Tag: Europeans

It may have been the effect of the plough and the need to feed more draught animals as its use spread that gave rise to a practice that some think caused the centre of European wealth and power to move north of the Alps. The practice was that of running three fields at once. For centuries it had been customary to run two fields: one to grow crops on, and one left fallow for the animals to graze and fertilize with their droppings. With an increase both in population and in the number of animals being used, it may have been the need for more food than could be provided simply by assarting that caused the change to three-field rotation. It may also have been the fact that, unlike the Mediterranean, the north has enough rain in the summer to water an extra crop. Whatever the reason, the new system was to sow oats and legumes (beans or peas) in the spring, and cereals in the autumn, letting the third field lie fallow. Until then the population had lived mostly on cereals, and so legumes were an important addition to their diet. (Small wonder that one eminent historian has described the Middle Ages as being full of beans.) The advantage of legumes is that they fix their own nitrogen from the air, thus being self-fertilizing, and enrich the trace elements in the soil. They also provide a diet rich in protein, or amino acids. With the combination of carbohydrates from cereals, fats from animals, and the 50 per cent increase in output from the three-field system, the population of Europe took off. The way people lived began to change very much for the better.

— Connections, pp. 65-66

The other innovation that came to agriculture at much the same time as the [horse-drawn plow] was the nailed horseshoe, and its origins are equally doubtful. Some dated in the ninth century [C.E.] have been found in Siberia, and there are references from the same period to their appearance in Byzantium. By the eleventh century the horseshoe was in use in Europe. Its effect was to put the horse to work in all weathers and over all terrain, for it protected the animal’s feet against both rough ground and foot rot. The horseshoe also permitted horses to be used more for transport, and because people could now ride their draught animals to the fields at a reasonable speed they could afford to live further away from them. The villages grew, as the peasants sought the benefits of community living.

— Connections, pp. 65

As armor improved, and more and more foot soldiers as well as knights were equipped with it, the sword became less and less effective as a weapon. To a degree this was acceptable, because in many medieval fights between knights the object was not to kill your opponent, but rather to render him helpless so that he could be captured. After all, when ransomed he was worth a great deal of money! Another very valid reason for this “compassion” was that if you started killing others of the aristocracy, you might very well be killed yourself!

— The Book of Swords, p. 65

[Ivanhoe arrives on the field unexpectedly, and is verbally challenged.]

Templar herald:

Your name! Your rank! Your purpose!

Ivanhoe:

I am Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a knight proven in battle. I am here to sustain with lance and sword the just rights of the young woman, Rebecca—and to defy Sir Brian Guilbert as a liar, a traitor, and a murderer!

— “Ivanhoe” (1982)

William pummeled his forehead in frustration. "I’m never going to remember all this!"

"Bards have remembered it for a thousand and a thousand years," Mathilda said, gently implacable, "and a thousand times more than this besides."

"Bards have years to learn," he shot back. "You’re giving me days."

"Months," she said….

— Rite of Conquest, Chapter 8

The reaction of the Carthaginian proconsul Martianus Capella to the fall of Rome was more pragmatic. He saw that the expansive, public life of the Empire was gone for good. If the Romans were to survive at all, it would be in a very different world,with everything on a much smaller scale. Without the centralising influence of Rome, the Empire would be fragmented into tiny states and cities that would have to exist autonomously on limited resources. They would need condensed forms of Roman knowledge to help them.

Such a condensation was Capella’s packaged version, in nine volumes, of the imperial school curriculum. That course had been divided into two sections, the first of which contained all the rules for the teaching of the primary subjects of rhetoric, grammar and argument. These had been the staple of early instruction in an expanding Roman imperialist society with a need to win over conquered tribes with oratory, teach them Latin, and formulate complex legislation to hold everything together.

To these three early subjects Capella added four more from the Empire’s later years. As Rome grew it had become necessary to expand the school curriculum with more practical subjects relevant to the day to day organisation of sophisticated urban life. Music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy were added. These subjects formed the advanced studies. Capella’s book detailed these seven subjects, which were known as the seven liberal arts, together with an encyclopedic anthology of all the facts relating to them. His work was to become standard reference for education for the next six centuries.

— The Day the Universe Changed, Chapter 2

The influence of the state did not usually reach far into the lives of individuals. When frontier provinces changed hands at the end of a war, the affair was normally managed with a sedulous regard for established local institutions, so that from being an ‘Austrian’ you could find that you had become a ‘Sardinian’ without noticing any difference in your everyday routine. We are a world removed from the twentieth century, when wars have frequently been fought with the purpose of eliminating the core area of an enemy state and imposing an alien regime and ideology.

— The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, p. 12

There was one important reason that allowed this “mystery” of making a sword or knife to continue and flourish. The reason was very simple. The makers themselves did not know why the swords they produced were good, mediocre and a few really bad. These last they threw back into the pot to be re-melted and re-forged. What they did know was that if they used ore from a specific place, and did certain things by rote, taking a specified time to do it, and in a certain manner, they frequently came up with a good sword blade. And rarely, a truly superb sword blade appeared. But they did not know why.

The real secret to this was simply carbon content in the iron. But since the science of chemistry and metallurgy had not yet been developed, no one knew it. The average person is quite surprised to learn how late it actually was before the impurity, carbon, was proved to be what turned iron into steel. Some recent discoveries in England have shown that very high quality steel was produced in England in the “Dark Ages” (circa 476-1000 [C.E.]). Hamwic was a Saxon port that is under modern Southampton. Much of it has now been excavated, and a very interesting discovery was made. Several blooms of very high quality steel were found, plus several knives with high quality steel edges. These blooms are homogenous steel, with about two percent carbon. Properly forged, this could produce exceptional quality blades.

Shortly before this discovery, another one equally fascinating was announced. It seems that a monastery, abandoned when [King] Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church, was also a metal producing factory. This is not unusual in itself. But what is unusual, is that the process they used was identical to the Bessemer process that was invented by Sir Henry Bessemer in the 19th century, and was in use in manufacturing until quite recently.

In 1740, Benjamin Huntsman, a maker of watch springs, found that he could produce much superior steel by melting the steel, allowing the slag to rise to the surface, and then skimming it off. This is much the same technique as was used in producing Wootz steel of India. But carbon wasn’t discovered until 1774 by Swedish metallurgist Sven Rinman. In 1786 French chemist Guyton de Morveau showed that the substance isolated by Rinman was carbon, introduced into the iron, that turned the iron into steel.

As early as 1540 an Italian had suggested that steel was the “pure” form of iron, and to achieve this purity the iron was heated up: and charcoal, leather, and other such substances added to help burn out the impurities. Since charcoal and leather both contain carbon, he was on the right track, but going in the wrong direction. It was the impurities—sulfur, phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen, total oxygen, and sometimes carbon—that frustrated steel production. Modern steelmakers grapple with these impurities today, but with a clear understanding of what they are fighting.

The ancient blacksmith could only fall back on empirical knowledge gained from trial and error.

— The Book of Swords, pp. 26-27

[An eleventh century, C.E.,] knight would look to have a string of horses: a palfrey for everyday travel, a war-horse for combat (not yet the immensely heavy horses of later medieval warriors), mounts for servants and baggage which in Spain would often be mules rather than horses because they consume less water.

— The Quest for El Cid, chapter 8

William the Conqueror and his sons amazed continental contemporaries by the extent of their financial resources. Their financial resources were great not only because of England’s wealth, for certainly, taken as a whole, the kingdoms of France and Germany were much richer, but because the Anglo-Norman king was able to tax the resources of his realm to a degree far exceeding that of any ruler in Europe. Money was needed to support the king and his family, his central administration, his local representatives, and his military establishment. The relative effectiveness of English royal taxation inaugurated by William the Conqueror is an important key to the political history of the Middle Ages. It helps to account for the fact that as late as the fifteenth century the king of England was able to inflict crushing defeats upon French kings, who ruled a country with three times the population of England and whose landed, commercial, and industrial wealth, if we could estimate it precisely, would be even greater. In the Middle Ages, no less than in the twentieth century, wars cost money, and the power of any particular king was greatly dependent upon the comprehensiveness and efficiency of his taxation system. In this regard the Anglo-Norman king was at least a century ahead of the Capetian monarchy, and no German ruler of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ever had any comparable command of the financial resources of his country.

The chief source of income of early medieval kings had been their own estates, and William naturally drew a substantial part of his income from the royal demesne, whose administration was the sheriffs responsibility. The law courts were also a lucrative source of income, but it was their clever and unrelenting use of the feudal possibilities for taxation that accounts for the great financial resources of the Anglo-Norman rulers. Like any other feudal lord, William enjoyed the prerogatives of relief, wardship, and the regular aids, and his treasury found that these old institutions could be made to produce great sums. Not only the lay vassals but also the bishoprics and abbeys that owed feudal obligations to the crown, were subjected to this kind of taxation. In addition to all these sources of royal income William inaugurated the practice of allowing his vassals the option of not sending their knights to serve in the feudal host on payment of a certain sum per knight’s fee; the practice came to be called scutage (literally, “shield money”) in the early twelfth century. William’s tenants-in-chief were glad to be freed of the burden of keeping their knights trained and equipped for war, and William preferred to use the income he obtained from scutage to hire mercenaries for his continental wars. Paradoxically, the same king who brought feudal institutions to their highest refinement and used them most effectively for enhancing royal power was the earliest to realize the inefficiency of the feudal method of raising armies. By feudal law the vassals were required to serve only forty days a year, which was a tremendous nuisance in a long campaign; the knights who were provided to his feudal host were not always adequately prepared and armed; it was advisable to leave most of the English army at home in case of another Scandinavian invasion, which threatened during most of the Conqueror’s reign; and William had the special problem of transporting the knights and horses across the channel, which was both expensive and risky. He preferred to hire mercenaries among the landless knights of Normandy, Flanders, and Brittany for his frontier campaigns against various French princes. The Anglo-Norman monarch’s envious continental enemies were not slow to realize the significance of this military innovation. A chief minister of the French king in the first half of the twelfth century referred to the English ruler as “that wealthy man, a marvelous buyer and collector of knights.” William initiated the slow substitution of mercenary forces for feudal armies, which is one of the central military developments of the High Middle Ages.

— The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Chapter 12

Godfrey, Baron of Ibelin:

[With his son, Balian, kneeling before him.]

Be without fear in the face of your enemies.

Be brave and upright that God may love thee.

Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death.

Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong.

That is your oath.

[Backhands Balian hard across the mouth. Balian tastes blood.]

And that is so you remember it.

The Hospitaller:

Rise a knight…

— “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005)

On the material side the life of the feudal class was rough and uncomfortable. The castles were cold and drafty. If a castle was of wood, you had no fire, and if a stone castle allowed you to have one, you smothered in the smoke. Until the thirteenth century [C.E.] no one except a few great feudal princes had a castle providing more than two rooms. In the hall the lord did his business: received his officials and vassals, held his court, and entertained ordinary guests. There the family and retainers ate on trestle tables that at night served as beds for the servants and guests. The chamber was the private abode of the lord and his family. The lord and lady slept in a great bed, their children had smaller beds, and their personal servants slept on the floor. Distinguished visitors were entertained in the chamber. When the lord of the castle wanted a private talk with a guest, they sat on the bed. The lord and his family could have all the food they could eat, but it was limited in variety. Great platters of game, both birds and beasts, were the chief stand-by, reinforced with bread and vast quantities of wine. They also had plenty of clothing, but the quality was largely limited by the capacity of the servant girls who made it. In short, in the tenth and eleventh centuries the noble had two resources, land and labor. But the labor was magnificently inefficient and by our standards the land was badly tilled. Not until the revival of trade could the feudal class begin to live in anything approaching luxury.

— Mediaeval Society, pp. 30-31

Emphasis mine.

[King Henry III of England’s] fate was decided at [the battle of] Lincoln [1217 C.E.]. It was the last and perhaps the greatest military engagement of William Marshal‘s long and distinguished life. Having assembled 400 knights and 250 crossbowmen from all parts of the kingdom in Newark after Whitsun…, Marshal marched his men straight to Lincoln. He arrived on May 20 to find that Louis’s forces had entered the walled city and were besieging the castle. The French prince himself was farther south, besieging Dover, and the count of Perche was in command at Lincoln, surrounded by the bulk of the rebellious English earls. The French knew that Marshal was arriving, but they dithered and could not agree on a strategy. As they procrastinated, Marshal addressed his knights with a speech to rival that written by Shakespeare for Henry V. “These men have seized and taken by force our lands and our possessions,” he said. “Shame on the man who does not strive, this very day, to put up a challenge. If we beat them, it is no lie to say that we will have won eternal glory for the rest of our lives.“

The rhetoric must have had some effect. Marshal took charge of his loyal knights, telling them to be ready to slit their own horses’ throats if they needed to take shelter behind the carcasses in the open plain that lay before the northern entrance to the city. Bishop des Roches commanded the crossbowmen, and Ranulf earl of Chester one group of knights, but they could only watch with awe as Marshal led a direct frontal cavalry attack on the city. The old man was so desperate to join battle that he almost forgot to put on his helmet before he charged the enemy. When he adjusted his armor and led the first charge, he plowed into the French defenders with such force that he punched a hole three lances deep in their lines. If this was the last chance to save the dynasty he had served all his life, then he was determined to give it his all.

Six bloody and brutal hours of fighting ensued. It was a grisly, awful scene: the air filled with the deafening clang of weapons upon helmets, lances shattering and flying in splinters into the air, limbs crushed and severed by blows from swords and maces, and sharp daggers plunging into the sides of men and horses alike. They fought through the city until the streets heaved with blood and human entrails. “The noise,” recalled Marshal, “was so great that you would not have heard God thunder.“

At the end of the fighting, the French were roundly defeated. Almost every major rebel baron was captured, and the count of Perche died when a spear was thrust through his eye and into his brain. When the news of the loss reached Prince Louis in Dover, he immediately raised his siege, made for London, and began to think of terms for withdrawal.

— The Plantagenets, Securing the Inheritance

Emphasis mine.

William Marshall was 70 years old, here.

Fighting filled the noble’s need of something to do, a way to exert himself. It was his substitute for work. His leisure time was spent chiefly in hunting, otherwise in games of chess, backgammon, and dice, in songs, dances, pageants, and other entertainments. Long winter evenings were occupied listening to the recital of interminable verse epics. The sword offered the workless noble an activity with a purpose, one that could bring him honor, status, and, if he was lucky, gain. If no real conflict was at hand, he sought tournaments, the most exciting, expensive, ruinous, and delightful activity of the noble class, and paradoxically the most harmful to his true military function. Fighting in tournaments concentrated his skills and absorbed his interest in an increasingly formalized clash, leaving little thought for the tactics and strategy of real battle.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 3

Jean de Colmieu described the typical “motte-and-bailey” castle of northern France:

It is the custom of the nobles of the neighborhood to make a mound of earth as high as they can and then encircle it with a ditch as wide and deep as possible. They enclose the space on top of the mound with a palisade of very strong hewn logs firmly fixed together, strengthened at intervals by as many towers as they have means for. Within the enclosure is a house, a central citadel or keep which commands the whole circuit of the defense.The entrance to the fortress is across a bridge…supported on pairs of posts…crossing the ditch and reaching the upper level of the mound at the level of the entrance gate [to the enclosure].

Requiring no skilled labor, such motte-and-bailey castles were quick and cheap to construct. They had a further advantage in that they were basically independent of considerations of terrain, and could be built anywhere that a fortification was needed. The motte, or mound, was steep-sided, sometimes partly natural, sometimes wholly artificial, formed in part by soil from the encircling ditch. Flat-topped, roughly circular, usually one hundred to three hundred feet in diameter at the base and anywhere from ten to one hundred feet high, the motte was crowned by a wall of timber palisades. The “central citadel or keep” was hardly more than a blockhouse or tower, usually of wood, though occasionally, where stone was plentiful, of masonry. The tower was too small to house more than the lord or the commander (castellan) of the castle and his immediate family, and the entire space of the motte was too restricted to accommodate the garrison with its animals and supplies except on an emergency basis.

Therefore a much larger space was cleared below the motte, given its own ditch and palisade, and connected to the upper fort by an inclined trestle with a drawbridge. This lower court, or bailey, was roughly circular or oval, its exact shape depending on the contours of the land. Sometimes there were two baileys, or even three, in front of the mound or on either side of it. The sense of the arrangement was that the garrison could use the whole interior of motte and bailey for everyday living, secure against minor attacks. In case of a serious threat, the garrison crowded up into the steep-walled motte.

— Daily Life in Medieval Times, Section I, Chapter 1

[King] Jean II [of France], who succeeded his father, Philip VI, in August 1350 [C.E.], could have served Machiavelli as model for Anti-Prince. Impolitic and impetuous, he never made a wise choice between alternatives and seemed incapable of considering consequences of an action in advance. Though brave in battle, he was anything but a great captain. Without evil intent, he was to foster disaffection to the point of revolt and lose half his kingdom and his person to the enemy, thereby leaving his country leaderless to meet its darkest hour of the age. His subjects with surprising forbearance named him Jean le Bon (John the Good), using the surname, it has been supposed, in the sense of “prodigal” or “careless” or being a good fellow. Or it may have referred to Jean’s devotion to chivalric honor or to his alleged generosity to the poor, as illustrated by his once giving a purse to a servingmaid whose milk pails were knocked over by his greyhounds.

He came to the throne bent on taking the field to erase his father’s defeats of the past decade, and on the first day of his reign notified all the principal lords of the realm to hold themselves ready to appear at his summons when “the time should come.” The truce arranged after the fall of Calais and renewed during the Black Death was due to expire in April 1351. Inheriting an empty treasury, Jean had no money with which to pay an army, and could not move without first replenishing his funds and adapting his military resources. The need to learn something from the failures of Crecy and Calais was not lost on him, and he was groping with certain ideas for military reform.

His first act, however, within three months of becoming King, was to execute the Constable of France, Comte d’Eu, and sixteenth Comte de Guines, a second cousin of Enguerrand VII, a man of powerful connections and “so courteous and amiable in every way that he was beloved and admired by great lords, knights, ladies and damsels.” Captured by the English at Caen in 1345, D’Eu had been unable to raise the ransom fixed by King Edward. When it came to important captives, Edward never let himself be limited by the principle of chivalry that a knight’s ransom should not be placed at a figure that would ruin him or exceed his revenue for one year. After four years of captivity, Comte d’Eu regained his liberty, supposedly in exchange for ceding to Edward his strategic castle and county of Guines, adjoining Calais. On this suspicion, Jean had him beheaded upon his return to France without trial or public procedure of any kind. The King listened in silence to the pleas of D’Eu’s friends for his life, offering no reply except to swear that “he would never sleep so long as the Comte de Guines lived”; or according to another version replying in tears, “You shall have his body and we his head.”

Jean could have chosen no better way to alienate the nobility whose support he needed than to execute a noble of D’Eu’s rank and many friends without public explanation or trial by his peers. If D’Eu had indeed acted treasonably (the truth remains obscure), the King had every need to make plain the reasons for his act, but Jean was either too willful or too wooden-headed to understand the advisability of good public relations.

His next act made matters worse. He gave the office of Constable to his relative and favorite, Charles d’Espagne, who was said to be the object of the King’s “dishonest affection,” and to have persuaded Jean to murder Comte d’Eu so that he himself might have his office. Besides the prestige of military command second to the King, the Constableship had lucrative perquisites attached to the business of assembling the armed forces. Bestowal of the post on Charles d’Espagne, who was unpopular in the usual way of kings’ favorites, added fury to the nobles’ dismay at a time when the King had reason enough to fear their separatist tendencies. The episode was a divisive opening of the reign at a time when it most needed unity.

Jean’s father, too, had been “ung bien hastif horns” (a very hasty man), and intermarriage for centuries with first cousins had left the Valois unstable. Jean retained Philip’s uneasiness about the legitimacy of his claim to the crown and Philip’s readiness, not without cause, to suspect treachery. In his capacity for sudden vindictiveness, he took after his mother, the lame Queen, who, despite her piety and good works, was called “a very cruel lady, for whomever she held in hate, he was dead without mercy.” She was credited with having prodded her husband to the act that so appalled his time—the execution in 1343 of fifteen Breton lords who were his prisoners.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 6

Nothing more clearly illustrates the power of war as a culture-shaping force than the eerie parallels between feudal Japan and feudal Europe. Both societies rested on the labor of relatively unfree peasants, and both were ruled by hereditary warrior classes—knights in Europe and bushi, or samurai, in Japan—representing, or at least serving, the landed aristocracy. If, through some magical transposition, a medieval knight and a samurai had met on the same road, they would have immediately recognized each other as kin. Both wore helmets and armor, fought on horseback, rallied to flags emblazoned with dynastic symbols or totems, invested their swords with mystic power, and subscribed to a special warrior ethic—chivalry in Europe, bushido in Japan—which codified, for its adherents, a kind of religion of war.

In her study of the bushi tradition, Catharina Blomberg lists these parallels, only to dismiss them as “entirely fortuitous” since, after all, there had been no contact between medieval Europe and Japan. What she misses is the entirely unfortuitous effect of the means of destruction which these two cultures shared: Both employed metal blades to cut human flesh and horses to transport warriors to and about the battlefield. This technology leads to, and even seems to require, the kind of social arrangement we know as feudalism, which has been defined as an “essentially military…type of social organization designed to produce and support cavalry.” A very similar pattern emerged in precolonial western Africa: a social and economic elite of mounted, knightlike warriors, subscribing to a quasi-religious warrior ethic.

The knight and the samurai are in some ways special cases, preferring, as they did, to fight at close range with their cherished swords. Other warriors of the pre-gun era, no less proud and individualistic, fought from a distance with metal-tipped arrows propelled by compound bows. The European knight was again and again shocked to encounter, during the Crusades and the various incursions of nomadic Asian “hordes,” highly skilled mounted warriors who announced their attacks with a hail of arrows and used their bladed weapons primarily to dispatch the wounded. But all—swordsmen and archers alike—were part of a system of warfare that depended on the synergy of metal and muscle. The metal could be worked to a point as an arrow tip or pounded to a cutting edge as a sword. The muscle could be that of the human arm alone or that of the arm reinforced by the speed and strength of the horse. Either way, the metal-and-muscle approach to warfare imposed certain common themes on the cultures that engaged in it, whether they did so reluctantly or with zest.

— Blood Rites, pp. 144-45

Fighting on horseback with lance, sword, and heavy armor did not necessarily make a knight out of a soldier, even during the early period. Other mounted and nonmounted soldiers coexisted in the immediate retinue of the knight (the “lance”) or as independent or semi-independent units of mounted sergeants, or routiers. The retinue of a knight changed with time and location. In 1100 [C.E.] Robert II, Count of Flanders, promised to provide 1,000 knights, each with three horses, to King Henry I of England, suggesting that the knights were accompanied by other men who may have fought with them besides taking care of the horses. The religious Order of the Knights Templar listed three horses for each member. In 1268, when Charles, Count of Anjou, moved into Italy to take the southern peninsula from the successors of the Normans, he ordered each knight to bring four horses, suitable armor and weapons, as well as a squire (armiger) and two other retainers (gardiones). Each member of the “lance” performed different functions on the battlefield. The squire, who was not necessarily a young man, acted as a light cavalryman, the others as footmen with bows or crossbows and spears. Later on, larger retinues became common.

Sergeants were also common in the armies of the middle period of medieval warfare. In 1187 the count of Hainault sent Philip Augustus 110 of his best knights together with eighty sergeants equipped like the knights. In 1194 the king of France could count on the recruitment of 240 sergeants from St-Denis, 300 from Sens, Laon, and Tournai, 500 from Beauvais, and 1,000 from Arras. Generally their wages were between three and four sous a day, well below the five to seven sous given to knights. When the loot taken at Constantinople in 1204 was divided, their share was double the share of foot sergeants but half that of knights. Mounted sergeants were not identical to squires but of mixed social origins. Some came from the lower ranks of nobility, holders of small fiefs who could boast neither prestige nor financial means. Others may have originated from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, or even the peasantry, who had training in arms, become supporters of a lord, and learned how to fight on horseback. Their role on the battlefield varied. At times they lined up with the knights; sometimes they fought as a separate unit; sometimes they were given instructions to carry out a specific mission. At the Battle of Bouvines [(1214)] they were grouped as a light cavalry to soften up the enemy for the knights. Toward the end of the battle, 3,000 were given the task of crushing any remaining resistance. However, by the second half of the thirteenth century sergeants on horseback disappeared from the French armies; the mounted men were usually divided between knights and squires. The term knight was replaced by the generic term man-at-arms.

The routiers fought from horseback but were different from knights and mounted sergeants. The term routiers, probably originating from the Latin rumpere and meaning “members of a detachment,” constituted groups of adventurers, men known for their wild behavior and not constrained by the ethical rules of knighthood….

— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, pp. 175-76

In southern Holland there appears to have been a taboo against placing weapons in graves, which occurs but very rarely, perhaps indicating that weapons were less a personal possession than held on behalf of the group…. This changes in the Early Iron Age, after about 800 BCE, when male graves with weapons do occur more frequently…. Swords in graves have often been altered, in ways that require considerable skill, such as fashioning them into a circle or folded, concertina-like, which has the side-effect of putting them out of use as swords; bending swords in this way without breaking them requires at least as much skill as making them in the first place….

— Magic: A History, p. 225

Good luck using that (magical?) sword you looted! 😀

Burnished and shiny like a mirror, the sword, usually about three pounds, was a double-edged instrument of death. For most of the medieval period, at least north of the Alps, its main use was for slashing and hacking, a method that may have given the best results against chain armor. In the Mediterranean, probably due to Roman influence, the thrust was more common. It required less physical strength and stamina and could be more deadly, for a single hit on a major organ would kill.

The design of the sword did not change much in the period 800-1350 [C.E.]. The emphasis was on sharp edges more than a sharp point. But by the fourteenth century, as mounted soldiers switched from chain to plate armor, the old system of slashing was revealed to be insufficient. The tendency was to emphasize the point, which would exploit the joints in plate armor. Its length depended on the holder’s stature, but normally it was about 100 centimeters. According to L. Tarassuk and C. Blair, the typical sword of a fourteenth-century knight was long, with the blade itself being almost 1 meter.

— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, p. 134