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

were believed to be culturally inferior. During the 11th and 12th centuries it was
common lor English writers to describe the barbarity and backwardness of these
peoples. When the Scots raided into northern England they were supposed to have
killed men, women and children, spitting babies on the tips ol their spears and drinking
blood. We have already seen how Aelred of Riveaulx, in his account of the Battle of
the Standard, dismisses the highland Scots because they wore no armour; he concludes
the speech with the suggestion that the Anglo-Norman forces fight not men but cruel
beasts. Gerald of Wales' accounts of the Welsh and Irish are a little less colourful and
slightly more balanced, but even he emphasizes their lack of mercy to opponents,
noting that whilst in France 'knights are taken prisoner, here [in Wales and Ireland]
they are beheaded; there they are ransomed, here they are butchered'. He also records
the shock of the Anglo-Norman forces when, after they defeated an Irish force at
Ossory in 1169, their Irish allies started taking the heads of their slain enemies. The
same sorts of ideas and rhetoric were used for the peoples of the Baltic, Prussia and
Livonians, who were also beyond the chivalric boundary as pagans.
Things were not so clear cut in the Latin East. The similarities between the martial
aristocracies of Islam and Western Europe meant that the former, despite being
'infidels', might be accorded treatment far more in keeping with chivalric ideals than
were the Christian but less familiar warrior chiefs of, say, Gaelic Ireland. According
to the mid-13th-century poem the Ordenede chevaLrie, a knight called Hugh of Tiberias
won his freedom from the Muslims by instructing the Islamic leader Saladin about
CHIVALRY: THE KNIGHTLY CODE -