Origins of chivalry
The Victorian gentleman has a long pedigree. All societies have esteemed in their ruling classes martial prowess, generosity and wisdom. Though their own roots were firmly implanted in early feudal times, the classically-trained Victorian gentlemen loved to dwell on their affinity with their Greek and Roman counterparts. Like Plato’s ideal guardians they, too, aspired to fulfilling their role as leaders of men in the field while young and as law-givers and magistrates in maturity. P. Mason has summed up the the Greek ideal beautifully in The English Gentleman. The Rise and Fall of an Ideal:
They must be swift and strong, brave and high-spirited, dangerous to their enemies but gentle to their friends. They must be trained in body and mind, taught not only to handle their weapons and control troops in the field but to admire what is beautiful and to display in everything they do a sense of harmony and proportion. This training in a sense of proportion will make them virtuous and ensure that they do not try to overturn the state and become a danger to it.
(1982: 21)
This Athenian ideal also decreed that a man of good birth and education should be beautiful and good and keep a balance between the body and the mind. The republican Rome had added to this ideal a stern sense of duty and high-minded seriousness which rejected the trivial. A well-born Roman also despised personal power and after holding high office retired to his country estate. (Ibid.:
22)
For the true origins of the modern gentleman’s code of honour, however, we must go back to the pre-Christian Teutonic warrior bands. Though ultimately the medieval knight could be seen to have inherited the status of the Roman landed magnate and the political power of the infantry soldier of the Praetorian guard, his ideals were forged in the three turbulent centuries between the end of the western Empire and the accession of Charlemagne. Differently from the Roman legionaries he fought on horseback and held land because he was a skilled fighter. (Barber 2000: 4)
Early medieval kings and great lords were essentially military leaders whose success and failure depended on their ability to attract and maintain an armed following. The warfare of the time facilitated the emergence of a certain type of warrior. The war fought pre-eminently for plunder or conquest favoured swiftness and mobility on the part of the attacker and a body of men strong enough “to launch an attack, intercept one, or evade an interception” and, when under attack themselves, have “sufficient protection and training to destroy an inferior force or hold off a superior one” (Whitton 1990: 122). The invention of
the stirrup in China at the end of the fifth century and its adoption in Europe at the end of the seventh tipped the balance in favour of cavalry over infantry in the field. Now that the rider could keep his balance on impact, the way was open to a new type of warrior – the knight. His advantages were as follows:
[P]rotective mail armour and shield, a horse bred to bear the weight of a man so equipped, a high saddle and stirrups which enabled the rider to put his horse’s momentum behind his spearpoint, and the lengthy training which gave him the skill to control these elements and to act in concert with his fellows made the knight the dominant force in battle. Knights were never the most numerous element in any army – they were too expensive for that – but they did represent the element which could force a battle by its mobility and win it by its strength.
(Ibid.: 122–123)
The composition of the retinues of knights assembled around a great man could vary enormously. They could be mercenaries looking for lucrative employment, men drawn to a particular campaign by the prospect of loot, landless nobles out for a chance to improve their condition or men under a contract of service. In all these groups pressure to reward service with land was strong, as possession of land provided the only security against disablement, sickness or old age and was the necessary precondition of marriage. (Ibid.: 121)
The fragmentation of the Frankish kingdom into a host of small principalities constantly at war with each other had led to the formation of private armies by great magnates and corresponding levis by towns. The return to central authority under Pepin and Charles Martel brought along the merger of the two and the practice of rewarding service with land, as the time of anarchy had demonstrated the fickleness of the loyalty bought by gold alone. Once the big landowners with their war bands had been integrated into the formal structure of government in Charlemagne’s time, service ceased to be viewed as disho-nourable also by smaller landowners. The advantages of holding land from a lord who offered protection in return for military service gradually came to outweigh the merits of retaining individual freedom. The collapse of central government during the inept rule of Charlemagne’s descendants, Viking and Saracen attacks on the remnants of his empire in the ninth and Magyar raids in the tenth century accelerated the development of systems of vassalage and tenure. When these pressures ceased, the lords continued to consolidate their power further, though not without vehement opposition from the men they had
‘enfeoffed’. During the High Middle Ages feudal service became well-nigh universal and lost any remaining taint of shame as kings held land from kings and the Pope in Rome, while claiming to be overlord of all temporal rulers, styled himself the ‘servant of the servants of God’. (Barber 2000: 11–12, 22)
Strictly speaking, the mounted warrior up to the late eleventh century is no more than a proto-knight. Though possessing many features one would today call chivalrous, what they lacked was a self-conscious esprit de corps, a sense of belonging to an élite and privileged class with a distinct ethos. (Ibid.: 3–4)
The moment of the transformation of the mounted warrior into the knight proper is difficult to pinpoint due to the scarcity of historical records and literary works from the period. Contemporary terminology is of little help here and tends to confuse the issue. The Latin miles, the Roman name for a soldier, was in the tenth and eleventh century used variously to denote warrior, vassal and armed retainer, and used interchangeably with caballarius, meaning a mounted warrior. Yet the twelfth-century knight is not just the old soldier on horseback in a new guise. He is the carrier of a new set of values which combine martial accomplishments with pride in ancestry and a keen sense of social status. (Ibid.: 16)
The values sung in the twelfth-century chivalric romances are those of a newly-established, arriviste group, not of an old, well-established class. The knight’s equipment was so expensive that only the well-to-do could afford it, so the new class of warriors came from wealthy but not necessarily titled families.
It was inevitable that the newcomers would seek admission to the ranks of nobility. Military distinction has traditionally been taken as an indicator of honourable potential in men of modest birth and prowess in arms. Because of its honourable associations, it could be seen as conferring higher social status on an individual than his social origins might otherwise warrant. The old nobility’s claim to special status had been through descent. For much of Western Euro-pean history man’s rank, his place in the natural hierarchy of things, and his nature, noble or otherwise, has been seen as having been determined by his
‘birth’, as the Latin word natura implies. Some individuals, or families, just inherited and passed on a greater stock of honour than others and this entitled them to special privileges and the leading position in society. (Powis 1984: 3, 14, 19–20)
The newcomers claimed virtue through their vocation. While nobility was conferred on an individual “through the childbirth pangs of a noblewoman”
(Keen 1984: 146), initially knighthood was not. The knights were dubbed to knighthood, which marked their entry into a military fraternity with an emerging corporate identity. Originally the ceremony of dubbing a knight may have marked only equipping a man with martial arms. It was a custom of great antiquity, Tacitus in the first century observing in his Germania that among Germans a young man’s achievement of maturity was marked by equipping him publicly with shield and spear, the equivalent of the Latin toga. (Ibid.: 66–67) In Carolingian times vassalage was marked by a grant of equipment, the
‘complete arms’, from a lord to his vassal as a ‘heriot’, to be returned on the vassal’s death. The delivery of arms on the occasion of coming of age or joining a war band in ‘pre-chivalric’ times is not dissimilar to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century practice of conferring knighthood upon a young man’s entry into a vassal group. (Barber 2000: 10) The relationship of the vassal to his lord was analogous to ties of kinship, as it had been earlier in the war band. Hence the great emphasis, both in life and literature, laid on the social standing of the
man from whom one received one’s arms. The aura of his greatness would embrace also his followers: “das Wurde wardens wirdet mir” – “the worth of the worthy makes me worthy”, in the words of a German ministerial poet of the twelfth century (Keen 1984: 69). The practice, common already with Lombard kings, of sending one’s sons to the court of a great lord to be brought up in his household and to receive his arms from him, in such a manner sharing his honour and dignity, became universal in the Middle Ages. This idea of associative honour lies behind mass knightings which became widespread in the twelfth century and ushered in a new era for the mounted warrior. As the ties and obligations of vassalage became clarified and particularized, the mere act of homage and delivery of arms could be elaborated further and given a more universal meaning. The growing practice in the twelfth century of great men knighting, with great lavishness and ceremony, their sons upon coming of age together with other young noblemen in their foster care to provide their heirs with the nucleus of their own war bands points to knighthood acquiring a new significance. It is on its way to becoming a special estate. (Ibid.: 69–70)
In the early days a knight could make a knight of whomever he pleased, but from the beginning there had been the feeling that men of low birth and the unfree could not be knighted. The knights’ special ire was roused by the pretensions of tradesmen and rich peasants to arms. To keep out such undesirables, royal and imperial ordinances were passed limiting access to knighthood only to the descendants of knights. This gave to what had merely been a profession a new pride in descent and a sense of belonging to a select club. As lineage took precedence over vocation in defining knighthood, the line between the old nobility of the blood and the new one of military virtue became blurred, noblesse and chevalerie becoming complementary terms. The traditio-nalists would try in vain to assert the supremacy of the aristocrats of the blood over mere cavalrymen. The public opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of those who claimed nobility through individual virtue and achievement. “The law says that in the beginning nobility came only from good character and manly worth and courtesy,” claims André le Chapelain in the 1180s (quoted in Keen 1984: 157). In the next three centuries all possible sources, both Christian and pagan, would be ransacked by heraldic writers intent on proving the possibility of ascent from humble beginnings to great heights by virtue alone.
(Ibid.: 143–161)
The medieval chivalric ideal
‘Chivalry’ in its narrow sense denotes collectively all those warriors who had formally and ceremonially taken up knighthood. In its wider and more ambiguous sense it is used to describe “the obligations, estate and style of life of those entitled, on account of their birth, to aspire to knighthood, but who may or
may not be knights in fact”. (Keen 1984: 145) Keen whose definition this is, has remarked on the elusive nature of the term, which is rather “an evocative word, conjuring up images in the mind”, than a precise term. He has highlighted the difficulties any scholar would face when trying to pin it down:
One can define within reasonably close limits what is meant by the word knight, the French chevalier: it denotes a man of aristocratic standing and probably of noble ancestry, who is capable, if called upon, of equipping himself with a war horse and the arms of a heavy cavalryman, and who has been through certain rituals that make him what he is – who has been ‘dubbed’ to knighthood. But chivalry, the abstraction from chevalier, is not so easily pinned down. It is a word that was used in the middle ages with different meanings and shades of meaning by different writers and in different contexts. Sometimes, especially in earlier texts, it means no more than a body of heavy armed horsemen, a collective of chevaliers. Sometimes chivalry is spoken of as an order, as if knighthood could be compared to an order of religion: sometimes it is spoken of as an estate, a social class – the warrior class whose martial function, according to medieval writers, was to defend the patria and the Church. Sometimes it is used to encapsulate a code of values apposite to this order or estate. Chivalry cannot be divorced from the martial world of the mounted warrior: it cannot be divorced from aristocracy, because knights commonly were men of high lineage:
and from the middle of the twelfth century on it very frequently carries ethical or religious overtones. But it remains a word elusive of definition, tonal rather than precise in its implications. (Ibid.: 1–2)
The composite portrait of the knight which emerges from the romances and popular treatises on chivalry is a set of virtues ostensibly largely secular, owing to their martial origin, yet, as we shall see below, they were defined in close conjunction with the Church.
The classic virtues of good knighthood are predictably qualities which were already highly esteemed in the Germanic war band – honour, prowess, courage, hardiness, truthfulness, loyalty, generosity and the free and frank bearing which bespoke of good birth and virtue. As the warrior rose on the social scale, nobility and courtesy, administrative ability and his role as the protector of the community became pronounced. His first duty was to defend the faith of Christ against unbelievers, which would win him honour in this world and the next, but a close second was his duty to protect his temporal lord and the territories entrusted to him, where he was to pursue all malefactors and defend the weak.
He had to be wise and able to mete out justice, administer his estates well, so that he could support his rank and keep an open house befitting his station in life. He was expected to be in constant training, hunting wild beasts and seeking jousts and tournaments to test and improve his skills. He should be valorous and charitable and his motives for seeking knighthood should be pure. He must prize honour above all and take care his reputation was not tarnished by
‘reproach’. His greatest achievement was renown won among his peers for feats of arms and here a gradation evolved on the principle of ‘he who achieves more
is the more worthy’. One could start one’s career by winning acclaim at jousts and tournaments, then go on to winning greater honour in war in one’s own land and then as a crusader in distant and foreign parts. A chevalier sans reproche, a knight without blemish should eschew pride, false-swearing, idleness, lechery and treason. Treason was the darkest of crimes, the ultimate treason being slaying one’s lord, but equally heinous was adultery with his wife or surrendering his castle. Cowardice in the field was another grave offence, gross cowardice, like treason, punishable by death and lesser instances involving loss of status and removal of insignia. Public disgrace was likewise the punishment for breach of faith, the failure to pay ransom when taken prisoner and freed to return home to raise it. Dishonourable conduct toward women involved marrying below one’s estate, slandering women and raping them. Access to the company of honourable knights was barred to hardened excommunicates, violators of churches, murderers of malice prepense, arsonists, robbers and pirates. (Keen 1984: 2–15, 175–176, 210–211)
The knight striving for ever greater fame in his profession of arms could find an added spur to his ambition and solace in the harsh male world of constant competition in the favour to be found with ladies. With the advances in building techniques and improved standards of living, the members of the rough and ready war band had to rethink their attitude to women. A way had to be found to protect the few noblewomen now living amidst the ever-increasing armies of retainers in what amounted to barrack-room conditions in the new castles and baronial halls. As the prime functions of marriage were dynastic aggrandize-ment and the preservation of the purity of the lineage, sexual relations with the seigneur’s wife, daughters or female wards were out of bounds for the socially inferior retainers. A means had to be devised to channel the sexual energies of the hot-headed young men growing up or serving in the household into socially acceptable behaviour which would not harm their own career prospects nor damage the marriageability of the ladies. (Duby, Barthelémy, de la Roncière 1988: 75–83)
The culture of courtly love, which came into being as a response to this need, removed the lady from within the reach of her social inferiors by putting her on a pedestal, yet allowed the men around her to focus their desire on her person in an asexual and rigidly controlled way. She could be worshipped from afar, respectfully and secretly, her favour could be sought discreetly yet publicly by becoming her champion in jousts and tournaments, she could be the object of agonized outpourings of the heart in poetry and song, yet her reputation would not be tarnished if all this was done according to established conventions.
(Ibid.) The cult of the lady, the knight’s service of the object of his secret desire in a spirit of feudal submission and near-religious fervour, took centuries to develop and owed its evolution to a number of powerful influences working together. Its sources are varied and still a matter of debate, so below only the
(Ibid.) The cult of the lady, the knight’s service of the object of his secret desire in a spirit of feudal submission and near-religious fervour, took centuries to develop and owed its evolution to a number of powerful influences working together. Its sources are varied and still a matter of debate, so below only the