Valour, troth, largesse, had no necessary connection with Christianity. It was otherwise with certain of the remaining qualities of a knight. According to Christian teaching, pride was the deadliest of sins. So haughtiness, boasting, and vain-glory were to be held vices by the Christian knight. He should show a humble demeanour, save toward the mortal enemies of God; and far from boasting, he should rather depreciate himself and his exploits, though never lowering the standard of his purpose to achieve. Humility entered knighthood’s ideal from Christianity; and so perhaps did courtesy, its kin, a virtue which was not among the earliest to enter knighthood’s ideal, and yet reached universal recognition.
Christianity also meant active charity, beneficence, and love of neighbour. These are virtues hard to import into a state of war. Fighting means harm-doing to an enemy; and only indirectly makes for some one’s good. Let there be some vindication of good in the fighting of a Christian knight: he shall be quick to right the wrong, succour distress, and quickest to bear help where no reward can come. Since knighthood’s ideals took form in crusading times, the slaughter of the Paynim became the supreme act of knightly warfare.
If such elements of the knightly ideal were of Christian origin, others still were even more closely part of mediaeval Christianity. First of these was faith, orthodox faith, heresy-uprooting, infidel-destroying, fides in the full Church sense. Without faith’s sacramental credentials—baptism, participation in the mass—no one could be a knight: and heresy degrades the recreant even before the scullion’s cleaver hacks off his spurs.
From faith knighthood advances to obedience to the Church, a vow expressly made by every knight on taking the Cross, and also incorporated in the Constitutions of the crusading Orders of Templars and Hospitallers. But does the knight pass on from obedience to chastity? This virtue might or might not enter knighthood’s ideal. It scarcely could exist with courtly or chivalric love;[667] and, in fact, knights commonly were either lovers or married men—or both. Yet even in the Arthurian literature there is the monkish Galahad, and many a sinful knight becomes a hermit in the end; and among real and living knights, the Templars and Hospitallers were vowed to celibacy. In these crusading orders the orbits of knighthood and monasticism cross; and it will not be altogether a digression to review the foundation and constitution of one of them.
The Order of the Temple was founded in the year 1118 by Hugh of Payns (Champagne) and other French knights; who placed their hands within those of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and vowed to devote themselves to the protection of pilgrims in the Holy Land. Probably they also bestowed their lands for the support of the nascent Order. Ten years afterwards Hugh passed through France and England, winning new recruits and appearing at the Council of Troyes. With the authority of that Council and of Pope Honorius II. the Regula pauperum commilitonum Christi Templique Salomonici was promulgated. St. Bernard, to whom it is ascribed, was in large part its inspiration and its author. It still exists in some seventy-two chapters; but one cannot distinguish between those belonging to the original document of 1128 and those added somewhat later.[668]
This regula with its amendments and additions was translated from Latin into Old French (par excellence the tongue of the Crusades), and became apparently the earliest form of the Regle dou Temple, upon which was grafted a mass of ordinances (retrais et establissemens). Apparently the whole of the extant Latin regula was prior to everything contained in the French regle; and accordingly we shall simply regard the Latin as containing the earliest regulations of the Temple, and the French as exhibiting the modifications of tone and interest which came in the course of years.
The hand of St. Bernard ensured the dominance of the monastic temper in the original regula; and Hugo, the first Master of the Temple, could not have been the Saint’s close friend without sharing his enthusiasms. So the prologue opens with a true monastic note:
“Our word is directed primarily to all who despise their own wills, and with purity of mind desire to serve under the supreme and veritable King; and with minds intent choose the noble warfare of obedience, and persevere therein. We therefore exhort you who until now have embraced secular knighthood (miliciam secularem) where Christ was not the cause, and whom God in His mercy has chosen out of the mass of perdition for the defence of the holy Church, to hasten to associate yourselves perpetually.”
This phraseology would suit the constitution of a sheer monastic order. And the first chapter exhorts these venerabiles fratres who renounce their own wills and serve the King (Christ) with horses and arms, zealously to observe all the religious services regularly prescribed for monks. The regula contains the usual monastic commands. For example, obedience to the Master of the Order is enjoined sine mora as if God were commanding, which recalls the language of St. Benedict.[669] Clothes are regulated, and diet; habitual silence is recommended; the brethren are not to go alone, nor at their own will, but as directed by the Master, so as to imitate Him who said, I came not to do mine own will, but His who sent me.[670] Again, chests with locks are forbidden the brothers, except under special permission; nor may any brother, without like permission, receive letters from parents or friends; and then they should be read in the Master’s presence.[671] Let the brethren shun idle speech, and above all let no brother talk with another of military exploits, “follies rather,” achieved by him while “in the world,” or of his doings with miserable women.[672] Let no brother hunt with hawks; such mundane delectations do not befit the religious, who should be rather hearing God’s precepts, and at prayer, or confessing their sins with tears. Yet the lion may always be hunted; for he goes seeking whom he may devour.[673]
The religio professed by the Templars is called, in the Latin rule, religio militaris, which the French translates “religion de chevalerie,” not incorrectly, but with somewhat different flavour.[674]