Chivalric Ideology

Since it contributed to so many structural elements of society and culture, chivalry was valorised by voices utilising a range of terms of praise to compliment the knights and men at arms for desired qualities.

Fully citing the evidence from practising knights or those very close to them would exhaust the entire remaining space allocated to this chapter; but we can sense the force and tenor of this evidence by drawing on what was written about or by William Marshal and Geoffroi de Charny, our two fully active knights who were taken as models in their own age. Drawing on these two unexcelled sources allows us to stride back through the centuries and almost listen to armoured men talking about their profession.

The Histoire, which conveys the life and views of the great Marshal, offers a veritable hymn of praise to the firm bonding of prowess and honour, with numerous warnings about incurring shame if the bond is severed. His early career showed the practicality of earning honour - and sustaining it by considerable profit - in successful tournament encounters. As was typical of so many knights, William Marshal thought of chivalry as almost defined by the good exercise of prowess. His biographer describes one body of knights who were sallying forth against their enemies from a besieged castle as charging ‘por faire chevalerie', that is to do chivalry.^[840] He later praises chivalry as ‘Such a difficult, tough and very costly thing to learn that no coward ventures to take it on.'^[841] And the lavish praise - even in this authorised biography - is not confined to the Marshal. John de Preaux, for example, is praised for taking and giving blows in best knightly fashion, as

a man who was pure gold when it came to taking blows;

but those who tangled with him did not get off lightly themselves, for he was well capable of showing them what he was made of, since he knew all about handling arms.⁸

Of course the goal is ever to win honour and deflect shame. When jealous detractors accuse him of an affair with the wife of the Young King, son of Henry II, the Marshal meets the challenge characteristically with martial defiance.

One should be concerned with his honour, so that no tale of our wrongdoing can be told; shame lasts longer than destitution.

He even warns that those who flee honour and fail to perform well by defending their lord's lands (in Ireland) should be cursed to eternal shame by God.^{[843] [844]} If, as we have already seen, Charny paired the soul and honour, the Marshal's close friend linked chivalric shame with an eternity of hellfire.

Geoffroi de Charny was obsessed with prowess and honour as central elements functioning as a great Gothic arch upholding the structure of chivalric thought. Any reading of his works makes this clear. The very frequency with which he employs these terms in his most important work, the Livre de Chevalerie, underscores the point. Honour and terms based on that root-word appear 230 times in this relatively short treatise of about 100 pages in modern print; prowess and references to deeds of arms appear 146 times.11 The fusion of prowess with honour is dramatically emphasised in his opening pages, where Charny lays out a simple but revealing scale of increasing knightly honour won through martial violence. Combat in indi­vidual jousts within a tournament is surely honourable, he says; participation in the group combat within the tournament (known as melee) brings a man even more honour; but outright war itself (rather than the extreme sport of tournament) is truly the most honourable enterprise for a knight. The reason for this scale, as he explains, is that each new level requires more physical effort and presents more danger.¹² He does not, of course, denigrate any demonstration of prowess and in fact seems never to have witnessed such a display that he did not admire. As he writes, ‘Indeed, all deeds of arms merit praise for all those who perform well in them.

seek constantly and diligently opportunities to perform deeds of arms. And when God grants you the good fortune to find them, do your duty wisely and boldly, fearing nothing except shame, striving with the skill of your hand and the effort of your body to as great a degree as your powers can extend in order to inflict damage on your opponents, always being among the first in battle.1⁴

To a significant degree honour, in Charny's view, is won physically; it is achieved through notable deeds of arms; it can be lost in any action that brings shame or any failure to take suitable vengeance. When a man he had paid to open a gate into the English-held fortress at Calais sprang a trap on Charny instead (resulting in Charny's capture), Messire Geoffroi caught and killed the man, quartered his body and displayed the results publicly.1⁵ The wisest and most able knights, Charny insists, fear shame more than mere death.1⁶ He warns his readers to imagine the shame that would disgrace any man in old age if he has not done all that he could to win honour in arms.1⁷

Idealistic and reforming writing presented warnings and admonitions aimed at modifying aspects of knightly behaviour. The good knights, they pointedly declare (with fingers crossed) fight only in just causes; they do not despoil churches or trouble the poor; they obediently follow the guidance of clerics on all such matters. Prescriptive urgings by writers such as John of Salisbury, Ramon Llull and Christine de Pisan

12 Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny. The same sentiment is expressed by a combatant in the famous ‘combat of the thirty' which took place in Brittany, according to the chronicler Jean le Bel: The True Chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290­1360, trans.

13 Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, pp. 86-7. 14 Ibid., pp. 195-6.

15 ttuvres de Froissart, ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1867-77), vol. v, pp. 271-4; Chronique normande du XIVe siecle, ed. Auguste Molinier (Paris: Renouard, 1882), pp. 103-4; Chronique de quatre premieres Valois (1327­1393), ed. Simeon Luce (Paris: Renouard, 1862), pp. 29-30.

16 Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, pp. 132-3.

17 Discussed ibid., section 19.

are well known. But do results along these lines of exhortation or even close engagement with them appear in working codes of chivalry close to active knighthood? Even a hasty look into such working codes as those of William Marshal and Geoffroi de Charny reveal a much more limited and directed focus. The piety of knights is clear and not the issue at hand. What emerges is the sense that these men at arms - while considering themselves models of piety and members of one of the orders of society instituted by God - show an independent cast of mind in matters of profession and status.^{[845] [846]} They stress the need to avoid dishonour and shame. As the writings by or about our two admired knights have already indicated, warnings within their codes were likely to stress preserving all-important warrior honour from shame, rather than any altruistic desire to reduce the exercise of violence as a social good. The focus, that is, remains within the social level of the knightly, with little concern for the sub-chivalric.

Shame emerged from multiple causes, of course, and was not limited to failures of knightly vigour. The Histoire of William Marshal makes this broad point clearly, sternly admonishing warriors that any act violating elite social norms - spreading falsehood, disloyalty, treason - could release corrosive shame upon resplendent honour. Yet this emble­matic work elaborately highlights the shame resulting from weakening or severing the bond between prowess and honour.

This is not the time for idle threats,

let us quickly launch an attack on them [the French].

Let us give thanks to God, who has given us the opportunity to take our revenge on those who came here to do us harm and damage.

Nobody should hold back:

a man takes full revenge for the wrong and shame done to him when he overcomes his enemy.1⁹

Relentlessly self-referential, such working ideals offer no parallel to altruistic constraints on action in defence of honour that flowed readily from the pens of idealistic reformers.

This point of view emerges with even greater clarity from Geoffroi de Charny. Writing during the early phase of the Hundred Years War, Charny is particularly worried that French knights and men at arms will not hear the clarion call to arms, will not stir themselves to drive out the English from the kingdom. The constant enemies of honour are close at hand - sloth, timidity and the agreeable soft life. Warriors must play the tough game of war, not real tennis; they must don chafing armour, not doublets adorned with pearls; they must accept the inevitable gamble of combat, rather than the mild uncertainty of games of dice. Once roused and on the field, they can licitly collect loot, but never let it hinder the valorous engagement and pursuit of the enemy.^[847] Far from unique or idiosyncratic, this broad view can be found in the values of admired knights throughout medieval Europe and across the medieval centuries suffused with chivalry.^[848]