InternatIonal CommIssIon of mIlItary HIstory

BulgarIan CommIssIon of mIlItary HIstory

aCta 2012teCHnology and warfare

38th ICmH Congress ProCeedIngs

sofIa, BulgarIa, 25 august – 1 sePtemBer 2012

urCH alma mater

sofIa unIversIty Press

2013

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Prof. Dr. John Hosler (USA) Military Technology in the writings of John of Salisbury

The 2011 Weapons System Handbook, accessible online, provides a ready guide to non-classified ammunition, weapons, vehicles, intelligence and control equipment, and a host of other current military technologies used by the United States Army. In over three hundred pages it not only provides the Army’s official terminology for these devices but also their dimensions, capabilities, and applica-tions.1 Medieval military historians can only dream of such detailed, government-approved, technical sources. Outright descriptions of military materials are rare in the Middle Ages, which was an era without standing armies or military-industrial complexes. Medievalists also face another peculiar challenge: the extant sources for military affairs were often written by ecclesiastics who were relatively ignorant of troop-types, tactics, and military technology. As a result, modern interpretation of medieval campaigns hinges on language that is often imprecise, misleading, or wholly incorrect.2

I have lately written a book on one of the major ecclesiastical sources for war-fare in the twelfth century, John of Salisbury.3 John was one of the best-educated men of his day and worked as a clerk to the archbishops of Canterbury; later in life, he became the treasurer of Exeter Cathedral and also the bishop of Chartres. John was a prolific author who wrote three major books, two saints’ lives, two moralis-tic poems, and 325 personal letters. Of these works, undoubtedly the most famous is the treatise Policraticus, which was heavily read in the later Middle Ages and remains on many university political science reading lists today.

In the course of my research, I endeavored to catalog every technological military term John of Salisbury used across his entire corpus: every word for arms, armor, equipment, and transportation. The result is a collection of over six hundred Latin terms that, on face value, constitutes an important resource for military his-torians. Yet caution is needed because John neither participated in combat nor wit-nessed an actual battle with his own eyes, and much of his terminology came not from contemporary sources but rather from a sizable array of Biblical and ancient texts in his library. Before properly assessing John’s contribution to the study of

1 Weapons Systems 2011, accessed 27 June 2012, <http://www.army.mil/info/references/>.2 On the relative strengths and weaknesses of clerical military descriptions before the fourteenth

century, see J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340, trans. S. Willard and Mrs. R. W. Southern, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge 1997), 10–11.

3 J. D. Hosler, John of Salisbury: Military Authority of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Leiden forthcoming); this paper contains material from chapter one.

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medieval warfare one must first come to grips with his military language. The pre-cision or vagueness of his word choices often affects the reliability of his military descriptions and, therefore, the utility of his writings for military historians.

It is my argument that John of Salisbury’s soundness as a source for medieval military technology is a provable notion. To do this, I will first explain my method of checking the accuracy of his terminology. Then, I will demonstrate the extent to which his descriptions of arms and armor mesh well with the military customs of his own day. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the applicability of my method to other medieval, ecclesiastical sources.

The AssizesIn order to check the accuracy of John of Salisbury’s language, I have employed my own (medieval) version of the U.S. Army’s Weapons System Handbook: two assizes (“decrees/inquests”) issued in the year 1181 at the court of King Henry II of England (1154–1189). These assizes required citizens to possess specific types of weapons and armor for the common defense, with each man’s required array differing according to his financial condition. In the Assize of Arms, which was issued in England, mail, helmet, shield, and lance were all required for a holder of a knight’s fee (feodum unius militis) as well as a free layman holding chattels or rents worth sixteen marks (liber laicus). Free laymen with chattels or rents of ten marks could forego the shield, and every other English freeman was to possess a quilted doublet, helmet, and lance.4

The second assize, issued at Le Mans (Maine), has similar financial delinea-tions, except that instead of lances swords, bows, and horses were required for some men 5 The richest citizens (with chattels valued in excess of 100 pounds) were required to maintain “a complete set of military accoutrements” (arma mili-taria plenarie). Other contemporary documents from the 1180s suggest that such a full knightly array would have included: spurs, mail leggings, hauberk, helmet, sword, lance, and shield. � Although this description refers to the ideal armament of a knight competing in a tournament, it is roughly contemporary to Henry II’s assizes and fits particularly well with the Le Mans assize, which, unlike the Assize of Arms, demands possession of a sword.

4 The text of the Assize of Arms is printed in W. Stubbs (ed.), Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 9th ed. (Oxford 1913), 183; in English translation, see D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway (eds.), English Historical Documents Volume II: 1042–1189 (London 1953), no. 27.

5 The text of the assize at Le Mans is printed in W. Stubbs (ed.), Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, 3 vols. (London 1868–1871), 2.253; in English translation, see H. T. Riley (trans.), The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, 2 vols. (Reprint, New York 1968), 2.1.

� D. Crouch, Tournament (Reprint, London 200�), 141, has usefully employed a description of a knightly array from Ralph Niger’s De re miltari et triplici via peregrinationis Iersolimitane (circa 1187): spurs, mail leggings, hauberk, helmet, sword, lance, and shield.

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The exact purpose of these assizes has been a matter of great debate. Some his-torians have seen them as a reconstituting of the old Anglo-Saxon militia system, known as the fyrd. The fyrd was conceptualized as a means of regional defense against Viking raids in the ninth and tenth centuries, which could occur suddenly and in random locales. Localized militias, it was reasoned, could mobilize and respond to these raids much more quickly than could the king’s host. Other histo-rians have contended that the assizes were intended to arm the townsfolk in order to check the power of the nobility and/or to increase the stock of available weapons in the kingdom. I myself have argued that Henry II was not creating a militia but a system of military reserves that would be suitably equipped for participation in the king’s formal military campaigns, if need be.7

Yet whatever their true purpose, my interest in the assizes in this paper is their technical content. They are royal, not ecclesiastical, documents: the types of weapons contained therein, therefore, represent accurate terminology for the late twelfth century–words that were in use in the court of one of Europe’s most powerful military leaders. In the assizes are found the following Latin terms for the arms and armor:

Assize of Arms, 1181 Assize at Le Mans, 1181clypeus shield arcus et sagittae bow and arrowslancea lance equus horse capellum ferreum iron cap gladius swordcassis helmet capellum ferreum iron cap aubergel mail shirt albergellum hauberklorica hauberk8 wambasia quilted doublet9

These assizes were issued in 1181, the year immediately following John of Salisbury’s death in 1180. I have therefore employed these two assizes as ciphers, of a sort, in order to assess the accuracy of his military terminology. In particular, I will focus on John’s military lexicon regarding armor, hand-held, and missile weaponry.

7 For the principal theories, see: W. Stubbs, The Early Plantagenets (New York 1889), 88; H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh 19�3); P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Jones (London 1984); and J. D. Hosler, Henry II: a Medieval Soldier at War, 1147–1189 (Leiden 2007), 118–119.

8 A form of mail shirt; see I. Peirce, “Arms, Armour and Warfare in the Eleventh Century”, Anglo-Norman Studies 10 (1987): 237–240.

9 An aubergel was a mail shirt, similar to the lorica but lighter and with shorter sleeves; see D. Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Sourcebook, Volume I: Warfare in Western Christendom (London 1995), 135. A wambais was also called a gambeson, or a quilted coat of fabric to be worn underneath armor; see M. Bennett, Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Warfare (Mechanicsburg 1998), 125.

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ArmorJohn of Salisbury uses four different words to refer to shields. The first and most common is clypeus, of which there are twelve appearances in his writings. As seen in the Assize of Arms, this was indeed the contemporary term in England. What is impossible to know is if John was referring to kite-shaped or round shields, both of which were used by the Anglo-Normans.10 His other three words for shield are not contemporary but are rather taken from the Old Testament and Roman texts that informed his research. The Latin scutum he acquired from both the Book of Job (corpus illius quasi scuta fusilia; “his body is like molten shields”) and the Strategemata of Sextus Julius Frontinus (ornatum scutum elegantius; “shield elegantly decorated”).11 Umbone he took from both the Punica of Silius Italicus as well as Juvenal’s second satire.12 Finally, John found the word ancilis in Ovid’s poem Fasti.13 Interestingly, John applies Ovid’s ancilis in order to describe the small shields used by Harold Godwinson’s skirmishes in Wales in 1063–this is an example of John applying classical language to modern events.14

Three of the words for body armor in the assizes (wambasia, a quilted doublet; aubergel, a mail shirt; and albergellum, a mail-shirt with short sleeves) do not ap-pear in John of Salisbury’s works. The only one that does is lorica, which was a hauberk, that ubiquitous medieval mail tunic with short or long sleeves. However, his language is imprecise as to the armor’s design and function. He could have been referring a Roman lorica, which appears in his sources and can be found in three different styles: a basic bronze breastplate, the lorica squamata (scales attached to linen); a lorica hamata (metal rings hammered together); or a lorica segmentata, or cuirass, which was bands of bronze attached to leather.15 Overall, John seems rather uninterested in accuracy regarding armor. In fact, he most often uses the generic word arma with adjectives added to describe its function: “costly armor” (pretiose armatorum), “light armor” (leui armorum), and “heavy armor” (graui armorum). His generic arma references outnumber his more-precise use of lorica and other terms by a ratio of at least 2:1.

10 Peirce, “Arms, Armour, and Warfare”, 243–244.11 C. C. J. Webb (ed.), Ioannis Saresberiensis Episcopi Carnotensis Policratici, 2 vols. (London

1909), 2.�.1; cf. Job 41.�, and M. B. McElwain (ed.) and C. E. Bennett (trans.), Sextus Julius Frontinus: Stratagems, Aqueducts of Rome (Reprint, Cambridge, MA 1997), 4.1.5.

12 Policratici, �.� and 3.13; cf. J. D. Duff (trans.), Silius Italicus: Punica, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA 1934), 1.4.354 (umbonibus umo); and S. M. Braund (ed. and trans.), Juvenal and Persius (Cambridge, MA 2004), 2.45-4� (sed illos / Defendit numerus junctae umbone phalanges).

13 Policratici 5.3; “Salii,” in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (eds.), oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1996), 1348.

14 Policratici, �.�.15 W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke (ed. and trans.), The Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume Two:

the Later Letters, (Oxford 1979), no. 279 (loricatorum); Policratici, �.19 (loricam); K. DeVries and R. D. Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 2nd ed. (Toronto 2012), 55–56.

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John’s term for military helmets is galeae, which appears four times. Again, he acquired the term from two of his ancient sources: a galea appears in the Book of Wisdom 5.19, and also in the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus.1� This is an antiquated term: it does not appear in the assizes, and John does not seem to have taken it from any contemporary source.

weaponsThe most-frequently referenced weapons in John of Salisbury’s writings are swords. He employs three specific terms for sword, explaining why he does so in his book Metalogicon, his defense of the seven liberal arts: “In the case of ‘multivocal’ terms, several words, such as ensis, mucro, and gladius, all mean and name the same thing.”17 Gladius and its variations is easily his most-used term for the weapon: there are at least 121 uses of this word in John’s writings. It is also the sword-term to which he most often adds an adjective to convey a larger point: there is, for example, the “sword of sorrow” (doloris gladius) that pierced the Virgin Mary; as well as the “sword of the spirit” (spiritualem gladium).18 In contrast, the word ensis is used only nine times and mucro only six. More general words also appear: ferrum, which literally means a piece of metal, appears nine times; telum, which can also refer to a projectile, appears three times, and in these cases only the context reveals that John is actually writing about a sword.

It is the massive numerical difference between the appearances of gladius and ensis/mucro that bears further consideration. Gladius is the term used in Henry II’s assize at Le Mans, so its frequent appearance in John of Salisbury’s writings does indeed reflect contemporary usage. It is clearly his preferred term for sword. Unlike his outdated terminology for shields and helmets, however, his use of ensis and mucro do not seem to coincide with his quoting of ancient texts; their relative infrequence suggests that John may have used them simply for variety’s sake.

1� Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume Two, nos. 279 and 299; cf. Wisdom, 5.19 (induet pro torace iustitiam et accipiet pro galea iudicium certum; “He will put on justice as a breastplate, and will take true judgment instead of a helmet”); and W. Peterson and M. Hutton (eds.), Tacitus: Dialogus, Agricola, Germania (Reprint, London 1925), 272–273 (Paucis loricae vix uni alterive cassis aut galea”).

17 J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (eds.), Ioannis Saresberiensis: Metalogicon, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 98 (Turnhout 1991), 3.3; the translation is from D. D. McGarry (trans.), John of Salisbury: the Metalogicon. A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Berkeley 1955), 156. John attributes the “multivocal” concept to Boethius; see In categorias Aristotelis Commentaria, in J-P Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina, 221 vols. (Paris 1844–1864), 64.168D (multivoca sunt quorum plura nomina una diffinitio est, ut est scutum, clypeus…).

18 J. C. Robertson (ed.), Vita Sancti Thomæ Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols. (London 1875-1885), 2.19.301-322; Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume Two, no. 2�9.

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The only polearm mentioned in the Assize of Arms is the lancea, but John of Salisbury only uses it three times. In each case it is in reference to a different type of weapon: a couched lance, the spear of King Saul, and the thrown javelin that killed the Emperor Julian in 363.19 More common references to polearms in John’s works are the Latin hasta, which is a thrusting spear. He also uses the words teli, pila, and iacula, all of which typically denote thrown spears or javelins; however, in some contexts John is referring to javelins being employed by foot-soldiers in a thrusting manner.

I would argue, however, that the usage of lancea in the Assize of Arms is just as vague as in John of Salisbury’s works. Although the assize required every freeman to possess a lancea, these could not have all been the identical weapon: poorer citizens were extremely unlikely to own a horse, for example, and so would not need the longer, lighter lance preferred for mounted use.20 Lances themselves were an adaptation from the customary infantry spear: two meters long, of uniform width up and down its length, and tipped with a leaf-shaped iron point.21 In other words, a lack of specificity exists on the part of both John and the assize, for which we can hardly fault only one party.

Regarding missile weapons, the assize at Le Mans required men carry an ar-cus et sagittae, or bow and arrows. John of Salisbury’s terminology is entirely in line with the assize. Arcus is the only word he uses for “bow,” and it makes five appearances in his writings. The accompanying arrows he calls sagittae on several occasions, although at one point he uses spicului instead; while this could refer to different types of missiles, the spiculum in this case is definitely an arrow because John is writing about the untimely death of King William Rufus in 1100–shot dead with a hunting arrow in the New Forest.22 When writing more generally about “missiles” or “darts” John uses one of three ambiguous terms: iaculi, teli, or mis-silis.

ConclusionsAs ciphers go, the two assizes from King Henry II’s reign can provide only a baseline for determining the accuracy of technological terminology in medieval ecclesiastical sources. Their use is restricted to the Anglo-Norman and Angevin

19 W. J. Millor, H. E. Butler, and C. N. L. Brooke (eds. and trans.), The Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume one: the Early Letters (London 1955), no. �5; Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume Two, no. 17�; Policratici, 8.21.

20 B. S. Bachrach, “’A Lying Legacy’ Revisited: the Abels-Morillo Defense of Discontinuity”, Journal of Medieval Military History 5 (2007): 154, notes how lancea can mean either “spear” or “lance,” depending upon context.

21 DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 11–15; E. Oakeshott, The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Cavalry (Reprint, Woodbridge 1994), 258-259.

22 Policratici, �.18; E. Mason, William II: Rufus, the Red King (Stroud 2005), 223.

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realms, and they are best-applied in the eleventh and twelfth centuries because weapon types and terminology changed rapidly in the thirteenth. John of Salisbury himself discusses a range of additional weapons and armors that are never mentioned in the assizes, such as axes, cudgels, daggers, hooks, slings, and mechanical devices such as catapults and battering rams. Moreover, he himself was privy to documents originating outside of northwestern Europe and could therefore appropriate contemporary terms for these items that were common in other locales.

Nevertheless, this brief survey demonstrates that John of Salisbury had, to some extent, a sound knowledge of contemporary military technology. Lancea, clypeus, lorica, gladius, and arcus et sagittae were all proper military terms in his day. Together with the equus in the Le Mans assize, they represent nearly the whole array of an armored, elite soldier in the twelfth century. John employed some of these words frequently and accurately in context. Out of eleven different terms for arms and armor in the assizes, John employs six, for an accuracy rate of fifty-five percent. This is not a bad demonstration of military terminology at all, especially when considering that he had no military training and probably little personal experience with violence until the last decade of his life. His technologi-cal terms that do not match those in the assizes are either vague references such as arma or outdated words that he took from his Biblical, ancient, and Patristic sources. Therefore, I would argue that John’s value to historians researching medi-eval warfare and military technology should necessarily increase.

Finally, I would suggest that this is a method that can be employed in other areas and periods in early and high-medieval Europe. Whether one is researching the Carolingian Empire or the Crusades, ecclesiastical sources form an important basis for our knowledge of military technology, but they should be checked at every possible turn against governmental record documents such as charters, laws, and financial rolls.23 The elite men who initiated military campaigns necessarily had more experience with battle, and the scribes who wrote down their dictates and counted their money had motivation to seek greater precision in their terminol-ogy. The result of more-careful word-study will be a better knowledge of the tools available to the practitioners of medieval warfare.

23 For example, a statute of William the Lion of Scotland (1165–1214) that reads, “habeat equum, habergeon, capitum e ferro, et cultellum qui dicitur dagger”; see Oakeshott, Archaeology of Weapons, 253. Past scholarly efforts in this vein have yielded significant results; see for example D. S. Bachrach, “English Artillery 1189–1307: the Implications of Terminology”, English Historical Review 121 (2006): 1408–30.