Gone Medieval - Medieval Warfare: Deception and Trickery

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Deception and trickery have always been a universal feature of warfare and the wars of the Middle Ages were no exception - from the Battle of Hastings to the “fake corpse ruse”. But how did Medieval mores justify deception during wars? Was cunning considered an admirable quality in a warrior? Was the culturally and religious "other" more deceitful than Western Europeans? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more from Dr. James Titterton, author of Deception in Medieval Warfare: Trickery and Cunning in the Central Middle Ages. This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Chivalry is the famous backbone of the medieval knight and of medieval warfare, or at least that's what we're led to believe. James Tititon's new book, Deception in Medieval Warfare, tackles this question head on.

What tricks did medieval generals have up their sleeve and how did they reconcile the use of deception with their chivalric principles? James is here to tell us more about the underhand tactics and the medieval view of them. Welcome to God Medieval, James. Thank you very much for having me, Matt. It's a pleasure. What kind of source material are you able to draw on to start with as you explore deception in medieval warfare? Are we looking at chronicles?

Are we looking at romantic stories that give us a bit of an insight? Mostly what I'm looking at is chronicles. So these are narrative histories written down at the time, either by contemporaries or by people living slightly later and drawing on other accounts. Sometimes they're drawing on written accounts, sometimes they're drawing on rumors that are circulating or eyewitnesses that may have been there. So it's not quite what we would call objective historical reporting, but it's the closest thing that we have in the Middle Ages.

But you mentioned romance and fiction and literature. I do draw on some of that a little bit in the book because this is in some ways closer to what the fighting men of the period are reading and listening to. Chronicles are written in Latin most of the time by clerics for other clerics. There are secular individuals who can read Latin, we know this, and it may be read to them. But if you want to know what the French-speaking aristocracy of Western Europe, which is the area I'm studying mostly, were. interested in what their culture was like, what their values were like, you want to go to the romances and to the chancons deseges, the great French epics. And we find in both of them lots and lots of trickery involved in warfare. And I guess the fiction is a good indicator of what

people are interested in, what excites people, what they want to know a bit more about. So I guess that fictional side can tell us a bit more from that perspective, maybe. Yes, the middle ages is full of trickster characters and trickster stories. We know absolutely that people were interested in these kinds of stories. So very famously you have Robin Hood. Robin Hood is from slightly later than my period, but the figure of the outlaw trickster, the man who flees to the forest with a band of supporters and lives as an outlaw to fight injustice or his enemies, that figure appears already in the 12th and 13th century. So there's people like Herawad. Your listeners might know him as Herawad the Wake, the Saxon leader who resisted the Normans in the Cambridge

Fens. There's stories about him doing stuff that is very similar to Robin Hood. Fulke Fitzwarren, Eustace the Monk, these kind of characters of all sort of proto Robin Hood figures that appear in the 12th and 13th century. The story of Tristan and Isolt, which is a great love story in which the knight Tristan drinks a love potion and the lady is sold who's supposed to be married to the king of Cornwall and they fall in love and they have this clandestine love affair that involves a lot of trickery it's a burlesque and a comedy as well as a romance and they have to do all sorts of things like they're in the same room and to get into the bed Tristan like jumps between the two beds because they've put stuff on the floor so that they'll hear them and it's all this sort of thing

it's quite knockabout. And my personal favourite of the trickster characters, I've sometimes seen him described as a 12th century bugs bunny. There's Raynard the Fox, who is part of this world of anthropomorphic animals. The lion is the king. His enemy is the wolf, Isengren. And this is the front cover of my book,

is Raynard and Isingrin fighting each other as knights. But Raynard is this completely amoral trickster character. He will just deceive people for no particular reason and even when it doesn't benefit him particularly he just can't stop but there's all these very bawdy slapstick stories about him and he was clearly very popular and these were read started off in latin but we have english versions french versions dutch versions german versions there are references to raynard everywhere you find him in carvings in churches and in manuscript marginalia you'll find foxes taking geese or foxes dressed as bishops preaching to dutches

and it's all these sort of satirical ideas. And Raynor is this sort of mimetic figure throughout the Middle Ages. And he is a trickster. So we can tell from all of this that trickery and cunning are something that is considered entertaining in the middle ages. Not necessarily the most admirable, maybe, but certainly entertaining and something that people want to hear about. I don't think I've ever heard Tristan and Assault sound so much like a carry-on film, but definitely make it sound more watchable. One of the thing on the sources, as we get into this idea of trickery and military tactics in particular, do we need to be wary of whether we're hearing from the tricker or the trickie, if you like,

the person on the receiving end or the person doing it? Because presumably they have different views of whether trickery is a good thing. Yes, it depends very much, not so much actually on whether it's the tricker or the tricky. It's whether the person writing the story approves of the trickery. So, for example, a Norman chronicler will say, and then this happened, and the French came in, and they did this terrible thing, and this terrible deception, and it caused so much damage. And then the same incident may be described by the French chronicler going, oh, our king did this wonderfully clever thing, and the perception is slightly changed. But sometimes you also get people writing from the perspective of the tricked, and they will say this happened, and they use it as a learning experience, as a teaching experience, because history in this period isn't just for entertainment or information. It's didactic. It's meant to teach you something. Reading history is meant to help you become a better person. And one of the things that trickery teaches you is to be prudent. Prudence is a virtue. Wisdom is a virtue. virtue. Even the clerical writers are not naive about this. They know that the world is full of people

who will try and deceive you. So, for example, the 12th century author Gerald of Wales tells a story about this particular English nobleman riding through the forests of Wales. And I'm not making this up, pure Monty Python, with a minstrel and a fiddler going before him, singing through the woods. And then the Welsh rebels in the woods immediately jump out and kill him. And Gerald says, His counsellor told him this was a bad idea. And this goes to show you should always listen to good advice when you receive it. So the moral of the story isn't, look at these terrible Welshmen. It's look at this stupid Englishman who should have been paying attention

and should have been listening to good advice. So it's not quite as straightforward as trickery is good if we do it and it's bad if they do it. Sometimes you can say there seems to be just an acceptance that, okay, it's going to happen. You need to be clever about this. You need to recognise that this is going to happen. to you. Yeah, and what can we learn from it and how can we be better prepared so it doesn't happen to us again? Yeah.

If you don't ever write about it, you don't ever learn about it. Yes. When you're researching the book, did you find that there was much of a disconnect between the ideals of war and the reality of it? So I think we often acquire this view of the chivalric Middle Ages in which knights were all honourable to each other and, you know, they fight, stand up jewels with each other and this kind of thing. And that must be hard to reconcile with the idea that there are deceptive tactics going on as

well. Did you find that there was a disconnect between the way that people thought war ought in an ideal world to be prosecuted and how it actually was? Not as much as I expected when I started the project. When I started the project, I was expecting to find a lot of chroniclers and poets criticizing trickery or going around the houses to justify it. But actually, what I found mostly was that there seems to be an acceptance that this was happening and this was going to happen. The important thing for most writers seems to be that once you have clearly stated that there is a war going on between two noblemen, two kingdoms, whatever, whatever you do after that point is fair game, within reason. So if you go to sleep

overnight in camp and don't watch out and don't put up guards and I come along and you're asleep and I capture you or kill you while you're in your sleep, that seems to be fair game. It's your fault. You knew I was out for you. It's when it becomes more, you didn't tell me we were having a war, you didn't tell me this was the state. The accusations go around to things like assassination and murder and it's shifted from one moral category to another. A comparison you might make today is say the difference between murder, terrorism and collateral damage. We have very different categories in our society of what we consider to be legitimate and illegitimate violence. The same thing happens in the Middle Ages. But there is

examples of great chivalric figures using these kind of tactics. Richard the Lionheart, William Marshall, William the Conqueror, these great warriors are depicted by authors who are sympathetic to them as employing these kind of tricks and being shown to be clever generals, prudent generals, even warfare where you might expect things to be more idealized, say in accounts of the Crusades, which are these unambiguously moral, righteous causes fighting against the heathen for the recovery of the Holy Land. Even then, trickery when it is used in the service of God in these wars can be admirable. It can be described as clever. as cunning, not underhanded or dishonorable.

It's an interesting distinction, and I ask because I'm surprised that there isn't more of a disconnect between those two, so it's interesting, but I guess we should allow that these people existed in that world and were well aware of what was actually going on around them. Is it often important, and maybe I'm thinking about clerical, chroniclers more than anybody else, to try and find a precedent or a connection in either ancient history or some kind of biblical justification for what they see going on? Does that allow them to rationalise naughtiness? The Bible has examples of this. Joshua does this in the book of judges. He pretends to run away to lure the men of eye, AI. His army pretends to run away and then an ambush party jumps out and takes the city while it's undefended. And the Israelites do it later in the book of judges where they do the same thing to the Benjaminites. So there is a precedent there that you can look at it and go, oh, and Joshua's a prophet. Joshua's the anointed of the Lord. So if he can do it,

in that context and in a righteous cause, then that might be something we can use. And I guess we see William the Conqueror doing exactly that at Hastings. Yeah. And making an effort to present his assault on England as justified by God because Harold had made all these oaths on relics and things like that. So by making a kind of holy connection, he can almost justify it as, well, you know, Joshua did this in God's name. I'm doing this in God's name. Yeah, absolutely. Gideon does the same thing.

He attacks the Midianites while they're asleep. It's a really multi-layered deception because Gideon and his men, he has a commando force with them with tortures in pots. And they surround the camp and smash the pots and start shouting and waving the torches. And the Midianites think, oh goodness, there's thousands of them were surrounded and they all panic. And we see versions of that story being used throughout the Middle Ages, different places, different times, people attacking by night. I've not found an example where it's explicitly said, and this is what Gideon did, therefore it was okay for us to do. but considering that these are written mostly by clerical authors, they would expect their audience to know. And in the same way, they're all Latin scholars, and they all have all had a Latin education, and have learned to read Latin from classical texts that have been preserved.

And the classical world, again, is perfectly fine. The Roman texts are perfectly fine with trickery in warfare, as you might expect. We don't necessarily think of the Romans as particularly chivalrous in the same way we do. stereotypically of the Middle Ages. But the Romans had lots of examples in their literature of this happening. There was an author called Fron, who wrote a book called the Stratagamata, the first century text, which is nothing but a collection of these stories of different kinds of deception. In fact, I based my book, the structure of it on the Stratagamata, because he divides it into types of deception, and I did, oh, that's a good idea, I'll do that. And Fronternus's book is often bound together in a manuscript with a work by

the art of warfare, in inverted commas, De Re Militari, which was seen in the Middle Ages, by clerics at least, as the definitive description of how you fight a war. And frontinus was often bound together in manuscripts with this art of war, so it's clear that there's a

intellectual connection, at least amongst the the clergy, between legitimate, effective warfare and deceitful conduct in that and tricking, misdirecting your enemy. And as you mentioned, you break the book up into types of deception. And one of the things you deal with is spies in the book. Yes.

Presumably part of the problem with dealing with spies is that can be quite hard to see, at least if they're good at being spies. So it makes them difficult to spot maybe. But how do we see spies and how important were they in various situations? There's a couple of issues, as you say, a good spies one you can't see. J.O. Prestwich, who wrote an article about this back in the 70s, I think. think about the intelligence network of William the Conqueror. He said that what we have to remember is that often the chronicler summarise the whole work of this huge intelligence network that's clearly

out there with just, it was reported to the king. So he doesn't tell us how or why, because the chronicler probably doesn't know, but it's assumed that the king has people all over the place, not necessarily like we'd think of there as like MI6 or MI5, but he has people gathering information and passing information, there's a whole network of information about what is going on in his lands that is then fed back to him, and it was reported to the king. We occasionally get references to them, explicit references, although it is sometimes difficult to work out exactly what's going on, because the word in Latin and the word in old French, which are the two main languages of the sources I use, for spy, is the same word

as the word for scout. So when you're looking at account, and it's very unhelpful. They say things like, and we sent out explorators, and they came back and told us about the dispositions of the enemy. Is that just scout? And then what's the line? Because espies the word in French, but it's difficult. And I discussed this in the book. We have like a one or two examples of people who are very clearly either disguising themselves or pretending to be something they're not in order to gather this kind of information.

So, for example, we've got Peter the Deacon in 10. The Norman warlord Robert Giscard wants to conquer Sicily, as part of the great Norman conquest of the southern Italy and Sicily by the Normans. And he wants to attack the city of Palermo. So he sends a man called Peter the Deacon to the city. And it says Peter the deacon could speak the Saracen tongue, so probably Arabic. But Robert says to him, don't let on that you can speak Arabic. Don't let on that you can do this. So Peter goes and pretends he can't speak.

So the Saracens will all talk in front of him. as if he can't understand them. And then he comes back to Robert and says, oh no, they're absolutely terrified of us. The city's ripe for the picking, the strength there. The city is like a body without a soul, is the description. So this is one of the very rare examples we find of espionage being explicitly described in the Chronicle.

And it's described by an Italian chronicler, a martyrs of Montecino, as a great piece of cunning, is the translation, that Robert uses to conquer Sicily. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists

and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. from pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Does the acceptability of using spies ever depend on the circumstances? So in that circumstance where you're dealing with people they would consider Saracens rather than co-religionists, other Christians, was it more acceptable? perhaps on Crusade in the Holy Land than it was against fellow Christians in Europe,

or is there not really that distinction? It's very difficult because nobody seems to discuss it. There's not much in the way of explicit discussion about the morality of doing this. Again, I think it's more of a brute fact of warfare that an army needs this kind of information, that people will be gathering this kind of information, and that it's considered prudent and sensible. It's more visible, I think, in the crusader sources, because there you have, have a group of people who have been dislocated from their own place and their own culture

and put in a new place and culture where they don't speak the language, they don't know the terrain. So in Western Europe, for example, you can talk to the local landowners, you can talk to the local clergy, you can go and round up a bunch of peasants and say to them, where does that road go? Where's the ford that allows us to cross the river? Have you seen the enemy, where are they? And it's much more difficult in the near east. And we occasionally get. little bits of information about how this is being done. Richard the Lionheart on his crusade, there's a reference in one of the chronicles to

Bernard the King's spy, the royal spy. And it says he was a native of that country and spoke the Saracen language as well as anybody there. And we know how much he was paid. He was paid a great deal. The Chronicle actually lists his fees. So this is clearly a man of very specialist skills and the king is using him.

So there's an indication that they're aware, obviously, that they need this kind of local information and that they're bringing these people as translators and as spies. I guess the Richard I first and Saladin relationship is quite interesting from that point of view because you do see even though they're at war, they're talking to each other an awful lot and sending envoys to each other and you do get a sense from some of the chronicles that this is always about testing the mood of the opposition camp. It's just about getting through Saladin's door or Richard's door and finding out how scared

or nervous or whatever else they are, but it's covered up as a kind of peaceful envoy to deliver presence and things like that. But I guess it sounds like they considered that good practice to gather as much information as you possibly could. It wasn't sneaky. It was just good practice. Yeah. And also, diplomacy is a very good cover for espionage because you have to go there and they're under a flag of truce. So you can walk around and you can come back. And you can also use that to your advantage. So if you have an envoy coming into the camp, you can send it around and say, look at my vast army. Look at how strong the walls are. You'll never get in here. You'll never. And then they go back and the idea is that they tell them.

which is what's happening with Peter the deacon, is that the Emir of Palermo thinks that he's put up a brave front and he doesn't realize that he hasn't. Have you got a couple of examples of the kinds of tactics and deception that we can see in operation? I mean, you mentioned William Marshall before, so that rings bells. How on earth is he being sneaky?

He is being sneaky, and it seems to be these are some of his favorite stories that he liked to tell. The history of William Marshall that's put together by his family after he dies, is obviously designed to celebrate him and make him look as good as possible. and some of the stories that he includes are decidedly underhanded but again it's treated as a joke for example at tournaments it describes him as this great tournament which is mock warfare essentially in this period it's not individual jousting it's everybody gets together in two huge teams and fights over several miles of countryside and it said that the count of flanders had a trick

what's supposed to happen is that everybody gets in the field and then when someone blows the whistle everyone runs at each other and there's a big fight. And it says that the counter Flanders would just not join in and would just wait until everyone else was knackered. Then he and his men would ride and capture everybody and win the tournament. And William Marshall goes, that's a really good idea. I'm going to do that. And he tells the young King Henry, who he's mentoring as the older knight, we should do this. This is a really good tactic.

And this is presented as an entirely positive thing as a really good sound way of behaving, despite the fact that it is clearly against the spirit. of what's supposed to be happening here. But they're a lot more ruthless than you'd think. And I guess you can pass that off as the prudence of learning lessons from other people. You know, if it works for the counter Flanders, we should do it too. Yeah, we keep getting beaten up by this guy. We should copy him.

But this extends not just in this sort of play world of the tournament. This extends into the real world of warfare. So in 1188, William has now moved on and is now in the household of King Henry II, so the young Henry's father. and they are negotiating with Philip Augustus, King of France. And Philip Augustus has essentially thrown his toys out the prim and said, I'm not going to negotiate with you, it's war, I mean it this time. And the poem again describes this is the only source we have for this.

So this is obviously something that he was very proud of, and the family were very proud of him, even if he didn't really do it. They wanted to say, look what he did. He goes to King Henry and says, my lord, right, pretend to disband the army. If we send all of the army away, the French will think we've given up and they'll go home and they'll disband their army.

But secretly, we'll gather everyone back together in a week's time and then they'll be undefended and we can pillage and plunder all the lands around here. And the king replies to Marshall, Marshall, you are courtly, you've displayed courtesy. You have been a good courtier to me and given me good advice because that's what the courtier's supposed to do. Again, it's this idea of good advice of being a good vassal.

And they do that. And then it describes with the kind of glitians, that you only get in sort of 13th century romance about all the horrible atrocities they commit to the local peasantry because these are aristocrats and they don't care. But yeah, the fact that's in the text I think is really significant because if it was considered morally dubious or dishonorable, then there's no way that the family of William Marshall would have let that get put in the text. There's no way the poet who's being paid to make William Marshall look like this great hero

that he's got the reputation for would have put that in. And we know from, if you read David Crouch's study of the text, that the Marshall poem very definitely edits out certain aspects of his career or deemphasises aspects of the career that weren't considered honorable or particularly glorious. So the fact that they kept this stuff in tells us something about the culture, tells us something about their mindset. Yeah, it makes it even more interesting that it stayed there. One of the other tactics that you talk about in the book is the fake.

corpse ruse. So can you tell us a little bit about what that is and some examples of when it was used, please? This is a really interesting little story that has a very long shelf life. So the first example I can find of it in a medieval text is in a Norman chronicle, Dudo of San Quentin writes a history of the Norman dukes. Duke Richard of Normandy says, I want you to write this history that gives the history of the Norman people and my family. And the idea is that it makes them look like legitimate part of the European aristocracy. And at the start of the story is a story about this Viking raider called Hasting, who is going on a pillaging expedition to Italy, and he gets to this city and he thinks it's wrong,

it isn't, and he can't work out how to get inside. So he pretends that he wants to be baptized, and priests come out of the city and they baptize him. Then he sends word a couple of days later that he's dying. His men then pretend that he's dead, and they say, he's dead, he's a Christian, can we bring him into your city to bury him? And they put weapons inside the coffin, inside the beer, and they carry the dead body in, and they have a funeral mass for him. And he describes him jumping up in the middle of the funeral mass, drawing his sword and killing the bishop saying the funeral mass. It's this really over-the-top story. And then

they pillage the city and all of this. And it's meant to show how wicked and awful the Viking people were before the good Duke Rollo appears, the founder of the Norman Duke Lime. and he's baptized for real and he cleanses the sin of the Norman people for all of things that are epitomized by Hasting. But what's interesting about this story, on its own, it's just really over-the-top story, a villain origin story for the Normans. But it starts appearing in later chronicles as an example of cleverness, of sneakiness, of commendable trickery. So Robert Giesgard again is described as doing something very similar to get into a town in Italy in the 11th century. He doesn't kill anybody doing it. He pretends that one of his men has died and says,

we need to bring the body in and then they drop the coffin in the doorway of the town and they can't shut the door and the guys all jump and the Normans all run in and take over the town. But there's no blasphemy. There's no bishop killing, no rape and pillage. And we get the same thing that his son, Roger II of Sicily, is alleged to have done this to get into Monte Cassino. And there's also a version of this story that gets circulated. about Harold Hardrada, so from 1066 and all that, the Viking. The saga of his life has a version of this story that allegedly happens in Sicily while he was serving as a member of the Varanjian Guard for the Byzantine Empire,

because Harada was the King of Norway, was exiled and while in exile, and we know this is true, he went to fight for the Byzantine Empire. But this story gets attached to him, and again, it's the same basic trick, but all of the blasphemy has been removed. I doubt it ever really did happen. But that's not the most important or interesting thing I think about this story. It's the fact that it's been repeated in different contexts, attached to different individuals,

and used as an example of the cleverness and the cunning of the Normans or the Norse or the Vikings or whoever's doing it, and that people obviously liked hearing that story. And that tells you something about the culture. That tells you something about the culture. the mindset of these people. I was going to say it's almost like it's a successful trope that people will buy it. It appears in various guises in Hollywood films today. We can see the same themes and the same processes going on, slightly altered. So a thousand years ago, people still like those

kind of tropes and they wanted to see them presented in a slightly different way as exciting stories. Once I started doing this project, I couldn't watch a film. I suddenly realized every film I watched, every action film, oh my goodness, it's that trope from the medieval chronicles. The coming hero is still with us today in so many different forms. There's a definite podcast in that. We'll have to come back and tear some medieval films apart. Or not even medieval films. I think it's just all sorts of films, isn't it?

Yeah. I think more of this has been presented as acceptable and even laudable than I thought was going to be the case. Did you come across things that were absolutely off limits? Were their tactics that were considered beyond the pale? And even if they were, do we still see them used? The only thing that I found that seems to be universally considered, regardless of context, as bad in terms of deceitful tactics, was if you make an oath to somebody and then you break it. Because as you mentioned, for the back and forth between day Richard and Saladin, this is a thing throughout the Middle Ages in that it's very small scale warfare by the standards of what we've later periods, and it's very personal. So sieges often are a constant back and forth, not just of arrows and swords, but of words, of people negotiating.

And often the accounts of battles, for example, will say, and before the battle started, both sides sent out invoice to try and resolve it peacefully. And sometimes that works, and sometimes that didn't. Sometimes the battle happens anyway. And this could involve making promises, and you would give your word and make an oath, sometimes on holy artifacts. You'd like to bring a Bible or a relic and make an oath. So, for example, to say, I swear not to attack you tomorrow, it is a feast day. I will not attack you on the day of John the Baptist, for example. And the idea is that once you've given that, you've given your word in an honour-based culture that is extremely important.

So to break that is to break one of the fundamental social contracts that holds this society together, because many of a society is held together by oaths. You make an oath to your liege lord. monk swear oaths to the abbot, clergy swear oaths to the Pope, and kings swear oaths to uphold the laws of their kingdom, and all the way down to basic business transactions is that it takes the form of an oath. So to break that is to put yourself outside of the social norms,

and almost you declare yourself fair game for anything. But people still do it, because it's a really effective trick if you can pull it off, because if the enemy's not expecting you to attack and you've said you will, you could just defeat them without having to go through the whole process of a stand-up fight. And we do find occasions where this happens and we have a glimpse, not much, but a glimpse of how they might have justified it. So an example I use is from a chronicle by the name of Galbert of Bruges. This is set in Bruges in low countries. And he tells the story of the murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders.

Charles the Good is having a dispute with a local family called the Erembalds, and eventually it gets to the point where the Erembals murder him while he's at prayer in a church in Bruges. It's this utterly scandalous thing, breaking so many taboos. He's their liege, Lord, it's in a church. And then the Erembalds flee to the castle that's in the centre of Bruges. Like most medieval cities, has a fortress that can be used for defence, and they hold up in there. And then those who support Count Charles, who want to punish him. them come and lay siege to the castle and Galbert is in the town at the time and it's almost a diary

he's writing. One of the things Galbert says is that the Count's treasure, the treasury of the county is in the castle with the Erimbals and he says that the besiegers are coming out, standing outside and saying, okay, send out some of the money and we'll let you go and will be merciful. And so the Erimbald send out a bit of the money and they don't let them go. And then they do it again and they do it again. And Galbert says the besiegers justified this by saying they're oath breakers and an oath made to an oath breaker is not valid. We don't have to do anything. Now, Galbert seems to think this is morally ambiguous.

Galbert appears to be being ironic when he's talking about this. But my theory is that maybe we're seeing just a little bit into the mindset of the people who do these kind of things is that if you can portray your enemy as so morally repugnant that they have put themselves outside the bounds of conventional morality, then you can do anything you like to them. We see this in the Battle of Evesham in the 13th century in England. Simon De Montfort and all of his followers are brutally murdered after the battle. They're defeated and then just hacked to bits,

which is direct contravention of chivalric convention. They're supposed to be if they surrender. You're supposed to take them hostage. You're supposed to show mercy to a defeated enemy. But Simon Demontfort, by his actions, by seizing the king, seizing power, breaking this contract of how the kingdom is supposed to be governed, has set himself outside of conventional morality.

And so the royalists go, no, this is it. We're going to kill him. So it's just about how you position your enemy. I guess if we go back to Hastings again as well, William the Conqueror is careful to position Harold as someone who has broken an oath, and therefore he is fair game. And it's odd that we remember him as William the Conqueror, what he would probably say was, no, I was just getting what was rightfully mine.

There was no conquest here. never really king because he was an oath breaker. Exactly. Yes. William the Just Restorer doesn't have the same ring. No, no. The Conqueror is one of the great epithets to be given, but I just wonder whether he would say, oh, I wasn't a conqueror. No, no, that's not how it worked. Thank you so much for joining us to share all of that, James. It's been absolutely fascinating insight into medieval mindset, I think, as much as military tactics, it's about what people thought of it and how they rationalise these things and use these things. It's been fascinating

to talk about. Yeah, whether these individual tactics were used exactly if we got in a machine and went and stood at Hastings and watched, would we have seen these exact tactics happening? I think is something we can't know because everything we know about military history and medieval military history particular is filtered through all these sources. But what we can know about and what we can study, and for me, what's more interesting is how did people think about this? What was the culturally accepted way of doing this? Because we can get closer to that. Yeah, and I guess we always have to be wary, again, you know, with Hastings, if William's men did flee when he didn't want them to, if you win the battle, then you can kind of recast that as

a clever military tactic anyway, whether it's what really happened or not. But as you say, it's more about what people wanted you to know. Yes, absolutely. Or wanted you to think about what's going on. Brilliant. Thank you so much, James. James's book, Deception in Medieval Warfare is out now and is packed with examples, details and source material to explore this aspect of medieval warfare and mindset a little bit further. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us

anywhere that you get your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.