[] St. Palaye, part iii. passim.
[x] The word bachelor has been sometimes derived from bas chevalier; in opposition to banneret. But this cannot be right. We do not find any authority for the expression bas chevalier, nor any equivalent in Latin, baccalaureus certainly not suggesting that sense; and it is strange that the corruption should obliterate every trace of the original term. Bachelor is a very old word, and is used in early French poetry for a young man, as bachelette is for a girl. So also in Chaucer:
"A yonge Squire,
A lover, and a lusty bachelor."
[y] Du Cange, Dissertation 9me sur Joinville. The number of men at arms, whom a banneret ought to command, was properly fifty. But Olivier de la Marche speaks of twenty-five as sufficient; and it appears that, in fact, knights-banneret often did not bring so many.
[z] Ibid. Olivier de la Marche (Collection des Mémoires, t. viii. p. 337) gives a particular example of this; and makes a distinction between the bachelor, created a banneret on account of his estate, and the hereditary banneret, who took a public opportunity of requesting the sovereign to unfold his family banner which he had before borne wound round his lance. The first was said relever banniere; the second, entrer en banniere. This difference is more fully explained by Daniel, Hist. de la Milice Françoise, p. 116. Chandos's banner was unfolded, not cut, at Navarette. We read sometimes of esquire-bannerets, that is, of bannerets by descent, not yet knighted.
[a] Froissart, part i. c. 241.
[] Mém. sur la Chevalerie, part v.
[c] The prerogative exercised by the kings of England of compelling men sufficiently qualified in point of estate to take on them the honour of knighthood was inconsistent with the true spirit of chivalry. This began, according to Lord Lyttelton, under Henry III. Hist. of Henry II. vol. ii. p. 238. Independently of this, several causes tended to render England less under the influence of chivalrous principles than France or Germany; such as, her comparatively peaceful state, the smaller share she took in the crusades, her inferiority in romances of knight-errantry, but above all, the democratical character of her laws and government. Still this is only to be understood relatively to the two other countries above named; for chivalry was always in high repute among us, nor did any nation produce more admirable specimens of its excellences.
I am not minutely acquainted with the state of chivalry in Spain, where it seems to have flourished considerably. Italy, except in Naples, and perhaps Piedmont, displayed little of its spirit; which neither suited the free republics of the twelfth and thirteenth, nor the jealous tyrannies of the following centuries. Yet even here we find enough to furnish Muratori with materials for his 53rd Dissertation.
[d] The well-known Memoirs of St. Palaye are the best repository of interesting and illustrative facts respecting chivalry. Possibly he may have relied a little too much on romances, whose pictures will naturally be overcharged. Froissart himself has somewhat of this partial tendency, and the manners of chivalrous times do not make so fair an appearance in Monstrelet. In the Memoirs of la Tremouille (Collect. des Mém. t. xiv. p. 169), we have perhaps the earliest delineation from the life of those severe and stately virtues in high-born ladies, of which our own country furnished so many examples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which were derived from the influence of chivalrous principles. And those of Bayard in the same collection (t. xiv. and xv.) are a beautiful exhibition of the best effects of that discipline.