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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
It can be very difficult to identify the beliefs and attitudes of a long-dead society. The writings of moralists and law-makers may only represent an ideal: a prescriptive view of morality had little relation to how the majority actually thought and behaved. It is even harder to discern the attitudes of medieval combatants, as most of our sources were written by noncombatants. The closest we can get is to declare that this was how our authors thought combatants should behave and that, perhaps, those who actually waged these wars agreed with them.
Astute Heroes and Deceitful Villains: Case Studies in the Language of Deception
To determine whether medieval chroniclers thought military deceptions were licit or illicit, we can analyse the vocabulary they used to describe acts of deceit. Just as modern English possesses numerous synonyms for deception and trickery, such as craft, cunning, subtlety, ingenuity and guile, each with their own particular connotations, medieval chroniclers employed a range of words when writing about deception: callidus, ingenium, ars, uafer, dolus, fraus. The following section is made up of three case studies based on chronicles that are rich in the language of deception and representative of broader trends in contemporary narratives. Each study analyses the terms that the chronicler used for tricks and stratagems and how these terms were used to present these acts as licit or illicit. One could write an analysis of individual word use across a broad corpus of sources but such a study would not present these terms in their proper context, as well as being tedious to read.
Orderic Vitalis
The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis (d. c. 1142), a monk of Saint-Évroul in Normandy, is one of the most detailed sources for Anglo-Norman affairs during the late eleventh and early twelfth century. It is replete with accounts of warfare, from the greatest campaigns of the day to highly localised conflicts fought in the vicinity of Saint-Évroul. The breadth and the variety of the military narratives contained within the Historia make it an ideal case study for the language of military deception in the central Middle Ages.
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