ABSTRACT
In one obvious sense Chivalry is not confined to the Middle Ages, for many human beings are happily so inclined. If we study it in this period, the reason lies in the fact that people had begun to systematise their ideas about their fellow-men, to gain some notion of the value of individual personality and to react strongly against the wastage and brutality which disturbed life in the period of the great invasions. These appreciations and feelings did not remain isolated in individual thinkers, as had been the tendency in classical times, but were organised and generalised in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. Medieval Chivalry became an institution as well as an ideal. An institution, it was the unwritten convention of a noble or military class, whose members could only reach and maintain their status in it through proper observance of its ceremonies and duties. An ideal, it supplied the rudiments of morality, and served as a means whereby the Church sought to educate the high-spirited and predatory, and to sublimate the acquisitive instincts. It was not law, though it had no small effect upon customary codes. It was not feudalism, had no essential connexion with tenure and vassalage, although it gave the tenurial system some of its coherence and strengthened many of its sanctions. In its earliest stages it is best described as the Christian form of the military life; for then, while it was pervaded by strong religious influences, it represents the compromise of the Church with pagan violence. In its later developments it lost its moral aspect and passed into aestheticism, became unmuscular and largely decorative, much as robust Victorianism gave place to the ’nineties. Yet its best examples in any period are an inspiration of right conduct in their embodiment of valour and gentleness; and it is one of the gifts of the Middle Ages that such a union is still prized, even where its occurrence confronts us with the dilemma of having to choose between an Oliver and a Roland.
