Expecting Cowardice

Expecting Cowardice:
Medieval Battle Tactics Reconsidered

Stephen Morillo

For no man ever proves himself a good man in war

unless he can endure to face the blood and the slaughter,
go close against the enemy and fight with his hands.
Here is courage, mankind’s 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 to

Leave 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 Razo’s command; their nocturnal arrival remained unknown to
the Welsh, who were camped some distance away. The account continues:
1 Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1960), pp. 14–15.
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. 93–95. I would like to thank Rob Babcock for bringing my atten-
tion to the account of this minor but interesting battle in the Brut.
66 Stephen Morillo

The following day, Gruffudd ap Rhys and Rhydderch ap Tewdwr, his uncle, and
Maredudd 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, apparently
spending much of the day in somewhat haphazard preparations for assaulting
the castle. A river ran through the valley, crossed by a single bridge. The Brut
goes 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 the
Welsh 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 bridge
then 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 Razo’s force.
These men counter-attacked the scattered Welsh, aided by the archers who now
turned to meet their pursuers, and “bore down upon the troop in front and killed
as 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 men
with 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 Ystrad
Antarron forms an interesting point of entry for a re-examination of medieval
tactics with a focus on the role played by cowardice, both actual displays of
cowardly behavior and more importantly the multivalent expectations of
cowardice 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 of
death. 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 for
now, suicide was rare and religion just as rarely led men actively to seek death.4

4 On suicide, see S. Morillo, “Cultures of Death: Warrior Suicide in Europe and Japan,” The
Medieval History Journal 4, 2 (2001), 241–57. I shall deal with religion more below.
 Expecting Cowardice 67

Thus, on hearing of the approach of the rebel forces and their slaughter of the
garrison at Ystrad Peithyll, Razo is said to be “trembling with fear.” Now fear of
death 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, actions
characterizable in general as potentially beneficial to the individual but detri-
mental to the group. For the rational response of an individual to imminent
danger, 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 of
death or to stifle, redirect, or make impractical the natural “flight” response to
danger among their soldiers.6 In fact, the construction of notions of cowardice
and the shame that inevitably attended it are one communal, cultural response to
this problem of mutual cooperation in war. But a variety of more specific
measures ranging from the material to the moral regularly reinforce the general
Idea of Cowardice as safeguards against individual safety-seeking at the
expense 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 those
dangers other than flight, and perhaps above all bonding them into groups
whose mutual experience causes them to value their companions’ lives as highly
as their own.7 Closely related to training and experience is discipline, which
acts both to suppress emotional responses generally and to enhance the control
a commander can exert over his troops.8 It is telling that the Brut’s description

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 and The Return of the King, the
second and third of the Lord of the Rings movies. It worked by programming “rational”
responses into individual virtual fighters called agents, then massively replicating such fighters
and letting them interact under their own initiative. “When Massive was first tested 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 “fight”
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, where
S. L. A. Marshall’s 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,
68 Stephen Morillo

of the rebel force emphasizes its indiscipline. They arise “incautiously,” fail to
array their forces in an orderly way with flags for groups to rally around,9 and
proceed through the countryside “thoughtlessly.” This is an army setting itself
up for a breakdown of discipline, and therefore for excessive individualism and
its potential for flight. This is, in other words, an army whose commanders have
a rashly diminished expectation of cowardice for their own troops and have as a
result taken inadequate countermeasures against its appearance. Razo, by
contrast, though trembling with fear, uses his own fear productively in sending
for reinforcements and (judging by the results) formulating a tactical plan
designed to take advantage of the rebels’ rashness. Reading more into the
evidence 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, and
that 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 one’s own troops. Common tactical expedients include
forming an army up in deep, dense formations – depth and density, though they
increase vulnerability to missile fire, impart some of the psychological and
statistical security that causes herding in animals, as well as making the most of
the group bonds created by training – and putting the best, and best-equipped,
warriors in the front line of such formations. Both techniques were used by
Henry I and his brother Robert Curthose at Tinchebrai, for example.10

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 Régime 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, 1969–72), 6:88–90; Priest of Fécamp’s letter, English
Historical Review 25 (1910), p. 296. A number of other countermeasures against the expected
cowardice of one’s 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 (see
J. R. E. Bliese, “Rhetoric and Morale: a Study of Battle Orations from the Central Middle
Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 201–26, and numerous other studies by the same
author). Among such reasons, defense of religion often figured 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.300–c.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,
 Expecting Cowardice 69

Expectations of cowardice in the enemy force also influenced tactics. The

Welsh clearly expected cowardly behavior from the “French,” as the Brut calls
the Anglo-Normans: they are almost insulted at the bold advance of the castle’s
archers, “wondering why they should venture so confidently to approach the
bridge.” And with the benefit of hindsight, the chronicle attributes this to the
French 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 on
enemy 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 troops
to think of themselves as braver than their “naturally” cowardly foes. Classical
generals sometimes intimidated opposing forces even before battle began by
ordering a series of precise, drilled formation changes in the enemy’s face: they
served no tactical purpose, but demonstrated to their own troops and to the
enemy their superior levels of training, experience, and by extension bravery.11
Medieval armies lacked the capacity for such displays, as they did not practice
drill in large formations, lacking the money and administrative infrastructure to
gather and train troops (usually infantry) in such maneuvers. But they some-
times deployed the heroic equivalent in the form of an individual riding out
before an army and performing flashy feats of arms.12 Conspicuous displays
claimed, in effect, “our heroism is better than yours,” as conspicuous displays of
piety 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 motivated
by such considerations, though in the event he had the bad luck to have his horse
killed quickly under him, followed by the good luck that his discomfiture and
rescue made the subsequent feigned flight of the archers, accompanied by his
real flight, all the more convincing.
The feigned flight shows perhaps the most interesting intersection between
cowardice 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. 114–16. 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 in
response to the commander’s 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. 98–99. Alexander once intimidated
rebellious Illyrian tribesmen with a display of his phalanxes’ drill: Robin Lane Fox, Alexander
the Great (London, 1974), p. 78.
70 Stephen Morillo

flight depends, in other words, on the believability of the apparent cowardice on

display. Obviously, the circumstances at Ystrad Antarron were made for this
deception. The Welsh, fresh off a victory and the slaughter of one garrison, were
overconfident – rash, incautious, and inadequately prepared against the poten-
tial cowardice of their own troops, as already noted. They also seemed to hold
their 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 be
used by an army that had opened the battle with a convincing display through
drilled maneuver of their own superior training and bravery, as the psycholog-
ical signals the two techniques sent were mutually contradictory. Of course, if
the 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 the
battle even began. Second, and more commonly, feigned flight lost its effective-
ness with repeated use against either the same troops or against a foe with
enough institutional memory to build safeguards into its training of soldiers and
education of commanders. Roman and Byzantine military manuals warned
against incautious pursuit of certain foes who were known to employ the
feigned flight, for example, and Crusaders learned to curb their impulse to
pursue fleeing Turks after they discovered, to their cost, that the apparent
cowardice 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 guard
against 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 of
battles, for eventually, in most battles, one side ran. Cultural idealizations of
heroic or brave behavior might extol the principle of dying with one’s lord and
fighting to the last man, as in the Song of Maldon,14 but actual examples of such
stands to the death are quite rare, especially if we exclude cases where trapped
defenders had no escape route. Ironically, given the self-protective rationale
built 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 than
someone armed and actively meeting attacks. Thus, when armies ran, they did
so not, usually, because their casualties had already mounted to unbearable
proportions of their force, but because the mass of the army came to think that

12 One well-known example is the tale of Taillefer, a Norman who opened the Battle of Hastings
with songs of Roland and feats of arms, at least according to Wace, Roman de Rou, trans.
E. Taylor (London, 1837), pp. 189–90.
13 For Romans, see, e.g., Arrian, Array against the Alans, sections 25–30, discussed in
M. Pavkovic, “A note on Arrian’s Ektaxis kata Alanon,” Ancient History Bulletin 2.1 (1988),
21–23. On Crusaders, see R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193 (Cambridge, 1956), pp.
156–88.
14 The Battle of Maldon, ed. and trans. Bill Griffiths (Norfolk, 1991), pp. 48–52, lines 202–325.
 Expecting Cowardice 71

they would.15 Battle crises were thus matters of perception as much as reality.
The near flight of the Normans early in the day at Hastings and their rallying by
William, who had to remove his helmet and ride up and down the lines to halt
the flight, with subordinates beating on their own men to stop them in their
tracks, illustrates this nicely.16 Measured against cultural norms, psychological
crises in battle were episodes of mass cowardice.
Commanders knew this, and common tactics aimed at inducing panic and
cowardice. Attacks on an enemy’s leader threatened to unhinge an army’s
psychological composure at its lynchpin: the leader’s death or flight could be
decisive, as the Normans nearly demonstrated at Hastings, and as the Saxons
showed later in the day after Harold’s death, though their flight at that point can
hardly be called cowardly.17 Attacks on an army’s flank and rear aimed at
disrupting the psychological zone of security created by deep, dense formations.
Helias of la Fleche’s flank attack on Robert Curthose’s army at Tinchebrai had
exactly this effect, and worked first not on Robert’s infantry column, but on
Robert’s cavalry unit held in reserve behind the line, led by Robert of Bellême.18
Note that cavalry can flee more easily than infantry, one reason commanders
sometimes dismounted troops whose bravery or commitment was in question.
King Stephen’s dismounted knights fought to the end at Lincoln; those who
remained mounted fled early, contributing to the king’s defeat.19 The widely
recognized lower resistance of mounted men to cowardice contributed, as much
as cavalry’s 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 of
footsoldiers carrying out the tactic.20 Finally, many battle-avoiding or
battle-delaying tactics were effective in the war of nerves armies always played.
Waiting itself was mentally tiring to the side without the initiative, but more
importantly cutting an enemy off from food or water or harassing them without
engaging directly could induce fatigue, lowering defenses against fear and so
raising the likelihood of cowardly behavior when battle did ensue.
In short, expectations of cowardice – in one’s own troops, in enemy troops,
and in enemy troops about one’s own troops – pervaded preparations for combat

15 Keegan, Face of Battle, pp. 104–5, 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. 128–31.
17 WP, pp. 136–41.
18 OV 6:88–90.
19 OV 6:542; John of Hexham, in Symoneis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols.
(London, 1882–85), 2:284–333, at 307–8.
20 The equivalent tactic for infantry is more often the planned, fighting 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. 23–25, 65–66.
72 Stephen Morillo

and the tactical conduct of battles in medieval warfare. The prevalence of

“Cultures of Bravery” is, in this light, an unsurprising response to a pervasive
problem.

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-face
combat with melee weapons. For others, such tactics were signs of cleverness –
bravery and manliness having been constructed more around whether one won a
battle than how one fought it. Similar divisions separated warrior classes who
disdained the use of long-range weapons, especially the bow, and those for
whom 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 that
different constructions of bravery and cowardice met in battle, may well have
raised the psychological stakes involved in expectations of cowardice in ways
that 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 and
cowardice included conventions of surrender and ransom that mitigated the
potentially fatal consequences of cowardice. But troops known to come from a
different culture, especially one whose details were unknown, posed a more
frightening psychological challenge. Truly unknown enemies could appear
immune to the usual expectations of cowardice: the Mongols, not just in Europe
but in most places that they invaded outside their steppe homeland, initially
appeared invincible, which translated in terms of expectations of individual
Mongol soldiers that they would not feel fear as humans did. Their use of terror

21 Medieval western Europeans (mêlée weapons, face-to-face), steppe nomads (missile weapons,
hit-and-run tactics) and Kamakura-era Japanese bushi (missile and melee weapons, face-to-face
combat 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 Kortüm (Berlin, 2006), 29–42; I develop
the thoughts sketched in this paragraph, with sources, more fully there.
 Expecting Cowardice 73

tactics – making examples of selected towns and cities they captured – simply
reinforced the aura of fearless, ruthless invincibility surrounding their early
campaigns. This is one reason why the Mamluk victory at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was
so 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 one’s own
posed problems, especially as conventions of surrender and ransom were
unlikely to cross cultural boundaries. The reality of a higher chance that combat
would prove deadly worked in combination with the misunderstandings
promoted by different cultures of cowardice in terms of what tactics were
acceptable or manly, to produce a volatile emotional mixture. In short, enemies
across a cultural boundary would often be objects both of greater fear and
greater 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 for
revenge for having had that fear inflicted on them, plus cultural disdain, often
equaled a very bloody pursuit. Or, as the Brut describes, the winner would “kill
as 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 of
the 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 medieval
battlefields probably played a more positive and fundamental role in shaping
tactics, army composition, and the patterns of trans-cultural warfare than
bravery ever did, reducing bravery to just one of the images on the obverse of
the coin of cowardice.