The career of William Marshal (1146/7-12), who rose from being the
penniless, landless younger son of a middle-ranking nobleman to be
regent of England in the minority of Henry III, is one of the most
extraordinary stories of theMiddle Ages. His biography was completed
shortly after his death by a household minstrel and we are fortunate
that it survives to give a unique portrait of a twelfth-century knight's
life in the early days of tournaments and chivalry as well as his career
in warfare and politics.
The History of William Marshal is the earliest surviving biography of a
medieval knight - indeed it is the first biography of a layman in the
vernacular in European history. Composed in verse in the 1220s just a
few years after his death, it is a major primary source not simply for
its subject's life but for the exceptionally stormy period he had had to
navigate. It could hardly be other than major, given that its subject
was regarded as the greatest knight who ever lived and that he rose in
the course of his long life to be a central figure in the reigns of no
fewer than four kings: Henry II, Richard Lionheart, John and Henry III.
This remarkable biography was brought to light in the late nineteenth
century thanks to a determined hunt for the manuscript by its first
editor, the eminent French scholar Paul Meyer. It gives a vigorous
account of events, full of vivid detail and passionate comment and
frequent flashes of humour. And it gives revelatory insights into the
attitudes and perceptions of the time, especially into the experience
and nature of warfare in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries.
But while its quality and value have been long acknowledged, the poem
has sometimes been deemed less than impartial and objective.
Commissioned as it was by Marshal's own son, and intended not least for
his family's fond enjoyment, it is littlesurprise that the poem's
adulation of its subject is rarely qualified by regrets for failings or
what are nowadays referred to as "errors of judgement". Marshal is
presented as - to all intents and purposes - flawless: not simply a
magnificent warrior, supreme in tournaments and battles alike, but a
paragon of the key chivalric virtues of prowess, largesse and unfailing
loyalty. But this is not surprising: the idea of the fallible hero is a
modern invention, and the writer of this work - like Marshal himself -
was steeped in the old ideals of the chansons de geste as well as the
more recent ideology of chivalry. In any case, there can be no denying
that Marshal's achievements -and sometimes his behaviour - were by any
standards extraordinary and seen as such by his contemporaries, and the
poem corresponds with what we know of his life from other sources.
Few other medieval biographies have the immediacy of this celebration of
Marshal's career, based not least on stories told by Marshal himself and
those close to him, and it is made available here for the first time in
a modern prose translation.
