PROLOGUE
MARK TWAIN’S Connecticut Yankee, finding himself suddenly
transported across centuries into the strange world of Camelot, manages,
despite the shock of time travel, to preserve his acute sense of observation.
From the start he views the Arthurian court ambivalently, feeling horror
at its failure to anticipate the democratic and technological glories of his own
nineteenth century, mixed with a somewhat reluctant dash of romantic admiration
for its very otherness, exhibited with such vigour and colour, especially
in the quaint richness of its verbal expression.
If the Yankee thus drops substantial weights onto the pans swinging on each
side of the scales of judgement, the balance arm tips heavily toward the negative.
His early conclusion is that Camelot must be an insane asylum, its
denizens virtual savages who can be dismissed as ‘white Indians’. Listening to
the talk in court for the first time, he reports:
As a rule the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and courtly; and I
noticed that they were good and serious listeners when anybody was telling anything—
I mean in a dogfightless interval. And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent
lot; telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety, and
ready and willing to listen to anybody else’s lie, and believe it, too. It was hard to associate
them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering
with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.1
This passage, of course, shows us much that we try to avoid as historians. Here
the Yankee shares the prejudices of his age and wears the racial blinkers of his
creator; he also reveals the sour suspicion of all things venerably European that
periodically appeared in Twain’s books.2
Yet we can more easily read on past the prejudices and culturally smug comments
about childlike natives when we observe that the passage and the book,
whatever their obvious failures in cultural relativism, present a thoroughly
1 A Connecticut Yankee, 13. Twain would have appreciated Clausewitz telling his wife that it
would be years before he could recall the scenes of Napoleon’s Russian campaign ‘without a shuddering
horror’. Quoted in Keegan, A History of Warfare, 8.
2 The complex, shifting, even contradictory relationship between Twain and European culture
is noted in Kaplan’s fascinating study, Mr Clemens and Mark Twain.
salutary admonition to us as modern analysers of the medieval phenomenon
of chivalry. For the great danger in the study of chivalry is to view this important
phenomenon through the rose-tinted lenses of romanticism, to read
chivalry in terms of what we want it to be rather than what it was. However
glorious and refined its literature, however elevated its ideals, however enduring
its link with Western ideas of gentlemanliness—and whatever we think of
that—we must not forget that knighthood was nourished on aggressive
impulses, that it existed to use its shining armour and sharp-edged weaponry
in acts of showy and bloody violence. As Twain reminds us succinctly, we
must not forget to shudder.
To avoid romanticism should enable analysis, of course, not prevent it. An
occasional, salutary shudder does not mean we must judge chivalry—as Twain
does here—by modern liberal standards, nor indeed that we must judge it at
all, but simply that we should take care not to be blinded by the light reflected
off shining armour; we should try instead to look at the social effects of
chivalry as dispassionately as possible, and now and then manage to write of
chivalry in a tone other than the reverential. Such efforts in no way diminish
an appreciation of the vast investment in chivalry by medieval people or of the
vast importance attributed to chivalry by modern analyses that may go well
beyond the particularly medieval range of vision. In fact, the most compelling
reason to avoid romanticizing chivalry is that taking a view through rosetinted
lenses distorts and finally trivializes this extraordinarily powerful force
in early European history.
Significant benefits accrue if we follow Twain’s advice and avoid romanticism.
We can better evaluate the mixture of the ideal and the actual in the
medieval past. We can consider chivalry as a range of ideals closely and complexly
intertwined with a set of practices and problems, noting always the context
which required this fusion. By escaping romanticism we can better
recognize the linkage between chivalry and major issues in medieval society,
especially the crucial issue of violence and public order.
In any romanticized reading, chivalry becomes a purely positive and uncomplicated
factor in securing order. Such a reading holds, in essence, that chivalry
brought about the internalization of necessary restraints in a vigorous group
of men—valorous and violent men, to be sure, but potentially the finest of fellows
their society could produce. These stout men learned the ideal, used their
weapons in the name of God and in aid of the weak and oppressed. If violence
and the prevalence of war in medieval society caused any problems of order,
some modern scholars imply, these problems could not be inherent in chivalry
itself, nor could they even be encouraged by chivalry. Rather, the trouble
stemmed from the insufficient generalization of chivalry in society, from the
unfortunate fact of limited diffusion, with chivalry unable to touch all warriors
with its simultaneously elevating and restraining hand.
A preference for reading texts in this fashion is surely understandable.
Scholars’ tasks are so much easier, so much more hopeful, if the tone of the
texts is considered unproblematically upbeat, if these texts are considered to
favour values scholars themselves hold dear. Most denizens of the groves of
academe, after all, tend to be mild-mannered (except for the verbal violence of
departmental meetings, long footnotes, reviews, and the institutional cocktail
party); they sometimes also show a certain emotional commitment to positive
value judgements about their particular era and field of study.
An element of modern scholarly identification with the upper social layers
in the distant past may even lie buried now and then within this line of argument,
for should any slightly distasteful issues about warlike violence arise in
analysis, the locus of trouble is quickly identified and the terminology is
quickly changed. ‘Soldiers’, whose very name implies wage-taking rather than
the true calling (and the right social status) might, granted, be hard for the
knights to control; they might get out of hand, might ride, pillage, burn, and
rape on a scale sufficient to constitute a social problem; but the problem of the
soldiery was that they were not knights and had yet to acquire the internalized
restraints of chivalry. War on the home front, the ‘private war’ of knight
against knight, or of knight against the sub-knightly, was apparently either
uncommon or simply the means of asserting needed hierarchical order.
This study argues, to the contrary, that in the problem of public order the
knights themselves played an ambivalent, problematic role and that the guides
to their conduct that chivalry provided were in themselves complex and problematic.
The issues are built into some of the very ideals of chivalry, not merely
in the lamentable inability of fallible men to attain them. This approach is not
simply a self-consciously hard-nosed brand of realism or even some species of
cynicism. It takes as a given the yawning gap between a knightly practice that
is recoverable (if we only look diligently) and the impossibly high ideals
expressed for it in one major text after another. This gap is unsurprising and
need spawn no modern moralizing.
Upon discovering this divergence, beginning students, of course, often
decide to debunk chivalry: the cads did not live up to the high ideals after all.
Any slice of human history could, however, show groups of people more or
less professing one course and more or less following another; surely that discovery
cannot be the point of serious study. Nor need it be the point in a study
of chivalry and order. The chivalry that knights practised upheld the high
ideals of a demanding code of honour; as we will see, these ideals were probably
achieved as nearly as any set of human ideals ever can be in an imperfect
world. Yet even when achieved, their ideals may not have been fully compatible
with the ideal of a more ordered and peaceful society also being advanced
during ‘the age of chivalry’.
The issues analysed in this book are thus as much social as individual and the
questions concern political and social order more than any judgement of
knighthood. Of course, competing investments of meaning will compel us to
think of chivalry throughout this book as a concept working under constant
tension. The goal is to discover the mixture of ideals and practices knights followed
in an atmosphere of reform, and to learn how this process affected the
effort to secure public order in a society just coming to its mature formation.
It will not prove helpful to analyse chivalry in terms of an unreflective and
rough practice of knights confronted by a glowing theory or high ideal that
outsiders all agreed upon and wanted to impose. Each competing ideal sought
to bend chivalry to its plan; knights took up some of these ideas, rejected
others, and were sure they had ideals of their own.
Use of the term chivalry by the medievals themselves suggests a blurring of
such simplistic categories as theory and practice. When they spoke or wrote of
chivalry (militia in Latin, chevalerie in French), any of three related meanings
may have been in their minds. First, the term could mean nothing more theoretical
or ethical than deeds of great valour and endurance on some field of
combat, that is, heroic work with sword, shield, and lance. Second, the term
could mean a group of knights. In the simplest sense this may be the body of
elite warriors present on some particular field of battle. In a more abstract
sense the term might refer to the entire social body of knights considered as a
group stretching across space and time. Third, chivalry might be used to mean
a knightly code of behaviour.
Just what that code should be was not clear in detail, sometimes not in fundamentals.
Idealist critics wanted to change much in the knightly mixture of
ideals and practices; some of these idealistic reformers were knights themselves.
Chivalry can only be interpreted, in other words, as a mixture of ideals
and practices constantly critiqued by those who wanted to change both.