Commoners on Crusade: The Creation of Political Space?
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English Historical Review Vol. CXXXVI No. 579 Advance Access publication 26 May 2021
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ehr/ceab091
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Commoners on Crusade: The Creation
of Political Space?*
According to a monastic chronicler from Lower Saxony, in October 1147,
at Nicaea in Asia Minor, tensions within the crusade host of Conrad
III of Germany threatened to erupt into mutiny. The chronicler pinned
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the blame on rumours that Conrad proposed bailing out the poverty-
stricken and amateurish infantry and despatching them by sea directly
to the Holy Land. The putative recipients angrily rejected royal largesse
and authority, electing their own leader, a man called Bernard, and
condemning Conrad with the words: ‘Since he scorns to have common
people (plebem) with him, we refuse to follow him as king.’ In this story,
the king backed down.1 Whether or not these events actually happened,
the incident conforms to similar descriptions of popular challenges to
crusade leadership that emerge from almost all the large-scale crusade
campaigns to the eastern Mediterranean from the First Crusade
onwards. Shared features include collective non-noble identity (note,
in the incident at Nicaea, plebs—a collective noun); organised popular
political action; active public dialogue between commanders and their
followers; social tensions that expose suspicions of elite self-interest and
backsliding; and an outline of a coherent set of commoner ideological
principles revolving around a desire to maintain, and occasionally to
assert, communal fraternity across social groups in a common cause.
Disputes between leaders and led, often concerning commanders’
perceived caution or greed, punctuated large campaigns to the Near East.
On the First Crusade, open disagreement surfaced at Antioch, Ma’aarat
and Arqah over the priority and urgency of an attack on Jerusalem. At
Ma’aarat, for example, according to Raymond of Aguilers, who may
have been there, insurgent commoners (‘milites et omnis populus’) tried
to negotiate a change of policy with Count Raymond of Toulouse in a
formal assembly and were later unavailingly subjected to violent physical
intimidation before forcing the leadership to adopt their opinion.2 During
* This essay has been greatly improved by comments and suggestions made by the editor, the
two anonymous referees, and audiences in Stanford, Berkeley and London. The remaining faults
are mine alone.
1. Annales Palidensis, ed. G.H. Pertz, Annales aevi Suevici, Monumenta Germaniae Historica
[hereafter MGH], Scriptores [hereafter SS], XVI (Hanover, 1859), p. 83: ‘Nos ... quia spernit
habere plebem, recusemus et eum sequi regem’.
2. The writer’s description incorporated scriptural language from the liturgy: ‘Tandem
convenerunt episcopus Albariensis et quidam nobiles cum populo pauperum, et comitem
evoceraverunt. Quumque episcopus praedicationem suam complesset, procubuerunt milites
et omnis populus ante comitem...’: Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt
Iherusalem, in Recueil des historians des croisades: Historiens occidentaux (5 vols, Paris, 1844–95)
[hereafter RHC Occ.], iii. 270–72 (tr. J.H. Hill and L.L. Hill [Philadelphia, PA, 1968], pp. 79–82
and 81 n. 12). For the First Crusade disagreements, see C. Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of
the Crusades (London, 2006), pp. 124–64.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)246 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
the Second Crusade, sharp disagreements over strategy in Iberia were
aired robustly within the crusade commune established at Dartmouth.3
Popular action in despite of leaders’ opposition during the Third Crusade
led to a disastrous attack on Saladin’s camp in July 1190 and later helped
bully a reluctant Richard I into launching his second march towards
Jerusalem in June 1192.4 The fear of public opinion led the leaders of
the Fourth Crusade serially to keep most of the army in the dark over
the intended destinations of Egypt and Zara and forced the leaders to
accept open debate over the diversion to Constantinople in large army
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assemblies.5 As in 1190, in August 1219, in the teeth of their superiors’
opposition, the non-nobles—la menuda gens—forced an engagement
with the Egyptians after accusing the high command and knights of
idleness and cowardice and attending an acrimonious parlamen of the
leaders, seemingly very much like the inclusive parlements on the Fourth
Crusade described by Jonathan Riley-Smith.6 Loud resentment over the
division and distribution of booty, as well as the self-indulgent habits of
the rich, accompanied the Third, Fifth and 1248–50 crusades.7 In every
case, disagreement led to public confrontation. Such dissent, at least in
surviving descriptions of it, appears regularly to have followed almost
institutional forms—issue, consultation, assembly, debate, dissent,
resolution, action—that seem far from random.
Such evidence exposes the political space that existed within large
crusade armies, distinctive public arenas where authority and command
were negotiated, restricted and occasionally contradicted in open
discussion and debate among those beyond the elite of kings, barons,
bishops and wealthy knights. These processes assumed certain repeated
patterns of witness, engagement and consultation that stretched from
ritual to confrontation. This has already been suggested some years ago
in a study of the First Crusade.8 What follows extends that investigation
to incorporate political dynamics within subsequent major expeditions
3. De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. C.W. David (New York, 1976), pp. 100–111, 164–77.
4. Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, I: Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta
Regis Ricardi, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series, xxxviii (1864) [hereafter Itinerarium], pp. 89–91,
359–66 (tr. H. Nicholson, The Chronicle of the Third Crusade [Aldershot, 1997], pp. 94–6, 321–
6). Cf. The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation, ed. P. Edbury
(Aldershot, 1998), pp. 94–5 (a translation of the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre).
5. Geoffrey of Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. E. Faral (2nd edn, 2 vols, Paris,
1961), i. 31, 148, 200, ii. 60, 66 (tr. C. Smith, Chronicles of the Crusades [London, 2008], pp. 11,
39, 53, 69, 70); Robert of Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. P. Lauer (Paris, 1924), p. 12 (tr.
E.H. McNeal, The Conquest of Constantinople [New York, 1966], p. 42). For later assemblies, see
J. Riley-Smith, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Fourth Crusade as an Institution’, in A. Laiou,
ed., Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and its Consequences (Paris, 2005), pp. 71–87.
6. ‘Et adonx agron parlamen li crestien ... E tota la menuda gens acordec si ad aquest cosselh’:
Fragmentum de Captione Damiatae Provincialis Textus, ed. Reinhold Röhricht, Quinti Belli Sacri
Scriptores Minores (Geneva, 1879), p. 185; Riley-Smith, ‘Toward an Understanding’, n. 5.
7. See below, nn. 78–88.
8. C. Tyerman, ‘Principes et Populus: Civil Society and the First Crusade’, in id., The Practices
of Crusading: Image and Action from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2013), no.
XII, pp. 1–23.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 247
to the Mediterranean involving exchange and negotiation between
the leaderships and non-noble and commoner followers.9 The nature
and social structures of these crusade armies conditioned how these
interactions were mediated through a variety of mechanisms, from
formal, legally enforced ordinances of conduct and inclusive public
assemblies to informal bonds of association and aspiration forged on
campaign. The operation of these processes may suggest that the internal
organisation of these large campaigns was less sui generis than some
have imagined, and was reliant as much on accepted contemporary
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secular constitutional and ideological expectations as on the image of
a ‘military monastery on the move’ promoted by apologist monastic
observers.10
I
On the face of it, the structure of crusade armies might suggest severe
limits on the creation of political space beyond that of lordship
hierarchies. As in any other medieval army, nobles, who provided
the core campaign funding, skills and leadership, travelled with their
households or maisnies, accompanied by a wider circle of kindred and
clients, their mouvances. These marched, messed and fought together.
Parallel to lordship groups, urban contingents travelled under civic
leaders, often bound together in mutual sworn associations or, by the
thirteenth century, formal confraternities. Crusading elicited support
beyond normal military hierarchies of service, attracting men and
women of some (often modest) means, who were explicitly allowed
to take the cross and to raise funds independently of formal tenurial
obligations.11 While recruitment could be socially profligate, service
depended on continued access to resources. All crusaders required
funds, their own or another’s. To survive, and to be effective as
warriors or supporting non-combatants, freelance crusaders needed
to attach themselves to others. This dynamic propelled the creation
of new mouvances as some lords died or became impoverished while
others thrived, attracting new followings, as notably witnessed on the
First Crusade by the careers of Baldwin of Boulogne and Tancred of
9. Such political engagement was not confined to Mediterranean crusades, as shown, for
example, by the apparent role of the ribaldi at the siege of Béziers in 1209 at the start of the
Albigensian crusade. (For a convenient discussion with references, see Peter of Les Vaux de Cernay,
The History of the Albigensian Crusade, tr. W. Sibley and M. Sibley [Woodbridge, 1998], Appendix
B, pp. 289–93.) However, the Baltic, Spanish and internal crusades in Europe presented individual
special features of organisation and duration that made them distinct from those to the eastern
Mediterranean, although that is not to say that they did not share some features of leader–led
dialogue.
10. J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London, 1986), p. 2.
11. As in Eugenius III’s 1145–6 bull Quantum praedecessores: P. Rassow, ‘Der Text der
Kreuzzugsbulle Eugens III’, Neues Archiv, xlv (1924), pp. 302–5.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)248 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
Lecce. These same practical imperatives of association imposed the
12
equally pragmatic necessity of co-operation and consultation. In this,
crusading provides a rich cameo of contemporary political and social
exchange.
Political communities in medieval western Europe were habitually
conceived as including those beyond the decision-making elites—
as shown, for example, in the extensive use of public assemblies
to witness legal and political deliberations, or the use of juries, a
model of corporate agency enshrined by lawyers, law makers and
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decretalists from the late twelfth century in the Roman Law maxim
Quod omnes tangit—even if consent could be regarded as largely
formal and passive.13 Similarly, and even more obviously, at a micro-
level, small communities and households naturally operated through
informal discussion and consultation across hierarchical divisions. This
commonplace domestic necessity became intensified by the exigencies
of long, stressful and dangerous military campaigns such as crusading,
even if not always as bizarrely as when Louis IX, in the heat of the battle
of Mansourah in Egypt, paused to summon his council of household
knights and consult them on immediate battlefield tactics. John of
Joinville, who recorded the king’s desperate collegiality, later described
how he himself debated with his own knights and household servants
as to which enemy group they should surrender to, all having their
say. The desideratum was to go for whichever group was more likely
to keep the Joinville entourage together in captivity. The debate—at
least in Joinville’s gilded memory—was open; his cellarer vociferously
disagreed, arguing that death was preferable and a shorter route to
Paradise than surrender. Unsurprisingly, he was ignored.14 Both in
theory and in practice western European society ran on collective
lines, and not just in urban or economic settings. Part of the exercise
of lordship was the acquisition and display of communal acquiescence.
On crusade it was no different, except that the context of a mass of
separate but interdependent clients, kindreds, and local, regional and
national groups, and often fractured lordship, rendered the negotiation
of authority and common enterprise more complicated.
12. See the classic J. France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade
(Cambridge, 1994), and id., ‘Patronage and the Appeal of the First Crusade’, in J. Phillips, ed.,
The First Crusade: Origins and Impact (Manchester, 1997), pp. 5–20; C. Tyerman, How to Plan
a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages (London, 2015), esp. pp. 127–77;
C. Marshall, Warfare in the Latin East, 1192–1291 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 75–7.
13. For assemblies and corporate behaviour, see T. Reuter, ‘Assembly Politics in Western Europe
from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth’, in P. Linehan, J. Nelson and M. Costambeys, eds., The
Medieval World (2nd edn, London, 2018), pp. 511–29; S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in
Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 1984); P.S. Barnwell and M. Mostert, eds., Political Assemblies
in the Earlier Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003); L. Melve, ‘Assembly Politics and the “Rules-of-the-
Game” (ca.650–1150)’, Viator, xli (2010), pp. 69–90; and a number of papers in K. Dutton, ed.,
Political Culture, c.800–c.1200, special issue of History, cii (2017), pp. 743–932.
14. John of Joinville, Histoire de St Louis, ed. Natalis de Wailly (Paris, 1874), chs. 231 and 318,
pp. 127, 172–3 (tr. Smith, Chronicles of the Crusades, pp. 202–3, 224).
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 249
II
Who were the commoners? Contemporary collective descriptions can
be both consistent and fluid, not ostensibly based on set legal, economic
or sociological criteria, yet resting on seemingly understood categories
of status. Seeking descriptive definitions can lead into a nominalist trap,
except that contemporaries—at least writers, government officials and
lawyers—identified and categorised each other by naming occupation
and social standing.15 The problem of definition is compounded by the
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nature of the sources, composed by men, mainly clerics, who tended
to adopt possibly misleading typologies based on theological nostrums,
literary conventions, a hierarchical worldview and de haut en bas
prejudices. Although military aristocrats and their social equals in the
church provided the initiative, leadership and funds for the wars of the
cross, the vast majority of crusaders were not wealthy knights, nobles
or elite clerics. However, members of this majority rarely appear in the
historical record through their own direct and unmediated testimony
but rather as stereotypes crafted by elite historiographical condescension,
fashioned and often demeaned by hegemonies of hierarchy, patriarchy
and moral sentiment. Crusading commoners usually lacked their own
voice, variously dismissed as minores et mediocres, insignificant people,
the plebs, populi, vulgi, menu gent or menu peuple: non-nobles, burgesses,
smallholders, peasants, civilians, women and children, members of the
turba, the crowd.16
While collective descriptions distinguish between barons, rich
knights, poor knights, sergeants, and the menu peuple, acting in concert
or defined as distinct social groups, such categories could be fluid and
may mislead or conceal. For example, the term ‘poor’ often represented
a literary or theological construct, at best a relative term embracing
different social and economic status—the un-rich, the commoner, not
just the impoverished—while plebs could simply mean non-noble.17
Campaign vicissitudes could alter status, knights becoming, in Odo
of Deuil’s phrase, ‘paupers since yesterday’.18 Equally, status could be
enhanced. In the carve-up of booty after the capture of Constantinople
in 1204, spoils were supposed to be divided unequally between
knights; clergy and mounted sergeants; the rest of the army, ‘les autres
15. For the role of names, cf. R.R. Davies, ‘Presidential Address. The Peoples of Britain and
Ireland, 1100–1400, II: Names, Boundaries and Regnal Solidarities’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 6th ser., v (1995), p. 3.
16. For example, James of Vitry, Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (1160/1170–1240), ed. R.B.C.
Huygens (Leiden, 1960), p. 103; Itinerarium, pp. 89, 102, 118, 124, 258, 305, 308, 366, 379; Robert
of Clari, Conquête, ed. Lauer, pp. 15, 46, 79–80; Guillaume de Nangis, Gesta Ludovici, in Recueil
des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet et al. (24 vols, Paris, 1737–1904)
[hereafter RHGF ], xx. 440–42.
17. As in the later medieval and early modern university of Oxford; for the ‘poor’, see Tyerman,
How to Plan a Crusade, pp. 170–77.
18. Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, ed. V.G. Berry (New York, 1948),
p. 122: ‘Ab heri pauperes’.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)250 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
menus gens de l’ost’; and women and children, a familiar pattern of
distribution. According to Robert of Clari, his brother Aleaumes of
Clari, a clerk, successfully claimed the higher share of a knight—20
marks as opposed to 10—both because of his exemplary military deeds
and because he possessed his own hauberk and horse.19
Nonetheless, from sermons, private property deals and government
legal and financial records, as well as literary narratives, it is evident
that commoner crucesignati mirrored the spectrum of free society.
Chroniclers remained consistently alert to social and occupational
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gradations. In describing the crusade host at Nicaea in early 1097,
Fulcher of Chartres identified those who fought with hauberks and
helmets (i.e., knights), those who fought without, and those not bearing
arms—clerics, women and children.20 Given their ubiquity across
sources, these categories may have been more than literary devices;
they may reflect reality. They were replicated in descriptions of booty
dispersal on the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, where a rough tripartite
scheme emerges—one hesitates to call them three estates—of nobles,
their militarily effective followers (poorer knights, mounted sergeants),
and the rest, as in Oliver of Paderborn’s account of discussions between
‘barons, knights and people’ (‘communi consilio baronum, militum
ac popularium’).21 Familiar contemporary urban parallels, such as the
twelfth-century Milanese commune’s capitanei, vavassores and plebs,
spring to mind.22 Women and children could occupy an additional
sub-category of non-combatants. Following the fall of Damietta in
Egypt in 1219, after the magnates had taken a third, the remaining
booty was supposed to be divided on a sliding scale, at a ratio of 8:4:2:1,
between knights; priests and turcopoles (indigenous light cavalrymen);
other ranks, called in one source clientes; and finally, at the bottom,
at 3 besants each, wives and children.23 Seventy years earlier, Odo of
Deuil distinguished between nobles (nobiles), common knights (milites
gregarii) and the infantry (pedites).24
19. Robert of Clari, Conquête, ed. Lauer, p. 96 (tr. McNeal, p. 117).
20. Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Iherosolymitana, in RHC Occ., iii. 333: ‘Sexies centum millia
ad bellum valentium aestimabant, quorum centum millia loricis et galeis muniti errant: exceptis
inermibus, videlicet clericis, monarchis, mulieribus et parvulis’. In general, see Tyerman, How to
Plan a Crusade, ch. 6, pp. 150–77; id., ‘Who Went on Crusades to the Holy Land?’, in Practices
of Crusading, no. XIII, pp. 13–26.
21. Oliver of Paderborn, Historia Damiatina, ed. Hermann Hoogeweg, Die Schriften des
Kölner Domscholasters späteren Bischofs von Paderborn und Kardinal-Bischofs von S. Sabina,
Oliverus (Tübingen, 1894), p. 257. For the Fourth Crusade, see Robert of Clari, Conquête, ed.
Lauer, p. 96, and cf. Devastatio Constantinopolitana, in Annales Herbipolenses, ed. Pertz, MGH,
SS, XVI, p. 12; for the Fifth, John of Tubia, De Iohanne Rege Ierusalem, ed. Röhricht, Quinti belli
sacri scriptores minores, p. 139.
22. Cf. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, p. 171.
23. John of Tubia, De Iohanne Rege Ierusalem, ed. Röhricht, p. 171.
24. Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici, ed. Berry, p. 130: ‘Omnes vestri exercitus gregarii
milites his diebus armis proiectis pedites sunt effecti, et cum eis de nobilioribus multi’.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 251
Despite an intrinsic literary formality, such categories may preserve
genuine corporate identity of the sort described by the eyewitness
Rhinelander writer of the Devastatio Constantinopolitana, in recounting
how, in 1203, when they heard of the diversion to Greece, the populus
of the Fourth Crusade assembled together and swore a compact (‘facta
conspiratione iuraverunt’) not to go.25 Oliver of Paderborn recorded
how, after the capture of Damietta, the knights met separately, apart
from the leadership, to orchestrate their opposition to Cardinal
Pelagius’ policy of immediate aggression.26
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As is well known, commoner crusaders came from widely different
social conditions, from Robert of Clari’s ‘poor knights’, men of some
prominence in Picardy, Artois and Flanders, downwards.27 As with
the term plebs, the concept of ‘the commons’ in this period could
also simply mean all non-nobles.28 In the context of political action
on crusade, commoners could be seen as all those not involved in
the decision-making of the high command. The range of commoner
occupations revealed in archival and literary sources was legion.
Some formed part of the wider military establishment: less affluent
knights, sergeants, squires, engineers, archers, crossbowmen, infantry
troops, steersmen and sailors. These were joined by a huge array of
necessary household servants, officials and hangers-on, from priests,
notaries, valets, butlers and cooks to physicians, minstrels, laundresses
and de-lousers. A wider circle could provide useful or essential
supporting services, as varied as schoolmasters and merchants to a full
host of artisans, from blacksmiths, bakers, masons and carpenters to
goldsmiths, fishmongers, dyers and prostitutes (who, on Louis IX’s
1249–50 campaign in Egypt, apparently traded in brothels organised
by members of the king’s own household).29 Many crusaders came
from lesser- or middle-ranking landholders, expected to possess some
basic military training, if not aptitude.30 According to disapproving
clerical commentators and legal records, crusading held particular
attraction for criminals.31 Not all artisans necessarily signed up to ply
their trades on crusade, their occupations being recorded simply as a
means of identification in domestic legal and fiscal records. It is hard to
locate the significant function on campaign in the 1230s for Louis IX
25. Devastatio Constantinopolitana, ed. Pertz, p. 10: ‘Quod cum populus cognisset, se videlicet
in Greciam iturum, convenerunt, et facta conspiratione iuraverunt se nunquam illuc ituros’.
26. Oliver of Paderborn, Historia Damiatina, ed. Hoogeweg, p. 248.
27. Robert of Clari, Conquête, ed. Lauer, pp. 3–4.
28. As implied in Odo of Deuil’s distinctions of nobles, common knights and infantry: De
profectione Ludovici, ed. Berry, p. 130. For a recent discussion, see J. Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: The
Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381–1549’, in H. Pryce and J. Watts, eds., Power and
Identity in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2011), pp. 244–5 and nn. 8, 9.
29. Joinville, Histoire de St Louis, ed. de Wailly, ch. 171, p. 94 (tr. Smith, p. 187).
30. See the English Assize of Arms of 1181: Benedict of Peterborough, recte Roger of Howden,
Gesta regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti abbatis, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series, xlix (2 vols, 1867),
i. 278–80.
31. Tyerman, ‘Who Went on Crusades’, p. 21 and n. 26.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)252 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
of France’s tapestry maker, or Ralph the otter-hunter from Aylesbury,
England.32 Nonetheless, crusading should perhaps be seen as much as a
phenomenon of artisans as of knights, of carpentry as much as castles.
The evidence from crusade sources underlines more considerable
and lasting fluidity in status, especially in those described as milites
(knights), than some schematic recent historiography would allow.33
From Odo of Deuil to Robert of Clari to the formal divisions of
booty, a distinction is drawn between the wealthy nobles and the
poorer knights. Knights being degraded by their loss of horses feature
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in accounts of the First and Second Crusades. The tensions between
leaders and led—for example, over whether to march to Jerusalem in
1098–9—included opposition from those classed as milites co-operating
with commoners.34 As the experience of Aleaumes of Clari might
suggest, function—at least on campaign—remained pragmatically as
significant as measures of gentility, although an understanding of the
importance of the latter was as clearly shared by Odo of Deuil as by
Robert of Clari and Geoffrey of Villehardouin.35 What emerges from
the communal negotiations within crusade armies, from the 1090s
to the 1220s, are alliances between lesser knights and non-knights,
sometimes independent of the great nobles, sometimes not. Factors
such as wealth, talent, shared experiences and levels of association
with the noble leadership prevailed. Social distinctions were preserved
in, say, the distribution of booty, but this did not prevent collective
solidarity among those outside the circle of leadership. To take an
example from the Third Crusade, the ill-fated foray of 25 July 1190
against Saladin’s army outside Acre, although disparaged by observers
as comprising the plebs and vulgus, included knights, gregariorum
militum, in defiance of the wishes of principes of the leadership.36 The
English tournament regulation of 1194 distinguished between the tariffs
payable by counts (20 marks), barons (10 marks), and two grades of
miles—the landed (4 marks) and landless (2 marks), the latter perhaps
nearer the gregrarii milites of Acre and, on campaign, possibly difficult
in simple material terms to separate from armed mounted sergeants.37
32. Itinera, dona et hernesia (1239, account of Blanche of Castile), RHGF, xxii. 592; Calendar
of Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Hartland (3 vols to date, London,
2007–), no. 323, iii. 57.
33. See, for example, D. Crouch, The English Aristocracy, 1070–1272: A Social Transformation
(London, 2011). The literature on the emergence of knighthood is very large; see, for example,
G. Duby, The Chivalrous Society, tr. C. Postan (London, 1977); M. Keen, Chivalry (London,
1984); D. Barthélemy, La chevalerie: De la Germanie antique à la France du XIIe siècle (Paris,
2007); J. Flori, Chevaliers et chevalerie au moyen âge (Paris, 1998); R. Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry
(Cambridge, 2016).
34. Raymond of Aguilers, Historia, in RHC Occ., iii. 270.
35. As suggested by Odo’s commentary on the loss of knights’ status on the Asia Minor
campaign: De profectione Ludovici, ed. Berry, p. 130.
36. Itinerarium, p. 89: ‘Die igitur Sancti Jacobi, die luctifica et infesta, infelix illa gregariorum
militum turba prorumpit’ (tr. Nicholson, p. 95).
37. Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. Thomas Rymer
et al. (4 vols in 7, London, 1816), vol. i, pt. 1, p. 65.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 253
Beneath the literary and legal vocabulary of knighthood, theoretical
social grading and lived experience may not have matched exactly.
The cultural niceties of emerging formulaic social gradations were
overlain by the exigencies of resources and combat. On crusade, as in
thirteenth-century English parliaments, knights could be counted and
act in concert with commoners.
Women crucesignatae were ubiquitous, receiving separate treatment
in ordinances regulating conduct on campaign and in the division of
booty. In a letter of 1200, Pope Innocent III distinguished between wives,
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who could embark with their husbands, and unmarried women, who
should only be allowed to depart if of sufficient wealth to lead their
own contingent of fighting men, as some did. Although organisers and
commentators asserted stereotyped gender roles, crucesignatae varied as
greatly as crucesignati, from queens and noblewomen to the less exalted
wives, daughters, servants and prostitutes, including independent women,
such as the adventurous pilgrim Margaret of Beverley; or the remarkable
Parisian woman physician, magistra Hersende, who may have nursed a
dysentery-ridden Louis IX in the Nile Delta in 1250; or the twenty-two
unchaperoned women in a ship’s company of crusaders bound for Louis
IX’s army in Egypt in 1250 who appeared, alongside their male shipmates,
as plaintiffs in a class action against their derelict and corrupt shippers.38
Further social and economic diversity lay beneath generalised male
occupational identities (such as ‘clerk’). Master dyers in England,
for example, could be managers of substantial businesses. The cooks
who wielded copper pots and pestles defending the crusaders’ camp
outside Constantinople in 1203 may have cut very different figures
from the chef of Count Stephen of Blois who followed his master on
the First Crusade after having consigned to the abbey of Marmoutier
considerable property holdings, including a house in which his mother
lived.39 Members of the Italian crusader confraternity of the Holy
Spirit, formed in 1216 during the Fifth Crusade, included those who
could provide their own military equipment and those who could not
and had to borrow some from the confraternity.40 At the bottom of
the scale, men and women took the cross with the most modest of
incomes—small farmers and villeins with property perhaps worth only
a few shillings in rent, teetering on the edge of serfdom.41 Yet, however
38. Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade, pp. 165–7 and references, esp. B. Kedar, ‘The Passenger
List of a Crusader Ship, 1250’, Studi Medievali, xiii (1972), pp. 267–79.
39. Robert of Clari, Conquête, ed. Lauer, p. 46; for Hardouin Desredatus’ charter, see Telma
(Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives), Chartes originales antérieures à 1121
conservées en France (CHRS—Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, 2012–), at http://www.
cn-telma.fr/originaux/charte3133/.
40. Les registres de Alexandre IV (1254–1261), ed. Charles-M. Bourel de la Roncière et al. (3 vols
in 8 parts, Paris, 1895–1959), no. 346.
41. For example, M.R. Evans, ‘“A Far from Aristocratic Affair”: Poor and Non-Combatant
Crusaders from the Midlands, c.1160–1300’, Midland History, xxi (1996), pp. 23–36; and above,
n. 17.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)254 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
impoverished, these crusaders originally possessed some property and
enjoyed sufficient freedom to take the cross and be in position to enjoy
the material crusader privileges of protection of property, debt relief,
the right even as tenants to seek mortgages, and delay in answering civil
law suits. Such people were used to a degree of public agency of their
own and were familiar with the collective mechanisms governing rural
and urban society, even if most lacked absolute freedom of choice or
action outside the orbits of lords, knights, employers, urban magnates,
mutual associations or communes. Many crusaders who travelled by
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sea had experience of shipboard contracts and, in some cases, sworn
communes.42 Pooled resources and collaborative organisation were
necessary and convenient on land or sea, forming cat’s cradles of formal
and informal mutual dependence.
Evidence of the lived experience of commoner crusaders, although
fragmentary and partial, confirms an image of social inclusion and
corporate association. Price lists for travel that survive from the
thirteenth century indicate the affordability of crusading: in the 1240s
a third-class berth from Marseilles to Acre might have cost slightly less
than an English thatcher’s annual income, but was easily affordable for
a Parisian celebrity chef (who could probably have managed a first-
class berth) or a posh tailor.43 From shipping contracts it is possible
to calculate ordinary crusaders’ diet, rations, costs, and recipes for
the ubiquitous, unappetising ship’s biscuits.44 Aspects of non-military
behaviour—gambling, swearing, copulating, thieving, fighting—
may be observed in the anxieties expressed in surviving ordinances
of behaviour promulgated by crusade leaders.45 Mundane communal
activity may be gleaned from mentions of friends messing together
or the account of how on the First Crusade songs were familiar
accompaniments—except after military defeats, when the camp fell
silent. The English compendium of narratives of the Third Crusade,
the Itinerarium Ricardi regis, recorded the custom in the camp at Acre
for a public crier to walk through the army every evening declaiming
three times ‘Holy Sepulchre, help us!’, repeated by the crusaders in
a daily act of corporate prayer.46 Collective medical provision was
42. Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade, pp. 167–70; cf. Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana,
ed. and tr. S. Edgington (Oxford, 2007), pp. 158–61, for an alleged sworn navali collegio
encountered by crusaders at Adana in Cilicia in 1097.
43. Kedar, ‘Passenger List’, pp. 271–2; cf. C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages:
Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 29–30, 226.
44. For details of suggested diet, see Marino Sanudo Torsello, Liber Secretorum Fidelium
Crucis, ed. Jacques Bongars, Gesta Dei Per Francos, siue Orientalium expeditionum, et regni
Francorum Hierosolimitani historia (2 vols, Hanover, 1611), ii. pp. 60–64; see also J.H. Pryor, ed.,
Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades (Aldershot, 2006), especially chs. 11 (T. Madden,
‘Food and the Fourth Crusade’) and 13 (R. Unger, ‘The Northern Crusaders’).
45. See below, at nn. 58–77.
46. L. Paterson, Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading
Movements, 1137–1336 (Woodbridge, 2008), p. 16 and n. 61; Itinerarium, p. 253 (tr. Nicholson,
p. 240).
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 255
developed. Gossip and rumour were ubiquitous social mechanisms
47
of communal bonding.48 Rumour was seen as fuelling recruitment for
the First Crusade and playing a central role in creating panic during the
siege of Antioch in 1097–8, and was clearly a feature of the camp life of
the Third, Fourth and Fifth Crusades.49
In terms of distinctive political action, literary and apologetic sources
tend to depict crusaders on or beyond the fringe of political society
conceptually, as an imagined community of credulous or intemperate
commoners driven by material appetites not reasoned spirituality:
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the cannibals at Antioch and Ma’aarat al Numan first described in
accounts of the First Crusade by the leaders themselves;50 or, classically,
if misleadingly, the undisciplined followers of Peter the Hermit.51
The Provençal visionary Peter Bartholomew on the First Crusade was
disparaged both as a layman and a peasant: ‘some said they would never
believe that God carried on a conversation with such a man, overlooking
princes and bishops in showing himself to a peasant (rustico homini)’.52
Commoners appear in crudely delineated but narratively useful masses,
their actions providing a barometer of morale and the moral or physical
plight of the armies. Groups or individuals are plucked out of the crowd
as stereotypical exemplars of courage, greed, suffering, debauchery,
criminality—imagined types lent artificial identity and caricatured
sectional self-interest. Yet these tropic portrayals may emerge from
authentic information, as all crusade narratives were in varying degrees
compilations of material some of which derived from lay veterans,
the clerical compilers wishing either to suppress the lay voice or to
edit it to fit respectable ecclesiastical norms and didactic purposes.53
The chroniclers’ commoner could be at once imagined and authentic.
Their typology of orders and estates—rich and poor, noble, common,
great, middling—may have derived from academic and scriptural
47. P. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon
(Cambridge, 2004); Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade, pp. 251–5.
48. C. Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past and Present,
no. 160 (1998), pp. 1–23, esp. 11–18, and the comments and references in the introduction to
T. Fenster and D.L. Smail, eds., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe
(Ithaca, NY, 2003), pp. 1–11; cf. P. Contamine, ‘Introduction’, and C. Gauvard, ‘Rumeur et
stéreotypes à la fin du moyen âge’, in M. Balard, ed., La Circulation des nouvelles au moyen âge
(Paris, 1994), pp. 9–24, 157–77.
49. For the rumour in 1095–6, see Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, ed. R. Hill
(Oxford, 1972), pp. 1–2; for the Antioch panic, Raymond of Aguilers, Historia, in RHC Occ., iii.
253–7 (tr. Hill and Hill, pp. 50–57); Albert of Aachen, Historia, ed. Edgington, pp. 304–9.
50. Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100, ed. H. Hagenmeyer (Innsbruck, 1901), no.
XVIII, pp. 167–74.
51. A characterisation debunked as long ago as F. Duncalf, ‘The Peasants’ Crusade’, American
Historical Review, xxvi (1921), pp. 440–53.
52. Raymond of Aguilers, Historia, in RHC Occ, iii. 280–81: ‘Quum autem haec fratribus
ostendissemus, coeperunt quidam dicere quod nunquam crederent quod huismodi loqueretur
Deus, et dimitteret principes episcopos, et ostenderet se rustico homini’ (tr. Hill and Hill, p. 96).
53. See, for example, C. Symes, ‘Popular Literature and the First Historians of the First
Crusade’, Past and Present, no. 235 (2017), pp. 37–67.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)256 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
models and ingrained social prejudice but it also represented attempts
at social analysis based, in the case of many crusade commentators,
on observation. Unlike the collective attributes chroniclers assigned to
commoners, reported anecdotes and consistent descriptions of specific
patterns of behaviour need not necessarily be dismissed as complete
fiction.
Sermon literature and accounts of preaching also constructed the
imagined commoner. While uplifting sermon anecdotes, exempla,
tended to parade inspiring stories of crusading knights, some presented
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vignettes of commoners regularly shown in unflattering light: the
gluttonous peasant; the skinflint usurer; the bullied servant; the
butcher selling bad meat; the crooked blacksmith; the henpecked or
uxorious husbands prevented from taking the cross by obstructive
wives (a favourite theme of normally misogynistic preachers).54 Crowds
were habitually bored, riotous, belligerent or hostile, so setting up
staged moments of revelation or conversion: the cross appearing in
the sky, an epiphany of eloquence or a convincing miracle. Yet there
was contact with reality. The wide social engagement that preachers
described is confirmed by documentary evidence. Despite sermonising
caricatures, wives would have been justifiably apprehensive at being
abandoned by their husbands, with female agency perhaps reflected
in the thirteenth-century extension of crusader spiritual privileges to
spouses and family. Wives’ objections fit a wider impression of popular
questioning and dissent. The preacher and canonist Hostiensis accused
simple souls of an irrational preference for crusades to the Holy Land
after a German crowd had very effectively heckled him for his sophistry
in favour of a crusade against the Hohenstaufen.55 A thirteenth-century
English compendium of exempla presented a veteran crusader, a
Cambridgeshire mason, repeatedly warning sermon audiences against
taking the cross. Of course, as the point of the anecdote, he received
his necessary comeuppance by subsequently falling from his scaffolding
and biting through his tongue.56 However artificial, such stories hint
at promoters’ anxiety that their message could be contested by those
outside their cosy clerisy—that commoners possessed minds, thoughts,
experiences, even voices of their own, and dissident voices at that.
III
One body of evidence concerning the mass of crusaders and support
civilians relates directly to the creation of political space. Major
expeditions to the east generated ordinances of conduct and discipline
54. Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade, esp. pp. 87–123 and n. 6, and p. 318 for a short
bibliography.
55. For references and discussion, see H. Mayer, The Crusades, tr. J. Gillingham (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 320–21.
56. Le Speculum Laicorum, ed. J. Welter (Paris, 1914), pp. 34–5, no. 151.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 257
to be obeyed by all recruits regardless of status, regions, legal traditions
or prior loyalties. Although promulgated by leaders, such ordinances
were enacted and enforced through often strikingly similar patterns of
formal elite consent and mass sworn engagement. In terms of military
discipline, these crusade ordinances paralleled regulations for conduct
on campaigns elsewhere, such as those promulgated by Frederick
Barbarossa for his army in Italy in 1158, that similarly recognised the
nature of an army as a social, economic and legal space in need of rules.
However, Frederick’s treuga, as it was called, gives no indication that
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those it affected—the troops—formed any sort of sworn community.57
During the First Crusade, at the start of their campaigns, Bohemund
and Godfrey of Bouillon issued orders regulating their armies’ behaviour,
in Godfrey’s case with attendant capital penalties.58 However, at Antioch,
the collective leadership, noting the strain that hunger, mortalities and
incessant combat had placed on the cohesion or fellowship (societas) of
the army, imposed regulations on trading, money-changing, theft and
sexual conduct, a characteristic combination of the material and moral,
with judges appointed to supervise draconian punishments.59 Similar
regulations were agreed by the commune established by the crusader fleet
at Dartmouth in 1147: the settlement of disputes, criminal offences, the
distribution of money and booty, the role of women, the mechanics of
corporate discussion, and the security of employment and lordship ties,
with justices assigned to impose strict adherence and harsh penalties for
infringements.60 Famously, according to Odo of Deuil, Louis VII’s 1147
ordinances, promulgated at Metz at the start of his campaign and sworn
to by the magnates (principes), were subsequently ignored.61 This led to
the creation of a rather different sworn community after the disaster
at Mount Cadmus, a fraternitas run by the Templars to cope with the
emergency of collapsing discipline. Odo noted that this was agreed
communally (‘communi consilio’), a formal validation, but, unlike the
Metz rules, reinforced by oaths taken by all, ‘rich and poor’.62
57. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz, MGH,
Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi [hereafter SS rer. Germ.],
XLVI (Hanover, 1912), pp. 199–202.
58. Gesta Francorum, ed. Hill, p. 8; Albert of Aachen, Historia, ed. Edgington, pp. 68–9.
59. Albert of Aachen, Historia, ed. Edgington, pp. 228–9: ‘Decreverunt omnem iniustitiam et
feditatem de excercitu abscidi, videlicet ut nullus in pondere aut mensura, nec in auri vel argenti
cambitione, nec in alicuius rei mutuatione, aut negocio confratrem Christianum circumveniret;
nullus furtum presumeret; nullus fornicatione sive adulterio contaminaretur. Si quis vero hoc
mandatum transgrederetur, deprehensus sevissima pena affligeretur’.
60. De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. David, pp. 56–7: ‘Insuper leges severissimus sanxerunt, ut
mortuum pro mortuo, dentem pro dente’, etc.
61. Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici, ed. Berry, pp. 20–21: ‘Statuitque leges paci ceterisque
utilitatibus in via necessarias, quas principes sacramentis et fide firmaverunt. Sed quia ipsi non
bene tenuerunt eas, nec ego retinui’.
62. Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici, ed. Berry, pp. 124–5: ‘Inducitur itaque communi
consilio ut omnes mutuam et cum illis in hoc periculo fraternitatem statuerunt, firmantes fide
dives et pauper quod de campo non fugerent et magistris ab illis sibi traditis per omnia oboedirent’.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)258 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
On the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa’s severe disciplinary
ordinances concerning disputes, theft, cheating, fraud and violence
were implemented with judicial savagery, having been agreed by the
magnates but then sworn ‘in every tent’, a procedure described as ‘in
modum incredibilis’.63 The detailed regulations devised by Henry II and
Richard I for the polyglot Angevin crusade forces in 1188–90 covered
debt, dress, swearing, gambling, women, the disposal of deceased
crusaders’ goods, a prohibition on poaching another’s servants (similar
to that in the 1147 Dartmouth ordinances), army discipline and the
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internal market in perishable goods, backed by harsh capital, corporal
and financial penalties.64 Of course, in the event, justice was not blind.
In new rules to cover both their forces, agreed by Richard I and Philip II
at Messina in October 1190, the original universal Angevin restrictions
on gambling and disposal of property were watered down for kings,
magnates, knights and clerics, while remaining in full severity for other
ranks.65 The process of association also varied. According to the royal
clerk and crusader Roger of Howden, the statutes or assizes regarding
the Angevin fleet were agreed, as in normal Angevin administrative
and legislative practice, after consultation with ‘archbishops, bishops,
earls and barons’ and proclaimed as being issued ‘with the common
counsel of honourable men (proborum virorum)’.66 (In twelfth-
century England, a probus vir was deemed acceptable as a witness or
assessor of lawsuits—i.e., a community representative). However, in
a separate writ, Richard insisted by royal command that everyone
(omnes homines) going by sea to Jerusalem swear fidelity to these assizes,
and to the jurisdiction of the justices appointed to supervise them.67
By contrast, the joint Messina rules were agreed, again in Roger of
Howden’s witness, by the archbishops, bishops, earls, counts and
barons of both armies (‘totius exercitus peregrinorum’) and confirmed
by the archbishops, bishops, masters of the Temple and Hospital and
earls, counts and barons individually (‘in propriis personis’). To these
common rules were added some regarding provisions and commerce
specific to Angevin forces. Howden makes no mention here of general
63. Historia de Expeditione Friderici Imperatoris, ed. A. Chroust, Quellen zur Geschichte
des Kreuzzuges Kaiser Friedrichs I, MGH, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, Nova series, V
(Berlin, 1928), pp. 24–5: ‘Horum denique omnium consilio principum ... imperator optimis et
perneccessariis ac discretis legibus exercitum informavit et sacramento ad has observandas astrinxit
per singulorum contubernia’ (tr. G. Loud, The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa: The History of the
Expedition of the Emperor Frederick and Related Texts [Farnham, 2010], pp. 57–8).
64. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series, lxxiii (2 vols,
London, 1879–80), i. 409–10; Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 30–32,
110–11.
65. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 129–32.
66. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 110: ‘De communi proborum
virorum consilio has fecisse justitias’.
67. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 111: ‘Omnes homines sui
per mare Jerosolimam ituri essent obedentes praeceptis et consiliis praedictorum justitiarorum
navium suorum … et ut supradictas assisas suas jurassent se fideliter servaturos’.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E 259
oaths. However, these rules clearly formed part of the wider agreement
between Richard and Philip to co-operate, confirmed at an assembly
with counts, earls, barons ‘et clero et populo’, perhaps implying at least
a nod at community representation.68
From the Fourth Crusade, the Picard knight Robert of Clari,
in testimony corroborated by the Alsatian monk Gunther of Pairis,
recorded the rules regarding booty, rape, theft and assault on clerics,
apparently sworn on relics by the whole army shortly before the
final assault on Constantinople in April 1204.69 Oliver of Paderborn
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noted similar sworn agreement over booty—‘in commune iuravimus
omnes’—before the capture of Damietta in 1219. Earlier during
the Fifth Crusade, rules of conduct—‘leges et nova jura ob pacis
observanciam’—had been agreed collectively (communiter) by the 1217
German and Frisian North Sea crusade fleet, again at Dartmouth.70
These find echoes in the rules established by thirteenth-century mutual
assistance crusade fraternities.71
In each case, the moral and practical objective remained social
harmony through the creation of a mutual legal corporation, crusaders
literally becoming coniurati (a description applied to crusaders in other
contexts) beyond their initial oaths of enlistment.72 Given both the
practical need for military discipline and the theoretical equality of
status between crucesignati, involvement by the widest army community
in swearing oaths of association may come as no surprise. On one level,
such expedients reflect the self-image of fraternitas which elsewhere
found practical expression in the common funds during the sieges
conducted by the First, Third and Fifth Crusades at Nicaea, Antioch,
Acre and Damietta. On another level, it conforms to similar sworn
civilian associations that, from written records, proliferated in twelfth-
and thirteenth-century western Europe. Such sworn ordinances did
not contradict hierarchy; in civilian society lords habitually imposed
their authority through systems of mutual oath-giving. However, the
ordinances do reveal a settled acknowledgement of the establishment
of distinct legal—and hence political—communities in which defined
68. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 129: ‘Octavo die Octobris,
rex Franciae [et rex Angliae] coram comitibus et baronibus suis et clero et populo’; and for the
agreement, ii. 129–30.
69. Robert of Clari, Conquête, ed. Lauer, p. 68: ‘Quant il eurent tout chou atiré, après si fist
on jurer seur sains a tous chiaus de l’ost’. Cf. Gunther of Pairis, Historia Constantinopolitana, tr.
A. Andrea, The Capture of Constantinople: The Hystoria Constantinopolitana of Gunther of Pairis
(Philadelphia, PA, 1997), p. 107.
70. Oliver of Paderborn, Historia Damiatina, ed. Hoogeweg, pp. 237–8: ‘In commune
iuravimus omnes ut asportata de civitate spolia redderentur inter victores dividenda’. Gesta
crucigerorum Rhenanorum, ed. Röhricht, Quinti belli sacri scriptores minores, p. 29.
71. Les registres de Alexandre IV, ed. Bourel de la Roncière, no. 346.
72. For the Dartmouth commune as a coniuratio, see De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. David,
p. 101; for English crusaders in 1190 called coniurati, William of Newburgh, Historia rerum
Anglicarum, ed. Richard Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I,
Rolls Series, lxxxii (4 vols, 1884–9), i. 308–24.
EHR, CXXXVI. 579 (April 2021)260 C O M M O N E R S O N C RU S A D E
networks of order and control could operate beside pre-existing systems
of lordship and command.
Echoes or parallels might be drawn not just with contemporary
civic communal arrangements or with Frederick Barbarossa’s leges pacis
regulations for his Italian campaign in 1158, but also perhaps with the
Peace of God tradition as developed and institutionalised by rulers
in the twelfth century. Peace of God assemblies, from the late tenth
century onwards, although in action and decrees driven by lay and
ecclesiastical elites attempting to shore up their authority and impose
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hierarchical order, were presented by clerical observers as embracing
popular demand and support. The early eleventh-century Burgundian
witness, the monk Ralph Glaber, wrote of peace councils ‘of the whole
people’ (‘ex universe plebe’) attended by the ‘great, middling, and
poor’ (‘maximi, mediocres ac minimi’).73 While the reality may have
been less socially inclusive, and the Biblical overtones of the people
of Israel inherent in the portrayal of corporate social ownership of the
peace movement were clearly tropic, such presentations recognised
the practical reality that power—secular, ecclesiastical or spiritual—
required public affirmation. The linguistic construct of peace became
a twelfth-century commonplace, continuing to ally religious resonance
with political application. The Clermont decrees in 1095 included
peace legislation.74 The idea of a peace, even if imposed by a ruler, as
was increasingly common, implied a pact (pax deriving from paciscor,
to settle, make an agreement, etc.) creating a formal community of
obligation, recognised in mutual oaths. On crusade, these associations
could act as attributes of communal action or of lordship. Descriptions
of the ordinances of Dartmouth in 1147 and 1217, of Louis VII in 1147
and of Frederick Barbarossa’s crusade regulations in 1189 all talk in
terms of leges pacis, establishing a peace and its observance, references
that in context carry specific religious and moral as well as legal force.75
(Typically, Howden avoids such language; his ordinances are statutes,
assizes and justitiae.)76 Although the combination of the religious,
moral and legal suited the ideology of crusading, it was not confined
to it. Rather, as with other features of crusading, it reflected current
73. Rodulfus Glaber Opera, ed. J. France et al. (Oxford, 1989), pp. 194–5 and cf. pp. 196–7 for
a Mosaic echo.
74. For a recent summary and analysis, see G. Koziol, The Peace of God (Leeds, 2018); for
some older views, H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century’,
Past and Present, no. 46 (1970), pp. 42–97, and M. Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to
the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c.970–c.1130 (Oxford, 1993), esp. ch. 1, ‘The Peace
of God and the First Crusade’, pp. 21–69; on popular involvement in Peace of God movements,
B. Töpfer, Volk und Kirche zur der beginnenden Gottesfriedenbewegung in Frankreich (Berlin,
1957), and T. Head and R. Landes, The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in
France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), esp. Landes’s essay on the Limousin, pp. 184–218,
and R.I. Moore, ‘Postscript’, pp. 320–26; R. Somerville, The Councils of Urban II, I: Decreta
Claromontensia (Amsterdam, 1972).
75. Above, nn. 57, 61, 63, 70.
76. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici Secundi, ed. Stubbs, ii. 110, 111, 129–32.
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