In Our Time - Chivalry

Episode Date: February 13, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss chivalry, the moral code observed by knights of the Middle Ages. Chivalry originated in the military practices of aristocratic French and German soldiers, but developed into an elaborate system governing many different aspects of knightly behaviour. It influenced the conduct of medieval military campaigns and also had important religious and literary dimensions. It gave rise to the phenomenon of courtly love, the subject of much romance literature, as well as to the practice of heraldry. The remnants of the chivalric tradition linger in European culture even today.Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History and Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, University of LondonMatthew Strickland Professor of Medieval History at the University of GlasgowLaura Ashe Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester CollegeProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, the medieval knight for whom the novel is named, praises the idea of chivalry to the book's heroine, Rebecca. Schivalry, according to Ivanhoe, is, but the stay of the oppressed, the redressor of grievances, the curb of the tyrant. nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword.

Schivary was the code of honour observed by medieval knights. It began as a set of conventions about behaviour on the battlefield, and developed into an elaborate code of governing many different aspects of knightly behaviour, from a warrior's moral and religious duties to his love affairs. From the time of the Crusades onwards, chivalry was a significant factor in European society, not just influencing how war was conducted, but also leaving a significant legacy in art, music and literature.

With me to discuss chivalry are Mary Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History and Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London. Matthew Strickland, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, and Laura Ash, Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Worcester College. Matthew Strickland, can you give us some idea when chivalry, as we generally are going to regard it in this programme,

first appeared in recognisable form. Yes, it emerges clearly from the sources, the obscurity of the sources, around the year 1100, but it has its origins in the post-Carolingian world, the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the late 9th and early 10th century. And how did we see it forming? So it had its origins, what were they? Well, whereas the Carolingian Empire's wars...

We're talking about the Emperor of Charlemagne. Yeah, Emperor of Charlemagne. Crown King, Christmas Day. That's the one. Emperor, sorry. Indeed. And his wars are essentially wars of external expansion, often against enemies that are non-Christian, the Magyars, and so forth. What happens in the late 9th and 10th century is that Francia implodes into a number of small warring states of counties, which in themselves, fragment.

And it's from that turmoil that the origins of chivalry really seem to emerge. And what appears to happen is that groups of... of heavily armed warriors, knights, as we come to call them, forming around lords, local lords and castellans, develop a distinctive ethic of war. And this is different from the kind of ethic we see in the Anglo-Saxon or the Scandinavian world. In a very important sense that the world of bear wolf, the world of bead, if you were a warrior facing defeat, there were two choices,

death or slavery. what we see happening in the 10th, 11th century is these Frankish knights, these elite armed warriors fighting on horseback develop a brotherhood in arms, a sense that these local conflicts, often between men who are kinsmen or they are known quantities, they're culturally similar. They're Franks, they're Christians.

A sense of clemency develops, and crucially that's tied to ransom. So honorable surrender becomes one of the key facets of early chivalry. And this pushes into the 11th century and so it develops in the 11th century. There's a big change coming on but before we get to that can you just tell us the development that

pushes into the 11th century? Why does it gather pace there? Well it's to do with this nature of warfare becoming its small scale, it's localized between enemies of the same culture as Frankish Christian culture. What directions did they give them about behaviour on the battlefield? You've mentioned

the word warriors. Yes. What was the idea how should they behave? The idea is, is that because your opponent is a fellow Frank, he's a fellow elite cavalryman a knight, in defeat you are supposed to offer him the chance to surrender. Obviously, there's plenty of killing in fighting itself, but this code develops, an absolutely crucial code, that when you have the advantage over a defeated warrior,

a fellow knight, you should offer him clemency, and he can surrender for ransom. Where did that idea come from? that's a very good question. It's a disputed one. It seems to be partly due to the reluctance to kill fellow Christians within this period. There are penitential ordinances issued by the Frankish Church for killing in war between Christians. That's one element.

Secondly, monetary economy is developing in this period. So actually being able to ransom prisoners becomes easier. and crucially too, third factor, slavery, enslaveing Christian captives, becomes increasingly frowned upon. Mary Rubin, the church started to take a great interest in this in warfare towards the end of the, let's say, 11th century, when all sorts of things are being converged. Marriage is becoming considered in a different way. Society in a different way, but the church is moving in and the Christianisation begins to get underway. Christianisation more formally.

How did that affect chivalric values? It's really interesting, and you're right, the influence of the church becomes much more pervasive in all areas of life. And of course, in a way, the elite class, the people who are wealthy and influential, and indeed the great founders of monasteries and patrons of the church,

are absolutely crucial to sort of bring them on, as it were, to the values. And this takes many forms. It takes, for example, the form of the church prohibiting certain types of marriage, certain types of mob. Multiple marriages, indeed, which were common traditionally amongst Germanic people and emphasising what will become monogamous, lifelong marriage,

as we in a way still know it in the Christian tradition. It also means that just trying to impose some sort of control on all this activity that Matthew has described. So a movement in the late 10th century, bishops, just locally, not too ambitious but effective, councils whereby they summon the warriors of the area and say, look, between Thursday and Sunday, you do not fight. These are the days, you know, associated also with the days of Christ's passion and resurrection. You do not fight. Or you may want to fight amongst you lot, armed, trained, but you do not touch women and children and orphans and clerics, indeed, unarmed as they're meant to be, or indeed Jews on route and merchants. Have we any evidence of how much notice the knights took of this? great question well the councils continue the efforts continue so clearly it's not something that happens overnight but something is infusing of course we know that this was not regarded fully but it becomes

slowly slowly more of a set of norms that people know about are expected to adhere to and there is a certain penalty through the church through its through penance through excommunication indeed if you break them in them very very flagrant manner but we haven't all that much evidence by the sign of it, any hard evidence. No, rather we have evidence on the attempts. We obviously don't have so much evidence about the breaking. Now, what we have a twinning here, which is extremely interesting

for the whole of European culture, is primogenitors banging along, and the younger sons are finding great wealth, great opportunities, great power in forming and leading the great monasteries. Sorry I've used great four times, but it's worthwhile here.

Especially the Clooneyacs, a Cisterians, massively wealthy, massive landowners, These men actually acting as aristocrats in an abbey. That's very true. And that's another thing I think is often missed, that when we think of the church and the knights in aristocracy, these are not two separate entities. These are brothers.

These are cousins. You know, what is an abbot? He's my younger brother in a cacic sort of thing. Who can use a sword as well? Who can use a sword because we played together and trained together as boys. And conversely, also the knight would have a certain amount of literate education as well. in a great household, knightly household. So you're absolutely right.

This is the same class of people. And that is why these great monasteries have a really deep understanding of those who will become their founders and benefactors, and even sometimes knights who will retire at the end of their life to join a monastery.

And when the description of the fight against sin is articulated by monastic writers, it's fight. It's a fight against the devil. It's a chivalric, worthy, honorable fight. They become two very powerful pillars. working together. Laura Ash, can you give us a bit more detail

about what at this time, we're in the late 11th century, we haven't got to the Crusades yet, I have said that, because that is a huge changing factor. This time, a bit more detail, what was seen as essential values of the chivalric knight in its formative period? Well, you could say that at this point, it's debated whether chivalry as a code existed

because many of the characteristics that we regard as particularly essential to chivalry have to wait for the crusades to develop. Before the Crusades, we have an essential problem, which I think explains the huge flowering in chivalry, which is that fighting men had basically been told that they were going to hell. And of course, the problem is, if you're telling the entire ruling class of Europe

that they're not going to get the rewards of their own religion, then I think that sums up as an unsustainable social condition. And so at this point, obviously these warriors valued loyalty in one another. They value prowess. They value willingness to risk their lives for one another, for their lord. But at this point the flood of ideologies which came to make up chivalry had to wait

for the Pope to press the button as it were, for the Pope to say you need not be committing a sin merely by shedding blood. Can we distinguish between the chivalry tradition developing in what we can call this country, although they're all in bits and bombs and states and And France and Germany say, take those three. Are they very different traditions or is you beginning to become one thing?

Yeah, I think they're very different. Can you give us some illustration? Well, so, I mean, Matthew already mentioned the kind of Anglo-Saxon world. I mean, in the Anglo-Saxon world, when you defeated an enemy, you killed him. I mean, because that way you get rid of your enemies. Whereas in the Frankish world, as he's described, there was much more a sense that warfare is endemic, it's continued, It's continual if you've lost something this week.

You might win it back next week. And so in some ways, you could say that the clemency that Matthew described in the Frankish world actually helped warfare to remain endemic, you know, because there were enough people, because the stakes were lower and therefore it could carry on continually. And were the differences in manners between the two? Because in England there's a long tradition, a long, much longer tradition, of being infieldy to the state to the king. mattered more centrally, I'm asking you, not telling you, than in the other countries.

Did that make a, in the other places, we mustn't say countries, because they're all bits and bobs. Yeah. No, I think this is a dramatic difference because the chivalricode as it developed in France was very much centred around the aristocratic knight, the individual with his own warband, his own followers. Whereas in England there had been a much strong monarchy and of course the arrival of the Normans only really strengthen the grasp of the monarchy on the state. And so the effect is a very different role for the knight. And I think in the long run, actually, a more positive role,

a role in which the knight was enfolded into government. I mean, knights end up in Parliament in England in the 13th century. But at this point, it means that there is a sense in which monarchical power is stronger in England in a way that doesn't allow a sort of flowering of aristocratic ideology such as chivalries in France. It does go back, doesn't it? We're talking about Alfred being in that position and we can go back further than that. But just before we move on, Laura,

Miry was talking about the influence of the church. Can we talk about the relative importance of the sacred and the secular in bringing together this notion of chivalry? We can. We could for many hours. The question is, to what extent chivalry becomes a genuine piety that lay people have. I mean, it becomes the ideology for pious lay aristocratic men. And then the question is, has it actually absorbed Christian codes of living? Or is it in fact simply copying the framework of Christian codes of living? And it's difficult to say. We can say that clerics continually write that chivalry should be religious. So for clerics in the 12th century, a proper chivalric knight is chased, his virtue, He is humble. He is willing to shed his blood as Christ shed his blood.

He's like a monk. Exactly so. They figure knights like monks and monks figure themselves like knights. And this becomes a struggle for ideological power for the rest of the Middle Ages. But so for the clergy, chivalry is indeed supposed to be an almost monastic vocation with violence added in. But for the aristocracy, their values are very different. They value largesse above all, which is generosity, which is rewarding your followers. They value courtesy, which is this high ideal of one's behaviour in all gatherings.

One's behaviour at the court, one's behaviour with ladies and so on and so on. So there are definitely two separate strands that go to make up the ideals of chivalry. Matthew, you wanted to get in, and then I've got a question, for you. I was just taking up what Laura said. I mean, what's interesting, isn't it, is there is this creative tension between clerical ideas. of chivalry and that the secular aristocracy's view, and the fact that the tournament, which is the most important way in which chivalric ideas are developed and disseminated through a European-wide scene is actually prohibited by the church at the second latter in Council 1130

is a classic example of how there's a head-on collision. Going back to your point, Mary, though, about the clerics being the younger brothers of knights. I mean, at the courts, the 12th century courts, it's Kretti Andetois, he's a clerk who comes up with the great Romance. So there's a creative tension there between the ideals of the clergy. But the point I just want to stress

before we move on is that, yes, there's a tension, but the knights are profoundly religious, in a sense separate from the dictates. Well, let's go on to this religious business. I mean, skirting round it, we've got the platform. Then the Pope comes in at the end of the 11th century.

He's been around, but he comes in, and he comes in, And he said, we're going on crusades. And God will allow you to kill people, and you can go to heaven, provided you're fighting for God against God's enemies. That changes the entire game. And then from that, all sorts of things begin to accrete to the idea of chivalry and the knights who are involved in chivalry grow. Is that right?

It's certainly a very, very important moment, the preaching of the First Crusade by Urban, the second at Clermont in 1095. And as I always mentioned, the key point here is that the Pope says, unites you men of war who have been killing each other and terrorizing the peasantry within Christendom. Now turn your energies from this sinful internal war to fighting the enemies of Christ and to recapture the Holy Land. But I do think, though, that this is very much a clerical view. And while there is clearly, it pushes a button. There's a massive response to the First Crusade.

Knights from all over Europe sign up. with the promise of remittance of penance if you go on the journey and come back. You don't have to perform penance. If you die, then the belief is that you will gain martyrdom in war. So that's obviously a very powerful element introduced. Sorry, to interrupt, but Laura is saying earlier that the church didn't know how long he'd carry on dealing with its most powerful persons, the warrior class, telling them that they'd go to hell for what they're doing. Now they're telling them the opposite, don't they?

No, I think they're trying to make a distinction between valid war and war that leads to just war. Anything on the Crusades is a valid war, so it's game certain much. It's a holy war. I mean, holy war is not new in 1095. You think Alfred the Great, he and his warriors are fighting a holy war. But I think the key point is that clerical contemporaries see this as a way of salvation for the knight class. Briefly, and then I go to memory.

Yeah, just to say that absolutely a Knight on Crusade, at least when the Crusades were successful, It was felt that game, set and match, as you say, the night is saved. However, a night wasn't always on crusade. And the question is, how do you justify your normal daily life back at home when you're back in France or England? And, Mary, can you tell us, can you try to answer that question, but also tell us about how these military organizations inside knighthood began to grow? These clubs, really? Yes, they are clubs.

I mean, just to start by saying, it's important to remember that there is this supply of training. young men who are potentially very violent and what you do with them. Can you just stay on train for them? Sure. Because that's very interesting. I mean, they're trained very hard to do it very difficult stuff. They are, but they're also directed. I mean, ride on a horse, a big horse with huge weapons and without rains, killing other people for full speed.

It's tricky, and they start very young, don't they? They do start young, and they do it. It forms literally their body, let alone their attitude. But the interesting thing is that this is what we call the creative. tension between the violence and the Christian ethos, as it were. Already in the 1060s, they're going to Spain to fight the Muslims with the blessing of the Pope, the Pope before Urban II indeed. So there is this, again, church and its aristocracy. There is this understanding. You can find projects for this class to do good in the world. You can promise them something to the reward

in heaven, etc. So there is a sort of its presage throughout the 11th century. And of course, in the 1090s and the crusade to Jerusalem. the response is quite extraordinary and unexpected by the Pope. But I think Jerusalem is a different, is where it changes, I would suggest, you know from what I do. In terms of scope, absolutely. As soon as you say Jerusalem, the thing takes fire, doesn't it? But there is a connection because the families from southern France, from France and southern France, that tended to be the Crusaders in the 1060s in Spain,

it's their sons and grandsons who are some of the leaders of the Crusader Jerusalem. So there is an ethos, and you mentioned primogeniture before, certain dynasties are marked by a vocation of crusading wherever it's happening. But can we just go back to my original question, these chivalric orders? Can you just enumerate a few? And then the list of knows what I'm talking about. Okay. So I think you mean the military orders that develop particularly after the first crusade.

The hospitlers or the Templars. Again, the beginnings are sort of vague. They're in a foreign land. They don't know the language. So pilgrims will arrive with the crusade hosts. And soon after, once it's conquered, they need a place to. say, they need burial, they die there. And so groups around, particularly around language groups and ethnic groups develop. So for

example, the seeds of the Great Teutonic Order of Northern Europe are sown in Jerusalem in a hospital for German-speaking people. And it's recognized that a lot of people come and want to fight. And a format is conceptualized of a sort of a very holy knighthood, a particularly holy knighthood that will live like monks. And it's very telling. one of the greatest theologians and mystics of the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbott

helped design the rule of life for the Templar Order. He said, no more malice, but militia. It's better in Latin. So, meaning to say, take the violence of the night. We'll all be pleased. Can you remember it in Latin? Yes, of course. Non-malizia said Militia, Nova Militia,

a new military mode of being. So there's this constant creative, thought, what do you do with this powerful cohort of willing people? And one way is designing, so if you're living chased alone without a family in Tiberius or in some castle in the Galilee, garrisoning,

that's a terribly efficient way of mobilizing nightly force. Laura, you wanted to come in, but I rushed through what they had to do to become knights. Can you flesh that out? It was to do a great number of things. training was one of them. Can you just tell us more about it, where they came from and why they were such a small, really, group? Yeah, well, this is something that changes because certainly the words that we now identify with Knight and Chevalier originally referred to quite a large group of people, which is to say more or less all armed men. And then as time goes on through the 11th, 12th centuries, the group that are allowed to call themselves knights get smaller and smaller because it requires more and more resources.

resources, monetary resources, to have the training, to have the possessions. You know, a horse costs a fortune. Armour. Exactly. Armour costs a fortune. And so you get to this stage where the aristocracy is really drawing into itself all rights to chivalry. And those who are permitted to call themselves knights become fewer and fewer in number. And how were they, and so this group become, and as Miris said, they formed themselves into the Knights Templar and so, and so.

When did the, as it were, the ideas which came from a martial route and were directed on a Christian path, when did they begin to infiltrate into other things they did in society? Well, I think it's almost the reverse. It's almost as though knights living their daily lives back in Western Europe appropriated the sense of glory that came from, the Knights Templar that came from crusading and so on and deployed it to their own ends. So Matthew has already talked about the tournament and so on.

So the tournament being the place which is both the greatest exposition for the aristocracy of chivalric prowess. And yet at the same time something routinely decried by the church as sinful, wasteful, empty, pointless. And so what happens is you get a stage of development in late 12th century, early 13th century, when knightly discourse is simply appropriating to itself an idea that it is a pious ideal. I mean, Matthew mentioned that knights have an extreme piety. It's just not the piety of the church. And the tournament, though, to stay with that,

those are really serious training grounds, aren't they? And these young men have brought a very early to be very good horsemen, capable of the thing I gabbled about a bit earlier on. But the tournaments became essential training, grounds for them. They are very well organized, introduced, you've got big prizes, they're worth winning, and so on.

Can you? Well, in their origins, seemingly, they emerge into the sources in the 12th century again, it's no coincidence. They are meleys, they are carefully organized teams of knights training as heavy cavalry

manoeuvres. So jousting often is a prelude to this group combat, which is by far the most important element. And there you you learn to wear armor, you learn skills in horsemanship of single combat, capturing your opponent unharmed, because it's all about ransom of horses and armor. That's the prize that you get in the tournament. So if you win the tournament, you've got the other chaps horse and his armor.

That's right. So in a sense, if you look at something like the history of William Marshall, who is the great knight of the late 12th century, his early career from a landless fourth son to becoming regent of England, it's predicated in his early years on winning large, of money through horses and armour taken in the tournament. Briefly, and then I go to Mary. Yeah, just on that, this explains, of course, the fundamental economic motivation behind chivalry. I mean, it was the tournament circuit

which allowed younger sons to make their fortunes and to become great. And so this sense that we can make combat, this ideal of our class, we can make it, relatively speaking, safe, and we can keep doing it, and there will be great, great winners. Mary, can you... After you.

And just to say, that they're continuing... to be also external borders and battlefields, be it's Scotland or Wales, or Livonia, the Baltics, there is constant activity also at the borders, which is more expensive, more dangerous, but potentially much more glorious.

So we're talking about, I suppose, what I was going to come to, we're talking about a spread of chivalry, when these are roving around the place, we wouldn't call them mercenaries, would they, but they went to the Baltic for experience, money, glory? Glory, money. Of course, it has

this blessing of being a crusade because as the Middle Ages unfold in the later centuries, crusade can attach to almost any endeavor that the Pope feels is worthwhile. Like, for example, going on crusade to the south of France against the supposed heretics, the Cathars. So there is that, and you can have

blessing to warfare, to the seasonal warfare in northwest Europe, the Baltic states of today, in order to continue converting over the 13th and 14th century pagans into the Christian fold. And it becomes the absolutely done thing. The Henry IV, as a young man, Bollingbrock, he went off for two seasons and they were entertained and there were performances and all sorts of goings on, Arita Passage. And for the young

man who is not running estates yet, who is not running, doesn't have an office of state perhaps at court, this is a tremendous proving ground and also keeping people away where they can be troublesome for a while. Laura, one of the areas in which she will redeveloped was into the area of courtly love, rather unexpectedly really. Can you tell us what courtly love meant? Okay. So courtly love is a phrase

that needs to be expressed in inverted commas really. It's a modern way of summing up a variety of codes of practice between men and women by which there were highly wrought forms of behaviour that were acceptable and ideals whereby a knight would win his lady and so forth. But as you say, it's profoundly unexpected.

It's outside marriage. Well, so... That's what your notes say. Well, sometimes, there's a lyric expression of courtly love, which is the adoration of the unobtainable lady, which you see in Petrarchan sonnets, occasionally, Petrarchan sonnets, Shakespearean sonnets. That's that track.

But the other track is love in romance narrative, where actually quite often they get to marry their beloved and that's what they win. But the really strange thing is the idea that love should somehow make you a better night. I mean, this is what is suddenly claimed in the late 12th century and it makes very little sense. You know, if you imagine a footballer telling us teammates

that being in love makes him a better footballer. I bet they do. Well, maybe. Anyway, perhaps it does. But in any case, it's not always seen through. I think in the end, Courtly Love is a heightened social aristocratic code which developed at the same time

and amongst the same people as chivalry and the two became intertwined from then on with the result that there are times when love is seen as vital to chivalry there are other times when it's pushed more to the side. But isn't it, Laura, the idea that love ennobles the warrior, that the warrior isn't simply a skilled horseman, skill with his lads,

love ennobles and get the sense from the chivalric writing, particularly the 14th century, the knights actually believe this. Yeah, no, there is a sense. Mary to come in now, please. But there's also something that's the converse. That is, mystics, great religious writers, will speak in the terms of courtly love when they speak of their love to Christ,

of their devotion to the Virgin Mary. So again, this is a culture deeply intertwined. And I think we want to introduce here the notion of the life cycle, meaning to say, When you're young and making your way as a knight, you participate in quite a different manner in this idea of courtly love games than if you are a middle-aged person,

a father, a head of an estate, holding offices of state, to be a knight at 18 or 20 and to be a night at 45 as a different matter. And that is why we have so many knights who give up at what then was old age now, just middle age, and they join a monastery, they retire to their estates,

they turn to learning and the best example of all is the great Henry Grossmont, Duke of Lancaster, who is one of the greatest nights ever. He also went to the Baltic. He also did that. And a great figure in British history. And in middle age, he writes the most extraordinary devotional work. The book of Holy Medicine, which is all about a penance in a way for a life in arms. There's a lot to get through because it's so interesting. It's unpacked this stuff. So if we can shorten our answers now, I want to get two or three things quickly done,

then we can move on. The first is we're missing out the worship, the new worship of Mary Mother of God. Mary Mother of Christ, sorry, Mary Mother of Christ, which I think, wasn't it part of the reason that courtly love, the worship of women, grew? Well, quite plausibly.

I mean, Mary is Miris area. Well, it gives, it's... How euphemous. So, no, it all comes together. It's exactly in these circles, both monastic and lay, that Mary becomes this both a mother and a figure of desire and a love. And we can find sometimes in the poetry, you cannot tell. Who are they talking about?

The yearning to Mary or the yearning for Marie or Mariette or other figures of more of secular love. But that is something that is enjoyed and played upon. But she does get drawn into Shilry drastically. She is regarded as. special patroness of knights. And indeed it's often famously said that for 500 years in Europe, there wasn't a single battle in which Mary wasn't invoked on both sides. Matthew, can you tell us about the contemporary written sources?

For sure. Well, we've been talking a lot about clerical ideas. And what is refreshing is that really from the 13th century onwards, we start to get texts written in the vernacular languages by knights themselves. and perhaps the most important of these is a work called the Livre de Chevalry, the book of Chevalry, written by the leading French knight Geoffrey de Cheney,

who's killed, practicing what he preaches, holding the Oriflam, the French war banner in the battle against the Black Prince of Poitiers. And his book was written probably for the knights of King John the Second of France's new Chevalric Order,

the Order of the Star. And so we actually have a book written by a man seen by his peers to be the leading figure of French chivalry. And it's fascinating. It ties together a lot of what we've been talking about. He sees himself driven by courtly love to his lady. He's profoundly pious. He's the first owner or known owner of the Churin Shroud. But his motto is, he who achieves more is the more worthy. And that gets us into the world of competitive chivalric reputation. It's all about feats of

arms. What he says is, you know, young knights have got to start off jousting, then go to war. war will earn you merit. The most meritorious of war is holy war, war for God. You want to come in, Laura, but I... Just quickly to say that one thing that Jeffrey Dushanee has done to square the circle is that he thinks of prowess as a gift from God. And therefore, you know, no longer is it something that might bring you into sin. If you are great in war, then God must love you.

Can we put a caveat in here? We've talked about idealisation or one. It seems to me, and I've been reading for, not for this programme, other things, that there was a lot of bluff going on and there was a lot of hypocrisy and we must face up to that. We talk about the black prince, one of which I've been reading about my own purposes.

This great, great knight, Berm, Cressee, Poitier, what could be greater. He killed his prisoners. Yes, he did, towards the end of that battle at Poitier. He said the prisoners should be killed. That's Henry the Fifth at Ashen Court? No, we disagree here, but I can tell,

I can show you after this sort. He killed it. Many, and they can't. founded up the dead after that battle and it was massive. I have two ladies have their hands up at the moment. So I don't think we should think that everybody who espoused this ideal carried it through to the battlefield. Before the ladies getting, could I just say that?

I think what I would say is that chivalry certainly is, it's a bloody business, but war is about fighting and there is quite a lot of killing. The point I think is that in reality that chivalry is about restraint in victory. and yes the Black Prince, for example, orders the sack of the city of Limoges according to the laws of war. So there are constraints to killing. There are also legitimate elements to it.

And his father, Edward, put up the dragon which men take no prisoners. And Henry Vipterner, Black Prince took no prisoners at the end of that Battle of Paget. Honestly, he really did. Laura. But I think the thing to understand about this is that chivalry includes a great variety

of action that we were considered to be violent and horrifying. I mean, there is, and you can call it hypocrisy if you like, but I think that chivalry is really a term for, you know, it's a term of art for the aristocrats of Western Europe. It means success. And you could be praised for being chivalric if you've done something underhand if it succeeded.

You know, the greatest chivalric nights at the time are the ones who know when to withdraw and when to fight and when to be clement and when to be merciless. But they'd only chivalric to each other as well. Well, that's exactly it. The code binds only a specific class. Your companies of men, whom, and now the word you used earlier,

mercenaries, is very, very much to the point. If you hire men on contract and they travel with you and they work for you and they raise the countryside and they burn villages and they behave very badly to the local population, as they did in southwest France in the late 14th century regularly

in the course of the Hundred Years' War, that's not you being un-Shevouric. So there's a tremendous amount of bad warfare going on, which is not touched by this, as you say, by this term of art, strictly speaking. And if anything, and I hope Matthew agrees here, in the 14th and 15th century, there is almost an over-codification so that the limit of where the laws of chivalry apply becomes highly legalistic. and there's a tremendous amount and a growing amount of siege and and herring of countryside and so on that simply it's not within its remits

it may be within the remits of criminal law etc but in fact it's happening all the time and some great English people are leading it no that's true and if you read chroniclers like Fossa they do make a distinction between the actions of the nobility and the actions of the base archers excuse me the base arches who won most of those wars indeed

but they're troops who are Bowman, we call them. Yoman, Bowman. But Frasar, for example, tells us that at Cressie, it's the Welsh knifemen who kill the wounded French knights. Or the sack of Cannes in 1346. Thomas Holland, the chivalrous knight rescues nuns from archers who are running a mock and raping women. And then chivalrously takes three leading French knights into his custody to save them from the archers and gets 10,000 gold crowns for their ransom. One more comment on this then.

And let's start now. Warfare changed. Did chivalry change with it? Guns came in. Bowman proved to be more effective on the field than people charging on horses, as we saw at, I see, Poitiers, Agincourt, and many, many other places. Spears in the ground, as the Scots used, were against, were very good against, and so on and so forth. These chivalry changes as technology changed. The changing face of war, particularly in the 14th century, the rise of massed archery, of pikemen, it certainly increases the casualties among knights and nobles. I mean, 1,500 knights have probably killed at Cressey French knights. But chivalry, as the code of the officer class, the knightly class, continues very vibrantly until at least the 16th century. It's the rise of artillery, of effective handguns on the field,

and in particular the rise of professional standing armies which effectively changes a knightly elite into an officer class. Uniforms take the place of individual heraldic insignia. Do you want to talk about this change along? Yeah, well, just to say that there were some notable kind of historically shattering events. In 1302, a chivalric French army was routed by a group of what they regarded as Belgian peasants who were pikemen. So with different forms of warfare, it became the case. that the man on the horse

cease to be invincible. And yet there is this tremendous afterlife, nonetheless, of this cultural core of civility. So, for example, 1453, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, what is the response? The Duke of Burgundy creates an order and starts raising a crusade

in order to go and save it. So these habits amongst the elite nurtured in court still is extremely important. And it's the way exactly of setting themselves apart from this lower, lower, professional type and as well from of course merchant and bourgeois sort of upstarts rising in the

state. And Schuroy has a renaissance if you think about the court of Henry the 8th, Francis I first, these great monarchs. Field of the cloth of gold. Absolutely. Absolutely. You could argue finish it off as well as pushing forward didn't you. Well it is in a moment of transition but in a sense the last flickerings you could see

of what we might have a sort medieval view of chivalry. I think about the court of Elizabeth I first and the jousting of people like Dudley and Clifford These people are steeped in chivalric. But there is an idea that it continues, it takes different forms. I mean, you have chosen as perfect gentle knight, which he's very ironic about, but he's talking about, beginning to talk about a gentleman,

and the gentleman taking on much of the accoutrema, moral accoutrement, of the chivalric knight and so it potters through English, well, I know, but you know about lots, for a very long time, you could argue it's still around in a way today. Absolutely. Well, what happens is, as I say, I mean, the nobility, are always the military elite. So that notion of chivalry survives into the nobility of the ancient regime.

And then if you think about the Gothic revival in the 19th century, muscular Christianity takes on this idea of the chivalrous gentleman. Very, very powerful concept in Victorian society. And since you invited not just to talk about England, of course, the knights who, the Hidalgos who go over to Mexico and conquer for the Spanish kings, see themselves as doing chivalry, Belric work. And at the same time, just a few decades later, it'll be the great Don Quixote,

which is for us the mark of the end of chivalry, the wistful romance about chivalry that is already dead. And ultimately, Edmund Burke, with the death of Marie Antoinette, the true end of chival. Well, do you think so? Because it's arguable. We're in the anniversary of the First World, obviously, that certain behaviors by men and officers were could be called chivalry and were based on that notion. Laura?

Yeah, I mean, the horrifying spectacle of men with bare nets, i.e. men with what's effectively swords, marching towards artillery, is really an echo of that desperate change in the 14th century and you think, really, we haven't learnt much? But it's the code, isn't it? The men that the officers in the First World War

have been brought up on a literature of Foassar, of the Chevalier Bayer, of Charles Kingsley. All reprinted in the 19th century. Exactly. I think the thing is that one could say chivalry doesn't die, chivalry transforms into the ideas of an officer and a gentleman. I mean, look at all of the subjects of the painters.

The parapherites. Yes. Well, it starts with Tennessee early in the 19th century, of course. And Walter, you began with Scott. And again, Scott was big, not just in England and Scotland. In Europe, translated massively read through our European. Great influence on top. Absolutely. So the idea lingers.

Laura, last word, I think. I was just going to say that it's very striking that that quotation that you read out from Scott at the beginning expressed that idea that's original to French chivalry, that chivalry is a bastion of independence against tyranny. And it's striking that it should be that that should come back in the 19th century. And in the 20th century, of course, it's challenged by the whole feminist critique of behavior between men and women. Do we want men to have a different code that binds them in their violence? Or do we want to rethink it? Because obviously another programme,

we'll give us so many good ideas. We will take them all up. Thank you very much to me, Rubin, Matthew Strickland, Laura Ash. There are dozens of addition to have been our time about the Middle Ages. They're available online or on our In Our Time website. Next week, Social Darwinism.

Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.com.