Of William Caxton we know more. A native of Kent, he became an
apprentice, freeman, and livery man of the London Guild of Mercers, and
was for many years resident in the English factory at Bruges, which was
under their chief authority, though it represented and controlled all
English trading interests in the Low Countries. Such factories were the
usual, and indeed essential means of carrying on trade with foreign
nations in the Middle Ages. Thus charters were granted by Henry IV and
his successors to ‘Merchant Adventurers’ trading in Flanders, which, in
giving them a corporate character, enabled them to treat with the
authorities of the country more effectually than would have been
possible to private individuals, and also to exercise needful control
over, and give protection to, their own countrymen in the place. Though
these Merchant Adventurers included many of the City Guilds, the
majority were Mercers, and the factory at Bruges, while called ‘the
English Nation,’ and its house ‘the English House,’ was practically
under the management of the London Mercers’ Guild. Mr. Blades has given
an engraving from _Flandria Illustrata_ of the ‘Domus Anglorum’ at
Bruges as it was in Caxton’s time; and he thus describes the mode of
life of its inhabitants:—
‘A great similarity prevailed in the internal management of all
foreign guilds, arising from the fact that foreigners were regarded
by the natives with jealousy and suspicion. The laws which governed
the Esterlings in London, who lived in a strongly-built enclosure,
called the Steel Yard, the site of which is now occupied by the
City station of the South Eastern Railway Company, were much the
same as those under which the English Nation lived in Bruges and
other cities. The foreign merchant had, in Caxton’s time, to brave
a large amount of popular dislike, and to put up with great
restraints on his liberty. Not only did he trade under harassing
restrictions, but he resigned all hopes of domestic ties and family
life. As in a monastery, each member had his own dormitory, whilst
at meal-times there was a common table. Marriage was out of the
question, and concubinage was followed by expulsion. Every member
was bound to sleep in the house, and to be in-doors by a fixed time
in the evening, and for the sake of good order no woman of any
description was allowed within the walls[24].’
To this house of the English in Bruges Caxton went to live in the year
1441, being then probably about twenty years of age. In 1462 he was
acting as ‘Governor of the English Nation in the Low Countries,’ and
certainly in full possession of that office and title two or three
years later. And in 1465 he was appointed by Edward IV one of two
envoys with the title of Ambassadors, to negociate a renewal of the
existing treaty of trade with the Duke of Burgundy. We do not know at
what time he began to combine his literary studies or his acquaintance
with the new art of printing with the prosecution of his official
duties: but he tells us that in 1471, at the request of Margaret,
sister of Edward IV and wife of the Duke of Burgundy, he completed his
translation of the _Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_ which he had
begun, but laid aside unfinished some time before. And then, in order
to meet the desire of many friends to have copies of this translation,
he printed such copies for their use.
He was now in the service of Margaret, and married; and about the year
1476, after thirty-five years’ residence abroad, he returned to
England, there to introduce the Printing Press, and to make himself
famous to all ages by so doing. Caxton was not only a printer, but a
translator, an editor, and the publisher of the books which he printed
in unfailing succession, during the remaining fifteen years of his
life. He was the first of that honourable order of publishers who from
his day to our own still share with authors the gratitude of men for
that inestimable boon, the Printed Book. There are still publishers
among us who, like Caxton, are themselves authors and editors of no
unimportant ability: and not only to them, but also to those who aspire
only to be the publishers of other men’s books, do we owe—what even
the art of printing could have done little towards giving us—that
broad spreading[25] of knowledge which has become to us like the common
light of day in which we live and move, only half conscious of its
blessings. Mr. Blades justly defends Caxton against Gibbon’s censure of
him because he did not print the ancient classics. He did far better.
He printed and published translations from those classics for men who
could not read the originals; and it was surely no loss, but the
greatest gain, to Englishmen that he enabled them to read Chaucer’s
_Canterbury Tales_ and the _Polychronicon of English History_ (which
latter he carried down to his own time) rather than if he had printed
Virgil and Livy in the original Latin. He laid the foundations of
popular English literature in the best possible way. He taught his
countrymen to read, by giving them a large and judiciously selected
succession, year by year, of books which they could and would read. He
gave them books of piety and devotion, poetry and history, of chivalry
and romance, of morals and manners, including his own translations of
Cicero’s _Old Age and Friendship_; of proverbs, fables, and classical
legends; of statutes of the realm; and the _Game of Chess_, an allegory
of civil government. We cannot read down the list of ninety-nine books,
including several second and third editions, which Caxton printed,
without wonder and respect for the genius and the judgment of the man
whose choice of subjects was so wide, so high-minded, moral, religious,
and generous, and at the same time so popular. He was indeed, in all
senses, the first of English publishers. He died in 1491, occupied (as
his chief workman and successor, Wynkyn de Worde, tells us) on the last
day of his life in finishing his translation of the _Lives of the
Fathers_ from the French. Mr. Blades conjectures, with apparent
probability, that his wife was the Mawde Caxton whose burial is
recorded in the parish books of St. Margaret’s in 1489, and he adds:—
‘If so, it will explain, in a most interesting manner, the reason why
he in that year suspended printing the _Fayts of Arms_ until he had
finished a new undertaking, _The Arte and Crafte to Die Well_.’
The operation of the silent but never-failing laws which govern the
growth and progress of our national life, seems to be sustained and
directed in certain epochs of our history by great men who have yet
themselves been made what they are by those very laws. Among such laws
are the ideals of chivalry in its twofold aspect of self-sacrifice and
of self-assertion. And not least among the men who have given to the
spirit of chivalry its special English forms in which the sense of duty
and zeal in the redress of wrongs are characteristic, stand Sir Thomas
Malory and William Caxton.
§2. THE TEXT, AND ITS SEVERAL EDITIONS.
The first edition of Le Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton at
Westminster in 1485, as he tells us in the colophon. Two copies only
are known: they are folio, black letter, with wide margin, and among
the finest specimens of Caxton’s printing. One belongs to Mrs. Abby E.
Pope, of Brooklyn, United States, by whom it was bought for £1950 at
the sale of the Osterley library in 1885[26]; and the other to Earl
Spencer. The Osterley copy, which is perfect, has the autograph
‘Oxford’ on the first leaf; it was sold with the Harleian Library to
Osborne the bookseller, and apparently bought of him for £5 5_s._ by
Bryan Fairfax, who sold his library to Mr. Child, maternal ancestor of
the Earl of Jersey[27]. The Althorp copy, which was bought at Mr.
Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320, had eleven leaves deficient; but these
were supplied by Mr. Whittaker in fac-simile from the Osterley copy
with remarkable skill[28], though on collation with the original I have
found many mistakes. This edition, like all Caxton’s books but one, has
no title-page; the Prohem or Preface begins at the top of the first
page[29].
The two next editions of Morte Arthur were printed by Wynkyn de Worde,
the chief workman and successor of Caxton, in 1498 and 1529. Only one
copy of each is known. That of 1498 is in the Althorp Library: it wants
some pages, but contains the Preface, which is a reprint of that of
Caxton, though it here follows instead of preceding the Table of
Contents. This edition, which has numerous woodcuts, is not an exact
reprint of Caxton’s; there are differences of spelling and occasionally
of a word; and the passage in the last chapter but one, beginning ‘Oh
ye mighty and pompous lords,’ and ending with ‘turn again to my
matter,’ which is not in Caxton’s edition, appears here, as in all
later editions[30]. The edition of 1529 is in the British Museum, and
wants the Title, Preface, and part of the Table of Contents.
In 1557 the book was reprinted by William Copland, with the title of
‘The story of the most noble and worthy kynge Arthur, the whiche was
one of the worthyes chrysten, and also of his noble and valiaūte
knyghtes of the rounde Table. Newly imprynted and corrected mccccclvij.
¶ Imprynted at London by Wyllyam Copland.’ And on the title-page, above
the last line, is a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon, of which that
on the title-page of Southey’s edition is a bad copy. A copy of this
edition is in the British Museum, with a note that this is the only one
with a title which the annotator has seen.
A folio and a quarto edition were published by Thomas East, without
date, but probably about 1585, the former of which is in the British
Museum.
The next, and last black-letter, edition is that of William Stansby, in
1634, which has been reprinted by Mr. Wright, and which contains the
woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur in the middle and his knights
around, a copy of which is familiar to many of us in one of the small
editions of 1816. From the fact of an omission in this edition which
exactly corresponds with a complete leaf in East’s folio, Mr. Wright
concludes that the one was printed from the other. Each succeeding
edition departs more than the previous one from the original of Caxton;
but if we compare this of 1634 with Caxton’s, we find the variations
almost infinite. Besides remodelling the preface, dividing the book
into three parts, and modernising the spelling and many of the words,
there are a number of more or less considerable variations and
additions, of which Mr. Wright has given some of the more important in
his notes, but which I estimate at above twenty thousand in the whole;
and which have probably arisen in the minor instances from the printer
reading a sentence and then printing it from recollection, without
farther reference to his ‘copy,’ but in the others from a desire to
improve the original simplicity by what the editor calls ‘a more
eloquent and ornated style and phrase.’
No new edition seems to have been published till 1816, when two
independent editions appeared, one in two, and the other in three 24mo
volumes. Both are modernised for popular use, and are probably the
volumes through which most of my own generation made their first
acquaintance with King Arthur and his knights; but neither has any
merit as to its editing.
In 1817 Messrs. Longmans and Co. published an edition in two volumes
quarto, with an introduction and notes by Southey, who says,’The
present edition is a reprint with scrupulous exactness from the first
edition by Caxton, in Earl Spencer’s library[31].’ As it appears from a
note[32] that he had nothing to do with the superintendence of the
press, which was undertaken by Mr. Upcott, he was probably unaware that
eleven leaves were, as I have mentioned above, then wanting in the copy
from which this reprint was made. These had not then been restored in
fac-simile; for Earl Spencer’s copy contains a note, signed by Messrs.
Longmans and dated 1816, which gives a list of the pages then wanting;
and, in fact, the substitutes for them which actually appear in
Southey’s edition differ widely from the restored, or the original,
text. Thus in chapter xii. of the last book, besides the interpolation
of the long passage ‘O ye myghty and pompous lordes,’ &c., which is not
in Caxton, there are in the first eleven lines thirty-five variations
of spelling and punctuation, besides the introduction of the words ‘but
continually mourned un—’ and ‘needfully as nature required,’ which are
not in Caxton, and the change of Caxton’s ‘on the tombe of kyng Arthur
& quene Guenever’ into ‘on kynge Arthur’s & quene Gwenever’s tombe.’
And thus throughout the pages in question—seventeen in number[33]—the
spelling constantly, and words and even sentences occasionally, differ
from the real text of Caxton[34].
When at page 113 of volume i. the editor introduces the words ‘certayne
cause’ to complete the sense, he is careful to call attention, in a
foot-note, to the fact that these words are not in the original, but
taken from the ‘second edition,’ by which I presume he means that of
1498. But when he subsequently supplies seventeen pages which were also
not in his original, he gives no hint of the fact; and his reticence
was so successful that for fifty years the interpolations passed as
genuine among learned critics, who quoted from them passages wholly
spurious as Caxton’s genuine text. It was only in 1867 that, in
collating Earl Spencer’s copy with the edition of Southey, I discovered
that these passages—to which my attention was directed by Messrs.
Longman’s note above mentioned—did not correspond with Caxton’s text,
as represented by Whittaker’s restorations: and on afterwards collating
them with the Osterley text itself I found the like result. It remained
to trace them to their real sources. This was not so easy as might be
supposed, for though it was evident that Mr. Upcott must have had
recourse to one or other of the existing editions, the interpolated
passages in fact agree exactly with none of them. But a careful
collation of the last four chapters of the book (which include more
than half the interpolations, and may be taken as a fair specimen of
the whole) with the old texts, leaves no doubt that, with the exception
of the first thirty-six lines of chapter x, they were taken, like the
two words mentioned above, from the first edition of Wynkyn de Worde,
but with the spelling occasionally altered, and here and there a small
word put in, left out, or changed. These alterations throw an ingenious
disguise over the whole; but if we penetrate through this we find that
in these four chapters there are only thirteen words differing from
those in Wynkyn de Worde’s first edition, and these unimportant; while
in his second edition, and in those of Copland and East, the variations
from Mr. Upcott’s text of the same chapters are respectively
fifty-seven, fifty-six, and fifty in number, and many of them important
in kind: and if we go to the edition of 1634 we find the differences
still greater, except as to those thirty-six lines, which are supplied
from this edition, as they were wanting in the other copy. But the
colophon, or concluding paragraph of the book, Mr. Upcott could not
take from any of the editions which followed that of Caxton; for though
Wynkyn de Worde might, and in fact did, supply at least one or two of
the first words, the latter part of his colophon relates to his own
edition, and departs widely from that of Caxton, while those in the
later editions are still more unlike; and yet Mr. Upcott’s colophon is
a tolerable, though not an exact, representation of that of Caxton. But
his other materials can be ascertained beyond a doubt. They are, the
colophon as given by Ames, and repeated by Dibdin in a modernised and
otherwise inexact form[35], and that which first appeared in the
Catalogue of the Harleian Library[36], and was thence copied in the
article on Caxton in the _Biographia Britannica_, and also in Herbert’s
Additions to Ames. The colophons of Ames and of the Harleian Catalogue
have important variations from each other and from that of Caxton; and
as Mr. Upcott adopts some portions of each which are not found either
in the other, or in Caxton, we see the manner in which the paragraph in
question was compounded. Each stone of the ingeniously fitted mosaic
may be referred to the place from which it was taken. We cannot indeed
choose positively between Ames and Dibdin, or among the Harleian
Catalogue, the Biographia, and Herbert; but as the two paragraphs which
are required in addition to that of Wynkyn de Worde are both found in
Herbert’s Ames, it seems most probable that Mr. Upcott had recourse to
that work, though another combination would have served the purpose
equally well. That the interpolated passages are not taken from the
Osterley Caxton itself, even in the roughest and most careless manner,
is quite evident[37].
In 1858 and 1866 Mr. Wright published successive editions reprinted
from that of 1634. His learned introduction and notes are of
considerable interest; but nothing can justify the reprinting the most
corrupt of all the old editions when the first and best was within
reach, though perhaps at greater cost.
In 1868 was published the first edition of the present volume, with the
purpose of giving the original text in a form available for ordinary
readers, and especially for boys, from whom the chief demand for this
book will always come. It is a reprint of the original Caxton with the
spelling modernised, and those few words which are unintelligibly
obsolete replaced by others which, though not necessarily unknown to
Caxton, are still in use, yet with all old forms retained which do not
interfere with this requirement of being readable. For when, as indeed
is oftenest the case, the context makes even an obsolete phrase
probably, if not precisely, known, I have left it in the text, and
given its meaning in the Glossary, in which I have chiefly followed
Roquefort, Halliwell, and Wright. In the Glossary I have also added a
few geographical notes for those readers who may care for them. And for
the like reason—of making the book readable—such phrases or passages
as are not in accordance with modern manners have been also omitted or
replaced by others which either actually occur or might have occurred
in Caxton’s text elsewhere. I say manners, not morals, because I do not
profess to have remedied the moral defects of the book which I have
already spoken of. Lord Tennyson has shown us how we may deal best with
this matter, in so far as Sir Thomas Malory has himself failed to treat
it rightly; and I do not believe that when we have excluded what is
offensive to modern manners there will be found anything practically
injurious to the morals of English boys, for whom I have chiefly
undertaken this work, while there is much of moral worth which I know
not where they can learn so well as from the ideals of magnanimity,
courage, courtesy, reverence for women, gentleness, self-sacrifice,
chastity, and other manly virtues, exhibited in these pages.
The omissions, not many, nor in any sense constituting an abridgment of
the original, were thought desirable to fit the book for popular
reading. And if any one blames the other departures from the exact form
of that original, I would ask him to judge from the specimens of the
old type and spelling which I have given at the end of each book, and
of the volume, whether a literal and verbal reproduction of the whole
would not be simply unreadable except by students of old English[38].
And if some departure from the original was necessary, it was
reasonable to carry it so far as, though no farther than, my purpose
required. And, subject to these conditions, the present volume is in
fact a more accurate reproduction of Caxton’s text than any other
except those of Southey and Dr. Sommer. I have, indeed, made use of
Southey’s text for this edition, having satisfied myself by occasional
collation with the Althorp and Osterley Caxtons that it is a
sufficiently accurate reprint excepting as to the passages above
mentioned; and these have been taken by me from the original in the way
I have said.
In 1862, 1868, 1871, 1880, abridgments of Malory’s book were edited by
J. T. King, E. Conybeare, B. M. Ranking, and S. Lanier, respectively.
And in 1886 Mr. Ernest Rhys edited a reprint of fourteen of the
twenty-one books, from the version of Mr. Wright, with further
modernisations and an introduction.
In 1889, 1890, and 1891, Dr. H. Oskar Sommer edited, and Mr. Nutt
published, in three volumes, what will henceforth be the best, if not
quite the best possible, edition of Caxton’s original text, for the
scholar and the student. It would be hard to over-rate the industry,
the learning, and the munificent public spirit of these worthy
representatives of Sir Thomas Malory and William Caxton. The first
volume gives the text of the Althorp copy, page for page, line for
line, word for word, and letter for letter, with no change but that of
Roman for black letter type. It is, indeed, too scrupulously exact, for
it reproduces the mistakes in Whittaker’s fac-simile pages which now
form part of the Althorp copy, only correcting these by collations with
the Osterley original, given in the second volume. Whittaker has no
more authority than any other mere copyist; and the direct correction
of his mistakes would have made Dr. Sommer’s reprint a perfect
representation of the original while making a reprint of the collations
unnecessary. Besides these collations, and others of the second edition
of Wynkyn de Worde with the text of Caxton, Dr. Sommer’s second volume
contains a complete bibliography of the original text and all its after
editions; an Index of names of persons and places; a Glossary, or
indeed dictionary, of words, whether obsolete or still in use; and an
Essay on the language of the book.
In the third volume, after a graceful essay by Mr. Andrew Lang on the
literary merits of Malory, Dr. Sommer gives us a series—an original
and very important series—of ‘Studies on the Sources’; and he prints
from MSS. in the British Museum the only two of those ‘sources’ which
had not been so made accessible already, either by ancient or modern
editors. Into this hitherto chaotic mass of mediæval romances, French
and English, prose or verse, Dr. Sommer has now first brought light and
order. With an almost inconceivable amount of thoughtful and learned
labour, he has collated the various manuscripts with the printed
editions and with Malory’s book, in a detail which, great as it is,
represents, as he tells us, a still more minute investigation of which
he only gives the main results. With the exception of the story of
Beaumains, which is an enlarged narration of that of La Cote Male
Taile, and subject to the changes made by Malory’s own genius, all the
adventures and incidents of Malory’s Morte Darthur are now shown to be
found in one or more of these ‘sources,’ often translated literally
from French, or transferred word for word from the English, yet still
oftener so compressed and fused into a new shape that the finished work
is but a tenth of the bulk of the original matter. Dr. Sommer arranges
these sources into the four groups of the Merlin, the Lancelot, the
Tristan, and the Prophecies of Merlin, and shows the relations of each
group to the corresponding portions of Malory. He thinks, with M.
Gaston Paris, that Malory had a now lost form of the ‘Lancelot,’
comparable to the ‘Suite de Merlin’ discovered only fifteen years
since; and indeed believes that he has found some pages of this missing
‘Lancelot’ imbedded in a ‘Tristan’ MS. in the British Museum. But the
work of this learned critic must be studied in itself, not in a
summary. Of the light which these investigations throw upon the genius
of Malory, and on the character of his art, I have already spoken.
There is no title-page, as I have already mentioned, to the Caxton,
that which is given by several bibliographers being only an extract,
not very critically selected, from Caxton’s preface. But it is stated
in Caxton’s colophon that the book was ‘entytled le morte Darthur,’ and
he explains that it was so ‘entitled’ notwithstanding it treated of
Arthur’s birth, life, and acts as well as death, and also of the
adventures of his knights of the Round Table. And the concluding words
of Malory, ‘Here is the end of the death of Arthur,’ taken with their
context, point to the same title. It was indeed before Malory’s time,
and has been ever since, the traditional title of this story. We have
Mort Artus and Morte Arthure in the earlier times; Ascham, in Henry
VIII’s reign, calls this book La Morte d’Arthure; Tyrwhitt, Mort
d’Arthur; and Walter Scott and Southey, Morte Arthur, which last
probably many of us are familiar with as the old name which we heard
from our own fathers.
§3. AN ESSAY ON CHIVALRY.
St. Augustine replied to the enquiry, What is time? by saying, ‘I know
when you do not ask me:’ and a like answer suggests itself to us if we
try to find an adequate reply to the question, What is Chivalry? For
chivalry is one of those words, like love, duty, patriotism, loyalty,
which make us feel their meaning, and the reality of what they mean,
though their ideal and comprehensive character hinders us from readily
putting it into the forms of a definition. When the alchemist in the
Eastern tale compounds, with all the resources of his art, the
universal solvent before the expectant eyes of his pupil, the pupil,
seeing the mysterious fluid lie quietly in the crucible, exclaims, with
not unreasonable doubt, ‘O Sage, be not deceived: how can that which
dissolves all things be itself contained in a ladle?’ And how shall
chivalry, sparkling and flashing everywhere as it runs through that
great complicated tissue of human life which we call modern
civilisation,—how shall chivalry, the humaniser of society, be brought
within the limits of a definition?
Chivalry, indeed, exists for us in spirit rather than in outward and
visible form. It no longer comes to us with the outward symbols of
war-horse, and armour, and noble birth, and strength of arm, and
high-flown protestations of love and gallantry; yet we never fail to
know and feel its presence, silent and unobtrusive as it now is: we
recognise the lady and the gentleman not less surely now than they did
in old times; and we acknowledge their rights and their power over us
now no less than then. And if the spirit of chivalry does live among us
still, we may read its past history by its present light, and say in
Spenser’s words,—
‘By infusion sweete
Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive,
I follow still the footing of thy feete,
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.’
Let us then look back to those times when chivalry had an outward,
visible form, and was embodied in its own proper institutions, with
orders, and statutes, and courts of its own jurisdiction, and rituals,
and customs, like those of other great social institutions and members
of the body politic.
The deluge of the Teutonic nations which broke up the old Roman
civilisation threatened for some centuries to overwhelm Europe with
mere barbarism. We know now that the germs of a far higher and better
civilisation were everywhere ready to burst into life as soon as the
fury of that deluge had spent itself; but for a long period the evil
seemed mightier than the good. From time to time the clear head, the
noble heart and conscience, and the strong arm of an Alfred, a
Charlemagne, or an Otho, might bring a temporary calm and order into
the storm; but when the personal influences of such great men were
withdrawn, society relapsed again and again into ever new anarchy, and
war—at once the effect and the cause of anarchy—savage, cruel war
became the business of all men throughout Europe. The selfish, the
rapacious, and the unscrupulous fought for power, and plunder, and love
of fighting; and while violence could only be resisted by violence, and
each man had to defend himself, his family, and his possessions as best
he could, with no effectual aid from law and government, there was a
constant tendency to increasing barbarism and brutish, or worse than
brutish, instead of human, existence.
But man differs from the brutes in this, that while he can fall lower
than they, he can also rise higher, and that even the passions and the
impulses which he has in common with them may be subdued, and refined,
and modified, till they become the servants and instruments of his
human life, and the means by which all that is properly spiritual in
his being may be reflected and symbolised upon this earth in outward,
visible form. The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they
have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with
these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the
conquest of them, to new and higher life.
And so it was in the Middle Ages. The Church was, no doubt, the great
civiliser of the nations: still, whatever aid the State derived from
the Church, it then, no less than now, had a position and processes of
its own, by which it did its own work of civilisation too. And its
first great work for controlling the universal anarchy of which I have
spoken was the extension and firm establishment of that
half-patriarchal, half-military organisation which we call the Feudal
System. Every man who was not rich and powerful enough to be a lord
became—willingly or unwillingly—a vassal; and all men, from the king
downwards, were bound to each other for reciprocal service and
protection—a service and protection partly military, but partly
patriarchal, since they were rendered not by men strangers to each
other except for what Mr. Carlyle calls ‘the nexus of cash payment,’
but united by ties of family, and neighbourhood, and clanship, and by
the interests and sympathies that grow out of these. But the protector
of his own vassals easily became the invader of the rights and ravager
of the possessions of his neighbour and his vassals; and so the old
evils of anarchy and violence grew afresh out of the remedy which had
been devised to meet them. The ‘monarchies sank into impotence; petty,
lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot,’ says a learned
historian of this period, ‘and all attempts after scientific
instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this
state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material
life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe,
merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It is a sign of the prevailing
feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years
of our æra were drawing to their close, the people in every country in
Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world. Some
squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it for the
good of their souls on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay
day and night around the altars; some looked forward with dread, but
most with secret hope, towards the burning of the earth and the falling
in of heaven. Their actual condition was so miserable that the idea of
destruction was relief, spite of all its horrors[39].’
The palliatives with which men tried to meet the evils of the times
indicate the greatness of the evils, but also the moral feeling which
was the promise of better things. Such was the so-called ‘Peace of the
King,’ by which private wars were not to be entered on till forty days
after the committal of the alleged crime which was to be avenged; and
the ‘Truce of God,’ by which all these acts of private hostility were
suspended from Thursday to Monday in each week. And at the Council of
Cleremont, held by Urban II in November, 1095, a severe censure was
pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God was
confirmed; women and priests were placed under the safeguard of the
Church; and a protection of three years was extended to husbandmen and
merchants, the defenceless victims of military rapine. We are reminded
of the law of Moses, which provided Cities of Refuge for the man who
accidentally and without malice killed his neighbour, but who could not
look for protection from the vengeance of the family of the slain man
except within those special safeguards. In each case there is the same
unreasoning rage of the half-civilised man brought face to face with
the demands of religion and civil law: and each is obliged to yield
something to the other till the better cause has had time to prepare
and strengthen itself for a more complete triumph.
Chivalry, then, was the offspring of the same spirit which dictated the
Peace of the King, the Truce of God, and the decrees of the Council of
Cleremont. Chivalry has another name—Knighthood—and the two are
wanted to express all that we mean by either[40]. The chevalier was the
soldier who rode the war-horse: he whose birth entitled him, and whose
wealth gave him the means, to ride at the head of his vassals and
retainers to the war: all ideas of lordship, and mastery, and outward
dignity and power, are here embodied before us. But this ‘chevalier,’
this ‘ritter,’ or rider of the war-horse, was also to be a ‘knecht,’ or
servant: ‘He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant.’
The knight was to obey, no less than to command; he was to exert his
strength and power, not for selfish ends, but in the service of others;
and especially in the service of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed,
who could not help or defend themselves. It was, indeed, no new
discovery in the world, that such are the duties of him who possesses
power, and above all the power of the sword; and they who have tried to
trace the origin of chivalry to some particular place and time have had
to go to the Germans of Tacitus, to the Crusaders, to the Saracens, to
the Romans, the Greeks, the Trojans, the Hebrews, only to come to the
conclusion that chivalry belongs in its spirit to man as man; though
the form in which that spirit was clothed in Europe in the Middle Ages
has an individuality of which some of the sources may be ascertained,
and though from that time forward its power has been established, and
extended, in a manner, and with a greatness unknown to the ancients.
In those days society was essentially military. In this our own time
the main offices, interests, and occupations of the great body politic
are non-military, and the army is but a small portion of the nation,
specially trained for a minor, though indispensable, function therein.
Peace, for its own sake, and for the sake of the objects which can only
be obtained by the arts and with the opportunities of peace, is the end
and aim of every civilised nation now; and war is only an occasional
means to secure that end. But in the Middle Ages war was, or seemed to
be, the chief end of life to the greater part of every nation, and
especially to all who possessed rank, and wealth, and power, and were
in fact the leaders of the nation. And therefore chivalry, the spirit
which was to humanise those warriors, needed to be warlike too, and
thus to sympathise with those to whom it addressed itself.
Much, too, of its special form it no doubt owed to that wonderful race
of heroes, the Normans. The romantic love of adventure; the religious
and the martial enthusiasm; the desire to revenge injuries, and to win
wealth and power; the delight in arms and horses, in the luxury of
dress, and in the exercises of hunting and hawking; the eloquence and
sagacity in council; the patience with which when need was they could
endure the inclemency of every climate, and the toil and abstinence of
a military life; and the gentleness, the affability and the gallantry,
which were the characteristics of the Norman race; these must have been
more or less impressed on men’s minds wherever the Norman sway or
influence extended, from England to Sicily, and must have reproduced
something of themselves in the social habits and manners of the times.
When we read the description of William of the Iron Arm, the first
Norman count of Apulia, so strong, so brave, so affable, so generous,
and so sage above other men—a lion in battle, a lamb in society, and
an angel in council—we are reminded of the heroes of chivalry in the
days of its greatest refinement, the Black Prince, Sir John Chandos,
and Sir Walter of Manny, as they still live in the pages of Froissart;
or their counterparts in romance, King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Amadis of
Gaul, or Palmerin of England.
The Normans, the latest of the Northern races who descended, full of
wild life, from their mountains and forests, upon the comparatively
civilised plains of Europe, may have brought a newer and fresher
feeling for those old manners and customs which Tacitus describes as
characterising the Germans of his time, and which are with so much
probability connected with the chivalry of the Middle Ages. In ancient
Germany, and in Scandinavia, it was the custom for each youth, when he
was of an age to bear arms, to be presented with a sword, a shield, and
a lance, by his father, or some near relation, in an assembly of the
chiefs of the nation; and from that time he became a member of the
commonwealth, and ranked as a citizen. He then entered the train of
some chief, of whom he and his brother youths became the followers and
companions, forming one brotherhood, though not without ranks and
degrees, while a generous spirit of equality ran through all.
In ancient Germany, too, women were held in a peculiar reverence,
beyond what was known in the other—and otherwise more
civilized—nations of antiquity; and the presence of women in the hour
of battle with their husbands, brothers, and fathers, was regarded by
those warriors as an incentive to courage, and a pledge of victory,
which (as they boasted) their Roman foes were unable to appeal to for
themselves. And this old Teutonic reverence for women conspired with
the new Christian reverence for the Virgin Mary as the type and
representative at once of her sex and of the Church, to supply the
purer and nobler elements of the gallantry which forms so large a part,
not only of the romance, but of the actual history, of chivalry.
But Christianity exercised not only an indirect, but also a direct and
avowed action upon the forms of chivalry, as they attained to their
full proportions. Knighthood was certainly a feature and distinction of
society before the days of Charlemagne, who in permitting the governor
of Friesland to make knights by girding them with a sword, and giving
them a blow, adds ‘as is the custom.’ But no ritual of the Church as
yet consecrated that custom. Charlemagne girt the sword on his son
Louis the Good without religious ceremonies; and a century later the
Saxon king of England, Edward the Elder, clothed Athelstan in a
soldier’s dress of scarlet, and girded him with a girdle ornamented
with precious stones and a sword with sheath of gold, but without
religious rites. But in the next century, in the reign of Edward the
Confessor, we read that Hereward, a noble Anglo-Saxon youth, was
knighted by the Abbot of Peterborough, with confession, absolution, and
prayer that he might be a true knight. And this the historian describes
as the custom of the English, as indeed it was, or soon became, that of
all Europe; the Normans resisting the innovation longest, but at last
adopting it with their wonted ardour. The candidate for knighthood
confessed his sins on the eve of his consecration (for such it now
was), and passed the night in prayer and fasting in the church: the
godfathers, the bath, the white garment, and the tonsure (sometimes
limited indeed to a single lock) were the symbols of the new and holy
state of life to which he was now called: next morning he heard mass,
offered his sword on the altar, where it was blessed by the priest; and
he was created a knight—either by the priest of highest rank present,
or by some knight, who, in virtue of his knighthood, was qualified to
confer the sacred office he had himself received—in the name of God,
of St. George, and of Saint Michael the Archangel. He swore, and
received the holy communion in confirmation of his oath, to fulfil the
duties of his profession; to speak the truth; to maintain the right; to
protect women, the poor, and the distressed; to practise courtesy; to
pursue the infidels; to despise the allurements of ease and safety, and
to maintain his honour in every perilous adventure. And the Council of
Cleremont, of which I have already spoken—as if in order to give the
sanction of the Church in a still more formal and comprehensive manner
to the whole system of chivalry—decreed that every person of noble
birth, on attaining the age of twelve years, should take a solemn oath
before the bishop of his diocese to defend to the uttermost the
oppressed, the widow, and the orphans; that women of noble birth, both
married and single, should enjoy his especial care; and that nothing
should be wanting in him to render travelling safe, and to destroy
tyranny.
Thus, as has been justly observed, all the humanities of chivalry were
sanctioned by legal and ecclesiastical power: it was intended that they
should be spread over the whole face of Christendom, in order to check
the barbarism and ferocity of the times. While the form of chivalry was
martial, its objects became to a great extent religious and social:
from a mere military array chivalry obtained the name of the Order, the
Holy Order, and a character of seriousness and solemnity was given to
it; and it was accounted an honourable office above all offices,
orders, and acts of the world, except the order of priesthood.
The education for knighthood usually began at a still earlier age than
that mentioned in the Canons of Cleremont. The castles of the princes
and nobles were the schools of those days, at least for the youth of
their own class. Every feudal lord had his court, to which he drew the
sons and daughters of the poorer gentry of his domains; and if he were
a knight distinguished for his merits, his castle was also frequented
by the children of men of equal rank and reputation with himself: for
the prudent and careful father would often have some brother in arms
whom he thought better fitted than himself to educate his children in
the accomplishments and duties of his station. So, long after, Ben
Jonson, looking back on those old times, and picturing them in their
ideal aspect, says, that then
‘Goodness gave the greatness,
And greatness worship: every house became
An academy of honour.’