Clerics, Blunt Weapons, and Christian Assumptions
One items which received a lot of humor back in its day was the restriction of clerics only being able to use blunt weapons as they were forbidden from using weapons which shed blood. Anyone who has seen a medieval mace knows that a solid hit with one of those is going to shed a lot of blood, blunt weapon or not.
Recently I was reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It included the following statement:
[The knight] also had available, either attached tio his saddle or carried by his squire, a longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax fitted with a spike behind the curving blade, and a club-headed mace with sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and abbots on the theory it did not come under the rule forbidding clerics "to smite with the edge of the sword."
This work is copyrighted 1978 so it was clearly not the actual source for the rule regarding clerics but it clearly does represent the reasoning used for a cleric's weapon restriction. I'm not certain if this is "true" or not - I've done some Googling and have seen people who do not feel there was any such restriction but either way there are clearly sources that support this restriction that Gygax and company must have encountered.
I have read this too, additionally I am a medievalist; the only real counter-argument made to this is that Archbishop Turpin in "Le Chanson de Roland" uses a sword against the Moorish invaders. My answer to this is that it was set during an earlier time, and was clearly a case of Holy War- in this case counter-Jihad; so maybe he get's a pass for either one of those reasons or maybe he gets a pass because he's referred to as a "Paladin", like Ogier the Dane and Roland.
ReplyDeleteI also like how this passage highlights the use of multiple weapons. I really dislike D&D weapon specialization systems, because they make using anything other than the specialized weapon clearly suboptimal. I want a fighter incentive system that rewards the fighter for using different weapons in different circumstances. The weapon versus AC table is one attempt at doing this, but it is too awkward in practice. Something like special abilities per weapons that only fighters can use would be another approach that I've thought about before, but never really written down comprehensively.
ReplyDeleteOne of the early councils forbids clergy to fight wars as soldiers.
ReplyDeleteEC 1, Can 12, excommunicates for a decade christians who rejoin the army.