Knights' Tales: William Mauvoisin and Owen in Saint Patrick's Purgatory
Twelfth- and thirteenth-century European culture ordered, analyzed, and classified the social world, no less than the natural world, in an effort to align human society with the will of God. They wanted to identify ideal social categories and to define the proper labor to be performed by each. Given the social and cultural ferment of the time, such an effort could scarcely avoid contention. Given the social status and the particular labor performed by knighthood, the warriors would often stand near the center of this vigorous discussion. Two splendid stories from the twelfth century can take us directly into this search for order in society and meaning in labor.
One story was set down on parchment around 1133 by Benedictine monks who denounced the very profession of knighthood in the course of narrating a quarrel over property.1 “How William Mauvoisin [literally William the Bad Neighbor] Became a Monk (De Guillelmo Malevicino monacho facto)” was a story the monks of Notre Dame of Coulombs (in the diocese of Chartres) obviously liked to tell. The written record would preserve their version of a series of events important to them.2 It is a tale of an outstanding knight (miles optimus) who is grievously wounded in a war between two local lords.3 Sharply spurred by the fear of death, William hurried to this monastic church where he offered himself as a monk, was accepted, and, so the monks reported, tirelessly engaged in pious discourse about the monastic life.4 Significantly, he offered more than his personal conversion. If only God would allow him to recover from his wounds and give him time for penitence, William vowed he would found a chapel in the castle of Mantes in honor of another reformed sinner, St. Mary Magdalen. He cleared a path for the realization of this promise of a propertied gift by securing approval from lay and ecclesiastical authorities at every level: the king of France, the bishop of Chartres, and the canons of Mantes (canonicis ipsius villae). God was gracious, we learn, and William recovered. But then humans intervened: he was swiftly taken by relatives from the monastery to the city of Chartres on the pretext that he could get better medical care there (“sub occasione quod medicamina sibi necessaria apud Columbas invenire non possent, quae Carnoti copiosè invenirent”). In fact, he was “slipped out and seduced (ductus et seductus)” by them, says the monastic writer tersely and judgmentally. Won over by the entreaties of his worldly relatives, that is, William agreed that new arms and armor should be made for him. Throwing aside the shabby habit of a monk and resuming secular garb, he mounted a great warhorse and stretched out his hand to take once again his knightly shield. It was a mistake. At once divine wrath struck him with fire in the old wound that he had thought fully healed. Raving, William rushed back to the sanctity of the cloister, hurrying to the nearest monastery: but he could not avert divine judgment, even though he became a monk again—of St. Peter, Chartres, under profession of Notre Dame of Coulombs—and even though he showed sorrow and contrition in his bodily affliction. He died, our monastic author triumphantly insists, on the very day he gave up the profession of a monk and, forgetting spiritual warfare, returned to mere warfare in the world. William had been a powerful man in local society; he received the monastic burial he craved; but hopes for his fate in the afterworld cannot have been high. God is not easily deceived. Wishing to aid the departed soul as much as he could (“de ejus anima sollicitus, vel volens supplere, in quantum poterat”), Samson, William's brother (an important cleric—at that time provost of the church of Chartres and later archbishop of Reims), consulted with King Louis, Geoffrey, bishop of Chartres, and the canons, in order to secure the dedication of the church in Mantes to Mary Magdalen, thus fulfilling his brother's expiatory promise in this world. The goal, obviously, was to soften his punishment in the next.
We can see that the monks' interest in the tale was twofold. At the most apparent level it established the circumstances of a donation important to them; the church of St. Mary Magdalen at Mantes was to be a dependent of the monastery of Coulombs (“quae esset sub ditione Columbensis ecclesiae”). Yet the rich detail provided—especially divine wrath striking William just as he reaches out for the emblematic knightly shield—suggests that broadly ideological as well as propertied interests are being buttressed in this story. Not only is the sanctity of a vow to follow the monastic profession reinforced, the monastic life itself is once more shown to be superior to mere warfare in the world. Though he sadly lost sight of this after his initial fearful and temporary conversion, William, we must assume, fully realized the severe spiritual dangers inherent in his life as a knight by the time he died in terror, having perhaps too late returned to the cloister, “raving (desaeviente).” This little story makes a large point about the spiritual perils of knighthood, even as it speaks to the security and superiority of monastic life or the possession of a particular piece of property. The knightly shield William bore in this story decidedly carried no names of the trinity or of the Godhead, as in the idealized Harley manuscript illumination of the mid-thirteenth century examined at the opening of this book. Clerical ideas about knighthood and its characteristic labor could be more critical than idealistic and supportive.5
A second story gives insight into knightly views on these issues. It is a curious and highly popular tale from the late twelfth century, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (Treatise on Saint Patrick's Purgatory).6 It is, of course, a clerical text in the sense that the original Tractatus was written in Latin, apparently by a Cistercian monk (a Henry or Hugh of Saltry), but we will see that it conveys strongly held knightly ideals—in fact, that it presents them with much confidence.7 Mirroring the developing knightly ideology in general, this text combines exultation of their ordo with ideas of pious atonement through the hard practice of their characteristic labor. It was popular and widely read. Numerous Latin copies of the full account have survived and verbatim extracts or abbreviated accounts were copied into various Latin chronicles and collections of saints' lives and miracles.8 Translations brought the story into many vernacular languages, including Old French and Middle English.9 By the thirteenth century the story, at least as told in outline, had even been condensed into a sermon exemplum and thus found its way to a yet broader audience.10 Especially interesting, the creative translation into French by Marie de France in the late twelfth century, Espurgatoire Saint Patriz, must have reached a wide lay readership. Thus we will consider two texts simultaneously (supplementing them with others as seems useful): Hugh's Tractatus and Marie's Espurgatoire. They tell the story of the knight Owen (Owain, Owein) and explain his motivation with frankness in a story aptly characterized as an instant medieval bestseller.11
Of his own pious volition, Owen determined to carry out an enterprise at once heroically bold and piously atoning: he will enter the pit on Station Island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland, a place traditionally considered an earthly gateway into purgatory. In short, he would bravely enter purgatory while still alive. The monastic author claims that the story of this exploit came from Owen himself and that he got it through a single intermediary. The knight's visit to the dread site supposedly took place around mid-twelfth century. Marie's translation may have appeared around 1190, shortly after the composition of the Latin account.
This account can be taken in one sense as an extended exemplum, presenting clerical ideas about sin and purgation in general. Yet in another sense it represents a chivalric tale of aventure, that is, a tale of the sort of knightly adventurous questing that emerges from the tradition of romance writing—a tradition that always drew upon very human and physical brave deeds and endurance as much as any spiritual dimension.12 We are given the significant information that Owen wished to atone for sins that troubled him and that had provoked clerical denunciation. The Middle English text suggests that the sins of this “tough and powerful young man (douhti man and swathe wight)” have been martial: “He knew much of battle and without doubt was quite sinful against his creator.”13 Marie says he had “labored against God with his great cruelty (kar mult aveit sovent ovré / cuntre Dieu en grant cruëlté).”14 We are told in the Latin text that Owen “manfully (virilis animi)”15 brushed aside the bishop's warnings of great dangers and entered the purgatory, “wishing to undertake a novel and unusual act of chivalry (nouam et inusitatam cupiens exercere militiam).”16 In Marie's account, Owen makes this declaration as he rejects the traditional penance imposed by the bishop. He announces,
Lord Bishop, I do not want
To expiate my sins easily
Nor endure such a penance.
Too much have I transgressed against my Lord,
And offended my Creator.
Accordingly I would choose, by your leave,
The most heavy penance.17
The motivation and even the language convey important ideas about chivalry, its labor, and penitence. Owen wants to expiate his wrongs by a physically heroic penance to match his very physical sins—his wrongful labors—of admitted cruelty. The bishop tries, instead, to get him to enter a monastery, Marie says, arguing that course to be “more certain (plus seürement).”18 To this traditional solution, Owen answers stoutly that he “would not do that. / He would take no habit / Besides the one he had.”19 The language is worth noting. A habit marks an ordo; Owen is stating his determination to remain in the ordo of chivalry and to seek expiation and salvation through pious work as a knight. He knows, of course, that it will involve suffering (peine).20 Though he confessed to the bishop in good form, he has chosen his own mode of penance against the bishop's advice, and he insured that it was truly and corporally heroic, as the account of his visit to purgatory will make terrifyingly plain.
As he prepares for this chivalric sortie into purgatory, wise and helpful religious men warn Owen that he must be vigorous and valorous: “you are perforce compelled to act manfully or else you will die body and soul because of your inaction.”21 Putting his body at risk as a knight will have determinative influence on the fate of his soul, no less than his body. He tells the clerics that in order to please God he would not “flinch from suffering, / Pain, and torment.”22 Owen, “who in the past had bravely fought men,” is now instructed in what the clerics consider a new kind of chivalry (“ad novi generis militiam instructus”) and is “now ready to give battle bravely to demons.”23 The Harley manuscript illumination (used to open this book) comes once again to mind, with its ranks of vile demons massing against the ideal knight, who is armed and ready for the fight. Only the specific spiritual meanings given to Owen's weaponry differ: he is armed with the breastplate of justice, the helmet of hope, the shield of faith, and grips the sword of the spirit.24 Owen repeatedly invokes the name of Christ, as he has been admonished, to escape the torments that a host of howling demons will inflict on him. He is “Christ's knight (le chevaliers Ihesucrist).”25 In this case, however, the designation decidedly does not mean entry into a religious order. We might even say that in place of doing the opus Dei of the monks in cloistered asceticism and prayer, he is doing the heroic work God demands of him as a knight.
The demons begin their dread work by dragging Owen with iron hooks back and forth through a huge, blazing bonfire built especially for his benefit. But he proves himself a true “soldier of Christ” and demonstrates “spiritual chivalry” as the fiends try to break his steadfast resistance with this and each succeeding torment. They show him the horrifically physical punishments being inflicted on sinners who have been consigned to their domain. He endures blasts of heat and numbing cold gales, sees sinners spiked to the ground, dunked in molten metal, turned on a great wheel blazing with fire, to which the fiends attach him, too. He must cross a perilous, narrow bridge over a stinking river teeming with demons trying to dislodge him. Persevering steadfastly, Owen finally comes to the Earthly Paradise beyond purgatory, sees the shining gateway to the Celestial Paradise from afar—a gateway he can hope to pass through after his death. He then manfully returns through purgatory to the beginning point, the pit opening onto earth. He has escaped with life and soul inviolate, and returned to human life. He becomes a crusader and a friend to Cistercians.
The clerical agenda is clear. This is a classic account of purgatory, drawing on many existing texts and traditions. Yet we cannot miss the references to his ordo and its labor, or the romance element in this wonderfully hybrid text, for all these emphasize the knight's adventure, his courage and steadfastness in suffering “manfully (viriliter)” as a stout knight who is told that he can thereby be “purified of his sins (ut a peccatis tuis purgeris).”26 The statement that Owen fought as a crusader after his return to the world is appended as a brief coda to the main work; playing the crusader is the result of his penitential suffering as a brave knight, not its sole or even its primary exercise. He is secure in his own knightly ordo. Marie de France pictures the knight upon his return from purgatory asking his king if he should now enter a religious order.
But the king answered
That he should remain as he was, a knight.
He counseled him to retain this station
So that he might serve God well
And so he did for the rest of his life.27
Marie underscores this important point near the end of her poem. Gilbert, a prominent Cistercian, has come to Ireland and finds he needs a local translator; Owen fills that need, but would go no further, would not leave his ordo:
He remained with Gilbert,
And served him well.
Yet he did not wish to change his station,
Becoming either a monk or lay brother:
He would die a knight,
And would never take any other habit.28
Owen will not play William Mauvoisin by seeking salvation within a cloister. The ideas imbedded in chivalric literature—in this instance a generation of epic and romance writing—have left their clear mark on the relationship of chivalry to satisfaction theology through the labor of its own ordo. The venerable genealogy of ideas we found in Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny again manifests itself in sources nearly two centuries earlier. If he read or heard the account of Owen's bold, knightly deed, as seems likely, Geoffroi de Charny could only have approved so resolute an assertion of the knightly order, so fine a demonstration that its labor provides bodily repayment to God.
Sacred Social Orders and the Value of Labor
Medieval society never actually divided simply into those who pray, those who fight, and those who work, the oratores, bellatores, and laboratores beloved of conservative clerical writers in the Middle Ages.29 It was not a schema accepted and used by all learned analysts. Clerics actually proposed a great variety of frameworks for conceptually organizing society, based on varying numbers of component groups and the labors proper to each. Yet behind all variety medieval thinkers generally pictured a social world rightly structured on categories reflecting a divine plan. They had long applied to certain vocations the term ordo, meaning a division of society that was sacred in that God desired its existence and had ordained its appropriate labor as essential for human society.30 They also used other terms, such as status, ministerium, officium, sometimes as synonyms for ordo, sometimes to indicate a profession for whose existence and labor divine approval was more problematic.31 Clerical opinion on the broad subject of identifying groups that properly constituted Christian society and labor was not monolithic or unvarying.
One powerful reason for the diversity is not far to seek: an increasingly complex High Medieval society required and generated a variety of ideas on social groups and labor. It is important to note both what changed and what remained unmoved. Two ordines from the trifunctional scheme—the oratores and the bellatores—continued to dominate the highest levels of the social pyramid, supported by assertions of divine approval. Medieval scholars never doubted that collectively (and in each of their many subdivisions) clerics formed an ordo (or a set of ordines), doing God's work on earth. Over time (and sometimes with weighty reservations) writers and thinkers made the same claim for the warriors—knighthood, too, was an ordo with an ideal labor intended in God's plan. As urban and mercantile elements in society grew rapidly in number and influence, the prominence of new lay groups demanded further analytical subdivision and much moral guidance. Clerics realized that they could not deal with an undifferentiated laity as merely a bloc of nonclerics, a lumpish ordo of labores, to use trifunctional terminology. Since lay folk lived their lives and did their work in a variety of social and professional groups, an effective pastoral theology would have to address these occupations as working components of the church.
Such analysis might theoretically elaborate a relatively new and positive view of worldly labor. Commenting on the Carolingian era, Carl Erdmann observed, “as yet, the ethical theories propounded by churchmen generally failed to take into account ‘professional life,' whether that of a class of warriors or anyone else's.”32 The need was for a list of licit lay vocations and a vocational morality for each. At first the search would not yield neat or consistent results, even at the hands of medieval clerics accustomed to analytical subdivision of any issue confronting them. The list of ordines, status, and other licit socio-professional groups remained flexible, varying from one writer to another. Some thinkers kept the threefold idea, but divided humankind along the lines of sexuality—the virgins, the continent, and the married. Some mixed sacred and social categories, such as the division into nobles, clerics, laymen, husbandmen, and women; or into clerics, monks, peasants, paupers, and “all men.”33 The twelfth-century nun and visionary Elisabeth of Schönau (d.1164/65), pictured Christian society clustered as the married, the celibate, prelates, widows, hermits, and children.34 Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) thought in terms of clerics, priests, married people, widows, virgins, soldiers, merchants, peasants, craftsmen, and “other types of men.”35 At the end of the twelfth century, John of Freiburg listed questions for confession to be directed to fourteen lay and clerical status.36 As we have seen (in Chapter 2), Geoffroi de Charny, one of our model knightly authors, borrowed either from the clerics or from his own imagination a set of four statuses: priests, monks, the married, and the knights.37 In all this variety, all writers considered the knights to be one fundamentally constitutive social group.
Clerical intellectuals worried about the morality of labor performed within their designated social groups, at least where lay folk were concerned. Modern scholars have debated the result. Most have long argued that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought about a clear change in thought: some have even suggested a revolutionary change. They argue that earlier medieval views contrary to the dignity of human labor gave way to valorization.38 If performed carefully, honestly, and humbly, in obedience to divine will, work was acceptable to God, even the work of lay men and women. They were not barred from salvation by their work and indeed might advance their spiritual state through labor. Admonition accompanied this cautious acceptance, of course. If clerics sanctified each ideal group and its role, they also castigated all its besetting sins. Especially after 1200, critiques were funneled through a standard type of sermon called sermo ad status or sermo vulgaris (a sermon addressed to lay occupational groups). Crafting such religious appeals and warnings to specific groups of people was widespread. In the early twelfth century, Honorius of Autun wrote sermons for various status groups: clerics, judges, the rich, the poor, milites, peasants, and married folk.39 In the mid-thirteenth century, Humbert of Romans, master general of the Dominicans, published several collections of sermons, each containing a hundred models for use by preachers who wished to speak specifically to—or at least about—certain social groups and their activities. Local clerics preparing sermons could likewise mine those of Jacques de Vitry for their useful exempla relating to characteristic social groups and their labor.40
The clerical view does seem to be broadening and positive. Medieval university scholars who produced model sermons sometimes made elevated claims for ordinary work. Jacques de Vitry, for example, granted that those who work hard and honestly at their toil are valued by God as much as those who sing all day in church or keep watch throughout the night in prayer.41 He thinks good work is a duty for all. Humbert of Romans added that work helps all—even the rich and the clerics—avoid the sin of idleness (otium).42 Endured patiently in a licit cause, almost any suffering by medieval people could be thought to bring spiritual merit, redeeming the faults of the sinner.43 At maximum, good lay folk in every profession could work toward salvation. As the twelfth-century writer Gerhoh of Reichersberg asserted, “every profession…has a rule adapted to its character, and under this rule it is possibly by striving properly to achieve the crown of glory.”44 We have already seen that Geffroi de Charny made this very claim for knighthood in his mid-fourteenth-century treatise.
This line of evaluation continued throughout the Middle Ages. An even more positive interest in human work of all sorts appears in a classic late medieval work. In Book 4 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, written at the end of the fourteenth century, sloth, we learn, is prohibited by all law.45 Moreover, Gower attributes to Solomon the Wise the idea of the naturalness of human labor: “As birds are made for flight, so is man for work.”46 Work is necessary for those who think “for to thryve,”47 and present folk should recognize the splendid achievements of past labors, both manual and mental, which could scarcely be reproduced, Gower thinks, in the present. These feats came from human effort under divine blessing. The use of metals, for example, was found “Thurgh mannes wit and Goddes grace.”48 Gower provides a long list of discoverers and inventors that he finds worthy of remembrance.
A variety of forms of human work, scholarly tradition holds, were to some degree accepted by medieval ecclesiastics; clerics recognized that work was necessary for a well-ordered society; it was also useful for helping individuals to practice humility and avoid the snares of sin, baited by idleness. Some churchmen attractively saw human labor as generating wealth beyond subsistence needs, thus providing the wherewithal for charity.
This emphasis on the positive clerical evaluation of labor undoubtedly catches one important dimension of emerging clerical thought. Yet the emphasis has recently provoked sharp criticism. The revisionist work of a Dutch scholar, Birgit van den Hoven, stresses these cautions. She and other scholars argue for a divergence of ideas on this basic theological question.49 In place of ready agreement and a linear progression of validating ideas, they find a significant ideological divide; medieval thinkers writing on labor showed no unanimity, sometimes even no consistency within single authors. George Ovitt, Jr., comments succinctly on these contradictions:
God ennobled work by doing it himself; God punished postlapsarian man by making him earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. Nature was intended for man's use; nature is to be cared for and emulated by man. Monks must labor with their hands; monks must be preoccupied with the opus Dei (i.e., prayer and contemplation).50
The case made by revisionists commands attention. Any thought of ideas shifting in a single and progressive direction, of a revolutionary triumph for a positive theology of labor, should be viewed with caution. For work is, finally, valued by many medieval churchmen, not for itself or what it produced, but because it is considered penitential: it is hard enough and demands enough submission and sacrifice to entail suffering and thus become a form of penance. Labor not only produced a dampening effect on inherent human sinfulness but through suffering achieved a redemptive effect. The point is made concisely in a collection of Middle English homilies by John Mirk. One of these warns that, “whoever would escape the judgment at the Second Coming…must work his body in good works and supply his bodily needs with labor, and put away all idleness and sloth. For whoever will not work on earth with men, as St. Bernard says, will labor with the devils of hell.”51
Labor is here a substitute, endured on earth, for the pains imposed in the afterlife for sin. Similarly, in Old French literature it is striking how often the verbs “travailler (to work)” and “pener (to suffer)” appear together.52
Another layer of caution is useful. The churchmen are, of course, far from any taint of genuine egalitarianism in their thinking on labor. They maintained an ideal hierarchy of occupations, with themselves naturally at the top and the others, with declining elements of spirituality, ranked in descending order.53 Even John Gower, whose positive evaluation of human labor we have noted, ranked the work of the mind well above work of the hands:
Labor with the hands is productive, such that in daily life and actions a man might be able to live. But he who for the sake of wisdom [doctrine causa] bears labors in the mind prevails further and obtains perpetual merit.54
Moreover, it is hard to extract even minimal acceptance from the ecclesiastics for some professions ineradicably embedded in society. They remained worried about the knights and were deeply concerned and censorious in particular about merchants, whom they denounce as “usurers” with a vigor we will discuss below.
It is interesting to speculate on how most lay folk would have understood the story of the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden as told in Genesis. Whatever softening might come from progressive theologians, would not the more negative evaluation of ordinary labor linger as the message to be drawn from the punishment of Adam and Eve? It would be easy to miss the subtleties—God's good labor of creation, man's joyful prelapsarian labor—and concentrate on physical work imposed as a consequence of sin, even as a punishment for sin. This seems the message that would stand out dramatically. Adam and Eve are not only exiled from the Garden of Eden; Adam is also condemned to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and Eve is to bear children in pain, as another species of penitential labor of the body.55 During a theological discussion in the Song of Aspremont, for example, the expulsion from paradise and the need for human labor are linked to sin: of Adam the author says, “his paradise he lost and had to leave / and work to live.”56 Work always retained a certain penitential character in the thought of many medieval churchmen and many who listened to them.
Rather than a simple division into two clear analytical camps on the value of labor, there was likely a spectrum of views that clustered at opposite ends of a scale calibrating its value. Far from a new religious valorization of labor sweeping away an older sense of labor as penitence, we find sets of contending ideas that coexisted in clerical culture generally and may even have intermixed in single minds. Work could be valued for its social, charitable, and individual benefits; but it was often cherished as a cause of commendable personal hardship and suffering, even as a form of penance for wrongs committed. Perhaps this split is deeply rooted in human nature. The Latin noun laborare, after all, carries the meaning of both work and of suffering. The duality might be understood and appreciated even among dedicated modern professionals by five o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Yet asceticism marked medieval culture to a remarkable degree and left its heavy imprint on views of labor.
An ethical evaluation of the labor performed by the knightly order was an obviously crucial element of the much more general discussion of lay labor. In fact, it presented an undeniably special case for analysis. The knights' labor was fighting: essential and dangerous work, both morally and socially. The tools might seem unusual, the work sometimes glorious, sometimes distressing; yet work it was. As a medieval French proverb plainly asserted, “no good work could come from a knight without a sword, a clerk without a book, or a laborer without tools.”57 In their treatises (examined in Chapter 2) Lancaster and Charny repeatedly employ some form of the noun “work,” or the verb “to work.” As these authors suggest, knights work the body physically; they perform hard and perilous labor. Though wary of sin, they considered their labor pleasing to God. Such a view likely commanded general agreement among proud warriors. Clerics were necessarily of more than one mind and both defended and deplored the labor carried out by knights on campaign and battlefield. Debate over violence and war occupied many medieval minds.58 The very existence of a moral debate rather than a single clerical position is important; and it worked within a context of continuing general discussion of accepted lay groups and labor.
The knights, as usual, got the best of two worlds. Most socio-professional groups involved in hard physical labor merited a lower level of regard in the minds and blueprints of scholars who unsurprisingly placed much greater value on intellectual work. Yet knightly ideology carried out one of its characteristic intellectual coups in securing high spiritual merit for the truly physical work done with their hands. In most clerical schemes such work, opus manuum (work done by hand), clearly suffers from this taint. The work of prayer and contemplation, the opus Dei, drawing on knowledge of Latin and liturgy, could be managed only by those of status who so often did no manual labor. The knights undoubtedly performed hands-on labor, but unlike most manual work it won them spiritual benefits, not to mention high praise and towering piles of loot. Exercising prowess was their highly valued opus manuum. Chivalric literature is full of specific, exulting references in which knights insist that they have won victories by cutting down opponents with their own hands; such work, they know, insures imperishable honor in this world and an appreciative reception in the next.59 They will not accept that this manual work brings reduced merit. In his authorized biography of the great knight William Marshal, the author reflects at one point on the nobility of the work of chivalry in comparison with other labor:
What is armed combat? Is it the same
as working with a sieve or winnow,
with an axe or mallet?
Not at all, it is much nobler work,
For he who undertakes these tasks is able to take a rest
When he has worked for a while.
What, then, is chivalry?
Such a difficult, tough,
And very costly thing to learn
That no coward ventures to take it on.60
The inversion of the clerical view is striking. Far from encouraging humility as the antidote to swelling pride, the knights' particular form of work inflates a well-fed sense of their superiority and rectitude. The characteristic labor of their ordo establishes them at the top of lay society; it gives them a platform from which to compare their status even with that of the churchmen, as we saw so plainly in the treatise of Geoffroi de Charny.
Charny spoke for his ordo in declaring one of their clearest and most constant assertions: God has graciously granted their much-valued prowess and regularly ordains their victories. These claims for a blessed labor could scarcely be labeled extreme by critics. Did not the holy fathers address them as the order of bellatores? Did not clerical writers find the determinative agency of God on every battlefield? Charny's own piety intersected with a long clerical tradition to yield his intense belief that prowess is a divine gift for which the knight must be ever thankful.
Some works of imaginative literature even picture the very hand of God guiding and strengthening a knight's hand as his sword executes its valorous slashes.61 And even the prosaic chronicler who told of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century repeatedly assured readers that the victories of his heroes came by divine grace; he is certain that they left thousands of their enemies vanquished on one particular field “through the force and power that the good Jesus granted them.”62
Yet abundant evidence also emphasizes that the knightly form of work was bitterly hard, involving undoubted deprivation on campaign and the possibility of injury or death in brutal close combat, with weapons honed to a good cutting edge. This suffering allows the knights to claim penitential merit, as we have seen. Their situation is utterly unlike others who work by their hands, as William Marshal's biographer emphasized. The patient farmer bent over his spade in cold muck and rain, like the humble cobbler bent over the torn shoe on his bench, must know he is doing God's will and accept that each physical ache and each hour of resignation will be toted up for the final spiritual accounting.63 The knight on his great warhorse waiting to charge might feel anxiety, but could also experience the adrenalin rush of impending battle; if he wins, he is richer and more honored. If he suffers wounds or even death, he has repaid God a part of the debt for sin by his hard labor in a good cause. Chivalric ideology again takes on powerful form by drawing on complex theological ideas and shaping them to its profession.
The theological divide—or spectrum of view—over orders and their labor offered a golden opportunity in the use of the power of paradox. From a rich quarry, knightly ideology could extract rock-solid ideas that justified their particular status and work. Or, to use an image they might prefer, they planted a mailed foot firmly on each side of the line of debate in order to lay claim to benefits from each while carefully avoiding limitations of either.64 This highly selective process would be repeated.
Knighthood as an Ordo
In 1114 a church council meeting at Beauvais deprived Thomas of Marle, an infamous evildoer, of his cingulum militarem, literally his belt of knighthood.65 A man difficult to constrain, he had to be condemned in absentia. Yet this symbolic deprivation retains significance, for it was meant publicly to exclude him from the military ordo which he was thought to have disgraced by flagrant and rapacious behavior.66 Linked more to past practices than future actions, this ecclesiastical censure recalls Carolingian precedents of several centuries earlier. Legislation enacted in synods and councils of the ninth century had declared that warriors guilty of grave crimes were to be deprived of military standing; these decrees apparently led to effective action. As Carl Leyser commented (in presenting this evidence), chivalry had “manifold roots,” some of which reach back into the Carolingian past.67
Granting the likelihood of earlier roots, many scholars argue that chivalry emerged more clearly in the later twelfth century.68 It is noteworthy that references to a knightly order multiply in surviving sources from the mid to late twelfth century. The danger lurks of mistaking the better survival of evidence for an increased sociocultural phenomenon, but the sheer number and variety of references finally cannot be gainsaid. Speaking of knighthood as an ordo becomes almost reflexive in the words uttered or written by knights no less than by clerical intellectuals. A few references can indicate this trend, though the goal must be to observe an important process unfold, rather than to isolate each datable reference.
If Guibert of Nogent referred (at roughly the same time as the condemnation of Thomas of Marle) to crusaders, at least, as an ordo equestris (an order of mounted fighters), much more interesting is the self-description of English knights in 1138 as reported in a chronicle; they told a high cleric before a battle with the Scots to leave the fighting to them “as their ordo required (sicut illorum ordo exigebat).”69 Only a few years later, Abbot Suger, in his account of the deeds of the French king Louis VI, referred easily to a young man as “well versed in the pursuits of the knightly order.”70
By the second half of the twelfth century, the Geiger counter of relevant evidence begins to click more regularly. John of Salisbury, writing just after mid-century, considered knighthood—not merely Templars or crusaders—a licit profession intended in the divine plan.71 Even an early administrative treatise, the Dialogus de Scaccario, written in 1179, recognizes that knighthood is characterized by a collective honor that sharply constrains royal officials in dealing with its individual members.72 Though the first redaction of the Moniage Guillaume (William in the Monastery), from about 1150, has little to say about the knightly order, the second redaction of this chanson, written about 1180 (as we will see) devotes lengthy conversations to a highly favorable comparison of the knightly ordo with that of the monks.73 We have already noted the view of the knight Owen (in the tale of St. Patrick's Purgatory) that the military order is fully sufficient for a pious warrior. Chrétien de Troyes in his Perceval, probably written before 1191, famously refers to chivalry as le plus haut ordre that God has ordained and made.74 Considering the disorderly conduct of his knightly nephews, a contemporary cleric, Peter of Blois, bitterly complained, “The order of milites now is not to keep order.”75 Alan of Lille also weighed in on the critical clerical side in his sermon Ad Milites,76 which refers to the belt of knighthood, the cingulum, as the outward sign of knighthood; he declares hopefully that it must be a symbol of a true, inner knighthood. At the same time the bishop of Rennes, Étienne de Fougeres, in his Livre des Manieres asserted the validity of the knightly order, but added warnings. The knight, he wrote,
can save himself in his order
If nothing is found to cause him remorse.
But if he wants to murder traitorously
Or deceitfully steal or kill,
Then he must indeed be expelled from the order
Have his sword removed, be harshly punished
Spurs removed
And be thrown out from among the knights.77
The bishop who penned these lines looked at knights with unblinkered vision. But it is worth noting that even the disqualifying sins are violations of the true form of lay “labor” within the order.
Through the early decades of the thirteenth century, references to the knightly order mount in the influential Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle of prose romances. The term appears only once or twice in the romance composed first, the Lancelot (c. 1215–20), and again just occasionally appears in the Story of Merlin (after 1230); but this vocabulary increases dramatically in the Quest of the Holy Grail (c. 1225–30), with about a dozen references, and in the History of the Holy Grail (after 1230), with more than two dozen references. The usage continues in continuations such as the Post-Vulgate Merlin and Quest.78 Sometimes these texts even enthusiastically refer to chivalry as the noble order or the high order. By about 1220, a clerical treatise has appeared under the title Ordene de chevalerie (The Order of Chivalry); the treatise urged churchmen to recognize the merits of chivalry and the debts Christian society owed it.79 Ramon Lull's highly popular treatise significantly entitled The Book of the Order of Chivalry appeared in about 1280. Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny in mid-fourteenth century had no doubts that they were members of a sanctified ordo. Their fifteenth-century fellow knight and fellow author Thomas Malory could scarcely restrain his praise for what he repeatedly termed the “hyghe ordre of chivalry.”
Ceremonial practice reinforces the evidence of terminology. At about the same time as ordo usage increased, a young man's formal entry into knighthood increasingly involved the formal rite of dubbing, as Jean Flori and Maurice Keen have emphasized.80 Even if the strictly religious elements in the ceremony vary with time and location, a formal rite of entry into knighthood suggests that the new knight is joining a distinct body of men performing a specified labor.
Competitive Asceticism Among Ordines
A scheme of divinely sanctioned social orders would be important to all the groups in question. It is thus hardly surprising that though scholars composed an ideally harmonious social world in treatises, sharp competition among groups was common in the real world. As Caroline Bynum has argued, the twelfth century discovered not only the self but a plenitude of groups, each busily engaged in self-definition (no less than competition).81 Competition could find expression through religious ideology no less than social status and economic acquisition. It played an integral part in shaping knightly ideology. How did the chivalric ordo rank vis-à-vis that other self-assured ordo, the body of clerics? How did both of the most privileged and valorized ordines view other social groups, and especially the only one that really mattered to them, the merchants? These debates opened another avenue for asserting chivalric independence, however pious the knights considered themselves. Chivalric assertiveness naturally produced sharp reactions within the ecclesiastical caste and stimulated claims (as old as the Gregorian Reform) for clerical superiority and leadership in the march toward salvation.82
Competition so often turned on the degree of asceticism practiced by those in each constitutive social body. Any group that successfully claimed to endure and suffer more than another could boast higher spiritual merits than its rival, earning more of God's good will. This competition was made all the more keen by the high expectations placed on valid social groupings in maintaining the sort of ordered world on which God would smile.
The clerics set the standard. They famously (and theoretically) abstained from sexuality as a form of bodily discipline and meritorious sacrifice. The tenor of their claims, evident from so many twelfth-century sources, can perhaps nowhere better be appreciated than in The Jewel of the Church (Gemma Ecclesiastica) by that most popular writer of the age, Gerald of Wales. His book, as he tells us with characteristic modesty, was warmly appreciated by no less an ecclesiastical figure than Pope Innocent III.83 Gerald sounds the theme of celibacy tirelessly. Significantly, he discusses the struggle in military and highly ascetic language: “Resist the desires of the flesh manfully. Dry up the springs of lust through fervor of the spirit. The greater the struggle, the greater the crown.”84 He continues, “Know, then, that if a man does not punish himself, God will do so.”85 And he significantly adds, “No crown is given unless the struggle of a fierce battle has taken place.”86 This last statement appears prominently on the Harley manuscript illumination analyzed at the opening of this book. Gerald goes on in a vein that would suit that illumination perfectly. “We ought to fight continuously against the strong desires of the flesh; we must suffer [with Christ] if we are to reign with him.”87 Quoting the Book of Job, he intones that monks must recognize that “life on earth is a warfare and a continuous conflict with the enemy.”88 He summarizes for his brothers the teaching of St. Paul, using language that draws on potent Christus-miles parallels:
As Christ offered the Father His entire body as a victim for us, generously exposing Himself to pains, to spittle, to stripes, to chains, to blows, to insults, and finally to the ignominious gibbet of the cross, so we should crucify our bodies to the world for His sake and willingly exposing ourselves to abstinences and insults and persecutions, devote our bodies completely to the service of God.89
A few lines later Gerald approvingly quotes St. Jerome, “You are effeminate soldiers if you desire to be crowned without a struggle, for no one will be crowned unless he fights manfully.”90 Within the cloister, even within the priesthood, life is interpreted as a species of spiritual warfare, with celibacy the key to ascetic discipline. “That a priest needs to be pure,” Thomas of Cobham's Summa Confessorum declares in the early thirteenth century, “is so obvious that it hardly needs saying.”91 John Pecham in Ignorantia Sacerdotium (1281) states that although holy orders are a form of perfection, marriage is a sacrament for the imperfect. True heroic endurance, in other words, graces the celibates.92 Clerics were expected to practice a genuine form of self-denial. The growing powers of the institutional church watched closely to be certain of their self-discipline, and assured them of God's favor won through the abstinence and suffering of their bodies.
Sometimes the clerics saw themselves standing apart from all lay people, whether of chivalric or mercantile stamp. In one sense, this is only an instance of the rivalry of all groups that some scholars have emphasized as an aspect of high medieval social thought no less than a fact of social interaction. From a highly theoretical perspective, clerics could lump knights and merchants together; both groups of lay folk were troublesome and their labors morally dangerous.93 One of the standard exempla that appears in numerous collections asks the question, how many demons does it take to watch a certain site? The answer always specifies that many agents of the devil are required to keep watch over a monastery, filled with a multitude of true souls, but only one need watch some other site (the target of the story), since its inhabitants are already given over to the power of the devil. Significantly, though this targeted site may be a town gate or marketplace, it may also be a castle.94 Both the knight's ruthless violence and the merchant's endless usury troubled society and offended divine order.
The competition began in youth, as clerics recognized. An early sense of their religious vocation, adult clerics often recall in later writings, produced animosity from brothers whose feet were set on the path to knighthood. Gerald of Wales says his brothers disturbed his early studies with their ready praise of the knightly life.95 Guibert of Nogent, dressed even while a child for his adult career as a monk (though his father and brothers were knights), later said he considered the “rest of my race…in truth mere animals ignorant of God, or brutal fighters and murderers.”96 We have already encountered Peter of Blois bitterly complaining of young knights that “The order of milites now is not to keep order.”97
Clerical controversialists clearly did not always accept the knightly claim to carry out the divine will with their swords. They jibed that the actual labor of knights was theft and rapine. Étienne de Bourbon in the mid-thirteenth century told a story handed down from early Dominican friars in Burgundy. They had encountered knights driving before them cattle and oxen plundered from the poor. The laymen asked the friars what they are and are asked the same question by the friars. Surprised, the laymen say that one can tell at once that they are knights (“Immo videtis quod milites sumus”). But with malice aforethought one of the friars answers that they surely are cattlemen, for one is identified by the animals one drives. Yet, the friar continued—twisting the blade already thrust home—rather than you leading the stolen cattle to your homes, the cattle are driving you to burn in hell (“Sed, ut dicam verius, ducunt vos dicta jumenta ad inferni patibulum pocius quam vos ipsa ad vestram domum”).98 In another of his sermon tales, Étienne de Bourbon presents a wicked provost seizing cattle in a war that pitted the bishop of Macon and his allied townsmen against the count of Macon and his knights. Noting one lone cow left behind, the provost loudly orders its seizure. God's judgment falls upon him precisely at that moment and for the rest of his life he is able to say nothing but “Seize the cow! (Tange vaccam!)”99 Defending their own ascetic turf, clerics sniped at knightly claims with practiced skill and undisguised glee. The monks in particular enjoyed a good story showing that knights who thought themselves tough and worldly found life in the cloister unbearable. Caesarius of Heisterbach writes that an abbot told him that “a certain knight” who was the genuine article—”honourable and renowned in military service (honestum et in militia nominatum)”—tried to convince a comrade to enter a monastery as he had done. But the comrade replied “with a word of great cowardice”: “I am really afraid of…the lice that infest your robes (Vere, amice, ego forte…timeo…vermiculi vestimentorum).” Caesarius adds proudly, “indeed the woolen cloth does harbour a quantity of vermin (pannus enim laneus multos vermiculos nutrit).” He even pictures the converted knight himself reviling his timid fellow: “Alack! What a valiant soldier! You whom swords could not terrify when fighting for the devil! Have you to be frightened by lice now that you are going to be a soldier of Christ?”100 The vituperation works in this case and (as is usual in monastic stories) the cloistered life claims the soldier. But the underlying monastic assertion of superior meritorious suffering is obvious and informative.101 Caesarius later makes the same point using the monastic diet. A “certain man still in the world (quidam ex saecularibus)” marvels that converted knights “so delicately brought up in the world, can live upon simple vegetables, peas and lentils.”102 Even priests, though they lacked the thoroughly heroic image of monks, could still claim a more demandingly ascetic life than the laity. “Nothing in this life,” William of Pagula wrote of the priestly vocation in the early fourteenth century, “is harder, more burdensome, or perilous than the office of bishop or priest; but nothing is holier in the sight of God if one soldiers on and does his duty in the way Christ commands.”103
The clerical revulsion from blood pollution by the knights at all levels could be strongly felt and expressed. Abbot Suger in his Deeds of Louis the Fat,104 quotes Pope Paschal II who declares that knights' hands are stained by blood from the sword. In describing the coronation of his hero as King of France, Suger significantly distinguished between the merely secular sword of knighthood and the ecclesiastical sword used righteously to correct evildoers. In the coronation ceremony, he insists, Louis exchanged one for the other.105 Perhaps this loathing of blood pollution was again at work in the minds of Abbot Suger and of Gerald of Wales when (borrowing from the Roman author Lucan) they described the German Emperor and Richard Lion-Heart, respectively, as happy only when they could mark their triumphs by walking in the blood of their enemies.106
We can imagine how knightly blood pressure rose when satiric stories were told by chuckling clerics, busily advancing claims for the meritorious suffering of their ordo. Apologists for the knightly ordo did not let down their side in answering them. One of the popular epics of the cycle of William of Orange, the Moniage Guillaume (William in the Monastery) puts this conflict of ordines directly into the spotlight. An aged William retires to a monastery, leading to much discussion of the monastic and knightly orders, to the benefit of the bellatores. As already noted, not the first redaction of this text from about 1150, but the second of about 1180, shows this sharply competitive emphasis.107 An angel guides William, aging and tired after his vigorous career in arms, to enter a monastery. He is changing his ordo under heavenly guidance, but he is not an easy convert to the monastic life. Though (reminding us of William Mauvicin) he hands over his shield symbolically to St. Julian, the heavenly patron of the house, he inserts an escape clause in his pledge: if needed by his king to combat pagans, he will return to the world of physical fighting, paying for the privilege. Yet William hears from the abbot that he must now suffer for his sin of killing so many men, as he accepts the tonsure and dons the robe of a monk (far too short for his vast frame). He proceeds to frighten the other monks by his strength and touchiness (and to beat them when provoked). Even worse, he nearly consumes their supplies of food. Jealousy and resentment lead them wickedly to plan a mission for him that can only be fatal, since they prohibit fighting against the robbers they know will attack him on the journey they propose. This plot device sets up humorous scenes—William progressively and piously giving his prized possessions to the robbers, but finally defending his pants—but it also produces fascinating conversations in the monastery about clerical and knightly ordines as William and the abbot spar verbally before he obediently sets forth. The abbot preaches a code that is the inversion of the knightly line: one must, as a form of penance, suffer evil without fighting back.108 But William declares this code too cruel and condemns all those who created it to the devil who must be behind the order. He has no doubts about the superiority of the order of chivalry and responds to the monastic prohibition of violence with assurance:
Master, he said, your order is too strict!
Such a convent could come to a bad end.
God should hinder whoever established it.
The order of chivalry is worth a good deal more;
It fights against Turks and pagans;
For the love of God it suffers martyrdom,
And is baptized in its own blood
To establish right order.
Monks do nothing but eat and drink
Read and chant and sleep and snore.109
William drives his point home by repeatedly associating the monastic order with shame, the knight's greatest fear.110 Soon he redoubles his point by repeating his entire defense of the chivalric ordo: it is the force needed to conqueror Saracen lands and to convert these unbelievers to true religion. Monks who send out knights into danger are meanwhile eating, drinking wine, and snoring in their cloisters.111 He refers with sarcasm to monastic services that will be held over his dead body when he is killed by the robbers.112 A historian blessed with a time machine might enjoy watching in the far corner of some hall as lay members of the audience react to the poem declaimed for their entertainment.
One of the short miracle tales by Caesarius of Heisterbach makes a similar point about the knightly ordo more concisely. A dying lord hears a commotion in the adjoining room.113 Asking the cause, he learns that his nephew is trying to rape some woman there, and she is proving difficult. The dying knight is a lover of justice and unhesitatingly declares, “Hang him.” The household knights only pretend to obey, fearing consequences after the old man's imminent death. But as he lingers, he catches a glimpse of his nephew very much alive. Calling the young man close to his bedside he plunges a fatal dagger into him. At the point of his own death, shortly thereafter, he is visited by a bishop come to hear his confession. Noting that in recounting his sins the great knight has omitted the killing of his nephew, the bishop refuses to give him the host, the consecrated bread transformed into the saving body of Christ, and walks toward the door. The old knight triumphantly tells the bishop to look within his pyx (the carrying box) for the host. The host is missing there, but lies on the knight's tongue. God has understood the knight's virtue and has given him the saving sacrament, even though the bishop did not. The story remarkably portrays God's valorization of direct and vigorous knightly action, even though it violates the usual religious norms enforced by the clergy.114
Occasionally we can hear the knights speak their minds, even in the twelfth century. Late in that century, Henry II of England expressed the characteristic knightly riposte, claiming superiority rooted in the very toughness of their lives as warriors. In words that would have warmed even the great heart of Geoffroi de Charny two centuries later, he contrasted knightly meritorious suffering with the easier, less hazardous lives of clerics. Gerald of Wales (always the best source of gossipy direct quotation) reports the king's words, spoken in response to an offer of the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem conveyed to him by the patriarch of Jerusalem. Henry archly told the patriarch, “The clergy can call us to arms and perils, since they themselves will receive no blow in the fight nor shoulder any burdens that they can avoid.”115 It comes as no surprise that a monk's vision in the early thirteenth century pictured Henry in fiery armor in the other world, perilously mounted on a stallion snorting sulphurous fumes.116
Ambroise's Estoire de la guerre sainte shows the continuing debate. Hugh de la Mare, a cleric, urges Richard I to withdraw out of danger during the fighting on Cyprus before the king reached the Holy Land: “Sir, get away, for they have hordes of people, beyond counting.” Richard responded sharply: “Sir clerk, concern yourself with your writing and come out of the fighting; leave chivalry to us by God and Saint Mary.”117
Later in the thirteenth century, elaborate remarks by historical French nobles are reported by the chronicler Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora for the year 1247.118 In the process of forming sworn associations against clerical financial exactions, these lords denounced the “superstitious clergy” who seem to have forgotten that “by the warfare and bloodshed of certain people in the time of Charlemagne and others, the kingdom of France was converted from the errors of the gentiles to the catholic faith.” Such unappreciative clerics, the French lords insisted, “would place us in a worse condition than God wished even the gentiles to be in, when he said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.” The secular lords know, to the contrary, “that the kingdom was neither acquired by written law nor by the arrogance of clerks, but by the sweat of war.” Let the clerics, they say, return “to their condition in the early church and by living in contemplation, may, as becomes them, show to those of us leading the active life the miracles which have long since departed from the world.” The thrusts are sharp, the independence and lay confidence are manifest. Knightly mentalité clearly endows strength sufficient to banish any disabling fears about the morality of its characteristic labor. As we have seen, Geoffroi de Charny (who favored fare and attire simple enough to warm the heart of even an uncompromising monastic reformer) came directly to the point by describing chivalric suffering and comparing it to the supposedly hard life of the clerics. He caps his case by asking, rhetorically, “and where are the orders which could suffer as much?”119
Other knights on the stage of history and their fellows on the pages of imaginative literature directly assert the rectitude of their own order against clerics who would play the warrior. This was trespassing on the preserve of the sacred labor of the knightly ordo. Just before the Battle of the Standard, fought between the English and the Scots in 1138, Archbishop Thurstan of York boldly announced that he and his parish priests bearing crucifixes would join the English fighters.120 In a scene that parallels contemporary chanson, the archbishop solemnly gave the English forces, gathered before him in arms, God's blessing and forgiveness after they had accepted private penitence and a general three-day fast with alms.121 Although the archbishop again declared his determination to join the army in battle, English barons firmly informed him that he should return to his prayers and religious duties and leave the fighting to them “as their order required.”122 A century and a half later, when on another northern field of battle the English and Scots again fought, another bishop was told to act within his ordo, by knights confident of their own. At Falkirk in 1298, Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham, actually commanded one division of the English army. Yet when he tried to restrain his fighters who were eager to advance, these proud warriors told him plainly, “It is not for you, bishop, to teach us about knightly matters, when you should be saying mass. Go and celebrate mass and leave us to get on with our military affairs.”123 The word ordo is missing, but the knights assert a strong sense of the proper function for clerics and for knights.
Some clerics were clearly sensitive to the basic knightly argument. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of a fearful priest who carried a sword on a night journey. Encountering a hideous man whose figure suddenly grew to the height of the trees, he fled in terror, only to be told by lay brothers in a monastery what he should have known: the devil fears a psalm, not a sword. In other words, he was acting outside the principles of his ordo.124 Richard de Templo, an Augustinian who incorporated the Estoire of Ambroise into his chronicle, at one point exclaims, “How distant, how different is the life of contemplation and meditation among the columns of the cloister from that dreadful exercise of war.”125
That such conversations can likewise be found in romance shows their widespread dissemination. In the Middle English Sultan of Babylon, the warrior Ferumbras makes the point. While still a pagan (before his defeat by the hero Oliver converts him to Christianity), he unhorses a fighter leading a contingent out from Rome and is surprised to find the man is tonsured. The unhorsed man is, in fact, the pope. Ferumbras may be a pagan, but as a warrior he is given the knightly line of thought,
Fye, priest, God give you sorrow!
What are you doing armed in the field,
Who should say matins tomorrow?
I hoped you would be an emperor,
Or a war-chief of this host,
Or some worthy conqueror!
Go home and stay in your choir.126
Mythology for the Knightly Ordo: Round Table and Grail
All these speakers stand firmly on the ground of a distinct chivalric ordo and the performance of its proper labor; all challenge the clerics and would restrict them to the work of their own ordo. Sometimes, more subtle tactics were employed, and indirect maneuver rather than frontal charge guided knightly strategy. This meant elaborating what Maurice Keen aptly termed the mythology of chivalry. Creating such a mythology powerfully buttressed the claims made for a chivalric ordo. While never openly anti-sacerdotal, elements of the mythology in fact often placed the knights in a close, direct relationship with God, the founder of their ordo. Such constructs might show disturbing tendencies to circumvent the clergy or at least to minimize their mediating role; they constituted flank attacks in the competitive struggles among the ordines.
One remarkable intellectual construct even elaborated a mythical genealogy of chivalric heroes. The Quest of the Holy Grail (c. 1225–30) traced the line of the great Lancelot (while criticizing his sinful liaison with Queen Guenevere) and introduced his yet greater (and sexually pure) son Galahad. Lancelot is declared to be descended from Christ, through generations of pious knights and Grail keepers.127 His son Galahad, the perfection of spiritual knighthood, even takes on significant attributes of Christ. Imitatio Christi here is raised to a higher power.
Yet another succession of knights—in this case a line of heroes who were not imagined blood relatives—not only connected chivalry to Christ himself, but reached even further back in time to incidents and characters in Jewish sacred history. The famous Nine Worthies, three sets of three great heroes, were presented as founding pillars of chivalry. Great knights from any writer's own time might receive fulsome praise as worthy to be number ten in the series; no doubt all knights could try to see at least something of themselves in the Nine Worthies who gave chivalry so glorious a past.128 Since the sets pictured three classical heroes (Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar), three Jewish (David, Josua, and Judas Macabeus) and three Christian (Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon), the line of models for knighthood again extended chivalric history well back into a glorious past and combined historical figures with literary heroes. In fact, this cultural genealogy is obviously and significantly older than that of the church itself, since it predates the founder and all the early fathers and saintly martyrs. At the very least, chivalric literature created knights about whom the odor of sanctity hovered. In the best-known examples the knights recall Christ himself, as all scholars recognize in the events marking the death of Roland in his chanson, or the symbolism and deeds associated with Galahad in the great Quest of the Holy Grail. Humbler knights in works less renowned can show some of the traits of sanctity.129
The specific symbols of Round Table and Grail suggest a divine mission for chivalry. Robert de Boron achieved this in three romances on Merlin and the Grail written in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. In effect he cross-pollinated the pseudo-historical chronology of Geoffrey of Monmouth with the potent religious symbolism of Chrétien de Troyes. This fusion was absorbed wholeheartedly in the chivalric literature that conveyed knightly ideology.130 Christ could be thought of as a knight, as we have seen—as even his disciples might be (with a little more effort); and the fellowship of the Grail table was obviously knightly in the sense of a European court. By the mid-fourteenth century, monarchs on both sides of the Channel were, in effect, founding tables for their own royal chivalric orders—the Garter in England and the Star (or Noble Maison) in France.131 Robert de Boron conceived of Arthur's Round Table as the third in a trinity of tables.
Grail and sacred table symbolism combined. At the First Table, Christ and his disciples gathered for the Last Supper, sitting around the vessel that became the Grail. It was later used by Joseph of Arimathea, to whom Pilate had entrusted Christ's body and to whom Christ entrusted the vessel to hold his sacred blood. Whatever Chrétien had intended by the mysterious graal, apparently a platter carried in sacred procession in his romance, Perceval, Robert's Grail has become eucharistic, the sacred chalice of the mass. Knighthood is linked with the central sacrament of the altar.132 Other elements of the Last Supper become powerful chivalric symbols as well: the empty seat left by the guilty withdrawal of Judas would evolve, remarkably, into the famed Siege Perilous, a seat that would serve only the greatest knight in the world and destroy any lesser man who deigned to try.
Under divine instruction, Joseph of Arimathea created the Second Table, and gathered the faithful around it, with the Grail at its center for marvelous sacramental meals. Utherpendragon, Arthur's father, would of course produce the Third Table, directed by Merlin.133 Through Robert's pen, one of the divine goals set for the knights of the Round Table in the time of Arthur is to find the Holy Grail now come to Britain where it rests in the care of the Fisher King, who is Perceval's uncle. Though this current Grail keeper is terribly ill, he cannot find release in pious death, Merlin foretells, “until a knight of the Round Table has performed enough feats of arms and chivalry—in tournaments and by seeking adventures—to become the most renowned knight in all the world.”134 The requirements are significant: prowess is bonded with piety.
In the third romance in Robert de Boron's trilogy, Perceval is destined to be this knight, to sit in the mysterious vacant seat at the Round Table, and finally to succeed in the quest for the Grail. No less impatient than destined, however, he sits prematurely in the vacant seat, encouraged by all his fellow knights who think his demonstrated prowess in a tournament has already earned him the right.135 Perceval is spared divine wrath only by pure grace; the stone seat splits beneath him with a noise like the end of the world. The stern voice of God announces that the seat will never mend nor will healing come to the current keeper of the Grail—the maimed Fisher King—until, the text pointedly repeats, a great knight “has performed enough feats of arms and goodness and prowess.”136 The knight who achieves so much, the Voice assures, will be guided to the castle of the Fisher King where he must ask the right questions: What is the Grail? Who does it serve? Though Perceval first finds the Grail castle, he fails to ask the questions and is told he cannot have the Grail, “because you're not wise or worthy enough, and have done too few deeds of arms and prowess and too few acts of goodness.”137 Perceval, of course, eventually makes all right, with Merlin's help finds his uncle, asks the questions, heals the Grail keeper, and replaces him, retiring from chivalry. What seems so striking for our inquiry, however, is the strong link forged between good knightly prowess and the central relic in the story, the original Eucharistic vessel. The three tables and this vessel connect the ordo of chivalry, characterized by its demanding life of arms, to Christ himself and to the vessel that re-creates his sacrifice—and triumph—at the altar.
This ideal of knights searching for the Grail is more famously elaborated in the Quest of the Holy Grail in the Vulgate Cycle, a few decades after Robert de Boron completed his trilogy. As this romance blends clerical exhortation and chivalric independence, it shows the tensions that could crackle within a single work. Strong clerical visions for an order of knights surface unmistakably, but lay independence is equally clear, though perhaps not always recognized. The clerics, granted, tried determinedly to bend the moral direction of Grail quest to spiritual rather than worldly chivalry. Yet in the process, this meta-quest in fact brings the religious charge in romance to maximum valorizing potential. Though most knights fail, the finest, ideally exercising with their swords and their bodies the characteristic work of their ordo (as even the clerics envisioned it) achieve virtual union with God, who feeds them himself from the Grail. To Galahad, the finest of all, God even reveals himself. In much humbler passages along the way, the Quest makes major concessions to the realities of chivalric life as lived in the world. Tournament is accepted as licit without a murmur. The crucial virtue of prowess is largely accepted as a God-given talent, provided only it is well exercised and its ultimate origins acknowledged. Perceval hears talk of his ordo and its hard labors from “a man robed like a priest” speaking to him from the deck of a miraculous ship:
[God] would try you to determine whether you are indeed his faithful servant and true knight, even as the order of chivalry demands. For since you are come to such a high estate, no earthly fear of peril should cause your heart to quail. For the heart of a knight must be so hard and unrelenting towards his sovereign's foe that nothing in the world can soften it. And if he gives way to fear, he is not of the company of the knights and veritable champions, who would sooner meet death in battle than fail to uphold the quarrel of their lord.138
Would knights hearing such passages think only of spiritual struggles and the Lord God? Or might they think of their faithful service to a secular lord or—what seems more likely—of the hierarchical continuum of lords beginning on earth and reaching into heaven? Would the conception of hard service register as purely spiritual or would it have a strongly physical dimension in their minds?
One suspects that knights must commonly have read or heard all highly clerical themes in their own fashion, receiving the contents through a powerful chivalric filter, the same filter we have already encountered at work in the knightly reception of crusade preaching (in Chapter 4). At the end of the Middle Ages, Sir Thomas Malory certainly employed such a filter for his version of the Quest. In his Morte Darthur even the Grail Quest emerges as a wonderful adventure and a blessing descending on knighthood. Far from reading his source as a stern sermon ad status (to be taken to heart point by point as a practical guide to an ordo and a remedy for its many faults), he seems deliberately not to see the failure of most knights on the quest and even wipes from his hero, Lancelot, as much of the tarnish as is possible. Galahad glows with unearthly virtue and is admired at a distance by Malory; but Lancelot is the best of sinful knights, the sort of model a practicing warrior might conceivably emulate. Malory is devoted to a society led by the “moste Kynge” and the “moste knyght.” Even as it slides inexorably toward the cliff edge, the society of the Round Table, Malory's Hyghe Ordre of Chyvalry, is glorious and grand in his sight, though its incurable ills must be painfully lodged in his heart.
Blessed Virgin, Ally of the Knightly Ordo
If the Grail quest is well known, one of the trump cards held by the knights is too often ignored. They buttressed their high ordo through a close relationship with the Blessed Virgin. The Queen of Heaven was their special patroness. Her protection confirmed their validity, perhaps even in some dimensions their superiority.139 Her knights did her great honor and she responded, on occasion even being represented as magnanimously accepting gifts from their illicit loot.140 Her protection is invaluable: the demon who has insinuated himself into a household is unable to work his evil on the knight who honors the Virgin daily.141 A knight who has sold his soul to the devil by denying Christ, is saved when he stoutly refuses to deny the Virgin. She intervenes with her son in gratitude.142 Repeatedly, she is shown coming to the aid of imprisoned knights, for whom she had a special affection.143 As that pioneering medievalist Henry Adams noted, “On every battlefield of Europe for at least five hundred years Mary was present, leading both sides.”144 She generously arranges time desperately needed for confession leading to forgiveness of their sins. Her gracious generosity flows in response to even the most formal devotions or the most abbreviated verbal declarations on the point of death. Caught by his enemies, as one exemplum pictures, a “noble but crime-stained knight” pleaded for time to confess, a plea denied by his nervous captors, anxious to decapitate him. He had time only to state his intention to confess before the sword blow struck. Yet the Blessed Virgin intervened with her son and the knight's good intention saved him, says Caesarius of Heisterbach, who tells the miracle story.145 Even more graphic is the tale of a Norman knight who was truly shameful and wicked and guilty of various killings and atrocities, as the Augustinian Thomas of Cantimpré tells. He was finally caught by his enemies in a pass and summarily beheaded. But as the severed head rolled down the slope it continually and horrifyingly called out (non paucis horis clamans horribiliter) to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Understandably frightened, the all but paralyzed killers endured continuous cries from the knight's grisly head hour after hour (incessante capite clamante). A quaking priest summoned from a nearby village at first would not come near the body and insisted that he would do nothing until the head was replaced atop the knight's corpse. As soon as this was done and the priest had miraculously heard the dead knight's confession, peace was restored, and all present marveled at the power and favor of God's Mother.146 Though the loving power of Mary is the religious point the clerical author clearly wanted to establish, a knight might take special notice of the Virgin's favor to one of his order, even to one scarred by sin. She understands the problems and weakness of knights and forgives those devoted to her. In a sermon story, a robber-knight who says fifty Aves every day narrowly escapes capture by his enemies. He thanks the Blessed Virgin who has saved him, but receives a timely warning in the form of a vision: Mary offers him dainty food in a foul dish, a symbol of his devotions offered her in the midst of his blemished life.147 She could even forgive knights who trouble the clergy. A parish priest who has been harassed and plundered by a neighboring castellan finally loses patience and, holding a consecrated host in his hand, threatens the Virgin; he will not release her son until he is avenged on that knight. In a vision he sees his enemy hanging over the pit of hell, supported only by five golden cords. An angel with a drawn sword stands ready to cut the cords and plunge the sinful knight into the eternal blazing pit. The priest enthusiastically calls for that very action. But when the Virgin explains that these cords are the Aves said daily by the castellan, the priest desists. He explains the vision to the knight, converting him to a better life.148 Yet life-changing repentance does not always seem to be required. A knight who buys a young girl from her parents while he is riding to a tournament spares the girl's virginity because he learns she is named Mary. Though he is killed in the tournament, his soul is saved, as this girl learns in a vision in which the Virgin Mary appears. Girls with other names, one fears, would have been well advised to avoid this knight.149 Another knight has a vision of judgment with fierce demons coming to seize his soul. He manages to fight them off, using as he would a sword the taper he had once dedicated to the Blessed Virgin in a church.150 Another knight, who lives openly by plunder, nonetheless adores the Virgin and though his heart has been pierced by an enemy weapon is miraculously saved from instant death in order to make confession and secure salvation.151
Knights must have deeply appreciated these stories told in sermons or savored in private reading. Joinville includes one at the point in his chronicle of the crusade of Louis IX where he relates his pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Tortosa: “it was there that the first altar was erected on earth in honour of the Mother of our Lord.” Among the many great miracles he knows were accomplished by the Virgin there, the example he chooses to tell concerns a man possessed by the devil, whose friends pray for his health. But from within him the devil cries out in response, “Our Lady is not here. She is in Egypt giving help to the King of France and the Christians who will land this very day to fight on foot against the mounted forces of the heathen.” Joinville assures his readers that the date was written down and given to the legate who gave the information to him in person. “I can assure you,” Joinville testifies, “that Our Lady did indeed help us that day, and would have helped us still more if…we had not angered her and her Son.”152 It is a story Henry Adams could appreciate: the Virgin helping out her knights on the field of battle.
Joinville's story is set on crusade, but the most famous story of the Virgin's aid concerns the mock battlefield of tourney. In versions retold endlessly across the Middle Ages, a knight on his way to a tournament stops to hear a mass sung in her honor in a church by the road. Lost in devotion, he forgets the tournament completely. Suddenly remembering his knightly goal, he hurries toward the tourney field, only to meet returning jousters who congratulate him on his victory, some even acknowledging that they are prisoners won by his admirable display of prowess. Momentarily astonished, he comes to understand that the Virgin has jousted for her faithful knight in his absence.153
This asserted assurance of help from St. Mary sets knights far apart from laymen in other socio-professional groups, and especially from the merchants. Can one imagine the Blessed Virgin counting out coins, working the scales, collecting interest, or selling goods in a marketplace, even for a merchant who had devotedly honored her? The explanation is not simply that the Queen of Heaven favored sinners of high social status. The Virgin was, in fact, known for the dramatic help she gave even to the humble. Eileen Power went so far as to claim that for all her chivalric friends, she liked common folk best.154 Robbers of all ranks who showed her any devotion seem to have given her no pause. In a late twelfth-century story, another tale endlessly retold later, she supports a convicted thief on the gallows for three days, preventing his drop to sudden death and allowing him time for repentance and salvation.155 Stories of her help for merchants or usurers, however, are conspicuously absent.156
Elite Ordines Versus the Merchants
Knights and clerics could readily agree on one point: both groups were certain that their respective ordines and labor vastly outshown that of merchants and their labor. Disdain for the merchant was, of course, one of their areas of solid agreement. Though often fearful and worried about the knights, the clerics showed a decidedly less favorable view of the merchants. One tale pictures a usurer, who has endowed a church and secured burial before the altar, rising suddenly from his grave to beat the monks with a candlestick snatched from the altar; even reburying his body outside the churchyard secures them no peace, for the man haunts the neighborhood. Finally the monks realize that they must purchase peace by returning his gifts, earned by foul usury.157 An even more damning sermon story, provided by Jacques de Vitry, shows a deceased usurer refused burial in the church cemetery by the parish priest. When the usurer's friends protest, the priest puts the corpse on the back of an ass and suggests the will of God be done. Straightaway the beast carries its load to the gallows where robbers are hanged and shakes it off into a dunghill, where the priest leaves it.158
Knights warmly seconded this denigration. That both they and the churchmen needed the merchants' services and their liquid assets is obvious; that from a practical perspective they more or less came to terms with them can be demonstrated. Canon law creatively swung open the door of religious valorization just widely enough to prevent complete censure of the merchants' work, so crucial in the urban and economic boom medieval Europe experienced. Yet deep animosity remained and was frequently expressed. Attacks from the privileged ordines on usury and usurers—the category into which all men of trade were indiscriminately dumped—appear in a steady stream of vitriolic moral tales for private reflection and sermon preparation.
Why did knights and clerics combine in despising merchants? Social status comes first to mind. Whatever their own disputes and rivalries, knights and the upper clergy shared broad social layers: whether in youth they took up arms or served at the altar, they thought themselves marvelously superior to those who went into trade. Both elite groups enjoyed looking down privileged noses at bustling men of markets and finance. Yet so obvious an answer seems incomplete. Ideological as well as social criteria entered the equation. The knights, for all their faults, clearly could be better fitted than usurers within an ideal ecclesiastical plan for human society. Such ideas mattered.
One of a set of exempla collected in the fourteenth century makes the case concisely, using trifunctional terminology with the merchants censoriously appended:
The three kinds of human that God made are the clerics, knights, and workers; but the fourth kind was thought up by the devil, namely the townsmen and usurers who are not clerics because they do not know letters, are not knights because they do not know how to bear arms, and are not workers because they do not engage in human labor and the devil works them. Likewise the merchants are among men like the drones among bees who do not make honey nor carry fruit, but do harm to the bees. Similarly the merchants oppress the clerics, outfit the knights, and shake down the workers and because on no day do they serve, they suffer idleness and injure many. For this reason Solomon said that idleness begets all evils.159
If not good theology, this is powerfully revealing social commentary.
Clerical intellectuals widened the distance between merchants and the elite orders by their hatred of usury. Long suspect by the twelfth century, usury provoked newly intense condemnation, seen in the enactments of the Lateran councils of 1139 and 1179.160 The Parisian circle of Peter the Chanter, especially concerned with issues of social ethics, played a prominent role through preaching campaigns and through influence in ecclesiastical legislation late in the twelfth century and through the early decades of the thirteenth century. In fact, they seem to have pioneered the use of vivid sermon exempla to castigate the usurers, often showing them in full evil in life and in final confusion upon their deathbeds.161 The emergence of the several orders of friars not many years later ushered in the ideal set of enthusiastic preachers and confessors to broadcast the message and apply the technique to the widest possible audience.
Some of the intellectuals tried hard to accept the merchants. Jacques de Vitry included them in “the multiform types of men” who “have special rules and institutions differing from each other according to the different types of talents entrusted to them by the Lord, so that the one body of the church is put together under its head, Christ, out of people of differing conditions.”162 Yet he told of a cleric who wanted to “show to all how ignominious was the profession of usury, which no one would dare publicly to confess.” He announced in his sermon, “I wish to absolve you according to the trades and professions of each (officium et ministerium singulorum).” Beginning with the smiths, he then called on all the men present to rise craft by craft; but when he asked for the usurers to rise to receive absolution, for shame no one dared stand up, “but all hid themselves for shame, and were derided, and put to confusion by the others for not daring to confess their profession.”163
Eudes de Châteauroux (another in the Paris circle), contrasted townsmen and usurers with the good knights signing up for crusade. Unlike the knights who showed their thorough trust in God, these townsfolk do not want to join the movement, “and what is more they aim to deprive those who join up of their inheritance.” Yet, Eudes exults, “the authority will always stay with the nobles, whether or not the usurers who devour them want it.”164
Feelings ran deep, as the exempla show. One poor knight who asks a count for aid is rudely interupted by a rich bourgeois in the count's retinue, who declares his lord has nothing to give. The right-thinking count, however, gives the worthy knight this very bourgeois, to hold until ransomed.165 Another knight turned monk, sent to sell asses on behalf of his religious house, proves constitutionally unable to play the lying merchant: he honestly explains the faults of the beasts.166 When a usurer who has acquired the possessions of a knight dies, the knight marries his widow and together they enjoy the good life while the dead sinner roasts in hell.167 Another knight while crossing a bridge in Paris hears a wealthy burgher blaspheming God. He punishes the man with a terrible blow to the mouth, breaking the off ender's teeth. Brought before the king of France to answer for this action, the knight says that he would be unable to bear hearing his earthly king reviled, how much more should he revenge his heavenly king. The earthly king honors and releases him and ignores the burgher's claim.168 On his wedding day a usurer passed beneath the portal of a church bearing a stone figure of a usurer. At just that moment the heavy stone purse clutched by the figure broke loose, and in its fall struck and killed the man.169 It is hard to imagine a parallel story picturing a knight killed by a stone sword falling from a military statue on a church façade. Gifts from knights were accepted with honor and thanks, even by clerics who were not concerned to know if the source might be morally tainted. But the oats a usurer gave to a priest in an exemplum is found to be full of serpents. No wonder a usurer who insists on a third of his wealth being buried with him must suffer demons in the other world who grant his wish by stuffing his mouth with red-hot coins.170
End-of-life scenes usually offered a favorite stage for deprecating usurers. In the throes of death they lose speech, but recover only to ask about their money. Their bodies rest uneasily in consecrated ground and may have to be moved. One, whose dead body is examined, strangely has no heart; it is soon found, of course, in his money chest.171 The story contrasts sharply with that reporting the examination of the heart of a pious knight who had died while on crusade—on the Mount of Olives, in fact: the heart was found to contain a golden crucifix.172 Little wonder that a knight is reported to have shouted out in a crisis of the Cathar wars, “we are suffering worse torments than a money-lender's soul!”173
The disdain of elite ordines is obvious, and the likely ideological underpinning for it is significant. Supporting all these particular expressions of dislike is the utterly nonheroic profession of the merchants: the labor of their ordo involves no meritorious suffering. Clerics genuinely suffered in rejecting the allures of sexuality and thereby won high praise and divine approval. The hard lives of the knights similarly brought them spiritual merit. The merchants ran their hands lovingly through piles of polluting coin, but practiced no physical asceticism at all, and after being soundly excoriated on earth faced an uncertain future.
We must recognize that the knights in fact won the competition and got the best of both worlds. Though their labor involved acts of mutual blood pollution in armed combat, their sufferings in campaign and combat not only won them the loot and the praise that sustained their dominant position in society, it likewise bolstered their hopes of yet greater glory in the halls of heaven. Such conceptions of ordo and labor underscored their vigorous and self-confident mentalité.
Knightly conceptions of ordo and labor underscore their vigorous and self-confident mentalité. Though some fears may have crept in after midnight, or in a crisis, or on the deathbed, knights seem by and large to have thought they enjoyed a positive relationship with the divine. With their labor largely defined as they would wish, they could gladly accept membership in an ordo created by clerical intellectuals. Even on his deathbed the great William Marshal demonstrated this view with a confident assertion that certain clerical strictures on knightly life could not be true. Gawain walks in the same glow of confidence as an ideal chivalric heaven opens welcomingly and he is surrounded by throngs of grateful folk he has saved by arduous works of caritas on earth (the charity in this case achieved with his sword).174
This is not the heaven of the clerics, crowded with ranks of pacific saints and virgins intoning hymns. It recalls rather the great hall of Valhalla with the Christian God at last on the dais, wearing truly divine armor as he welcomes his fellow warriors as guests at the unending feast.