The Martial Arts Of Medieval Europe

hope to clearly establish the systematic nature of all three sources, comparing them and bringingin parallel references from medieval treatises on war, romances, chronicles, iconographicsources, and surviving artifacts. My intention is to take these pieces of corroborating evidenceand use them to place the fighting treatises into their proper historical and literary contexts. In sodoing, I hope to establish first that many medieval combatants practiced variations on what wemight profitably think of as a European “martial arts” tradition that existed as early as the twelfthcentury and well into the age of gunpowder. I also hope to further establish the importance thatthe existence of such an art represents: that martial necessity drove rational, deliberate, andelegant solutions to the problems of personal defense. These solutions helped to crystallize andreinforce traditions of individual empowerment and responsibility that sparked the long traditionof individualism that characterized European culture as it rose into the Renaissance and throughthe Enlightenment.IntroductionStudents of medieval warfare and chivalric culture have long struggled to understand howmedieval men fought. Surviving records, as preserved in chronicles, scattered accounts,diplomatic letters, rolls of decrees and court records, romances and knightly or princelyhandbooks, reveal very little about how medieval weapons were used. Surviving iconographicsources, for the most part stylized and created without precision of detail, have lent few insightsand few studies have related them to physical technique or to the experience of the man-at-arms.1Surviving physical evidence, for the most part weapons and armour, have been grosslymisunderstood and are generally ignored in favor of common misconceptions. A few works on1An exception is J.R. Hale’s masterpiece, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1990. For the most part, iconographic reference has been useful only in the study of survivingelements of physical culture, particularly arms and armour.3

wound pathology, such as Bengt Thordemann’s Armour from the Battle of Wisby,2 and VeronicaFiorato’s Blood Red Roses,3 are sometimes used to reinforce the brutality of field combat withshock weapons,4 built as they are on the “worm’s-eye view” established by John Keegan in hisgroundbreaking 1976 work, Face of Battle.5The need to fill in the part of the “story” relating to medieval fighting, combined with thepaucity of sources, has driven generations of historians to fill the gap with surprisingassumptions. Successive waves of students exploring the middle ages through historical analyseshave been regaled with assertions that medieval men, encumbered both by excessive armour andtechnical ignorance, fought with fury but without precision. John Keegan,6 alongside VictorDavis Hanson,7 found armour to have been unimaginably hot and impractical. The medievalfighting man is still thought to have been somehow less practical and less effective than hismodern counterpart.HistoriographyAs gunpowder supplanted the martial arts of medieval Europe, these arts underwent aprofound transformation as personal combat retreated into the quasi-legal domains of the duelsso beautifully and frightfully illuminated in Shakespearean theater. Out of this tradition, in turn,2Bengt Thordemann, Poul Nörlund and Bo E. Ingelmark, with Introduction by Brian R. Price, Armourfrom the Battle of Wisby, Union City, CA: Chivalry Bookshelf, 2001. First published in two volumes by Kungl,Vitterhets Historie Och Antikvitets Akademien, Uppsala, 1939.3Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel, Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of aMass Grave from the Battle of Towton AD 1461, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.4Re-enactors, for example, have considerable expertise in what amounts to experimental archaeology, butthe few formal studies made by authentically-minded medieval re-enactors have been largely ignored within eventhe most recent academic treatments of medieval battle. One such work, The Medieval Soldier: 15th CenturyCampaign Life Recreated in Colour Photographs. London: Windrow & Greene, 1994, is superb but stands alone.5John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, New York, PenguinBooks, 1976.6Ibid., p. 106.7Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. New York: Knopf,1989, pp. 78-9.4

came the modern sport of fencing, and it is for the most part only fencing historians who haveexamined and attempted to explain these little-known manuscripts. This tradition, most recentlyand exquisitely analyzed by Sydney Anglo, has nonetheless characterized the medieval treatisesas unsystematic and disorganized.Likewise, military historians have completely ignored them, not because they have beenunknown, but because they have never before been placed into an appropriate historical context.A small army of enthusiasts, fencers and martial artists have succeeded in rescuing the worksfrom popular obscurity, and have produced some very fine translations and interpretations. Butthese works are very weak on context, and in fact generally focus on the technical aspects of themanuscripts while missing the overall principles and strategies.It is perhaps easy to invent for ourselves an idealized conception of the Middle Ages andof the feudal society that formed its foundation. Given the relative scarcity and inaccessibility ofsource material, generations of scholars have generally filled in the gaps of knowledge withcontemporary experience, which tell us more about the era of the scholar than of the medievalperiod itself. Indeed, true objectivity must remain an unattainable ideal, as the perspective of thecommentator will forever require qualification before the presented evidence may be deemedcredible. My hope is to convey an understanding of these treatises within their historical context,examining the cultural environment as well as their pedagological heritage.Personal or “Micro” Combat and the Study of Military HistoryIt is true, as Egerton Castle asserted in 1893, that the knight’s harness provided a potentand practical defensive capability. But it is not necessarily true that this defensive capabilitytranslated into offensive disability or stagnation, or that his approach relied exclusively on5

endurance. Indeed, to defeat an armoured man with shock weapons would instead encourageskill, precision and the efficient application of force. While a man could eventually ifinefficiently be battered down in armour of mail or plate,8 he could more quickly be renderedineffective or dispatched by attacking around the armour or applying focused energy at a criticalpoint in his defense.9 Indeed, this is commonly accepted as the main reason for key changes inthe design of the medieval sword at the dawn of the fourteenth century: it became both moreacutely pointed and the handle was extended, allowing a second hand to be placed on the hilt,yielding both control and leverage.10 These are enhancements that require skill to maneuver thepoint between plates of iron and steel.But writers looking at the Middle Ages and Renaissance have long followed EgertonCastle’s lead, when he asserted, “Paradoxical as it seems, the development of the ‘Art of Fence’was the result of the invention of firearms.”11 And further,little material exists to suggest a regularized training process involving an understandingof certain basic principles and of the techniques arising out of them. There was nocoherent theory of personal combat that guaranteed success to the skilled man over anopponent relying on brute force. The strong man, the durable man, the man who couldride hardest and best take the punishment dealt out to him by the weapons of hisopponent, was the winner. This was the period of pre-theory. It needed a revolution tochange its combat techniques.128Andrew W. Boardman, renowned War of the Roses scholar, argues from forensic and chronicle evidencethat strength and endurance were predominant at least during his period, when fully-armoured knights equipped inthe latest Italian or German “white armour” tended towards the use of dramatically more powerful pole-weapons,such as the poleaxe. While Boardman even includes a plate from the fifteenth-century German treatise by HansTalhoffer, in none of his texts does he discuss the use of such weapons, for which Talhoffer was known at the timeof the Wars of the Roses. At least three of Hans Talhoffer’s treatises survive from 1443, 1459, and 1467.9See the techniques suggested by Hans Talhoffer and the fifteenth century anonymous treatise, La Jeu dela Hache, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrit Français 1996. See also armoured combatsections in Fiore dei Liberi’s treatise, fols. 32v-35r, reproduced in Fiore dei Liberi and Massimo Malipiero, Il Fiordi Battaglia di Fiore dei Liberi da Cividale, Udine: Ribis, 2007, figures 203-226.10Ewart R. Oakeshott, Records of the Medieval Sword, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1991. See alsoEduard Wagner, Swords and Daggers: An Illustrated Handbook, London: Hamlyn, 1975, for a more popularpresentation. Oakeshott’s work is considered to be the standard reference, and he provides a broadly accepteddevelopment typology.11Egerton Castle, Schools and Masters of Defense, London: George Bell, 1885, p. 18.12Arthur Wise, The History and Art of Personal Combat, London: Hugh Evelyn, 1971, p. 31.6

Early writers on medieval military history, such as Sir Charles Oman, tended to see theknight as unimaginative in war, encumbered by absurd and weighty iron defenses, unable toeffectively operate without armour or horse. As Oman wrote in his 1898 thesis, “ when merecourage takes the place of fighting skill and experience, tactics and strategy alike disappear.”13His opinion was hardly changed by 1924, as he wrote in his magisterial two-volume A History ofWar in the Middle Ages, “ The [Hundred Years] war was carried on by a series of forays,sieges, and chivalrous but unscientific exploits of arms .”14 Arthur Wise, writing in 1971,concluded similarly, “The result was the fully armoured man, carrying some sixty pounds ofsheet metal on the surface of his body. When he fought mounted, he had a certain mobility still,but when he fought on foot that mobility was considerably restricted.”15John Keegan propelled the “new military history” into the mainstream with hismagnificent 1976 work, Face of Battle, but the idea of unskilled reliance on physical enduranceand strength was once more given fresh currency. Keegan, re-launching the “battle piece”narrative—this time from the soldiers’ rather than the generals’ point of view—sought to provide“a picture of understanding of the practicalities of the fighting and of the mood, outlook andskills of the fighters, which were themselves part of the eye-witness chronicler’s vision.”16 Ascompelling, worthy and influential as this study was, however, Keegan’s interpretation of thoseprecise qualities he sought to illuminate—the soldiers’ “outlook and skills,” was flawed. Keegan,like many traditional academics, drew his conclusions based on synthesis of secondary sources,including those made by Charles Oman,17 Ferdinand Lot,18 Sir Harry Nicholas,19 and Col. Alfred13Sir Charles Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, A.D. 378-1515, ed. J.H. Beeler Ithaca, CornelleUniversity Press, 153, p. 58.14Sir Charles Oman, A History of The Art of War in the Middle Ages, Volume Two, London: Greenhill,1991, p.126. This is a reprint of the original 1924 edition.15Wise, p. 33.16John Keegan, The Face of Battle, New York: Viking Press, 1976, p. 86.17Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages (2nd edition), London: Methuen, 1924.7

Burne.20 Within the text, and seemingly without primary support, he recycles the traditionalviews of knights unable to move with efficiency or real effectiveness. For example, he assertsthat during the retreat of English spearmen, “the men most exposed trot[ed] backwards beforethe French spearpoints, ‘wrong-footing’ their opponents (a spearmen times his thrust to coincidewith the forward step of his left foot).”21 It is not clear in the text where Keegan drew this orsimilar details from as they are not found in the sources cited in his bibliography. Based on theidea that neither men nor human responses have changed significantly since the Middle Ages,Keegan drew extensively on comparisons with modern circumstances. At the start of the chapter,for example, Keegan highlights a Vietnam protest in Grosvenor Square in London from 1968.22It is likely that this kind of adaptation of modern studies informed many of his interpretations,but Keegan’s approach, echoed by Col. Grossman’s superb 1995 book On Killing, confusesstudents of medieval combat by ignoring romance literature, iconographic sources, and thefighting treatises and instead substituting modern experience.23 This approach is valuable, butshould perhaps be used only as a supplement where historical data is missing or is in need ofinterpretation. The medieval fighting treatises, contemporary with the Battle of Agincourt, couldhave dramatically improved the authenticity of Keegan’s analysis.18Ferdinand Lot, L’Arte Militaire et les Armées au Moyen Age, Paris: Payot, 1946.Harry Nicholas, History of the Battle of Agincourt, London: Johnson 1827.20A. H. Burne, The Agincourt War, Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1956.21Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 99. In fact, the fighting treatises often suggest moving the right foot withthe thrust of a sword or spear, what George Silver called in the sixteenth century, “agreement of hand and foot.”Figures in the Fior di Battaglia show figures with either foot forward, but the right foot is shown clearly on Gettyfol. 39v, reproduced in Massimo Malipiero, Il Fior di Battaglia di Fiore dei Liberi da Cividale, (Udine 2007), figure255. Similarly, the mid-fifteenth century fighting master Filippo

Students of medieval warfare and chivalric culture have long struggled to understand how medieval men fought. Surviving records, as preserved in chronicles, scattered accounts, diplomatic letters, rolls of decrees and court records, romances and knightly or princely handbooks, reveal very little about how medieval weapons were used.