Terry Jones' Medieval Lives by Alan Ereira

Author:Alan Ereira
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2005-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

KNIGHT

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

THE YEAR: 1278. THE PLACE: open country near Le Hem, in Picardy. A court is assembled; the field is laid out for a tournament and splendidly bedecked ladies are watching from a platform. At their centre is a queen, none other than King Arthur’s wife, the lady Guinevere. Alongside her is an even more surprising figure: the Lady of Courtesy.

A herald in full finery has proclaimed that Queen Guinevere requires all who want to pursue love in arms to appear before her; and before they can join her court they must joust. Now seven identically dressed knights appear and surrender themselves to the queen, saying they have been defeated by the knight with a lion. The knight in question then arrives with his lion and seven damsels, Guinevere’s ladies, whom he has rescued from the seven knights in a week-long quest.

The drama of the knight errant, riding around the countryside in shining armour rescuing damsels in distress, was being played out as courtly theatre – by real knights. Was chivalry ever anything more than an entertainment? Was anyone ever motivated by such pure and noble sentiments that they set off every morning looking for distressed damsels and dragons in need of killing? How did they make a living?

How did the lives of the knights play-acting at Le Hem relate to the kind of chivalric story they were performing?

The reality of knighthood – like reality for all people living medieval lives – was in a constant state of flux throughout the Middle Ages. Concepts of knighthood changed and the perception of what knights were, and what they should be doing, also changed. The only thing that remained constant was that the idea of chivalry was never what we mean by the word today.

Behind the fantasy is a story of violence: of the desire of young men to experience, and get rich and famous through, its practice; and the attempts of society to construct a context in which that violence could be channelled or contained.

It was an effort that was doomed to failure. By the end of the Middle Ages writers looked back and lamented that the golden age of chivalry had passed. In 1385 a French monk wrote:

. . . these days all wars are directed against the poor labouring people and against their goods and chattels. I do not call that war, but . . . pillage and robbery . . . warfare does not follow the rules of chivalry or of the ancient custom of noble warriors who upheld justice, the widow, the orphan and the poor . . . And for these reasons the knights of to-day have not the glory and the praise of the old champions of former times . . .

Tree of Battles

But had the golden age of chivalry ever existed at all?

WHAT WAS A KNIGHT?

Anglo-Saxon knights did not fight on horseback. But Europe’s nobility did and after the Norman conquest in England the word ‘knight’ was also understood to mean a horse-warrior.

William the Conqueror rewarded his victorious followers with grants of the land they had just conquered.

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