Chapter 13
Chivalry: knighthood and its code of honour, courtesy, prowess and service; the ideals and the decline of chivalry.
574 passages · 297 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Chivalry names both an institution and an ideal. As an institution it is knighthood: the dubbing of mounted warriors, their place among the ranks of society, and their orders and fellowships. As an ideal it is a code joining prowess to honour, courtesy, mercy and the service of women and the weak. Caxton, introducing Malory, says the book treats of chivalry, prowess, hardihood, courtesy, love and gentleness, and also of the Grail quest and the fall of Arthur’s court1. He commends it as a mirror in which noblemen may learn noble acts while seeing good knights honoured and vicious ones punished2. That combination of a code, a quest and a fall marks out the territory. Chivalry is a great idea for these books because nearly every period in them meets it in a different form. It appears as the living practice of the chronicles, as the romance that Cervantes parodied, as the lost civilization that Burke mourned, and as the half-ironic metaphor of the moderns.
The question of origins is raised chiefly by the moderns. Renan argues that pure love and exalted devotion to woman as the highest end of life are neither ancient, Teutonic nor Arab, but Breton3. Chivalrous gallantry, he says, first found literary expression in the Breton romances, and French imitators later turned the knight’s zeal for ladies’ honour into shameless gallantry4. He describes Arthur’s court as a company of equal heroes and chaste ladies loving by chivalric law, a picture that enchanted the world5. Shelley agrees that the blending of Celtic institutions with Christianity led toward the emancipation of women6. He calls chivalry the law of the worship of love, with poets as its prophets, and credits it with improving the relation of the sexes in modern Europe7. Burke traces European manners to ancient chivalry, which softened power, made kings companions and subdued pride by manners8. He also holds that the chivalrous spirit of fealty freed both kings and subjects from tyranny9. Schiller praises the generosity of chivalrous manners for correcting nature’s injustice. Under it weakness became sacred, the conqueror spared the disarmed foe, and strength was tempered by gentleness toward women and strangers10. Emerson makes chivalry the creator of the gentleman, a type he follows through Sidney to Scott11, and he observes that the valour of the feudal age now passes from war into politics and trade12.
Don Quixote states the order’s purpose more plainly than anyone. Knighthood, he says, was instituted in a corrupt age to defend damsels, protect widows and assist orphans13. Knights are God’s ministers of justice by arms, and their calling is more laborious than the religious life14. For that reason he ranks arms above learning, as more exposed to danger and nobler in its end15. That the fullest definition comes from a madman is the first sign of how unsettled the idea becomes.
How a knight is made is shown seriously and in burlesque. In Froissart, Edward III refuses help to his son at Crécy so that the boy may win his spurs and have the honour of the day16. A Scottish lord likewise says that Maxwell has won his spurs by taking Percy17. Dante’s Cacciaguida was girded a knight by the Emperor Conrad for valiant service and died crusading18. Harrison records that knights were made for courage before or after battle, or for virtue and service, and that the dignity was not inherited19. In Malory, Galahad charges the newly made Melias to be a mirror unto all chivalry20. Cervantes reduces all this to an innkeeper’s farce: a vigil over arms in a stable yard, accolade blows and a sword girded on by wenches21,22. The tension between birth and merit runs through the corpus. Malory’s queen praises Galahad for his lineage as well as his prowess23, and Froissart’s Robert Sale is a low-born man knighted for valour24. The Wife of Bath’s hag, as Dryden retells her, argues that true nobility is virtue and not ancestry25. Burns contrasts the prince who can make a belted knight with the honest man, whose worth no prince can confer26.
The orders gather these questions into institutions. Harrison relates how Edward III founded the Garter as a society of honour for the most virtuous, and how its legend grew from a courteous retrieval of a lady’s garter27,28. Goethe’s Egmont rests his safety on the privilege of the Golden Fleece, which allows him to be judged only by his fellow knights, and he protests when the king overrides it29,30. Hypocrisy shadows the orders from the start. Dante places the Joyous Friars, an order sworn to defend widows and orphans, among the hypocrites in gilded leaden hoods31,32. Spenser recalls the Templars decayed through pride33. By Bacon’s day such orders were conferred promiscuously, on soldiers and civilians alike, and they gave little encouragement to martial virtue34. Even so, Emerson finds Knights of the Bath still swearing to defend injured ladies35.
The perfect knight receives his classic portrait in Chaucer. The Knight loved chivalry, truth, honour, generosity and courtesy, campaigned widely, and was meek and never discourteous, a “verray parfit gentil knight”36,37. The epics show prowess and loyalty in their older and harder form. Homer and Beowulf offer heroic honour that is akin to chivalry but comes before it38,39. Roland vows not to belie his race40, mourns Olivier’s prowess and their lifelong comradeship41, and fights on with Turpin, whose rule is that a brave warrior yields only with his life42. Froissart supplies emblems of the same fidelity. Blind King John of Bohemia has his knights tie their reins to his and lead him into the fray, and they die with him43. Audley vows to be first into battle44. Sale scorns the rebels’ offer as a dishonour to his natural lord and fights until he is killed45.
Honour is settled by combat. In the Roland, Thierry and Pinabel confess, hear Mass and fight a judicial duel in which God vindicates the loyal knight46,47. Shakespeare keeps the form in Lear, where Edmund accepts the duel “by rule of knighthood”48. At Otterburn, Douglas wins Percy’s pennon and dares him to come and fetch it49,50. In the ballad version Douglas proposes single combat so that their men may be spared51. The chronicles thus pose a question the code cannot easily answer, which is how honour stands to prudence. Olivier begs Roland to sound the horn, while Roland holds that doing so would be an unknightly disgrace52. Percy, his honour touched by the lost pennon, rides out against the counsel of prudent knights without waiting for reinforcements53,54. Froissart’s knights shame those who flee and prefer death to reproach55,56. Cervantes turns the problem inside out: Quixote insists that his retreat from the Holy Brotherhood is not fear57.
Against the code’s ferocity stand its gentler duties. After Poitiers the Black Prince serves the captive French king humbly, refuses to sit with him and awards him the prize for prowess58,59. Knights were ransomed on their word, at rates that let them keep their degree60,61. Lindsay takes Redman on parole, and the two later dine together62,63. In the ballad, Douglas offers Percy ransom and praises his courage64, and in Malory, Bors spares Pridam when he yields65. Cellini keeps his parole to a castellan, although a soldier tells him a prisoner owes no faith66. Generosity completes the picture. Audley gives his pension to the squires who helped him fulfil his vow, and the prince doubles it67,68. The Robin Hood ballads invert rank: an outlaw equips a fallen gentle knight, who returns to repay the debt with gratitude69,70. Violations are condemned by the code’s own measure. Rossetti judges the slaying of an unarmed king to be “not as a knight”71. Schiller’s Gessler keeps his knightly word to Tell only by treachery72. Tennyson’s Arthur calls the lying Bedivere unknightly73. Milton’s Lady observes that courtesy is found more in lowly sheds than in the courts where it was named74.
Service to women is chivalry’s most distinctive and most contested strand. Froissart’s knights shelter ladies and nuns from violation75,76. Malory’s Bors rescues a maiden at the cost of leaving his brother in peril77, and Galahad destroys the wicked custom of the Castle of Maidens78. Schiller’s Bertha rebukes Rudenz for betraying his vow as the natural protector of the oppressed79. Ruskin makes the young knight’s devoted obedience to his lady the first conception of honourable life80. For him the lady buckling on the knight’s armour signifies that a woman’s hand braces the soul81. Emerson, by contrast, mocks the “new chivalry” of women’s rights82. Cervantes probes the convention from within. A traveller objects that knights commend themselves to ladies rather than to God83. Quixote answers that a knight without a lady enters chivalry like a thief84, and that the perfection of a lover’s penance lies in madness without cause85. Pressed by Sancho, he concedes that Dulcinea is an ideal, like the feigned ladies of poets86, served for her worth alone and without reward87. The romantics revived the lover-knight without that irony, in Scott’s Lochinvar88 and in Coleridge’s knight crazed by scorn who nonetheless rescues his lady89.
Malory’s Grail quest sets chivalry against itself. A hermit contrasts the earthly knighthood of tournaments and vainglory with heavenly knighthood90. Launcelot confesses that his deeds of arms were done for the queen and for worship, not for God, and is told that prowess avails little against God91,92. Gawain refuses penance, pleading the hardships of adventurous knights, and is condemned as an untrue knight93,94. Only the chaste Galahad, Percivale and Bors remain pure95. Percivale resists lust when he remembers the cross on his sword96. Melias falls because he entered knighthood without confession97. Galahad surpasses Launcelot, insists that vengeance belongs to God, and dies after achieving the Grail98,99,100. Renan notes that the prose versions likewise separated earthly from mystical chivalry101, and Tennyson’s Galahad keeps a virgin heart through prayer102. The Roland had already fused faith with arms in Turpin, the warrior archbishop who absolves the knights and then fights beside them103,104. Milton gives the sharpest dissent: fabled knights and tournaments, he says, rank below patience and martyrdom as heroic argument105.
Cervantes stands at the turn. His gentleman reads romances until he takes them for true history106 and resolves to seek adventures for eternal renown107. He calls the killing of windmill giants a service to God108. His justice backfires. He rescues the boy Andrew, but the farmer flogs him again109, and Andrew afterward curses knights-errant as meddlers110. He defends freeing the galley-slaves on the ground that knights must aid the oppressed whatever their crimes111, and the freed convicts stone him112. The book declares itself an invective against the romances113. The curate and the barber burn most of Quixote’s library but spare Amadis and Palmerin for their decorum114,115, and they praise Tirante, in which knights die in their beds116. The canon condemns the books as implausible fables117. He nonetheless allows that they give scope to portray the valorous, courteous Christian knight118, and he wishes real heroes put in their place119. Quixote answers by defending the reality of Arthur and the Peers120, and he claims that knight-errantry made him valiant, courteous and liberal121. Sidney had already testified that Amadis moved men to courtesy and courage122. Whether the ideal survives its fictions is the question Cervantes leaves open. Quixote’s own lament against gunpowder, which lets a base arm kill the bravest knight, suggests that the age itself has answered it123.
The sense of decline is older than modern complaint. Dante’s Florentines ask whether courtesy and valour still dwell in their city124, and Marco Lombardo finds them fled from Lombardy125. Malory’s hermit sees the Round Table, founded on humility, now blackened by sin126. Cervantes’ innkeeper declines to become a knight-errant because the old ways are out of use127. Burke’s famous cry that the age of chivalry is gone mourns a time when honour felt a stain like a wound128. Carlyle laments that no ideal chivalry now invites young valour129. He also explains the decline: as virtue grows self-conscious, chivalry shrinks into punctilios of honour and politeness130. Satire records that shrinkage. Jonson’s Kastril learns quarrelling by rule and is likened to Amadis and Quixote131,132. Manzoni’s gentlemen dispute whether beating a challenge-bearer was a knightly deed133, and his Don Ferrante judges cases of honour from treatises134. Haskell sneers at the “high-toned chivalry” of plundering Confederates135. Descartes warns against the extravagances of knights-errant136, and Burke himself turns Quixote into a figure for abstract liberty freeing criminals137.
Yet chivalry also outlives its institutions. Spenser makes Arthur a knight perfected in the moral virtues so that he may fashion a gentleman138. Carlyle describes Scott carrying “Chivalry Literature” across the world as an affectionate, half-regretful look back at the feudal past139. Keats’s knight-at-arms is undone by a faery lady140. Tennyson’s Arthur concedes that the old order changeth141. Thoreau recasts walkers as knights-errant of a new order142. Channing hopes that courtesy, once the coarse privilege of the high-born, may become the habit of labourers143. Emerson, for his part, holds that the truly worshipping soul has no chivalry at all144. The books thus leave two questions unsettled. One is whether chivalry was a civilizing law or a romance of force. The other is whether its spirit can pass from arms into ordinary moral life, or survives only as nostalgia and parody.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Race and Nationality 5c · Poetry 2c · Love 4c
See also: Custom and Convention 9a
See also: War and Peace 8c · Courage 8a · Honor 5b · Duty 6a
See also: Justice 7d · Honor 5b
See also: Honor 5a · War and Peace 8c
See also: Custom and Convention 9a · War and Peace 8c · Honor 6a
See also: Madness 7c · Love 4c · Memory and Imagination 5b · Sense 4b
See also: Duty 8c · Honor 8b · Custom and Convention 9c
See also: Miracles 7b · Sign and Symbol 5c · Prophecy 7a
See also: Prophecy 5b · Sign and Symbol 6b · Miracles 7b · Religion 7c
See also: Memory and Imagination 5b · Madness 6a · Poetry 10a · Diversion 10a
See also: Madness 6a · Memory and Imagination 5b · Custom and Convention 9a · Sense 4b
See also: Punishment 6d · Memory and Imagination 5b · Revenge 8e · Labor 6d
See also: Poetry 10a · Truth 9e · Diversion 10a
See also: Poetry 8c
See also: Honor, Courage, War and Peace, Madness, Love, Poetry