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

of Vegetius to tell him of the importance of
his army having food and water, or that
he should not fight a battle unless he felt he had a
distinct advantage? Other material found in
Vegetius was not adopted, in particular the raising,
training and organization of a standing army of
infantry - in other words, things that a medieval
commander would need to refer to in order to
learn, but for which he had little use, not having
the underlying social and cultural structures
necessary to implement them. The popularity of a
work like Vegetius might lie as much in the fact
that his was the only available classical work on
the practice of war as in any usefulness. Classical
writings were held in high esteem as the learning
of a superior age, and knowledge of them was an
indicator of erudition and intelligence. At the very
least, it was felt that such didactic works, like the
Speculum regale, were something that a lord or
king should display amongst his possessions.
The same might be suggested about the fighting manuals of the late 14th and 15th
centuries. Whilst they reveal something of the methods used by the masters they are by
no means works for self-instruction. The masters were careful to protect the secret
techniques at the core of their system; many sections of the manuscripts are unclear or are
intentionally obtuse. Lichtenauer, the earliest of the named German masters, swore his
pupils to secrecy and wrote down only the most ambiguous rhyming verses, sufficient that
his pupils and himself might remember it but useless to anyone who might seek to steal
his system. One copy of Talhoffer's manual was bound up alongside discussions of siege
engines and the making of fireworks and other matters that appear only slightly related
to combat, which again suggests that these were curios rather than working textbooks.
The medieval knight was not, for the most part, a low-brow illiterate thug. As we
shall see, many of them were as erudite, literate and eloquent as their brothers
and cousins in the Church, but theirs was a practical calling, a physical pursuit and,
as such, book learning must have been of secondary importance.
The knight might read Vegetius, he might train at the pell, attend tournament, and
be taught by the finest combat masters in Europe, but in the end it was the campaign
and the battlefield that called him. Only there could he prove his mettle and fulfil
his potential and his vocation.
TACTICS AND TRAINING -}=>•
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