Chivalry
It is interesting to reflect how the meaning of words shifts over time, and how a word can sometimes long outlast its original purpose and meaning.
“Mile” is a good example, since it originally derived from the distance covered by a Roman soldier marching a thousand steps. Nowadays, the usage of miles has nothing to do with marching Romans, and most of the world uses kilometers anyway, but the name remains, having long outlived its original meaning.
“Chivalry” is another good example. Nowadays “chivalry” or “chivalrous” typically means a man acting in a deferential way to a woman – holding the door, pulling out a chair for her, taking her coat, standing when she approaches the table, etc – that an individual woman will find either charming, annoying, patronizing, or perhaps some combination of the three, depending on her particular disposition and her opinion of the man in question.
But that definition of the word is only a ghostly relic of what it used to mean.
“Chivalry” comes originally from the French word Chevalier, which means “mounted warrior on horseback”, which was the French term for the medieval knight. In the Middle Age, the term chivalry both referred to the expected conduct of a knight, and in a larger sense knighthood as an institution or perhaps the proper behavior expected of the knightly warrior class as a whole.
Medieval knighthood originated from essentially three sources – 1.) the practice of barbarian kings and chieftains gathering a “comtitatus” around them, a group of chosen warriors who lived with him and were expected to die with him if necessary, 2.) the influence of the medieval Catholic church, and 3.) how a combination of the stirrup, the lance, and heavy armor meant that cavalry dominated the battlefield for most of the Middle Ages.
Number three meant that knighthood was usually available only to the wealthy. The knight fought on horseback, and fighting on foot was for lesser men, peasants, serfs, and churls. Mounted combat was his defining trait. Horses were (and still are) very expensive, and suitable armor and weapons were likewise expensive. Additionally, learning to ride a horse in battle while effectively wielding melee weapons was a difficult endeavor, which meant that the boys and men who did needed to make a full-time profession of it. Which, again, limited knighthood to those able to afford it.
A lot of what we think of as chivalric behavior evolved out of the medieval church’s efforts to control and regulate knighthood. Early medieval knights were essentially armed thugs employed by local warlords. The early history of feudalism in post-Roman Western Europe tends to boil down to “local warlordism” based around holding land, with centralized states only slowly developing. In the late 800s and the 900s, the church advocated movements like the Peace of God, which tried to instruct knights and nobles not to kill or rob women, children, the elderly, monks, nuns, priests, and other noncombatants, and the Truce of God, which tried unsuccessfully to ban fighting on holy days and any possible holidays. The fact that the church felt the need to be that specific shows just how widespread that kind of local warfare was.
While many knights adopted the external forms of piety, movements like the Peace of God and the Truce of God did little to dissuade them from the practical business of looting and seizing as much land as they could hold. Evidence of this is found in the First Crusade and the subsequent crusades. One of the motivations for the First Crusade was to drain off a lot of the belligerent young knights out of western Europe and send them off to fight infidels in the Holy Land instead of making trouble at home.
“Chivalry” as a code of conduct developed out of a combination of the fact that it was expensive to be a knight and the church’s attempts to regulate it. That meant that knighthood saw itself as a distinct social class with standards of behavior. A knight was supposed to be pious. He should show no fear, and charge to meet the enemy without hesitation. A knight fought on horseback – fighting on foot was for lesser men and churls. A knight should be pious and reverent toward the church and obey his lord unquestionably. He also ought to show courtesy to women of noble rank (this did not apply to peasant and townswomen). He also should develop romantic love for an unattainable married woman (since marriage between nobles was usually for reasons of power and not love), and should use that unrequited love to spur him on to feats of valor. A knight should also be generous and open-handed to the poor and his fellows.
All of this sounds good, but in practice a lot of these virtues twisted around into vices. Fearlessness in battle turned into arrogance and delusions of invincibility. One of the reasons France did so badly for much of the Hundred Years’ War was because the French knights insisted on charging into battle at once to demonstrate their knightly valor and prowess, which let them get slaughtered en masse by English longbowmen. Additionally, readiness to fight evolved into fighting for any excuse at all, which frequent led to wars both ruinous and utterly pointless. Knighthood’s class awareness often caused nobles to treat warfare as a chivalric adventure, which was not conducive to sound strategy and victory. Generally the most successful medieval monarchs were those like Henry II, Edward I, Charles V, and Philip II Augustus who did not allow knightly virtues to get in the way of hard-headed practical policy. Generosity turned into extravagant displays of public magnificence, which in turn meant attempting to squeeze more tax money out of the peasants and merchants. A knight’s respect toward the church often meant giving large donations to have masses said in perpetuity for his soul after a lifetime of plunder. And, of course, a knight might have unrequited Lancelot-style love for an unattainable married noblewoman, but in practice many knights had many, many bastard children, and sometimes with their “unattainable” married noblewomen.
Moralistic writers in every century of the Middle Ages bemoaned the laziness, greed, and luxurious living of their contemporary knights, and frequently exhorted them to return to the hardier, more virtuous knights of past years. Even the Middle Ages had the Nostalgia Filter.
As is so often the case with institutions that have outlived their useful utility, knighthood was never really reformed but eventually became obsolete. By the end of the Hundred Years’ War, the French king maintained a professional standing army, which was far more useful than giving land to nobles and attempting to get knights out of them through feudal obligations. Other nations soon followed suit. Longbows and crossbows heralded the weakness of armor, and then gave away to trained infantry soldiers equipped with firearms. Horsemen remained an important part of warfare for centuries, since they were vital for scouting and attacking unprepared infantry formations. The American Civil War was the first truly industrial war, and yet the war still had numerous significant cavalry battles.
But the armored knight’s days as master of the battlefield were over, and while knights remained part of the upper class, knighthood gradually became a ceremonial honor that had nothing to do with its original purpose of mounted warfare. Recently filmmaker Christopher Nolan became Sir Christopher Nolan, Knight Bachelor of the United Kingdom, for reasons entirely unrelated to wielding a lance on horseback while wearing heavy armor.
So as we can see, the word “chivalry” has a long, long history, so it is amusing to see how the last remnant of its original meaning in the modern era is “hold the door open for women.”
It occurred to me as I wrote this out that the reason I’m a fantasy novelist and not a historian is that I thought “hmm, there’s the ideas for like twelve different books in all of this.” Which is perhaps the point. Chivalric knighthood was something of a myth, but the myth inspired some great stories over the centuries.
-JM
