Chivalry in the Middle Ages

Out of old Germanic customs of miliary initiation, crossed with Saracen influences from Persia, Syria, and Spain, as well as Christian ideas of devotion and sacrament, flowered the imperfect but generous reality of chivalry in the Middle Ages in Europe.

A knight was a person of aristocratic birth--i.e., of titled and landowning family--who had formally received into the order of knighthood. Not all "gentle" men (men distinguished by their "gens" or ancestry) were eligible to knighthood or title; younger sons, except of royal blood, were normally confined to modest properties that precluded the expensive appurtenances of chivalry; such men remained squires unless they carved out new lands and titles of their own.

The youth who aimed at knighthood submitted to long and arduous discipline. At seven or eight he entered as a page, at twelve or fourteen as a squire, into the service of a lord; waited on him at table, in the bedchamber, on the manor, in joust or battle; fortified his own flesh and spirit with dangerous exercises and sports; learned by imitation and trial to handle the weapons of feudal war. When his apprenticeship was finished he was received into the knightly order by a ritual of sacramental awe. The candidate began with a bath as a symbol of spiritual, perhaps as a guarantee of physical, purification; therefore h

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ian, saving their chastity; to all knights he was to be a brother in mutual courtesy and aid. In war he might fight other knights, but if he took any of them prisoner he must treat them as guests. The French knights captured at Crecy and Poitiers lived, until ransomed, in freedom and comfort on the estates of their English captors, sharing in feasts and sports with their hosts. Above the conscience of the commons feudalism exalted the aristocratic honor and "noblesse oblige" of the knight--a pledge of martial valor and feudal fidelity. This meant unstinting service to all knights, all women, all weak and poor. Therefore, manliness was restored to its Roman masculine sense after a thousand years of Christian emphasis on feminine virtues. Chivalry, despite its religious aura, represented a victory of Germanic, pagan, and Arab conceptions over Christianity; a Europe attacked on every side needed the martial virtues again ("Medieval History: Into the Trees" 105), All this,however, was chivalric theory. A few knights lived up to it, as a few Christians rose to the arduous heights of Christian selflessness. But human nature, born of the jungle and the beast, sullied the one ideal like the other. The same hero who one day f ou
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