A little one-handed bec de faucon for a captain….

Leafing throught the newly-published second volume of Ralph Moffat’s excellent Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook*, I came across the above entry in an inventory of the Château of Blois made in March 1434.

It intrigued me, and got me thinking about the use of weapons as emblems of command, and the different types that have been used.

• Volume Two will be out soon (I got an advanced copy). Volume One is available here, and I heartily recommend them both for your bookshelves. The quote comes from Document 89, page 143 (Blois, Bibliothéque Abbé Grégoire, Collection Joursanvault, Role CXIV Inventory of the Château of Blois, 31 March 1434).

Swords.

We’re very used to thinking of swords as emblems of rank and authority today, in no small part because in most modern militaries officers still have a sword as part of their dress uniform.

To a certain extent this was true in the middle ages as well. I have written previously about the use of ‘bearing swords’ as symbols of devolved royal power and noble status, including the sword of the Constable of France, who was the senior comander of French royal armies through most of the medieval period.

However, swords as symbols of military rank were not so common. The problem was that most warriors in the high and late middle ages, and almost all of those who might be sufficiently socially elite to have command, would have carried a sword into battle as a matter of course. When everyone was waving a sword around how would the commander’s sword be distinguished?

It is no surprise then, that other emblems of command would come into use.

The Baculum, and Mace.

One of the most famous occurences of a weapon used as an emblem of command appears in the Bayeux Tapestry. On three ocassions Norman commanders are shown carrying clubs of knotted wood into battle. Often the focus is on Odo Bishop of Bayeux, who is twice depicted with club in hand. The traditional interpretation is that he is shown carrying it because as a churchman he was forbidden to shed blood and therefore used a club instead of a sword.

Now this is nonsense. Besides the fact that if you hit someone hard enough with a wooden club you are going to draw blood just as readily as if you had whacked them with a sword, it seems obvious that the intention of the restriction is that men of the Church should not participate in violence at all. Secondly, bishops were landholders, and as such had duties as both secular and ecclesiastical lords. Thirdly, plenty of bishops were prepared to ignore the restriction and take an active part in battle. To take just one example, Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais was such a regular warrior (participating actively in the Third Crusade and the battle of Bouvines) that the chronicler and illustrator Matthew Paris chose to depict him in a full knight’s helm with his mitre serving as a crest, rather than as a prelate.

Finally, the baculum also appears in the hands of William of Normandy, the future William the Conqueror, and he is neither a churchman nor under any ban on the shedding of blood.

The baculum is one form of a long-standing emblem of command - the baton. They are in use today as the token of a senior general (it was claimed that every one of Napoleon’s soldiers held a figurative Marshal’s baton in their knapsack, a metaphor for the ability of ordinary soldiers to be promoted on merit). The same symbol - sometimes referred to as a wand of command was being used in the middle ages. When Thomas Erpingham gave the order for the English archers to loose their first volley at Agincourt, we are told he did so by throwing his baton into the air.

The orgins are obscure, but I would suggest they lie with the Romans and the vine stick that was one of the emblems of rank carried by centurions, used for corporal punishment.

A variant on the baculum is the mace. Again, the orgins are ancient. In western Europe they are found being paraded ahead of the monarch as part of the regalia (or those delegated royal powers, such as the mayors of certain cities). In Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine the buława a ball-headed ornamental mace, was the mark of the hetman, the highest military commander, equivalent to a medieval western Euroepan constable or marshal, whilst Ottoman officers had similar tokens in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Partisans and Halberds

By the late sixteenth century there was increasing emphasis on the command structures within infantry units, and the officers of these sported particular weapons as their symbols of command.

For officers, the weapon of choice became the partisan; some eight- to ten-feet in length, with a spear-like head. For the sergeants the weapon was the halberd, similar in length but dominated by an axeblade.

Such weapons had developed in the high and later middle ages from agricultural tools. They were popular amongst urban militias and, perhaps most famously, the fifteenth-century Swiss that were so successful against the Duchy of BUrgundy’s troops. By the end of the period they had taken on something of a ceremonial aspect, being the weapons chosen for the personal bodyguards of kings and nobles. The weapons for these troops were often highly decorated, their blades inscribed with the arms of the nobleman, or other decorative elements

Whilst they might be effective weapons, they were also very useful for helping to dress the lines of troops and to level the muskets of the men for more effective volleys, being used much like a builder’s line. Some ceased to be practrical weapons, their heads becoming increasingly decorative. The extreme of this was the production of ‘leading staffs’, which looked like a partisan but whose head was merely a heavily decorated finial rather than a practical spearpoint.

Why a Bec du Faulcon?

So, why should the bec de faulcon beocme the preserve of a captain?

I suspect that it came about in much the same way as the use of halberds and partisans for sergeants and officers in the early modern period. The weapon was developed as an effective tool against plate armour, designed specifically to cave in, distort, or even pierce the plates. However, it cannot simply have been its practicality that led to its adoption as a symbol of rank.

Like the polearms of the early modern period, the bec de faulcon seems to have a connection with rank and position, perhaps drawing on the use of the baculum or mace as an emblem of command. It would be an obvious weapon, distinct from the swords and maces carried by mounted gendarmes, or the lances or polearms used by them on foot. It would also have been different from the wands carried by more senior commanders. Its form would have leant itself to embellishment and decoration, allowing it (again like the partisan) to become an object of high status and display.

As always, there is more to be found here, and it may be that a close reading of the documents connected with the establishment of the French (ro indeed Burgundian) Compagnies d’Ordnnance would shed more light on whether this was a universal symbol, expected of all captains, or merely an assumption on the part of the scribe compiling the inventory.

Whichever is the case, the petit bec de faulcon a une main pour vng capp[itai]ne is a nice example of how weapons are often more than simple tools for killing.