In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, towards the end of her tragic life the eponymous heroine enters for the first time the church in which her distant forbears were buried. They included ‘Sir Pagan d'Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by the Battle Abbey Roll’. Contemplating the mournful sight of tombs ‘canopied, altar-shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet holes remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff’, she was forcibly reminded ‘that her people were socially extinct’. In Roman Polanski's film Tess (1979), with the delectable Nastassja Kinski in the starring role, this scene is played out against a backdrop of the authentic fourteenth-century tombs of the famous Breton knightly dynasty of Beaumanoir in the abbey of St-Magloire de Léhon, just outside Dinan. Among them is that of the family's most celebrated warrior, Jean (IV) de Beaumanoir, captain of Josselin. On 26 March 1351 he led thirty fellow countrymen to victory against a similar number of English, Breton and German knights and esquires in the Battle of the Thirty, a bloody chivalric episode which cost the lives of a quarter or more of the sixty-two who took part. Feeling thirsty during a brief pause in the fighting, Beaumanoir was famously advised by a companion, ‘Boy ton sang, Beaumanoir; ta soiff te passera’, ‘Drink your blood, Beaumanoir, your thirst will pass’, according to a near-contemporary poetic account that ensured this minor skirmish passed quickly into enduring legend.