The word chivalry derives from the French term cheval, or horse, and those practicing chivalry in medieval times possessed highly developed horseback-riding skills. Dressed in armor during times of battle and known as knights, from a term that originally meant “boy” or “youth,” these chivalric young men came to represent a local form of justice.
At the fall of the Roman Empire, many chiefs assumed power in northern Europe, which was bereft of central leadership. Such chiefs felt hostility toward one another, as each coveted the others’ land and the power that land and loyal citizens brought them. As the feudal system developed, and lords grew more powerful, they kept a careful watch on each other to retain a peaceful balance in their regions. The knights worked for their lords to help in that control. Simultaneously, the church impressed upon the feudal leaders and their knights the importance of protecting the weak, a crucial aspect of right living. Thus, the ideals of chivalry emerged.
The chivalric knight practiced fair play, exhibited extreme valor, served a spiritual leader represented by the church, and an earthly master represented by his feudal lord. He practiced forbearance and modesty, extending courtesy and compassion to all. His service to a man of rank resulted in his also achieving rank, but to be worthy of honor, he had to bear up well under the demands of chivalry’s lofty ideals. Often from a moneyed background, in order to practice humility, a knight ignored his material possessions or the status of his family name to depend instead on others for his sustenance, choosing sometimes to eschew comfortable lodging to sleep on the ground under the stars as evidence of devotion to the pure and simple life.
The knight served as a warrior when called upon, but in peacetime, often embarked on quests suitable to his stature. His adventures might emerge from a pledge of love or religion, result in actions meant to right injustices, and occasionally win rewards of treasure, although most often the honors and titles resulting from completing a quest sufficed. Called knights-errant, such individuals traveled about the country seeking justice for others. All castles and households routinely extended generous hospitality to knights in recognition of their importance to society.
In some instances, even feudal lords might be seduced to commit evil in the name of greed or power. In that condition, castles that once protected their inhabitants and kept them secure became prisons, sometimes of torture and horror. A knight-errant from outside the castle keep would then have to free the prisoners, usually after confronting and defeating the castle’s leader.
In some quests, knights served aristocratic women, often the wives of their leaders, and declared a chaste, or courtly, love for such ladies, to whom they pledged lifelong loyalty. They represented their ladies during contests called jousts in which knights could display their skills as horsemen, charging one another on horseback in an attempt to dismount their competitor with a weapon; long poles called lances often served as weapons of choice. Strict rules controlled such contests. For instance, horses could not be stabbed, nor could a knight who had raised his visor, the drop-down face cover on his helmet, be struck. Jousts generally drew a large attendance and often resulted, despite the safety rules, in cruel maimings of man or beast and even death. Sir Walter Scott featured jousts in some of his historical novels, most notably, Ivanhoe (1819), the first of his novels to use England as a setting, even though Scott himself found jousts repugnant. Such adventures were labeled romances, originally denoting a composition written in a Romance language, those evolving from western Europe, where a blend of Latin with native languages was called Langue Romaine.
Stories of chivalry often grew from initiation plots, where a young man experienced training, usually by an aged, skilled knight retired from the field. A task would draw the trainee into duty, and in some plots, the older teacher-knight would fall to the evil that the young hero then pledged himself to defeat. Many chivalric tales grew from the British legend of King Arthur, a figure who was a blend of fact and fantasy, perhaps based on a fifth-century warrior chieftain named Riothamus. Arthur supposedly established a round table that hosted a gathering of the noblest knights. Many tales evolved that focused on the Knights of the Round Table, some involving mystical creatures, monsters, and disguises, such as Gawain and the Green Knight. While that story focused on an individual who had to pass a test, a second type of romantic quest featured conflict between duty and passion, such as the German Tristan und Isolde. A third type of romance, represented by Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, focused on a search for the Holy Grail and reflected aspects of the Arthurian legend.
Eventually, the term chivalry became associated with manners rather than actions. Chivalry still connoted loyalty, skill, generosity, and devotion, without the added dimensions of warfare and horseback skills. While fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries did not feature the high sentimentality of the earlier romance genre, and readers might find the high ideals of traditional chivalry laughable, even harmful to the development of gender and self-identity, aspects of chivalry and the romantic quest continued to shape plot and characters in literature and film media.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968.
De Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. 1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Gleckner, Robert F., and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds. Romanticism: Points of View. 2nd ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974.
Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Novel Analysis, War Literature
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