ACKNOWLEDGEMENT "THED WARF," says Coleridge, "sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on." Any book of this kind must be based upon the work of previous scholars, and I owe much to many giants, whose names wiU be found in the biblio- graphy. For the mediaeval section, one is outstanding: Henry Hewitt, whose Antient h o u r ,p ublished in 1860, has perhaps more of real value to offer the student of mediaeval arms than any other book. This exhaustive study is based upon contemporary documents, and contains none of the theories which have so be- devilled later research. In my study of the mediaeval sword I have followed his example, for my sources too have been original. As anyone who is interested in mediaeval life must, I owe a great deal to the countless painters and sculptors who have left so rich, detailed and accurate an account of the costume and arms of their contem- poraries. My work is based upon theirs; here and there I have illus- trated my text with copies of pieces of it, and though these lack the character of the originals, they are accurate copies. I have taken great care not to "improve" on the original, the better to show detail. Everything is as it was put on to the vellum or carved in the stone. Having expressed my gratitude to these giants of the past, I find I have scarcely room to name all the living people to whom I owe so much. Sir James Mann, K.C.V.O., F.B.A., Hon. Vice-President Soc. Antiquaries, Master of the Armouries of the Tower of London, whose encouragement and interest have always sustained me; Mr. R. L. S. Bruce Mitford, B.A., F.S.A., of the British Museum, and Mr. Martin Holmes, F.S.A., of the London Museum, who have firmly steered me into the correct paths of research; my friends Dr. Hilda Ellis Davidson, M.A., F.S.A., to whom I owe almost everydung I know about the Migration and Viking periods, Mr. Claude Blair, F.S.A., and Mr. J. F. Hayward, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose scholarship and immense knowledge of armour have been so generously at my disposal, and Mr. John Wallace, whose enthusiastic interest and wise criticism have often made the crooked ways straight and the rough places plain. Both Mr. Blair and Mr. Wallace read my book in typescript, an irk- CONTENTS some chore which has added greatly to its value; and my friends at the Armouries in the Tower of London. Introduction I must also thank those who have allowed me to illustrate objects from their collections, and in many cases have supplied Part One photographs: Mr. R. T. Gwynn, Mr. C. 0. v. Kienbusch, Mr. E. THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD A. Christensen, Mr. John Wallace, Mr. M. Dineley, Mr. Harold Petersen, Mr. David Drey, and Mrs. G. E. P. How. I 6 < THE PITILESS BRONZE" Five short passages from Beotvulfare in the translation by Charles W. Kennedy, copyright 1940 by Oxford University Press, Inc., I1 IRON COMES TO EUROPE: THE HALLSTATT New York, and are reprinted by permission of the publishers. I am PEOPLE 3 7 also indebted to Constable and Co. Ltd. for permission to include I11 THE GAULS 51 four stanzas from MSS. ofsalzburg, Canterbury and Limoges, trans- lated by Helen Waddell in hcr Mediaeval Latiit Lyrics. I cannot cut this list short without expressing my thanks to two Part Two secretaries, Mrs. Barbara Escott and Mrs. Anne Motion, who each enthusiastically typed thousands of words before Matrimony THE HEROIC AGE snatched them away from TheArchaeology of Weapons. My most IV THE GREAT MIGRATIONS 69 sincere thanks go also to Mrs. Alma Molseed, who typed the last part in her spare time and had the kindness to say when it was all v ROME IN DECLINE: THE GOTHIC CAVALRY 83 over that she had not been bored by it, and to my friend Mr. Patrick J. Jones for his patient skdl in taking endless photographs of things VI THE BOG-DEPOSITS OF DENMARK 89 in my own collection; and I cannot forget the helpfulness of my VII THE ARMS OF THE MIGRATION PERIOD 107 publishers during the two years the book has been in preparation. And, of course, my wife. She has had to put up with a houseful of weapons for nearly twenty years, as well as a husband who has Part Three frequently been a domestic menace by occasional absences of person THE VIKINGS in search of material, and permanent absence of mind by reason of brooding upon it. Her patience and encouragement and tolerant VIII SWORDS IN THE VIKING PERIOD acceptance of these things has made everything possible which without them would have come to nothing. IX THE VIKINGS AT WAR R. EWART OAKESHOTT X FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO THE NORMANS Part Four THE AGE OF CHIVALRY LIST OF PLATES XI THE 6 6 GAY SCIENCE" OF CHIVALRY The sword of Sancho IV, King of Castile, 1284-95. From his tomb in the XII SWORD TYPES AND BLADE INSCRIPTIONS, Capilla Mayor in Toledo Cathedral frontispiece 1100-1325 (~etweenpa ges 184 and 185) XIII SWORD HILTS AND FITTINGS I Three BronzoAge swords from Denmark (National Museum, Copenhagen). Warriors from a Krater of Attic red-figure ware, 5th XIV THE SWORD IN WEAR century B.C. (British Museum) 2 Shieldfiom the River Thames at Battersea, c. A.D. 50 (British Museum). 3 Iron Age sword and scabbard, c. 300 B.c.; sword withhilt and scabbard mounts of silver; sword with hilt and scabbard mounts of bronze, both XVI ARMOUR AND THE LONGBOW IN THE FOUR- fourth to fifth centuries A.D. (National Museum, Copenhagen). TEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES 282 4 Helmet from the ship grave at Sutton Hoo (British Museum). 5 Reconstructed shield from the ship grave at Sutton Hoo (British XVII SWORDS AND DAGGERS IN THE FOURTEENTH Museum). AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES 301 6 Viking sword from the River Thames (British Museum); sword of late Viking type (coll. author) ;s word c. 1130-70 (in a private collection) ; Appendix : Four Date-Charts sword from Fornham, site of a battle in 1171. Bibliography 7 Sword found in Denmark, c. 1150-1200 (National Museum, Copen- hagen); sword from the River Witham near Lincoln (British Index Museum); war sword from the River Thames, c. I300 (Guildhall Museum); sword with hilt of iron overlaid with silver, c. I300 (coll. author, ex coll. J. Wallace, Esq.). 8 Hilt of "The Sword of St. Maurice", Imperial Treasury, Vienna; detail ofplate 6c; hilt of sword c. 1300, with original grip (coll. author). g War sword, c. 1300 (coll. author); copy of "The Sword of St. Maur- ice" from the Royal Armoury at Turin (loll. author, ex toll. Sir G. F. Laking); sword from the tomb of Fernando de la Cerda, in the convent of Las Huelgas, Burgos. 10 Sword (unsheathed) of Sancho IV of Castile, showing part of the belt, and spurs of Sancho IV of Castile (Toledo Cathedral). 11 "The Israelites repulsed from Hai", from the Maciejowski Bible (Pinpont Morgan Library, New York). Seal of the Guild of St. George, Ferrara (c. 1290) (British Museum), impression of the seal of Roger Fitzwdter (1235). material is scanty (and so exceedingly dead) the art in which its In any attempt to write historically there must be a starting point. common usage is enshrined, whether poem or picture, is plentiful In dealing with the development of arms and the art of war, it seems and most vigorously alive. to be customary to begin at the period when the break-up of the Unul quite recently much of the vital literary material-the Old Roman Empire was almost completed. I propose to go to the other Testament, the works of Homer and the "folk-tales" of the Celts extreme and start at a point of time long before Rome itself began. and the northern races-was regarded as legendary stuff with little At some time about 1900 B.C. certain events completely changed the historical foundation or value, wlde the " Rigveda", a great corpus warhke outlook of all the peoples of the ancient East and destroyed of epic poems, religious texts, stories and popular songs produced those who (like the peaceable people of the Indus cidmtion of by the Aryans during the second dennium B.c., the foundation Mohenjo Daro) had none. With these events &.IS study d begin, upon which all the thought of Buddhism and Hinduism is based, though its main concern is with the Middle Ages. was little known and equally dismissed as romantic and mystical, the stuff of dreams. From somewhere in Western Asia people of a fighting race began Now all is changed. The events recorded in the Bible are known to move southward and eastward about 1900 B.C. In the following to be based solidly upon hcts, often narrated with great accuracy; two centuries the southbound arm of this great prehistoric pincer Homer's heroes and the stage on which they played their tremendous movement founded the nations of Hatti (known to us as the parts are legendary no longer; the stories of Ossian and Grania, Finn Hittites) and Mittanni, and imposed upon the indigenous people of and the Fianna bring much dead archaeological material in the the Aegean an aristocracy whlch Homer called the "b rown-haired museums of Ireland to life; while the Eddas of the north and the Achaeans", and which we refer to as the Myceneans, while part of epic of "Beowulf" are no more regarded as mythical. The Norse it pressed on to overthrow the we& and divided government of Sagas, which have always been accepted as partly true because of the 14th Dynasty of Egypt, occupying that land for 200 years. The their curt, hard-boiled realism, are explained and fured firmly into eastbound arm moved upon North-West India, crushing the mili- their hstorical setting by much hscinating material got out of the tarily helpless but otherwise ma+cent and powerful people of the ground. And the Rigveda, once only dimly understood as historical Indus. narrative, is explained by, and in its turn throws light upon, the Modern ethnography has dubbed this race "Indo-Europeany', and discovery of the great, ancient civrlization of the Indus valley, over- they are in every sense the founders of the modem world. From thrown in about 1900 B.C. by the Aryans, an Indo-European people them the Greeks and Romans are sprung, and most of the races of whose "Bible" it was. India as well as the Celts and the Teutonic peoples of the North; The object of this book is to put before the reader a sketch of part they are the ancestors of India and of every Western civilization. of a colossal subject, to follow this thread of man's invincible The reason for their success was their power in war, power based on penchant for fighting, to trace the development of the instruments a concept of fighting which in the second millennium B.C. was he devised to do it with, and to hear what he has to say about how entirely new. lie did it. And how he loved it. "Of arms, and of the man I sing," This was the use of horses, not as cavalry in the accepted sense but says Virgd, and he puts arms first. From the very beginning arms drawing light chariots each carrying one or two armed men, a have been sacred, invested with a sort of divine potency; a vestige highly mobile armoured fighting vehicle. When these chariots were of this could still be found among Occidental people less than a deployed in squadrons, acting together as disciplined corps, then the century ago in the West of America, for even such an unromantic- ancient formations of pedestrian spearmen were doomed. The power seeming piece of black machine7 as the "s ix-gun" retained a little ofEgypt, still mighty in spite of ineffectual government, went down of the ancient glamour. before the chariots of the Hyksos, the hated Sand-Ramblers or 14 15 Shepherds, who ruled them until the Princes of Thebcs took a leaf 3,000 years ago, yet it would not have been out ofplace in thirtccnth- out of their oppressors' book and tunicd their own weapon against century France. And this: them, driving them out of Egypt and far up into Canaan with With Bow let us win file, with Bow in battle, with armies of Egyptian charioteers in about 1580 B.C. Bow be victory in our hot encounters, The records of Egypt tell us much of the Indo-Europeans of the The Bow brings grief and sorrow to the foeman; armed Middle East, but the best account they give of themselves in their With Bow may we subdue all regions. primitive state before their settlingdown, and the liveliest, is left to Close to his ear, as fain to speak, she presses, holding us by the Aryans, the Indian branch of the family, in the Rigveda. Her well-loved friend in her embraces ; In many of the epic chants and narrative poems in this great literary Strained on the bow, she whispers like a woman-this omnibus we get convincing portraits of their war leaders and the Bow-string that preserves us in the Combat. bands who followed them; we can trace the same characteristics as Here the loved weapon is the bow, with the bow-string sounding in in the much later tales of old Ireland, which were told in very the warrior's ear like a woman's endearments, but the sentiment is similar language. the same as in the romances of chivalry. About a quarter of the prayers are addressed to Indra, the greatest Then, 800 years later, came the tremendous stories of Homer of the Gods: (whoever he may have been, he lived and wrote about 850 B.c.). Strong-armed, colossal, tawn y-bearded, and pot-bellied from drinking, The material he used had existed for many hundreds of years, he wields the thunderbolt in his more god-like moments, but fights passed on orally. In the most vivid and lively language he gives a Ue a hero with bow and arrows from his chariot. He is a catrle- clear picture of men's minds as well as their actions. These tales were raider, and above all he is the destroyer of the strongholds of the accepted as a true record of events in Homer's own time and in enemy, and victorious leader of the Aryans in their conquest of the classical Greece as well as during the whole of the Roman period and hated ancient empire of the Punjab. With him fight the young warrior- throughout the Middle Ages; it was the scepticism of eighteenth- band, the Maruts, who seem to be commanded by Rudra, rival to and nineteenth-century scholarship which damned them as being Indra and yet in some ways his counterpart, "Unassailable, rapid, . ." mere fairy-tales. Then, during the last years of the nineteenth young, unaging, ruler of the world. century, the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur The atmosphere is that of the Irish tales that reflect the conditions Evans transmuted what was thought to be the base metal of un- of the Celtic Iron Age of the first century B.C. in Ulster and North founded legend into thk pure gold of ascertained fact. They un- Britain; Indra is often reminiscent of the grotesque Dagda with his covered Troy itself and Golden Mycenae, and the palaces of Minos insatiable appetite, Rudra and the Maruts make one thmk of Finn in Crete. Schliemann even believed he had found the body of and the Fianna, the young band of heroes, and the cattle-raiding is Agamemnon, King of Men, in one of the shaft graves at Mycenae, similar. but the personages he dug up had lived some 300 years earlier than The warrior's look is like a thunderous rain-doud, the Homeric hero. When armed with mail he seeks the lap of battle. Wonderful as these material discoveries were, perhaps their Be thou victorious with unwounded body; so let greatest value was the proof that the story of Troy was no legend, The thickness of thy mail protect thee . . . but an historical event. Thls makes sense of the vivid realism of Whoso would kill us, whether he be a strange foe or one of us, Homer's characters, his attention to small details of behaviour-how May all the Gods discomfit him; my nearest, closest clearly we see the sleeping Diomedes: Mail is prayer. They went next to Diomedes son of Tydeus, and found him lying in That is part of an epic chant composed in the plains of the Punjab the open outside his hut, with his armour. His men were sleeping round 16 I7 . . . him with their shields for pillows. Their spears were stuck on end with The Batavi are not insulted by tribute or ground down by the tax the sharpened butts in the ground, and the bronze points flashed in the gatherer. Free from imposts and special levies, and reserved for battle, distance like lightning from Father Zeus. The Prince was asleep, with they are like weapons and armour, "only to be used in war". the hide of a farmyard ox behind him, and a glossy rug drawn under Which very neatly sums up the Roman's view of weapons. How his head. Nestor the Gerenian charioteer went up to him, woke hill1 different are the Germans he writes of! with a touch of his foot, and flung a taunt at him to rouse him further. "Wake up, Tydeides," he said, "why should you sleep in comfort all No business, public or private, [he says] is transacted except in arms. night long? Has it escaped your notice that the Trojans are sitting in But it is the rule that no one shall take up his arms until the State has the plain above us, barely a stone's throw from the ships?" attested that he is likely to make good. When that time comes, one of Diomedes, who had woken and leapt up in a trice, replied with some the chiefs, or the father or a kinsman equips the young warrior with a feeling. "You are a hard old man, sir, and you never take a moment's spear and shield in the public council. rest. Are there not younger men in the army to go the rounds and and again, speaking of council meetings: wake up all the kings ? There is no holding you down, my venerable lord." . . . if they approve, they clash their spears. No form of approval can carry more honour than praise expressed by arms. Here indeed is flesh to cover the archaeological bones. Here indeed we can see the germs of the mediaeval idea of the So we come to a point where we can compare actual armour and malung of a knight, as well as the great importance of arms to all arms found in the earth with the things a poet says about them; men, in peace not war; and then we read: though in Homer's case this is surprisingly little, it is probably because the Mediterranean peoples have never had that extraordm- On the field of battle it is a disgrace to the chief to be surpassed in ary romantic veneration for their arms so characteristic of Teuton, valour by his companions (companions here being used in the sense of Celt and Indian-and on the other side of the earth, the Japanese. personal following) or to the companions not to come up in valour to their chief. As for leaving the battle alive after your chief has fallen, The Minoans, Egyptians and Sumerians, like the Chinese, disliked thnt means lifelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, to war and alternately derided and reviled the soldier. The Myceneans put down one's own acts of heroism to his credit, that is what they and classical Greeks were Indo-Europeans, and tremendous warriors, really mean by allegiance. The chiefs fight for victory, the companions like the Romans after them, but they considered that arms were for for their chief. Many noble youths, if the land of their birth is stag- use in war only and tended to take an entirely unromantic arid nating in a protracted peace, deliberately seek out other tribes where matter-of-fact vicw of them. The ancient Greeks certainly considered some war is afoot. The Germans have no taste for peace; renown is their arms a worthy vehicle for applied art-the only time Homer easier won among perils, and you cannot maintain a large body of really lets himself go over armour is when he describes the shield companions except by violence and war. The companions are prodigal which Hephaestos made for Achilles, though even then he only in their demands on the generosity of their chiefs; it is always "give me describes the scenes with which the god embellished it. that warhorse" or "give me that bloody and victorious spear". As for The Roman attitude to arms was perhaps even more matter-of- meals with their plentiful, if homely, fare, they count simply as pay. Such open-handedness must have war and plunder to feed it. You will kt-actually very modem; the civilian fears and shuns them, the soldier has them issued to him, cares for them and keeps them clean find it harder to persuade a German to plough the land and await its annual produce with patience than to challenge a foe and earn the and in working order because he will get into trouble if he does not, prize of wounds. He thinks it spiritless and slack to gain by sweat what and has no love for them at all. Tacitus, writing of a particularly he can buy with blood. warlike German tribe allied to Rome which was given preferential treatment because of its value as a weapon, says: A Roman historian writing in the time of Trajan ? It reads more like 18 19 a twelftll-century description of European knighthood. Which, in a sense, it is; for here is the basic stuff of chivalry, though lacking the nobler virtues of courtesy, humility, gallantry and, of course, religion which we may be jusufied in believing were latent in the Celtic peoples of Gaul and Britain. It was the fusion of these virtues with the harsher Teutonic ones which eventually produced the whole flowering of the chivalric ideal. Part 1 THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD Chapter One "THE PITILESS BRONZE" HEN IN THE beginning of the second millennium B.C. the Indo-European people moved into the ancient world, they w brought a new concept of war. This was based on the use of swift horse-drawn chariots each carrying a warrior armed with a bow and driven by a charioteer, a fact of great archaeological importance. Not that they invented the chariot-the Sumerians must have the credit fo; that, for painted on some Sumerian scarlet ware vessels of Early Dynastic I date (c. 3500 B.c.) we find pictures of light two-wheeled cars with high fronts carrying one or two people and drawn by asses or oxen, and there are others in some slightly later Early Dynastic reliefs from Ur and Kafajah, and on the &mow "Standard" of Ur from the Royal Tombs (in the British Museum) similar ass-drawn chariots are shown in great detail, with solid wheels made of two halfdiscs dowelled together against the hub. Slow and clumsy these probably were, but even so must have been a terror to the foes of Sumer. Early in the second millennium, chariots were in use in Asia Minor, but with very important modifications. They had light, spoked wheels and were drawn by a pair of horses. Such chariots 2 1 &f $>$$=+& made their appearance in the Aegean countries, in the case of the Celtic West up to the time of the campaigns of significantly associated with Indo-European Agricola in Britain. There is plenty of literary evidence for the speakers, soon after this time, in mainland construction of the Celtic chariots, amply supported by archaeo- logical Grids of many examples in the tombs of chieftains. G14r5ee0c Be .Cb. efAo rec en15tu0r0y Bo.Cr . soa nladt eirn thCerree teis asboomuet So for more than 1,000 years the aristocratic charioteer was the evidence to suggest that young Achaean noble- arbiter of battle all over the world. Then, during the fourth century ~igI.. Chariotfrom a men were sent to the Hittite capital to be trained B.c., army formations similar to the ancient style of Egypt appeared Mycmean tombstone in chariotry. in an infinitely more formidable guise-the legions of Rome. It was The chariot was unknown to the ancient not long before the pendulum had swung and the legions swept Egyptians of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but Egypt was everything before them, and for the next 600 years the Roman overrun and occupied by the "Hyksos" Asiatics for a couple infantry was almost the only military force to be reckoned with of hundred years or so, between about 1750 and 1580 B.C. These in the civilized world. Even so, behind her northern and eastern invaders were Indo-Europeans, using chariots. Soon after the frontiers were many nations of unsubdued barbarians. Ammianus vigorous rulers of Thebes had thrown the Hyksos out of the Marcellinus, writing in about A.D. 400, says: Delta in about 1580 B.C. we find the Egyptian armies well equipped At this time, just as though the trumpets were sounding a challenge with chariots themselves, for the first Pharaoh to press far up throughout the Roman world, fierce nations were stirred up and began into Palestine, Amenhotep I (c. 1550 B.c.), used well-trained to burst forth from their territories. squadrons of chariots as the spearhead of his victorious host. After this, for another 150 years, the arms of Egypt were carried by These nations were the force which eventually swung the pendulum Pharaoh after Pharaoh northwards into Syria, until by 1400 B.C. all back; they flooded into the Empire, not with chariots as of old, but the lands as far as the Euphrates acknowledged Egypt's sovereignty. as heavy cavalry. The weapon of impact had come into its own Then the inevitable decline set in and Egypt had to contend with again, and would be the dominant force in the world unul the the great Indo-European power of the Hittites, who by about 1270 English cloth-yard arrow began to weaken it during the fourteenth B.C. had become a mighty nation. In the great clashes of these two century; it finally gave way when the perfection of gunpowder in powers in the thirteenth century B.C. the issues of battle were the fifteenth century brought in its turn another concept of war. . decided by charging chariots, just as in the thirteenth century A.D. The foregoing paragraphs contain a number of generahzations; they were decided by charges of mounted knights. my apology for them is that I must at least mention the tremendous Everyone is familiar with the Egyptian chariot, which appears so events in which the roots of the Middle Ages are planted. I have prominently and so often in the rehefs on the walls of temples and another reason, too, for going back as fir as this. From the Neolithic tombs; the Cretan and Mycenean chariots are less well known, Age to the present, there have been only two periods when nearly though there are plenty of representations of them in Minoan- all the personal armaments of war, provided they were of good Mycenean art (fig. I). A few actual chariots still survive in Egypt, quality, seem to have becn beautiful. One of these periods comes and there is the madicent bronze-covered Etruscan one from within the Middle Ages, though right at their end; for during the Monteleone in Idy (preserved in the Metropolitan Museum in second half of the fifteenth century nearly every weapon and piece New York)-though this was probably a ceremonial chariot, of armour of good quality was beautiful-with beauty of form, not not for use in war, for by the seventh century B.C. the civilized of ornament. This we shall see later; but the other is prehistoric. In peoples of the Mediterranean used chariots only for sport and the period which can be vaguely described as the Celtic Iron Age ceremony. It was left to the barbarians to continue the old tradition, (more precisely as the time of the La The cultures) weapons and 22 23