Knights, Honor, and Bloodshed: Crafting the Battles in “Forging Glory”
Greetings, intrepid readers! Today I wanted to discuss some of the most exciting things to create and write: battles. But first, a question: what comes to mind when you think of medieval battles? English longbowmen, German zweihanders, and Swiss pikemen are famous examples of foot soldiers. However, medieval contemporaries and later Hollywood scripts sell the idea that cavalry was king. Movies like Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven, and Waterloo feature terrifying cavalry charges slamming into masses of helpless infantry. Even fantasy staples like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones used cavalry charges to great effect, emulating real-world accounts of a smaller force of knights besting larger enemy armies.
Studying these battles in college was fun, and it also gave me context and ideas for how I wanted to write battles in Forging Glory.
No one can deny that Norman knights were extremely effective on the battlefield, but the challenge before me was more subtle. How exactly was I supposed to write believable battles while keeping the focus of the story centered on Roger? And how even did Roger attain this battle prowess so highly lauded by his autobiographer? The very first mention of Roger in Malaterra’s Deeds of Count Roger states “…he was a most handsome young man, tall and well-made, a most fluent speaker, shrewd in counsel, far-sighted in the planning of things to be done, cheerful and pleasant to everyone, strong and valiant, fierce in battle.” This is high praise for a teenager, but definitely something I captured and used in my process for building Roger’s character. But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It might be more useful to have that glorious context of how Nomans fought so we can better understand just how “fierce in battle” Roger truly was.
Most knights of the 11th century rode horses to battle but dismounted and fought on foot once armies clashed. Scholars agree that Norman knights were some of the first soldiers to remain mounted and use their horses as an extension of their combat prowess.
They weren’t the plate armor clad, lance-couched types you might think from jousts and tournaments a few centuries later. Instead, Normans fought in coats of chainmail, with their iconic conical helms. They carried a kite or round shield they strapped to their arms so as to still hold the reigns of their destriers (warhorses). In their right hand they would wield a spear, usually overhand to better stab down at infantry as they rode by. Once the spear had been broken or thrown, the knight would change to his sword, mace, or axe. The trick was to always keep moving and never get bogged down by groups of infantry, where they could kill your horse from under you or pull you out of the saddle. Norman tactics created confusion and panic in their enemies, with feigned retreats in order to pull tightly-grouped infantry units apart. Norman bowmen and crossbowmen would use these disengagements to further harass the enemy, creating more casualties and decreasing morale. There are MANY accounts of miniscule numbers of mounted Norman knights routing and completely destroying much larger armies of infantry. Now that we have the basis of medieval combat, we can go about creating battles centered around our young hero.
After many attempts at writing large-scale battles, all of them clunky and grandiose, I decided to focus on how one young man might have maneuvered through a battle, doing everything he could to survive. Again, there were some aspects of my life I was able to lean on in order to achieve the correct tone and emotion Roger might have felt while training and fighting. My experiences in Basic Training might not have been as dangerous as Roger’s first battle, but our instructors did their best to simulate the stress of combat. I distinctly remember one particular night in August where recruits were tasked with completing an obstacle course in the dark while instructors fired machine guns over our heads and flares were fired around the course to confuse us. It was a very stressful but insightful exercise. When it came time to write some of Roger’s first encounters with battle and combat, I felt I was able to capture not only the terror but also the comfort of instincts taking over, instincts created by years of training as a boy. Some scholars disagree on how much training Norman soldiers actually received, but in my personal opinion you don’t become “fierce in battle” on just bravery alone. For the sake of simplicity, I decided to trust my gut and run with it.
When these battle scenes made it to paper, I realized there was something missing. There was a distinct lack of suspense or fear on Roger’s part, and the reader is left to experience the battle without any question about whether Roger would survive or not. The first draft of Forging Glory included these exposition-type battles, written as if a professor was going over the sequence of events in a comfortable classroom. To make it a little more exciting, believable, and especially relatable, I decided to include a unique writing sequence that I wasn’t sure how well it would be received by readers. This is one of the things I’m most excited for all of you to experience, and I can’t wait to hear feedback on how it turned out. Without ruining the surprise, I can say that these revised battle scenes were very fun to write, and it provides a unique point of view into my main goal of describing how one man fights a battle.
The combat in Forging Glory is short and to the point, both to stay true to historical accounts and to prevent a portion of my readers from becoming bored. Blood and guts aren’t for everyone, so I left a lot of the descriptions to the reader’s imagination. I hope I was able to accurately portray just how deadly fighting could be in the Middle Ages, and in Roger’s case, how important it was to prove yourself and fight with honor and courage. Battle is what these knights lived for, and if glory and riches were what Roger strived for, the most sure way of achieving these goals was through glorious combat.
