SOCIAL DOMINANCE OF KNIGHTS IN MEDIEVAL AGE

Men who possessed and exercised the right to fight and who enjoyed the blessing of God on their hard way of life easily came to believe that they were, or deserved to join, the social elite; they readily demanded recognition of their rising status. Assertion of a right to social dominance thus provides another crucial component for the fusion that made chivalry and gave it such power in medieval society. Over time, knights rose in status and even the nobility decided to wear the chivalric mantle.

Chivalry and Nobility

The knights initially had to separate themselves from anything suggesting cultivation of the soil and the smell of manure, for many of those who became the knights were at first not fully and not always differentiated from villagers, tillers of the soil, even the unfree. At the opening of our period, when a fighting man was termed miles (plural milites)—the word which will come to designate knight—the meaning often carried a distinct sense of subservience and could be used of warriors of rather low social status. Many owned no land and few could have claimed to be possessors of political power. In fact, the term miles in this early period had no clear connotation of status and referred simply to function. Yet over time knighthood fused with nobility as a result of common military function, the decline of effective royal power over much of continental Europe, the increasing valorization of knighthood via ecclesiastical efforts for peace and crusade, and the influence of romance literature.
Though the process was far from uniform, in most regions of France knighthood and noble status began to fuse in the course of the twelfth century; knighthood became the ‘common denominator of the aristocracy’. The rise of knights was slower in German lands and took a different turn in England, where a distinct legal nobility never emerged; in Italy it gradually accommodated with swiftly reviving urbanism. But everywhere the right to commit warlike violence whenever honour was at stake became a sign of superior status; in time, it hardened into noble right over much of Europe. By the early thirteenth century, 'The Romance of the Wings', a popular vernacular manual for knights (c. 1210), says ‘their name, rightly speaking, is the true name of nobility’. This century, as Maurice Keen notes, shifted emphasis away from entry into knighthood via the ceremony of dubbing towards eligibility via noble lineage.
Works of literature show the conviction that chivalric qualities are rooted in genetic inheritance. Ceremonies welcoming back Lancelot to the Arthurian court (in the Lancelot) include a procession which orders the great men ‘according to their valour and lineage’. The assumption, of course, is that these two scales exactly coincide. In fact, knights in chivalric literature who fail to show the highest qualities may turn out to have a bad genetic line or other ignoble formation. Antor assures Arthur in 'The Story of Merlin that Kay’s' unpleasant ways must have come from the peasant girl who nursed him.
The History of the Holy Grail from the same cycle, a bad knight, we learn, was born ‘the son of a vile peasant, descended from a bad line and bad seed’. He was not the king’s son he had been thought to be. Inversely, Tor’s prowess, in the Merlin Continuation, proves his nobility; he was not the son of the peasant who had raised him; his mother had been raped by Pellinor, a great chivalric figure. Arthur has sensed the lineage from the start, as he tells Tor: ‘I believe that if nobility had not come to you from somewhere, your heart would never have drawn you to something as exalted as knighthood.’
The young Gawain, at the tender age of eleven, likewise shows heroic genes at work. Standing by his father’s graveside, he vows revenge on the killer, King Pellinor, in terms that elicit much admiration: ‘Please God, my lord, may I never earn praise for knightly deeds until I have taken appropriate vengeance and killed a king for a king.’ Those within hearing marvel at his words, ‘for they were noble, especially for a child’.
Nobility was likewise proved by physical beauty. In their literature knights portrayed themselves tirelessly as more beautiful than other mortals. A well proportioned body and a comely face identify the truly chivalrous, even if the young man is unknown, in disguise, or in rags.
When the Lady of the Lake brings the young Lancelot to be knighted by Arthur, the king at first resists her request to knight him wearing the armour and robes she has provided; he only knights men dressed in his own robes, he explains. Yvain, however, urges Arthur to make an exception: ‘you mustn’t just let him go, not a fine fellow like this! I don’t remember ever seeing such a good-looking young man.’ His advice is accepted and the Lady of the Lake leaves Lancelot at court. Her parting advice to him links moral and physical beauty with prowess: ‘Take care to be as beautiful in your heart as you are in body and limb, for you have as much beauty as God could bestow on any child and it would be a great wrong if your prowess did not prove its equal."
Some reality may even have supported the idea of superior physical form among the chivalrous. Surely not every villager or townsperson was unattractive, but better diet, better living conditions, and the catalyst of confidence might have produced distinct physical improvements in appearance. In their literature they are the beautiful people, the perfection of their bodies enhanced by contrast with the dwarves who so regularly appear in their menial service and who are usually as uncourtly in speech and manners as they are unlovely in body.

As knighthood continued its social rise, the term knight even took on a more restrictive meaning than the term noble. Knighthood, in the close sense of those who had actually been dubbed and become active, strenuous knights, became a minority, a subset, even among the nobility.
The case is clear from England. The number of men called knights in the England of William the Conqueror stood at about 6,000; by the midthirteenth century actual or potential knights numbered only about 3,000, with about 1,250 actually having been dubbed. Perhaps three-quarters of a typical fourteenth-century English army was composed of men below the rank of knight. The cost of the ceremony of dubbing, of horses, and more elaborate armour restricted the group. Obligations to participate in local activities of royal governance supply another reason, adding to the economic costs of taking up knighthood the investment of time and the sheer bother of serving on the judicial and administrative inquests so characteristic a feature of medieval England.
In France, also, the cost of active participation in chivalric life rose, and the number of dubbed knights fell accordingly; knighthood as a specific status ceased to encompass all those who were recognized as noble. Fewer than half the French nobles had actually been dubbed in the early fourteenth century. To read any documents relating to this nobility is to encounter many esquires (damoiseaux) alongside the knights and great lords.Strenuous knights were only a core of the medieval French nobility, as they were only a core of a medieval French army. Such an army meant a small body of belted knights accompanied by a much larger company of men-at-arms.
Does this trend mean a waning of the influence of chivalric ideas? On the contrary, the chivalric ethos in fact generalized to all who lived by arms, whether of noble family or not; chivalry served as a source of inspiration even beyond the ranks of lords and active, strenuous knights; it touched all men-atarms. In theory, chivalry might best be exemplified in the conduct of those formally noble or the practising milites, but several social rings beyond this inner circle aspired to the status and benefits it conferred.
Christine de Pisan wanted the ideal of chivalry extended to all warriors. Geoffroi de Charny endorsed the aspirations of those below the social level of knights; the key to the honoured and honourable life inherent in chivalry, he thought, ought to guide all who lived by the honest practice of arms. He would have been less happy with the aspirations of those bourgeois families that kept arms and armour and showed devotion to tournament and romance literature. Yet their interest, too, makes the point, valuable for our enquiry, that to all who wanted any share of power and influence, any recognition of high status, showing signs of a chivalrous life was crucially important.
This fact would not be lost on those wearing mitres, tonsures, or cloth hats rather than iron helms. A powerful show of prowess could add an accepted, perhaps necessary layer of respectability to high status grounded in ecclesiastical office or the unheroic possession of moneyed wealth. A town facing a formal declaration of war by the lord of the nearby castle, a religious house threatened or attacked by a knight who contested some monastic rights, a bishop defending his rights as a great lord—all would quickly appreciate the power of chivalry as prowess, the valorization of vigorous action taken with arms in defence of honour.
Public order was a problem of such urgency in high medieval society precisely, that is, because the capacity to use arms in this manner and a belief in its efficacy, even in its nobility, were such characteristic features at the top of society. The Abbot of Saint-Nicholas-au-Bois presumably had such thoughts in mind as he led an armed troop against the town of Crespy in Laonnais in the early fourteenth century; as his troop attacked the outskirts of the town, crying ‘Kill, kill! Death to the louts from Crespy!’, the abbot wounded one man with his own hand and then rode his horse over another. For their part, French townspeople claimed the characteristic chivalric right to private war; French knights indirectly recognized such rights by issuing formal challenges of war against these collective lordships. The number of men who claimed the social status of knighthood and who went to the wars as practising warriors undoubtedly declined during the Middle Ages; yet the code of knights, with its strong focus on prowess as the key to honour, cast its mantle over a widening circle of believers.

The Role of Formal Manners

As natural lay leaders in society, knights display the ideal behaviour to be expected of them. They know just how to speak to each person in the elaborate social hierarchy; they know when to speak, and when to fall politely silent. They know how to receive orders as graciously as they accept hospitality or fine gifts. They are now unmovably resolute, now overcome and swooning as their fine emotions take hold. As if seated in an opera house, we may feel that the measured gestures should be accompanied by music, the monologues and choruses being sung to tunes we simply no longer hear.
Agreement on the importance of fine manners among medieval contemporaries is impressive. Non-fictional works of instruction for knights provide the same point of view as that of so many works of imaginative literature. Yet so much seeming agreement raises interesting questions.
We might especially ask about the origin and intent of all this tireless emphasis on proper behaviour in various social settings and in dealings with various social levels. Was this instruction an attempt by those outside the caste to remake knights, to change their thinking and, in time, their behaviour? Did knights themselves resist, only reluctantly accepting a somewhat cramped framework for behaviour, or did they think that following such behaviour was important to their social dominance? Did the concern for manners and courtly behaviour actually civilize the knights in the exact sense of reducing their violence and integrating them into a more ordered society?
These are large questions that have attracted the attention of distinguished scholars. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias pictured the rough warrior being slowly civilized as the early modern gentleman. More recently, Stephen Jaeger has convincingly located the origins of courtliness—which would become so important in French romance and in all the vernaculars it touched—in the German court tradition beginning in the tenth century. No one, moreover, would deny that basic changes in aristocratic behaviour and aristocratic violence took place between (say) the later tenth and the later seventeenth century.
Recognizing the force and attractiveness of all this work, it is possible to consider chivalry at best as an unsteady ally of the complex forces at work producing these great changes. The evidence brought into play in this book reinforces a view that chivalry was no simple force for restraint. The worship of prowess makes chivalry a poor buttress to a unilinear progressive view of civilization. In fact, the formally polite modes of behaviour seem less an intrusive check on knighthood than an expression of the knights’ own high sense of worth, of rightful dominance in society; good manners were less a restraint on knightly behaviour than they were its characteristic social expression.
These forms of good behaviour, after all, informed the entire span of knightly life and set it apart from anything common. Much knightly violence itself was enthroned in good manners, not prohibited by them. As the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers wrote so succinctly, ‘the ultimate vindication of honour lies in physical violence’. The range of this good behaviour, as we have seen, extended from bloody deeds of prowess on the field of battle or in the tournament, through a piety which never lost its degree of lay independence, to polite behaviour and correct speech among mixed company whether in a great court or humble vavasour’s hall. We need only think of the scene repeated hundreds if not thousands of times in chivalric literature. A wandering knight comes conveniently to some castle or fortified house at the end of a hard day of riding and fighting.

The knight meets with a gracious reception from the good man in charge, who welcomes him into his home with open-handed hospitality; the host inevitably has a beautiful daughter who removes the knight’s armour, and dresses him in a soft robe of fine stuff; they converse most politely while the tables are set and the roast finishes. The next morning, after mass in the chapel, the knight is again on his way to adventure, which quite often means freeing his hosts from some dread peril which has become evident during his brief stay. In gratitude the host offers the victorious knight his beautiful daughter, an offer which is acknowledged with many thanks, but must be turned down with apologies because of a pressing quest or an earlier claim on the knight’s heart.
This scene celebrates the formal and superior chivalric manners under discussion. The knight is most polite in speech and action with everyone in this setting, male and female, even the enemy whose defeat will free the gracious host from an evil custom or a siege. Having unhorsed this enemy and hacked him into submission, the knight rips off his foe’s helmet and turns down the mail ventail (protecting the vulnerable throat), perhaps pounds the fellow’s face a bit with the pommel of his sword; then, bloody sword blade at the ready, he politely offers a choice of surrender or decapitation. If the foe yields, the victor cuts not.
What scholars traditionally term courtoisie is much in evidence here, and in all the knight’s social relations. The scene likewise indirectly praises the largesse of the host who freely gives what is his to the worthy knight. All show an interest in amors. If the knight makes no sexual advances to the daughter (or resists hers, if she is more forward) he has demonstrated loiauté by not repaying his host’s good with ill. The mass heard in the castle chapel shows the hero is pius. Even if no mortal combat is actually portrayed, from either wing of this domestic stage set, like summer thunder, come the echoes of the knight’s prouesse.
Sometimes courtliness and fine manners even seem subsumed within prowess, despite our sense (rooted in etymology) that they represent gentler virtues that internalize restraints. As Norman Daniel observes, ‘the sense of cortois seems to extend to any expedient favourable to a knight. Giving freely is aristocratic, and it is taking such an expedient brutally that makes it possible.’ William Marshal’s tactical advice that King Henry should pretend to disband his forces but then secretly reassemble them and suddenly ravage French territory elicits from the king a telling compliment: ‘By God’s eyes, Marshal, you are most courteous [molt corteis] and have given me good advice.
I shall do exactly as you suggest.’ In the opening of his Yvain, Chrétien refers to Arthur ‘whose prowess taught us to be brave and courteous’. When Perceval converts the Coward Knight to prowess in the Perlesvaus, he gives him the new name of Bold Knight, ‘for that is a more courtly name than the other’. At one point in the Lancelot do Lac Arthur rebukes Gawain for interrupting his reverie at a meal; his thoughts were courtly because they were about a man of great prowess: ‘Gawain, Gawain, you have shaken me out of the most courtly thoughts I ever had . . . for I was thinking about the best knight of all men of valour. That is the knight who was the victor at the encounter between Galehot and me.’
Certainly any denial or neglect of the accepted forms will quickly acquaint the miscreant with the cutting edge of prowess. Chivalric texts invariably note that two honourable people meeting each other exchange greetings; any failure is a significant event. Thus a squire riding disconsolate in the Lancelot (troubled by the news that his brother has been slain) commits a serious offence when he neglects to greet another squire waiting before some tents he passes; the offended squire attacks and mortally wounds him. A lapse of courtesy has cost him his life.
Denial of hospitality can easily be fatal if it touches Lancelot. Near the end of the Lancelot, the hero seeks lodging in a pavilion, but is refused by the maiden within, who tells him her knight will return and will object. He announces he is staying regardless, for he has no other lodging. Her knight does return, denies Lancelot hospitality, and orders him out with threats. Lancelot arms and tells the knight he will die for this dishonour.
His first sword stroke cuts off the man’s arm. Both the mortally wounded knight and his lady faint. When the knight’s brother tries to take vengeance, Lancelot stuns him with another great sword stroke, rips off his helmet, and beats him nearly to death with it. He spares the man’s life on condition of pardoning him for the death of his brother. It then emerges that there was a hermitage nearby; the battered brother takes Lancelot there. For the audience of this romance, was the point not that hospitality must not be denied?
Chivalric largesse, mythology, and refined manners certainly purveyed social power. They created an image of knights as naturally superior to all other laymen and on a par with the clerics; pious and appropriately violent, they are splendidly refined in life and love. These chivalric ideas, even if they sometimes seem rather abstract in their details, flowed into daily life through a thousand channels to became a force in social relationships. If the process is complex and can only be seen indirectly from our six or seven centuries of distance, the broad social result is by no means in doubt.

By Richard W. Kaeuper in the book 'CHIVALRY AND VIOLENCE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE', Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 1999, p.189-205 & 206-208. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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