![]() If you cut long staves, sharpen them at one end, stand shoulder-to-shoulder several ranks deep, turn your sharpened staves into a hedge of levelled points – and keep your nerve – you can stop any charge of armoured horsemen.Īnother representation of the myth. Infantry have always been able to supply themselves with the weapons necessary to stop cavalry. The pattern is then set for at least 750, perhaps as many as 1,000 years – until the appearance of the English longbowman, the Swiss pikeman, and the Burgundian hand-gunner brought about ‘the revival of infantry’ at some point in the later Middle Ages. This, we learn, begins with the final displacement of ancient heavy infantry – the Greek phalanx and the Roman legion – by heavy horse in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Sir Charles Oman, the great military historian, entitles the second chapter of his monumental The Art of War in the Middle Ages, ‘Commencement of the Supremacy of Cavalry’. Think only of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or the work of Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris or, indeed, John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur.Įnduring not only in fiction also, it seems, in the historical imagination. It has infected literature and art for hundreds of years. More precisely, it was the ideology of the feudal ruling class, not a description of either social or military realities. That is because ‘the knight in shining armour’ represented the social class that was the primary audience for the genre.īut the implicit concept – a ruling class of warrior horsemen, formed in tight-knit bands of brothers, living according to a code that stressed courage, endurance, skill at arms, loyalty to one’s lord, humility and piety, manly virtue, the protection of women – the concept known as ‘chivalry’, was a myth. The armoured and mounted knight was at the centre of this tradition. Malory was part of a long tradition of romantic, courtly, chivalric literature. ![]() The myth seems to have infected the judgement of generations The enduring myth of chivalry, here represented in Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones’ The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest of the Holy Grail, c.1890. They are the ‘computer game’ action heroes of their time. His ‘Knights of the Round Table’ are larger-than-life caricatures based on the English feudal aristocracy of the Wars of the Roses. Sir Thomas Malory (1415-1471), who composed (or compiled) this most famous account of the Arthurian legends, was born in the year of Agincourt and died in the year of Barnet. Here, as so often in this late-medieval romance, two lines of armoured horse confront one another and here too, as so often, matters are suspended to permit an iconic combat of champions. (Chapter XXII, Book XX, Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory, 1485) And then they laid their spears in their rests, and they came together as thunder, and Sir Gawaine brake his spear upon Sir Launcelot in a hundred pieces unto his hand and Sir Launcelot smote him with a greater might, that Sir Gawaine’s horse’s feet raised, and so the horse and he fell to the earth. And both parties were charged to hold them still, to see and behold the battle of these two noble knights. And both the hosts were assembled, of them without and of them within, and stood in array full manly. And then Sir Launcelot armed him at all points, and mounted upon his horse, and gat a great spear in his hand, and rode out at the gate. ![]()
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