ABSTRACT
The second part of this book is concerned with the means by which clergy made war, particularly how they acquired and managed men, fortresses and the spiritual weapons that they used during campaigns. Of the many potential areas for research suggested by clerical involvement in warfare, by far the most extensively treated in secondary literature has been the possession by churches and churchmen of lands burdened by military obligation. This has traditionally been seen as the source of prelates’ power to field warriors and underpins the tendency to describe militant clergy as acting ‘as lords’. Indeed, much of the evidence for knight service in general in this period is ecclesiastical in origin. The central point of discussion hitherto has been the question of servitium debitum, fixed quotas of knights to be raised for royal armies by tenants-in-chief from their lands, a question primarily approached through charters and other diplomatic sources. A stronger emphasis, however, on narrative sources, particularly house chronicles and hagiography, permits a broader approach which includes the strategies through which prelates sought to secure the loyalty of warriors and the difficulty with which this was achieved.
