OSBORNE, JAMES MICHAEL, Ph.D. Qui plus fait, miex vault: Evaluating Combat in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. (2006) Directed by Dr. Robert L. Kelly. 172 pp. I seek to correct a deficiency in Malory studies, the inadequate attention paid to the thematic implications of Malory’s treatment of armor and various forms of combat. I explore three topics: Malory’s changes to his source texts in his depiction of the style of armor and the form of tournaments insofar as they bear on defining the temporal setting of his narrative; Malory’s implicit definition of the virtues of the ideal knight errant and tournament champion; and his definition of the knight-commander in war. My over- arching conclusion is that Malory’s treatment of combat is essentially ethical. The style of both armor and tournament combat in Malory both suggest a pre- fifteenth-century temporal setting, a finding which suggests that scholars’ attempts to evaluate the behavior of Malory’s knights in the light of fifteenth-century tournament regulations are anachronistic. A “checklist” of virtues for the ideal knight is created through discussions by Malory’s leading knights. Malory’s “score-keeping” of tournament performance is therefore important to clarify which knights are qualified to participate in this discussion. The chivalric virtues recommended conform closely to those praised in the medieval manuals of Lull, Charny, and Bouvet. The qualities so defined become the standard by which to judge the relative merits of Malory’s knights. From a close comparison and contrast of leading knights, Lancelot emerges as the ideal exemplar of the knight errant and tourney champion. From a similar comparative study of knights who take command in war, in particular, King Arthur, Lancelot, Tristram, and Gawain, Lancelot also emerges as the ideal knight-commander, both in the light of the skills of military leadership recommended by medieval military manuals as well as the ethical standard provided by the medieval concept of the just war. QUI PLUS FAIT, MIEX VAULT: EVALUATING COMBAT IN MALORY’S LE MORTE DARTHUR by James Michael Osborne A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2006 Approved by ___________________________ Robert L. Kelly, Committee Chair © 2006 James Michael Osborne To my grandmother, Ethel Rone (1896-1990) A Promise Kept ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Committee Chair ____________________________________ Robert L. Kelly Committee Members _____________________________________ Denise Baker _____________________________________ Stephen Stallcup _____________________________________ Christopher Hodgkins June 21, 2006 Date of Acceptance by Committee June 21, 2006 Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of the members of my Committee: Dr. Denise N. Baker, Dr. Christopher Hodgkins, and Dr. Stephen Stallcup. I especially thank the Chairman of my Committee, Dr. Robert L. Kelly, who provided scholarly acumen and constant inspiration. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. MALORY’S THIRTEENTH CENTURY: AN EXAMINATION OF THE TOURNAMENTS AND ARMOR OF LE MORTE DARTHUR 24 Tournament and Historical Setting 24 Armor and Historical Setting 36 III. BEYOND PROWESS AND WORSHIP: COMBAT AND MALORY’S USE OF FOILS 52 IV. MALORY’S BALANCED AND COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF WAR 107 War: Worshipful and Destructive 108 Command and Control: Malory’s Use of Vegetius 122 Malory’s Moral Judgment of War 136 V. CONCLUSION 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY 161 v 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When modern readers open the pages of Sir Thomas Malory’s work, they are confronted with a world of chivalry—and violence. Indeed, Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman claim that what “perhaps most sets Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur apart form other examples of Arthurian literature is its excessive violence. It is not quantitatively more violent than other medieval versions of the legend, but it is often more gratuitously violent” (118). And though Malory has played a central role in bequeathing to the English-speaking world the concept of chivalry, largely thanks to Caxton’s printing of his text as Le Morte Darthur, the violent aspects of Malory can create an almost impenetrable barrier to understanding the book because the general brutality of the Middle Ages is often difficult for the modern mind to comprehend. Take, for example the following accounts of what some considered “fun” in the Middle Ages: In village games, players with their hands tied behinds them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so they should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. (Tuchman 135) 2 Readers may be tempted to dismiss such behavior as exclusive to the lower classes, those not ascribing to the chivalrous codes of honor reflected in Malory’s work. But here is another account of a similar level of barbaric behavior, but this time from professional soldiers: On April 27, 1487, at Domodossola, northwest of Milan . a battle took place between a Swiss army and the duke of Milan’s troops, who subjected the otherwise victorious Swiss to a crushing defeat. In the following weeks, the Lucerne town council collected official eyewitness accounts of the battle. It does not make for pleasant reading. A certain Mangold Schoch reported, among other things, that during the fighting ‘the welsch [Italians] had chopped off the fingers of the Germans [that is, the Swiss],’ stuck them into their hats, and walked around the city. He had also heard that dead Swiss soldiers had had the fat cut out of their bellies and that this fat had been sold in the apothecary shops of Milan. Some Swiss soldiers had even been eviscerated to this end while still alive; others had their throats slit; others, ‘who had pretty hair,’ the witness stated, had had their heads cut off, skewered on spikes, and carried about the city. (Groebner 127) And that what we today think of as chivalry could, for the medieval mind, encompass an almost similar level of brutality seems even more troubling. For example, take the following excerpt from the knight-troubador Bertran de Born’s possibly satiric “In Praise of War”: And once entered into battle let every man proud of his birth think only of breaking arms and heads, for a man is worth more dead than alive and beaten I tell you there is not so much savor in eating or drinking or sleeping, as when I hear them scream, “There they are! Let’s get them!” on both sides, and I hear riderless 3 horses in the shadows, neighing, and I hear them scream, “Help! Help!” and I see them fall among the ditches, little men and great men on the grass, and I see fixed in the flanks of the corpses stumps of lances with silken streamers. Barons, pawns your castles, And your villages, and your cities Before you stop making war on one another. (lines 37-53) In a period where there were even tournaments dedicated to the Virgin Mary,1 such calls to battle and violence were common. Few medieval English texts combine the violent aspects of the knightly profession with the inspirational gloss of chivalry more uneasily— to the modern mind—than Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Though Malory’s text contains few incidents so brutal and bellicose as the above examples, the modern distaste for the violence in Malory, and Malory’s incessant recitation of it, may be responsible for the dearth of critical study on the fighting itself and its function in the text. Even contemporary critics of Malory find the persistent violence in Le Morte Darthur numbing. For example, in discussing combat in Malory, Jill Mann observes that The events of the narrative are repetitive and hard to connect with each other; since it is difficult to see them as a meaningful sequence, it is difficult to remember them, even over the span of a few pages. Furthermore, this means that it is difficult for us to assess these actions in moral terms . yet the knight’s most characteristic activity is within the physical sphere, in physical combat, often undertaken for its own sake, or as the result of a randomly-imposed ‘custome’ (331 emphasis added). 1 Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence 50. 4 Robert R. Hellenga, despite the fact that he devotes an article to Malory’s tournaments, claims that the “tournaments are the worst offenders” and finds them—and the fighting in general— “wearisome” (67). Muriel Whitaker says the “chivalric exploits” in the Book of Tristram are so numerous that the “modern reader finds [them] boringly repetitive” (37). Whitaker also refers to the “monotonous regularity” of the details of fighting in her discussion of tournaments and adds, “The catalogues of participants [in tourneys] may produce an effect of chivalric plenitude but fail to engage the interest of the modern reader” (39).2 Elizabeth Edwards notes that most “of the Morte is composed of narrations of combat,” and claims that in “‘The Book of Sir Tristram’, particularly the sections Vinaver calls ‘The Round Table’ and ‘King Mark’, challenges comes so thick and fast that it is hardly possible to form any coherent view of overarching structure” (65).