Chivalry, as embodied by the Arthurian legend, and chivalric, medieval romances, had a considerable impact on life in the courts of England and Wales for many centuries following the rapid growth of chivalric romance in the twelfth century. Edward I (1239-1307), after defeating the last of the Welsh princes who might claim descent from Arthur, stylised himself Arthurus redivivus, as did several other monarchs.56 He surrounded his claim with great pageantry when he gathered the chivalry of Europe together for a Round Table in 1284 at Nefy in Carnarvonshire and was presented with the Crown of King Arthur.57 In 1344 Edward III endeavoured to use the codes of honour followed by King Arthur and his knights to found the Order of the Garter, a brotherhood of knights meant to emulate the Round Table.58 The events of the Hundred Years War that ravaged the French and English peoples from 1337 to 1453 created disillusionment with royal wars and the romantic associations surrounding them, causing chivalry to suffer a period of prolonged unpopularity. Authors such as Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes derided chivalry, mocking its romantic sentiments and idealisation of prowess in arms, and advancement in military technology dispensed the practicality of knighthood. Chivalry, however, survived. Caxton’s 1485 publication of Malory’s LD did much to help popularise chivalric romance. This edition would be reprinted five times with De Worde’s 1498 reprint becoming the
56 Karl Heinz Göller, ‘Reality versus Romance: A Reassessment of the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, in The
Alliteratice Morte Arthure: A Reassessment of the Poem, ed. by Karl Heinz Göller (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981),
pp. 15-29, at p. 17.
57 Rishanger, Loomis, and Powicke cited in William Matthews, ‘The Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of
a Myth’, in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1, (1970), 307-26, at p. 294.
first illustrated volume. Edwards suggests that the lack of extant early printings of LD potentially indicates that the work was so popular that it was literally ‘read to destruction’.59 In 1522, Henry VIII ordered the paintwork on the Winchester Round Table, constructed during the reign of Edward I, to be restored and an image of himself sitting in Arthur’s seat added, reaffirming the royal claim to Arthurian descent. Under the reign of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I (1533- 1603), chivalry experienced a resurgence. Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene (1590) immortalised the monarch’s court as a paragon of chivalric expression.60 During Elizabeth’s reign, yearly coronation day feasts, such as the one described in the quote below, were celebrated with displays of chivalry that closely resembled the anticipation of adventure that often preceded feasts in Arthur’s court:
In the mean time, whilest hir grace sat at dinner, sir Edward Dimmocke knight, hir champion by office, came riding into the hall in faire complet armor, mounted upon a beautiful courser, richlie trapped in cloth of gold, entred the hall, and in the midst thereof cast downe his gantlet: with offer to fight with him in hir quarrel, that should denie hie to the righterous and lawfull queene of the realme. The queene taking a cup of gold full of wine, drank to him thereof, and sent it to him for his fee together with the cover.61
The twelve-day tournament held at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 was plainly modeled after the Arthurian legend and exhibited the influences of Malory where a minstrel read from De Worde’s editions of LD and ‘the LADY OF THE LAKE was introduced to make part of [Q]ueen
Elizabeth’s entertainment’.62 Though jousting had ceased to be part of professional martial training, the pageantry at Kenilworth demonstrates the continued prominent influence and
popularity of medieval romance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Elizabethan chivalry centred around extravagant devotion to Elizabeth herself and took on more qualities of
59 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Reception of Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. by Elizabeth
Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 241-52, at p 243.
60 Edmund Spenser, Fairie Queen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909); Girouard, Camelot, p. 17.
61 Quoting Dyce in Ivan L. Schulze, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry and the Faerie Queen’s Annual Feast’, Modern
Language Notes, 50.3 (1935), 158-61.
62 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Reception of Malory’s Morte Darthur’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. by Elizabeth
Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 241-252, at p. 244; Alex Davis, Chivalry and
fantasy and the exotic than had previously been used. Her reign saw numerous mock battles and tournaments, and even embraced a medieval-gothic style of architecture which constructed castles and castle-like homes. The importance of ballistic technology grew during the English Civil War (1642-1651), hastening the process of obsolescence of more primitive combat that relied on individual brute strength and gallantry. This had an obvious effect on the use and perception of chivalry. With the waning importance of lances and bows in favour of cannons and guns, knights in armour became redundant and the romance that surrounded such combat
lessened. Thus chivalry in the Elizabethan court was valued more for its pageantry than its military applications. The last tournament was held in 1624. 63
The beginning of the English Enlightenment in the mid-seventeenth century saw the rise of rationalism, the physical sciences, and epistemology; interest in reason eclipsed interest in romance, and though individuals may have been proud of their noble heritage the impulse to mimic the chivalric figures of the past had largely gone. Certain elements of the chivalric
tradition such as the language used to address a woman, the practice of duels (albeit with pistols), and codes of behaviour were absorbed into seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century life, but by and large chivalry had fallen from its once lofty position.64 Warring had been entrusted to small private armies, literature and art moved towards favouring classical and Renaissance works, and the age of chivalry came to be viewed as a romanticised idea of a barbarous past. This occurred in combination with a widespread distaste for anything that savoured of ‘enthusiasm’ following the belief that people and society should be modeled on tempered reason. 65 Chivalry was considered an absurdity that culminated with the Crusades, an event that, as Hume put it, was
63 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1981) p. 17.
64 Ibid.
‘the most signal and the most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.’ 66 Yet despite this and Edmund Burke’s 1790 remark that chivalry was dead (in society as well as politics and war), its tenets would persist within the conduct of gentlemen and would once again reemerge in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
* * *
The ruins of Kenilworth, which once displayed the robust Elizabethan interest in chivalry and romance, became the site of one of the most important dialogues on the cultural, moral and literary influence of chivalry on eighteenth century governance and society. In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Richard Hurd argued the superiority of chivalric manners and Gothic superstition to Greek heroic poetry, and modern poetry’s indebtedness to it, justifying the growing interest in the medieval.67 The Letters would rationalise the already developing
fascination with the medieval that was coming into vogue, providing ‘justification for literature of the Middle Ages and the use of romantic material in modern poetry.’68 The discussion between Hurd, Digby, Addison, and Arbuthnot addresses concerns over the comparative barbarity of the medieval period and the incompatibility of chivalry with the more modern and civilized society of the late seventeenth century. While Addison both mourns the loss of the environment of chivalry and condemns the brutality and baseness of the society that so honoured it, he ultimately views chivalry as essential to the refinement of society:
No policy, even of an ancient legislator, could have contrived a better expedient to cultivate the manners and tame the spirits of a rude and ignorant people […] the generous sentiments, it inspired, perhaps contributed very much to awaken an emulation of a different kind; and to bring on those days of light and
66 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688 (New York,
NY: Liberty Fund, 1983), p. 243.
67 Audley L. Smith, ‘Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance’, ELH, 6 (1939), 58–81, at p. 58. 68 Ibid.
knowledge which have disposed us, somewhat unthankfully, to vilify and defame it…the first essays of wit and poetry, those harbingers of returning day to every species of letters, were made in the bosom of chivalry, and amidst the assemblies of noble dames, and courteous knights. And we may even observe, that the best of our modern princes, such as have been most admired for their personal virtues, and have been most concerned in restoring all the arts of civility and politeness, have been passionately addicted to the feats of ancient prowess.69
The brave deeds and generous behaviour that colour the stories and actions of medieval courts are cited as without real merit because they can only exist in an environment of social inequality and injustice, making the present age, even without chivalry, superior to the former. Don Quixote is referenced as a prime example of the growing disenchantment with chivalry and the romance surrounding the medieval.70 While Addison sees Don Quixote as bringing ‘eternal dishonor on the profession of knight-errantry’, Arbuthnot sees the work merely as a condemnation of ‘the abuses of chivalry, and the madness of continuing the old romantic spirit in times when, from a change of manners and policy, it was no longer in season.’71
Just two years after Hurd’s Letters were published, Horace Walpole would produce The Castle of Otranto, a novel which would be the impetus for a new literary genre that blended medieval romance and gothic, further encouraging the growth of medieval interest that was making its way into British antiquarian and literary circles. This novel would also inspire one of Britain’s most influential writers who would refashion chivalry to the tastes of a modern
audience: Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s modernisation of this medieval construct and his development of the historical fiction genre were instrumental in the growth of a literary, cultural, and social environment that not only looked fondly on chivalry but subsumed it into its national identity. The following chapter will explore how Scott helped transform modern Britain’s understanding of chivalry, demonstrating how the nation’s culture and society shifted in response, as well as the
69 Richard Hurd, The Works of Richard Hurd, D. D. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davis, 1811), pp. 194-95. 70 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventure of Don Quixote (London: Penguin Classics, 2000). 71 Hurd, Works of Richard Hurd, p. 199
larger impact chivalry had on gender roles, education, literature, and ultimately, perceptions of masculine responsibility and war.
* * *
Understanding the prominence of medievalism in British culture from the mid-eighteenth century onward is vital to understanding its impact on the culture and ethics influencing
enlistment and the pro-war mentality that predominated the early months of the First World War. The disillusioned texts produced in response to the war illustrate one of the many complex reactions to the conflict, one that was engendered by an interest in chivalric ideals fostered through literature and education. The ideals and romanticism which disillusioned writers reviled were formed over the course of a century and a half of fascination with the medieval. What began in the mid-seventeen hundreds as a burgeoning interest in historical and literary heritage took on an active and formative role in modern Britain and still exerts a significant influence on the legacy of WWI. The identity of the English gentleman formed slowly, at first adopting many of the characteristics detailed in Medieval Romance, and then adjusting to the interests,
practicalities, and social climate of modern Britain. This section examines the rediscovery of chivalry in the mid-seventeen hundreds and traces its growth and impact through the start of the nineteenth century, elucidating the way changing social and cultural norms within the middle and upper classes effected expectations and reaction to WWI.
This examination will be largely limited to the consideration of the middle and upper classes of Britain. The intention of this is to highlight the more direct nature with which these classes came in contact with chivalry later on in the nineteenth century and how its values were
encoded in British culture and education. By examining how popular literature was recuperating chivalry and its spread through the public school system, we are better able to understand chivalry’s formative role in the production of a mentality predisposed to embracing the romance of war and the similarly inspired notions of masculinity that were operative in the early stages of WWI.
This chapter will focus on the literary beginnings of chivalry in modern Britain, highlighting key authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson who were
instrumental in the popularisation of romanticised notions of chivalry. It will look closely at the ideas surrounding and development of the label ‘gentleman’, exploring how this title became operative and its precise meaning at different points in time. Finally, this chapter will explain how public schools came to reinforce the social requirement of being a gentleman and their reliance on certain chivalric ethics. By following the growth and impact of chivalry in the century leading up to the First World War, this chapter will demonstrate how crucial the concept of chivalry was to British culture and how Britain’s national response to the call to arms in many ways hinged on the ethics of chivalry.
It could be said that chivalry’s most direct impact on the legacy of WWI was in terms of social etiquette, ethics and morals transmitted through the formative education in public schools. Boys were taught the value of honour, strength, hardiness and brotherhood. Sport became
synonymous with war, the sports field a battlefield and teammates comrades in arms. As scholars such as Michael Paris have shown, this allegory helped to glamourise war as well as to make light of, or disregard its brutality, a fact that authors such as Sassoon would later condemn. Though schools’ curricula were heavily weighted towards classics, pupils still had significant engagement with works containing medieval or chivalric themes as will be shown in Chapter
Two. The image of the valiant knight was heavily romanticised and the honour of combat portrayed as the ultimate masculine, transformative experience, a combination which had a profound impact on many men’s perception of war.