Conclusion

Summary

This book has documented the various ways in which active experience of fighting in the hethenesse remained a central characteristic of fourteenth-century chivalric society. Evidence of attitudes and behaviour among the military elite show a rich culture of distant campaigning and crusader militancy, unstifled by the demands of the Hundred Years War, the collapse of Jerusalem crusading and the onset of the papal schism. There was no general decline in enthusiasm for war in the hethenesse, despite the various obstacles that lay in the path of embarking captains and retinues. We have seen, moreover, that English knights and esquires did not move in a backwater of idealism or play the junior partner to continental nobility, as traditionally depicted in histories of the later crusades. On the contrary, in the period following Richard the Lionheart's famous crusade of the 1190s, it is likely that English knights enjoyed their greatest degree of independence and opportunity in the years between 1307 and 1399, the range of war-frontiers and shorter terms of crusade service encouraging a response which rivalled, if not eclipsed, the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the ‘heyday’ of crusading, for its wide distribution of experience among arms-bearing families. Prussia and the coastal marches of the eastern Mediterranean displaced Syria and Palestine as primary frontiers, but it is right to think of the fourteenth century as a golden age of English crusading.