NEWSLETTER #13: MEDIEVAL <<MOI AUSSI>>
How can Hollywood really help us understand the Middle Ages? Are you Team Elizabeth or Team Mary Queen of Scots? And who would win a fight between Richard III and his great-great-grandad?
On December 29th 1386 the great and good of medieval France flocked to a monastery in the suburbs of Paris to watch a celebrity death-match. The contestants were two knights: Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. During the past year a deadly hatred had festered between them, owing to the fact that Carrouges’ wife, Marguerite, had accused Le Gris of raping her.
No amount of litigation had been able to settle the case one way or another, so the two men had agreed to take part in mortal combat, and let God decide. Their fight had been sanctioned by the teenage king of the day, Charles VI, and advertised all over the kingdom. According to the famous chronicler Jean Froissart, who wrote a detailed account of the affair, it ‘caused such a stir that people came to Paris to see it from many different places.’
The crowds assembled at lists prepared in St Catherine’s square, not far from the Knights Templars’ French headquarters in what is now Le Marais. What they got was a rumble that would echo down the ages. The fight was close. It was bloody. It was ultraviolent. And it was decisive. It ended with one man triumphant and the other dead, his corpse hauled off to be hung up at the gibbet at Montfaucon – a warning to others of the terrible torments that awaited the unrighteous, both on earth and in the hereafter.
Froissart devoted several pages of his famous chronicle to this exciting episode, which was not surprising: it appealed to his chief interests, which were the deeds of knights and the dread responsibilities of a life lived chivalrously. Froissart placed it in a sequence of stories which included the hair-raising recollections of a knight-turned-freebooter, a ghost story about a knight who was served by a supernatural messenger until he treated him unchivalrously, an account of a planned French invasion of England and details of the English king Richard II’s political struggles with his uncles.
Other French chroniclers followed Froissart’s lead, and by the end of the fourteenth century the duel between Carrouges and Le Gris had become part of the grand history of the French kingdom. Details were added (or invented) over the years, and the tale is still well known to medievalists today. As of 2021 it is also well known to cinema-goers, for the duel and the crime that led to it are the subjects of a new film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Jody Comer, Matt Damon and Adam Driver, entitled The Last Duel.
This month I watched The Last Duel at a preview screening in central London. I wrote a little bit about it here. And I have been thinking about it ever since. That is in part because, as with any good Ridley Scott film (think: Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven) there are memorable action sequences and super-gory slayings. It is also because the film does what Froissart and other chroniclers did not, and gives great weight to the perspective of a woman – Marguerite de Carrouges. (The Last Duel has been widely billed as a ‘medieval #MeToo’ movie.)
Even more than that, though, The Last Duel got me thinking about how history is converted into drama. The process of turning scholarly storytelling into big-budget entertainment is complicated. It requires compromises, fudges and deviations from the truth. Why do we do it? And why are so many historical dramas enraging to history fans, who demand Hollywood ‘stick to the facts’ at the cost of all other considerations? I want to share a few thoughts about those big questions in this newsletter, in the context of The Last Duel.
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