The Knight in History (32 page)

GATEHOUSE, ST. BENET’S ABBEY, WHERE SIR JOHN FASTOLF WAS BURIED.
(HALLAM ASHLEY)

John Paston’s son, also named John, growing up in a situation of affluence and elevated status, spent an apprenticeship at the court of Edward IV and at twenty-one was knighted. Yet even now the family did not escape its troubles with Fastolf’s inheritance. Two of the other executors of Fastolf’s will summarily sold Caister Castle to the duke of Norfolk, who sent armed men to take possession. Sir John Paston’s younger brother, confusingly also named John, commanding the little castle garrison, withstood a siege for some days and finally surrendered on terms. After the duke’s death in 1476 the Pastons once more recovered Caister, and at long last settled with their rivals, sharing the properties, somewhat diminished in the course of the struggle, and transferring the bequest for a college from Caister to Oxford, where the hall of Magdalen College carries Fastolf’s armorial bearings to this day.

Sir John Paston was a knight of a different stamp from the hardbitten old warrior who was the source of the Pastons’ fortune. A pleasure-loving courtier, he lived agreeably in London and answered his mother’s pleas for thrift with recommendations for the sale of farms or the pawning of plate. More resembling Shakespeare’s Falstaff than had the real-life Fastolf, he distinguished himself as a soldier only by participating on the losing side in the battle of Barnet in 1471, in which Edward IV defeated the Lancastrian army of the earl of Warwick.
⁷³
Sir John died in 1479, and his younger brother John became head of the family. Active and energetic, this John Paston served as sheriff of Norfolk in 1485–1486, fought in the battle of Stoke in 1487, and was knighted on the field.
⁷⁴

The family flourished under the Tudors, increasing in wealth and importance. The sons were habitually knighted, managed their estates, and served the king. In the seventeenth-century Civil War, they took the Royalist side, lost most of the family fortune, and were forced to sell Caister. With the Restoration they returned to favor. Sir Robert Paston became earl of Yarmouth, and his eldest son, William, married one of Charles II’s numerous illegitimate daughters. Accession to the upper ranks of the nobility made it appropriate for the family to prove its pedigree with a genealogy. Compiled in 1674 for Sir Robert Paston, it was evidently based on a family tradition current in the fifteenth century but not supported by any surviving documents. Copied on fine vellum and illustrated with 260 coats of arms, it traced the family to a reputed Norman ancestor, “Wulstan de Paston,” a cousin of the earl of Glanville, and pictured his descendants as landed aristocrats; even John Paston’s grandfather Clement, the “good plain husbandman,” was given a coat of arms.
⁷⁵

Genealogies, however, could not repair the family’s losses after the new political reversal of the revolution of 1688. The last Lord Yarmouth lived into the eighteenth century, a Tory survivor in a Norfolk dominated by great Whig families. He died without heirs in 1732, leaving nothing but debts.
⁷⁶

9

The Long Twilight of Chivalry

OH YE KNIGHTS OF ENGLAND, WHERE IS THE CUSTOM AND USAGE OF NOBLE CHIVALRY THAT WAS USED IN THE DAYS OF KING ARTHUR? WHAT DO YE NOW BUT GO TO THE BAGNIOS AND PLAY AT DICE…. LEAVE THIS, LEAVE IT AND READ THE NOBLE VOLUMES OF THE HOLY GRAIL, OF LAUNCELOT, OF GALAHAD, OF TRISTRAM, OF PERSEFOREST, OF PERCIVAL, OF GAWAIN AND MANY MORE. THERE SHALL YE SEE MANHOOD, COURTESY, AND GENTLENESS. AND LOOK IN LATER DAYS OF THE NOBLE ACTS SINCE THE CONQUEST…. READ FROISSART. AND ALSO BEHOLD THAT VICTORIOUS AND NOBLE KING HARRY THE FIFTH, AND THE CAPTAINS UNDER HIM…AND MANY OTHERS WHOSE NAMES SHINE GLORIOUSLY BY THEIR VIRTUOUS NOBLESSE AND ACTS THAT THEY DID IN HONOR OF THE ORDER OF CHIVALRY
.

—Conclusion of William Caxton’s
translation of
The Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry
(1484)

IN OUR FOREFATHERS’ TIME, WHEN PAPISTRY, AS A STANDING POOLE, COVERED AND OVERFLOWED ALL ENGLAND, FEW BOOKS WERE READ IN OUR TONGUE, SAVING CERTAIN BOOKS OF CHIVALRY…WHICH, AS SOME SAY, WERE MADE IN MONASTERIES, BY IDLE MONKS, OR WANTON CANONS: AS ONE FOR EXAMPLE,
MORTE ARTHURE:
THE WHOLE PLEASURE OF WHICH BOOK STANDETH IN TWO SPECIAL POINTS, IN OPEN MANSLAUGHTER, AND BOLD BAWDRY: IN WHICH BOOK THOSE HE COUNTED THE NOBLEST KNIGHTS, THAT DO KILL MOST MEN WITHOUT ANY QUARREL, AND COMMIT FOULEST ADULTERIES BY SUBTLEST SHIFTS
….

—Roger Ascham,
The Scholemaster
(1570)

AT A VILLAGE OF LA MANCHA, WHOSE NAME I DO NOT WISH TO REMEMBER, THERE LIVED A LITTLE WHILE AGO ONE OF THOSE GENTLEMEN WHO ARE WONT TO KEEP A LANCE IN THE RACK, AN OLD BUCKLER, A LEAN HORSE, AND A SWIFT GREYHOUND…. THE ABOVE-MENTIONED GENTLEMAN IN HIS LEISURE MOMENTS (WHICH WAS MOST OF THE YEAR) GAVE HIMSELF UP WITH SO MUCH DELIGHT AND GUSTO TO READING BOOKS OF CHIVALRY THAT HE ALMOST ENTIRELY NEGLECTED THE EXERCISE OF THE CHASE AND EVEN THE MANAGEMENT OF HIS DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
.

—Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote
(1605)

I
N THE final centuries of the Middle Ages, knighthood reached its highest pinnacle of prestige but showed unmistakable signs of decay. In the thirteenth century the numbers of knights had dwindled and their function in society had ceased to be exclusively military. The ceremony of dubbing had become merely honorific, no longer a necessary prerequisite for the career of a fighting man, and many fighting men had ceased to seek the honor. In the fourteenth century the knights’ monopoly of elite status in the army was challenged by these “squires,” who equally with them became indentured captains. In England in the following century, knights, squires, and simple “gentlemen”
^*
similarly shared the political functions of the community. Simultaneously, the money fees of “bastard feudalism” replaced the old links of lord and vassal: land, homage, and feudal loyalty.

The indenture system, which had served as the instrument of recruitment almost throughout the Hundred Years’ War, began to be replaced in the middle of the fifteenth century by new military arrangements. Already foreshadowed by earlier French army reforms, a system of permanent “
compagnies de grande ordonnance
” was established in 1445 by Charles VII, each company of a hundred lances (600 men), headed by captains appointed by the king, the companies stationed in designated towns and paid and supplied by their respective provinces. To reinforce this mounted force in time of crisis, Charles formed the
francs-archers
(free bowmen), some 8,000 strong, infantry reservists who lived at home, were exempt from royal taxes, were equipped if necessary at the expense of their parishes, practiced their skills regularly and underwent periodic inspection, and could be summoned at the will of the king. To this cavalry and infantry were added royal companies of artillery, the whole forming a permanent professional army.

In 1473 Charles the Rash, duke of Burgundy, reorganized his army into companies of cavalry, archers, and foot soldiers, the companies divided into squadrons subdivided into smaller units, each with a commander, forming the echeloned structure characteristic of the modern army.

Other European countries copied France and Burgundy, and the army raised by private contract was gradually replaced by armies under the direct command of the ruling authority and financed by the state. In these new national armies, knights served but were indistinguishable from nonknightly men-at-arms who wore the same armor, rode the same horses, and came to earn the same pay.
²

The maturing of the artillery arm contributed to the trend. Artillery had played a small role in Du Guesclin’s war, a larger one in Fastolf’s, and finally a crucial one in the French siege and field operations of the last stage of the Hundred Years’ War. The knight was no more vulnerable to gunfire than anyone else, but expensive cannon and gunpowder strongly reinforced the trend toward national professional armies.

The knight Jean de Bueil (1405–1478), who fought under Joan of Arc at Orleans and was one of Charles VII’s counselors, in his late years penned an autobiographical prose romance
^*
that provides a realistic picture of contemporary war and its demands on the soldier: the privations that “all men who wish to acquire honor and glory through war must bear and endure patiently.”
³
Modern war, said De Bueil, was a profession, not a sport. Knights who had spent their lives at court were not fitted for it, either in hardihood or skill.
⁴
Discipline, sound tactics, and rational strategy were required, not impulsive heroics. “The good and valiant knights, captains, and mercenaries should not plan and direct the difficult enterprises of battle by force of arms and number of men alone, but also by subtlety and good prudence.”
⁵
As for the role of cannon, De Bueil described no fewer than 240 different kinds, giving the quantity of powder for the discharge of each, the number of horses needed to haul it, and the number of cannonballs necessary for a siege.
⁶
In his account, ransoms are disposed of by prior contract, as is the booty gained by raids frankly designed to obtain it.
⁷
When the enemy suggests a sort of Battle of the Thirty, De Bueil’s hero (and alter ego), the Jouvençel, refuses: “We have come to drive [the enemy] out and to wage war against them on our terms, not on theirs.”
⁸
Jousting he treats with contempt; the man who indulges in it does so only out of vainglory. “He spends his money, he exposes his body to take life or honor from the one he fights, which brings him little profit; while he is thus occupied, he abandons war, the service of his king, and the public good; and no one should expose his body except in meritorious deeds.”
⁹

In words more expressive of the patriotism and esprit de corps of the modern soldier than of the individualism of the medieval knight, he explains that in war, love of comrades, hatred of tyranny, and loyalty to a good cause bring “a joy that can only be described by the man who has experienced it.” A man strengthened by these emotions is “truly afraid of nothing.” The man who serves in the profession of arms, even for a secular cause, is “blessed in this world and the next, and a true servant of God.”
¹⁰

But while military progress was stifling the old knightly spirit of individual glory, the age nevertheless celebrated the fame of individual knights whose deeds, thanks to the improved state of communications, were widely reported. The most famous was Pierre Terrail, the “Chevalier Bayard” (c. 1473–1524), who fought in the Italian wars of Charles VIII and Francis I of France and distinguished himself not only by his feats of arms and skillful generalship but by his character: he was reputed to be the perfect knight, “
sans peur et sans reproche
.” Mortally wounded, fittingly enough by a musket ball, he rebuffed the comfort offered him by his enemy, the rebel Constable de Bourbon: “Sir, there is no need to pity me, for I die in good state. But I pity you, who fight against your prince, and your country, and your oath.”
¹¹

The Chevalier Bayard’s biography, like those of William Marshal and Bertrand du Guesclin, records its hero’s accomplishments not only on the battlefield but in the tournament, where he won all the prizes but often chivalrously yielded them to the runners-up. Bayard’s tournaments were fought “at the barriers,” with combatants approaching each other on either side of a wooden fence. Although Bayard sometimes killed opponents, the tournaments by now were designed as spectacles and athletic competitions, in contrast to the earlier rough and tumble. They might still end with a melee, but always an orderly and well-regulated one.

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY TOURNAMENT:
KNIGHTS JOUST AT THE BARRIERS, WHILE LADIES WATCH.
(BRITISH LIBRARY, MS. NERO D IX, F. 32B)