HENRY OF LANCASTER (c. 1310–61) and Geoffroi de Charny (c. 1306–56) were vigorous warriors involved in the constant, hard campaigning and diplomacy of the first phase of the Hundred Years War. Although they may never have crossed swords in any engagement, they were often present in the same theaters of war and did meet as envoys for a series of negotiations to secure a truce in 1347.1 Each had high chivalric standing emphasized by being chosen an original member of his sovereign's knightly order, Lancaster becoming a knight of the Garter, Charny of the Star. The piety of each was dramatically registered by a valued sacred possession: Henry cherished a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns; Geoffroi owned what we now know as the Shroud of Turin.2 The piety of each likewise took the standard form of endowment: Lancaster reendowed a collegiate foundation at Leicester; Charny a church at Lirey.3 Both men reveal a puritanical streak that would have a long future among warriors in the West, an early form of that mentalité that would later form the minds of Cromwellians and Ignatius of Loyola.4
They were also both authors of extensive treatises that intimately explore the religious mentalité of chivalry. As prominent and pious chivalric figures whose books present more than a narrowly personal statement, they can speak for knighthood in their own times. Their books demand close attention in our inquiry.
Lancaster's Livre de seyntz medicines
Henry, first duke of Lancaster, wrote the Livre de seyntz medicines (The Book of Holy Remedies) in 1354, as he tells us in its final paragraph.5 The book was meant to be read by his friends and was later owned by other prominent, strenuous knights, namely, Sir John de Grailly, Captal de Buch, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, famous as the founder of the library within the Bodleian which still bears his name. The book came to Gloucester as a gift from “the baron of Carew”; apparently this is Thomas de Carew, a vigorous knight and diplomat.6 Buch and Gloucester added their coats of arms to a copy still preserved.7 These proud marks of ownership underscore our sense that the book presents a statement highly valued in eminent chivalric circles.
Lancaster's Livre takes an extremely physical approach to its subject and relies heavily on imagery from the author's knightly profession. It pictures his body as a castle and the soul as the treasure within its walls, beset by enemies which are sins. Since his ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, and heart are each attacked by all seven of the deadly sins, the scheme allows for enough combinations and permutations to delight any scholastic.8 E. J. Arnould, the mid-twentieth-century editor of the text, suggests that it was written in segments, day by day, right through Lent.9 M. Dominica Legge suggested to Arnould that the work may have been produced as a form of penance.10 I fear that some readers who struggle through its turgid prose and allegory gone to seed—244 pages in Anglo-Norman French—may think it penance to read. William Pantin, kind among historians, refers to the book as “a work of great freshness and simplicity” and agrees with Froissart that its author is “imaginative.”11 Yet Lancaster's biographer, Kenneth Fowler, in a classic understatement declares the book “not remarkable as a work of literature.”12 Even its editor, who tries to like it, declares the work “laborious,” “long-winded and repetitive.”13 But it is vastly informative for our inquiry into religion and chivalry. Any reader who persists could not doubt that it was written by a knight writing with his profession in mind, even if we lacked Henry's announcement of authorship (his name written backwards in a final gesture of abject humility) at the conclusion of the work. The text crackles with chivalric or feudal terminology of wounds, war, courts, castles, siege, prison, ransom, vassalage, treason, safe-conduct, and the like.14 In a telling military phrase, Lancaster even asserts that because of his sins he is at war with God. The daily kisses he gives to God at mass are intended to be signs of peace and truce between them, though he confesses that he constantly and traitorously breaks these suspensions of hostilities.15
Only a few pages into the text, Lancaster addresses our issues, in a passage worthy of full quotation:
I pray you, Lord for the love in which you took on human form, pardon my sins and watch over me, dearest Lord, that henceforth I be able to resemble you in some ways, if wretched food for worms such as I can resemble so noble a king as the king of heaven, earth, sea, and all that is therein. And if, dearest Lord, I have in this life any persecution for you touching body, possessions, or companions, or of any other sort, I pray, dearest Lord, that I may endure willingly for love of you, and since you, Lord, so willingly suffered such pains for me on earth, I pray, Lord, that I may resemble you insofar as I can find in my hard heart to suffer willingly for you such afflictions, labors, pains, as you choose and not merely to win a prize [guerdon] nor to offset my sins, but purely for love of you as you, Lord, have done for love of me.16
Here we encounter a model knight declaring his willingness to suffer in imitatione Christi. He wants, ideally, to suffer out of pure, mimetic love, but the specific denial that his goal is merely to offset sins through suffering is informative, and likely reveals the actual link between suffering and spiritual merit in his mind. Any reader will quickly learn that the leitmotif of this text is suffering: together, the noun “suffering” and the verb “to suffer” appear in this text more than sixty times. The nouns “pain” and “travail” likewise appear repeatedly.17 At the top of the scale Christ's suffering redeems humanity. The descriptions of Christ's torments during his passion, to a modern eye, pass the bounds of propriety and stand like a signpost pointing toward late medieval crucifixes from which many modern folk will want to avert their gaze. The sufferings of the Blessed Virgin are also imaginatively reproduced and fill whole pages; her tears, shed at each indignity visited upon her son, like warm white wine, cleanse the sinner's wounds and prepare them for the most efficacious healing ointment—Christ's sacrificial blood.18 The sufferings of saints, and especially the martyrs, get at least honorable if rather generic mention. Their sufferings and martyrdom serve as added counterweights to Lancaster's sins on the divine scales of eternal justice.19 But at the bottom of this hierarchy even human suffering, when endured in good causes and motivated by the right intent, yields some measure of satisfaction for the un-manageable debt owed for sin.
Sir Henry wants to suffer for the Lord he sometimes calls “Sire Dieu.” He senses his guilt intensely. Mirroring relationships as lively as his bonds with his tenants, and images as venerable as the theological treatises two and a half centuries earlier,20 Duke Henry calls himself “a foul and evil traitor, the chief cause of my good lord's villainous death (cheitif et malveis traitre, q'est la principale cause de la vileyne mort de son bon seignur).”21 We have already noted his sense of making war against his Lord. Wishing to avoid pride, he says he would henceforth serve not worldly inconsequentials or worse, but God “en perils et en peyne.”22 For his great sins, he declares “I would put my-self in pain and in perils so that I might find some way to please you, sweetest Lord (moy mettre en peyne qe jeo puisse ascune chose faire a la plesance de vous, tresdouz Sires).”23 As this wish suggests, his suffering must in some infinitesimal measure not only resemble but repay Christ's own suffering, as he recognizes:
I pray you, Lord…that I might so suffer all pains and sorrows patiently for love of You, sweet Lord, to repay you some part of what I owe for the most horrendous griefs, pains and vilanies that you suffered, sweet Lord, so graciously for wretched me.24
Or, again, he prays,
That I can understand that through the slight pain I endure on earth I am quit of the great pains of hell. This is a good deal as for a little suffering in this world, which is nothing to endure, one can escape the pains of hell, which are so terrible and joyless: and a man certainly cannot earn more by well enduring your gift of suffering than to have by this a reduction of the pains of purgatory.25
These sentiments come from the pen of a man who refers regularly to “my wretched body (cheitif corps), and who says that his body deserves literally to be boiled, fried, and roasted in hell (en enfern boiller, roster et frire).”26
The pious, atoning sentiment could not be clearer; but is there any chivalric connection here? Is it likely that any knight, a joyful practitioner of prowess—as proudly physical a creed as can be imagined—would sincerely denigrate the body and long for its sufferings? Do such sentiments not emanate from clerics rather than knights and is not Henry of Lancaster merely aping such language as his confessor might use and impose? Even that would be evidence of interest, of course, but I want to suggest that much more is at work. In the first place the imaginative context that he has constructed for his work must be kept in mind. The sites of sin for which cures are needed he describes as wounds (not fevers to be cured or boils to be lanced) and wounds come from weapons. Sometimes wounded limbs, he knows (with his mind likely on the aftermath of battle) must be removed at the joint.27 Henry sometimes also speaks of fractures (viles brisures)28 which I am sure he did not imagine resulting from an unfortunate tumble down a newel staircase. The context of combat in this treatise directs our reading. His use of the terminology of pain and labor echoes the language many works of chivalric literature use to describe campaign and battle, as we will see. This likelihood is strengthened by his admission of fear when he hears tales of battle; his fears focus on being shamed or suffering sudden death without a chance for confession.29 For other lay groups these terms might have more general meaning; for knights the backdrop for thought is campaign and battle.
Moreover, Duke Henry sometimes wonderfully reveals his train of thought, if indirectly. In discussing how the tears shed by the Blessed Virgin will wash the wounds of his own wretched body he comes to nasal wounds, a topic which puts the realist in him in mind of the blows that struck Christ's nose during his scourging. He comments, in all piety, that Christ's nose must have looked like that of a habitual tourneyer, and that his mouth must have been discolored and beaten out of shape. Here he writes with the voice of experience. Warming to his topic, he says that indeed Christ did fight in a tournament—and won it, securing life for humanity.30 As a strenuous knight, his conception of imitating Christ readily turns to this martial version of the savior and his role.31
It seems to me not too much to claim, then, that Henry of Lancaster conceives of the strenuous knightly life itself as meritorious suffering, as a form of penance acceptable, even pleasing, in God's eyes as satisfaction for sin. In its own way, militia is a form of imitatio Christi.32 We should note, above all, that Henry of Lancaster is not talking about crusade. Although he had personally gone on more than one crusading venture, and although he does mention pilgrimage with some regularity, never in his treatise does he specify fighting unbelievers; his references to pilgrimage seem to indicate travel to sacred places, not the armed pilgrimage that was crusade. When he declares that the great gift of divine salvation is a bargain, given the modest level of human suffering required in return, he may draw on a venerable theme of crusade sermons; but he is putting all suffering of knights into the balance pan, not specifically that suffering endured as a crusader. He thinks that the hard life and the hard blows that knights endure repay some of their vast debt to God, even, we must assume, if that means the campaigning of what we would call the Hundred Years War, rather than any crusade in the Mediterranean or in company with the knights of the Teutonic order. It is knighthood in general that represents for him a life of expiatory suffering; this includes crusade but does not inhere in crusade solely. Through suffering in heroic atonement he imitates Christ and in some small way repays the debt for sin.
Charny's Livre de chevalerie
This point of view emerges even more clearly in the second treatise, that written by Henry's contemporary, Geoffroi de Charny, the leading French knight of the age and author of a highly informative Livre de chevalerie. Charny was in the fullest sense a strenuous knight who apparently wrote this treatise for what was intended to be a grand new royal chivalric society, the Order of the Star founded by King John of France. Only the utter failure of this order under the repeated hammer blows of defeat suffered by French knighthood in this phase of the Hundred Years War, I believe, condemned Charny's treatise to obscurity in its own time. However, in company with Lancaster's book, it has much to tell us.33
If Henry of Lancaster wrote a religious treatise for which chivalry functions as a subtext, Geoffroi de Charny wrote a chivalric treatise with intensely religious overtones. Thus in analyzing knightly religion in Charny we can reverse the process by which we approached Henry's Livre. There we looked for religiously significant suffering and then found a link with knighthood. With the Livre de chevalerie we must first examine Charny's emphasis on suffering endured in the profession of knighthood, and then turn to find the linkage with religious expiation.
In company with Lancaster, Charny undoubtedly thinks physical suffering is spiritually good, the mere body is nothing. In fact, he refers regularly to the wretched body (chetiz or chetifs corps), using the very phrase beloved by Lancaster.34 They could sing harmonious duets on the dangers of sloth, although for formally distinct goals. Charny's part would include truly vigorous denunciations of self-indulgent concern over choice dishes, fine wines, the best sauces; he can denounce soft beds, white linens, and sleeping late, in language that would do credit to a crusty monastic reformer.35 Lancaster, we should note, would add his voice especially against the vice of gluttony; he was a noted gourmet, though he denounces this delight as a sin, and was suffering from gout when he wrote his treatise. “Too great a desire to cosset the body is against all good,” is Charny's summary statement covering all forms of bodily indulgence.36
Instead, Charny finds the obvious goal in life to be vigorous military effort, disciplining the body, taking the endless risks and suffering that campaigning entails without fear or complaint. Charny even advocates embracing the dangers and pains with joy at the opportunity for doing deeds that will secure a man the immortality of human memory. It will also, he says pointedly, secure a man the sighs and admiration of soft ladies.37
Yet the emphasis is on masculine physical effort, struggle, and heroic suffering. The very process of getting to the scene of serious military action is worthy; as long as one travels to fight:
For indeed no one can travel so far without being many times in physical danger. We should for this reason honor such men-at-arms who at great expense, hardship, and grave peril undertake to travel.38
Although he warns that “The practice of arms is hard, stressful and perilous to endure (le mestiers d'armes soit durs et penibles et perilleux a l'endurer),” he insists that for good men “strength of purpose and cheerfulness of heart make it possible to bear all these things gladly and confidently, and all this painful effort seems nothing to them (bonne volenté et gayeté de cuer font toutes ces choses passer seurement et liement, et tout ce travail ne leur semble nient).”39
To some extent bodily suffering and effort represent goods in themselves; but they must be seen as the necessary accompaniments of what I have argued is the greatest chivalric quality in Charny's mind, prowess. Skillful, courageous, hands-on violence, the bloody and sweaty work of fighting superbly at close quarters with edged weapons is the glorious means of securing honor, which Charny (in company with all professional fighting men in all ages) knows is well worth purchasing at the price of mere pain, mutilation, or even death.40 Prowess and honor as a linked pair represent the highest human achievement to Geoffroi de Charny. Suffering is good because it is bonded to the prowess that secures honor. At the very opening of his book he constructs an ascending scale of the several modes of fighting. All are worthy since they demonstrate prowess and yield honor; but some are more worthy than others: Individual encounters in jousting are good, tourney (involving groups of combatants) is better, war is clearly best. Tournament, for example, is better than individual jousting, not only because it involves more equipment and expenditure but because it also entails “physical hardship (travail de corps), crushing and wounding and sometimes danger of death.”41 Obviously, real warfare involves even more effort and greater danger of death. Charny says concisely, “By good battles good bodies are proved (par les bonnes journees sont esprouvez les bons corps).”42
These good men who prove their worth with their bodies in combat bear a heavy burden as models for the rest, a burden carried only with “great effort and endurance, in fearful danger and with great diligence (a grant peine et travail, en grant paour et peril, en grant soing a s'entente mise).”43 Their great deeds of prowess have been accomplished
through suffering great hardship, making strenuous efforts, and enduring fearful physical perils and the loss of friends whose deaths they have witnessed in many great battles in which they have taken part; these experiences have often filled their hearts with great distress and strong emotion.44
We can usefully recall here Henry of Lancaster's willingness to suffer “persecucioun de corps, d'avoir ou d'amys.”45
Charny laments that he can hardly tell fully of the lives of such good men, “hard as they have been and still are (si dures come elles ont esté et sont encores).”46 But men of worth “do not care what suffering they have to endure.” Charny lives so fully within this code that he cannot understand men who fail to realize the need for prowess, suffering, and honor. How vexing and shameful it must be, he muses, to reach old age without doing great deeds.47
Near the end of his treatise he provides a capsule statement one more time, in the hopes of reaching his audience with a message that seems to him not only vitally important but self-evident:
And if you want to continue to achieve great deeds, exert yourself, take up arms, fight as you should, go everywhere across both land and sea and through many different countries, without fearing any peril and without sparing your wretched body, which you should hold to be of little account, caring only for your soul and for living an honourable life.48
Here, as elsewhere, he pairs the soul with honor, raising in specific form our general question of the relationship between basic questions of religious belief and the putatively secular triad of prowess, honor, and military suffering. What is the connection in Charny's view?
Of course Charny is convinced, in the first place, that God is the source of a knight's prowess. As every good and perfect gift, it comes from above. “You can see clearly and understand that you on your own can achieve nothing except what God grants you,” Charny intones, going on to ask, “And does not God confer great honor when He allows you of His Mercy to defeat your enemies?”49 Possessing the qualities of a great man-at-arms has nothing to do with fickle fortune. For,
if you have the reputation of a good man at arms, through which you are exalted and honored, and you have deserved this by your great exertions, by the perils you have faced and by your courage, and Our Lord has in his mercy allowed you to perform the deeds from which you have gained such a reputation, such benefits are not benefits of fortune but…by right should last.50
The pious response, as Charny insists tirelessly, must be to thank God heartily for the great gift and to use it well.51
But are the hard life and valorous suffering of a knight spiritually meritorious? Do they enter into the calculations that figure so prominently in the medieval economy of salvation by the fourteenth century? With a vengeance, Charny asserts that the knightly life truly qualifies.52 He first approaches this topic when opening a discussion of the various orders in society. He will analyze not the three ordines of conservative theologians adumbrated by Georges Duby, but his own set of four: the married, monks, priests, and knights. The several specifically religious orders, he grants, pray for themselves and others and disdain the world and the flesh appropriately. Yet “they are spared the physical danger and the strenuous effort of going out onto the field of battle to take up arms, and are also spared the threat of death (et sanz nul peril de leurs corps ne a grant travail d'aler aval les champs pour eulz armer ne en doubte d'estre tuez).”53 After wandering off topic to describe the knighting ceremony, he returns to this theme and declares knighthood to be the most rigorous order of all, especially for those who keep it well (“la bonne ordre de chevalerie qui entre toutes autres ordres pourroit l'en et devroit tenir la plus dure ordre de toutes, espeuciament a ceulz qui bien la tiennent”). Though tough regulations constrain eating and sleeping and require vigils of the religious,
this is all nothing in comparison with the suffering to be endured in the order of knighthood. For whoever might want to consider the hardships, pains, discomforts, fears, perils, broken bones, and wounds which the good knights who uphold the order of knighthood as they should endure and have to suffer frequently, there is no religious order in which as much is suffered as has to be endured by these good knights who go in search of deeds of arms in the right way.54
Like the regular clergy, the knights on campaign suffer severe restrictions on eating and sleeping, but “when they would be secure from danger they will be beset by great terrors, and when they would defeat their enemies, sometimes they may be defeated or killed or captured and wounded and struggling to recover (quant il cuident estre asseur, lors leur viennent il de grans paours, et quant il cuident desconfire leurs enemis, aucune fois se treuvent desconfitures ou mors ou pris et bleciez et en la paine de garir),”55 and to this daunting list must be added the perils of travel, shipwreck, and robbers. “And where are the orders which could suffer as much (Et ou sont les ordres qui tant pourroient souffrir)?” Charny asks rhetorically and in triumph. “Indeed,” he says, capping his argument, “in this order of knight-hood one can well save the soul and bring honour to the body (Certes en ceste ordre de chevalerie peut l'on tres bien les aumes sauver et les corps tres bien honorer).”56
Charny completes his case by denouncing “those who perform deeds of arms more for glory in the world than for the salvation of the soul (qui fait les faiz d'armes plus pour la gloire de ce monde que pour l'ame sauver),” and praises “those who perform deeds of arms more to gain God's grace and for the salvation of the soul than for glory in this world (qui fait les faiz d'armes plus pour avoir la grace de Dieu et pour les ames sauver que pour la gloire de ce monde).” “Their noble souls,” he is convinced, “will be set in paradise to all eternity, and their persons will be forever honored (les ames dignes sont mises en paradis et sanz fin et les corps touzjours mais honorez et ramenteuz en touz biens).”57 The parallelism between salvation and honor achieved by prowess is complete. By working the body, by hazarding the body in deeds of prowess, the merely physical is transcended, in one direction to achieve glorious and imperishable honor, in another direction to help conduct the soul through purgatory to join its glorified body in paradise. Henry of Lancaster termed this the safe-conduct which leads to joy “sans fyn.”58
Like Lancaster, Charny is thinking about the knightly life in general, not about crusading. Again, like Lancaster, who went as a crusader against Moors in Spain and in North Africa, and (during a lull in the European war) against Slavs in Prussia, Charny went on crusade to Anatolia in 1345 (again, during a slow time in the Hundred Years War), and termed such fighting “righteous, holy, certain and sure (droite, sainte, seure et ferme).”59 But in no way does either knightly writer privilege crusade. Charny is, in fact, careful to assure his readers that they can fight in all proper wars without danger to their souls. This insistence in both of our fourteenth-century knights is significant. Crusade ideology as developed by clerics traditionally distinguished between the often sinful fighting of knights at home and their redemptive and meritorious battles with enemies of the faith. To the contrary, all their arduous travel, all their privations, all the dangers and suffering in fights with worthy opponents in licit causes seemed to Lancaster and Charny to prove their love for God, and to repay some portion of their debt for sin which had necessitated his sacrificial love.
The convergence of thought in our two authors is all the more remarkable when we recall the different personal agendas evidently standing behind each treatise. Lancaster wrote an intensely personal and pious penitential work, likely day by day through Lent; Charny wrote a tract for the French royal chivalric order, intending to buck up the warriors of the kingdom at a low point in their martial success against English invaders. It can come as no surprise to find a differing tonality in the two works: Lancaster can scarcely pen a page without thinking of penitence and hell; Charny mentions the afterlife without specifically naming either hell or purgatory and does so only in reference to the bad men-at-arms whom he discusses briefly and with patent distaste.60 Yet in the argument of both books the heroic, ascetic suffering of righteous knighthood merits divine forgiveness. Whatever their differences in tonality, Lancaster and Charny share a fundamental sense that through their hard lives knights do penance for their inevitable sins.
The Power of Paradox
To modern sensibilities, this line of thought, which seems so logical and necessary to Charny and Lancaster, will not represent religiously meritorious practices. In fact, it did not seem so to some medieval writers. In the twelfth century Ralph Niger, for example, objected. He asserted that “the shedding of human blood is in no way a fitting atonement for sins.”61 His view, of course, represents a dissent from what he knows is majority opinion. Most medieval scholars and theologians held views on warfare and the will of God that modern people may find difficult.
Adopting analytical neutrality we must take note of the remarkable benefits this line of thought guaranteed the knightly order in medieval society. The asceticism which so marked this society usually involved giving up something truly important: clerics (in theory) gave up sex; women (as Caroline Bynum has taught us) sometimes gave up food; all religious folk thought piety involved doing something unpleasant or giving up something pleasant.62 But the knights can have it both ways with regard to suffering and violence. William James writes in The Varieties of Religious Experience that “the impulse to sacrifice” may be “the main religious phenomenon” and he describes “the undiluted ascetic spirit” as “the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh.”63 What chivalric ideology did with sacrifice and the poor flesh is surely a remarkable case in point. Knights acquire turf on both sides of a great divide; they work both sides of a basic contradiction; and this yields power. Are they not at once victors and victims, self-exalters and self-abasers? They can praise hands-on prowess as the glorious practice of their beautiful bodies, which, of course, ensures their status as it wins them foaming praise and glittering loot. They can groan over their sufferings in hard campaigns and battles in which their bodies may be deprived of comforts, bruised, cut, and broken. Yet they can even more obviously gloat over the triumphs that secure their dominance. The very exercise of their professional labor thus helps to secure pardon for its inseparable wrongs. God himself has given them the great physical strength and spirited capacity by which their dominance in the world is secured. Yet he is also mollified when they suffer willingly, meritoriously, in a good cause, as did his son. Thus bodily superiority proved sword in hand is celebrated in epic and romantic literature and chivalric biography with pride and style; it stands alongside the sacrifice and suffering of hazarding the body, risking all, being on the receiving end of all that edged weaponry.64 This is why Roland, dying in his great chanson, can offer up his glove (symbolic of his knightly life) to a willing God, “for all his sins.”65
The chivalrous are laying claim to participate in the dominant religious paradigm, based on suffering and bodily atonement, which is essentially clerical and specifically monastic in origin. At the same time they are enthusiastic practitioners of a chivalric paradigm based on prowess, honor, and bodily exaltation (which seems to be the eternal warrior code and specifically that originating in the Germanic West).66 Lancaster says he wants his service to be for God, not for worldly causes worth nothing (“en chosez moundeynes de nient”).67 Charny carefully distinguishes the good men-at-arms from the sadly reprobate.68
Yet these model knights also demonstrate a spirit of decided independence within their piety. Each calibrates the scale himself; each decides, in effect, what God will approve on the basis of ideas largely drawn from non-theological principles and practices.69 On the crucial matter of setting standards for good knightly life and work, our authors reach their own conclusions. Against all clerical strictures Lancaster was an avid tourneyer, who seems to have delighted in the colorful spectacle of the sport as well as its violence. A royal grant from Edward III authorized Lancaster and a group of knights of which he was captain to hold annual tournaments at Lincoln.70 He is described in the grant as one “who delights in acts of war.”71 It is not surprising that in the midst of all his pious contrition on all other topics he manages to say that knightly pleasures such as tournament and dancing are not evil in themselves.72 Aptly pouring salt into a wound, Lancaster even managed a string of puns that reverses the common clerical word play on tournament as torment. Picturing Christ as a victorious tourneyer for humanity, he says “Le turnoy estoit pur nous quant il par turment tourna nostre dolour en joie (the tourney was for us when he by his torments turned our sorrow into joy).”73 Charny, too, accepts tournaments without a second thought and is even more blunt. Two rungs on his ladder of chivalric perfection, as we saw, involve individual jousting or the more active and thus more virtuous mêlée.74 He approves discrete love affairs on the grounds that they will improve a man and make him more preux. No language or thoughts of fornication or adultery enter his text; perhaps they did not enter his mind. A cloud of such issues floated over knighthood: what causes are worthy and involve meritorious suffering? When is killing allowable, even meritorious, despite the sixth commandment? When is vengeance, so often linked by clerics with wrath—one of the seven deadly sins—actually just and meritorious?
Charny approves most of the guerres of his day, including what the lawyers would term private war, raiding, and counter-raiding, as well as grand campaigns often termed public war and led by kings and blessed by bishops or the bishop of Rome. As long as he follows the rules requiring formal defiance of an enemy, as long as he is himself a true cheftain de guerre or follows such a man, as long as he fights in defense of honor, a knight's hard campaigning and cutting will win untroubled accolades from Charny and Lancaster.75 They consider all good knightly fighting to be religiously meritorious—or at least all that was carried out bravely by good men.
The lines of thought seem contradictory, yet they in fact merge, for chivalry in its religious dimension becomes knightly practice in what were considered good causes, suffering in atonement for sin and thanking God for the strength to do it all. And doing all that chivalry entails seems truly glorious to the knights, whatever the qualifications necessitated by any pacific line of religious sentiment. Surely Henry of Lancaster did not truly believe he was in essence a worm, however clearly he confessed to that state. Many a religious order stood ready to accept into their cloister a noble ex-worm, classically when age and infirmity had largely closed a vigorous chivalric career. Most knights, however, clearly remained in their status and worked out their relationship with God along professional lines. Henry of Lancaster's piety must have been real and his emotions surely focused powerfully in a religious vein. No disrespect is offered in insisting that he wanted to have it both ways: to be a powerful lord who can (as he confesses) stretch out his beautiful legs in the stirrups of his great horse on the tourney field or the battlefield; and also to relate the sufferings he endures as a knight to the passion of Christ.76 He could scarcely imagine his piety foreign to his chivalry. Geoffroi de Charny, I believe, is so convinced of the religious rectitude of his chivalric life, so happy God has given it to him, so sure his own sufferings are meritorious, that with characteristic vigor he mentally fills in the gap rather than bridging it.77
Heroic prowess, meritorious suffering, lay independence (within a frame-work of lay piety), and highly selective appropriation of useful theological ideas—all formed a great amalgam in the thinking of Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny. The crucial question thus arises whether this set of ideas had significant ancestry or is only a late or idiosyncratic development in the long lifespan of chivalry. The question will lead us back into twelfth-century sources, that is into the very era when chivalry was developing characteristic form. Do sources of this vintage link the hard chivalric life with religious atonement? Finding such links would suggest a long ancestry: the pattern in Lancaster and Charny began to form centuries earlier.78 Thus we must search for elements of a developing ideology. Such a search cannot be a mere hand-picking of ideas that accord with views we have seen in Lancaster and Charny. Any emerging ideas that could narrow the gap between warrior values and religion must be considered significant. What ideas dominated the discussion? Did they anticipate structural elements in Lancaster and Charny? What ideas seem to have been acceptable to the knights (rather than coming solely from clerical strictures)?
Such a body of ideas can, in fact, be found. Key elements of this amalgam were at least two centuries old when Lancaster and Charny wrote, as each chapter of this book will argue. To understand how basic constituents of this chivalric religious ideology combined, we must first examine their setting, beginning with church reform, lay piety and a developed theology to guide it, along with the phenomenon of asceticism. These elements, staples of historical analysis on their own, must be seen afresh within the context of a developing chivalric ethos. Chapter 3 launches this effort.