Medieval knights and chivalry on the battlefield

The knight of the Hundred Years’ War was a different sort of warrior from the knight of the First Crusade. He was heavier: clad in plate armour of wrought iron and steel, on a destrier that might weigh 1,200 pounds and cost as much as a small manor. He was more expensive: the equipment of a single man-at-arms, with horse, harness, and weapons, could run to 80 or 100 marks, and the support of a single lance — a knight, his squire, his page, and three or four mounted archers — was the cost of a small company. He was more professional: paid by indenture, contracted for the half-year, supported by the customs of war that the late-medieval state had developed. He was also, in the eyes of the chroniclers, more chivalric. The ideals of chivalry, which had been worked out in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were the ideals of the Hundred Years’ War; the actual conduct of war, in the new conditions of the longbow and the cannon, was a long and humiliating disappointment.

The knight, in the late Middle Ages, was a legal and social category. The English statute of 1275, the Statutum de Militibus, distinguished between men who held their lands by knight-service and men who held them by other tenures; the French coutumier of 1273, the Établissements de Saint Louis, made a similar distinction. The knight, in other words, was a man of free birth who held a knight’s fee, who had been dubbed by a knight, and who had the right to bear arms. The system of knight-service, in England and in France, was the working basis of the feudal state.

The knight, in the Hundred Years’ War, was also a social type. The chivalric literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the chansons de geste, the Arthurian romances, the troubadour poetry — had produced a vocabulary of chivalric virtue: prowess, loyalty, largesse, courtesy. The literature of the Hundred Years’ War, the chansons de geste of the late period, the chronicles of Froissart, the Royaumont continuation of the Grandes Chroniques, was an extended meditation on whether the actual knight still lived up to the ideals. The answer, the chroniclers generally agreed, was no. The chronicler of the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, the Leicestershire canon who wrote his chronicle in the 1390s, was particularly severe: the knights of the reign of Richard II, he wrote, were “more devoted to worldly vanity than to the defence of the realm.”

The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348, was a piece of the chivalric ideal in a new key. The order, of twenty-six knights, was a brotherhood of honour, with a chapel at Windsor, a feast of St George, and a rule of conduct. The Order of the Golden Fleece, founded by Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1430, was a similar foundation. Both orders, while ceremonial, were political: the king who created a chivalric order was the king who bound a body of nobles to his service. The orders, as Malcolm Vale has argued, were the chivalric ideal translated into the politics of the state.

The mounted charge in 1337

The Hundred Years’ War began with the mounted charge as the central tactic of the European battlefield. The English army of 1339, the French army of Philip VI, the Flemish army of Louis of Flanders, all had the mounted knight as their main striking force. The knight, mounted on a heavy horse, couched his lance, charged the enemy line, and tried to break the formation. The longbow, the crossbow, and the cannon were supporting weapons. The mounted charge was the central act of war.

The mounted charge, in the period, was a complicated matter. The knight, in plate armour, weighed perhaps 220 to 280 pounds, and his horse weighed 1,200 to 1,500 pounds; the charge, in the right conditions, was a devastating affair. The chroniclers of the 1340s, the Froissart of the 1370s and 1380s, the Chronique de Normandie of the 1430s, all describe the charge in similar terms: the knight in his harness, the horse at the gallop, the couched lance, the impact. The charge, however, required open ground, a clear line of advance, and a willing enemy; the charge, in the wrong ground, was a disaster.

The French, in the early years of the war, were slow to develop new tactics. The French army of 1337, the French army of 1340, the French army of 1346, were all essentially the same army: a body of mounted men-at-arms, with a few crossbowmen and a few infantry. The English, by contrast, had developed a new system: the longbowmen, the dismounted men-at-arms, the contracted indenture system. The two systems would meet on the field of Crécy, in 1346, and the meeting would be a catastrophe for the French.

The defeats of 1346 and 1415

The Battle of Crécy, on 26 August 1346, was the first great demonstration that the mounted charge was no longer the central tactic. The French cavalry, charging uphill through freshly ploughed ground, was cut down by the longbow. The English longbowmen, in the V-formation on the slope, fired at a rate of twelve to fifteen arrows a minute; the French cavalry, in the mud, could not charge effectively. The French losses, perhaps 2,000 knights, were catastrophic; the English losses were minimal. The disaster of Crécy was the first sign of a long-term change in the art of war.

The Battle of Agincourt, on 25 October 1415, repeated the lesson. The French cavalry, charging through the mud and the rain of arrows, was cut down in great numbers. The English longbowmen, firing at a rate of twelve to fifteen arrows a minute, made the French charge impossible. The French losses, perhaps 4,000 to 6,000 men, were catastrophic; the English losses were minimal. The disaster of Agincourt was the second sign of a long-term change.

The defeats of 1346 and 1415 had a profound effect on the European imagination. The chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405), in his Chroniques, gave the most widely read account of both battles; the chronicler of the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, the Annales Henrici Quinti, the Royaumont continuation of the Grandes Chroniques, all worked out the political and religious consequences. The defeats of 1346 and 1415, in short, were the death of a world: the world of the mounted charge, the world of the chivalric single combat, the world of the chanson de geste. The English had found a way to win; the French, slowly, would find a way to recover.

The dismounted battalion: a French response

The French response to the disasters of 1346 and 1415 was, in part, to develop a new army. Charles V (1364–1380) and Charles VII (1422–1461), in their different ways, began the work of reform. Charles V created the francs-archers in 1368, a body of infantry raised by the communes; Charles VII created the Compagnies d’ordonnance in 1445, fifteen companies of a hundred lances, with a permanent staff and a permanent budget. The new French army, under the Bureau brothers, was an artillery army: the cannon was the new arm, the gunner was the new soldier, the camp-follower was the new support.

The new army was, in part, a dismounted army. The French men-at-arms, in the new system, were to fight on foot, with the cannon and the crossbow and the longbow supporting them. The French infantry, in the new system, was the core of the army, and the mounted knight was a supporting element. The change is treated in detail in How gunpowder changed medieval warfare, and in Medieval knights and chivalry on the battlefield, the parallel essay of this site.

The new French army was tested, for the first time, at the Battle of Formigny in 1450. The English army, under the command of Sir Thomas Kyriel, was destroyed by a French army that combined dismounted men-at-arms with cannon and field works. The battle of Castillon, in 1453, repeated the lesson. The mounted knight, in the new system, was a subordinate; the dismounted man-at-arms, the cannon, and the infantry, were the new striking force.

Chivalric literature and the disillusionment of war

The chivalric literature of the period, the long poems of the late Middle Ages, was a literature of disillusionment. The Romance of the Rose of Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1230) and Jean de Meung (c. 1275) had been an elaborate celebration of courtly love; the Vœux du Paon of Jacques de Longuyon (c. 1312) had been a celebration of chivalric virtue; the Prose Tristan of the 1230s, and the prose Lancelot of the same period, were the great Arthurian cycles. The chivalric literature of the late Middle Ages, the Perceforest of the 1340s, the Lancelot du Lac of the 1470s, the Petit Jehan de Saintré of Antoine de la Sale (1459), was a literature of doubt. The Petit Jehan de Saintré, in particular, is a study of the failure of the chivalric ideal.

The chivalric literature of the 1370s and 1380s, the period of the French reconquest, was a literature of restoration. Christine de Pizan, the Italian-born daughter of an astrologer to Charles V, wrote the Epistre Othéa and the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V (1404) to remind the French court of the chivalric virtue of the great king. Eustache Deschamps (c. 1346–c. 1406), the soldier-poet of Champagne, wrote a long ballade in praise of the great captains of the reconquest: Boucicaut, the Marshal, who had fought at Nicopolis in 1396; Clisson, the constable, who had broken the power of the English in Brittany. The chivalric ideal, in the work of Christine and of Deschamps, was a piece of propaganda for a kingdom at war.

The work of the chronicler Jean Froissart, the most influential writer of the late Middle Ages, was a more complicated affair. Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405) was born in Valenciennes, the son of a minor official of the bishop of Cambrai. He wrote in French, for a Burgundian patron, a long chronicle of the war from 1325 to 1400. The Chroniques is a celebration of the chivalric ideal: the long descriptions of tournaments, the long speeches of the great captains, the long account of the battles. Froissart, however, did not personally witness the great battles of the early war; he was nine years old at the time of Crécy, and the account he gives is the work of his informants. Froissart’s Chroniques is, in short, a literary work: a construction of the chivalric ideal in a world that had already moved beyond it.

The historiography of chivalry is a large field. The most important modern studies are those of Maurice Keen, Chivalry (1984), and Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry (1981), both of which treat the chivalric ideal as a working ideology of the late-medieval state. The work of Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (1970) and The New Knighthood (1994), and of Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards (1980), is also important. The historiography of the knight, in the Hundred Years’ War, is, in short, the historiography of a long and complicated transformation.

References and further reading

Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981).
Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London: Boydell, 1970; rev. ed. 1995) and The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vols. I–V (London: Faber & Faber, 1990–2021).
Philippe Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France de Philippe le Bel à Louis XII (Paris: PUF, 1997).