Chivalry

 

1 DUBBING TO KNIGHTHOOD

FROM the second half of the eleventh century, various texts, soon to become more numerous, begin to mention that here and there a ceremony has taken place for the purpose of “making a knight”. The ritual consisted of several acts. To the candidate, who as a rule was scarcely more than a boy, an older knight first of all handed over the arms symbolic of his future status; in particular, he girded on his sword.1 Then, almost invariably, this sponsor administered a heavy blow with the flat of his hand on the young man’s neck or cheek—the paumée or colée, as the French documents term it. Was it a test of strength? Or was it—as was held by some rather late medieval interpreters—a method of making an impression on the memory, so that, in the words of Ramon Lull, the young man would remember his “promise” for the rest of his life? The poems do indeed often show the hero trying not to give way under this rude buffet—the only one, as a chronicler remarks, which a knight must always receive and not return;2 on the other hand, as we have seen, a box on the ear was one of the commonest methods, sanctioned by the legal customs of the time, of ensuring the recollection of certain legal acts—though it is true that it was inflicted on the witnesses and not on the parties themselves. But a very different and much less purely rational meaning seems at first to have attached to the gesture of “dubbing” (the word was derived from an old Germanic verb meaning “to strike”), originally considered so essential to the making of a knight that the term came to be used habitually to describe the whole ceremony. The contact thus established between the hand of the one who struck the blow and the body of the one who received it transmitted a sort of impulse—in exactly the same way as the blow bestowed by the bishop on the clerk whom he is ordaining priest. The ceremony often ended with an athletic display. The new knight leapt on his horse and proceeded to transfix or demolish with a stroke of his lance a suit of armour attached to a post; this was known as the quintaine .

By its origins and by its nature dubbing to knighthood is clearly connected with those initiation ceremonies of which primitive societies, as well as those of the ancient world, furnish many examples—practices which, under different forms, all had the common object of admitting the young man to full membership of the group, from which his youth had hitherto excluded him. Among the Germans they reflected a warlike society. Without prejudice to certain other features—such as the cutting of the hair, which was sometimes found later, in England, in association with dubbing—they consisted essentially in a delivery of arms. This is described by Tacitus and its persistence at the period of the invasion is attested by many texts. There can be no doubt as to the continuity between the Germanic ritual and the ritual of chivalry. But in changing its setting the act had also changed its social significance.

Among the Germans all free men were warriors. All had therefore the right to initiation by arms wherever this practice was an essential part of the tradition of the folk (we do not know if it was universal). On the other hand, one of the characteristics of feudal society was, as we know, the formation of a group of professional fighting-men, consisting primarily of the military vassals and their chiefs. The performance of the ancient ceremony naturally became restricted to this military class; and in consequence it came near to losing any kind of permanent social foundation. It had been the rite which admitted a man to membership of the people. But the people in the ancient sense—the small civitas of free men—no longer existed; and the ceremony began to be used as the rite which admitted a man to membership of a class, although this class still lacked any clear outline. In some places the usage simply disappeared; such seems to have been the case among the Anglo-Saxons. But in the countries where Frankish custom prevailed it survived, though for a long time it was not in general use or in any way obligatory.

Later, as knightly society became more clearly aware of what separated it from the unwarlike multitude and raised it above them, there developed a more urgent sense of the need for a formal act to mark the individual’s entry into the society so defined, whether the new member was a young man of “noble” birth who was being admitted into adult society, or—as happened much more rarely—some fortunate upstart placed on a level with men of ancient lineage by recently acquired power, or merely by his own strength or skill. In Normandy, as early as the end of the eleventh century, to say of the son of a great vassal: “He is not a knight”, was tantamount to implying that he was still a child or an adolescent.3Undoubtedly the concern thus to symbolize every change of legal status as well as every contract by a visible gesture conformed to characteristic tendencies in medieval society—as witness the frequently picturesque ritual of entry into the craft gilds. It was necessary, however, that the change of status thus symbolized should be clearly recognized as such, which is why the general adoption of the ceremony of dubbing really reflected a profound modification in the idea of knighthood.

During the first feudal age, what was implied by the term chevalier, knight, was primarily a status determined either by a de facto situation or by a legal tie, the criterion being purely personal. A man was called chevalier because he fought à cheval, on horseback, with full equipment; he was called the chevalier of someone when he held a fief of that person, on condition of serving him armed in this fashion. The time came, however, when neither the possession of a fief nor the criterion—necessarily a somewhat vague one—of mode of life was any longer sufficient to earn the title; a sort of consecration was necessary as well. The transformation was completed towards the middle of the twelfth century. A turn of phrase in use even before 1100 will help us to grasp its significance. A knight was not merely “made”; he was “ordained”. This was how it was put, for example, in 1098 by the count of Ponthieu as he was about to arm the future Louis VI.4 The whole body of dubbed knights constituted an “order”, ordo. These are learned words, ecclesiastical words, but we find them from the beginning on the lips of laymen. They were by no means intended—at least when they were first used—to suggest an assimilation with holy orders. In the vocabulary which Christian writers had borrowed from Roman antiquity, an ordo was a division of society, temporal as well as ecclesiastical. But it was a regular, clearly defined division, conformable to the divine plan—an institution, really, and not merely a plain fact.

Nevertheless, in a society accustomed to live under the sign of the supernatural, the rite of the delivery of arms, at first purely secular, could scarcely have failed to acquire a sacred character and two usages, both of them very old, gave openings for the intervention of the Church.

In the first place there was the blessing of the sword. Originally it had had no specific connection with the dubbing. Everything in the service of man seemed in that age to call for this protection from the snares of the Devil. The peasant obtained a blessing for his crops, his herd, his well; the bridegroom, for the marriage bed; the pilgrim, for his staff. The warrior naturally did the same for the tools of his profession. The oath “on consecrated arms” was already known to the old Lombard law.5 But most of all the arms with which the young warrior was equipped for the first time seemed to call for such sanctification. The essential feature was a rite of contact. The future knight laid his sword for a moment on the altar. This gesture was accompanied or followed by prayers, and though these were inspired by the general form of benediction, they early took on a form specially appropriate to an investiture. In this form they appeared already, shortly after 950, in a pontifical compiled in the abbey of St. Alban of Mainz. This compilation, a substantial part of which was doubtless based on borrowings from older sources, was soon in use throughout Germany, as well as in northern France, England, and even Rome itself, where it was imposed by the influence of the Ottonian court. It diffused far and wide the model of benediction for the “newly-girt” sword. It should be understood, however, that this consecration at first constituted only a sort of preface to the ceremony. The dubbing proceeded afterwards according to its peculiar forms.

Here again, however, the Church was able to play its part. Originally the task of arming the adolescent could as a rule be performed only by a knight already confirmed in that status—his father, for example, or his lord; but it might also be entrusted to a prelate. As early as 846, Pope Sergius had girded the baldric on the Carolingian Louis II. Similarly, William the Conqueror later had one of his sons dubbed by the archbishop of Canterbury. No doubt this compliment was paid less to the priest as such than to the prince of the Church, chief of many vassals. Nevertheless, a pope or a bishop could scarcely dispense with religious ceremonial. In this way, the liturgy was enabled to permeate the whole ceremony of dubbing.

This process was completed by the eleventh century. It is true that a pontifical of Besançon composed at this time contains only two benedictions of the sword, both of them very simple. But from the second of these it emerges very clearly that the officiating priest was supposed to do the arming himself. Nevertheless, to find a genuine religious ritual of dubbing, we must look farther north, towards the region between Seine and Meuse which was the true cradle of most authentic feudal institutions. Our oldest piece of evidence here is a pontifical of the province of Rheims, compiled towards the beginning of the century by a cleric who, while taking the Mainz collection as his model, none the less drew abundantly on local usages. Together with a benediction of the sword, which reproduces that in the Rhenish original, the liturgy comprises similar prayers for the other arms or insignia—banner, lance, shield, with the single exception of the spurs, the delivery of which was to the end reserved for laymen. Next follows a benediction upon the future knight himself, and finally it is expressly mentioned that the sword will be girded on by the bishop. After an interval of nearly two centuries, the ceremonial appears in a fully developed form, once again in France, in the pontifical of the bishop of Mende, William Durand, which was compiled about 1295, though its essential elements apparently date from the reign of St. Louis. Here the consecratory rôle of the prelate is carried to the ultimate limit. He now not only girds on the sword; he also gives the paumée; in the words of the text, he “marks” the aspirant “with the character of knighthood”. Adopted in the fourteenth century by the Roman pontifical, this form was destined to become the official rite of Christendom. As to the accessory practices—the purifying bath, imitated from that taken by catechumens, and the vigil of arms—these do not appear to have been introduced before the twelfth century or ever to have been anything but exceptional. Moreover, the vigil was not always devoted entirely to pious meditations. If we are to believe a poem of Beaumanoir, it was not unknown for it to be whiled away to the sound of fiddles.6Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suppose that any of this religious symbolism was ever indispensable to the making of a knight, if only because circumstances would often have prevented it from being carried out. At all times knights might be made on the field, before or after the battle; witness the accolade (colée)—performed with the sword, according to late medieval practice—which Bayard bestowed on his king after Marignano. In 1213, Simon de Montfort had surrounded with a religious pomp worthy of a crusading hero the dubbing of his son, whom two bishops, to the strains of Veni Creator, armed as a knight for the service of Christ. From the monk Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, who took part in it, this ceremony drew a characteristic exclamation: “O new fashion of chivalry! Fashion unheard of till then!” The less ostentatious blessing of the sword itself, according to the evidence of John of Salisbury,7 was not general before the middle of the twelfth century. It seems, however, to have been very widely adopted at that time. The Church, in short, had tried to transform the ancient delivery of arms into a “sacrament”—the word, which is found in the writings of clerics, gave no offence in an age when theology was still far from having assumed a scholastic rigidity and people continued freely to lump together under the name of sacrament every kind of act of consecration. It had not been wholly successful in this; but it had carved out a share for itself, larger in some places, more restricted in others. Its efforts, by emphasizing the importance of the rite of ordination, did much to kindle the feeling that the order of chivalry was a society of initiates. And since every Christian institution needed the sanction of a legendary calendar, hagiography came to its aid. “When at mass the epistles of St. Paul are read,” says one liturgist, “the knights remain standing, to do him honour, for he was a knight.”82 THE CODE OF CHIVALRY

Once the religious element had been introduced, its effects were not confined to strengthening the esprit de corps of the knightly world. It also exercised a potent influence on the moral law of the group. Before the future knight took back his sword from the altar he was generally required to take an oath defining his obligations.9 It was not taken by all dubbed knights, since not all of them had their arms blessed; but, many ecclesiastical writers considered, with John of Salisbury, that by a sort of quasi-contract even those who had not pronounced it with their lips were “tacitly” bound by the oath through the mere fact of having accepted knighthood. Little by little the rules thus formulated found their way into other texts: first into the prayers, often very beautiful ones, which punctuated the course of the ceremony; later, with inevitable variations, into various writings in the vulgar tongue. One of these, composed shortly after 1180, was a celebrated passage from the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. In the following century these rules were set forth in some pages of the prose romance of Lancelot; in the German Minnesang, in a fragment of the “Meissner”; finally and above all, in the short French didactic poem entitled L’Ordene de Chevalerie. This little work had a great success. Paraphrased before long in a cycle of Italian sonnets, imitated in Catalonia by Ramon Lull, it opened the way to the abounding literature which, during the last centuries of the Middle Ages, drained to the lees the symbolic significance of the dubbing ceremony and, by its final extravagances, proclaimed the decadence of an institution which had become more a matter of etiquette than of law, and the impoverishment of the very ideal which men professed to rate so high.

Originally this ideal had not lacked genuine vitality. It was superimposed on rules of conduct evolved at an earlier date as the spontaneous expression of class consciousness; rules that pertained to the fealty of vassals (the transition appears clearly, towards the end of the eleventh century, in the Book of the Christian Life by Bishop Bonizo of Sutri, for whom the knight is, first and foremost, an enfeoffed vassal) and constituted above all a class code of noble and “courteous” people. From these secular moral precepts the new decalogue borrowed the principles most acceptable to the religious mind: generosity; the pursuit of glory or “praise” (los); contempt for fatigue, pain and death—“he has no desire to embrace the knight’s profession,” says the German poet Thomasin, “whose sole desire is to live in comfort”.10 But this reorientation was effected by imparting to these same rules a Christian colouring; and, still more, by cleansing the knightly tradition of those profane elements which had occupied, and in practice continued to occupy, so large a place in it—that dross which had brought to the lips of so many rigorists, from St. Anselm to St. Bernard, the old play on words so charged with the cleric’s contempt for the world: non militia, sed malitia:11 “Chivalry is tantamount to wickedness.” But after the Church had finally appropriated the feudal virtues, what writer would thenceforth have dared to repeat this equation? Lastly, to the old precepts which had undergone this process of refinement, others were added of an exclusively spiritual character.

The clergy and the laity were therefore united in demanding of the knight that piety without which Philip Augustus himself considered that he was no true prudhomme. He must go to mass “every day” or at least “frequently”; he must fast on Friday. Nevertheless this Christian hero remained by nature a warrior. What he looked for most from the benediction upon his arms was that it would make them effective, as is clearly shown in the wording of the prayers themselves. But the sword thus consecrated, though it might still as a matter of course be drawn at need against his personal enemies or those of his lord, had been given to the knight first of all that he might place it at the service of good causes. The old benedictions of the end of the tenth century already lay emphasis on this theme, which is greatly expanded in the later liturgies. Thus a modification of vital importance was introduced into the old ideal of war for war’s sake, or for the sake of gain. With this sword, the dubbed knight will defend Holy Church, particularly against the infidel. He will protect the widow, the orphan, and the poor. He will pursue the malefactor. To these general precepts the lay texts frequently add a few more special recommendations concerning behaviour in battle (not to slay a vanquished and defenceless adversary); the practice of the courts of law and of public life (not to take part in a false judgment or an act of treason—if they cannot be prevented, the Ordene de Chevalerie modestly adds, one must withdraw); and lastly, the incidents of everyday life (not to give evil counsel to a lady; to give help, “if possible”, to a fellow-being in distress).

It is hardly surprising that the realities of knightly life, with its frequent trickery and deeds of violence, should have been far from conforming always to these aspirations. One might also be inclined to observe that, from the point of view either of a “socially” inspired ethic or of a more purely Christian code, such a list of moral precepts seems a little short. But this would be to pass judgment, whereas the historian’s sole duty is to understand. It is more important to note that in passing from the ecclesiastical theorists or liturgists to the lay popularizers the list of knightly virtues appears very often to have undergone a rather disturbing attenuation. “The highest order that God has made and willed is the order of chivalry,” says Chrétien de Troyes, in his characteristically sweeping manner. But it must be confessed that after this high-sounding preamble the instructions which his prudhomme gives to the young man he is knighting seem disconcertingly meagre. It may well be that Chrétien represents the “courtesy” of the great princely courts of the twelfth century rather than the prudhommie, inspired by religious sentiments, which was in vogue in the following century in the circle of Louis IX. It is doubtless no accident that the same epoch and the same environment in which this knightly saint lived should have given birth to the noble prayer (included in the Pontifical of William Durand) which may be regarded as a kind of liturgical commentary on the knights carved in stone on the porch of Chartres and the inner wall of the façade of Rheims: “Most Holy Lord, Almighty Father … thou who hast permitted on earth the use of the sword to repress the malice of the wicked and defend justice; who for the protection of thy people hast thought fit to institute the order of chivalry … cause thy servant here before thee, by disposing his heart to goodness, never to use this sword or another to injure anyone unjustly; but let him use it always to defend the Just and the Right.”

Thus the Church, by assigning to it an ideal task, finally and formally approved the existence of this “order” of warriors which, conceived as one of the necessary divisions of a well-ordered society, was increasingly identified with the whole body of dubbed knights. “O God, who after the Fall, didst constitute in all nature three ranks among men,” we read in one of the prayers in the Besançon liturgy. At the same time it provided this class with a religious justification of a social supremacy which had long been a recognized fact. The very orthodox Ordene de Chevalerie says that knights should be honoured above all other men, save priests. More crudely, the romance of Lancelot, after having explained how they were instituted “to protect the weak and the peaceful”, proceeds—in conformity with the emphasis on symbols common to all this literature—to discover in the horses which they ride the peculiar symbol of the “people” whom they hold “in right subjection”. “For above the people must sit the knight. And just as one controls a horse and he who sits above leads it where he will, so the knight must lead the people at his will.” Later, Ramon Lull did not think he offended Christian sentiment by saying that it was conformable to good order that the knight should “draw his well-being” from the things that were provided for him “by the weariness and toil” of his men.12 This epitomizes the attitude of a dominant class: an attitude eminently favourable to the development of a nobility in the strictest sense of the term.

NOTES

  1 See Plate X.

  2 Raimon Lull, Libro de la orden de Caballeria, ed. J. R. de Luanco, Barcelona, R. Academia de Buenos Letras, 1901, IV, 11. English translation: The Book of the Ordre of Chivalry trans. and printed by W. Caxton, ed. Byles, 1926 (Early English Text Society).

  3 Haskins, Norman Institutions, 1918, p. 282, c. 5.

  4Rec. des Histor. de France, XV, p. 187.

  5Ed. Rothari, c. 359. Insufficient research has hitherto been devoted to the liturgy of dubbing to knighthood. In the bibliography will be found an indication of the works and collections which I have consulted. This first attempt at classification, rudimentary though it is, was only made possible for me by the kind assistance of my Strasbourg colleague, Abbé Michel Andrieu.

  6Jehan et Blonde, ed. H. Suchier (Oeuvres poétiques de Ph. de Rémi, II, v. 5916 et seq.).

  7Polycraticus, VI, 10 (ed. Webb, II, p. 25).

  8 Guillaume Durand, Rationale, IV, 16.

  9 Peter of Blois, ep. XCIV.

10Der Wälsche Gast, ed. Rückert, vv. 7791–2.

11 Anselm, Ep., I (P.L., CLVIII, col. 1147); St. Bernard, De laude novae militiae, 77, c. 2.

12Libro de la orden de Caballeria, I, 9. The whole passage has a remarkable flavour.

XXIV

Marc Bloch

Feudal Society

Translated from the French 

by L.A. Manyon