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

Where the Church could not stop war within Europe it sought to redirect it
elsewhere. Part of the rationale behind the preaching of the First Crusade was to
redirect the violent energies of the warrior class away from internecine warfare and
unite them against a common enemy more suited to the Church's views on warfare.
The crusade continued to be used by the Church in this way throughout the medieval
period. In the 14th century the Church attempted to address the problem of the Great
Companies and routierd that were ravaging France by offering to engage them for
crusades in the east. The companies of both Sir John Hawkwood, the great condottiere
captain, and the French freelance Bertrand du Guesclin made noises about going on
crusade, although in the end neither did.
The medieval Church, then, recognized that it could not eliminate war, but that it
could attempt to regulate and direct the warriors' behaviour. It recognized the knights
as one of the three divinely ordained ordined, or orders, of society. The pugnatored,
'those who fight', ranked alongside the oratored, 'those who pray', and the laboratored,
'those who work', in a mutually supportive model of society. The Church adopted the
knight and his equipment as metaphors for the Christian's struggle against evil. Here
it was building on passages from the Old Testament, using Isaiah 59:17 and Ephesians
6:10-17, which refer to the donning of the armour of God, but extended the metaphor
considerably.
Its writers also appealed directly to the knights themselves. They cajoled and
threatened with damnation, warning of the dire consequences of the pomp, vanity and
violence of the knightly life. Orderic Vitalis tells the tale of the mednie Hellequin.
A monk named Walchelin was returning to his home late one January night when
he heard the commotion ol a band of horsemen approaching. Four troops of ghosts
passed him by: a group of commoners, then women riding side-saddle, the third a
party of priests and monks and, finally, an army of knights, all black save for flickering
flames. The monk tried to grab one of the horses, seeking proof of what he had
witnessed, but he was attacked and beaten off. One of the knights was the monk's
dead brother. He describes his torments, saying 'I have endured severe punishments
for the great sins with which I am heavily burdened. The arms which we bear are red
hot, and offend us with an appalling stench, weighing us down with intolerable weight,
and burning with everlasting fire.' He went on to explain how his spurs were wreathed
with fire, 'because I used bright sharp spurs in my eager haste to shed blood'.
He finally warned his brother of the damnation that would pursue him too, but also
explains that because of the monk's vocation and prayers their father had been spared
the same torment and his own suffering had been eased.
The leading 12th-century ecclesiastic Bernard of Clairvaux demanded of the
secular knight:
CHIVALRY: THE KNIGHTLY CODE -