Woman in the battle field? come on!

I'm afraid abrasiveness has always been my middle name (partly due to growing up in a terrifyingly plain-spoken Quaker family); I work hard on it but I often lapse. If I've ever abraded you, deC, I'm very sorry for it because I do respect your judgement and good manners.

I'm actually not so convinced myself that the physical differences between men and women were crucial - even less so since the discovery of Richard III's skeleton in Leicester. Have you been following the reports on that? The osteologists report that Richard's long bones are so slender that at first sight they wondered if they were dealing with a female skeleton, and that his spine was so painfully curved that it would have reduced his height by several inches to significantly below average - he would have been 5' 8' if his spine had been straight - and severely compromised his heart and lung function. If a 'slight as a girl' young man stunted by scoliosis and with under-performing heart and lungs could become not merely a competent general but a battlefield fighter to be reckoned with (which even the most hostile contemporary witnesses agree that he was), then a strapping healthy young woman in regular training should certainly have been equal to the physical demands of knightly warfare.

It's the 'regular training' issue, to my mind, that is key. Even a good rider could not just put on full armour, grab a lance and go do what a knight did; if that had been so, males of the knightly caste wouldn't have trained as rigorously from boyhood as we know they did. And a person could only get that training, which was expensive and couldn't possibly have been undertaken covertly, if their parents/guardians had wanted them to have it; which in turn meant that - except in very exceptional circumstances - it would have had to be seen as socially acceptable and appropriate.

An example of 'very exceptional circumstances' is the 13th-century Roman de Silence, in which the heroine is a count's daughter who has been passed off as a boy from birth by her parents, so that she can inherit their fief. Naturally, as a young nobleman she is trained in warfare, and as an adult performs a series of knightly exploits before her sex is revealed. This is the only example I know of in medieval literature of a 'female knight', and demonstrates that, at least in their fantasy fiction, medieval people could accept that a woman was physically capable of fighting as a knight provided she had the training and status of a man. In other words, this story is our old friend, the exception that proves the rule.

For me the clincher about 'no female knights' is Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. Christine trawled classical literature, Christian legends and medieval history for examples of female strength, courage and virtue. She wrote enthusiastically about the Amazons, who she naturally imagined as having the stratified social structure and military tactics of her own time (nobles fighting as knights, commoners on foot as archers). But although she cited many medieval ladies for their feats of intelligence, courage, effective rule and so on, she doesn't name a single medieval female fighter. And if Christine, one of the best-informed woman of her age, had never heard tell of any fighting medieval ladies, you pretty much have to conclude that either she really didn't know any to tell about, or that in medieval society (i.e. not safely quarantined in classical history) their activities had been seen as so shocking and unnatural that she knew it wouldn't advance her case to mention them.