Expecting Cowardice 5 Expecting Cowardice: Medieval Battle Tactics Reconsidered Stephen Morillo For no man ever proves himself a good man in war unless he can endure to face the blood and the slaughter, go close against the enemy and fight with his hands. Here is courage, mankind’s finest possession, here is the finest prize that a young man can endeavor to win. – Tyrtaeus, Praise of the Virtuosity of the Citizen Soldier1 Some barbarian is waving my shield, since I was obliged to Leave that perfectly good piece of equipment behind under a bush. But I got away, so what does it matter? Let the shield go; I can buy another one equally good. – Archilochus, Elegy2 Introduction In 1116, the Welsh rebel Gruffudd ap Rhys marched on the Anglo-Norman castle of Ystrad Antarron, having sacked the castle at Ystrad Peithyll. According to our Welsh source for this episode, the Brut y Tywysogyon (the Chronicle of the Princes), Razo the steward, the man who was castellan of that castle and whose castle had before that been burnt and whose men had been killed, moved with grief for his men and for his loss, and trembling with fear, sent messengers by night to the castle of Ystrad Meurig, which his lord Gilbert [de Clare] had built before that, to bid the garrison that was there to come swiftly to his aid. And the keepers of the castle sent him as many as they could find. And they came to him by night.3 Gilbert sent 20 knights and 50 archers, who joined the 30 knights and 40 archers already under Razo’s command; their nocturnal arrival remained unknown to the Welsh, who were camped some distance away. The account continues: 1 Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1960), pp. 14–15. 2 Lattimore, Greek Lyrics, 2. 3 Brut y Tywysogyon: The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS 20 Version, ed. and trans. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1952), pp. 93–95. I would like to thank Rob Babcock for bringing my atten- tion to the account of this minor but interesting battle in the Brut. 66 Stephen Morillo The following day, Gruffudd ap Rhys and Rhydderch ap Tewdwr, his uncle, and Maredudd and Owain, his sons, arose incautiously from their camp without arraying their forces and without placing ensigns in their van; but in raging fury, like a band of thoughtless inhabitants without a ruler over them, they made their way towards the castle . . . When they came to the valley before the castle, they halted, apparently spending much of the day in somewhat haphazard preparations for assaulting the castle. A river ran through the valley, crossed by a single bridge. The Brut goes on: And then, as it is the way with the French to do everything by guile, the keepers of the castle sent archers to the bridge to skirmish with them . . . And when the Britons saw the archers so boldly approaching the bridge, incautiously they ran to meet them, wondering why they should venture so confidently to approach the bridge. A lone mailed horseman accompanied the archers to the bridge and charged the Welsh infantry on the bridge. His horse was killed under him, and only his coat of mail saved his own life. He and the archers who dragged him from the bridge then fled up the side of the valley pursued by many of the Welsh, though some of the latter stayed on the far side of the bridge. But waiting just over the ridge of the hill was the remainder of Razo’s force. These men counter-attacked the scattered Welsh, aided by the archers who now turned to meet their pursuers, and “bore down upon the troop in front and killed as many as they found. And then the inhabitants were dispersed over the other lands on every side, some with their animals with them, others having aban- doned everything but seeking only to protect their lives, so that the whole land was left waste.” This was a minor battle. The Anglo-Norman losses amounted to one mounted man and five archers; the Welsh lost somewhat more – over 400 men with many more wounded – but still not a huge number. But with its feigned flight, its real flight, and its subplot of ethnic tension, the battle of Ystrad Antarron forms an interesting point of entry for a re-examination of medieval tactics with a focus on the role played by cowardice, both actual displays of cowardly behavior and more importantly the multivalent expectations of cowardice that permeated the psychology of battle. Expectations of Cowardice in Action We may start with a basic claim about the psychology of combat: for most soldiers and warriors, the experience of combat is permeated by the fear of death. There are suicidal and fanatical exceptions to this rule, of course, but for most European combatants in this period, where we will confine our view for now, suicide was rare and religion just as rarely led men actively to seek death.4 4 On suicide, see S. Morillo, “Cultures of Death: Warrior Suicide in Europe and Japan,” The Medieval History Journal 4, 2 (2001), 241–57. I shall deal with religion more below.  Expecting Cowardice 67 Thus, on hearing of the approach of the rebel forces and their slaughter of the garrison at Ystrad Peithyll, Razo is said to be “trembling with fear.” Now fear of death is not cowardice, of course. It is a rational response to a dangerous situa- tion. But it can lead to actions that the culture constructs as cowardly: running from battle, failing to fight in support of friends and lords, and so on, actions characterizable in general as potentially beneficial to the individual but detri- mental to the group. For the rational response of an individual to imminent danger, multiplied many times, can create a disastrous response for an army.5 Military leaders expect such fear and its potential for inducing cowardice. All armies therefore take countermeasures designed to mitigate the fear of death or to stifle, redirect, or make impractical the natural “flight” response to danger among their soldiers.6 In fact, the construction of notions of cowardice and the shame that inevitably attended it are one communal, cultural response to this problem of mutual cooperation in war. But a variety of more specific measures ranging from the material to the moral regularly reinforce the general Idea of Cowardice as safeguards against individual safety-seeking at the expense of the group. Foremost among these are simple training and experience, which impart multiple benefits including letting soldiers calculate more ratio- nally the actual danger they face, teaching them effective responses to those dangers other than flight, and perhaps above all bonding them into groups whose mutual experience causes them to value their companions’ lives as highly as their own.7 Closely related to training and experience is discipline, which acts both to suppress emotional responses generally and to enhance the control a commander can exert over his troops.8 It is telling that the Brut’s description 5 A fascinating example of this came in the development of “Massive,” the computer program used to generate large-scale battle scenes in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, the second and third of the Lord of the Rings movies. It worked by programming “rational” responses into individual virtual fighters called agents, then massively replicating such fighters and letting them interact under their own initiative. “When Massive was first tested two armies were pitted against each other to fight it out. Once the scene was rendered, a bug in the program was found. Agents were actually seen running away from the battle field!” (Reported at http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1047582857, last accessed by this author on 2 June 2004.) The reprogramming that then ensued to insert virtual “courage” into these digital armies corresponds in effect, if not in technique, to the reprogramming of basic rational responses in individual real men that converts them, more or less successfully, from people carrying weapons into soldiers. 6 Imminent danger can also cause an individual to prepare for combat, but triggering the “fight” half of the natural “fight or flight” response often requires that flight be removed as an option first. See note 10 below. 7 The literature on small group cohesion is voluminous, especially for the modern period, where S. L. A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (New York, 1947; paperback reprint Norman, OK, 2000) initiated an intense and often heated debate among historians and military professionals. The bibliography for “Battlefield Stress, Combat Motiva- tion and Military Medicine” in John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976) is a decent entry point into some of that debate. More recently, see Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing (Boston, 1996) and the literature cited there. 8 Discipline is often best imposed in conjunction with (or through) drill. Though overstated, 68 Stephen Morillo of the rebel force emphasizes its indiscipline. They arise “incautiously,” fail to array their forces in an orderly way with flags for groups to rally around,9 and proceed through the countryside “thoughtlessly.” This is an army setting itself up for a breakdown of discipline, and therefore for excessive individualism and its potential for flight. This is, in other words, an army whose commanders have a rashly diminished expectation of cowardice for their own troops and have as a result taken inadequate countermeasures against its appearance. Razo, by contrast, though trembling with fear, uses his own fear productively in sending for reinforcements and (judging by the results) formulating a tactical plan designed to take advantage of the rebels’ rashness. Reading more into the evidence than it might bear, he is also said to be full of grief for his lost men, which implies that he is close to his men, presumably understands them, and that his expectation of their levels of bravery or cowardice will not be mistaken or misjudged in his tactical planning. Some tactical planning entailed further countermeasures against the expected cowardice of one’s own troops. Common tactical expedients include forming an army up in deep, dense formations – depth and density, though they increase vulnerability to missile fire, impart some of the psychological and statistical security that causes herding in animals, as well as making the most of the group bonds created by training – and putting the best, and best-equipped, warriors in the front line of such formations. Both techniques were used by Henry I and his brother Robert Curthose at Tinchebrai, for example.10 William McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA, 1995) provides an interesting overview of the impact of drill on cohesion, discipline and group bonding in human societies generally and armies in particular. Of course as commanders from times and places as disparate as Warring States China and Ancien Régime Europe recog- nized, discipline, control, and “bravery” could also be induced by creating a greater fear in the rank and file of their own officers than of the enemy. 9 Flags and standards from Roman legionary fasces to regimental flags have served throughout military history as symbols of group loyalty and as practical rallying points and counter- measures against cowardice. 10 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History (hereafter OV), ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969–72), 6:88–90; Priest of Fécamp’s letter, English Historical Review 25 (1910), p. 296. A number of other countermeasures against the expected cowardice of one’s own troops were common. The ultimate distillation of the principle behind a front line of elite warriors was the tradition of generals leading from the front line themselves, setting an example of bravery. This in turn led to the abstraction of models of bravery into heroic ideals presented to soldiers in literature and immediately before battle in orations designed to appeal to every possible reason for adhering to such ideals, including the shame that would attend men who show cowardice and the glory awaiting those who showed bravery (see J. R. E. Bliese, “Rhetoric and Morale: a Study of Battle Orations from the Central Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 201–26, and numerous other studies by the same author). Among such reasons, defense of religion often figured prominently, but religion could also act to suppress the fear of death more directly by promising soldiers spiritual rewards if they did die, and could enhance group bonds and morale: see, e.g., David Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War, c.300–c.1215 (Woodbridge, 2003). Finally, a good stiff drink could numb the fear response, though at the risk of impairing combat ability: Keegan, Face of Battle,  Expecting Cowardice 69 Expectations of cowardice in the enemy force also influenced tactics. The Welsh clearly expected cowardly behavior from the “French,” as the Brut calls the Anglo-Normans: they are almost insulted at the bold advance of the castle’s archers, “wondering why they should venture so confidently to approach the bridge.” And with the benefit of hindsight, the chronicle attributes this to the French propensity for “guile,” which we may read as “the trickery resorted to by cowardly troops who cannot win in a manly way.” Such aspersions cast on enemy troops, especially those separated from their foes by divisions of culture, religion, class or ethnicity, are commonplaces in medieval sources. Commanders often did their best to reinforce the tendency among their troops to think of themselves as braver than their “naturally” cowardly foes. Classical generals sometimes intimidated opposing forces even before battle began by ordering a series of precise, drilled formation changes in the enemy’s face: they served no tactical purpose, but demonstrated to their own troops and to the enemy their superior levels of training, experience, and by extension bravery.11 Medieval armies lacked the capacity for such displays, as they did not practice drill in large formations, lacking the money and administrative infrastructure to gather and train troops (usually infantry) in such maneuvers. But they some- times deployed the heroic equivalent in the form of an individual riding out before an army and performing flashy feats of arms.12 Conspicuous displays claimed, in effect, “our heroism is better than yours,” as conspicuous displays of piety before battle made a similar claim about religion. The attack by the single Norman knight at the bridge at Ystrad Antarron may well have been motivated by such considerations, though in the event he had the bad luck to have his horse killed quickly under him, followed by the good luck that his discomfiture and rescue made the subsequent feigned flight of the archers, accompanied by his real flight, all the more convincing. The feigned flight shows perhaps the most interesting intersection between cowardice and tactics. For what a feigned flight shows, is that armies expected their enemies to expect cowardice out of them. The verisimilitude of a feigned pp. 114–16. Strategic manipulation of armies by their commanders in order to suppress cowardice is exemplified by the practice among commanders of armies in Warring States China of maneuvering their own armies into situations where no retreat was possible before a battle in order to make their men fight more desperately: Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany, 1990), p. 106. The political context of command in Warring States China, especially the creation of centralized, authoritarian territorial states from the remains of polities built around aristocratic lineages, encouraged the systematic devaluation of bravery, heroism, and individual initiative on the part of soldiers, who were supposed to act unthinkingly in response to the commander’s will. Clearly, if discourses of bravery and cowardice are put out of bounds, training, discipline and manipulation such as this must assume a greater role in more extreme forms in meeting the problem of fear of death. 11 On the fear Spartan phalanxes inspired with their drilled and dressed ranks, see Victor D. Hanson, The Western Way of War (New York, 1989), pp. 98–99. Alexander once intimidated rebellious Illyrian tribesmen with a display of his phalanxes’ drill: Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (London, 1974), p. 78. 70 Stephen Morillo flight depends, in other words, on the believability of the apparent cowardice on display. Obviously, the circumstances at Ystrad Antarron were made for this deception. The Welsh, fresh off a victory and the slaughter of one garrison, were overconfident – rash, incautious, and inadequately prepared against the poten- tial cowardice of their own troops, as already noted. They also seemed to hold their enemies in contempt, wondering when they appeared bold and blaming French guile afterwards for the defeat. Any successful feigned flight required this expectation of cowardice to be in place. This has two implications for the patterns of its use. First, it could not be used by an army that had opened the battle with a convincing display through drilled maneuver of their own superior training and bravery, as the psycholog- ical signals the two techniques sent were mutually contradictory. Of course, if the display was truly convincing, there was no need to employ feigned flight or any other tactic, because the enemy army had already broken and run before the battle even began. Second, and more commonly, feigned flight lost its effective- ness with repeated use against either the same troops or against a foe with enough institutional memory to build safeguards into its training of soldiers and education of commanders. Roman and Byzantine military manuals warned against incautious pursuit of certain foes who were known to employ the feigned flight, for example, and Crusaders learned to curb their impulse to pursue fleeing Turks after they discovered, to their cost, that the apparent cowardice of their foe was likely to be a ruse designed to take advantage of the Franks’ own rashness.13 In both cases what armies had to unlearn or guard against was their expectation of cowardice in the enemy. A few further comments regarding expectations of cowardice in battle can be made. For one, the expectation seems reasonable given the common pattern of battles, for eventually, in most battles, one side ran. Cultural idealizations of heroic or brave behavior might extol the principle of dying with one’s lord and fighting to the last man, as in the Song of Maldon,14 but actual examples of such stands to the death are quite rare, especially if we exclude cases where trapped defenders had no escape route. Ironically, given the self-protective rationale built into the flight instinct, flight was the stage of battle when casualties were highest, as it was far easier to kill someone who was not defending himself than someone armed and actively meeting attacks. Thus, when armies ran, they did so not, usually, because their casualties had already mounted to unbearable proportions of their force, but because the mass of the army came to think that 12 One well-known example is the tale of Taillefer, a Norman who opened the Battle of Hastings with songs of Roland and feats of arms, at least according to Wace, Roman de Rou, trans. E. Taylor (London, 1837), pp. 189–90. 13 For Romans, see, e.g., Arrian, Array against the Alans, sections 25–30, discussed in M. Pavkovic, “A note on Arrian’s Ektaxis kata Alanon,” Ancient History Bulletin 2.1 (1988), 21–23. On Crusaders, see R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193 (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 156–88. 14 The Battle of Maldon, ed. and trans. Bill Griffiths (Norfolk, 1991), pp. 48–52, lines 202–325.  Expecting Cowardice 71 they would.15 Battle crises were thus matters of perception as much as reality. The near flight of the Normans early in the day at Hastings and their rallying by William, who had to remove his helmet and ride up and down the lines to halt the flight, with subordinates beating on their own men to stop them in their tracks, illustrates this nicely.16 Measured against cultural norms, psychological crises in battle were episodes of mass cowardice. Commanders knew this, and common tactics aimed at inducing panic and cowardice. Attacks on an enemy’s leader threatened to unhinge an army’s psychological composure at its lynchpin: the leader’s death or flight could be decisive, as the Normans nearly demonstrated at Hastings, and as the Saxons showed later in the day after Harold’s death, though their flight at that point can hardly be called cowardly.17 Attacks on an army’s flank and rear aimed at disrupting the psychological zone of security created by deep, dense formations. Helias of la Fleche’s flank attack on Robert Curthose’s army at Tinchebrai had exactly this effect, and worked first not on Robert’s infantry column, but on Robert’s cavalry unit held in reserve behind the line, led by Robert of Bellême.18 Note that cavalry can flee more easily than infantry, one reason commanders sometimes dismounted troops whose bravery or commitment was in question. King Stephen’s dismounted knights fought to the end at Lincoln; those who remained mounted fled early, contributing to the king’s defeat.19 The widely recognized lower resistance of mounted men to cowardice contributed, as much as cavalry’s greater mobility, to the use of feigned flight mostly by cavalry units. The feigned flight of the archers at Ystrad Antarron is a rare case of footsoldiers carrying out the tactic.20 Finally, many battle-avoiding or battle-delaying tactics were effective in the war of nerves armies always played. Waiting itself was mentally tiring to the side without the initiative, but more importantly cutting an enemy off from food or water or harassing them without engaging directly could induce fatigue, lowering defenses against fear and so raising the likelihood of cowardly behavior when battle did ensue. In short, expectations of cowardice – in one’s own troops, in enemy troops, and in enemy troops about one’s own troops – pervaded preparations for combat 15 Keegan, Face of Battle, pp. 104–5, discusses this as the threatened extension of the “killing zone.” 16 The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers (hereafter WP), ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 128–31. 17 WP, pp. 136–41. 18 OV 6:88–90. 19 OV 6:542; John of Hexham, in Symoneis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols. (London, 1882–85), 2:284–333, at 307–8. 20 The equivalent tactic for infantry is more often the planned, fighting withdrawal, as for instance at both Marathon and Cannae, where the center of the Greek and Carthaginian lines’ fighting retreat helped draw the Persian and Roman armies into double envelopments; see the introduc- tory accounts in R. E. and T. N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1986), pp. 23–25, 65–66. 72 Stephen Morillo and the tactical conduct of battles in medieval warfare. The prevalence of “Cultures of Bravery” is, in this light, an unsurprising response to a pervasive problem. Cowardice and Culture It is important to emphasize the plural in “Cultures of Bravery” (and there- fore of Cowardice), however, for different cultures constructed the central char- acteristics of bravery and cowardice differently. The acceptability of feigned flights, other sorts of ruses, ambushes, and so on, for example, varied widely. For some cultures, such tactics were indeed construed as unmanly, as signs of cowardice, bravery having been constructed around notions of how one fought, with the “how” usually centered on the honor to be gained in face-to-face combat with melee weapons. For others, such tactics were signs of cleverness – bravery and manliness having been constructed more around whether one won a battle than how one fought it. Similar divisions separated warrior classes who disdained the use of long-range weapons, especially the bow, and those for whom it was the weapon par excellence for demonstrating the skill that set a warrior apart from the common sort of soldier.21 Trans-cultural warfare, war that crossed lines of military culture so that different constructions of bravery and cowardice met in battle, may well have raised the psychological stakes involved in expectations of cowardice in ways that can account, at least in part, for the greater brutality and bloodiness usually displayed in such warfare.22 An enemy known to share the same culture and expectations of cowardice as oneself is more predictable than an unknown foe. In much of western Europe the shared culture of knightly bravery and cowardice included conventions of surrender and ransom that mitigated the potentially fatal consequences of cowardice. But troops known to come from a different culture, especially one whose details were unknown, posed a more frightening psychological challenge. Truly unknown enemies could appear immune to the usual expectations of cowardice: the Mongols, not just in Europe but in most places that they invaded outside their steppe homeland, initially appeared invincible, which translated in terms of expectations of individual Mongol soldiers that they would not feel fear as humans did. Their use of terror 21 Medieval western Europeans (mêlée weapons, face-to-face), steppe nomads (missile weapons, hit-and-run tactics) and Kamakura-era Japanese bushi (missile and melee weapons, face-to-face combat with either), illustrate just a small part of the possible range of combinations that could be constructed as brave. 22 I develop a general typology of trans-cultural warfare, with important distinctions drawn between inter-cultural war and what I call sub-cultural war, in “A General Typology of Transcultural Wars – The Early Middle Ages and Beyond”, in Transcultural Wars from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. Hans-Henning Kortüm (Berlin, 2006), 29–42; I develop the thoughts sketched in this paragraph, with sources, more fully there.  Expecting Cowardice 73 tactics – making examples of selected towns and cities they captured – simply reinforced the aura of fearless, ruthless invincibility surrounding their early campaigns. This is one reason why the Mamluk victory at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was so important beyond Egypt, for it dispersed that aura and brought the Mongols back to the world of human expectations of cowardice. Even better-known foes whose culture of cowardice differed from one’s own posed problems, especially as conventions of surrender and ransom were unlikely to cross cultural boundaries. The reality of a higher chance that combat would prove deadly worked in combination with the misunderstandings promoted by different cultures of cowardice in terms of what tactics were acceptable or manly, to produce a volatile emotional mixture. In short, enemies across a cultural boundary would often be objects both of greater fear and greater disdain than culturally similar enemies. Thus, if they broke and ran, as the Welsh did at Ystrad Antarron, their foes’ release from fear and thirst for revenge for having had that fear inflicted on them, plus cultural disdain, often equaled a very bloody pursuit. Or, as the Brut describes, the winner would “kill as many as they found” until “the whole land was left waste.” Conclusion Conventions and cultures of bravery have received much attention in writing on medieval combat. In some ways, this paper simply examines the flip side of the coin of bravery. But I hope this examination of the reverse image has shown that cowardice played a larger role than the simple absence of bravery might imply. In particular, the expectations of cowardice that pervaded medieval battlefields probably played a more positive and fundamental role in shaping tactics, army composition, and the patterns of trans-cultural warfare than bravery ever did, reducing bravery to just one of the images on the obverse of the coin of cowardice.