ABSTRACT
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; on the other hand, as people 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. 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. 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.
