“Miniver loved the days of old / When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; / The vision of a warrior bold / Would set him dancing. / Miniver cursed the commonplace / And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; / He missed the Medieval grace / Of iron clothing.” The New England poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, mocking his own streak of romanticism in Miniver Cheevey, has perfectly anticipated Professor Nigel Saul.
For Honour and Fame has all the academic credentials – 18 pages of references – fitting the holder of the chair in Medieval History at Goldsmiths. He is genuinely informative on the detail of his period: castellation, heraldry, the role of the tournament and the literature – Mallory, Christine de Pisan and the like. This is, for all sorts of well-handled information, a very useful book. But, in outlook, Dr Saul is terribly close to 19th century historical novelists and sees high-minded lay figures out of Pre-Raphaelite art. Walter Scott and Rossetti hover about his ardent narrative.
He is in the business of exalting the knight, “parfit and gentil”, about whom some historians believe Chaucer was being tongue-in-cheek, derisive. Knightly failings, here and there a massacre, steady acquisition of cash and land, are sort of acknowledged – a passing wave – then submerged in handy parenthesis. His knights are, like the US Army, the essential good guys, their excursions missions civilisatrice.
He is, too, oddly pro-Norman, telling us that the awful Anglo-Saxons used to kill all their enemies, citing King Harold after the first battle of 1066, at Stamford Bridge: “He put the fleeing survivors to the sword without mercy. A century before, his ancestors had acted in the same way toward defeated Vikings.” About which ancestors, there is not a word on Alfred or Athelstan, both marked by the very qualities of the idealised knight. By contrast with Harold, the Conqueror, noble Norman besieging the brute Saxons in Exeter, contented himself with blinding only one of his hostages “in view of
the defenders” and, when the city surrendered, he abstained from loot and slaughtering.
This is extraordinary thinking and an absurd comparison. Harold was fighting off the latest of three centuries of invasion by Vikings. He was defending England in Yorkshire to make ready for fighting another invasion, by the chivalrous William, in Sussex. William was the invader, picking off towns from which, as king by conquest, he would derive future use and taxes. Mass killing, says Saul, was “not the Norman way”. For “the English found themselves the beneficiaries of a Medieval proto-version of the modern Geneva convention.” Under which there took place, in the late 1060s, the Harrowing of the North, reduction of a rebellious population by, er, mass slaughter. This was also the practice, two centuries later, of that other Norman, dear to Scottish nationalists, William Wallace, who went from village to village across Cumberland making his sharp point.
The same irrationality, the same blandness in the face of the nasty record, applies to Saul’s treatment of individuals. Hero worship is very rarely either good thing or good history, and he has it in a big way. Witness Richard I, “a Napoleon of his age.” Richard was, indeed, notably brave and an outstanding soldier, but nothing here acknowledges that he was also impressively savage. Consider August 20 1190 when he “shepherded 3,000 bound Muslim prisoners onto the plain in view of Saladin’s army and then butchered the men, women and children” – which, we were told, “was not the Norman way.” Unsurprisingly, that event does not appear in this study. But it can be found in Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore (p258) who adds: “So much for the legend of chivalry.” Later that year, Richard, criticised by his French knights for too long a negotiation with the Saracens, beheaded Turkish prisoners and posted the heads around his camp (p259).
However, for Professor Saul, “Richard’s magic was to work its effect in various ways. In the first place, the memory of his achievements was to live after him.” It was indeed. For this was the Third Crusade, the perfect undertaking for a chivalrous knight, Medieval Christianity butting bloodily and witlessly against Medieval Islam in pursuit of supposed Holy Places, the crying folly of an age of faith and its customary outcome, barbarism. The word “crusade” is today a commonplace term across the Middle East, perhaps the keystone in the contemporary wall of murderous incomprehension.
Yet there is very little here about barbarity or consequence. Crusading was what knights did and rather splendid. “In the late 12th and 13th centuries, those who took the cross were motivated by two factors above all: commitment to a holy war in the quest for personal salvation and the knightly quest for adventure.” Even the decadence of the later crusades is made attractive: “Of greater importance to those tempted by crusading were such worldly considerations as the quest for honour and an appetite for the exotic.”
No mention of Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, to which the Venetian element diverted the pure-purposed First Crusade for loot and acquisition. And if there is something in For Honour and Fame about the pogroms of Jews which, for example, Count Harrach in the Rhineland committed as pious prelude to taking the cross,
I must have missed it.
The truth is that no period of history should be idealised. The Renaissance overlapped with the Counter Reformation and its train of Christian savagery. The Enlightenment sparked off the Paris Terror and the drownings at Nantes. Knightly virtue did exist in an intense, pious fashion. But the knight was feudal master to his peasantry and might keep his own gallows for them. He had a code, which he might keep, but it had to do with making war: at one stage for ransom, a sort of highflown gangsterism, later for territorial gain.
Look at the Foreign Office in the late 19th century – overwhelmingly aristocratic, preoccupied with honour and territory – and observe the last blooming deadly fruit of the code of honour and fame, lower case, lots of dead.
