Perhaps too we have listened in fancy to the proceedings of the so-called Courts of Parliaments of Love, in which the ladies were wont to hear questions of gallantry gravely argued on both sides by poets pleading in verse, and then to give their judgments according to the logical and metaphysical rules which the schoolmen applied to theological enquiries. But I can now but remind my reader that such things were; and must hasten forward, leaving ungathered flowers that would make many a wreath and nosegay.
The golden age of chivalry was the period from about the middle of the eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century. We may say with Gibbon, that the Crusades were at once a cause and an effect of chivalry. In the Crusades the spirit of knighthood, with all its characteristic features, actuated vast bodies of men of every rank and nation, and found a foe believed by all Christendom to be to it what the individual robber and plunderer was to the knight errant who went forth in his own country to defend or rescue the widow and orphan and their possessions, or the traveller along the road which passed the castle of some powerful though unworthy baron. The chivalry at home was kept alive, and raised to its highest energy, both in man and woman, by the chivalry in the Holy Land. It is in this period that the chief institutions of chivalry took their rise, or reached their full form; while their ruder features were gradually softened with the increasing refinement of the times, till they presented that aspect with which we find them in the days of Edward III and the Black Prince, as drawn by Froissart or Chaucer, or in the romances which were then written or remodelled out of older materials, and which show that even in the estimation of other nations the English court then afforded the pattern of knighthood for Christendom.
Thenceforward the outward forms of chivalry began to decay; very gradually indeed, and not without apparent resuscitations from time to time. But no real revival was possible; for the immortal spirit was seeking new habitations for itself, more fitted to the new world which was succeeding to that of the Middle Ages. And perhaps Cervantes, by helping to tear up with his merciless satire the last remnants of an honest faith in the old forms of chivalry, did as real, though we cannot say as genial, a service to the cause of chivalry itself, as Spenser did in endeavouring to preserve its spirit by transferring it to the region of allegory. The last expiring token of the old spirit in the old forms which I have found, is in the records of the Knights of Malta—the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem—when the news of the great earthquake in Sicily, in 1783, arrived at Malta. Then those poor feeble-minded sybarites remembered for a moment their manhood and their knighthood, and their vows as Hospitallers; they manned their galleys, and, with food and clothing and medicines, and the consolations of their faith, were speedily seen, in their half-military, half-priestly garb—the armour covered by the black robe with the white cross—at the bedsides of the wounded and the dying, as they lay amid the still tottering ruins of their devastated houses. In a very few years, in that same generation, the Order had passed away for ever; but it is pleasant to him who stands in the palace of the Grand Masters among the trophies of their former greatness, or treads the aisles of the cathedral of St. John, where every step is upon the emblazoned gravestone of a knight, to think of this, and not of any less worthy deed, as their last act.
‘The knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust:
His soul is with the saints, I trust:’—
but he has left to us an imperishable and a rich inheritance, won for us by him. To him we owe our Manners—all that world of existence implied in the names Lady and Gentleman. Through the Middle Ages it was ‘Our Lady,’ the Virgin mother who embodied and represented to all men and women, from the prince to the peasant, their ideals of womanhood and ladyhood. In modern times St. Paul has been held to be the model of a gentleman; in whose acts and writings are found all the principles, maxims, and spirit of a character entirely chivalrous, in the amplest sense of the term: while one of our old dramatists has ventured, in words of touching tenderness and reverence, to point to a yet higher realisation of that ideal;—
‘The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;