Knights and Hermits
The spectacular Grail scene at Corbenic is a culminating experience, the apotheosis
of an imagined spiritual quest. Lay assertion of independence from clerical
authority appears much more regularly in the prominence of hermits in all
chivalric literature, particularly in the romances. Hermits are clearly the chivalric
cleric of choice. In the forests which are the setting for adventure, hermits
seem to have established their dwellings at convenient intervals of one day’s
ride in order to accommodate knights errant who lodge with them regularly.
They are figures of wisdom as well as keepers of plain hostelries for the
Knights and Piety 57
61 For the consecration of Josephus, see Chase, tr., History of the Holy Grail, 25–8; Sommer, ed.,
Vulgate Version I, 30–6. Here, Josephus is termed ‘sovereign bishop’ over his sheep, is dressed in
all the ‘things a bishop should have’, is attended by angels, and is anointed and consecrated by God
‘in the way a bishop should be’. He wears a mitre, holds a crozier, has a ring on his hand. He performs
the first mass. Later he ordains priests and bishops. Chase, ibid., 49; Sommer, ibid., 78.
62 Clerical ideas of reform are discussed in Chapter 4, further discussion of the The Quest
appears in Chapter 12.
chivalrous; a knight can find an explanation for his recent adventures or his
troublesome dreams and a sure guide for his future conduct, as well as a bed,
and at least barley bread and water.
Hermits are ubiquitous in chivalric literature. A hermit starts Yvain on his
road to recovery after madness in Chrétien’s Yvain;63 another speaks the key
advice to Perceval on Good Friday in his Perceval.64 Scores of hermits nourish
and direct the knights throughout The Quest of the Holy Grail. In fact, hermits
will play a key religious role in romance for the next several centuries.65 And not
only in romance. The spoken advice that becomes Llull’s important manual on
chivalry, we must remember, likewise comes from an old hermit who is instructing
a candidate for knighthood. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis pictures a hermit
foreseeing the future at the request of Queen Matilda, consort of William the
Conqueror. His elaborate vision could come from the pages of The Quest.66
To realize why this knightly preference for hermits is significant to the lay
piety of chivalry we need to understand the kind of figure hermits represent.
Two key facts seem to stand at the heart of an answer. First, both as we find
them in medieval society and as they were represented in chivalric literature,
hermits were closely integrated with the world around them; they were part of
lay society. In England hermits were sometimes expected to take on such mundane
functions as hospitality, chapel tending, work on roads and bridges, as
well as the spiritual counselling and advice to laypeople we might expect.67 In
literature they appear as especially attuned and sympathetic to knighthood, and
often have come from the same social milieu as knights, indeed have often been
knights themselves until age and waning capacity closed a chivalric career.
A second characteristic is of equal importance. Hermits were, in Angus
Kennedy’s words, ‘not opposed to but rather on the outskirts of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy proper’.68 The combination is perfect for making them ideal
purveyors of religion to the practitioners of chivalry. With thoughts of lay
independence and suspicions of clerical aggrandizement in their heads,
knights could readily appreciate the somewhat marginal position of pious
hermits within the ranks of the clergy.69
63 Kibler, ed., tr., Yvain, ll. 2831–90.
64 Bryant, tr., Perceval, 67–70; Roach, ed., Perceval, ll. 6217–517. The didactic role plays on
unabated through the continuations to this latter romance.
65 Angus Kennedy provides an especially helpful overview: ‘The Hermit’s Role’. Cf. Frappier,
‘Le Graal’.
66 Chibnall ed., tr., Ecclesiastical History, III, 104–9.
67 Ann Warren, ‘Self-Exclusion and Outsidership in Medieval Society: The English Medieval
Hermit’, paper read at the University of Rochester, 1991.
68 Angus Kennedy, ‘The Hermit’s Role’, 83.
69 If Henrietta Leyser is correct, the hermits in the world at the time chivalric romances were
being written were already forming institutions and had moved some distance from the more solitary
life pictured in these texts: see Hermits and the New Monasticism.
Benedictine monks and some clerics understandably took offence at the hermits’
claims and their criticisms of older monastic forms; they sometimes
directed sarcastic attacks at what they considered anarchic, orderless, headless
(i.e. leaderless) hermits.70 Their scorn and criticism, of course, make the same
point as the knightly endorsement, from an opposing direction: these men are
outsiders, not fully citizens of the world of clergie. Not all hermits were, in fact,
priests, and even those who were priests seemed more engaged in the life of
the laity and less entrenched in clergie than their fellows in monastery, parish
church, or episcopal court. As Jean Becquet wrote, if Western eremiticism was
clearly clerical, it was also lay, finding its recruits among laymen as well as
monastics, and combining them in ‘a perfect symbiosis’. He notes that the
master of one of the prominent eremitical orders in mid-twelfth-century
France, the order of Grandmont, was Pierre Bernard, a former knight who had
only recently become a priest.71 Some scholars are not sure that all hermits had
even received the licence from the bishop theoretically necessary for entering
the eremitical life.72
In fact, there is always a faint scent of the protest movement lingering about
hermits. Jean Leclercq notes that in the eleventh and twelfth century they represented
something of a movement or reaction, especially against contemporary
monasticism; Angus Kennedy argues that by the fourteenth century
hermits in literary works took on the role of critics of the Church of their day.73
In short, hermits combined a maximum of recognized piety and involvement
in the life of the laity with a minimal possession or exercise of ecclesiastical
authority; to this potent brew they added a dash of criticism of the church
establishment.
Their undoubted piety was buttressed by the asceticism that always registered
as authentic piety in medieval consciousness. This very asceticism
showed the heroic character of the hermits, a quality which, of course, struck
a responsive chord in knights; each group undertook its characteristic adventures
and put the body in peril for a higher goal. Knightly recognition and
approval of this asceticism appears regularly in chivalric literature. A hermit in
the Perlesvaus, we learn, has not stepped outside his hermitage for forty years.74
Llull’s hermit patently shows his holy life in his worn clothing, worn body,
Knights and Piety 59
70 See the examples in Leclercq, ‘Le poème de Payen Bolotin’; this article discusses and prints
a twelfth-century satire directed against hermits. See also Flori, L’Essor de chevalerie, 262–3, citing
Geroh of Reichersberg.
71 Becquet, ‘L’Érémitisme’.
72 G. G. Meersseman, commenting on Becquet’s paper in L’Eremitismo in Occidente, 207;
Becquet’s agreement appears at ibid., 209.
73 Ibid., 210, 594; Angus Kennedy, ‘The Hermit’s Role’, 76–82.
74 Bryant, tr., Perlesvaus, 75; Nitze and Jenkins, eds, Perlesvaus, 112.
many tears. In the ‘first Continuation’ of the Perceval, a hermit keeps a vow of
silence through each night, visited by a helpful angel.75 Ascetic discipline wins
for the hermits particularly clear and direct channels to God and his angels.
Through this efficient access to divine power hermits can foretell the future,
explain the past, heal the injured.76 The Mort Artu even explains Gawain’s mysterious
increase of prowess at noon by the fact of his baptism by a holy hermit
at that hour.77 In the Perlesvaus, Lancelot receives from a hermit the tempting
offer to take upon himself Lancelot’s sin with the queen. The gesture is noble,
but Lancelot declines, confident that God will understand.78
Such powers are all the more attractive to knights when the hermits have
actually known the chivalric life and come from the proper social class. The
continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval by Gerbert shows us a band of twelve hermits
led by a hermit king, all former knights.79 Lancelot and Yvain stop at a
hermitage in the Lancelot and find ‘two good men, one who was a priest and
another who had been a knight and was the uncle of the two knights’ guide’.80
The hermit who gives Lancelot useful information early in the Lancelot ‘was
very old and had been a knight, one of the handsomest in the world. He had
turned to religion in his prime, when he had lost within one year all twelve of
his sons.’81 A hermit in the Perlesvaus had been a knight in King Uther’s household
for forty years and then a hermit for another thirty years.82 Time and
again romance authors show us hermits who have long been knights and who
can thus speak to other knights on a level plane of social equality and shared
vocation.83 A hermit whom Yvain meets (in the Lancelot) had been a knight
errant even before Arthur was crowned: ‘And I’d have been a member of the
Round Table, but I refused to join because of a knight member for whom I
bore a mortal hatred, and whose arms I later cut off. So after he was crowned,
King Arthur disinherited me.’84
One hermit after another is presented as a former knight. In the Lancelot do
Lac, to pick an example almost at random, we meet a hermit who had in his
previous profession been one of the finest knights in the world.85 The hermits
75 ‘first Continuation’ in Bryant, Perceval, 152.
76 Many examples in Angus Kennedy, ‘Portrayal of the Hermit-Saint’.
77 Cable, tr., Death of King Arthur, 181; Frappier, ed., La Mort, 173. Cf. the highly effective
prayers of Perceval’s hermit uncle in Roach, ed., Didot Perceval, 180.
78 Bryant, tr., Perlesvaus, 110–11; Nitze and Jenkins, eds, Perlesvaus, 168.
79 Bryant, Perceval, 239–43; Williams and Oswald, eds, Gerbert de Montreuil, I, ll. 8906–10153.
80 Rosenberg, tr., Lancelot Part III, 301; Sommer, ed., Vulgate Version, IV, 110.
81 Rosenberg, Lancelot Part III, 86; Sommer, Vulgate Version, III, 163.
82 Bryant, Perlesvaus, 41; Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, I, 60–1.
83 Many examples in Angus Kennedy, ‘Portrayal of the Hermit-Saint’.
84 Kibler, tr., Lancelot Part V, 174; Micha, ed., Lancelot, IV, 248.
85 Corley, tr., Lancelot of the Lake, 139; Elspeth Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 209.
who are so thick on the ground in The Quest of the Holy Grail likewise prove
often to have been knights; the hermit who hears Lancelot’s confession in this
text at least has a brother who is a knight and who can be called upon for the
essential horse and armour Lancelot has lost.86 In the Perlesvaus a hermit does
one better and keeps a stable of warhorses ready for use by worthy knights in
need; this is the sort of cleric a chivalrous audience could really appreciate.87
Some of the hermits never quite block out the trumpet calls of their former
calling. One who keeps arms to fight against robbers and villains appears in the
Perlesvaus and later in that romance hermits enthusiastically join with Perceval
in battle.88 It is more common, of course, for hermits to consider that warfare
continues in their new lives but takes a different form; in singing their masses,
they are often said to wear ‘the armor of Our Lord’.89
The link becomes even stronger when we note how many heroes themselves
end their lives as hermits. Perceval becomes a hermit at the end of The Quest of
the Holy Grail; Lancelot, Bleoberis, Girflet, Hector (as well as the Archbishop
of Canterbury) are all hermits in the closing pages of the Mort Artu and, again,
in Malory’s great book.90 William of Orange, who has retired from knighthood
to become a rather unhappy monk in William in the Monastery, hears the
voice of God telling him in a dream to leave that community and become a
hermit.91
Some hermits even reverse the usual pattern and turn to the greatest knights
for advice or even spiritual intercession. In the Perlesvaus, for example, a hermit
takes counsel of Perceval because of his good life, and another asks Galahad (in
The Quest of the Holy Grail) to intercede with God for him.92 The projection of
knightly lay independence in chivalric literature could scarcely be clearer.
Did this portrayal of hermits and the elaboration of mythology and learning
really mean anything to a knight setting out on a countryside campaign or
Knights and Piety 61
86 Knights become hermits, see Matarasso, tr., Quest, 138, 209; Sommer, ed., Vulgate Version,
VI, 86, 142; the hermit’s brother and Lancelot’s equipment, see Matarasso, ibid., 94; Sommer,
ibid., 51.
87 Bryant, tr., Perlesvaus, 236; Nitze and Jenkins, eds, Perlesvaus, I, 367. The Post-Vulgate Quest
for the Holy Grail notes that in the good old days the kingdom was full of hermits, many of them
former knights. The custom was to bear arms for thirty or forty years and then go off into mountainous
solitude where they ‘performed pennance for their sins and sensuality’: Asher, tr., Quest,
177; Bogdanow, ed., Version Post-Vulgate, 302.
88 Bryant, Perlesvaus, 108, 168–71; Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, I, 164–5, 262–8.
89 e.g. Matarasso, Quest, 86, 103; Sommer, Vulgate Version, VI, 45, 59.
90 Matarasso, Quest, 284; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 198–9; Cable, tr., Death of King Arthur,
226, 231–2; Frappier, ed., La Mort, 227, 232–5; Vinaver, ed., Malory. Works, 722.
91 Ferrante, ed., tr., Guillaume d’Orange, 304–5; Cloetta, ed., Deux redactions, laisse 30.
92 Bryant, Perlesvaus, 264; Nitze and Jenkins, Perlesvaus, I, 407 ; Matarasso, Quest, 256;
Sommer, Vulgate Version, VI, 176. A priest asks Bors for his prayers when the knight comes before
the Holy Grail and an abbot also asks for his prayers. Matarasso, ibid., 180, 199; Sommer, ibid.,
120, 134.
even on a crusade? Would any particular knight care about an some imagined
hermit’s advice, about Joseph of Arimathea, the shield of Lancelot, or the miracles
of Galahad?
Knights need not have been primarily men of ideals to have ideals that mattered
to them. If chivalric literature presents critiques and hopes for the reform
of chivalry, it also reveals a good deal of the basic religious attitudes commonly
held by knights. Their piety may have been thoroughly formal and from a
modern, ideal perspective may look distressingly devoid of deep spirituality;
but it need not have been less real for all that, nor less a guide to their conduct.
These attitudes constitute a form of lay piety that was eminently practical. The
knights wanted to be pious, orthodox Christians; they also insisted on a valorization
of their profession of arms which would link them, finally, with
divine order. Ideas that carried such weight mattered to them.