A BROAD SET of ideas about the medieval warrior profession would necessarily be framed in terms of a religious no less than a military ethos. Powerful religious movements of the age thus form an essential backdrop to an emerging ideology that could justify and elevate knighthood. Three of these elements demand special notice because of their undoubted importance: church reform, the widespread culture of asceticism, and lay initiative and independence. Though they may be of equal importance, they do not require equal scrutiny in this study, since some have enjoyed more scholarly attention than others. Church reform, the first topic, is in particular a venerable staple of medieval historiography. The goal here is not to explicate so well-developed a historical theme but to establish its significant connections with ideas about knighthood. This is not the usual focus of investigation, and historians have not always linked surges of reform with the emergence of a special strand of lay theology for the knighthood in general. The second element of the religious framework requires more attention. All who study the middle ages encounter the dense atmosphere of asceticism in those centuries; they so regularly breathe this atmosphere that it may come to be taken for granted. Yet it deserves close analysis and can be seen as a crucial environment for the emergence of the chivalric ethos. The third factor, a remarkable degree of independence within genuine knightly piety, is important enough to merit separate treatment in the following chapter. Another theme (nurtured in the atmosphere of asceticism analyzed in the current chapter) will be repeatedly considered in later chapters and especially in Chapter 5: knightly meritorious suffering.
The Effects of Church Reform
Church reformers labored to effect their plans in every medieval era: but efforts with great impact on chivalric ideas came in two particular phases. General scholarly attention has focused on the earlier phase. From the second half of the eleventh century, clerics strongly advanced claims to superior status and a directive role within Christian society generally. Major figures of this Gregorian Reform drew upon and moved into the upper ranks of the secular clergy, becoming bishops and even popes. Their most pressing goal was to create right order in the church itself, closely conceived as a body of clerics; continuing renewal would then come through the purifying outreach of a hierarchical elite into the church as Christian society. The clerics would purify lives and religious practices, shaping and encouraging piety and some-times disciplining its excessive enthusiasms in a dynamic social world. For no group was this goal more crucial than the knights.
Elaborating and enforcing this lay theology could not proceed at the desired speed. To produce right order in church and world, the reformers quickly found they required centralizing measures of governance and law. They were certain that institution-building and law-making centered on Rome would surely yield broad moral reform, the ultimate goal. Yet the immediate, if largely unanticipated, results were legalism, an emphasis on finance, institutionalization, and political conflict, most famously though not solely with the German emperors who had their own ideas about the proper ordering of society. So did many other powerful laymen. As kings, dukes, lay “advocates” of monastic houses—or simple local strongmen—powerful lay lords had secured an iron grip on much church property and often over clerical elections. Concerned churchmen understandably feared these laymen could block reform and delay or prevent the creation of an ideal religious society. Surely Christian society was to be guided by clerics marshaled solidly behind an effective papacy, rather than warlords acting under various titles.
Over generations, the institutional as well as theological implications of this program produced the Papal Monarchy so familiar to students of medieval history. Layers of officials, courts, and law slowly emerged, with one compass point of their expanding reach set firmly in Rome. Of course, the reformers encouraged and helped to provide acceptable outlets for lay folk who wanted to participate more fully in religious life and practices. The most enthusiastic of the laity could simply be encouraged to leave the world and enter some religious order, especially in an age fertile in new orders. Yet that option did not satisfy all and clearly could satisfy only a minority of knights who left the world near the end of their careers. Many faithful folk, the knights among them, wished to live fully religious lives without leaving the world for the cloister.1
As the violent storms of political struggle over investiture abated, serious thought could focus again on a clearer and more elaborate theological framework to guide the lives of lay folk trying to find firm moral ground in a world stirred by unsettling social and economic changes. New groups of reformers applied their talents and labor to just such efforts in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In effect they launched a second important phase of clerical reform, seeking to develop a more elaborate lay theology as a framework for the religious life and practices of the great body of nonclerics.2 The earlier phase of reform—that led by the Gregorians in the last quarter of the eleventh century—had given clerics a needed measure of independence and had secured papal leadership within the church. Movement toward a needed second phase came in the early twelfth century with a group of theologians in Laon (under the leadership of Master Anselm). As Alexander Murray has argued, these men “were in fact the principle re-founders, after the Carolingians, of systematic evangelical study.”3 By the late twelfth century a circle of learned theologians at Paris—whose ideas linked them to views of other leading theologians and canonists—were doing the hard work required on this second advance, elaborating a theology that was specifically crafted for the laity. Their task was to construct what Daniel Bornstein aptly termed “the definition of a form of Christian life that is neither sacerdotal nor monastic, but distinctively lay.”4
Guided by Peter the Chanter or Cantor (d. 1197), as John Baldwin has shown, the group of theologians in Paris was especially vigorous in taking up the daunting goal of adapting religious thought for the brave new world of High Medieval Europe; they wrote, preached, and lobbied the powerful. The influential legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 shows some results of their work.5 Churchmen confronted a world of more money and all the vexing issues that money entails (especially issues of usury), of changing forms of war and the financing of war, of more directive power vested in kings and their courts. The circle of theologians in Paris included some of the most influential clerical writers and administrators of the next generation, Robert of Courson, Thomas of Cobham, Jacques de Vitry, Stephen Langton, Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Poitiers, Peter of Poitiers of St. Victor, Foulques de Neuilly, Gilles de Corbeilles, and Raoul Ardent. Although they gathered as Parisian academics, they resolutely addressed pressing social issues, wrote copiously, held councils, went on preaching tours, entered papal service, gained the support of so vigorous a pope as Innocent III and so powerful a king of France as Philip II. Under their guidance a more developed theology for the laity began to emerge.
Two major sets of ideas in their reform program are especially significant for our themes. First, they discussed the proper role and constructive labor of ideal social groups—socio-professional sets of people known by various names such as ordo, status gradus, honor, dignitas, officium—that constituted the building blocks of society and whose necessary labor animated the world within the divine plan. They were certain that usury was not licit and they worried about the spiritual consequences of warfare as well as commerce, vigorous labor in each being a potent source of sin.6 Second, they worked at developing the theology of confession and penance as the means for dealing with sin which sadly distorted God's plan for human society. These ideas are so fundamental to chivalric ideology that two later chapters will examine the issues in detail. Chapter 7 will focus on a society of orders, each carrying out the labor proper to it, including the hard labor of knighthood. Chapter 8 examines developing ideas of contrition, confession, and penance as the framework for dealing with the dread results of sin on individuals and society.
Far from solely a top-down impulse, burgeoning piety among laity as well as clergy animated a religious society seeking a wide variety of new spiritual outlets and pious practices. New church buildings in gleaming white stone arose in the green countryside, endowed often by pious lay gifts; pilgrims from all levels and professions flocked to visit a growing list of sacred destinations near and far; lay folk (along with the clerics) enthusiastically embraced the cult of relics, seeking (through the merit of the associated saint) health and grace from God; lay guilds and confraternities began to flourish.7 The knighthood would take part in and be affected by this flourishing piety in its rich variety of forms. They endowed churches and monasteries if income permitted, or gave as generously as they could to existing houses; they readily went on pilgrimage and most notably on crusade; they formed their own professional, pious “order” and they venerated or avidly collected relics.8
Lay enthusiasm was laudable in clerical eyes, but it likewise entailed dangers. Tensions easily arose over the proper role for the laity in this vibrant religious society undergoing change along so many significant lines. The question posed in stark terms—who was to be in charge of spirituality in this society?—was swiftly answered by the orthodox majority in favor of the clergy. Yet, put in only slightly less stark terms—how fully was the clerical elite to be in charge?—the issue of independence stubbornly persisted.9
Scholars for generations have emphasized anticlericalism and heresy among the laity in general; more recently some have not only stressed piety, but have insisted on loyalty and enthusiastic orthodoxy at the parish level up to—and even beyond—the Reformation. With regard to the knights, both views are extreme and the combination of piety and independence requires emphasis instead.10 Deep spirituality can be sensed in some knights; nearly all were dutiful participants in the sacramental system that mediated fallible humanity's relationship with divinity. These warriors, whose literature emphasized hands-on violence, respected the work done by the priests' own hands at the altar or beside the deathbed. The knights followed most of the standard religious forms prescribed for lay people. They opposed heresy with strong voice and even stronger sword-arms. As both Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny have shown us (in Chapter 2), they could be immensely and even verbosely pious.
But certain modes of thought and professional practice were crucial to them, and on such issues they required accommodation—or at least tacit noninterference—from the church. On such issues I am convinced that their attitudes were far from irreverent and were in fact founded on confidence that God was on their side and would understand. He was, of course, the bellicose Lord of Hosts, whose vengeance was a wonder to behold and a thrill to hear described (when directed against others). The knights imagined that their relationship with Dominus Deus (the Lord God) was ideally like that which should obtain with dominus rex (the Lord King). Sadly, both heavenly and earthly sovereigns had, in their own fashion, created troublesome ranks of official mediators (often compounding the problem by elevating men of no great social rank) who stood between the good knights and their good lord. The clergy and all those fussy royal bureaucrats were forever getting in the way, both sets armed with endless parchment books or rolls scribbled with crabbed Latin, outlining a restrictive world of do's and don'ts. Of course, ideas upholding knighthood could never uncompromisingly contravene the essential rites conducted by a specialist core of clerics (nor the need for monarchy). Yet late in an evening (perhaps after considerable wine had flowed), the knights might reflect that the ways of the Lord—as carried out by clerics—were frustratingly inscrutable. If the world were truly right, the knights could, when necessary, simply outflank all these intrusive intermediaries; on matters of chivalry essential to them they should relate to the Lord God (or to the Lord King) directly and personally, on the basis of their good and hard service. Their concept of right order in the world differed from that of clerical reformers who claimed the same high goal.
Prudence intermixed with sincere belief led the knights to cooperate as much as possible with the religious and administrative intermediaries—their nephews, cousins, and uncles, of course. These worlds of thought overlapped and were congruent in significant fashion. But wherever ecclesiastical restraints (or royal bureaucrats) cut into chivalric flesh, the knights simply refused to comply; indeed, by and large refused to believe that they should comply, and this refusal was backed by that fundamental, proud sense of a personal understanding with the Lord of Hosts, the giver of their great prowess and ordainer of all victories.
Yet they knew that God expected meritorious suffering. We must understand the sheer power of asceticism in medieval religion in general in order to recognize its specific link with knighthood. All the knightly conceptions and debates under consideration in this study flourished and took distinctive form in an atmosphere of intensely held beliefs about meritorious corporal suffering. The cultural commitment to asceticism might easily be overlooked in the constellation of religious forces; how it operated within the ideological frame for chivalry merits a closer look.
Gloria Passionis, the Glory of Suffering
Both prowess and asceticism claim central spaces in chivalric thinking. They dominated the thought of our model knight/authors Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny. While both sets of ideas may cause some queasiness to modern sensibilities, prowess is undoubtedly better known and appreciated than asceticism. A surviving academic insistence, however threatened, on reading classic works such as the Iliad, Beowulf, or the Song of Roland in introductory courses on history and literature teaches modern students fundamentals of the fierce ethos animating men who fought other men in hand-to-hand combat. It is a virtue, moreover, clearly considered timeless and relevant, as popular films and endless television shows amply demonstrate. Since the very idea of ascetic self-discipline is disavowed by arbiters of thought and practice in modern life, however, almost nothing of the literature of asceticism is still known to any but specialist scholars. The basic notion will surely seem puzzling if not repugnant to many today. Yet the motive force of this impulse within High and Late Medieval religion must be kept in mind if we are to make sense of men who could have taken Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny as models. For them there was obviously a gloria passionis, a glory of suffering or endurance.
Of course an ascetic tradition is ancient and ubiquitous, not unique to medieval Christianity, nor totally new in the twelfth century. As Clifford Geertz observed, “there are few if any religious traditions, ‘great' or ‘little,' in which the proposition that life hurts is not strenuously affirmed and in some it is virtually glorified.”11 Furthermore, “In one way or another,” as Eric Auerbach similarly observed, the Stoic idea of passio (suffering, enduring), “has played a part in almost every system of morality since the Stoics.”12 If early Christian thought was influenced by the Stoic ideal of standing aloof from the world with its unreasoning restlessness and strife, it significantly transformed the means to achieve this goal. As Auerbach explains, “The aim of Christian hostility to the world is not a passionless existence outside of the world, but counter-suffering, a passionate suffering in the world and hence also in opposition to it; and to the flesh.”13 In the New Testament, Christ's words (in Matthew 16:24) were taken as giving divine sanction to such a view: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Here the two potent ideas of passio and imitatio Christi join: one follows or imitates Christ less by works of charity and love than through suffering that in some small measure joins with his sacrificial and redemptive passion. The emphasis evoked a comment from St. Bernard who, in writing for the Knights Templar, described the Holy Sepulcher as holding pride of place among all holy and wondrous sites recalling the life of Christ in the Holy Land. “I do not know why people feel a greater devotion at the place where he lay while dead than at the places where he did things while alive,” Bernard muses.14 He has already assured the Templars of the merits of suffering for God and especially dying for God: “Life is indeed fruitful and victory glorious, but more important than either is a holy death. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more so are those who die for the Lord.”15 A long tradition informed this view. The general goal—especially prominent as the movement of monasticism gathered strength in the Late Antique and Early Medieval world—became spiritual warfare aimed at disciplining the body, and working past the merely temporal and physical to “open oneself to what God wants to give.”16 This will involve pain, as Richard Kieckhefer suggests:
The saints…viewed suffering as the specific means God has chosen both for Christ's redemptive work and for the sanctification of those who imitate Christ. Atonement came not from charitable works, nor from prayer, nor from enlightenment, but from pain. If God's wrath was appeased by suffering, this meant that suffering was somehow pleasing to God.17
If Christian asceticism draws on a tradition very much older than the twelfth century, there are still good reasons for stressing its impact in the period that interests us. We will see how the movement of ideas encouraged an ascetic culture in which the faithful increasingly earned religious merit through corporal suffering, deprivation, and pain. Such basic theological ideas have not always been brought into the story of chivalry, but they can help us to understand the infusion of Christian asceticism into the knightly ideology of heroism.
The medieval practice of asceticism could involve the closest calculation, a true economy of salvation. The hermit Dominic Lorica, as Peter Damian recorded, precisely worked out the spiritual effectiveness of his self-flagellation: efficiently using whips in both hands, he lashed his body through the reciting of three psalters of one hundred fifty psalms each; this yielded three thousand blows equaling one year of penance. He claimed credit for a total of one hundred years. Damian was himself a true believer in physical disciplining of the body, noting that those who used the discipline “believe they are par-taking in the passions of our Redeemer.”18 By the High Middle Ages—and throughout the Later Middle Ages—both the practices and language used by medieval people in search of the gloria passionis will nearly disorient a modern investigator who uncovers them. For the people of this age, as André Vauchez has written, “Penance was a condition, virtually a way of life,”19 and it was worked out on the body of the penitent. Jacques de Vitry told of a robber captain who, brought into a monastery and seeing the hard physical lives of the monks, asked what great crime they have committed to deserve such penance.20
The foundation for such views stood firmly upon innumerable stories that told of martyrs who went willingly, even joyfully, to unspeakable deaths as a witness to their faith. They are engaged in vicarious, meritorious acts of imitatio Christi. In the absence of convenient pagan oppressors in their own age, the successors of the original Christian martyrs—monks, nuns, and anchorites across centuries—devised creative methods of confining their own bodies or inflicting pain upon them.21 Entry into cloistered life was compared to martyrdom; both seemed a second baptism, by which monks, nuns, and hermits were reborn into new life.22 This impulse for glorious suffering and the language urging and praising it are obviously important to our investigation. St. Bernard's words on the ideal of the martyr, often quoted in the following generations, transport us directly into the High Medieval world of such thought. He says of the martyr,
For he does not feel his own wounds when he contemplates those of Christ. The martyr stands rejoicing and triumphant, even though his body is torn to pieces; and when his side is ripped open by the sword, not only with courage but even with joy he sees the blood which he has consecrated to God gush forth from his body. But where now is the soul of the martyr? Truly in a safe place…in the bowels of Christ, where it has entered, indeed through his open wounds.…And this is the fruit of love, not of insensibility.23
This theme plays on and even intensifies in the Later Middle Ages. In his Contra Amatores Mundi, Richard Rolle (d. 1349) classically explained the need for suffering and struggle:
Therefore it is to be affirmed that the fact that the persecutions of our enemies is useful and necessary for us has been demonstrated; lest, having no persecutor, we deserve no crown. Clearly, unless we fight, we do not conquer; and we shall not be crowned unless we conquer. Therefore soldiers are armed, victors are crowned, losers are killed. When they fight, they tarry in this world, when they conquer, they are taken up to heaven; and when they are conquered, they are thrust into hell.24
Such sentiments as Rolle's, if not quite such exuberant language, appear plentifully. Gerald of Wales had summed up this theme—indeed, the theme of asceticism generally—saying “The greater the struggle, the greater the crown.”25
A variety of texts give us examples of lay people in search of personal morality often achieved through ascetic atonement.26 From the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and Dominicans—in this regard heirs of St. Bernard—urged lay men and women to engage in an affective piety that drew them imaginatively into the drama of Christ's suffering, graphically depicted for them in word and image. Just how far this might succeed appears in one of the letters of Catherine of Siena who urged, “Delight in Christ crucified; delight in suffering. Be a glutton for abuse—for Christ crucified. Let your heart and soul be grafted into the tree of the most holy cross—with Christ crucified. Make his wounds your home.”27
By the late Middle Ages, as Mitchel Merback has argued, the crowds that pressed for a view around a site of public execution might—in addition to any purely voyeuristic motives—have interpreted what transpired before them in a religiously expiatory framework. They were about to see what all hoped would be a “good death.” A condemned sinner (differing from them only in degree, or luck) would confess, suffer grievous bodily affliction in expiation for his or her sin, and go cleansed into the afterlife. So convinced were medieval people that suffering was meritorious that the criminal about to die might be considered a quasi-martyr, might offer to intercede for the crowd which, in turn, could be praying for him. The blood and body parts of the executed might be coveted for healing properties. Even the rope that hanged a criminal was likewise highly prized and credited with special powers.28
Could such attitudes pervade an entire society, or at least represent an elite cultural ideal, highly valued? Was High and Late Medieval society invested in pain and suffering in ways that set it apart from other societies in other times? Esther Cohen has advanced a broad and persuasive argument that the experience of pain in human history is not only culturally mediated but changeable over time, even within a given culture. In Medieval Europe from the twelfth century and increasingly in the later Middle Ages, the social and individual response to pain was not the utter rejection we take as a given in modern life, nor the impassivity (contemptuous disregard) or impassibility (transcendence) of some cultures. It was, rather, what she terms philopassianism, an actual embracing of physical anguish as useful. “Pain comprised both the penalty for original sin,” she writes, “and the redemption of humanity.” It was thus “from the very beginnings a central historical and cosmological force rather than an individual, evanescent experience.”29 This represents a sharp turn away from the reactions to pain found in the early medieval era. What replaced such views was a conception of pain and suffering as vehicles of grace, to be actively sought by believers who could thus imitate Christ. They would imitate his passion even more than his life and follow him in his newly emphasized suffering, some even in his death. At least to this degree they would be crucified with him, voluntarily choosing to suffer for him, as he had for them.30 The pains they suffered on earth would indeed be salutary, for harsh as they might seem, they reduced the infinitely worse penalties awaiting them in the sulphurous flames and dark caverns of hell or purgatory. Pain and retribution were joined. During the early years of the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort was faced with a novice “heretic” who disavowed his beliefs after seeing the burning of his teacher, one of the perfecti. Cutting short all debate, Montfort ordered the fearful man burned also: if he was genuinely contrite, the flames would expiate his sin; if lying, he simply deserved the flames.31 Cohen argues that belief in the usefulness of pain and suffering was socially widespread, not simply the high theory of a minority of ecclesiastical intellectuals: “philopassionism was an integral part of the common consciousness, an awareness so widespread and universal as to be considered axiomatic by contemporaries.”32 Scholars will certainly debate the exact nature and social spread of medieval ideas about meritorious pain. Few would want to argue that peasants in their fields or merchants in their counting houses were actively seeking corporal suffering on a daily basis. But all scholars will have encountered the pervasive element of philopassionism in the cultural evidence available on the society they study.33 And all medieval folk seem enthusiastically to have admired the elite corps of saints, martyrs, hermits, and anchorites who represented the real specialists.
Religious intellectuals undoubtedly subscribed to ideas of redemptive suffering. The passion and crucifixion of Christ were ever in their minds, and they enthusiastically preached mimetic, personal, redemptive suffering to the laity. Devotional eyes turned increasingly to the agonies of Christ, with which the pious viewer was to identify. Although the identification was soulful, it sometimes also took the form of harsh ascetic practices carried out on the believer's body. Obviously, the vivid illustrations and descriptions of torments awaiting sinners in purgatory and hell reinforced the message, showing that corporal suffering could purge and release and would surely punish. The paintings would linger in the mind, as did descriptions of terrifying demons inflicting unspeakable tortures on those being painfully purged or those eternally damned. In one section of his collection of sermon stories devoted to fear of purgatory, Étienne de Bourbon presents a knight who clearly affirms that the pains he suffers there are like nothing on earth.34 A late thirteenth-century set of stories includes an account of Lazarus, raised from the dead by Christ, but going through the remaining fifteen years of his earthly life unsmiling: he had seen the torments of sinners at first hand.35 The technique is often used: in addition to the frighteningly specific paintings and descriptions, much might be left to a guilty sinner's fervid imagination, with only the magnitude of suffering in relation to anything known of earthly pain being specified. A ghost from a collection of exempla appears on earth to declare that to escape the pains he is suffering in hell he would walk a razor-sharp bridge from now until Doomsday.36
Ascetic heroes were held up for emulation, as surviving collections of sermon tales and moral manuals testify. One of Odo of Cheriton's set of moral tales written in the mid-thirteenth century presents a piously ascetic hermit who wept at the end of a year in which he has suffered no illness, for, he claims, God has forgotten him.37 Another popular story pictured a hermit who discovered a new source of water conveniently closer to the cave that served as his home. He gave up any thought of shortening his walk for water when he noticed an angel counting the reduced number of steps that could make his life easier, but less meritorious.38 A knight's daughter in a fourteenth-century collection of tales has already cut off her nose to escape an unsuitable marriage, preserve virginity, and remain wholly devoted to Christ. Living sparely in a peasant hut, she complains that God has given her no signs of love and rejoices when she is afflicted with skin disease, falling sickness, and leprosy.39 In a similar collection of tales, a monk is saved in the afterlife by a display of the rods used to beat him for his sins in life.40 A departing crusader is shown to align his family on the shore in order that his sailing should be the more wrenching.41 The late medieval Pricke of Conscience informed English readers that suffering came from God as chastisement or test; taken well, it serves a believer as a substitute for penance: “and if he suffer it without complaint, it serves him in place of penance.”42 The same mental assumptions inform a thirteenth-century story told by Caesarius of Heisterbach of a monk who had once been a valorous knight (he had won fourteen warhorses in his first tournament). Afflicted with worms that continually swarmed from his body, causing a stench that his monastic brothers could not bear, for him, as Caesarius says, death and salvation approached as “the day of reward for so much endurance (dies adesset remunerationis pro tantae patientiae).”43
Knights absorbed and participated in this broad cultural investment in meritorious suffering and atonement. Although a general cultural value, asceticism was vigorously urged upon them in specific terms. A steady flow of miracle stories and sermon exempla that featured knights regularly linked their physical pain and suffering with divine forgiveness. Noting only a few examples from this abundant body of evidence must serve to establish the point. A late twelfth-century collection of miracles of the Blessed Virgin tells a story, often repeated in later collections, of three men-at-arms who have rashly killed a man in a church devoted to St. Mary. After all three subsequently fell victim to a disease the author calls “internal fire,” they confessed to a priest, who imposed an unusual penance on them. They must wear the offending swords tightly bound to their bodies. We learn that the men willingly accepted this highly physical (and richly symbolic) penance; the author of the tale assures readers that they carried out the penance fully. He wants readers or hearers to accept the story as literally true and claims to have met one of the knights, even naming the house where the meeting took place, located at Amfreville-sur-Iton, between Rouen and Evreux. The writer testifies that the soldier's sword had gradually become embedded in his flesh.44
A more graphic account of horrific punishment inflicted by God on a knight in expiation of his sin was told by Master Boniface, Bishop of Lausanne, to Thomas of Cantimpré, who included it in his rich collection of stories and moralizing commentary, Bonum universale de apibus (The Common Good from Bees)—basically a set of stories for preachers written just after the mid-thirteenth century.45 It concerns a noble knight from the bishop's diocese who went hunting with his pack of hounds in the Alps. Curious to find out what has set his dogs to furious barking, he comes into a beautiful grassy spot in the mountains. The scene there is anything but pastoral. He comes upon a large and courtly human-like figure (quasi hominem magnum et elegantem) who is in fact a dead knight sent back to earthly life in corporeal form as a timely warning to the noble hunter. While alive he had been, the spectral knight announces, a truly great sinner (peccator immanissimus) hard at work in the fighting between Richard Lion-heart and Philip Augustus; never did he confess or take the Eucharist. Only tears shed at the moment of his miserable death moved God to mercy. Yet divine mercy in his case is being decidedly tempered by ascetic atonement, for the knight is in continual, dreadful torment; two great iron nails are affixed so that they constantly wound his eyes and will continue to press into them until the Day of Judgment. Immediately after he has provided this explanation of his punishment the knight vanished; but the impact on the noble hunter remained, Thomas assured his readers. No longer would he live an evil life and ravage the poor. In fact he took it upon himself to give other knightly sinners the message of harsh penance he had seen inflicted, to encourage better lives in them. Along with the warning, of course, went the message that such torment in purgatory would finally save the knight at the Day of Judgment.
Though the physical details of this story are disconcerting, what surely must rank as the most ferocious story of knightly lay asceticism follows immediately in the Bonum universale de apibus.46 A German knight who had led a life of evil (multis rapinis et caedibus per patriam debacchatus) was finally brought to justice and condemned to a merited decapitation. Far from disputing the sentence, he asked only time to make sufficient penance for his grievous sins. Simple decapitation would not be enough to wipe clean his slate. With the assistance of a relative he obtained an iron mechanical device revealingly called a dentrix—it clearly had teeth. With this device he urged the court to chop off, in order, his hands, elbows, arms up to the shoulder (vsque ad humeros), feet, lower and upper legs, then his genitals, ears, eyes, nose, lips, and finally the head. Although with sorrow, the court complied. When the grisly work had so far progressed that only the sinner's trunk and head remained, he said, cheerfully (hilari vultu), “If only this little torment I have suffered because of my sins, could be done to my miserable body again and even a third time, and in this way I could be crucified for the longest time.”47 Then, the tale says, his tears began to flow, he begged for prayers from the awed onlookers, and bowed his head for the last chop.48 This hyperbolic story, we should recognize, is a mini-sermon on penitential suffering, not an account of horrendous judicial punishment.
At least a kinder story, also told by Thomas of Cantimpré, concerns the wise man and vigorous knight Count Louis of Looz (Lossensis).49 This noble knight prostrated himself before a most holy woman, the Blessed Christina, tearfully confessing all his sins. He did not ask for an indulgence, which he knew she could not give (quam dare non potuit), but simply sought her prayers. Christina graciously petitioned God that she might take the count's sins upon her own body (vero in meo corpore) and this was allowed, by divine grace. Pleasant as it is to move away from the dentrix, we should note the common message here: sins are visited upon a knight's suffering body—unless he can find a saintly substitute.50 God is mollified and the scales of judgment are tipped toward salvation by corporal suffering willingly endured, even on behalf of another.
The ascetic emphasis we have found in Lancaster and Charny reflects an old and established tradition. Knights' piety readily took ascetic form: their ideology incorporated meritorious suffering that came to them from pulpit, paintings, and sacred writings. Yet the measure of chivalric independence remained real, as the next chapter argues.