Why Medieval Knights Went Completely Insane

It's probably not news to anybody that fighting an incredibly brutal hand-to-hand combat for hours at a time, crushing guys' heads with maces, seeing your homies get impaled or beheaded, and then just kind of sitting there to deal with it in the aftermath, probably had some seriously damaging long-term psychological effects. But it might actually be worse than we could even imagine, especially because the medieval mind was of course anatomically the same as ours, but spiritually was way different. PTSD as a clinical diagnosis didn't exist until 1980, and it was essentially invented to describe what was happening to Vietnam veterans. To sum it up super simply, PTSD is a fear disorder with flashbacks and hypervigilance. It's basically like your central nervous system is stuck in the on position at all times. When you look through the medieval sources, you don't always find that kind of thing, and I think applying modern terms to the medieval past can sometimes [music] be a stretch, which is a hilariously ironic thing for me to say, but anyway. What we can find in the medieval sources is something even deeper. There was an 11th-century French warrior named Rigaut, who had gotten pretty seriously injured in a battle. He somehow survived, but his right arm was totally paralyzed, and there wasn't really a lot that medieval doctors could do for that kind of thing. Rigaut ended up falling into a deep depression when he got home, and according to a contemporary chronicle, he wanted to die rather than drag out a disgusting and useless life with his body in such a shameful state. The injury obviously had forced him to give up his life as a soldier, but in medieval society, that was his role. He was one of those who fought, and now he was nothing. If you keep on reading the chronicle, Rigaut just keeps going deeper and deeper into this downward spiral, and even stops doing the things that used to make him happy, like riding horses. For a red-blooded, testosterone-filled medieval man to not want to zoom around on a steed, something had to be seriously wrong. We can look at another example from the 11th century, which is recorded in a Viking saga called Egil's Saga. There was a Viking warrior named Onund, and he lost his lower leg in a brutal battle in the late 9th century. Maybe you can already see where this is going. When he gets home, he's fitted with a wooden prosthetic leg, and in typical medieval fashion, everybody starts calling him Einarr Treeleg, which in terms of medieval nicknames is actually much better than Notker the Stammerer or Louis the Fat. Eventually, his leg healed up as much as it could, and he could walk around with the prosthetic, but mentally he was never the same.