Introducing the volume’s fourth and final thematic strand (Cultural Perspectives), this chapter offers a study of warfare and violence in the age of William the Conqueror. Following a general introduction, it scrutinises the justifications of William’s wars and the history of hostilities and their limitations in Normandy. This is followed by a discussion of rebellion against ducal and royal rule contextualised within contemporary cultures of warfare and violence in northern France. The chapter concludes with studies of castles, conquests, and conduct in the Anglo-Norman world of the eleventh century.

“A greater event cannot take place among men than one wherein lies the fortunes of all the land, the state of the prince and the life of an infinite number of persons, the honour or dishonour of the overlord, the knights and all the nobility.” So wrote Christine de Pizan in her Livre des faites d’armes et de chevalerie, composed around 1410, concerning the enormous stakes that a pitched battle could involve. Much of her text comprises a vernacular reworking of Vegetius’ De re militari, and it has been the debate concerning the nature of “Vegetian strategy” and the place of battle within strategic thinking that has run, from the very first issue of the Journal of Medieval Military History, as a rich thematic seam through research on medieval warfare across a wide chronological and geographical span.

On 10 February 1306, in the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries, Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick, and his followers slew John Comyn, lord of Badenoch and a leading member of one of Scotland's most powerful families. A rising against the occupying English immediately followed and, on 25 March, Bruce was inaugurated as king of Scots at Scone abbey. Barely three months later, on 19 June, King Robert marched on Perth to confront Aymer de Valence, Edward I's newly appointed lieutenant in Scotland. Yet according to the chronicler Walter of Guisborough, at the ensuing battle at nearby Methven, on Bruce's orders, ‘all the men at arms on horses had a white coat over their armour, so that they appeared to be in white shirts and you could not see who was who or what arms he bore’. In an age when the bearing of arms on shields and heraldic coat armour was both an essential prerequisite of nobility and a pragmatic measure in battle to ensure capture rather than death, such an act was astonishing. It can be seen either an act of solidarity, symbolically substituting personal recognition for a group identity in the cause of liberation, or as a grim measure of desperation because Bruce and his men now feared for their lives.

Few figures played such a central role in the world of Henry II as his son Henry, the Young King. From the death of his older brother William on 2 December 1156, he was Henry II's principal heir, the object of his father's deep affection and the linchpin of his dynastic schemes. The only post-Conquest English king to be crowned in the lifetime of his father, young Henry's coronation in 1170 precipitated the final stages of the Becket crisis and led, though perhaps by no means inevitably, to the most acute crisis of Henry II's reign, the great war of 1173–4. In 1183, the Young King's support for a major rebellion in Aquitaine came close to wresting the duchy from his younger brother Richard — a situation arguably far more serious for Richard than John's rebellion in 1193–4 — and in his efforts to support his younger son, Henry II twice came within an inch of losing his life when arrows were shot at him from the walls of Limoges. But although the Young King's death from fever at Martel on 11 June 1183 led to the collapse of the revolt, his political legacy continued to prove injurious. As John Gillingham has suggested, Richard's inability to quell the revolt of 1183 may have seriously undermined his father's belief in his ability to hold down the duchy, while it was Henry's deeply rooted fear that Richard would seek to supplant him, as the Young King had tried to do in 1173–4, that led the old king to the fatal policy of refusing formally to recognize Richard as his heir.