The Measure of a Medieval Man: the Emotional Community of Military Men in the Fourteenth Century

What went through a medieval knight’s mind when he saw fellow soldiers turn and flee a battlefield? How did he feel in the aftermath, when it was time to identify and grieve for fallen friends and comrades? These questions are difficult to answer, because candid war writing was not widespread until the First World War. What has survived is plentiful writing that includes depictions of emotions such as fear, shame, and cowardice by military men, texts that intended to influence other men’s behaviour. My dissertation explores this writing and these questions, focusing on the major land battles in the first half of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). This period saw decisive English victories at the Battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), and a Pyrrhic victory at Nájera (1367). The lengthy conflict saw increased democratization of warfare, where a former farmer from Wales could kill with a longbow as effectively as could a French duke on horseback. Part of the problem of studying medieval emotions is that the culture was still largely oral. As Andrew Taylor wrote in his 1999 article, boys learned how to behave both in battle and with their comrades from conversation with older men. There are, however, chronicles and epic poems that have survived from the period. While none of these are candid diaries, they illuminate the kinds of fear that were acceptable, what qualified as cowardice, and how men avoided shame. All this writing both stems from and supports what I am calling the ‘emotional community of military men’, with an eye to Barbara Rosenwein’s work on emotional communities. I rely largely on a careful reading of the above sources to get as close as possible to the emotions associated with the fluctuating boundaries of the community of military men and with the active renegotiation of class masculinities. This dissertation therefore stands at the intersection of history, literary studies, the history of emotions, and the history of masculinities. It has two main parts. The first establishes how the emotional community of military men affected the way knights could expect to be depicted. It explores how the history of emotions provides a way to define the community and shows how writers reinforced the communities’ boundaries. The second part offers close readings of writing concerned with the three major land battles that occurred between 1346 and 1367, showing what emotions were permitted to military characters, and how the authors intended their writing to instruct other men.