In 1217 a man known as ‘the greatest knight’ broke a treaty to, as he saw it, save England from French rule. Catherine Hanley asks: did he go against the ideals of chivalry?
“What, then, is chivalry?”
This question is posed in the History of William Marshal, a 13th-century biography of a man who is often called ‘the greatest knight’ in history and held up as a paragon of chivalry.
But those four seemingly simple words hide a multitude of answers and interpretations, and when we look more closely we can see that contemporary notions of ‘chivalry’ were very different from some modern definitions.
In 1217 England was in turmoil. The barons had been divided for some while, half of them rebelling against King John while the other half remained loyal. The rebels gained the upper hand when they forced John to agree to the terms of Magna Carta, but he reneged on it almost immediately and they realised that their only remaining option was to overthrow him.
These barons offered the English crown to Louis, eldest son and heir of King Philip Augustus of France, and in May 1216 Louis duly invaded and was proclaimed king.
Louis enjoyed great success through the summer, but John’s unexpected death in October swung the pendulum back the other way, as Marshal and others proclaimed John’s son, the nine-year-old Henry III, king. Some of those who held a grudge against John were less keen to be seen fighting against a blameless child, and stalemate ensued.
William Marshal, named regent for the young king, needed to make significant progress if he were to keep Henry on his throne and not see him supplanted by Louis. But to what extent, exactly, was he prepared to get his hands dirty in service of his cause?
A truce was agreed at Christmas 1216, which was then extended until 23 April 1217; the terms were that ‘everything was to remain till that time in the same state as it was on the day of the truce being sworn to, with respect both to castles and other possessions’. Louis took advantage of the pause to make a temporary return to France in order to ask his father for more troops and money.
This made sense, as he would need greater resources if he were to break the stalemate, but it demonstrated either a great faith in William Marshal’s integrity, or a staggering naivety (or possibly both). Upon hearing that Louis had left England, Marshal sent his troops fanning out through the east, south-east and south to attack and seize half a dozen strongholds. This meant that he had broken the terms of the agreement; he had reneged on his solemn word, and this was a serious matter.
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The declaration of a truce could only ever be a generally accepted convention rather than an actual law (because there could not be a law that governed warring parties in such a way), but, self-evidently, once it was declared it involved the cessation of armed conflict.
In this case the terms had been laid out clearly to stipulate that everything should remain as it was on the day the truce was agreed until the day it ended, including the possession of castles. It is difficult, therefore, to square Marshal’s actions with any modern conception of integrity or chivalry.
Naturally his biographer spins the situation positively, trying to imply that it was Louis who had broken the truce first by going back to France, and that in attacking the castles in his absence Marshal was merely retaliating. As an argument, this is weak: there is a difference between using a period of truce to leave the field and regroup, and using it actually to restart military action while the enemy is absent. It is debatable whether the former ‘breaks’ the truce, while the latter certainly does, and Marshal (as well as all his contemporaries) would have known this very well.
The most charitable way to interpret Marshal’s actions would be to suggest that he might have believed, or wished to believe, that Louis’s withdrawal was permanent. If that were so, then the war was over and the realm of England was under the control of Henry III, meaning that his regent could take whatever action he deemed appropriate.
However, it is extremely unlikely that this was the case, and neither Marshal nor his biographer put the idea forward as an excuse. The truce was not vague or indefinite: it was to last specifically until 23 April, at which point all parties expected the war to resume.
The only plausible conclusion to be drawn, then, is that Marshal knew that the truce was only a temporary pause in the war, and that Louis would be back when the agreed period was up, but that he decided to break it anyway. But how ‘chivalrous’ or otherwise was this?
‘Chivalry’ was a nebulous concept in the 13th century, capable of being interpreted in many different ways. There are numerous instances in military accounts of the era of actions being taken that might cause the modern reader to blink, while contemporaries saw them as a perfectly normal part of war: ravaging the countryside, for example, or burning the crops and houses of peasants.
But the key thing about such actions is that they were taken against those of lower rank, those who mattered less in the eyes of lords and knights and whose individual lives and livelihoods did not need to be taken into account in the big-picture calculations of a war.
If we were to take any of the implied ‘rules’ of chivalry as being hard and fast, it might be that a knight was expected to keep his word once he had given it to another knight, if only for the maintenance of his own reputation.
Even this, however, was subject to interpretation and point of view, and a couple of earlier sections of the History of William Marshal give us an excellent illustration of the way similar acts might be perceived differently depending on whether they were performed by friend or foe. When Marshal was an advisor to Henry II while the latter was in peace negotiations with Philip Augustus, he advised Henry to feign disbanding his troops after an agreement was reached, so that Philip would do the same, but then to reassemble them again to take the French by surprise.
The biographer sees nothing wrong with this, having Marshal praised by Henry: ‘Marshal, you are most courtly and have advised me very well; it will be done, exactly as you say.’ However, at a later point in the text, when the French take the opportunity of a truce to attack a castle, this is ‘a heinous crime’ and ‘a cowardly act of treachery’, because it was done by Marshal’s foe.
Chivalry, then as now, was very much in the eye of the beholder: ‘we’ can do things that would be unacceptable coming from ‘them’, because our cause is more noble or more important, or simply because we are right and they are wrong. A good case might therefore be made either for or against William Marshal’s actions in early 1217, under the prevailing circumstances and depending on your point of view.
So what, then, is chivalry? Or what was it in 1217? Marshal had given his word to Louis about the truce, but was he bound to keep his pledge to an invader who was seeking the English crown? Was his primary duty to remain honest and honourable, and to keep his promises, or was it to win back the kingdom of England for the boy he recognised as king?
If the latter, and given the dire situation in which the royalist party found itself, was he entitled to use any means at his disposal, no matter how ‘unchivalrous’, to ensure success?
The end result of all this, after several more military engagements in the spring and summer of 1217, was that Marshal was successful and Louis withdrew from England. Would this have happened if Marshal had stuck to the letter and the spirit of the truce agreement? If he had been more overtly chivalrous? And how would history have judged him if he’d been honest and straight-down-the-line, only to see Henry III deposed and Louis I wearing the crown in his place?
All this, and more, forms the subject matter of 1217: The Battles That Saved England. Readers are encouraged to find out more and to reach their own conclusions.
1217: The Battles That Saved England by Catherine Hanley is published on 9 May, 2024.
Catherine is an expert in this period, and has written other Historia features about it. If you’d like to dive a little deeper into this turbulent era, have a look at:
Magna Carta
England’s Forgotten King
The Battle That Saved England
England’s First Great Naval Victory
Her other features include:
The personal and the political in the Middle Ages
Matilda: The greatest king England never had
And we also interviewed her for Historia.
There’s more about William Marshal in Lost and found: remembering William Marshal, the Greatest Knight by Elizabeth Chadwick.
In At the heart of English history: the Warenne Earls of Surrey Sharon Bennett Connolly looks at the rise and fall of one of the great families of medieval England.
Images:
- Grave of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke in the Temple Church, London: Kjetil Bjørnsrud for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- King John from the Abbreviatio Chronicorum Angliae by Matthew Paris: BL Cotton Claudius D VI f 9v
- Arrival of Louis of France in England from the Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16 II, f 50v via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Louis arriving in London from the Histoire de la Toison d’Or by Guillaume Fillastre: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The men of Ghent capture and pillage Grammont, 1380, from the Chroniques of Jean Froissart: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Second coronation of Henry III from the Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16, f 56 via Wikimedia (public domain)
