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General Introduction

Of Knyghthode and Bataile is an unexpectedly fascinating work. At one level, many scholars have no doubt dismissed it as a point of trivia: it is the second surviving English rendition of one of the most popular military treatises ever written. Yet in truth it is much more than that. “One of the most brilliant military poems of the fifteenth century,” as Catherine Nall has regarded it, Of Knyghthode and Bataile well deserves to be counted among “the most elaborate, creative, and rich texts produced during the Wars of the Roses.”

This poem, as Nall indicates, stands at the crossroads of history. Behind and beyond its status as a translation — more accurately, a paraphrase — of Vegetius’s famed work alternatively titled De re militari or Epitoma rei militaris, it engages with the contemporary realities of the nascent Wars of the Roses, the evolving status of chivalry at the end of the Middle Ages, and the shifting face of war as technological changes brought gunpowder to conflicts on the land and great ships into conflict upon the sea. The poet’s world, in so many senses, was fragmenting, and he saw in the historical Vegetius a means to achieve present unity and healing: a properly trained fighting force would enforce the legitimate authority of the king, and a stabilized throne would bring peace for a shared society.

First Years of the Wars of the Roses

In its most literal sense, the Wars of the Roses began on May 22, 1455, when longstanding political rivalries among noble factions, combined with the mental instability of Henry VI, led Richard, duke of York, to meet the king in arms at the town of St. Albans. What would come to be called the First Battle of St. Albans had an impact far beyond its relatively small scale: Lancastrian leaders, including the duke of Somerset, the earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford were killed in the Yorkist victory, and the king was abandoned into his enemies’ hands. The duke of York made no immediate play for the throne — whether due to respect for regnal authority or an awareness of the limitations in his position — but in retrospect the die of war had been cast. The Wars of the Roses, which would last until the 1487 death of the duke’s son, King Richard III at Bosworth Field, had begun.

In the early years, attempts at keeping the peace were made, most notably during the elaborate ceremonies of the Loveday of 1458. On March 25 of that year, Henry VI — at the time in complete control of his faculties — orchestrated a public display of peace and unity, walking with his Yorkist foes from Westminster Abbey to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, surrounded by pomp, pageantry, and armed retinues. His queen, the influential Margaret of Anjou who fought bitterly for her husband’s Lancastrian cause, followed the king, walking hand-in-hand with the duke of York. Payments and promises were made.

Within months, however, hostilities were once more rising. The Yorkist Richard Neville, the earl of Warwick whom history would come to call “the Kingmaker,” had held the captaincy of the garrison at Calais for several years. Calais, a massive port on the shores of France, was not just a rich nexus of trade between the English, the French, and the Low Countries, but also an important foothold in the larger geopolitical struggles between the kingdoms of France and England. To be captain of Calais was an important and enriching post. Beginning in May 1458, Warwick directed ships from Calais to plunder a number of Castilian and Hanseatic merchant ships, causing a diplomatic row. Called by Henry VI to answer charges on the matter, Warwick declined.

Influential members of the king’s retinue, led by Margaret of Anjou, assumed the worst of Warwick’s actions. The court retreated to Coventry, deep in the queen’s home turf, and a council was called for June 24, 1459. Fearing that attendance would mean arrest, the duke of York, the earl of Salisbury, and the earl of Warwick refused the summons. Branded as rebels, the three men set out to bring their scattered forces together under the banner of York at Ludlow. On October 12 the rebels were making lines near a bridge beside the small town of Ludford in Shropshire, when the royal banner appeared on the horizon. The rebel army quaked at the prospect of fighting the king himself, and the Yorkist leaders knew they were undone. With hardly a shot fired, the Battle of Ludford Bridge was over before it began. York himself fled to Ireland, where he still had support. Salisbury and Warwick fled to Wales and then to Calais, only just beating the arrival of the duke of Somerset, whom the king had ordered to replace the rebellious earl as captain of Calais.

From November 20 to December 20, the Parliament — later termed the Parliament of Devils — met in Coventry. The Yorkist rebels were declared guilty of high treason, and bills of attainder were passed against them. Their lands were seized. Henry VI and the Lancastrians began to wrest back control of the country, all the while keeping a watchful eye across the English Channel to where Warwick adeptly held off Somerset’s attempt to take back Calais and entrenched his power.

Date and Authorship

The following spring, a parson exiled from Calais in the political struggle approached Lord Beaumont with the gift of a poem about the making of war that he wished to give to the king. As Nall has noted, this was in keeping with the times: “reading, writing and the prosecution of warfare went hand in hand in the fifteenth century.” In any case, the parson’s poem was read, found worthy, and the presentation was made when Henry VI returned to London on March 1, 1460. The poem was Of Knyghthode and Bataile, and the parson seems likely to have been a churchman named Robert Parker.

This identification of the date and authorship of Of Knyghthode and Bataile stands both with and against prior scholarship. The poem’s first and only edition was executed for the Early English Texts Society in 1935 by Roman Dyboski and Zygfryd Marjan Arend, based on the three manuscripts then known: Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 243; London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xxiii; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 45. A fourth manuscript has recently been discovered in London, College of Arms, MS R.25. In their edition, Dyboski and Arend are led by the poem’s opening stanza — which declares its occasion to be a festive entrance by the king into London on the kalends of March (lines 1–8) — to suggest that the poem ought to be associated with the Loveday of 1458. This event was indeed celebratory, but Dyboski and Arend are forced into substantial difficulty trying to turn March 25 (the date of the Loveday) into March 1 (the poem’s kalends of March). Even more problematic, the poem makes reference to events beyond the Loveday. Lines 985–1026 unmistakably refer to the Battle of Ludford Bridge on October 12, 1459 and its immediate aftermath: Warwick’s subsequent retreat to Calais on November 2, 1459 (lines 987–88), and the Coventry Parliament from November 20 to December 20, 1459 (line 995). This Parliament’s bills of attainder against the Yorkists also lies behind other statements on the part of the poet, including his direct reference to the king’s enemies as “a legioun attaynte” (line 2017).

In short, the poem must surely have been composed after the end of 1459. As for a date before which it must have been written, the partisan poet would no doubt have crowed about the great Lancastrian victory at the Battle of Wakefield on December 30, 1460 if he had known of it. Narrowing the range still further, it would be difficult for the poet to present the poem through the intermediary of Lord Beaumont after the Battle of Northampton, on July 10, 1460, in which Beaumont died. A presentation date of March 1 not only falls perfectly within these terminal dates but also fits the approximate occasion of King Henry VI’s return to London from Coventry. And, as Daniel Wakelin has observed in likewise arguing for a 1460 dating, “the scanty records of Saturday, 1 March 1460 do not attest a full entry pageant in London, but they do reveal martial display surrounding the king” that could inspire the vision described by the poem.

Regarding the parson in question, Dyboski and Arend conclude that “the material at our command proves insufficient for identifying the person of the author.” Other scholars have not been so reserved. Earlier, in 1913, Henry Noble MacCracken made the suggestion that the poet ought to be identified with Robert Parker, whom he regarded as the author of another anonymous work, On Husbondrie, likewise a verse adaptation of a late-antique Latin treatise. Parker’s career, MacCracken observed, had much to recommend it as would seem fitting for the author of Knyghthode and Bataile. The Patent Rolls note that a Robert Parker, chaplain, succeeded a clerk of the king’s closet to an appointment as parson of Stanford Rivers on February 25, 1439; it is presumably this same Robert Parker, now declared the king’s own clerk, who was later named parson of the Church of St. Nicholas in Calais on August 16, 1450. Robert Parker also appears on March 2, 1460 — the day after what we can now identify as the presentation date of the poem — in a military-related commission from the king:

Commission to John Judde, esquire, master of the king’s ordinance, Henry Nevill, Alexander Norton, Robert Parker, John Carpenter and Dederic Tyle [rectius Pyle], to take carpenters called ‘whelers’ and ‘cartwryghtz’ and other carpenters, stonemasons, smiths, plumbers, artificers and workmen for the works of the king’s ordnance, and bombards, cannons, ‘culvryns,’ ‘serpentyns,’ crossbows, bows, arrows, ‘saltpetre,’ powder for cannons, lead, iron and all other stuff for the said ordnance, and carriage therefor and horses called ‘hakeneys.’

Despite the suggestive possibilities of this passage, to which we will return, MacCracken’s identification of Robert Parker as the author of Knyghthode and Bataile was rejected in 2004 by Wakelin, who put forward John Neele instead.

Wakelin begins his objection to Robert Parker by first observing several flaws in identifying shared authorship between On Husbondrie and Of Knyghthode and Bataile. These points are rightly made, though they say nothing of Robert Parker’s hand in any case, just that the author of one might not be the author of the other. And, as it happens, the case for Parker’s presumed authorship of either text lies most strongly with Of Knyghthode and Bataile, not On Husbondrie. Wakelin next wonders whether Beaumont’s involvement in the presentation of the poem might indicate that the poet has a place in the court of Margaret of Anjou, for whom Beaumont served as her “grandest household servant,” though this train of speculation does not go far. Returning to Parker’s candidacy, Wakelin states that “it is unclear how long Parker remained at St Nicholas’s, Calais: other priests were appointed to the chantry of Holy Cross in that church throughout the 1450s.” In addition, he dismisses the possibility that the parson Robert Parker is the same Robert Parker commissioned by the king to deal with armaments in 1460: “another unspecified Parker was employed as armourer to Henry VI in 1455, who is surely that Parker.”

Wakelin is quite right that there was a Parker who served as king’s armorer at this time, but that man is not actually “unspecified” in the records. His name was Thomas, and he was given a grant for life “of all the workshops . . . of the armoury within the Tower of London” on May 6, 1450; he also later served as a counsel to a trial by battle on May 11, 1453. It is a difficult proposition to accept that the keeper of the king’s accounts was on multiple instances confused by Robert and Thomas Parker in the absence of any evidence.

In place of Robert Parker, Wakelin suggests John Neele, who, “because of his Lancastrian affiliations and because of his learning,” was appointed rector of St. Mary’s in Calais in January 1458. To the latter point, Neele’s education cannot serve as much argument for or against his authorship without a direct connection between his schooling and the text in question or, at the very least, evidence that Parker’s education would have prevented him from composing it, none of which is evident. To the former point, Neele holds no more Lancastrian affiliations than Parker: Neele was indeed the receiver of several grants from the king in 1460; but so, it seems, was Parker, who had previously served as a clerk of the king. It is true that in May and June 1460 this same Neele apparently “received a benefice on Guernsey and a command to set in order castles there and in Jersey” — evidence that Wakelin posits as a reward for composing Of Knyghthode and Bataile. Yet, as we have already seen, Parker appears to have a military command of his own, a commission to oversee the manufacture of weapons of war for Henry VI on March 2, 1460, just one day after the supposed presentation of this poem about war to the king.

Wakelin’s last piece of evidence in favor of Neele is that his later career matches the poem’s later history: Neele continued to be held in favor by the crown after Edward IV seized it, just as later Yorkist manuscripts preserved Of Knyghthode and Bataile by stripping or altering its specifically Lancastrian segments as theycopied it. This logic seems to suggest authorial oversight of those alterations, though the manuscripts provide no internal evidence that this is so. And, once more, we can say much the same about the career of Parker, who was parson of St. Gregory by St. Paul’s during the reign of Edward IV. Wakelin suggests that this cannot be the same Robert Parker because this would give him an over-long career. Yet we can be sure that at least one well-connected churchman named Robert Parker had an overlapping career across this entire period: a clerk named Robert Parker, son of John Parker, is mentioned in a deed of January 17, 1434, and a chaplain named Robert Parker, son of John Parker, is recorded on December 1, 1487. We cannot be certain that this is the same Robert Parker as the chaplain in Calais and the man commissioned by the king, but, likewise, it should not be casually dismissed. Lastly, it is worth noting, too, that the poet’s devotion to Calais comes across as long-held, with deep enmity for the Yorkists who, in the text, now hold it. Parker was assigned to a Calais post in 1450; shortly afterward, the duke of Somerset — one of the Lancastrian leaders who was killed in the First Battle of St. Albans — became captain of Calais. In the political struggle of the next decade, Parker would have seen the captaincy come into the hands of the duke of York himself in 1454, and then the Yorkist earl of Warwick in 1456. Neele, who was appointed to his Calais post in 1458, would have known Calais only as a Yorkist stronghold, while Parker would have personally witnessed, as Of Knyghthode and Bataile relates, its fall from the Lancastrians.

Beyond the poet’s self-identification with Calais, Of Knyghthode and Bataile gives further reason to connect poem and place. In several key sequences, the poet “shows great familiarity with and takes a wild sort of delight in stormy aspects of the sea,” as Dyboski and Arend observe, suggesting that “he must many a time have observed them from his town of Calais.” The poet’s imaginative explication of a naval battle in the latter parts of the poem — a sequence that spurred MacCracken to comment “Here is someone, in that barren age, who knows what he is about” — likewise seems to point to a life lived in close proximity to the sea. Unfortunately, not enough is known about our possible authors to utilize this awareness to help us identify more positively the poet at work.

On balance, the identification of the author cannot be made with complete certainty, but there is little to Neele’s claim that Parker cannot match or better. One must admit that it is a highly remarkable coincidence that Robert Parker was close to the king, was a parson of Calais prior to its Yorkist takeover, and was named to an appropriate commission within a day of his formal presentation of the poem. It is also noteworthy to observe that in that commission Parker and his fellows were specifically tasked with ordinance including bombards, cannons, culverins, and serpentines. These relatively new-for-the-time artillery pieces make appearances in two memorable sequences in Of Knyghthode and Bataile:

Al this aray, and bumbardys thei cary,bombardsAnd gunne and serpentyn that wil not vary,[a] gun and serpentineFouler, covey, crappaude, and colveryneAnd other soortis moo then VIII or IXne.. . .The canonys, the bumbard, and the gunne,cannons; bombard; gunThei bloweth out the voys and stonys grete,sound and large stonesThorgh maste and side and other be thei runne.mast; hullIn goth the serpentyne aftir his mete.serpentine; targetThe colveryne is besy forto getecoulovrineAn hole into the top. And the crappaudetop [of the ship]; crapaudeauWil in. The fouler eek wil have his laude.veuglaire also; praise(lines 1849–52, 2854–60)

Indeed, these citations, and the royal commission that came the day after its presentation, are some of the earliest citations of several of these gunpowder weapons in English.

So what was the text that Robert Parker — or John Neele, or perhaps someone else entirely — handed over to King Henry VI?

Vegetius

Sometime in the late fourth century or early fifth century, a Christian writer named Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus — commonly and hereafter called Vegetius — wrote a treatise on how to reform the declining Roman army into the more potent force that it had been in earlier days. Scholars continue to debate the degree to which his work, De re militari [Of Military Matters], accurately reflects the Roman military experience in either his own or an earlier time, especially considering its heavy dependence on earlier literature, yet what is beyond dispute is the enormity of its influence in later centuries. Vegetius’s book is the most influential military treatise across the entirety of the Middle Ages: it was copied and recopied throughout the period and survives in nearly two-hundred manuscripts in its original Latin version alone.

Through translation and paraphrase, Vegetius found additional life in the vulgar languages of Europe, passing through the hands of writers as well known as Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan, and Niccolò Machiavelli. The first translation into English was a 1408 prose translation, apparently by John Walton. Among its eleven surviving manuscripts is an ornate copy made for King Richard III.

The second Vegetius in English is the work here edited, in which our parson from Calais was determined to adapt this important text into Middle English poetry for King Henry VI. For its early date and historical context alone, it is noteworthy. As Julia Boffey writes: “whatever its origins, the rendering into English of a treatise about ‘euery feat of werre’ by a one-time inhabitant of a town whose role throughout the fifteenth century was crucial in hostilities relating to trade and to both domestic and foreign politics is not without its significance.”

Despite containing many words and turns of phrase that bear French influence, Of Knyghthode and Bataile appears to be adapted from a particular family of the Latin Vegetius. A thorough comparison of its peculiarities with the Middle English prose translation (1408), the Anglo-Norman translation (1271–72), the French translations by Jean de Meun (1284), Jean Priorat (1284–90), and Jean de Vignay (ca. 1315–20), as well as two anonymous French translations (ca. 1280 and 1380) reveals no intermediary source between the Latin Vegetius and our Middle English poem. It is, of course, possible that the source is another French version that has yet to be identified, though Wakelin has observed a close affinity between the writer’s composition and its Latin source: “this poem conjures the tone of Latin by using a tortuous grammar, with ablative absolutes and gerundives, and a sesquipedalian phraseology. The vocabulary is even more Latin than the Latin is, with some long words used in English when no like words occur in the original.” In sum, our poet freely adapts his source material, sometimes going through it at great speed and with little elaboration. When his source discusses material that surely appeared irrelevant to fifteenth-century practice, such as camels, elephants, and scythed chariots (Veg. 3.23–24), he simply skips over it. In several instances he adds details here and there, or adds entirely new material. Only a few sections receive a great deal of attention and elaboration, most notably Vegetius’s treatment of ships and naval warfare (lines 2609–2972), which Dyboski and Arend, rather colorfully, chalk up to the poet having been “a trueborn Englishman.”

One of the more important questions to ask about a manual for chivalry and war is how it might have affected the conduct of war. It has been argued by Bernard S. Bachrach, among others, that Vegetius had a practical influence throughout the Middle Ages because narratives describe military leaders following the precepts of his manual. To demonstrate this, he considers only writers who appear to be unaware of Vegetius and narrate war without any rhetorical embellishment, then shows that their descriptions of warfare, strategy, and tactics clearly follow the precepts of Roman manuals. Bachrach claims that military leaders, in line with manuals, attacked only if battle was inevitable, harassed superior forces rather than confront them directly, used surprise, held reserves, positioned their forces so that the enemy faced the sun, held fortifications along lines of supply and communication, used fortifications to deter invasion, and took good care of their horses. Although scholars have identified some “pocket-sized” manuscripts of Vegetius that might be carried on campaign, it is clear that these are merely smaller copies of the text that were meant for use in libraries and not in the field. Until the mid-fourteenth century Vegetius’s manual was almost exclusively owned by monks and other religious figures. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the text became more popular with secular owners, especially French military leaders, in a period that witnessed the production of many of the vernacular translations. However, it remains uncertain whether military leaders actually read or used these books at all. The nobility collected large libraries that included such manuals, but in many cases they appear to have used their books only to demonstrate their own military prudence and patronage of mankind’s collected wisdom.

It is tempting to imagine military leaders in the Middle Ages making practical use of military manuals. It would allow the often fragmentary, contradictory, and confusing representations of war to be filtered out by comparison. Manuals would answer many of the fundamental questions that recorded sources overlook and reveal how medieval military men approached the problems of war, and so help us to arrive at a clearer understanding of the period. It is evident, however, that those who described war in their narratives did not transparently represent leaders fighting according to Vegetius, but themselves often turned to Vegetius so that they could better write accounts of war. As John Keegan succinctly notes,

Battles are extremely confusing; and confronted with the need to make sense of something he does not understand, even the cleverest, indeed pre-eminently the cleverest man, realizing his need for a language and metaphor he does not possess, will turn to look at what someone else has already made of a similar set of events as a guide for his own pen.

Since these Roman texts were viewed as authorities, medieval writers employ them to appear well read, lend authority to their writings, and make the military leaders they describe look all the better. However, writers rarely demonstrate their reading of these texts through direct quotation or cited paraphrase, but instead use them in a broader sense to understand warfare. Correlation between Roman precepts and medieval descriptions of war proves only that medieval writers, not military leaders, had read and accepted such ideas. Indeed, chroniclers portray Henry VI as reading Vegetius so that he could appear to be a wise and thoughtful military leader. These manuals offer little in the way of detailed or specialized advice that might be applicable on the medieval battlefield, but rather only “common sense.” In the end, even if the text was not used in a literal sense by English military leaders, it still found importance amongst readers in the period, many of whom were clearly military men, if at least as a codification of the ideals they already held.

But what of our Middle English version of Vegetius? There is more at work in Of Knyghthode and Bataile than a simple Middle English translation of Vegetius. The parson’s 3,028-line poem was, as the broad political context discussed already implies, deeply connected with its time. As Christopher Allmand observes, the poet’s goal seems hardly focused on the accuracy of his translation at all; instead, “his method was more to emphasise certain themes running through Vegetius’s work which might be used to build the foundations of a message, social and political as much as military, which would turn his version of De re militari into a committed text bearing upon contemporary problems in English society.” In this sense, Wakelin writes, though it is “a brilliant verse translation,” it should be judged more precisely in terms of a paraphrase: the poet “intersperses Vegetius’ dry technical advice with bombastic eulogies of political obedience, and paraphrases much military instruction into mischievous allegories of the possible fate of the king’s enemies, the supporters of the Duke of York.”

In other areas the text reveals much about the time of transition in which it was composed. In several instances the writer discusses newer technology, most notably gunpowder weapons (such as at lines 1850–51: “gunne and serpentyn that wil not vary, / Fouler, covey, crappaude, and colveryne”), which were used in Europe by 1327 and were becoming more and more important by the mid-fifteenth century. These instances help to illustrate the great variety in gunpowder weapons at this important stage in their development. The poet adds these and other details to bring his text’s presentation of warfare up to date to ensure that its readers found it valuable and relevant, rather than just a series of antiquary details.

On the other hand, throughout the text the poet is fairly imprecise with his handling of many of Vegetius’s Latin terms. Most notable of these is miles, which in classical Latin meant a professional soldier. The word was notoriously slippery throughout the later Middle Ages and, although commonly translated today as “knight,” it might refer to a man’s military function, equipment, training, experience, or high social status in contrast to other men. Our writer variously translates the word as “chivaler,” “knyght,” and “werreour,” and it is not at all clear what sort of the above-mentioned meanings he might have been aiming for in any given situation, let alone as a whole. Is the poet trying to suggest that knights were meant to be mounted by employing the French term “chivaler,” with its equine connotations, or that other combatants were not necessarily of the knightly class by using “werreour”? Indeed, the Latin term bellator (meaning “warrior” or “fighter”) is variously translated as “chivaler,” “bellatour,” and “werreour,” with no suggestion that these were distinct from “werreour” as translated from miles. The difficulty in terminology is clearly expressed in the following passage (lines 1209–15):

The chivaler, be he legionary,knight, whether he [is a] legionnaireAs seide it is beforn, on hors or foote,Or aydaunt, that is auxiliary,On hors or foot — if that thei talk or motediscussOf werre, and reyse roore, up by the rootewar, and raise riotHit shal be pulde with myghti exercisepulledOf werreourys, governed in this wise.

Here we see a “chivaler,” which may or may not also be a “legionary,” either on horseback or on foot, in opposition to an “aydaunt” (auxiliary), either on horseback or on foot, and then “werreourys,” seemingly employed in a more general sense for all combatants. In most cases it is not clear whether he employs different translations to signify different types of men, or merely to fit the meter or rhyme. Allmand succinctly notes that “There appears to have been little attempt at consistency here. Was there ever intended to be such? Are we too ‘modern’ in expecting it? Probably so.”

In other cases, the direct senses of the Latin words are more clearly translated for their inherent functions. The Latin pedites (meaning those on foot) is translated straightforwardly as “footmen” or “men on foote.” Equites (meaning those on horseback) is translated as “hors” (similar to the Napoleonic “horse” for cavalry), “horsemen,” and “ryderys.” These two ideas, in their varied translations, were often set in direct contrast with each other, and so shows that the poet viewed them as words meant to convey modes of fighting, rather than anything related to quality or equipment. But such cases of clear meaning in the poem are rare when it comes to combatants.

The often fluid understanding of these terms for military men further reflects the ever changing makeup of armies in this period, when the use of the heavily armored combatant, often of the knightly class, had diminishing importance in the face of increasing reliance on missile weapons (gunpowder or otherwise). Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the proportion of men-at-arms to archers steadily declined in English forces. Men-at-arms were generally from landed families, but were not necessarily of the knightly class. Indeed, fewer and fewer knights opted to fulfill their service when called. The poet, unlike his source, focuses on the importance of noble birth (for example at lines 271–77), although he does not use “knyght” to consistently signal higher social status. This reflects the late-medieval debates on whether nobility, and thus meritorious status, was gained from birth or earned through conduct. Archers were generally from the lower stratas of society, although they were on occasion members of gentry families, despite the poem’s suggestion that they were drawn from the same pool of men as knights (lines 432–34). Armies also included more specialists, especially to man gunpowder weapons, which saw increasing use throughout the fifteenth century.

The poem’s attention to other areas reveals much else about the poet’s concerns. The focus on discipline, logistics, and the importance of paying one’s military men (such as at lines 278–80, 397–99, 483, 603–06, and 796–98), is part of a larger dialogue in English writings in this period after the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) that attempts to understand why the English were defeated. This focus might have been influenced by the poet’s experiences in Calais, where the members of the garrison were particularly fickle when it came to their pay. Other details on kingship and leadership found throughout suggest an anxiety over the instability that England was suffering. The omission of some details, notably all mention of retreat, along with a considerable shift in tone and style, with battles “written in high imaginative excitement,” all reveal a far more “chivalrous” interpretation of war. Although the French versions of Vegetius typically include the word “chivalry” in the title and their discussions, they rarely discuss the ideals of knighthood and knights, and instead mostly present sober translations.

Manuscript History and Provenance

Of Knyghthode and Bataile is indexed as item 3185 in ed. Boffey and Edwards, New Index of Middle English Verse, and it survives in four known copies:

  • MS: Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 243, fols. 1r–55v. [Base-text for this edition.]
  • A: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 45 (Part 2), fols. 1r–7v, 18r–23v, 41r–43v, 46r–53v.
  • C: London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A.xxiii, fols. 2r–53v.
  • R: London, College of Arms, MS R.25, fols. 24r–62v. [This text not in NIMEV.]

The text is transmitted fairly accurately in MS, A, and C, although there are some changes in A and C, and many more in R. None of the four copies appear to have been originally bound with any other material, although A and R have since been rebound with other texts.

MS is an octavo volume with vellum pages of 241 x 166 mm, with the writing occupying 164 x 95 mm of space, that has post-medieval binding. It is written in Secretary with some Anglicana forms in a hand of the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The first letters of some words, especially at line beginnings, are rubricated, and certain other words are written entirely in red ink. The first letter of each of the proems and the books are many lines in height and heavily decorated, typically with red and blue ink. The volume is probably not an autograph copy, although it is the earliest of the four texts, as it includes praise of Henry VI on several occasions and does not have the many changes found in the later manuscripts. In its early years it may have been owned by the family of William and Ralph Hastings. Its text is described in greater detail below.

C, written in a hand contemporary to that of MS, was first owned by one Edward Hatcliff, whose name is inscribed on fols. 56v and 57r. It must have been written after July 10, 1460, when John Beaumont was killed and Henry VI was captured at the battle of Northampton, because it suppresses all mention of Henry VI in a positive light, notably by omitting both the general proem (lines 1–88) and the proem to Part III (lines 978–1026), while also replacing Henry VI’s name with Edward IV’s at lines 121 and 2880, and significantly changing the meaning of lines 2982–85 to fit a different ideal of war. It omits the Latin passages at the beginning of Parts II and IV (before lines 621 and 2224), possibly because the other two Latin passages were then absent when the general proem and proem to Part III, which they were within, had been removed. C also includes glosses above some peculiar or imprecise terminology, mostly in English but also occasionally in Latin, and an alphabetical index (fols. 54r–56v), rare for Middle English texts. Such glosses of military vocabulary were often added by English humanists to classical writings, in both their original and translated forms. As Wakelin has demonstrated, these changes to the text were in the exemplar that C was copied from.

A was itself copied from C not long after it was written. The two texts are very close throughout, with essentially the same glosses and index (fols. 54r–56v), and are even in very similar hands, although a full comparison is impossible due to the many leaves that have been lost from A over the centuries. (This loss had begun by the late fifteenth century at the latest, as fols. 15–16 were evidently missing by then, when R was written.) The changes related to Henry VI and Edward IV are all present (lines 121, 2880, and 2982–85, and the original foliation of the MS indicates that lines 1–88 and 978–1026 were omitted following C), and the Latin passages are likewise absent.

R was possibly owned early on by somebody named “John,” as the name is written on fols. 30v and 34v. It was written in the late fifteenth century and follows C and A in replacing praise of Henry VI with Edward IV, omitting the two sections of the text that were in favor of the Lancastrian king, and reordering phrases in many other instances. A word-by-word comparison of R with MS, A, and C indicates that R was copied from A or a text very close to it. Setting aside spelling, C has six differences from our base text that are not followed by A or R:

  • Line 140has in in place of and
  • Line 1321adds joo jo before journal (uncancelled dittography)
  • Line 1341has of in place of second and
  • Line 1428adds is before is (uncancelled dittography)
  • Line 2674omits tan
  • Line 2925omits to make

In each of these cases R follows not C, but A, which has silently corrected these changes. In three other instances R follows the visible corrections that the scribe of A made to his text after copying it from C:

  • Line 2322C has sadde in place of saddest, while A has sadde with st added in afterwards to make saddest
  • Line 2422C has hevy in place of every, while A has hevy with the h scraped and an er abbreviation added afterwards to make every
  • Line 2988C omits that, while A has this in place of that

In only one case does R follow C against A (at line 1194 they omit tech), but this is certainly because the scribe accidentally passed over A’s reinsertion of the missing word in superscript. Indeed, the scribe of R was not as careful as those of C and A, and has many further changes to the wording and word order of his text throughout. Some of the more peculiar alterations are due to his misreading of his source manuscript, such as bataile for vitaile twice (lines 1066 and 1481), oragge for cragge (line 2250), soon for foon (line 1784), with for wight (line 1832), and an unabbreviated the for ye ten times because of his confusion between his source’s formation of þ (for th) and y (lines 401, 1161, 1162, 1430, 1572, 1948, 2511, 2822, 2844, and 2976). The most egregious instance of his mangling of the text is when he wrote the first two words of line 2491 but then, due to eye skip, filled out the line with line 2492 from the second word onwards. He noticed his error almost immediately and attempted to fix it by cancelling the first two words of line 2491, replacing them with the first word of line 2492 in superscript, and then adding in line 2491 in full after line 2494, where it creates a peculiarly ordered rhyme scheme (aabbbcc). At other times he skips over individual lines (465 and 1114) and once an entire stanza (607–13), seemingly by accident. Besides these lines and those omitted from A and its source, C, he omits sixteen consecutive stanzas (lines 866–977), which are equivalent to two leaves that were originally in, but are now missing from A (fols. 15–16). R has many other changes to its text throughout, although the substance is much the same.

MS employs a consistently structured layout. For many of the stanzas it includes short Latin summaries, many of which appear to be taken from the Latin Vegetius. Its general proem (lines 1–88) is in eightline stanzas of ababbcbc, with the final rhyme of each stanza rhyming with the first of the following stanza. The rest of the text is in seven-line stanzas of ababbcc (rhyme royal), although the proems to Parts II, III, and IV (lines 621–41, 978–1026, and 2224–44) also have the final rhymes of each of their stanzas rhyming with the first of those that follow, just like the general proem. Aside from the proems, the text is arranged with eight stanzas to each leaf, with four to a side, lettered A–D on the rectos and E–H on the versos. The manuscript’s main text, omitting the general proem, was foliated when it was originally written, although early in the manuscript’s history it was rebound so that several of its bifolia are now ordered incorrectly.

At the conclusion of his poem, the poet asks copiers to respect the text: “Thi writer eek, pray him to taken hede / Of thi cadence and kepe ortographie, / That neither he take of ner multiplye” (lines 3026–28), which clearly influenced the C and A scribes, as they closely follow the text (often preserving peculiar spellings) and its layout. C was originally foliated in exactly the same manner as MS, but skips folio 17 in its foliation because the manuscript from which the scribe was copying was missing this leaf (lines 978–1026, at the modern foliation of fol. 19 in MS, originally fol. 17), certainly because its text here was strongly in favor of Henry VI. A, copied from C, has the same layout and retains its original foliation, although many of its leaves are now missing (fols. 8–17, 24–40, and 44–45, the equivalent of lines 481–1026, 1363–2300, and 2469–2580). In many instances a different hand has corrected its text against another that is very close to MS. The text’s layout, with folio numbering and stanza lettering, enabled the reader to quickly identify and reference the section they were examining, and allowed for precise references to be included in the indices at the end of C and A. The layout, along with the glossing and attention to detail, suggests that the text was meant to be read and extensively used. This consistency in layout and a conscious attempt to preserve the text reveals the humanist influences on the writer and these scribes. The R scribe, in contrast, largely ignored the original layout of the text. He added an additional stanza per page, making ten per leaf, and omitted the rest of the apparatus in his source, including the glosses, stanza lettering, and index.

Editorial Practice

MS is used as the base text for this edition because it offers the earliest and fullest version of the text. Major variants in A, C, and R are included in the Textual Notes, but minor differences, such as spelling, are omitted. The text has been corrected in the few instances where there are clear errors, with each case detailed in the Textual Notes. We note textual deletions with struck-through text in the Textual Notes, but make no distinction between different types of deletion. In instances where the hands are rather ambiguous we have marked our uncertainty with question marks (?). As mentioned above, there are marginalia and glosses in the manuscripts, but because these are typically repetitions of the text’s meaning they have been silently omitted. In a few instances in which these help to understand the meaning of the text, especially for its peculiar terminology, they are cited and discussed in our notes. In our marginal glosses we have tried to retain the peculiarities of the poet’s terminology, regardless of the original Latin words that he translates from, and we provide different glosses for each term whenever applicable. This has helped us to avoid implying any sort of additional professionalism that did not yet exist in the period, as would have been suggested by using the simplified terms of “soldier,” “infantry,” or “cavalry.”

The earlier edition of the text has many issues that merit this new edition, no small number of which result from its troubled production history. Roman Dyboski, the initial editor, began work on his edition in 1906. He soon transcribed the three texts that he knew of, and made progress in other areas, but did not have the luxury of being able to easily revisit (let alone photograph!) his manuscripts to double-check aspects of them that he may have mis-transcribed or been otherwise unsure about. His pace was slowed by national events, notably his participation in the First World War and his subsequent seven years in Russian incarceration. Some time after he regained his freedom he took on his colleague, Zygfryd Marjan Arend, as a co-editor, and together they finished the volume in 1935. The sporadic work on their edition encouraged much inconsistency and unevenness in the treatment of the text and the varied subjects discussed in the volume. Besides their focus on the text’s language, their major concern in examining the text was to see how it related to the Latin Vegetius. They did not properly treat it as a text with its own cultural, intellectual, literary, and historical contexts. The aim of the present edition of Knyghthode and Bataile is to provide both a more accurate text and a more contextualizing apparatus to aid the reader.

We have also endeavored to follow the base manuscript more closely whenever possible. Here, for instance, is our text, lines 1657–63 of the poem, in a transcription from the base manuscript (fol. 31r), followed by the edited text in both the Early English Texts Society edition of Dyboski and Arend and the present edition. The transcription:

At brigge or hard passage or hillis broweIs good to falle vppon · Or if ther bemire or mareys · or woode or grovis roweor aggravaunt other difficultee,To falle uppon is thenne utiliteeThe hors to sech · Vnarmed ar aslepe /To falle vppon is good to take kepe ·

Dyboski and Arend:

At brigge or hard passage, or hillis browe,Is good to falle vppon; or if ther beMire or mareys or woode or grovis roweOr aggravaunt other difficultee,To falle vppon is thenne utilitee;The hors to sech vnarmed or aslepeTo falle vppon is good to take kepe.

Present edition:

At brigge or hard passage or hillis broweIs good to falle uppon. Or if ther beMire or mareys, or woode or grovis roweOr aggravaunt other difficultee,To falle uppon is thenne utiliteeThe hors to sech. Unarmed ar aslepe;To falle uppon is good to take kepe.

The reader will note small punctuation differences in the initial lines, where the present edition attempts to follow the MS indicators more closely. The most significant differences, however, occur in line 1662, where the misreading by Dyboski and Arend of MS ar as or (underscored above) reverberates across the MS punctuation: in search of a verb, the editors are forced to ignore both the mid-line punctus and end-line virgule in that line. Their result, for which they provide little rationale, garbles the meaning of the line whether compared to the poet’s apparent intent or his source in Vegetius.

As a more complicated and fascinating example, here are lines 2980–86 of the poem, first in transcription (fol. 55r):

Hail porte saluz · with thi pleasaunt accesseAlhail Caleis · Ther wolde I faynest londeThat may not Ioo · Whi so · For thei distressealle / or to deye / or with her wrong to stondeThat wil I not to wynne al EngelondeWhat myght availe · A litil heer to dwelle /And world withouten ende abide in helle ·

Dyboski and Arend:

Hail, porte saluz! with thi pleasaunt accesse,Alhail Caleis! ther wolde I faynest londe;That may not I [—] oo, whi so? for thei distresseAlle, or to deye or with her wrong to stonde.That wil I not, to wynnne al Engelonde!What myght availe, a litil heer to dwelle,And world withouten ende abide in helle.

Present edition:

Hail, porte saluz! With thi pleasaunt accesse,Al hail Caleis! Ther wolde I faynest londe.That may not Joon! Whi so? For thei distresseAlle, or to deye, or with her wrong to stonde.That wil I not to wynne al Engelonde!What myght availe? A litil heer to dwelle,And world withouten ende abide in Helle!

Again, there are minor changes of punctuation scattered through the passage, but the reading of line 2982 (underscored) calls out for particular attention. The base manuscript records a clear Ioo or Joo (medieval I and J being interchangeable), but no reading of Ioo/Joo seems to withstand scrutiny within the context of the line. To remedy the situation, Dyboski and Arend suggest that these are two words. Though the scribes in these manuscripts do have a general, if not perfect, respect for the spaces between words, adding such a space is not a wholly unacceptable emendation on its own, just as it is in adding a space between the words Al and hail in the previous line. However, Dyboski and Arend further add an intervening mark of punctuation via an em-dash that, while bracketed in their text, is inexplicably labeled as being “in MS” within their footnotes. As the transcription above shows, there is no punctuation between the three closely aligned letters. Nevertheless, the editorial invention of Dyboski and Arend has subsequently led critics down a rabbit hole of creative readings. Wakelin, for instance, appears to have taken their em-dash as a purposeful omission, such that he suggests a far different punctuation — That may not I . . . oo, whi so? — and thereby wonders if this odd line “deliberately omits the poet’s name.”

Examination of the other three manuscripts only complicates the situation, as this stanza has been heavily altered in all of them, as seen in a transcription of C (which is closely followed by both A and R):

Hayle poort saluz with thy plesaunt accesseal hail Caleys · There wold I fayne o londeThat maynot Ioo · whiso · for they distressealle or to deye / or with here werke to stondeThat dar to right go wynne alle Engelondewhat myght availe a lite in errour dwelle /and world withouten ende abide in helle

These changes are no doubt related to the previously discussed shift in the political history surrounding the text. The original, Lancastrian text, was written at a time when Calais was in the possession of the rival Yorkists. Thus the poet in this stanza complains that he is exiled from Calais, which is in the hands of those (i.e., the Yorkists) who would either kill him or make him stand with their wrong (i.e., their rebellion). He insists he would not help this enemy even if it personally earned him possession of all England, because the result would only be a temporary victory: life in this world is finite, and such a betrayal would earn him an eternity in Hell. Such an anti-Yorkist stance was no longer suitable with the Yorkists in control of both England and Calais. The Yorkist revisor of the poem thus had to do something with the stanza, and his revisions may have been led by the original MS Ioo/Joo. Facing the same uncertainty as modern editors in determining its meaning, he seems to have read Joo as meaning ‘Jew’. This reading replaces the Yorkist rebels with Jews, who by law could not be in Calais. Further, the text would then suggest that the Jews would be unwelcome regardless, as they would either kill the citizenry or forcibly convert them to the werke of their faith, which would attempt to seize all England. These Jews will live here in error (i.e., sin) and then earn an eternity in Hell.

If an anti-Semitic reading is possible within the subsequent texts, could it be original to the poem? Abrupt though this turn to anti-Semitism would be, it would not be wholly impossible from the self-described parson who throughout Of Knyghthode and Bataile is quick to condemn his enemies to torment and had, in the previous stanza, praised the Virgin Mary. Still, it seems highly improbable given the consistent anti-Yorkist positions in the text and how well a simple political reading fits within the context of the poem here — the next stanza looks forward to a time when the king would regain governance of Calais — and elsewhere. What, then, is the editor to do with MS Ioo/Joo? The suggestion here is that the confusion is the result of a scribal omission of a macron (the scribe makes a similar mistake in writing oo for oon in line 2403). MS Joo would then be read as Joon, an odd spelling for the name John. While it would be tempting to read this name as that of the poet himself, John frequently stands as a generic reference to a priest or man in the Middle Ages (as it remains today in “John Doe”). Rather than signing the poem or intending to engage in anti-Semitism, the poet would simply be noting that a fellow like him cannot go to Calais . . . which was precisely the case.

In sum, separation between this edition and its forebear are numerous. Beyond differences in the reading of the manuscript and the related editorial punctuation of its lines, this edition takes a more compassionate look at the poet and his work. The previous editors, for example, often dismiss the poet as mistaken in his understanding of Vegetius, both “untechnical” and “clumsy” (see, e.g., our Explanatory Notes to lines 1734–40, 1748–49, and 2968), when they themselves appear to be in error. There is little doubt that the compound effect of these judgments has negatively impacted our ability to understand and appreciate this text. We hope that this present edition is therefore more sensitive to Of Knyghthode and Bataile’s craft, and more respectful of its poet’s contemporary reading of Vegetius.