Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

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KNIGHT
THE AGE OF THE MEDIEVAL KNIGHT
This book will look at the world of the knight over almost a thousand years; seeking
his origins in the declining years of the Roman Empire and the early medieval seventh
to tenth centuries, and charting his rise to prominence in the so-called high middle
ages that lie approximately between 1000 and 1400. It will try to understand
something of the decline in knighthood (in England at least) towards the end of this
period and the way it was reinvigorated by Edward Ill's military successes in his
campaigns against the Scots and French, and his love of chivalric culture and the
spectacle of tournaments and pageants. In the late middle ages, from the middle of
the 15th century, the knight's dominance of the battlefield came increasingly under
attack, and the book will look at the factors that led to his apparent disappearance
from the battlefield in the 16th centuiy.
In describing the world of the medieval knight, alongside surviving arms
and armour, and his image in effigy, brass and illuminated manuscript, a wide
range of written sources are used. The numerous chronicles written by monks like the
12th-centuiy Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, born in Shropshire but composing his
Ecclesiastical HLitory in the Norman monasteiy of St Evroult-en-Ouche, or secular
clerks like the 14th-century Parisian Jean Froissart, are our main source for the events
of the period; the writers recording the major national and local events of their time.
In his Conquest of Ireland Gerald of Wales, a churchman with both Norman and
Welsh relations, gives us a contemporary (if somewhat partial) view of his family's
participation in the early Anglo-Norman campaigns in Ireland in the 1170s; whilst his
vibrant descriptions of Ireland and Wales give us some insight into the way in which
such men experienced warfare in these cultural borderlands.
At the other end of the spectrum are the fictional works; the tenth- and
1 1 th-centuiy epics, like the Song of Roland or the series of tales about Duke William
of Orange, which focus on the superhuman martial prowess of their heroes, and the
later and more sophisticated romances, like those written about the knights of King
Arthur by the French author Chretien de Troyes in the 1 1 70s and 1180s, where the
blood-thirsty descriptions of knightly combat were juxtaposed alongside stories of
courtly life and love. Whilst such tales cannot be taken as source material tor actual
historical events, and are as exaggerated as any Hollywood epic, they certainly do
have an element of truth to them and, at the very least, reflect something of knightly
aspirations and ideals.
Lying somewhere between these two types of source are the histories, such as the
Roman de Brut and Roman de Ron written by another Norman cleric, Wace, in the
mid-12th century. Telling the histories of Britain and Normandy respectively, from