Download PDF | [Cambridge Medieval Textbooks] Richard W. Kaeuper - Medieval Chivalry, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
445 Pages
AN APPROACH TO CHIVALRY: WAS IT REAL AND PRACTICAL?
Standing securely upon its spur of rock above the Charente River in south-central France, the castle of Verteuil seemed impregnable. A French force under the duke of Bourbon was besieging the castle in 13 8 5 as part of a campaign to sweep away garrisons of routiers who, though formally aligned to the English crown, were simply robbing and devastating the countryside for their own profit. 1 To attack this formidable fortress, the duke relied on two classic siege techniques: he bashed parts of the defenses with stone-throwing machines Oeaving several projectiles embedded in the fabric for later discovery by archaeologists), and he cut mines under the walls to topple them (and traces of these, too, have been found).
The defenders had to endure the missiles, but knew how to respond more actively to the mines: they dug counter-mines, eventually intersecting the advancing tunnels of the besiegers. Armored men fought in these cramped tunnels as torches cast fantastic shadows of their hacking and thrusting figures on the chiseled rock walls. One chronicler, Jean Cabaret d'Orville (who wrote about the duke of Bourbon under the patronage of the ducal family), tells that the duke himself, wanting a share in the danger and glory, descended into the mine with a few close followers and, gripping ax and sword, battled a defender named Regnaud de Montferrand.
The duke's identity remained deliberately hidden until, in the heat of combat, one of his excited followers suddenly shouted out his lord's war cry, "Bourbon! Saint Mary!" Hearing these potent and revealing words, Regnaud, a nobleman who was an unknighted squire, dropped his sword, fell to his knees, and offered to hand over the castle if only the duke would knight him, for this would be the greatest horror that could come to him. 2 At least this is Jean Cabaret's account. Another chronicler, the famous Jean Froissart, says simply that the garrison surrendered after their leader was fatally struck by one of the massive stone projectiles flung at the fortress. How can modern investigators understand these conflicting narratives of the capture ofV erteuil and make sense of the chivalric culture they apparently reflect? Did Regnaud cheerfully surrender a strong base (from which plundering raids had sustained his band) in return for the horror of being knighted by a great lord? The modern conclusion might hold that the colorful narrative is merely an invention or that, if accurate, the actions it described remain puzzlingly impractical. Accustomed to thinking ofleaders bent over maps far from the front lines, we may ask if the great duke was eager to risk his own life in a cramped underground passage for the sake of glory and adventure. Yet our sense of possibilities might be stretched by Geoffrey le Baker, a mid-fourteenth-century English chronicler who insisted that during the early phase of the Hundred Years War the duke of Lancaster acted in the very manner attributed to the duke of Bourbon.
colorful stories in his own chronicles. 4 Other modern romantics will be enthralled with accounts by Cabaret and Baker for their seeming irrationality, and will welcome colorful alterity as an antidote to gray modernity. Yet either view trivializes chivalry by declaring it fanciful and divorced from real life with its serious business of war and loot. The central issue, of course, is not whether such particular combats by a French or an English duke took place but whether hardened medieval warriors in general acted on such chivalric motives (or believed they should do so).
To argue the contrary, to make a case for the seriousness and practicality of chivalry, even when possibly embedded in storybook incidents, we need not - indeed, cannot - determine the factual accuracy of many hundreds of incidents, such as the conclusion of the siege of V erteuil, centuries in the past. Obtaining truth quotients from a vast roster of such incidents would be impossible and could, in any case, never calibrate a scale for the importance of chivalry as a historical force. We will come closer to success by seeking to understand why chivalry was so important to influential medieval people; for virtually every medieval voice we can hear accepts a chivalric mentalite and seems anxious to advance it (and often to reform it toward some desired goal) as a key buttress to society, even to civilization. What quickly becomes apparent is the striking compulsion to read the world in chivalric terms; for Cabaret's and Baker's insistence on the presence and power of such motives and gestures is scarcely unique or even unusual.
Portrayals of men similarly moved by chivalric ideals on campaign, in battle, and in courtly gatherings appear regularly throughout chronicles, biographies, handbooks, treatises, and the entire corpus of chivalric literature. This overwhelming mass of evidence presents real or fictional incidents like the scene in the tunnel, each described in exuberant language. Moreover, the incidents may not all be invented. Grand chivalric actions are documented by what seems secure evidence. Even the grim battlefield could generate scenes and incidents that seem lifted from the pages of romance. To take only one classic example, the great Castilian knight Don Pero Nino sent to his lady love the twisted and bloodstained sword he had used in combat, its edge toothed like a saw from striking mighty blows. 5 This battle relic would have made a more suitable gift than the severed genitals of Simon de Montfort sent by one of his enemies to that victor's wife after Montfort was killed at the battle of Evesham in 126 5. 6 Aspects of tournament from the very real world of the twelfth century made their way into description of that sport in romance literature, where they were splashed with even more color and adorned with symbolism that, in tum, affected historical tournament practice.7
The elite military function glorified in chivalry may sometimes have adopted fancy dress and embraced flashy gesture, but it was obviously recognized as crucial within its society; chivalry emerged and matured in a hard world well aware of dangers from enemies, some at a distance, some quite close at hand.
The medieval lay aristocracy developed as a warrior caste in response to these conditions and opportunities for advancement. Though never the sole element of military force, and rarely even the most numerous body of fighters, knights were crucial to military success; and they knew that their military performance was likewise crucial to their social success. Any doubts will vanish upon reading the immensely practical questions about the division of loot and the profitable matter of ransoming prisoners posed in the Questions for the Joust, Tournaments and War composed by the great fourteenth-century knight Geoffi-oi de Charny for the royal French Order of the Star. 8 Yet we will need to look beyond combat and see in chivalry a wide and working set of ideals and ideas. Social markers essential to establishing status bore a clear chivalric stamp, a fact well known to all with ambitions to rise in the medieval world. Chivalry in fact provided the esprit de corps for the laity in this world; it framed not only war and peace, but status, acquisition and distribution of wealth, the practice of lay piety, the elevated and elevating nature of love, and ideal gender relationships, among much else. Its ideals and practices, in short, performed crucial societal work that was far from fanciful or merely silly, but rather was fundamental. The evidence and the argument of this book are meant to sustain such a case.
Of course the color and exuberance of chivalry and even its hyperbolic spoken language and enacted gestures will surely strike us, but they cannot mask the consequential work being accomplished. To say so much is not to admire, nor to condemn; but understanding how chivalry functioned at the core of medieval society for half a millennium remains an important task of analysis. The first chapter of this section seeks to cut a path through the thickets of romanticism to reach authentically medieval chivalry, and then emphasizes the practical role of that chivalry within its society. The second chapter turns to the useful evidence that can be extracted from the careers and writings from several model knights.
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