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

himself as a scholar. Similarly, the account of the Fourth Crusade by Geoffrey de
Villehardouin is very much a dispassionate narrative rather than being a personal
memoir. We get a much more personal account in Joinville's Life of Saint LouLt, but
even here, when it comes to the description ot battle, it is the action he witnessed and
was a part of rather than the things he felt that come to the fore.
Even when we do get what appears to be the emotional response of a warrior to
battle, we must be careful. Can we really believe the 12th-century knight and poet
Bertrand du Born, for example, when he writes:
I love it when the chargers throw everything and everybody into confusion, And I enjoy
seeing strong castles besieged, and bastions broken down and shattered, And seeing the
army all surrounded by ditches, protected by palisades of stout tree trunks jammed
together ... I tell you, neither in eating, drinking, nor sleeping, do I find what 1 feel
when I hear the shout 'At them!' from both sides, and the neighing of riderless horses
in the confusion or the call 'Help! Help!' or when I see great and small together fall on
the grass of the ditches; or when I espy dead men who still have pennoned lances in
their ribs.
It sounds very much like the sentiments in a heroic epic like The Song of Roland or an
Arthurian romance. It is hard to believe that knights really felt like that about battle
although, as we have seen, the chivalric ethos could have a major impact on the way
in which the knight conducted himself in war.
Gerald of Wales seems to reinforce this idea of the knight 's lust for battle, when he
has the Anglo-Norman commander Raymond le Gros discussing the fate of prisoners
taken at Wexford by Anglo-Normans in 1170, saying that:
In the midst of martial conflict it is a soldier's duly, clad in his helmet, to thirst for blood,
to concentrate on killing, to plead his case with his sword alone, to show himself in all his
actions an unyielding warrior, displaying a ferocity more than ordinarily brutal. But by
the same token, when the turmoil of battle is over and he has laid aside his arms, ferocity
too should be laid aside, a humane code of behaviour should be once more adopted...
Again, however, we must be careful not too assume too much from what are almost
certainly not Raymond's actual words but Gerald's carefully crafted prose.
So much of what we read is like this: examples of battlefield courage and fear
dressed up to reinforce the chivalric ideals. The 14th-century The Vowj of the Heron has
what might be a more realistic perspective on the question; after describing the banter
and the boasting that takes place in the warmth of the tavern it continues:
CAMPAIGN AND BATTLE -J*
Opposite: The Holkham
picture bible of 1327-35
separates out the warfare
of 'Le grant peuple' from
'le comoune gents' but
apart from their armour
and horses there is little to
distinguish the two groups,
particularly in the ferocity
of the combat. (© British
Library)
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