And he that at the head of his troop defies me,
Binding my manly body with his sword
I make my mistress.”—Bonduca.
In the first book of the Peloponnesian War, it is stated by Thucydides that “the people of the Continent exercised robberies upon one another; and to this very day,” he adds, “the people of Greece are supported by the same practices.” The great historian especially names the Ozolian Locrians, Ætolians, and Acarnanians, and their neighbours on the continent; among whom, as he informs his readers, the custom of wearing their swords, or other weapons required by their old life of rapine, was still retained. “This custom,” continues the writer, “of wearing weapons, once prevailed throughout Greece, as the houses had no manner of defence, as travelling was full of hazard, and the whole lives of the people were passed in armour, like barbarians. A proof of this,” says the civilized Thucydides, “is the continuance still in some parts of Greece of these manners, which were once with uniformity general to all. The Athenians were the first who discontinued the custom of wearing their swords, and who passed from the dissolute life into more polite and elegant manners.”
What the Athenians did so long ago was not accomplished in our own metropolis until the end of the first quarter, or rather the beginning of the second half, of the last century. The example, slowly set by London, was soon enforced at Bath. I say “enforced,” because there was a pleasant despot there, who ruled so supreme that the very “Baths of Bath” seemed only to flow at his permission.
It was in presence of “Beau Nash” that fell the swords and top-boots of the squires and the aprons of the ladies. The results thereof, at least of the putting aside the sword, at Bath and in London, and throughout the country generally, where gallant submitted to be disarmed in obedience to law or to custom, may be described in the language of Thucydides, as applied to the Athenians when they abandoned ruffianism and adopted refinement:—“Men passed from the dissolute life into more polite and elegant manners.”
In the simple old Saxon days the sword played a considerable part in the making of a knight. The candidate for chivalry was required, the day before his consecration, to confess; and then pass the night in the church, in prayer and fasting. On the following day he was to hear mass, and during the service he placed his sword upon the altar; the priest, after the Gospel, took the weapon, blessed it, and then, with benison on the warrior, laid the blade on the neck of the knight, who however was not a knight complete until he had received the Sacrament as a complement of the blessing.
Thus the Church made her own cavaliers: but the Normans, who came among us under a banner blessed by the Pope, held his method of consecration in scorn and abomination. The knights so made they accounted of as no knights at all, but as mere “tardy troopers and degenerate plebeians.” So, in modern times, a militia ensign with a Norman name affects to look with contempt on a “captain” who may have fought his way to his title in Spain or South America; and the young noble who at Oxford has taken a degree, not conferred by right of knowledge, but seized by right of nobility, pretends to look down upon men who, at Bonn, at Marburg, or at Göttingen, have penned their Latin thesis, and maintained its statements against all adversaries, and who have won their honours,—in short, by earning and deserving them.