Archive for the ‘Thugs In Armour’ Category
I Drub Thee, Sir Knight
The original knighting ceremony had nothing to do with “chivalry,” as we were taught to understand that term in the Arthurian romances. It was simply adoption into a brotherhood of warriors, symbolised by the “dubbing”; which was more of a hazing than a gentle tap. (Elizabeth Moon gets the buffet right in her Gerd cycle, […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
Nice Little Republic You Have Here, Guv, Pity If Something Happened To It
The Ditmarschen affair in the early thirteenth century illuminates an aspect of the period that does not make it into popular histories, let alone films. We find the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and various counts cutting a deal to apportion the dues to be extracted from an area, once the free peasant republic that existed there […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
Imperial Star Destriers
With the best will in the world, no movie director, not even Peter Jackson, can show us what a medieval “destrier” or warhorse really looked like and how he behaved. They are extinct. No living person has seen one, any more than he has seen a tyrannosaurus. Not because of any process of natural selection, […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
More Militaristic Than Thou?
We think of the Middle Ages as a militaristic epoch. But consider this: the knightly class, whose sons were trained in arms from an early age, was only a fraction of the population. To this may be added the city militias, and a probable martial facility on the part of the peasantry (women all carried […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
The Knight’s Bonus
Hollywood and cod fantasy do not seem to think about how a knight lived from day to day – that is, where his next meal came from. Older textbooks talk about the knight’s fee as a measure of land, giving the impression that every knight was the lord of a village and was fed by […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
The First Crusade: Aggression Or Liberation?
In the beginning was the patriotic view of the Crusades. As recently as the works of Chesterton we find complete certainty that the Christians were right to march to Jerusalem, take it and rule it, either in self-defence, as a superior culture, or simply because Deus vult. There was some awareness that the Muslims were […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
In Defence Of The Almoravids
Much of the Spanish tourist industry, and the whole of the Spanish early-music movement, revolves around the slogan of the Tres Culturas; by which is meant the peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians and Muslims in both Andalusia and Christian Spain. The motivation for this is apparently a kind of national repentance for the Expulsion and […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
Sauce For The Gander Is Sauce For The Goose
In the beginning was the Standard Model of “feudalism,” according to which a 12th-century lord received lands from the king on condition of future military and other service. This was challenged first by Elizabeth Brown and later also by Susan Reynolds, both of whom believed that this feudal contract was an ex post facto construction […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
You Go, Girl-Knight
Various historical-fiction, fantasy and SF writers have posited that in hard times many women might become warriors for the same reasons as their brothers, namely to make a living and to rise in the world. Which is indeed what we are seeing with the American armed forces today. It is rather a pity that the […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
We’ve Missed A Conspiracy Theory!
Reading one day the memoirs of ‘Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani (as one does), I was greatly struck by a passage about the Christian agitation for the Third Crusade. He has just described how some knights, being captured and relieved of their armour, were found to be female – an aspect of the wars that deserves to […]
In: GETTING MEDIEVAL, Thugs In Armour
