A FEW YEARS after the victorious William the Conqueror had won the English crown, the Norman bishops composed (in 1067–70) an ordinance imposing penance on those men-of-war who had helped William gain his great prize. Their slate of sins had to be wiped clean of wartime wrongs. The ordinance laying out conditions was confirmed by the papal legate, Ermenfrid of Sion. The clerics, in effect, invert Geoffroi de Charny's scale of merit linked to increasing prowess: they produced a graded scale of penance according to the severity of military sin committed. In descending order of severity, penance was imposed for killing a known number of men, wounding a known number of men, killing or wounding an unknown number of men, etc. Motive was also addressed: fighting for gain entailed heavier penance than fighting “as in a public war.” There were additional clauses for the further sins sure to occur in the wake of campaigning and conquest: adultery, rape, fornication, and violation of churches. Whether or not these penances were effectively carried out is unclear, but the direction of thought is significant.1 Two earlier post-battle ordinances survive, though many may have been lost. Penitentials from the eighth and ninth centuries imposed fasting on warriors who killed in battle; but the evidence is confusing, as Sara Hamilton notes.2 The Norman ordinance may have been, if not the last in a series, at least a late example in a long chain of formally imposed penances for battlefield killing and wartime misdeeds, stretching back several centuries into the Carolingian past.
Thoughts connecting warfare and warriors with confession and penance were in fact significantly shifting, as we can see by comparing this Norman ordinance with several roughly contemporary papal letters. Writing in 1063 to the clergy who would instruct warriors setting out from Italy to join the war against Muslims in Spain, Alexander II required the volunteers to confess their sins to a bishop and accept an assignment of penance; yet he then removed these same penances because of the campaign that they were about to fight. Their hard struggle would itself become a penance, and killing in warfare—here, of course, the killing of non-Christians—would not require the remedial steps imposed by Ermenfrid of Sion on the Norman conquerors. As the pope explained in another letter, killing was permitted when the aim was repressing crime or fighting enemies of the faith.3 About twenty years later, Anselm of Lucca, the noted legist for the reform papacy, argued that the good warriors of Lucca fighting against imperial troops—Christians, of course—were gaining forgiveness through their hard service: a remissio peccatorum. The French jurist Ivo of Chartres, as David Bachrach has pointed out, recognized a case for post-battle penance, but relied heavily on views of such early Church Fathers as Augustine who saw a sinless role for soldiers when their motive was not booty.4
The timing of these changes in thought is interesting. H. E. J. Cowdrey takes the Norman promulgation of a penance for the Conquest as a sign of the conservatism of both the Norman bishops and the legate and suggests that the practice of assigning general scales of penance for military sin died out about the time of the crusades. Bernard Verkamp similarly concluded that imposition of such penances for campaign and battle ended as early crusading began. In Gratian's foundational canon law collection, the Decretum (c. 1140), as David Bachrach notes, these penances imposed on warriors after the fight have finally disappeared.5 Ideas that will contribute to powerful currents in crusading thought and chivalric thought are just emerging at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century.
Satisfaction for Sin: The Range of Views
Theologians knew that sin separates humans from God; as rebellion or treason against the highest Lord, it could provoke his dread wrath against individuals or entire groups of sinners. They were also certain that sin distorts and destroys proper human relationships and ruins the ideal social world intended in the divine plan. Life on earth, after all, should to some small degree anticipate the ordered bliss of heaven, rather than the grim turmoil and torments of hell to which sin leads. Confession and penance were the means of neutralizing the poison of sin in individuals and in society at large. In the process, of course, clerical agency was asserted and clerical primacy promoted. Confession and penance formed the most significant elements in the new theology being developed for the laity. Through a renewed emphasis on these remedies, clerics intended once again to enact reform, to make right order in the world and guide sinners to bliss in the next world.6
So basic a set of ideas generated differing views both among the medieval theologians struggling to make them effective and among modern medievalists trying to understand their use and effectiveness. To fit chivalry into the framework, we must examine the range in points of view, old and new.
Scholars have in fact long placed the processes for dealing with sin under their microscopes, trying to understand what the system was, when it began, and how it operated. Yet on basic issues inquiry is in considerable flux. Recent work charges that earlier scholars imagined the categories of confession to be more stable and the processes more systematic than was actually possible in the medieval world. Taking prescriptive treatises and clerical legislation as evidence of accomplished fact, some scholars—the critique asserts—have projected too precise a taxonomy and too unitary and orderly a chronology of change. In this revisionist work, sharp turning points vanish and lines of demarcation blur.7
Though generalization remains difficult, a broad traditional scholarly view can be identified; it posits several lines of significant change. Along one such line, it is suggested that mechanisms for confession and penance moved from public ceremonies involving entire groups to private meetings of individual sinner and supervising cleric. Another line of change involves a shift from these major and nonrepeatable cleansings to the regularly repeated meetings with a priest better known in later Catholic history. Along with these structural changes, content in confession and penance also has been seen to shift: exterior, often heroically physical acts of penance yielded to a greater concern for true inner contrition for sins. The decisive step is often thought to have arrived with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which issued Constitution 21, Omnis utriusque sexus.8 This decree required that each year all adult Christians make a private and individual confession to their parish priest before receiving the Eucharist. The goal was annual spiritual self-examination on the part of all the faithful, accomplished under clerical supervision. The sinner's own parish priest was to serve as confessor and spiritual guide; acting as a physician for the soul, he would pour the spiritual equivalent of oil and wine onto their wounds. To instruct and guide the priests, a steady stream of handbooks flowed from the pens of scholars. Some of the works may have been intended for literate lay folk themselves.9 An unanticipated catalyst for the process appeared in the creation and rapid spread of the new orders of friars. Within a few decades their influence was felt throughout Christendom. They specialized not only in preaching to the laity but in hearing confession as well; the processes were, of course, considered complimentary. According to the Dominican Humbert of Romans, a friar who preached but refused to hear confessions was analogous to a farmer who sowed but did not reap.10 The harvest of lay confessions was, in fact, plentiful. As is well known, the friars' vigorous confessional work led the parish clergy to feel their competition quite keenly.
If much evidence supports such elements of the traditional view, significant qualifications are emerging. Even if they grant significance to the legislation of 1215, some scholars argue for continuing influence of a much older tradition of ideas emphasizing contrition.11 They also insist on a variety of forms of penance in actual practice, rather than a revolutionary shift after 1215 that replaced one paradigm of thought and practice with another. Close studies of evidence from 900–1050 in the German Reich by Sara Hamilton, and of thirteenth-century northern French documents by Mary Mansfield, in effect bracket the Fourth Lateran Council chronologically and make this revisionist case. Hamilton proposes continuities with the Carolingian past but sees a vital era of development in the tenth and eleventh centuries, well before the work of Innocent III and his colleagues; Mansfield finds that public penance was not dramatically edged out by repeatable private confession and penance but persisted as one acceptable form through the thirteenth century and, in some regions, well beyond. An exact taxonomy of types of penance, as both scholars argue persuasively, existed more in the formal treatises of scholastics than in the practices of confessors and parishioners. In fact, they argue that the very notions of public and private penance, often used in scholarly analysis, tended to blur in actuality.
Given these critiques, it seems especially unlikely that a straightforward timeline can now be accepted, with successive periods and discrete types of penance (as found in prescriptive documents) completely replacing their predecessors.12 No doubt scholarly debates will be fruitful and multiply in years to come. In trying to understand chivalric piety, however, we can respectfully and prudently sidestep the particulars of scholarly debates and concentrate on a few features that are both relevant to the present inquiry and not in hot contention.
Our question is how knighthood could be fitted into the structure for dealing with sin. Prickly chivalric pride in their ordo and a firm belief in its licit and valorous labor could justify disruptive violence by pious, proudly independent knights. Could they be brought to accept structures of atonement and contrition for sin?
It is highly significant that once again a range of theological views— rather than straightforward agreement—persisted on ideas about confession and penance. Current scholarship, as we have seen, suggests that older and newer views could coexist, even in the same minds. This repeats a pattern we have encountered before with regard to other basic issues: the theology of Christ's role in redemption (in Chapter 6), and the theology of social orders, labor, and suffering (in Chapter 7). Where a range of religious ideas or practice coexisted, those who wrote about knighthood could draw selectively upon them all. Writers valorizing chivalry once more found it wonderfully useful to pick and choose, in the present case incorporating religious elements that gave a splendidly penitential stance to knighthood. New (or newly emphasized) ecclesiastical plans and practices could become not only compatible within the profession of knighthood, but indeed highly supportive of it. Chivalric ideology was fond of having the best of all possible worlds of thought.
A crucial question was whether the mechanism of atoning for sin should be considered heroic and intensely physical, or rather as a more spiritual and interior dialogue between the sinner and God. Is grievous bodily suffering, in other words, the potent solvent of sin, or does heartfelt contrition work that marvel?
Heroic atonement through intense or prolonged physical pain and suffering had many adherents.13 Spectacular forms of heroic penance for notorious sins undoubtedly continued into the High Middle Ages and beyond. They might still be imposed on offenders for specific, heinous sins, as appears in both historical and imaginative literary accounts. Perhaps most famously, public beating with rods was accepted by Henry II of England after the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. In the pages of romance, wellknown figures such as Sir Gowther, Robert the Devil, and Guy of Warwick (each recognizing himself guilty of heinous offenses) willingly endured harsh bodily suffering in recompense.14 Readers of such texts knew that many of their contemporaries would have participated in imposed fasts, processions, and nonvoluntary pilgrimages, and would know that the truly heroic in their world (especially among the clergy) continued to subject their sinful bodies to even more creatively taxing penances. Heroic and physical forms of occasional penance continued to be considered efficacious for individuals and sometimes for entire groups and communities.
The tradition itself had venerable clerical roots, of course, reaching back to the heroic penance sometimes imposed in the early church. “One knows he is forgiven,” Thomas Tentler explains of this view, “because he is willing to perform the overwhelming penitential exercises demanded by the church. The consolation of this system lies in its difficulty.…only the ascetic seemed efficacious.”15 It was a tough tradition. As the influential early theologian Tertullian wrote of heroic penance in the first centuries of Christianity,
The harder the pains of this second and only penance, therefore, the more effective it is as a demonstration; so it should not be shown in the conscience alone, but should also be directed towards some external act.…The less you spare yourself, believe me, the more God will spare you.16
Medieval writers continued the chant. Gerald of Wales wrote, “Know, then, that if a man does not punish [himself], God will do so.”17 Or, as St. Bernard wrote, debts not paid on earth must be paid “in purgatorial places (in purgabilibis locis).”18 By the fourteenth century, texts like the Pricke of Conscience concisely instructed that sins must be paid for in this life or the next. Having encountered the medieval obsession with asceticism, we cannot feel surprise at the central place physical suffering held in many minds worried about sin and atonement. The elaboration of a doctrine of purgatory in the High Middle Ages was an obviously powerful stimulus. Jacques Le Goff has argued for the birth of purgatory as a substantive in language and a place in cosmography by the end of the twelfth century, though ideas of interest were clearly in circulation well before then.19 It may have given trembling sinners hope for an eventual release from the antechamber of hell and joyful entry into paradise; but it surely reinforced the idea that the debt of sin must be paid by grueling physical torment endured for years on end. All knew that the soul possessed a corporality that made the physical nature of suffering terrifyingly certain. Étienne de Bourbon straightforwardly asserted that any pain in purgatory was worse than any known on earth (excedit enim omnem penan quam unquam passus est aliquis in hac vita). He continued with a harrowing story of an evil official who declares half a day in purgatorial pain worse than his long-term illness while alive on earth.20 Thomas of Cantimpré had joined the priesthood in order to improve the uncertain otherworldly fate of his father, a knight; he recorded terrifying dreams in which his father's face would appear to him, battered by the harsh, punishing blows he regularly received in purgatory. These dreams, Thomas assured his readers, brought home to him in the midst of his everyday concerns the physical reality of purgatorial punishment.21 Popular views seldom doubted that bodily pain and suffering would be involved in atonement. John Bossy speaks to this point tersely:
While the remission of sins was in the textbooks the effect of a threefold action of contrition, confession and satisfaction performed in private between individual sinner and an individual priest, it was in practice governed, like marriage, by an unwritten tradition that sin was a visible and social matter to be redeemed by acts as visible and social as the Passion of Christ.22
Luther noted disapprovingly in his Ninety-Five Theses (1517) that ordinary folk still believed that they must undergo painful penances in order to have forgiveness of sins.23
Since the process of physical atonement, as theologians emphasized, could begin in this world, it would behoove a sinner to get started on making the required satisfaction. Any punishment owed but not accounted for on earth would lengthen the time sinners experienced the refined tortures of purgatory, if the sins did not condemn them to eternity in hellfire. The living, as pictured in exempla, often receive visions of dead companions suffering horrifically in purgatory or hell for sins unexpurgated on earth. One of a pair of knightly friends, a sermon told its hearers, planned to do penance for three years for a great sin, but died before he could even begin. His troubled spirit appeared in a dream to his friend, who charitably took on the penance for him, and was rewarded by annual visions showing the dead sinner's blackened body cleansed and lightened by successive thirds.24 A fourteenth-century pastoral handbook instructs the priest to inform his parishioners: “All the good things you will do and all the difficult things you will endure are your penance.”25 Lenten fasting and sexual abstinence, the physically difficult or even dangerous enterprise of pilgrimage—let alone the hidden hair-shirts or the public flagellant movements—persisted in an age intensely aware of the example set by the suffering Christ and the early generations of his saintly martyrs. At the end of the Middle Ages, Martin Luther, while a young monk, would nearly ruin his health with harsh bodily discipline.
Some clerical voices continued to use the threat of harsh physical punishment to bolster their insistence on full restitution of stolen property. Jacques de Vitry records the vision focused on a virtuous knight who had fought as a crusader in the Holy Land and against the Cathars. Yet after his death, the hero suddenly appeared from otherworldly torment to seek a friend's help; he needed the living fellow knight to restore property he had stolen so he can be freed from dire punishment.26 In another of his tales, a knight who died while on campaign with Charlemagne in Spain wanted a companion to give his valuable horse as alms. But the fellow fails to act and in a dream learns from the dead knight that his release from the terrors of purgatory is being delayed; the defaulting knight is warned that judgment will fall upon him, as well. It comes more swiftly than anticipated. The very next day the frightened companion dies miserably and in a highly uncertain spiritual state.27 Clearly, clerics wanted knights to restore stolen goods; interestingly, they did not want them to become too confident in even the considerable benefits of crusading.
Yet strong though this tradition of physical atonement was, other ideas and practices led away from the corporal and heroic. Legislation from the highest ecclesiastical authority in 1215 required periodic interior reflection and emphasized contrition for sin; confessors were supported in this task by a steady flow of new preaching manuals and collections of tales that could animate sermons. Emphasis usually fell on the sinner's necessary contrition, which the priest, acting as physician of the soul, was to encourage through skilled and patient probing. Given this vital inner state of true contrition, and its necessary expression through the observable flow of tears, a sinner need not feel so very much worry over outer works of penance closely calibrated in units of suffering to match the severity of sin committed. The way was officially cleared, in fact, for penances to be lightened in weight as well as emphasis. Some thought it more a sign of acceptance of the necessary mediation of Holy Church than a painful payment to God through physical suffering. Contrition, these theologians argued, was the crucial element in reconciliation between sinful humans and the divine, though they never ceased to insist on the role of the priest and the actual performance of penance. Of course, a few clerics may have longed for sterner measures all around, such as the priest in an exemplum who, when troubled by a knight with an infirm leg, thinks not of medicinal confession and light penances but boldly prays that the other leg might be afflicted also, disabling the troublesome man.28
Increasingly, as most lay folk experienced it, the regimen of confession and penance was becoming nonheroic, repeatable, and local. Weberian sociologists might say that it was becoming routinized in the religious life of the majority. For them the sacrament increasingly meant that they periodically recalled their quotidian sins and showed their parish priest genuine contrition of heart; they then performed the light physical penance assigned, usually some task far from the heroic. Pragmatic theologians in fact encouraged confessors to assign lighter penance, hoping thus to encourage the laity to participate fully and effectively in the healing process of confession. Some of the numerous manuals written to help confessors actually suggest a process of bargaining to find a penance that the sinner will accept and perform. A steady flow of miracle stories shows this feature of negotiated penance, often brought into the process after resistance to the idea of confession and penance on the part of knights. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of a knight who will perform no penance assigned. To the frustrated confessor's question as to what the knight could actually perform, the response is that he could refrain from eating sour apples from a horrid tree on his property. This becomes the set penance. Of course, the man quickly develops a craving for that very fruit, once it is prohibited. If the story reveals psychological insight, it likewise provides us with insight into pastoral practice.29 A similar story is told about an English sheriff whose penance is not to eat cod, which he loathes.30 An even bolder knight refuses penance, arrogantly insisting his servant will do it for him. The weary confessor tells the servant to remind his master of death ever approaching.31 Some stories suggest confessors must exercise caution. A knight pictured in a fourteenth-century exemplum actually kills the confessor who tries to impose a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The next confessor, a prudent man, insists only that the knight's servants remind him of his eventual death at every meal.32 Much less harrowing still is the penance given to a knight who confesses, while in the Holy Land, that he has committed adultery under a tree in his garden at home in England. Moved by his wife's dream that he is being stabbed to the heart under that very tree, he finally confesses. His Franciscan confessor requires him simply to say five Aves. In a dream, his wife then sees a doctor healing the wound in his heart with five flowers.33
Those who valued contrition of heart over harsh physical penances also tended to favor frequency in the process of penance. The cleansing rite should be offered and experienced regularly in a regimen of spirituality that sustained the sinner through a lifetime—not once, or very infrequently, to expunge a great sin. With a focus on quotidian wrongs and the need for recurrent self-examination, the process should be repeated. Such thinkers parted company with practice in the early church: originally, penance for major sins was heroic, it took place once in life, and it changed that life, setting the sinner apart in a new social and religious category, the ordo penitentialis. Some clerics insisted that the old sinful lay life must be abandoned in order for a true penance. Some laymen shared their view. In his book on penance (1208–13) Robert of Flamborough pictures a sinner (who respectfully calls his confessor “Lord”) asking why confession and penance must be repeated. Would not once suffice? The questioning layman learns that on Judgment Day he will have to vomit up all his sins, and so would be well advised to confess regularly and receive the light penance (penitentiam minuas) assigned.34
Clerical thought was clearly moving along more than one line of development. Spiritualizing influences undoubtedly affected the practice of confession and penance. Yet the need of grievous bodily suffering remained a cultural component in the general populace throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Vividly specific paintings of purgatory and hell in church murals are now faded, but must once have been more vivid in every sense; on church façades we can still see the stone sinners being thrust into the maw of hell by stone demons; stories told out in sermons by impassioned friars or read even by the laity in book collections and treatises can only have increased the sense of tension. Tireless emphasis on physical punishment in the afterlife contended with clearly interiorizing lines of thought. Purgatory and hell did not become spiritualized and nonphysical. Interior remorse moved by love of God and located more in the incorporeal human soul than in the body remained opposed by almost unspeakable corporal afflictions visited upon sinners who must endure them without any bodily dissipation as final release from torture. The question remained: is God mollified and divine justice satisfied primarily by intense physical suffering or by inner contrition and sorrow of heart? The theological impulse in the direction of spirituality and internality, so naturally attractive to modern investigators who emphasize it, scarcely commanded the entire range of theological views on sin and redemption. Other and more vigorous ideas were still available.
Knights, Confession, and Penance
Evidence from miracle and sermon stories and from chronicles focuses our attention again on how knighthood could fit into the emerging theology designed to cleanse human society of besetting sin. Though the question is difficult and the evidence murky, several specific questions allow an approach: (1) Did knights know and care about this theology of atonement? (2) How thoroughly would they participate? (3) Would they willingly turn to their parish priest as confessor?
(1) Close scholarly investigations on both sides of the Channel help settle the question of knightly knowledge and concern.35 In a significant study, David Crouch has made an interesting case that the early twelfth-century military aristocracy in England “shows signs of highly valuing the sacrament of penance” and that they aspired to regular, private confession. The English church was working to encourage a “penitential culture” among its laity that had even become “exciting and fashionable” among the lay elite. He draws evidence from the deathbed statements and the lives of a number of males and some females at the royal courts of Stephen and Henry I. This penitential tradition of interest reaches back into the 1120s and likely has even pre-Conquest roots.36
Evidence of a different sort suggests knightly awareness of the new emphasis on confession radiating from the Lateran Council of 1215. John Baldwin has studied a set of French romances written just before and just after the great council, considering these literary works at least an initial gauge of aristocratic awareness, since they were directed to courts filled with knights and ladies.37 The two works predating the council were written by Jean Renart—L'Escoufle (1200–1202) and the Roman de la Rose (c. 1209). These, Baldwin argues, show an exteriorized and routinized sense of religion based on clerical performance of rituals; little or no interior sense of sin appears, but a generous sense of the importance of such lay values as honor and the preservation of good name is prominent. The two sample works written after the council, however—Gerbert of Montreuil's Roman de la violette (1227–29) and his Continuation to the Conte du Graal of Chrétien de Troyes (written about the same time) show a new interest in doctrine and especially focus on the sacrament of private penance. Heartfelt contrition is even emphasized in these later works as essential to a good confession.38
Undoubtedly, Gerbert of Montreuil was promoting the latest theological ideas about confession and penance to the knights who thronged the courts to which he sent these post-Lateran works. Such romances provided an important channel for the diffusion of chivalric ideas. Of course, this educational effort does not prove that these ideas were fully accepted. As Baldwin notes, the new ideas “competed with but did not entirely replace the exteriorized forms of the previous generation.”39 Clerical views, however, had clearly gained a hearing. These likely took hold over time. Jeremy Catto argues for close engagement of the later medieval English nobility:
The development of the practice of personal confession, stimulated by the friars in the thirteenth century, is an obscure but probably fundamental aspect of later medieval religion.…It is likely that by drawing attention to the individual conscience, the practice of confession altered the whole scope of moral life. There is evidence that members of the high nobility took practical steps to examine their consciences systematically.40
Clerics certainly broadcast their message to the knights throughout the High and Later Middle Ages. In a starkly admonitory tale, William of Newburgh shows penance making the difference in the eternal fate of two twelfth-century English knights. His account could have been pressed into use as a sermon exemplum. Though both men attacked churches during the troubled reign of King Stephen (1135–54), and died on the same day, one came to everlasting bliss because he did penance; the other, who did not, roasted in eternal flames.41
How carefully clerics tried to fit the message to the knightly audience. They know the sensitivities they must address, illustrated by a knight who resists going to confession because he thought it would be a sign of cowardice.42 Tellingly, one late fourteenth-century English manual attempted to reach the knightly by joining confession to chivalric ideals; the author provided a rather shaky list of ways in which making confession actually enhances that great chivalric quality of “worshype.”43 A Middle English Gesta Romanorum refers twice to penance as a kind of tournament: “the tournament of penance by which we may come to eternal joy.”44 The wise confessor in a story retold frequently draws on military customs used for ending quarrels; he tells a stubborn knight who will not make full peace with God through penance that he should at least declare a truce for a fortnight. He then extends the term gradually, finally getting an unlimited peace between God and the truculent knight.45 A more blatant inducement for the warriors appears in a miracle story told by Caesarius of Heisterbach: he presents a knight who wins a judicial duel against a huge opponent through “the virtue of confession.”46
All this evidence and scholarly analysis is helpful and important. We can likewise appreciate the need for caution, a need that may bear strengthening as we continue with our list of questions.
(2) The vexing issue, of course, is estimating how broadly or enthusiastically acceptance and participation spread among the knighthood. The great body of chivalric literature shows much borrowing of clerical ideas but also highly laicized forms of penance. Men who considered their profession heroic likely wanted penance to be heroic. In the early thirteenth-century Lancelot, the hero himself assigns such penance to a traitor that Lancelot (rather than God) would consider himself well repaid.47 A knight in a story by Caesarius of Heisterbach takes the prize by assigning himself two thousand years in purgatory.48 The notion of paying with swords and meritorious suffering would be an attractive alternative. A late medieval English book of homilies, Mirk's Festial, insists that a sinner must
work his body in good deeds, and sustain his life with labor, and put away all idleness and sloth. For he who will not work on earth with men, as St. Bernard says, will indeed work with the fiend of Hell.…For just as a knight shows his wounds sustained in a battle to his great commendation, so all the sins for which a man has confessed and done penance can be shown much to his honor and to the great discomfort of the devil.49
After Gawain has accidentally killed a lady in the Merlin Continuation, his penance is assigned by ladies at court (as commanded by the male authority of Arthur and Merlin). This penance turns out to be practicing certain ideal chivalric values in his life: always serving and defending ladies—”unless it is against your honor”—and (as Arthur insists) ever granting mercy to a defeated knight.50 In the terrible internecine killing that disrupts the Grail quest late in the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle, Calogrenant, who knows he is about to die blameless under the sword of his brother Lionel, calls out:
Dear Father, Jesus Christ, who allowed me to enter in Your service, though I was not as worthy as I should have been, take pity on my soul so that this pain which my body must endure because of the good and kind deed I attempted [the rescue of a maiden while his brother was in great difficulty] may be counted as penance and relief to my soul.51
How ideal if penance could indeed consist—as much as possible—in the very practice of their hard lives as warriors. This book has argued repeatedly that such a view formed one major strand in chivalric ideology. We have found a steady stream of passages that openly assert (as Lancaster and Charny did) what is at least suggested in the death of Calogrenant—that the very vocation of chivalry is a form of penance. In his Morte Darthur, Sir Thomas Malory, another practicing knight, gives a telling speech to Gawain whom a hermit is trying to bring to penance in standard form for his “synne.” Gawain asks what that penance would be, only to be told it must be what the hermit decides: “such as I woll gyff the.” Gawain responds: “Nay, I may do no penaunce, for we knuyghtes adventures many times suffir grete woo and payne.” No further penance is needed or can be tolerated, since the hard knightly life is in itself penitential. The good man can respond only with a resigned “Well,” and hold his peace.52 At times even a hermit must simply recognize knightly life and assumptions and factor knightly labor into the formula of penance.53 After Gaheriet has confessed all the sins of which he thought he was guilty, the Merlin Continuation says a hermit “gave him such penance as he thought he could do along with his labor at arms.”54
(3) Knights adopted penance into their vocabulary and mentalité: yet without discounting their piety, it seems fair to doubt that they were generally willing actors in the ritual of confession precisely as outlined in Canon 21 of Lateran IV and the handbooks for confessors. We must picture the actual process.55 There were no medieval confessional boxes to assure genuine privacy. Confessing sinners knelt openly in a church at the knees of their priest, who inclined his body toward them with his hood providing the only screen to block their voices. The shame proud folk felt in making such a confession was in fact part of the penance, sometimes even the most important part, as was recognized by both theologians and writers of romance.56 Even if the confession might be whispered into the hood of the priest's inclined head, so that it was largely inaudible to others waiting their turn, acts of satisfaction imposed could well reveal the nature of the sin. The principle that the punishment should fit the crime did not have to await the genius of Gilbert and Sullivan. Even the jurisdictional reservation to the bishop of certain classes of sin (and a few to the pope) provided further clues to all interested observers in the community.
There was another worry to trouble knights. Did confessors tell tales, sober or in their cups? We know they talked to each other, as their books of exempla document.57 Moral tales undoubtedly appreciated by the laity pictured dire consequences for those confessors who broke the formally imposed silence. In one, a knight who had secretly killed a man confessed his dire sin, only to learn that the priest revealed the murder to their ruler, hoping for a reward. Instead, the righteous ruler blinded the priest and cut out his tongue.58
It is hard to imagine knights confessing their sins individually in an open church while kneeling before the local priest, even if we picture them moving by right to the head of a queue of their fellow parishioners or even, more likely, if the church were cleared for them.59 Questions that knights might be asked as guides to making their confession could require answers about pillage, extortion, injustice, oppression of tenants, violence against clerics, killing in war, participation in tournaments, urging a lord into unjust war, simony, and keeping a private chapel without license.60 Insight into knightly reluctance appears indirectly but powerfully in the steady stream of admonitory exempla urging full participation. A pious knight, one such story relates, was ashamed to confess to his parish priest and so sought out the urban anonymity of London to confess in Westminster Abbey. There a clever devil disguised as a monk heard him tell his sins to no good spiritual effect. As he lay on his deathbed, only the powerful intervention of Saint Peter, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene saved him from eternal fire.61 Were historical knights as unwilling as this fellow to participate along with all their social inferiors in a practice so tinged with shame and to carry out the patently nonheroic penance assigned?
Concern over possession of unlicensed private chapels (a question that we have seen could be asked of confessing knights) raises the likelihood of one solution: confession to a private chaplain in a congenial setting. The practice was likely widespread, especially after the appearance of orders of friars on the scene, though precise estimates are likely impossible, especially for those below the level of the very great. Philippe Contamine says that in France by the later Middle Ages they were “innumerable.”62 Jeremy Catto writes of the later medieval English nobility, “Perhaps by 1300, certainly by 1350, it had become customary for noble families to be advised by their own confessors, usually friars, who were trusted intimates of the household, and often executors of their wills.”63 In mid-fourteenth-century England, Henry of Lancaster, as we have seen, wrote his Livre des seyntz medicines at the advice of his own confessor; across the Channel, one of many privileges cherished by Geoffroi de Charny was a license to keep a private chapel. Scholars would like to know at what social rank (and in what numbers and by what time) the potentially troublesome aspects of confession were lessened by the privilege of recourse to a private confessor. If, as seems likely, a significant body of knights of lesser status than the great lords lacked this privilege, we are left asking what transpired in their minds as they heard that their salvation depended upon periodically acknowledging their faults to the local cleric. It seems significant for proud knights at any level and in any time that the act of confession and the penance that followed involved shame.64
Knights who confess in romance almost invariably tell their sins to a hermit or sometimes to a cleric of suitable standing: an abbot, a bishop, or even the pope, rather than the prescribed parish priest.65 Caesarius of Heisterbach reports a lord in the habit of confessing to four abbots at once.66 The choice of confessor in knightly literature is significant, for hermits (and even the bishops in romance) are much closer to the knights in spirit, in social status, even in vocation than any local priest. Regularly, romances specify that the hermit in question is a former knight who has given up the vigorous life in a more sedate old age. Romance hermits live at a convenient single day's ride from each other, their hermitages dotting the forest with little cells of accessible hospitality and holiness. Hermits understand knights and cater to their every need; their hermitages are congenial confessionals no less than plain hostelries. Living the heroic life in a spiritual mode (after a hard and heroic knightly career), they are close to the divine and can interpret dreams, sometimes predict future events, often guide the perplexed, and willingly hear confession. As the Post-Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail explains,
Know that at that time there were in the kingdom of Logres a great number of hermits everywhere, which was not without its amazing side, and there were few who were not knights or noblemen. At that time by God's grace, all the knights of that kingdom, after they had borne arms thirty or forty years, left their lands and their families and went to the mountains, to the most secluded place they could find and there performed penance for their sins.67
These are ideal clerics hot from the forge of knightly imagination. How real this image could be for practicing knights appears in the wonderful story told in the life of Saint Wulfric of Hazelbury, an English hermit of the mid-twelfth century. A vigorous knight gave this holy man his chain-mail hauberk “as to a stronger knight” and the hermit wore it until in old age it simply slipped off his withered shoulders.68 The romance image of a solitary knight errant in a forest hermitage consulting with an old hermit on spiritual matters—and at least infrequently confessing tearfully to him—is one form of pious and independent response by chivalric ideology to the new lay theology.
In some of this literature, knights even dispense with the hermits, arranging penance for themselves without any clerical mediation, often after a clear message of warning comes to them directly from God. The degree of independence is striking. Once they receive the divine warning and survive the crisis it entails, the reformed sinners announce a new life. Yet they often do condign penance through the continued heroic exercise of their knightly labors, though now in a new mode. Here chivalric ideology is manifested in action rather than explicit statements of ideas. Guy of Warwick in the fourteenth-century English romance classically shows this point of view.69 Through the first thematic half of the romance he tries to perform enough chivalric acts of prowess to win the love of Felice, the daughter of his lord. She has high standards in such matters and it takes thousands of lines of hard labor with lance, shield, and sword against able foes before she accepts Guy as a knight and finally as the best knight. Having won every fight and thus won his lady in marriage, Guy experiences an unexpected crisis. One night, musing over the night sky “thikke with sterre,” his thoughts turn to the splendid honor God has done him by granting him victory always. What has he done for God in return? In all his fighting he has sought merely worldly fame and the hand of a prized lady. These thoughts bring a resolve to enter “goddis seruyse” (God's service). Felice, to whom he generously offers half the spiritual benefit he will earn, advises him instead to follow traditional aristocratic modes of repaying or pacifying God; Guy should found churches and monasteries.70 Guy, however is thinking not of endowment but of heroic asceticism, carried out with his own body: “What I have done with my body / shall be paid for with my body / To free me of that wrong.”71 Though he bequeaths his sword to his unborn son (leaving instructions for his eventual knightly training) and sets off as a pilgrim, Guy is soon drawn back into a vigorous life of prowess. He atones for his earlier chivalric life, one heedless of God, with a new chivalric life of pious prowess “in God's service.” This entails more fighting as a great knight, now without incurring the stain of vainglory. He fights for the rescue of friends and the restoration of their honor. In other words, his great prowess upholds the ideals of lay society through the valorous fighting that wins him spiritual merit. This highly popular romance pictures knightly conversion/atonement as carried out essentially on chivalric terms; a special interpretation of the economy of salvation rests on the understanding that links the good Lord and one of his good knights. Guy satisfies God throughout most of the remainder of his life not by walking pacifically as a barefoot pilgrim, staff in hand, visiting shrines, but by fighting bravely with weapons and suffering meritoriously. That he becomes a hermit near the close of his life hardly discounts the half lifetime of knightly atonement. Rather, it simply shows the aristocratic capacity to make use of all religious options, and to close a career with a kind of extended deathbed experience, the enacted equivalent of wearing a monastic or Templar robe at the end of life, after a rich career of heroic atonement through demanding deeds of prowess. Knightly ideology fused elements of current theological thinking on confession and penance in a manner best calculated to advance chivalry. It is no accident that a story in the Gesta Romanorum refers to Christ calling men to the “tournament of penance, by which we may come to everlasting joy.”72
That knights are pointedly reminded how powerful and necessary confession and penance are seems telling, an indication that their views were not fully in accord with ecclesiastical precepts. The author of the Post-Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail pictures even Bors, pious Grail knight that he is, reminded by a hermit “that if you were the best knight now in the world, your knighthood would only harm you until you were clean confessed and had received the body of God.”73 Readers of one miracle story learned that a knight who went to confession accompanied by a devil came out so changed by confession that the devil could no longer recognize him.74 Models embodying clerical views appear in imaginative literary texts doing and saying what the clerics ardently preach. The thirteenth-century Post-Vulgate Death of Arthur presents a classic example. The archbishop of Canterbury, keeping company with the surviving Grail knights, exuberantly declares penance to be “better than all other worldly things,” and promises to keep at it while life lasts; it is only slight suffering and it brings such disproportionate benefits.75 A departed sinner in the History of the Holy Grail reports from an otherworld of flaming torment that all sinners can yet hope: God forgives them “as long as they do penance.”76 Gawain learns from a hermit during the Quest of the Holy Grail, that the seven brothers he killed for their evil custom at the Castle of Maidens could better have been allowed to do penance and thus reconcile themselves with God.77 A hermit gives Lancelot even more specific advice in the post-Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, didactically specifying that atonement for his sin requires the three processes of contrition, confession, and penance, as stressed in current theology.78
Ideal knights may occasionally be shown obediently confessing and carrying out the penance assigned in at least an approximation of the approved manner. And most are prudent enough to know that at the end of life confession is a wise step. We can take Arthur, fearing imminent death early in the Lancelot, as crying out for all knighthood, “Oh God! Confession! The time has come!”79 When he is actually dying from grievous wounds late in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the king again calls out, this time in genuine need: “Call a confessor for me carrying Christ in his hands; whatever happens, I will be confessed quickly.”80 At least some of Malory's characters reinforce the point. A sorrowful Lancelot confesses to a hermit, and wears a hair shirt in the name of holy penance.81 This proud knight, who has always returned a hostile blow with interest, now gladly takes a penitential beating (“the discipline”) from his hermit/confessor.82 Bors dons a rough tunic and changes his diet (to a regimen that will dampen lust) at a hermit's insistence.83
That the message could, indeed, reach receptive historical knights can be read in the treatise of Henry of Lancaster. Henry has interiorized the framework of contrition, confession, and penance: he writes repeatedly of confession of heart (contrite de coer), is sensible of the danger of sudden death, admits that he must make “satisfaction for sin with his body and goods according to the direction of his priest.”84
The depth of piety in Lancaster's treatise is informative. Yet the great mass of chivalric evidence leaves the impression that moving many knights into an ideal clerical frame for atonement could be difficult.85 Even the ultimately religious hero Perceval (in Robert de Boron's romance named for this knight and in Chrétien's more famous romance) comes to genuine confession only after many years of brashness and sin. His sister has warned Perceval that knights in the area would kill him simply for his horse, but that he must likewise be careful not to commit the great sin of killing a knight. He is also burdened by the sin of causing his mother's death by suddenly leaving home in search of the chivalric life. His sister wants him to confess and take penance from their uncle, who is a hermit. Almost as if baiting the hook, she adds that this holy uncle might be able to put him on the right track for the Fisher King (another uncle), who is keeper of the Grail. Though Perceval agrees, all that transpires in the hermitage is a polite conversation in which the hermit-uncle tells Perceval he should not kill knights but should rather “spare them and bear with them in all kinds of ways for the sake of your mother's soul.”86 If this is some quasi-penance, Perceval is unable to perform it, for he kills a knight immediately after leaving the hermitage (though he is sorry, and thinks the man brought it on himself).87 He then wanders seven years without thinking of God at all. At the end of that time, he is seen by pilgrims on Good Friday, armed and ready for more fighting. Realization of his error sends him back to his hermit-uncle for what is stated to be confession and penance (the content of each left unspecified). Yet even after religious cleansing, he still breaks his chivalric vow not to sleep twice in one place until he finds the Fisher King and Grail. In his Grail quest, it is Merlin who rebukes him, but then shows the way to his goals.88 Spiritual and chivalric conversions are evident here, both purchased at the cost of a hard life of prowess and goodness as required by Merlin and even by God. If all comes out as it should, the slow progress also registers.
Clerics recognized how demanding their task was, how tentative progress could be. Henry of Lancaster seems more pious and malleable than many of his fellow knights. Major knightly figures in the classic Vulgate Cycle of romance and in the great compendium of chivalry by Sir Thomas Malory show they have not fully absorbed the clerical guidance and warnings. Significantly, Malory, a practicing knight no less than an author of romance, mentions confession and penance scarcely at all, except in his retelling of the Quest of the Holy Grail which he largely borrowed from a highly clerical French source, where they were emphasized.89
Clerics clearly worried about this degree of knightly unwillingness to participate fully, as they continued to worry generally about the unsettling independence written into much of chivalric literature. A sizeable body of sermon stories, stretching across several centuries, documents their conviction that knights need regular correction and encouragement—even sharp if indirect threat—on issues of confession and penance. Many sermon exempla provided by Étienne de Bourbon begin with the phrase, “a certain infamous knight was unwilling to perform any penance at all.”90 In one of these stories even Pope Alexander III (1159–81), while in France, failed repeatedly to impose penance on a knight; he finally gave the sinner his valuable ring asking only that the knight think and talk of death whenever he glanced at it. This worked; the knight returned, requesting that a full penance be imposed for his wrongs.91 Yet another knight will do no fasting, pilgrimage, or even prayers as penance. Told by an accommodating confessor to avoid the food he hates (a technique we have encountered before), he comes to crave it. Told to avoid manual work on Sunday, he feels strangely compelled to take over a peasant's plow in the fields. Finally, he gives in and asks for a real penance.92
Warnings to the obdurate could be dramatic, but only sometimes are said to have worked. Gerald of Wales assured readers of his Jewel of the Church that a young man from the army of Philip II of France was unable to enter a church whose doors stood wide open. Advised by a monk that some un-confessed sin blocked his entry, the man confessed to stealing wood from a poor widow, restored the value of what he had stolen, and accepted penance. The case was solved.93 A heretical great lord (in a story from Caesarius of Heisterbach) unwisely scorned the church of Rome and, rejecting confession, died impenitent. Only one result could follow.94 In another of his exempla, a certain Landgrave Ludwig (a notorious robber and tyrant, who had died two years before Caesar wrote) has rejected his confessor's urgings to repent: if he is one of the elect, the landgrave argues, he is saved; if not, no good deeds will help. Caesarius warned all readers that the man died under a great burden of sin.95
Timeliness was crucial. Pragmatic clerical voices tirelessly reminded knights that lives filled with much danger should be insured by regular confession; death came swiftly and unexpectedly. Why delay? The very repetition, of course, points to a continuing need to convince the doubtful. Such motives obviously inform the clerical tale in which Emperor Ferdinand III in the mid-thirteenth century was visited three times by the solicitous Virgin Mary, who warned him to make his confession. Though he unwisely ignored two warnings from even so powerful a source, her third visit at last moved him and he sought out a confessor. It was just in time. On the following day he was killed in battle by a stone.96 The terrifying, spectral black knights who threaten Arthur and his fellows in the Perlesvaus are significantly identified as those who died without repentance; they must scour the woods at night and collect body parts of slain knights.97 A grimly realistic tale by Caesarius of Heisterbach pictures a knight and his two sons fatally wounded by enemies. When Cistercian monks come to remove the bloody bodies and find the father still alive—though he at first feigns death, fearing they are the murderers returned—they provide him with the “oil of pity and the wine of repentance” through confession and last rites. This knight, Caesarius announces firmly, entered heaven.98 Was not the reader or sermon listener first to admire the charitable Cistercians and then to ponder the fate of the others? One of the highly practical benefits a heavenly patron or (more commonly) patroness provided, in fact, was time for that final, all-important act of confession in articulo mortis (at the point of death).
In clerical stories, knights are regularly said to have neglected confession and to stand in great need of such aid. A knight devoted to St. Mary Magdalene is killed in battle, an exemplum tells, but through her merits revives long enough to take the crucial final act.99 Historical figures who appear in the History of the Albigensian Crusade regularly and gleefully report that important men on the opposite side died without time for confession.100 The Blessed Virgin regularly provides such services (as we have already seen in Chapter 7). Three brothers in an exemplum told repeatedly had plotted to kill a knight, but were foiled; two were captured and hanged. The third managed to escape and prayed to the Blessed Virgin that he might never die without making his confession. When the avenging relatives finally caught him and hacked his body to pieces, he was graciously given time to confess before he expired.101 Even to a knight who openly lived by plunder, she provides the crucial time for confession as he lies dying with a lance through his heart. He has, after all, been her devotee.102 She convinces another pillaging knight to use his gains to found, enter, and lead a monastery. Yet he still requires close attention; when he dies without confessing, she must approach her son to secure his salvation.103 And delaying confession while counting on last minute help, or waiting until the death agony struck, was literally playing with fire. Delay costs seven additional years of torment in purgatory for one warrior.104 Walter Map tells a strangely admonitory story about the knight Eudo, who has lost all possessions and makes a desperate compact with the devil for recovery. One of the most seductive devilish arguments convincing Eudo is that he need not fear hell, being assured “you have a long life before you, and ample time is left you. Moreover, before your death I will forearm you by three plain tokens…so that after each you may have time to repent.”105 Eudo and the devil set to work plundering at will. Of course, the knight repents only temporarily after the first two warning signs (a fall from his horse that breaks his leg, and a seeming chance arrow striking his eye), slipping quickly back into the sinful life of pleasure and plunder. Though truly repentant and fearful after the third sign (the death of his first son), Eudo confronts an angry and disbelieving bishop when he tries at last to confess; on the spur of the moment the angry bishop assigns Eudo the penance of throwing himself into a blazing fire. Walter Map blames the bishop for such a penance, but relates that Eudo leaps joyfully into the flames, anxious to perform his penance, and is burned to ashes.
Clerics worried over one final knightly lapse: they might make a partial confession or they might not carry out the penance assigned. In more than one exemplum, a knight brought to confess willfully leaves some sins untold. One warning pictures a knight unwisely making an incomplete confession to his bishop. A monk observing him can see a symbolic black dog gripping the knight by the throat, even after the unwitting bishop has pronounced absolution. Only when the knight is brought back for full confession does the phantom dog loosen his grip and vanish.106 Full performance of penance similarly freed a sinful knight from the torment of a lizard attached by sharp teeth and claws to his shoulder, in a story told earlier by Walter Map.107
Perhaps the most evocative evidence appears in a short and charming French romance, Le Chevalier au barissel (The Knight with the Barrel). The story is pious, and direct; in fact, it seems (like Saint Patrick's Purgatory discussed in the previous chapter) a blend of extended exemplum and romance. Written in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and reproduced many times, it suggests how hard it could be to get some knights to confess and how much harder to get them to understand contrition.108 Even if he is “of great reputation (de grant renon)”—and handsome, rich, of good family, noble in appearance—the knight in question surely stands in dire need of confession. He is, in fact, false, disloyal, traitorous, fierce, prideful, and cruel. From a secure fortress that eliminates fear of lay authority at any level (king, prince, count, viscount), he has for thirty years sallied forth to ravage the district, sparing neither high nor low, males nor females, lay nor religious folk; all falling within his power are killed, robbed, or shamed. He has no more fear of God than of lay authority; he avoids all religious services, and ignores days set aside for pious fasting. As the story opens, he even demands a fine venison breakfast on Good Friday when all the faithful should reverently fast and, above all, avoid meat. His friends—obviously more pious knights— “si chevalier…qui plus de cuer a Dieu tendirent”—try to convince him to confess his sins to a holy hermit in the neighboring woods, adding that he should shed tears of repentance. “‘Cry?’ he exclaims. ‘Is this some joke?' ”109 He roughly suggests they can cry while he laughs, for he surely will not shed tears.110 His similar response to the idea of confession in general, a few lines later, is “Confess! A hundred devils!”111
Yet he finally goes with “those hypocrites (ces papelars),” asserting that he does this for their sake, rather than for God. He intends to make a phony confession like that of Renart (li confessions Regnart)—the wily and amoral fox in the popular animal stories of the day, who even tricked and ate his bird/ confessor.112 To make such a faked confession, he crudely declares, is merely “to piss into the wind.”113 He certainly will not appear humble; he comes to the hermitage “more fierce than a mad dog or a werewolf.”114 Though his friends piously come before the holy man in confession, this proud knight resists, but possibly reveals a crack in his armor by asking, with regard to God, “Why should I pray to him when I do nothing for him?”115
A model of wise persuasion, the hermit meets the knight outside his chapel; speaking softly, respectfully, he welcomes the recalcitrant sinner, appeals to the gentle heart that, as a knight, he must possess, offers him his services as priest of Christ crucified for all sinners. This care is met with more rudeness: the knight announces that he has nothing to say to the priest, and nothing to receive from him; he would actually prefer a nice fat goose (cras oison) to anything the priest has on offer. Confessing, the holy man assures the knight, is done for God, not for his priest. But the knight declares the hermit would be too harsh an intermediary (trop fier plaidieu) and they, in effect, begin the bargaining process over penance often suggested as a technique in confessor's manuals. When the hermit assures the knight that he need found no religious houses (no maison et no capele et no couvent), the knight counters that he will cooperate on condition he is not even asked to give charitably or say prayers (que ja aumosne n'i ferai ne patrenostre n'i dirai). Assuring him he can leave if he is displeased, the hermit takes him sweetly by the hand into his chapel. The knight complains that the priest never stops and enters the chapel with ill grace. The hermit—again, sweetly (doucement)—leads him to the altar and there announces that the knight is his captive now (or estes vous en ma prison) but must consider it no insult to talk with him.116 Unless he were to cut off his head, says the hermit, the prisoner could not escape by any act until he has “told his life (dite vostre vie).” Wrathfully, the knight refuses and—obviously considering himself formally a captive—demands his liberty. But the hermit now begins to speak specifically of sins, confession, and the penitence owed to God who died on the cross. As sweetly as before, he asks the knight (who has warned that he is close to killing him and freeing the world) to tell him just one sin.117 It is Good Friday, the hermit implores, the day of Christ's great sacrifice. Finally moved, the knight-prisoner (li sires qui tous fu pris) finally experiences a sense of thorough shame (devint trestous honteus).
An important milestone has been reached, and yet the issue of penance remains. At first the hermit suggests fasting each Friday for seven years. Astonished, the knight says he could not manage even three years. Nor can he consider walking barefoot for a year, the next suggestion. Nor would he wear wool without underclothing; his flesh would be troubled and the vermin would be obnoxious. Nor would he discipline himself each morning with a switch; a “bad idea (pesme novele),” the knight thinks. He announces as a principle that he cannot think of striking or tearing his own flesh (Je ne poroie ce souffrir ne ma car romper ne ferir). Likewise he rejects pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or to Rome, or to Santiago, or even going annually to a local monastery, there to say specified prayers while kneeling. Finally, the hermit names a penance easily accepted: the knight must simply fill and return the hermit's water barrel. With a scornful laugh (de desdaing rist), the knight agrees. An apparently easy task, however, proves impossible: water will decidedly not flow into the barrel, whatever he tries. Outraged, he revisits the hermit and swears a great oath118 to achieve the task set for him. The hermit sees divine anger for sin in the miracle; the knight feels only irritation and assures one and all that he does nothing for God.119 He will find a stream to fill the barrel.
His penitential quest, such as it is, begins. For a year he searches, suffering much “paine et travaus.”120 Selling his clothes for food, he must wear garments that cover him with shame.121 He wanders in all weather; he is forced to beg. After a hard year, his travels take him back to the hermitage on another Good Friday. There he hears that his penance has not been completed because it lacks repentance.122 The hermit calls out for mercy to God and the Blessed Virgin, offering himself as the object for divine wrath while praying vicariously for the knight. Witnessing this selfless love from a man unconnected to him, holding nothing from him, the knight abandons his characteristic state of wrath and fierce independence. He prays for true repentance and senses his own responsibility for his sins. With “bele courtoisie” God recognizes his good intent and allows the knight's troubled heart to generate a single great tear from his eyes. This falls “like a crossbow shot (com on trait de boujon)”123 straight into the barrel. The single tear fills the barrel to the breaking point. A joyful hermit pronounces the penance complete, the sinning knight saved from hell. He receives a final communion from the hermit and dies piously in his arms.124
This process leading to confession and penance is, of course, imaginary; the ending miraculous. At the edge of the stage hover pious knights pictured as accepting the penitential system of the church. All ends well. Yet the spotlight has relentlessly followed the recalcitrant knight in center stage and revealed (with theatric exaggeration) the elaborate, even devious, means a confessor might have to employ—even a hermit, the chivalric confessor of choice—to bring a proud warrior to recount his sins and accept the clerical scheme for their cleansing.
In a rich mix of ideas, clerics debated whether sin was neutralized by heroic, physical penances or by inner contrition, whether confession was essentially a public rite for cleansing a sinner once in a lifetime or was to be used repeatedly in a regular program of private sessions with a parish priest. As always, chivalric ideology drew on more than one strand of religious discussion—while ignoring or suppressing others—to construct the most supportive set of interlinked ideas. In effect, knightly ideas emphasized the heroic element in penance over contrition of the heart, but accepted the idea of repeatable penance; meritorious suffering of their profession stood alongside (perhaps, for some, in place of) a regimen of cleansings mediated by their local priest. The fusion of heroic with repeatable penance gave them maximum benefits and eliminated any disabilities or dread stain of shame. In tough cases and emergencies, pious shame might prove unavoidable, of course; a sense of guilt or at least political prudence might demand dramatic—even shaming—rites of a great knight/king: Henry II after the murder of Thomas Becket, Emperor Henry IV in the snow at Canossa. In general practice, however, knighthood at every level wanted no form of penance that would diminish their status or sacred honor. They compromised, but maintained a needed degree of independence. Those who were able turned to private confessors in their households. But the general belief in hard knightly labor and merit seems to have remained firm. They warmly asserted that they had a special arrangement with the Lord of Hosts, with the Christ-Knight, and with the gracious queen of the heavenly court. While never straying from piety, their view differed significantly from the model that clerics mandated for lay folk in general. Exactly how regularly this left most of them kneeling before the priest on the floor of their parish church remains unknowable.
Their stance brought splendid benefits to knighthood. By insisting on their own heroic, corporal penance they could claim they stood beneath the banner of religious conservatism: they followed—or rather modified for their own use—one of the ancient strands of penitential practice dating to the early Christian church and helped maintain it into the age of chivalry. Yet they firmly believed true penance was possible while continuing in a military profession. Performing penance through deeds of arms was the praiseworthy practice of their ordo. Physical suffering endured throughout a lifetime of campaign and battle for righteous causes counted when souls were weighed in the balance, closely watched by demons and angels.