Religious Valorisation

If main lines of thought cherished by active warriors valorised prowess generating honour, how did men at arms come to terms with basic principles of their religion within a tough and demanding profession of arms? A first thought might be that medieval religion would function as a major agent in controlling or reducing the violence of the chivalrous, especially as it impacted the population at large.

Good evidence suggests a more complex paradigm. Churchmen did, indeed, strive in general to reduce the violence among the lords and kings of Christendom. On many a battlefield the fateful clash of armies was at least delayed while a concerned bishop or papal legates attempted to negotiate an end to hostilities. Yet the papacy under the vigorous pontiff Innocent III blessed a French invasion of the kingdom of England unresponsive to the directives and interdict from the Holy See and he launched a crusade against Cathars within southern Europe, in addition to a crusade originally intended for the Holy Land that veered, to his intense displeasure, to target Constantinople. Bernard of Clairvaux, in effect an uncrowned pope, had already enthusiastically promoted crusade and had written his famous trea­tise for the Knights Templar, labelling their knightly action not man-killing but the killing of evil.^[849] In an obviously dangerous world, churchmen knew that some violence was necessary and thought of rigorous pacifism as a notion of heretics who could not accept clerical authority.

However, if some clerical intellectuals in academic studies regularly blended considerable criticism with praise and valorisation, commentators closer to the warriors both in social environment and intellectual attitude tilted the balance of the scales of judgement decisively towards praise. Of course men who were vigorously professional knights - or those who wrote about them specifically - stood in the front ranks of the positive. They were sure of unwavering knightly piety. Some practising knights wrote their own views. Religious thought was not generated by clerics alone. Practising knights cherished religious ideals; they welcomed them in the imaginative literature they patronised and read (and occasionally wrote); and a few of them even composed elaborate statements of the link between undoubted piety and their hard professional practice.

Clearly, views on religion and knightly violence could not represent straightforward opposition or contradiction. Instead, they intertwined in a great range of thought on chivalry appearing in formal treatises, in vernacular manuals, in chivalric biography and in the overwhelming corpus of imagina­tive literature (especially in chansons de geste and romance).

Ever a good witness, the Marshal, as his biographer tells us, thought of chivalry as an honour divinely bestowed. It came to him in a court ceremony at Drincourt: ‘There William the Marshal was dubbed / a knight, and he willingly accepted the honour / accorded him by God.'^[850] Throughout his career, we learn, God's grace was so bountiful that his performed feats of arms always covered him in glory.^[851] When that career had catapulted him to the peak of chivalry, the Marshal was given the honour of knighting the Young King (son of Henry II of England). The language again shows sig­nificant lines of thought. The Young King says to William, ‘From God and from yourself, / My lord, I wish to receive this honour.' Girding on his sword and kissing him, the Marshal asks that ‘God keep him most valorous, / honoured and exalted', the poet adding ‘As indeed God did'.^[852] In the heat of combat the cry raised by the Marshal's men was ‘God is with the Marshal!'²⁶ A ‘loyal and whole-hearted friend' of the Marshal (who considers him a suitable marriage match for his sister since ‘he carried well his shield and lance') sings out in pious praise. ‘May the God who advances the cause of all worthy men / Take revenge for him on all those who have done him / Harm and ill, although he has done no wrong!'²⁷

God is an imminent presence throughout the History. He thinks like a knight, advancing the careers and honour of the just, bringing wrongdoers to shame. The knightly sense of close companionship with the divine is striking, but not surprising. After all, Christ appears to be one of them, the holy warrior against evil who died heroically from a lance stroke in the climax of his earthly career.^[853] Not only does he value strenuous physical effort, his distribution of rewards is keyed to the severity of the effort undertaken.

In rewarding the members of the knightly order he has ordained, God relies on a scale of increasingly tough meritorious action, not unlike the scale of honour advanced by his devoted servant Geoffroi de Charny. In fact, Charny once again provides intimate insight into knightly thought. Beyond his ceaseless references to God and the Blessed Virgin Mary, he is even more explicit than the Marshal's History on the bonds joining knightly suffering, merit and reward. After noting the merit readily earned by monks and clerics who lead a properly ascetic life (through sexual abstinence, frugal diet and hours of kneeling in prayer), he proudly awards the palm of meritorious physical suffering to the stout members of the order of knighthood:

this [suffering by those in religious orders] is all nothing in comparison with the suffering to be endured in the order of knighthood. For whosoever might want to consider the hardships, pains, discomforts, fears, perils, broken bones, and wounds, which the good knights who uphold the order of knighthood as they should, endure and have to suffer frequently, there is no religious order in which as much is suffered as has to be endured by these good knights who go in search of deeds of arms in the right way.^[855]

God values the very toughness of their hard profession, gauging his rewards by this scale. Triumphantly, Charny asks, ‘And where are the [non-chivalric] orders which could suffer as much?' He caps this case by declaring, ‘Indeed, in this order of knighthood one can well save the soul and bring honour to the body.'^[856] Once again his view is no outlier in chivalric thought. As far back as the Song of Roland the link between physical suffering in knighthood and spiritual merit that could reduce the payment owed for sin had appeared.

I can understand that through the slight pain I endure on earth I can be quit of the great pains of hell. This is a good deal (Ceo seroit une bon merchandise) as for a little suffering in this world, which is nothing to endure, one can escape the pains of hell, which are so terrible and joyless: and a man certainly cannot earn more by well enduring your gift of suffering than to have by this a reduction of the pains of purgatory.^[857]

The medieval church taught that God (who had in Christ died on Calvary to redeem humanity) was mollified by virtuous human suffering; it reduced the terrifying punishments for sin that loomed for every human in the afterlife. The knights, following their hard profession, reduced the punishment for inevitable sin. It was, as Lancaster drily noted, a good deal. If campaign and battle established dominance, ensured honour, provided sustaining profit, the very rigours and perils - blows, wounds and even death - ever present in armed combat, became forms of penance within the religious system they fully accepted.

The framework must not be imagined as limited to crusading. That crusade was meritorious fighting could never be gainsaid. The warriors lauded and exhorted in the Song of Roland are fighting Muslim enemies (with almost demonic allies); both Charny and Lancaster served as crusaders; Charny praised the fighting on crusade as ‘righteous, holy, certain, and sure'.^[858] Clerics, joined by some modern historians, would have been happier if the knighthood of Europe had indeed limited their combat to crusade, most of it far enough away from the homeland to reduce disruption. But this is far from the attitudes embedded in what we can recover as working codes of chivalry.

Whatever view we take of the moral results of a fusion between chivalric practice and undoubted knightly piety, recognising the power of the bond remains crucial. Just before the fatal sword blow ended Charny's life on the battlefield of Poitiers in 1356, the thoughts active beneath his helm must have included not only details of effective combat and the protection of the king of France, but probably the honoured reception awaiting him in a gloriously chivalric heaven, presided over by the Lord of Hosts. If clerics valiantly tried to mould knighthood into compatibility with their conception of social and religious order, the knightly working codes of chivalry suggest a piety that valorised their profession and justified the elevated social status that it ensured.