The King: Agincourt

Tags

Agincourt, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, The King, Timothée Chalamont

One of the reasons I stopped posting during Covid was I got busy right in the middle of a two-part review of The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), a movie I rather disliked. I did the initial review, but I knew I needed to post a review of its battle scene, but after a couple months had passed, I couldn’t recall the scene clearly enough to review it from memory and the prospect of watching it again discouraged me from doing it; the Covid stress was bad enough without compounding it with a crappy movie. But I finally had the right combination of time and mental health to make myself rewatch it. And hey! It’s exactly as crappy as I remembered it being!

If it’s so crappy, why did I feel I needed to review it? Well, it’s about the battle of Agincourt, which has the distinction new of being one of the very few medieval battles to be depicted in film three times. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another medieval battle depicted on screen three times, but I’m betting there have been at least three treatments of the battle of Hastings or the battle of Hattin that I haven’t seen. And that just seems to merit a post.

The Historical Agincourt

Since I’ve already discussed this battle in detail, I’ll just let you read it here if you need to. But I’ll summarize. In 1415, Henry V launched an invasion of northern France. After capturing Harfleur, he marked east, encountering a good deal of rain, and his men began to get sick, so he aimed for Calais with the intention of returning to England. But the French, knowing his army was weak, chased him down at Agincourt.

Knowing that he was seriously outnumbered and his men were weak, Henry adopted a very defensive position between two woods, organizing his men into a line in which his men-at-arms (cavalry dismounted to fight on foot) were either flanked by or interspersed with his longbow men. After some initial exchange of arrows (which the French probably were on the losing end of), the French cavalry charged but got repulsed by arrow fire. The French infantry advanced, but took high casualties because of the longbows. They lost formation and got slowed down by the muddy field, the retreating casualties, and the mounting bodies. The nature of the field channeled the French into an increasingly tight zone where they were unable to fight effectively against the English infantry. The English victory was sealed when the longbow men put away their bows and joined the attack using knives and hatchets.

A 15th-century depiction of Agincourt (inaccurately showing both sides using longbows)

The result was one of the most lopsided victories in medieval history. The French suffered something between 4 and 10,000 casualties, while the English suffered only about 110 casualties.

The King‘s take on Agincourt

In the film, Henry (Timothee Chalamet) is advised by one of his nobles to not confront the French because the English forces are sick and outnumbered. But Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) proposes a bold plan. The field at Agincourt will be very muddy once it rains overnight (which he knows it will because his bad knee always aches before rain) and the mud will neutralize the French advantage of numbers. So he suggests that instead of fighting on horseback, the English should dismount and fight on foot (a plan so novel the English have actually been doing exactly that for several generations). But the French won’t just advance onto the field on their own, so he suggests that a small force of men be advanced to draw the French into attacking them. Then, when the mud fouls their charge, the rest of the English forces, which have been hidden in the forests on either side of the field, will charge in at their flanks.

Chalamet as Henry V

Henry agrees to this gamble and, as predicted, it rains overnight. Because the men who are first advanced will essentially be making a suicide maneuver, Falstaff declares his intention to lead them, which Henry dislikes, but Falstaff persuades him that it’s the best option, and makes Henry promise not to make the follow-up attack until the French troops are fully committed. Henry meets with the Dauphin (Robert Pattinson) and offers to fight in single combat rather than a full pitched battle, obviously trying to keep Falstaff alive. The Dauphin rather strangely suggests this means Henry is a coward and as a result the battle goes ahead.

And it plays out roughly as Falstaff had planned. Falstaff leads a force on foot into the muddy field. The French make a very slow charge on horseback, not using lances but swords, and the English arrow-fire forces them to speed up. They slam into Falstaff’s unit, who, despite being substantially armed with pikes, make no effort to use the pikes to break the cavalry charge, even though that’s one of the main reasons to use pikes. As predicted, the mud bogs everyone down and the fight completely loses its organization (because cinematic soldiers can’t ever keep their ranks tight).

The English advancing onto the field

The French advance their reserves into the fight and the Dauphin gets into the battle as well. The English continue firing their arrows, mostly at the advancing cavalry, and then Henry launches his flanking maneuver. Then there is a long battle montage that focuses a lot on how muddy and vicious the fighting is.

Then the Dauphin shows up and offers Henry single combat. Even though the Dauphin is fresh to the fight and Henry is exhausted, Henry accepts, but the Dauphin embarrasses himself by slipping in the mud so much Henry just lets his men swarm the Dauphin. Logically the thing to do would be to either let his men kill the French prince or take him captive, but it’s unclear what finally becomes of the prince. Henry finds Falstaff dead and has a brief cry, and then walks off the field as men kneel before him. He’s asked what to do with the captives and orders them killed, a detail that is historically accurate, except that Henry made the decision during the battle, not after it; it’s also in Shakespeare, but almost always cut because it makes Henry look bad).

Robert Pattinson as some strung-out French hippie

The first thing to note is that this bears only a casual resemblance to the historical Battle of Agincourt. The French did indeed make a charge into a muddy field and get bogged down and they did indeed lose the battle. Henry did fight in the battle. Beyond that, however, it’s mostly fantasy. Falstaff wasn’t a real person and therefore couldn’t lead anyone into battle, and the English did not advance their forces first; the French changed and got bogged down and then eventually the English advanced. The French forces seem to be entirely cavalry; there’s no crossbowmen and while there are some infantry, they don’t seem to fight. The Dauphin was not present at the battle and Henry never made any offer to fight a single combat. There was no English flanking maneuver, unless you count the longbow men getting involved after they couldn’t continue arrow fire because the English troops were in the melee.

Additionally, this version of Agincourt is rather improbable for a couple reasons. First, if the English had advanced a force on foot, the French would probably have done the logical thing and used crossbows to cut them down, rather than charging into battle. So this battle requires the French to be too impatient to do the obvious thing. A second problem is that in order to flank the battlefield, Henry would have to get his men fairly close to the French position without being spotted, which requires the French to have not sent out any scouts into the forests to watch for such maneuvers. That’s a pretty basic mistake, again not impossible, but unlikely. Falstaff’s proposal is basically a suicide mission, and that sort of thing seems to have been generally uncommon in medieval warfare. So while the King‘s version of Agincourt is a battle that could have happened in the 15th century, it’s a pretty unlikely one, since it requires the French to be fairly stupid about one of the things they were famous for.

The French charging onto the field

How does it compare to the other two screen version of Agincourt?

The King‘s Agincourt bears virtually no resemblance to Olivier’s 1944 version. Olivier’s version very heavily emphasizes the French cavalry charge, turning the charge into a truly great moment of cinema in which the pace of the music beautifully mirrors the pace of the charge. The emphasis is on the gallantry of the charge and the actual fighting is reduced to a crowd of knights milling around in a mass and some English archers leaping out of trees onto cavalry that is inexplicably riding through the woods.

Michôd’s scene draws more heavily off on Branagh’s 1988 version. The field is muddy, and the extended melee scene has the same tone, with lots of slow footage of men fighting brutally, punching each other, falling in the mud, and so on. Both convey a very strong “war is hell” feeling, and neither tries to glorify the fighting at all, in contrast to Olivier’s version which was filmed at the end of World War II and made for audiences who already understood how horrible war could be and therefore wanted to see something glorious and uplifting. While Michôd certainly isn’t copying Branagh, I think Branagh’s influence is still there. Frankly, Branagh’s version is far superior, both in terms of its plausibility and as cinema; the music hauntingly underscores the mayhem in a way that still affects me when I think of the film. It’s a far more emotional scene, in part because Branagh took the time to develop the secondary characters enough that we care when we see them die, whereas The King is almost entirely focused first on Falstaff and then on Henry. (Michôd also admits that he ripped off a scene from Game of Thrones, supposedly unintentionally.)

So if I had to rank the three scenes in terms of accuracy, it would be Branagh on top, Michôd second, and Olivier third. Michôd’s battle does at least make sense even if it’s improbable, whereas Olivier’s just looks silly today ((but, in fairness to Olivier, stunt work was a much less developed and most of his extras were amateurs hired because they owned a horse). Ranked in terms of cinema, it would be Branagh, Olivier, then Michôd.

Overall, Michôd’s film is, in my opinion, just a fairly all-around miss. There is nothing I like about it at all, and I disliked watching it enough that it made me put this blog on hiatus for 18 months (well, ok, Covid was a factor too, but still…). For me, the battle is actually the highpoint of The King, and that’s saying something. If you want to see the story of Henry V well-told, rent Branagh’s brilliant film and savor its wonderful cast, masterful interpretation of the play, and Shakespeare’s glorious language.

Want to Know More?

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.

Dragon Knight: It’s Got Pretty Scenery

Tags

Daniel Auteuil, Dragon Knight, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Movies, Movies I Hate, Pseudohistory

Perhaps my mistake was watching this when I was under the weather. I came down with something in the middle of the week and watching tv was about all I was up for, so I figured I’d watch something for the blog. And I settled on Dragon Knight (2003, dir. Hélene Angel, aka Rencontre avec le dragon, aka Red Dragon aka The Red Knight; French with subtitles) a film so obscure its Wikipedia page is barely more than a stub, despite starring well-known French actor Daniel Auteuil. But watching this film in my weakened state was a serious error it will take some time to recover from.

The film is set at some unspecified time during the later Middle Ages, in gorgeous southern France. It’s about a 15-year-old boy Felix (Nicholas Nollet) who wants to become a knight because he’s heard a story about the brave Knight of the Red Dragon (or just the Red Dragon), a great hero who rescued his young friend Raoul from a fire and was baptized by the fire (the Red Dragon of different titles) so that he won’t die, although he’s horribly burned. Eventually Felix finds the Red Dragon, Guillaume de Montauban (Auteuil), but learns to his surprise that Montauban is really just a bounty hunter, currently seeking a poet who ran away from the papal court. There’s another bounty hunter, Mespoulede (Gilbert Melki), also hunting the runaway poet, leading a substantial band of thugs who help him. Raoul (Sergi Lopez) is following Montauban, having gone insane; there’s a very complex and angst-ridden back story here involving a love triangle. There’s also a runaway mother superior who’s looking for the poet. Over the course of the film, Felix gradually becomes disillusioned with his hero, who fails to match up to his expectations and wrestles with his own personal demons.

It’s a very French film. People you can’t empathize with are doing things you don’t really understand. This is the sort of film where people get histrionic whenever there’s a moment’s downtime to reflect on how awful their past is, and spend much of the film so physically or emotionally exhausted that they fall down a lot at dramatic moments. If you pay attention you can piece together most of the back story, although you’ll have to care a lot more than I did. Half the cast appear to be delusional from grief at different moments. And the film is riddled with unexplained plot points. Why has the pope placed such a huge bounty on the poet? Why has Mespoulede’s horse died? Who’s the guy who’s wearing a half-face mask and getting angry at Montauban? Where did the baby go? What does the pope want with all those children? Why do Mespoulede and Montauban hate each other? I realize I haven’t explained any of that, but neither does the film. It seems to think that being a French film is an automatic license for not explaining things.

From a historical standpoint, the film is sort of incoherent. Montauban is a former crusader, and there’s another crusade supposed to be getting ready, but this is entirely irrelevant to the film; at no point does crusading actually matter at all. As I said, it’s unclear when the film is set; if I had to take a guess, it would be the early 14^th century, because the pope seems to be living in France. But the sets, other than the gorgeous French countryside, suggest some time around the 12^th century. But the pope is waiting at Aigues-Mort (misspelled in the subtitles as “Wegmort”), which wasn’t founded until the 1240s. But that’s not a problem because apparently Aigues-Mort is just an empty beach.

At first I thought the film’s costume designer was following the “it’s medieval, so it’s all the same” theory of costuming. Montauban spends the whole film wearing a long leather gown with square metal plates sewn onto it, and several other characters wear variations on this. Perhaps this is supposed to be a 14^th century coat of plates, but it’s not. He also wears a 15^th century tournament helmet with wings on it, but only when it provides a good camera shot. Felix runs around in a gambeson and knee guards, while Raoul mostly just wears a big sweater. Mespoulede seems to have a metal grill sewn onto his gambeson, and some of his men are wearing metal forehead guards.

Auteuil as Montauban in his weird coat of plates

And then about an hour into the film, the pope arrives with a massive entourage, and that’s when I realized that the costumer designer was actually smoking crack. The pope is wearing some sort of golden bulb on his head and massive platform shoes, looking like a dropout from the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar. He’s attended by knights in late medieval plate armor, one of whom is wearing—I am not kidding about this—an enormous metal tutu. The pope’s drummers are all covered in white body paint, and the crowd of people around him are variously wearing leather fleeces, generic rags, cloth-of-gold gowns, and red versions of KKK robes. The pope is apparently kidnapping children for his fiendish plot to tonsure them; I’m not really sure about that, but the film puts it out there just to drop it entirely.

After everything else wrong with this film, pointing out that it repeats the myth that medieval armor was so heavy that knights had to be lowered onto their horses with a crane is sort of an anticlimax.

The pope and the guy in the metal tutu. I told you I wasn’t making it up

Also, for reasons that aren’t explained, in a movie that is otherwise trying to be brutally realistic (at least what it imagines brutal realism about the Middle Ages would be), Raoul is a were-pig. He turns into a boar every night. At first I thought perhaps this was supposed to be symbolism, but no, he’s a were-pig. And his dead wife is wandering around covered in blood and talking to people. This really wasn’t a fair twist to throw at me in my weakened state, because I started thinking that maybe I was sicker than I thought and having hallucinations.

In case you hadn’t understood what I’m trying to tell you, this is not a film for watching. This is a film for putting aside and not looking at. This movie needs a warning label (although all the various titles it’s had might qualify, since that’s often a sign of a not-good film). This is not a film for the young, the elderly, or the immune compromised. For the love of God, Montresor, listen to my frantic cries! It’s too late for me; I’ve already seen it and my head hurts. (No joke; I actually got feverish after the film.) But there’s still time to save yourself. Watch an episode of Reign instead.

Update: My friend Bill has suggested that the metal tutu is probably inspired by Henry VIII’s tournament armor. It’s a genuine style of armor, called a tonlet. Clearly, someone associated with this film saw this and thought “I want that in my film! It’s within 200 years of the period of the film, so that will be ok.” Most tonlets aren’t fluted like this one, which was meant to be worn on a horse, not on foot. Thanks, Bill!

Henry VIII’s tonlet

 

Want to Know More?

Dragon Knightis, unfortunately, available from Amazon. You’ve been warned.

You might also want to lay in a supply of this:

Stealing Heaven: The Great Medieval Love Story on Film

Tags

Denholm Elliot, Derek De Lint, Heloise, Kim Thomson, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Monks and Nuns, Paris, Peter Abelard, Stealing Heaven

Stealing Heaven

It’s been a while since I tackled a truly medieval film on this blog, so when a friend of mine suggested that I cover Stealing Heaven (1988, dir. Clive Donner, based on the novel by feminist author Marion Meade), I thought it was a good opportunity to get back to the Middle Ages with perhaps the most famous love-story to emerge from medieval history.

Peter Abelard

In the 12^th century the most important centers of European intellectual activity were a small number of schools attached to cathedrals. These cathedral schools were in theory intended for the training of clergy, but during the expansion of royal and ecclesiastical institutions in the 12^th century, cathedral schools began to attract large numbers of lay men who wished for advanced education so that they could serve in royal government, in a bishop’s household, or act as lawyers or physicians.

Of these schools, the cathedral school at Paris was arguably the most important. The cathedral issued teaching licenses to scholars, who were thereby empowered to charge a fee to teach any students who wished to study under them. In the early 12^th century, the most noteworthy of these teaching masters was Peter Abelard, a brilliant logician who attracted enormous attention and large numbers of students by his bold new approach. He was one of the first medieval scholars to develop a deep understanding of the logical methods of the ancient philosopher Aristotle, and his reputation was based substantially on his application of Aristotle’s logic to medieval philosophy and theology (although technically he was not qualified to teach the latter subject).

His most important work was the Sic et Non (“Yes and No”). In this text, he asks a series of 158 theological questions (such as “Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?” and “Does God know everything, or not?”) and then cites Biblical sources to answer the question first affirmatively and then negatively. Having demonstrated that the Bible apparently contradicts itself on the issue, Abelard then proceeds to reconcile the contradiction with logic, showing how the Bible in fact presents a consistent answer if one reads the texts carefully. In doing this, Abelard laid the foundation for the Scholastic Method that was to dominate medieval universities for the next several centuries; Sic et Non became a basic textbook for university students. And, in fact, the Cathedral School at Paris would, by the end of the 12^th century, evolve into the University of Paris.

Abelard was a rather arrogant man, making enemies of other scholars by poking holes in their ideas. In particular, he humiliated his former teacher, William of Champeaux in an intellectual debate. His skill at this made him extremely popular with his students.

Around 1115, he encountered Heloise, the niece of Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris. Her family background is unclear, but she was remarkably well-educated by the standards of the day, knowing Latin, Greek and Hebrew (the latter two languages not being common knowledge even among educated men). Having been raised at the convent of Argenteuil, by 1115, she was living in Fulbert’s household in Paris. Perhaps attracted by her reputation for education, Abelard proposed to Fulbert that he move into Fulbert’s household to tutor Heloise. Her age is uncertain, but it has been argued that she was probably in her mid-to-late 20s.

Abelard and Heloise debating

In the course of tutoring her, Abelard also seduced her. The affair became a subject of gossip, and Heloise eventually became pregnant. She gave birth to a boy named Astrolabe. Fulbert was upset about this, but Abelard agreed to marry her on the condition that the marriage be kept a secret, because scholars were expected to be single and celibate, and if word spread about his marriage, he would be unable to advance within the Church.

After the marriage, however, Fulbert began to spread word of it, to punish Abelard for the embarrassment he had caused Fulbert. Abelard sent Heloise to Argenteuil, but this caused Fulbert to fear that Abelard was trying to get rid of her, and so Fulbert hired a group of men to attack and castrate him.

Humiliated and apparently spiritually devastated by this turn of events, Abelard chose to enter a monastery, and insisted that Heloise become a nun at Argenteuil. Abelard established a new school at his monastery and soon began teaching theology as well as philosophy, once again attracting a crowd of students. He continued making enemies, which led to numerous conflicts, including one in which he was condemned for heresy.

He established a chapel, the Oratory of the Paraclete, where he again became a successful teacher. In 1129, the monks of St Denis gained control of the house at Argenteuil and evicted the nuns, including Heloise, who was by this time the prioress. Abelard installed Heloise and the other nuns at the Paraclate, where Heloise was made abbess, while he went to another house and again resumed teaching.

He published his theological masterpiece, Scito Te Ipsum (“Know Thyself”), in which he argues that the morality of a sin was strongly influenced by the intention behind the sin. In doing this, he became one of the first to argue that intention was as important as action in determining morality, a position which continues to have enormous influence in Western thought even today.

After that, Abelard became a target for Bernard of Clairvaux, who as a monk objected to Abelard’s rationalist approach to the mysteries of scripture. Bernard orchestrated another condemnation of Abelard for heresy. Fortunately for Abelard, Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny, one of the most important abbots of the day, intervened to protect Abelard, who died about two years later, in 1142. He was buried at the Paraclete.

 

Their Correspondence

After his brief reunion with Heloise at the Paraclete in 1129, the two seem to have never seen each other again. They corresponded for a while, and Heloise rebuked him for not writing more often. She outlived him by more than two decades, dying in 1163 and being buried alongside him. In the 19th century, their bodies are thought to have been moved to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where lovers still go to pay tribute to them.

Their tomb, or perhaps cenotaph, at Pere Lachaise

Heloise’ letters reveal her to be a very unhappy woman who is still deeply in love with Abelard. When he requests burial at the Paraclete, she asks him not to talk about dying before her, because her life will have no meaning once that happens. She agonizes over her role in his physical suffering and social ruin. She is particularly distressed over what she sees as the bitter injustice of God.

…all the laws of equity in our case were reversed. For while we enjoyed the pleasures of uneasy love and abandoned ourselves to fornication…we were spared God’s severity. But when we amended our unlawful conduct by what was lawful, and atoned for the shame of fornication by an honourable marriage, then the Lord in his anger laid his hand heavily upon us and would not permit a chaste union though he had long tolerated that which was unchaste. The punishment you suffered would have been proper vengeance for men caught in open adultery. But what others deserve for adultery came upon you through a marriage which you believed had made amends for all previous wrong doing; what adulterous women have brought upon their lovers your own wife brought upon you.

Later in the letter, she explicitly accuses God of cruelty, and admits that she cannot find it in herself to be truly penitent for her feelings.

How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires….In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes…Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost.

She goes on to lament the fact that she became a nun, not to please God, but to please Abelard. Because she understands Abelard’s teaching on intention, she fears that nothing she does can please God, because her intentions are wrong.

Abelard’s response makes clear that he is motivated by a more sincere repentance than she. He urges her not to bring up such unhappy thoughts and reminds her that they both agreed that chastity was morally superior to marriage. In her response, she agrees to do as he asks, but one can’t help thinking that Abelard has run away from her pain without offering much comfort.

 

Stealing Heaven

Stealing Heaven (and I assume the novel on which it is based) focuses entirely on the love story of Abelard and Heloise. After a brief opening in which we see an elderly Heloise (Kim Thomson) behave mysteriously and die at the Paraclete, the film jumps back to her early life at Argenteuil, showing her arguing with the magistra who is teaching the nuns basic theology. Not too many movies pass the Bechdel test with a theological debate. Heloise hates being a nun, but is soon told that she will be sent to Paris to live with her uncle Fulbert (Denholm Elliot).

Thomson as Heloise

The film follows traditional scholarship by assuming that she was a young woman of about 17 when she came to Paris (whereas more recent scholarship has argued that she was about a decade older). As such the film assumes that Fulbert was planning to marry her off, whereas if she were older, that is less likely the reason he took her in.

The film erroneously sets its events about half a century too late. The cathedral of Notre Dame is under construction, which only began in 1163, way too late for Abelard and Heloise’ affair. Fulbert is charged with helping raise revenue to fund the construction project, and his efforts to marry of Heloise seem to be part of that project. He is also forging and selling relics to raise money, something which Heloise eventually tells him he is damned for doing. This is entirely fabricated for the story, with no basis in fact. The film also incorrectly identifies Suger, the Abbot of St. Denis, as the Bishop of Paris.

In the film, Abelard (Derek de Lint) has an established career as a teacher, with an enormous crowd of rowdy students and an envious fellow teacher. The students refuse to believe that Abelard is truly chaste, and pay a prostitute to try to seduce him in his room. He refuses to have sex with her, but he is accused of consorting with prostitutes, and Suger orders him to find new lodgings, which is how he comes to be living with Fulbert and thereby falls in love with Heloise.

Abelard’s classroom

The reality was quite different. Abelard wrote one of the earliest autobiographies in Western literature (the History of My Calamities). In it he says that he was attracted to Heloise by her reputation from learning, and decided that he wanted her in his bed. So he persuaded Fulbert to let him move in and teach Heloise. He presents himself as entirely the instigator of the affair, and Heloise says in one of her letters that she resisted him at first.

But in the film, they only begin to fall in love once the tutoring has started. Heloise is as attracted to him as he is to her, and in some ways she is the instigator. She burns a charm she has been given to confirm that he will be her true lover. Abelard repents quickly and wishes to break off the affair, but is unable to restrain himself.

However, once the film has gotten past their initial coupling, it follows historical events fairly closely. Their affair becomes public gossip, Fulbert learns of it and tries to separate them, she discovers that she is pregnant, he sends her off to Brittany where Astrolabe is born, and so on down to them both entering monastic orders, even though she truly does not want to. The film addresses the eviction of the nuns from Argenteuil and their arrival at the Paraclete, and tacks on a brief scene where Abelard brings Astrolabe to meet her.

De Lint brooding as Abelard

The film is largely Heloise’ story. She emerges as by the far the more interesting of the two lovers, having a forceful personality even at the start of the film, whereas Abelard comes off as somewhat irresolute, despite his initial commitment to chastity. She resists marrying him because it will harm his career in the Church, but gives in because her love for him is so intense that she cannot deny him anything, although after his castration, she refuses to abandon him even when he tells her to.

The film does not address the couple’s later correspondence, but it tries to explore the turmoil she felt in later life. Early in the film it is made clear that she dislikes convent life and has little aptitude for it. She resents being returned to Argenteuil after their marriage, and when she learns that Abelard has been castrated, she announces that she no longer believes in God. She declares that Abelard is her Crucified Lord, and later hides a feather she caught during their affair in the base of a crucifix so that when she reveres the cross, she is actually revering this symbol of their love. As she lies dying, she asks to see the crucifix, takes the hidden feather out, and throws away the crucifix. While none of this is historically accurate, it is at least an attempt to explore the spiritual crisis she experienced as a nun.

The film offers only the vaguest hint of what 12^th century intellectual life was about. It shows Abelard lecturing to his students, but it’s no more successful at capturing a 12^th century classroom than movies are at capturing modern university classrooms. In what passes for scholasticism in the film, Abelard points out the seeming contradiction between “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and Saul and David killing the enemies of Israel, and then lets his students joke about various vaguely related issues without bothering to offer any resolution to the issue. His debates with Heloise are similarly insipid attempts to mimic medieval scholastic thought, and bear little resemblance to any of Abelard’s actual ideas. The doctrine of intention, which is fairly central to Heloise’ sense of the relationship, is nowhere to be found.

Nor does the film address any of Abelard’s various controversies with scholars, or even point out that he continued as a teacher after he became a monk. It makes no effort to explain Abelard’s historical importance, so that once again, historical figures in film are reduced to romantic fodder. In the process, it strips away his less likable qualities, such as his intellectual arrogance and his pleasure in rousing controversy. It turns him from an arrogant intellectual into a brooding romantic. It situates the birth of their romance in a chance meeting rather than in his intentional plan to seduce her into his bed.

The film also ignores the fact that Heloise’ life story was not simply about romance; she was remarkably well-educated, a rare example of a medieval female author (although her surviving output is only a few letters) and she was an important abbess in a period when abbesses were declining both in educational attainment and social prominence.

Despite all its flaws, I still like this film. Heloise emerges as a fairly strong-willed woman. She has considerable agency; although she agrees to do what Abelard wants, she always does so as her choice, and rather than simply being seduced, she pursues her desire for Abelard as much as he pursues his for her. And her desire for him is not simply physical but intellectual; there is little doubt that she is his equal intellectually. So the film seems to have captured important elements of the real Heloise’ personality, and perhaps even exaggerated them slightly; Meade is a feminist author after all. Thomson’s performance is the heart of the film, and she brings real strength of personality to the role. And, somewhat interestingly, the sex scenes offer De Lint’s body for erotic consideration almost as much as Heloise’.

Is it a great movie? No. But it is a far better medieval romance than many other films. And it’s fun to see a film that at least tries to make intelligence and education seem sexy. As a university professor, I appreciate that.

Want to Know More?

Stealing Heaven is available on Amazon. Also, Marion Meade’s novel Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard is available for Kindle.

Most of what we know about Abelard and Heloise’ lives comes from Historia Calamitatum: The Story of my misfortunes, one of the first autobiographies ever written. A small set of letters between Abelard and Heloise were known for centuries. There used to be a theory that Abelard wrote both his own and Heloise’ letters as an intellectual exercise, but Betty Radice has persuasively argued that Heloise wrote her half of the correspondence. You can read her emotionally tormented letters in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Not too long ago, however, Constant Mews argued that he discovered a much larger collection of letters between the two lovers, which he published as  The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (The New Middle Ages).

M.T. Clanchy’s Abelard: A Medieval Lifeuses Abelard’s life to explore 12th century culture, with a particular emphasis on the intellectual world of the time. There is also a wealth of scholarship focusing on Abelard’s important contributions to philosophy and theology. If you want to know more about that, try John Marenbon’s The Philosophy of Peter Abelard.

The Advocate: An Ok Film Hurt by Miramax

Tags

Bad Prologue Texts, Colin Firth, Crappy Prologue Texts, France, Leslie Megahey, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, The Advocate, The Hour of the Pig

Several weeks ago, I got a request to review The Advocate (original title, The Hour of the Pig, 1993, dir. Leslie Megahey). The film is a fun little picture about the late Middle Ages that is by no means perfect (it lacks any sort of real dramatic climax, for example), but is better than many movies set in the Middle Ages. It deals with an interesting and unusual subject, the curious tradition of legal trials for animals, and gets a surprising amount of the details correct. But the American release of the film was sadly mishandled by Miramax and the result seriously hurts the overall film.

One version of the film’s cover

The Facts Behind the Film

The Advocate/The Hour of the Pig (hereafter, just “The Advocate“) was originally a joint British/French production written and directed by Irish film-maker Leslie Megahey. I haven’t been able to find out anything about how Megahey got interested in the film’s subject matter, but he seems to have done a moderate amount of research into late medieval legal practices.

The protagonist of the film, Richard Courtois was very loosely modeled on Barthelemy de Chasseneuz (1480-1541), a French lawyer and jurist, chiefly remember for an influential treatise of French law that he produced in 1517. As a young lawyer in Autun, France, in the early sixteenth century, he made his reputation by engaging in a clever defense of a group of rats that had been put on trial for destroying the barley crop in the district. Chasseneuz insisted that the rats in question had to be summoned into court to answer for their crimes. When the rats predictably failed to show up, he argued that since they were dispersed in the countryside, it was necessary to advertise the summons more widely than had been done. After they failed to answer the second summons, he argued that they had failed to show up because they had not been given a guarantee of safe passage, and were in fear of the local cats. This resulted in the case getting dismissed.

Colin Firth as Richard Courtois

This remarkable trial brings us into very curious and obscure legal territory, namely the idea of animal trials. This is not a phenomenon that has been highly studied. Virtually all the scholarship done of this topic has drawn heavily off the work of Edward Payson Evans, a Victorian scholar who published two articles and a subsequent book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906). (If I had to guess, I’d say that Megahey ran across Evans’ book somewhere and used it as the basis for the film.) Starting in the late 90s, perhaps as a result of The Advocate, a small trickle of articles has come out that have explored the issue from different angles, but overall it’s still a rather arcane issue.

Animal trials are exactly what they sound like, full legal trials for animals. Among the types of animals put on trial have been pigs, donkeys, dogs, birds, horses, snails, snakes, insects, and cows. Mostly, they were accused of some form of homicide or violent assault, but bestiality charges were also common. Another major category of charge was destruction of crops, a very serious charge in an agricultural society. These trials generally treated the animal as a human legal defendant, holding it in custody (often at considerable expense to the state), and according it a day in court, legal representation to speak for it, and a full trial. Most animal defendants appear to have been found guilty and executed, but at least a few of them were acquitted; however, it has been suggested that the sources may primarily be recording cases that resulted in conviction, thereby skewing our understanding of the phenomenon. Sentences usually mirrored the penalty a human would have received; hanging and burning seem to have been most common. One Russian goat was sent to Siberia for its crimes.

Historians (primarily Evans) have identified around 200 animal trials running from the 9^th century down (a group of moles) to the 20th century. 1906, a Swiss dog was tried and executed. In 1929, Kentucky found a dog guilty of attempted murder and sent it to the electric chair. In 2005, Ontario passed legislation to regulate pit bulls that included a provision for the dogs to be cited for dangerous behavior (the dogs themselves, not the dogs’ owners). While most of these trials occurred in Western Europe, especially France and Italy, they have also been conducted in the United States, Canada, Russia, Brazil, and Australia. But notice that the numbers are exceptionally low—200 cases across 1,000 years from all across Western civilization. This is an extremely rare phenomenon.

Obviously, the idea of putting an animal on trial like a human seems bizarre to the modern mind. So what’s going on here? The few scholars who have seriously considered animal trials have offered a range of explanations for them. Evans, as a good Victorian, saw animal trials as a relic of medieval superstition, a sort of vestigial legal procedure. Some scholars have tended to see animal trials as a reaction to a significant crisis that aimed to reassure a frightened community and re-assert law and order; so when a swarm of rats or locusts destroyed a village’s crop, authorities could conduct a trial as a way to reassure an anxious community that the problem was being addressed. Other scholars have argued that animal trials are evidence of an underlying debate over competing views about the natural world, how God, humans, and animals relate, and the moral status of animals. In an interesting blog post about The Advocate, Philip Johnson has asserted that animal trials ultimately derive from a theological argument that because God created animals, they possessed a limited form of rights and could not simply be destroyed without some sort of legal process. So while scholars have not settled on a general explanation for the phenomenon, they agree that it is worth serious consideration for what it can tell us about medieval and early modern culture (what it can tell us about modern culture has generally been ignored).

It has also been pointed out that animal trials rest on a notion that animals possess a limited form of personhood, and therefore these trials fall into a category of legal debates about who has personhood and under what circumstances. When seen from this light, the issues don’t seem quite so foreign. Modern Americans can appreciate questions about whether slaves are persons (the Constitution says they are only 3/5^th of a person), whether brain-dead people such as Terry Schiavo are persons, whether the fetus is a person, and whether corporations have sufficient personhood to have political and religious rights. My point here is that when you actually start to dig into the phenomenon, you quickly realize that it’s not really that irrational an idea, at least in theory.

Legal systems as diverse as those of ancient Babylon, Republican Rome, and modern America have wrestled with the question of who is legally responsible when an animal inflicts injury or damage to someone else. The current American solution to the question is to say that an animal’s owner is responsible, and because that seems familiar to us, we find the Babylonian and Roman solutions to the same problem to be the ‘obvious’ solution, and we are consequently puzzled when we discover that some other legal systems have preferred to say that the animal itself is legally responsible.

It is also important to understand that just because an animal was put on trial does not mean that everyone involved in the process automatically accorded the animal full personhood. Chausseneuz devoted some time in his legal treatise to a case in which locusts have been excommunicated by an ecclesiastical court. Following Thomas Aquinas, Chausseneuz argued that lower creatures (those devoid of any capacity to reason) were agents of divine will, and therefore should not be excommunicated, because that would be blasphemous (because the ultimate target of the excommunication would be God); rather, he felt that the excommunication ought to be directed more generally against whatever devil had motivated the insects’ misbehavior. In a 16^th century French case, in which a group of weevils were sued by a group of vineyard owners, the vineyard owners’ counsel argued that because God had made animals subject to human authority, it was reasonable to excommunicate them. The weevils’ court-appointed counsel responded that it was improper to invoke canon law against beasts that are subject only to natural law. So even contemporaries could be deeply divided about the issues at play.

The Film

The film’s protagonist is the fictional Richard Courtois (Colin Firth), who as I noted before, was very loosely inspired by Chausseneuz. The story is set in 1452 in Abbeville, which is located in modern northern France, but at the time was technically within Ponthieu and therefore under the formal authority of the kings of England. Exactly why Megahey chose this setting I have no idea, but the film understands that the legal situation in Ponthieu was complex because it wasn’t technically part of France.

Abbeville

The film has three sequences involving animal trials, which gives viewers the impression that animal trials were common instead of rare oddities. The film opens with the public execution of a man and his donkey for committing bestiality. At the last minute, the donkey is saved because of character witnesses who have sworn that the donkey was of good character and would never willingly have done such a thing, but the man is hanged.

The first case

The second case involves a witch, Jeannine (Harriet Walter), who, among other things, is accused of sending rats to sicken a neighbor. Courtois successfully uses Chasseneuz’ trick of summoning the rats to appear in court as witnesses, and when they fail to do so, that charge against Jeannine is dropped. But because Courtois fails to understand the complex legal situation in Abbeville, Jeannine herself is convicted and executed, despite his dismay.

Finally, Courtois is, much to his surprise and frustration, appointed as defense counsel for a pig that has been accused of murdering a young boy. The pig is owned by Mahmoud and Samira, a pair of foreigners traveling through the region. The film can’t seem to figure out if these people are Moors, gypsies, or Jews; it says they are Moors, but also says that they came from “little Egypt” (suggesting they are gypsies), and in one scene shows them as victims of a forced baptism the way some Jews were. Courtois falls in love with Samira and while he doesn’t care about the pig itself, he tries to find a way to resolve Samira’s problem that the pig is her primary asset. He offers to pay her twice the pig’s value, but for some reason she refuses this. (The pig trial is probably based very loosely on a 1457 trial in which a sow and her piglets were accused of killing and eating a young boy.)

Courtois and Samira

At the same time, Courtois slowly begins to realize that the pig may in fact be innocent, which means that someone else killed the boy. As he searches for the truth, he gets tangled up in the interests of the local nobleman, the Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre (Nicol Williamson), who wants Courtois to marry his slightly deranged daughter.

At this point, the film tends to get a little lost. Several subplots are introduced, including the presence of a secret group of Cathars (more than a century after the last Cathars died out) and a spy for ‘the Inquisition’, but these plots don’t go anywhere. The murderer is finally revealed but not confronted, and just as Courtois decides to leave town, a new plot involving a knight with the Black Death gets introduced and them immediately abandoned. It’s hard to categorize this film; it’s been labeled a thriller, a murder mystery, and a black comedy, and certainly has elements of all three.

All in all, the film is most interesting when it’s wrestling with the legal cases at hand. It accurately depicts some of the legal complexities of the period. The trials are conducted before a judge, but with no jury. The film understands some of the complex legal procedures that Chasseneuz discusses in his cases. Courtois’ servant (Jim Carter) repeatedly tells people that his employer’s proper title is Maître, which is the correct French form of address for a man with a university degree. Courtois accurately distinguishes the charges that Jeannine worshipped the devil (diabolism) from the charges that she had harmed someone with magic (maleficia).

But other elements of the legal system the film gets wrong. I’m not an expert on medieval French law, but the cross-examination of the witnesses that happens in several scenes strikes me as far too modern. More seriously, the film lumps all its legal proceedings together into a single legal system, when in fact across France there were at least two court systems, civil courts, which handled cases under the jurisdiction of towns, nobles, and the king, and ecclesiastical courts, which handled cases under the jurisdiction of the local bishop. Depending on what venue the case was in, it could be judged by royal law, local custom, or canon law.

All of Courtois’ cases are heard in what appears to be the Abbeville town court, which is presided over by a magistrate. Toward the end of the film, however, the town court turns out to actually be the Seigneur’s court, because d’Auferre steps in and insists on his right to hear the pig’s case personally. Again, allowing for the fact that I don’t study medieval France, where jurisdictional issues are quite complex, this strikes me as definitely possible; a nobleman could definitely have granted a town the right to hear cases technically under his jurisdiction.

But many moral crimes, such as bestiality, would have been handled in an ecclesiastical court, not the town or seigneurial court. Chausseneuz’ rat trial was an ecclesiastical trial, conducted under entirely different laws than would have operated in civil courts. Depending on which charges were initially brought against Jeannine, she might have stood trial in either a civil court (for maleficia) or an ecclesiastical court (for diabolism). The collapsing of all the cases into a single courtroom setting is probably forgivable due to the challenge of explaining a complex legal system to modern viewers unfamiliar with it, but it does represent a significant bending of the facts; while it is possible that both Jeannine’s case and the pig’s case would have wound up in the same court, it seems unlikely.

As a side note, one thing the film does a good job of is the costuming. Most of the clothing (with the exception of Samira’s generic gypsy outfits) is a reasonable attempt at 15^th century clothing. Courtois sports a liripipe in some scenes (as in the picture up above). And in a particularly remarkable detail, the noblewomen in d’Auferre’s family follow the fashion for very high foreheads. Given that historical films almost always present women’s hairstyles according to contemporary tastes rather than historical accuracy, this is commendable.

D’Auferre’s daughter, with her fashionable high forehead.

So What’s Miramax Got to Do with This?

The film opens with a prologue text. The original British/French production’s text reads, In medieval France animals were subject to the same legal processes as human beings, including trial in a court of law. This story is based on real life cases.

This text does a couple things. It situates the film in medieval France. It explains, without judgment, that animal trials were a genuine phenomenon (although it somewhat misleadingly implies that animal trials were common or even standard). And finally, it asserts an underlying historicity for the film by truthfully acknowledging that the film draws off of actual events (although naturally it de-emphasizes how heavily fictionalized it is). So while it sets the scene in a very general way, it makes little effort to shape how the audience will react to the movie.

When the film was marked in the US, however, Miramax not only changed the name of the film from The Hour of the Pig to The Advocate and trimmed out about 10 minutes (mostly for reasons of nudity, apparently), but it also completely changed the prologue text. The American version of the text reads as follows:

France—the 15^th century, the dark ages…

 The people were still gripped by ignorance and superstition, mortally afraid of the power of Satan, expecting God’s       punishment—the plague that was sweeping Europe.

In such uncertain times the Church, the State, and the Law should have been the guiding lights, but the Church was sometimes as corrupt as the State.

The local Lords, the Seigneurs, ruled with cruel self-interest and justice was reciprocated by a somewhat confused legal profession.

Each region had its own laws, but all had one extraordinary provision…

Animals were subject to the same civil laws as human beings. They could be prosecuted and tried in a court of law.

Unbelievable as it may seem, all cases shown in this film are based on historical fact.

There are so many things wrong with this text that I hardly know where to start. It employs the worst cliché about the Middle Ages, the notion that it was ‘the Dark Ages’, an era of ignorance, superstition, absurd beliefs and practices, and legal and spiritual corruption.

The concept of the Dark Ages was invented in the 19^th century, but no serious historian uses it as a synonym for the Middle Ages any more. To the extent that the phrase is still used at all, it is sometimes employed to refer to a period in which there is a complete or near-complete loss of written documentation, so that scholars might occasionally refer to the Greek Dark Age (the period from c. 1200 BC to c.850 BC after the collapse of Mycenaean culture) or the British Dark Age (the late 5^th to late 6^th century AD, immediately after the collapse of Roman civilization in England and Wales). But even this limited usage is uncommon.

The Miramax text tells us the same things the original text does, but it lards on a heavy dose of moral judgment. It tells us that the events are both true and ‘unbelievable’. The text presents animal trials as uniquely medieval, and ignores both the fact that they were not common in the Middle Ages and that they were not unheard of is modern Western society. The legal system is explicitly labeled ‘confused’, implying that there is an objectively correct position to take on legal issues and medieval lawyers couldn’t figure out what it was.

The text also rather oddly emphasizes the idea that animal trials were a partly due to the influence of a corrupt Church, ignoring the fact that the only hint of the medieval Church in this film is a decidedly worldly priest (Ian Holm) who befriends Courtois early in the film, and a passing reference to ‘the Inquisition’. Nor is the Seigneur d’Auferre presented as particularly cruel. The judgmentalism of the text is at odds with the film’s tone; Courtois is sometimes baffled by the legal situation he finds himself in, but the only time he rails against it is when he loses Jeannine’s case on a technicality.

The overall effect of the Miramax text is to undermine much of the film, by explicitly telling the audience that what will follow is a lot of superstitious nonsense. It destroys the possibility that medieval people might actually have had sensible reasons for assigning a degree of legal personhood to animals, and instead just tells the viewer that these people are idiots deserving of ridicule.

In doing so the Miramax text serves to establish a substantial intellectual distance between the audience and the medieval people we are watching, by suggesting that the viewers are much more intelligent, well-educated, moral, and reasonable than medieval people were. These medieval people are Not-Us, and they are to be looked down upon from a position of confident superiority. By flattering the audience so extensively, it discourages the audience from thinking of past people as normal human beings, and instead relegates them to the category of benighted freaks who had no reason for what they believed and did.

I give the movie credit for being above average in regard to some of the historical details and setting. In fact, given the weakness of the plot in the second half of the film, it is probably best watched for what it tries to tell us about late medieval society, or for the performances, most of which are quite solid. But the prologue text has to be ignored.

In an interview, Harvey Weinstein once remarked that of all the films he’s worked on, The Advocate was the worst, and that people shouldn’t see it. Sadly, had he not gotten involved in the project, it might have been a better film, if only because it wouldn’t have gotten such a lousy opening.

Want to Know More?

The Advocateis available on Amazon.