Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (23 page)

They specialized in surprise night raids on towns, when they would massacre the men, rape the women, carry off whatever was worth taking and burn the rest.

This was not in any sense chivalric warfare; it was a job. Hawkwood did not fight for glory or honour. He was simply a down-to-earth businessman – whose business happened to be war. There is a story that two friars once greeted him with the usual ‘May God grant you peace'. Whereupon Sir John retorted: ‘May God take from you your alms.' When the friars asked why, he replied: ‘Why not? You come to me and say that God should let me die of hunger. Don't you know that I live by war, and peace would destroy me?'

CESENA

In 1377 Sir John Hawkwood was under contract to Cardinal Roberto, Count of Geneva, when the citizens of Cesena killed some of his soldiers. Roberto offered them an amnesty if they would surrender their arms, which the citizens did, foolishly trusting the word of a cardinal-priest of the order of the ‘Holy Apostles'.

Then Cardinal Roberto summoned Hawkwood from nearby Faenza, where he'd been busy coordinating the rape of all the female inhabitants, and told him to go to Cesena and kill everyone. To do Sir John justice, it is reported that he protested this was not really playing the game, but the cardinal said he wanted ‘justice', and by ‘justice' he meant ‘blood and more blood'. The resulting massacre shocked Europe.

Hawkwood's troop ‘burned and slaughtered all the town. The river was coloured with blood. And among the smoking ruins, the rapes, the killings was a pitiful episode. Twenty-four friars were killed in front of the main altar, together with the congregation.' According to hostile chroniclers, as many as 8000 people died. Up to 16,000 fled and Hawkwood, ‘not to be held entirely infamous, sent about a thousand of the women to Rimini'.
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Every building was destroyed and the town was completely rebuilt following the destruction. Only a few pieces of the original walls survive.

But the action did no harm to Hawkwood's reputation. Maybe it even helped by showing how carefully he carried out orders. Over the next 20 years he continued to flourish. He bought castles and property in Italy and estates in England. For the last 15 years of his life he was under more or less permanent contract to the city of Florence, and before he died in 1395 the city promised him a magnificent marble tomb in the great cathedral – the Duomo – in the heart of Florence.

However, the Florentines were businessmen and they never lost their business sense. When the King of England requested that Hawkwood's body be returned to his native land, they felt there were better things to do with their cash than build an empty tomb, so they got an artist to paint a picture of what the tomb would have looked like if they had built it.

The non-aristocratic son of a tanner had become virtually a nobleman, by turning warfare into a business. Meanwhile, chivalry developed as a game of social status, ever further removed from the reality of war. And the knights of England became country gentlemen, the backbone of county administration.

Chivalry was a fantasy, used to put a respectable gloss on the horrors of war. It would be hard to argue that Norman knights were more violent or bloodthirsty than other warriors throughout human history, or that chivalric knights like William Marshal or the Black Prince were less bloodthirsty than mercenary captains like Sir John Hawkwood. But in the fourteenth century people felt something had changed with the commercialization of warfare.

The chivalrous knight in shining armour never really did exist. All that rescuing damsels and helping the weak was just wishful thinking – a construct of the medieval mind, taken up with enthusiasm by the Victorians and passed on to Hollywood film-makers of today.

But maybe we are better off without chivalry. Its fine ideals were all too often used to perpetuate war – which is what those who live by war want. Francho Sacchetti, one of Hawkwood's contemporaries, said of him: ‘He managed his affairs so well that there was little peace in Italy in his time.'
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And it is still true that those who promote war are usually those who stand to benefit from it – be they arms manufacturers, politicians or knights in shining armour.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DAMSEL

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H
ELPLESS, THREATENED AND FOREVER IN NEED OF RESCUE
, the medieval damsel-in-distress is an archetype deeply bound up with the image of the chivalrous knight in shining armour. It's easy for us to understand that back in the brutal world of the Middle Ages women should be at the mercy of forces beyond their control, and that they should need rescuing by heroic males.

William Maw Egley's 1858 painting of the Lady of Shalott and her distant hero, Sir Lancelot, seems to convey, in its antiquarian detail, an authentic medieval vision (at least if one overlooks the very nineteenth-century appearance of Mrs Egley): the helpless lady sealed in her chamber, the armoured man emblematic of freedom and courage. But the picture evokes a world that would have been incomprehensible in the age it is meant to represent.

Not that noble ladies didn't need rescuing on occasion. But when they did, they infuriatingly failed to live up to our stereotype.

DAMSELS-AT-WAR

Take Nicola de la Haye: she was certainly trapped in a tall tower and in need of rescue. But it was all a bit different from the fairy tale.

For a start, the tower in which she was trapped didn't belong to a wicked uncle, stepfather or some other malign relative – it belonged to her. It was part of Lincoln Castle, and Nicola was the hereditary constable – governor – of the castle. What's more, she wasn't at all a helpless damsel; she was a military commander in her own right. As well as governing the castle she was also co-sheriff of Lincolnshire. She was obliged to provide knights' service at the castle and exercised jurisdiction over the royal portion of the city of Lincoln.

She was trapped because an invading French army had occupied Lincoln and was laying siege to the castle.

Mind you, Nicola was a bit mature for a damsel – she was pushing 70. But then again, her knight in shining armour was also an old-age pensioner. He was none other than William Marshal, and although he was now well into his seventies he was the regent of England and was still generally regarded as the epitome of chivalry. William drove the French off, saving Nicola, Lincoln and the whole of England for the young Henry III. Ever the perfect knight, he then celebrated his and Nicola's joint victory by taking her castle away from her and handing it over to the Earl of Salisbury.

Nicola, however, wasn't going to put up with that sort of behaviour from a geriatric like William. She stormed down to London, had the castle restored to her control and kept going as constable until she was well into her eighties. ‘What, then, is chivalry? Such a difficult, tough, and very costly thing to learn that no coward ventures to take it on.'
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On the down side, Nicola did not get the job of sheriff back. It is one of the oddities of social change that there are times when women are just not considered the right people to be sheriffs. England had to wait nearly 400 years for the next one – when Lady Ann Clifford was appointed sheriff of Westmoreland on the basis that not only was she one of the wealthiest women in the country, but she was also a recognized expert with a crossbow. Both James I and Cromwell found her hard to deal with, and that was the end of the story for woman sheriffs until the Victorian era.

WOMEN AS PROPERTY

The roles of men and women in society, and the relationship between the sexes, were forever changing throughout the period that we conveniently (if mistakenly) refer to as the ‘Middle Ages'. There was no one set of attitudes. It was a constantly varying dynamic – just as it is today.

It would probably be wrong to talk of any steady advance in women's rights and privileges through the 500 years after the Norman Conquest, but it is possible to say that towards the end of the period women were enjoying a more equal role in society, and more respect than they had previously been given – and then things were reversed.

Of course, they lived in a man's world – particularly at the start of the Middle Ages. The Conquest meant that William ‘owned' the country. It became his personal property, and he had no intention of giving it away. Instead he allowed his followers the use of lands in return for their military service. This link between property and the profession of arms meant landholding became a male preserve. Men ruled the roost, and wives and daughters were supposed to do what they were told by their husbands and fathers.

Many of the new Norman overlords expected to find wives among the widows and daughters of the Englishmen they had supplanted, and the new king encouraged this as a way of consolidating the Conquest. Not surprisingly, many of these women resisted. Some retreated to nunneries for self-protection. However others, like Christina of Markyate, resisted in other ways.

CHRISTINA DE MARKYATE

The Conquest meant a property windfall for the Normans, but this was naturally at the expense of the former owner-occupiers. Anglo-Saxons found themselves both dispossessed and unable to enter the power structure. Many an unhappy couple fell back on the time-honoured tradition of trading in their daughter's flesh: marriage to a wealthy member of the new establishment could put an entire family back on the social ladder.

This is the fate that Autti and Beatrix de Markyate resolved on for their young daughter, Christina, some 30 years after the Battle of Hastings.

Autti was an ambitious Anglo-Saxon merchant in the village of Markyate in Hertfordshire who seems to have decided to achieve Norman respectability by offering his family's sexual favours to the conquerors. His sister Alveva became the mistress of the notorious Ranulf Flambard – a man who was universally feared and infamous for his greed and ambition. The liaison was potentially attractive as Ranulf had been William Rufus's chief minister, and became bishop of Durham. However, Rufus was killed and the hated Ranulf was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He escaped to Normandy with the help of his mother (apparently a one-eyed witch).

When Christina was about ten years old Ranulf returned to England and his bishopric was restored. The bishop dropped in on his way to London, Alveva laid on a family feast and Ranulf saw Christina. He liked what he saw.

Christina's parents were only too happy to oblige the bishop with their daughter's . . . well ‘hand' wasn't perhaps what Ranulf had in mind.

Intermarriage may have been encouraged by the Conqueror as a way of embedding his men in their new country, but Christina had no intention of getting embedded with anyone. She had made a pilgrimage to St Albans Abbey when she was younger, and it had made a big impression on her. It must have been by far the largest building she had ever seen, and here she had made a secret vow of virginity, scratching a cross on the wall of the abbey to signify her commitment to Christ.

After the feast Christina was left in Ranulf's room with him, and he began to introduce her to his wicked ways. Knowing perfectly well what all this was about, Christina suggested that she should lock the door – and promptly did so from the outside.

The enraged bishop determined to have the girl broken, and arranged for a young nobleman, Burthred, to ask for her hand in marriage. Her parents were delighted. Christina was going to achieve more for the family than Aunt Alveva ever had: their grandchildren would be legitimate members of the nobility.

The problem was that Christina refused to be married, pleading that she was promised to Christ. Her parents spent a year trying to get her to see sense, buying her presents, making promises. Eventually she was browbeaten into agreeing to a betrothal – but betrothal was one thing, consummating the marriage was another. And a marriage did not count until it was consummated.

Her parents embarked on a desperate series of stratagems, surrounding the girl with entertainers, taking her to banquets, trying to get her to loosen up. When these failed they shoved the hapless Burthred into her bedroom to do what he could. Christina sat the lad down and lectured him on the attractions of chastity for both sexes. He left somewhat confused, but was hectored into making a more robust effort.

Christina's parents pushed him into her room again and told him to stiffen up, be a man and take their daughter by force. This had her climbing up the wall – literally. She ‘hastily sprang out of bed and clinging with both hands to a nail which was fixed in the wall, she hung trembling between the wall and the hangings.' Burthred could not find her and gave up his attempt at rape-within-marriage.

Eventually Autti carted his daughter off to the Augustinian canons of St Mary's Priory in Huntingdon: ‘Why must she depart from tradition? Why should she bring this dishonour on her father? Her life of poverty will bring the whole of the nobility into disrepute!' The prior was more impressed by the daughter than he was by her father, and so was the bishop until Autti bribed him to order her to marry. Christina, though, was unmoved.