The Myth of the ‘Miles Strenuus’: A Footballing Analogy
With Euro 2020 grinding on, I was minded to share a very tenuous link between football/soccer and knighthood.
There is a tendency to talk about knights as if they were all exactly the same. We routinely read that knights would be trained from the age of 6, be wearing armour by the time that they were 12, and taking the field at 16. We’ll be told that their raison d’etre was war, that they trained regularly, owned horse, armour and weapons, always ready to ride off in support of their lord.
Certain knights are held up as being the exemplars of their class. We are presented with William Marshall, the knight who rose from nothing to become the friend of princes, and regent of England. Wielding lance and sword with great success on the tournament ground and battlefield, he was still fighting in his 70s. Then there’s John II le Maingre, Marshal Boucicaut. He is the knight that would daily run a mile, could somersault, vault onto horseback, climb the underside of a ladder hand-over-hand, and brace himself between two walls and shimmy up between them, all whilst wearing his armour.*
Even if we accept that men like Boucicaut and Marshall actually lived up to their hype (and we should remember that each of these men’s reputations is based on biographies written to set them up as the greatest knight of their age), the fact is that they were not typical of every knight in Europe, and that there were plenty who fell well short of these standards.
The Analogy.
So, here’s the analogy. I suggest that we should think of those who acted as knights as being very much like those who play football/soccer (or indeed any other professional sport - heck, Wimbledon is on; think of them as tennis players).
You have those for whom the game is everything. They are talented, committed and feted across the world for their skills. These are your top-flight professional, premier league footballers. Those who get selected to play for their country. They are sponsored by the wealthiest, train and play almost continuously, and are the men who others seek to emulate. This is where one places the likes of William Marshal and Boucicaut. But, like the international and premier league players, these knights were the minority.
Below our premier league players, we have those for whom the sport is still their career, and who train and play solidly, but who never have the skill or the good fortune to become as successful, as famous or as wealthy. There are plenty of knights like this, the miles strenuus, for whom military service in a royal or baronial familia provided their meat and drink, and whose place of work was at tournament or the battlefield.
Below them again, there is a vast spectrum of players for whom the game is not their profession. This includes the semi-professional, who runs a job alongside their soccer, all the way down to the those who like a Saturday-afternoon kick-about, or are part of a five-a-side team. This is the sort of player for whom soccer is important, but cannot be the priority. The sort of person who’ll come out for training if the weather is good, or their office job doesn’t keep them at their desk until late. The bulk of football is played by this sort of amateur.
Knighthood is the same. There were plenty within the chivalric class whose priority was not combat, but the management of estates, or as an officer within the domestic household of a lord or prince, or even, in the late middle ages, trade or the courts. This didn’t mean that they were not prepared to take the field as men-at-arms, indeed their rank and their gender might make them feel it was required of them. But their first battle might be the first time they’d actually worn armour.
This is why we get the likes of Bonfils of Manganelli, who hired a suit of armour for the sum of seventeen solidi, from Antenoux Pecora, a fellow citizen of Gaeta near Rome, when the former headed across the sea in 1248.** A man who had to hire armour for a campaign would not seem to readily match the template created by William Marshal.
Of course, the vast majority of people connected with football are not players at all, but fans. There are thirteen times as many fans as there are players of the sport.*** Here the analogy breaks down. No matter how ‘A Knight’s Tale’ might picture it, knightly combat had nowhere near the popular appeal of football/soccer.
That, however, is a topic for another blog post.
* Lest we assume that this is all so much rubbish, Daniel Jaquet has proven that it can be done in his fifteenth-century harness.
** ‘Bonfils Manganelli: Hiring of a Suit of Armor, 1248’. The Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1248suitarmr.asp, accessed 2/7/21).
*** A rough calculation based solely on the figures on this site. If they are wrong, well… I am a historian of medieval warfare, not a sociologist specialising in sport.
