As the good Queen’s beloved bed-hangings were dispersed in fragments among the Canons of York, so her dying benedictions would seem to have been scattered no less widely to the winds. One of the servants so tenderly commended to the King’s care was Chaucer’s wife; but another was Alice Perrers, whom Edward had already noted with favour, and who now took more or less openly the dead Queen’s place. Men aged rapidly in those days; and, as Edward trod the descending slope of life, his manly will weakened and left little but the animal behind. Philippa was scarcely cold in her grave when Alice Perrers, decked in her mistress’s jewels, was masquerading at royal tournaments as the Lady of the Sun. Presently she was sitting openly at the judge’s side in the law courts; the King’s shame was the common talk of his subjects; and even the formal protests of Parliament failed to separate her from the doting old King, from whom on his death-bed she kept the clergy away until his speech was gone. Then, having stolen the very rings from his fingers, she left him to a priest who could only infer repentance from his groans and tears. Thomas of Woodstock, the Queen’s Benjamin, fared not much better. He became the selfish and overbearing leader of the opposition to Richard II., and was at last secretly murdered by order of the royal nephew whom he had bullied more or less successfully for twenty years.
CHAPTER XV
KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES
| “‘But teach me,’ quoth the Knight; ‘and, by Christ, I will assay!’ ‘By St. Paul,’ quoth Perkin, ‘ye proffer you so fair That I shall work and sweat, and sow for us both, And other labours do for thy love, all my lifetime, In covenant that thou keep Holy Church and myself From wasters and from wicked men, that this world destroy; And go hunt hardily to hares and foxes, To boars and to badgers that break down my hedges; And go train thy falcons wild-fowl to kill, For such come to my croft and crop my wheat.’” “Piers Plowman,” B., vi., 24 |
The theory of chivalry, which itself owes much to pre-Christian morality, lies at the roots of the modern conception of gentility. The essence of perfect knighthood was fearless strength, softened by charity and consecrated by faith. A certain small and select class had (it was held) a hereditary right to all the best things of this world, and the concomitant duty of using with moderation for themselves and giving freely to others. Essentially exclusive and jealous of its privileges, the chivalric ideal was yet the highest possible in a society whose very foundations rested on caste distinctions, and where bondmen were more numerous than freemen. The world will always be the richer for it; but we must not forget that, like the finest flower of Greek and Roman culture, it postulated a servile class; the many must needs toil and groan and bleed in order that the few might have grace and freedom to grow to their individual perfection. In its finest products it may extort unwilling admiration even from the most convinced democrat—
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“Often I find myself saying, old faith and doctrine abjuring, ... Were it not well that the stem should be naked of leaf and of tendril, Poverty-stricken, the barest, the dismallest stick of the garden; Flowerless, leafless, unlovely, for ninety-and-nine long summers, So in the hundredth, at last, were bloom for one day at the summit, So but that fleeting flower were lovely as Lady Maria?”[182] |
When, however, we look closer into the system, and turn from theory to practice, then we find again those glaring inconsistencies which meet us nearly everywhere in medieval society. A close study even of such a panegyrist as Froissart compels us to look to some other age than his for the spirit of perfect chivalry; and many writers would place the palmy days of knighthood in the age of St. Louis. Here again, however, we find the same difficulty; for in Joinville himself there are many jarring notes, and other records of the period are still less flattering to knightly society. The most learned of modern apologists for the Middle Ages, Léon Gautier, is driven to put back the Golden Age one century further, thus implying that Francis and Dominic, Aquinas and Dante, the glories of Westminster and Amiens, the saintly King who dealt justice under the oak of Vincennes, and twice led his armies oversea against the heathen, all belonged to an age of decadence in chivalry. Yet, even at this sacrifice, the Golden Age escapes us. When we go back to the middle of the 12th century we find St. Bernard’s contemporaries branding the chivalry of their times as shamelessly untrue to its traditional code. “The Order of Knighthood” (writes Peter of Blois in his 94th Epistle) “is nowadays mere disorder.... Knights of old bound themselves by an oath to stand by the state, not to flee from battle, and to prefer the public welfare to their own lives. Nay, even in these present days candidates for knighthood take their swords from the altar as a confession that they are sons of the Church, and that the blade is given to them for the honour of the priesthood, the defence of the poor, the chastisement of evil-doers, and the deliverance of their country. But all goes by contraries; for nowadays, from the moment when they are honoured with the knightly belt, they rise up against the Lord’s anointed and rage against the patrimony of the Crucified. They rob and despoil Christ’s poor, afflicting the wretched miserably and without mercy, that from other men’s pain they may gratify their unlawful appetites and their wanton pleasures.... They who should have used their strength against Christ’s enemies fight now in their cups and drunkenness, waste their time in sloth, moulder in debauchery, and dishonour the name and office of Knighthood by their degenerate lives.” This was about 1170. A couple of generations earlier we get an equally unfavourable impression from the learned and virtuous abbot, Guibert of Nogent. Further back, again, the evidence is still more damning; and nobody would seriously seek the golden age of chivalry in the 11th century. It is indeed a mirage; and Peter of Blois in 1170, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry in 1220, who so disadvantageously contrasted the knighthood of their own time with that of the past, were simply victims of a common delusion. They despaired too lightly of the actual world, and sought refuge too credulously in an imaginary past. Even if, in medieval fashion, we trace this institution back to Romulus, to David, to Joshua, or to Adam himself, we shall, after all, find it nowhere more flourishing than in the first half of the 13th century, imperfectly as its code was kept even then.
By the end of that century, however, two great causes were at work which made for the decay of chivalry. Before Dante had begun to write, the real Crusades were over—or, indeed, even before Dante was born—for the two expeditions led by St. Louis were small compared with others in the past. In 1229 the Emperor Frederick II. had recovered from the infidel by treaty those holy places which Coeur-de-Lion had in vain attempted to storm; and this had dealt a severe blow to the old traditions. Again, during the years that followed, the Pope did not hesitate to attack his enemy the Emperor, even in the Holy Land; so that, while Christian fought against Christian over Christ’s grave, the Turk stepped in and reconquered Jerusalem (1244). Lastly, his successors, while they regularly raised enormous taxes and contributions for the reconquest of Palestine, systematically spent them on their own private ambitions or personal pleasures. Before the 13th century was out the last Christian fortress had been taken, and there was nothing now to show for two centuries of bloodshed. Under these repeated shocks men began to lose faith in the crusading principle. A couple of generations before Chaucer’s birth, Etienne de Bourbon complained that the upper classes “not only did not take the cross, but scoffed at the lower orders when they did so” (p. 174). In France, after the disastrous failure of St. Louis’s first expedition, the rabble said that Mahomet was now stronger than Christ.[183] Edward III. and his rival, Philippe de Valois, did for a moment propose to go and free the Holy Land in concert, but hardly seriously. Chaucer’s Knight had indeed fought in Asia Minor, but mainly against European pagans in Spain and on the shores of the Baltic; and, irreproachable as his motives were in this particular instance, Gower shows scant sympathy for those which commonly prompted crusades of this kind.[184]