[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.
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
The army that took to the field against [King Philip II of France] at the battle of Bouvines [1214 C.E.] was a typical medieval affair—loud, violent, and disorganized. Each leader had his own men and his own standard, and such grand strategy as existed was fairly rudimentary. Cavalry charges were the main weapon used by either side. At times the battle would have resembled the melee of the tournament field, but with added intent. Men carried heavy lances and pounds of chain mail, which could suffocate its wearer to death if he fell awkwardly in the churned mud of the field. Bloodcurdling screams and the sickening crunch of heavy metal piercing into human flesh, grunts of effort and the thick, gurgling breath of the dying, would have raged all around, as hand-to-hand fighting left the plain at Bouvines gouged and bloodstained.
The English troops rallied around the earl of Salisbury’s blue banners with yellow lions rampant emblazoned upon them. They fought bravely on the right flank. The leaders from both sides were at the center; both [Emperor] Otto IV and Philip were unhorsed during the fighting. The battle raged for three long hours, first in favor of the imperial troops and then, as the fighting wore on, tipping toward the French.
The French were victorious in the end. Their cavalry charges, led by some of the finest knights in Europe, gradually overwhelmed the patchwork of coalition forces arraigned against them. Otto and Philip led their knights in a melee, which was settled decisively in the French favor. Otto was protected manfully by a group of Saxon knights, but eventually he had no choice but to flee the battlefield, narrowly escaping capture as he galloped off. The counts of Flanders and Boulogne and the earl of Salisbury were less fortunate. They were all taken prisoner and escorted back to Paris, where the citizens and students of the university danced and sang in the streets for a week to celebrate the famous victory.
— The Plantagenets, to Bouvines
…[The] king’s household was a cavalcade of carts and packhorses, stretching out for hundreds of yards as the court rumbled through the countryside. Everything was portable: finely dressed servants carried bed linen and precious plate, heavy pouches of coin, the valuable books [the king] enjoyed reading, and well-guarded caches of precious jewels. [The king]’s chapel could be unpacked by the roadside, as could his dining room. The great snaking caravan train moved twenty or so miles every day, churning up muddy roads and drawing openmouthed spectators as [the king] called on his subjects and enjoyed their generous hospitality.
— The Plantagenets, Salvaging the Wreck
Perhaps one in six Englishmen in the late twelfth century [C.E.] was technically a clergyman. While most were not and never would be priests, there were plenty in minor orders or who had entered the Church for an education and left to work for lay masters. Many parish priests were poorly educated and barely literate. Their lives would not have differed much from those of ordinary peasants. But clerical status bestowed great advantage if one fell foul of the law. The Church demanded the right to discipline criminous clerks but punishments were considerably lighter under canon law than under the secular criminal code. The Church would neither inflict trial by ordeal nor mutilate or execute the guilty….
— The Plantagenets, Unholy War
Twelfth-century France was divided into loose and shifting territories that owed little or no allegiance to any central authority, ruled across large swaths by noblemen who were little more than warlords. As he watched his tenacious and cunning father grind his way through the conquest of Normandy, Henry would have learned that political survival was a game of forestalling shifts of power, managing volatile relations between one’s friends and enemies, and appealing to the right allies at the right time in order to further one’s territorial objectives. In such a bewildering business, only the most devious and adept players survived.
— The Plantagenets, Ambition
[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
Alpine travel was difficult. Much of it was conducted on foot up steep slopes or, if a person had some money, by mule or ass. Mules (a cross between a male donkey and a female horse) have a lot going for them. They are intelligent, sure-footed, calm animals, strong, adaptable, and with greater endurance than horses. They live longer and can travel up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) per day and are much cheaper to keep than horses. The horse had snob value—a bit like traveling business or first class—but usually only rulers, the wealthy, or important couriers used horses because they were expensive to buy and maintain. Their advantage was speed. Carts or coaches were rarely used for alpine travel because of the deplorable state of the infrastructure; the roads and bridges were often just the remnants of Roman originals or rutted, muddy tracks. Summer and fall were the best times to travel because there was less likelihood of extreme weather—although it could still get very hot in midsummer. Sensible people avoided alpine travel in winter.
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
The composition of the baggage train varied greatly, depending on the time and place and the structure of the army to which it was attached. In [medieval] Iberia, for example, few wagons were used. Instead, each man-at-arms would have a mule carrying four to eight days’ provisions for himself and his servants, and the townsmen would have their own mules in smaller proportion. In England, France, and Germany, large wagon trains were the norm. A provision of one wagon for ten horsemen seems to have been fairly typical. Municipal militia contingents as well as lords had their carts, wagons, or mules. These might be numerous or few, depending on the anticipated duration, range, and purpose of the expedition, as well as the expectations of dearth or plenty in the campaign theater and the wealth of the community from which the force was drawn. One Swiss force of 440 men going to help break a siege marched with only two carts (though they were large, five-horse models): one packed with bacon, dried beef, oatmeal, barley, butter, and salt and the other with cooking gear, dishes, and tools, including scythes and sickles, as it was late June, time for the wheat harvest. A much higher ratio of wagons, around one per twenty or thirty men, was not uncommon, especially when tents had to be carried. The contingent sent by Arras to the French royal host in 1340 had six wagons drawn by nineteen horses for 200 footmen and two mounted constables, for example. Horsemen, especially nobles, required more baggage, both to support their more luxurious lifestyle and because of the need to carry a rolling reserve of bulky fodder and oats for the horses. Hence, considered as a whole, a mixed army, especially one with a large proportion of mounted men, might have as many as one baggage wagon per ten combatants, or even more.
— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, pp. 74-75
At the bottom of the scale is the small fief of a single knight. As a rough estimate, it takes the labor of fifteen to thirty peasant families, working a holding of forty to one hundred hectares, to support one knight, his family, and his warhorse. (A hectare is 10,000 square kilometers, or about 2½ acres.) On such a small manor, the knight lives little better than his peasants.
— Who Lives In That Castle?, Dragon Magazine #80
To talk about the night watch, we first have to talk about night itself. In a pre-industrial world, artificial light was expensive. Candles of tallow and beeswax are animal products, so can be produced only in limited amounts. Firewood, peat, and dried dung are labor-intensive to gather and prepare. So too is olive oil or flaxseed oil for lamps. Before gas and kerosene, you could light the night if you really wanted—but it would cost you. Consequently, nights stayed dark. Most Europeans were home by twilight, barred their doors, and stayed indoors. In the Middle Ages, many cities imposed curfews: only a select few were permitted out after dark. This cut down both on burglaries and people breaking their necks falling into open cellars.
But having an entire city asleep posed its own problems. The biggest was fire! Medieval European cities were tinderboxes. Entire city blocks burned down every year. And if no one was awake at midnight when someone’s improperly-banked coals set their house on fire, the blaze might spread to multiple houses before anyone even noticed. Plus, you had the problem of crime: if no one else was about after dark, that gave thieves full run of the night. The solution to these problems (and honestly more the former than the latter) was the night watch.
Many night watches began as citizen’s brigades, with each able-bodied male resident assigned to patrol the streets so many nights a year. As early as 1150, the guilds of Paris were on the hook for providing the city’s watchmen. Sentinels sat in the tallest church steeple in town to watch for fires. (Amsterdam was big enough that the watch manned four separate steeples!) Other watchmen patrolled the streets alone or in pairs watching for fires and thieves. Your beat might cover the whole city or just your own neighborhood. If you saw a fire, you set up a cry so sleepers could awaken and help put it out. If you saw a burglar, you tried to grab him so he could appear before a magistrate in the morning. For worse crimes, you also started the ‘hue and cry’ to summon your sleeping neighbors to help. This watch system, while practical, was unpopular. No one much liked being a watchman. If you could afford it, you hired a substitute to take your place….
Author’s emphases.
The sky paled to silver and rose as [Sarissa] came down to the river. She bent to lave her face, to drink of the cold clean water. When she had had her fill, she knelt there for a while, breathing damp cool air, watching the sun spread light across the horizon.
The river caught the flame of it. She trailed her fingers in water as bright as fire. It was clear here, and filling with light. Fishes darted; weeds swayed in the current. Farther out, where the river was deeper, the water darkened to black beneath the sun’s brilliance.
Sarissa pulled off her boots and waded out into the icy river. The shock of the cold made her gasp, but she steeled herself to bear it. The current tugged at her. She rooted herself in the earth. The water flowed over her but could not move her. When it lapped her chin, she filled her lungs with every scrap of air that they could hold, and slipped into a strange dark-bright world.
She swam as a fish swims, supple and swift, down and down into that realm of dim green shapes and rippling weeds, lit with sudden flashes of light: sun rising, fish leaping. She passed out of the sun’s light, but there was light below her, a gleam in the river’s darkness.
Just as she knew that her breath must fail her, her outstretched hand touched the thing that lay on the river’s bottom. It was hard, colder than the water, and caught fast in a tangle of weeds and clay. She grasped the end of it and thrust against the current. Her lungs had begun to burn. But she would not let go.
The earth fought for the victory, but the water in its current caught Sarissa and swirled her suddenly upward. Blind, half-unconscious, lungs afire, she burst into the light.
She fell on the green bank with her prize caught beneath her. Out of the water it was a massive, icy-cold thing, but its heart was fire.
She lifted herself to her knees. A sword lay in the grass. It gleamed as if it had come new from the forge, grey rippled steel like the water that had begotten it. Its hilt was plain silver without adornment, but for a white stone set in the pommel.
As she knelt in front of it. Tarik flowed out of the river, licking cat-whiskers, flicking a fish’s tail that flowed and stretched and transmuted into a cat’s. He inspected the sword with approval. The water had done well, his glance said, and the sun’s fire, forging a blade for a champion’s hand. If indeed there was a champion in the world, and if, once chosen, he would do what he had been sought out to do.
Tarik, when he was a cat, had a cat’s irony. But it was a fine sword, as solid as earth, and as palpably real. Sarissa trusted that the same would be true of the man for whom it had been wrought.
— Kingdom of the Grail, Chapter 3
Although the process is obscure, the result is quite clear. By 987 [C.E.] the soldiers of the West Frankish state were arranged in a feudal hierarchy bound together by oaths of vassalage. The king was at the top of the feudal pyramid: the suzerain of the land. A few dukes and counts were his direct vassals. They in turn had their vassals, rear vassals, and rear rear vassals. At the bottom of the pyramid was the simple knight with just enough land and peasant labor to support him, his family, and his horses. Now this structure was not all embracing by 987; in fact, it never was. As late as the latter part of the twelfth century the count of Dreux surrendered large allodial holdings to the count of Champagne and received them back as fiefs. A recent study has shown that large allodial estates persisted throughout the Middle Ages in the region around Bordeaux. But in comparison with the total area of the country these exceptions were of slight importance, and the principle beloved by feudal lawyers—no land without a lord—became essentially true. Thus all land was someone’s fief and every landholder except the king was someone’s vassal. The soldiers, the knights, held the land of France, and they were bound together by the feudal system.
— Mediaeval Society, pp. 16-17
Excerpts from books, films, television, and other websites to inspire your role-playing. Also original fiction, game design ideas, and commentary.
Latest Posts(loading...)
