, he would be entitled to a portion of one fifth of all merchandise entering the islands from Spain, and would have the right to mint his own coin in the islands.41 These rights Bethencourt secured to himself, without any mention in his charters of Gadifer's interest, and on his return to Rubicon he made it clear that he had no intention of sharing in any significant degree.42 Before the end of the summer relations between the two partners in consequence broke down irreparably. Gadifer, who had lost his ship, his investment and a good many valuable personal possessions to which de Berneval had helped himself, left the Canaries and made his way to Spain. There he totally failed to make good his claims against Bethencourt at the Castilian court: (he was hampered by the fact that he was not able to produce any documents to support his case and it seems likely that his original agreements with his partner were oral).43 From Spain he returned to France, penniless, unaccompanied, with nothing to show for endeavour and hardship endured and with nothing to sell but his name. Even the gold collar of the Camail was no more: it had been 'appropriated' by one of Bethencourt's colleagues in Spain (and presumably sold) in 1403 — whil Gadifer was struggling, undermanned, to enlarge what he still at that time imagined to be a joint conquest.44 Gadifer probably got back to France too late to make much of the favour of his old patron, Louis of Orleans, who was murdered in Paris by John the Fearless's retainers in November 1407. But he was not entirely forgotten, and we catch a few later glimpses of him, struggling to reascend the greasy pole of fortune. It was his old reputation, no doubt, that secured him command of a company of men that was sent in 1409 to support Boucicault, his old comrade in arms, in Genoa:45 and in the next year there is a record of a gift to him from the king of 100 francs, 'to help him maintain his estate', granted in memory of past good services.46 In 1411 he was at the head of a company again and once more in the service of the house of Orleans, as the quarrels of the French princes degenerated into civil war:47 at la Ferte Jouarre in that year he was one of a group of Armagnac knights who swore to seek vengeance for the death of

41

Ibid., i, pp. 415-16 (app., doc. 79); ii, pp. 101-3. Ibid., ii, p. 229. 43 Ibid., ii, p. 231; and see Cioranescu's comments (i, p. 186). 44 Ibid., iii, p. 34. 45 Ibid., i, p. 191; and see Chronique de E. de Monstrelet, ii, p. 39. 46 Canarien, i, p. 430 (app., doc. 91). 47 Choix es pieces inedites sur la regne de Charles VI, ed. L. Douet d'Arq (Paris, 1863), i, p. 345. 42

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Louis of Orleans.48 In 1414 we find him seizing the opportunity, after the Burgundians had been driven out of Paris, to petition for restoration to his seneschalcy of Bigorre — but the reigning seneschal, Arnaud de Lavedan, was not a Burgundian, and the petition was refused.49 When he did finally get the office back, after Arnaud's death, it was at the hands of the young Charles VII, in 1422, when he himself was seventy or thereabouts.50 He had only a little longer to live and serve to the end the cause of Armagnac and Orleans with which he had been associated for more than thirty years. In 1423 there was a new seneschal in Bigorre, and it seems clear that Gadifer had gone the way of all flesh. The career of Gadifer de La Salle is an amazing one, fit material for a historical novel. For just that reason, it is worth emphasising to what a large degree it was entirely conventional, even typical — provided we cover up for a moment the page of his exploits in the Canaries. He was an adventurer of a kind that we meet repeatedly in the annals of the fourteenth century, a minor nobleman who had no option but to take risks and to use his elbows as well as his sword if he was to make any show of maintaining his estate. The smallness of his patrimony and his consequent enduring financial insecurity were clearly dominant factors in his life. He made his debut in the rough and tumbling and brutal world of the Free Companies. His martial talents were his most saleable asset, and for long he sought armed service where he could find it. He was dependent on patrons and luck - and in some small degree on his shrewdness as a gambler who knew how to fleece richer men of sums modest to them but substantial to him. For long his most consistent objective was an office that would carry with it a greater measure of financial security and some local influence. But it looks as if, when he achieved this, he had become too used to the pleasures and excitement of the court to make use of his opportunity in Bigorre in any solid way. The prospect of a more glittering fortune - with concomitantly much higher risk — that the Canaries seemed to offer was a much more powerful lure to him than administrative service in a remote province. He failed, as we have seen, to make good that glittering prospect, and was returned by hard fortune to his old ways and to leading a company of men-at-arms, which remained ever open as a career opportunity in the fragile political conditions of the time. But it was too late for him now

48 49 50

Canarien, i, p. 192; Chronique de la Pucelle, ed. Vallet de Viriville (Paris, 1859), p. 135. Canarien, i, p. 193, 443 (app., doc. 103). Ibid., i, p. 194.

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to hope to rise high, and he ended not far from where he started, with a record of service, crime and achievement quite unstriking by the standard of the time — apart, of course, from the interlude in the Canaries. That, I think, is about as much as one can say about his record in terms of formal position and achievement. There is, however, a little more to the record as I have gone over it than just that. There are signs of a consciousness on Gadifer's part of a certain style of knightly achievement, aimed at and, in part at least, realised. There were, of course, plenty of others, his contemporaries, who saw service, as he did, at Rhodes and in Prussia, on that kind of lointain voyage that, according to Geoffrey de Charny's Livre de chevalerie, will attract those who hope to be remembered as souverain preux.51 But Gadifer's crusading service was more than just casual: it was repeated, with two journeys to Prussia, one to Rhodes and one to Barbary in Bourbon's company: and the great Canary expedition was undertaken under a crusading indulgence. It would seem that the cachet of this sort of activity was something that evoked a real response from him, and that profit was not his sole motive in undertaking these ventures (there was not much profit to be won in Prussia, for instance). The same sort of consciousness of chivalrous style seems to be reflected in his joining the company of the Court of Love — _indeed, it is another of Charny's maxims in the Liv re de Chevalerie that it is well for those who aim at high things in arms to be in love par amours, for the love of woman will excite them to seek renown and honour.52 Of course, there is nothing much really that can be said about that side of Gadifer's life; whether love did excite him, at any point, to any particular venture. We do not even know if he was married. We do know, though, that he had a bastard son, Hannibal de La Salle,53 who accompanied him to the Canaries and served him loyally there. Even though we cannot say anything of his loves, there is a little flurry of points here of which I think that something can be made. Clearly Gadifer's election to the Court of Love suggests that he was recognised as a man of literary tastes, perhaps one who had tried his hand at poetry. The name that he gave his bastard son, Hannibal, suggests the same: and perhaps it was he who gave that curiously classical name to the fort on Lanzarote, Rubicon. There is in fact no doubt that Gadifer did have

51

G. de Charny, Livre de chevalerie, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. E. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1863), i, pt 3, pp. 467, 504. 52 Livre de chevalerie, pp. 483-86. 53 Canarien, i, pp. 189; ii, p. 37.

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literary interests: one of the more curious minor details that the chronicle of the Canaries reveals is that he had with him on the journey certain livres de romans (like his collar of the Camail, they were among the things that were stolen from him and disposed of in Spain).54 Gadifer's own name, which is an uncommon one, is also interesting: it came from romantic literature, from the romance of Alexander,55 and it looks as if his family, and not just he alone, had literary tastes, for the names of two of his kinsmen, Brandelis and Guidamors de La Salle, are also literary.56 There seems here, in the background of this minor noble family of Poitou, to be an awareness of literature that suggests that it is no accident that Gadifer's career, perhaps rather formally and only in touches but nevertheless unmistakably, does have echoes of the models of knighthood of romances and courtesy books. This brings me to what must be my last point. Gadifer's name, his lettered interests and his crusading experience all remind us of that nostalgic strand in chivalrous culture that looked back to examples drawn from the knightly past for models of conduct. That theme is indeed taken up explicitly by the authors of the Canarien: many are the knights who, hearing of the high adventures and fine deeds of those who in their time have undertaken distant voyages and of their battles fought against the infidel in the hope of turning them to the Christian faith, have taken heart and courage and wished to resemble them in their good work . . . and so Gadifer de La Salle and Jean de Bethencourt, knights born of the kingdom of France, undertook their voyage for the honour of God and to uphold and extend our Holy Faith.57

A great deal of the story that the Canarien tells, however, recalls — at any rate at this distance of time — not so much the chivalric crusading tradition as something a little different. Bertin de Berneval's slaving propositions, the troubles that they generated with the Guanches, Gadifer's ordeal when he was marooned on the He des Louppes, and Bethencourts's charters with their creation of a new lordship and their trading privileges, all have more of the ring of the early history of the Spanish in America and the Indies than of traditional crusade history. In the same way, the preaching of the priests who accompanied the 54

Ibid., iii, p. 49. The Buik of Alexander, ed. R.L. Graeme Ritchie (Edinburgh, 1925), ii, p. 44ff: as Cioranescu points out (Canarien, i, p. 166), a King Gadifer also appears in Les Narbonnais. 56 Canarien, i, pp. 165-66, 344 (Brandelis); pp. 187-89, 405-6 (Guidamors). 55

57

Ibid., iii, p. 15.

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expedition and the story of the baptism of the king of Lanzarote and his people have more of the flavour of the early Spanish missions in the New World than of the plans of Bacon or Lull for the conversion of the traditional Mahommedan enemies of Christianity. The Canaries chapter in the eventful and romantic life of Gadifer de La Salle is the most unique, and, I think, the most significant one. It permits us to see, behind the conformist shape of his knightly career, the lineaments of the conquistador of the future taking shape, and thus brings into focus the strands of relation that link the world of Jean de Bueil and Jehan de Saintre with that of Pizarro and Cortes.

8

The Jurisdiction and Origins of the Constable's Court In the later middle ages, the court presided over by the constable of England and the earl marshal, commonly known as the Court of Chivalry, enjoyed a wide and important jurisdiction. It dealt with cases arising out of acts of war, including disputes over rights in prisoners and their ransoms, in which substantial financial interests were often involved. It dealt with cases that concerned the right to armorial bearings, and the celebrated dispute between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor over the right to the arms azure a bend or was commenced before it in consequence.1 It took cognisance of appeals, principally of treason, in which battle was offered by the appellor: for this reason, the celebrated duel of Sir John Annesley and Sir Thomas Caterton was fought out before it in 1380.2 Traitors taken in arms in open rebellion were brought to judgement before it — though its jurisdiction here was limited, for since it administered the civil law it could only levy execution upon the body and goods of a convicted traitor, and could not distrain upon his lands (only a common law court could do that).3 Because the procedures of the constable's court did not follow common law, it was suspected from time to time of being the instrument of

1 See N.H. Nicolas, The Controversy between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, 2 vols (London, 1832). 2 J. Bellamy, 'Sir John de Annesley and the Chandos Inheritance', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 10 (1966), pp. 94-105; Morley v. Montagu (PRO, SP9/10, fo. 32v); Scrope v. Kighlee (CPR, 1399-1401, p. 401); Inglose v. Tiptoft (BL, MS Cotton, Titus C I, fo. 192); The Prior ofKilmain v. Ormond, Proceedings of the Privy Council [PPC], ed. Sir H. Nicolas (London, 1837), vi, pp. 57-59; Lyalton v. Norres (PPC, vi, p. 129). 3 See below, p. 156.

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would-be royal tyranny. It was one of the articles alleged against Richard II after his deposition that he had caused appeals to be brought in the constable's court against persons alleged to have spoken in disparagement of the king.4 Later, in the time of the Yorkists, chroniclers viewed critically the summary judgements upon traitors taken in the field that were pronounced by John Tiptoft when he was constable, by 'lawe padowe'. So he came, we are told, to be hated by the people, for the 'dysordinate dethe that he used'.5 Even outside such violent times as Richard II's last year and the Wars of the Roses there were complaints about the Court of Chivalry, allegations (no doubt true) that it was seeking to extend the range of its view and was encroaching on matters that ought to go to common law. In 1379 the Commons petitioned against appeals of treason being brought by bill before the constable and marshal, against the form of the Great Charter.6 In 1384 it was provided, in response to a petition of the Commons, that the Court of Chivalry should not hold pleas touching the common law.7 The inhibition seems to have been ineffective, for the Commons continued to petition on the subject, and that in spite of a statute of 13 Richard II that defined within clear limits the jurisdiction of the court (once again in response to a Commons petition). 'To the constable it pertaineth', this statute declared, 'to have cognisance of contracts touching deeds of arms and of war out of the realm, and also of things that touch arms and war within the realm which cannot be determined nor discussed by common law.'8 This definition is expanded thus in a note in the Black Book of the Admiralty: The conestable and mareschall hath knowleche upon all maner crymes, contracts, pleets, quarell, trespas, injuries and offenses done beyonde the see in tyme of werre betwene souldeour and souldeour, betwene merchaunts, vytelers, leches, harbours, launders, corvesers [i.e. cobblers], laborers, and artificers necessary to the oost, and if any of the personnes be oone [of our own subjects], and the other personne be a straunger, the conestable and mareschalle shall have knowleche in the said matere done in the werre beyond the see: and of all maner dedes of armes here within the londe doone he hath

4

Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 420. J. Warkworth, A Chronicle of the Reign of King Edward the Fourth, ed. J.O. Halliwell, Camden Society (1839), pp. 5, 9. 6 Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 65. 7 Statutes, 8 Richard II c. 5; Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 202. 8 Statutes, 13 Richard II st. 1, c. 2; Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 265. 5

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cognoissance, and of the offenses doon beyonde the see he hath knowleche of here in the londe.9

This note gives a vivid impression of just how wide a compass there was to the jurisdiction of the constable's court, and of the importance of his power to consider matters arising out of acts done beyond the sea in which aliens might be parties. One can also see how easily conflicts of jurisdiction could arise between the Court of Chivalry and the common law courts — for instance in a case of debt which was related to a martial contract, such as an indenture of war.10 Given the wide range of its authority and the notoriety of some of the cases that were brought before it, it is perhaps initially surprising that the Court of Chivalry has not received more attention than it has from historians. The principal reason for this neglect is that the medieval records of the court have for the most part disappeared, in contrast with those of other and better-studied prerogative courts, although it is clear that they were once fully registered. This is also the reason why the only full-scale modern study of the court, G.D. Squibb's The High Court of Chivalry, published in 1959, is largely concerned with the activities of the court in the seventeenth century, for which period quite extensive records have survived.11 Even these for a long time lay forgotten in the College of Arms, until their significance was recognised by Sir Anthony Wagner. Squibb's is the first study based on them. The High Court of Chivalry is a fascinating book, which casts much light into interesting and obscure corners of the legal and social history of the seventeenth century. Very properly, it also includes a brief survey of the 'origins and medieval jurisdiction of the Court'.12 Since my main excuse for putting together this essay is that I do not agree with a number of points made in this part of a work that has come to be justly considered as authoritative, I must stress that in Squibb's book they belong to an essentially introductory section, and that my criticisms of them in no way invalidate the very interesting and valuable discussion of the later 9

Black Book of Admiralty, ed. T. Twiss, RS (London, 1872-76), i, p. 281. This was the matter in issue in Pounteney v. Borney (YB 13 Henry IV, Michaelmas, pi. 10). The case was commenced in the Court of Chivalry; the defendant obtained a writ of privy seal to stay proceedings there on the ground that it was triable at common law; the council granted a procedendo allowing the constable's court to proceed, but this was successfully challenged: it was finally sent to the Exchequer Chamber. Comparable cases include Salisbury v. Montagu (CPR, 1385-89, p. 67) and Tottenas v. Mareshal (ibid., p. 85). 11 G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford, 1959). 12 Ibid.,ch. l,pp. 1-28. 10

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activities of the court, which are his main theme. Indeed it is because his book has come to be authoritative that it is worth pursuing the matter further. Another reason for pursuing it is that, since Squibb wrote, a large part of the dossier of an important medieval Court of Chivalry case, the dispute concerning the ransom of the court of Denia (captured at Najera in 1367), has been discovered among the Westminster Abbey muniments by Dr A. Rogers and published.13 In addition, Professor R.I. Jack has focused attention on another Court of Chivalry case, that of Grey v. Hastings (temp: Henry IV), which was known to Squibb but had not, when he wrote, been studied in any detail.14 It has, in fact, become apparent since 1959 that there is rather more interest about the fragmentary records of the medieval court than was once supposed. Two central points in Squibb's account of the early history of the Court of Chivalry seem to me to be open to challenge. The first is the assumption that its jurisdiction was exclusive in cases triable by the 'law of arms' (those concerning ransoms, for instance, and disputes over armorial bearings) and that this jurisdiction was quite different and distinct from that exercised by the officers of royal hosts, in accordance with the ordinances of war proclaimed in the host in question.15 The idea that they were similar has arisen, he believes, because the officers appointed to preside in the courts of the host were usually referred to as the constable and marshal (as they are, for instance, in Richard IFs Durham ordinancs of 1385, and in Henry V's ordinances of 1419):16 but their temporary jurisdictions, limited to matters (principally of discipline) that were mentioned in ordinances issued for a single campaign, were really quite different from the 'formal and settled' jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry, he argues.17 That they were different in degree I accept, but I believe the difference to be much less significant than Squibb suggests, and in particular in its relation to another point in his argument. For he goes on to suggest that we should not seek for the origins of the Court of Chivalry (as most historians have done) in a 13

A. Rogers, 'Hoton versus Shakell: A Ransom Case in the Court of Chivalry, 1390-5', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 6 (1962), pp. 74-108; 7 (1963), pp. 53-78. 14 R.I.Jack 'Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance, 1370-1436', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 38 (1965), pp. 1-19. See also C.G. Young, An Account of the Controversy between Reginald Lord Grey ofRuthyn and Sir Edward Hastings (privately printed, 1841). 15 Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, pp. 3-12. 16 Black Book of the Admiralry, i, pp. 453-58, 459-72. Squibb sees that often the constable and marshal of a host would in fact also be the constable and marshal of England, but still maintains that the court in the host would be different from the Court of Chivalry. 17 Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, pp. 6, 12.

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gradual extension of the jurisdiction which the constable and marshal of England had exercised from a quite early period in the king's hosts, and which is clearly comparable to that later exercised by constables and marshals, in accordance with ordinances of war. The Court of Chivalry originated, Squibb believes, as a result of the delegation by the king's council to the constable and marshal of certain aspects of its general jurisdiction over matters which could not be tried by common law. The formal act of delegation can, he thinks, be pin-pointed fairly precisely to the years 1347-48.18 This is the second point on which his view seems to me to be questionable. Underlying Squibb's emphasis on the difference between the Court of Chivalry and the courts of the hosts over which their constables and marshals presided is the assumption that I have mentioned, that the former exercised a constant and more or less exclusive jurisdiction in certain kinds of cases, for instance heraldic disputes and disputes over rights in ransoms; and that this can be contrasted with that exercised by courts in the hosts which were principally concerned with matters of discipline. This assumption is demonstrably open to challenge. It is true that all the half dozen medieval cases that originated in the Court of Chivalry and of which full records survive were concerned with the kind of matters that Squibb refers to its exclusive jurisdiction. The Denia case and the case of Gerard v. Chamberlayn concern rights in prisoners and their ransoms: that ofHawley v. des Roches a breach of safeconduct 'done beyond the sea'. Those of Scrope v. Grosvenor, Lovell v. Morley and Grey v. Hastings all concern disputed rights to armorial bearings.19 It is quite clear, however, that the Court of Chivalry had no exclusive jurisdiction in any of these matters. The ordinances of war have a great deal to say about the taking of prisoners and about rights in their ransoms, and make it clear that it was the business of the constables and marshals of the hosts to enforce the regulations that they laid down.20 Even disputes over bearings were regarded as within their jurisdiction: to quote from a fifteenth-century set of ordinances: 18

Ibid., pp. 12-15. For Scrope v. Grosvenor and the Denia case, see above notes 1 and 13. Of the unedited causes, the records of three are among the Chancery Miscellanea; Lovell v. Morley is PRO, C47/ 6/1; Hawley v. des Roches, PRO, C47/6/4; Gerard v. Chamberlayn, C47/6/5. Grey v. Hastings survives in a seventeenth-century transcript, College of Arms MS, Processus in Curia Marescalli, i and ii (ii also contains a transcript of Lovell v. Morley). 20 Durham ordinances, cl. 12, 13, 19, 21; Henry V's ordinances, d. 14, 15, 16, 20, 27, 35 (Black Book of the Admiralty, i, n. 16). 19

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Item that no man debate for armes prisoners nor for none other thyng so that none ryotte contest nor debate be ynne the hosts . . . but yff so be that any man felt hym grevyd shewe his grevaunce to the constabyll and marshall and right shall be done.21 This should not surprise us. Arms, as the means of recognition in the field, were directly relevant to good order in a host: besides, we know that commanders on occasion awarded armorial bearings to deserving soldiers and, if they could grant them, it was natural that they should also be able to judge disputes concerning them.22 Concrete examples show, moreover, that constables and captains, and summary courts assembled on their authority, did try cases involving all the matters mentioned above. A few examples among very many should suffice. In 1356 the Black Prince, as commander of the Poitiers host, took judicial cognisance of the dispute between Denis de Morbek and Bernard de Troye as to which of them had captured King John of France in that great battle.23 In 1425, when the English captured Le Mans, so many quarrels arose over rights in prisoners and ransoms that a special court had to be set up in the host, under the presidency of Lord Scales, in order to deal with them.24 In 1417 Thomas, duke of Clarence, as constable of the army, judged in a curia militaris (the same title which the Court of Chivalry was given in Latin texts) the charge against Walter Sydenham and William Broke that they had plundered persons travelling under the king's safe-conduct.25 There are examples also of the trial of armorial cases in the courts of hosts. John of Gaunt told the Court of Chivalry in the Scrope v. Grosvenor case of how, when a dispute arose over armorial bearings in 1359 in the great royal host in France, between Richard Scrope and Carminow of Cornwall, there had assembled a court of six senior knights who had heard the matter and given judgement.26 No one suggested that they had acted ultra vires. The reason why we know about the case of Scrope v. Carminow is that it was referred to in a Court of Chivalry case. The dispute between Denis

21

BL, MS Add. 33191, cl 18: compare Durham ordinances, cl. 8; Henry V's ordinances, cl. 9. N. Upton De studio militari, ed. E. Bysshe (London, 1654), pp. 154, 200 (accounts of grants of arms made to soldiers by the earl of Salisbury in the 1420s). 23 J. Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, v (Brussels, 1868), p. 468. 24 AN, Xla 4795, fos 324v-325. 25 Foedera, IV, iii, 38: compare RotuliNormannie, ed. T.D. Hardy (London, 1835), i, p. 378. These cases show that curia militaris was not a title confined to the Court of Chivalry, as suggested by Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, pp. 2-3. 26 Nicolas, The Controversy between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor, ii, pp. 49-50. 22

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de Morbek and Bernard de Troye as to which had captured John the Good at Poitiers, which I have also mentioned, also seems to have come before the court of the constable and marshal — presumably because it had not been finally settled when the Black Prince's host disbanded.27 These facts are significant, for they show, and clearly, that far from being concerned with cases different in their nature from those judged by officers in the hosts, the Court of Chivalry was often concerned with the same kind of cases, sometimes even with the same cases. The relation between all these martial courts was indeed close, and necessarily so. The orders that a commander had given could be directly relevant to a Court of Chivalry case. Thus in the case of Gerard v. Chamberlain, heard in 1403 before commissioners on appeal from the Court of Chivalry, we find the marshal of Despenser's host of 1383 being called to testify that, under the terms of an ordinance that he had made, Gerard had had no right to take prisoner Hannequin Lower, whose standing as a prisoner of war was in dispute between him and Chamberlain.28 The judgements of lesser captains could also be matter for the Court of Chivalry to consider: the case of Hawley v. des Roches came before it in consequence of a sentence of the earl of Arundel as captain of Brest.29 Another case that arose, like that of Gerard v. Chamberlain, out of the 1383 expedition was that of Louis de Sancerre (the famous French captain) against Matthew Gournay and others. Sancerre was seeking payment from various of Despenser's subordinate captains, presumbly owing to him under the terms of their treaties of surrender to the French, and could not apply to the commander of the host in question, which had been disbanded. He had to sue somewhere else, and tried first in the court of the captain of Calais: subsequently the case was revoked before the Court of Chivalry.30 Indeed, if a campaign had ended, and the powers of the commander of a host had lapsed when the host was disbanded, to whom was a complainant who, like Sancerre, believed himself to have been injured in rights acquired during the course of the campaign, to turn, if not to the

27 Rymer, Foedera, III, i, p. 193: and see further. BL, MS Cotton Cal. D. Ill, fo. 102 (Bernard de Troye's testament). 28 PRO, C47/6/5. Faringdon, the marshal, said he had published an order to the effect that Flemings who came into the obedience of the king should be free, and that any already taken prisoners of war should be delivered free of ransom. Gerard claimed Lower was his prisoner: Faringdon's evidence suggested he had no right to a ransom from him. 29 PRO, C47/6/4 (roll no. 5). 30 Rymer, Foedera, III, iv, 19; and see CPR, 1388-92, p. 242.

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constable and marshal as the standing lieutenants in war of the prince, against whose soldiers he wished to complain? It was here, as I see it, that the real difference between the Court of Chivalry and the courts in the hosts lay, that the one exercised a constant, the others a temporary jurisdiction, not that they were concerned with different kinds of cases. In the nature of things it was likely that routine issues of discipline would mostly be dealt with on the spot by the host's officers; and equally that claims which were knotty and which might involve large sums (as that which Sancerre was pursuing presumably did) often had to be referred to a higher tribunal. But neither kind of court had an exclusive jurisdiction over either kind of case. That is why the text in the Black Book of the Admiralty that outlines the Office of the Conestable and Mareschall, and that was quoted earlier in this essay, not only explains and expands the definition of the Court of Chivalry's jurisdiction given in the statute of 13 Richard II, but also notes that it is their business 'to punysh all manner of men that breken the statutes and ordonnaunce by the kynge made to be kepyd in the oost in the said tyme, and to punysh the same according to the peynes provided in the said statutes'.31 As the author of this text realised, the constable and marshal, especially if they were in the king's company in the king's host, might have to deal with matters of ordinary discipline, as well as with more exalted affairs. If it is accepted that the jurisdictions exercised respectively by the Court of Chivalry and by officers of the hosts were not radically distinct but interrelated, then the suggestion, rejected by Squibb, that the former owed its origin to a gradual extension of the authority that the constable and marshal of England had traditionally exercised in royal hosts, becomes hard to resist. Vernon Harcourt, who held this view, instanced as early examples of the judicial authority of the constable and marshal the roll of the placita exercitus that survives for the Scottish campaign of 1294-95; and the trial in 1322 of Roger Damory (also described as one of the placita exercitus)?2 The former certainly shows a military court to have been in existence in 1294-95, though there is no hint of any body of usage that it followed, distinct from the common law. The latter is more interesting and needs a little more attention. 31

Black Book of the Admiralty, i, p. 281. L.W. Vernon Harcourt, His Grace the Steward and Trial of Peers (London, 1907), pp. 362-63 The placita of 1294-95 are among the Exchequer Accounts Various, PRO, E39/93/15: the record of Damory's trial is given in full by Vernon Harcourt, Trial of Peers, pp. 399-400; see also Par/. Writs, II, ii, app., p. 261. 32

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Damory in 1322 was sentenced for treason, for having been in arms against his liege lord King Edward II, by a tribunal whose members were Fulk Fitzwarin, constable of the king's host, John de Weston, marshal of the household, and the Justice Geoffrey Le Scrope. Squibb, in support of his view that this trial has no relevance to the history of the Court of Chivalry, points out that neither Fitzwarin nor Weston were officers of state — that they were not the constable and marshal of England.33 Fitzwarin, however, was the constable of the royal army (Bohun of Hereford, the hereditary constable, was among the rebels), and Weston was the official deputy of the marshal, Thomas Brotherton, earl of Norfolk.34 Squibb also points out that the proceedings were not specifically by law of arms': nevertheless, the manner of proceeding was very similar to that followed by later constables who summarily sentenced to death traitors taken in arms in the field. To Squibb this similarity is irrelevant, for his view is that the drumhead courts martial presided over by Tiptoft and other constables during the Wars of the Roses were distinct from the Court of Chivalry.35 But, as I have shown elsewhere, they followed the same kind of procedure as was followed in 1405 when Henry Boynton was summarily condemned by the Constable John of Lancaster. The record of his sentence is explicitly stated to have been extracted from the registers of the Court of Chivalry, and to have been in accordance with the law of arms'.36 In the light of this record, and of other instances from the reigns of Henry IV and Henry VII when traitors were arraigned before the Court of Chivalry,37 the stated objection to allowing the trial of Damory any relevance to the history of that court loses its force. The placita of 1294-95 and the record of the judgement on Damory are not the only early references to the martial jurisdiction of the constable. Matthew Paris, for instance, mentions it in connection with an 33

Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, p. 11. CCR, 1318-23, p. 581. 35 The High Court of Chivalry, pp. 26-28: 'in so far as such proceedings had any legal validity at all, they derived it from the direct grant of the Crown', i.e. from the terms of the patents appointing the constables to their office. The most relevant patent is that appointing Lord Rivers Constable in 1467, printed by Vernon Harcourt, Trial of Peers, pp. 407-12. 36 BL, MS Add. 9021, fos 8-9 (transcript, made for Anstis of an exemplification of the sentence, from the registers of the Court of Chivalry, by letters patent of John of Lancaster, 26 May 1408). And see below, pp. 149-66. 37 E.g. cases of Northumberland and Bardolph, commenced in the Court of Chivalry, Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 604: of Ralph Hastings, condemned by Fulthorpe, the constable's lieutenant, ibid., p. 633: and the trial of Lord Audeley in 1497, Vernon Harcourt, Trial of Peers, pp. 414-15. 34

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incident during the Gascon campaign of 1254. Spoil had been taken by the king's Welsh troops, and some of them were severely punished for this by the king's unpopular Poitevin relations. This caused an outcry and Henry III had to take the quarrel into his own hands and patch it up. The whole affair should, however, says Matthew, have been referred in the first place to the earl of Hereford, in accordance with custom and his hereditary right.38 Hereford was constable of the host, but his hereditary right must refer to his office as constable of England. So apparently as early as 1254 the constable could claim jurisdiction over a case involving spoliation in war. Robert of Reading, in a similar vein, complains of Edwards II's commission of the regimen exercitus (? the disciplining of the army) to Gilbert of Clare, because this office belonged to the earl of Hereford by hereditary right.39 There is also to be considered a record of the right claimed as pertaining to his office by Edward II's earl marshal, Thomas of Brotherton, which states that jurisdiction in the king's host is the exclusive province of his constable and marshal. This text may not be authentic — it cannot be traced back further than the reign of Richard II, though its contents suggest an earlier date (for instance in their concern with the marshal's duty of certifying the feudal service in the host of those holding by military tenure).40 Even it if is not authentic, it does at least show that in Richard's reign the jurisdiction of the constable and marshal was considered to be closely associated with the offices that they discharged in royal hosts, and to have an old pedigree. At this point it clearly becomes necessary to look more closely at Squibb's suggestion that the origin of the Court of Chivalry derived from a delegation by the royal council of part of its power to try cases which could not be dealt with at common law. Part of the reasoning behind this suggestion is an analogy with what Marsden believed to have been the origin of the powers of the Court of the Admiral41 — whos jurisdiction over 'deeds of war' done on the high seas was in many ways

38

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H.R. Luard, RS (London, 1872-83), v, p. 442. Flores historiarum, ed. H.R. Luard, RS (London, 1890), iii, p. 158. 40 BL, MS Cotton Nero D VI, fo. 85v. The MS appears to date from Richard II's reign (its list, fo. 76ff, of the kings of England a Noe usque in hunc diem, ends with Richard), and to have been written after 1385 (since it includes a text of the Durham ordinances, fo. 89). The reference on fo. 65v to the claim of Margaret Brotherton to appoint a marshal at Richard II's coronation perhaps suggests that the 'customs' claimed for Brotherton as marshal were brought forward in that connection. 41 R.G. Marsden (ed.) Select Pleas in the Court of Admiralty, Selden Society (London, 1894), i, pp. xivff. 39

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similar to that of the constable and marshal. Marsden traced the rise of this court to the period 1340-57, but his account of the precise manner of its institution was not very definite, and, as he himself pointed out, left to be accounted for an enigmatic Year Book reference to the jurisdiction of the admiral in 1297.42 The other part of the reasoning behind Squibb's account of the origin of the Court of Chivalry is his assumption that, once it was in being, it had an exclusive jurisdiction in certain kinds of cases. There is a reference in a copy of a letter patent of 19 July 1347 to the appointment, in the host before Calais, of a commission to try disputes that had arisen in the army over rights to certain armorial bearings and war-crests.43 This was a kind of matter that would have come into the purview of the Court of Chivalry, says Squibb: ergo, there was no Court of Chivalry in July 1347. But in August 1348 there is a clear reference to the court, when two Serjeants of arms were ordered to arrest in Jersey William le Counte, claimed as a defaulting prisoner of war by William de Wynchelez, and to bring him before the constable and marshal to there answer the points to be put forward against him.44 So, between July 1347 and August 1348 we have the date of the institution of the Court of Chivalry pin-pointed — and at a point in time which fits neatly into the same bracket of years to which Marsden traced the origins of the Admiral's Court. There are two objections to the arguments outlined here. The first has already been stated, that the assumption that the Court of Chivalry ever had an exclusive right to try such matters as disputes over prisoners or armorial bearings is unsafe. As we have seen, an ad hoc tribunal was appointed to hear and determine an armorial dispute in 1359, when the Court of Chivalry was certainly in existence: a fortiori Edward III could do the same in 1347, whether or not there was such a court then. The second derives from a reference in the record of the proceedings in the case ofLovell v. Morley, commenced in the Court of Chivalry in Richard H's time. John Molham esquire, aged seventy years, in this case testified that, on the Crecy expedition, he had been in the service of William de Bohun, constable of England, and had filled the office of clerk to the Court of Chivalry. After Crecy - well before July 1347, it is implied Nicholas Burnell had challenged the arms of Lord Morley and

42 43

Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, p. 14, quoting Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1137, fo.

144. 44

CPR, 1348-50, p. 174.

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demanded that his claim be heard in the court.45 And so it was heard, later, during the siege of Calais, by the constable and marshal. This testimony shows that there was a Court of Chivalry in existence before either of the cases in Squibb's bracket of July 1347 to August 1348, so the bracket will not hold. Nothing Molham said, it should be noted, suggests that he thought that the post that he had held was a new one, associated with a novel jurisdiction. It is worth noting the glimpse that he gives us of the Court of Chivalry sitting tribunalement in the army, on campaign, in the same way that any court attached to the army might do. If the pedigree of the Court of Chivalry has to be traced further back than the time of the Crecy expedition, then it becomes hard indeed not to accept the thesis that it developed as a result of a gradual extension of the lieutenancies that the constable and marshal traditionally exercised in the king's armies. It is especially so now that we have been shown the court sitting in the host, on campaign, with a clerk in attendance, who was in the retinue of the constable. That is not, however, to say that the 1340s were not a key period in the rise of the constable's court to the new prominence that it enjoyed in the later fourteenth century and in the fifteenth. The fact that the references to the authority of the constable before that time are so few and enigmatic, and afterwards become so comparatively plentiful, tells its own story. In regarding the middle years of the fourteenth century as crucial to his story Squibb is absolutely right, I believe, even if he can be faulted on points of detail. For the outbreak of the Hundred Years War undoubtedly did give a new prominence to legal problems arising out of a state of war. The taking of spoil and prisoners began to be big business for English lords and gentlemen, and the division of shares in spoil became for them the subject of carefully drawn contractual arrangements in indentures of war. The observance of safe-conducts became more than a matter of discipline now that huge sums by way of ransom might be obtained by taking the bearer a prisoner, if only a technical legal fault could be found in the terms of his protection. The cult of chivalry, which Edward III encouraged for propaganda purposes, at the same time was sharpening sensitivities about such matters as the right to particular bearings with a particular history, and more people too, esquires as well as knights, were beginning to adopt heraldic arms. From the 1340s on, moreover, most of the acts of war in which Englishmen

45

College of Arms MS, Processes in Curia Marescalli, ii, fo. 98'. Molham states that he himself wrote out Burnell's bill.

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were involved and in which they could hope to win reputation and riches, were 'done beyond the sea', where the common law did not run. These new circumstances gave a new importance to the jurisdiction that all captains and constables of hosts exercised, and also created a new need for legal recourse to officers whose position and jurisdiction were not dependent on temporary posts of command. This gave a new importance to the offices of the constable and marshal of England, who had long been regarded as the king's standing lieutenants in martial matters. Significantly, it did the same thing in France for the offices of the constable and marshals of France, and for the same reasons. Indeed, the picture is the same elsewhere too: everywhere in Europe, in this age, we come across constables and marshals — or officers with equivalent titles judging on behalf of their princely masters disputes arising out of war. And we find at the same time advocates, trained in Roman law, beginning to bring their legal expertise to bear to elucidate and rationalise the issues arising in such cases, to give the ill-defined military customs that constituted the law of arms' a respectable and coherent legal footing. Thus, at the same time that the constable and marshal achieved in England — as elsewhere — a new prominence in their judicial role, the law that they administered in their court became more clearly distinguishable from the common law administered by the king's other judges. It remains of course possible that, sometime in the 1340s, the advice of the king's counsellors (a group not well-defined) may have given the kind of legal business that was then raising new problems a push in the direction of the constable and marshal. If so, it was probably continental example that prompted them, and in any case it only needed a little push. A lieutenancy in an army, even at a humble level, cannot be exercised without some sort of jurisdiction being accepted as inherent in it, as any modern company commander or adjutant can tell you, and the constable and marshal of England were lieutenants at a far from humble level. Tleas of the army', as we have seen from Damory's case, had already come to include potentially such weighty matters as the judgement of traitors taken in arms. Besides, it should be remembered that well before the outbreak of the Hundred Years War the offices of the constable and marshal had grown in importance, because the size of the royal hosts in which they exercised their lieutenancies had grown, and the business of imposing order in them had become a larger business. Texts such as the Tract on the Steward's Office and the Modus tenendi parliamentum remind us that in the period when, under the first two Edwards, the organisation of war was imposing new strains, the sensitivity of the great hereditary officers of state, the steward, the constable

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and the marshal had become sharper with regard to their rights, privileges and jurisdiction.46 The parts played by Edward I's constable and marshal in the famous events of 1297 underscore the same point, that these great noblemen were beginning to establish their offices as offices of state rather than of the king's military household. It was as officers of the military household, however, that they had first achieved prominence: that was the context in which, way back in Henry I's time, the Constable Walter de Pitres was hailed asprinceps militiae domus regis.47 The first origins of the later authority and pre-eminence of the constable and marshal are, in short, to be sought in the position that they held in that institution whose importance in early times John Prestwich, before all others, has taught us to appreciate, the military household of the kings of England.48 As he has shown, it was a good training ground for officers whose role was at once military and judicial.

46

Vernon Harcourt, Trial of Peers, pp. 164-69. J.H. Round, The King's Serjeants and Officers of State (London, 1911), p. 79. 48 J.O. Prestwich, 'The Military Household of the Norman Kings', English Historical Review, 96 (1981). 47

9

Treason Trials under the Law of Arms On 13 July 1405 Henry de Boynton, knight, was brought before the Court of Chivalry in England, sitting in Berwick at a place called 'Waleisgreene', and was there condemned to death for high treason. His crime had been that of levying war against the king in his own realm, in the company of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. The evidences of his guilt were a series of warlike acts against the king's lieges, committed 'si notoirement et si publicement que par nulle tergiversacion nautre excusacion queconque purra estre concele ne denie'. He had ridden in arms, robbed, plundered and taken ransom in the lands of his liege lord, and he had surrendered the keys of Berwick into the hands of the king's enemies, the Scots. He had refused his sovereign entry into the town when the royal host lay before it, so that the king had been forced to fire his cannon at the walls of his own city. These acts amounted to notorious treason, and as such they were judged by John of Lancaster (the later Duke of Bedford), constable of England, presiding in the court, 'par1 comandement mon tresredoute seigneur et pere le roy avantdit ton liege seigneur'. Boynton was therefore condemned to death, to be hanged, beheaded and quartered, and all his goods and chattels to be forfeit to the king. The form of this sentence is known from an exemplification by letters patent under the seal of John of Bedford, given on 26 May 1408.2 Three important points seem to emerge from the account therein given. The first of these is that the sentence was pronounced par commandement of the king, which is to say in effect that Boynton was convicted of 1

2

MS per.

MS Add. 9021, fos 8-9 (transcript made for Anstis from the original manuscript in the College of Arms).

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notorious treason upon the king's record. The second is that he was adjudged guilty of treason, not according to the common law, but 'selonc les leys et usages darmes de la Court de Chevelerie en Angleterre'. The third point is that the exemplification was made from the entry in the official registers of the Court of Chivalry, a legally constituted court whose powers were recognised and defined by statute. These powers included jurisdiction in all cases arising out of acts of war done within the realm of England which could not be decided at common law. The whole case therefore seems to have an important bearing on the law of treason as it was applied in England in the later middle ages. This is a matter with which historians have, in recent years, been much concerned; and with justice, for the crime was one to which the violent and kaleidoscopic events of the reigns of Edward II, Richard II and Edward IV gave ugly prominence. Boynton's case has, it is true, no bearing on the wisdom of these kings in having recourse to the process of treason in dealing with seditious magnates, which many have questioned. But it does have a bearing on the views of those historians who have gone further, and questioned in certain instances the legality of such processes. This is quite another matter, and one which, if the sentence passed on Boynton in 1405 has any significance, seems to need reconsideration. The trials which have principally been criticised as illegal are all to some extent similar to one another, and also to Boynton's trial before John of Bedford. Nearly all of them were summary trials, before persons other than the king's normal justices, or, in the case of peers, parliament. Common Law procedures were not followed and the sentences seem to have been of special savagery. On several occasions degradation from all honours were added to the horrors of hanging, beheading and quartering, and even, once or twice, impalement also. The other striking feature of these trials is that nearly all of them occurred at times of open civil war. There are two series in particular of trials of this summary kind whose legality had been doubted. One is the series of trials before Edward IV's constables, especially Tiptoft, whose ferocious judgments 'by law padowe' shocked even his bloodthirsty contemporaries.3 The other is the series of savage treason trials of Edward II's reign, in particular those of the captured adherents of Thomas of Lancaster after Boroughbridge. Beside these two sets of trials should be set the further

3

Warkworth's Chronicle, ed. J.A. Halliwell, Camden Society (1839), p. 9: 'The Erie of Wurcestre was gretely behatede emonge the peple, for ther dysordinate deth that he used.'

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series dating from the period of Northumberland's revolt in Henry I V's reign, among them the trial of Boynton, which for some reason have failed to attract same notice.4 This is not the case, however, with the trial of William Wallace in 1305,5 which has many similarities with these other trials and has also been criticised as irregular. He too was condemned as a traitor by a special court, without being heard in his defence, and it is on these grounds that he has by many been regarded as illegally condemned. It is perhaps a result of the respect which Edward I and the Lancastrians have traditionally enjoyed with legal and constitutional historians that the criticisms of these latter have largely been levelled at the trials of the reigns of Edward II and Edward IV. Edward IFs practice of convicting traitors 'by record' was, says Professor Plucknett, admitted in the parliament of 1326 to be in direct contravention of Magna Carta,6 and was regarded later as unacceptable by the common law judges.7 Tiptoft's activities in Edward IV's reign have called down a series of denunciations from experts in terms far less reserved. They are roundly condemned by the eloquence of Bishop Stubbs: 'Another abuse', he wrote, 'which had the result of condemning its agents to perpetual infamy was the extension of the jurisdiction of the High Constable of England to cases of high treason, thus depriving the accused of the benefit of trial by jury and placing their acquittal or condemnation in the hands of a political official.'8 Holdsworth, in his History of English Law, echoes him; 'Edward IV, he declares, 'extended the powers of the court [of the constable] without any regard for . . . statutory limitations.'9 Mr Squibb, the historian of the Court of Chivalry, follows their lead, with a reservation to the effect that 'in so far as such proceedings had any legal validity at all, they derived it by direct grant from the Crown'.10 This 4

See also the trials of Northumberland and Bardolph in the Court of Chivalry, known from the reference in Rotuli parliamentorium, iii, p. 604; of Ralph Hastings, known from ibid., iii, p. 633; and of Archbishpp Scrope in T. Gascoigne's Loci e libro veritatum, ed. J.E. Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), pp. 226ff (decollatio Scrope}. Fulthorpe, who tried both Scrope and Hastings, is described as the constable's lieutenant in BL, MS Add. 9021, so presumably these cases also were tried in the Court of Chivalry. 5 Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, RS (London, 1882-83), i, pp. 140-42. 6 T.F.T. Plucknett, 'The Origin of Impeachment', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 24 (1942), p. 58. 7 W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1880), iii, p. 302. 8 Ibid., p. 63. 9 W.S. Holdsworth, History of English La.4, i (7th edn, London, 1956), p. 575. 10 G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford, 1959), pp. 27-28.

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statement seems to sum up the general view fairly accurately. Though the judges in these cases were acting under royal authority, the crown's action in licensing summary proceedings, without indictment, without jury, and by a law other than the common law of England, is held to have been in direct contravention of statute and of accepted legal usage. In particular, it was unconstitutional, in that it was a flagrant breach of clause 39 of Magna Carta. The objection that they were contrary to accepted usage is raised against these trials largely because the various series into which they fall have traditionally been treated quite separately. If Tiptoft and the other Yorkist constables were merely following precedents of Henry I V's and Edward H's reigns, this objection would clearly be weakened. The normal view here is that proceedings against traitors by the 'king's record' became discredited and were abandoned soon after the reign of Edward II, and the Year Books of his son are quoted in support of this belief.11 If this is accepted, Tiptoft's trials, said to have been 'by lawe padowe', must clearly represent a different kind of proceeding. This, however, is quite contrary to the implication of Boynton's sentence, which sets a clear precedent for the activities of Edward I V's constables, as in this case sentence was passed by the king's command; in effect, that is, on his record, as in Edward H's time. Contemporary accounts of the trials in the periods in question are, moreover, so strikingly similar that it becomes very doubtful whether one can justly differentiate the procedure or the laws involved in the different series. This point will be made clearer if I quote in extenso the two accounts of trials which appear to me most strikingly similar. They are respectively the accounts in the Brut Chronicle of the trial of Andrew de Harclay, earl of Carlisle, in 1323, and the account in a College of Arms manuscript of the judgment passed by Tiptoft on Sir Ralph Grey in 1464. Let us turn to the first of these. Early in 1323 Andrew de Harclay had been arrested for treasonable negotiations with Edward H's Scottish adversaries; he was tried summarily by judges appointed by special commission on 3 March and subsequently executed. These are the words which the Brut Chronicle puts into the mouth of his judge, Sir Anthony de Lucy: 'Sir Andrew, the king . . . did unto you much honour, and made you earl of Carlisle, and thou, as a traitor to thy lord the king, leddest his people of this

11

Plucknett, The Origin of Impeachment', p. 62, quoting Year Book 12 & 13 Edward HI, RS, pp. 96-101'.

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country, that should have helped him at the battle of Byland, . . . away by the country of Copeland, and through the earldom of Lancaster, wherefore our lord the king was discomfited . . . by the Scots through thy treason and falseness; and if thou hadst come betimes, he had had the mastery. And all that treason thou didst for the great sum of gold and silver, that thou tookest of James Douglas, a Scot, the king's enemy. And our lord the king's will is that the order of knighthood, by which thou undertookest all thine honour and worship upon thy body, be all brought unto nought, and thy state undone, so that other knights of lower degree may after thee beware . . . ' Then commanded he anon to hew off his spurs from his heels; and after he let break the sword over his head, the which the king gave him to keep and defend his land therewith, when he made him earl of Carlisle. And after he let him unclothe of his tabard and of his hood, and of his furred coats and of his girdle. And when this was done, Sir Anthony said unto him; 'Andrew,' quoth he, 'now art thou no knight, but a knave; and for thy treason the king's will is that thou be hanged and drawn.'12

There are, it is true, certain objections which can be raised against this account of Harclay's trial. In the first place, in the commission under letters patent Sir Anthony de Lucy was not one of the judges appointed to give sentence;13 he was present at the trial only as sheriff of Cumberland, and as the officer who had arrested the earl. Moreover, the text of the sentence to be read, given in the Coram Rege Rolls,14 differs (though not in substance) from that in the chronicle. There is no doubt, however, that the chronicler described what he pictured as having happened and, as he was probably writing in the 1330's,15 he can hardly be accused of being anachronistic. There are, in addition, certain similarities between his account of this trial and that of the trial of Thomas of Lancaster in the previous year.16 This seems to confirm that he was describing what he as a contemporary believed to be the normal procedure; and that is all I wish to claim. Given this, the similarity between his account of Harclay's trial and that of the sentence pronounced on Sir Ralph Grey by Tiptoft in 1464 becomes remarkable. Grey was a Lancastrian captain, who, after the battle of Hexham, had held out in Bamborough; after a fierce siege he was surrendered to the earl of Warwick and taken to Doncaster, where

12 13 14 15 16

The Brut, ed. F.W.D. Brie, i, EETS, 131 (London, 1931), p. 227. Rymer, Foedera, II, i, p. 509. Parliamentary Writs, ii, pt 2, appendix, p. 263. The French chronicle, from which the Brut is translated, ends at this point. The Brut, ed. Brie, i, p. 222.

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he was tried before the constable. These are the words with which Tiptoft is said to have addressed him: Sir Ralph Grey, thou hast taken thee the order of knighthood of the Bath, and any so taking that order ought to keep the faith the which he makes; therefore remember thee the law! Wilt thou that I proceed to judgement? These matters show so evidently against thee that there is no need to examine thee of them, by [the evidence of] certain persons of the king's true subjects, the which thou hast wounded, and show here that thou canst not deny this; thou hast drawn with force of arms unto the king our most natural sovereign lord, the which thou wotest well gave thee such trust, and in such wise ministered his grace unto thee, that thou hadst his castles in the North party to keep; thou hast betrayed Sir John Astely, knight, and brother of the Garter, the which remaineth in the hands of the king our sovereign lord's enemies in France. Item, thou hast withstood and made fences against the king's majesty, and his lieutenant lord my brother of Warwick; it appeareth by the strokes of the great guns in the king's walls of his castle of Bamborough. For these causes, dispose thee to suffer thy penance after the law. The king had ordained that thou shouldest have had thy spurs struck off by the hard heels with the hand of the master cook . . . Item . . . the king had ordained here . . . the king of arms and heralds, and thine own proper coat of arms, the which they should tear off thy body, and so thou shouldest as well be degraded of thy worship, noblesse and arms, as of the order of knighthood; and also here is another coat, of thine arms reversed, the which thou shouldest have worn of thy body, going to the death ward, for that belongeth after the law . . . Then, Sir Ralph Grey, this shall be thy penance - thou shalt go on thy feet to the town's end, and there thou shalt be laid down and drawn to a scaffold made for thee, and that thou shalt have thy head smite off thy body, [which is] to be buried in the Friars', thy head where it please the king.17

A comparison between the phraseology of this sentence and the B rut's version of Harclay's trial leaves little doubt that it is the same procedure that is being described. Both sentences open with a reminder to the accused of the onus laid on his honour by the rank to which the king had advanced him. Both sentences include degradation from the order of knighthood. The crime in both cases was military, and in both involved intelligence with the king's enemies. Harclay was condemned on the king's record of his treason; Sir Ralph Grey's sentence had been 'ordained' by the king before he was brought before the constable. In all these respects both sentences are equally similar to that of Boynton, except that in his case degradation was not expressly ordered. The 17

Printed in Warkworth's Chronicle, ed. Halliwell, pp. 36-39, notes. Grey's degradation was in fact pardoned, and sentence limited ultimately to drawing and beheading.

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sentence passed by Bedford in this trial does, however, help to elucidate one point about this degradation. The condemnation of Grey's arms was said 'to belong also after the law'. Now, matters pertaining to arms were not within the scope of the common law: they were judged by the law of arms and were usually tried in the Court of Chivalry, where the civilians, not the common lawyers, practised. This suggests that it was the law of arms which Tiptoft was here invoking, and not a new-fangled lawe padowe', as the hostile chroniclers would have it. The matter seems no longer in doubt when one finds that it was precisely by this law of arms, and in the Count of Chivalry, that Bedford condemned Boynton.18 Tiptoft, therefore, whatever else he may have done, was here apparently not exceeding the powers which other constables had used before him. Reference to the English manuals on the law of arms, such as those of Johannes de Bado Aureo19 and Nicholas Upton,20 confirms that degradation or dishonour was a regular military penalty for treason. In fact degradation seems to have been frequently a feature of the sentences pronounced at summary treason trials. It was invoked in Edward II's time, for instance, against others besides Harclay. It seems to have been implied in the sentence passed on Thomas of Lancaster, since in 1325 his brother Henry was in trouble with Edward II for using the arms of his brother, which the king held to have been condemned with the earl.21 The summary court which tried the elder Despenser at Bristol on 27 October 1326 specifically condemned his arms: e pur ceo qe autre fetz feites deshonurer ordre de chivalerie en tant com vous fcites pendre les bones gens en cotes quartiles, agard la court qe vous seietz pendu en une cote quartile de vos armes, et seient les armes destruz pur touz 99 jours.

The implication here seems to be that this penalty had been generally invoked against the Boroughbridge traitors, and that responsibility for

18

The trials, in their absence, of Northumberland and Bardolph (1405-6) are also said to have been conducted 'en Court de Chivalrie' and 'solonc la ley et usage d'armes' (Rotuli parliamentorium, iii, p. 604). 19 Johannes de Bado Aureo, Tractatus de armis, ed. E. Bysshe (London, 1654), p. 44; 'quando portans arma debet dishonorai propter proditionem . . . tune arma sua sunt pingenda per transversum . . . quia fides etiam hosti servanda est de jure civili et armorum'. 20 Upton, De officio militari, c. 15, ed. Bysshe (London, 1654), p. 29, classes 'gradus dejectio' as a military penalty for treason. 21 Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young, Nelson's Medieval Texts (1957), p. 137. 22 Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, i, pp. 317-18.

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this was laid at Despenser's door. There are other like instances later. Some similar ceremony seems to have been observed at the execution of Archbishop Scrope in 1405: Gascoigne says that he was not allowewd to die in the attire of an archbishop, but was led 'as a sheep to the slaughter', clad in a linen shirt, with a blue cloak about his shoulder.23 Lord Audeley in 1497 was led to execution with 'a cote armour upon hym of paper all to-torne'.24 It would seem that this was a normal feature of the sentences passed on traitors according to the law of arms by military courts. Matters of arms were not triable by common law. They were tried by the civil law and the laws of honour, over which only military courts had jurisdiction. After its official constitution, they were normally tried in the Court of Chivalry. This would confirm the suggestion that the sentences passed in summary courts were not by common law, but by the law of arms. Other features of these sentences bear out this view. For instance, they did not involve confiscation of lands, which in the case of persons tried in this way was authorised by posthumous acts of attainder. The reason would seem to be that it was generally accepted that military courts could not declare forfeiture of lands, but could only distrain goods and persons.25 Offences itemised in them, such as that of torturing women (alleged against the younger Despenser), were not said to be common law crimes, but to be 'encontre lorder de chivaler'.26 The whole tenor of the evidence quoted at the trials, moreover, seems to confirm that the offences were against military law, not English common law. This evidence was of quite another kind than the normal sifting of facts before a jury. The points rehearsed were matters of common knowledge, and they seem to have been largely aimed to show that a state of war existed ani that the accused person had committed acts of war against the king in his realm. Two matters in particular are mentioned in nearly all the extant sentences. One is that the accused had taken the field against the king in his kingdom 'with banners displayed'. William Wallace is said to have appeared in arms against Edward I Vexillum in bello mortali deferens'.27 Thomas of Lancaster had appeared in arms with his men Vexillis 23

Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, p. 227 (decollatio Scrope). Chronicles of London, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905), p. 216. See also below n. 85. 25 Rotuliparliamentoriwn, iii, p. 473 (1400-1): petition from the Commons that the constable and marshal should not exceed their powers, and that 'les ditz Conestable et Mareschal ne delyverent en execution . . . terre ne tenement dont ascun est seisy de franc tenement a meyns, salvant tout foith ia dit Court execution soulement de corps et beins . . .' 26 Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. J.R. Lumby, RS (London, 1889), i, p. 438. 27 Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, i, p. 141. 24

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explicatis';28 of his companions, Roger Damory had ridden in arms 'ove baner desploye',29 Bartholomew de Badlesrnere and others had besieged Tickhill 'ove banere desplaye cum enemy du Roy';30 Henry de Wyllington and Henry de Montfort had drawn up their men 'en champ entbatailez ove baneres desplayez'.31 Among later instances might be quoted Lord Welles who was beheaded when his men were 'in armez with baner displaied';32 and Lord Audeley who raised men who 'bellicis et invasionis armis induti guerram contra nos [i.e. Henry VII] pleno campo levatis et extensis velis inierant pugnam'.33 The reason behind the endlessly recurrent use of this phrase appears when one examines the technical significance of banners in the laws of war. The banners flown gave the combatants the clue as to the rules which their enemies were going to observe. One might instance the 'bausons', the streamers of rerd sendal flown from the mast of a ship, 'which everywhere amongst mariners means death without quarter'.34 The unfurling of the oriflamme at Crecy is said by the English chroniclers to have been a sign that the French would take no prisoners, give no quarter.35 The exact significance of appearing 'ove baner desploye' is defined in a case tried before the parlement of Paris in 1363, in which an Englishman, Henry Pomfret, was suing his French prisoner, Jean de Melun, for his unpaid raftsom.36 Part of Melun's defence was that he had been taken in time of truce and was therefore not liable to ransom; Pomfret's reply was that 'Melun et ceux de sa compaignie chevauchoient a pennon desploye qui etoit vraye signe de guerre entre les gens d'armes'. That is to say that Melun, by riding under banners displayed, was acting as if engaged in open war, and so could be taken and ransomed in accordance with the rules of open public war. On the same principle, a liegeman appearing against his king in arms under banners

28

Rotuli parliamentorium, ii, p. 3. Parliamentary Writer, ii, pt 2, appendix, p. 261b. 30 Ibid., p. 265a. 31 Ibid., p. 262a. 32 Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire, ed. J.G. Nichols, Camden Miscellany, 1 (1847), p. 10. 33 Patent Roll 12 Henry VII, part 2, m. 4, printed in L.W. Vernon Harcourt's His Grace the Steward and the Trial of Peers (London, 1907), pp. 414-15. 34 P.M. Powicke, The Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1953), p. 644. 35 Chronicon Adae de Murimuth, ed. E.M. Thompson, RS (London, 1889), p. 247; Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. Lumby, ii, p. 89. 36 BN, MS Fr. 21717, fos 144ff (transcript assembling various entries from the parlement register, AN, Xla 1469). 29

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displayed was clearly levying war upon him, and could be taken as a traitor. Neither Boynton nor Grey was accused of having appeared in arms with banners displayed. This, however, was only because both were taken, not in the field but at sieges, and in a siege men did not fight 'ove baner desploye'. The sign of open war in a case of siege was 'tire canon ou engin gecter'. When a prince had appeared in arms before a town, says Commynes, special laws under the droit de guerre came into operation.37 A commander who surrendered a town before he had been fired on or molested could be prosecuted for having surrendered it without siege;38 conversely, once it had been fired on, a state of siege existed.39 Tiptoft's statement to Ralph Grey Item, thou hast withstood and made fences against the king's majesty . . . it appeareth by the strokes of the great guns in the king's walls of his castle of Hamburgh, constituted therefore evidence that he had levied open war against the king in his realm and was so guilty of treason. Precisely the same point was made at Boynton's trial, where it was recorded that after he had refused Henry IV entry into Berwick, the king had ordered his great cannons to be fired, so that 'par force de la bone et forte tirer de ses ditz canons et les graundes et marvellous coupes dicelles lou murez de son dit chastell ferront [sic] rompez et quassez . . . '40 The display of banners, or the firing of cannon at a siege, was a recognised sign of open war, and therefore constituted evidence that a traitor had levied war against the king in his realm, which was defined as a treason by the statute of 1352.41 The law of arms, however, was not

37 Philippe de Commynes, Memoires, v, ch. 6, ed. B. de Mandrot (Paris, 1901-3), i, p. 376: 'despuis que ung prince a pose son siege et faict tirer son artillerie devant une place . . . si aulcuns viennent pour y entrer et la reconforter . . . ilz sont dignes de mort par les droictz de la guerre'. 38 See Norfolk's petition against Somerset, 1453, in which he states that 'it hath be seen in manye royaumes and lordshyps, that for the losse of tounes and castells wythoute sege, the capitaynes that hav lost theym han be deede and beheded, and her godes lost', Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner (London, 1904), ii, p. 291. Compare the allegations of Talbot against Robert Stafford, before the parlement of Paris, 17 Aug. 1433, that since he had lost La Fert£-Bernard 'sans assult et sans engins\ 'par le droit darmes, il a tout confisque et sest rendu indigne' (AN, Xla4797, fo. 106). 39 See a letter of Philip the Good, after his retreat from before Calais in 1436, defending his honour by explaining that he had not officially commenced a siege: 'nous ne nous y meismes que par maniere de logis, et non de siege comme dit est, ne y feismes asseoir ne tirer aucunes bombardes' (AD Nord, B 18842, 29521). 40 BL, MS Add. 9021, fos 8-9. 41 25 Edward III, st. 5, c. 2.

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governed by statute; it was an international law, observed entre gens de guerre, and was founded in the canon and civil laws.42 Within the realm, of course, statute also applied, but it is important to note that the action in question was a treason under international military law as well. According to the canon and civil laws, the right to levy open war was the preserve of the sovereign prince,43 who was empereur en son roialme, and for a subject or any other without advowal to infringe this right constituted the crime of lese majeste, because it was an accroachment on royal power. Hugh Despenser was in fact expressly accused of 'purpernant real pouare' because he rode against his enemies 'a force et armes';44 Lord Audeley's crime was defined as laesio majestatis.45 The common lawyers, with memories of the feudal right of diffidatio in mind, always fought shy on this matter of accroaching royal power; under the law of arms, which was founded in the civil law with its better defined doctrine of lese majeste, the case was clearer. This explains the significance of another point, which is nearly always raised against traitors tried before summary courts, that they had taken spoil or prisoners and burned or wasted land. Badlesmere in 1322 was accused of having burned Bridgnorth and killed and plundered the king's lieges.46 Damory's crimes were summed up as 'traysons, arsons, homicides et robberies'.47 Boynton was said to have robbed, spoiled and pillaged the king's lieges 'en guisse de guerre'.48 Northumberland in 1406 was stated to have pillaged Berwick and other places in the North, and to have taken Robert Waterton prisoner.49 Ralph Grey had been instrumental in the capture of John Astley, who had been put to ransom by the king's enemies.

42 See AD Nord, B 18823, fo. 21 (letter of Nicholas Ryssheton, doctor of civil law, to the Burgundian envoys, Calais, 25 May 1405): 'jura et usus armorum fundentur principaliter tarn per textus quam per doctores juris civilis e canonici'. 43 H. Bonet, The Tree of Battles, pt 4, ch. 82 (written c. 1387): 'He who decides on war should have no sovereign': G.W. Coopland's translation (Liverpool, 1949), p. 175. Heraldic treatises show that this book was regarded as the ultimate authority on the law of arms: see Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 764, fo. 11; Phillipps MS 10396 (in private hands), fo. 19; BN, MS Fr. 1968, fo. 64v. It was quoted by Norfolk in his petition against Somerset (Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, ii, p. 291). 44 Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. Lumby, i, pp. 437ff\ 45 Vernon-Harcourt, Trial of Peers, p. 414. 46 Parliamentary Writer, ii, pt 2, appendix, p. 265a. 47 Ibid., p. 261b. 48 BL, MS Add. 9021, fos 8-9. 49 Rotuli parliamentorium, iii, p. 605.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Now the right to take spoil and to hold men to ransom by the law of arms applied only in 'just' or public war, which for legal purposes meant a war authorised by a prince.50 In other kinds of war, for instance feudal war, such rights were severely limited.51 Pillaging and taking prisoners in a war other than that of a prince was therefore not only public robbery but also lese majeste, since the commander of the troops in question was arrogating to himself royal power. It was on these grounds that commanders of free companies, like Merigot Marches52 and William Bou lemer,53 were sentenced to death for lese majeste. Once again we find that a matter regularly raised at the summary trials constituted military evidence of a treason by military law, though no English statute defined the taking of ransom as high treason. Reference to the civil law and the law of arms will again help to explain the charges against Harclay, who had not committed any act of open war against his sovereign. The accusation against him rested, according to the entry on the Coram Rege Roll, on the fact that he had made a truce with the king's mortal enemy, Robert Bruce.54 The right to make truces was, like the right to levy war, royal,55 though it could be delegated. It often was delegated to commanders in the field, and in particular to the wardens of the Scottish march, of whom Harclay was one. Edward II was clearly aware of this possible line of defence, for shortly before Harclay's arrest he ordered a search to be made in the Chancery for any grant of powers to conclude truces made to the earl.56 Harclay seems to have had such a grant,57 but it was presumably either regarded as rendered nonoperative by the tumultuous succession of political events in the north 50

See above, n. 43. Bonet, The Tree of Battles, pt 4, ch. 43, (Coopland's translation, pp. 147-48). 52 H. Duples-Agier, Registre criminel du Chdtelet de Paris (Paris, 1861-64), ii, p. 207: 'au dit prisonnier [Merigot Marches] qui n'est chief de guerre le Roy n'a aucune guerre formele . . ., mais par maniere de traison veult prendre, exiger et lever patiz et raunceons comme desja a fait depuis le temps d'icelles treues criees'. 53 See AN, Xla 1471, fo. 293: 'Boulemer nestoit que pillart et ne pouvoit faire guerre et fu execute pour ses demerites'; see also AN, X2a 8, fo. 130, which makes it clear that his crime was construed as treason: 'Guilelmus Boulemer anglicus pro crimine lese majestatis . . . morti condempnatus'. The case for and against Boulemer is briefly stated in a letter addressed by Edward III to John, king of france, on 4 Dec,. 1361: Some Documents Regarding the Fulfilment and Interpretation of the Treaty ofBretigny, ed. P. Chaplais, Camden Miscellany, 19 (1952), p. 22. 54 Parliamentary Writer, ii, pt 2, appendix, p. 263. 55 Bonet, The Tree of Battles, pt 4, ch. 103 (Coopland's translation, p. 189), defines truces as 'royal surety', 'according to the masters'. 56 See A. Mason, 'Sir Andrew de Harcla', Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 29 (1929), p. 124, where the order is printed. 57 Ibid., p. 122. The commission to Harclay was dated 9 Feb. 1322 (n. 5.). 51

Treason Trials under the Law of Arms

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since it was given, or else the truly exceptional terms of the truce which Harclay had concluded were regarded as outstepping the terms of his commission.58 To make a truce, or indeed to give safe-conducts or make any agreement with the king's enemies without proper grant of powers, again constituted lese majeste and can be found defined as such in other military cases.59 The law of arms lay, at least from the reign of Edward III on, within the jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry, in which the constable of England presided.60 This jurisdiction was statutorily recognised in the thirteenth year of Richard II's regin,61 and the common lawyers, as the Year Books show, acknowledged the right of this court to try by the civil law certain matters which were not their concern.62 The statutory definition of its powers included the right to judge matters arising out of war within the realm. This would seem to have given the constable at least some title to consider cases of treason where the treasonable act was an act of war, as John of Bedford, Tiptoft and other constables undoubtedly did. A problem, however, remains with regard to the trials of Edward IFs time, as there was then, as far as we know, no Court of Chivalry in existence. Roger Damory's trial was, it is true, referred to as one oftheplacita exercitus^ and his sentence was recorded by a constable of the army64 and a deputy of the earl marshal.65 But this does not cover the other cases which were tried before commissions which usually included common law judges. The same holds true for the trial of Wallace, which was held before a tribunal which included both knights

58

He and Bruce had agreed virtually to coerce Edward and govern England through a council of twelve. For the text of their agreement see Mason, 'Sir Andrew de Harcla', pp. 122-23. 59 See Henry V's Mantes orders, section 22, The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. T. Twiss, RS (London, 1871-76), i, p. 466; see also the case of the English captains whose goods were confiscate in 1360 'pro crimine lese majestatis' for having made a treaty to evacuate Poix without Edward Ill's permission (AN, Xla 17, fos 275ff), and Pole's statement in 1384 to Despenser's captains: 'il n'est mye lisible chose, einz moelt grant mesprision en la persone de chescun lige Homme du Roi, de faire Treitie avec aucun Enemy du Roi sanz la volentee et expresse auctorite du Roi . . . ' (Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, p. 157a). 60 Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, pp. 14-15. 61 13 Richard II, st. l,c. 2. 62 E.g. Year Book 37 Henry VI, Easter, pi. 8 (Black Letter edn, London, 1679). 63 Parl. Writs, II. ii, appendix, p. 261a. 64 Ibid., plea held 'coram Fulcone filio Warini Constabulario [et] Johanne de Weston Marescallo'. 65 Ibid. John Weston was at the time deputy marshal for Brotherton; see Calendar of Close Rolls, 1318-23, pp. 443, 447, 452, 462, 580.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

and common law justices.66 The Despensers were tried by summary tribunals, whose personnel seem to have quite simply included such major lords as were available on the spot. There are other problematic cases later, too: it is not clear, for instance, what power the earl of Oxford had to try Tiptoft in 1470;67 or Lord Montagu to condemn the prisoners taken at Hexham in 1464.68 Reference to normal procedure in military cases will help to clear up this difficulty. The jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry over the law of arms was far from exclusive. In fact, almost every kind of case which was tried before it could be, and on occasion was, tried before summary courts assembled in the hosts. The most important cases which the Court of Chivalry considered, apart from cases of treason, revolved about ransoms and safe conducts, and rights to armorial bearings. We hear frequently of summary courts considering cases of ransom.69 The right of captains to try disputes among their men concerning prisoners and rights in them were recognised in orders of both Henry V70 and Bedford.71 The right of the constable in royal hosts to try cases of arms also was recognised, both in Richard IFs Durham ordinances for the host of 1385,72 and in Henry V's orders for his hosts given at Mantes in 1419.73 The dispute concerning arms between Richard le Scrope and Carmynau de Cornewall, mentioned in the Scrope and Grosvenor case, actually was tried before a summary court assembled in the host by John of Gaunt in 1359.74 In all these instances, courts assembled in armies appear empowered to try the same kind of cases as the Court of Chivalry and, like it, they on occasion tried cases of treason. A good example of a case of treason considered by a summary court of this kind is the trial of

66

Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, i, p. 139. See G.E.C., Complete Peerage, x, p. 240, nn. (h) and (i). 68 Gregory's Chronicle, ed. J. Gairdner, Camden Society (1876), pp. 224-25. 69 See J. Baurein, Varietes bordeloises (Bordeaux, 1784-86), i, pp. 200-5 (case tried by Talbot at Bordeaux in 1453); AN, Xla 4795, fo. 324v (case originally tried by Lord Scales in the field after the fall of Le Mans, 1425); Jean de Bueil, Lejouvencel, ed. L. Lecestre and C. Favre, Soci£te de 1'histoire de France (1887-89), i, p. 220; ii, pp. 10, 91, 94-95. 70 Rymer, Foedera (London, 1724-26), x, p. 106. 71 Order published at Caen, Dec. 1423, printed by Miss B.J.H. Rowe, 'Discipline in the Norman Garrisons under Bedford, 1422-35', English Historical Review, 46 (1931), pp. 201-6. 72 The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. Twiss, i, p. 454: 'Item, pur nul debat darmes, prisons, loiges, ne de nulle autre chose queleconqe, qe nul face riote. . ., mes sil soi sente greve, monstre sa grevance au Conestable et Mareschall, et droit li serra fait.' 73 See Henry V's Mantes orders, section 9, The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. Twiss, i, p. 461. 74 Sir H. Nicolas, The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy (London, 1832), i, pp. 49-50. 67

Treason Trials under the Law of Arms

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the Marshal d'Audreham before a tribunal of twelve knights empanelled by the Black Prince in his host after the battle of Najera in 1367.75 The treason was a purely military one; d'Audreham was accused of being a traitor to his faith, in that he had broken the oath which he had given to the Black Prince, as his captor and master after Poitiers, by appearing in arms against him while his ransom was still unpaid. He was in fact acquitted on a technical point, but had he been found guilty, says the Spanish chronicler, he could not have avoided a traitor's death, it was clearly under powers as commanders, similar to those used in these cases, that men like Lord Montagu condemned men taken in battle for treason. The court which tried the elder Despenser at Bristol in 1326 was one exactly similar to those empanelled to try cases under the law of arms by Gaunt and the Black Prince, being constituted on the spot from among the magnates in the rebel host.76 The summary trials of traitors taken in arms in times of civil war seem therefore to have followed a regular pattern, to have been tried according to a law valid in military cases, and before persons who had a recognised title to try such cases. They have, however, been alleged to be unconstitutional and contrary to statute. The reference to statute must presumably be to the statute of 1352. The relevance of this statute in the matter is questionable, as it makes no reference to the mode of trial in treason cases. It simply states that the accused must be 'atteint de ouverte faite par gens de lour condicion',77 an attempt, presumably, to protect the great against the testimony of irresponsible persons, which Bractonian doctrine seemed to allow.78 Otherwise statute merely defined what acts constituted high treason, including the act of levying war against the king in his realm. The object of the statute here would seem to be to prevent the common law judges from construing as treason vaguely

75

P. Lopez de Ayala in Cronicas de los reyes de Castilla (Madrid, 1779), i, pp. 459-60. It is worth noting that, as in the case of ordinary traitors, it was common practice to exhibit reversed the arms of those who were 'traitors to their faith' because they had failed to pay their ransoms: e.g. AN, Xla 25, fo. 23 (Henry of Lancaster reversing the arms of Guillaume Blondel); AN, Xla 4798, fo. 376v (Thibaut des Termes reversing the arms of the lord of Chateauvilain); AN, Xla 4801, fo. 255v (La Hire reversing the arms of Robert de Commercy). /6 For the composition of this tribunal see Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, i, p. 317. 77 25 Edward III, st. 5, c. 2. 78 Bracton, De legibus Angliae, ed. T. Twiss, RS (London, 1878-83), ii, p. 258: 'Ad accusationem vero hujus criminis admittitur quilibet de populo, liber homo et servus et minor infra aetatem constitutus'. I owe this reference to Mr J.M. Kaye, of the Queen's College, Oxford.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

warlike acts, done within the realm but not against the king, as they had done in the cases of John Gerbergh in 134779 and of Auktyn Hobyn in 1352.80 Though in both these cases a warlike act (that of holding the king's lieges to ransom) was involved, the judgements were regarded as open to dangerous abuse because there was no evidence that the king';s person or realm was being attacked, or that any state of emergency existed. The statute forbade, for the future, judgements such as these, but nothing in it would seem to preclude summary procedure against traitors taken in arms in genuine times of war. This point has a bearing on the other charge, that summary trial of traitors was unconstitutional. This is normally held to have been implicitly recognised by the reversal of the judgement on Thomas of Lancaster, in the parliament in 1326, on the ground that it infringed Magna Carta.81 He had not, it was said, been tried by the law of the land, as he had been inhibited from speaking in his own defence; and this objection was upheld. This would appear at first sight damaging, but on closer inspection a technical point seems to be involved. Henry of Lancaster's petition for reversal depended on the submission that his brother had been condemned tempere pacts.32 The evidence which he produced to substantiate his point was that 'nee idem rex [i.e. Edward II] unquam in tempore illo cum vexillis explicatis equitabat'.83 In other words, he was suggesting that, as the king had not unfurled his banner, it was still officially a time of peace. Interestingly, there appears to be some substance in his claim. The canon of Bridlington records that, when in March 1322 Edward II and his army crossed the Trent, he was about to unfurl his banner, but was dissauded by the younger Despenser. For, declared Despenser, 'si vexillum tuum, domine mi rex, fuerit explicatum, universalis guerra totam terram undique perturbabit, quam tuis

79 Gerbergh was accused of having taken William Bottlesford prisoner, 'armatus cum plateis et aliis armaturis et de quadam tunica vocata cote armure de armis suis propiis modo guerrino manifeste vestitus', and of having put him to ransom, thereby 'usurpando sibi infra regnum regis regiam potestatem' (PRO, MS Index 17117, fo. I73v). 80 Rotuli parliamentorum, ii, p. 244b. 81 Ibid., ii, p. 5a. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.

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165

temporibus vix poteris temperare'.84 It does not seem exaggerated to suggest that what Despenser meant was that, if the king unfurled his banner, a state of open war would exist and common law be partly suspended, with unforeseeable consequences. At all events, it seems clear both that there was a certain substance in the claim that 1322 was a time of official peace, and that the reversal of Lancaster's sentence implied that conviction by record was illegal in such time. Henry of Lancaster made no claim that the common law would protect anyone from summary trial in time of war. No more did the statute of 1352, which defined the mode of accusation but not the form of trial in cases of high treason. The statute of 13 Richard II seems to confirm finally what has been here suggested, that in times of open war the law of arms was regarded as having valid application, even in England, in military cases. Otherwise there would be little point in the licence to the constable, who could not consider matters triable at common law, to judge deeds of war done in the realm. The proceedings of summary military courts in cases of treason do not, therefore, represent isolated and unconstitutional travesties of justice, but present an unbroken series of trials in which a more or less regular procedure was applied consistently, in accordance with the rules of a known law. Originally, of course, the procedure was novel. The old feudal law recognised the aggrieved subject's right of diffidatio,I, and the new processes were not, I think, used before the time of Edward I. At the start they were employed somewhat tentatively, hence the association of common law justices with knights in the commissions which tried such persons as Rhys ap Maredudd, William Wallace and the Boroughbridge rebels.85 But gradually the procedure became regular, so that by the beginning of the fifteenth century it could be described as being 'selonc les leys et usages d'armes de la Court de Chevalerie d'Angleterre'. Since this law of arms was founded in the civil law, this

84 Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. Stubbs, ii, p. 75. This suggests that the king's own banner had to be displayed before a state of war was deemed to exist. This would explain the Appellants' anger at the display of the king's banner by de Vere at Radcot Bridge in 1387 (Rotuli parliamentorium, iii, pp. 235-36); together with the statement of the civil lawyers that they could present no case against the Appellees (ibid., iii, p. 236b). If a state of war had existed, proceedings under the law of arms might have been instituted before Gloucester in the constable's court, but it was clearly not in the Appellants' interest to suggest that there had been a state of open war. 85 One reason for this may have been that in some of these cases, e.g. that of Wallace, the accusation rested in part on ordinary common law offences; only certain of the charges were of an extraordinary nature.

166

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

adds emphasis to the important influence of civil law on English legal practice, and of ideas drawn from the civil law on English constitutional attitudes in the later middle ages. It also provides a legal warrant, valid in times of open war in the realm, for the barbarities even of Tiptoft. Postscript

The references above (pp. 151, 161, 165) to the trial of William Wallace are not intended to imply that his treatment as a traitor was justified or justifiable. It can only be so interpreted on the assumption, which Edward I and his judges made but which any good Scotsman than as now would indignantly reject, that Edward I was the rightful and legitimate King of Scotland.

10 English Military Experience and the Court of Chivalry: The Case of Grey v. Hastings The medieval records of what was called the Court of Chivalry of England, the Court of the Constable and Marshal, have perished.1 The Calendars of Patent Rolls, with their evidence about the appointment of commissioners to hear appeals from the court's judgement in cases concerning prisoners, ransoms, indentures, safe-conducts and other military matters, hint tantalisingly at how active this court must at times have been, but tell no more.2 We know that its records were once preserved in registers; they are lost. Accounts that are fairly full of a small handful of cases that lay within its jurisdiction have, however, survived among the Chancery Miscellanea, among them the records of two great disputes from the reign of Richard II over rights to particular armorial bearings, the cases ofScrope v. Grosvenor and ofLovell v. Morley? Parts of the record of the proceedings in a third armorial case, Grey v. Hastings which dates from the reign of Henry IV, also survive in three later MSS, of which the fullest — it is more or less complete — is in the

1

On this court see G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford, 1959); and M.H. Keen, 'The Jurisdiction and Origins of the Constable's Court', above, pp. 135-48. 2 See eg: CPR, 1374-77, p. 54; 1381-85, pp. 354,596; 1385-88, pp. 84,85,104,169; 1388-92, pp. 45, 47, 324, 412; 1408-13, p. 391. 3 Scrope v. Grosvenor was published by Sir N.H. Nicolas, The Controversy between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Grosvenor in the Court of Chivalry, 2 vols (London, 1832) [cited henceforward as Scrope and Grosvenor]: Lovell v. Morley is PRO, C47/6, no. 1.

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Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

College of Arms.4 It is a seventeenth-century transcript of proceedings, and appears to derive either from the register or from a copy taken from it. There seems no doubt that it is a faithful transcript of a fifteenthcentury record, and it runs to over 700 pages in a clear, closely-written hand. The accounts of the proceedings in these three armorial cases are obviously of enormous interest to anyone concerned with the history of heraldry; they are also of very considerable interest as sources for the study of the martial experience of the English aristocracy and gentry of their time. In the case of the Scrope v. Grosvenor proceedings, this has long been recognised. This dispute lay between Richard Lord Scrope of Bolton and Sir Robert Grosvenor of Cheshire, as to which had the better right to the arms azure a bend or. Both claimed that these had been the arms of their ancestors, which they had borne in wars and at tournaments time out of mind. On each side more than 150 witnesses were called, and much of the testimony was concerned with where and on what martial occasions particular individuals had seen members of the family of either Scrope or Grosvenor armed in the arms in question. From this testimony it is in consequence possible to reconstruct with some accuracy the details of the martial careers of members of the two families, and it is also possible to uncover a good deal of information about the martial careers of the witnesses (though this information is necessarily less complete, since there was no cause for them to mention campaigns in which they had served but in which no Scrope or Grosvenor took part). Michael Bennett has used the evidence of the Grosvenor witnesses to illustrate most effectively the decidedly military character of the gentry of Cheshire and Lancashire (the counties from which most of his witnesses came).5 Cheshire men had a martial tradition that looked back to the Welsh border wars: the fact that Chester was the Black Prince's palatine county made sure that the tradition was maintained through his time in the wars with France. Chaucerian scholars have long been aware of how useful the evidence of the Scrope witnesses can be for putting into context the crusading martial experience that Chaucer attributes to his Knight in the Canterbury Tales, because the Scropes, as it

4

The MSS are (i) College of Arms, PCM (2 vols); (ii) College of Arms, MS Philipot P.e. 1; (iii) BL, MS Harley 1178: the two latter MSS contain only extracts. Those in College of Arms, MS P.e. 1 are said to derive from an 'antique register' in the possession of Henry, earl of Kent, 15411615 (a descendant of the Greys of Ruthin). This could be the text from which the full transcript in (i) above was made. 5 MJ. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 82-83, 166.

The Case of Grey v. Hastings

169

happens, were a family with an impressive record of crusading service in Prussia and the eastern Mediterranean.6 Barnie, Bennett and others including myself have used the testimony more generally to illustrate various aspects of English social history during the period of the Hundred Years War.7 Attention has however largely concentrated on the evidence from the case of Scrope v. Grosvenor only, largely no doubt because the proceedings in the other two armorial cases that I have mentioned have never been fully published. What they have to tell us about English martial experience in the late middle ages has in consequence not been much explored. The case of Lovell v. Morley came up very soon after that of Scrope v. Grosvenor, and the campaigns and incidents about which the witnesses in these two cases testified were very much the same ones, with a distinct concentration on the great years for the English, before the reopening of the war in 1369. It is my impression — and I stress that it is very much only an impression — that there is nothing about the Lovell v. Morley evidence that alters in any significant way the impressions that can be derived from Scrope and Grosvenor, though of course it offers all sorts of small and interesting additions of detail. That is the reason why I wish to concentrate in this essay on the case of Grey v. Hastings which does offer some interesting contrasts with Scrope v. Grosvenor. This is because the case came on a whole twenty years after Scrope v. Grosvenor had been concluded, and called on witnesses who had different memories and experiences. Most of the evidence to which I shall be referring was taken down in 1408 and 1409: final judgement in the case was given in Grey's favour on 9 May 1410.8 Hastings appealed from that judgement, but his appeal was never heard.9 If it had been, we might know more about English views on the law of arms and about English heraldic usages in the early fifteenth century, but it would not be likely, as far as I can see, that anything would have been said that would affect the view of English martial experience offered by the testimony that had already been recorded before 1410. I must make it clear straight away that Grey v. Hastings is not by any means as good a source for illustrating martial careers and experience as 6

J.M. Manly (ed.), The Canterbury Tales (London, n. d.), p. 555: and see the references cited in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson (3rd edn, New York, 1987). 7 M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism] M.H. Keen 'Chivalrous Culture in Fourteenth-Century England', Historical Studies (1976), pp. 1-24. 8 C.G. Young, Reginald Lord Grey and Sir Edward Hastings (London, 1841), pp. 27-28. 9 Ibid., pp. 32-34.

Pedigree of Hastings and Valence William de Valence Aymer, Earl of Pembroke, d.s.p. 1324 Elizabeth

William d.s.p.

m. Richard, Lord Talbot d. 1356

Gilbert, Lord Talbot d. 1 357

Richard, Lord Talbot d. 1396

Gilbert, Lord Talbot d. 1418

*Joan

Joan

m. Joan de Munchesney m. John Comyn d. 1306

m. David, Earl of Atholl d. 1326

David Earl of Atholl d. 1335

David Earl of Atholl d. 1369

Henry Hastings __J6 Isabel

m. (1) John Lord Hastings d. 1313

John m. Juliana Leyburn d. 1325

Laurence m. Agnes Mortimer Earl of Pembroke (sister of Katherine d. 1348 Mortimer, Countess of Warwick and mother of Sir William Beauchamp J°hn Earl of Pembroke m. Anne Manny d. 1375

John Earl of Pembroke d.s.p. 1389

m. Joan de Cantelo m. (2) Isabel Despenser

Elizabeth m. Roger, Lord Grey of Ruthin, d. 1353

Reginald Lord Grey of Ruthin d. 1398

Reginald Lord Grey of Ruthin d. 1440

m. Alianor Lestrunge

Thomas d.s.p.

John** d.s.p. 1393

Hugh m. Margery d. 1347 Foliot

Hugh Maud d. 1369 m. Sir Robert m. Margaret de la Everingham Mar Hugh m. Anne Despenser d. 1386 .

m. (1) Margaret de Roos (2) Joan Asteley

Hugh d.s.p. 1396

m. (1) Elizabeth of Lancaster (dissolved) (2) Philippa Mortimer

NOTES * A claim to a moiety of the Valence (but not the Hastings) lands, put forward on behalf of the descendants of Joan after the death of the last Hastings earl of Pembroke, failed by default in Chancery in 1391, and finally in 1397, see Jack, 'Entrail and Descent'.

** The position of this John Hastings, of whom little is known, is problematic . Cockayne, The Complete Peerage lists him as the elder brother of Hugh I of Elsing (pp. 366-67). In 1351, however, it was found that Margaret Foliot's lands should pass to her sons John and Hugh, with remainder to the heirs of Hugh's body. In the Norfolk and Suffolk inquisitions post mortem after 1389 Hugh IV of Elsing was returned as the heir of the earl of Pembroke, not John, though he was living. The line of Hugh II seems therefore to have been treated as the elder one.

Edward d. 1438 m. (1) Muriel Dinham (2) Margery Clifton

Elsing Variant of the Hastings Pedigree

John Hastings d. 1313

m. Isabel de Valence

Elizabeth

John Hastings m. Isabel Dispenser I John Hastings m. Juliana Leyburn

Laurence Hastings m. Agnes Mortimer earl of Pembroke d.1348

John Hastings earl of Pembroke d. 1375

John Hastings earl of Pembroke d.s.p. 1389

m. Anne Manny

m.

1) Elizabeth of Lancaster (dissolved) 2) Phillipa Mortimer

Hugh Hastings d.1347

m. Margaret Folot

Hugh Hastings d. 1369

m. Margaret Everingham

Hugh Hastings d. 1386

Hugh Hastings d.s.p. 1396

m. Anne Despenser

Edward Hastings

m.

1) Muriel Dinham 2) Margery Clifton

Edward Hastings was succeeded by his son by his first wife, John Hastings, who was thus, according to later doctrine, Ae jure Lord Hastings, but was never summoned to parliament as such. In 1841, by the judgement of the House of Lords, the barony of Hastings was called out of abeyance in favour of Sir Jacob Astley, Bart, who claimed in right of his descent from Elizabeth, wife of Hamon Lestrange and daughter and co-heiress of Sir Hugh Hastings of Elsing (d. 1540), after the death in 1542 without issue of her brother John.

m.

Roger, Lord Grey of Ruthin d.1353

Reginald, Lord Grey d.1388

Reginald, Lord Grey d.1440

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Scrope v. Grosvenor is. This is because the circumstances out of which the two disputes arose were quite different. In the earlier case Richard Scrope and Robert Grosvenor both claimed that the arms azure a bend or had always been their family arms. In the later case, no one denied that the arms in dispute, or a manche gules, had been the arms of the earls of Pembroke of the house of Hastings; the question was over who had the right to inherit them after the last earl was killed in 1389 in a tourneying accident at Woodstock, under age, and though already twice married without heirs of his body.10 On the Scottish expedition of Henry IV in 1400 both Reginald Lord Grey of Ruthin and Sir Edward Hastings appeared armed in these arms. Grey immediately challenged Hastings' right to bear them, and took his case to the Court of Chivalry.11 Hastings in 1400 was under age — about nineteen — and in consequence it took a long time, nearly seven years in fact, before the case came to be heard.12 When it was, the central civil question before the court was formally this; which of the two, Reginal Grey or Edward Hastings, was the true armorial heir of the last earl of Pembroke? It is clear though that there were larger issues in the background, and if Hastings had won there is little doubt, I think, that he would have hoped to open a case against Grey concerning the lands of the Hastings inheritance,13 a matter of common law and outside the jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry. Formally, that court was restricted to considering 'contracts touching deeds of arms and war out of the realm, and also things that touch arms and war within the realm which cannot be determined nor discussed by the common law'.14 The Hastings inheritance was clearly what was in Edward's mind when, before the military court, he charged Grey with having destroyed or suppressed muniments relating to his title and, throwing down his gauntlet, offered to prove it on his body in the lists.15 This brought a second, criminal issue before the court; ultimately it ruled that battle did not lie in the matter. 10

T. Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, RS (London, 1864), ii, p. 195. PCM, i, p. 273. 12 In 1401 Grey petitioned Parliament for the appointment of a proctor for Hastings, whose inability as a minor to plead was holding up proceedings, Rotuli parliamentorum, iii, pp. 480-81. It seems that a proctor must have been appointed, since the case was commenced, according to Adam of Usk who appeared for Grey in the Court of Chivalry on 30 June 1401: see Chronicon Adae de Usk, ed. E. Maunde Thompson (London, 1904), pp. 58,63-64. After this the case seems to have lapsed until 1407. 13 This is the clear implication of Adam of Usk's remark, that if Grey had lost he would have been 'utterly undone', Chronicon Adae de Usk, p. 58. 14 Statute 13 Richard II, cap. 2. 15 C.G. Young, Grey and Hastings, pp. 19, 24-25. 11

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I must explain, as briefly as I can (since others have explained it at length) why there was a problem over the Hastings arms and inheritance. The difficulty arose thus.16 Back in the reign of Edward I, John Lord Hastings, son of Henry Lord Hastings and sometime competitor for the throne of Scotland, had married Isabella, one of the sisters of Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, who died childless in 1324. As a result of that match John Hasting's grandson, Laurence, became in 1339 the first Hastings earl of Pembroke, and quartered the arms of Valence with those of Hastings. Laurence's father John, son of John and Isabella de Valence, had never been called earl of Pembroke, probably because he died only a year after Earl Aymer, in 1325. Laurence was the grandfather of the young earl who died in 1389. John I and Isabella had another child besides this John II, a daughter called Elizabeth, who married Roger Lord Grey of Ruthin, grandfather of the plaintiff in the Court of Chivalry in Henry IV's reign. As the earl who died in 1389 was the only child of an only child, it seems clear therefore that Grey of Ruthin was, as he claimed to be, the heir of the whole blood of Hastings and Valence. That was the basis of the judgement in his favour that was ultimately given in the Court of Chivalry. However, John I Hastings had been married a second time, after the death of Isabella de Valence, to Isabella Despenser, by whom he had two sons, Thomas and Hugh, and this complicated matters. Thomas died heirless; Hugh became the founder of a cadet line, Hastings of Elsing in Norfolk. He died in 1347, his son Hugh II in 1369, and his grandson Hugh III in 1386/7. Hugh III left two sons: Hugh IV who was under age when he died at Calais in 1396; and Edward, the defendant against Grey in the Court of Chivalry. Though young Edward had no Valence blood in him, there does not seem much question that in Henry IV's reign he was the closest in the male line of descent from John I Lord Hastings, whose paternal arms had been or a manche gules. So Edward's appearance in these arms in 1400 was a good deal more than just a try out from an impertinent youth of the half blood. These were the facts out of which the dispute arose, and they were not on the face of it such as to elicit testimony about military experience in the way that the Scrope and Grosvenor controversy did. Grey took his stand on his pedigree, on the undoubted fact that he had received livery

16 The genealogical history reviewed below is discussed in detail by R.I. Jack. 'Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance, 1370 to 1436', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 38(1965), pp. 1-19.

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of the lands of the Hastings inheritance, and on the fact that he had been 'generally reputed' to be the heir and returned as such in the inquisitions post mortem after the death of the earl of Pembroke (though not in all of them: in Norfolk and Suffolk the jurors had returned Hugh Hastings IV of Elsing as the heir).17 His witnesses did not in consequence need to say much about their military experience, though one or two of them did in reply to questioning specify occasions on which, after 1389, they had seen Grey publicly armed in the arms or a manche gules. Hastings in reply to Grey's contentions sought first to query the pedigree that his opponent had offered, proffering a second, alternative (and as far as I can see incorrect) version of his descent;18 and secondly, he sought to query the circumstances in which Grey had obtained livery of the lands. The unfortunate fact was that in 1389 both Edward and his brother Hugh had been under age and so incapable of themselves pursuing their claim and, as Sir Simon Felbrigge put it, it was to be doubted whether Lord Grey would have obtained livery so easily if they had not been minors.19 Hastings further believed, as I have mentioned, that there had been skulduggery on Grey's part, and that he had suppressed muniments including entails which had confined the arms (and presumably the Hastings land too) to the male line.20 None of these contentions required asking witnesses to say anything about what they had or had not seen on campaigns. Edward Hastings had however one further argument, and it was one that meant that his witnesses did in fact say quite a lot that has a bearing on military experience. Once again there is a need for a little explanation. John I Lord Hastings, the common ancestor of both Lord Grey of Ruthin and Edward Hastings, died in 1313 and was succeeded by his son John II. When John II died in 1325, his son Laurence, the first Hastings earl of Pembroke, was very young, probably six years old: Laurence did not engender an heir, another John, until just over a year before he died. This John III was the earl who was captured in 1372 by the Spaniards in a sea battle off La Rochelle: he never came back to England (he died on 17

G.E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage (London, 1910-1959), vi, pp. 155-56, 357. See above, pp. 171-72, and C.G. Young, Grey and Hastings, p. 21; PCM, i, pp. 412,437,465. In the variant Elsing pedigree Isabella Dispenser is shown not as the second wife of John I Hastings (as in the Grey pedigree), but as the wife of a John Hastings his son, to whom she bore two sons, John, father of Laurence, earl of Pembroke, and Hugh I of Elsing. The variant thus makes Hugh a son of the whole blood, and introduce a third John Hastings where Grey has only two. 19 PCM, i, p. 444. 20 C.G. Young, Grey and Hastings, p. 24. 18

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his way home, on parole to set about raising a ransom). So he never saw the son whom his wife, Anne Manny, bore after he had left the country on his last expedition. That son was the earl who was killed in a tourneying accident in 1389.21 There were thus a series of very long periods in the fourteenth century when there was no heir of Hastings in the head line. The contention of Edward Hastings was that during these periods his father, grandfather and great grandfather had borne publicly on formal military occasions and in battle the arms of Hastings, with a label of three points argent, and that that, according to the custom of England, was the difference in arms traditionally awarded to the next heir of the line (the fact that it was the difference that the Black Prince had borne in the arms of England lying strongly in his favour).22 He contended further that his ancestors had borne these arms, without challenge or reproof, in the company and presence of the earls of Pembroke, and of the ancestors of Lord Grey, and that this must imply that these people had recognised his forebears as the next heirs of Hastings should an earl of Pembroke die without heirs of his body. To prove all this he called a large number of witnesses who could testify that they had seen direct ancestors of his armed on campaign in the arms or a manche gules with a label. There is really very little doubt that Edward Hastings was right in his facts here. The arms or a manche gules with a label appear clearly on the famous brass in Elsing church of Hugh Hastings I of Elsing. Even Sir William Hoo, called on behalf of Grey in the Court of Chivalry and at seventy-four one of the most senior and militarily experienced of his witnesses, could not deny him; he had seen the father and the grandfather of the defendant thus armed on diverse occasions, he admitted, and he could only explain that fact that there had been no challenge as being the consequence offolie ou negligence.2^ The evidence of Hastings' own witnesses was thoroughly consistent on the point, as one might expect. Few, naturally, could remember Hugh I of Elsing; but since both Hugh II and Hugh III were strenuous knights, members of the Lancastrian military retinue who had both seen extensive service, their evidence is of considerable interest for anyone seeking information about

21 Walsingham remarks that from the time of Aymer de Valence to the time of the last Hastings earl, there was no earl of Pembroke who had ever seen his father (Historia anglicana, ii, p. 195). 22 PCM, ii, p. 37; C.G. Young, Grey and Hastings, pp. 25, 26. 23 PCM, i, p. 322.

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the military experience of English gentlemen in the later part of the fourteenth century. I think it will be best for me to start by considering the evidence offered by Grey's witnesses: it is less full and interesting concerning military service and experience than the Hastings testimony and had better be got out of the way. A good deal of what they had to say concerned a wholly domestic incident of 1370, fully explored by Professor Jack, when Grey's father, hearing a rumour that the earl of Pembroke had died on campaign in Guienne, promptly went hunting in the earl's chase at Yardley, telling the foresters that he was the heir.24 This led to a furious row with Pembroke, who felt Grey had shown unseemly haste and still less seemly relish at the news of a kinsman's death. So angry was he that he set about making arrangements to ensure that if he died heirless, his lands should not go to Grey; but the relative in whose favour he had it in mind to instruct his feoffees was not Hugh of Elsing, but his cousin Sir William Beauchamp.25 When the last earl did die Grey's son, our plaintiff who had by then succeeded his father, was obviously worried about this, and made terms with Sir William which assured him a very handsome share in the Hastings inheritance.26 This story does not really concern us, but it does give an indication of the circumstances in which Edward Hastings believed that muniments might have gone missing, and whom he suspected of colluding with Grey in their suppression. To Grey this tale was obviously important, because it seemed to show that Pembroke really had thought his father was his next heir; otherwise why should he have contemplated steps to disinherit him? Most of Grey's thirty-eight witnesses in fact said nothing about military service, but a small handful of them did. John Brenker and Thomas Stotfield, esquires of Bedfordshire had both seen Grey armed in the Hastings arms (quartered with his own, says Brenker) in Richard II's host in Ireland.27 Grey served in both Richard's Irish expeditions: Henry Howard, another Bedfordshire esquire, specified that he had seen him bearing the arms in the first expedition, in 1394.28 Thomas

24

R.I. Jack, 'Entail and Descent', pp. 6-9. Ibid., p. 8. 26 Ibid., pp. 9-12; Adam of Usk tells us that 'William Beauchamp, Lord of Bergavenny, for that he ... had a moiety of that lordship and of others which belonged to the said earl, for his own advantage worked manfully with the said Lord Grey', Chronicon Adae de Usk, pp. 58, 221. 27 PCM, i, pp. 267,271. 28 Ibid.,i, p. 281. 25

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Lounde of Bedfordshire had seen Grey armed in the arms of Hastings on the Scottish expedition of 1400 and had witnessed his challenge to Edward Hastings when he appeared in the same arms.29 Reginald Ragoun had seen Grey armed in the Hastings arms then and in Henry IV's company in Wales, riding against the rebels.30 John Becke esquire has also seen him so armed in the war against Glendower, 'two or three years ago'.31 This short list specifies just those campaigns which one would have expected to be mentioned, in the light of the known facts about Grey's career. There are two points I wish to make regarding the testimony for Grey, one arising out of this evidence that I have just quoted from witnesses who made it clear that they had martial experience, the other from the evidence of others who, for the most part, seem not to have had any. The first is this, that if one compares the campaigns mentioned by Grey's witnesses with those mentioned in the Scrope v. Grosvenor controversy, they really are rather small beer. That no doubt is why the Grey testimony lacks that chivalrous tone that colours so much of the evidence in the earlier case. There is no such matter as the testimony of Nicholas Sabraham about how he saw Sir Henry Le Scrope armed in the company of the earl of Northampton when he rode by torchlight from Lochmaben as far as Peebles; or John Rither's story of how young Geoffrey Le Scrope fell fighting against the pagans in Lithuania; or William Moigne's story of how in 1347 William Le Scrope's daring in the interception of a French attempt to revictual Calais was the talk of the whole army.32 Comparatively, the statements are flat and factual, the memories untinged with glamorous detail. My second point arises out of the rather meticulous details which Grey's witnesses offered about themselves: it may seem unrelated but I think it is not entirely so. They all gave their age, their standing or occupation (esquire, parson, husbandman and so on) and stated whether or not they were literate, whether they were gentlemen of ancestry, and whether they had arms. A little group of them claimed explicitly to be gentlemen of ancestry, but not to have arms.33 Only one of these claimed to have ever served in war, and the others do not seem 29

Ibid., i, p. 273. Ibid., i, p. 264. 31 Ibid., i, p. 283. 32 Scrope and Grosvenor, i, pp. 124, 127, 165. 33 PCM, i, p. 198 (John Lee); 229 (John Boteler); 242 (William Parker); 271 (Roger Tunstall); 273 (Thomas Lounde). 30

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to have felt they had missed anything. John Lee, esquire of Buckinghamshire, was indeed quite explicit that he had never served in war but lived off his lands which were worth £50 a year to him.34 Another little group singled themselves out as apprentices-at-law;35 all these claimed to be gentlemen both of ancestry and of coat armour, but their careers were notably unmilitary. As Robert Baa put it, he was one who had never been involved in viages?6 There is a distinct contrast here with the Scrope and Grosvenor record, where a whole series of witnesses testified as to how they had seen those two great lawyers, the brothers Geoffrey and Henry le Scrope, armed in the arms of their family at war and especially at jousts and tournaments.37 There is actually only one single reference that I have found to jousts anywhere in the Grey v. Hastings case, and that is in the Hastings testimony. Altogether it is once again a somewhat less chivalric note that is struck by the evidence of the gentlemen of ancestry testifying in this later case, on the Grey side at any rate, than by the witnesses who appeared in that other great armorial suit of a generation earlier. Some of them made it pretty clear that the traditional association between gentility of birth and the martial calling did not mean very much to them. Hastings's witnesses tell us a great deal more than Grey's do about military experience; because a principal point on which evidence was sought on Sir Edward's side required that they should testify about what they had seen at the wars. There were also a great many more of them, altogether not far short of a hundred. I shall be concentrating on the testimony of just forty-two, all of whom made it clear that they were present on particular, identifiable campaigns. I have probably missed a few more who say somewhere in their often lengthy depositions that they had seen service, but I think I have got most of the ex-soldiers. The other Hastings witnesses had many interesting things to say, about church furniture with the Hastings arms, about lost pedigrees, vanished muniments, and exchanges that they had heard about who the next heir of the last earl of Pembroke was. But I must leave that on one side on this occasion as irrelevant.

34 35 36 37

Ibid., i, p. 198. Ibid., i, pp. 176 (John Henry), 243 (John Styvede), 284 (Robert Baa), 290 (John Enderby). Ibid., i, p. 284. Scrope and Grosvenor, i, pp. 98, 103.

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My forty-two witnesses can be divided into two groups by age, sixteen who by their own reckoning were under forty-five when they gave their evidence, and twenty-four who were older (those, that is to say, who were born in or before 1364; two failed to give their age).38 Of course a number of them probably misremembered their ages, so the division may not be precise, but the contrasts between the two groups are sufficient to suggest that it is not very misleading. Among the older men, there were ten who were able to specify three or more military expeditions on which they had seen either Hugh I or Hugh II or Hugh III of Elsing armed in the arms of Hastings with or without a label of three points.39 In the younger group there were two, Sir William Berdwell and Thomas Clifford esquire of Kent, who testified to service on three or more expeditions: four of the others mentioned two expeditions in which they had served, the rest only one. These figures are of course no reliable guide to the total military experience of these witnesses: they were only asked to testify about occasions when they had seen a Hastings of the Elsing line in the arms or a manche gules ^ differenced or entire. Edward Hastings had however clearly chosen his witnesses carefully, with a view to eliciting the maximum of evidence about the arms borne by three of his ancestors who had between them seen a great deal of service, so the tally remains at least indicative. It may seem the more significant if I add that in the younger group only one witness claimed to be under thirty-five.41 They were not, as Edward Hastings himself was, men who could show little service because they were not yet old enough to have acquired more than one campaign ribbon. The fact seems to

38

The twenty-four older men were: J. Bere (PCM, i, p. 426); N. Braynton (p. 529); S. de Burgh (p. 427); Sir W. Calsthorp (p. 457); R. Chyrche (p. 451); Sir T. Erpingham (p. 439); R. Fyshlake (p. 329); Sir T. Gerbergh (p. 496); D. Hemnale (p. 458); Sir W. Hoo (p. 544); J. Kirkstead (p. 519); T. Lucas (p. 445); R. Lymworth (p. 413); Lord Morley (p. 435); J. Parker (p. 533); J. Payn (p. 502); W. Plumstead (p. 478); R. Poley (p. 495); J. Roger (p. 397); Sir R. Shilton (p. 423); T. Spekkesworth (p. 395); T. Stanton (p. 486); Sir J. Wiltshire (p. 401); Sir J. de Wilton (p. 497). The sixteen younger men were: E. Barry (p. 393); Sir W. Berdwell (p. 390); Sir R. Berney (p. 474); J. Bryston (p. 464); H. Claxton (p. 467); T. Clifford (p. 500); Sir S. Felbrigge (p. 443); Sir J. Gyney (p. 425); T. Hengrave (p. 492); Sir L. Kerdiston (p. 456); R. Marian (p. 513); Sir R. Morley (p. 421); C. Mortimer (p. 509); J. Reymes (p. 444); Sir M. Stapleton, (p. 442); Sir W. Wisham (p. 399). For T. Pikworth (p. 404) and T. Swinburne (p. 405) no age is given. 39 R. Fyshlake, Sir T. Gerbergh, D. Hemnale, Sir T. Erpingham, R. Lymworth, Lord Morley, W. Plumstead, Sir R. Shilton, Sir J. Wiltshire, Sir J. de Wilton. 40 Sir W. Berdwell (4); T. Clifford (3); Sir R. Berney, Sir R. Morley, Sir J. Gyney, J. Reymes (2). 41 Sir L. Kerdiston; but see below in n. 43.

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have been more simple, that it was hard in 1408/9 to find men under forty-five whose military experience was at all extensive. One further point that seems worth mentioning about the younger group is how early in their lives they first saw arms. Four out of the sixteen had been on expeditions by the time they were twelve.42 A fifth, Sir Leonard Kerdiston, if he was right at giving his age as twenty nine (which I doubt) could not have been more than seven when he saw Hugh Hastings III in Richard II's host in Scotland in 1385.43 He clearly was very junior, for he said himself that he was too young then to recall whether Hugh's arms were differenced with a label or not. All but one of the younger men had demonstrably seen service by the time they were sixteen or thereabout.44 It is not really feasible to make a comparison here with the older group, since many of them had probably seen service before the first occasion on which they remembered seeing a Hastings in the relevant arms. It is however possible to make a comparison with Scrope v. Grosvenor, since the witnesses in that case not only gave their ages but also stated how long they had been armed - or specified the firs battle or campaign in which they had been in arms. From that evidence it is clear that fourteen or fifteen was a very common age for first arming, and that it was not exceptional to be armed even younger: but it also makes clear that there were a good many who did not see service until their twenties.45 The implication of the consistently early date for arming among Hastings's younger witnesses therefore seems plain: it suggests that in 1408/9 it was not easy to find gentlemen under forty-five or so who could testify to military experience, unless they had been armed at a relatively early age. Not surprisingly, there is a distinctively stronger chivalric flavour to the testimony of the Hastings' witnesses that there is in that of Grey's. Nicholas Braynton recalled vividly how, on the chevauchee of 1373, he had seen Edward's father, Hugh Hastings III who was then a very young man, kneeling to receive his knighthood at the hands of John of Gaunt, with an escutcheon before him of the arms of Hastings with a label, 42

Sir W. Berdwell, T. Clifford, T. Hengrave, Sir R. Morley. PCM, i, p. 456; his age is clearly entered as XXIX, and he alludes to his youth; but I think it must be intended to be XXXIX, which would just make him old enough to have served on the post mortem inquest that found for Hugh IV Hastings, as he seems to imply he had done. 44 The exception was H. Claxton, who mentions no service before the Scottish expedition of 1400, when he was c. thirty-five. 45 A systematic count would be possible: I base my statement on a sample of just short of sixty names in Scrope and Grosvenor, i, pp. 150-215; twenty of these seem to have been armed by the time they were sixteen (if they have stated their age correctly). 43

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quartered with those of Folliot.46 Robert Fyshlake, who accompanied Hugh III on a journey to the eastern Mediterranean, to Jerusalem and elsewhere, remembered how in all the important places where he stayed (including the Hospitallers' maison d'honneur at Rhodes), Hugh left an escutcheon of his arms.47 John Parker recounted how he had always heard that Hugh II, Edward's grandfather had first raised his banner in an engagement against the Saracens.48 Those who had been in Hugh Ill's company on Gaunt's Castilian expedition of 1386 (in which he perished) were full of memories of his distinguished conduct in the skirmishing at Brest on the way to Spain.49 The chivalrous tone comes out most strongly of all, perhaps, in the story told by a number of witnesses about how both the duchess of Norfolk and her daughter, Anne Manny countess of Pembroke, had begged Hugh III to bear the Hastings arms entire on that expedition 'so as to do honour to the said arms' while the earl was too young to serve in the war.50 It was generally agreed that Hugh has so borne them, and had done them honour. Even so, the Hastings testimony has not quite the full flavour that makes the evidence of the Scrope and Grosvenor witnesses such a marvellous companion piece from judicial records to set alongside the stories of Froissart, if one wishes to illustrate the chivalrous mentality of the fourteenth century. It seems to me probable that this has something to do with the campaigns on which Hasting's witnesses served, and that it may have a further significance, on which I will speculate in conclusion. The campaigns which Hastings' witnesses could recall straddle a very long period. The longest martial memory was that of Sir William Hoo of Sussex, who could remember seeing Hugh Hastings I, Edward Hastings' great grandfather, armed in the arms of Hastings with a label, quartered with those of Folliot, on the 'first expedition of the Prince Edward in Picardy', that is to say in the Black Prince's company in 1346/7.51 Hoo gave his age as seventy-two, which would make him ten or eleven at th time. The latest evidence given by any of Hastings' witnesses was that of Henry Claxton, who saw Sir Edward in the Hastings arms in Henry IV's Scottish host of 1400.52 Inside this bracket of time, there was one witness

46

PCM, i, p. 529. " Ibid., , p. 429. 48 Ibid., , p. 533. 49 Ibid., , pp. 402-403, 440, 446. 50 E.g., P CM, i, pp. 418, 475, 509; and see C.G. Young, Grey and Hastin gs, p. xv. 51 PCM, i, p. 544. 52 Ibid., , p. 467.

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whose memory went back to the siege of Rennes, one who could recall the 1359 chevauchee of Edward III, and one who was at Najera:53 but th. main weight of testimony referred to the campaigns of the 1370s and 80s. Two witnesses had been in Guienne in 1370:54 two had been with the earl of Pembroke in 1372, when he was taken prisoner in the sea fight off La Rochelle;55 three had been on John of Gaunt's chevauchee of 1373.56 and eight had been with Gaunt on the expedition to St-Malo in 1378.57 Four witnesses had served in the fleet commanded by Sir John Arundel that was dispersed by a storm in 1379, with the loss of many ships:58 Thomas Pikworth remembered how Hugh III, after he had go safely to land, had hung a banner of his arms in the church at Falmouth in thanksgiving for deliverance from the sea.59 Twelve witnesses had served on Buckingham's expedition of 1380,60 and eighteen in each case on Richard II's Scottish expedition of 1385 and on the Castilian expedi-. tionof 1386.61 All these campaigns and expeditions of the 1370s and 80s were in their own way important, and they clearly left their individual mark in knightly memory, but none of them could be called glorious. There were noble feats of arms achieved by individuals in their course, and Hugh Hastings III clearly made his mark in them as a chivalrous man: but they had not, from an English point of view, the kind of resonance in recal that the great campaigns of the 1340s and 50s had had. In consequence it was not possible to talk of them in quite the same way, with quite the same confident tone of knightly nostalgia that the Scrope and Grosvenor witnesses could adopt when they thought back to martial companionships in the great days of Edward III. The quality of English military

53

J. Bere (Rennes); W. Parker (1359); Sir T. Gerbergh (Najera). Sir T. Gerbergh; W. Plumstead. 55 Lord Morley; Sir J. Wiltshire. 56 N. Braynton; R. Lymworth; R. Poley. 57 Sir W. Berdwell; R. Fyshlake; D. Hemnale; T. Hengrave; Lord Morley; W. Plumstead; Sir R. Shilton; T. Swinburne. 58 Sir W. Berdwell; R. Fyshlake; T. Pikworth; W. Plumstead. 59 PCM, i, p. 404. 60 S. de Burgh; T. Clifford; R. Fyshlake; Sir T. Gerbergh; D. Hemnale; R. Lymworth; Lord Morley; T. Pikworth; W. Plumstead; T. Stanton; T. Swinburne; Sir J. de Wilton. 61 Sir R. Berney, Sir T. Erpingham, Sir J. Gyney, Sir R. Morley, R. Poley, J. Reymes, Sir R. Shilton, Sir J. Wiltshire deposed that they had served on both expeditions; J. Bryston, R. Chyrche, R. Fyshlake, Sir T. Gerbergh, D. Hemnale, Sir L. Kerdiston, J. Kirkstead, R. Lymworth, W. Parker and T. Swinburne claimed service in 1385; E. Barry, T. Clifford, Sir S. Felbrigge, T. Lucas, R. Marian, C. Mortimer, J. Payn, W. Plumstead, J. Roger, and Sir W. Wisham on the Castilian expedition. 54

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experience in the two periods was, clearly, rather different. What I want to muse on in conclusion is what the effects of that difference of quality may have been. The value of the evidence I have been examining seems to me to lie in its suggestiveness; it is not of the kind from which anything very significant can be proved to the hilt. My conclusion in consequence has to take the form of a question, to which the answer cannot be definitive. In 1389 Philippe de Mezieres in his Songe du vieilpelerin addressed the English thus: Listen, you who have sown such terrible shedding of man's blood! By your evil war . . . the whole of Christendom has for fifty years been turned upside down . . . and what is worse, what you have been empowered by God's permission to achieve for the chastisement of the sins of the Scots and French, you and your fathers have attributed solely to your own valour and chivalry, drunk as you are with pride and stirred up by stories of Lancelot and Gawain and their wordly valour.62

These are passionate and loaded words; nevertheless it is hard not to feel that, as applied to Englishmen of the 1380s and their fathers, they had a certain justification. Whence my question: would it be fair to suggest that, on the whole, English gentlemen of the next generation were just a little less crudely confident in chivalric values, less bellicose, less drunk with stories of worldly valour? In the evidence that we have heard there are some pointers in that direction. Among Grey's witnesses the little group of barristers who claimed proudly to be gentlemen of ancestry and coat armour but who were not martial men are from this point of view interesting. The relevance to gentlemen of a legal training and the significance of the legal profession as a path for the upwardly mobile in the landowning sector of society are already striking in fourteenth-century England: in the fifteenth century they became still more so. In 1450 William Worcester in a famous statement lamented that among Englishmen of gentle blood those who knew how to hold courts had come to be more respected 'as the world goes now' than those who had spent 'thirty or forty years in great jeopardy' in the king's wars.63 And it is not only the 62

Ph. de Mezieres, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. G.W. Coopland (Cambridge, 1969), i, pp. 396-97. 63 W. Worcester, TheBoke of Noblesse, ed. J.G. Nichols, Roxburghe Club (London, 1860), pp. 77-78.

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lawyers among Grey's genteel witnesses who seem somewhat unmartial. Of course there had always been gentlemen like that other witness of his John Lee esquire, who had lived off their lands and did not meddle with viages;64 it is interesting though, to hear one identifying himself so explicitly in the Court of Chivalry. The shape of the more extensive military experience of the Hastings witnesses also seems to me significant. In the testimony in all the surviving armorial disputes tried in the constable's court there are a great many references to what witnesses had heard as common report among 'old knights and esquires'. The stories that Hastings's elderly witnesses and their one time companions-in-arms could tell of the martial doings of their youth were not such as to inflame the ardour of younger men in quite the way that the stories told by the Scrope and Grosvenor witnesses would have done. Those who demonstrably had really extensive service records were all older men, and the campaigns that even they could recall lacked glamour from an English point of view. The campaigns that Hastings' younger witnesses could remember best were Richard II's Scottish expedition of 1385 and Gaunt's expedition to Castile, neither of them militarily very successful, and both of which, in 1408/9, were a long time ago. Few seem to have seen subsequent military service and a great many of their neighbours and contemporaries would probably not have seen any, because the opportunities had been so few. It seems hard to believe that the children of these men would not have grown up a little less excited about the prospects of winning their spurs abroad than their grandparents would have been. English local landed society was dominated by the kind of men and the kinds of families whose members represented their shires in parliaments, served regularly on local commissions, and acted as sheriffs and as justices of the peace. In the fourteenth century men of this stamp were prominent at the wars as well as at home, and most had some military experience at least. As Professor Michael Powicke has pointed out, after 1420 their absence among the English war captains of the fifteenth century is striking.65 Even the new flurry of military enthusiasm that Agincourt aroused seems to have run out of steam rather quickly. That seems to have had quite a lot to do with the English failure to capitalise effectively on Henry V's great successes in the only period

64

See above, n. 34. M. Powicke, 'Lancastrian Captains', Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. Sandquist and M. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), pp. 371-82. 65

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when it might have been possible to do so, in the years immediately following the treaty of Troyes. There was still, in those years and subsequently, a steady trickle of well-born adventurers crossing the sea from England to France, hoping to make a name and a fortune; but it was becoming a trickle rather than a stream. Feats of arms still commanded wide respect, and there were still plenty of chivalrous minded spirits — Edward Hastings, of a family of distinguished and strenuous knights, was clearly one such. But there do not seem to have been quite so many coming forward quite so eagerly as of yore, especially after the post-Agincourt euphoria had begun to wear off. There was a change of mood, by the beginning of the 1440s at latest a clearly discernible one, and one that by then was clearly important. So the question arises. Does this have anything to do with the kind of military experience — and the kind of lack of it — that the generation of Englishmen who testified in the Grey v. Hastings case and their contemporaries, men who had grown up in the 1380s and 90s, had enjoyed? Is there room to suggest that the seeds of that cooling of bellicose ardour, among gentlemen, that had become noticeable by the 1440s, had been sown a generation earlier? The Grey v. Hastings testimony certainly opens the door to speculation on the point, but it would clearly be very unwise to jump to a conclusion on the basis of evidence that is, in its nature, slender and very eclectic. The testimony that I have been going over may perhaps be sufficient to allow the question to be raised: it is certainly not sufficient to warrant offering an answer one way or the other. There is enough though to suggest that we need to allow for very considerable variations and also for considerable fluctuations in the attitudes of the gentlemen and aristocrats of England towards the war with France. In considering those fluctuations, and variations, it further suggests, we need to take into account the impact of experience not just on those at the political helm, but also on the landowning, political class more generally. It is easy to be tempted to treat their attitude as relatively unitary and consistent, both in class terms and over time: the Grey v. Hastings evidence helps to remind us of how unwise it is to yield to that temptation.

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11

Some Late Medieval Ideas about Nobility My attention was first directed to the subject that I want to discuss in this essay1 on reading the important article by Dr Charity Willard, published in 1967 in Studies in the Renaissance and entitled 'The Concept of True Nobility at the Burgundian Court'.2 In this article she argues firstly, that the humanist contribution to Burgundian views about nobility, and especially the humanist presentation of the view that personal virtue was the only valid justification for a claim to be recognised as noble, requires stronger emphasis than has usually been allowed. She also suggests that a principal medium for the penetration of humanist ideas into the French-speaking, aristocratic world of the Burgundian court was through translations into the vernacular of humanist works in Latin and of classical authors. In particular she stressed the significance and influence of Jean Mielot's popular translation of Buonaccorso of Montemagno's Controversies de nobilitate. This text usually appears in MSS alongside a debat d'honneur between 'three chivalrous princes' - Hannibal, Alexander, and Scipio Africanus — as to which should take precedence in honour, and which likewise was translated by Mielot, from Giovanni Aurispa's (amended) Latin version of Lucian of Samosata's Dialogue of the Dead? 1

I must express my gratitude to my colleague at Balliol College, Oxford, Dr J.K. Powis, who read this essay in manuscript and offered numerous and perceptive criticisms and suggestions 2 C.C. Willard, 'The Concept of True Nobility at the Burgundian Court', Studies in the Renaissance, 14 (1967), pp. 33-48 3 Mielot's two translations have recently been edited by A.J. Vanderjagt in his Qui sa vertu anoblist (Groningen, 1981); see pp. 191-222 for the text of the Controversie de noblesse', pp. 165-80 for the Debat d'Honneur. Aurispa, in his Latin translation of Lucian's Greek text, altered Minos' judgement in this debate from one in favour of Alexander to one in favour of Scipio, and gave Scipio an expanded speech in his defence.

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A brief resume of the content of these two pieces will explain why they seem significant in the context of ideas about nobility. The Controversia presents the imaginary pleadings before the Roman Senate of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Gaius Flaminius for the hand of the lovely Lucrece, who has promised herself in marriage to him of the two who shall be judged the more noble. In the debate Scipio claims the higher nobility on the ground of his illustrious lineage and of his wealth: Flaminius rests hi. case on his education, his quest for wisdom and virtue, and his proven readiness to serve the state with counsel and in arms. No judgement is given, but it is made clear that Flaminius is to win the day. In the debate of the three princes, Hannibal, Alexander and Scipio Africanus contend for precedence in honour before Minos, judge of the underworld, on the basis of their respective martial achievements. Each has a splendid record of battles won and conquests made to rehearse; but the laurel goes to Scipio, on the ground that his achievements have been more virtuous, in that he has laboured not for his own glory but for the common wealth of his native city, Rome. The two texts thus concur in two points; in relating precedence and honour — the very stuff of nobility — to personal virtue, and in relating personal virtue to the service of the common weal. The emphasis on these themes, it has been suggested, is symptomatic of an important shift of views which, in the Burgundian world of the mid fifteenth century, was modifying ideas about the true foundations of nobility. Dr Willard is by no means the only scholar who has argued that such a shift was taking place: indeed, the real importance of her article is as a particularly lucid contribution to a more general reaction against an older view that stressed the traditional chivalric aspects of Burgundian court culture more strongly than its humanist side, and which was given classic expression in Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages. A few years before Dr Willard wrote, J.H. Hexter had drawn attention to the importance of humanist influences in Burgundy in his seminal paper on The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance* More recently A. Vanderjagt, introducing his valuable edition of texts on nobility under the title Qui sa vertu anoblist, has taken up the matter again and has vigorously castigated the older view that owed so much to Huizinga.5 He

4

J. Hexter, 'The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance', Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), pp. 45-70. 5 Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, ch. 1.

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has stressed the secularist orientation of Burgundian political and social thinking, and in particular the store that is set, in the works that Mielot made popular in translation, on the virtuous service of the state — the chose publique — which, in his view, distinguishes their ideal from the traditional chivalric mould and which he sees as one of the principal signs of the strength of the humanist influence.6 Like Dr Willard, he sees that influence as conveyed largely through vernacular translations, and so as one that we must trace rather through the impact of ideas than through appreciation of good Latinity. Hence he reacts sharply to N.F. Blake's statement that Burgundian vernacular culture was 'distinctively medieval, and in behaviour and literary taste the court seemed to be scarcely touched by the new humanism that was spreading northwards from Italy'.7 Blake's view, however, is not only reminiscent of Huizinga's but is also not far out of line with that of the most considerable contemporary English historian of Burgundy, Richard Vaughan.8 Clearly there is an issue here that is worth taking a look at. Aside from the translations of Mielot, Dr. Willard in her article gave some attention to two other Burgundian texts that treat of nobility, the anonymous Enseignement de la vraye noblesse (1440), and the French translation from the Spanish (by Hue de Salves, provost of Veurnes) of Diego de Valera's Espejo de verdadera nobleza (written c. 1440: translated 1460).9 The latter of these is edited by Vanderjagt along with Mielot's two translations, with which it is bound up in several MSS. Both he and Dr Willard stress the 'humanist' material that it incorporates: and indeed Valera, rather strikingly, uses a number of the very same examples drawn from classical history (in fact from Valerius Maximus) that Buonaccorso uses in his Controversia, and to illustrate very similar

6

Ibid., ch. 3. N.F. Blake, Selections from William Caxton (Oxford, 1973), introduction, pp. vii-viii. 8 See R. Vaughan, Philip the Good (London, 1970), ch. 5, and especially pp. 155-58: Vanderjagt comments critically, Qui sa vertu anoblist, p. 18 9 Valera's Spanish text is edited by M. Penna, in his Prosisas castellanos del siglo XV (Madrid, 1959); the French translation of Hue de Salves is edited in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, pp. 237-301. Vanderjagt has located fifteen MSS. The 'Enseignement' (in some MS entitled Tmaginacion et la vraye noblesse' has never been printed: a very cursory quest in obvious places reveals seven MSS (two in the Bibliotheque Royale at Brussels; two in the British Library and one each in the Bibliotheque Nationale, at the Arsenal, and at Mus£e de Conde in Chantilly); more may survive. It was sufficiently well thought of for a de luxe presentation copy to be prepared for King Henry VII of England in 1496, now BL, MS Royal 19 C VIII. I have used the better of the two MSS in the Bibliotheque Royale at Brussels, MS B 11047. 7

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points.10 The Enseignement, which Willard describes as a 'more conservative work' does not draw quite so heavily on material that can be specifically labelled humanist (though there is a great deal of classical allusion in it), and makes use of examples drawn from sources not used in any of the other three texts, for instance from the Grail cycle and from the mythical history of Godfrey de Bouillon.11 But these two texts, the Enseignement and Valera's treatise, nevertheless resemble one another in more ways than either resembles Mielot's two translations from Latin. Both use a wide range of sources, and both draw heavily on material that is not humanistic. They are besides works of a different kind from Mielot's originals. He translated two virtuoso literary exercises; these are much longer, discursive treatments of nobility, devoting much space to explicit comment on contemporary conditions as well as to historical example and classical opinion. Their authors were, in both cases, secular noblemen, not professional scholars: Diego de Valera was a Castilian knight errant and diplomat of distinction and the author of the Enseignement was, by his own account, a lesser noble of Hainault, of gentle birth but de petit estat.12 Both, in addition, are alike in including in their treatises substantial sections on chivalry and on heraldry (hardly a humanistic subject). The similarities between them, and the points of contrast between them and the Mielot translations, combined with the fact that the French versions of all four belong to the period 1440-60, altogether suggest that a further examination of the treatment of nobility in Valera and the Enseignement may throw some more light on the questions: how sharp was the impact of humanist ideas on the concepts of nobility current in Burgundy and northern France in the fifteenth century, and whether their influence really was breaking the mould of earlier ideas on the subject? It will be my contention that their evidence in fact suggests that there were more influences at work than have been suggested in the arguments so far rehearsed, and that these have tended to exaggerate both the novelty of what has been called the humanist and the rigidity of what has been called the chivalric tradition.

10

The examples of the following are, for instance, quoted in parellel contexts by both authors; Tullius Hostilius (see Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, pp. 208, 248): M. Porcius Cato (ibid., pp. 208, 248): L Cornelius Scipio (ibid., pp. 210, 254); Fabius, son of Quintus Fabius (ibid., pp. 210, 254). In one passage Valera refers directly to Lucian's Dialogue (the original of the debat d'honneur, ibid., p. 240. Vanderjagt considers it likely that he used the Castilian translation of Lucian made by Ramirez de Guzman for Juan II of Castile). 11 Bibliotheque Royale, MS 11047, fos 34, 72v-73. 12 Ibid., fo. 3; MS 10314, fo 5.

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Before embarking on a more careful consideration of these two works and their sources, it may be useful to offer one or two general observations, in the hope of putting their ideas into better perspective. Looking back to earlier medieval writing on the subject of nobility, a first point becomes clear immediately; that is that there is nothing new about the thesis, which Valera, theEnseignement and Buonaccorso's Controversia all alike labour, that the true foundation of nobility is to be sought in personal virtue rather than in wealth or lineage. Long before the humanist period this was a topos of writing on the subject. As far back as the late twelfth century Andreas the Chaplain wrote in his De arte honeste amandi that 'in the beginning true nobility came in only from good character and manly worth . . . he who gets his nobility only from himself is to be preferred to him who derives it as a sort of inheritance from those from whom he gets his being'.13 The same point provides a delicately handled ironic theme in the early thirteenth-century prose Lancelot, whose hero is noble by blood but proves it by his deeds in ignorance of his ancestry. 'I do not understand how one can have more gentility than another . . . unless he earns it for himself by his prowess . . . But know that if a great heart makes a gentleman, I shall hope to make myself among the most gentle.'14 Jean de Meun, in his continuation of the Romance of the Rose subscribed to the same opinion: 'Is he a gentleman who would claim name and praise because he has inherited nobility from others, though he has not their merit or their prowess? I say, no.'15 In the early fourteenth century Dante gave classic expression to the view in his Convivio, justifying at length and in the philosophical terms that he had learned from Cicero and above all from Aristotle his famous conclusion; 'therefore let not any scion of the Uberti of Florence or of the Visconti of Milan say, "I am noble"; for the divine seed does not fall upon a race, that is a stock: for as will be proved, the stock does not make the several individuals noble, but the individuals ennoble the stock.'16 Dante's views about nobility were widely circulated, and are in fact noted by Valera, who knew about them because they had been quoted by other authors in between times.17

13

Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J J. Parry, (New York, 1941), p. 38. H.O. Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances (Washington, 1909), iii, p. 89. The implications of the passage are discussed by E. Kennedy, 'Social and Political Ideas in the French Prose Lancelot', Medium Aevum, 26 (1957), pp. 102-4. 15 Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. E. Langlois (Paris, 1914-24), lines 18755-8. 16 Dante, Convivio, trattato IV, c. xx. 17 Notably by Bartolus of Sassoferrato, in his commentary on Codex 12.1.1.; see below n. 33. 14

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This draws attention to a second contextual point. Nobility was not a new topic of debate in the mid fifteenth century, in Burgundy or anywhere else. The matter had been much discussed earlier, and it had been specifically and eagerly discussed in certain French works of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, for instance in the Songe du vergier, and in the writings of Philippe de Mezieres, Alain Chartier and Christine de Pisan (who was herself no mean classicist).18 These works and writers that I mention were all associated with the French court; they thus remind us of the debt that the court culture of Burgundy owed to the culture of the Valois royal court in the reigns of Charles V and Charles VI, the brother and nephew respectively of the first of the great Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold. In the context, it is significant that all these authors, and in particular Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier, were well versed in classical history and learning. Indeed, if it is humanistic to use classical history in order to illustrate the virtue and value of service to the common weal (which was the great lesson that Cicero and Valerius Maximus clarified for their late medieval readers), they were no less humanist than Valera or Mielot. This seems to me to suggest that the emphasis on the virtue of state service in the Burgundian authors may be a reflection not so much of novel Italian influence but rather of the stirring of a sense of Burgundian identity, of a Burgundian common weal separable from that of the original French homeland of the Valois dukes (which was certainly a feature of the reigns of Philip the Good, and Charles the Bold). The high respect of these French authors of an earlier generation for chivalric values, notwithstanding their classical interest, also suggests that one needs to be very cautious about hinting at any tension between chivalric and humanist ideals, a point that seems to me to find further confirmation in the simultaneous interest at the Burgundian court in both the classical and the chivalric (especially the Carolingian chivalric) past. When one looks at the treatment of nobility specifically in these French works of the age immediately preceding that of Valera and 18

See in particular Songe de vergier, i, chs 149-52; P. de Mezieres, Lesonge du vieilpelerin, ii, chs 110-12, ed. G.W. Coopland (Cambridge 1969), pp. 527ff; A. Chartier, Le breviaire des nobles, in The Poetical Works of A. Chartier, ed. J.C. Laidlaw (Cambridge, 1974), 395ff; and le quadrilogue invectif, ed. E. Droz, (Paris 1923); and Christine de Pisan, Le chemin de longe estitde, ed. R. Puschel (Paris, 1881), especially pp. 149ff, 164ff, 176. In her extensive quotations in this work (written in 1403) from Valerius Maximus and Vegetius Christine anticipates Valera and Mielot, and sh. probably did as much as either to shape Burgundian court thinking about nobility. A copy of her work (now Bibliotheque Royale, MS 10982) was in Philip the Good's library from its foundation.

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Mielot another significant point emerges. It seems quite clear that the reasons why the writers close to the French Valois court thought that the subject of nobility was of importance were principally practical and political. The woeful inadequacy of the nobility in their traditional role as the warrior estate, as the armed defenders of the patria and the common weal, seemed to them to be among the primary reasons for the agonies that France was enduring in the Hundred Years War. The insufficiency of the noble response to the call to arms was driving the king to turn for aid instead to men of mean estate, strangers to the discipline of chivalry and out to make themselves rich from pillage. In consequence, the nobility was being infiltrated by the wrong sort of men, actuated by the wrong sort of motives. The nobles generally were too preoccupied with the maintenance of outward show and a traditionally lavish style of living: their besetting sins, vainglory and covetousness, were causing them to oppress the common people with taxes, to impoverish the crown in their relentless quest for pensions and offices, and were driving many lesser nobles into lives of armed plundering. The overbearing pride of the nobles and the disorderliness of their political and social behaviour had become a major threat to reasonable government; and in the consequent confusion the traditions of obedience and loyal service to the prince which were the justification of their privileges seemed to be almost universally forgotten. Whence the call of authors like de Mezieres, Chartier and Christine de Pisan, to remember the standards of nobility. The Burgundian writers thus inherited an interest in the values and status of the nobility from a generation to which they had seemed to be matters of urgent and very practical concern. The same practical concern reappears, urgently and emphatically expressed, in both Valera's Treatise and the Enseignement. There are shades of different emphasis as between these later works and the earlier ones, naturally enough, and between the two later works individually. The Enseignement has more to say about the evils of pillaging, and about conspicuous waste and its ill consequences; Valera has more to say about the noble's dependence on the prince, to serve whom nobility was instituted, and about the dangers of admitting the wrong kind of people to noble privilege. But essentially their doctrines are very similar. Both stress the martial role of the nobility, both stress that nobility is founded in virtue, and both repeat the traditional warning not to put your trust in riches or lineage. Both are nevertheless, plainly and explicitly, deeply respectful toward the claims of lineage, and the reason is clear: that their words were aimed principally and practically at those who considered themselves to be noble, and they assumed — with justification — that this

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must normally mean the nobly born (as their concern with heraldry, the insignia of hereditary nobility, aptly testifies). Neither was in fact opposed to inherited privilege; what they deplored, like the writers of the preceding generation and for similar reasons, was its unacceptable face. Their repeated emphasis on the foundation of true nobility in personal virtue was not intended as a plea for meritocracy, but as an appeal to the aristocracy to mend its way, to be mindful of values; and about this appeal there was nothing new. Much of this was true also, I believe, of Mielot's translations of the humanist pieces by Buonaccorso and Aurispa. The message that he sought to convey was similarly intended for the existing, largely hereditary aristocracy. What was new and different about these humanist works was their literary form, rather than the ideas that they purveyed, which were not in essence different from those expressed in other works that were more chivalrous and less humanistic in their tone. Even the form and tone lost something of their distinctive novelty in translation, moreover. In Mielot's vernacular version of Buonaccorso's Controversia we find Flaminius claiming that he has won all that 'gloire de chevalerie peut apporter';19 and his story of how in battle he won from one of Mithridates' 'knights' his 'coat of arms' is given a chivalric ring because Mielot is using a chivalric vocabulary to render the Latin of his humanist source.20 In the process the distinction between the two tones has become blurred, and it is not surprising that it has done so. Emphasis on the value of dutiful service and on military achievement and discipline were common themes to classical and chivalric history alike, and the two blended easily. If we turn from this subject of vocabulary to look at the way in which Valera and the Enseignement author handled the actual material that came to them from classical sources, a parallel point emerges. Both quote extensively from classical writers. Valera, the more learned, uses Cicero, Seneca, Lucan, Livy and others, but for both the most important ancient source was Valerius Maximus, whose work was no newcomer to learned circles in the fifteenth century. If we look at the quotations from these classical sources, we find that they are deployed principally for two

19

Mielot, Controversia, lines 999-1000 in Vanderjagt, Quisa vertu anoblist, p. 216. Ibid., lines 990-95. In this passage, Mielot has actually expanded the Latin text to give it a knightly twist; see Buonacorso's text, in E. Garin, Prosatori Latini del Quattrocento (Milan, 1952) p. 156. 20

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ends. One is to provide authority for the view that the only valid claim to nobility is one that rests not on birth or riches but on individual virtue, which view, as we have seen, is not in itself new. The second is to provide examples from antique history that illustrate this claim and its complementary inverse, that riches and great ancestry without virtue are worth nothing. This is all in accord with what those who stress the humanist influence on writing on nobility have told us to expect, but we have to bear in mind that, as I have shown, these authors drew on a wide and quite miscellaneous range of sources. A second category of material that both quote extensively is Christian religious writing, the Bible, the Fathers (Gregory and Isidore in particular) and some later writers, for instance John of Salisbury. When we turn to this second category of sources the importance of the humanist message begins to look less clear, for we find they are used to almost precisely the same ends as the classical sources: to provide authoritative statements about the nature of nobility and to offer examples that illustrate general points. Thus the examples of Cain and Abel and of the sons of Noah are quoted to show that virtuous and vicious children can spring from the same stock.21 David is quoted as an example of one who from a shepherd rose to be king, in just the same way as the example of Marius, the carpenter's son who rose to be a general and was consul seven times, is invoked from classical history, to prove the same point, that a man of no lineage can rise to nobility by virtue.22 In case it should be thought that it was the humanist approach that had induced an appreciation of the significance of the biblical examples, I should add that the three biblical examples that I have quoted, the cases of Cain and Abel, of the descent of Noah and of David are all referred to in the context of the self same issue of nobility in the fourteenth-century Songe du vergier.^ The classical material did not induce a new approach here: it was fitted into a ready-made position in the framework of an already traditional argument. It is interesting, in this context, to find that quotations from both these categories of source material, classical and scriptural or patristic, tend to be dense at particular points in our texts, and are often mingled together pretty indiscriminately. Thus Valera, for instance, states the principle

21

Bibliotheque Royale, MS 11047, fo. 12v (Noah's sons); Valera in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, p. 252 (Cain and Abel). 22 Ibid., pp. 248, 178. 23 Songe du vergier, i, chs 149, 150; text in Revue du moyen age Latin, 13 (1957), pp. 184, 186. The Songe significantly remarks that more examples can be found in Valerius Maximus. See above, p. 186.

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that 'habits of virtuous living make men noble, without regard to riches', and proceeds to quote in support, in the order in which I give them, the authority of Boethius, Seneca, Ambrose, Gregory, Chrysostom, Cicero, Lucian and Aristotle.24 Clusters of quotations such as this one suggest flonlegia in the background: they also suggest, more importantly, that the writers that we are looking at thought of classical, scriptural and patristic materials in much the same way, very much in terms of authorities that would demonstrate the respectable pedigree of general statements, and as quarries of examples that would illustrate these. Indeed, our two authors do not seem to see any important distinction between the lessons illustrated by reference to the authors that the humanists specially prized and the teaching of the traditional Christian authorities. One ancient writer from whom both Valera and the Enseignement quote extensively must, however, be put into a further and particular category, that is, Aristotle. He is in a different case from the other classical authors that I have been mentioning because his influence on medieval thought dated back to long before the humanist period, as did that of Boethius and of Cicero, the other philosophic authors whom these two writers quote most frequently. There are echoes of both Artistotle and Boethius in the Enseignement9s treatment of the cardinal virtues, and Valera quotes Aristotle, frequently and specifically, on all sorts of matters. But above all it seems clear that for both authors Aristotle was the most important non-Christian authority for the view that, as part of both the natural and the moral order, nobility ought to be related to virtue, and that it derived from the 'habit' of virtuous living. As the Ethics and the Politics explained, virtue was related to political life and the aptitude for ruling, and the writers on nobility picked up the point. Aristotle became in consequence the principal authority for their reiterated statement that a man who is free and noble should possess talents that fit him for leadership and authority. He was also their best authority for the complementary view, that nobility is lost by those who lapse into Vile offices', what Aristotle called banausic occupations.25 His views on slavery and on the degrading nature of manual work obviously chimed very neatly with the contemporary fifteenth-century concept of derogeance, the notion that nobility may be lost, civilly, by the pursuit of occupations unfitting to a noble.

24 25

Valera in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, pp. 239-40. Ibid., p. 261.

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Aristotle's influence on thinking about nobility was thus clearly important, but we need to be careful about the way in which its impact was assimilated. The vernacular words that our medieval authors used to render in French Aristotle's ideas on this matter are significant. Thus the natural slave is rendered as 'serf, his condition, as 'servage\ serfdom. The word for the 'freedom' that Aristotle so often alludes to is franchise, which has strong chivalric overtones,26 and his 'rule' or lordship is translated as seignourie, a word carrying connotations of feudal jurisdiction that cannot have been in the mind of the Stagyrite. We see here at work the same process that was remarked earlier, when we looked at the way in which Mielot's vernacular gave a chivalrous twist that was not there in the original to the classical spirit of the words and the stories that he translated; here, once again, we find the ideas of an ancient author are being modified and adulterated by the implications of an alien vocabulary. A still more important twist that the writers on nobility gave to Aristotle's thinking - and a twist in the same direction - arose from their rendering of his 'free man' by the French vernacular word noble. I should add that they were not alone in so rendering him: the mistranslation — which is perhaps too strong a word — was almost instinctive. If one looks back from their writing to the French translation of the Politics by Nicholas of Oresme, another writer of the Valois court circle of Charles V whose importance I have emphasised, and one who probably influenced the author of the Enseignement, one finds him making the same equation in the most directly relevant passages. 'Thus we see', he for instance writes 'that servitude and liberty, or to be noble or nonnoble are matters that are determined by virtue.'27 His vernacular glosses are still more eloquent of the way in which Greek thought could be bent in the effort to make it relevant to fourteenth-century French conditions; as when he comments on what Aristotle has to say about the inheritance of moral characteristics that 'cest la cause et commencement dont vient premierement noblesse de lignage ou gentilesse';28 and notes that, while sometimes noble lineages decline and descend to gens de

2h See e.g. Bibliotheque Royale MS 11047, fo. 33: 'franchise est de moult grant recommendation . . . et a proprement parler selon notre langue franchoise la personne Tranche en soy ne peut souffrir servage; et selon la parole des philosophes il est deux manieres de serfz cestassavoir les ungs par nature et les autres par la ley'. 27 N. Oresme, Le livre des politiques ed. A.D. Menut, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 60 (1970), p. 56. 28 Ibid., p. 56.

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petit valeur, some last for ages long and that he has seen in the church of Rouen a genealogy of the noble kings of Scotland that traces their ancestry from William the Lion in the twelfth century right back to Japheth.29 Examples from Scripture, the authority of classical writers and the opinions of Boethius are all drawn in to elucidate Aristotle in these glosses, very much as they are drawn in by Valera and the Enseignement author.30 The effect is to alter significantly the application of what Aristotle has to say, by adjusting his ideas about the civic aristocracy of the Greek polis to fit the frame provided for the noble in medieval estates literature. The classic estates literature of the high and later middle ages viewed society in terms of three estates, whose roles were co-operative: the priests who prayed for society and ministered to spiritual needs; the warriors who defended society and the church with their arms; and the labourers who tilled the land to support the living of themselves and the other two orders. In early vernacular texts the second estate is usually identified as the chevalerie: but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the word noblesse is used at least as often to describe it, and it is clear that to a great many the terms seemed to be complementary. As a gloss on the Grand coutumier de Normandie puts it, 'in the division of the estates, the estate of nobility is called the estate of chivalry'.31 It is of course not implied here that every nobleman was a knight — this was palpably not the case: what is implied is an identification of the social function of the chivalrous and the noble, which is seen essentially as a martial one. That is why Valera in his treatise on nobility devotes so much space to chivalry specifically, and why we find the translation of Aurispa's debate, which is described as a meeting of 'three chivalrous princes' and which is entirely concerned with their martial achievement, bound up with treatments specifically of nobility. I think this should make it clear why I argue that, when the writers on nobility translated Aristotle's free man or citizen by the world noble, they were giving a very important twist to his meaning. They invoked the authority of the Greek philosopher in a context quite alien to his thinking, by applying his remarks about the man fitted by virtue and talent to rule to a quite different kind of person, essentially the man fit to

29

Ibid., p. 57. Ibid. 31 BN, MS Fr. 2765, fo. 45: quoted by Guilhiermoz, Essai sur I'origine la noblesse en France au moyen age (Paris 1902), p. 374 n. 18. 30

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fight. Among other things, this helps to explain why certain ideas that are very prominent in Aristotle are notably absent from their works. They have no conception of the value of political activity for the noble (as the Italian humanists, in contrast certainly had), nor have they considered at all seriously the problem of upbringing to political responsibility and participation that Aristotle discusses so carefully in the Politics. Here their chivalric pre-occupations and their emphasis on discipline and obedience as politico-military virtues have very largely obscured to them a whole dimension of ideas about the civic education of the socially privileged that were vital both to Aristotle and to humanists of the Florentine school. In the works on nobility that we are considering, civic humanism and a conception of the value of studia humanitatis surface identifiably only in Mielot's translation of Buonaccorso's Latin.32 The civic ideology, with its antique roots, which really did have something new to contribute to the debate on nobility, flourished in the Italian soil where there was a strong urban republican tradition: ducal Burgundy was stony ground for its reception. Hardly less important than Aristotle as an influence on our two late medieval writers on nobility was a group who approached the question from a very different angle, and who are also distinct from the humanists, the fourteenth-century jurists and professors of Roman Law. Among these the most influential was Bartolus of Sassoferrato, the leader of that school of commentators who came to be known as the 'post-glossators'. What they had to say seemed politically and practically relevant, not only to our authors but also to those influential technical experts on the social rituals of nobility, the heralds, whose views on nobility cut a good deal of ice in court circles, in Burgundy and elsewhere.33 The lawyers did indeed have something substantial and new to contribute to the debate on nobility, that one will not find in Jean de Meun or Dante or in the writings of the early humanists or even in Aristotle. The distinctive quality of their outlook was largely the consequence of their particular angle of vision, as practical lawyers. Since nobility is a civil status, Bartolus argued (and Valera simply repeated his argument, translated), the claim to be noble, civilly speaking, must rest

32

'Controversie de noblesse', in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, pp. 215, 217, 220. See e.g. The Argentaye Tract, ed. D. Manning (Toronto, 1983), pp. 71, 72-73, for a good example of the influence of Bartolus on a heraldic writer. 33

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ultimately on recognition by the constituted authority, the lawgiver — on an external, legal and recognisable standard, not on internal virtue or imparted genes. By the lawgiver he meant, as he explained, the emperor, or the king in his kingdom, or the sovereign council of a free city (what he called a civitas sibiprinceps). Bartolus is very emphatic at this point. There are three kinds of nobility, he says.34 There is what he calls theological nobility, which is what separates those elected by God's grace to bliss from the damned: since we cannot know who these nobles are this kind of nobility has no relevance to civil life. Secondly, there is natural nobility, which he defines by reference to Aristotle's explanation in the Politics of how some are marked out for freedom by their virtues, and are so distinguished from the common herd. This was the kind of nobility, he says, that Dante spoke of in the Convivio\ but however virtuous a man may well be he will still not be civilly noble unless the prince recognises him to be so — not even if he should live in virtue for a thousand years. The only meaningful kind of nobility, to Bartolus, is what he calls 'civil nobility', because it is the only sort of nobility that can be related consistently to civil practice and law, which for instance can and does recognise as noble the helpless infant of noble parents. This infant, he points out, by definition cannot yet have formed the habit of virtuous living; and he is noble not simply on account of his birth, but because the prince and the laws recognise as noble the stock from which he springs. The standard that he sets is thus clear, definite and human. This Romanist view that Valera found principally in Bartolus he was able to take up and to expand, showing that on the one hand it was in accord with scriptural example — he quoted the instance of Pharaoh's 'ennoblement' of Joseph — and that on the other it accorded with the practice of his day.35 He had been present when the Emperor Sigismund knighted one Orsalamin, the son of a butcher, and so made him noble; he knew that King Charles VII of France had ennobled Jean Bureau, the master of his artillery, and other soldiers who had distinguished themselves; he was acquainted too with a good many Castilians, he says, whose fathers had been ennobled by the king of Castile.36 The Bartolist approach did indeed fit well with the practice of his time, of an age in which the granting of letters patent of ennoblement, extending the

34 Bartolus, Commentaria in Codicem, 12.1.1. (in the Basle, 1562 edn of his commentaries on the Codex, p. 942). 35 Valera, in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, p. 256.

36

Ibid., pp. 269, 322.

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privileges of nobility to an individual and all his descent, was becoming increasingly common; and which even saw great collective recognitions of nobility, as when in 1470 Louis XI recognised as noble all those Normans, non-nobles, who could show that they or their forebears had held noble fiefs and had lived nobly — without involving themselves in any occupations that would derogate from their nobility — for forty years.37 Valera's work, in popularising the Bartolist approach, thus served to affirm and uphold the validity of practices that in fifteenthcentury France and Burgundy were forging strong links between the nobility and the princely authority, and to stress the theoretic dependence of the former on the latter. The author of the Enseignement summed up the moral of this teaching well, 'without the prince nobility has neither virtue nor power', (ni vertu ni puissance)?** When Bartolus, discussing the right of the prince to ennoble, stated that the qualifying condition of nobility was the prince's acceptance of it as such, he assumed that ennoblement meant normally the promotion not just of an individual but also of his progeny. Valera, here as elsewhere, made the same assumption (whence the long discussion in his treatise of the question of the nobility of bastards). Theory here reflected practice accurately: Louis XI's Norman ordinance, quoted above, for instance ennobled expressly not only the non-noble holders of fiefs themselves but also 'leur posteritee et lignee nee et a naistre en loyal mariage'.39 The specific relevance of fief-holding to nobility that is here stressed was of course important — and that hereditary title to fiefs rested on princely grants was duly noted by the writers on nobility. 'In the long past princes gave and shared out tenements among their knights,' says the Enseignement, 'to each according to his worth, and these we now call fiefs.'40 'When the prince grants to a commoner a dignity or seigneurie he becomes noble', says Valera, elaborating a point made by Bartolus; and such nobility, he adds, will last as long as the dignity or fief remains with the same lineage.41 There is an important common-sense point in the background here, that wealth and nurture inevitably have their part to play in forming the noble. Just as, if a knight is to perform the kind of martial service that is expected of him, he will require an estate - a fief— to support him, so if a youth is to acquire the habits of virtuous living 37 38 39 40 41

J.R. Bloch, Vanoblissement en France au temps de Francois ler (Paris, 1934), pp. 43-44. Bibliotheque Royale, MS 11047, fr. 29v. Bloch, L'anoblissement en France, p. 43. Bibliotheque Royale, MS 11047, fos 32-33v. Valera, in Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, p. 261.

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apposite to nobility he must be brought up in circumstances that will foster their formation. That is to say he must have a noble upbringing, and the easiest and most natural avenue to this was obviously through noble parentage. If a prince wishes for the good service of the nobility who are the bras et mains of his commonwealth, says the Enseignment, he will need to look after his nobles well, so that they may be able to bring up others to serve him in the same way.42 Here is presented a strong case for the recognition of the hereditary principle, that does not involve any suggestion that the inherent quality of nobility can be passed by mere progeneration, and which in no way impugns Bartolus' principle that civil nobility derives not from internal qualities but from external recognition. It also emphasises the reciprocal interest that ought to bind together the prince and his nobles; their task is to serve him as head of the commonwealth and this means that it must be to his advantage to show favour to them by grants of fiefs, offices and posts of profit, so that a new generation may be nurtured in the noble tradition of service. The clear definition that the Romanist teaching gave to the relation of the nobility to the princely commonwealth was what, most of all, made it appear relevant and important to writers on the subject. Valera and his contemporaries were far from being the first to see this. The author of the Songe du Vergier, writing at the French court of Charles V, had anticipated him by translating the key passages from Bartolus' commentary on the title De Dignitatibus in the twelfth book of the Codex and incorporating them into his knight's authoritative remarks on nobility.43 Bartolus' teaching fitted very well into the general thesis of the Songe, the defence of secular monarchical authority on the ground that it was the embodiment of the public weal. Honore Bonet, in his Tree of Battles which was written not much more than a decade later, likewise drew heavily on the Roman law and lawyers to press his point, that the overriding duty of the chivalrous and noble soldier was to the prince, and that soldiers could win in war no private right in pillage or prisoners or captured castles except by the assent of the prince in whose cause, as that of the commonwealth, the war was fought.44 These and other French writers, like Christine de Pisan (whose views on chivalry were heavily influenced by Bonet) had put the service of the state and of the prince into the centre of the picture in discussions of nobility and

42 43 44

Bibliothdque Royale, MS 11047, fos 29, 35. Songe du vergier, i, ch. 150, is largely based on Barbolus commentary. The Tree of Battles, pt iv, p. 14, trans. G.W. Coopland, (Liverpool, 1949), pp. 134-5).

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chivalry well before the time of Valera and of the humanist translations of the mid-fifteenth century. Bonet and Christine were also, well before that date, turning to Valerius Maximus and to Vegetius in order to illustrate the principles that they were preaching from Roman example and practice. Though by the middle and later fifteenth century humanist learning in translation had uncovered to vernacular writers on nobility a much wider range of classical sources from which examples might be quarried, the ideas which these examples were employed to illustrate were not new. It was the Roman lawyers, influenced by Aristotelian as well as by the juristic thought, who first focussed the discussion of nobility on the chose publique, not the humanists. Late medieval ideas about nobility, it seems to me, did not owe their shape to any single, unitary influence. Rather, in an effort to make sense of contemporary conditions, and to explain what was of value in current conventions, what valueless and unacceptable, writers on the subject blended a series of approaches, Christian, chivalrous, Aristotelian, Romanist and humanist. They made much use of materials that can be labelled 'humanist' not because these were in tension with older, chivalric traditions, but for the opposite reason, because they were easily assimilated to them. Loyal martial service was what had always been expected of the knight : Roman history proved to be a rich store of examples of the way in which loyal disciplined service had won for the great soldiers of the classical past honour and esteem — and had furthered the fortunes of the republic. Aristotle was a profound influence for a similar reason, because his account of the functional relation of different groups in the polls and of the different Virtues' apposite to different ways of life could be easily assimilated to the contemporary conception of the hierarchical, cooperative relation of the three estates of society. If writers like Valera and the Enseignement author took little notice of what Aristotle had to say about upbringing to civic responsibility as described in the Politics, that was because it had no analogue in the noble society that they knew, which was nurtured in a strong chivalric tradition from which they saw no reason to shake free. Besides, there was another reason too for this omission, that the society that they knew had opted for the authoritarian rather than the republican solution to the general problems of government, and of noble disorder specifically, which made them more readily appreciative of the qualities of the courtier than of the 'citizen', of the value of obedient and dutiful service rather than of the value of participatory political activity. Here the Romanist teaching, which treated the prince as the fount of all

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honour, privilege and secular dignity, was obviously a propos. The Romanist emphasis on the overriding claims of the public weal offered in addition a means of cutting through the spider's web of private rights and interests and personal obligations whose intricacy could so easily be used to justify feudal and martial anarchy. The Roman lawyers, with their stress on the civil, secular aspects of nobility and on its dependence on the civil, secular authority had something formidably relevant to a society whose leaders were seeking, as Nicholas Wright has put it, 'to create disciplined national chivalries in a world where chivalry had traditionally accepted neither discipline nor nationalism as virtues'.45 Wright speaks of 'chivalries' but his meaning is not significantly altered and remains equally applicable to the facts of fifteenth-century life if one substitutes for his chivalry the word nobility. I have mentioned writers on nobility seeking to blend a series of different approaches to their subject; to suggest that they succeeded in achieving a synthesis would be going too far, I think. The unreconciled ambiguities of attitude come out much more clearly in longer, discursive works, like Valera's treatise and the Enseignement than they do in short pieces like those that Mielot translated (whose literary form leant itself to a unitary approach), and that is one of the reasons why I have concentrated my attention on the former. My other reason for concentrating on them has been that they seem to me more illuminating in one particular way, because their authors felt a stronger need to relate their statements to contemporary conditions, which as usual were riddled with ambiguities. If one asks how they could hope to have it so many ways, to maintain for instance that virtue was the foundation of true nobility but that princely recognition was essential to make it valid while at the same time proclaiming the acceptability of the hereditary principle, the answer is, simply, that they are reflecting the tensions and ambiguities of contemporary aspirations and of contemporary conditions. This is equally, I believe, the explanation of their lack of unease with what seems to me the most striking tension — on the theoretical plane at any rate — in what they had to say, the tension between the implications of what they borrowed and adapted respectively from the Bartolist and the Aristotelian traditions, the two influences on their thinking that I have laboured most and which seem to me the most important theoretically. The Bartolist notion of civil nobility was essentially conventional, and in

45 N. Wright, 'The Tree of Battles of Honor£ Bouvet and the Laws of War', in C.T. Allmand (ed.), War, Literature and Politics in the late Middle Ages (Liverpool, 1976), p.31.

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principle opened a way by which nobility could, by the operation of princely authority, be transformed into a mere bundle of privileges, shared by men of diverse education, wealth and background, with too little in common to give any real meaning to the nobility as an estate within the social whole. In contrast the Aristotelian teaching, as adapted and modified by the late medieval writers, was tied to a view of society that was at once organic and hierarchic. The Aristotelian tradition assumed that hierarchy was natural to society. This was what made it possible, for instance, for the author of the Songe du vergier to claim, notwithstanding his emphasis on princely authority as the foundation of nobility, that 'a knight who is noble by lineage should be more honoured than he who is newly ennobled by the prince'.46 He saw the latter's entry into a new world of privilege as a mere modification in detail of a natural, pre-existing and time honoured order. He failed to see that making all depend on that artificial man, the prince in his publica persona, called in question the naturalness of the order he was describing and the natural pre-eminence of those born to nobility. He failed to see it — at least so I believe — because he and his contemporaries lived, quite satisfactorily, with this and many other ambiguities of attitude. Acceptance of things as they were made them unalert to the theoretical incompatibilities, for they really did believe, at the same time, that the prince was the fount of all worldly honour and that natural nobility — that of lineage — was to be more esteemed than new civil nobility. In the capacity to live with ambiguities, as in many other ways too, the late medieval writers on nobility in France and Burgundy anticipated the approach of later French writers on the same subject, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, as one looks forward from the late middle ages to the writing on the nobility of that age, the most striking thing is how little has changed. In the matter of sources, later writers looked to much the same authorities as did those of the fifteenth century. Dravasa's description of Tiraqueau as invoking the authority of 'a rich tradition of names' from Plato to Bartolus would fit Valera equally well, though he wrote a hundred years earlier.47 The matters that preoccupied the later writers were still the familiar ones that we have seen preoccupying the late medieval authors. Du Rivault offered the old individualist definition of nobility, that it is the honourable recognition

46

Songe du vergier, i, ch. 152; Revue du moyen age latin, 13 (1957), p. 191. E. Dravasa, 'Vivre noblement: recherches sur la derogeance de noblesse aux XlVe-XVIe siecles', Revue juridique et economique du sud-ouest, 17 (1966), p. 108. 47

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owed to virtue, and justified the hereditary principle in terms of nurture and family tradition as well as of birth, just as the Enseignement did.48 Thieriat restressed the position that Bartolus and Valera had outlined, that civil nobility depended on the sovereign prince, and that none could claim it 'without the sovereign's permission, even though in virtue he surpasses others of his condition'.49 The old justification for the privileges of the nobility on the ground of their military service, which was founded in feudal and chivalric conceptions, was repeated again and again. Nicholas Frerot, glossing the Ordinance of Blois of 1589, still looked on nobility in the same feudal terms that the Enseignement described; it was on account of their fiefs, he explained, that nobles were obliged 'to serve the king and crown in times of war, to expose their persons, arms and horses, as the case may require'.50 Montaigne still conceived the nobility as the martial estate, preeminently, and described the military profession as 'the proper, only and essential place for the nobility of France'.51 Brantome's complementary claim that the profession of arms ennobles a man, whether he be of noble stock or not, simply restates the maxim of Valera's contemporary Jean de Bueil. 'les armes ennoblissent 1'homme quel qui'il soit'.52 The writers that I have quoted were for the most part better read in the classics than their forebears of the fifteenth century, but it does not seem to have made much difference to them. They remained concerned with dilemmas, questions and ambiguities familiar to the late medieval writers and showed the same tendency as their forebears to assimilate what they learned from antiquity to what they learned from feudal and chivalrous tradition, and to fit all together into a framework of agreement that was theoretically ramshackle, but — given contemporary conditions — socially persuasive and reassuring. I do not think that we should be very surprised that humanist teaching of the fifteenth century did not leave a more sharp and specific mark on thinking about nobility; that it did not, if I am right, shape a new mould. The classical writers that influenced Valera, the Enseignement author, Mielot and others of their generation, and of later generations too, were for the most part authors who accepted as natural a patrician order in

48

See D. Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560-1640 (Stanford, CA, 1969), pp. 81, 87. Ibid., p. 88. 50 Ibid., p. 35. 51 M. de Montaigne, Essais, ii, 7. 52 Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis, p. 38: J. de Bueil, Le Jouvenel, ed. C. Favre and L. Lecestre (Paris, 1887-89), ii, p. 81. 49

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society, as those two great masters among them, Aristotle and Cicero, did. Their opinions were in consequence such as to suggest only modifications of conventional wisdom in the matter of hereditary nobility and its significance in society, not radical rethinking on meritocratic or egalitarian lines. Really radical rethinking could only come with a dawning conception of the common weal as something apart from and independent of an actual, contemporary and existing hierarchical social order, which the preservation of that order, even if purged of its abuse, might not necessarily serve. It could come only when men began to question what the late medieval authors and their successors assumed to be beyond question, and to ask whether there really was any sound, civil reason why one social group should be more privileged than another, why everyman should not be entitled to the sort of privileges that the nobility had traditionally regarded as reserved to itself. That however, is another story, and to reach that position took a great deal more than the blending of humanist with chivalric and other attitudes toward nobility that has been my theme in this essay.

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The Debate over Nobility: Dante, Nicholas Upton and Bartolus Tuit enim quidam nomine Dancy, de Florencia, vulgaris poeta, laudabilis recollendeque memoriae, qui circa hoc fecit quandam cantilenam in vulgari, La doulce ryme damouf.1 These are the words of Nicholas Upton, canon of Salisbury, in his De studio militari, written about 1446. They are part of the discussion that, in that work, he devotes to the subject of nobility; and he goes on to quote Dante's famous reference to Emperor Frederic IPs definition of nobility, that it means ancient riches adorned with fine manners. As G. W. Coopland, writing of Upton, remarked, it is hard not to wish to probe further into what lies behind this surprising quotation from Convivio IV.2 I thought the same when I read Coopland's comment, several years ago now: this essay is about what one finds if one probes further. But first, who was Nicholas Upton? He was a highly literate English cleric of the fifteenth-century.3 Educated at Winchester and New College, where he graduated as a Bachelor of Civil Law, he entered in the early 1420s the household of that great soldier, Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury; he was present with him at the field of Verneuil in 1424 and continued in his service until the earl's death before Orleans in 1428, and was one of his executors. After his master's death he remained for some time in France, in the service of other lords; sometime in the 1430s he returned to England and to a comfortable series of ecclesiastical preferments; he became rector of Chedzoy in Somerset, a prebendary of 1

Nicholas Upton, De studio militari, ed. Bysshe (London, 1654), p. 64; hereafter cited as Upton. Upton has francicised 'la dolce rime d'amor' of Dante's original Italian. 2 G.W. Coopland, The Tree of Battles of Honore Bonet (Liverpool, 1949), p. 23 n. 42. 3 See R. Dennys, The Heraldic Imagination (London, 1975), who offers on pp. 77-79 an excellent review of Upton's career, which I have here abbreviated.

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Wells, and finally precentor of Salisbury Cathedral. Beyond that we do not know much about him. His will shows that he amassed a small library, which included a copy of the Roman de la rose, also the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomew the Englishman and Augustine's Super Johannem, the last two of which he bequeathed to his old school, Winchester. But it does not seem likely that he had ever seen, let alone read, Dante's Convivio. Indeed he seems from his version of the title, to have thought that it was written in French.4 He must rather, as I thought when I began to follow Coopland's lead, have borrowed his quote from someone else; and this seemed intrinsically likely, since the De studio militari is very largely a pastiche — a not unskilled pastiche — of borrowings from other works. Upton's long section on heraldry, which fills most of Books III and IV of his work, was largely borrowed from the treatise of an earlier English writer, whom he calls Johannes de Bado Aureo, and whose identiy is not known.5 When dealing with the duties of knights in Book I, he lifted substantial passages from Vegetius and from John of Salisbury's Policraticus.,5 Elsewhere he repeats verbatim long sections from the works of the great Italian (and French) lawyers — in particular from the Tractatus de hello of John of Legnano;7 and from the Roman Law Commentaries of Bartolus of Sassoferrato.8 The views of Dante on nobility are also quoted — including the selfsame passage, somewhat less clearly identified — in the works of another writer on nobility who was almost exactly Upton's contemporary. This is Diego de Valera, whose Espejo de la verdadera nobleza was written c. 1440.9 This was a popular and influential work, and was translated into French (c. 1460) for the Burgundian court by Hue de Salves (who ascribes the 4 John Blount, who translated Upton's work into English, c. 1500, certainly thought so: 'Ther was sometyme a famouse poete in fflorence callyd Danty which made a certen dyttey concerning this matter whych was namyd in ffrenche after thys wyse . . .' The title is left blank in MS, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. Misc. D227, fo. 53v. 5 E. Jones, Medieval Heraldry (Cardiff, 1943), who prints John's treatise along with a Welsh translation of it, argues for the authorship of John Trevor, bishop of St Asaph's, who died in 1410. The suggestion is attractive, but not at all points convincing. 6 Thus Upton, De studio militari, i, c. 5 (p. 12 of Bysshe's edition), is from line 17 borrowed from the Policraticus, vi, c. 3 (ed. C.C.J. Webb, Oxford, 1909, pp. 9-11); p. 13 line 5 picks up Policraticus, vi, c. 19 (Webb, pp. 54-55); book 1, c. 7, line 4 follows the Policraticus, vi, c. 12 (Webb, p. 28) and takes the rest of its material from book 6, c. 12 (Webb, p. 28), c. 2 (Webb, p. 9) and vi, c. 14 (Webb, p. 37). 7 Coopland, Tree of Battles (p. 23 n. 42), summarises the borrowings from John of Legnano's Tractatus de hello, ed. T.E. Holland (Oxford, 1917). 8 See below, nn. 18ff. I have also found substantial verbatim borrowings from Hostiensis, Summa aurea; from Durandus, Speculum juris, and the commentaries of Dynus. 9 In Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. M. Penna (Madrid, 1959), pp. 89-113.

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relevant passage to one Eldante).10 A number of copies of this translation survive, including one that was in the ducal library of Philip the Good, and another that was executed for that famous expert in chivalry, Philip's councillor and councillor to Charles the Bold after him, Louis de Gruthyse.11 Perhaps I should mention here that Upton's work was likewise translated, into English, by John Blount, a kinsman of the Lord Mountjoy, and that the Latin original was dedicated to the great bibliophile, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester; there is a kind of parallel.12 Diego de Valera, the author of the Espejo, was a Castilian knight of some distinction and of considerable learning.13 Born in 1412, he had a distinguished and international career in arms, fighting in 1431 against the Moors of Andalusia, and later in the 1430s against the Hussites of Bohemia under the leadership of Albert of Austria, the collar of whose order he bore. We also know, from Olivier de la Marche, that he took part in the famous pas d'armes of the Tree of Charlemagne, arranged by the Burgundian seigneur Pierre de Bauffremont, near Dijon in 1443. He was besides a prolific writer, whose works exhibit a considerable knowledge of classical as well as of contemporary writing, and who clearly was also well acquainted with the great Italian juristic authors. He wrote on heraldry, on duels and challenges, in defence of women and on the virtues, and compiled a chronicle of Castile. As Upton was a cleric with an unusually considerable experience and expertise in military affairs and chivalry, so Valera was a knight with an unusually wide knowledge of letters, and not just of courtly letters (his work in defence of women was much indebted to Christine de Pisan) but of Latin literature and Roman law too. Though they are entirely independent of one another, the works of Upton and Valera are similar in a number of ways. Both treated the subject of nobility from the same angle: their interest was essentially in the title to and justification for the privileges and dignity of nobility,

10

Qui sa vertu anoblist, ed. A. Vanderjagt (Groningen, 1981), pp. 237-83. Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale, MS 10977-9 was formerly in the ducal library; Paris, BN, MS Fr. 1280 belonged to Louis de Gruthyse. 12 On Blount, see the introduction to F.P. Barnard, The Essential Portions of Nicholas Uptons De studio militari, Translated by John Blount (Oxford, 1931). It is not certain which, if any, of the surviving MSS of Upton's original was the presentation copy for Humphrey of Gloucester; the Holkham copy (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Holkham misc. 31) is a possibility, on which see Dennys, Heraldic Imagination, p. 80. 13 Vanderjagt, Qui sa vertu anoblist, summarises Valera's career on pp. 225-28. See as well L. de Torre y Franco Romero, 'Mosen Diego de Valera: su vida y obras', Boletin de la academia de la historia, 64 (1914), pp. 50-83, 133-68, 249-76, 365-412. 11

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which both viewed as a practical, legal and social issue, rather than as a philosophical and ethical one, as Dante had done. Both had a substantial knowledge of and interest in heraldry, practically acquired. Upton tells of how he had designed arms — argent three oxes heads sable — for a soldier who was ennobled for his gallant conduct at the battle of Verneuil, where he was wounded in the genitals (oxen being gelded beasts):14 Valera tells of how he had been present when the Emperor Sigismund, at a tournament, gave arms to one Orsalamin, the son of a butcher.15 Both relayed much recondite information about the symbolic significance of tinctures and metals in heraldry. More important to my purpose, both used very much the same sort of sources to put together their legal-cum-chivalrous handbooks, and used them in a similar way, often borrowing substantial passages more or less verbatim from Latin authors (whom Diego, of course, had usually to translate). Both for instance drew heavily on writers of classical history, especially on Valerius Maximus, and on some other antique authors, notably Cicero and Vegetius. Both knew their Aristotle, principally the Ethics and the Polities', they both quote extensively from Scripture and from the Fathers, and occasionally from St Thomas (it is naturally very hard here to know what respectively they had at first and what at second hand, from others). Above all both borrowed liberally from the Italian jurists and in particular from Bartolus of Sassoferrato, who was widely known to all writers who were interested, as they were, in heraldry, on account of his Tractatus de insigniis erarmis, which may reasonably rank as the first attempt to treat heraldry seriously from an academic point of view.16 These are the sort of authorities that one expects learned writers on such a topic as nobility to rely upon. It is, however, rather remarkable, so it seemed to me as it had to Coopland, to find these two authors quoting Dante as an authority on a par with them. All their other authorities wrote in Latin, he alone in vulgari, and neither usually thought of vernacular writers as authoritative. Upton, as we know, possessed a copy of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose, which treats extensively of nobility:17 he did not, however, refer to Jean at any point in his treatment of the subject in the De studio militari. Dante thus stands among their authorities in a class of his own. Yet through their works his views on nobility, as

14 15 16 17

Upton, p. 154. Valera, Espejo, p. 108. The Tractatus is edited by Jones in Medieval Heraldry, pp. 224-52. Jean de Meun, La Roman de la rose, ed. E. Langlois (Paris, 1914-24), lines 18, 607-946.

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expressed in the Convivio, were conveyed widely to aristocratic circles in northern Europe, as being of significance to those concerned with the justification and explanation of the existing juridicial dignity and privileges of nobility. This is what makes it 'hard not to wish to probe further' their deployment of his judgement alongside the views of distinctly different authorities, the doctors of law and theology and the classical philosophers. The reason, which I for one was slower to tumble to than I should have been, is of course that they both did so because their authority, Bartolus, had done so before them. Both, as I have explained, borrowed very freely from this jurist, and both knew of Dante's views on nobility because of the close scrutiny to which they had been subjected by Bartolus in his commentary on the title De dignitatibus in the twelfth book of the Codex (Cod. 12, 1:1).18 Indeed, the words of Upton's which I quoted at the start of this essay prove on inspection to be no more than a slightly contracted version of Bartolus' own words, omitting some Italian that, I take it, Upton could not understand. The words in fact pin down a point where he is beginning to lift his matter from Bartolus, more or less verbatim but with omissions, for a page and a half. Valera's text at the corresponding point is not related in quite the same word for word manner to that of the Italian jurist,19 but this, as far as I can see, is largely because he had to translate (and precis) Bartolus into his own tongue. Neither author adds anything to what Bartolus quoted from Dante, and both repeat his comments on what Dante had to say without adding anything significant thereto. How Bartolus came to know of Dante's opinions raises no problems. He was a highly literate and civilised man, widely read outside his own subject; so his knowledge of the great poet of the previous Italian generation comes as no surprise (though it is a little more interesting that he should look to the Convivio, which does not seem to have circulated very widely at first). Indeed, it would have been very surprising if he had not known him, for his principal master was the great jurist of the previous generation, Cino da Pistoia,20 who was Dante's friend and a poet in his own right (maybe that is why Bartolus did know the Convivio). This personal connection aside, we have other evidence that Dante's

18

Bartolus, Commentaria in Codicem (Basle, 1562), pp. 939-45. The scrutiny of Dante's opinions commences on p. 941, col. 1. 19 Valera, Espejo, p. 90. 20 J.L.J. van de Kamp, Bartolus van Saxo Ferrato, 1313-1357 (Amsterdam, 1936), p. 6.

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works were found interesting by the leading Italian civilians, largely no doubt because of their vigorous defence of the empire and of the authority of the imperial laws. John of Legnano, for instance, devoted the major part of a treatise that he put together on the rights of the church in Bologna to a refutation of Dante's allegations against the papacy in the Monarchic,, that it had usurped imperial right: it is a papalist universalist tract in reply to Dante's imperialist one.21 Nevertheless, I think it maybe worth pursuing a little further why it may have been that Bartolus paid so much attention to Dante's views on nobility specifically, and for this reason if for no other, that it was in consequence of that attention that Dante's opinions on this topic became known in circles where the Comedy was not read, and in which his views on the rights of the empire would not have seemed of any great significance, circles such as those for which Upton and Valera wrote. The matter is interesting for another reason too, the question of what it was about Dante's conclusions about nobility that drew attention to them. They were not quite as novel, I think, as is often claimed. Both Batkin and Vanossi, for instance, see his insistence on the theme, that nobility is acquired not through birth but only through virtuous living, as a reflection of the new and dynamic ideals of the civic bourgeois, opposing to the old idea of hereditary nobility a new, caste-free conception of nobility of spirit.22 This way of looking at things fits in well with Vanossi's suggestions that Dante's ideas on the subject reflect those of that other bourgeois, Jean de Meun, who was equally opposed to the idea that nobility can truly be an inherited quality: 'Is he a gentleman who would claim name and praise because he has inherited nobility from others, though he has not their merit or prowess? I say no'.23 Vanossi may be right here in thinking that the canzone that introduces Tractate IV of the Convivio has echoes of Jean de Meun (via the Fiore):24 but to suggest that to relate nobility to character and virtue rather than to birth was either a new idea or a specifically urban or bourgeois one is, I believe, misleading. Andreas the Chaplain, writing not for the bourgeois but for a clerical and courtly audience, put almost precisely the same point as Jean and Dante back in the twelfth century: 'the law says that in the beginning nobility came in only from good character and manly

21

L. Rossi, Dagli scritti inediti di Giovanni da Lagnano (Bologna, 1898), pp. 20-51. L.M. Batkin,Dante e la societaltalianade 1300 (R'dri, 1970), pp. 143-59; L. Vanossi,Danteeil 'roman de la rose' (Florence, 1979), pp. 32, 58-59, 309-10. 23 Le roman de la rose, lines 18, 755-58. 24 See Vanossi, Dante, passim. 22

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worth and courtesy', he wrote, adding that he who gets his nobility 'only from himself is to be preferred always to him 'who derives it as a sort of inheritance from those from whom he gets his being'.25 The essence of Dante's future view is here stated quite distinctly. An almost exactly similar view is put in another courtly work, of the early thirteenthcentury, the Prose Lancelot, in a discussion to which Elspeth Kennedy has drawn attention. 'They tell me all people are descended from one man and one woman', says Lancelot, 'so I do not understand how one can have more gentility than another . . . unless he earns it for himself in the same way that men win lands and honours. But know that if a great heart makes a gentleman, I shall hope to make myself among the most gentle.'26 Here the argument is presented that nobility cannot come simply from birth, because we all descend from one ancestor, Adam; it is the very same argument with which Dante later made such play, showing that its denial must imply descent from more than one original and in effect posits the existence of two different species of men,27 an opinion at once absurd and contrary to Christian teaching. So it was not because of its novelty, I would argue, that Dante's view of nobility caught the eye (and in particular the eye of Bartolus), nor yet because it reflected a 'bourgeois' spirit; it must have been for some other reason. What made Tractate IV of the Convivio impressive to a learned man, perhaps especially a jurist, in a way that Jean de Meun, for instance, did not similarly impress, was, I believe, the manner of its presentation. In it Dante brought to bear upon the subject of nobility the whole weight of his very considerable erudition, and gave his references. He probed and analysed the topic with all the latest weapons of philosophical teaching, of theological speculation, of literary and juristic authority, and referred over and over again to his sources, in a suitably learned manner. Indeed, I think it could be said that, outside purely theological writing, his was the first really serious academic treatment of the subject. In this sense, it really was novel and original. It caught the eye of the jurists, and very properly, because it lifted the discussion of nobility, as a status significant in social and civic terms, on to a new plane.

2:>

Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J.J. Parry (New York, 1941), p. 38. E. Kennedy, 'Social and Political Ideas in the French Prose Lancelot', Medium Aevum, 26 (1957), pp. 102-4. 27 Convivio, iv, 15: 'E senza dubbio forte riclerebbe Aristoteli udendo fare spezie due de 1'umana generazione'. 2

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This is brought out by the very great seriousness with which Bartolus took Dante's arguments, and by the way in which his own, different view of the matter seems to have developed out of his analysis of them. Thus Bartolus seizes on Dante's distinction between nobility as applied to men, and as applied to animals, plants or minerals, and identifies the same point of difference, that in them nobility cannot be generated as it is in man.28 A noble pearl cannot be made more or less noble, but a man who is not noble may become so. He picks up what Dante has to say about our common descent from a single common ancestor and expands it: if it is really argued that that is not the true story of our origins, he points out, the implied conclusion will savour of the Averroist opinion, that 'mundus fuit ab aeterno', that there was no first beginning; and that is contrary to faith.29 Bartolus again sees the point of Dante's objection to the defenders of hereditary nobility, that in implying that base ancestry can be wiped out by oblivion they must seem to be suggesting a series of logical absurdities (e.g., that oblivion can be the cause of nobility) — and makes his reply to it, introducing a legal concept. Of course oblivion does not obliterate past rusticity, but prescription can establish present nobility.30 The author of the Songe du vergier, another writer who like Upton 28 Ibid., iv, 14: 'in ciascuna spezie di cose veggiamo 1'imagine di nobilitade e di viltade; onde spesse volte diciamo. . . uno nobile Falcone e uno vile, e una nobila margherita e una vile . . . in loro generazione di nobilitade essere non puo'. Compare Bartolus's passage commencing 'Exemplum in Falcone, aliquis dicitur gentilis . . . idem de caeteris animalibus, idem de pomis', Commentaria in Codicem, p. 942, col. 1. 29 Convivio, iv, 15, and Canzone, lines 69-73:

Ancor segue de cio che innanzi ho messo Che siam tutti gentili o ver villani, O che non Fosse ad uom comminciamento, Ma cio io non consento, Ned ellino altressi, se son cristiani. Compare Bartolus: 'Ex hoc . . . sequeretur quod omnes sumus nobiles, vel omnes sumus ignobiles, quia si primus parens Fuit nobilis ergo omnes descendentes. . . aut ipsi habent dicere quod mundus Fuit ab aeterno, quod est Falsum et contra fidem Christianum'. 30 Convivio, iv, 14: 'E se 1'avversario pertinacemente si difendisse, dicendo che bene vogliono questa transmutazione Fare quando lo basso stato de li antecessori corre in oblivione . . . rispondo cosi; che di cio che dicono seguitano quattro grandissimi inconvenienti, si che buona ragione essere non puo'. Compare Bartolus: 'Pone rusticus incipit esse probus homo, et valens, et tenere statum nobilitatis. Certe ipse non est nobilis, quia ilia rusticitas non potuit purgari plene et perFecte in eo, sed filii et nepotes sui erunt nobiliores, ut tola die videmus in rusticis provenientibus ad aliquem gradum civitatis. Unde ex patre ignobili, tamen valente, nascitur films vel nepos nobilis, et sic non praesupponit quod poeta dicebat, et posito quod praesupponeret, non sequeretur quod illae essent Falsae consequentiae', Commentaria in Codicem, p. 941, col. 1.

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and Valera borrowed his juristic view of nobility from Bartolus (and through his reading of him likewise encountered Dante's opinion), clarifies the point here in his expansion of it. It would indeed be absurd, he says, to suggest that the king, when he issues letters patent of nobility, can be supossed to ennoble the plebeian ancestor of him that he ennobles, or that the new noble's neighbours will forget his original rusticity. But in the next generation the plebeian's children will live nobly, and their children will be known to be descended from men who did so, and will be recognised as noble by birth by their neighbours - and right is made by recognition of this sort.31 As these examples show, Bartolus sometimes accepted Dante's reasoning, sometimes pushed it further, and sometimes — more often, in fact — rejected it. Where Dante was most influential on him, it seems to me, was in leading Bartolus forward to his most important conclusion, that with regard to men nobility cannot be regarded in a unitary way, but that one must distinguish between different kinds of nobility, of which he identified three.32 Dante's argument, that nobility was a capacity implanted by God in the souls of individual men, which as it grew expressed itself in virtuous living and was the root and cause of virtue, became the basis of his definition of the first kind of nobility that he recognised. This he described as 'theological nobility', which to him distinguished the elect to eternal felicity from those foreknown to damnation. The root of salvation here is implanted by God, as Dante suggested, and its fruition is election to bliss, corresponding to the true felicity considered by Dante to be the end of human life.33 Following Dante's leads, Bartolus again used him, and Aristotle, as guides in defining his second kind of nobility, which he called 'natural nobility'. This he explained in terms of the natural capacities (or virtues) of individual men, which makes one aptus dominari, and so noble, another fit only for mechanical arts: this kind of nobility, that of the natural ruler, we jurists would define as introduced by the jus gentium (the jus naturale gentium, to give its full title), he says, since the distinction between the natural ruler and the mechanic is 31 Songe du vergier, ed. M. Schnerb-Lievre (Paris, 1982), p. 306. The French of the Songe seems to be clearer here than the Latin of the Somnium viridarii, on which it is based. 32 Bartolus: 'Dico, pro declaratione praesentis, quod habemus ponere tres nobilitaes. Prima est nobilitas theologica . . . Secunda est nobilitas naturalis. Tertia est nobilitas politica et civilis', Commentaria in Codicem, p. 942, col. 1. 33 Ibid., p. 942, col. 1: 'de prima theologica et spiritual! est quaerendum in conspectu aeterni judicis, apud quern nulla est obumbratio . . . ut dicit poeta praedictus. Nam apud Deum est nobilis omnis, qui est in gratia . . . Item, omnis ille qui est virtuosus, dico de ilia virtute quae facit hominem felicem'.

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apprehended by natural reason. Dante, Bartolus here implies, distinguished inadequately between the first two kinds of nobility. If we follow him, we will be in danger of concluding that one who is fit only for mechanical arts or the rustic life has not implanted in him the capacities which fit man to eternal felicity,34 and that cannot be so: in the kingdom of heaven we know that the last shall be first. Bartolus was clearly suspicious, and perhaps justly, that Dante's celebration of philosophy might cover a tendency too elitist to find room in heaven for the ploughman who had no aptitude for ruling but lived virtuously in his own calling. When it came to natural nobility, considered on its own, he was, however, quite prepared to accept a distinction of intellectual capacities as relevant to social distinctions, and to accept too that the differences were individual and not a matter of breeding. With regard to this second kind of nobility what Dante said was quite right, he thought, and he took his stand explicitly with him: 'et cum hac determinatione posset esse vera quod dicit poeta'.35 Where Bartolus broke most sharply with Dante, moving on to new ground of his own, was in his definition of his third kind of nobility, which he called 'civil nobility', and which he clearly considered to be, in a lawyer's human terms, more relevant if less perfect than the other two. In the case of both theological and natural nobility, as he saw, the standard was an internal one. This was obviously true of natural nobility, as an individual either has talents that fit him to rule or he has not. As Dante explained his matter, it was true also of theological nobility, despite the fact that what was described was the implanting of a seed or capacity for virtue by an external creator, for that implanted only a capacity, as yet unrealised. 'Wherever virtue is, there is nobility: but virtue is not always there where nobility is', Dante had said, and had gone on with his famous phrase, 'So we in woman, and in those of tender age perceive this healthfulness, so far as they are quick to shame, which yet from virtue is diverse.' Yes, said Bartolus, this verecundia (quickness to shame) is diverse from virtue, and nobility can only be realised, according to this view, in the fruition of the values that verecundia nourishes, 34 Ibid., p. 942, col. 1: Traeterea, si verum esset dictum ejus, sequeretur quod nullus plebeius esset virtuosus, vel praedestinatus ad salutem.' 35 Ibid., p. 942, col. 2: 'Secundo modo potest considerari prout cadit in hominibus ista nobilitas naturalis, et tune debet intelligi . . . naturali ratione inducta, quod nos juristae appellamus de jure gentium primaevo . . . Et de ista nobilitate Philosophus I Eth. iii ubi dicit quod nihil aliud virtus et malitia discriminat servum et liberum . . . Hoc autem non est intelligendum de omni virtute, sed de ea quae competit aliquibus, prout sunt apti dominari. . . et cum hac determinatione posset esse vera quod dicit poeta.'

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from within.36 But nobility, in the civil sense, cannot be defined in this way; because when it is so defined there is no clear means of recognising it, of translating out of internal, moral or theological terms into external and social ones. Bartolus felt acutely the need in this latter field to rely on some sort of standard that was external and objective. He was not, at any rate as far as his commentary shows, very much concerned by the long excursus in which Dante explained why he did not, in this matter of nobility, feel bound by the opinion of the emperor, even though his authority was the foundation of the laws.37 Bartolus saw, more simply, that Dante's approach was for practical purposes too high-faluting: it would make nonsense of the law. Of course laws ought to have an ethical base, which should be respected. If a nobleman had two sons, one virtuous and one reprobate, then the reprobate would lose his nobility; if, that is, in his vicious living he committed an offence that carried with it the penalty of degradation. But what of the case of the son of a nobleman who was neither virtuous nor reprobate, but simply insane? His insanity, over which he had no control, should surely not cost him his nobility, nor his progeny, if he had any, theirs. And what of the young nobleman, to whom the law recognised an inheritance of privilege, who was destined to lose his nobility by his reprobate living, but as yet had not fallen? Until then he must be noble, and what would formally cost him his nobility would not be his internal degradation, which might be a drawn-out process, but the external legal judgement that, from a specific point, it was forfeit.38

36

Convivio, iv, 19, and Canzone, lines 101-2, 105-8: E gentillezza dovunqu' e vertute, Ma non vertute ov' ella . . . E noi in donna e in eta novella Vedem questa salute, In quanto vergognese son tenute, Ch' e da vertu diverso.

Compare Bartolus: 'Item potest esse nobilitas ubi non est virtus . . . Exemplum in puella verecundia, nam verecundia est diversa a virtute, et tamen in ea est nobilitas'. 37 Convivio, iv, 9. 38 Bartolus: 'Sciendum ergo est quod ex parentibus nobilibus quandoque nascitur films nobilis et virtuose vivens . . . quandoque nascitur films reprobus, qui habet mores malos, ex quibus est infamis, et tune perdit nobilitatem . . . quandoque nascitur filius qui non habet mores, nee bonos nee malos . . . forte est demens, vel furiosus. Et isto casu retinet nobilitatem', Commentaria in Codicem, p. 942, col. 2. And elsewhere, p. 942, col. 1, 'Item, pone ex uno Rege natum filium qui futurus est reprobus . . . saltern interim, antequam vitia committat, est nobilis'.

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So Bartolus fell back on the authority of the law and the lawgiver, tacit or express, as the yardstick of his third kind of nobility:39 He admitted riches, which Dante had vilified, not as a criterion of nobility, but as a possible causa remota thereof;40 and admitted inheritance of privilege, not because of the worth of blood but because the law recognised it.41 The prince ought to recognise natural virtue, he admitted; and of course the social hierarchy ought, in its way, to mirror the hierarchy of heaven by rewarding the virtuous here on earth; but there was no lawful way of forcing the prince to make it do so, inforo externo42 And with a wealth of quotation from legal, classical and biblical authority he domonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that was how things always had been. Bartolus scrutinised Dante's opinions, weighed them, accepted this from them and rejected that, using the Convivio's arguments as a basic structure for his own commentary on the Codex 12.1.1, a commentary that led to conclusions quite different from Dante's, but remaining always respectful of the poet's position. Via Bartolus, Dante's views, adulterated, interpreted and misinterpreted, were passed into wider currency. Upton, Valera, the Songe du vergier and Felix Hemmerlin all repeated the arguments that Bartolus had hammered out around Dante's perhaps overly enthusiastic presentation. I say overly enthusiastic, for I am not sure that his arguments in the Convivio are entirely coherent at all points and they are certainly incomplete: both in the Monarchy and in Cantos XV and XVI of the Paradiso he said things which do not entirely square with the Convivio.43 Nevertheless, his views were important and influential. In consequence of the attention that Bartolus focused on them, they were a major factor in initiating a great learned debate about the nature of nobility, in which a great deal of ink was spilled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — and thereafter — with the same old arguments and authorities, refurbished, modified and reinforced, being bandied to and fro. Even the Reniassance humanists

39

Ibid., p. 942, col. 2: 'Sicut ergo ille apud Deum est nobilis quern Deus sua gratia gratum facit, in foro nostro ille est nobilis quern princeps sua gratia vel lex sibi gratum vel nobilem facit.' 40 Ibid., p. 941, col. 1: 'Conclude quod divitiae non sunt dignitates nee dignitatem possunt dare directe, ut dicit poeta, possunt tamen esse causa remota, ob quam nobilitas evenit.' 41 Ibid., p. 943, col. 1: 'Sunt quaedam quae non sunt vitia nee virtutes, ut progenies, propter quam lex seu princeps concedit dignitatem.' 42 Ibid., p. 942, col. 2: 'Nobilitas apud nos inventa est ad similitudinem et imitationem illius nobilitatis quae est apud Deum'; but, alas, 'videmus quotidie apud principes seculares, et ecclesiasticos, quod propter vitia aliquis ipsi principi efficitur accepturus, et ab ipso nobilitates et dignitates consequuntur', p. 943, col. 1. 43 Monarchic,, ii, c. 3; Paradiso, xv, esp. lines 46-49; xvi, lines Iff.

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did not so much change the tenor of the discussion, in which they took a keen interest, as bring to bear on it a greater wealth of classical erudition, in particular to illustrate the ennobling quality of virtue. I have argued elsewhere, at length, that the humanist age contributed comparatively little that was novel, conceptually, to the debate about the nature of true nobility.44 I will not repeat that argument here, but will conclude on a different point. It is sometimes suggested that, not only in this matter but more generally, the late middle ages and the fifteenth century in particular, did not contribute very much that was original or really novel in the area of conceptual speculation. Be that as it may, there is no doubt about their importance in another respect in the history of thought. They were a great period for the dissemination of learned ideas, to much wider circles of people, for many of whom the taste of real erudition had previously been inaccessible. Along with this went, I think it must honestly be confessed, a dissemination of the learned manner, of citing authorities and also of dropping names and references, by no means always verified, to give an air of erudition: the specious side of this sort of display of learning (of which most of us academics have sometime or other been guilty) was perhaps specially common in vernacular writers. For the vernaculars, for the first time, were becoming in this age an important medium for the dissemination of learning, through translations (such as those translations of Aristotle, Augustine and John of Salisbury that were commissioned in the court circle of Charles V of France), and through learned treatises in the vernacular, such as were some of the works of Christine de Pisan, the writings of Honore Bonet — and Diego de Valera's treatise on nobility. It was not just in the sort of subject area that I have been discussing that this development was important; the vernacular theological writings of Hussites and Lollards are part of the same story, and so is the spate of translations from classical authors that the vogue of humanism elicited. But vernacular mirrors for nobility were among the more important vehicles in the wider dissemination of learning, because they had a ready-made readership in literate lay aristocratic circles, in this field Dante's Convivio, with its avowed object of bringing philosophy and the relevance of its teachings to civilised social (or civic) living within the range of the active 'citizen', who would be excluded from its 'feast' of knowledge if it was written in Latin, was a pioneering work.

See above, pp. 190-94.

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By an irony, those parts of the Convivio with which I have been concerned in this essay reached a wider audience than even Dante, perhaps, could have expected, only after — and because - his ideas had been retranslated into Latin and glossed with legal learning by a great jurist; and so found their way into vernaculars quite other than his own, the Castilian of Diego de Valera, the French of Hue de Salve's translation of Valera's work, and the English of Upton's translator. But they did find their way into these foreign tongues and to unexpected circles, because what Dante had said seemed relevant to Bartolus and what Bartolus said seemed in its turn to have a relevance to contemporary social conditions and questions that made it worth relaying beyond the schools. It was the same way as that in which so much erudition, in this time, was being spread more widely than ever before. That is the point about whose importance one is reminded if one probes further the surprising quotation from the Convivio by a fifteenth-century English canon of Salisbury with which I opened.

13

Henry V's Diplomacy Although the title given to this essay is 'diplomacy', what I am really going to discuss are treaties — which traditionally are the diplomatically negotiated alternative to wars in international affairs and confrontations. The Hundred Years War produced many minor treaties, and two great ones, the treaty of Bretigny of 1360 and the treaty of Troyes of 1420.l Each, as it happened, marked a moment of flood-tide in English success in the wars. Each equally represented an important effort to put an end to the confrontation between England and France, which had caused the Hundred Years War and was older than it was, by a settlement which, it was hoped, would allow reasonably for the aspirations of both English and French. The two treaties represent respectively two different approaches to the problems at issue between the two kingdoms. Bretigny proposed a substantial dismemberment of the territories that formed the kingdom of France, ceding to the English in full sovereignty, independent of the French crown, wide territories in the south-western provinces that had traditionally been subject, in some degree or other, to that crown, so leaving to the Valois French kings a diminished inheritance. Troyes, Henry V's treaty, made a clean different approach: the crown of France was not to be dismembered and the bounds of the kingdom would remain much as they had traditionally been; but the Valois heir would be disinherited in favour of a Plantagenet who would marry a Valois princess and secure the inheritance to a Plantagenet-Valois line. In both cases the central problem was the same: would the settlement - could the settlement — be made acceptable to the

1

Rymer, Foedera (London, 1724-26), vi, pp. 219-228 (Bretigny); ix, pp. 895-904 (Troyes).

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French? Did it allow for their aspirations sufficiently reasonably to put a stop to the fighting, at least semi-permanently? I am going to commence by discussing the first of these treaties, Edward Ill's treaty of Bretigny. The treaty of Bretigny was a settlement with a good deal more importance, and a wider potential frame of relevance, than those of the immediate circumstances in which it was agreed in 1360. Indeed it was still highly relevant to the diplomacy of the early years of Henry V's reign. Before examining this treaty, I need to explain a little about the nature of diplomacy, as I conceive it. Diplomacy is an art inevitably related to the circumstances of a particular moment. If one uses the Aristotelian definition of an art as a capacity of doing something well, it is the art of Realpolitik, and artistry in it must be in conformity with the limits of its material, which are the exigencies of the immediate situation, available force, possible combinations and so on. But diplomacy demands artistry in Realpolitik in another way too, for it is — or at least it was by the fourteenth century and has been ever since — a professional business. What I mean to say is that its solutions must not only conform to the Realpolitik exigencies of a situation, but must also be presentable (I think that is the best word) in terms of the ideas of international law, natural justice, and international custom prevalent at the time. It is not just a matter of calculating in the arithmetic of power, but more like moves on a chessboard. The moves, and especially the taking of pieces, must follow the rules: they must be made to look right and, whether justifiable or not, must be made to look justifiable to reasonably independent onlookers, who in the game of diplomacy are always about. That is where it calls most sharply for professional expertise. About the treaty of Bretigny I want initially to make two points, both of which arise out of the fact that, as a settlement, it proved abortive. Part of the reason for this was a matter of Realpolitik, and this is my first point. The treaty was made at a moment when French fortunes were at a terrible ebb, in the aftermath of Poitiers, when the French king had been made prisoner and his kingdom had been distraught by the Jacquerie and the revolt of the 'children of Navarre*. These were short-term conditions, whose effect was to give the French very little alternative to agreeing to the terms of the treaty: but the central element in the settlement, the cession to the English of an enlarged Aquitaine as a sovereign principality, was not in the long run acceptable to the French kings; nor was it sufficiently clearly in the interests of all the inhabitants of the new principality (though it was very acceptable to some of them, notably the citizens of Bordeaux and Bayonne.) The other part of the

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reason why the treaty proved abortive — and this is my second point and the one I want to stress for a moment — is that the treaty was not juridically watertight: that is to say, it was not only inadequately conceived in terms of Realpolitik, but also insufficiently well drafted. The result was that the French were able to claim, at the first moment that suited them, that it was not binding. The facts here have now become familiar. At a late stage in negotiations an essential part of the treaty, the formal and final renunciations, by the English and French respectively of the claim to the crown of France on the one hand and the sovereignty over Aquitaine on the other, were cut out of the main treaty, and postponed (so as to ensure that all the territorial adjustments agreed had actually taken place before the renunciations were made).2 In the event, and as a consequence of their being taken out of the main treaty, the renunciations were never made (whether through the fault of the French or the English remains a matter of debate). As a result, Charles V was able to claim in 1369 that, since he had never renounced sovereignty in Aquitaine, he was entitled to hear in his court the complaints of the Gascon lords against their seigneur, the Black Prince. Because it was a fact that, since the sealing of the treaty, Edward III had ceased to use the title of king of France and also that the French king had ceased to exercise sovereign rights in Aquitaine, there was a delicate legal question in issue here. Charles did not make his claim without taking professional advice. Christine de Pisan, in her biography of the king, tells us that he consulted carefully, before taking the final step, with the jurists of Bologna, that famous centre of jurisprudential learning.3 Charles was not the only one to consult lawyers, either. Pierre Chaplais has printed the advice that was offered by two Bolognese jurists, John of Legnano and Richard of Saliceto, to the consuls of Millau and Rodez, who were concerned because their cities lay in the Black Prince's territories, over which now both he and Charles were simultaneously claiming sovereignty.4 With a wealth of legal reasoning and due citation of key passages

2

R. Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V (Paris, 1909-31), ii, pp. 242-50; P. Chaplais, 'Some Documents Regarding the Fulfilment of the Treaty of Br£tigny', Camden Miscellany, 19 (1952), pp. 5-8; and see J. Le Patourel, 'The Treaty of Br£tigny, 1360', Transactions of the Royal Historical Association, 5th Series, 10 (1960), pp. 19-39, especially 37-39. 3 C. de Pisan, Le livre desfais et bonnes moeurs du sage Roy Charles V, ed. S. Solente (Paris, 193640), ii, p. 119. 4 Chaplais, 'Some Documents Regarding the Fulfilment of the Treaty of Br£tigny', pp. 58-78.

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from the Digest and its glosses, the two professors (who were almost certainly those who had advised Charles also) concluded that the king of France was entitled to claim sovereignty, in spite of the treaty of Bretigny. It followed that the treaty was abortive, because unfulfilled, and that legally the status quo ante was in force, and that Gascony was dependent on the French crown in the way that had been made clear in the terms of the treaty of Paris of 1259. The opinions of John and Richard were copied out and served up, with their implications clarified, as erudite propaganda in that great royalist text of Charles V's court circle, the Songe du vergier.5 Of course these were only opinions; the English view was quite different. Nevertheless, the whole incident indicates and illustrates the importance of professionalism in diplomacy in the period. It also helps to explain why every English embassy, of Henry V's time and before, included among its named personnel experts in civil law, such as Honyngham, Ware, Kemp, and Philip Morgan — the last of whom we see in Henry V's reign leading the negotiations for the English at Alengon, and rising to be chancellor of Normandy and bishop of Worcester. Diplomatic professionalism was already part of an established career structure. I hope that the moral of the events that I have been rehearsing is clear. They illustrate just how important it was, in the late middle ages, that treaties should be well drafted, so that their terms should have a chance of sticking; so that it should be as hard as possible to find, as circumstances changed (and circumstances always do) loopholes that would justify discarding solemnly sealed rolls of parchment as 'scraps of paper'. Realpolitik, in other words, if it was to reach its end, had to be reinforced with all the skill of professionalism to protect its settlements against the new Realpolitik of changed circumstances. The propaganda purposes to which the French put the learned opinions of John of Legnano and Richard of Saliceto, professors of Bologna, is a useful illustration of the respect in which juridical professionalism, in the context of treaties, was held in the period. There is one further point that must be made about the treaty of Bretigny. It may have been abortive: that does not mean that it was unimportant, or that the main treaty was particularly ill drafted. It represented a real effort to find a settlement, and it gave France and England nine years of peace with one another. In doingjust that, it came nearer to providing a lasting settlement than any other treaty that the 5

Ibid., pp. 56-57.

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war threw up, the treaty of Troyes included. In consequence, it remained important, even after it was abrogated unilaterally by the French, and especially after it became clear (after 1374) that they would not be able to carry that abrogation the whole way through — that they would not be able to re-establish the legal status quo ante, and force the English to accept that Gascony was a fief of the French crown. Because the English and French remained formally at war, and because it remained the nearest thing to a settlement that had been achieved in the great confrontation of Plantagenet and Valois, the shape of its terms continued to dominate Anglo-French diplomatic exchanges from the end of Edward Ill's reign to the end of Henry IV's, and to a substantial degree into the reign of Henry V. From the time of the discussions in the presence of the papal mediators at Bruges in 1374-75, through Richard II's reign, down to the 'treaty' of Bourges in 1412 and into Henry V's reign, the great diplomatic query remained the same: what would the French be willing to offer in Aquitaine; and could the English accept it.6 Boundaries, and terms of tenure of lands to be ceded to the English in the south west, remained the crucial issues. The French, after 1369, remained consistently unwilling to offer lands in full sovereignty; the English, equally, were never prepared to accept less as the basis of a final settlement. Various expedients were explored: the grant of Aquitaine as a fief to a cadet of the Plantagenet line (John of Gaunt became duke in the 1390s, and the question of whether he might hold the duchy by liege homage of the French king was explored, but fell foul of Gascon resistance); a long truce, perhaps combined with a dynastic marriage (this was the solution attempted in 1396, when Richard and Charles VI were drawing closer, and Richard took the infant Isabella of France as his second bride);7 a smaller sovereign Aquitaine (which is what the French princes who had joined the duke of Orleans in league against the duke of Burgundy were prepared for in 1412).8 This last offer was the best, from an English point of view, that the French made over the whole period, and they would not have made it but for the civil war that had broken out in France after Duke John of Burgundy had murdered Duke

6 On the Bruges negotiations, see E. Perroy, 'The Anglo-French Negotiations at Bruges, 1374-7', Camden Miscellany (1952), introduction, especially pp. xvi-xix; on the Bourges treaty, see M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 1399-1453 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 59-62. ' For further discussion of these negotiations see J.J.N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom (London, 1972), pp. 142-63, 166-78. 8 Vale, English Gascony, pp. 59-60.

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Louis of Orleans in 1407. The fact that in 1412 French princes of the blood were prepared to offer this much was important for Henry V. I have said that the terms of Bretigny dominated exchanges over the period from the 1370s to the accession of Henry V; they really did, and that was how it came to be commonly known at the time as 'the great peace'. Aquitaine and the south west was its focus. The English claim to Normandy as part of the ancestral inheritance of their kings, which had been under review at the time of the (abortive) treaty of Guines of 1354 and when the second (abortive) treaty of London was drafted in 1359, was not mentioned at Brdtigny, and was more or less out of sight thereafter, until 1413.9 No one in that long interim expected more than the English claims in the south west to come under discussion. This is what marks a sharp break in diplomatic history at the beginning of Henry V's reign. From the first, or from very early on anyway, Henry in diplomacy is found raising quite new issues — new in the sense that they raised matters not touched on in the 'great peace'. I suppose they might more properly be called old issues, newly raised. The instructions that he gave to his ambassadors in 1414 and 1415 bid them bring into the picture English rights in Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, parts of Provence, Nogent and Beaufort, each of which claims had an ancient history of its own (that to Normandy going back to William the Conqueror; Maine, Anjou, and Touraine to Henry II's inheritance from his father Geoffrey; and the Provengal claims to the rights of Henry Ill's wife, Eleanor of Provence).10 Having raised these claims initially, Henry V was never afterwards prepared to back away from them toward the limits of what his great grandfather had gained by the 'great peace', except on two occasions, and then only temporarily: once in 1415, and once in 1416 when he was anxious to demonstrate his moderation to the Council of Constance and to Emperor Sigismund.11 I do not see any reason to suppose that on either occasion his objective was more than 9 On the negotiations of 1353-54 see K. Fowler, The King's Lieutenant: Henry ofGrosmont, First Duke of Lancaster (London, 1969), pp. 113-14., 129-30, 135-38: on the 'second treaty' of London, 1359, see Delachenal, Charles V, ii, pp. 80-83; and Le Patourel, The Treaty of Br£tigny', 10 (1960), pp. 28-31. 10 Foedera, ix, pp. 209-15. 11 Ibid., p. 212 (1415); ix, p. 786 (recapitulating 1416); and on the manoeuvres of 1416 see further Wylie and Waugh, Henry the Fifth, (Cambridge, 1929), iii, p. 15, and references there cited. I suspect Henry's moderation in 1415 was similarly tactical, to gain time to launch the Agincourt expedition and to impress observers, especially the Fathers of Constance, with his reasonableness.

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tactical: he consistently wanted more than had been ceded at Bretigny and meant to get it. Henry V was able to press for more than his father or Richard II or Edward III in his later years could ever dream of obtaining because of a new situation in France. In 1407 retainers of John the Fearless had murdered Louis of Orleans under cover of dark in the streets of Paris. By 1410 his party and that of Louis' son, Charles of Orleans, were moving toward armed confrontation, forcing their fellow princes in France to take sides. In the circumstances it was inevitable that both parties should look to England for support, for each knew that if they did not the other would. In 1411, when Prince Henry was effective chief of his father's council, the English and Burgundians were close, and an English force under the earl of Arundel and Sir John Oldcastle was dispatched to France: they distinguished themselves in the fighting near Paris, at St-Cloud. In 1412, after the coup which ousted the prince and the Beauforts from the council, the Armagnacs got the better reception. Their exchanges with the English led to the treaty of Bourges. The French princes leagued against Burgundy agreed to recognise Henry I V's just title to the duchy of Aquitaine, without any mention of French sovereignty; in return, they were promised military support, and an expeditionary force larger than that of 1411 was mustered under the duke of Clarence. Clarence sailed for France and might have achieved something substantial there, but for the cessation of hostilities agreed by the French princes at the 'pacification' of Auxerre. The cessation was only temporary, however, and all through Henry V's reign the struggle between the parties in France continued, intermittently. Through the first six years of his reign, down to 1419, whichever side was in greater difficulties could be relied on to bid importantly for his support. In 1414, when the civil wars reached a new peak of ferocity and Charles VI unfurled the Oriflamme against John of Burgundy, the duke was ready to go a long way to secure military aid, until the peace of Arras relieved the pressure on him.12 In 1416 again, when it was imperative for him to forestall any possibility of an alliance of Henry, Sigismund and Charles VI against him, he was anxious at the great summit meeting at Calais to give the impression of being complaisant towards the English, who seem even to have entertained hopes that he might recognise Henry as king of France.13 In 1418, when John had secured

12 13

See R. Vaughan,/o/m the Fearless (London, 1966), pp. 205-7. Ibid., pp. 213-15, and references there cited.

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Paris, his enemies the Armagnacs were ready to discuss a possible alliance with Henry, on the basis of a division of the spoils to be won in Burgundian territory.14 Every twist and turn of fortune in the French civil wars was an opportunity for Henry, and he exploited the opportunities with skill, and to the full. Essentially, what Henry needed to do, during the period when his army was overrunning Normandy, was to keep the French parties in a situation where they preferred to look to him in the hope of triumph over their rivals, rather than fall back on their natural alliance, as Frenchmen, against the 'ancient adversary' of France. So successful was he, that in the summer of 1419 he was near a new measure of victory. John the Fearless and Queen Isabella came in June of that year to Meulan to discuss in earnest terms much more generous than those Edward III had won at the 'great peace', which would give England Normandy in full sovereignty as well as Aquitaine, the settlement to be sealed by a dynastic marriage alliance between Henry and the Valois princess Catherine of France.15 Just how serious the French were is revealed in a letter written by Queen Isabella to Henry in September, when the situation had changed, which also explains why a settlement was not reached: Although the offers that you then made were agreeable enough to us, there was nevertheless great difficulty in the way of accepting them and concluding with you, for at the time all were advising that we should incline to our son [the Dauphin, who was with the Armagnacs]; and if we and our own said cousin [Duke John] had accepted the terms and concluded on them, all the lords, knights, cities and good towns would have abandoned us and joined with our said son; whence even greater war would have arisen.16

The French parties were more concerned with their position vis-a-vis one another than with the English threat. All through the period down to September 1419, while Henry was seeking (or was at least assumed by most men to be seeking) a settlement on the Bretigny lines that would grant him territories (preferably a good deal more extensive than those ceded in 1360) in full sovereignty, the records show repeatedly how important the professional and technical 14 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, ed. N.H. Nicholas, 7 vols (London, 1834-37), ii, pp. 350-58; Foedera, ix, pp 628-31, 632-45. 15 Foedera, ix, pp. 761-64, 775-76, 788-90; and see Wylie and Waugh, Rymer, Henry the Fifth, iii, pp. 160-70. 16 G. Du Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII (Paris, 1881), i, p. 187.

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aspects of negotiations were. Henry was demonstrably aware of their significance. English negotiators were always armed with carefully referenced arguments about the 'great peace' and what it had given the English, and about other claims arising out of it, for example the unpaid arrears of King John the Good's ransom. The 'great peace', buttressed by the treaty of Bourges of 1412, provided a splendid basis for diplomatic propaganda; and in 1415, on the eve of sailing on the Agincourt expedition, Henry dispatched copies of the Bourges agreement to the emperor and to the council of Constance, 'so that all Christendom should know of the injuries that the duplicity of the French had inflicted on him'.17 In his personal letter to Tiptoft at Constance, written on 25 January 1417 to explain the proposals for a settlement mooted to him by his prisoner, the duke of Bourbon, Henry showed he had the documents to hand: and Tiptoft, ye shall understand that the lands [to be ceded] been named by him also, much as is comprehended within the Great Peace, in the form as they be therein comprehended; and Harfleur with as much of Normandy that lieth next to it as I will agree me; and all holden in the form as the Peace maketh mention.18

Henry and his advisers knew the texts, knew their technical implications, and understood the rules of the game. The council's aide-memoire of 1418, preparatory to instructing the embassy that would meet the Armagnacs at Alengon, perhaps best illustrates their professionalism. It opens by rehearsing the Realpolitik grounds for treating: unless agreement could be reached there was no foreseeable end to war; holding Normandy with paid forces was already proving an excessive expense, which fell principally on England; and so on; and 'for all these causes . . . it were as well to take the shortest way, stinting of war and shedding of Christian blood'.19 But the difficulties of making an alliance with the Dauphin and the Armagnacs had to be considered. Was the Dauphin of sufficient age to make an alliance? What security could be obtained that an alliance with him would be ratified in due course by the king of France? Would an alliance with him compromise Henry's claim to the crown of France? What would the legal situation be if, after an alliance had been agreed, John the Fearless should offer to do homage to Henry: li 18 19

Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. F. Taylor and J.S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), p.16. Foedera, ix, p. 428. Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, ii, p. 351.

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would the king be entitled to receive his homage? The French showed the same concern with legal technicalities, as witness the debate in Burgundy's council, before the meeting at Meulan in 1419, with Rapiout and Rolin putting the arguments as technical experts: could the cession of Normandy be legally justified, they asked?20 Since sovereignty would be alienated, it would dismember the crown of France: had Duke John, as the king's lieutenant, the right to alienate in such a degree? Concern with expert and technical points was common ground to English and French alike. Henry V did succeed in keeping the warring factions in France apart, and did, in consequence, come close to achieving a settlement on the lines of Bretigny but still more generous to the English. John the Fearless and Queen Isabella would not have come to Meulan in person in June 1419, and they would not have brought Princess Catherine with them, if they had not intended to do business in earnest with Henry, and they cannot have expected that he would be satisfied with anything less than Aquitaine 'in the form as it is comprehended in the great peace' and Normandy in full sovereignty. The fact remains that Henry did not achieve such a settlement. When it came to the point, John and Isabella found not that Henry could not accept the terms proposed (though his lack of moderation in his demands was unhelpful), but that they could not accept them themselves, as the queen's subsequent letter explained. Desperate as the military situation was from the point of view of the Burgundian party in the summer of 1419, it was not desperate enough for its leaders to hope that they could maintain their credit if they allowed themselves to acquiesce in such a dismemberment of the territories of the crown of France as was proposed, even with their own followers. It seemed better to turn to the only possible alternative, to seek an alliance to resist the English with the Dauphin and the Armagnacs, even though the blood of the leaders of that party and of their kinsmen and colleagues cried so loud for vengeance on John of Burgundy as to render such an accommodation wholly unnatural. The Burgundians' temporary success in forging this alliance with the Armagncas (by the treaty of Pouilly) put Henry's achievement in greater peril than it had been at any earlier point, for it threatened to present him with an enduring commitment to war in France that would strain and almost inevitably overstrain his English resources — which were all he could count on to maintain the struggle, now that his French enemies

20 P.

Bonenfant, Du meurte de Montereau au traite de Troyes (Brussels, 1958), p. 14 n. 1.

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were united. 'Fair cousin, we wish you to know that we will have the daughter of your king, and all that we have asked,' he said in his last words to John the Fearless; 'or we will drive him and you out of his kingdom.' 'Sire, you may be pleased to say so,' John replied, 'but before you can drive my lord and me out of his kingdom, I make no doubt that you will be heartily tired.'21 John was right: Henry was on the point of having overreached himself, of being unable to force a peace on his terms, and unable equally to sustain indefinite war. He was saved from this dilemma not by his own skill, but because the alliance of Burgundy and Armagnac really was too unnatural, and because the blood of Louis of Orleans, Bernard of Armagnac, Henri de Marie and countless others did cry too loud for vengeance. When on 10 September Duke John was murdered by the Dauphin's men on the bridge of Montereau, whither he had gone solemnly to meet his new allies, the whole situation, military and diplomatic, was changed overnight. The murder precipitated a situation in which the Burgundians under their new duke Philip had no real alternative to allying with the English, since if they did not they were effectively bound to lose Paris to Henry and likely to lose control of the court to the Dauphin, and further to run the risk of being isolated between two enemies who could not be relied upon not to make common cause. The terms on which they had to do so were however entirely outside the Bretigny tradition, which had conceived of settlement in terms of the cession of French lands to the English king in full sovereignty, and which had dominated diplomacy in the Anglo-French confrontation for over sixty years. Henry had now come into the open with a new set of Realpolitik objectives, which would set his draughtsmen new problems in the art of Anglo-French treaty-making. The treaty of Troyes, of 1420, made a clean break with the old tradition. Argument over the cession of lands was abandoned and a settlement was sought by completely different means, by an attempt to divert the line of succession to the French throne to the English descendants of the French royal line. The treaty was the direct product of the quite exceptional circumstances following the murder of John the Fearless. In any other conditions it could not have stood any hope of being rendered acceptable to French opinion. Creation that it was of a particular moment and an unforeseeable outrage, its terms nevertheless bear 21

Monstrelet, Chronique, iii, pp. 321-22.

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testimony to Henry V's skill as a negotiator, and to his grasp of what it was essential to strive for: to make the terms legally watertight (as those of Bretigny had proved disastrously not to be); and to draft them in such a way as to render them acceptable to as wide a body of opinion in France as possible.22 The essential purpose of the treaty of Troyes was to settle the succession to the French throne on Henry V, who would marry Catherine of France, and on their heirs, as legitimate successors to Charles VI. There were a number of difficulties to be overcome here, but two principal ones: the now established 'Salic Law' that the crown of France could not pass to a female or through the female line; and the existence, in the person of the Dauphin, of a legitimate son of Charles VI. The last was not really tackled in the treaty itself, but was dealt with outside it: the Dauphin had already been declared guilty of lese-majesty, which would render him incapable of succession, and this was confirmed by the sentence delivered at a formal lit de justice in 1421.23 Great care was taken however to get round the other difficulty of the law of succession, in as satisfactory a way as was feasible. Charles VI's own authority, as king regnant of France, was invoked, first and foremost, to validate Henry's succession, which meant leaving him on his throne for his lifetime and dropping altogether from the treaty all references to the Plantagenet claim to the crown of France. So the treaty opened with the statement that King Charles, in consideration of the marriage of Henry to his daughter Catherine, had taken Henry to him as his son, and Henry had taken him and his Queen Isabella to him and would honour them as father and mother. It went on to explain that King Charles had agreed that on his death, 'the crown and kingdom of France with all its rights and appurtenances shall pass to and perpetually abide with the said Henry our son and his heirs'.24 The formal terms further stressed the continuity of the succession by the title 'Heir of France', which Henry was to assume at once, and by the stipulation that in Charles's lifetime all official acts of regality should be in Charles's name, and under his seal. This continuity was later to become a staple element in English propaganda, deployed effectively in iconographic depictions of Henry VI

22 For what follows, I am much indebted to the ideas of my former pupil, Miss Ruth Thomas of Somerville College, set out by her in a paper read to the Oxford undergraduate seminar on Henry V, several years ago. 23 Bonenfant, Du meurtre de Montereau, pp. 128-29, 177-79; Ordonnances des Rois de France, xii (Paris, 1777), pp. 273-77. 24 Foedera, ix, p. 897.

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showing his descent from the two royal houses of Valois and Plantagenet, which both carried the blood of St Louis in their veins.25 The legality of the treaty was not however to depend solely on the authority of Charles VI (who was mad; and in any case, had any king on his own authority the right to alienate his crown from the true line of succession as if it were private property?). Its terms expressly provided that they must be ratified by the estates of both realms, as they in fact were. In current juristic theory, the most secure manner in which the fundamental laws of a country could be changed was by the incorporated authority of the whole people and their sovereign (personal or collective): was not that the manner in which the authority of the Roman Republic had been legally transferred to the emperors in antique days? Given that awesome precedent, this was a way of altering the fundamental law of succession that civilians could understand and defend. In an effort to buttress still further the legally binding force of the treaty, oaths were sought individually from the lords, the communities, and personally from the subjects of the king of France to adhere to it (which rendered them perjured and traitors if they were found in breach of their oaths). Duke Philip's concern at Arras in 1435 to have his oath to the treaty of Troyes declared invalid before completing his break with the English is witness to the importance and effectiveness of this device. He needed the authority of a papal legate to enable him to do it: the architects of Troyes had shown skill in their efforts to make its authority watertight. By dropping the Plantagenet claim and presenting himself as the heir of Charles, married to his daughter, Henry made what was from an English point of view a very major concession. At the same time he made an important commencement on the task of making sure that the terms of Troyes were not only lawful but could be made acceptable to a sufficient body of Frenchmen. A series of further detailed clauses were drafted with this object clearly in mind. Henry was to be a French king, in due course, to his French subjects. The kingdoms and customs of France and England were to be kept entirely separate and independent, the union of their crowns to be purely personal. To all lords, cities, towns, universities and churches of France Henry promised that he would maintain them in their ancient and due rights and privileges. He would maintain the authority of the parlement and would exercise his

25

See J.W. McKenna, 'Henry VI and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422-32', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), pp. 145-62.

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powers of government with the advice of the 'noble and wise men of France', and appoint to office with their counsel persons 'able and agreeable' to French custom - Frenchmen, that is to say. There would be no attempt at anglicisation. Further, he promised that no taxes would be levied except in grave necessity, and that he would abide always by the laws and customs of France. He would not dismember the crown: Normandy, on his accession, would revert to its status of a dependency of the crown of France. All lands recovered from the adherents of the Dauphin (with whom Henry promised to make no peace without the assent of both the king and the new Duke of Burgundy) would revert immediately to the French crown. As an inducement to those Burgundians who had lost lands in Normandy in the course of the war so far, Henry promised to find them recompense from these conquered lands (he could not, naturally, now disinherit the Englishmen to whom their Norman fiefs had been granted). The duke of Burgundy himself had secured his cut already, having been promised back at Christmas 1419 that wide lands in northern France would be added to his territories once peace was made.26 To Frenchmen at large the greatest inducement of all, of course, was the prospect of peace, which, as the text laboured, was the principal object of the treaty — peace, free commercial intercourse with England, and hopes of returning prosperity for a harried kingdom and a desperate people. Peace was indeed the most important thing that Henry suggested he could deliver — and the most difficult of delivery. Altogether, one may say of the terms of the treaty of Troyes, given that it was the product of a quite sudden and unforeseen twist in the course of events, that they were remarkably skilfully drafted. By that I mean no more than I say. Whether they could really be made to stick depended on other factors; the reaction of great waverers, like the duke of Brittany and the count of Foix, neither of whom were parties to the agreements of May 1420; on the success of the English and Burgundians in pressing the war further against the discredited Armagnacs; on whether the inducements and assurances that the terms offered would prove sufficient to hold together at least the Burgundian party in France. In 142022, the key years when Henry was still alive and looked set fair to enter on his French inheritance, there were signs that might justify cautious optimism in these regards (though there were others too, whose implications were rather alarming). Henry's military advances were less rapid, 26

Rymer, Foedera, ix, p. 826.

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but he continued to advance his conquests. At the time that he died, negotiations were well advanced which looked like bringing both the duke of Brittany and the count of Foix into the treaty. On the whole, the old Burgundian party in France accepted it. There were some notable hesitations and some defections: Louis d'Orange refused to take the oath to Troyes, as initially did the city of Tournai, while the powerful count of Tanquarville went over to the Armagnacs. But in Paris Burgundian councillors and civil servants remained at their posts in the parlement and the chambre des comptes: there was no mass exodus from the university; and the chapter of Notre-Dame, after a show of reluctance, accepted the situation. Such an observer as the 'Bourgeois de Paris' was not very enthusiastic for the new dispensation, but he thought the English were much preferable to the Armagnacs.27 As things began to settle, men who had left their homes in Normandy and in the Paris basin, when the theatre of active hostilities seemed to be approaching their homelands, started to trickle back. Henry himself was personally highly regarded by many Frenchmen. Had he lived it seems just possible that he might have made the Troyes settlement durable — just possible, though for myself I cannot see it as very likely. The real trouble with the treaty of Troyes was that the AngloBurgundian alliance, which was the cornerstone of the whole settlement, was at root thoroughly unnatural. It had been precipitated by the act of naked assassination which ended John the Fearless's life at the bridge of Montereau. When in November 1419 the Burgundian council concluded that 'de deux maulx le moins pire est a eslire'28 and that that meant allying with Henry, they were accepting the Realpolitik implications of an emergency: they had no real long-term interest in a Plantagenet succession in France, even if diplomatic skill could present it as something less than that, as a kind of quasi-adoptive Valois succession. It would not gain their duke any influence in Paris. It bound the French Burgundians, who had prided themselves on their patriotism as Frenchmen, to the leader of a people who were traditional enemies of the French. Unless the Dauphin's support were to collapse totally and quickly, it would not bring peace. And if the Dauphin's support did not collapse quickly, the Burgundian French - the duke included — were bound to find that they had closer and more important national ties and associations with the lords and people of his party than they had with

27 28

Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris, 1405-1449, ed. A. Tuetey (Paris, 1881), p. 139. Bonenfant, Du meurtre de Montereau, p. 218.

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King Henry and his English captains. That is indeed what they did discover, or rather rediscover, after Henry was dead. Once they did so, it did not take long before experts began to look for legal loopholes in the treaty of Troyes, which cumulatively would provide justification for its abrogation by the Burgundian French.29 It took the Burgundians fifteen years from 1420 to come round finally to that point. That in itself is witness to the skill with which the treaty of Troyes had been drafted. Altogether its terms testify to the outstanding talent of King Henry in what I called at the beginning of this essay the art of diplomacy. He was certainly a master of Realpolitik, skilled in calculating the arithmetic of power, and a bold one. In 1419 he could without any difficulty have achieved a settlement on the Bretigny lines, but more generous; he preferred to go for the larger prize, because he saw he had a chance of getting it. If he got it, the problems of maintaining a Bretigny-type settlement, of defending English Gascony and English Normandy, would disappear. He would not need to fear the recovery of France because he would be king of France. In the detail of the settlement which brought him his prize, he showed that he fully appreciated the importance of the technical side of treaty-making, that arrangements must be made as far as possible juridically watertight and must look presentable. A question must nevertheless remain with regard to his diplomatic talents, brilliant, knowledgeable and hard-working as he undoubtedly was in this field. It is whether his skill was not at the tactical rather than the strategic level, in diplomacy if not in war. What is most open to criticism is his sense of the limits of the possible. The murder of John the Fearless, and the great opportunity that it opened, saved him in 1419 from having to maintain his conquest with English resources that were almost certainly inadequate. Instead he obtained the triumph of being recognised as Heir of France; but the settlement embodying this triumph was intrinsically unstable. It did not cater sufficiently for the long-term interests of any substantial party, and was too much the product of temporary circumstance. He had high ambitions and great gifts; it is not quite so clear that he was the kind of man who could think through to the end where these were leading him.

29

On the legal arguments that were finally presented in criticism of the treaty, at Arras in 1435, see J.G. Dickinson, The Congress of Arras, 1435 (Oxford, 1955), pp. 66-75, 173-77; and J. Ferguson, English Diplomacy, 1422-61 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 169-74.

14 The End of the Hundred Years War: Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England 'Today it is told Cherbourg is gone, and we have now not a foot of land left in Normandy': so James Gresham wrote to John Paston on 19 August 1450.l It was then just twelve months since Charles VII of France, at Roches Tranchelion on 31 July 1449, had declared himself no longer bound by the truce with the English, on the ground of their armed escalade of the town of Fougeres in Brittany, and their refusal to make reparation for this breach of the truce or to disavow the capture.2 In the intervening year all that was left of the wide lands that Henry V had won with the 'blood and treasure' of England was overrun by the French, in a militarily decisive campaign. James Gresham's use in his letter to Paston of the 'royal we' — we have not a foot of land left — shows nicely how Englishmen had come to identify their king's claims in France not just with his private dynastic rights but with the crown in its collective sense, embodying the community and its interest, whereby 'the leste lyge man, with body and rent, He is a parcel of the crowne'.3 It is not surprising, therefore, that the ignominious collapse of English Normandy sent powerful shock waves through the country. Well before the surrender of Cherbourg the duke of Suffolk, Henry VI's chief minister whose incompetent diplomacy had culminated in the sack of Fougeres and so offered the French their casus belli, had been toppled, and subsequently murdered. In the anger of the 1

Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner (London, 1872), \, no. 103. On the taking of Fougeres see A. Bossuat, Perrinet Gressart et Francois de Surienne, agents d'Angleterre (Paris, 1936), pp. 301-35; M. Keen and M. Daniel, 'English Diplomacy and the Sack of Fougeres in 1449', History, 59 (1974), pp. 375-91. 3 Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS (London, 1904), p. 51. 2

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moment, incredible rumours of his treachery circulated, that he had plotted with Dunois, Guillaume Cousinot and others to depose King Henry, that he had 'steered' the duke of Orleans to excite the French to attack Normandy; rumours which were solemnly brought forward as formal charges when he was impeached in the spring parliament of 1450.4 Somerset, the lieutenant and commander in Normandy whose loss of nerve at Rouen (and subsequently) had ensured that the French won back the duchy with a minimum of fighting, was never formally impeached; but there was a widespread demand that he be brought to account, and charges were prepared against him.5 Already at the moment when he was treating for the evacuation and surrender of Caen, Cade's rebels in July 1450 were demanding punishment of the traitors by whose means Normandy, Anjou and Maine had been 'delivered* and 'our true lords, knights and esquiers, and many a good yeoman lost and solde ere they went'.6 The anger against Somerset did not go away: in his Shrewsbury manifesto of 1452 York called on all men to consider 'first the worship, honour and manhood asserted of all nations to the people of England, whilst the kingdom's sovereign lord stood possessed of his lordship in France', and then to compare with this the 'derogation, lesion of honour and villainy reported generally unto the English nation for the loss of the same, namely unto the duke of Somerset, when he had commandance and charge thereof.7 Mowbray of Norfolk returned to the same charge in 1453, reminding the council of the 'overgreat dishonour and losses that be come to this full noble realm of England' as a result of Somerset's misconduct, and that the traditional punishment for those who showed cowardice in the face of the enemy was death.8 So the blame for the disaster in France was laid squarely at the doors of Suffolk and Somerset. But was it justly so laid? No one would wish very vigorously to defend either the diplomatic mismanagement of the one (Suffolk's domestic abuse of his influence being in this context irrelevant), or the military loss of nerve of the other, yet a puzzle remains. Both Suffolk and Somerset clearly appreciated the vulnerability of

4

Rotuli parliamentorum, v, pp. 177-78. Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France, ed. J. Stevenson, RS (London, 1861-64), ii, pt 2 (pp. 718-22) (questions to be put to Somerset); Paston Letters i, pp. Ixxvii-lxxx (detailed charges prepared by York, which he hoped in 1452 to have prosecuted). 6 J. Stow, Annales (London, 1631), p. 390. 7 Paston Letters, i, p. Ixxxiii. 8 Ibid., i. no. 191. 5

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Normandy, and what needed to be done there. Back at the beginning of 1445, Suffolk had urged on York, Somerset's predecessor as lieutenant in Normandy, the need to use the respite from hostilities afforded by the truce of Tours to put the defence of the duchy into good order.9 Somerset received similar, and emphatic advice on his going into Normandy: that it be purveied fore here in England of ordinaunce for the felde al maner thing that longithe to the werre, as speres, bowes, arowes, axes, malles, ribawdkyns and alle other stuffe necessairie . . . and that alle youre principalle places be stuffed of alle manner of artillerie, furnysshid withe vitaile for alle manere of doubles, [and] that soche places as bene frontures upon the marches, as Pounthorson, Averaunshes and other places . . . be fortiffied and repaired sufficeauntlie that thei may be stronge and habille to resiste the Kingis ennemies. 10

Somerset was an experienced commander and the advice was not lost on him: in the spring of 1449 we find him desperately appealing to England for aid, complaining that 4ther is no place in the King's obeissaunce purveied, nother in reparations, ordenaunce ne eny maner artillerie', and reminding all and sundry of the effort that England had put into the conquest of 'that land . . . whereof the shamefulle loss . . . shuld not oonly be to the irreparable hurt of the commyn profile but also an everlastying spite and perpetuell denigration of the fame and renoune of this noble Reme'.11 Yet there was no response, even at this late date. It was not until July, when open war was clearly imminent, that the parliament of 1449 increased its grant of a half subsidy to a whole one, abated by 6000 marks.12 It was not until early in 1450 that any force could be despatched to reinforce Somerset, and then it was a mere 3000 men that went with Sir Thomas Kyriell, to be cut to pieces by the French before they could join the lieutenant, at Formigny. The real fault, it begins to appear, lay not with Suffolk and Somerset, rather with their countrymen whose response to the needs that these two both well understood was too slow and too slight, but who were to be so ready to blame them. There is thus a kind of partial defence, at least, for these two much denigrated men. They may have mismanaged things, but that was not 9

Rotuli parliamentorum, v. 74. Letters and Papers, ii, pt 2, pp. 592-93. 11 Rotuli parliamentorum, v, pp. 147-48. 12 Ibid., pp. 143-44. 10

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the real reason for the swiftness and the totality of the collapse, which was what raised popular anger to such a pitch of fury. The reason why things were not 'seen to' in 'this time of abstinence' (i.e. the truce of Tours), as Suffolk advised, was at root not lack of leadership but a lack of will and concern in that sector of the community that formed the political nation of fifteenth-century England, the gentry whose representatives sat in the Commons and held the purse strings that allowed government to do things that needed to be done. And that will, it would seem, was already lacking when the 'abstinence' was agreed. My object, in the rest of this essay, will be to try and trace its failure back to its origins. Lack of will and concern is, I am aware, by no means a novel explanation of the final ignominious defeat of the English in the Hundred Years War, in the wake of which first Suffolk and then Somerset were dragged down. All I wish to do is to follow up some of the leads offered by recent research, notably that of Christopher Allmand, Michael Powicke and Robert Massey, which seem to me both to have underlined the significance of this factor and to have made it easier to understand.13 Gerald Harriss has lately and with admirable clarity explained why it was, in cash terms, that nothing could be done about repairing the defences of Normandy after Suffolk came away from Tours with a truce in 1444.14 The expenses of Henry VI's marriage, the king's own overlavish patronage and his spending on his colleges, combined with an unscheduled fall in the revenue from the customs, meant that the truce did not relieve the pressure on crown finances in the way that it must have been hoped it would. Indeed the new treasurer appointed on 18 December 1446, Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle, was soon having to take drastic steps in order to prevent the position from 13

C.T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415-50 (Oxford, 1983); idem, The Collection of Dom Lenoir and the English Occupation of Normandy', Archives 6 (1964), 202-10; idem, The Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy', Economic History Review, 2nd series, 21 (1968), pp. 461-79; idem, 'La Normandie devant 1'opinion anglaise a la fin de la Guerre de Cent Ans', Bibliotheque de I'Ecole des Chartes, 128 (1970), pp. 345-68; M.R. Powicke, 'Lancastrian Captains', Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T.A. Sandquist and M.R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), pp. 371-82; R. Massey, The Land Settlement in Lancastrian Normandy', Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. A.J. Pollard (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 76-96. Massey explores the subject in much greater detail in his thesis which I had the privilege of examining, The Lancastrian Land-Settlement in Normandy and Northern France, 1417-50' (unpublished ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1984). 14 G.L. Harriss, 'Marmaduke Lumley and the Exchequer Crisis of 1446-9', Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society, ed. J.G. Rowe (Toronto, 1986), pp. 143-78.

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deteriorating further and disastrously. But the problem of lack of will and concern does not go away in the light of this expose, nor does Harriss suggest that it should. As has been said, the indications are that it was not a new problem in 1445. It is one that needs to be seen in a wider chronological context, and that belongs to a broader canvas than that of financial history only, and one on which the brush strokes have, necessarily, to be more impressionistic. Perhaps as good a way as any of introducing the nature of the problem will be via a comparison between the English reactions to adverse fortunes in the war in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively. The two great peace treaties of the Hundred Years War, of Bretigny and of Troyes, were both followed in England by periods of financial insouciance (with rather more justification in the former case, since the years 1360-9 were a good deal more like a peace, from an English point of view, than the years 1420-9). Then, after the reopening of the war in 1369, as after the English reverse before Orleans in 1429, the tide of military success turned against the English, and their conquests, in the south west of France in the one case and north of the Loire in the other, came under pressure. There, however, the similarity ends abruptly, for the reaction to ill-success in the two instances was entirely different. Faced with the shock of unexpected reverses, the English in the 1370s, largely through Parliamentary grants, literally poured money into their war effort. Continuing lack of success did not deter them. After the disaster that overtook Pembroke's expedition in 1372, after the fiasco of Gaunt's march across France from Calais to Bordeaux in 1373, after the aborting of the Breton expedition of 1375, and even after the exorbitant poll tax of 1380-81 had triggered off the Peasants' Revolt, they remained ready to pay for more. The indignation of chroniclers like Walsingham and of the Commons in parliament against those upon whose unpatriotic and self-interested conduct they blamed reverses - Latimer and his lieutenants at St-Sauveur and Becherel, or alleged traitors like John Menstreworth and Thomas Catrington, or Despenser and the captains of his disastrous 1383 expedition to Flanders15 - testify to a widespread sense of involvement and commitment, as do the independent efforts of, for example, the London merchant Philipot to equip ships to clear the

15 ChroniconAngliae, ed. E. Maunde Thompson, RS (London, 1874), pp. 77 (Latimer), 13536 (Menstreworth), 261-64 (Catrington); Rotuliparliamentorum, ii, pp. 324-26 (Latimer); iii, pp. 324-26 (Despenser and his captains).

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seas of Scots and Spanish raiders.16 So, in a different and perhaps more telling way, do the arguments advanced in the 1371 parliament and subsequently, in which Wyclif took such an interest, that in the kingdom's necessity it might be legitimate to force a contribution from the endowments of the possessionate clergy.17 Altogether the 1370s were a period of unusually sustained and intensive assented taxation for war purposes, perhaps only comparable with the middle years of Henry V's reign, when he was victoriously laying the foundations of the Lancastrian conquest in France. The mood of commitment outlasted them: it was not until the late 1380s that the popular appeal of sabrerattling began to dwindle. If willingness to pay is an acceptable index of involvement, throughout the period there seems to have been no lack of will or concern on the part of Englishmen to maintain their footholds on the soil of France. The reaction of England and of Englishmen to military set-backs in the fifteenth century, in the decade and a half following the relief of Orleans, contrasts sharply with that of their forebears. In 1380 the Commons, faced with a request for £160,000 (principally for Buckingham's expedition to Brittany) agonised and haggled, but ultimately came up with a poll tax of 'groats' through which they expected to raise £100,000;18 in 1434, when Gloucester offered to take charge of affairs in France, and right the situation if £48,000 could be raised for his expenses, he was told by the treasurer that it would not be possible to raise half the sum.19 It is true that when, in the aftermath of Orleans, Henry VI was about to cross to France for his coronation there, and again in 1436 in the indignant aftermath of the breakdown of the Burgundian alliance at Arras, the Commons were relatively generous, granting a double subsidy in the first instance and a subsidy combined with a graduated income tax in the second;20 but the general pattern of taxation in the period 1429-44 was of grants at a reduced rate and with collection spread over an extended period. As Steel has shown, the picture is if anything even more dispiriting if one looks at it in terms of

16

Chronicon Angliae, p. 199. John Wyclif, De civili dominio, ed. J. Loserth, Wyclif Society (London, 1900), ii, p. 7; V.H. Galbraith, 'Articles Laid before the Parliament of 1371', English Historical Review, 34 (1919), pp. 579-82; A. Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (Oxford, 1940), pp. 210-24. 18 Rotuli Parliamentorum, iii, pp. 88-90. 19 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, ed. N.H. Nicolas, 6 vols (London, 1834-37), iv, p. 214. 20 Rotuli parliamentorum, iv, pp. 336-37, 486-87. 17

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the readiness of local gentry and borough communities to lend to the crown.21 The observations of Hue de Lannoy in 1436 bear this out: he told the duke of Burgundy that in his opinion 'all the commons of their realm are tired and wearied out with the war'.22 By the time of the Calais peace conferences of 1439 it was clear that, in the interest of obtaining relief from the pressures of war, the English were prepared to consider very substantial concessions, including the renunciation, in return for an adequate settlement, of the title to the crown of France which they had so aggressively reasserted scarcely eight years earlier by crowning Henry VI in Paris. Alternatively (and rather preferably) they were prepared to consider suspension of the use of the title for the duration of a long truce.23 There was still a good deal of rhetoric at those conferences about the title itself, about St Bridget's prophecy of an English succession in France and about the judgements of God given in England's favour on the field of battle.24 But this was mere rhetoric, as the ambassadors' readiness to look at suggestions like those mentioned above attests. They knew that England was no longer in this matter ready to put her money where her mouth was, in the way she had been in the fourteenth century. The contrast I have been drawing, between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, must not be pressed too far. In terms of customs revenues, of the comparative burden of bad debt, perhaps most of all in terms of what we would now call 'economic confidence', the 1370s were clearly a much more propitious period in 'public finance' than the 1430s and 1440s, and that must go some way at least to explaining why parliament was so much more generous. Even so reasons can be put forward that would support an a priori expectation that the English reaction to reverses should have been«sharper in the 1430s than in the 1370s, not less so. The treaty of Troyes and the coronation of Henry VI in Paris clearly committed English honour even more seriously than Edward Ill's royal claim and his assumption of the arms of France had done. Henry V's conquest of Normandy had brought benefits that were more tangible to Englishmen than had been the extension, by the treaty

21

A. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377-1485 (Cambridge, 1954), ch. 6, esp. pp. 259-65. Quoted by Allmand, 'La Normandie devant 1'opinion anglaise' (1970), p. 363. 23 Cf. C.T. Allmand, The Anglo-French Negotiations, 1439', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 40 (1967), pp. 1-33; and idem, 'Documents relating to the Anglo-French Negotiations of 1439', Camden Miscellany, 24 (1972), pp. 79-149. 24 Ibid., pp. 115-17. 22

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of Bretigny, of the frontiers of the duchy of Aquitaine: as Colin Richmond has written 'it gave the coastal shires of England about thirty years of security . . . It was a wise strategy that kept the war as deep into France as possible.'25 The commercial advantages that control of both shores of the Channel afforded were widely appreciated: it dispelled the fears that had disturbed Chaucer's merchant so much, about the keeping of the seas 'betwix Middleburgh and Orwell'.26 In addition, in consequence of Henry V's conquest, a substantial number of Englishmen had acquired titles, lands and house property in France, and in Normandy in particular; and for these the French advances put not just national reputation but personal wealth and livelihood at risk. This Lancastrian land settlement relates with another matter that is nowadays regularly brought into the picture when English interests in the maintenance of the war in this period are under discussion, that is the lure of gains of war. As McFarlane long ago pointed out (using Fastolf s career as a prime example) it was possible, at any rate for individuals, to make very considerable profits out of war even in periods when the war generally was going badly for the English, as it was in both the 1370s and the 1430s.27 This matter of gains of war is worth some consideration, I believe. For if I am right, there is here again a contrast between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, but one whose implications run in the opposite direction to what I have suggested above, and will so help to explain why the reaction to adversity in the later period was less sharp and concerned than in the earlier one, not more so. Gains of war, like other property, may be divided into two broad categories, moveable and immoveable. The distinction between the two was understood very clearly in the period of the English wars in France, and different rules applied to them;28 they are not always so clearly distinguished in modern historical writing (largely because it has been so much concerned with gains as an independent inducement to war service, where the distinction is at its least important). Into the moveable

25

C.F. Richmond, The Keeping of the Seas during the Hundred Years War, 1422-40', History, 49 (1964), p. 284. 26 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 276-77. 27 K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 31ff; idem, 'The Investment of Sir John Fastolf s Profits of War', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 7 (1957), pp. 91-116. 28 M. Keen, The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1965), p. 139.

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category fall booty, prisoners and their ransoms, and such profits of war as appatis (tribute levied by garrisons on a locality); into the other category lands and lordships, titles and tenements. In the fourteenth century, a very high proportion of what was won in France in the moveable form was brought back to England. Writing of the years after Edward III had returned from his expedition of 1346-47, Walsingham described how in England 'there were few women who did not possess something from Caen, Calais, or other overseas towns, such as clothes, furs or cushions. Table cloths and linen were seen in everyone's houses: Married women were decked in the trimmings of French matrons, and if the latter sorrowed over their loss, the former rejoiced in their gain'.29 Knighton tells us that Henry of Lancaster built the great palace of the Savoy out of his French winnings;30 William Berkeley told Leland that his house at Beverstone was built out of the ransoms of the prisoners that his great grandfather had won at Poitiers.31 These examples are taken from the great years before 1360, it must be admitted. But in the 1370s the flow had not dried up entirely; memories of the dramatic windfalls of the recent past were still green, and the evidence of them was visible in high profile. Though quantitative comparison is not possible, it seems apparent that in the fifteenth century the proportion of the moveable profits of war that found their way back to England was much smaller. This was because the nature of the fighting, on the English side, had changed, from the time of the treaty of Troyes onwards. The age of the chevauchees, of the expeditionary host raised in England and which returned home when the campaign was over, laden (hopefully) with prisoners and booty, was now past: the Agincourt expedition was the last of them. The great English captains of the fifteenth century, Talbot and Scales, John Fastolf, William Oldhall, Matthew Gough and their ilk spent years on end, sometimes nearer decades, in service in France, and so did a high proportion of the archers and frien at arms who served under them.32 These captains, and a good many of their subordinates too, acquired offices, estates and houses in France, possessions which were often more extensive than what they held in England (many of the lesser men held nothing there). What they won in France was, in consequence, for the

29 30 31 32

Quoted by H J. Hewitt, The Organisation of War under Edward III (Manchester, 1966), p. 110. Chronicon H. Knighton, ed. J.R. Lumby, RS (London, 1895), ii, p. 118. J. Leland, Itinerary, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (London, 1909), iv, p. 133. A.J. Pollard, John Talbot and the War in France (London, 1983), ch. 5.

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most part spent there likewise: it did not come back to England. There were of course those who, like that famous pair John Winter and Nicholas Molyneux, did make careful plans to send their winnings home, to be invested in the 'purchase of manors', but they were the exceptions rather than the rule.33 French outgoings often ate too deeply into profit for there to be much left over to send back, even in the case of men of standing. Indeed even Talbot, with his captaincies, his offices and his right in all the prizes he and his men took did not, by Dr Pollard's calculation, do much better than break even after he had met the expenses of his household in France, of estate and garrison administration, and carried his arrears of pay.34 The very incomplete and unsatisfactory evidence with regard to the extent of the sums accruing to Englishmen from moveable gains of war renders any sort of overall quantitative analysis of their importance quite impossible. It has been questioned, probably rightly, whether they were ever of such an extent as to have any impact of significance on the English economy.35 If there ever was such a time, one would expect it to have been in those years in the fourteenth century when instalments on the huge ransoms of the kings of France and Scotland were still coming in, certainly not in the fifteenth century. But for individuals gains of war could be spectacularly important financially: and they also had a powerful psychological impact. Even in their least durable form, as of those table cloths and trimmings that Walsingham remarked on, they caught the eye. In the fifteenth century this impact was inevitably blunter in England than it had been in the past, because there was less to be seen there. What was true of gains of war in moveable form was even truer of gains in the immoveable category, and not only in the visual sense. These were, of course, much more important in the fifteenth century than they had been in the fourteenth, on account of the deliberate policy of Henry V and Bedford of settling Englishmen in the areas conquered from the

33 K.B. McFarlane, 'A Business Partnership in War and Administration, 1421-45', English Historical Review, 78 (1963), pp. 290-310. The compact between Molyneux and Winter stipulated that clear profit gained in France was to be repatriated 'pour acheter des heritaiges au royaume Dangleterre' (p. 309). 34 Pollard, Talbot, ch. 6, esp. p. 120:'he was perhaps able to make a slight profit out of the war . . . he was certainly not a major profiteer . . . in the end something more akin to a survivor'. 35 M.M. Postan, 'The Costs of the Hundred Years War', Past and Present, 27 (1964), pp. 34-52, esp. 43-50.

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French.36 Their liberal grants of lands, lordships and houses not only to peers and captains but also to many relatively humble Englishmen were not and could not be sources of clear profit in the sense that, say, the ransom of a valuable prisoner could be.37 Major grants, like Salisbury's county of Perche or the three vicomtes of Aubec, Orge and Pontaudemer that Thomas, duke of Clarence obtained from his brother, or the county of Maine that later came the way of Edmund Beaufort, might constitute a real accretion to disposable seigneurial income, though at the same time, naturally, they often generated new calls on it. Smaller grants, like the numerous enfeoffments recorded on the Norman Rolls after the fall of Rouen or those that were distributed as rewards to soldiers who had been at the field of Verneuil, were expected to generate an income on which, after outgoings had been set against it, a serving man-of-arms might hope to maintain himself and his family, but not to generate a clear profit over and above that (that sort of profit, it was originally intended, should go to the crown, but the lands were often wasted and there seldom was much).38 There were of course men who, like Fastolf, saw the way the wind was blowing in the 1430s and succeeded in realising substantial sums by the sale of their French properties, which they reinvested in England, but again they were the exceptions. The ordinances that Henry V and Bedford made, inhibiting the sale of properties held by Englishmen to others than their co-nationals, helped to ensure that they should be.39 The consequence was straightforward, that preservation of the Lancastrian conquest in France came to be of very great, indeed vital, importance to those Englishmen who spent most of their time there; and, conversely, to be of relatively little importance, except perhaps psychologically, to those Englishmen who spent most of their time in England. These latter came, in consequence, to be progressively less and less eager to make substantial contributions towards the maintenance of the conquest, from which no profit came their way.

36 Massey, 'The Lancastrian Land-Settlement', pp. 77-81; Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, ch. 3. 37 Massey, 'The Lancastrian Land Settlement', pp. 61-62. 38 Grants were usually not made outright but up to a given value, e.g. 800 livres tournois. The idea was that if the declared income from the lands granted exceeded the figure named, then the sum in excess would be due to the crown. But I know of no instance where this occurred; receipts were usually well below the grant valuation. 39 L. Puiseux, L'emigration normande et la colonisation anglaise en Normandie au XVe siecle (Paris, 1886), p. 75.

250

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

This seems to me to be among the most important points that recent research into the Lancastrian land settlement in France (especially that of Christopher Allmand and Robert Massey) has clarified. As Massey explains, the settlement policy was a French, not just a Norman one;40 indeed it had to be, since part of the object was to involve English captains and soldiers in the preservation of the conquests that had been won by their arms, wherever these might be (no one else was likely to commit themselves with much enthusiasm to their defence). Hence it was extended beyond Normandy into the Paris region as Henry V advanced and after Verneuil into Maine. What the grantees became thus involved in, however, was the maintenance of the Lancastrian interest in France, not in England, and the deeper the conquest drove into Normandy and beyond, the sharper the separation of those two interests became. Allmand has suggested that the policy of settlement may have been influenced, m part, by English experience in Ireland, and this seems quite plausible.41 Certainly — unless Henry V or his successor should succeed, and rapidly, in gaining general recognition as king of France — it was calculated to have the same effect that English policy (or lack of policy) had with regard to settlement in Ireland: that is, of creating a 'middle nation',42 resented by the natives as alien intruders and by their English cousins as having insufficient kinship with them, certainly too little to justify levying major fiscal contributions in England in order to enable them to preserve their 'foreign' possessions. The growing anxiety of the Anglo-Irish settlers' appeals for assistance from England,43 and the increasing deafness of the English ears on which they fell, is a recurrent theme of late medieval Irish history: it is not a happy analogy for Lancastrian France and its prospects. The English of Normandy, at the end of the Hundred Years War, were by no means as yet as foreign to England as the contemporary 'English' of Ireland, though if Allmand is right in his delineation of the feelings of a good many of the lesser among them, things were beginning to go that way: 'the duchy was their homeland, the source of their livelihood . . .

40

Massey, 'The Lancastrian Land-Settlement', pp. 81-82. Allmand, 'La Normandie devant 1'opinion anglaise', p. 355. 42 The phrase 'middle nation' first occurs in O'Neill's remonstrance to Pope John XXII, 1317; see E. Curtis, A History of Medieval Ireland (revised edn, London, 1938), p. 192. 43 E.g. the appeal of 1435 discussed by AJ. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968), p. 369. 41

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they had the sense of belonging in the country'.44 In another and more important sense the difference in their positions was absolute. In Ireland the 'English', facing the aggressiveness of Gaelic princes whose ambitions were local and who were incapable of concerting with one another for long, could be left largely to fend for themselves. The English in Normandy, faced in Charles VII with a truly formidable enemy and a more and more united country behind him, could not. That was the root of the problem facing Henry VI's councillors. Desperate appeals from the Anglo-Irish of the Pale they could afford to ignore, and did: simply to desert to their fate the English of Normandy and France, while the glory of Henry V's victories was so fresh in memory, was not thinkable. No government would be likely to survive the psychological shock, domestically, of such an abandonment, as 1450 showed. On the other hand, they knew that the funds that would be necessary for such a massive military task as the long-term defence of the conquest looked to be would not be forthcoming from England. They were caught on the sharp horns of dilemma. Either they must face realities, abandon territory and honour, and risk reaping the whirlwind of popular rage; or seek to maintain honour in spite of interest being lacking, a course which, however laudable it may be in the case of individuals, tends to be politically disastrous. Traditionally, the reaction of the English government in this situation has been described in terms of tensions between a 'war party' and a 'peace party'. These terms need to be handled with care, especially in the context of the findings of Allmand and Massey. The phrase 'peace party' in particular is potentially misleading. The experience of the two men who are usually credited with the leadership of such a party, Cardinal Beaufort and after him Suffolk, was not such as to incline them at all toward a policy of mere capitulation, of getting out as best they could. Suffolk had had a long and distinguished military career, had been granted substantial lands across the Channel, and had lost a brother and a father in the war:45 while Beaufort had contributed more funds, from his private resources, towards the making and maintaining of the conquests of his nephew Henry V than had any other single individual.46 44

Allmand, 'La Normandie devant 1'opinion anglaise', p. 348. See Suffolk's own defence in parliament in 1450, Rotuli parliamentorum, v, p. 176; his grants in France included Hambye and Briquebec (sold in 1430, Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, p. 67), the county of Dreux, and Chanteloup and Creances in the Cotentin, Complete Peerage, xii, pt 1, p. 444. 46 G.L. Harriss, 'Cardinal Beaufort: Patriot or Usurer?', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 20 (1970), pp. 129-48. 45

252

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

But they both were realists and saw, as Lannoy had put it, that the 'affairs of France cannot long continue in the state they are'.47 At Calais in 1439 Beaufort seems to have been prepared to toy — though he toyed only — with the possibility of recognising that Normandy and Gascony were held of the French crown, which would mean the restitution of the Frenchmen put out of their lands by the English conquest, but only if the French would contribute a major part of the sum that would have to be paid in compensation to the English settlers.48 When it became clear that they would not do so, the next best thing seemed to be to try to distract Charles VII by efforts to rekindle troubles between the French king and his princes and among the princes themselves: this was almost certainly a major (if tacit) reason for the release of the duke of Orleans from his long captivity in 1440. By the time that it became clear that the duke's liberty would not have any such effect, and nor would the feelers put out towards the count of Armagnac, the need for a truce had become imperative. It is probable that Suffolk, in order to get it, was ready, informally, to agree that Maine should be ceded,49 calculating perhaps that he could just about get away with that, and that anyway it would establish, together with the marriage of Margaret, a new English link with another French princely house, that of Anjou. It seems likely that misplaced hopes of creating tensions in French aristocratic circles are once again the best explanation of his disastrous attempt later, in 1449, at intervention in Breton politics.50 This is hardly a 'peace' policy: rather it seems to be a record of a quest, fruitless in the end, for a means of preserving most, at least, of what was left of the English conquest, without charging England more than she was prepared to pay. In England there was one man who was consistently critical of the concessions that Beaufort and Suffolk, in their difficult conduct of diplomacy, were prepared to consider: Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Henry V's last surviving brother. He can hardly be called the leader of a 'war party' however. Once he had been a great power in the land, but by the 1440s he had become something of a one-man band. Those who

47

Letters and Papers, ii, pt 1, p. 239. Allmand, Camden Miscellany, xxiv, pp. 145-46. 49 See T.B. Pugh, 'Richard Plantagenet (1411-60), Duke of York, as the King's Lieutenant in France and Ireland', Aspects of Late Medieval Government, ed. Rowe, p. 122.1 am informed by Dr M.K. Jones that there is an earlier reference to the possibility of the cession of Maine in Edmund Beaufort's grant of the county as an appanage. (BN, MS. Nouv. acq. fr. 3642 n. 800 A, 19 July 1442). 50 Keen and Daniel, 'English Diplomacy and the Sack of Foug£res', pp. 387-90. 48

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have sometimes been associated with him, as York and John Holland, duke of Exeter, do not seem during his lifetime (or in York's case perhaps before the end of 1446) to have been estranged from the court, as he was; and their view of things was probably closer to that of Suffolk than to his posture of belligerence. Holland was ageing, had come home from Gascony before the completion of his term as lieutenant, and was much involved with his own financial and family arrangements; he had never shown strong political partialities. His promotion in 1443 to the rank of duke, and his tenure of the offices of constable of the Tower and lord high admiral suggest that he remained persona grata with the court.51 York, when he came back to England in 1445, did not come, as he would in 1450, as a critic of the courtiers, and had every reason to believe that he had the king's and their goodwill; his two eldest sons had just been created earls of March and Rutland respectively,52 and he was clearly hoping that he would be favoured with the renewal of his Norman lieutenancy. At the same time he was involved in negotiations for the marriage of his heir to a French princess, hardly a warmonger's overture.53 There was of course a real war party in Normandy, under the influential leadership of captains who had made their fortunes in the war and who had substantial properties in the duchy, and who were close to the council in Rouen — but not very close to the court or council of Westminster (or to Gloucester, for that matter). There may have been one or two of the higher English aristocracy who saw eye to eye with them, almost certainly Talbot, who had spent so much of his career in service in France, perhaps also Somerset, who had likewise a long service record and whose landed wealth was more amply secured in France than in England.54 Neither of these was close to Gloucester, and when he died Talbot was in Normandy and Somerset about to set out thither. Gloucester apart, the history of the 'war party' in the later 1430s and 1440s, such as it is, belongs to the story of Lancastrian France rather than of Lancastrian England, and those are, as I have been trying to suggest, distinct and separate stories.

51

Holland's position is carefully analysed in M. Stansfield, 'The Holland Family: Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, and Dukes of Exeter' (Unpublished D. Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1987). 52 Pugh, Aspects of Late Medieval Government, ed. Rowe, esp. pp. 122-25, 127. 53 Letters and Papers, i, pp. 79-86. 54 Somerset's extensive French interests are examined in M.K.Jones, 'The Beaufort Family and the War in France, 1421-50' (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 1982).

254

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

That separation has been my theme and I must conclude on it. The suddenness of the final collapse of Lancastrian France, which so shocked and enraged contemporaries, was deceptive. The seeds of the dissolution of Henry V's conquest had been planted at its inception, because of the plans for a measure of English settlement that were an integral part of his policy of conquest. Such settlement created an English interest in that conquest that was important to some Englishmen (those enfeoffed in France) but was quite separate from that of the community of the English homeland. The lands that they held were French lands, held mediately or immediately of the French crown, and there was no significant advantage to England in their holding them. Yet in the long term there was no way of maintaining their possession, except with English arms (and money), because their possession brought no advantage at all to France or to Frenchmen. The tensions inherent in this situation did not become really apparent, in England and to English councillors, until the 1430s, though the petition of the Commons, in 1421, that the crowns of England and France should in perpetuity remain separate and independent of one another, was a warning shot across the bows.55 The fact that, at the early stage, so many prominent Englishmen found themselves, in consequence of Henry's victories, in possession of considerable estates on both sides of the Channel helped temporarily to obscure the underlying but real division of interest. Their trans-Channel possessions were however only a flimsy coupling between the two worlds of Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England, because for all men, perhaps above all for the prominent, there came a time when they had to choose between priorities. Some men naturally did their best to keep a solid footing in both worlds, as for a long time did Fastolf, whose splendidly recorded acquisitiveness, in combination with his irresistible instinct to proffer unsolicited advice, have perhaps allowed him to colour too much our vision of his age. But he was rather exceptional, and finally even he had to make his choice (though he grumbled bitterly to the end about his French losses). As Michael Powicke has trenchantly pointed out, a substantial proportion of the greater captains of the Agincourt expedition (as of the subordinate leaders of most of the major fourteenth-century hosts) were the kind of men who formed local opinion and swayed local politics in England, whose careers combined with occasional military service membership of parliament, the tenure of shrieval office, and sitting as JPs on

55

Rotuli parliamentorum, iv, p. 127.

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the commission of the peace in their counties.56 But from 1417 onward men of this sort became rarer and rarer among the leaders of the soldiery in France. Men like Matthew Gough, Fulk Eyton and Osborne Mundford were too busy in France to have a chance of being able to discharge these sorts of offices in England. They were men of the same stamp and background as others who stayed at home and dominated their county communities, but their paths had led them in a different way and their situation shaped for them different priorities. It is in this light, I believe, that one must read the often quoted passage of William of Worcester: But now of late dales, the grettir pite is, many one that ben descendid of noble bloode and borne to armes, as Knightis sonnes, esquiers, and of othir gentille bloode, set hem silfe to singuler practik . . . as to lerne the practique of law or custom of lande, or of civil matier, and so wastyn gretlie theire tyme in suche nedelese besinesse, as to occupie courtis halding, to kepe and here out a proude countenaunce at sessions and shiris halding . . . And who can be a reuler and put hym forthe in suche matieris, he is, as the worlde goithe now, among all astatis more set of than he that hath despendid xxx or xl yeris of his daies in gret jubardies in youre antecessourys conquestis and werris.57

Worcester is not here telling us, as he seems to be, about a sea change that has come over English upper class society; only about how, as a result of Henry V's conquests, the preoccupation of English gentlemen who chose to take their part in their counties drew them apart from those other gentlemen who chose to take their chance in the king's wars overseas. He is also, as he intended though perhaps not in the way he intended, telling us something very important about why Lancastrian France collapsed as it did, like a pack of cards, in 1449-50. Englishmen who bore out a proud countenance at sessions and shire holdings were quite capable of bearing arms too, as they showed at Wakefield and Towton and Tewkesbury; they let Lancastrian France go to its fate not because they had turned soft, but because they had too little to lose there.

56 Powicke, 'Lancastrian Captains', Essays Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. Sandquist, pp. 371-82. 57 TheBoke of Noblesse, ed. J.G. Nichols, Roxburghe Club (London, 1860), pp. 77-78.

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Index Abel, 195 Acciaivoli, Nicolo, 73 Acre, 68 Adalia, 9 Adam, 215 AdamofUsk, 172n., 176n Adderbury, Sir Richard, 114 Admiralty, Black Book of, 136, 142 —, court of, 144, 145 Aeneas, 30 Agincourt, battle of, 55, 184, 185, 228n., 231,247,254 Agolant, 67 Albert of Austria, king of the Romans, 211 Alenc,on, 231 Alexander, king, 64, 68, 133, 187, 188 Alexandria, 10, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116 Alexiad, 1 Alexius I Comnenus, 1 Alfonso IX, king of Castile, 33 Alfonso XI, king of Castile, 33, 105 Algeciras, 104, 105, 112, 113 Alsace, county of, 17 Amance, Wichart d', 29 Ambroise, chronicler, 67, 69 Ambrose, St, 196 America, 133 Amis and Amiloun, 43, 54, 58, 60 Andalusia, 211 Andreas the Chaplain, 21, 22, 23, 35, 41, 191,214 Angevins, 86, 87 Anjou, 228, 240, 252 —, Charles I, count of, —, Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of, 228

—, Louis I, duke of, 12, 124, 128 —, Rene, duke of, 53, 73 Anna Comnena, 1, 2, 3 Annesley, Sir John, 135 Anthonne, battle of, 59 Antioch, 67 Appellants, 165n. Aquinas, St Thomas, 212 Aquitaine, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 232, 246; see also Gascony Arbois, 30 Archpriest, see Cervole, Arnaut de Arcite, 43, 44, 45, 48, 55 Ardres, Arnold of, 87n. Argentine, Sir Giles d', 71, 94 Aristotle, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 205,

207,212,217,221

Armagnac, Jacques d', due de Nemours, 74 Armagnac, Bernard, count of, 233 Armagnac, Jean I, count of, 53 Armagnac, Jean III, count of, 12 Armagnac, Jean IV, count of, 252 Armagnacs, 48, 130, 131, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236 Arms, college of, 168 Arras, congress of, 235, 244 Arras, peace of (1414), 229 Arthur, king, 7, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 64, 65, 68,71,72,75,77,78,83,84,90 Arthur, Alliterative Mort d', 7 Arundel, Edmund FitzAlan, earl of, 89 —, Richard FitzAlan, earl of, 141 —, Thomas FitzAlan, earl of, 229 —, Sir John, 182 Ascalon, battle of, 66 Astley, Sir John, 73, 154, 159

258

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Aubec, 249 Audeley, James Lord, 156, 157, 159 Audr£ham, Arnald Marshal d', 163 Augustine, St, 221 Aure, Seigneur d', 54 Aurispa, Giovanni, 187, 194, 198 Auvergne, 51 Auxerre, pacification of, 229 Averroes, 216 Avesnes, Jacques d', 69 Avignon, 5, 9, 12, 20, 102 Avranches, 241 Aymon, four sons of, 68 Baa, Robert, 178 Bachada, Gregoire, 66n. Baddlesmere, Bartholomew de, 92n., 157, 159 Bado Aureo, John of, 155, 210 Bajazet, Sultan, 12, 112 Balliol, Sir Edward, 110 Bamborough, castle, 153, 154, 158 —, Robert, 97 Band, Order of the, 33, 35, 36 Barbe, Rasselas de, 40 Barbour,John, 40, 71 Bardolph, Thomas Lord, 151, 155n. Bartholomew the Englishman, 210 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 76, 199, 200-6, 210,212,213,215-19,220,222 Batersen, Henry of, 39 Bauffremont, Pierre de, 211 bausons, 157 Bayonne, 224 Bazentin, Huart de, 29 Beauchamp family, 110-12, 117; see also Warwick, earls of — Roger, 111 —, Sir William, Lord Abergavenny, 176 Beaufort, 228 —, Cardinal Henry, 251, 252 Beaumanoir, Jean, 97 Becke,John, 177 Bedford, John of Lancaster, duke of, 143, 149, 150, 161, 162,248,249 Bedfordshire, 176, 177 Belfort, Roger de, 52 Bellengues, Jeanette de, 39 Benedict XIII, pope, 128 Beneventum, battle of, 5 Benolt, Thomas, 76, 78 Berdwell, Sir William, 179 Berkeley, Thomas Lord, 91, 92

—, Sir William, 247 Bernard, St, 6 Berneval, Bertin de, 129, 130, 133 Beroul, 25 Berry, John, duke of, 122, 123, 124 Berwick, 149, 158, 159 Bethencourt,Jeande, 122n., 128, 129, 130, 133 B£thune, Conon de, 31 Beverstone, 247 Bible, 195, 198, 212 Bigorre, 124, 125, 131 Black Prince, see Edward Blois, ordinance of, 206 Blondel, Guillaume, 163n. Blount, John, 211 Blyth, 85, 87 Boccacio, 73 Boethius, 196, 198 Bohemia, 28; see also Hussites Boiardo, 25, 26 Bologna, 214, 225, 226 Bonet, Honore, 15, 19, 76, 202, 203, 221, 224 Boniface VIII, pope, 5 Bordeaux, 224, 243 Boroughbridge, battle of, 150, 155, 165 Boueicault, Jean de, Marshal, 32, 37, 39, 96, 118, 126, 130 Boulemer, William, 160 Bourbon, John, duke of, 32, 58, 59, 231 —, Louis, duke of, 32, 104, 113, 116, 118, 126, 127, 132 Bourges, kingdom of, 16 —, treaty of, 227, 229, 231 Bourgignan, Arnaut Guillem le, 50 Bouvier, Gilles le, Berry Herald, 77 Boynton, Sir Henry, 143, 149, 150-52, 15455, 158, 159 Boynton, Thomas, 11 In. Brackley, 85, 89, 94 Braintree, 94 Braynton, Nicholas, 180 Brenker,John, 176 Brest, 140, 181 Bretel, Jacques de, 29, 30 Br^tigny, treaty of, 9, 122, 223, 226, 228, 229, 230, 232-34, 238, 243, 246 Breux, Sir John, 107 Bridget, St, 245 Bridgnorth, 159 Brieys, Henri de, 29 Bristol, 92, 155, 163

Index Britain, matter of, 25 Brittany, 97, 239, 243, 252 —John IV, duke of, 46, 57 —, John V, duke of, 237 Broke, William, 140 Brotherton, Margaret, countess of Norfolk, 144n., 181 Bruges, 5, 227 Bruni, Leonardo, 63 Brut Chronicles, 152, 154 Buch, Jean de Grailly, captal de, 46, 52 Buckingham, Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of, see Gloucester, dukes of Buckinghamshire, 178 Bueil, Jean de, 80, 121, 134, 206 Buonaccorso of Montemagno, 187, 189, 191, 194,199 Bureau, Jean, 200 Burgos, 11 Burgundy, and Burgundians, 16, 78, 84, 98, 131, 187, 189, 192, 199, 201, 205, 210, 229, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238, 244 —, Anthoine, bastard of, 84 —, Charles the Bold, duke of, 45, 48, 49, 192,211 —, John the Fearless, duke of, 45, 46, 58, 130, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 237, 239 —, Philip the Bold, duke of, 122, 123, 127, 192 —, Philip the Good, duke of, 36, 58, 158n., 192,211,233,235,236 Burley, Sir Simon, 52 Burnell, family, 107 —, Nicholas Lord, 145 Byfleet, 94 Byland, 153 Byzantium, 10, 46 Cade's revolt, 240 Caen, 240, 247 Caerlaverock, 69, 77, 78 Caerleon, 78 Caesar, Julius, 72 Cain, 195 Calais, 31, 71, 96, 110, 127, 141, 145, 146, 158n., 173, 177, 243, 245, 247, 252 Calogrenaunt, 2 Calverley, Sir Hugh, 9, 11, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55 Camail, collar of the, 127, 130, 133 Cambrai, Raoul de, 67 Campo, Castle of, 125 Canarien, 122, 128

259

Canary Islands, chapter 7 passim Canterbury, 84, 103 Canterbury Tales, lOlff, 114, 118, 168 Carcassonne, 51 Carlisle, earls of, see Harclay Carminow, esquire, of Cornwall, 140, 162 Casalibus, 126 Cassell, battle of, 75 Castile, 11, 33, 102, 105, 129, 130, 181, 182, 184, 190,200,211 Catalan Company, 10 Caterton, Thomas, 135, 243 Catherine of Valois, queen of England, 230, 231,232,234 Cause, Pelegrin de, 57 Caxton, William, 26, 63, 98 Cervole, Arnaut de, 10 Chabannes, Anthoine de, 17 Chalons, little battle of, 87, 94 Chambre des comptes, 237 Champagne, Marie de, 24 Chandos, Sir John, 14, 27 Chandos Herald, 77 Chanson d'Antioche, 65, 67, 69 Chansons de geste, 6, 24, 41, 64, 65, 66 Charles, king of Navarre, 6 Charlemagne, 25, 26, 65, 67, 68, 72, 192; Tree of, 211 Charles IV, emperor, 11 Charles V, king of France, 11, 12, 13, 16, 114, 123, 192,204,221,225 Charles VI, king of France, 16, 33, 65, 114, 121, 127, 192,227,229,235 Charles VII, king of France, 16, 18, 19, 20, 73, 131, 200, 239, 251; as dauphin, 230, 231,232,233,236,252 Charles VIII, king of France, 18 Charles of Durazzo, 8, 124 Charles of Valois, 5 Charny, Geoffrey de, 7, 8, 34, 35, 36, 37, 76, 78, 132 Chartier, Alain, 192, 193 Chartres, Fulcher of, 4 Chastellain, Georges, 76 Chateauvillain, Georges, seigneur de, 45, 52, 163n. Chaucer, Geoffrey, chapter 6 passim, 168 Chauvency, tournament at, 29, 30, 31 Cheapside, 95 Chedzoy, 209 Chepstow, 89 Chermont, Guillaume de, 52 Cheshire, 108, 168

260

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Chevalier au Cygne, 65 Chevalier de la Charette, 24, 28 Chigwell, 109 Chivalry, Book of (by Ramon Lull, translated Caxton), 6, 7, 26, 27, 63, 80, 98; Chivalry, Book of (by Christine de Pisan), 16 Chivalry, Book of (livre, by Geoffrey de Charny), 36, 76, 132 Chivalry, Court of, 105, 108, 109, 110, 112, chapter 8 passim, chapter 9 passim, chapter 10 passim Chrysostom, St John, 196 Cicero, 191, 192, 194, 196,207 Cino da Pistoia, 213 Clarence, Thomas, duke of, 46, 48, 49, 140, 229, 249 Claxton, Henry, 181 Clement IV, pope, 5 Clement VII, pope, 12 Clermont, council of, 3, 4, 10 Clifford, Sir Lewis, 114, 119 —, Thomas, 179 Clisson, Olivier de, 46, 48, 49, 52, 55, 57, 122 Codex (of Justinian), 202, 213 Cologne, 75 Commercy, Robert de, 163n. Commines, Philippe de, 158 Comminges, Roger de, 69 Compagnies d'Ordonnance, 17 Compiegne, 48 Conde, Baudouin de, 3, 31, 36 Confort de I'ami, 6 Constable of England, lord high, 105, chapter 8 passim, chapter 9 passim Constable of France, 12 Constance, council of, 228 Constantinople, 1,47, 116 Controversia de nobititate, 187, 188, 189, 194 Convivio (Dante), 191, 200, 209, 210, 213, 214,215,220,221,222 Copeland, 153 Corcia, 38 Cornumarant, 66 Cornwall, 56 Cortes, conquistador, 134 Cortesia, 22 Coucy, family, 66 Couloignes, Perceval de, 122 Courtenay, Sir Edward, 112 Cousinot, Guillaume, 240 Coventry, 91

Crecy, battle of, 75, 95, 102, 110, 145, 146, 157 Croissant, Order of the, 73 Crusades, 10, 31, chapter 6 passim, 128, 134; —, the Albigensian, 67, 69; see also Prussia, Saracens, Turks —, the first, 1,3,4, 19,66 —, the third, 31,67 Cumberland, 153 Cuvelier, 8, 11,67,69 Cyprus, 9, 10, 11, 13, 38, 104 Dame Blanche a 1'Escu Vert, Order of the, 32 Dammartin, Rainald Count of, 70 Damory, Roger, 142, 143, 147, 157, 161 Damsel, Loathly, 83 Dante, 191, 199, 200, chapter 12 passim David, king, 72, 195 De arte honeste amandi, 21, 22, 191 De proprietatibus rerum, 210 De studio militari, 209, 210 Denia, Alfonso, count of, 138, 139 derogeance, 196 Deschamps, Eustace, 119, 121 Despenser, Henry, bishop of Norwich, 102, 110, 141,243 —, Hugh the elder, 155, 156, 162, 163 —, Hugh the younger, 156, 159, 162, 164, 165 —, Isabella, 173 —, Thomas, Lord, 114 Dialogue of the Dead, 187 Dido, 30 Dijon, 211 Dit dou Baceller, 31 Dol, Baudry de, 3 Doncaster, 94, 153 Dorset, 109 Dorylaeum, 1 Douglas, Sir James, 40, 153 Dracula, count, 83 Dragon of Foix, Order of the, 35n. Du Guesclin, Bertrand, 9, 11, 12, 17, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 67, 69, 71, 80, 121, 122 Du Rivault, David, 205 Dubois, Pierre, 31 Du£din, Erguerrand, 52 Dunois, Jean, count of, 17, 240 Dunstable, 89 Dunstable Tournament Roll, 92 Durandus, William, 21 On.

Index Durham Ordinances (Richard II), 138, 162 ecorcheurs, 16, 19 Edward I, king of England, 27, 68, 78, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 148, 151, 156, 165, 173 Edward II, king of England, 87, 89, 94, 143, 144, 150, 151, 160, 161, 164 Edward III, king of England, 31, 71, 72n., 94, 95, 96, 113, 145, 146, 160n., 161, 182, 224,225,227,229,245, 247 Edward IV, king of England, 60, 150, 151 Edward, the Black Prince, 55, 68, 72n., 77, 118, 140, 141, 163, 168, 175, 181, 225 Eleanor of Provence, queen of England, 228 Elsyng, 175; and see Hastings of Eltham, 98 Enfield, Sir Bartholomew de, 93 Enseignement de la vraye noblesse, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206 Ensenhamen del cavalher, 25 Erec et Enide, 40 Eretisch, 117 Erpingham, Sir Thomas, 107, 113, 114 Escariano, 49, 50 Espejo de verdadera nobleza, 189, 210 Essex, 109 Ethics (Nicomachean), 196, 212 Ethiopia, 49 Exchequer Chamber, 137n. Exeter, 91 —, John Holland, duke of, 253 Eyton, Sir Fulk, 255 Faidit, Gaucelin, 90 Falcomont, Ruart de, 39 Falkirk, battle of, 90 Falmouth, 182 Fastolf, Sir John, 246, 247, 249, 254 Fer de Prissonier, Order of the, 32 Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Spain, 41 Field of the Cloth of Gold, 84 Fimarcon, Seigneur de, 53 Fiore, 214 Fishlake, Robert, 107, 181 FitzHenry, Thomas, 109 FitzStephen, Ralph, 86 —, William, 91 Fitzwarin, Fulk, 143 —, Ivo, llln. Flanders, 102, 110,243

261

Flavy, Guillaume de, 48, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62 Floques, Robert, 17 Florence, 191 Folliot, family arms of, 181 Formigny, battle of, 241 Forre, Sir, 2 Fort Espice, 45, 50 Fougeres, 239 Frederick II, emperor, 209 Frederick III, emperor, 17 Free Companies, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 123, 124,131 Frevot, Nicholas, 206 Frisia, 75 Froissart, Jean, 9, 13, 40, 57, 63, 71, 76, 96 Fuerteventura, 129 Fulthorpe, Sir Roger, 151 n. Furnival, William, llln. Gaius Flaminius, 188, 194 Galahad, Sir, 27, 76 Garinjean, 123 Garter King of Arms, 73, 154 Garter, Order of the, 31, 34, 72, 95, 117 Gascoigne, Thomas, 156 Gascony, 17, 75, 108, 226, 227, 238, 252; see also Aquitaine Gaveston, Piers, earl of Cornwall, 90, 93 Gawain, Sir, 27, 75, 183 Gelre Herald, 75, 76, 77, 118 Genoa, 33, 130 Gerard v. Chamberlayne, 139, 141 Gerbergh, John, 164 Germany, 21, 111 Girart, 22 Glastonbury, 26 Glendower, Owen, 177 Gloucester, Gilbert of Clare, earl of (d. 1295), 85, 88 —, Gilbert of Clare, earl of (d. 1314), 92, 144 —, Humphrey, duke of, 211, 244, 252, 253 —, Richard of Clare, earl of, 93 —, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of, 96, 113, 114,244 Godfrey de Bouillon, Advocate of Jerusalem, 26, 65, 66, 68, 72, 190 Golden Apple, Order of the, 32, 51, 60 Golden Fleece, Order of the, 58, 73, 76 Golden Shield, Order of the, 32, 33, 35 Goldingham, Alexander, 109 Gomez, Diez da, 38, 39 Gottfried of Strasbourg, 25

262

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Gough, Matthew, 247, 255 Gournay, Sir Matthew, 141 Grail (Graal), Holy, 27, 190 Granada, 11,41,74, 104 Grand Canary, island of, 129 Grandson, Othon de, 38 Greece, 10, 47, 197 Gregory XI, Pope, 5 Gregory, St (Pope Gregory I), 195, 196 Gresham, John, 239 Grey, Sir Ralph, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159 —, Sir Thomas, 40, 72n. —, William, 107 Grey of Ruthin, Reginald, lord, 106, chapter 10 passim —, Roger, lord, 173 —, v. Hastings, 183, 189, chapter 10 passim Griffith, William, 59 Grosvenor, Sir Robert, 106, 108, 135, 168, 172 Gruthyse, Louis de, 211 Guanches, 129, 133 Guelders, duchy of, 127 Guines, treaty of, 228 Guinevere, queen, 24, 25, 28 Haenen, Claes; see Gebre Herald Hainault, 190 Hannibal, 187, 188 Harclay, Sir Andrew, earl of Carlisle, 152, 153, 154, 160, 161 Harpeden, Sir John, 52 Hastings, Henry, lord, 173 —, Sir John 70 —, John I, lord, 173, 174 —, John II, lord, 174 —, William, lord, 59, 60 Hastings of Elsyng, Sir Edward, 106, chapter 10 passim —, Elizabeth, 173 —, Sir Hugh I, 175, 179, 181 —, Sir Hugh II, 173, 175, 179, 181 —, Sir Hugh III, 107, 173, 175, 179, 180, 182 —, Sir Hugh IV, 173, 174 —, Thomas, 173 Hawkwood, Sir John, 9 Hawley v. des Roches, 139, 141 Hector, 72 Hem, tournament at, 29, 30, 83 Hemmerlin, Felix, 220 Hemricourt, Jacques de, 39, 40

Henry I, king of England, 148 Henry II, king of England, 85, 86, 228 Henry III, king of England, 88, 89, 91, 97, 144, 228 Henry IV, king of England, 72n., 107, 138, 143, 151, 158, 167, 173, 181, 227; as Henry Bolingbroke, 96, 113, 115, 116 Henry V, king of England, 63, 98, 138, 162, 184, chapter 13 passim, 239, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255 Henry VI, king of England, 234, 239, 240, 242, 244, 246, 251 Henry VII, king of England, 143, 157, 189n. Henry II of Trastamare, king of Castile, 11 Henry III of Trastamare, king of Castile, 129 Henry, the Young King, 69, 86, 87n., 91 Hereford, Humphrey de Bohun, earl of (d. 1275), 144 —, — earl of (d. 1322), 89, 92, 143 —,—, earl of (d. 1372), 108, 109, 112 Hernoisez, Philippe de, 50 Hertford, 89, 91 Hesbaye, 39 Hexham, battle of, 153, 162 Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, 69 Hobyn, Auktyn, 164 Holland, 79 Holy Land, 86, 87; see also Jerusalem Holy Places, 2, 4, 104 Holy Sepulchre, 3, 13,75 Holy War, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 15, 115 Homer, 41 Honyngham, John, 226 Hoo, Sir William, 175, 181 Hospitaller, Order, 104, 123, 181 Hostiensis, 21 On. Hotspur, Henry, see Percy Hoveden, Roger, 86 Howard, Henry, 176 —, Robert, 11 In. Howden,John, 90 Hugo Falcandus, 46 Huizinga,J., 64, 80, 188 Hussites, 211,221 Huy, 40 Indies, 133 Inglose v. Tiptoft, 135 Ireland, 47, 86, 176, 250 Isabella, queen of Castile, 41

Index Isabella of Bavaria, queen of France, 127, 230,234 Isabella of Valois, queen of England, 127, 227

Iseult, 25 Isidore of Seville, 195 Italy, 5, 8, 10, 18, 28, 124, 127 Jacquerie, the, 224 Jaille, Hardouin de la, 122 Jerusalem, 2, 7, 11,78, 181 Jerusalem, chanson de, 66 Joan of Arc, 54 Joan of Kent, 68, 112 Joanna I, Queen of Naples, 124 Jersey, 145 John, king of England, 56, 62, 89 John of Gaunt, see Lancaster John of Legnano,210, 214, 225, 226 John of Salisbury, 195, 210, 221 John the Good, king of France, 9, 10, 34, 57, 140, 141, 161n., 231 Joinville, Jean de, 46 Joseph (patriarch), 200 Joshua, 72 Jouvencel, le, 121 Judas Maccabeus, 72 Juliers, duchy of, 118 Juvenal des Ursins, Jean, 46

Kay, Sir, 29 Kemp, John, archbishop of Canterbury, 226 Kenilworth, 85, 95 Kent, Thomas Holland, earl of, 112 Kerdiston, Sir Leonard, 180 Knighton, Henry, 247 Knight's Tale, 44, 48, chapter 6 passim, 168 Kniprode, Winrich von, 105 Knot, Order of the, 73 Konigsberg, 107, 108, 110, 117 Kyriell, Sir Thomas, 241 La Ferte Bernard, 158n. LaFerteJouarre, 130 La Hire (Etienne de Vignolles), 17 LaMarche, Olivier de, 211 La Mothe, 75 LaRochelle, 128, 174, 182 La Sale, Anthoine de, 36, 118, 121 La Salle, Brandelis de, 124, 133 —, Gadifer de, 80, chapter 7 passim —, Guidamors de, 133

263

—, Hannibal de, 132 Lady of the Lake, 70 Lalaing, Jacques de, 36 Lancashire, 168 Lancaster, Edmund, earl of, 87, 88 —, Henry, earl of, 164, 165 —, Henry Grosmont, duke of, 97, 105, 113, 115, 116, 163n.,247 —, John of Gaunt, duke of, 102, 113, 114, 145, 162, 163, 180, 181, 182, 184, 227, 243 —, Thomas, earl of, 89, 92, 150, 153, 156, 164,165 Lancastrians, 151, 153, chapter 14 passim Lancelot, romance of, 26, 191 Lancelot, Sir, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 37, 47, 68, 70, 78, 80, 183 Langtoft, Peter, 27, 68, 78, 90 Languedoc, 10,21,54 Lannoy, Hue de, 245, 252 Lanzarote, island of, 128, 129, 132 Latimer, William, lord, 243 Lavedan, Arnaud de, 131 Le Bel, Jean, 70, 71,79 Le Counte, William, 145 Le Mans, 140, 162n. Le Scrope, see Scrope Lee, John, 178, 184 Lefevre de St-Remy, Jean, 76 Leland, John, 247 L'Esparre, Florimont de, 52 Levant, 5 Lichtenstein, Ulrich von, 28, 30 Liege, 39 Ligron, 123 Lincoln, Henry Lacy, earl of, 88 Lincolnshire, 110 Lindsay, Sir David, 96 Listenois, Seigneur de, 32, 51 Lithuania (Lettow), 104, 105, 109, 111, 177 Livre de la paix, 16 Livre de seyntz medicines, 115 Livy, 194 Lochmaben, 177 Lohengrin, 66 Lollards, 102, 221 Lombardy, 10, 12 London, 74, 85, 91,243 London, treaty of (1359), 228 Longueval, Aubert de, 29 Lorraine, 17 Louis, king of Naples, 73 Louis IX, king of France (St), 5, 235

264

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Louis XI, king of France, 45, 48, 49, 201; as Dauphin, 17 Louis the Great, king of Hungary, 10 Lounde, Thomas, 177 Louppes, He des, 129, 133 Love, Court of, 33, 127, 132 —, God of, 30 —, Prince of, 127 Lovell, John, lord, 106, 107 Lovell v. Morley, 139, 145, 167, 169 Lower, Mannequin, 141 Lucan, 194 Lucian of Samosata, 187 Lucy, Sir Anthony, 152, 153 —, William de, 109 Lull, Ramon, 6, 7, 26, 27, 80, 98, 134 Lumley, Marmaduke, bishop of Carlisle, 242 Lusignan, 123 Lusignan, Geoffrey de, 68 Luxembourg, 50 —, Waleran de, 29 Machaut, Guillaume de, 6, 7 Magna Carta, 89, 136, 151, 152, 164 Maillart, Guillaume, 52 Maine, county of, 228, 240, 250, 252 Maio, Admiral, 46 Malory, Sir Thomas, 78, 84 Mandeville, Sir Thomas, 93 Manny, Anne, countess of Pembroke, 175, 181 Manny, Sir Walter, 27 Mantes, Ordinances of (Henry V), 162 Mantua, Galeas of, 38 Many, Gilles de, 39 Map, Walter, 72 Marcabru, 22 Marches, Merigot, 160 Margaret of Anjou, queen of England, 252 Marius, Caius, 195 Markward of Anweiler, 5 Marie, Henri de, 233 Marmion, Sir William, 40 Marian, Arnaut Guillem de, 25 Marshal^ Gilbert, 89 —, William the, earl of Pembroke, 69, 77, 86,91 Marshal of England, earl, chapter 8 passim, 167; see also Constable of England Mascaras, Le Bourg de, 45, 50 Meleagaunt, 24 Melun, Jean de, 157

Memel, River, 116 Menstreworth, John, 243 Merlin, 77 —, romance of, 72 Messembria, 110 Messina, 86 Metz, 11 Meulan, 232 Meun, Jean de, 191, 199, 212, 215 Mezieres, Philippe de, 3, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 65,66, 114, 183, 192,193 Middleburgh, 246 Mielot,Jean, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197, 199, 204, 206 Milan, 191 Millau, 225 Minnesang, 21, 23 Minos, 188 Miraval, Raimon de, 22 Modus tenendi parliamentum, 147 Moigne, William, 177 Molham,John, 145, 146 Molyneux, Nicholas, 48n., 248 Monarchia (Dante), 214, 220 Monstrelet, Enguerrand de, 121 Montagu, Jean Seigneur de, 59 Montagu, John Neville, marquis of, 162, 163 Montereau-fault-Yonne, 237 Montessor, 67 Montfort, Simon de, earl of Leicester, 93 Montfort, Henry de, 157 Montlezun, Arnaud Guilhem de, 125 Moors, 11, 104, 105,211 Moppertingen, Adam de, 76, 118 Morbek, Denis de, 57, 140, 141 Morgan, Philip (Bishop of Worcester), 226 Morlans, Philibert de, 51, 53 Morley, Robert, lord, 145 —, Sir Robert, 107 —, Thomas, lord, 106, 107; see also Lovell v. Morley Morley v. Montagu, 135n. Mortimer, family, 98 —, Robert, 86 —, Roger, 95 Mountjoy, John Blount, lord, 60 —, William Blount Lord, 211 Mowbray, Alexander, 40 —, Thomas, earl marshal, 96 Mundford, Osbern, 255 Najera, battle of, 55, 102, 103, 163, 182 Naples, kingdom of, 12, 18, 124

Index Navarre, 'children of, 224 Navigiero (chronicler), 41 Nefyn, 90 Neville family, 112 New College, Oxford, 209 Newburgh, William of, 85 Newbury, 89 Nicholas of Oresme, 197 Nicopolis, battle of, 12, 104, 112, 113, 116 Nine Worthies, the, 26, 71, 75, 76 Nino, Don Pero, 38, 39 Noah, 195 Noauz, 28 Nogent, Guibert de, 2 Norbury, John, 113 Norfolk, 174 —John Mowbray, duke of, 158n., 240 —, Thomas Brotherton, earl of, 143, 144 Norham Castle, 40 Normandy, 17, 84, 128, 201, 226, 228, 230, 231, 236-38, 239-42, 245, 246, 250-53 Normandy, Grand coutumier of, 198 Northampton, 91 —, William de Bohun, earl of, constable, 145, 177 Northumberland, Henry Percy I, earl of, 112, 149, 151, 155n., 159 Nueil, Philippon de, 123, 124 Ogier (the Dane), 68 Oldcastle, Sir John, 229 Oldhall, Sir William, 247 Oliver (paladin), 67, 68 Orange, Louis Prince d', 237 Orge, 249 Oriflamme, the, 157, 229 Origny, 67 Orleans, 209, 243, 244 —, Charles, duke of, 46, 48, 49, 227, 229, 240,252 —, Louis duke of, 45, 46, 58, 126, 128, 130, 131,228,229 Oronville, Cabaret d', 117 Orsalamin, 200, 212 Orwell, 246 Our Lady, banner of, 121 Ouvedale, Sir Peter de, 93 Ovid, 24 Oxford, John de Vere, earl of, 162 —, Robert de Vere, earl of, 165n. Pachymeres, George, 47

265

Palamedes, Sir, 30, 38 Palamon, 43, 44, 45, 48, 55 Palermo, 46 Palma, 129 Panassac, Galoby de, 50 Papacy, 4, 102 Paris, 16, 73, 78, 130, 131, 229, 233, 237, 245, 250 —, Bourgeois of, 237 —, Matthew, 47, 83, 89, 143, 144 —, treaty of, 226 Parker, John, 107, 181 Parlement of Paris, 45, 52, 125, 157, 235 Parliament, 136, 240, 241, 243, 245 —, Commons, 136, 242, 243, 244, 254 Passion, Order of the, 13, 14, 114, 119 Pasteaul, Etienne, 122 Paston, John, 239 —, Sir John, 98 Peasants' Revolt, 243 Pedro 'the Cruel', king of Castile, 11, 55, 105 Peebles, 117 Pegulham, Aymer de, 2 Pembroke, Aymer de Valence, earl of, 89, 173, I75n. —, John Hastings, earl of (d. 1376), 172, 176, 182,243 —, John Hastings earl of (d. 1389), 173, 174, 175,178,181 —, Laurence Hastings, earl of, 173 Perceforest, 27, 44 Perceval, Sir, 27, 68 Perche, county of, 249 Percy, Sir Henry 'Hotspur', 112 —, Sir Ralph, 112, 114 —, Sir Thomas (earl of Worcester), 112 Perilous Card, 141 Peter de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, 9, 10, 104, 108, 110,111, 112, 113,114 Pheasant, vows of the, 78 Philipot, John, 243 Pikworth, Thomas, 182 Pisan, Christine de, 15, 192, 193, 202, 203, 211,221,225 Piskre, 110 Pitres, Walter de, 148 Pizarro, 134 placita exercitus (Edward I), 142, 143, 161 Plantagenet dynasty, 34, 223, 227, 234, 235, 237 Plato, 215 Poitiers, battle of, 35, 57, 75, 102, 140, 141, 163,224

266

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Poitou, 122, 123 Poland, 111 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 210 Politics (Aristotle), 196, 197, 199, 200, 203, 212 poll tax, 243, 244 Pomegloi, 28 Pomfret, Henry, 157 Ponteaudemer, 249 Pontorson, 241 Pouilly, treaty of, 232 Pounteney v. Borney, 137n. Poupaincourt, Jean de, 125 Pouzauges, seigneur de, 123 Prussia, 75, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118, 121, 123, 126, 132, 169 Pucelleflagellee, 29 Quercy, 51 Radcot Bridge, battle of, 165n. Raets, Rutger, 75, 118 Ragoun, Reynald, 177 Ragusa, 124 Rapiout, Jean, 232 Rayneval, Ralph de, 52 Reading, Robert of, 144 Rene of Anjou, see Anjou Renaissance, the, 63, 64, 68, 79, 80, 220 Rennes, 182 Reydon,107 Rhodes, 107, 108, 123, 132, 181 Ribemont, Eustace de, 71 Richard I, king of England, 31, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 98 Richard II, king of England, 96, 102, 107, 112, 114, 115, 118, 136, 138, 142, 145, 150, 161, 165, 167, 176, 180, 182, 184, 187 —, — .Letter to, 13 Richard III, king of England, 90 Richard of Saliceto, 225, 226 Richard the Pilgrim, 66n., 67 Richemont, Arthur, count of (Constable of France), 53, 54 Rieux, the marshal de, 48, 54, 55, 56, 62 Robert of Artois, count, 29 Robert the Bruce, king of Scots, 71, 160 Robert the Monk, 3, 66n. Rochester, 89 Roches Tranchelion, 239 Rodez, 225

Roland (paladin), 67, 75, 76 Rolin, Nicholas, 232 Roman de la rose, 65, 191, 210, 212 Roman des chetifs, 66 Roman law, 199, 210, 211, 225, 226 Roman republic, 235 Roman senate, 188 Romans, 7, 16 Rome, 188 Rouault, Tristan, 122 Rouen, 198, 240, 249, 253 Rougemont, 51 Round Table (and round table tournaments), 25, 26, 31, 72, 73, 74, 83, 90,95 Roye, Regnault de, 96 Rubicon, fort of, 128, 130, 132 Russia, 47, 111 Sabraham, Nicholas, 110, 111, 177 St-Aulbin (Brittany), 74 St Catherine's monastery (Sinai), 75 St-Cloud, skirmish at, 229 St George, fraternity of, 51, 53 St George's day, 72n. St-Inglevert, jousts of, 96, 118 St-Malo, 182 St-Maur, Benoit de, 65 St Valentine's day, 127 Saintre, petit Jehan de, 36, 118, 121, 126, 134 Salic Law, 234 Salisbury, 85, 209, 210, 222 —, Joan, countess of, 31; see also Joan of Kent —, John Montagu, earl of, 112 —, Patrick, earl of, 85 —, Thomas Montagu, earl of, 27, 209, 249 —, William Montagu, earl of (d. 1348), 95, 105,112 Saluzzo, Thomas, marquis of, 38 Salves, Hue de, 189, 210, 222 Sancerre, Louis de, 38, 50, 141, 142 Saracens, 38, 74, 107, 181 Sarasin, 29 Satalia, 104, 108, 109, 112 Savoisy, Charles de, 38 Savoy, 10, 17 Savoy, Amadeus the 'Green Count' of, 11 Scalacronica, 40 Scales, Anthony Woodeville, lord, 84 —, Robert, lord, 96 —, Thomas, lord, 140, 162n., 247

Index Scarborough, 90 Schism, the Great, 5, 102 Scipio, Publius Cornelius, 188 Scipio Africanus, 187, 188 Scotland, 40, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 108, 142, 149, 152, 153, 160, 173, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 198, 244, 248 Scripture, see Bible Scrope, Geoffrey of Masham (LCJ), 108, 143, 178 — , Sir Geoffrey (junior) of Masham, 108, 109, 110, 177 — , Sir Henry, of Bolton (chief baron, exchequer), 108, 178 — , Henry of Masham, lord, 177 — , Sir Henry (of Masham), 110 — , Richard, archbishop of York, 151n., 156 _ , _, lord, of Bolton, 106, 108, 135, 162, 168, 172 — , Sir Stephen, 110 — , Sir William, earl of Wiltshire, 108, 109 Scrope v. Grosvenor, chapter 6 passim, 139, 162, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 177, 180, 182, 184 Scrope v. Kighlee, 135n. Sempy, seigneur de, 96 Seneca, 196 Serifontaine, 38 Seville, 128 Sforza, Francesco, 121 Ship, Order of the, 8 Shrewsbury, 240 — John Talbot earl of, 158, 162n., 247, 253 Sicily, 5 Siete partidas, 38 Sigismund, emperor, 200, 212, 228, 229, 231 Simon (advocate), 45 Sluys, battle of, 102 Smithfield, 84 — , tournaments at, 119 Somerset, Edmund Beaufort, duke of, 158n.,240,241,252n.,253 — , John Beaufort, earl of, 113 Songe du vergier, 195, 202, 205, 216, 220, 226 Songe du vieil pelerin, 183 Spain, 11, 17, 41, 52, 104, 110, 128, 129, 133, 174, 181,244 Stafford, Robert, 158n. Star, Order of the, 34, 35, 73 Stephen, king of England, 83 Steward's office, tract on, 147 Stotfield, Thomas, 176

267

Strongbow, Richard de Clare, earl, 86 Suffolk, 109, 174 — , William de la Pole, duke of, 239, 240, 241,242,251,252,253 Surienne, Francois de, 74 Sutton, Hamo de, 92n. Swan Knight, the, 66, 77 Swans, feast of, 78 Swiss, the, 17 Swynford, Katherine, 113 Sydenham, Walter, 140 tailles, 18 Takka, Lord of Satalia, 109 Talbot, see Shrewsbury, earls of Tanquarville, counts of, 237 Tarbes, 125, 126 Tartars, 95 Templars, Order of the, 6 Termes, Thibaut des, 45, 50, 52, 163n. Teutonic Knights, 105, 116, 117, 123 Tewkesbury, battle of, 255 Thieriat, Florentin de, 206 Thirty, Combat of the, 97 Thouars, 122, 123 Thrace, 10 Tickhill, 85, 157 Tiercelet, Order of the, 7, 8, 35n., 117 Tiptoft, John, see Worcester, earls of — , Sir John, 231 Tirant le Blanc, 49, 50, 53 Tiraqueau, Andre, 205 Toison d'Or, see Golden Fleece Tony, Robert de, 77 Touraine, 228 Tournai, 237 Tournaments and tourneying, 2, 28, 29, 30, 31, 77, 83, 86, chapter 5 passim, 118, 178 Tours, truce of, 17, 241, 242 Towton, battle of, 255 Tractatus de insigniis et armis, 212 Trau, Soldich de la, 118 Treatise of Nobility, by D. Valera, see Espejo Tree of Battles, 202; see also Bonet, H. Trent, river, 85, 164 Tress, Order of the, 32 Trevor, John, Bishop of St Asaph's, 21 On. Trie, Renaut de, 39 Tristan, Sir, 25, 30, 37, 38, 68 Troubadours, 22, 23, 41 Trouveres, 21 Troy, 64 Troye, Bernard de, 57, 141

268

Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages

Troyes, Chretien de, 2, 24, 25, 28, 29, 40, 45 —, treaty of, chapter 13 passim, 243, 245, 247 Truce of God, 4, 19 Tunis, 104, 113, 114, 126 Turks, 4, 9, 10, 114 Turpin, Pseudo, 70 Uberti family 191 Uf ford, family, 111, 112 — , Sir Thomas, 111 Upton, Nicholas, 155, chapter 12 passim Urban II, pope, 3, 4, 9, 14 Urban IV, pope, 5 Urban V, pope, 9, 10 Urswyk, Robert, 11 In. Utherpendragon, king, 74 Valence, Isabella de, 173 —, William de, 88, 89 Valenciennes, 40 Valera, Diego de, 189-92, 195, 196, 200-4, 206, 210-13, 217, 220, 222 Valerius Maximus, 76, 189, 192, 194, 203, 212 Valladolid, 30 Valois dynasty, 223, 227, 235, 237 Vatatzes, 47 Venaissin, county of, 1 1 Venice, 111, 124 Venus, 28 Venusfahrt, 28, 30 Vere, Robert de, 52; see also Oxford, earls of Vergil, 41 Verneuil, battle of, 209, 212, 249, 250 Veurnes, 189 Vezier, Arnaudon de, 125 — , Dominique de, 125 Vienne, Humbert Dauphin of, 7 Vieuxpont, Yves de, 126 Villandrando, Rodrigue de, 11 Villehardouin, Geoffrey de, 66 Visconti, family 191 — , Gian Galeazzo, 12 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 93 Vitry, Jacques de, 28 Vogelweide, Walther von der, 21 Wace, 65 Wakefield, battle of, 255 Waldegrave, Sir Richard, 109, 110 Waleisgreen, 149 Wales, 85, 90, 95, 96, 168 Wallace, William, 151, 156, 161, 165, 166 Wallingford, 90

Walsingham, Thomas, 243, 247 Walter, Theobald, 85 Ware, Henry, 226 Warenne, Hamelin, earl of, 85 Warfusez, lords of, 39, 40 Warquenheuse, Wautier de, 50 Wars of the Roses, 136, 143 Warwick, 85, 94 — , Guy de Beauchamp, earl of, 89 — , Richard de Beauchamp, earl of, 97, 111 — , Richard Neville, earl of 153, 154 —, Thomas de Beauchamp, earl of, 111, 112 Warwick pageants, 111, 117 Waterton,John, 113 — , Robert, 159 Weberton, Sir John, 40 Wells, 210 Wells, John, lord, 96, 157 Werchin, Jean, 72n. Weston,Johnde, 143 White Hart retainers, 59, 119 Wilderness, the, 116 William I, king of England, 228 William the Lion, king of Scots, 198 Wilton, 85 Wilton Diptych, 119 Winchester College, 209 Windsor, 72n., 95 Winter, John, 48n., 248 Woodeville, Sir Edward, 74, 75 Woodstock, 172 Woodstock, Thomas of, see Gloucester, dukes of Woodville family, 98 Worcester, John Tiptoft, earl of, constable, 136, 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 166 — , William, 183, 255 Worthies, see Nine Worthies Wrythe, John, Garter King of Arms, 73, 75 Wyclif,John, 102,244 Wykes, Thomas, 87 Wyllington, Henry de, 157 Wynchelez, William, 143 Wyntoun, Andrew of, 97 Yardley Chase, 176 Year Books, 161 York, Edmund of Langley, duke of, 114 York, Richard, duke of, 240, 241, 253 Yorkists, 84, 136, 152 Yorkshire, 108, 110 Yvain, 2, 29