(no subject)
Several [...] episodes from the chronicles and literary sources show how much dread men had of violating the prohibition of eating meat on a fast day-including one in Raoul de Cambrai, where Raoul, unrepentant for having just burned a convent with all its nuns inside, retracts with embarrassment an order to prepare a feast when he is reminded that it is Lent.
How, then, can soldiers have been so apparently blase about the prospect of being involved in-and perhaps dying unshriven in-an unjust war, which Augustine termed "only brigandage and arson on a large scale," implying that any deaths inflicted in such a struggle would be murder? [...] since, by definition, a sovereign lord had no temporal lord to judge him, only God could do so; his followers had neither that right nor that duty. Hence, almost without exception, a war declared by a sovereign prince was ipso facto treated as a just war by his own men, by neutral princes, by canon law, and (unless its own interests were attacked) by the church as well. [...] And clearly, in medieval soldiers' minds, to expect a man to refrain from pillage and burning, or to expect him to cross his lord because the latter was conducting an unjust war, would be far too much for someone as reasonable as God to ask of them.
Medieval styles of fighting, in close order and among relatives, hearth companions, and lifelong friends, inherently strengthened the motivational powers of glory and shame. When there was no anonymity for combatants, noted Jacques de Hemricourt in the fourteenth century, "none dared be a coward."
When Henry Percy, the sixth earl of Northumberland, fought to the death rather than fleeing at Towton in 1461, he was only upholding the standard set by his father the fifth earl (killed at St. Albans in 1455), his paternal grandfather Hotspur (killed at Shrewsbury in 1403), and Hotspur s father the fourth earl (killed at Bramham Moor in 1408), all of whom shared his name as well as his blood.
How, then, can soldiers have been so apparently blase about the prospect of being involved in-and perhaps dying unshriven in-an unjust war, which Augustine termed "only brigandage and arson on a large scale," implying that any deaths inflicted in such a struggle would be murder? [...] since, by definition, a sovereign lord had no temporal lord to judge him, only God could do so; his followers had neither that right nor that duty. Hence, almost without exception, a war declared by a sovereign prince was ipso facto treated as a just war by his own men, by neutral princes, by canon law, and (unless its own interests were attacked) by the church as well. [...] And clearly, in medieval soldiers' minds, to expect a man to refrain from pillage and burning, or to expect him to cross his lord because the latter was conducting an unjust war, would be far too much for someone as reasonable as God to ask of them.
Medieval styles of fighting, in close order and among relatives, hearth companions, and lifelong friends, inherently strengthened the motivational powers of glory and shame. When there was no anonymity for combatants, noted Jacques de Hemricourt in the fourteenth century, "none dared be a coward."
When Henry Percy, the sixth earl of Northumberland, fought to the death rather than fleeing at Towton in 1461, he was only upholding the standard set by his father the fifth earl (killed at St. Albans in 1455), his paternal grandfather Hotspur (killed at Shrewsbury in 1403), and Hotspur s father the fourth earl (killed at Bramham Moor in 1408), all of whom shared his name as well as his blood.