“Unraveling the Myths: The Surprising Reality of Medieval Monarchical Power Revealed!”
That said, as we covered in depth in our video: Did Any Medieval Knights Ever Rescue a Damsel in Distress, let’s just say neighbouring barons attacking an enemy’s land were happy to slaughter and maim the lower classes on a whim, often precisely because it hurt their enemy’s standing amongst their own subjects and took away some of their labour forces. Afterall, one of the main points of even the barons was to keep the common man relatively safe from such things.
As an example of this sort of thing and how common it appears to have been, we have one 12th century chronicler Orderic Vitalis extolling the virtues of a knight for choosing NOT to slaughter a large group of peasants. As outlined in historian Catherine Hanley’s book War and Combat, 1150-1270: “he describes a raiding expedition undertaken by a young knight, during which his men destroy the homes of a group of peasants and kill their livestock. The peasants themselves flee to huddle around a cross; the knight spares their lives, and this charitable deed, according to [Vitalis] deserves to be remembered forever.”
Indeed, so brave; so noble.
In contrast, a 12th century knight and lord Waleran Count of Mellent was noted as simply cutting off one of the feet of any peasants he encountered while in his enemies’ lands. The idea being that lord now had not only just lost a useful worker, but also had an extra crippled and unhappy individual on his hands to manage, assuming the individual survived the de-feeting encounter with Count Waleran.
