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4 Galbert of Bruges and the Urban Experience of Siege sTeven isaaC More than four centuries after Galbert of Bruges recorded the tumultuous events of 1127–28, William Shakespeare set himself the task of imagining and recreating the conditions of a medieval siege, in this case, that of Harfleur by Henry V. After costly assaults that doubtless embittered his surviving troops, the English king threatened Harfleur’s inhabitants (who were also its defenders) with quite a graphic litany of atrocities that his soldiers would perpetrate upon them, their wives, and children should the besiegers finally enter the city by force. He ended the roll call of likely outrages by demanding: “What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid? Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?”1 In the Bard’s version of events, the vivid imminence of what Henry threatened cowed the city’s governor into surrender. In the actual event, the city’s leaders maintained a vigorous defense, one that gave little hope of a quick capitulation. Further assaults and countermeasures ensued before Harfleur’s defenders requested of King Henry the formulaic waiting period (four days in this case) to request a relief force from their French overlord. When that aid was not forthcoming, they were able to stave off the city’s sack by a negotiated surrender.2 Shakespeare may be forgiven a bit of literary license in his need to move his play onward, but this scene should still give the military historian reason to pause. The forces that typically worked upon medieval burghers defending their communities did not lead them to roll over at the first sign of 89 1. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, III.3.43–44, ed. Claire McEachern (Harmondsworth, 1999), 49. 2. Anne Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud, 2006), 96–98. 90 sTeven isaaC trouble. Going back at least to the twelfth century, medieval cities repeatedly and successfully showed themselves able to fend off besiegers. Nonetheless , they were often the prey of kings and magnates, of marauders, and of rival cities. These two elements, power and vulnerability, combined to create a peculiar military culture in medieval cities, especially those of the twelfth century. Thus, the paradox in our sources: the almost simultaneous images of townspeople as fearful and bellicose.3 As the image of cities as nonfeudal islands in a feudal sea recedes, the martial components of urban life grow more apparent. The role of the urban environment as a breeding (and proving) ground for foot soldiers, the ones loathed and dreaded for their effectiveness, becomes all the more understandable. Once considered oddities, those aspects can now be seen as normative, and nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in the record left us by Galbert of Bruges.4 In his account, we see the very process that shortly thereafter yielded the type of professional soldiers that traumatized the social elites of the latter 1100s. Galbert’s entries have an immediacy, a wealth of detail, and that very vividness that military historians so rarely find in medieval sources—all of which begs the question: why have we not turned more often to him? The road from Shakespeare’s after-the-fact imagination to Galbert’s almost daily journal is not all that far. The laws of war that Fluellen took for granted at both Harfleur and Agincourt immediately recall the “laws of the siege” developed at Bruges in the spring of 1127.5 Still, few historians have traveled this road fully.6 Because of the wealth of evidence available, the four3 . The picture is all the more apparent in the latter part of Galbert’s history, as the people of Bruges suffer the vicissitudes of Thierry’s campaign for the comital title (Galbert, [107]/ [118]). See also Guibert of Nogent’s description of how the burghers of Laon strove to hide the trappings of their wealth so as not to attract the rapacious attention of nearby nobles (Autobiographie 3.11, ed. Edmond-Réné Labande [Paris, 1981], 366). 4. Ross’s notes (trans.) betray repeated astonishment or puzzlement over the close relations between townsmen and their lords, including intermarriage, general socializing, and habitual negotiation of “feudal” customs. 5. An interesting analysis of Shakespeare’s reliance upon, and twisting of, historical traditions may be found in Theodor Meron, Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (Oxford, 1993). The conventions of siege warfare were well-established by Galbert’s day, with roots stretching back into both Greek and...

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