Robert Bemborough

Combat des Trente (Combat of the Thirty): an illumination in the Compillation des cronicques et ystoires des Bretons, of Pierre Le Baud. The two strongholds of Ploërmel and Josselin are fancifully depicted within sight of each other. Sir Robert Bemborough (d. 1351) was a medieval knight who led the Montfortist faction during the Combat of the Thirty. This was an arranged battle between thirty knights from both sides during the Breton War of Succession, a struggle for control of the duchy between the House of Montfort and the House of Blois. Bemborough was killed in the battle.

The battle was greatly renowned. Bemborough was subsequently depicted by chroniclers as a model of chivalry.

Background Bemborough led the Montfortist faction which controlled Ploërmel. The Montfortists were supported predominantly by English knights. He was challenged to single combat by Jean de Beaumanoir, the captain of Josselin, the nearest stronghold controlled by the French-supported Blois faction. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, this purely personal duel between the two leaders became a larger struggle when Bemborough suggested a combat between twenty or thirty knights on each side, a proposal that was enthusiastically accepted by de Beaumanoir. They agreed to an arranged fight at a field marked by an oak tree midway between the two fortresses. Bemborough is supposed to have said,

And let us right there try ourselves and do so much that people will speak of it in future times in halls, in palaces, in public places and elsewhere throughout the world. The words are recorded by Froissart: "the saying may not be authentic", Johan Huizinga remarks, "but it teaches us what Froissart thought".

Identity It is unclear whether Bemborough was English or German. His identity is something of a mystery and his name is spelled in many variant forms. It is given as "Brandebourch" by Froissart, and also appears as "Bembro" and "Brembo". His first name is sometimes given as Robert, sometimes as Richard. The chroniclers Jean Le Bel and Froissart say he was a German knight, but historians have doubted this. The 19th-century writer Harrison Ainsworth, taking his cue from the Breton language version of the name, "Pennbrock", concluded that his actual name was the English "Pembroke". In Breton "Penn-brock", sounds like the phrase "badger-head", which became a derogatory nickname for him.

Henry Raymond Brush also argued that he was probably English. The Dictionary of National Biography noted the possibility that he was Sir Richard Greenacre of Merley, and he may have derived the name by which he is known from Bromborough in Cheshire.

Cultural image Froissart portrays both Bemborough and his opponent Beaumanoir as ideal representatives of chivalry, who fight for honour and glory rather than personal gain. However, a popular ballad of the period, La Bataille de Trente Anglois et de Trente Bretons, depicts Bemborough as the leader of a band of foreign brigands despoiling the local population, and Beaumanoir as a heroic defender of the people. This version passed into Breton popular culture. It later became the French nationalist version of the Combat, with Bemborough as chief villain. Pierre Le Baud standardised this version in his History of the Bretons (1480), in which Bemborough (called 'Richard Bambro') is portrayed as a soldier animated by a vicious desire to avenge the death of English leader Thomas Dagworth. It reaches its apogee in de La Borderie's Histoire de Bretagne, according to which his control of Ploërmel is distinguished by "rapacity and cruelty" and a "brutality, a ferocity all his own". His virtuous opponent de Beaumanoir challenges him after receiving desperate victims of his brutality into Josselin. The arrogant Bemborough taunts him, but gets his just deserts at the hands of Beaumanoir's men at the Combat.