Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen

Abstract

Maurice Keen taught at Balliol for forty years until his retirement in 2000, becoming one of the seminal figures of English medieval scholarship, in spite of the fact that he stood outside the dominant tradition of Oxford medievalism founded by the unbending K.B. McFarlane. This volume is a tribute to a life of scholarship and a delightful personality, from his many friends, pupils and admirers. It is arranged in three parts: ‘Nobility and Chivalry’, ‘Soldiers and Soldiering’, and ‘Treason, Politics and the Court’, titles which convey a fair impression of the contents. As always with Festschriften, the standard of the contributions is variable, but the best will make valuable contributions to the ideology of warfare in late medieval Europe. Christopher Tyerman, pursuing his interest in late medieval crusading, contributes an essay on the crusading ventures of Louis I, Duke of Bourbon (d. 1342), one of the leading lights in the abortive crusading project of 1316. Craig Taylor's essay on ‘English writings on chivalry and warfare during the Hundred Years War’, takes us to the heart of Maurice Keen's field. As he points out, almost all contemporary treatises on chivalry were written in France, very few in England. But his conclusion that French works on chivalry were little known in England would, I suspect, have surprised the contemporaries of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Caxton. What medieval noblemen read and what they thought about war is also the theme of Christopher Allmand's study of the Strategemata of the first century AD Roman writer, Sextus Julius Frontinus, a manual for commanders which offered some shrewd advice to practitioners, not all of it obvious, but which seems, as in the case of the better-known Vegetius, to have had no impact at all on the practice of war. Adrian Ailes traces the origin of the practice of obtaining royal grants or confirmations of arms, in an age in which most arms were assumed by no other authority than the bearer's. The practice is commonly dated to the reign of Richard II, but Ailes shows that it was at least half a century older. Nigel Saul, who has spent some years rescuing the study of the monuments of gentry families from amateur antiquaries, pursues his efforts with a study of the remarkable paintings commissioned by the Camoys family in Trotton church (Sussex). He interprets them, surely rightly, as an attempt by the probably illegitimate Thomas, Lord Camoys (d. 1421), to reassert the claims of an ambitious family, frustrated by the limits of its influence.