Medieval Lives (2004) s01e05 Episode Script

(Horse whinnies ) There was once a knight in shining armor.
Handsome, noble and strong.
He dedicated himself to God and love.
St.
George! And the Lady Joan! Wherever he went, he brought justice and mercy.
(Whimpers ) Many a time he rescued a damsel in distress and jousted to win his lady's favor.
Were there really knights like this in the Middle Ages? or were the knights they remember here, in the Italian town of Cesena, more typical? one day, in 1377, a troop of knights and armed men rode into the town, closed the gates and set about killing every man, woman and child.
one report claimed that 5,000 unarmed civilians were slaughtered in one day.
The knight in charge of this massacre was an Englishman.
His name was Sir John Hawkwood.
What on earth had happened to the golden age of chivalry? our story of the knight begins in 1066 when William the Bastard conquered England.
The Anglo-Saxons called his followers ''cnihts'' which became knights.
William, who now understandably changed his name to William the Conqueror rewarded his knights with land and property.
But they didn't pay rent.
Instead, they had to provide military service for the king.
The whole system was designed as a war machine.
And the sort of knight who did well in it was not the quiet, retiring type.
The ability to beat another man to a bloody pulp or cut him to pieces was not merely a requirement of knighthood.
It was one of its ideals.
Richard the Lion heart, for example, was celebrated amongst the knightly classes for his habit chopping his victims' skulls down to the teeth.
But to anyone who wasn't a knight, this was a problem.
How could you control these men? How could you channel their testosterone culture into something that was less destructive in society? The idea society came up with was to try and invent a code of behavior by which the knightly class must learn to govern themselves.
Well, it certainly seemed like a good idea.
What made the Norman knights different was the fact they fought on horseback.
And since the French for horse was ''cheval'', a mounted warrior was known as a chevalier.
And so the code of conduct for knights, indeed their whole culture, became known as chivalry.
But what exactly was chivalry? Well, it depended who you were.
The knights themselves had no doubt what chivalry meant to them.
It meant learning how to kill people, making money and getting famous.
And in the 12th century, the man who best embodied what knights thought chivalry was was Sir William Marshal.
William was already hardened to the perils of battle by the ripe old age of five.
In 1152, William's father, John the Marshal, rebelled against King Stephen and the king laid siege to John's castle.
oop! During the siege, his father handed William over as a hostage and at one point the king put the boy into a catapult and threatened to shoot him back over the castle walls! William's father shouted back that he didn't care about the child since he had the hammer and the anvils to make more and better sons.
William clearly knew what it was to have a caring, loving father.
And just to make sure he got the point, when his father died, he didn't leave his son a penny.
William was faced with two alternatives.
Join the church or become a knight.
So William went to Normandy, where his cousin ran a sort of military academy.
Exactly what William might have learned there was demonstrated to me by Steve Mallett, a specialist in medieval horsemanship and historian Tobias Capwell.
- It looks frightening! - I think that's the idea.
- They train them to rear? - Absolutely, yes.
There's manuscript evidence that actually shows horses being trained to kick, to strike out at a shield that's held by an attendant.
So the horse is a weapon? The horse is the most powerful weapon that a knight has.
And what's the most crucial part of that training for the horse? Well, the horse is a flight animal.
And its natural reaction, which is perfectly sensible, is there is a threat so you run away.
But what Steve's doing here is teaching a horse to override its natural instinct.
The training should bring the horse to a point where it's really an extension of the rider.
The horse's legs are moving as if they're the rider's own legs.
And then when the rider asks for something it happens instantly.
I bet there were times when William felt he wasn't getting anywhere.
He was still broke, but at least he was learning to join the ruling class.
(Tobias ) Right now he's working to move the horse sideways.
The ability to subtly change your line against an opponent is extremely important.
This is really about power steering.
- He just stops just like that.
- Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Power brakes as well.
very important.
At the end of it all, William was dubbed a knight by the Earl of Tancarville.
Now at last he was equipped to earn a bit of ready cash.
And he didn't even need to go to war.
There was plenty to be made on the tournament circuit.
In the early days, a tournament was a miniature war, played for sport.
The tournament field stretched over miles and could include villages and towns.
It was a bit like the Isle of Man Grand Prix, only with knights chasing each other on horseback, and hacking at everyone with swords.
It was terribly popular.
The money-making came when you captured another knight and held him for ransom.
William hit the jackpot with his first tournament.
His biographer tells us, ''only that morning Marshal had been a poor man ''as regards possessions and horses ''but now he had four and a half fine mounts.
'' I'm not quite sure what he did with the half a horse.
- Maybe he ate it.
- (Whinnies ) (clears throat) Sir William didn't just get rich.
He achieved that other aim of chivalry.
Fame.
While he was still in training, he caught the eye of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Well, a lot of young knights did.
But then he served her husband Henry II with great success.
In return for his loyal service, Henry rewarded William with the hand of the most eligible heiress on the market.
She came complete with oodles of land and her own castle.
And this is it.
Chepstow.
Well, the landless William had finally become a man of property.
It was every knight's dream come true.
He was famous as a warrior and one of the richest men in England.
( # Gregorian chanting) When he was buried at Temple church in London in 1219, the Archbishop of Canterbury called William Marshal ''the best knight in the world''.
Fame, wealth and God's approval.
It's what chivalry was all about.
If you were a knight.
oh, and sex.
Knights used chivalry to legitimize doing the things they liked doing.
violence was intrinsic to the cult of chivalry.
Even, you may be surprised to learn, violence to women.
According to the great chivalric writer Chretien De Trois ''If a knight found a damsel alone, ''he would sooner think of cutting his own throat ''than of offering her dishonor.
''But on the other hand, ''if the damsel were accompanied by another knight, ''and if it pleased him to give combat to that knight and win the lady by arms ''then he might do his will with her just as he pleased ''and no shame or blame whatsoever would attach to him.
'' Well, isn't chivalry just full of little surprises? ( # Discordant fanfare ) So for the knights, chivalry meant fighting, fame and fortune.
But there were others who wanted to harness the power of chivalry in their own interests.
The church, which was itself often the victim of the knights' violence, had the bright idea of diverting their energies.
(Shouting) In 1095, pope urban II reversed centuries of Christian doctrine by announcing that it was now fine for violent young men to butcher people, so long as the victims weren't Christian.
From all over Europe, knights flocked to the cause.
At the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, they boasted of wading in infidel blood up to their knees.
Hitherto, knights would have had to do penance for killing.
But now the killing was the penance.
In 1276, the Catalan knight-turned-hermit Ramon Lull thought he'd better lay down some ethical guidelines.
Lull said the proper chivalric knight's first duty was to defend the christian faith.
Then his lord and then women, widows, and orphans.
For Lull, even the knights' equipment was full of religious significance.
The mail coat protected him like a castle against vice.
The helmet was a symbol of the knight's fear of shame.
The sword reminded him of Christ on the cross.
The shield signified how he should defend his lord and the spear stood for truth and strength.
There was a third power in the land with an interest in controlling the violence of the knights.
This was their earthly lord, the king.
( # Bagpipes ) To keep knights on side, the king was happy to offer glamour, pageantry and all the fun of dressing up.
What's more, in royal employment, knights could become part of the fantasy worlds they enjoyed in their stories.
Edward III for example revived the glorious, though entirely fictitious, traditions of King Arthur.
Windsor castle was to be his new camelot and he planned to set up a round table of no less than 300 knights.
He must have realized he was heading for a catering disaster with 300 knights round one table.
So he went for something more exclusive.
He created two tournament teams, each of 13 star knights.
These were to be the 26 members of the order of the Garter.
And this is the order's home, St.
George's chapel, Windsor.
Even today, to be a Knight of the Garter is about as exclusive as it gets.
As a perk, you get free storage for your crest and banner here in the chapel.
These are today's Garter knights.
You can still see them arranged on either side of the chapel in two teams, just as they would have been in Edward's day.
Up there there's Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest with a kiwi and an ice pick.
And that banner is Sir Edward Heath, with a morning cloud.
That was the name of his yacht.
And over at the end there is the Baroness Thatcher.
She's the only one without a sword.
Probably going to give her a battle-ax.
But why did medieval knights feel they needed to stick swans and trees on their helmets? Why indeed have banners? The thing is nowadays we recognize famous people by their faces because we've seen photos of them countless times in the newspapers.
But back in the Middle Ages, you'd have no idea what anyone looked like unless you'd actually met them face to face.
And that's why people had coats of arms.
So, David, if I were to be granted a coat of arms, to tell people who I am, what might it look like? Well, we have prepared an approval sketch which shows what you might be granted.
So you see here the main charge on the shield is very bold and simple.
It's a great, big, yellow snake.
It's a gold python, which is a reference to Monty Python.
For the crest, animals make the best crests, and we heard that you were rather dominated by your bossy cat at home, so we've given you your cat and it's holding a quill pen to represent your writing career.
I would like to point out that the cat does not do my writing for me.
Ah! I see there's a motto here.
''Messias non est.
'' - You know what that means.
- Ah.
''He's not the Messiah.
'' Hm.
(Miaow ) So if I charged into battle with a cat on my head you'd know who it was.
You'd also know who it was running away as soon as the fighting started.
It was a kind of dare to ride into battle with your name plastered all over you.
on the other hand, heraldry could also act as a sort of life insurance policy.
one knight, Sir Robert Knolles, used to ride into battle with an inscription on his helmet which read, ''Whoever captures Sir Robert Knolles ''will gain 100,000 gold coins.
'' Well, you're not going to kill a golden goose like thatI Chivalry was so crucial to the conduct of knights that Edward III set up a court of chivalry and believe it or not, one still exists.
And this is it.
The Earl Marshal's court in the college of Arms.
At the moment, it's an exhibition space for these rather surreal heraldic devices.
So what sort of cases did the court of chivalry deal with? Knights on trial for failing to open the drawbridge for a damsel or running away from the dragon? Uh-uh.
The major preoccupation of the courts of chivalry was money.
There were always squabbles to be settled about who owned the rights to which prisoner or how the booty was to be split.
The other major concern of the court of chivalry was settling disputes over the rights to a particular coat of arms or crest.
Sometimes the cases went on for years.
So, did chivalry reduce the horror of war in any way? Well, yes, it could do.
So long as you happened to be a knight.
Edward III's son, the Black prince, was, according to his biographer, the perfect root of all honor and nobleness, of wisdom, valor and largesse.
Here's how he put chivalry into practice.
In 1370, the people of Limoges rebelled against the rule of the Black Prince.
The prince hastened to crush the rebellion and during the fighting three French knights were cornered by the Duke of Lancaster.
Eventually they had no choice but to surrender.
My lords, we are yours! You have vanquished us.
Therefore act according to the law of arms.
''My God!'' replied the Duke of Lancaster.
''We do not intend otherwise ''and we accept you for our prisoner.
'' The Duke of Lancaster would make a tidy sum from the ransoms and the French knights would live to fight another day.
So, fine if you were a knight, but the townspeople were not knights and the Black prince's chivalry didn't extend quite that far.
''All ranks, ages and sexes ''cast themselves on their knees before the prince, ''begging for mercy.
''All were put to the sword.
''Upwards of 3,000 men, women and children ''were put to death that day.
'' The whole point is, these chivalric laws of war had absolutely nothing to do with the Geneva Convention.
Nowhere in the order of the Garter was there anything about protecting civilians or the proper treatment of ordinary prisoners of war.
chivalry was strictly for the toffs.
The irony was, while Edward III was busy glamorizing the code of chivalry, at the same time, he had no intention of fighting the French by it.
The army he took across the Channel in 1339 was fundamentally different in its make-up from previous armies.
y ou see, the nature of warfare was changing, thanks largely to economics.
In the 14th century, there was an arms race going on just the same as today and knights were finding it increasingly expensive to get themselves onto the battlefield.
Since Roman times, the standard bit of kit had been the mail coat.
But developments in missile technology had brought a new kind of arrow that could go straight through mail.
And a new kind of crossbow was developed with even greater penetrating power.
So knights started looking for extra protection.
of course, weapons evolved to be more effective against plate armor.
There's an old French song that describes a knight so terrified that he soiled his saddle blanket.
I'm not surprised.
As the expense soared, many of the landed gentry tried to avoid military service.
So when Edward landed in France at the beginning of what was to be the Hundred years War, the bulk of his army were paid soldiery, mostly from the lower ranks of society.
This army also contained another element that was enough to make any noble knight soil his saddle blanket.
For all his chivalrous talk, Edward was preparing a distinctly down-to-earth surprise for the French.
He had thousands and thousands of well-trained peasant archers all armed with longbows.
Never mind the chivalry - kill the horses.
At the Battle of crecy in 1346, thousands of French noblemen charged in full pageantry.
But the English were playing by a different rule book.
In five minutes of battle, the English loosed more than 300.
000 arrows.
The flower of French chivalry was cut down by archers on threepence a day.
In all, the French lost over 5,ooo men to a few hundred English.
In 1360, both sides had had enough.
A peace treaty was signed and that was when the world changed.
Edward said, ''Right, my lot home.
Stop fighting.
Home, everybody!'' Nobody took any notice.
They were having far too good a time.
You see, a lot of Edward's army didn't have any homes to go to.
They may have been fighting in France for 20 years.
They may have captured a castle and there they were, living like lords.
Why should they go home? And so a new kind of military captain emerged.
Many styled themselves knights whether they'd been actually knighted or not.
And they formed themselves into what they called Free Companies fighting neither for lord nor God but for themselves.
They were bands of robbers on a nightmare scale.
one company was reported to be 16,ooo strong.
The Free companies swept down through France causing havoc and destruction.
And eventually they descended on Avignon here which in those days happened to be the residence of the Pope.
They burnt the surrounding countryside and threatened to attack God's representative on earth unless he handed over a spiritually uplifting sum of money.
Eventually, the pope coughed up around 100.
000 florins, enough to pay a 14th-century construction worker for about, oh, 3,ooo years.
God's representative on earth was a realist and he knew they couldn't be bought off easily.
So he said to the brigands, ''Look, boys.
''I'll throw in free pardons ''for all the sins you may have committed up to now.
''And I'll even have a word with a man I know who can find you some work in Italy.
''can't say fairer than that, can I?'' Now, it wasn't a stupid suggestion.
Italy was full of career opportunities for mercenary soldiers with nowhere to go.
of course Italy didn't actually exist in those days.
It consisted of a lot of city states like Pisa, Rome, Florence, Milan, Mantua and so on.
And they'd been at each other's throats for centuries.
But the citizens weren't exactly interested in fighting.
So they'd got into the habit of employing mercenary companies to do their fighting for them.
Which bring us back to this chap, Sir John Hawkwood, perhaps the most famous English knight of his day.
He was not a nobleman, but the son of a tanner, who'd made his way up through the ranks.
Hawkwood soon established his own mercenary company and made such a good living fighting for whoever would pay him that he was able to buy several castles, like this one in Tuscany.
Not bad for a poor lad from Essex.
Sir John was not a chivalric knight.
He had no pretence to lofty ideals and he didn't fight for glory or honor.
He was simply a businessman whose business happened to be war.
In 1377, Hawkwood was under contract to a certain cardinal by the name of Roberto.
Now, Roberto had a quarrel with the citizens of this town, Cesena.
They'd murdered some of his soldiers.
However, Roberto magnanimously offered them an amnesty if they'd surrender their arms.
Foolishly, the citizens of cesena thought they could trust the word of a cardinal priest of the order of the Holy Apostles.
As soon as they were disarmed, cardinal Roberto summoned Hawkwood from nearby Faenza where he'd been busy coordinating the rape of all the female inhabitants.
The cardinal said he wanted justice.
By justice he meant blood and more blood.
The resulting massacre shocked Europe.
According to one chronicler, they burned and slaughtered all the town.
The river was colored with blood and among the smoking ruins, the rapes, the killings, was a pitiful episode.
24 friars were killed in front of the main altar, along with the congregation.
one account claimed that 8,ooo had died and 16,ooo fled.
Every building was destroyed.
However, this wasn't the sort of thing that harmed a military man's reputation.
Far from it.
And for the last 15 years of his life, Hawkwood was under more or less permanent contract to the city of Florence.
When Hawkwood died, the city laid on a funeral of epic proportions and celebrated him as a hero.
The Florentines never lost their sense of business.
You see, they promised Hawkwood a magnificent marble tomb right here in the great cathedral of Florence.
However, when Richard II requested Hawkwood's body be returned to England, the Florentines decided to cut their losses and instead they put up this magnificent painting of what the magnificent marble tomb would have looked like if they'd built it.
Nonetheless, the tanner's son from Essex had become virtually a nobleman by turning warfare into a business.
The mercenary and the knight had become one and the same.
But was there ever really a difference? The knight of fantasy never really did exist.
All that rescuing damsels and helping the weak was just wishful thinking.
Even in the Middle Ages, chivalry could mean what you wanted it to mean.
Maybe we are better off without chivalry.
Its fine ideals were all too often used to perpetuate warfare which is what those who live by war want.
one of Hawkwood's contemporaries said of him he managed his affairs so well there was little peace in Italy in his time.
And I guess it's still true that those who promote war are usually those who are going to profit from it, whether they're arms manufacturers, politicians or knights in shining armor.