morillo cowardice

8/7/2019 Morillo Cowardice

1/9

Expecting Cowardice

5

Expecting Cowardice:

Medieval Battle Tactics Reconsidered

Stephen Morillo

For no man ever proves himself a good man in warunless he can endure to face the blood and the slaughter,go close against the enemy and fight with his hands.Here is courage, mankinds 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 toLeave 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 Razos command; their nocturnal arrival remained unknown tothe Welsh, who were camped some distance away. The account continues:

1 Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1960), pp. 1415.2 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. 9395. I would like to thank Rob Babcock for bringing my atten-

tion to the account of this minor but interesting battle in the Brut.


2/9

The following day, Gruffudd ap Rhys and Rhydderch ap Tewdwr, his uncle, andMaredudd 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, apparentlyspending much of the day in somewhat haphazard preparations for assaultingthe castle. A river ran through the valley, crossed by a single bridge. The Brutgoes 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 theWelsh 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 bridgethen 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 Razos force.

These men counter-attacked the scattered Welsh, aided by the archers who nowturned to meet their pursuers, and bore down upon the troop in front and killedas 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 menwith 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 YstradAntarron forms an interesting point of entry for a re-examination of medievaltactics with a focus on the role played by cowardice, both actual displays of

cowardly behavior and more importantly the multivalent expectations ofcowardice 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 ofdeath. 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 fornow, suicide was rare and religion just as rarely led men actively to seek death.4

66 Stephen Morillo

4 On suicide, see S. Morillo, Cultures of Death: Warrior Suicide in Europe and Japan, The

Medieval History Journal4, 2 (2001), 24157. I shall deal with religion more below.


3/9

Thus, on hearing of the approach of the rebel forces and their slaughter of thegarrison at Ystrad Peithyll, Razo is said to be trembling with fear. Now fear ofdeath 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, actionscharacterizable in general as potentially beneficial to the individual but detri-

mental to the group. For the rational response of an individual to imminentdanger, 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 ofdeath or to stifle, redirect, or make impractical the natural flight response to

danger among their soldiers.6 In fact, the construction of notions of cowardiceand the shame that inevitably attended it are one communal, cultural response to

this problem of mutual cooperation in war. But a variety of more specificmeasures ranging from the material to the moral regularly reinforce the general

Idea of Cowardice as safeguards against individual safety-seeking at theexpense 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 thosedangers other than flight, and perhaps above all bonding them into groups

whose mutual experience causes them to value their companions lives as highlyas their own.7 Closely related to training and experience is discipline, which

acts both to suppress emotional responses generally and to enhance the controla commander can exert over his troops.8 It is telling that the Bruts description

Expecting Cowardice 67

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 andThe Return of the King, the

second and third of the Lord of the Rings movies. It worked by programming rational

responses into individual virtual f ighters called agents, then massively replicating such fighters

and letting them interact under their own initiative. When Massive was first t ested 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 f ight

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, whereS. L. A. Marshalls 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,


4/9

of the rebel force emphasizes its indiscipline. They arise incautiously, fail toarray their forces in an orderly way with flags for groups to rally around,9 andproceed through the countryside thoughtlessly. This is an army setting itselfup for a breakdown of discipline, and therefore for excessive individualism and

its potential for f light. This is, in other words, an army whose commanders havea rashly diminished expectation of cowardice for their own troops and have as a

result taken inadequate countermeasures against its appearance. Razo, bycontrast, though trembling with fear, uses his own fear productively in sending

for reinforcements and (judging by the results) formulating a tactical plandesigned to take advantage of the rebels rashness. Reading more into theevidence 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, andthat 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 ones own troops. Common tactical expedients includeforming an army up in deep, dense formations depth and density, though theyincrease vulnerability to missile fire, impart some of the psychological and

statistical security that causes herding in animals, as well as making the most ofthe group bonds created by training and putting the best, and best-equipped,

warriors in the front line of such formations. Both techniques were used byHenry I and his brother Robert Curthose at Tinchebrai, for example.10

68 Stephen Morillo

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 Rgime 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, 196972), 6:8890; Priest of Fcamps letter, English

Historical Review 25 (1910), p. 296. A number of other countermeasures against the expected

cowardice of ones 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 (seeJ. R. E. Bliese, Rhetoric and Morale: a Study of Battle Orations from the Central Middle

Ages, Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 20126, and numerous other studies by the same

author). Among such reasons, defense of religion often f igured 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.300c.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,


5/9

Expectations of cowardice in the enemy force also influenced tactics. TheWelsh clearly expected cowardly behavior from the French, as the Brutcallsthe Anglo-Normans: they are almost insulted at the bold advance of the castlesarchers, wondering why they should venture so confidently to approach the

bridge. And with the benefit of hindsight, the chronicle attributes this to theFrench 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 onenemy 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 troopsto think of themselves as braver than their naturally cowardly foes. Classical

generals sometimes intimidated opposing forces even before battle began byordering a series of precise, drilled formation changes in the enemys face: they

served no tactical purpose, but demonstrated to their own troops and to theenemy their superior levels of training, experience, and by extension bravery. 11

Medieval armies lacked the capacity for such displays, as they did not practicedrill in large formations, lacking the money and administrative infrastructure togather and train troops (usually infantry) in such maneuvers. But they some-

times deployed the heroic equivalent in the form of an individual riding outbefore an army and performing flashy feats of arms.12 Conspicuous displays

claimed, in effect, our heroism is better than yours, as conspicuous displays ofpiety 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 motivatedby such considerations, though in the event he had the bad luck to have his horsekilled quickly under him, followed by the good luck that his discomfiture and

rescue made the subsequent feigned flight of the archers, accompanied by hisreal flight, all the more convincing.

The feigned flight shows perhaps the most interesting intersection betweencowardice 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. 11416. 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 inresponse to the commanders 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. 9899. Alexander once intimidated

rebellious Illyrian tribesmen with a display of his phalanxes drill: Robin Lane Fox, Alexander

the Great(London, 1974), p. 78.


6/9

flight depends, in other words, on the believability of the apparent cowardice ondisplay. Obviously, the circumstances at Ystrad Antarron were made for thisdeception. The Welsh, fresh off a victory and the slaughter of one garrison, wereoverconfident rash, incautious, and inadequately prepared against the poten-

tial cowardice of their own troops, as already noted. They also seemed to holdtheir 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 beused by an army that had opened the battle with a convincing display throughdrilled maneuver of their own superior training and bravery, as the psycholog-

ical signals the two techniques sent were mutually contradictory. Of course, ifthe 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 thebattle even began. Second, and more commonly, feigned flight lost its effective-

ness with repeated use against either the same troops or against a foe withenough institutional memory to build safeguards into its training of soldiers andeducation of commanders. Roman and Byzantine military manuals warned

against incautious pursuit of certain foes who were known to employ thefeigned flight, for example, and Crusaders learned to curb their impulse to

pursue fleeing Turks after they discovered, to their cost, that the apparentcowardice 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 guardagainst 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 ofbattles, for eventually, in most battles, one side ran. Cultural idealizations of

heroic or brave behavior might extol the principle of dying with ones lord andfighting to the last man, as in the Song of Maldon,14but actual examples of such

stands to the death are quite rare, especially if we exclude cases where trappeddefenders had no escape route. Ironically, given the self-protective rationalebuilt 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 thansomeone armed and actively meeting attacks. Thus, when armies ran, they did

so not, usually, because their casualties had already mounted to unbearableproportions of their force, but because the mass of the army came to think that

70 Stephen Morillo

12 One well-known example is the tale of Taillefer, a Norman who opened the Battle of Hastingswith songs of Roland and feats of arms, at least according to Wace, Roman de Rou, trans.

E. Taylor (London, 1837), pp. 18990.13 For Romans, see, e.g., Arrian, Array against the Alans, sections 2530, discussed in

M. Pavkovic, A note on Arrians Ektaxis kata Alanon, Ancient History Bulletin 2.1 (1988),

2123. On Crusaders, see R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 10971193 (Cambridge, 1956), pp.

15688.14 The Battle of Maldon, ed. and t rans. Bill Griffiths (Norfolk, 1991), pp. 4852, lines 202325.


7/9

they would.15 Battle crises were thus matters of perception as much as reality.The near f light of the Normans early in the day at Hastings and their rallying byWilliam, who had to remove his helmet and ride up and down the lines to haltthe flight, with subordinates beating on their own men to stop them in their

tracks, illustrates this nicely.16 Measured against cultural norms, psychologicalcrises in battle were episodes of mass cowardice.

Commanders knew this, and common tactics aimed at inducing panic andcowardice. Attacks on an enemys leader threatened to unhinge an armys

psychological composure at its lynchpin: the leaders death or flight could bedecisive, as the Normans nearly demonstrated at Hastings, and as the Saxonsshowed later in the day after Harolds death, though their f light at that point can

hardly be called cowardly.17 Attacks on an armys flank and rear aimed atdisrupting the psychological zone of security created by deep, dense formations.

Helias of la Fleches flank attack on Robert Curthoses army at Tinchebrai hadexactly this effect, and worked first not on Roberts infantry column, but on

Roberts cavalry unit held in reserve behind the line, led by Robert of Bellme. 18

Note that cavalry can flee more easily than infantry, one reason commanderssometimes dismounted troops whose bravery or commitment was in question.

King Stephens dismounted knights fought to the end at Lincoln; those whoremained mounted fled early, contributing to the kings defeat.19 The widely

recognized lower resistance of mounted men to cowardice contributed, as muchas cavalrys 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 offootsoldiers carrying out the tactic.20 Finally, many battle-avoiding orbattle-delaying tactics were effective in the war of nerves armies always played.

Waiting itself was mentally tiring to the side without the initiative, but moreimportantly cutting an enemy off from food or water or harassing them without

engaging directly could induce fatigue, lowering defenses against fear and soraising the likelihood of cowardly behavior when battle did ensue.

In short, expectations of cowardice in ones own troops, in enemy troops,and in enemy troops about ones own troops pervaded preparations for combat


15 Keegan, Face of Battle, pp. 1045, 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. 12831.17 WP, pp. 13641.

18 OV 6:8890.19 OV 6:542; John of Hexham, in Symoneis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols.

(London, 188285), 2:284333, at 3078.20 The equivalent tactic for infantry is more often the planned, f ighting 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. 2325, 6566.


8/9

and the tactical conduct of battles in medieval warfare. The prevalence ofCultures of Bravery is, in this light, an unsurprising response to a pervasiveproblem.

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-facecombat with melee weapons. For others, such tactics were signs of cleverness

bravery and manliness having been constructed more around whether one won abattle than how one fought it. Similar divisions separated warrior classes who

disdained the use of long-range weapons, especially the bow, and those forwhom 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 thatdifferent constructions of bravery and cowardice met in battle, may well have

raised the psychological stakes involved in expectations of cowardice in waysthat 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 andcowardice included conventions of surrender and ransom that mitigated thepotentially fatal consequences of cowardice. But troops known to come from a

different culture, especially one whose details were unknown, posed a morefrightening psychological challenge. Truly unknown enemies could appear

immune to the usual expectations of cowardice: the Mongols, not just in Europebut in most places that they invaded outside their steppe homeland, initially

appeared invincible, which translated in terms of expectations of individualMongol soldiers that they would not feel fear as humans did. Their use of terror

72 Stephen Morillo

21 Medieval western Europeans (mle weapons, face-to-face), steppe nomads (missile weapons,

hit-and-run tactics) and Kamakura-era Japanese bushi (missile and melee weapons, face-to-facecombat 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 Kortm (Berlin, 2006), 2942; I develop

the thoughts sketched in this paragraph, with sources, more fully there.


9/9

tactics making examples of selected towns and cities they captured simplyreinforced the aura of fearless, ruthless invincibility surrounding their earlycampaigns. This is one reason why the Mamluk victory at Ayn Jalut in 1260 wasso 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 ones own

posed problems, especially as conventions of surrender and ransom wereunlikely to cross cultural boundaries. The reality of a higher chance that combat

would prove deadly worked in combination with the misunderstandingspromoted by different cultures of cowardice in terms of what tactics wereacceptable or manly, to produce a volatile emotional mixture. In short, enemies

across a cultural boundary would often be objects both of greater fear andgreater 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 forrevenge for having had that fear inflicted on them, plus cultural disdain, often

equaled a very bloody pursuit. Or, as the Brutdescribes, the winner would killas 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 ofthe 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 medievalbattlefields probably played a more positive and fundamental role in shapingtactics, army composition, and the patterns of trans-cultural warfare than

bravery ever did, reducing bravery to just one of the images on the obverse ofthe coin of cowardice.


morillo cowardice

Documents