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

Beyond those confines chivalry's writ did not run. When Geoffrey of Anjou talks
about owing a special compassion towards knights, there is an unspoken yet obvious
corollary that this compassion did not extend to those beyond the knightly rank. From
an economic point of view the lowly pedites, the common footsoldiers, had no ransom
value and were not worth taking alive. The weapons of most of these men - the spear,
pike, bow and crossbow - meant that they could defeat the knight at a distance,
rendering him impotent on the field. This is the reason crossbowmen were so often
picked out for particularly harsh treatment. They could kill the greatest knight without
putting themselves in any great danger, or indeed breaking into a sweat. The
relationship between the two formed something of a vicious circle. The knightly class
would not spare the footsoldier, who expecting no mercy offered none and fought all
the harder. In turn, this hardened the attitudes of the knightly class towards the foot.
Even amongst their own armies the treatment of footsoldiers and knights could be
grossly disproportionate. Before the assault on Messina in 1190, Richard the Lionheart
proclaimed that men who ran from the battlefield were to be punished; knights by the
loss ol their belt, but footsoldiers by the loss of a foot. At both Courtrai and Crecy
French knights rode down their own crossbowmen, in the first instance because they
feared that they might take all of the glory and in the second because they appeared
to be achieving too little. When the crusader army captured the Cathar town of Beziers
in 1209, during the Albigensian Crusade, William of Tudela tells us that the
footsoldiers, first into the city 'had settled into the houses they had taken, all of them
full of riches and treasure, but when the French [knights] discovered this they went
nearly mad with rage and drove the soldiers out with clubs, like dogs...'
Describing the aftermath of Crecy Froissart notes that 'Among the English there
were pillagers and irregulars, Welsh and Cornishmen armed with long knives, who
went out after the French and, when they found any in difficulty, whether they were
counts, barons, knights or squires, they killed them without mercy. Because of this,
many were slaughtered that evening, regardless of their rank.' These men had no stake
in the chivalric process; being pillagers and irregulars they lay outside of the
arrangements tor the division of ransom. They would get more from the personal
effects ot a dead knight than the captured body of a live one.
It is worth noting that as well as identifying them to be irregulars, Froissart
distinguishes these men as Cornish and Welsh. Chivalry was a Catholic and Western
European phenomenon, limited to the cultural milieu emanating from the lands ot the
old Carolingian Empire. Wars with peoples from beyond these cultural boundaries
were not tought according to chivalric principles, primarily because their opponents
did not adhere to them themselves. Often there is also an element of racial
discrimination. In England's wars against the Welsh and the Irish it is clear that they