Phenomenon of Chivalry

He was clothed in white tunic, red robe and black coat, representing respectively the anticipated purity of his morals, the blood he capability shed for value or God, and the death he must be active to meet unflinchingly. For a day he fasted; he passed a night at church in prayer, confessed his sins to a priest, attended Mass, received communion, heard a sermon on the moral, religious, neighborly and military duties of a knight, and solemnly promised to fulfill them. He thusly advanced to the altar with a sword hanging from his deal; the priest removed the sword, blessed it, and replaced it upon his neck. The candidate turned to the seated lord from whom he sought knighthood, and was met with a stern research: "For what purpose do you desire to enter the order? If to be rich, to take your ease, and be held in honor without doing honor to knighthood, you are unworthy of it, and would be to the order of knighthood what the simoniacal clerk is to the prelacy." The candidate was prompt with a reassuring reply. Knights or ladies then clothed him in knightly array of hauberk, cuirass or breastplate, armlets, gauntlets (ar more thand gloves), sword and spurs. (Gold spurs were the sign of a knight, silver spurs of a squire; to "win his spurs"--of gold--meant to attain to knighthood). The lord, rising, gave him the ac

Chivalry, beginning in the tenth century, reached its height in the thirteenth, suffered from the brutality of the Hundred Years' War, shriveled in the ruthless hate that divided the English aristocracy in the Wars of the Roses, and died in the theological fury of the religious wars of the sixteenth century. But it left over(p) its decisive mark upon the society, education, manners, literature, art and vocabulary of medieval and redbrick Europe.

The Saracens were astonished by the crudeness and cruelty of the Crusaders; even the cracking Bohemund, to show his contempt of the Greek emperor, sent him a load of sliced off noses and thumbs. Such men were exceptional, but they were plentiful. It would of of course be absurd to expect soldiers to be saints. Good sidesplitting requires its own unique virtues.

These rough knights drove the Moors into Granada, the Slavs from the Order, the Magyars from Italy and Germany. They tamed the Norse into Normans, and brought French civilization into England on the points of their swords. They were what they had to be.

"Medieval History: epos Stuff." Economist 4 Nov. 1989: 111.

All this,however, was chivalric theory. A hardly a(prenominal) knights lived up to it, as a few Christians rose to the surd heights of Christian selflessness. But human nature, born of the hobo camp and the beast, sullied the bingle ideal like the other. The same hero who one day f ought bravely in tournament or battle might on another be a faithless murderer; he might carry his honor as proudly as his plume and, like Lancelot, Tristram, and more real knights, break up fine families with adultery. He might talk of protecting the weak, and strike unarmed peasants down with a sword. He treated with scorn the manual worker on whose labor rested his citadel of gallantry, and with frequent coarseness and perfunctory brutality the wife whom he had sworn to cherish and protect. He could hear mass in the morning, rob a church in the afternoon, and drink himself into obscenity into
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