School of War - Ep 238: James Titterton on Medieval Deception

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

James Titterton, historian and author of Deception in Medieval Warfare: Trickery and Cunning in the Central Middle Ages, joins the show to discuss strategies and stratagems in the age of castles and knights.       ▪️ Times     •      01:29 Introduction     •      02:18 High Middle Ages     •      09:03 Oathbreakers              •      12:01 Sources     •      16:21 Doctrine             •      22:07 Bribery                •      31:23 Spies and feints         •      39:26 Plausibility                •      42:19 Professionals  Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

A very early meaning of the term strategy had a lot to do with what we might today call stratagems, tricks or deceptions that a general could employ to shape the fights to come, or perhaps secure a victory without having to fight at all, or at least fight at a very low cost. Today, an interesting conversation about how such deceptions were employed in the high Middle Ages, at a time of knights and chivalry and, relevantly for our purposes in 2025, a time of castles and sieges, In other words, a time when the defense was dominant over the offense. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

We continue to face the rain situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight on the landing ground. He'll fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never surrender. scholarly received his PhD in medieval studies from the University of Leeds. And we're going to talk about the subject of his first book today, which is called Deception in Medieval, Warfare, Trickery and Cunning in the Central Middle Ages. There it is. James, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thank you for inviting me. It's lovely to be asked to talk about this again. It's been a little while. Carter, we have a running interest in deception and trickery in general on the show, really with regard to warfare in 2025 and the kinds of things we've seen happen in the last few. years in places like Ukraine and Israel. But of course, you know, we mix history and current events on the show. And so your book just sort of leaped out at us. It's always interesting to go back and look at how things used to work and see what you can unpack from that in terms of what

might be applicable today. Let me start here. Your book is about the higher, the central middle ages. Both generally and in military terms, what is that? So the high middle ages, It's obviously like all historical periods, it's a construct. Nobody at the time thought we're living through the middle of something. Nobody thought that they were medieval. Everybody always thinks they're living at the end of history. So if we take the Middle Ages to be roughly post-Roman Empire, fall of Rome in the 5th century, the end of the Western Roman Empire, and the end of the Middle Ages to be about the Reformation,

about that, the Protestant Reformation. The Central Middle Ages is the bit in the middle, and it is chronologically somewhere between the end of the Carolingian Empire, when that sort of breaks down in the West, and you get East Francia and West Francia and then the emergence of the nation states there. And it sort of ends, it's generally reckoned around the time of the Black Death. The Black Death is kind of the end of it in terms of chronologically,

because then there's these massive shifts in society. in how society's organized, in religious culture, the way that people are just thinking about their lives and about their relationship to God changes massively. And obviously, these huge demographic changes. Militarily, what makes the Central Middle Ages to me is it's the age of the night. Now, there's been armored cavalry before and there's armored cavalry afterwards right up into the 17th century. but the central Middle Ages for me, it's the era of the night and the castle.

It's the era when warfare is mostly dominated by our classic image of the knight, the guy on the war horse with the lance and the male coat. And that is the only professional soldier in Western Europe, what we think of as professional. And foot soldiers and archers are very much auxiliary things. on the battlefield in this period. And the other thing that, and arguably the more important thing that defines warfare in this period is the castle, is the freestanding fortification or the fortification

within an urban centre that can be used to project military power into the surrounding area. And that really affects the dynamic of warfare. It becomes about controlling castles, about projecting your military and political authority, which are basically the same thing, from using these garrisons and then attacking and defending these garrisons becomes the main thing you're doing in warfare. It's not an age of pitched battles. It's not an age of, though they exist and they happen.

They are the minority. Most people don't want a field engagement. It's a siege. It's siege warfare and it's the goal of most campaigns is, not total victory. It's we get this castle. We get these castles. We get to control these areas and things. So two thoughts that your comment inspires for me. One, it seems like in an age where fortresses and the defense are quite powerful, that the subject of your book becomes very prominent. That is to say, surprise, deception, cunning, trickery, however you want to characterize it. If it's really,

really hard to take over something and you're sitting these protracted sieges, the games of the mind, suddenly become very important and your your most economical path to any kind of offensive. Yeah, that's the thing. These are, the thing that I find most fascinating kind of what drew me to this subject was the contrast, almost, the two standards that are being upheld by the commanders in this period and the knights in general and the fighters in this period. In the one hand, this is an age in which outward form and behavior is very important, ideas of honour and social prestige and reputation and what we would eventually call chivalry

are hugely important. And this is a huge, and also Christian morality, the idea of honesty and piety and of conspicuous displays of moral behavior. This is part of this society that they're all living in. But at the same time, they're having to balance at the fact that they are professional warriors who need to get results. And they have. have all of the pressures that all commanders have is that they want to create victory, they want to achieve victory with minimum losses, minimum cost, and as quickly as possible. And that brings this state of, well, a deception is a great way of winning with minimal losses very quickly, a lot of the time theoretically. But it's also, it has this connotation of

dishonorable or it can be certainly portrayed or spun as underhand. as the morally suspect. And so that was to me was the really interesting thing. But yes, absolutely the imperative when you have a siege going on and you want to get inside as quickly as possible, then finding any strategy you can to get in there. And sometimes we have examples of people. We've got some examples. And we have examples of people as you'd expect.

Sometimes there are people who explicitly don't take the deceptive option. Quite rarely, but they explicitly don't. and there are also examples of people who do whatever they need to to win. And most people fall in the middle. I think that's just human nature. Well, the second thing I was going to say, and what you just commented, complicates it a bit, is that, you know, where you're living in a period now where I think conventional wisdom holds that the defense has some advantage over the offense, that the battlefield is an extremely visible place.

It's hard to move. If you move, you tend to get shot at and precision being what it is. is often quite successfully. I don't know if there's a parallel to the chivalry angle. Maybe it's our embrace of international law and our, you know, the embraced by many countries, at least, of a sort of liberal. Yes. Maybe that's that if I, I don't know if that's overdoing it,

but not exactly the high Middle Ages, but maybe that works a little bit. One that I see that I think is quite relevant is the idea of oath breaking. This is a very important concept in medieval society. and the idea is that you swear an oath, you give your word, and it's a holy act, you usually invoke God, or you physically bring relics in to swear on them, and God is kind of the guarantor of what you're saying. And in theory, this is a great system. If you've given an oath, a sacred oath, you are going to keep that because it is a sacred promise.

It is more than just a promise. It is an act in which you have invoked divine. But there's a few examples. certainly in the military context that I found of people saying, well, if you are an oath breaker, then any oath sworn to you is invalid because you've already shown that you can't be trusted. Therefore, we don't have to keep our faith because you've already broken your faith. So, for example, during the siege of Bruges Castle 1137, I think it's 1137 in the early 12th century, the Erimbald clan who have murdered their camp.

They have broken all of the most fundamental bonds of their society by murdering the Count Charles of Flanders at the altar. And they've hightailed into the castle in the middle of town and are holding out. And Charles's vassals, the loyal vassals, have come and are besieging. And we hear from the notary of Bruges, Galbert, who's literally just sat round the corner writing this as it's going on. And he says that they would offer promises to the besieged and said, send out the treasure, because the Count's treasury, the county treasury, is in the castle. Send out the treasure and we will negotiate

favorable terms with you. So they would go, okay, fine, and they'd send out like a bag of gold or something. And then the besiegers would say, send out another bag of gold

and then we'll talk. And they kept doing this. And he says that they, they justify this by saying, well, they have already broken their oaths to the count. Therefore,

when obliged, they've put themselves outside of the conventional system of warfare, of human interaction, almost. You might like a parallel if anyone who's a fan of like Robin Hood, for example. Robin Hood in certain versions of the story is sometimes called a wolf's head,

which was an English phrase for an outlaw, was that somebody who'd put themselves outside of the law was to be treated as if they were a wolf and could be killed without any repercussions in the same way you could kill a wolf because it was a dangerous predator. So how do you reconstruct this period? I mean, this is a period that in other times in our modern era would have been referred to is the dark ages. What do you have by, I mean, what are their, what are there doctrinal texts? You know, what are the historical documents that you're relying?

How do you put this all together? Yeah. How to get a steam coming out of medievalist steers is there. I know, I know. I used the phrase dark ages. I said it wasn't a different. It was a dark ages for us when we used the phrase, no doubt. Yeah.

It was, the dark ages is used kind of pejoratively. It originally just meant we don't have many sources. And that is kind of the early Middle Ages, what we think of. before my period. And one of the things that sets apart the high middle ages from what came before it is that you have this what's called the 12th century Renaissance. And there's like every century seems to get a renaissance these days. But the 12th century Renaissance is this great period of learning and of discovery and of a tradition of history writing that starts to appear as various things are happening. This is the same period that universities are being created in the West.

The first, like Oxford University is founded around this time, Bologna, places like that. And the monastic tradition is becoming, is as solidified itself as a center of learning. And people are copying and reading Roman histories. So most of my sources are what we call Latin Chronicles, which are narrative histories of contemporary events, which are written sometimes as literal continuations, but often in imitation of the Roman histories that these people are reading. and they're thinking, well, Livy and so on, wrote these histories of their events, their contemporary events. We need to write ours as well in these forms. And so that provides the meat of what's in the book, the meat of my research, is these

narrative histories that are written in Latin, which is also the period towards the end of my period, when we're starting to also get what we call vernacular writing. So we're getting things in the languages that ordinary people or the nobility at least would speak. So French, old English, early, getting into Middle English. Right at the end of the book, I also use the text that kind of inspired the whole project is The Bruce, John by John Barber, which is the first major work in Old Scots. And it's basically understandable. You can read it now. It's sort of, as long as you know some of the keywords, it's just in a very, very, very strong, English and a very, very strong Scottish accent with dialect terms that we wouldn't have. And also,

there's Italian and Dutch and German, of course, happening at the same time. So those are the main things that I use to get the events of what's happening. And these have all sorts of issues that you have with any historical source, any narrative source is, has all of these different layers that you have to go through to try and work out and to understand what is going on here, because their understanding of what history was is different to our understanding and what we think of as history. They saw history as a moral genre.

It was designed to educate and to show the and to be improving. It's almost quite Victorian in this idea that you would read these histories and understand what a good king looked like or a good bishop or also these were deeply religious texts. These were deeply religious people. Their entire worldview cannot be separated from their Christian faith. And so they interpreted everything they saw as the. will of God as somehow God's working out in there. And it's really interesting sometimes when things happen that they don't think should happen, like crusades.

Most of the crusades fail. So they have to come to, they have to rationalize this. They have to explain, like, why did this crusade fail? Well, it must have been a sin somewhere we sin and we didn't sit and we didn't do the right thing. And that's why the first crusade is so miraculous. It works. And therefore, that must be a sign of gods. They get to Jerusalem.

They take Jerusalem. They found the kingdom of Jerusalem. No one ever expected that to happen. Nobody thought that could happen. So it becomes this sign of God's will. And it sort of follows on from that. In terms of doctrine, what you would call now military doctrine, we don't really, they didn't really have it, is the short answer.

Sounds simpler than today. Simpler and a lot less professional. There is, it's important to remember, I think, that the middle ages is still primarily an oral culture. Writing is a specialized skill. People make their livings by being able to read and write. Scribes, clerics, clergy can do it. You could make a very good living out of being the person who knows how to read, particularly Latin. And most of the nobility, it's a myth, a bit of a Hollywoodization myth that the nobility were all illiterate. There's a great line in the Richard Lester film Robin and Marion where a nobleman just says,

ha, books of the clerks. Well, we know that that's not quite true. I mean, for example, Richard the Lionheart could read and speak Latin. He spoke Latin well enough to be able to joke in it. We've got that an account from a chronicler. So John, we know could read and write, King John of England. He read law books. He was a very intelligent, well-educated man.

But how you fight, how you learn to fight, how you conduct warfare, just doesn't seem to have been in the way we think of today. There's no schools, there's no academies, there's no equivalent of West Point you send your kids to. You learn by doing. You usually learn your individual fighting skills by learning from someone in your household, by your, or by hiring a professional, who is a professional soldier, you'll teach your kids how to fight. In terms of how they managed armies, it was basically learning on the job. There are texts that survived into the Middle Ages from the Roman period which offer theories of warfare, the most famous of which is Vigetius on military matters, De Re Militari, it's called.

And that does survive into the Middle Ages, and it is known and it is copied. And it is available in various monastic libraries. and we see it being quoted by chroniclers sometimes and reference sometimes as that. But there is vanishingly little evidence that actual soldiers and generals, commanders, kings, even the kings who maybe have access to it, are reading it and putting it into practice.

And it would be very difficult to tell if they did as well, because if you actually read it, it's really just full of commonplaces, things like, it's a good idea to attack when your enemy isn't expecting you. It's quite difficult to cross a river. Make sure that you're not surprised if you're marching through unfamiliar country. It's really kind of basic stuff that you, because Vagetius himself is writing kind of a summary of other books that didn't survive, and this is the only one

that kind of survived. What is interesting and kind of works from, that informs what I read, I think, and this is my part of my theory, is that the people who are writing our histories and who are writing about warfare in this period. So the chroniclers. A lot of them have read Vagetius, or they've read phrases from Vigetius. And Vagetius encourages people to use deception. He has whole chapters dedicated to how to do ambushes. There's also a text called the Stratagamata by a guy called Frontenus,

which is just a whole collection of Roman stories from Greek and Roman history, written in the classical Roman period, of deceptions, of types of deception. It's, you know, how to deceive somebody when you're inside a fortress, how to deceive somebody when you're outside a fortress, how to make your army look bigger than it is, how to make your army look smaller than it is, things like that. And that, again, is copied and known in the Middle Ages. And the chroniclers are reading this. They are looking at this and thinking, okay, this is our model for how wars are supposed to be fought. Therefore, this is a good way to fight because they loved the Romans. The Romans are held up as this ideal

society, this great imperial society that we want to emulate, you know. There's a reason that Charlemagne, when he wants to assert his power over Europe, goes to the Pope and says, make me the emperor of Rome. That's hugely important to them. And they all want to be classical, you know. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great are not just historical figures for the people in the high middle ages. They are heroes like Lancelot in romances and epics.

And you have stories about Julius Caesar and Alexander goes. off and fighting giants and dragons and having these great adventures. So they think of these classical figures as figures to be emulated and to be admired. And so these texts that we've got that say, you should use deception in warfare. This is something we should do. They are there in the culture and they are definitely influencing how the culture is writing about history, whether or not William the Conquer at the Battle of Hastings is, I think it's very unlikely he sat there with a copy of the jetty is going, right,

okay, we need to pretend to run away here. I don't think that's some, I found no evidence that anyone was doing that. But these ideas are in the culture, in the milieu. And so given what you've said about the primacy of castles and the frequency of sieges, I suppose that bribery and, and the sort of espionage that goes with turning elites and getting people to open gates for you and things like that. Yes.

Probably very important in all this. Would you speak to that element of things? Yes, absolutely. There's a whole chapter in the book on bribery. But again, bribery is an interesting thing because it can be spun by the Chronicles as a clever thing to do, as a admirable trick to play. So you can say that such and such came down, it came to the walls, and he perfidiously entered the walls by paying him money to get in. Or you can say that, well, the Castellan was being mistreated and horribly undervalued by his lord. And therefore, he was, obviously he was going to accept a bride.

And you move the moral failure from the person that offers the bribe to, well, of course he offered, of course he was. going to take the bribe, because he had a bad lord, and this person was a good lord and was going to give him something. Because the relationship between lord and vassal was meant to be reciprocal. You got service, but the lord was served and got the service of the vassal, but in return he had to give him something, whether it be land or favors or cash or just preferment in certain things. And it was a understood thing that if you had a bad lord, you could rebel. It was it could happen. Just get the appendix to the book.

You have these very impressive tables and tabulations. Yeah, that was kind of my supervisor. My PhD and sort of insisted on it, but actually it's really useful. Yeah, no, it's helpful and very cool, actually. So probably the most famous bribe in the period is Bowerman's Antioch in 1099, June 1099. So the Crusaders have been stuck outside of Antioch for months, month, and they're getting nowhere. They're a tiny army. It's a huge city.

They can't possibly blockade it properly. And they know that there's a Turkish army out there. There's a Turkish army coming, and they're going to be called between the walls and this army. And their attempts to storm in have completely failed. They're not strong enough to do it. So somehow, and this is a kind of interesting comment on how porous a medieval siege was, because it seems to be that people were coming and going all the time. And there was a lot of Congress between the two armies.

There's no sort of nowadays who have these sort of these ideas of security and of making sure that information doesn't get out or the information only gets out when we want it to. And there's no sort of fraternization or anything that can. But in the Middle Ages, simply isn't the discipline. Simply isn't the means to control this. And there seems to have been like a lot of Congress between the garrison and the desegging army at this siege. And so Bowerman gets in touch with a guy who's controlling, who's commanding one of the. the towers of Antioch and he bribes him. He says, look, if you let me in, I will give you, and we never really find out what he offers, but it's a promise of some sort of wealth.

And the guy says, right, yes, I'll do it. On a certain night, you come to the walls with a ladder. I'll let you in. My guys won't attack you and you can get in and take the city from the inside. And Bowman then uses this as leverage because he's an incredibly duplicitous figure. And he uses his leverage with the other crusade leaders and says, look, I, if you're I've done this. I've made this, this, this, giving us this tactical advantage. In return, I become Lord of Antioch when this is done.

Because that's what I want. I want a city for myself. And they go, okay, fine, we have to. And it works. It only works because the guy inside the tower opens the door at the base of the wall and lets them in. Because they bring one ladder and it breaks. They get two guys on the wall and it breaks.

And the third guy goes on it, which just shows you like how amateur. this is compared to like, no, no, you know, it's not like we're building specific ladders. It's like, what are we doing? It's broken. What are we doing? Image of these guys milling around at the foot of the wall and they actually open a gate, a little side door for them that they get in that way. But later, but this is a kind of a problem for the crusade chroniclers who are writing about this, because of course, this is God's will. This must be God's will because it's the triumph of the crusaders of the soldiers

of Christ over the enemies of the Muslims. But it's, it is an open. act of betrayal and treachery on the part of this traitor. So they have to come up with sort of ideas. In some later chroniclers, they just say, oh, there was no bribery. He had a vision and a saint came to him in the night

and told him to do this and he was converted. Or that he was a Christian. He was an Armenian Christian who did this. And the early chronicles don't say this. They just say that poem and paid him. But they have to try and fit this together into their worldview. But yeah, that's probably the most famous bribe in history.

But it causes problems for how they are thinking about, how they are thinking about this as a holy war. It's a totally fascinating story on so many levels, one of which, of course, just the centrality of the bribe itself to success, which in the present era we would think of such acts of espionage as not being core military functions. In fact, they might even be performed of whole other elements of the state than the military to, you know, seek out to somebody and bribe them on the other side.

But then, of course, a feature of the era, as you just documented or described, is leveraging that, that you have the successful espionage operation, leveraging that for your own political benefits amongst this complicated, you know, collection of allies that you're fighting with. That is an unusual feature of the age and quite striking. It's particularly an interesting feature of the Crusades, because although theoretically they are all extremely, They are all nominally united and committed together.

Everyone's got, they've all got their own agenda. They've all, in the third crusade, particularly, like Philip and Richard have been knocking seven bells out of each other for years in France over territory. And then on the crusade,

they can't, it's almost unreasonable to expect them to drop all of this and enmity. And they've always got one eye to what's going to happen after us because they know this isn't going to be permanent and they're going to have to go home at some point and start the war again between them. So there is this sense of, of both, again, they have to, the ideal is they give up everything for the crusade.

They dedicate everything to this cause that is higher than themselves. But they also have responsibilities as kings at home and as lords at home and of responsibilities to their families, to their legacy as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, they have to work on that as well. They have to, the fact of that in and what sort of, what sort of works there. There's the story of Louis the Philip's father, Louis the seventh, besieging Ruehom during the great rebellion against Henry II in the 1170s, I want to say, that where Louis has this dilemma, he's given a truce in honor of a saint's day, apparently, to the citizens of Ruan. There's very intense assault on the city. Hasn't got him anywhere. He hasn't got in. But he gives a truce to the citizens.

And the citizens are all out like dancing and there's jousting in front of the city. of the walls and stuff that's sort of, ah, we're having a holiday. And the French are sat there watching them, and Louis Council has come to him and say, go on. They're not expecting it. We attack. And he goes, no, no, no, I can't possibly. This would be blasphemy.

This would be a stain on my honour. And they're like, we need to get this city. We need to take Ruan. Henry is coming. Henry II, the English king, is on his way. We have to do this. It's fine. Virgil.

Virgil says that it's okay. There's this line from Virgil, the chronicler quotes or says that they quote to him, which is trickery or might, who cares which in the case of an enemy, which is all his fair and love and war. But Louis is really conflicted. It seems to present him as Louis. And then afterwards, when they sort of, when it fails, it gets spotted by a guy sunbathing on a church tower.

And afterwards when it failed, apparently the king is trying to blame the count of Flanders, who talked him into it and saying, no, no, no, it wasn't me. I didn't want to do this. I got bad advice. You know, it's the classic thing of the king is pure, the king is moral. It's always the bad advisors, the bad ministers, you know, the president is never wrong. We just sack the secretary of state, the secretary that did this. You know, the president is untouchable.

The king is untouchable. The prime minister is, you know, is untouchable. We have to, but we will dismiss the members of the cabinet. So we talked about bribery and espionage. You also made reference to ambushes. What are the other major categories? that you document and seem significant in the era? Well, we've already touched on the espionage side of things,

that spies and spying because just like today, getting information and having accurate information about your enemy, where they are, what they're going to do, is so important because then you can anticipate them. And this is the same for the Middle Ages. It's actually more important because this is an era without maps. the idea of a topographical map doesn't exist. They just don't exist.

It's all local knowledge. So you have to get, there's so much information gathering that goes on, down to things like, okay, how do we get to that castle? Where's the road go? So espionage and information gathering, this is an understudied topic. It feels like there could be more to do on it. It's because we don't know how they're doing this,

but they must have done. They must have had a network of people. They must have had a very quite sophisticated, network of scouts and informants to just a move of armies. Because nowadays we have drones and satellites and all sorts of things. But even, you know, even in the 18th century, they had maps. They had decent maps you could tell. And the Middle Ages doesn't have them.

It's a miracle sometimes that they get anywhere. So yeah, espionage is hugely important. And if you have information about where your enemy is and what you're going to do, you can ambush them. At best you can lie and wait for them in a mountain pass, forest, somewhere like that, jump out on them when they're not expecting you. The other things that I tend to look at, another big one is the idea of the feigned flight.

So pretending to retreat when you're actually, is still in control, and either using that to make your opponent follow you into an ambush, or using it to put them into a dissonadish position. I mean, the most famous example of this is the Battle of Hastings. The English are deployed on the top of Senlack Hill, and the Normans, depending on who you believe, either deliberately or at first accidentally, they charge, they run backwards, look like they're retreating,

and the English go, great, we've won, chase some of them, chase them down the hill, the Norman's wheel round, cut them down when they're out of position, and they can do this repeat, and they do this a couple of times, and eventually break through the English shield wall and destroy the formation. It's, there seems to be that this was used quite a lot by the Turkish peoples, so the Seljuk Turks and the armies in the Saladin, who were mounted archers, and they seem to use this quite a lot. The author of one of the Chronicles of the Third Crusade, the Itinerorum Perigranorum, describes Turkish archers.

This is a, we think this was a chronicle who was actually on the Crusade, describes the Turkish archers as annoying flies, in that you persistent fly, who you bat away, but keeps coming back. And this appears to have been how they were fighting. They were sort of riding round and round the crusaders, peppering them with arrows, trying to entice them to chase them, Then they'd pretend to run away and then turn around and catch them when they were isolated. And this was not seen as a dishonorable tactic.

It was seen as an unusual tactic. It was not something that Knights did. If the Westerners, when they fight, everybody goes forward at once in the same direction. And you just use weight of horse flesh and iron to like barrel through your opponent and break them. Whereas the Turkish archers, the Turkish horseman seemed to be fighting in a completely different way. And it baffles them at first, the crusaders. And they don't know what to do with it. and eventually work out their own, they adapt to it in the same way that, you know, historically,

people have had to adapt their doctrines to fight any sort of unusual enemies or, you know, same way that, you know, say the Americans in Vietnam, for example, had to learn how to do counterinsurgency because the Viet Cong were not playing the same game they were, they were not using the same tactics, the same infrastructure of any kind, you know. It's an analogous in that at least. In terms of other deceptions, the most dramatic ones, the most colorful ones, and probably the ones that are least likely to be actually strictly true are the disguisers. They are the most fun.

These are the ones where people are flying extra banners to make it look like there's more of them than there are. These are ones where people are dressing up as, so like 1109, Hugh of Cressy, who's a French nobleman against Louis the Fat, this French king, he's trying to get into a castle that's being besieged by the... Noah Zempec in those days. No. No, no Zempec. No. No, no, Zempeg. No, I don't think anyone called it to his face.

But, no. Yeah, Louis the Fat, he's besieging this castle, and Hugh of Cressy wants to get in to support the garrison. And the chronicler says, he dressed himself sometimes as a juggler, sometimes as a prostitute to try and get in. And, like, no, it didn't work amazingly. And just the image it cudges pure Monty Python, you know,

Terry Jones and a wig. And also because this is the period of heraldry where people are the nobility adopting distinctive, colorful coats of arms so that they can be recognized on the battlefield, we have examples of people discarding their coats of arms or dressing up in other people's coats of arms or using the war cry of an enemy to be seen as a member of the other side. And this is again, something that is used nowadays. I think in my book I mentioned it's from 2017. The Taliban used this against the Afghan forces. They pretended to be injured and got into an ambulance with like sailing drips and stuff on them, drove this ambulance into an army base of the then Afghan government and they killed lots of lots of people. It was a, this still does kind of happen.

I mean, I was looking up because I knew that you would be asking about modern strategies and things. Operation Spiderweb is with the Ukrainians with the drones coming out of the lorries. That's very, very similar. to like James Douglas hiding people in haywagons to get inside a Scottish castle. You open this sequence saying that, you know, it's not clear that all this stuff is strictly true and fair enough with some of the more colorful individual tales. But a lot of what you describe, you know, the extra banners to act like you have more

armies than you do. Well, that, you know, that has absolute echoes in the history of modern warfare. You know, the allies created a whole fake army before the invasion of Northwest Europe. It's the same basic idea. Yeah. And as you point out, you know, there are plenty of incidents in various Middle Eastern conflicts of, I think I remember one incident in particular in Iraq. I'd have to go remind myself with the details of, I don't know if it was Al-Qaeda fighters

or who exactly it was, but insurgents in Iraq dressing up as women to conduct an infiltrate. Because, of course, you have the conservative card. You can cover everything. And then, of course, launching their attack once they're through. So, you know, a lot of what you just described, you know, only slightly updated, it seems like a feature of war. A lot of it is fairly plausible. I found a reference around looking this.

Apparently, the Ukrainians are still using like wooden trucks to wooden dummies to tend to be rocket launchers so that the Russians will bomb those and not the real rocket launches. Yeah. That's becoming, if anything, that's becoming a dominant feature of the battlefield and likely to be a dominant feature of any other major battlefields going forward just to create so many targets, right, to confuse. If the enemy's super precise and can kind of strike at what he chooses, you have to, one of the ways to deal with that is you give them lots and lots of choices, not all of which you're real, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's, as I say, most of the stories that I'm

talking about are in from one source by a guy who wasn't there, who is being written down by somebody who's heard this second hand or even third hand. So I'm always reluctant to say, this definitely happened for a lot of them, because the standard. to which these authors are holding themselves is not the same standard that we would hold a modern reporter or journalist or historian. What I think is interesting about them is that they tell us what they think was plausible to happen, and also it tells us what they think was morally permissible or not. And a lot of these disguises are portrayed wholly positively as a very clever thing to do, as a valiant thing to do, as an example of warriors cunning. rather than cowardice or deception. It's portrayed as a,

Audric Vitalis, the great Norman chronicler. It's probably my favorite chronicler because he's got such a good eye for a good story. He gives an account of a siege in which they've got, this is one knight who is, we don't quite know what he's doing, but he seems to be running around the walls, changing his coat of arms or whatever insignia he's wearing. Like it might be like a banner he's got on his spear or the color of his shield or something,

to make it look like there's multiple knights in more knights in the place than there are. And he's like running from place to place. It's like, ah, he's over here and ah, he's over there. And that is portrayed wholly positively. It's described, he's described as a valiant knight. I think the word is something like valiant or honorable, though there's the epithet that Aldrich gives him. So this is clearly seen as legitimate within warfare. The only thing that they seem to regard as not legitimate, the thing that is almost universally condemned, is this idea that we talked about earlier about oath breaking.

if you give your word to somebody and then you go back on it, which is so like a truce, a temporary truce, or if you offer to exchange hostages or something like that, and then you go back on that, that is beyond the pale.

That is the thing that is almost universally condemned because your word is supposed to be your bond and it has all these religious connections. But again, as we've spoken about, even that could be justified if you wanted to. You could come up with an excuse for it. whether people accepted that excuse was entirely kind of down to them.

Last question for you. So as the high middle ages and its distinctive phase of warfare comes to an end, and I know the next phase you see renewed importance of the infantry. I suppose castles and fortifications don't go away exactly. No. But the infantry comes back in a big way, and the role of fortifications maybe starts to shift. In terms of your subject, the role of deception and stratagem,

what if anything changes as that new phase comes in? As far as I can tell, and the next big project would probably be looking at how does this change in the 14th, the 15th century. The reading I've done is that actually not that much changes in terms of what they're doing. The things that change is that in terms of the armies that are being used as much more emphasis on hiring people, There's people who are effectively full-time professional soldiers. The reliance on what we would call the feudal model of you call up your feudal troops who are obliged to give you a certain amount of military service and then they go home again. That's already on its, that's not working very well in the 13th century.

And by the time you get to the 14th and 15th centuries, that's basically gone and everybody just pays a tax. All the people who are old military service, pay a tax and you hire professionals to do it for you. you. So the armies get a bit more professional. Still way below what we think of as today. And again, the importance of like properly drilled foot soldiers who can actually stand and defeat armored cavalry, things like the Battle of Cautroy, the Battle of Bannockburn. These are the things that are happening here. But my book sort of, as far as I can tell from what's happening in the 14th and 15th centuries, it's very similar. There's a great text that I need to do more work on. I have skimmed through a little bit because it wasn't it was out of the praise range,

but it's called Le Juvensal and it's written by a former French mercenary captain, Knight who saw service in the Hundred Years' War. And he writes it as it's told in the form of kind of an idealized romance, like this young man who's never named and about all of his adventures. But what it's actually intended to be is a how-to manual, a guide for young knights who are just starting out to read. and how to do these things. And it includes lots of the same deceptions.

And things like, and then Lejuvon Sal had to get into this fortress. And so he hid his men in the woods and let the garrison right out to chase some of his men. And he ambushed them. And, you know, it's all kind of the same stuff that's going on here. It seems to be. And it doesn't really change that much. And the attitudes to it, again, I don't think change a huge amount. of Shrewsbury, which is famous, made very famous by Shakespeare, Henry the 4th.

There's a brilliant, there's a scene at the end of Henry the 4th, which is based on the chronicles, which is actually, I've traced it back and it is in the original chronicles, where Douglas, the Earl of Douglas, kills who he believes to be Henry the 4th in the battle. And then Hotspur comes in and says, no, no, that's not the king, that's another guy. And he says, why did he tell me, what's going on? I thought that was the king. he said, ah, the king hath many marching in his coats. Because Henry IV entered this battle, apparently, with a whole bunch of doppelgangers.

Guys dressed exactly as him, so that to protect him, so that you wouldn't know. And again, this appears to have been a pretty standard ruse that they were using right through the period, up until like the Wars of the Roses. You know, people would be wearing other people's coats, or you would go into battle dressed anonymously to protect yourself, you're a target, that's the point of heraldry, kind of. One of the points of howledry is you stand there in this brightly colored shirt and say, come at me, I'm, look at me, I'm so honorable and courageous. But the problem with that is people do come at you and you

get killed or captured, which is extremely expensive. So what you do is you have like six people dressed as you. So you perform the social role of being a courageous leader while still protecting yourself. Fascinating stuff, and it seems to me actually quite relevant. James Titterton, author of Deception in Medieval Warfare, Trickery and Cunning in the Central Middle Ages. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a really interesting conversation. Thank you for inviting me. It's lovely to talk about this stuff. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.