Terry Jones' Medieval Lives by Alan Ereira Read Free Book Online

saw a long wall of wooden shields that would be impervious to their arrows. Even worse, there were no Anglo-Saxon archers to shoot back at them – Normans did not carry many arrows and relied on picking up their enemy’s spent ones after the first barrage.
    Their infantry would have to attack with the undamaged enemy raining down deadly missiles from above them as they struggled up the slope. Then the knights would also have to launch themselves uphill, having to push their horses’ flesh against a solid and heavily spiked wall of shields.
    It would be a suicide assault.
    It appears that the Norman resolve to fight was somewhat uncertain. The Anglo-Saxons would not have helped matters by chanting their prebattle war cry: ‘ Ut! Ut! ’ (Out! Out!). Simple, and intimidating when shouted by 7000 or 8000 men armed with spears and axes.
    It was at this uncertain point that William’s minstrel Taillefer asked for permission to give a little performance. *1
    According to one account, he rode forward and juggled with his sword. A minstrel was a ‘jongleur’, a jester, a general entertainer, but if juggling was all Taillefer did it would have been very odd. Another chronicle, presumably based on an account by someone nearer the performance, describes him singing the Song of Roland.
    The version we have runs to 291 verses, which is a little long for the event. Since it is clear from internal references that it dates from somewhat later than 1066, we can assume that Taillefer was working from an earlier and probably shorter version; and that even then, under the circumstances, he probably went for the edited highlights. The song he sang told a famous story, of battle against impossible odds and heroic death that would never be forgotten.
    And then he attacked the Anglo-Saxon line, all by himself. And he was killed.
    There have been other battles, even in recent years, when soldiers who were required to attack but were frightened to advance have watched a volunteer from their own ranks go forward to certain death. The result always seems to be the same. The death creates a moral certainty; the survival of the men watching seems not to matter to them any more. Now they will advance with absolute resolution, irrespective of the odds. They do this not to exact revenge or even because they feel hatred for the enemy – they advance because they are totally bonded to the man they saw die. In this moment they do not have homes or even lives to return to. This moment is all there is, and the spinning world revolves around what they must do.
    This is why the battlefield can be a place of music, of song, of poetry. Taillefer’s death-song shaped the history of England, Europe and the whole world.
    The Normans charged. The initial attack was indeed suicidal, but their determination to succeed was now unbreakable. The first assault was followed by another, and then another. The battle continued all day long until eventually, as it began to grow dark, the English defence crumbled, dissolved and disappeared. A new history of England had begun.
    The Norman survivors did not see this wonderful tale as being all that heroic. The Bayeux tapestry, a strip-cartoon account of the high points of the conquest of England, leaves Taillefer out. The hint of cowardice, the leadership of a low-born entertainer – these do not seem to have been themes that attracted Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the man who commissioned the tapestry.
    THE PUBLIC RELATIONS MINSTREL
    An eleventh-century jongleur was pretty low down in the social order. Taillefer was a ‘jongleur des gestes’, a man who entertained the mighty with the heroic epics that fired their blood. The emphasis was entirely on military virtues; women barely figure in the epics of the period. These poems were a validation of the military ethos, placing the listeners inside the world of heroic action and, in effect, inviting them to see their own warfare as participation