John Hewitt

“ In 1237 the Milanese again placed their defiant Carrocium in front of the imperial host. They went forth with an army of about sixty thousand men, and fixed their Carrocium where their ranks seemed to be strongest. At sight of this, the emperor summoned his counsellors, and, animating them by warlike words, said: "Behold how these insolent Milanese, our enemies, dare to appear against us, and presume to provoke me, their lord, to battle; enemies as they are to the truth and to Holy Church, and borne down by the weight of their sins. Cross the river, unfurl my Banner, my victorious Eagle! ”

“ One of the first things that strikes the student in turning over the illuminated manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxons, and comparing their pictures with the relics procured from the graves, is the great frequency in the paintings of the barbed spear or angon, and its extreme rarity in real examples. We have already seen, in the description of Agathias, that this weapon was employed with fearful effect by the Franks in the seventh century; and the constant occurrence of it in the vellum-paintings of a later date, leaves us no room to doubt that it was a familiar form to our Teutonic ancestors. ”

“ With the nations of the Stone Period and the Bronze Period we do not purpose to occupy ourselves; not that the relics of their times are of an inferior interest, but that, in commencing with the days of the iron-workers, which for general purposes we assume to be identical with the retirement of the Romans beyond the Alps, and the domination of the northern nations in the centre and west of Europe, we feel that we have a task before us already much greater than we can hope to fulfil, either to the satisfaction of our readers, or our own. ”

“ Our abbot, who was styled 'the Magnanimous Abbot,' went to the siege of Windsor, where he appeared in armour, with other abbots of England, having his own banner, and retaining many knights at heavy charges; being more remarkable there for his counsel than for his piety. ”

“ The highlanders adhered to their old habits and their old arms with a pertinacity which has not been extinguished even in our own day. The round shield ornamented with knot-work subsisted to the field of Culloden, and the dagger with its hilt of the same pattern, is still in vogue. ”

“ Meantime the slingers with stones, the archers with arrows, and the crossbow-men with bolts, each intent on his own department, began to press forward and dislodge their opponents from the ramparts. Soldiers, too, unmatched in courage, ascend the Tower, waging nearly equal war against the enemy with missile weapons and with stones. Nor indeed were our foes at all remiss, but trusting their whole security to their valour, they poured down boiling grease and oil upon the Tower, and slung stones on the soldiers, rejoicing in the completion of their desires by the destruction of multitudes. ”

“ We find, therefore, in the poems and chronicles of this later time, constant mention of rich arms and armour; and in the capitularies of Charlemagne especially, we get a glimpse of the improvements in northern warfare. "Let each count," commands the emperor, "be careful that the troops he has to lead to battle are fully equipped; that they have spear, shield, a bow with two strings, and twelve arrows, helmet, and coat-of-fence [7] ." We here see the soldiery adding to their defensive appointments the casque and lorica, and to their offensive arms the bow and arrows. ”

“ By the ancient laws of Helsingia, every youth on attaining the age of eighteen, was bound to furnish himself with five kinds of warlike equipment: a sword, an axe, a helmet (jernhatt) , a shield, and a byrnie or a gambeson. A spirited passage of Giraldus Cambrensis brings the Norwegian troops vividly before us. ”

“ This soldier of the emperor's host struck at the neck of the king, the usual point of attack, and though the gorget of the monarch prevented the weapon from inflicting any wound, the barbs of the spear became so firmly fixed between the hauberk and the head-defence, that the sturdy German was enabled to pull Philippe Auguste from his horse and lay him prone at his feet. The king managed to raise himself again, but the soldier held firm. ”

“ Their weapons were a short spear, javelins, and an axe. The axes, which they had derived from the Norwegians and Ostmen, were excellently well steeled. "They make use of but one hand when they strike with the axe, extending the thumb along the handle to direct the blow; from which neither the helmet can defend the head, nor the iron folds of the armour the body; whence it has happened in our time that the whole thigh of a soldier, though cased in well-tempered armour, hath been lopped off by a single blow, the limb falling on one side of the horse, and the expiring body on the other. ”

“ War-cries were still in vogue, and saintly relics and emblems were regarded with a veneration commensurate with the power of the Church and the confiding credulity of the soldiery. The sacred symbol of the Cross is seen constantly on the shields of the knights; and one of the barons of Rufus, on departing for the Crusades, tells the king that his shield, his helmet, his saddle, and his horses, shall all be marked with this holy device [187] . It was even found useful to enrol mock-saints in the armies contending against the enemies of the faith. ”

“ The knights, indeed, not content with their panoply of steel, seem in the course of the middle-ages to have fortified themselves with a complete outwork of shields. Thus we have the ailettes, the shield proper, the garde-bras, or elbow-shield, the shoulder-shield, the Beinschiene, or shield for the legs, the vamplate on the lance, and the steel front of the saddle, which was in fact but another shield for the defence of the knight's body. ”

“ This is curiously shewn in the law of Ethelbert which enacts that "if one man slay another, he is to pay his wergyld: but not so, if the slayer happen to be the king's weapon-smith or his messenger; in that case, he is to pay only a moderated wergyld of a hundred shillings [74] ."
We have already noticed the curious custom of burying the spear-head in the same vase with the bones of the Anglo-Saxon warrior. An analogous practice has been observed in Denmark; where the sword of the hero, broken into several pieces, is placed over the mouth of the urn. ”

“ Let us now examine, as far as we are enabled to do so, what was the Teutonic warrior's defensive equipment. The structure of the Body-armour can only be inferred from indirect evidences; for the vague terms of the [Pg 61] writers, such as lorica and byrnie, and the rudely conventional forms of the painters, who indicated a tree by a cluster of three or four leaves, and a coat-of-fence by a few circles penned on the parchment or punched on the bronze, afford us little help in determining with exactness how the armour-smith achieved his task. ”

“ Like his ancestors, the ancient Germans, of whom Tacitus tells us, "nihil neque publicæ neque privatæ rei nisi armati agunt," the Anglo-Saxon freeman always went armed; a circumstance, however, that proves, not so much the extent of his freedom, as the smallness of his civilization. The ancient Egyptians, on the contrary, always went unarmed; and in the Kristendom's Saga we read, that among the Icelanders, about 1139, so great was the security, that "men no longer carried weapons at a public meeting, and that scarcely more than a single helmet could be seen at a judicial assemblage [17] ." ”

“ The Pole-axe is the almost universal form of this arm in the Bayeux tapestry. Not only the Saxon soldiery, but Harold, and even Duke William himself, are armed with this fearful weapon. Indeed, for a force of infantry, [Pg 49] as the English were, contending against cavalry, no other kind of axe could have been of much service. Wace, whose minute descriptions, wearisome enough to the general reader, are invaluable to the archæologist, has not lost sight of the long-handled axes of the islanders. ”

“ In Anglo-Saxon illuminations, a very large majority of the fighting men appear to have no defensive armour at all but the helmet and shield; as in this example from a MS. of Prudentius, of the eleventh century, in the Tenison Library. The leg-bands seen on these figures, and on many others of the same period, were in common use among the soldiery. It is a fashion of which we find an early example in the calceus patricius of the Romans, and a remnant in the chequered hose of the Scottish Highlanders. ”

“ But in the south of Scotland the fashions of France and of England had made great inroads; especially advanced by the crowds of discontented nobles of Saxon and of Norman blood, who sought in the court of the Scottish king solace for their misfortunes, or revenge for their wrongs. Thus in the seal of Alexander I. (1107-1124,) [Pg 107] we find that monarch wearing the hauberk with tunic and the nasal helmet, and armed with lance and kite-shield, exactly as seen in the monuments of his more southern cotemporaries. ”

“ The more ancient quintain was merely a post or a shield fixed on a pole, which the tyro attacked in lieu of a living antagonist. But a new element was soon given to the quintain, which at once brought it into favour with the populace: it was so contrived as to inflict summary punishment on the inexpert. To one kind, a bag of sand was fastened, which, whirling round from the force of the blow struck at the opposite end, buffeted the tilter who was not expeditious enough to get out of its way. Others were made in the form of a Turk, armed with sword and shield ”

“ From the beginning he must learn to labour, run, carry heavy weights, and bear the sun and dust: he must use sparing and rustic food: he must accustom himself to live in tents, or in the open air." Then, turning upon the luxurious and effeminate knights of his day, he upbraids them in a diatribe which gives us a singular picture of the manners of this age. ”

“ A lorica formed of metal, without the aid of any texture of wool or of silk, could scarcely be anything else than a coat of chain-mail. We may further refer to the Bayeux tapestry (Stothard, Plate xvi.) , where the pillards are appropriating the armour of the slain. The last figure in the second border of that plate is stripping the hauberk over the head of a fallen warrior; and, in thus turning it inside out, discloses the interior of the garment, which exhibits the ring-work exactly in the same manner as it is seen on the outside of others. ”

“ It is not unworthy of note that the effigies of two of these Judges of the Tournament, fully equipped in the trappings of armed knighthood, have been preserved to our days: the monuments of Edmund Crouchback and of William de Valence in Westminster Abbey are among the most curious memorials that can be consulted by the student of ancient military costume. ”

“ The Abbé Cochet, however, describes the remains of a lance-shaft found at Envermeu as being of oak; black with age, and of an extreme hardness [55] .
The staves were sometimes of a rich and costly character. The heriot of the Anglo-Saxon Wulfsige consisted of two horses, one helmet, one byrnie, one sword, and a spear twined with gold [56] .
The spear-staves deposited in the graves are necessarily of the shorter kind: the length of the entire weapon being about six feet; a fact easily ascertained by measuring the distance from the blade to the iron shoe, where that is found. ”

“ The forces employed in these services differed in nothing from those of the west of Europe; the strength of the host consisted of the heavy-armed knights with lance and target, while the communal levy fought with such weapons as they could best wield or most easily obtain. The Hungarians, who overran the country as far as the Tiber on the north, and the Saracens, who harried the land to the south of that river, acted in small bodies of light cavalry, compensating by the rapidity of their movements for the inferior solidity of their armament. ”

“ Clerics are still found participating the dangers and glories of the battle-field; not alone as councillors or leaders, but sturdily wielding the deadly mace, and clad in hauberk and helm, like the lay vassals and men-at-arms around them. We have already seen the Bishop of Durham leading a division of the English at the battle of Falkirk. At the great battle of Bovines, in 1214, the French army was commanded by Guerin, bishop-elect of Senlis ”