Writing Battles

New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Rory Naismith, Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Rory Naismith, Elizabeth Ashman Rowe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350253162
• eBook ISBN: 9781786726193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Battles have long featured prominently in historical consciousness, as moments when the balance of power was seen to have tipped, or when aspects of collective identity were shaped. But how have perspectives on warfare changed? How similar are present day ideologies of warfare to those of the medieval period? Looking back over a thousand years of British, Irish and Scandinavian battles, this significant collection of essays examines how different times and cultures have reacted to war, considering the changing roles of religion and technology in the experience and memorialisation of conflict. While fighting and killing have been deplored, glorified and everything in between across the ages, Writing Battles reminds us of the visceral impact left on those who come after.

1

‘What is this Castle call’d that stands hard by?’

The naming of battles in the Middle Ages

Robert Bartlett

Introduction

In his pioneering article of 2000, ‘The Naming of Battlefields in the Middle Ages’, Philip Morgan began by invoking Shakespeare’s Henry V, and this chapter will do the same.¹ In Act Four, after the great struggle between the French and the English fought on St Crispin’s day, 1415, the weary king hears the welcome words from the French herald: ‘The day is yours.’ Henry’s first response is to thank God – ‘Praised be God, and not our strength for it’, he says – but he follows this pious utterance immediately with a question to the herald: ‘What is this Castle call’d that stands hard by?’ and, on learning that it is called Agincourt, makes the pronouncement, ‘Then call we this the field of Agincourt.’

Battles don’t name themselves. Someone has to decide which of many local features is to be chosen to immortalize the fight. It might be a stream that ran through the field of battle, a nearby castle, as in the case of Henry’s Agincourt, the nearest town or a multitude of other landmarks. This is not to mention the possibility of taking a name from something other than topography, as in the case of the Battle of the Golden Spurs, a name by which the battle fought between the French and the Flemish outside the walls of Courtrai in 1302 is often known, on account of the number of gilded spurs the victorious Flemings stripped from the dead or captured French knights.

Then, of course, there is the question of who names the battle. In the case of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the situation is quite clear: the victorious general decides the name. But things are not always that simple. In the heat of events, even a victorious general might overlook this important task. Then it is up to others, participants and non-participants alike, to find a way of talking about the bloody day. And, naturally, the victors and the vanquished might not come to the same conclusion about the name a battle was to be remembered by. In the American War between the States this issue recurred, not only in the name of the overall conflict itself, but in the naming of no fewer than eight battles where the Union and the Confederacy differed, of which Bull Run/Manassas is the best known. In this case, as in several others, the Union chose to name the battle after a landmark on the battlefield, usually a stream, and the Confederacy after the town that served as its base for the operation.²

The First World War saw a kind of fighting that made definition of a specific ‘battle’ very difficult. Trench lines ran for hundreds of miles, military activity might take place almost continuously and even the big ‘pushes’ could be difficult to separate and name. Consequently, after the war the British government established an official ‘Battles Nomenclature Committee’, whose task was to name and date battles. This published a report in 1922: The Official Names of the Battles and Other Engagements Fought by the Military Forces of the British Empire during the Great War 1914–1919. The committee continued its task during the Second World War and the Korean War. Part of its practical purpose was to give sense and order to the award of battle honours; it is, after all, very difficult to give battle honours unless one knows the battle for which they are being awarded. Naturally enough, although there was coordination of British and Empire efforts in this respect, the French and the Germans might do things differently. While the British Third Battle of Ypres starts on 31 July 1917 and ends on 10 November of that year, the French Second Battle of Flanders, while starting on the same day, ends on 9 October, and the German Battle of Flanders starts on 27 May 1917 and ends on 3 December.³

In the Middle Ages, the heralds were the closest thing to a Battles Nomenclature Committee. Their first and main function was to identify and record participants at tournaments, but this role gradually expanded to include real battles too. ‘Sir’, says one address to the heralds in the fifteenth century, ‘yours is a fair office, for by your report men judge of worldly honour … in arms, in assaults, battles, sieges and elsewhere …’.⁴ The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, writing a history of the years 1400–44, and the ultimate source of the scene in Shakespeare’s play, describes how Henry V summoned the heralds, both French and English, after his victory, and

The king asked them the name of the castle that he saw nearby. And they answered him that it was called Agincourt. ‘And because’, said the king, ‘all battles ought to bear the name of the fortress, village or town nearest to where they took place, this from now and forever shall be named the battle of Agincourt.’⁵

Modern historians have been sceptical whether this exchange took place as described, but there is no doubt that ‘Agincourt’ was the usual name of the battle from or soon after 1415, although there were some other ways of referring to it; the most chilling is probably a local French designation of the battle as ‘the day of the English’.⁶

Grammatical form

The standard modern form of battle names in English is a generic noun, ‘battle’, and a specifier, in most cases a place name in the genitive: ‘Battle of PLACENAME’. Looking at each of these elements in turn, and beginning with usage in English, it is clear that by the end of the Middle Ages, the current convention, ‘the battle of PLACENAME’, was well established. In the short summary chronicle contained in the commonplace book of John Benet, who was vicar of Harlington in Bedfordshire in the 1450s and 1460s, there are mentions of ten battles, most of them in English in the form ‘the battle of Poitiers’, ‘the battle of Shrewsbury’, ‘the battle of Agincourt’, and so on, although on two occasions the text switches into Latin, for the primum bellum apud St Albans (the first battle at St Albans) and bellum apud Northampton (the battle at Northampton), while Towton, the bloody battle fought ten miles south-west of York on Palm Sunday 1461, is ‘the great battle in the North’.⁷ The word ‘battle’ is derived from Old French and is found in English from around 1300, although not commonly with a genitive place name of this type until later.

Obviously, battles had been written about in England before 1300 and, prior to the arrival of the French loanword, there was the Old English ‘fight’, as both noun and verb.⁸ In its earlier, briefer annals the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses the forms ‘At this time X fought with Y at placename’ or ‘At this time X and Y fought at placename’. Thus the annal for 851 begins, ‘At this time the ealdorman Ceorl, with the men of Devon, fought with the heathen men at Wicgan beorge’, and that for 715 reads ‘At this time Ine and Ceolred fought at Wodnes beorge’. Minor variants are found, such as the reversal of the order of opponent and place (‘At this time Cuthred fought at Beorg feorda with Æthelbald’, s. a. 752), or the use of alternative prepositions (‘At this time Cynewulf and Offa fought around Bensington’, s. a. 777).⁹ These formulations, which are common, perform the same service of identifying a site as is done by ‘Battle of placename’, but, instead of the somewhat neutral noun ‘battle’, also identify the opponents and use an active verb ‘fight’.

For analysis of terminology in Latin, which was the most common medium of historical writing for most of the Middle Ages, the natural starting point is Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (Etymologies), written in the seventh century, one of the most formative works in the intellectual life of the medieval West. This is what he has to say of the subject:

Bellum, pugna and proelium differ. For bellum is said of the whole, as in Punic. Its parts are pugnae, as in Cannae … Again, there are many proelia in a pugna. For one thing is happening on the wings, another in the middle, another in the extremities of the battle-line. Therefore, bellum is the whole, pugna what happens on one day, proelium is part of a pugna.¹⁰

This is clear and concise, qualities of Isidore’s that have always attracted medievalists looking for a guide to the complexities of usage (a well-known case is the reliance on Isidore’s categories when discussing the so-called ages of man, childhood, adolescence, etc.). He seems to be saying, simply, that there is war, as in Punic war, there is battle, as in the Battle of Cannae, and there are the subordinate actions during a battle: bellum, pugna, proelium. However, although clear and concise, and perhaps appropriate for classical Latin, these distinctions are completely useless when actually investigating the medieval Latin terminology of warfare.¹¹

As already mentioned in passing, the chronicle in the commonplace book of the fifteenth-century vicar, John Benet, called the first battle of St Albans (1455) and the battle of Northampton (1460) primum bellum apud St Albans and bellum apud Northampton, and the use of bellum for battle was completely standard, as also is its specification with the phrase ‘apud plus placename’. For example, although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is mainly in English, the entry for 1046 in the Laud Manuscript (MS E: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud misc. 636) opens with a single phrase in Latin, Bellum apud Uallium Dunas (this is the battle of Val-ès-Dunes, January 1047), and that for 1054 with Bellum apud mare mortuum (the battle of Mortemer, February 1054).

Fontenoy

One of the most distressing battles in the struggles between members of the Carolingian dynasty that took up much of the ninth century was Fontenoy: a bloody encounter between Charlemagne’s grandsons in 841, sixteen miles south-west of Auxerre. Analysis of how it is referred to by the chroniclers and other narrative writers brings up a few points of general relevance. The first is simply lexical and grammatical. Although, as we have seen, a common Latin formula for naming a battle was to use apud (‘at’) plus the name of the place, it was also possible to construct an adjective from the place name and use that instead. The Latin adjectival form from Fontenoy was Fontaneticum, so we have references throughout the centuries to either the praelium Fontaneticum or the bellum Fontaneticum.¹² We also have two rarities in this case. One is a poem about the battle written by a participant, who names himself as Angelbert. The earliest manuscript of the poem, from the tenth century, has a headi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Medieval battles, model and myth
• 1 ‘What is this Castle call’d that stands hard by?’: The naming of battles in the Middle Ages
• 2 Battle-writing and commemoration: The transition from conflict to peace
• 3 ‘Undying glory by the sword’s edge’: Writing and remembering battle in Anglo-Saxon England
• 4 Fortress London: War and the making of an Anglo-Saxon city
• 5 ‘Axe-age, sword-age’: Writing battles in Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia
• 6 Medieval Irish battle narratives and the construction of the past
• 7 Which ‘pagans’?: The influence of the crusades on battle narratives in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia
• 8 Writing a battle: The case of Stamford Bridge (1066)
• 9 Shooting arrows: Cinematic representations of medieval battles
• 10 A troubled memory: Battles of the First World War
• Afterword: The companionship of battle-writers
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright