Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/109

Rh reconnoitring, had to take off their coat-armour, because their honour would not suffer knights to retreat, when accoutred for battle. Now, the king himself had put on his coat-armour, and so, having passed it by, he could not return to the village mentioned. He therefore passed the night in the place he had reached and also made the vanguard advance accordingly, in spite of the dangers that might have been incurred.

Just as a political conflict was regarded as an action at law, so there was also but a difference of degree between a battle and a judicial duel, or the combat of knights in the lists. In his Arbre des Batailles, Honoré Bonet places them under the same head, although carefully distinguishing “great general battles” and “particular battles.” In the wars of the fifteenth century, and even later, the custom for two captains or two equal groups to appoint meetings for a fight, in sight of the two armies, was still kept up. The Combat of the Thirty has remained the celebrated type of these fights. It was fought in 1351 at Ploërmel, in Brittany, between the French of Beaumanoir and a company of thirty men, English, Germans and Bretons, under a certain Bamborough. Froissart, though full of admiration, cannot help remarking: “Some held it a prowess, and some held it a shame and a great overbearing.” The uselessness of these chivalrous spectacles was so evident that those in authority resented them. It was impossible to expose the honour of the kingdom to the hazards of a single combat. When Guy de la Trémoïlle wished to prove in 1386 the superiority of the French by a duel with an English nobleman, Peter Courtenay, the dukes of Burgundy and Berry at the last moment issued a formal prohibition. The authors of the Jouvencel disapprove of these competitions of glory. “They are forbidden things and which people should not do. In the first place, those who do it, want to take away the good of others, that is to say, their honour, to procure themselves vain glory, which is of little value; and, in doing this, he serves none, he spends his money; ... in being occupied in doing this, he neglects his part in waging war, the service of his king and the public cause; and no one should expose his body, unless in meritorious works.”

This is the military spirit, which itself has issued from the spirit of chivalry and is now gradually supplanting it. The