In June 2004, I visited the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA, with my sister and her family and a mutual friend. The museum contains Medieval armor and weapons: metal suits, swords, halberds, daggers, and so on. These are the defenses and weapons that guns and gun powder eventually defeated.
I am not into any of this — had I been a Medieval soldier, I would prefer to have operated a catapult. But that aside, my brother-in-law and I noted that the suits of armor and swords, not to mention the anvils and vises uses to make them, were often beautifully decorated. The decorations did not help the weapons as killing devices but added to their cost and turned many of them into works of art.
More to the point, the museum reminded me of a remark by James Gilligan, a forensic pychiatrist who has worked with many violent criminals. Gilligan said that the Medieval rulers often had the same characteristics as today's violent crooks: they were short tempered violent, and touchy about their honor. I think Gilligan mentioned this in his book, Preventing Violence 1, but perhaps it was in his previous book.
Gilligan makes two points about the violent men he interviewed in prison: they are unlike you and me, in that they really do not think of others; and they are different because they were taught through out childhood by a treatment of them — most viciously a destruction of their sense of self worth — that led to suffering whose response — a willingness to destroy others — means they must be restrained for the rest of us to be safe.
Many Medieval soldiers lived in what is called, with a virtuous cast, an `honor based' society. What this means in practice is that these men were sensitive to how they perceived others thought of them (they are sensitive of their `honor') and would fight any who slighted them (or who were perceived to have slighted them).
Many sociological histories speak of a higher murder rate in Medieval times than now; this is the reason. Less violent or non-violent farmers, artisans, and businessmen had to gain power and build a civilization. This building was so successful that in the United States, in World War II, S. L. A. Marshall found (as reported in his 1947 book, Men Under Fire) that the majority of US soldiers became `pacifists when under fire'. It is not that they were unwilling to join the army, nor that they would not feed ammunition to a solider operating a machine gun, but that they would not personally try to kill an enemy directly when being shot at themselves.
(Note that these men were mostly conscripts, not volunteers. People willing to kill, who are not criminal, fit what Walter Russell Mead calls the `The Jacksonian Tradition' in US politics. It is one of four major US political traditions.)
Return to: Notions
Or return to: Rattlesnake Home Page