When we are in the fields, on our swift war-horses, our shields at our necks and our lances lowered, and the great cold numbs us all, our limbs fail us both before and behind, and our enemies are approaching us.
THE VOWS OF THE HERON, MID-14TH CENTURY
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Much of the time campaigning is no fun; it is a hard, relentless slog. You will hope that there will be great deeds of chivalry to perform, but all too often you will be riding through a desolate countryside, failing to make contact with your enemy.
When to campaign
You need to be ready to campaign at any time of the year, and you probably won’t have much choice in the matter. It is obviously best to go when the weather is good and food is plentiful. That means late summer. You will note that the English fought the battle of Crécy on 26 August and Poitiers on 19 September. It is, however, not always possible to arrange matters so conveniently, and you may find yourself in the field later in the year.
•Autumn campaigning, particularly in northern Europe, normally means mud, as fields are churned up by men, horses and carts.
•Winter brings snow; you will be bitterly cold on expeditions in the Baltic lands in winter. Snow was more unexpected in Lombardy in February 1339 when the battle of Parabiago was fought.
•Spring brings better weather for campaigning, but food is in short supply. In northern Italy the melting snows of the Alps mean swollen rivers in Lombardy, making things difficult for armies on the move.
•Summer is the best time for campaigning, but it can be very hot, particularly in southern Europe.
You can, and perhaps should, decide when to campaign by using scientific methods. When John Hawkwood’s men marched out of Padua at half past five in the morning on 11 January 1391, this precise timing was on the advice of his astrologer Alessio Nicolai.
Muster
There is a lot of work to be done when an army musters. Lists have to be drawn up of the men in their various contingents, and in some cases agreements over pay may have to be finalized. There will probably be discussions over who is to serve in which of the main battalions in the army, and how they are to be drawn up for battle.
A muster is likely to take several days, as the troops gradually arrive. The waiting can be tedious, and you are unlikely to find that there is any training provided to keep you occupied.
Camp
If you read Vegetius on the art of war, you will discover how well organized the Romans were with their camps, which were all carefully planned and laid out. You will not find anything like that happening today. As the army marches, harbingers will be sent out in advance to find suitable lodgings. With luck, there may be a town or village in which houses can be commandeered for the army’s use. The marshal has the job of determining who should go where, but all too often it is a matter of every man for himself. There is no question of tents being available for everyone. Chaucer described Sir Topaz:
And because he was a knight adventurous,
He would not sleep in any house,
But lay down in his hood;
His bright helmet was his pillow,
And by him his charger grazed
On herbage fine and good.
On the English campaign against the Scots in 1327, knights as well as ordinary soldiers had to sleep in the open, close to the river Tyne, holding their horses’ reins. It can be different if you are part of a very large slow-moving army, for then it should be possible to make use of the tents and other equipment that is kept in the baggage train. There is a description of the camp on the English expedition to Scotland in 1300 in The Song of Caerlaverock:
We were quartered by the Marshal, and then might be seen houses built without carpenters or masons, of many different fashions, and many a cord stretched, with white and coloured cloth, with many pins driven into the ground, many a large tree cut down to make huts; and leaves, herbs, and flowers gathered in the woods, which were strewed within; and then our people took up their quarters.
Commanders get elaborate tents, while ordinary soldiers make do with primitive shelters, as this detail from a fresco in Siena shows. (Palazzo Pubblico, Siena)
If an enemy breaks into a camp, tents offer no protection, and are easy to collapse. (From A. Parmentier, Album Historique, Paris 1895)
Accounts show that the king, Edward I, had a great leather tent, and 20 new canvas ones for the campaign; it all sounds very attractive. Yet the reality can be pretty uncomfortable. You are unlikely to find any proper latrine arrangements. If it rains, even the grandest tent will spring a leak.
On the march
The procedure for preparing to march is normally as follows:
•Banners are carried out and set up, so that everyone knows where to go.
•At the first blast of the trumpets, the horses must be rounded up, given oats and saddled.
•At the second blast of the trumpets, you should eat.
•At the third, put your armour on and take up your weapons.
•At the fourth, mount your horse and go to the correct banner. Then, move off.
An army on the march. A column of troops can stretch for many miles. (From A. Parmentier, Album Historique, Paris 1895)
A full-scale army on the march is a magnificent sight. The scene when Edward I set out into southwestern Scotland in 1300 was described at the time, again in The Song of Caerlaverock:
On the appointed day the whole host was ready, and the good King with his household, then set forward against the Scots, not in coats and surcoats, but on powerful and costly chargers; and that they might not be taken by surprise, well and securely armed. There were many rich caparisons embroidered on silks and satins; many a beautiful pennon fixed to a lance; and many a banner displayed. And afar off was the noise heard of the neighing horses: mountains and valleys were everywhere covered with sumpter horses and wagons with provisions, and sacks of tents and pavilions.
You will probably find that the army is not very well organized, and that you are not all made to march in a set order. There should, however, be a vanguard, a main body and a rearguard. Scouts should be sent ahead to spy out the land. In practice, the various columns may well take different routes, and there will be lots of stragglers. The cavalry will probably get well ahead of the infantry in the course of the day, and the baggage train may get left far behind. The whole army will be spread out over a wide expanse of countryside. A huge host, complete with large numbers of infantry and encumbered with a baggage train, moves slowly. It took Edward III’s army a month to go from Calais to Reims in 1359, an average of about 5 or 6 miles a day.
A mounted raid, or chevauchée, is a different matter. The Black Prince, on his 1355 raid from Gascony to Narbonne, could manage 25 miles a day and more. You will be exhausted by a fast ride, as King Pedro IV of Aragon discovered in 1364:
When we dismounted, we complained of the long day we had passed, for we had not dismounted during the whole day, eating in our saddles, we and all our people. And when we had dismounted we threw ourselves on a bed, complaining of the toil our person had suffered and that a few of such forced marches would suffice.
Such campaigning is tough on horses as well as on men. On the Black Prince’s raid in 1355 there was no water for them, so in desperation they were given wine to drink. The next day saw them staggering around, unable to keep a secure footing; many were lost as a result.
Food
Don’t expect a campaign to be a gastronomic tour. What you are likely to experience is, according to the Spaniard Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, ‘mouldy bread or biscuit, meat cooked or uncooked; today enough to eat and tomorrow nothing, little or no wine.’ You will, however, need to eat a lot; campaigning is hard work. The basic food is bread, made of coarsely ground grain. You will probably get some kind of pottage, again made from grain, stewed with dried beans and peas. What there is by way of meat and fish will largely depend on what can be captured; armies live off the land when they can. The Scots have a good way of dealing with cattle they take – they skin them, and then boil up the meat in a bag made from the animal’s hide. When Pedro IV of Aragon invaded Majorca in 1343, his infantry, the almogàvers, ‘overran the land and brought in many animals, large and small, so that our host had enough meat’.
Obviously, you should never drink the water. You won’t be used to it, and if you do drink it, you will almost certainly be very ill the next day. An important part of the job of providing provisions for the army is to ensure that there is enough wine and ale. It is a disaster if this goes wrong; when the English army in Scotland in 1356 had nothing but rainwater to drink, the campaign had to be abandoned. The quantities of drink needed are very considerable, for you can reckon on a man needing about a gallon a day. Getting drunk is one way of dealing with the miseries of campaigning.
When on campaign, you can face big problems if the enemy are wise to what is happening, and empty the land in advance of your invasion. This makes it very difficult for an army; it is said that when the English invaded Scotland in 1322 all they found was one lame cow.
Even when food is plentiful, you are told by de Charny that a knight ought to be frugal. Marshal Boucicaut insisted on the following:
•Only One kind of meat.
•No exotic or unusual sauces.
•Wine to be diluted with water.
•Dishes to be of tin or wood, not gold or silver.
That is one ideal; you may well feel that you deserve a proper treat if, say, your army captures a town and you find that there is a lot of food available. You can take spices with you to improve the diet; Henry Bolingbroke’s baggage when he went on crusade included ginger, cloves, sugar candy, nutmeg, pepper, saffron and caraway seeds. It is not a good idea, however, to be too fussy about food; don’t be like Gaston, count of Foix, who would only eat the wings and thighs of poultry.
The diet on campaign is not good for your teeth. The bread contains a great deal of grit from being milled by hand on portable millstones, and as you chew it, it will grind down your back teeth until they are flat.
Ravaging the land
One of the main weapons available to an army is the destruction of enemy territory. The chevauchée is capable of doing immense damage. John Wing-field described the Black Prince’s raid of 1355 in a letter:
And, my lord, you will be glad to know that my lord has raided the county of Armagnac and taken several walled towns there, burning and destroying them, except for certain towns which he garrisoned. Then he went into the viscounty of Rivière, and took a good town called Plaisance, the chief town of the area, and burnt it and laid waste the surrounding countryside.
The letter continues with a long list of places burned and destroyed. One chronicle reported that 11 fine cities and 3,700 villages had been devastated in the course of the Black Prince’s raid. Fire is the key weapon. As Henry V has it, ‘War without fire is like sausages without mustard.’ For Pedro IV of Aragon it was a normal part of war, and he described the progress of his army on one campaign in a very matter-of-fact way:
We slept first at Murviedo, then at Alcubles, burning and ravaging the land of the said Don Pedro as we went. And we found it abandoned and burnt everything.
You will probably find that you can leave the actual work of destruction to the common soldiers. The mercenary companies in Italy even employ specialist devastators, called guastatori. In 1371 the mercenaries Lutz von Landau and Federigo of Brescia conducted a savage raid, which saw some 2,000 houses burnt down. There was nothing left standing in the town of Mugnano di Creta after they set fire to it. Wooden houses are easy to set alight, and even stone ones will have inflammable wooden floors and perhaps thatched roofs.
Livestock can be killed, or better, stolen. John Hawkwood is said to have taken over 1,200 oxen and over 15,000 pigs and sheep in a single raid in Italy in 1385. If you take cattle and sheep from the estates of a wealthy monastery, it will probably want to buy them back, and you can then go in and drive them off again.
It is not a good idea to kill all the inhabitants; much better to ransom them. Even peasants can be made to pay for their freedom. On one occasion Haneken Bongard got 31 florins as ransom for each peasant he took from the estates of a wealthy hospital. The chronicler Jean de Venette was one of the few who was sympathetic to the French peasantry:
The only desire of the nobles was to ruin the peasants and to work them to death and to give them no protection against their adversaries. Thus the wretched peasants were oppressed on all sides, by friend and foe alike, and could cultivate their vineyards and field only by paying tribute to both sides.
You may think that this behaviour runs contrary to some of those chivalric concepts that you accepted when you became a knight. In The Tree of Battles, by the theorist Honoré Bouvet, the author puts forward an argument that the poor should not suffer:
If I wanted to decide that there was honour or valour in attacking a poor innocent who has nothing more in mind than to eat his dry bread alongside his sheep in the fields, or under a hedge or thicket, by my soul, I could not do it.
Bouvet complained that warfare directed against the labouring people was contrary to the traditions of chivalry, and that warriors should be concerned to maintain justice and protect widows, orphans and the poor. In practice, you probably will not be very bothered about this. Pillage and plunder are necessary in war, and it is the rank and file who carry out the unpleasant part of the work, not the knights. Burning territory does not involve killing people unless they are foolish enough to try to stop you. In any case, peasants are no part of the chivalric world, and if they had you at their mercy, they would show no kindness, so why be kind to them? In the peasant rising in France in 1358 the peasants roasted a knight and forcibly fed bits of him to his own wife and children.
Knights and men-at-arms attacking a group of peasants. The laws and conventions of war provide little real protection for unarmed civilians, and peasants often suffer greatly at the hands of soldiers. (British Library, London)
Discipline
According to The Tree of Battles, death should be the penalty for a range of offences. The list includes:
•Striking your commander.
•Revealing secrets to the enemy.
•Killing your companion-in-arms.
•Killing yourself.
It is a little difficult to see how the penalty could be applied in the last case. All this makes discipline sound very severe, but in practice it is not maintained with such rigour. It is particularly hard to impose if the men are not paid wages. As a knight, you will expect to be imposing discipline, rather than being on the receiving end of it.
Discipline in an army is the responsibility of the marshals and constables, and you could find yourself acting as their deputy. Much of what they have to do is prevent men stealing from each other and committing similar minor crimes. You have to be careful on the march to make sure that no one goes in front of the banners that lead the host; to do so is a serious offence. Shouting out orders such as ‘To horse!’ when you are not entitled to do so is also a major transgression. You need to keep control of the men under your command; a French ordinance of 1374 makes you responsible for all their actions.
The English have produced some elaborate military regulations. Richard II issued a set in 1385, and Henry V, a notably stern disciplinarian, has gone right over the top, producing four military ordinances. These are very detailed. They cover the obvious problems such as ensuring that men keep watch properly, and making sure that no one rides off without orders. You have to obey the instructions of the harbingers about billeting. Regulations set out the procedures to be followed when prisoners are taken; you cannot ransom them without the permission of your captain. Henry’s orders even go so far as preventing you from telling jokes about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Welshman.
Boucicaut, as marshal of France, was much concerned with matters of discipline, but his Life gives few details of how he actually exercised his role. He did, however, take care to appoint experienced officers under him; anyone who disobeyed them would be punished. Prig that he was, he forbad gambling with dice, and threatened anyone who swore with severe punishment. You may well doubt, however, if in practice it is possible to stop soldiers swearing.
In 1370 Robert Knollys faced a major discipline problem, which he could not resolve. He had led a large raid into France, the first time an operation of such size had been launched without an earl in command. It did not go well, for the French were learning how to deal with this kind of operation, by harassing it and emptying the land. Discipline collapsed, as John Minsterworth and others mutinied. They objected to Knollys as a commander on the grounds that he was their social inferior. Such incidents are rare; normally, military expertise such as Knollys possessed is properly respected.
It is not always easy to maintain discipline in a mercenary company. John Hawkwood had to threaten William Gold and his companions with execution when his orders were disobeyed. There is a story of how Hawkwood dealt with two of his men who were quarrelling over a pretty young nun by stabbing her, so denying her to either of them. This tale, however, is probably propaganda put out by the great commander’s enemies.
SIR ROBERT KNOLLYS
A Cheshire man, Knollys first appeared fighting in Brittany in the 1340s. In 1356 he campaigned with the duke of Lancaster in Normandy. He conducted notable damaging raids in central France in 1358–59, and fought in Brittany and Spain in the 1360s. Despite the failure of his raid in France in 1370, Knollys continued to take a leading part in the war, and in 1382 was influential in putting down the Peasants’ Revolt in England. He was a brother-in-arms of Hugh Calveley, another Cheshire man, and war brought him considerable wealth. He died in 1407.
Medical care
You want to do your best to ensure that you do not require medical attention on campaign; if you do need it, it will probably be unpleasant. Take the example of Bertrand du Guesclin, who was knocked out by stones, and then thrown into the moat at the siege of Melun. So as to revive him, the French buried him up to his neck in a dung heap; the warmth of the manure duly did the trick.
If you need a surgeon, you would do well to find someone like Henri de Mondeville, who served Philip IV of France. He had military experience, taught at Montpellier and wrote a vast textbook on surgery and medicine. If you need sensible advice on how, for example, to amputate a gangrenous limb, it is all there in his book. It explains that the way to remove a crossbow bolt from a man’s knee is to get someone to hit its point with a hammer, while protecting the joint itself from the blow.
The noted English surgeon John of Arderne had soldiers among his patients. He was a proctologist, and wrote a book on the subject, called De Fistula in Ano, about a rather unpleasant condition that may be caused by spending long hours in the saddle. The main treatment he recommends, apart from surgery, is the use of enemas; he is also likely to suggest a hot bath. You will almost certainly want to avoid such advice.
Surgeons can on occasion do a good job. At the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 the prince of Wales was wounded by an arrow, which struck close to the left side of his nose, leaving the barb deeply embedded. Initial attempts to deal with this by giving the prince drinks of various concoctions failed; then the surgeon John Bradmore made a special instrument, like a pair of tongs, which he used to extract the arrowhead. Your problem, if you are wounded, may be that surgeons are few and far between. They may even be reluctant to act. The Spanish knight Pero Niño had to take over on one occasion, when a surgeon was too frightened to cauterize a massive wound on a ship’s captain’s leg, and did the job himself with a white-hot iron.
Surgery is to be avoided if at all possible. This illustration from a treatise on surgery by Roger of Salerno shows a doctor examining various wounds; it seems unlikely that he was able to cure any of these patients. (From a treatise of surgery by Roger of Salerno, c. 1300. British Library, London)
Never mind battle, however – the great killer in this period is plague, which arrived in the west in 1347; a Genoese ship brought it from the siege of Caffa in the Crimea. In the first serious outbreak it killed about half of the population, but in some places the death rate was much higher than that. Curiously, however, it has not disrupted campaigning as much as you might expect. It meant that there were no major expeditions mounted in the years immediately after plague first struck, but there are no examples of campaigns being abandoned as a result of an army suffering from an outbreak. There is, in any case, nothing that you can do about plague. No one is clear as to its causes, and doctors have no methods of curing it.
OF CAMPAIGNING
You will probably get sunburned on campaign, and if you want to keep your tan, the French doctor Henri de Mondeville suggests you use a mixture of egg white and wheat flour on your face.
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Edward III’s army of 1359 took leather coracles in the baggage train, so as to ensure a supply of fish.
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On the 1382 campaign in Flanders, the French, after a false alarm, spent the night standing knee-deep in mud.
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According to Geoffroi de Charny, you should not try to be knowledgeable about good dishes and fine sauces, and should not spend any time deciding which wine to drink.
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If you tie a loaf of bread to your saddle, it will taste of horse’s sweat when you get to eat it.
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When the king of France, Charles VI, went mad for the first time, he unsheathed his sword and chased everyone in sight. This brought the campaign he was on to an end.
Feats of arms
You may well feel that you are not doing as much fighting as you would like on campaign, and that you do not have enough opportunities to display your skills. While ravaging the countryside may give you some pleasure, you will naturally want to have the chance to show off, to ride your charger and wield your lance. The answer for a knight is to issue challenges, and to persuade opponents to come and fight on equal terms. These jousts of war are closer to the tournament in character than to battle proper.
There is a tradition of single combat taking place before battle. In 1333 a gigantic Scotsman called Turnbull challenged an English knight, Robert Benhale, before the battle of Halidon Hill, and was roundly defeated. Since then, such fights between enemies have become much more common, and will provide you with excellent opportunities to display your jousting skills. A typical encounter was that between a French knight and the Englishman Robert Colville during the 1346 campaign. The Frenchman issued a challenge to single combat ‘for the love of his lady’. He and Colville had two rounds of jousting, but abandoned the third, as the French knight’s shield was broken.
In 1382 a young French knight, Tristan de Roye, learning that peace had been concluded between Castile and Portugal, sent a herald to the English under the earl of Cambridge, asking that someone should engage him in single combat. An English squire, Miles Windsor, anxious to be knighted, accepted. A large number of English knights accompanied him to Badajos where the fight was to take place. He was duly knighted before the engagement. Each man had three lances; each time they were shattered. Shields and armour were battered and split, but neither man was injured. Everyone thought that this was splendid, for honour was duly satisfied on both sides.
In such jousts, rules are applied. On one occasion, in 1379, an English knight, William Farrington, slipped, piercing his opponent through the thigh as he fell. This was disgraceful, and the earl of Buckingham was furious. William apologized fulsomely for his mistake, and was pardoned for the foul blow. In these fights, the issues between England and France are not so important. What is primarily at stake is personal honour.
Engaging in such feats of arms will enhance your prestige, but before you issue any challenges, think carefully about the dangers.