Abstract
When I was offered this book for review, my first thought was to wonder what its author could add to the depiction of English crusading in this period provided by his Oxford supervisor, Christopher Tyerman, in England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (1988). In fact he adds a good deal, though I think he is better on detail than in his attempts to reshape the bigger picture. Guard has been extremely industrious, not just making his way through the largely familiar printed sources, but drawing selectively on manuscript material in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Stafford, Worcester and Rome. These new sources, which are handled with critical insight of a very high order, enable him to add considerably to what we already knew about English crusaders. Their main fields of operation were the eastern Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, the Baltic, and eastern Europe (including Constantinople). Guard surveys each theatre of activity in turn. The chief feature that emerges is the sheer volume of participation. The days are long gone when English crusading in the 1300s could be dismissed as marginal or esoteric. Even so, its extent can be surprising. Right at the start of the book, Guard informs us that of the 52 men elevated to the rank of earl between 1337 and 1399, 21 undertook campaigns in non-Christian lands, a participation rate almost double that of the period 1215–1300. One could argue endlessly about what such figures mean, but in the hundred pages that follow Guard provides more than enough data to support his contention that this was a golden age of English crusading.
To take just one example from many, using a rare find from the Vatican Archives (reg. supp. 40, fols 145r–179r, ‘Rotulus Comitis Warrewici’), Guard paints a picture of the force that Thomas Beauchamp took from Gascony to Avignon in May 1364 with the intention of joining Peter of Cyprus. Beauchamp could well have had close on 1000 men under his command. Guard makes a good case for recasting the crusade’s leadership, at this point in its complicated evolution, as a triumvirate composed of King Peter, Amedeo of Savoy, and the Earl of Warwick. Circumstances compelled Beauchamp to divert his crusading energy to Prussia, but many Englishmen fought at Alexandria in 1365, with Amedeo in 1366, and in the Greek world in 1367–8. The effect on local government in areas which had experienced strong recruitment, such as the Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire border, was surely serious.
The second part of the book, in which Guard makes use of the careers of his many volunteers to revisit a number of debates about crusading in the late Middle Ages, is less successful. The research agenda here seems overfamiliar, and the positions advanced lack originality. That said, three of Guard’s arguments hold some interest and could repay development. The first is a spirited attempt to reinstate devotion as a driving force behind this remarkable surge of bellicose energy. Guard is even prepared to argue for this in the case of the Reisen – the campaigns with the Teutonic Knights against the pagans of Lithuania and Samagotia – whose secular trappings (notably the Eretisch or Table of Honour) have long been notorious. The second argument is that the image of the crusading king remained a coin of value in the period’s political discourse. And the third, for me the most interesting, is that a sharp dip in the crusading enthusiasm of the English nobility came under the Lancastrians. Henry IV’s retainers had their work cut out defending and enforcing the new regime, and under Henry V, for all that king’s rhetoric of crusade aspiration, the English stopped looking beyond ‘their’ French lands for military adventure. The problem is, of course, that none of these arguments is capable of definitive proof one way or the other.
This is an immaculately presented and referenced study and it is characterized by a lucid and engaging style of writing. For a first book, it is very good indeed.