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

only for the tournament and pageant, where the armourer himself could fully express
his artistry and skill with parade pieces as breath-taking as they were impractical.
Breath-taking and impractical might be how some would describe the chivalry of
the 14th century. It might be suggested that chivalry was a blindfold which prevented
the knight from seeing the oncoming strike of the Flemings'goedendag or the Italians'
arquebus. It might be argued that by the time Edward III was installing the first of his
Garter knights it had become nothing more than a meaningless shell, a fagade behind
which the bloody business of professional soldiering continued. But whilst the
demands of honour and prowess might lead a knight to make foolish errors, this had
always been the case - think of the Count of Artois at Mansourah (see p. 133) - and
the individuals had always been condemned for doing so. War had always been a
hard-headed business, and the knight ever the realist. This did not make the code by
which he lived any less real to him, or its tenets less worthy of pursuit.
A fine example of this comes from Sir Thomas Gray of Heton's history, the
ScaLacronica. A knight called Walter Marmion arrived at the border castle of Norham,
which was under the captaincy of Gray's father, carrying a helmet with a golden wing
as a crest. This helmet had been given him by his lady with the instruction that 'he go
to the most perilous place in Great Britain, and that he make the helm famous'.
A sizeable force of Scots nobles arrived outside of the castle four days after Marmion's
arrival. The latter equipped himself, 'all gleaming with gold and silver, so equipped that
it was a marvel, with the helm on his head', ready to engage the foe. Gray told him,
'Sir knight, you have come here as a knight errant, to make that helm famous, and it
is more fitting that chivalric deeds should be done on horseback than on foot,
whenever this can suitably be done', urging him on into the fray, promising to rescue
his body, dead or alive. Marmion rode out and engaged the Scots, who managed to
wound him in the face and drag him from his horse. At this point Gray emerged on
foot with the rest of the garrison and drove the Scots off, rescuing the questing knight.
The story is often held up as a singular image of knightly chivalry. The challenge
given by Marmion's lady is reminiscent of Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendierut or
one of the Arthurian romances. But it is the way in which Gray responds to it that is
most interesting. It makes the point clearly that even a practical warrior, as Gray
undoubtedly was, recognized the importance of chivalry to the warrior on the
battlefield. Both Gray and Marmion were warriors of long service, and there is no
suggestion in the account that Gray thought Marmion to be a fool or tried in any
way to dissuade him from his task, nor that Marmion was that fool, lacking self-
control or good sense. Both men saw the challenge of Marmion's lady as being
an acceptable and fitting one for a knight to undertake, acceptable even on the
no-nonsense battlefields of the Scottish border. That Gray brought the garrison out