Insistent references to the bow in 14th- and 15th-century literary sources seem at first glance incomprehensible. Bow and arrows are among the various rudimentary weapons available to homo selvaticus certainly among the most sophisticated. Ywain for example in the Ywain and Gawain, is described as "[a] naked man" who "a bow bare" (Braswell 1995, l. 1675), while Tristan in the Prose Tristan is also armed with a bow and arrows for hunting (Porney 1780). Both of them are honourable and brave knights who have lost their original status due to a fit of madness. As a consequence, they retire in the wilderness, living their life as uncivilised beast-like men.
These seemingly innocuous mentions may have a deeper meaning inscribed in the events of this era. Indeed, the Hundred Years War had seen the triumphant entry of the longbow onto the battlefields. From Crécy onwards, the archers were the undisputed protagonists of the French cavalry's repelling tactics, managing to achieve crushing victories over France. The change of course in the first phase of the war, however, can also be interpreted as a trauma whereby dismounted infantry became predominant over cavalry. This event also had political and social significance, whereby the old ruling classes saw their role undermined by the prowess of the subordinate classes –as the battlefield reflected traditional social dynamics.
Although difficult to prove from a literary point of view, historically the breakdown of chivalric ideals resulting from the emergence of professionalised infantry, as in the case of the archers, must have produced a certain trauma. The close encounters codified by knightly honour have deteriorated into unequal and distant clashes, in which it is not valour that determines who wins but cunning. The archer hides and stealthily shoots his darts at the knight. The chivalric ethos will be deeply damaged in the late Middle Ages and with it the idea of the upright knight. The appearance from the thirteenth century onwards (Alamichel 2007, 362) of an opposite model, that of the mad knight characterised by precise tropes, could therefore be the result of such an operation. Beritola in Boccaccio's Decameron, Orlando in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando furioso, in Italy, as well as Matto le Breune in the Prose Tristan, or Ysaÿe le Triste, Malory's Lancelot, and Partonopeus de Blois, in the Anglo-Norman world, would all be new manifestations of a new social anxiety concerning the renewed status of chivalry with its underlying political significance (Carpenter 1980). But they are above all the product of a bitter reflection –in general– on the fate of traditional chivalry and its superior values and –specifically– the nobility on the threshold of modern bourgeois culture.
References
Alamichel, Marie-Françoise. ‘Wod et wude dans la littérature médiévale anglaise ou l’espace de la folie’. Le Moyen Age CXIII, no. 2 (2007): 361–82.
Braswell, Mary Flowers. ‘Ywain and Gawain’. Robbins Library Digital Projects, 1995. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/braswell-ywain-and-gawain.
Carpenter, David A. 'Was There a Crisis of the Knightly Class in the Thirteenth Century? The Oxfordshire Evidence'. The English Historical Review, 1980, Vol. 95, no. 377 (Oct., 1980): 721–52.
Mameli, Beatrice. ‘Wylde and Wode: Wild Madness in Middle English Literature’. Doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2014.
Porney, Lewis. 'Prose Tristan'. Robbins Library Digital Projects, 1780. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/porney-prose-tristan.