Chretien De Troyes' Yvain: Grey Knights

Although the debates which account for much of the currency in the marketplace of ideas have their own intrinsic value, Joachim Bumke also addresses both the grimmer reality of things and the ideal in his The Concept of Knighthood of the Middle Ages. In his exploration of the historical context of knightly identity, he writes:

The aristocratic knighthood of which courtly poetry tells cannot be explained by shifting it into the social hierarchy. It is an educational and cultural idea of far-reaching significance and is a phenomenon of intellectual history rather than social history. The reality of the nobility around 1200 obviously looked quite different. We hear of political murders, and the feuds of the great men were conducted with treachery, extortion, robbery, and arson. In opposition to this crude reality the poets set up the chivalric ideal of virtue, the dream of the nobleman who incorporates humility into his nobility and therefore strives to satisfy at one and the same time the duties of the world and claims of God. (120)

Bumke's arguments are persuasive as he argues that there is a distinct dividing line between the idealized hope and the material existence of knighthood. The noble aristocracy was not as noble or genteel as one might imagine. The truth of the matter was that life was short and brutal, full of sickness, plague, and treachery (Huizinga 1- 19). What was needed to elevate the thinking and, thus, hopefully, the actions of the nobles were tales of valor and adventure, of justice and love. The stark reality of court intrigue was not that of courtly game but of real life-and-death situations where one may need to be heartless and cruel to survive, let alone succeed and prosper. Knights could either be the brutish enforcers of the powers that were or they could be elevated to stand for moral codes of conduct and of virtues to which all men ought to strive to represent. It was indeed an era where virtuous conduct and temporal duty at times could be at loggerheads.

The meaning of the term “chivalry,” of which authors such as Leon Gautier endeavor to provide the clearest meaning, has yet to be given a proper examination. Within the historical context of feudalism, an era of European history where different temporal forces compressed and expanded chivalry to have practical applications, our definitions are both simultaneously weakened and broadened. Maurice Keen begins his remarkable text on the subject of chivalry with this disclaimer:

Chivalry is an evocative word, conjuring up images in the mind--of the knight fully armed, perhaps with the crusaders--red cross sewn upon his surcoat; of martial adventures in strange lands; of castles with tall towers and of the fair women who dwelt in them. It is also, for that very reason, a word elusive of definition. One can define within reasonably close limits what is meant by the word knight, the French chevalier: it denotes a man of aristocratic standing and probably of noble ancestry, who is capable, if called upon, of equipping himself with a war horse and the arms of a heavy cavalryman, and who has been through certain rituals that make him what he is--who has been “dubbed” to knighthood. But chivalry, the abstraction from chevalier, is not so easily pinned down. It is a word that was used in the middle ages with different meanings and shades of meaning by different writers and in different contexts. Sometimes, especially in early texts, it means no more than a body of heavily armed horsemen, a collective of chevaliers. Sometimes chivalry is spoken of as an order of religion: sometimes it is spoken of as an estate, a social class-the warrior class whose martial function according to medieval writers, was to defend the patria and the Church. Sometimes it is used to encapsulate a code of values apposite to this order or estate. Chivalry cannot be divorced from the martial world of the mounted warrior: it cannot be divorced from aristocracy, because knights commonly were men of high lineage: and from the middle of the twelfth century on it very frequently carries ethical or religious overtones. But it remains a word elusive of definition, tonal rather than precise in its implications. (1-2)

So often, what we find in recorded histories of the life and practices of the knighthood are far different than what we see in the fictions generated at the same time. There is often a large difference in the idealized heroic figure and the mortal man who served his lord, both in war and peacetime, and who was subject to various societal pressures that were far out of his immediate control. The knight, in a feudal system, was not the knight errant of which we read in romance and legend. The knight was inextricably linked to the powers which created him, each with their own agenda for controlling and utilizing the medieval warrior. Knights were armed fighters defending their lord's interests and property. They were agents of the Church, deputized for the Church's goals in Crusades, as well as enforcers for domestic concerns. The knights also had self-interests to pursue, namely, the competition with others of equal or near rank to win both land and title and to amass force enough to maintain it. What remains in an analysis of European chivalry are echoes of the ideal, resonances of directives for knightly conduct.

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