The United Kingdom has eight orders of knighthood—the Garter, the Thistle, St Patrick, the Bath, the Star of India, St Michael and St George, the Indian Empire and the Royal Victorian Order; and, while the first is undoubtedly the oldest as well as the most illustrious anywhere existing, a fictitious antiquity has been claimed and is even still frequently conceded to the second and fourth, although the third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth appear to be as contentedly as they are unquestionably recent.
It is, however, certain that the “most noble” Order of the Garter at least was instituted in the middle of the 14th century, when English chivalry was outwardly brightest and the court most magnificent. But in what particular Order of the Garter. year this event occurred is and has been the subject of much difference of opinion. All the original records of the order until after 1416 have perished, and consequently the question depends for its settlement not on direct testimony but on inference from circumstances. The dates which have been selected vary from 1344 (given by Froissart, but almost certainly mistaken) to 1351. The evidence may be examined at length in Nicolas and Beltz; it is indisputable that in the wardrobe account from September 1347 to January 1349, the 21st and 23rd Edward III., the issue of certain habits with garters and the motto embroidered on them is marked for St George’s Day; that the letters patent relating to the preparation of the royal chapel of Windsor are dated in August 1348; and that in the treasury accounts of the prince of Wales there is an entry in November 1348 of the gift by him of “twenty-four garters to the knights of the Society of the Garter.”[45] But that the order, although from this manifestly already fully constituted in the autumn of 1348, was not in existence before the summer of 1346 Sir Harris Nicolas proves pretty conclusively by pointing out that nobody who was not a knight could under its statutes have been admitted to it, and that neither the prince of Wales nor several others of the original companions were knighted until the middle of that year.
Regarding the occasion there has been almost as much controversy as regarding the date of its foundation. The “vulgar and more general story,” as Ashmole calls it, is that of the countess of Salisbury’s garter. But commentators are not at one as to which countess of Salisbury was the heroine of the adventure, whether she was Katherine Montacute or Joan the Fair Maid of Kent, while Heylyn rejects the legend as “a vain and idle romance derogatory both to the founder and the order, first published by Polydor Vergil, a stranger to the affairs of England, and by him taken upon no better ground than fama vulgi, the tradition of the common people, too trifling a foundation for so great a building.”[46]
Another legend is that contained in the preface to the Register or Black Book of the order, compiled in the reign of Henry VIII., by what authority supported is unknown, that Richard I., while his forces were employed against Cyprus and Acre, had been inspired through the instrumentality of St George with renewed courage and the means of animating his fatigued soldiers by the device of tying about the legs of a chosen number of knights a leathern thong or garter, to the end that being thereby reminded of the honour of their enterprise they might be encouraged to redoubled efforts for victory. This was supposed to have been in the mind of Edward III. when he fixed on the garter as the emblem of the order, and it was stated so to have been by Taylor, master of the rolls, in his address to Francis I. of France on his investiture in 1527.[47] According to Ashmole the true account of the matter is that “King Edward having given forth his own garter as the signal for a battle which sped fortunately (which with Du Chesne we conceive to be that of Crécy), the victory, we say, being happily gained, he thence took occasion to institute this order, and gave the garter (assumed by him for the symbol of unity and society) preeminence among the ensigns of it.” But, as Sir Harris Nicolas points out—although Ashmole is not open to the correction—this hypothesis rests for its plausibility on the assumption that the order was established before the invasion of France in 1346. And he further observes that “a great variety of devices and mottoes were used by Edward III.; they were chosen from the most trivial causes and were of an amorous rather than of a military character. Nothing,” he adds, “is more likely than that in a crowded assembly a lady should accidentally have dropped her garter; that the circumstance should have caused a smile in the bystanders; and that on its being taken up by Edward he should have reproved the levity of his courtiers by so happy and chivalrous an exclamation, placing the garter at the same time on his own knee, as ‘Dishonoured be he who thinks ill of it.’ Such a circumstance occurring at a time of general festivity, when devices, mottoes and conceits of all kinds were adopted as ornaments or badges of the habits worn at jousts and tournaments, would naturally have been commemorated as other royal expressions seem to have been by its conversion into a device and motto for the dresses at an approaching hastilude.”[48] Moreover, Sir Harris Nicolas contends that the order had no loftier immediate origin than a joust or tournament. It consisted of the king and the Black Prince, and 24 knights divided into two bands of 12 like the tilters in a hastilude——at the head of the one being the first, and of the other the second; and to the companions belonging to each, when the order had superseded the Round Table and had become a permanent institution, were assigned stalls either on the sovereign’s or the prince’s side of St George’s Chapel. That Sir Harris Nicolas is accurate in this conjecture seems probable from the selection which was made of the “founder knights.” As Beltz observes, the fame of Sir Reginald Cobham, Sir Walter Manny and the earls of Northampton, Hereford and Suffolk was already established by their warlike exploits, and they would certainly have been among the original companions had the order been then regarded as the reward of military merit only. But, although these eminent warriors were subsequently elected as vacancies occurred, their admission was postponed to that of several very young and in actual warfare comparatively unknown knights, whose claims to the honour may be most rationally explained on the assumption that they had excelled in the particular feats of arms which preceded the institution of the order. The original companionship had consisted of the sovereign and 25 knights, and no change was made in this respect until 1786, when the sons of George III. and his successors were made eligible notwithstanding that the chapter might be complete. In 1805 another alteration was effected by the provision that the lineal descendants of George II. should be eligible in the same manner, except the Prince of Wales for the time being, who was declared to be “a constituent part of the original institution”; and again in 1831 it was further ordained that the privilege accorded to the lineal descendants of George II. should extend to the lineal descendants of George I. Although, as Sir Harris Nicolas observes, nothing is now known of the form of admitting ladies into the order, the description applied to them in the records during the 14th and 15th centuries leaves no doubt that they were regularly received into it. The queen consort, the wives and daughters of knights, and some other women of exalted position, were designated “Dames de la Fraternité de St George,” and entries of the delivery of robes and garters to them are found at intervals in the Wardrobe Accounts from the 50th Edward III. (1376) to the 10th of Henry VII. (1495), the first being Isabel, countess of Bedford, the daughter of the one king, and the last being Margaret and Elizabeth, the daughters of the other king. The effigies of Margaret Byron, wife of Sir Robert Harcourt, K.G., at Stanton Harcourt, and of Alice Chaucer, wife of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, K.G., at Ewelme, which date from the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., have garters on their left arms. (See further under “Orders of Knighthood” below.)
It has been the general opinion, as expressed by Sainte Palaye and Mills, that formerly all knights were qualified to confer knighthood.[49] But it may be questioned whether the privilege was thus indiscriminately enjoyed even in the earlier days Persons empowered to confer Knighthood. of chivalry. It is true that as much might be inferred from the testimony of the romance writers; historical evidence, however, tends to limit the proposition, and the sounder conclusion appears to be, as Sir Harris Nicolas says, that the right was always restricted in operation to sovereign princes, to those acting under their authority or sanction, and to a few other personages of exalted rank and station.[50] In several of the writs for distraint of knighthood from Henry III. to Edward III. a distinction is drawn between those who are to be knighted by the king himself or by the sheriffs of counties respectively, and bishops and abbots could make knights in the 11th and 12th centuries.[51] At all periods the commanders of the royal armies had the power of conferring knighthood; as late as the reign of Elizabeth it was exercised among others by Sir Henry Sidney in 1583, and Robert, earl of Essex, in 1595, while under James I. an ordinance of 1622, confirmed by a proclamation of 1623, for the registration of knights in the college of arms, is rendered applicable to all who should receive knighthood from either the king or any of his lieutenants.[52] Many sovereigns, too, both of England and of France, have been knighted after their accession to the throne by their own subjects, as, for instance, Edward III. by Henry, earl of Lancaster, Edward VI. by the lord protector Somerset, Louis XI. by Philip, duke of Burgundy, and Francis I. by the Chevalier Bayard. But when in 1543 Henry VIII. appointed Sir John Wallop to be captain of Guisnes, it was considered necessary that he should be authorized in express terms to confer knighthood, which was also done by Edward VI. in his own case when he received knighthood from the duke of Somerset.[53] But at present the only subject to whom the right of conferring knighthood belongs is the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and to him it belongs merely by long usage and established custom. But, by whomsoever conferred, knighthood at one time endowed the recipient with the same status and attributes in every country wherein chivalry was recognized. In the middle ages it was a common practice for sovereigns and princes to dub each other knights much as they were afterwards, and are now, in the habit of exchanging the stars and ribbons of their orders. Henry II. was knighted by his great-uncle David I. of Scotland, Alexander III. of Scotland by Henry III., Edward I. when he was prince by Alphonso X. of Castile, and Ferdinand of Portugal by Edmund of Langley, earl of Cambridge.[54] And, long after the military importance of knighthood had practically disappeared, what may be called its cosmopolitan character was maintained: a knight’s title was recognized in all European countries, and not only in that country in which he had received it. In modern times, however, by certain regulations, made in 1823, and repeated and enlarged in 1855, not only is it provided that the sovereign’s permission by royal warrant shall be necessary for the reception by a British subject of any foreign order of knighthood, but further that such permission shall not authorize “the assumption of any style, appellation, rank, precedence, or privilege appertaining to a knight bachelor of the United Kingdom.”[55]
Since knighthood was accorded either by actual investiture or its equivalent, a counter process of degradation was regarded as necessary for the purpose of depriving anybody who had once received it of the rank and condition Degradation. it implied.[56] The cases in which a knight has been formally degraded in England are exceedingly few, so few indeed that two only are mentioned by Segar, writing in 1602, and Dallaway says that only three were on record in the College of Arms when he wrote in 1793. The last case was that of Sir Francis Michell in 1621, whose spurs were hacked from his heels, his sword-belt cut, and his sword broken over his head by the heralds in Westminster Hall.[57]
Roughly speaking, the age of chivalry properly so called may be said to have extended from the beginning of the crusades to the end of the Wars of the Roses. Even in the way of pageantry and martial exercise it did not long survive the middle ages. In England tilts and tourneys, in which her father had so much excelled, were patronized to the last by Queen Elizabeth, and were even occasionally held until after the death of Henry, prince of Wales. But on the Continent they were discredited by the fatal accident which befell Henry II. of France in 1559. The golden age of chivalry has been variously located. Most writers would place it in the early 13th century, but Gautier would remove it two or three generations further back. It may be true that, in the comparative scarcity of historical evidence, 12th-century romances present a more favourable picture of chivalry at that earlier time; but even such historical evidence as we possess, when carefully scrutinized, is enough to dispel the illusion that there was any period of the middle ages in which the unselfish championship of “God and the ladies” was anything but a rare exception.
It is difficult to describe the true spirit and moral influence of knighthood, if only because the ages in which it flourished differed so widely from our own. At its very best, it was always hampered by the limitations of medieval society. Moreover, many of the noblest precepts of the knightly code were a legacy from earlier ages, and have survived the decay of knighthood just as they will survive all transitory human institutions, forming part of the eternal heritage of the race. Indeed, the most important of these precepts did not even attain to their highest development in the middle ages. As a conscious effort to bring religion into daily life, chivalry was less successful than later puritanism; while the educated classes of our own day far surpass the average medieval knight in discipline, self-control and outward or inward refinement. Freeman’s estimate comes far nearer to the historical facts than Burke’s: “The chivalrous spirit is above all things a class spirit. The good knight is bound to endless fantastic courtesies towards men and still more towards women of a certain rank; he may treat all below that rank with any decree of scorn and cruelty. The spirit of chivalry implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virtues to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are forgotten. The false code of honour supplants the laws of the commonwealth, the law of God and the eternal principles of right. Chivalry again in its military aspect not only encourages the love of war for its own sake without regard to the cause for which war is waged, it encourages also an extravagant regard for a fantastic show of personal daring which cannot in any way advance the objects of the siege or campaign which is going on. Chivalry in short is in morals very much what feudalism is in law: each substitutes purely personal obligations devised in the interests of an exclusive class, for the more homely duties of an honest man and a good citizen” (Norman Conquest, v. 482). The chivalry from which Burke drew his ideas was, so far as it existed at all, the product of a far later age. In its own age, chivalry rested practically, like the highest civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, on slave labour;[58] and if many of its most brilliant outward attractions have now faded for ever, this is only because modern civilization tends so strongly to remove social barriers. The knightly ages will always enjoy the glory of having formulated a code of honour which aimed at rendering the upper classes worthy of their exceptional privileges; yet we must judge chivalry not only by its formal code but also by its practical fruits. The ideal is well summed up by F. W. Cornish: “Chivalry taught the world the duty of noble service willingly rendered. It upheld courage and enterprise in obedience to rule, it consecrated military prowess to the service of the Church, glorified the virtues of liberality, good faith, unselfishness and courtesy, and above all, courtesy to women. Against these may be set the vices of pride, ostentation, love of bloodshed, contempt of inferiors, and loose manners. Chivalry was an imperfect discipline, but it was a discipline, and one fit for the times. It may have existed in the world too long: it did not come into existence too early; and with all its shortcomings it exercised a great and wholesome influence in raising the medieval world from barbarism to civilization” (p. 27). This was the ideal, but to give the reader a clear view of the actual features of knightly society in their contrast with that of our own day, it is necessary to bring out one or two very significant shadows.
Far too much has been made of the extent to which the knightly code, and the reverence paid to the Virgin Mary, raised the position of women (e.g. Gautier, p. 360). As Gautier himself admits, the feudal system made it difficult to separate the woman’s person from her fief: instead of the freedom of Christian marriage on which the Church in theory insisted, lands and women were handed over together, as a business bargain, by parents or guardians. In theory, the knight was the defender of widows and orphans; but in practice wardships and marriages were bought and sold as a matter of everyday routine like stocks and shares in the modern market. Lord Thomas de Berkeley (1245-1321) counted on this as a regular and considerable source of income (Smyth, Lives, i. 157). Late in the 15th century, in spite of the somewhat greater liberty of that age, we find Stephen Scrope writing nakedly to a familiar correspondent “for very need [of poverty], I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility,” i.e. than the fair market price (Gairdner, Paston Letters, Introduction, p. clxxvi; cf. ccclxxi). Startling as such words are, it is perhaps still more startling to find how frequently and naturally, in the highest society, ladies were degraded by personal violence. The proofs of this which Schultz and Gautier adduce from the Chansons de Geste might be multiplied indefinitely. The Knight of La Tour-Landry (1372) relates, by way of warning to his daughters, a tale of a lady who so irritated her husband by scolding him in company, that he struck her to the earth with his fist and kicked her in the face, breaking her nose. Upon this the good knight moralizes: “And this she had for her euelle and gret langage, that she was wont to saie to her husbonde. And therfor the wiff aught to suffre and lete her husbonde haue the wordes, and to be maister, for that is her worshippe; for it is shame to here striff betwene hem, and in especial before folke. But y saie not but whanne thei be allone, but she may tolle hym with goodly wordes, and counsaile hym to amende yef he do amys” (La Tour, chap. xviii.; cf. xvii. and xix.). The right of wife-beating was formally recognized by more than one code of laws, and it was already a forward step when, in the 13th century, the Coutumes du Beauvoisis provided “que le mari ne doit battre sa femme que raisonnablement” (Gautier, p. 349). This was a natural consequence not only of the want of self-control which we see everywhere in the middle ages, but also of the custom of contracting child-marriages for unsentimental considerations. Between 1288 and 1500 five marriages are recorded in the direct line of the Berkeley family in which the ten contracting parties averaged less than eleven years of age: the marriage contract of another Lord Berkeley was drawn up before he was six years old. Moreover, the same business considerations which dictated those early marriages clashed equally with the strict theory of knighthood. In the same Berkeley family, the lord Maurice IV. was knighted in 1338 at the age of seven to avoid the possible evils of wardship, and Thomas V. for the same reason in 1476 at the age of five. Smyth’s record of this great family shows that, from the middle of the 13th century onwards, the lords were not only statesmen and warriors, but still more distinguished as gentlemen-farmers on a great scale, even selling fruit from the castle gardens, while their ladies would go round on tours of inspection from dairy to dairy. The lord Thomas III. (1326-1361), who was noted as a special lover of tournaments, spent in two years only £90, or an average of about £15 per tournament; yet he was then laying money by at the rate of £450 a year, and, a few years later, at the rate of £1150, or nearly half his income! Indeed, economic causes contributed much to the decay of romantic chivalry. The old families had lost heavily from generation to generation, partly by personal extravagances, but also by gradual alienations of land to the Church and by the enormous expenses of the crusades. Already, in the 13th century, they were hard pressed by the growing wealth of the burghers, and even the greatest nobles could scarcely keep up their state without careful business management. It is not surprising therefore, to find that at least as early as the middle of the 13th century the commercial side of knighthood became very prominent. Although by the code of chivalry no candidate could be knighted before the age of twenty-one, we have seen how great nobles like the Berkeleys obtained that honour for their infant heirs in order to avoid possible pecuniary loss; and French writers of the 14th century complained of this knighting of infants as a common and serious abuse.[59] Moreover, after the knight’s liability to personal service in war had been modified in the 12th century by the scutage system, it became necessary in the first quarter of the 13th to compel landowners to take up the knighthood which in theory they should have coveted as an honour—a compulsion which was soon systematically enforced (Distraint of Knighthood, 1278), and became a recognized source of royal income. An indirect effect of this system[60] was to break down another rule of the chivalrous code—that none could be dubbed who was not of gentle birth.[61] This rule, however, had often been broken before; even the romances of chivalry speak not infrequently of the knighting of serfs or jongleurs;[62] and other causes besides distraint of knighthood tended to level the old distinctions. While knighthood was avoided by poor nobles, it was coveted by rich citizens. It is recorded in 1298 as “an immemorial custom” in Provence that rich burghers enjoyed the honour of knighthood; and less than a century later we find Sacchetti complaining that the dignity is open to any rich upstart, however disreputable his antecedents.[63] Similar causes contributed to the decay of knightly ideas in warfare. Even in the 12th century, when war was still rather the pastime of kings and knights than a national effort, the strict code of chivalry was more honoured in the breach than in the observance.[64] But when the Hundred Years’ War brought a real national conflict between England and France, when archery became of supreme importance, and a large proportion even of the cavalry were mercenary soldiers, then the exigencies of serious warfare swept away much of that outward display and those class-conventions on which chivalry had always rested. Siméon Luce (chap. vi.) has shown how much the English successes in this war were due to strict business methods. Several of the best commanders (e.g. Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Thomas Dagworth) were of obscure birth, while on the French side even Du Guesclin had to wait long for his knighthood because he belonged only to the lesser nobility. The tournament again, which for two centuries had been under the ban of the Church, was often almost as definitely discouraged by Edward III. as it was encouraged by John of France; and while John’s father opened the Crécy campaign by sending Edward a challenge in due form of chivalry, Edward took advantage of this formal delay to amuse the French king with negotiations while he withdrew his army by a rapid march from an almost hopeless position. A couple of quotations from Froissart will illustrate the extent to which war had now become a mere business. Much as he admired the French chivalry, he recognized their impotence at Crécy. “The sharp arrows ran into the men of arms and into their horses, and many fell, horse and men.... And also among the Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives, and they went in among the men of arms, and slew and murdered many as they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights and squires, whereof the king of England was after displeased, for he had rather they had been taken prisoners.” How far Edward’s solicitude was disinterested may be gauged from Froissart’s parallel remark about the battle of Aljubarrota, where, as at Agincourt, the handful of victors were obliged by a sudden panic to slay their prisoners. “Lo, behold the great evil adventure that fell that Saturday. For they slew as many good prisoners as would well have been worth, one with another, four hundred thousand franks.” In 1402 Lord Thomas de Berkeley bought, as a speculation, 24 Scottish prisoners. Similar practical considerations forced the nobles of other European countries either to conform to less sentimental methods of warfare and to growing conceptions of nationality, or to become mere Ishmaels of the type which outlived the middle ages in Götz von Berlichingen and his compeers.
Bibliography.—Froissart is perhaps the source from which we may gather most of chivalry in its double aspect, good and bad. The brilliant side comes out most clearly in Joinville, the Chronique de Du Guesclin, and the Histoire de Bayart; the darker side appears in the earlier chronicles of the crusades, and is especially emphasized by preachers and moralists like Jacques de Vitry, Étienne de Bourbon, Nicole Bozon and John Gower. John Smyth’s Lives of the Berkeleys (Bristol and Gloucs. Archaeol. Soc, 2 vols.) and the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry (ed. A. de Montaiglon, or in the old English trans. published by the Early English Text Soc.) throw a very vivid light on the inner life of noble families. Of modern books, besides those quoted by their full titles in the notes, the best are A. Schultz, Höfisches Leben z. Zeit der Minnesänger (Leipzig, 1879); S. Luce, Hist. de Du Guesclin et de son Époque (2nd ed., Paris, 1882), masterly but unfortunately unfinished at the author’s death; Léon Gautier, La Chevalerie (Paris, 1883), written with a strong apologetic bias, but full and correct in its references; and F. W. Cornish, Chivalry (London, 1901), too little reference to the more prosaic historical documents, but candid and without intentional partiality.