‘By a line
Of institution from our ancestors,
Hath been deriv’d down to us, and receiv’d
In a succession, for the noblest way
Of breeding up our youth in letters, arms,
Fair mien, discourses, civil exercises,
And all the blazon of a gentleman.
Where can he learn to vault, to ride, to fence,
To move his body gracefuller, to speak
His language purer, or to tune his mind
Or manners more to the harmony of nature,
Than in these nurseries of nobility?’
The boy of gentle birth, when he thus began his education, was called
by the names of Childe, or Damoiseau, or Valet, said to be a
contraction of Vassalet or little Vassal, and also Page, though this
last name was originally appropriated to the youths of inferior rank.
He usually entered the castle which was to be his school about the age
of seven or eight. He was to learn modesty, obedience, and address in
arms and horsemanship, and was duly exercised in the use of his
weapons, beginning with such as were suited to his strength. He was
instructed how to guide a horse with grace and dexterity, how to use
the bow and the sword, and how to manage the lance,—an art which was
taught him by making him ride against a wooden figure, which, if not
struck in true knightly fashion, was so contrived as to turn round and
give the awkward cavalier a blow with its wooden sword. He attended his
lord in the chase, and learnt all its arts; he attended him also in
many offices which we should now call menial, but which were then held
to be the proper symbols of modesty and obedience for the youth of
highest birth and rank. Thus the Black Prince was held to show the
highest respect to the French king, his prisoner, by personal
attendance on him. In the words of Froissart: ‘The same day of the
battle, at night, the prince made a supper in his lodging to the French
king, and to the most part of the great lords that were prisoners ...
and always the prince served before the king as humbly as he could, and
would not sit at the king’s board for any desire that the king could
make; but he said he was not sufficient to sit at the table with so
great a prince as the king was.’
And not the least important of the youth’s duties were those towards
the ladies of the house in which he lived. He was to wait on them
rather as attending a sort of superior beings to whom adoration and
obsequious service were due, than as ministering to the convenience of
human creatures like himself. The most modest demeanour, the most
profound respect, were to be observed in the presence of these fair
idols. And as not only the youths, but the maidens—the damoiselles no
less than the damoiseaux—were sent to the courts of the barons and
their ladies for education, it would often happen that this veneration
in which the boy was so early trained towards the ladies of maturer
years, would find an object in some young maiden whose more suitable
age might lead him, as he grew up, from mere boyish regard to that
passionate and abiding devotion which was the duty of every true knight
to his lady, and by the strength of which he held that all his power
for good was to be maintained. Here is a description of the beginning
of the loves of Amadis and Oriana, which is as charming as it is
simple; and which, though we find it in the pages of a romance, we
cannot doubt is a picture of actual life and manners. ‘Oriana,’ says
the old book, ‘was about ten years old, the fairest creature that ever
was seen; wherefore she was called the one “without a peer”.... The
child of the sea (that is, Amadis) was now twelve years old, but in
stature and size he seemed fifteen, and he served the queen; but, now
that Oriana was there, the queen gave her the child of the sea, that he
should serve her, and Oriana said that “it pleased her;” and that word
which she said, the child kept in his heart, so that he never lost it
from his memory, and in all his life he was never weary of serving her,
and his heart was surrendered to her; and this love lasted as long as
they lasted, for as well as he loved her did she also love him. But the
child of the sea, who knew nothing of her love, thought himself
presumptuous to have placed his thoughts on her, and dared not speak to
her; and she, who loved him in her heart, was careful not to speak more
with him than with another: but their eyes delighted to reveal to the
heart what was the thing on earth that they loved best. And now the
time came that he thought he could take arms if he were knighted; and
this he greatly desired, thinking that he would do such things that, if
he lived, his mistress should esteem him.’
Such was the beginning of the loves of Amadis and Oriana, so famous in
romance, and so generally held by knights and ladies to be a model for
themselves. Constancy, such as that of Amadis, was a virtue of the true
lover which those times of long inevitable separations and absences
demanded in forms hardly known in our days; and in proportion was it
insisted upon, and held in honour. So Spenser says:
‘Young knight whatever, that dost arms profess,
And through long labours huntest after fame,
Beware of fraud, beware of fickleness,
In choice and change of thy dear loved dame;
Lest thou of her believe too lightly blame,
And rash misweening do thy heart remove;
For unto knight there is no greater shame,
Than lightness and inconstancy in love.’
The peerless Amadis passed with more than ordinary rapidity to the rank
of knighthood. The youth more usually remained an esquire—the next
step to that of page—till he was twenty. He attended the knight to
whose person he was attached, dressed and undressed him, trained his
horses, kept his arms bright and burnished, and did the honours of the
household to the strangers who visited it; so that Spenser takes the
squire as the type of such courtesy. Here is Chaucer’s description of
the squire:
‘With him there was his son, a youngé squire,
A lover and a lusty bachelor,
With lockés curl’d as they were laid in press;
Of twenty years of age he was, I guess.
Of his statúre he was of even length,
And wonderly deliver, and great of strength;
And he had been some time in chevachie (military expeditions),
In Flanders, in Artois, and Picardie,
And borne him well, as of so little space,
In hope to standen in his lady’s grace.
Embroider’d was he, as it were a mead
All full of freshé flowers, white and red;
Singing he was, or fluting, all the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May;
Short was his gown, with sleevés long and wide:
Well could he sit on horse, and fairé ride;
He couldé songés make, and well indite,
Just, and eke dance, and well pourtray and write:
So hot he lovéd, that by nightertale
He slept no more than doth the nightingale.
Courteous he was; slowly and serviceable;
And carv’d before his father at the table.’
I have already spoken of the religious rites with which the esquire was
admitted into the order of knighthood, and of the solemn and noble
engagements into which he then entered. He had next to ‘win his spurs,’
as it was called; a phrase happily illustrated in the story of Edward
III and the Black Prince, which Froissart thus relates:—
‘This battle between Broy and Cressy, this Saturday, was right
cruel and fell, and many a feat of arms done that day came not to
my knowledge.... In the morning, the day of the battle, certain
Frenchmen and Almagnes perforce opened the archers of the prince’s
battle (_division_ as we should now say), and came and fought with
the men of arms, hand to hand. Then the second battle of the
Englishmen came to succour the prince’s battle, the which was time,
for they had as then much ado. And they with the prince sent a
messenger to the king, who was on a little windmill hill: then the
knight said to the king, “Sir, the earl of Warwick, and the earl of
Oxford, Sir Reynold Cobham, and other, such as lie about the prince
your son, are fiercely fought withal, and are sore handled,
wherefore they desire you that you and your battle will come and
aid them, for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will,
your son and they shall have much ado.” Then the king said, “Is my
son dead, or hurt, or on the earth felled?” “No, sir,” quoth the
knight, “but he is hardly matched, wherefore he hath need of your
aid.” “Well,” said the king, “return to him, and to them that sent
you hither, and say to them, that they send no more to me for any
adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive: and also say to
them, that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for, if God
be pleased, I will this day’s work be his, and the honour thereof,
and to them that be about him.” Then the knight returned again to
them, and showed the king’s words, the which greatly encouraged
them, and repented in that they had sent to the king as they did.’
Brave knights, to be ‘greatly encouraged’ by such stern though
manly words. We are reminded of the not less brave and knightly
demeanour of Sir Colin Halket and his men at Waterloo, when the
Duke of Wellington rode up and asked how they were, and the general
replied that two-thirds of the brigade were down, and the remainder
so exhausted that the relief of fresh troops, for however short a
time, was most desirable. But when the duke said that no relief was
possible, that all depended on _them_, the answer which the officer
made for himself and his men was, ‘Enough, my lord, we stand here
till the last man falls.’
Thenceforth the knight’s career depended, he would not have said on
himself, but on God and his lady: and if we may judge by the ordinary
language of the romances, his lady was often the object of actual
adoration, little differing from that he would have addressed to the
saints in the hour of danger or of triumph. Philosophic divines teach
us that although the worship of the saints may become in practice a
gross and degrading superstition, it has in it an element of true, and
in itself ennobling, faith in ideals of humanity more or less perfectly
revealed in human form: and so while we smile at the fictions of
extravagant fancy in which the mediæval knight was wont to clothe his
love, and his professions of love, for his mistress, we cannot
reasonably doubt that in the main, and for that time of youthful
imaginations rather than of sober reasonings, the knight was right.
When I think of what society was, and what it would still be, without
the humanizing influences of womanhood and ladyhood, and what it is by
means of these, I say that the tree may be judged by its fruits, and
that it is from a right noble stock, rightly and wisely cultivated in
the main, in those old days, that we are still gathering such noble
fruits. Much evil there was along with the good; and, what is worse,
much confusion between good and evil. I need not tell the reader of
chivalry romances, or of Lord Tennyson’s reproductions of some of their
incidents in modern form of thought as well as language, how painfully
this confusion defaces many of the fairest characters and most
interesting tales of chivalry, while the historical records of the
times in which those romances were written and read show that the
actual state of morals and manners exhibited the like confusions of
good and evil, in the ideals as well as in the conduct of life. But, as
I have already observed, we see, at least in the romance before us, the
good contending with, and mastering the evil, and this not least in the
end of the story of the guilty loves of Guenever and Launcelot, the
knight whose fame in romance perhaps surpasses that of Amadis, though
even mediæval morality was obliged to censure the constancy of
Launcelot’s love, while it might unhesitatingly extol that of Amadis.
Lord Tennyson has, I may assume, made every one familiar with the
retirement of queen Guenever to the nunnery of Almesbury, and with the
death of Arthur; and I venture for the completion of this sketch to
show, though from the present volume, how the old story which the poet
chiefly follows relates the death and draws the character of Launcelot.
Launcelot, when he heard of those events, went to Almesbury, and after
taking leave of the queen, resolved to follow her example; and became a
hermit and penitent, taking up his abode in a forest where was an
hermitage and a chapel that stood between two cliffs; and there he
served God day and night with prayers and fastings. Thus he, and other
knights who followed his example, ‘endured great penance six years, and
then Sir Launcelot took the habit of priesthood, and a twelvemonth he
sang mass.’ At the end of that time a vision directed him to take the
body of queen Guenever, now dead at Almesbury, and bury her with king
Arthur at Glastonbury. Then the story goes on:—‘And when she was put
in the earth Sir Launcelot swooned and lay long still, while the hermit
came out and awaked him, and said, Ye be to blame, for ye displease God
with such manner of sorrow making. Truly, said Sir Launcelot, I trust I
do not displease God, for He knoweth mine intent, for my sorrow was
not, nor is not, for any rejoicing of sin, but my sorrow may never have
end. For when I remember of her beauty, and of her noblesse, that was
both with her king and with her; so when I saw his corpse and her
corpse so lie together, truly mine heart would not serve to sustain my
careful body. Also when I remember me how by my default, and mine
orgule, and my pride, that they were both laid full low, that were
peerless that ever was living of christian people, wit ye well, said
Sir Launcelot, this remembered, of their kindness and mine unkindness,
sank so to my heart, that all my natural strength failed me, so that I
might not sustain myself.’ The story goes on to say that there he
wasted away, praying night and day at the tomb of the king and queen.
He died, and was taken to his own castle of Joyous Gard to be buried.
‘And right thus as they were at their service there came Sir Ector de
Maris, that had seven year sought all England, Scotland, and Wales,
seeking his brother Sir Launcelot. And when Sir Ector heard such noise
and light in the quire of Joyous Gard he alight, and put his horse from
him, and came into the quire, and there he saw men sing and weep. And
all they knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them. Then went Sir Bors unto
Sir Ector, and told him how there lay his brother Sir Launcelot dead.
And then Sir Ector threw his shield, sword, and helm from him; and when
he beheld Sir Launcelot’s visage he fell down in a swoon; and when he
awaked it were hard for any tongue to tell the doleful complaints that
he made for his brother. Ah, Launcelot, he said, thou were head of all
Christian knights! And now, I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir
Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly
knight’s hands; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare
shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode
horse; and thou were the truest lover, of a sinful man, that ever loved
woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and
thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights; and
thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among
ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever
put spear in the rest.’
Let me compare with this Chaucer’s description of the knight of his
times:—
‘A knight there was, and that a worthy[41] man,
That from the timé that he first began
To riden out, he loved chivalry,
Truth and honóur, freedom and courtesy.
Full worthy was he in his lordés war,
And thereto had he ridden, no man farre,
As well in Christendom as in Heatheness,
And ever honoured for his worthiness.
At Alisandre he was when it was won:
Full oftentime he had the board begun
Aboven allé natións in Prusse[42]:
In Lethowe had he reyséd[43], and in Russe,
No Christian man so oft, of his degree:
In Gernade at the siege eke had he be
Of Algesir, and ridden in Belmarie:
At Leyés was he, and at Satalie,
When they were won; and in the Greaté Sea
At many a noble army had he be.
At mortal battles had he been fifteen,
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene
In listés thriés, and aye slain his foe.
This ilké worthy knight had been also
Sometimé with the lord of Palathie
Against another heathen in Turkey;
And evermore he had a sovereign prise[44],
And though that he was worthy he was wise,
And of his port as meek as is a maid.
He never yet no villainy ne said
In all his life unto no manner wight:
He was a very perfect gentle knight.’
In an age when all men, not of the clergy, were divided between the two
classes of freemen or gentlemen, and serfs or villains, and the
villains were in habits and in human culture little better than the
domestic animals of which they shared the labours, the knight almost
inevitably belonged to the class of free, or gentle, birth. Still, in
theory always, and to a great extent in practice, it was not his birth,
but his personal merit, which qualified him for knighthood. The
personal merit would oftener exist, and still oftener come to light,
where it had the advantages and aids of education and general social
culture. But if it was recognised in the villain, or man of no rights
of birth, he might be, and often was, knighted, and was thereby
immediately enfranchised, and accounted a gentleman, in law no less
than in name. Thus Froissart tells us of Sir Robert Sale, the governor
of Norwich, that ‘he was no gentleman born, but he had the grace to be
reputed sage and valiant in arms, and for his valiantness King Edward
made him knight.’ He was governor during the popular insurrection of
which Wat Tyler and Jack Straw were the London leaders; and he was
invited to put himself at the head of one of the risings by men who
urged upon him—‘Sir Robert, ye are a knight and a man greatly beloved
in this country, and renowned a valiant man; and though ye be thus, yet
we know you well: ye be no gentleman born, but son to a villain, such
as we be: therefore come you with us, and be our master, and we shall
make you so great a lord that one quarter of England shall be under
your obeisance.’ He refused, and they killed him. The same king also
knighted the man-at-arms, son of a tanner, who was afterwards famous as
Sir John Hawkwood. And the courtly as well as knightly Chaucer, who
must more or less have reflected the feeling of the royal and noble
personages among whom he lived, goes farther, and asserts that not only
does virtue make the gentleman, but also baseness of mind the villain
or churl:—
‘But understand in thine intent,
That this is not mine intendement,
To clepen no wight in no age
Only gentle for his lineage;
But whoso that is virtuous,
And in his port nought outrageous,
Though he be not gentle born,
Thou may’st well see this in soth,
That he is gentle because he doth
As longeth to a gentleman;
Of them none other deem I can:
For certainly, withouten drede,
A churl is deemed by his deed,
Of high or low, as you may see,
Or of what kindred that he be.’
Akin to this recognition of gentleness of mind and manners, as that
which made a gentleman, was the sense of brotherhood among knights and
gentlemen, which led them to trust in each other’s honour, even when
they were fighting under the banners of hostile kings. The chronicles
are full of the instances of such consideration of the English and
French knights for each other in the wars between the two nations; and
it is not without probability that to these and suchlike manifestations
of the spirit of chivalry have been traced the courtesy and humanity
which characterise modern warfare in a degree unknown to the ancients.
Much indeed of barbarism and cruelty there was in the usages of war in
the best times of chivalry, even of the knights among themselves, and
still more when they came, with passions infuriated by resistance, upon
the people of lower rank than themselves. Edward III of England, and
the knights whom he gathered round him, are held alike by contemporary
historians and romance writers, and by those of modern times, to have
best exhibited the characteristics of chivalry in its day of greatest
refinement as well as splendour; yet no one can read the chronicles of
even the admiring Froissart without seeing how much savage passion and
cruelty was often mingled with their better dispositions: though we do
see also that the cruelty was not because, but in spite of their
chivalry. Froissart laments bitterly the iniquity of the massacre by
the Black Prince of the people of Limoges, men, women, and children,
more than three thousand. And when Edward III, before him, intended, as
would seem, to have treated the town of Calais in like manner, not only
did the French knights who had offered to surrender declare that they
would ‘endure as much pain as knights ever did, rather than the poorest
lad in the town should have any more evil than the greatest of us
all’—showing that they made no selfish distinction between the noble
and the villain—but the English knights, headed by Sir Walter of
Manny, that flower of knighthood, protested to the utmost against their
king’s purpose. And when he had yielded so far to their urgency as to
say that he would be content with the lives of the six chief burgesses,
Sir Walter of Manny again remonstrated, saying, ‘Ah, noble king, for
God’s sake refrain your courage: ye have the name of sovereign
noblesse: therefore now do not a thing that should blemish your renown,
nor to give cause to some to speak of you villainy [to charge you with
conduct unworthy of a knight and gentleman]; every man will say it is a
great cruelty to put to death such honest persons, who by their own
wills put themselves into your grace to save their company. Then the
king wryed away from him, and commanded to send for the hangman, and
said, “They of Calais had caused many of my men to be slain, wherefore
these shall die in likewise.”’
It needed a stronger influence than that of Sir Walter of Manny to save
their lives: and this brings me to speak of the LADY of the mediæval
times; the LADY, who was the counterpart of the KNIGHT, and without
whom he could never have existed. Here, indeed, I meet a difficulty
which reminds me of what Coleridge says of the female characters of
Shakspeare, that their truth to nature, and therefore their beauty,
consists in the absence of strongly marked features. It is impossible
to read the poems, romances, or chronicles of the mediæval times,
without feeling all through how important a part the lady plays
everywhere; and yet it is far from easy to draw her from her retirement
and bring distinctly before ourselves what she did, and get a picture
of her as definite as we can do of the knight. Still I must try to
trace the outlines of such a picture of one lady:—Philippa, queen of
Edward III, whom Froissart calls ‘the most gentle queen, most liberal,
and most courteous that ever was queen in her days;’ and who was the
very type and representative of the lady, in the highest and best
sense, in an age in which the ladies—such as the princess Blanche, the
good queen Ann, the countess of Salisbury, Jane de Montfort, and the
wife of Charles de Blois—were renowned for their gentle or their
heroic characters.
When Isabel, queen of Edward II, visited Hainault with her son,
afterwards Edward III, we are told that William, earl of Hainault, ‘had
four fair daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Jane, and Isabel: among whom
the young Edward set most his love and company on Philippa; and also
the young lady in all honour was more conversant with him than any of
her sisters.’ Queen Isabel had come to ask for aid against her enemies,
and Froissart gives an account of the discussion between the earl and
his council, who objected on prudential grounds to interfering with the
quarrels of the English, and the earl’s brother, Sir John Hainault, who
maintained that ‘all knights ought to aid to their powers all ladies
and damsels chased out of their own countries, being without counsel or
comfort.’ The earl finally yielded, saying, ‘My fair brother, God
forbid that your good purpose should be broken or let. Therefore, in
the name of God, I give you leave; and kissed him, straining him by the
hand in sign of great love.’ The whole passage is too long to quote,
but thus much gives a lively picture of the temper of the home and
court in which the young Philippa was brought up.
Her marriage with Edward, then only fifteen years old, was agreed on,
and sanctioned by the Pope. I am sorry to say that the chronicler gives
no account of the lady’s bridal outfit[45], except in the general
terms, that ‘there was devised and purveyed for their apparel, and for
all things honourable that belonged to such a lady, who should be queen
of England.’ They were married, and she arrived in England and was
crowned, ‘with great justs, tourneys, dancing, carolling, and great
feasts, the which endured the space of three weeks.’ And then ‘this
young queen Philippa abode still in England, with small company of any
persons of her own country, saving one who was named Walter of Manny,
who was her carver, and after did so many great prowesses in divers
places, that it were hard to make mention of them.’ If we couple this
statement, that she retained hardly any of her own people, with that
which Froissart makes in reviewing her whole life, that ‘she loved
always her own nation where she was born,’ we have pleasing thoughts
suggested of the cheerful acceptance of new duties in a foreign land by
the young wife; while, if I had space to describe in detail the noble
life of Sir Walter of Manny, the reader would agree with me that his
habitual presence in the English court must have done much to make both
Edward and the Black Prince, as well as the rest of the princes and
nobles, what they were, as knights and gentlemen.
The next glimpse we get of the queen is when she appears, accompanied
with three hundred ladies and damsels ‘of noble lineage, and apparelled
accordingly, at the yearly feast at Windsor, in honour of the order and
brotherhood of the Knights of the Blue Garter, there established on St.
George’s day.’ Again, when the king of Scots had advanced to Newcastle,
while king Edward lay before Calais, we see the queen arriving to meet
the English army, and going from division to division, ‘desiring them
to do their devoir’—duty was then, as now, the English soldier’s
word—‘to defend the honour of her lord the king of England, and, in
the name of God, every man to be of good heart and courage; promising
them that to her power she would remember them as well or better as
though her lord the king were there personally. Then the queen departed
from them, recommending them to God and St. George.’ She does not seem,
like some of the ladies of that generation, to have considered the
field to be her place while the battle was going on; but after it was
won she returned, and with her council made all necessary arrangements
and plans. Shortly after she joined her husband while he lay before
Calais, ‘bringing many ladies and damsels with her, as well to
accompany her, as to see their husbands, fathers, brethren, and other
friends that lay at siege there before Calais, and had done a long
time.’ And I think we may attribute it as well to the general
humanising influence of all those ladies, as to the personal persuasion
of Philippa, that Calais did not suffer the same horrors of war as did
Limoges at the hands of the Black Prince. To what I have already quoted
from Froissart as to this story, I must now add what he tells us of
Philippa, after Edward had refused to hear Sir Walter of Manny. ‘Then
the queen kneeled down, and sore weeping, said, “Ah, gentle sir, sith I
passed the sea in great peril, I have desired nothing of you; therefore
now I humbly require you, in the honour of the Son of the Virgin Mary,
and for the love of me, that ye will take mercy of these six
burgesses.” The king beheld the queen, and stood still in a study a
space, and then said, “Ah dame, I would ye had been as now in some
other place; ye make such request to me that I cannot deny you;
wherefore I give them to you, to do your pleasure with them.”’
And lastly, as a counterpart to the picture I have already given of the
death of the knight of romance, here is the account of the death of her
who was the lady of the brightest day of historical chivalry:—
‘In the mean season there fell in England a heavy case and a common:
howbeit it was right piteous for the king, his children, and all his
realm; for the good queen of England—that so many good deeds had done
in her time, and so many knights succoured, and ladies and damosels
comforted, and had so largely departed of her goods to her people, and
naturally loved always the nation of Haynault, the country where she
was born—she fell sick in the castle of Windsor, the which sickness
continued on her so long, that there was no remedy but death; and the
good lady, when she knew that there was no remedy but death, she
desired to speak with the king her husband, and when he was before her,
she put out of her bed her right hand, and took the king by his right
hand, who was right sorrowful at his heart. Then she said, “Sir, we
have in peace, joy, and great prosperity, used all our time together:
sir, now I pray you at our departing, that ye will grant me three
desires.” The king, right sorrowfully weeping, said, “Madam, desire
what ye will, I grant it.” The three requests of the dying woman
were—that the king should pay all that she owed to any man; that he
should fulfil all the promises she had made to the churches where she
had “had her devotion,” and that “it might please him to take none
other sepulture, whensoever it should please God to call him out of
this transitory life, but beside her in Westminster.” The king, all
weeping, said, “Madam, I grant all your desire.” Then the good lady and
queen made on her the sign of the cross, and commended the king her
husband to God, and her youngest son Thomas, who was there beside her;
and anon after she yielded up the spirit, which I believe surely the
holy angels received with great joy up to heaven; for in all her life
she did neither in thought nor deed thing to lose her soul, as far as
any creature could know. Thus the good queen of England died in the
year of our Lord 1369, in the vigil of our Lady, in the midst of
August.’
We have all pictured to ourselves, again and again, how the lady sat in
her bower with her embroidery and her missal or romance, and saw from
her lattice window her knight going from the castle with lance and
pennon, hoping to meet his foe: how the minstrel recited in the castle
hall the feats of arms of this or that hero in some distant
battle-field; and how the matron or the maiden heard those feats, and
thought with silent joy that it was her lord, her husband, or her
lover, whose deeds were thus winning the praises of the troubadour, and
the applause of the listening knights and squires. We have all seen in
imagination the tournament, with the pomp and splendour of its mimic
contests: contests which surpassed the Olympic and Corinthian games of
classic antiquity, not only in their gorgeous show, but still more in
the presence of the ladies, noble in birth, and fame, and beauty; whose
scarf, or glove, the combatants wore as the token of that favour which
was their highest incentive to distinguish themselves; and from whose
hands the conqueror received the prize of skill and bravery: while the
honourably vanquished might be sure that he would have the hardly less
welcome lot of being cared for by the same ladies, who never shrank
from this their acknowledged and well-fulfilled duty of tending the
wounded knight.
Perhaps too we have listened in fancy to the proceedings of the
so-called Courts of Parliaments of Love, in which the ladies were wont
to hear questions of gallantry gravely argued on both sides by poets
pleading in verse, and then to give their judgments according to the
logical and metaphysical rules which the schoolmen applied to
theological enquiries. But I can now but remind my reader that such
things were; and must hasten forward, leaving ungathered flowers that
would make many a wreath and nosegay.
The golden age of chivalry was the period from about the middle of the
eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century. We may say with Gibbon,
that the Crusades were at once a cause and an effect of chivalry. In
the Crusades the spirit of knighthood, with all its characteristic
features, actuated vast bodies of men of every rank and nation, and
found a foe believed by all Christendom to be to it what the individual
robber and plunderer was to the knight errant who went forth in his own
country to defend or rescue the widow and orphan and their possessions,
or the traveller along the road which passed the castle of some
powerful though unworthy baron. The chivalry at home was kept alive,
and raised to its highest energy, both in man and woman, by the
chivalry in the Holy Land. It is in this period that the chief
institutions of chivalry took their rise, or reached their full form;
while their ruder features were gradually softened with the increasing
refinement of the times, till they presented that aspect with which we
find them in the days of Edward III and the Black Prince, as drawn by
Froissart or Chaucer, or in the romances which were then written or
remodelled out of older materials, and which show that even in the
estimation of other nations the English court then afforded the pattern
of knighthood for Christendom.
Thenceforward the outward forms of chivalry began to decay; very
gradually indeed, and not without apparent resuscitations from time to
time. But no real revival was possible; for the immortal spirit was
seeking new habitations for itself, more fitted to the new world which
was succeeding to that of the Middle Ages. And perhaps Cervantes, by
helping to tear up with his merciless satire the last remnants of an
honest faith in the old forms of chivalry, did as real, though we
cannot say as genial, a service to the cause of chivalry itself, as
Spenser did in endeavouring to preserve its spirit by transferring it
to the region of allegory. The last expiring token of the old spirit in
the old forms which I have found, is in the records of the Knights of
Malta—the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem—when the news
of the great earthquake in Sicily, in 1783, arrived at Malta. Then
those poor feeble-minded sybarites remembered for a moment their
manhood and their knighthood, and their vows as Hospitallers; they
manned their galleys, and, with food and clothing and medicines, and
the consolations of their faith, were speedily seen, in their
half-military, half-priestly garb—the armour covered by the black robe
with the white cross—at the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, as
they lay amid the still tottering ruins of their devastated houses. In
a very few years, in that same generation, the Order had passed away
for ever; but it is pleasant to him who stands in the palace of the
Grand Masters among the trophies of their former greatness, or treads
the aisles of the cathedral of St. John, where every step is upon the
emblazoned gravestone of a knight, to think of this, and not of any
less worthy deed, as their last act.
‘The knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust:
His soul is with the saints, I trust:’—
but he has left to us an imperishable and a rich inheritance, won for
us by him. To him we owe our MANNERS—all that world of existence
implied in the names LADY and GENTLEMAN. Through the Middle Ages it was
‘Our Lady,’ the Virgin mother who embodied and represented to all men
and women, from the prince to the peasant, their ideals of womanhood
and ladyhood. In modern times St. Paul has been held to be the model of
a gentleman; in whose acts and writings are found all the principles,
maxims, and spirit of a character entirely chivalrous, in the amplest
sense of the term: while one of our old dramatists has ventured, in
words of touching tenderness and reverence, to point to a yet higher
realisation of that ideal;—
‘The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.’
And it was the transference of these Christian ethics, into the
practice of common daily, worldly life, in rude, half-barbarous times,
which we owe to the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; a
transference effected slowly, and with much mixture of evil with the
good: nor is the work nearly completed yet; but the worth of it can
hardly be overrated.
This is not indeed all, but there is much truth in the old motto,
‘Manners makyth man.’ Manners, like laws, create a region and
atmosphere of virtue within which all good more easily lives and grows,
and evil finds it harder to maintain itself. How large a portion of the
small, spontaneous kindnesses of hourly life, in which, after all, so
much of our happiness consists, are not only unknown, but impossible,
where habitual, unaffected politeness is wanting.
But manners are good, not only as affording a fairer field for the
exercise of the higher virtues, but good in themselves. They are a real
part of the beauty and grace of our human life. Courtesy, and
self-possession, and deference and respect for others; modesty and
gentleness towards all men, and recognition in all of the true gold of
humanity, whether it bear the guinea stamp or no; love of truth and
honour; and not only readiness, but eagerness to help the weak, and
defend their cause against the strong; and all these irradiated and
glorified, as often as may be, by that sentiment which
‘——gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices;’—
these are the things which make the lady and the gentleman.
And if it should seem as though the chivalry of our own times is
reduced to something less noble than that of old, when men risked life,
and things dearer than life, in defending the weak and attacking the
oppressor in his strongholds—when the hardness of the actual fight
against evil-doers was not exaggerated in the romances which pictured
the knights contending with dragons and enchanters and giants—we must
remember that our nineteenth century world is yet far from cleared of
the monstrous powers of evil, which still oppress and devour the weak;
and that a battle, not really less resolute, nor, if need be, less
desperate, than those of old, is still carried on by those who, under
the modest guise of common life, are fighting in the true spirit of
chivalry—uniting the most adventurous enthusiasm with the most patient
endurance, and both with the gentlest service of the poor, the weak,
and the oppressed; and, what is most worthy of admiration, the service
of the morally poor, and weak, and oppressed, who, but for such
deliverers, must remain in a house of bondage darker than can be built
or barred by earthly hands.
But whether we are content with the chivalry of manners, or aspire to a
place in the brotherhood of the chivalry of action, our principles, our
maxims, and our examples have come down to us as an inheritance from
the past:—an inheritance common to all who care to claim it; and won
for us by the old knights, fighting in the name of God and of their
ladies[46].
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