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During the late 1100s, tournaments were
enjoying their heyday, and Marshal excelled
at the jousts. For more than a decade, he was
said to have unhorsed and captured more than
500 combatants as he went from tournament
to tournament. Defeated knights would have
to pay a ransom. Together with the spoils from
seizing harnesses and saddles, Marshal could
enjoy a highly valued chivalric practice: largesse.
Generosity in distributing the bounty from his
wins allowed him to forge valuable loyalties.
As well as excelling on the tournament field,
Marshal acted as master of arms and confidant
to Prince Henry, son of Henry II of England and
heir to the throne. The young prince died before
he could wear the crown, and William fulfilled
the promise he had made to him to travel to the
Holy Land, where he fought for two years
alongside the Templars. When Marshal
returned, the king offered him the hand
of Isabel de Clare, Countess of Pem-
broke, one of the wealthiest heiresses in
the kingdom. The union raised Marshal to
the highest ranks of the nobility. His days
as a knight-errant were over.
Marshal would continue to shine on the
battlefields. When Richard the Lionheart
was away on the Third Crusade, William
protected his throne against the maneu-
vering of John Lackland, the king’s brother
and regent. After Richard’s death, when the
same John’s right to the throne was in dis-
pute, Marshal was one of the few great no-
bles to remain on John’s side during the First
Barons’ War, in which the nobility rebelled
and forced King John to issue the charter of
rights known as Magna Carta.
This uncompromising loyalty to the crown
sealed William Marshal’s reputation as the
greatest knight of his time. He died shortly
after his last great military victory, the Battle
of Lincoln, in 1217, where he succeeded in driv-
ing the French army out of England, and forc-
ing the French king to give up his claim to the
English throne.
Ulrich von Liechtenstein
While some knights became immortalized
through the poems of heroic deeds writ-
ten about them, others crafted those poems
themselves. A rich tradition of literature and
WINNER
TAKES
IT ALL
SEEKING THE PRIZEilliam Marshal’s knightly career is one of the few
that was meticulously documented, albeit in a
somewhat embellished form. The verse biography L’histoire
de Guillaume le Maréchal was commissioned by Marshal’s
son and heir, and relates Marshal’s adventurous life. It is a
fantastic resource for colorful details about the tournaments
knights competed in. Competitions in the 1100s often featured
giant melee battles, in which teams of knights would square
off against each other. At
the end of a particularly
boisterous battle,
Marshal’s helmet
was so battered and
misshapen that he
had to employ the
services of a blacksmith
to pry him out of it.
Marshal enjoyed such
great success on the
tournament circuit
that in 1179 he even
formed his own battle
company. Marshal
employed a patient
strategy for his team,
holding back while
allowing other teams to
fight each other at full
strength until they were
exhausted. Then, his
team could strike and
easily win the day—and
all the costly spoils that
fell to them as victors.ALAMY/ACIETERNAL REST
A recumbent statue
has been possibly
identified as William
Marshal, in London’s
Temple Church, where
he was buried in 1219.