Emotions and War

Medieval to Romantic Literature

S. Downes, A. Lynch, K. O'Loughlin, S. Downes, A. Lynch, K. O'Loughlin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137374073
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This volume addresses the place of the emotions in literary representations of war across six centuries of European history. It challenges modern assumptions about the passions and feelings attending violent conflict in order to reveal the multifarious historical emotions and emotional histories of war.

1

Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal

Lindsay Diggelmann

‘… so great were the misdeeds done/ that arrogance, envy, and overweening pride,

ever wont to sow discord,/ would not accept peace’.

History of William Marshal, lines 8061–4.

The early thirteenth-century French text known as the History of William Marshal tells the story of its eponymous hero’s lengthy career in the service of the first Plantagenet monarchs. Set against the background of ongoing conflicts between the Capetian king Philip II of France and his great rivals, Henry II of England and his sons Richard and John, the poem is an invaluable source for the political and cultural history of the period. Warfare, both serious and recreational, forms a central motif as William Marshal develops into a figure of unmatched chivalric prowess. While his skills on the battlefield and on the tournament circuit are duly celebrated, the poem offers a far more complex picture of medieval warfare and its emotional repercussions than simple hero-worship would allow. As the brief quote above suggests, the habitual conflicts of a ruling elite that viewed warfare as its very raison d’être gave rise to serious moral questions for contemporary observers. The absence of peace and the advent of war could be construed as a direct result of emotional excess (envy, pride), while military successes and failures could be shown as both reflecting and bringing forth emotional crises on the part of participants. Here I examine several episodes of warfare in the History, reaching back as far as the reign of King Stephen in the 1140s, in order to demonstrate how frequently and effectively the poem’s author makes use of the language of emotions. He does this for several reasons: to develop and intensify the characterizations of several of his protagonists, presenting them as susceptible to powerful and often destabilising bursts of anger, joy, grief or shame; to demonstrate, by contrast, a more sympathetic view on the possibility of emotional empathy acting to soften the harsh edges of a dominant warrior culture; and to comment on the devastating impact of warfare on those not able to defend themselves. Furthermore, the frequent focus on royal affairs allows the poem to offer a complex assessment of the emotions of kings, especially in times of war, which enhances our ability to understand how royal figures both behaved and were expected to behave by those who witnessed their actions.

William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and Lord of Striguil, was born around 1147 and served the early Plantagenet monarchs, spending the last years of his career before his death in 1219 acting as regent for the young Henry III. We know more of his life than we do of most of his peers because of the survival of a lengthy biographical poem, the History of William Marshal. The text, which was rediscovered only in the late nineteenth century, appears from internal evidence to have been composed in the mid-1220s by an author who names himself as John, but about whom we know very little else. He wrote under the patronage or encouragement of William Marshal’s eldest son (also William) and of John of Earley, one of the elder William’s closest confidantes. These two, along with other members of William Marshal’s household, are likely to have supplied many of the anecdotes and biographical details that fill the poem’s more than 19,000 lines. The poem itself is virtually unique as a secular biography celebrating a life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹ It was written in a French dialect which suggests its author was from Poitou or the Touraine, but it was probably composed in England. The sole surviving manuscript, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, was edited and published in the 1890s by the French scholar Paul Meyer. The availability of the poem in Meyer’s edition prompted several modern scholarly accounts of the life and times of the man often referred to simply as ‘the Marshal’.² More recently, publication of a splendid three-volume edition, translation and commentary by the Anglo-Norman Text Society has opened the poem up to newer scholarly audiences and approaches.³

Alongside recognition of its great value as a source of information about the affairs of the reigns of Stephen (r. 1135–54), Henry II (r. 1154–89) and the latter’s sons, Richard the Lionheart (r. 1189–99) and John (r. 1199–1216), criticism of the poem has tended to focus on its portrayal of emerging chivalric society in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. So insistent was this emphasis on chivalry and the tournament that John Gillingham felt obliged to point out some years ago that historians have tended to neglect its usefulness as a source on the practice of actual warfare. This is despite the fact that the text devotes more than twice as much space to descriptions of warfare as it does to the many tournaments of the Marshal’s youth.⁴ Nonetheless the tournament circuit is an important feature of the poem’s early phases, often showing the young knight accompanying Henry II’s eldest son, Henry ‘the Young King’, a key figure in the first half of the poem.⁵ The extensive Plantagenet lands in France, gained through the elder Henry’s Norman and Angevin inheritance as well as his marriage in 1152 to the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, meant that the English royal house was vastly more powerful and prestigious than its French counterparts for most of the period in question.⁶ Only from the middle of the reign of Philip II ‘Augustus’ (r. 1180–1223) did the Capetian royal house begin to challenge the status quo successfully, recapturing many of the Plantagenet continental dominions, notably Normandy in 1204. The History offers a detailed portrayal of the entire period and the on-going warfare between the English and French dynasties.

Several scholars have examined the links between the History and early Arthurian romance. Larry D. Benson set the tone with an examination of tournament scenes in the History and in four of the five romances composed by Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century, noting the similarities between the fictional and (more-or-less) historical accounts.⁷ Richard Kaeuper chose to compare the figure of William Marshal with the Lancelot of the early thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle, emphasizing similar approaches to the themes of chivalric prowess and piety.⁸ Laura Ashe has perceptively argued that the model of chivalry visible in both the History and the romances, with its dependence on largesse (generosity), was essentially applicable to men in the service of others and raised practical difficulties for the kings to whom they professed loyalty. Henry the Young King represents the greatest example of a monarch whose need to dispense largesse as a reward to men who had proved themselves by fighting for him far outweighed his ability to pay for it.⁹ All of these studies therefore examine the social reality of aristocratic warfare and its literary representation, finding in the History of William Marshal ample evidence for an emerging ideology of chivalry that could be located not just in imaginative literature but also in identifiable historical situations.¹⁰

Little attention has been paid, however, to the function of emotions within the History and especially to the important role of emotional language in the poem’s frequent descriptions of military encounters, both recreational and serious. While the possibility of a more thorough study encompassing the entire poem most certainly exists, in the current limited context I have found it useful to focus on several representative episodes in order to examine closely the ways in which the poet uses the language of emotions to enhance his portrait of military affairs. These examples relate both to important individuals within the narrative (the Marshal himself; the kings whom he served and against whom he fought) and, at times, to anonymous bystanders who feature only briefly as their lives intersect with the conflicts and campaigns of the mighty. The poem does not neglect the impact of warfare on ordinary people, though this is far from being its central concern. With regard to the emotional lives of all these figures, several consistent themes are apparent. Contrasting emotional standpoints can enhance the depiction of combatants in mock warfare (tournaments) and real warfare, heightening the contrast between opposing sides. Yet conflicting emotions are also apparent among allies, as jealousy and anger erupt amidst the intensity and uncertainty of military encounters. Furthermore, the joy of victory and the disappointment of defeat are seldom presented in a straightforward manner. The poet emphasizes joyfulness in a variety of ways: to demonstrate how pleasure in victory can mask inadequacies of leadership; how cheerful arrogance and over-confidence can lead to defeat; or how overwhelming relief can be the joyful response of innocents when potentially destructive conflict is avoided. Time and again the poet proves adept at employing the language of emotions to add depth and complexity to his portraits of the contemporary military caste and to comment eloquently upon the trials and triumphs of their violent pursuits.

This complexity begins to suggest why the History provides such a rich seam for those interested in discovering more about emotions in the medieval period. Among the most pressing issues for scholars of historical emotions is the difficulty of terminology and interpretation of the meanings associated with ‘emotion words’ across languages and cultures. This is connected to the necessity of accepting that what we are inevitably studying are the mediated representations of actual non-verbal responses to external stimuli. As Barbara Rosenwein, doyenne of the field, commented in a recent ‘Conversation’ between leading scholars in the December 2012 edition of the American Historical Review, ‘[t]he ways in which emotions are expressed are, in fact, our only pathway to them’.¹¹ Even so, the very use of emotion words and the naming of otherwise unarticulated mental processes may in fact shape and influence the associated feeling, as Richard Barton has pointed out in the twelfth-century context.¹² Insofar as the author of the History presents to us a range of meanings for a concept such as joyfulness (as I noted above and will explore more fully below) his work should remind us that the medieval presentation of emotions and the appreciation of the relationship between literary formulation and underlying reality could be just as fraught and contingent as our own. Thus we should avoi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – War as Emotion: Cultural Fields of Conflict and Feeling
• 1 Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal
• 2 ‘Blisse Wes on Londe’: The Feeling of Peace in Laȝamon’s Brut
• 3 ‘Je Hé Guerre, Point Ne La Doy Prisier’: Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d’Orléans
• 4 ‘He In Salte Teres Dreynte’: Understanding Troilus’s Tears
• 5 Human Prudence versus the Emotion of the Cosmos: War, Deliberation and Destruction in the Late Medieval Statian Tradition
• 6 Moving to War: Rhetoric and Emotion in William Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse
• 7 ‘I Was Enforced to Become an Eyed Witnes’: Documenting War in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
• 8 ‘Man Is a Battlefield within Himself’: Arms and the Affections in the Counsel of More, Erasmus, Vives, and Their Circle
• 9 Grief and Glory: The Commemoration of War in Seventeenth-Century England
• 10 Remembering Civil War in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’
• 11 ‘Terrible Delight’: Art, Violence, and Power in Early Eighteenth-Century War Poems
• 12 ‘In Brazen Bonds’: The Warring Landscapes of North Carolina, 1775
• 13 The Grievable Life of the War-Correspondent: The Experience of War in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Letters to The Times, 1808–1809
• 14 Afterword: Locating Emotions, Locating Wars
• Select Bibliography
• Index