Quick question. If a peasant managed to capture a knight or a lord in a battle, does he get the ransom or at least a share of it?

warsofasoiaf:

I’m having difficulty finding sources to answer your question, but I’d imagine it’d be difficult to tell which lucky peasant was the one who captured the noble in battle, since they’d probably be in formation. My guess is that it would depend upon the general of the capturing side. A peasant rebellion against the nobility probably is killing any nobles they capture, and a feudal levy might be so tightly overseen that the captain in charge takes control of the POW fairly quickly.

My instinct tells me that the captain would reward the peasants that captured the knight, perhaps with coin, and the general would collect the ransom, but again, my typical sources aren’t helping me here. @racefortheironthrone might know, though.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Good question.

Part of the tricky thing here is the term “peasant,” which I guess means peasant levy? Because there were a lot of soldiers who were non-nobles but professionals and therefore of higher status – your men-at-arms, your mercenaries, your household guard, etc. – who might technically be “peasants” in the sense of not being nobles or clergy, but who had all or most of the equipment and training of a knight. 

But for more specifics, let’s jump on the research train!

Turns out…yes, sort of. Culturally/ideologically it was a bit of a problem: Michael S. Drake in Problematics of Military Power points out how the common soldiers was a bit of a problem conceptually for the medieval mindset in general because they were commoners who did knightly stuff yet were too necessary to ban; likewise, common soldiers were not necessarily ransomable (there were some pretty ugly mass killings of captured peasant levies in the Hundred Years War, for example) and one couldn’t necessarily trust them to ransom a noble as opposed to rob his corpse. 

But, while I’ve seen a few legal scholars say the law of war forbade peasants/common soldiers from ransoming prisoners, they seem pretty well out-argued by the folks who can point to historical accounts of just that thing happening, so I’m going to say that whatever the laws of war might have said, once you have thousands of professional killers roaming the battlefield with misericords with profit in mind, those laws are promptly ignored so that nobles could be safely ransomed rather than being brutally murdered for their rings…

So yes, common soldiers could ransom, and odds are non-levies would be ransomed (because soldiers learned to keep enough liquid capital to pay a ransom pretty quick) albeit on the cheap. What seems to have become the practice vis-a-vis the common soldier capturing a knight is that the ransom would be bought by a higher up for a percentage of its value. For example, at one point Henry I of England bought the King of France’s banner (which had been taken on the field by a common soldier) for 20 marks, so that he could have the gloating privileges.