NOTES

CHAPTER 1. VIOLENT KNIGHTS, HOLY KNIGHTS

1. The story of this book, could it be fully known, was likely complex. The illumination was painted about the middle of the thirteenth century (1255–65) in a style that suggests links to the chronicler Matthew Paris and to artists at the royal court of Henry III. Obviously the book was written and painted for a discriminating customer of means, possibly an English Dominican of some standing. Our illustration may well have been taken from a previous book, parts of which are now missing. Yet this bilateral painting, along with two companion illuminations on the remaining sides of the bifolium—one showing a Dominican friar kneeling before Christ and the other an angel—well announces the interests governing the choice of contents. Several years after encountering this illustration, I discovered the wide-ranging and convincing discussion of these illustrations within the entire Harleian manuscript by the distinguished art historian Michael Evans, “An Illustrated Fragment of Peraldus's Summa of Vice.” Evans discusses the theological ideas involved and also provides black-and-white photographs of the central miniature and the flanking illuminations on the opening and final sides of the bifolium. He extensively discusses the Christus/miles image, which will be analyzed as a general theme in Chapter 6 below.

2. See Dondaine, “Guillaume Peyraut, vie et oeuvres.” Peraldus wrote this treatise in two parts c. 1236 and c. 1248. He may have studied at Paris but was not a university scholar. His concern for practical, pastoral theology shows at least similar interests to those in the circle of Peter the Chanter. At the Dominican house in Lyons, Étienne de Bourbon (a member of the circle of Peter, whose miracle stories will appear often in this book) was his fellow friar. This work by Peraldus was widely disseminated and was considered helpful in preparing sermons. A group of scholars in the U.S. and Canada, under the general direction of Siegfried Wenzel (University of Pennsylvania) is at work on Peraldus's Summa de vitiis.

3. The line appears frequently in medieval treatises, e.g., Alan of Lille's sermon Ad Milites, PL 210 col. 186. Biblical references throughout the text are drawn from the Vulgate, with English translations from the King James Version. Wherever a text is quoted in Latin and in English translation without mention of an English source, the translation is my own.

4. Ramon Llull, Libre que es de l'ordre de cavalleria; for the Old French translation see Livre de l'ordre de chevalerie.

5. Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac: The Non-Cyclic Old French Romance, 143–46, provides the symbolic meanings given by the Lady of the Lake to the young Lancelot in their famous conversation on ideal chivalry.

6. For this scutum fidei, see the discussion in Evans, “An Illustrated Fragment.”

7. 2 Timothy 2:5: “nam et qui certat in agone non coronatur nisi legitime certaverit.” The sentiment certainly continued in later medieval writing. Thomas à Kempis wrote: “Be thou therefore ready for the fight if thou wilt have the victory. Without striving thou canst not win the crown of patience; if thou wilt not suffer thou refusest to be crowned. But if thou desirest to be crowned, strive manfully, endure patiently. Without labour thou drawest not near to rest, nor without fighting comest thou to victory.” The Imitation of Christ, 3.19.4. My thanks to Edward Wierenga for pointing me to both references.

8. Matthew 5:3–9: the meek in the illumination inherit regnum rather than terram, as in the Vulgate. In general, compare the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:20–23.

9. Southern, Western Society and the Church, 41.

10. Classic accounts appear in Southern, Western Society and the Church, and Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages.

11. I investigate this theme in a forthcoming article.

12. Bertran, The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born.

13. See laisse 57 in Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, The Song of Girart of Vienne.

14. Line 257 in Benson, King Arthur's Death.

15. This medieval tension is clearly part of a very old story. Arduous service, bravely undertaken, has seemed in most ages to merit special benefits from divinity. Our paradox is unique neither to medieval society nor to the medieval Christian religion that animated it. Eileen Power wrote of the “primal instinct which leads man to drag his god into his battles” in her splendid introduction to Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, xxii. But the medieval evidence provides a classic case in a formative era of European history. Unlike modern soldiers who leave peacetime occupations for temporary service in military or naval forces, knights were professional warriors who defined their status and place in the world by their right to bear and use arms.

16. The fundamental starting point is Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, originally published in German in 1935.

17. Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety, examines one region, the Limousin and Gascony, in the period of the First Crusade. His perspective differs somewhat from that presented in this book.

18. As I have argued elsewhere (Chivalry and Violence, 273–97), chivalric ideas, never monolithic, were themselves subject to debate. Yet, as with the elements in a mass, we need to think of substance and accidents. In other words, while debate swirled around specific questions of chivalric action, a core of ideas justifying the profession lasted.

19. Keen, Chivalry; Flori, L'idéologie du glaive; Erdmann, Origins of the Idea of Crusade.

20. See the comment of Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 4: “The notion that religion tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience is hardly novel. But it is hardly investigated either, so that we have very little idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished.”

21. I have argued this point throughout my studies of chivalry; see especially Chivalry and Violence, 30–41, and “Literature as the Key to Chivalric Ideology.” This issue will be considered again, below, in Chapter 6. For a contrary view, see Nicholson, Love, War, and the Grail. I agree with Nicholson's point that knights may have written more of chivalric literature than we have previously imagined.

22. Leyser, “Warfare in the Western European Middle Ages.”

23. For a recent discussion, see Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War.

24. Busby, Raoul de Hodenc, Le Roman des eles, 117 (French), 175 (translation); Shinners and Dohar, eds., Pastors and the Care of Souls, 197–98 print, “Blessing for the sword of a new knight.” He is to fight God's enemies, defend Holy Church, etc., of course. With sword girded on, he is sprinkled with holy water and told to go in the name of the Lord. Printed from Collins, Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis, 69–70.

25. Gerald of Wales, The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, 47.

26. Baldwin kept relics of Thomas in his chapel after the martyrdom. Lambert of Ardres, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, 110, 121.

27. Quoted in Knowles, “Archbishop Thomas Becket: A Character Study,” 197.

28. McNab, “Obligations of the Church in English Society.”

29. Hallam, “Monasteries as ‘War Memorials',” 48.

30. Leyser, “Warfare in the Western European Middle Ages,” 201.

31. The relationship between what is holy and what is physical provides a general example. Men and women whose holy lives and outlook stood as far as is humanly possible from the merely bodily and physical in life were—after death—revered by the faithful as physical objects; the remains of their bodies and even their possessions were piously venerated. See Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims.

32. Considerable insight into the monastic view in the age when chivalry was just coming into being appears in Certain, Les Miracles de Saint Benoit, especially books 4, 5, 6, and 7. Some of these stories are discussed in Rollason, “The Miracles of St. Benedict.”

33. William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, 58–59.

34. Ralph of Niger worried that the shedding of human blood was in no way a fitting atonement for sin. See his “De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis,” cited in Flahiff, “Deus Non Vult,” 182.

35. The issue is debated. See Throop, Criticism of the Crusade; for the problems addressed by a specific preacher see Brett, Humbert of Romans, 167–94. For a critique of increasing negativity, see Siberry, Criticism of Crusading.

36. Quoting from a contemporary biography, “The Life of Leo IX,” printed in Robinson, The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century, 149.

37. Ibid., 151.

38. Cowdrey, “Pope Gregory VII and the Bearing of Arms,” 23.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 25.

41. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 650.

42. Ibid., 652.

43. Quoted in Erdmann, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 154.

44. Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood, 37; Latin in Sancti Bernardi Opera 3:216. Using the classic clerical word play, he refers to merely secular knighthood as “non…militiae, sed malitiae.” He assured the Templars—and later those involved in the Second Crusade—that they fought with no danger to their souls. In addition to his De Laude, see letter 391, in Letters of St. Bernard, 460–63, especially 462.

45. Robert of Flamborough, Liber Poenitentialis (1208–13); see especially 184–85, 226–28. Rising momentarily to the vitriolic level of St. Bernard, he declared that knights who gave up the emblematic warrior belt (militiae cingulum), presumably to enter a monastery, but went back into worldly knighthood “truly returned to their own vomit (vero ad propriam vomitum sunt relapse)” (271).

46. Alan of Lille, Textes inédits, 16–17, n. 30. For use in exempla see BL Additional 18351 late 14C, Exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, f. 39, and a story of Étienne de Bourbon in Anecdotes historiques, 370–71.

47. Alan of Lille, The Art of Preaching, 146; this text translates PL 210 cols. 109–95. Alan's general tirades against vanity and empty worldly honor run directly counter to central chivalric values. Sections of this work bear such telling titles as “On Despising the World,” “On Despising Yourself,” and “Against Pride.”

48. Ibid., 150; PL 210 col. 186: “Ad hoc specialiter instituiti sunt milites, ut patriam suam defendant, et ut repellant ab Ecclesia violentorum injuries.”

49. Ibid., 149–50; PL 210 col. 186: “sed jam milites facti sunt praedarii duces aliorum, facti sunt abigeri; nec jam exercent militiam, sed rapinam, et sub specie militis, assumunt crudelitatem praedonis: nec tam militant in hostes; quam grassantur in pauperes; et quos debent tueri clypeo militaris muniminis, persequuntur gladio feritatis. Jam suam prostituunt militiam, militant ut lucrentur; arma capiunt ut praedentur. Jam non sunt milites, sed fures et raptores; non defensores, sed invasores. In viscera matris Ecclesiae acuunt gladios, et vim quam debent in hostes expendere, expendunt in suos; hostes autem suos (aut torpore dejecti, aut timore perterriti) desistunt invadere, et in Christi famulos imbelles, cogunt gladios desaevire.”

50. Ibid., 24: PL 210 col. 115: “Ubi vanitas nisi in honoribus qui ad hoc homini favent ut dejiciant, ad hoc erigunt ut destruant? Ad hoc suspendunt ut gravius impellant; in quibus est vanitas vanitatum, quia importabile onus in honore, phasticus honor in onere, et in eis omnia vanitas cum funditus.” Reading this statement alongside a few pages of the works of Geoffroi de Charny or Sir Thomas Malory will make the incompatibility of ideas obvious.

51. La Bigne, ed., Maxima bibliotheca vetervm patrvm, 25, 495.

52. See the following BL examples: Arundel 506 f. 5, Arundel 22283 f. 14b col 2, Harley 273 f. 137b col. 2, Harley 2391 f. 221, Harley 2385 f. 65 col. 2, Harley 1288 f. 54, Additional 11284 f. 78b, Additional 18351 f. 12b col. 2, Additional 18347 f. 117, Additional 17336 f. 8, Burney 361 f. 154 col. 2. Versions of the story also appear in Banks, An Alphabet of Tales, 337, Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum, 124–25, and Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, 96–99. Alan Frantzen has found modern equivalents in the battlefield lore of the First World War: Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War. This tale evidently touched knights: it appears in the book of advice the Chevalier de la Tour Landry wrote for the instruction of his daughters in the fourteenth century: Offord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 237.

53. Rolle, The Contra Amatores Mundi, 96, 181: “Non audaces tales dixeris, qui dum aliorum scindunt tunicam, mala morte premiuntur. Micantibus armis, phaleratis equis ad bella properant, et priusquam percuciant interius moriuntur. Dum corda transverberant hominum, penetrantur et ipsi interius iaculis demoniorum. Dicamus eis, ubi est deus vester?…Non utique deus noster, quia illud quod plus amant sibi deum constituerunt. Alii feacerunt sibi deum superbam vanitatem seu vanam dignitatem, pro qua se extollunt, aspera paciuntur, penurias habent, vulnerant et vulnerantur, occidunt et occiduntur.” Even more than the rich invective, what is striking in this passage is its explicit denial that the suffering and hardships of knighthood serve the knights in a meritorious capacity, a theme of central interest throughout this book. Significantly, Rolle thinks it worthwhile to negate such a powerful idea. Far from gaining merit by their hard lives, a claim he obviously knows the knights make, they are, Rolle insists, damning themselves in the empty search for glory and honor.

54. One of the arguments advanced in Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence (129–60) holds that chivalry involved the veritable worship of prowess as a demigod.

55. All this evidence and especially that from literary works will, of course, raise the question of prescription and description, discussed in Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, passim. The long prayers in chansons de geste, for example, surely represent didactic clerical effort rather than statement of knightly belief. On these prayers in general see Koch, An Analysis of the Long Prayers in Old French Literature, and Labande, “Le Credo Épique.”

56. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 302.

57. Ibid., 303.

58. The story attributes this information to the Dean of Langres himself, who appeared after death to his bishop. BL Additional 21147 f. 24

59. The anonymous fourteenth-century Pricke of Conscience, ed. Morris says that suffering for one day in purgatory is worse than one year's earthly penance: “Swa es þe payn þar a day to se / Als mykel als here a yhere may be”: bk. 4, lines 2756–57, p. 75.

60. Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, line 3284.

61. Étienne de Bourbon., Anecdotes historiques, 29–30.

62. Power, Introduction to Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, xii.

63. See the helpful discussion in Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, 206–27.

64. Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin, 103–4.

65. Sommer, Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, 2: 234, lines 16–17: “couroucese sespee.”

66. The tension is seen often in Middle English literature, e.g., Benson, ed., Stanzaic Morte Arthure, passim. The knightly were often prone, of course, to see no contradiction. In laisse 158 of the Old French Girart de Vienne, ed.Emden, Oliver proclaims his trust rests in God and in his own flashing arms.

67. See, for example, Marcus Bull's estimate, summarized near the end of his Knightly Piety, 286.

68. Defense of their ordo is considered in Chapter 8.

69. For the early part of the period under survey, see Bull, Knightly Piety; for the Later Middle Ages, see the brief case studies in Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France, 245–59.

70. See, e.g., Jordan Fantosme's chronicle, written 1174–75, which often links treason with service of the devil, and shows the knights constantly in touch with God, praying, thanking him and his Mother, and the like: Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, 36–37, 42–43, 56–57.

71. As Bernier is told by his mother in Raoul de Cambrai, serve your overlord and God will be your reward. See Kay, ed., Raoul de Cambrai, laisse 68.

72. The topic of ordines will be examined in Chapter 7.

73. Even if the prohibition was considered to apply to murder rather than killing in general, the worry might persist. Indeed, might not any ambiguity here intensify personal reflection?

74. Bitterling, ed., Of Shrift and Penance, 66.

75. For Charny's views, see Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 178–81. Of course, he never stints in his praise of honor and severely castigates those who are cowardly, unwilling to risk all in the quest of honor. See Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 124–31. The knightly belief in prowess as the center of chivalry is discussed in ibid., 129–60.

76. God is characterized as the Sovereign Avenger (souvrains vengieres) in Paris and Ulrich, Merlin, 31.

77. See the thoughtful work of Timothy Gorringe, God's Just Vengeance.

78. Frantzen, Bloody Good, especially 47–48. The History of the Albigensian Crusade by Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay provides good examples of how the cross could be used to inspire violence. At the siege of Lavaur in 1211 the crusaders set a cross atop a wooden fortification erected near the castle under assault. When shot from the defenders' engines break one of its arms, Peter darkly assures his readers that “the Cross avenged the injuries it had suffered as will be shown later.” History of the Albigensian Crusade, 115. Early in his narrative Peter has referred to God as “the Lord of Vengeance (dominus ultionum).” Ibid., 35; idem, Petri Vallium Sarnaii monachi Hystoria albigensis, i: 60. The clerical author of the chronicle of the Lisbon Crusade of 1147 tells of elevating a piece of the true cross to crusaders about to assault the city: David, The Conquest of Lisbon, 154–59. The crusaders in the Holy Land famously wheeled fragments of the true cross within a cumbersome carriage into battle and though they lost them to the Muslims at the Horns of Hattin in 1187, pieces subsequently appear on many crusading battlefields; see the comment by Ailes in Ambroise, The History of the Holy War, 2: 3.

79. The History of the Albigensian Crusade again provides a good example. At the siege of Toulouse in 1218 Count Simon de Montfort, having witnessed the elevation of the host in a mass sung in his tent, proclaims “Let us go and if needs must die for Him who deigned to die for us.” Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 276; for the Latin, Petri Vallium Sarnaii monachi Hystoria albigensis, vol. 3, par. 609.

80. Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont; see laisse 235 and the beginning of 236.

81. Mullally, The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland, 102. It continues, “Strike, barons, without delay, in the name of Jesus, son of Mary! Strike noble knights (Al nun ihesu le fiz marie; / Ferez, chevaliers gentils)” (lines 1922–26). An earlier fight had left a thousand foemen beaten, killed, wounded, or captured “Par force e par uertu / Que lur fist le bon jhesu,” 108. This text was earlier edited by Orpen as The Song of Dermot and the Earl.

82. Newth, Aymeri of Narbonne, 25; Demaison, ed., Aymeri de Narbonne, 2:33: “Que Damedex qui pardon fist Longis, / Te doint vitoire contra tes enemis!” The sentiment is repeated; see Newth, 88, Demaison, 118.

83. Sommer, Vulgate Version, 1: 80–81; Chase, “History of the Holy Grail,” in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 1: 51–52.

84. Round, Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, no. 701.

85. He wrote that the foundation was “ad Deum propitiatio pro effusione tanti sanguinis Christiani”; William of Newburg, The History of English Affairs, i: 40. The motive for a foundation might, of course, be thanksgiving for victory: see, for example Boffa, Warfare in Medieval Brabant,168, a late thirteenth-century example.

86. Slack, Crusade Charters 1138–1270, 102–3.

87. Ibid., no. 24.

88. Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 4: 80–81, entire speech at 80–95. Significantly, the speech praises Norman prowess under God's beneficent hand.

89. Their literature often shows warriors communing in their own fashion with three blades of grass just before the opposing sides joined battle. E.g., Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, laisse 120. The bishops who blessed crusaders as the opposing forces took position just before the decisive battle of Muret in 1213 were repeatedly requested to renew assurances of divine favor and of heavenly reward to those who would perish. See Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 209–10; for the Latin, Hystoria Albigensis, 2: sections 461–62. David Bachrach gives many examples, Religion and the Conduct of War, passim.

90. See the comment of Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, 416–17: Bonitas non nisi bonum, probitas utriumque facit,” translated in James, Brooke, and Mynors as “goodness makes a man only good, prowess makes him either.”

91. Douglas, English Historical Documents, 2: 316; Latin in Stubbs, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, 3: 151 ff.

92. Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages, 56–57.

93. Discussed in the chronicle by Peter of les Vaux-des-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 58–59; Latin in Hystoria Albigensis, section 106.

94. Discussed, with many sources cited and quoted, in. Baker, “Meed and the Economics of Chivalry in Piers Plowman,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years' War. Modern scholars debate the degree of criticism of war and chivalric violence in the contemporary poem “Les Voeux du Heron.” See in this same volume the essays “Warmongering in Les Voeux du Heron,” by Norris Lacy, and “Inscribing the Body with Meaning: Chivalric Culture and the Norms of Violence in The Vows of the Heron,” by Patricia DeMarco.

95. Newman, The Cartulary and Charters of Notre-Dame of Homblieres, no. 84, 163–64.

96. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 49; Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 45–46.

97. Holden, Gregory, and Crouch, History of William Marshal, vol. 2, lines 18231–51.

98. See Poole, Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 486 n. 2.

99. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 103–4. In this case the worried knight was finally comforted by the Blessed Virgin, whom he had always revered.

100. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 290–91; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 316–17.

101. Thomas of Cantimpré tells an elaborate tale of this sort, Bonum universale de apibus, 2: 491–93. It is retold as a more concise sermon exemplum in BL Harley 2316 f. 10b.

102. Kay, Raoul de Cambrai.

103. Rosenberg, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 254; Micha, Lancelot, 1: 61.

104. Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, laisse 283: “Baron…por Deu, concilliés moi. / Pichiés ai fais dont je grant paor ai, / maint home aim ors dont je sui em esfrpo—/Raoul ocis, certes, ce poise moi. / Dusqu' a Saint Gile vuel aler demanois; / projerai le que placidis soit por moi / vers Damredieu qui sires est et rois.”

105. Hahn, Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, “Awntyrs off Arthur,” lines 261–312. The Middle English quotation reads, “‘How shal we fare’ quod the freke, ‘that fonden to fight, / And thus defoulen the folke on fele kinges londes, / And riches over reymes withouten eny right, / Wynnen worship in were thorgh wightnesse of hondes?'”

106. Rosenberg, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 271, Micha, Lancelot, 1: 152: “mais Nostre Sire ne garde mie a la cortoisie del monde, kar cil qui est buens al monde est mals a Dieu.”

107. Alan of Lille, The Art of Preaching, 52. PL 210 col. 131: “Quod hominibus altum est, abomination est apud Deum.”

108. Examples of pious death on the Mount of Olives in BL Additional 33956 f. 41, Additional 27336 f. 67, Arundel 231 f. 16; stories of dying piously in battle for the faith in Jacques de Vitry: The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, 172; Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 259; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 291. There is also a story of Étienne de Bourbon in Anecdotes historiques, 92.

109. Willingness to die at the close of a day in which great prowess has been demonstrated appears in Micha, Lancelot, 6: 103–4, and Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 1: 414.

110. Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, lines 466–68: “Þat he ne may sytte hys hors above, / Þat perauenture yn al hys lyue / Shal he neure aftyr þryue.”

111. Hudson, Four Middle English Romances, 203, lines 4615–18.

112. Mills, Lybeaus Desconus, 75.

113. Malory, Works, 156.

114. Evans, Unconquered Knight, 146.

115. Quoted in Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 627.

116. Paris, Chronica majora, 3: 290–91, discussed by Cazel, in “Religious Motivation in the Biography of Hubert de Burgh,” 109–10.

117. This source and the crusade are discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

118. David, The Conquest of Lisbon, 134–35.

119. Ibid.: “Quidam vero hoc interpretantes aiebant gentem illam ferocem et indomitam, alieni cupidam, licet tunc sub specie peregrinationis et religionis, sitim sanguinis humani nondum deposuisse.”

120. Ibid., 120–21.

121. Ibid., 152–53.

122. “Haec itaque repugnantia, si quando indultum est indulgere quieti, sapientis viri, audaciam sopiebat,” RHC III Occ., 605–6, discussed in Bull, Knightly Piety, 3–4. Urban's sermon and the difficulty of knowing exactly what was promised are discussed in Chapter 4.

123. Jean Leclercq discusses and prints this short Latin treatise, “Un document sur les debuts des Templiers.” The date places it just a few years before the order received official standing with a Latin rule. Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate print the letter in English in The Templars, 54–59.

124. Leclercq, “Un document,” 94: “audiuimus quasdam uestrum a quibusdam minus discretis perturbari, quasi profession uestra, qua uitam uestram ad portanda arma contra inimicos fidei et pacis pro defensione christianorum dedicastis, quasi, inquam, illa profession uel inlicita sit uel perniosa, id est uel peccatum uel maioris profectionis impedimentum.”

125. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from ibid., 94–96.

126. Ibid., 96–98.

127. David Bachrach finds similar doubt and a desire for assurance of divine favor on the part of early crusaders. Religion and the Conduct of War, 149–50.

128. Crouch, “The Troubled Deathbeds of Henry I's Servants,” 24; he notes that they were especially anxious before battle and on their deathbeds.

129. Shaw, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, 235; Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, 152: “Sire, je te pri que il te preingne pitié de moi, et m'ostes de ces guerres entre crestiens, là où j'ai vescu grant piesce; et m'otroies que je puisse mourir en ton servise, par quoy je puisse avoir ton regne de paradis.”

130. Lemaitre, “Les miracles de saint Martial,” 106–7; discussed in Goodich, Violence and Miracles, 135–46.

131. Evans, Unconquered Knight, 180–81. For the original Spanish see Carriazo, El Victorial, 272–73. The author comments that these folk are “cristianos católicos, e non son contraries a la feé de Jesucristo.”

132. It was an economy of precise calculations. Those who venerated the vial of Christ's blood brought by Henry III to England, for example, were given remission from penances imposed on them for precisely six years and 116 days. Paris, Chronicles, 120.

CHAPTER 2. TWO MODEL KNIGHT/AUTHORS AS GUIDES

1. Fowler, The King's Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster, 71, 78. He notes the military service of Lancaster in Scotland and Prussia as well as France, and his frequenting of tournaments, 103–10, 162. Rogers, The Wars of Edward III, 141–42 prints documents on the truce. For Charny's military career in France and on crusade, see Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 3–18.

2. There were perhaps contradictions in Lancaster's piety, as appeared when he conducted a great raid out of Bordeaux into the Poitou in 1346. Despite Lancaster's intense personal piety, his raid involved much arson and bloodshed, and inflicted significant damage on churches. Hearing the reports, Pope Clement VI was moved to write to Lancaster urging restraints to prevent the continued destruction of churches and the robbing of ecclesiastics. The case in point was the Benedictine house of Saint-Jean-d'Angely, which Lancaster's troops had systematically looted, expelled its monks, and held them for ransom. They had likewise robbed other churches of religious ornaments, books, chalices, vestments, silver vases, and relics. See the discussion in Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 68, and sources cited there. On Lancaster's piety in general, see ibid., 187–96. Lancaster received the sacred thorn from the King of France: Fowler, ibid., 109. For Charny and the Shroud, see Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 39–41.

3. For Lancaster's foundation see Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 187–92; for Charny's, see Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 38.

4. This tendency appears in their emphasis on the discipline of chivalry, their prohibition of soft living, even their strictures on dress. Perhaps the knightly preference for strictly observant religious orders shows this frame of mind well before the era of our two knight-authors, from Cistercians in the twelfth century to Minims and Carthusians in the fifteenth century. Jeremy Catto comments on the line connecting Henry of Lancaster to Loyola and the New Model Army in “Religion and English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” 52–54. Charny provides equally rich evidence.

5. Printed in Henry, Duke of Lancaster, Le Livre de seyntz medicines, ed. Arnould; discussed in Arnould, “Henry of Lancaster and His Livres des Seintes Medicines,” reprinted as a separate piece, and idem, Étude sur le Livre des saintes médecines du Duc Henri de Lancastre. Cf. Tavormina, “Henry of Lancaster, The Book of Holy Medicines,” which discusses the text and translates a small portion of it; and Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background, 216–20. Cf. Ackerman, “The Traditional Background of Henry of Lancaster's Livre,”114–18.

6. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) entries for Thomas and his medieval descendants, all in military careers. His DNB entry labels Thomas “a noted warrior.”

7. Two other shields are now unrecognizable. See Arnould, Étude, lxvi–lxvii.

8. Lancaster Livre de seyntz medicines, 64–84.

9. Arnould, Étude, lxxvii.

10. Cf. Legge's comments in Anglo-Norman Literature, 219, that his writing may have been an “imposition.”

11. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 231.

12. Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 195

13. Arnould's Introduction to Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, viii, ix.

14. Lancaster, for example, accuses himself of being the “cheitif et malveis traitre, q'est la principale cause de la vileyne mort de son bon seignur” (5).

15. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 178–79: “C'est une beiser qe jeo beise touz les jours a la Messe en signifiance de pees entre Nostre Seignur, luylo tresdouz Jesus, et moi, d'un mortel guerre qe sourdy entre luy et moi du primer qe jeo unqes fiu de age qejeo poai peccher. Car depuis ne feust unqes si mult trespetit noun qe jeo ne l'ai guerroie et sovent durement coroucee par le vile orde pecche mortel en qoi jeo siu mys tantl de terme, et me siu tenuz a la partie adverse contre mon droit seignour et contre mon homage qe jeo fisez en baptisme; et la siu jeo droitmal-veis traitre faux et desloials, et de tant pire come de moustrer si grant signe de pees tant come le fait et la volente estoient si contraires a pees et a bone acorde; et, coment qe a la foie un manere de soeffrance de guerre ad estee prise entre nous, come quant j'ai estee confes de mes pecchez et deusse receivoir le precious corps, Nostre Seignur, adonqes un poy duroient les trieves, mes ceo ne servoit pas longement qe rum pees ne feussente par moi contre bons promesses, et nepurgant tout dis beisaijeo en signe d'amour, la ou nul ne feust.”

16. Ibid., 4: “jeo…vous prie, Sire, pur l'amour de cele en qi vous preistes nostre semblaunce, qe vous me pardonetz mes pecchés et voillietz, trecher Sire, qe desormes jeo vous puisse en alcunes choses tresembler si avaunt comme un si cheitif viande al verm poet resembler a si noble Roi comme le Roi de cel, de la terre, et de la meer et de quantqe en eux sount. Et si j'ai, tresdouz Sires, pur vous en cest siecle ascune persecucioun de corps, d'avoir ou d'amys, ou en altre manere qele qe soit, jeo vous prie, tresdouz Sire, qe jeo le puisse prendre a gree pur l'amour de vous; et la ou vous, Sire de si bon gree soeffristes tauntz de peynes pur moi en ce siecle, jeo vous prie, Sire, qe jeo vous puisse resemblet en taunt qe jeo puisse trover en moun dur coer de soeffrir pur vous de bone volunté anguises, travailles, peynes, tiels comme il vous plerra, et nient soulement pur guerdoun avoir ne pur contrepeser a les mauz qe j'ai fait, mes tout entirement pur l'amour de vous, ensi comme vous feistes, Sire, pur l'amour de moi.” The sinner as worm or food for worms is a venerable theme. In a chapter of his Ars Predicandi entitled “On Despising Oneself,” Alan of Lille urges preachers to lead their hearers into thinking, “ego sum vermis (I am a worm)”: PL 210 col. 115.

17. Determined by scanning the text and carrying out word searches electronically.

18. As Mitchel Merback notes, “Mary's emotional suffering as an eyewitness to her son's spectacular torture-execution was seen by medieval authors to rival, or even to surpass, the physical agonies endured by Christ, since it grew naturally out of a perfect maternal love.” The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 151.

19. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 234. What counts is their “grandes peynes et tourmentz q'elle soeffri…et le martirement de touz les seintez martirs.”

20. See discussion in Chapter 6 with reference to the “feudal” terminology of St. Anselm.

21. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 178–79.

22. Ibid., 73; cf. 80, where he has left God's service for that of the devil.

23. Ibid., 116.

24. Ibid., 191: “jeo vous en prie, Sire,…qe jeo peusse si soeffrir toutes peynes et dolours pacientement pur l'amour de vous, douz Sires, a vous quiter une partie de ceo qe jeo vous doie de les tresoutrageousement greves peynes et vileynes qe vous soeffrestes, douz Sires, si debonairement pur moy cheitif.”

25. Ibid., 197: “qe jeo puisse conoistre qe par un petite peyne cy endurer jeo soi quites de toutes les grandes peynes d'enfern. Ceo serroit une bon marchandise, quant pur une poy de tribulacions, qe n'est riens a soeffrir, de ceo mounde, l'en poet eschaper les peynes d'enfern qe sont si grandes et sanz desport; et tout ne poet homme plus par ceo gaigner de bonement soeffrir vostre envoie de persecucions qe par ceo avoit allegeance de peynes de purgatorie.” Lancaster could easily have heard such language in crusade sermons or read them in chronicles or collections of moral tales. The chronicle of the crusade of Richard I frankly states that crusaders “had allowed themselves to be dispossessed that they might buy the love of God, for there can be no better bargain than [to gain] the love of the Heavenly King (E enguagier lor heritages / U perdu toz lor aages; / Se s'en laisserent deschater / Por lamor de Deu achater, / Que mieldre marcheiz ne pot ester / Que de l'amor le rei celestre)”: Ambroise, The History of the Holy War: Ambroise's Estoire de la guerre sainte, vol. 1, lines 359–64; vol. 2, 35. Model sermons composed by several writers in the early thirteenth century stressed the great rewards from God for the supposedly light sufferings of going on crusade. See the following passages in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 114–15, 118–19, James of Vitry, who even states that the Lord makes a “good bargain (bonum forum)”; 164–65, Eudes of Châteauroux; 188–89, 200–201, 208–9, Gilbert of Tournai, who, in the first entry cited, says the Lord “offers a very good business (optimum facit forum)” and in the final entry cited says the Lord “makes good business (modo bonum forum facit).”

26. Lancaster, Livre des seyntz medicines, 124.

27. Ibid., 165.

28. Ibid., 198. See Chapter 6 for discussion of parallels between Christ and his knights.

29. Ibid., 9, 61.

30. Ibid., 138.

31. Chapter 6 examines knightly imitatio Christi.

32. Only rarely did medieval writers recognize the danger of suggesting a form of penance without specifying the need for contrition. A conversation put into the mouth of a knight and bishop during the Albigensian Crusade has a doubting knight say “it amazes me that you clerics give absolution where there is no repentance.” Arnold, bishop of Nîmes, responds that “it grieves me that you should doubt that any man alive, even one utterly condemned, is fully shriven, as long as he has fought these men.” Shirley, Song of the Cathar Wars, 94–95; Martin-Chabot, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 2: 144: “‘Foucautz’ so ditz l'ivesques, ‘greu m'es car vos doptatz. / Que totz om calques sia, neis si era dampnatz, / Sol c'ab lor se combata, es totz penedensatz.'”

33. Dual language text and historical study appear in Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of hivalry. Page numbers refer to facing pages in this edition. In only slightly less explicit terms, ideas we find in Lancaster and especially in Charny appear in the treatise a contemporary French knight, the Chevalier de la Tour Landry, wrote for his daughters, Livre pour l'enseignement de ses filles. He explicitly mentions Geoffroi de Charny and Marshal Boucicaut as standards of chivalry. For Caxton's translation see La Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower.

34. See, for example, Livre de chevalerie, section 21, line 8; section 44, line 40 (122–23; 196–97).

35. Such denunciations also appeared in sermons. Alan of Lille in his Art of Preaching, denounced sloth, delicate foods, soft beds, loquaciousness, unwillingness to keep watch—the very vices Charny decried. See PL 210 col. 126.

36. Lancaster's gout: Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 194; Charny's view: Livre de chevalerie, 122–23. The Chevalier de la Tour could convert this duet into a trio. He writes that the good knight who seeks the great goal of worship (in Caxton's translation), “Payneth hym self and suffreth many grete trauuaylles as cold hete and hongre and putteth his body in to grete Ieopardy and aduenture to deye or lyue for to gete worship and good Renommee and maketh his body feble and wery by many vyages / also in many bataylles and assautes / and by many other grete peryls / And as he hath suffred payne and trauail ynough / he is put and enhaunced in to grete honour / And grete yeftes ben thenne gyuen to hym / and grete wonder and merueylle it is of the grete worship and grete renommee that men beren unto hym.” La Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 151.

37. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 121–22. As noted in Chapter 1, Charny obviously knows that the prowess of knights can be used badly. Tension over this central knightly quality appears regularly in most chivalric literature. The body of thought that knights accepted as their own tries to ignore this tension as fully as possible, preferring to think of prowess simply as a virtue and a gift of God.

38. Ibid., 90–91: “Car vraiment nulz ne peut aler en telx lointains voiages que le corps ne soit en peril maintes foiz. Et pour ce devons nous telz gens d'armes honorer qui a grant mise et a grant travail et en grant peril se mettent en aler.” The Chevalier de la Tour, his thoughts turning to the glorious days of his youth, fondly remembers two model knights as “brethren and good knyþts in arms.…for euer they vyaged & neuer rested tylle they came in place where they might essaye and preue the strengthe of theyr bodyes for to gete worship and good renomme. And so moche they dyd by theyr valyaunce that at the last they were renommed ouer al as charny and bouchykault were in their tyme.” La Tour Landry, Book of the Knight of the Tower (Caxton), 151.

39. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 116, 119.

40. The spiritualized language of clerics could easily support this very physical and this-worldly contest. Alan of Lille urges Christians to be armed for the battle of life, not to fear boldness because of death, and the like. See PL 210 cols. 126, 134, 155. What is surely the pure knightly prayer is intoned in a chronicle of the Albigensian crusade: “‘Ah, Lord God of glory, by your most holy law,’ said each man to himself, ‘keep us from shame, do not let us be disgraced!'” Shirley, Song of the Cathar Wars, 54; Martin-Chabot, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 1: 234: “‘Oi, sire Dieus de Gloria!, per ta santisma lei / Garda'ns de dezonor’, so ditz cascuns per sei, / ‘Que no siam auni!'” In the Middle English romance Amis and Amiloun, a character prays that God preserve him from shame even though he knows he fights in a wrong cause: Foster, Amis and Amiloun, 35.

41. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 86–87.

42. Ibid., 90–91.

43. Ibid., 108–9.

44. Ibid., 110–11: “ont aquiz par leurs grans peines, travaulx et paours et perilz de corps et perte de leurs amis mors que ilz ont veu mourir en plusieurs bonnes places ou ilz ont esté, dont ilz ont eu mesaises et courroux en leur cuer souvent.”

45. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 4.

46. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 110–11.

47. Ibid., 112–13.

48. Ibid., 194–95: “Et se ainsi le voulez faire bien continuelment et souvent, travaillez vous, armez vous, combatez vous, ainsi comme vous devrez, alez partout et par mer et par terre et en pluseurs pays, sanz doubter nulz perilz ne sanz espargne de voz chetiz corps, dont vous ne devez tenir nul compte, fors que de l'ame et vivre honoreement.”

49. Ibid., 132–33. Cf. 86–87, where Charny explains that knights want to continue in tournaments “because of the success God has granted them in it.”

50. Ibid., 134–35: “Et se vous avez renomee d'estre bons homs d'arames, et don't vous soiez enhauciez et honorez et vous l'aiez desservi par vostre grant travaille, peril et hardiesce, et Nostre Sires vous a fait telle grace qu'il vous ait ce laissié faire don't vous avez tele renommee, ycilz biens ne sont mie biens de fortune, mais sont biens qui par raison doivent durer.”

51. Again, the Chevalier de la Tour agrees: “the good and auncyent knyghtes…thanked god that had gyue them grace to kepe and hold them clenely / whereby they were sette before the other and worshipped ouer al.” La Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 154.

52. The Chevalier de la Tour Landry similarly links meritorious suffering and disciplined knightly work in benefits he holds out to his daughters if they, in the manner he thinks appropriate to their sex, work to preserve honor as the knights do. Each must “thynk how thus doynge she geteth the loue of god and of her lord / of theyr frendes and of the world And the sauement of her sowle / whereof the world preyseth her and god also” (152). Context helps to support this reading of combined spiritual and earthly reward, for this story comes in the midst of several exempla in which women's sexual asceticism has been highly praised. The Chevalier's mind is clearly focused on bodily discipline as a high value in the eyes both of God and right-thinking society. Writing a few pages later of martyrs for love, he states “For yf they had suffred for the loue of god whiche suffered soo moch for them the tenthe parte of the payne and dolour which they dyd suffre for the fowle delyte of theyr stynkynge lecherye / they should haue hadde mercy and grete guerdon in the other world” (162). He laments that evil women are no longer burned, stoned, immured, or beheaded, nor do they have their throats slit, but consoles himself that at least “they lese therfore theyr worship and theyre estate/ the loue of god and of theyre lordes and of theyre frendes and world also” (156). Once again worldly honor and God's love stand together. As in Charny's book, securing honor and saving the soul tend to move on parallel lines or even to merge.

53. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 166–67.

54. Ibid., 174–77: “N'est ce mie comparasons d'assez souffrir comme en l'ordre de chevalerie. Que qui voudroit considerer les paines, travaux, douleurs, mesaises, grans paours, perilz, froisseures bleceures que li bon chevalier, qui l'ordre de chevalerie maintiennent ainsi comme il doivent, ont a souffrir et sueffrent mainte foiz, il n'est nulle religion ou l'en en sueffre tant comme font cil bon chevalier qui les faiz d'armes vont querant justement.”

55. Ibid., 176–77. Compare Henry of Lancaster's confession that accounts of battles cause him fear of death and shame, and that he fears sudden death without a chance to make confession; see Livre de seyntz medicines, 9, 61.

56. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 176–77.

57. Ibid.

58. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 12.

59. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 164–65.

60. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, passim, where references to the dolorous pains of hell, the unending prison of hell, etc, appear scores of times. Charny's more allusive reference to the “grant penitence” endured by the unworthy in this world and the next appears at 178–81 of his Livre de chevalerie.

61. See Flahiff, “Deus Non Vult,” 267.

62. Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast.

63. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 243–44.

64. A good source for the constant reference to the toil and suffering of knightly life in a chivalric biography is the life of Don Pero Niño, told by his standard-bearer: Evans, The Unconquered Knight, 33–34, 38, 44, 82, 114, 131, 159, 176, 195.

65. Chanson de Roland, laisse 174: “Pur ses pechez Deu en puroffrid lo guant.”

66. Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 19: “The moral precepts that accompanied [the migrating Germans] from their pagan past were completely oriented to war, focussing on heroism, famous deeds on the part of the leader, loyalty on the part of the followers, revenge for those killed, courage unto death, contempt for a comfortable life at home.”

67. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 73.

68. Charny, Livre de chevalerie, 176–81.

69. The tradition was venerable by the time of Lancaster and Charny. Even the uncompromisingly pious Simon de Montfort, the much lauded knight or athlete of Christ who guided the early phase of the Albigensian Crusade, was unyielding to clerical authority “when it conflicted with his ambitions or with his own sense of what was his due,” as Sibly and Sibly note: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 297.

70. Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 104–5.

71. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1343–45, 196.

72. Fowler, King's Lieutenant, 78: He confesses to sinning in these activities, but the wrong is lechery, which he would still follow if he still had his youthful vigor, not the activities per se.

73. Livre de seyntz medicines, 138.

74. See the famous comment of William Marchal in Holden, Gregory, and Crouch, Histoire, lines 18480–18502.

75. Charny speaks to the issues directly at 164–67 of his Livre de chevalerie; Lancaster's view is diffused throughout his Livre de seyntz medicines, which assumes a framework of meritorious suffering in righteous warfare that mirrors that of Christ himself.

76. Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 77.

77. A modern theological stance recalling these knightly views appears in works of the famed Franz Bibfelt. See Marty and Brauer, The Unresolved Paradox: Studies in the Theology of Franz Bibfeldt. I owe this reference to Robert Wennerstrom and George Utech.

78. I accept the arguments of Jean Flori and Maurice Keen that the twelfth century is the formative period of chivalric growth, without denying that earlier precedents could be cited for elements that enter the great fusion of forces creating chivalry.

CHAPTER 3. THE RELIGIOUS CONTEXT FOR CHIVALRIC IDEOLOGY

1. Broad discussions appear in Southern, Western Society and the Church, 44–53, 100–170, 240–300; Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages; Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century; Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII; Robinson, Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century. Yael Katzir stresses changes in the wake of failure on the second crusade: “The Second Crusade and the Redefinition of Ecclesia, Christianitas, the Papal Coercive Power.”

2. This point of view finds support in Vauchez, The Laity, 98.

3. See Alexander Murray, “Confession Before 1215,” 77. Murray thinks the theologians of Laon found a particularly receptive audience in England while on tour with relics to assist the rebuilding of their cathedral. David Crouch would agree that a flourishing penitential culture existed in England: “Troubled Deathbeds of Henry I's Servants.”

4. See Bornstein's introduction to Vauchez, The Laity, xii. Part 1 of Vauchez's book speaks generally to these themes. In the process, these theologians would draw on older traditions of thought actively considered within monastic walls—about the variety of talents given by divine plan to humans, the place and value of labor in a religious life, the relative merit of the active and contemplative life, even the role of individual, private confession in cleansing sin.

5. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle.

6. Ibid., 56–57. As Baldwin points out, at first the terminology of ordines was limited in this circle to religious orders. Other terms served to distinguish lay social/professional groups. It is of interest that Peter the Chanter came from a family of knights and from a region of France that had suffered ravaging during the hostilities between kings of England and France; see 3–4, 205.

7. For a classic account, see Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages.

8. How their independence shaped their ideology will be examined in Chapter 4; the knightly ordo is the subject of Chapter 7.

9. Of course the laity most involved were themselves among the elite in the broadest sense; they could claim at least some privilege, and ranged from great lords through knights, gentry and substantial local landowners, and from wealthy urban merchants to successful craftsmen.

10. Were a new term of art needed to characterize their stance I would borrow a splendid word learned from my grandfather. A heroically stubborn and self-confident person might be charged with “indegoddampendence.” This term could concisely characterize knightly attitudes if we amend it to “selectively pious indegoddampendence.”

11. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 18.

12. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 67. The tradition is, of course, even older. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 95–102 (cited in Constable, Three Studies, 146) says the redemptive power of suffering was a normal aspect of ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian religions.

13. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 67–69.

14. Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood, 65; idem, Sancti Bernardi Opera 3: 229: “nescio quid sentitur, ubi mortuus requievit, quam ubi vivens conversatus est, atque amplius movet ad pietatem mortis quam vitae recordatio.”

15. Bernard, In Praise of the New Knighthood, 34; Sancti Bernardi Opera, 3: 215: “Nam si beati qui in Domino moriuntur, non multo magis qui pro Domino moriuntur?”

16. Rubenson, “Christian Asceticism,” 54.

17. Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 89, quoted in Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 150.

18. Sara Hamilton, “Penance in the Age of Gregorian Reform,” 62–63.

19. Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages, 122.

20. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 164–65.

21. Rubin, “Choosing Death? Experiences of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Europe,” and Geary, Furta Sacra, cited there.

22. See Constable, Three Studies, 149. Mid-twelfth-century crusaders on the expedition to take Lisbon were told they were being “reborn of a new baptism of repentance (novo penitentie renati baptismate)”; David, The Conquest of Lisbon, 72–73.

23. Quoted in Latin and translation in Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 70. The Latin reads: “Enim vero non sentiet sua, dum illius [Christi] vulnera intuebitur. Stat martyr tripudians et triumphans, toto licet lacero corpore; et rimante latera ferro, non modo fortiter, sed et alacriter sacrum e carne sua circumspicit ebullire cruorem. Ubi ergo tunc anima martyris? Nempe in tuto.…in viscera Jesu, vulneribus nimirum patentibus ad introeundum.…Neque hoc facit stupor, sed amor.”

24. Rolle, Contra Amatores Mundi, 76–77, 158–59: “Est igitur aff rmandum quod inimicorum persecucio utilis et necessaria nobis esse ostenditur, nequando non habentes persecutorem nec coronam mereamur. Utique nisi pugnemus, non vincimus; nec coronabimur nisi vincamus. Armantur ergo milites, coronantur victores, devicti occiduntur. Dum pugnant, in mundo morantur; dum vincunt, in celo collocantur; et dum vincuntur, in baratro detruduntur.”

25. Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church, 146. The Fasciculus Morum, edited by Siegfried Wenzel, 136–37, cites the Book of Proverbs: “Coronoberis si sustinueris pacienter.” It is worth recalling that the British Library Harley manuscript illumination with which this book began quotes the Pauline injunction that conquering and winning a crown require fighting; the illustrator pictured such a crown descending from heaven in the hands of an angel to rest on the ideal knight.

26. Some scholars have even argued that enthusiastic lay piety may have focused on ethical and ascetic ideas as much as on magico-religious rites. See Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism.

27. Quoted in Kieckheffer, Unquiet Souls, 109.

28. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 97–99, 129, 149–50, 152.

29. Cohen, “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” 52–53. Cohen has also published “The Animated Pain of the Body.” Cf. Mowbray, “The Development of Ideas About Pain and Suffering in the Works of Thirteenth-Century Masters of Theology at Paris, c. 1230–c. 1300.” Mowbray opens his interesting study with the statement, “The importance which theologians attached to painful means of redemption from sin was, it seems, immense” (1). He elaborates what he terms the development of a “theology of voluntary suffering” (103). Scott Pincikowski has written an important study of the role of pain in German chivalric literature: Bodies in Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue. P. S. Lewis wrote broadly of later medieval France, “Essentially it was upon pain that one dwelt in the later middle ages; upon the dolour of the Passion, upon the dolour of man.” Later Medieval France, 17.

30. The significant issue of knightly imitation of Christ is taken up in Chapter 6.

31. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, The Historyof the Albigensian Crusade, 62–63.

32. Cohen, “Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” 69. Common consciousness does not equal common practice, of course.

33. Caroline Bynum, for example, provides some striking evidence in Holy Feast, Holy Fast passim, and especially 199–201.

34. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 30. See Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, for three highly descriptive Middle English accounts of journeys through purgatory.

35. BL Royal 7 D I, f. 138b.

36. BL Additional 11579 f. 6b. Motive was sometimes important. This same manuscript declares that a hermit witnessed the pains of a couple who kept themselves from sin while alive merely to avoid these punishments (f. 9). Similarly, a dead Franciscan was allowed to return to give testimony from purgatory: he has been suffering in the dread otherworld only long enough to chant a De Profundis and a prayer, but he announced he would prefer to do earthly penance for the vast span of time extending from creation to Doomsday: BL Royal 12 E I, f. 157.

37. BL Arundel 231, vol. II, f. 6b.

38. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 38, 188–89.

39. BL Additional 15833 f. 141b.

40. BL Harley 3244 f. 84; also in BL Egerton 1117 f. 187b.

41. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 57: “Idcirco filios meos coram me adduci feci ut, excitato affectu ad ipsos, cum majori angustia mentis pro Christo relinquam illos, et ita magis merear apud Dominum.” A departing crusader with his family on shore also appears in Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 334–35. For knights there were distinctly practical limits, of course. A story repeated often tells of a crusader (sometimes specifically a Templar) who fasts on bread and water to increase his merit. He is, of course, so weak that he is put to shame in battle. In one telling, a comrade addresses him contemptuously as Sir Bread and Water and warns that he has rescued him twice when unhorsed; he will not do so a third time. Meritorious suffering through rigorous fighting is penance enough.

42. Morris, Pricke of Conscience, bk. 4, p. 97, lines 3542–43: “And, if he it thole noght grotchand, / In-stede of penance it sal hym stand.”

43. Caesar of Heisterbach, Dialogue of Miracles, 2: 255–56, Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 288.

44. The story appears in several medieval collections: BL Cotton, Cleopatra C X f. 135b; BL Additional 33956 f. 75b col. 2; BL Royal 20 B xiv, f. 160 col. 2. Cf. Dexter, “Miracula Sanctae Virginis Mariae,” 33–34. An interesting parallel in imaginative literature features a knight whose right hand is fixed to the hilt of his own sword which is thrust through the palm of his left hand and cannot be removed; Micha, Lancelot, Roman en prose, 2: 177–82.

45. What follows comes from Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, II, Li, 3, 386–88. The value of Thomas as a historical source is discussed in Alexander Murray, “Confession as a historical source in the thirteenth century,” 286–322.

46. Thomas of Cantimpré, II, Li, 5, 388–89.

47. “O vtinam tormentum istud quod respectu scelerum meorum paruum sustinui, reiterare semel, iterum, ac tertio liceret mihi miserrimo, et in eo diutiis cruciari.” The idea of being penitentially crucified is, of course, worth noting. Thomas uses this language more than once. See, for example, II, Li, 3, 386 where after an evil life a knight becomes a hermit and thus crucifies himself.

48. Ibid., II, Li, 5, 388–89.

49. Ibid., II, Liii, 23, 419–20.

50. Ibid. The saint is Christina the Astonishing, whose vita Thomas wrote.

CHAPTER 4. INDEPENDENCE IN KNIGHTLY PIETY

1. That there are some exceptions can cause no surprise. A major case is Froissart, whose chronicles seem simply to accept the validity of knightly life and combat as a given, needing no justification; any paradox or tension between the grand lives lived by warriors and the principles of their religion hardly enters his mind.

2. A tendency that persists despite the balanced view presented by Sidney Painter, Maurice Keen, and Jean Flori. I fully agree with Matthew Strickland that “Resistance by the knighthood to clerical interference in matters deemed the preserve of warriors was…far from incompatible with profound expressions of Christian belief.” See his War and Chivalry, 74, and the comments at 96–97.

3. Excellent surveys of tournament appear in Barker, Tournament in England; Barker and Barber, Tournaments, Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants; and Crouch, Tournament.

4. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 303–4; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 327–28.

5. The noted preacher Jacques de Vitry claimed that he convinced a knight of the sinfulness of tournament by proving to him the sport was indeed stained by every one of the seven deadly sins: Exempla, 62–64, 193. Walter Map focused on one deadly sin, pride: Master Walter Map's Book, 100–101. Attacks on tournament continued forcefully into the later middle ages in preaching manuals such as Johannes de Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium. For an example in collected moral tales, see BL Arundel 506 f. 73.

6. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus. This highly useful book never received a modern scholarly edition and remains relatively unknown.

7. His book provides a series of anti-tournament exempla, 364–73. The seal-of-confessional issue troubled medieval folk. In BL Additional 27336 f. 73, judgment falls on a priest who reveals a knight's confession that he committed murder. Called before his king, the knight tells the truth and is forgiven. The king cuts the tongue from the priest and blinds him.

8. What follows draws on Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, II, Li, 3, 366–68. Thomas is discussed in Murray, “Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century,” 286–83.

9. Toads frequently appear in exempla and convey a sense of disgust and dread. Usurers were likely to be troubled by them in life or, especially, after death: see BL Royal 7di f. 129, BL Additional 18364 f. 43b; even a knight's wife tangles with a toad when her husband oppresses poor folk to buy her an expensive wimple: BL Additional 27336 f. 70. A toad can even represent the devil, as in the Middle English Gesta Romanorum: Herrtage, Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, 6: the identification“þe tode is þe devil” appears there twice. Thanks to Alan Lupack for this reference.

10. Clerical ambiguity could occasionally, of course, present a more favorable side. In a famous miracle story, the Blessed Virgin jousts for her unusually devoted knight in a tournament: see BL Arundel 406 f. 23, BL Additional 33956 f. 75b col. 2, BL Additional 32248 f. 3, BL Additional 11284 f. 35. The majority of clerical utterance, however, was stoutly anti-tournament.

11. St. Bernard famously complained in a letter to Abbot Suger that even crusaders could not be weaned away from “those accursed tournaments.” Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 405.

12. For the discussion of tournament in Johannes de Bromyard, Summa Praedicantium (arranged by alphabetical topic); see the section on Ludus.

13. Erdmann, Origins of the Idea of Crusade, 343–44. Cf. Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences, 60: “there was a widespread popular belief that plenary indulgences were a culpa et a poena.” On all such issues the essays of James Brundage are insightful; see his Crusades, Holy War, and Canon Law.

14. Brundage, “The Hierarchy of Violence in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Canonists,” 677. Caroline Smith argues that even those preaching crusade sermons used deliberately unspecific language, suggesting benefits without precise canonical content: Crusading in the Age of Joinville.

15. Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont, laisse 236, line 4309: “sans boce regehir.”

16. William of Tudela, Song of the Cathar Wars, 14. An anonymous antipapal continuator pictures a crusader doubting the effectiveness of forgiveness through fighting, achieved without repentance, but this seems likely to be an anti-crusade propaganda thrust (94–95).

17. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, 137. The Latin reads, “promittentes firmissime quod, si in tam glorioso certamine pro fide occumberent christiana, remissionem adepti omnium peccatorum, statim gloria et honore coronati, mercedem reciperent sui certaminis et laboris” (Historia Albigeoise, 269).

18. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, 42. The Latin in Hystoria Albigensis, 74: “scientes remissionem omnium peccaminum a Deo et Ejus vicario universis indultam qui, orthodoxe fidei zelo succensi, ad opus se accingerent hujusmodi pietatis, dummodo contriti essent pariter et confessi. Quid plura? Publicatur ista indulgentia in Francia, armat se multitudo magna fidelium signo cruces.”

19. History of the Albigensian Crusade, 209–10; Peter's text says the knights wanted the assurances stated repeatedly.

20. Even so thoughtful an ecclesiastic as Humbert of Romans in his mid-thirteenth-century preaching exaggerated the power of crusade indulgences: see Brett, Humbert of Romans, His Life and Views of Thirteenth-Century Society, 172, and the sources he cites there. Brett emphasized how much more difficult it became to win crusading converts after the failures of both crusades of the saintly Louis IX (167–94).

21. See Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom, 27–30, 39, 110, 113–15, 126, 129; idem, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, 8–9, 13, 15, 21, 162–63. To spread his message, Urban and others conducted a preaching tour after the meeting at Clermont. Elements of this crusading ideology had appeared in a series of statements made by earlier popes in preceding decades. See, e.g., discussion in Bull, Knightly Piety, 2–3. Cowdrey points out that in statements of Gregory VII one can find the basic dichotomy between sinful violence of quotidian secular warfare and the blessed violence carried out at the behest of clerics. “Pope Gregory VII and the Bearing of Arms,” 26.

22. See also Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 1, 13, 15, 31; idem, The Crusades, Idea and Reality, 10; Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, 31–33; Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 17, 21, 154; idem, Fighting for Christendom, 27–30, 32, 42, 126, 129; Asbridge, The First Crusade, 32–35, 46–49; Porter, “Preacher of the First Crusade?”; Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, x, 2–3, 5, 8–36; Cowdrey, Popes, Monks, and Crusaders, 177–88, 285–311; idem, The Crusades and Latin Monasticism, 59–61, 76, 81, 83, 721–726, 739. Marcus Bull's Knightly Piety has convincingly argued that local religious centers and figures, largely monastic, played an especially formative role in generating the first crusade. His argument makes our scholarly uncertainties over Urban's exact words less troubling and emphasizes the goal of recovering a broad set of ideas at work motivating knights to take the cross.

23. Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War; France, “Holy War and Holy Men.”

24. The older view appears in Douglas, William the Conqueror, 187–88, and Erdmann, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 154–55, 188–89. For doubts, see Bates, Normandy Before 1066, 189, 202.

25. See discussion in Chapter 8.

26. Only a fragment of the letter survives; it is printed in translation from manuscript in Bull, Knightly Piety, 73.

27. See, e.g., Wolf, Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily, 110–11.

28. Cowdrey, “Pope Gregory VII's ‘Crusading' Plans of 1074.”

29. Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade; Lower, The Barons' Crusade.

30. Luke 9:23: “Si quis vult post me venire abneget se ipsum et tollat crucem suam cotidie et sequatur me,” quoted in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 59; Eudes of Châteauroux, “Sermon 4, 5” quoted in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 164–65, 170–71.

31. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 21–23: “in ista autem exponunt se morti, et hoc in casibus multis.”

32. Ibid., 204–5. This language of labor will be examined more closely in Chapter 7.

33. Ibid., 60–61, 68.

34. Ibid., 86–87. “Hunc enim Deus Pater signavit, cuius carni crux clavis ferreis affixa est, que molli filo affigitur palliis vestries.”

35. Ibid., 138–39: “omni periculo et labori se exponat.” The issue of chivalric labor is significant and will be addressed in Chapter 7.

36. Ibid., 146–47: “hodie melius et expressius confitentur Christum esse suum dominum quam milites?.…Ipse enim velut aves nobiles ad vocationem Domini veniunt, faciunt ei exercitum et equitationem.”

37. Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 66. The Latin (135) reads, “Praesentibus dico, absentibus mando, Christus autem imperat. Cunctis autem illuc euntibus, si aut gradiendo aut transfretando, sive contra paganos dimicando, vitam morte praepeditam finierint, remissio peccatorum praesens aderit. Quod ituris adnuo, dono isto investitus a Deo.”

38. RHC Occ 3: 729: “Arripite igitur viam hanc in remissionem peccatorum vestrorum, securi de immarcescibili gloria regni coelorum.”

39. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 194–95.

40. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum anglorum, 598–601: “Parui laboris in Turchos compendio retribuetur vobis perpetuae salutis statio.…Horum laborum erit causa caritas ut, precepto Dominico ammoniti, animas pro fratribus ponatis; caritatis stipendium erit Dei gratia; Dei gratiam sequetur vita aeterna.”

41. Ibid., 692–93, 606–7.

42. Ibid., 602–5: “Esto ergo ut sit semita itinerantium arcta, plena mortibus, suspecta periculis; sed haec eadem uos amissam ducet ad patriam; per multas nimirum tribulationes oportet nos introire in regnum Dei. Spectate ergo animo, si prensi fueritis cruces, spectate catenas, quaecumque postremo possunt tormenta infligi; operimini profidei uestrae robore horrenda suplitia, ut, si necesse fuerit, dampno corporum agatis animarum remedium. Mortemne timetis, uiri fortissimi, fortitudine et audatia prestantes? Nichil certe in uos poterit comminisci humana nequitia quo superna pensetur floria; non enim sunt condignae passiones huius temporis, ad futuram gloriam quae reuelabitur in nobis.….Per mortem ergo liberae animae vel oblectantur gaudiis, spe meliora presumentes, vel fruuntur suplitiis, nichil peius timentes.”

43. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 98–99: “remissionem cunctorum scilicet peccatorum quantum ad penam et culpam et insuper vitam eternam.”

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 112–13: “crucesignati qui vere contriti et confessi ad Dei servitium accinguntur, dum in Christi servitio moriuntur, vere martires reputantur, liberati a peccatis venialibus simul et mortalibus, ab omni penitentia sibi injuncta, absoluti a pena peccatorum in hoc seculo, a pena purgatorii in alio, securi a tormentis gehenne, gloria et honore coronandi in eterna beatitudine.”

46. Ibid., 116–17; 208–9. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay likewise made this point in his chronicle; see The History of the Albigensian Crusade, 37, 60. For St. Bernard's statement, see Letters of St. Bernard, 461.

47. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 97.

48. Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 257.

49. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 57, 188. Crusade sermons by Jacques de Vitry and Gilbert of Tournai explicitly recognize this willingness to be parted from “one's spouse, children, relatives and birthplace for the service of Christ alone (uxorem, filios, consanguineos et natale solum pro Christi servitio relinquere)”; quoted from Vitry's sermon in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 112–13. Cf. Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 334–35. Gilbert tells almost the same exemplum, picturing a knight calling for his small sons as he leaves “so that by exciting my feelings towards them, I would leave them behind for Christ's sake with greater anguish of the mind, so that I would count for more with God (ut excitato affectu ad eos cum majori angustia mentis reliquam eos pro Christo et ita magis merear apud Deum)”: Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 202–3. Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 150 pictures the tears and groans as crusaders depart. William Chester Jordan notes an entire set of departure rituals in “The Rituals of War: Departure for Crusade in Thirteenth-Century France.” These rituals closely draw on practices preceding departure on pilgrimage.

50. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 259; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 291.

51. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 92.

52. BL Royal 7 D i f. 90, BL Arundel 52 f. 113b (told here of Thomas of Marle).

53. BL Arundel 52 f. 113b. For a similar story in a chronicle, see Shaw, Chronicles of the Crusades, 299; Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, 226. The idea that all crusaders suffer as martyrs, not merely those who die, appears clearly in Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 279–80.

54. Nicholson, 379.

55. Text in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 186–87.

56. Morris, “Crusading Propaganda,” 95.

57. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 164–65: “quasi alter latro pendens in cruce absolvitur in momento.”

58. Paris, Chronicles, 205, 276.

59. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 84–85.

60. Ibid., 128–29.

61. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 47; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 119.

62. BL Additional 11284 f. 22.

63. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 112–13: “nullo modo dubitetis quod non solum vobis ad remissionem peccatorum et eterne vite premium valet hec peregrinatio sed etiam uxoribus, filiis, parentibus, tam vivis quam defunctis, multum proderit quidquid boni feceritis in hac via pro ipsis.”

64. Ibid., 164–65: “caros suos qui sunt in purgatorio iuvari potest, si crucem et peregrinationem assumpserit pro eis.”

65. Paris, Chronicles, 244, 259.

66. Ibid., 158.

67. Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 362.

68. BL Additional 27909 B f. 11. In a Middle English romance the knights are told to show their best prowess; they may shortly come before God! See Conlee, ed., Prose Merlin, 48–49. Some crusaders took an understandably different view of enemy bolts. A man wearing a parchment on his chest with God's name upon it is struck by a crossbow bolt that pierces his armor but is stopped by the holy name on sheepskin. Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 104.

69. Levine, ed., Deeds of God Through the Franks, 43; the entire passage reads, “Indebita hactenus bella gessistis; in mutuas caedes vesana aliquotiens tela, solius cupiditatis ac superbiae causa, torsistis: ex quo perpetuos interitus et certa damnationis exitia meruistis. Nunc vobis bella proponimus quae in se habent gloriosum martyrii munus, quibus restat praesentis et aeternae laudis titulus.” RHC Occ 4: 138.

70. Fulcher, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 66–67; the entire Latin passage (136–37) reads, “Procedant, inquit, contra infideles ad pugnam iam incipi dignam et trophaeo explendam, qui abusive privatum certamen contra fideles etiam consuescebant distendere quondam. Nunc fiant Christi milites, qui dudum exstiterunt raptores; nunc iure contra barbaros pugnent, qui olim adversus fratres et consanguineos dimicabant; nunc aeterna praemia nanciscantur, qui dudum pro solidis paucis mercennarii fuerunt. Pro honore duplici laborent, qui ad detrimentum, corporis et animae se fatigabant.”

71. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, 590–99; “Fuerit auiditatis nimiae quod fraters uestros, illo magno et eodem pretio emptos, ut quisque poterat illaqueantes contumeliose pecuniis emunxistis. Nunc uobis, inter ista peccatorum naufragia constitutis, portus placidae quietis aperitur, nisi negligitis.”

72. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 88–89: “Non reputantes vere Christi milites qui aliquid panicellum, quod vulgari Gallico ‘pannuncel' apellatur; de armis eius non habent.”

73. Ibid. 172–75: “Non recte ergo crucem accipiunt qui aliena rapiunt et ea que debent non solvunt; et melius est homini ut ‘nudus Christum nudum sequatur' quam…sequatur diabolum.…Non enim vult Dominus ut de rapina vel furto vel de re aliena ei serviatur.”

74. Laisse 168 in Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, Girart de Vienne, and idem, Song of Girart of Vienne. I have somewhat modified Newth's translation. The French reads: “Franc chevalier, ennor vos est creüe! Ceste bataille ne soit plus meintenue; / gardez que plus ne soit par vos ferue, / car Damedeu la vos a deesfandue. / Mes en Espagne, sor la gent mescreüe, / soit vostre force prove et conneüe; / la sera bien vo proece veüe / por l'amour Deu conquerre.”

75. Prestwich, Edward I, 395: “Both sides accepted an offer of arbitration from the pope, Boniface VIII, though the French insisted that he act in his private, not his public, capacity.” Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 323: “In 1298 Boniface VIII persuaded Philip and Edward to let him arbitrate the quarrel as a private person, not as pope.”

76. As always, I use crusade here in its common usage and do not wish to enter debates over modern designations of what constituted a “true” crusade.

77. It was written by an eyewitness to the events of 1147 but seems to have been reworked several decades later, as argued by Jonathan Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade and Holy War in De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi.”

78. Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” 221.

79. Livermore, “The ‘Conquest of Lisbon' and Its Author.”

80. Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” passim.

81. Ibid., 126.

82. David, Expugnatione, 60–61: “Auanti illic penitentes, quanti peccata et neggligentias cum luctu confitentes et genitu, peregrinationis sue conversionem utcumque inceptam, inundatione lacrimarum diluentes, in ara cordis contriti.” The specific issue was the diversion of their crusade to Lisbon on the way to Jerusalem.

83. As was done in the case of a letter of exhortation sent by St. Bernard, in Latin, to the nobles and people of Bohemia. Bernard expected the bishop of Moravia, whom he characterized as a learned and holy man, to explain the contents. Bernard, Letters, Letter 392, p. 464.

84. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 3–4, notes that though sermons in general and crusade sermons in particular are often mentioned in chronicles, seldom do such accounts give details about content. Cf. 18 n. 4 and sources there. Like so much of what was presented to crusaders, this sermon has a strongly penitential and redemptive character. See the general discussion, 52, and Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” passim.

85. David, Expugnatione, 70–72: “constat profecto omnes honorum dignitates, ut eternum a Deo consequerentur premium, felici peregrinatione commutasse! Blandos uxorum affectus, inter ubera lactentium pia oscula, adultorum magis dilecta pignora, parentum et amicorum affectanda solatia, soli natalis tantum dulci remanente sed torquente memoria, Christum sequuti reliquere.”

86. See Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 57–59, 59.

87. David, Expugnatione, 72–73: “per tot terrarum et marium pericula et longi itineris dispendia.”

88. Ibid. On the theme of new baptism, see Constable, Three Studies, 149.

89. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 64–67; cf. the views of Jacques de Vitry, 84–85. Note that knights who become monks convert; knights who become crusaders convert temporarily. The idea of knights suffering as penance in their own order involves no conversion, but this does link them with broad movements toward religious life in the world, so typical of later medieval piety.

90. David, Expugnatione, 78–79: “nam iure hoc evenit ut quis que ob tutelam sui corporis fecerit iure fecisse arbitretur.”

91. Ibid.

92. Ibid., 82–83.

93. Ibid., 85.

94. Even if it was written up for this very purpose later, it shows the continuing influence of a powerful set of ideas.

95. David, Expugnatione, 90–99: “Ecce nubes nostra devicit! Ecce nobiscum Deus!”

96. Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” 222.

97. David, Expugnatione, 152–53: “O medicinam omnibus consulentem, tumentia comprimentem, tabescentia reficientem, superflua resecantem, necessaria custodientem, perdita reparantem, depravata corrigentem!”

98. Ibid. The Latin phrases are “Christum sequuti, exules spontanei, qui pauperiem voluntariam suscepistis,” and “quia inchoantibus promittitur sed perseverantibus premium donataur.”

99. Ibid., 154–55.

100. Ibid., 156–57; “si quem hoc insignitum mori contigerit, sibi vitam tolli non credimus, sed in melius mutari non ambigimus. Hic ergo vivere gloria est, et mori lucrum.” There may be here an echo of the Pauline formula that “for me to live is Christ, to die is gain.”

101. Ibid., 158–59: “Sique demum cum magna voce Dei postulantes auxilium…machinam contra murum appropinquavere.”

102. Ibid., 106–7: “Normannorum genus quis nesciat usu continuatae virtutis laborem recusare nullum?—quorum scilicet in summa asperitate semper durata militia, nec in adversitate cito subvertitur, nec in prosperitate, tot difficultatibus exercitata, segni valet otio subici, nam semper otii vitia discutere negotiis didicit.…Audite, fratres, et recolite corrigendo mores vestros.”

103. Ibid., 106–7: “de piaculo violate societatis taceam, vos ubique terrarum infames et ignominiosi venietis.”

104. Ibid., 112–13.

105. Ibid., 120–21: “ambitionem vestram rectitudinis zelum dicentes, pro virtutibus vitia mentimini.” The chronicler may be using the Muslims here to express suppressed Christian self-doubts. A similar passage appears in the chronicle of Matthew Paris, relating to the crusade of Louis IX in Egypt. The sultan is made to say: “What rash insanity incites them to attack us in the hopes of disinheriting us, who have inhabited this most noble country since the flood? Surely they do not want us to believe in their Christ against our will? Who can be converted or believe, unwillingly?” Paris, Chronicles, 246.

106. The composition and intent of the text are closely discussed in Caroline Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, 47–74. See also two essays in Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruelle, eds., Les Champenois et la croisade: Philippe Ménard, “L'esprit de la croisade chez Joinville” (131–47), and Armand Strubel, “Joinville, historien de la croisade?” (14–56). Danielle Quéruel edited another set of essays on Joinville in Jean de Joinville: de la Champagne aux royaumes d'outremer; and Jean Doufournet and Laurence Harf present another set of essays in Le prince et son historien: la vie de Saint Louis de Joinville.

107. Shaw, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, 329; Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, ed. Wailly, 279: “que peu sont de gens qui regardent au sauvement de lour ames ne à l'onnour de lour cors.”

108. Philippe Contamine notes, in “Joinville, acteur et spectateur de la querre d'outremer” (42), that “Pour l'étude de la mentalité et des motivations des chevaliers, l'apport de Joinville est exceptionnel.” He likewise notes (43) another tension: that between la gloire and the obedience owed to a chief and the need for military discipline.

109. As noted also by Jean-Pierre Perrot, “Le 'péché' de Joinville: é criteur du souvenir et imaginaire hagiographique,” 196–98. He notes the use of the idea of passio, drawn from the rhetoric of martyrdom.

110. Shaw, 265; Wailly, 170.

111. Shaw, 216; Wailly, 88.

112. Shaw, 181; Wailly, 30.

113. Shaw, 247, Wailly, 140: “nous fist demander se c'estoit voirs que nous créiens en un Dieu qui avoit estei pris pour nous, navrez et mors pour nous, et au tiers jour rescscitez.”

114. Shaw, 247; Wailly,140: “Et lors nous dist que nous ne nous deviens pas desconforter, se nous aviens soufertes ces persecucions pour li; ‘car encore dist-il, n'estes-vous pas mort pour li, ainsi comme il fu mors pour vous'…” As usual, Joinville simply tells what he saw, without answering any of the many questions this ancient's appearance and speech raise.

115. Wailly, 2 (my translation).

116. Shaw, 163–64; Wailly, 2–3: “Et de ce me semble-il que on ne li fist mie assez, quant on ne le mist ou nombre des martirs, pour les grans peinnes que il soffri ou pelerinaige de la croiz, parl'espace de six anz que je fu en sa compaignie, et pour ce meismement que il ensui Nostre-Signour ou fait de la croiz. Car se Diex morut en la croiz, aussi fist-il; car croissiez estoit il quant il morut a Thunes.”

117. Shaw, 167; Wailly 7: “aussi come Diex morut pour l'amour que il avoit en son peuple, mist-il son cors en avanture par plusours foiz pour l'amour que il avoit à son peuple; et s'en fust bien soufers, se il vousist.”

118. Shaw, 191; Wailly, 47.

119. Shaw, 295; Wailly, 217.

120. Shaw, 195; Wailly, 53: “ainsi alai à Blehecourt et a Saint-Urbain, et autres cors sains qui là sont. Et onques retourner mes yex vers Joinville, pour ce que le cuers ne me attendrisist dou biel chastel que je lessoie et de mes dous enfans.” Cf. Nicholson, Third Crusade, 150, for an entire paragraph of description of the misery. The departure scene was a standard of crusade writing; see Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, 60, 65–66.

121. Shaw, 196; Wailly, 55: “car l'on se dort le soir là où on ne sait se l'on se trouvera ou font de la mer au matin.”

122. See especially the scene of the armed landing, and that on the causeway: Shaw, 204, 222; Wailly, 68, 95–96.

123. Shaw, 239, 240, 252–53; Wailly, 126, 128, 148.

124. Shirley, Cathar Wars, 54; Martin-Chabot, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 1: 234.

125. Caroline Smith notes the interplay between clerical and secular modes in Crusading in the Age of Joinville, passim. Conceptions of martyrdom provide a good case in point: see ibid., 90–108, 139–49.

126. Shaw, 219; Wailly, 92.

127. Shaw, 293; Wailly, 214.

128. The English crusader William Longespee actually did leave Louis's service, over a charge by French lords that he had acquired booty illicitly. See Paris, Chronicles, 228–29. This chronicler pictures the saintly king groaning that such quarrels would destroy the crusaders. The actual departure of Philip II of France from the Third Crusade is well known.

129. Shaw, 346; Wailly, 306: “A ce respondi-je que, tandis comme je avoie estei ou servise Dieu et le roy outremer, et puis que je en reving, li serjant au roy de France et le roy de Navarre m'avoient destruite ma gent et apovroiez; si que il ne seroit jamais heure que je et il n'en vausis-sent piz. Et lour disoie ainsi, que se je en vouloie ouvrer au grei Dieu, que je demourroie ci pour mon peuple aidier et deffendre; car se je metoie mon cors en l'aventure dou pelerinaige de la croiz, là où je veoie tout cler que ce seroit au mal et au doumaige de ma gent, j'en courouceroie Dieu, qui mist son cors pour son peuple sauver. Je entendi que tuit cil firent pechié mortel qui li loerent l'alee.”

130. Joinville's self-assurance is all the more striking in being directed at a pious king. The royal closeness to orders of friars and reliance on them as agents of reform in the kingdom is stressed in William Chester Jordan's study, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 53–55, 63, 185.

131. The author of the Chronicle of the Third Crusade (ed. Nicholson, 76) refers to the bishop of Beauvais, “more devoted to battles than books,” as a man who could have equaled Turpin if he could have found a Charlemagne. Cf. 96, where an archdeacon of Colchester is said to wear a double laurel wreath of feats of arms and learning; and 119, where Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, is praised as a worthy knight and pastor.

132. Shaw, 261–62; Wailly, 164: “se hasta d'aler avec Dieu, et feri des esperons, et assembla aus Turs touz seus, qui à lour espées l'occistrent et le mistrent en la compaingnie Dieu, ou nombre des martirs.”

133. Shaw, 230; Wailly, 109: “Vez-ci le prestre mon signour de Joinville, qui a les huit Sarrazins desconfiz.” In 1171, during the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, a monk named Nicholas “in a religious habit” is much praised for having killed an enemy leader with an arrow. Mullally, The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland, lines 1128–33.

134. Shaw, 298; Wailly, 223: “Ne troublés pas vostre conscience quant li patriarches ne vous absout; car il a tort, et vous avés droit; et je vous absoil en non dou Pere et dou Fil et dou Saint-Esperit. Alons à aus!”

135. Shaw, 243; Wailly, 132.

136. Studied by Jean Flori in “Pur eshalcier sainte crestiënté: Croisade, guerre sainte, et guerre juste dans les anciennes chansons de geste française.” See also Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, passim. For a general case for the independence of chanson de geste with regard to claims championed by the Gregorian papacy, see Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 231–53.

137. Flori, “Pur eshalcier sainte crestiënté,” 185.

138. Strickland, War and Chivalry, 34.

CHAPTER 5. KNIGHTLY IDEOLOGY DEVELOPED AND DISSEMINATED

1. Jean Flori entitled his biography of Richard Richard Coeur de Lion, le roi cheavalier.

2. Books providing important analysis of the origins of chivalric ethos include Keen, Chivalry; Flori, L'Essor de la chevalerie; Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals; Strickland, War and Chivalry; and Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France. That I have learned from these books on many points and disagreed with them on other points will be evident.

3. The evidence defies full citation. In addition to the examples given below, see the dozens of texts reproduced in the collection “Textes de Français Ancien” on the ARTFL website, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/TLA/. Dana Sample conducted an electronic search for me, using a range of Old French terms relating to suffering. The results were impressive and voluminous.

4. Brandin, La Chanson d'Aspremont, lines 6102–6: “‘Baron, or del sofrir. / Se ci morés, tot esters martir; / Avec les sains vos fera Dex server, / En paradis coroner et florir: / Illuec arés trestot desir.'”

5. Suard, Chanson de Guillaume, laisse 43.

6. Ibid., laisse 44. The quotation appears at lines 545–48: “Car saint Estephne ne les alters martirs / ne furent mieldres que serrunt tut icil / Qui en Larchamp serrunt pur Deu ocis!”

7. Ibid., laisse 69.

8. Ibid., laisse 72.

9. Ibid., laisse 107: “Trop par es enfess e de petit eé, / Si purreies ne traviller ne pener, / La nuit veiller ne de jur juner, / La grant bataille suffrir n'endurer.” Translation is by Lynette Muir in Glanville Price, William, Count of Orange: Four Old French Epics. Cf. Tusseau, ed., La Prise d'Orange, laisse 2.

10. Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, lines 470–71.

11. Kelly, “Love in the Perlesvaus: Sinful Passion or Redemptive Force?” 9; cf. his Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, A Structural Study, 157–80. The opening paragraph of the Perlesvaus refers to the truth established by writing and by the witness of knights “comme il voldrent soffrir paine e travail de la loi Jhesu Crist essaucier.”

12. Quotations from Bryant, trans., Perlesvaus 237–38; French in Nitze and Jenkins, eds., Perlesvaus, 367 and 369.

13. Pauphilet, Queste del Saint Graal, 124; Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 40.

14. Matarasso, Quest of the Holy Grail, 65–66; Pauphilet, Queste del Saint Graal, 40: “se Diex plaist, l'onor de chevalerie sera en lui bien sauve; car por peine qu'il li coviegne a soffrir ne remaindra il mie.” Knights on the Grail quest are said to suffer “les granz peines et les granz travauz”; Pauphilet, Queste, 235. More than once this text reminds its readers that Christ had suffered for his knights: e.g., Pauphilet, Queste, 84.

15. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 191–93; Paris and Ulrich, Merlin, 1: 233–42.

16. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 130; Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 306. He is bleeding from the mouth; he thinks he will die without confession; he faints, and is thought to be dead.

17. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4:198; Roussineau, La Suite du roman de Merlin, 1: 113: “Cele bataille sans faille, qui tant fu crueus et felenesse, comment cha a eure de tierce et dura dusques a eure de viespres. Et se li rois Loth ne fust si tres bon chevaliers comme il estoit, si houme eussent esté plus tost desconfi qui il ne furent. Mais il tous seus soustenoit le fais de la bataille par deviers soi que tout cil qui l'esgardoient se sainnoient a mierveilles qe il puet endurer la moitié de chou que il souffroit. Il enpren doit si toutes les proueches et tous le caus a faire.”

18. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 1: 51; Sommer, ed., Vulgate Version, 1: 80–81.

19. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 5: 186; Bogdanow, ed., Version post-Vulgate, 2: 455.

20. Holden, Gregory, and Crouch, History of William Marshal, lines 48–51.

21. Ibid., lines 10110–12.

22. Brault, La Chanson de Roland, lines 1010–14.

23. History of William Marshal. lines 280–83, 2175–82, 7208–15, 8870–76, 9475–86, 9498–9502.

24. Ibid., lines 1488–93, 4912–16.

25. Ibid., lines 704–8, 1764–66, 1864–68, 14455–63.

26. Hopkins, Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance, 3.

27. Benson, King Arthur's Death, lines 1850–52, 1855–60: “In the front of the firth, as the way forthes, / Fifty thousand of folk was felled at ones. / There was at the assemblee certain knightes / Some wounded soon upon sere halves. /…They sheerd in the sheltron shelded knightes / Shalkes they shot through shrinkand mailes; / Through brenyes browden brestes they thirled, / Bracers burnisht bristes in sonder / Blasons bloody and blonkes they hewen, / With brandes of brown steel, brankand steeds!”

28. Ibid., lines 2781–83: “All the flesh of the flank he flappes in sonder / That all the filth of the freke and fele of his guttes / Followes his fole foot when he forth rides!” and 3234–45: “There lions full lothly licked their tuskes / All for lapping of blood of my lele knightes!”

29. Conlee, Prose Merlin, lines 88–89, my emphasis.

30. Ibid., 154: the king swears, “so helpe me God, yef I might fynde a yonge bachelor that were a worthi man of armes that might wele endure peyne and travayle to meyntene my werre, to hym wolde I yeve my doughter.” Likewise, we might note that the term martyrdom (martirdom, borrowed from the Old French noun martire) appears in this text; phrases such as “soche martirdom and soche slaughter of men and of horse” appear, for example, at 144. The usage has come to mean merely slaughter or great suffering. Though derived from Christian usage, it carries no explicit religious meaning. Saracens are martyred, as in Conlee, Prose Merlin, 127, 135–36, 145.

31. Lydgate, Troy Book, line 1156.

32. Laisse 236 in Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont, and Newth, Song of Aspremont. The French reads: “Or me faites oïr, / Je suis uns om qui ne vos doi mentir: / Ki or ira sor Sarrasins ferir / Et le martire volra por Deu sofrir, / De xli fera paradis ovrir; / La nos fera coroner et florir / Et a sa destre nos fera seïr / Tes vos pechiés, sans bocce regechir, / Vuel hui sor moi de par Deu receullir; / La penitence sera del bien ferir.”

33. Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, Song of Girart de Vienne, trans. Newth, lines 6871–83; Yeandle, Girart de Vienne, lines 6876–84: “‘Seignor baron, a moi entendez ça. / Je sui es leu de Deu qui tot forma, / Et de seint Pere que a Rome estora, / A cui pooir des pecheors donna / De pardoner qanque il mes fet a. / Qui sor paiens ore aler en voudra, / Avec le roi qui France a garder a, / De ses pechiez trestoz quites sera, / En l'annor Deu qui le mont estora.' / Dient François: ‘Come haut pardon ci a.'”

34. Laisse 168 in Newth and Yeandle: “en Espagne sor la gent mescreüe / Soit vostre force prove et conneüe. / La sera bien vo proece veüe / Por l'amor Deu conquerre.”

35. Newth, Song of Aspremont, and Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont, lines 3969–71: “Je n'irai par ma foi. / Armes ai bones et ceval a mon qoi; / Jo nel la'rai que grans cols n'i employ / Et rendrai Deu tot ce que je li doi; / M'armes et mon cors quitement li otroi,'” Joinville narrates a historical case of a crusader who fears loss of honor if he goes for much needed help: Histoire de Saint Louis, ed. Wailly, 93–95; Shaw, trans., Chronicles of the Crusades: Joinville and Villehardouin, 220–21.

36. Laisses 420–23 in Newth and Brandin. In both cases the problem is solved by Archbishop Turpin, who volunteers to act as messenger and later as standard bearer. For the second service he extracts from the pope permission to act as both cleric and knight.

37. Ibid., lines 3960–61: “Ains serai hui em paradis flori / O les aposteles honorés et servi.”

38. Laisse 46.

39. Ambroise, The Crusade of Richard Lion-Heart, lines 3131–42, 12216–22. See the comments of Jacques de Vitry in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 112–13. The sermons Maier prints show repeatedly that crusading is itself a species of conversion and do not insist on salvific death sustained while on crusade.

40. Romances also valorize the knightly ordo, itself religiously based. This, too, will be considered shortly.

41. Schmidt and Jacobs, Middle English Romances, 6.

42. For Frappier's many insights see his Autour du Graal and Chrétien de Troyes et le myth du Graal. At page 156 in the latter, Frappier says Perceval is to represent “chevalerie très pieuse vivant dans le siècle.” My thanks to Raymond Cormier for this reference. Frappier even sees the sinner Lancelot moving through grace to the highest Christian virtues in La Mort le Roi Artu; see his Étude sur La Mort le Roi Artu, 218–58.

43. Looking ahead to a topic explored closely in Chapter 7, it is worth noting here that all three linked sets of ideas were encompassed within the concept of a divinely ordained chivalric ordo. By elevating and defending this idea of an ordo of bellatores, one writer after another in effect awarded spiritual merit to knighthood in general: the knightly ordo, approved in highest heaven after all, was not composed of crusaders only. Whenever we encounter glorification and defense of a sanctified knightly ordo we can read it as a shorthand representation for the sets of linked ideas that generated and diffused a chivalric ideology.

44. “The Life of Pope Leo IX,” in Robinson, The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century, 149, 151.

45. Suger, Deeds of Louis the Fat, 37, and Vie de Louis VI le Gros, 30: “Thomam de Marna optinuisse, hominem perditissimum, Deo et hominibus infestum.” Suger asserts clerical control when he assures his readers that Louis had at his coronation given up the sword of secular knighthood to take on the ecclesiastical sword used to punish evildoers, but here is another distinction destined to fade in chivalric ideology.

46. Deeds of Louis the Fat, 80, 94; Vie de Louis VI le Gros, 120: “impios pie trucidant.”

47. Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France, 204–6. The conservative Guibert of Nogent is scathing about Bishop Godfrey's assertion that royalist forces at Laon will merit the kingdom of heaven if they die in the fight.

48. Deeds of Louis the Fat, 129; Vie de Louis VI le Gros, 222: “tanquam Saracenos.”

49. Quoted and briefly discussed in Douglas, English Historical Documents, 2: 314. For the original Latin passage see Howlett, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, 3: 151 ff.

50. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, 193, says that in the thirteenth century the combination of pilgrimage and holy war inherent in crusade shifted from primary emphasis on pilgrimage to emphasis on holy war, which dominated for the rest of the Middle Ages. In his view, we can only with great difficulty call crusades in Europe against Christians pilgrimages, but they are holy wars.

51. Moore, Pope Innocent III, 41–42.

52. Ibid., 66–67.

53. PL 221 cols. 780–82, quotation from col. 781. The enormities committed by Markward's force are described in lurid language: “Deposuit siquidem, sicut quondam, diruere muros urbium redigere civitates in villas, captivare nobiles, torquere ac mutilare potentes, spoliare divites, pauperes flagellare, trucidare coram patribus filios et adulterare conjuges ante viros, per vim violare virgins et gladio perimere repugnantes” (col. 780).

54. Ambroise, History of the Holy War, 1: line 1432, translated by Ailes in 2: 51; the French reads, “Peors sarazins ne velt querre.”

55. See the useful generalizations made by Sibly and Sibly at the conclusion of their edition of Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay's History of the Albigensian Crusade, 313–20. Cf. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades, passim. Some crusaders—the elder Simon de Montfort a famous example—argued against diversion of the crusade and left the expedition to Zara, going instead directly to the Holy Land to fulfill their vows.

56. Shirley, The Song of the Cathar Wars, 89; Martin-Chabot, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 2: 118: “‘Senhors, de part de Dieu e del comte'n somo: / Cel que fara'l mur sec ne re I metra del so. / Que de Dieu e del conte n'ara bon gazerdo, / E desobre mas ordes aura salvacio.' Trastug essensescridan: ‘Tuit anem al perdo!'”

57. See the argument of Michael Lower in The Barons' Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences.

58. Newth, Aymeri of Narbonne, 124; Demaison, Aymeri de Narbonne, 2: 167.

59. Foulet and Uitti, Le chevalier de la charette, line 2147: “Qui sont pires que les Sarrasins.”

60. Lecoy, Le Roman de la Rose, 1: 206, lines 6723–28: “Mes, que cist dex plus net e tiegne, / de Mainfrai wel qu'il te soviegne, / de Henri et de Corradin, / qui firent pis que Sarradin / de conmencier bataille amere / contre Sainte Iglise, leur mere.”

61. See Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, 37, 73, 198, respectively; idem, Petri Vallium Sarnaii monachi Hystoria albigensis. The final reference to a slaughter at Beziers comes from Shirley, Song of the Cathar Wars, 21; cf. 32 for a reference to the southerners' hatred of the French and Lombards as “worse than Saracens.”

62. Deschamps, Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, 3: 140, lines 33–34 of a chançon on the “Révolte des Maillotins à Paris” in 1381: “Car pis ont fait que ne font Sarrazins: / Saint Germain ont assailli les sotars.”

63. Coopland, Le Songe du Veiel Pelerin, 1: 531: “il se puet dire selon la foy crestienne qu'ilz sont pires devant Dieu que Sarrazins. Et certainement se puet dire moralment que en la guerre des mescreans encontre les Crestiens, les mescreans ne sont pas si cruelx envers les Crestiens, et de l'eglise, des nobles, et du peuple comme sont les dessusdiz pillars.”

64. Ermengard in some translations.

65. Chanson d'Aspremont, lines 1447–50.

66. Kay, Raoul de Cambrai, laisse 67.

67. Langlois, Couronnement de Louis; Hoggan, trans., Crowning of Louis, in Price, William, Count of Orange: Four Old French Epics.

68. Langlois, line 1408.

69. Langlois, lines 2089–90; Hoggan, 42.

70. Langlois, lines 2018–19; Hoggan, 42.

71. Langlois, lines 1408, 2018–19, 2089–90.

72. A chanson extolling the deeds of William's father, Aymeri de Narbonne, comments on this very point, stating that William's hard life of honorable fighting had earned God's love. See Newth, Aymeri of Narbonne, 142; and Demaison, Aymeri de Narbonne, 1: 189–90.

73. Geoffrey of Monmouth: Historia Regum Britannie, vol. 1; see also the midthirteenth-century Latin paraphrase written in Brittany, ibid., 5: 231–33. Wace: Weiss, Wace's Roman de Brut; see 292–327 for the invasion and battle. Lawman's description of the forces and battle comes at lines 12651–67 and 13635–41 in Brook and Leslie, Lazaman: Brut; he is even more explicit, denouncing the enemies of the Britons as followers of Mahound, hated of God, etc.

74. Wright, Historia, 1, and 5: 238–47. Weiss, Wace, 327–29; Brook and Leslie, Lazamon: Brut, lines 14104–19.

75. For what follows, see Bryant, Merlin and the Grail, 165–66, 169. The emperor compounds his wrong by marrying a beautiful Saracen princess.

76. As we will see below, this valorization continues in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and in Malory.

77. Benson, ed., Foster, rev., King Arthur's Death. That Arthur's goals may later grow dangerously grandiose is a theme, pressed very forcefully in essays collected in Göller, The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Reassessment of the Poem. For a recent review of the considerable scholarship on this poem, see DeMarco, “An Arthur for the Riccardian Age: Crown, Nobility and the Alliterative Morte Arthure.”

78. Bensen and Foster, King Arthur's Death, lines 569–623.

79. Ibid., lines 3802–5.

80. Ibid., lines 3988–94.

81. Ibid., lines 4087–90.

82. Malory, Works, 707–8.

83. Kelly, “Love in the Perlesvaus,” 3.

84. Ibid., 9.

85. See Chapter 2.

86. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 73, Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 165: “Et por lor grant desloialte auoient il si torne chaus de cest chastel quil estoient pior de sarasins. ne ne faisoient rien que contre dieu ne fust et contre sainte eglize…tant de honte que se ce fuissent sarasin.”

87. Ibid. Of course, there is a stick as well as a carrot in this text. The mass of unregenerate knights fail in the quest and must listen to condemnations of sexual laxity through homilies on virginity; they must get pride regularly ground out of their bodies in hard experiences that they come to understand only when one of the small army of hermits patiently explains matters.

88. Sommer, Vulgate Version 3: 60; Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 32; Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 72: “Et si nous sera honours au siecle et preus as armes se nous i mourons por els. Car por son lige signor deliurer de mort droit len mettre son cors en abandon sans contredit. Et qui en muert il est autresi sauf com sil moroit sor les sarasins qui sont anemi nostre signor ihesu crist.”

89. Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 476; Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 199; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 3: 359: “nest cil qui destruit ceste vie sans forfeit pire que sarazins et se ie aloie outré meir sour les destruiseors de la crestiente il me seroit a bien iugie. Car puis que ie sui crestiens ie doi ester vengieres a mon pooir de la mort ihesu crist don't irai ie mon fil vengier qui crestiens est/ si li aiderai encontre cels qui sont en lieu de mescreans.”

90. Holt, Magna Carta, 263, 364.

91. Moore, Innocent III, 251, citing Cheney and Semple, Selected Letters of Innocent III, 221, letter 85. Yet not long after, in a rapidly changing situation, Guala, the papal legate in England, made a form of holy war out of the fight of English royalists against the French invaders under Prince Louis. These blessed royalists wore white crusading crosses; they were absolved by clerics before battle and described their recruits as converts; see Clanchy, England and Its Rulers, 144–45.

92. Holden, Gregory, and Crouch, eds., History of William Marshal, line 16139.

93. Ibid., lines 16150–51.

94. Ibid., line 16181.

95. Ibid., lines 16190–91.

96. Ibid., line 16197.

97. Ibid., lines 16227–32: “Les assolt en remission / De lors pecchez e en pardon, / De trestoz icels que il firent / Puis icele ure qu'il nasquirent, / Si qu'il en fussent quitement / Salvé al jor del jugement.”

98. Ibid., line 16233.

99. Ibid., lines 16292–98: “Dex qui ses buens veit e descuevre, / Nos met ui en son paradis; / De ce sui je certeins e fis; / E se nos lé vencons, sanz fable, / Nos avrons enor pardurable / Conquise a trestoz nose ages, / A nos e a toz nos lignages.”

100. Ibid., lines 16312–13: “Come proz e comme leials / E comme sages chevaliers.”

101. Ibid., lines 16378–400.

102. Ibid., line 16628.

103. Ibid., lines 17313–18.

104. Ibid., line 17328.

105. Ibid., line 17509.

106. Maurice Keen discusses this general phenomenon in “War, Peace, and Chivalry,” in his collected essays, Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages, 9–20.

CHAPTER 6. THE HERO AND THE SUFFERING SERVANT

1. See the overview in Marx, The Devil's Rights and the Redemption.

2. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, 215. He discusses this theory in general at 207–11.

3. See Southern's thoughtful discussion, ibid., 197–227.

4. Anselm, “Cur Deus Homo,” in S. Anselmi Opera Omnia 2: 42–133; idem, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, 295–389. Cf. Southern, Saint Anselm, 197–227, 279; John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 3–6; and Woolf, “Doctrinal Influences on the Dream of the Rood.” The study of Dániel Deme, The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury, is primarily concerned with the continuing theological relevance of Anselm's Christology in the modern world.

5. Quotation is from Southern, Saint Anselm, 223.

6. Anselm, “Cur Deus Homo,” 2, c. 6.

7. Southern, Saint Anselm, 201.

8. Ibid., 224–25.

9. Ibid.

10. Shaw, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, 169; Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, ed. Wailly, 14: “Vraiement…c'est bien respondu, que ceste response que vous avez faite, cest escripte en cest livre que je tieing en ma main.” Lea Shopkow noticed this evidence in History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, 213–14.

11. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, 302.

12. Ibid., 303. Even St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his De Laude Novae Militiae (Opera, 3:229; In Praise of the New Knighthood, 154), mused about the contemporary identification with Christ's suffering more than with his life or teachings. In his chapter meditating on the Holy Sepulcher he confessed puzzlement over greater pious devotion to places where Christ's dead body rested than to places where he lived and taught. This passage is quoted in Chapter 3 note 14. And In Praise of the New Knighthood, 156: “For if he had not suffered physically, he would not have paid the debt, and if he had not died willingly his death would have been without merit.”

13. David Aers in Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy, 23; cf. 16 ff.

14. Southern, Saint Anselm, 210–11; Clanchy, Abelard, A Medieval Life, 282–83. Abelard and his followers, for example, saw in the incarnation of Christ not legal redemption but a great act of love that humans should emulate. Christ gave humans “an example by word and deed of enduring until death.”

15. We will see similar choices available to advocates of knighthood in cases of ordines and labor in Chapter 7 and confession and penance in Chapter 8.

16. Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 112–13.

17. Ross, Middle English Sermons, 39: “suffred so peynfull dethe for vs vpon þe Crosse for to delyvere vs from þe peynes of hell and owte of þe dewels poure.”

18. Ibid., 37: “I seye euery man was gette in bateyll þrough þe myghtfull dethe þat Crist suffred on þe Rode Tree.”

19. Henry, duke of Lancaster, Livre de seyntz medicines, 138.

20. Ibid., 95.

21. Ibid., 179.

22. Ibid., 80.

23. Ibid., 6. Cf. the language of battles against sin, the devil, and death at 162.

24. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 87.

25. Of course, images of Christ as warrior were much older, as that magnificent Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood establishes. In this eighth-century text, Christ “the young warrior…/ stripped himself; climbed the high gallows, / Gallantly before the throng, resolved to loose Man's bonds” (lines 39–41). See Woolf, “Doctrinal Influences on the Dream of the Rood.” Our interest, however, must focus on High and Late Medieval works. There is an unusual Christ-knight story from c. 1400 in John Mirk, Mirk's Festial, ed. Erbe, 119–20. Christ appears as a knight who frees a lion (faithful) bound to a tree. Then leaves to go home (heaven), and the lion tries to follow, but drowns (pains of death).

26. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion, 65–66, quoting the Latin text.

27. The image is old. Even Gregory VII used the standard formula: as Christ laid down his life for men, so they should lay down their lives for their brethren. Cited and briefly discussed in Cowdrey, “The Spirituality of Pope Gregory VII,” 3.

28. Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont, lines 4772–77; my translation slightly modifies that of Newth, Song of Aspremont: “‘Dex,’ dist Gerars, ‘par ton saintime non, / Ja ving jo, Sire, por toi en Aspremon. / De tant franc home ai faite noreçon, / Don't je vos fis ier matin livrisson; / Ne vos sai traire de ce alter sermon: / Por nos morustes et nos por vos moron'.” Cf. lines 7659–61, where the message is repeated in a sermon by the pope: “Quint Dex por nos la mort en endura / Et il por nos ocire se laissa, / Faisons por lui ce qu'il fist por nos ja / Molt iert garis qui por luii i morra.”

29. Suard, Chanson de Guillaume, lines 813–16: “Sainte Marie, mere genitriz, / Si verreiement cum Deus portas a fiz, / Garisez mei, pur ta sainte merci, / Que ne mocient cist felon Sarazin.” Translation is by Lynette Muir, “Capture of Orange,” in Price, William of Orange: Four Old French Epics.

30. Suard, lines 818–24; trans. Muir. The French reads: “Mult pensai ore que fols et que brixs, / que mun cors quidai de la mort garir, / quant Dampnedeu meismes nel fist, / que pur nus mort en sainte croiz soffri / par nuis raindre de noz mortels enemis. / Respit de mort, sire, ne te dei jo rover, / car a fei meisme ne la voilsis pardoner.” The pope sweetens his message, as Duke Girart had earlier, by promising thoroughly earthly wealth to those who survive.

31. Suard, lines 310–14: “Et jo raft vus de Deu le rei fort, / et en cel esperit qu'il out en sun cors / pur pecchurs quant il suffri la mort, / ne vus faldrai pur destresce de mun cors” (translation by Muir).

32. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannie, ed. Wright, 5: 182–85 (facing pages, Latin text and English translation). Once again a text recalls the painted manuscript image with which this book began.

33. Ambroise, The Crusade of Richard Lion-Heart, lines 1186–92; cf. lines 1223–28.

34. Bryant, High Book of the Grail: Perlesvaus, 238; Nitze and Jenkins, Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, 368: “il n'est nul si bele chevalerie come cele est que l'on fait por la loi Deu essaucier, e por lui se doit l'on miex pener que por toz les autres; autresi com il mist son cors en paine e en travaill e en exill por nos, si doit chascuns le sien metre por lui.”

35. Lupack, Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, “Siege of Milan,” lines 697–708: “Criste for the sufferde mare dere, / Sore wondede with a spere, / And werede a crown of thorne: And now thou dare noughte in the felde / For hym luke undir thy schelde, / I tell thi saul for lorne. Men will deme aftir thi day / How falsely thou forsuke thi laye / And calle the Kynge of Skornne.”

36. Shaw, Joinville, 167, Wailly, Histoire, 7: “aussi comme Diex morut pour l'amour que il avoit en son peuple, mist-il son cors en avanture par plusieurs fois pour l'amour que il avoit à son peuple.”

37. Shaw, 163; Wailly, 2–3. The History of the Holy Grail argues that “the good…will undertake to suffer the difficult burden of earthly exploits of chivalry in order to learn about the marvels of the Holy Grail and the lance.” Chase, in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 1:51; Hucher, Le Saint Graal, 2:311: “pour les grans peinnes que il souffri ou pelerinage de la croiz, par l'espace de six anz que je fu en sa compaignie, et pour ce meismement que il ensui Nostre-Signour au fait de la croiz. Car se Diex morut en la croiz, aussi fist-il, car crosiez estoit-il quant il mourut à Thunes.”

38. At the opening of Chapter 7 we will see the knight Owen putting himself into avanture in entering purgatory.

39. Shaw, 247; Wailly, 182, 184. The story of Louis on crusade is filled with meritorious suffering: his mother considers him a dead man as soon as he takes the cross (Shaw, 191; Wailly, 47); Joinville suffers from leaving his home and his children behind (Shaw, 195; Wailly, 53); Joinville is troubled by fears of sea travel (Shaw, 196; Wailly, 54–55); in fact, trials and tribulations are frequently emphasized (as in Shaw, 216, 240, 262, 265, 267–68); at one point Joinville is pointedly told by a papal legate that their suffering on crusade contrasts sharply with luxurious conditions at the papal court (Shaw, 317; Wailly, 257). Yet deliberately seeking martyrdom is not accepted, as when the crusaders ignore a baker's advice to let themselves be killed by their Saracen captors and thus earn martyrdom (Shaw, 243; Wailly, 132). The king personally carried hods used to build a fortification, however, wishing like all the rest to earn the indulgence promised (Shaw, 295; Wailly, 217).

40. Discussed in Catto, “Religious Change Under Henry V,” 107–9. It is interesting that the new services at this time also included offices of the Five Wounds, the Crown of Thorns, and the Compassion of the Virgin, all obviously stressing righteous suffering. Religious foundations at Sheen and Syon similarly emphasized rigorous austerity.

41. General works: Le May, The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in English Literature; Waldron, “Langland's Originality: The Christ-Knight and the Harrowing of Hell,” and sources there. See Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature.”

42. Tolkien, Ancrene Riwle, Ancrene Wisse; see 198ff. Abundant citations to the voluminous literature on this text appear in Millett, Annotated Bibliography of Old and Middle English Literature, vol. 2, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group. My references were taken before I had access to Hasenfratz, Ancrene Wisse.

43. Tolkien, Ancrene Riwle, Ancrene Wisse, 182: “nis he a cang cniht þe secheÐ reste I þe feht & eise in þe place?”

44. Ibid., 182–83.

45. Ibid., 199: “and scheawede þuruh knihtschipe þet he was luue-wurde.”

46. Ibid., “He dude him ine turnement hefde uor his leofmannes luuve, his schelde ine uihte, ase kene kniht.”

47. It also gives the first use of Middle English words for tournament and chivalry, as Bennett noted in Poetry of the Passion, 64.

48. Le May, Allegory of the Christ-Knight, 22. Cf. Innes-Parker, “The Lady and the King.”

49. Le May, Allegory of the Christ-Knight, 22..

50. Text printed by Jubinal and Wright and discussed below.

51. As characterized by Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 271.

52. Ibid., 219.

53. Bryant, High Book of the Grail: Perlesvaus, 160; Nitze and Jenkins, Haut Livre 249: “Il se traient atant arrier, et oent la dedenz mener la plus grant joie que nus oïst onques, et entendent que le pluseur dient la dedenz que cil est enuz par cui il ierent sauvé en ii. manieres sauvé des vies, et sauvé des ames, se De xli lesse conquerre le chevalier qui porte l'esperit du deable.”

54. Bryant, High Book of the Grail: Perlesvaus, 161; Nitze and Jenkins, Haut Livre, 250: “que tot cil du chastel et d'autres chastiaz don't cil estoit garde, q'il tendroient la Viez Loi tresque a icele eure que li Bons Chevaliers seroit venuz' et por ce distrent il eu chastel tantost com il vint, que cil estoit venuz par qui lor ames seroient sauvees et lor mort respitiee; car il corurent tantost com it fu venuz au batesme, et creürent la Trinitéfermement, et tindrent la Novele Loi.”

55. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 5; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 7–8.

56. Using Asher's translation in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 190–91; Paris and Ulrich, Merlin: Roman en Prose, 1: 231–32.

57. Paul Meyer prints this in “Notice et extraits du MS 8336 de la Bibliothèque du Sir Thomas Phillipps a Cheltenham,” quotation at 530–31.

58. The next line pictures Christ as a knight acting on behalf of love.

59. See the discussion of “Saint Patrick's Purgatory” in Chapter 7 for another example of blended categories of expression.

60. It was first printed in Jubinal, Novel recueil de contes, 2: 309, and then by Thomas Wright, as an appendix to his edition of Peter of Langtoft, Chronicle of Pierre Langtoft, Appendix 2, 426–36.

61. Peter of Langtoft, Chronicle Appendix 2: 426–27: “Tant fu de pruesce son noun renome, / Qe sa chevalerie de tyrant fut doté.”

62. Ibid., 428–29.

63. Ibid., 430–31.

64. Ibid., 432–35.

65. Ibid., 436–37

66. Paris, Matthæi Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, 4: 593.

67. Henry, Duke of Lancaster, Le livre de seyntz medicines, 138; Piers Plowman, B Text Passus 19.

68. “And þanne should Ihesus juste þere-fore bi juggement of armes, / Whether shulde fonge þe fruit þe fende or hymselue.”

69. “Iusted in ierusalem a joye to vs alle.”

70. “wole juste in piers armes, / In his helme & in his haberioun humana natura.”

71. References to both are provided in Gaffney, “The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in Piers Plowman.”

72. BL Harley 219 f. 33, an early fifteenth-century book presenting Cheriton's tales from the thirteenth century.

73. See Wenzel, Preachers, Poets and the Early English Lyric, 234 n. 68.

74. “Tres persone Trinitatis possunt vocari milites rotunde tabule, quia omnes sunt equales virtutis et potencie.” The text continues, “Legitur in gestis arturi quod habuit milites nobiles de tabula rotunda et quando congregabantur simul, singuli super parietem castelli pendebant sua scuta. Et si quis scutum alicuius tangebat, possessor scuti cum tangente pugnabat.”

75. Warner, “Jesus the Jouster: The Christ-Knight and Medieval Theories of the Atonement in Piers Plowman and the ‘Round Table' Sermons,” 136–38. The Latin reads, “Ideo Filium oportebat descendere et defendere scutum et pugnare cum diabolo.”

76. Plentiful references in Le May, Christ-Knight; Gaffney, “Allegory”; Warner, “Jesus the Jouster”; Woolf, “Christ the Lover-Knight”; and Wenzel, Preachers, 233–38 (which quotes some remarkable examples).

77. Ross, Middle English Sermons, 37–39. A hermit meets an unarmed knight (an indication of human nature, not divine power) going to fight a giant to free prisoners he holds. The knight's coat of arms has a black bier (his suffering), white lily (his lady), and five roses (wounds). He wins humankind in battle.

78. Offord, The Book of the Knight of the Tower Translated by William Caxton, 14: “As the swete Ihesu Cryst dyd whiche faught for the pyte of vs / and of all the humayn lygnage.”

79. Ibid., 141: “And thus for pyte and Fraunchyse fought the gentyll knyght / and receyued v / mortalle woundes As the swete ihesu Cryst dyd whiche faught for the pyte of vs / and of al the humayn lygnage / For grete pyte he hadde to see them goo and falle in the tenebres of helle / wherfore he suffred and susteyned alone the bataylle moche hard and cruell on the tree of the holy Crosse / And was his sherte broken and perced in fyue places that is to wete the fyue dolorous woundes whiche he receyued of his debonayr and free wylle / in his dere body for the pyte that he had of vs.”

CHAPTER 7. KNIGHTHOOD AND THE NEW LAY THEOLOGY: ORDINES AND LABOR

1. Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 14: 245–46. All quotations in the following discussion are drawn from these pages.

2. The text states this is done “ad certificandam notitiam literis tradimus.”

3. The Mauvoisin family were lords of Rosny on the Seine. A family tree appears in Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries, appendix 20.

4. The monks report, “quotidie et penè totâ die de monachatu loquebatur devotissimè.”

5. The monastic ideal for knighthood appears in a highly visual exemplum purveyed by Caesarius of Heisterbach. The knight Walewan rode fully armed down the central aisle at the monastery of Hemmerode, to the altar devoted to the Blessed Virgin, and there took off his worldly armor to become a soldier of Christ: Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, ed. Scott and Bland, vol. 1, ch. 37, 49; idem, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Strange, 45. Monastic ambiguity over knighthood appears clearly in two stories told by the worldly cleric Walter Map later in the century. In one, a former knight extracts permission to leave the cloister at Cluny and win back lands taken from his son before returning to the life he had vowed to follow. In the second story, another knight leaves Cluny, promising not to fight personally, but becomes involved, is mortally wounded while unarmored, and—confessing to his squire—plans a fearsome penance of torment in hell lasting until judgment day. Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. James, rev. Brooke; cf. the older translation by Tupper and Ogle, Master Walter Map's Book, 22–25, 215–18. Stories about knights often do not distinguish hell and purgatory: this knight obviously had hopes of heaven after he had been purged in hell until judgment day..

6. For the Latin text see Easting, St. Patrick's Purgatory. An English translation of the Tractatus is given in Pontfarcy and Picard, St. Patrick's Purgatory. For the popular Old French translation of Marie de France, see Curley, Saint Patrick's Purgatory. The Middle English text “Sir Owain” appears in Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, On the date of the Tractatus, see the sources in Easting, St. Patrick's Purgatory, lxxxiv, n. 1; his useful list of sources appears in ibid., n. 2, and xviii, n. 1.

7. In the process the story speaks powerfully to ideas of penance as well, introducing the topic to be examined closely in Chapter 8.

8. List of sources in Curley, Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 2–3.

9. The translation of Marie de France will be discussed below. D. D. R. Owen discusses both Anglo-Norman and Old French versions in The Vision of Hell, 37–47, 64–66. For the Middle English text, see Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, which prints “Sir Owain,” 109–79. The introduction provides a good overview of issues and scholarship.

10. BL Egerton 1117 f. 182b, a collection of thirteenth-century religious tales.

11. Curley, Saint Patrick's Purgatory, l.

12. As perceptively noted by Yolande de Pontfarcy, in Pontfarcy and Picard, Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 31, 37. Michael J. Curley emphasized the role of Marie de France in putting the story into the context of contemporary romance; see his Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 1–2, 23–24. He presents the Old French text and English translation on facing pages.

13. Lines 173, 178–80, in Foster, Three Purgatory Poems: “Wel muchel he couthe of batayle, / And swathe sinful he was saunfayle / Ogain his Creatour.”

14. Lines 513–14. All citations of the poem by Marie are taken from Curley, Saint Patrick's Purgatory.

15. Easting, St. Patrick's Purgatory, 146.

16. Pontfarcy and Picard, 53.

17. Lines 530–36: “Sire eveskes, n'en vueil niënt / legierement espeneïr / ne tel penitence sufrir; / trop ai forfait a mun seignur / e offendu mun creatur. / Pur ceo eslirai, pr licence, / tute la plus grief penitence.” D. D. R. Owen notes that the story gained popularity among nobles and the site was later visited by knights and nobles from many lands: Vision of Hell, 45.

18. Line 553.

19. Lines 555–57: “que nun fera: / ja altre habit n'en recevra, / fors tel cum il aveit eü.”

20. Line 543.

21. The Latin: “aut viriliter agere ex necessitate compelleris aut pro inertia, quod absit, et anima et corpore peribis.”

22. Lines 649–50: “ne redutent mie a sufrirpeine e turment pur Deu plaisir.”

23. Easting, St. Patrick's Purgatory, 128.

24. See Ephesians 6:13–17.

25. Lines 879–80.

26. Easting, St. Patrick's Purgatory, 128.

27. Lines 1927–31: “E li reis li a respondu, / chevaliers seit, si cum il fu; / ço li loa il a tenir, / en ço poeit Deu bien servir. / Si fist il bien tute sa vie.”

28. Lines 1971–76: “Issi remest od Gilebert / li chevaliers e bien le sert. / Mais ne voleit changier sun estre, / moignes ne convers ne volt estre: / en nun de chevalier morra, / ja altre habit n'en recevra.”

29. Trifunctionalism is useful in the modern world to hardpressed teachers of Western Civilization courses—as it was to me in Chivalry and Violence. The classic work, which has generated much response, is Duby, The Three Orders. For a highly perceptive and critical response, see Brown, “Georges Duby and the Three Orders.”

30. A fourteenth-century sermon in Middle English describes hell as a place lacking ordines. See Knight, Wimbledon's Sermon, 66.

31. See Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 223–27; he notes that ordo was originally a classical term, without a sacred sense, but that—a common development for ideals in Christian society—the term was sacralized, joining status, 223–26. So pervasive was the concept that even animals could be seen in their respective orders. In the Quest of the Holy Grail (though in a scene obviously drawn from Chrétien's Conte du Graal), Perceval chooses to aid a lion fighting with a serpent, “por ce que plus est naturel beste et de plus gentil ordre que le serpenz.” Pauphilet, Quest del Saint Graal, 94. The author of the Moniage Guillaume even speaks of an order of thieves: Cloetta, Moniage Guillaume, Première rédation, line 546.

32. Erdmann, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 17.

33. Giles Constable, Three Studies, 249–360 in general; 301 gives examples.

34. Bynum, “Revisiting the Twelfth-Century Individual,” 91.

35. Ibid., 94–95.

36. Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge, 43.

37. Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 164–83.

38. See classic works such as Faire croire: modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle; Bynum, Jesus as Mother; Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Âge.

39. PL 172, 862–70. Honorius could take a decidedly dim view of milites; see PL 172, 1148.

40. See Le Goff, Schmitt, and Bremond, L'Exemplum, 150–53.

41. Cited in Hoven, Work in Ancient and Medieval Thought, 226.

42. See Brett, Humbert of Romans. Sermo LXXIX (ad maiores), cited in Hoven, Work in Ancient and Medieval Thought, 224 n. 117. Some preachers may even praise the peasantry as practicing, by their hard daily work, penitential virtues, and becoming no less than “martyrs of the Lord, offering their bodies as a living sacrifice to God”—as Claude Carozzi characterized sermons on agriculturalists, quoted in Hoven, Work, 236.

43. The themes of heroic and meritorious suffering have been developed in the previous chapter. Of course, suffering and renunciation by peasants would scarcely be considered heroic by High Medieval intellectuals. Yet suffering possessed such potency that the hard lives of even lowly villagers drew the attention of some clerics. See Hoven, Work, 237; Faire Croire, 15. Cf. Jacques de Vitry's “Sermo (LX) ad agricolas et vinitores et alios operatorios” in Pitra, “Semones Vulgares,” 437.

44. Quoted in Ovitt, Restoration of Perfection, 151–52.

45. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis, lines 2338–39. My thanks to Russell Peck who supplied these references in Gower.

46. Lines 2342–44: “As the briddes to the flihte / Ben made, so the man is bore / To labour.”

47. Line 2345.

48. Line 2452.

49. Hoven, Work; Ovitt, Restoration of Perfection.

50. Ovitt, Restoration of Perfection, 164–65.

51. Mirk, Mirk's Festial, 2: “he Þat syll scape Þe dome Þat he wyll come to at Þe second coming…must trauayl his body yn good workes, and gete his lyfe with swynke, and put away all ydlynes and slewth. For he Þat will not trauayle here with men, as Seynt Barnard sayth, he shall trauayle ay with Þe fendes of hell.”

52. Evidence drawn from an electronic word-search of the many Old French texts in the collection “Textes de Français Ancien” on the ARTFL website conducted for me by Dana Sample.

53. Hoven, Work, 159–200.

54. Gower, Confessio Amantis, 2: 288, Latin verse number vii.

55. See Genesis 3:16–19.

56. Newth, Song of Aspremont, 15; Brandin, Chanson d'Aspremont, 17: “Et si fu fors de paradis chacié / Et estut querre cascun don't il vesquié.”

57. Morawski, Proverbes Français, no. 376, 14: “Chevaliers sens espee, clers sens livre, menestrés sens outil ne pueent feire bonne besongne.” The element of moral uncertainty appears in another maxim: “A knight rejoices in a short mass and a long dinner (Courte messe et long disner est la joye au chevalier),” no. 424, 16.

58. For a classic account, see the work of Carl Erdmann, who traces the slow change in ideas toward a more favorable view of knightly order and its work: Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 17, 80–82, 122–23, 135, 171–74, 263, 316.

59. Numerous examples cited in Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, passim.

60. Holden, Gregory, and Crouch, History of William Marshal, lines 16853–63.

61. E.g., “Bevis of Hamptoun,” lines 810–14, 872–76, in Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury, Four Romances of England.

62. Mullally, The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland, lines 786–89, 1468–71, 1957–58, 2399–2402, 2482–84, 2978–81.

63. Even the hermit who planned to move his dwelling closer to the stream he used for water changed his mind when he sighted the hovering angel counting the steps required to fetch that water: Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 38, 188–89.

64. Jacques le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Âge, 172.

65. Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, 176.

66. A belt made an order. Peter of Blois said Baldwin of Ford (who became archbishop of Canterbury and died on the Third Crusade) “girded himself with the belt of the army of Citeaux in the service of Christ.” Peter of Blois, Later Letters, number 10, 53; cited in Constable, “The Place of the Crusader in Medieval Society,” 381–82.

67. Leyser, “Early Medieval Canon Law and the Beginnings of Knighthood,” 51 n. 1.

68. Leyser points to the dramatic increase in military activity in Europe, especially carried out by the Normans, as a significant force “for the formation of knighthood and the beginnings of an international knightly society,” 68–70, quotation from 68. The dating of chivalry to the later twelfth century is especially emphasized in the works of Jean Flori, Idéologie du glaive, and L'Essor de la chevalerie. This is likewise the position of Maurice Keen, Chivalry, and David Crouch, Birth of Nobility.

69. Constable, Three Studies, 333. Guibert, discussed further below, finished his work in 1108 and touched it up in 1121.

70. Suger, The Deeds of Louis the Fat, 57.

71. See the clear discussion by Jean Flori, with abundant sources, in L'Essor de la chevalerie, 286–87.

72. Fitzneale, Dialogus de Scaccario, 117.

73. Cloetta, Moniage Guillaume, to be discussed below.

74. Chrétien de Troyes, Conte du Graal, line 1620. The phrase comes from Gornemant, the hero's instructor in chivalry.

75. Cited by Constable in Three Studies, 332, from Peter of Blois, Epistle 94, Patres Ecclesiae Anglicanae: Petri Blesensis Opera Omnia, 1: 328.

76. PL 210 col. 185, a part of his Summa de arte praedicatoria from 1184.

77. Étienne de Fougeres, Le Livre des manières, 13–14: “Sauver se pout bien en son ordre, / si l'en n'I trove que remordre. / S'a traïson se veult amordre / ne par engin pincier ne mordre, / sil deit l'en bien desordener, / tolir l'espee et grief penner, / les esperons escoleter / et d'entre chevalers geter”; my translation.

78. The numbers were determined by searching the digital version of the texts obtained from the editors and translators working under the general direction of Norris Lacy.

79. Keith Busby, Raoul de Hodenc, Le roman des eles: The anonymous Ordene de chevalerie.

80. Flori, L'Essor de la chevalerie, passim; Keen, Chivalry, 64–83.

81. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 82–109.

82. Of course, the viewpoints of knighthood and clergy were by no means always directly opposed. Clerical authors wrote most of the propaganda on behalf of both ordines, as they had written both papal and imperial tracts in the great contest within the Empire. A number of them almost certainly wrote the vast body of chanson de geste and Arthurian romances which transmitted chivalric ideology. In stressing the important role of knighthood, even while hoping to guide and control it, they provided a rich store of imagery and vocabulary available to friends of knighthood who would use it imaginatively no less than selectively. Friendly authors could take the ironclad template of the most censorious commentary and snip, hammer, and reshape it for knightly life.

83. RS 21: 1, 119.

84. Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church, trans. Hagen, 146; Latin in RS 21: 2, 190: “carnilibus desideriis viriliter resistentes, calore spiritus fontes libidinis exsiccate. Quanto nimirum lucta gravior, tanta corona major.”

85. RS 21: 2, 194: “Scientes etiam quod aut Deus punit aut homo.”

86. Hagen, Jewel, 153; Latin in RS 21: 2, 199: “Non enim est corona nisi fuerit difficilioris certaminis lucta.”

87. Hagen, Jewel, 160; RS 21: 2, 208: “contra carnis tamen insultus fortiter dimicare debemus, et si conregnare volumus ut compatiamur eniti.”

88. RS 21: 2, 268: “Item militia est hominis vita super terram et continuus est nobis cum hoste conflictus.”

89. Hagen, Jewel, 202; RS 21: 2, 266–67: “Totum corpus suum Patri pro nobis victimam offerens, poenis, sputis, flagellis, vinculis, alapis, opprobriis, et ignominiso domum crucis patibulo gratis exposuit; sic nos, corpora nostra mundo propter ipsum crucifigentes, et abstinentiis, opprobriis, persecutionibus gratanter exponentes, divinis eidem obsequiis ex toto mancipemus.”

90. Hagen, Jewel, 203; RS 21: 2, 268: “Delicatus es miles si sine certamine vis coronari, nec enim coronabitur quis nisi legitime certaverit.”

91. Thomas de Cobham, Summa confessorum, quoted in Shinners and Dohar, Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, 9.

92. Shinners and Dohar, Pastors and the Care of Souls, 131–32.

93. Gregory VII thought that neither group could perform the labor of its vocation without sin: Cowdrey established that the view at the time of Gregory VII was that (like merchants) the knights would at least temporarily have to give up their professional labor if they wished to be reconciled with God. At the least, they could only use their arms under the close guidance of a bishop. See Cowdrey, “Pope Gregory VII and the Bearing of Arms”; Hamilton, “Penance in the Age of Gregorian Reform”; and Leyser, “Early Medieval Canon Law and the Beginnings of Knighthood.” Cowdrey notes (25–26) that Gregory's view was cited frequently and was taken into both the Decretum of Gratian and Peter Lombard's influential Sentences.

94. Examples of various sites: BL Additional 32678 f. 80b, BL Additional 11284 f. 90b, BL Additional 16589 f. 91b col. 2, BL Additional 27336 f. 13b. Humbert of Romans in a treatise on sermon-giving notes that castles, supposedly the refuge of the defenseless, are often rather dens of thieves. La Bigne, Maxima bibliotheca vetervm patrvm, 494.

95. See Gerald of Wales in The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis, 36.

96. See Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, 40.

97. Cited by Constable in Three Studies, 332, from Peter of Blois, Epistle 94, Patres ecclesiae anglicanae, 1: 328.

98. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes Historiques, 371.

99. Ibid., 375.

100. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, Chapter 48, 214: “Och fortem militem! Qui in bello diaboli non timuit gladios, in militia Christi timere debet pediculos?” Here the soldier of Christ is, of course, a monk.

101. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles 1: 244; Dialogus Miraculorum 1: 214.

102. Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 280; Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 245–46: “tales viri in saeculo tam delicati, oleribus inconditis, pisa et lente possunt uti.”

103. Shinners and Dohar, Pastors and the Care of Souls, 139.

104. Suger, The Deeds of Louis the Fat, 50; Vie de Louis VI Le Gros, 58.

105. The Deeds of Louis the Fat, 63; Vie de Louis VI Le Gros, 86.

106. The Deeds of Louis the Fat, 51; Wright, ed., trans., The Historical Works of Geraldus Cambrensis, 160.

107. Compare the texts in Cloetta, Les deux rédactions en vers du Moniage Guillaume, chansons de geste du XIIe siècle,. In the first redaction, the concept of orders had appeared. Indeed, the text refers to an order of thieves (line 546). But William merely curses the monastic order, rather than engage in close debate (line 727).

108. “En penitance le martire suffrés.” See ibid., second redaction, lines 472–75. Cf. lines 630–36.

109. Second redaction, lines 510–20: “‘Maistres,’ dist il, ‘vos ordenes est trop griés; / Sifais covens puisse prendre mal cief; / Qui l'estora Dieus doinst encombrier. / Assés vaut mieus ordene de chevalier: / Il se combatant as Turs et as paiens, / Por l'amor Dieu se laissent martirier. / Et sovent sont en lor sane batisié / Pour aconquerre le regne droiturier. / Moine ne voelent fors que boire et mangier / Lire et canter et dormer et froncier.”

110. Second redaction, lines 603, 637

111. Second redaction, lines 640–51.

112. Second redaction, lines 672–76.

113. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 140–42; Dialogus miraculorum, 2: 193–95.

114. Caesarius's tale is all the more remarkable in that he surely had no doubts about the superiority of the clerical order. Yet he recognizes an opening for the virtue of direct knightly action. The tale is a useful reminder that clerical opinion could scarcely have been monolithic.

115. RS 21: 8, 207: “‘Audaciter,’ inquit, ‘nos clerici ad arma et pericula provocare possunt, quoniam ipsi ictus in discrimine nullos suscipient, nec ulla quae vitare poterunt onerosa subibunt'.”

116. BL Cotton, Cleopatra C xi f. 62, col. 2.

117. Ambroise, The History of the Holy War, 2: 53. The complex textual history is discussed in ibid., 1:1–23, and Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 1–17.

118. All the following quotations are taken from Paris, Chronica Majora, 4: 593.

119. Kaeuper and Kennedy, Book of Chivalry, 174–77: “Et ou sont les ordres qui tant pourroient souffrir?”

120. “Promisit etiam eis quod suae diocesis presbyteros singulos cum crucibus, et parochianis suis pariter cum illis, in bellum procedere faceret, et quod ipse cum suis bello interesse, Deo disponente, cogitabat.” RS 82: 3, 161.

121. “Itaque, post acceptam privatam poenitentiam, illis pariter et omni populo archipraesul triduannum cum elemosinis indixit jejunium, ac deinde absolutionem, et benedictionem Dei et suam eis sollempniter tribuit” RS, ibid.

122. Richard of Hexham, De gestis regis Stephani et de bello standardii, in James Raine, The Priory of Hexham, Surtees Society 44, 46 (1864–65), 1: 87. Cited by Constable, Three Studies, 333. The text reads, “At illi ipsum remanere fecerunt, obsecrantes ut in orationibus, et elemosinis, vigiliis, et jejuniis, et in caeteris que ad Deum pertinent, pro eis intercedere satageret; ipsi vero pro ecclesia Dei et pro illo qui ejus minister erat, prout ipse eos adjuvare dignaretur, et, sicut illorum ordo exigebat, libenter contra hostes pugnarent.”

123. Quoted in Prestwich, Armies, 170.

124. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue, 1: 388; Dialogus, 1: 325.

125. Nicholson, Chronicle of the Third Crusade, 254.

126. Lupack, Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances, lines 559–66: “Fye, preest, God gyfe the sorowe! / What doist thou armede in the feelde, / That sholdest saie thi matyns on morwe? / I hoped thou hadiste ben an emperoure, / Or a cheftayne of this ooste here, / Or some worthy conqueroure. / Go home and kepe thy qwere!”

127. Lancelot's own lineage is explained in the Quest of the Holy Grail: see Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 44–45; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 96–98. Since Perceval's mother, Elaine, is descended from the line of Grail keepers, this later hero has a doubly blessed heritage.

128. For a good instance of a tenth worthy, see Guillaume de Machaut, La Prise d'Alixandre: The Capture of Alexandria, 20, 154, 191. John Lydgate in Troy Book, 339, equates Henry V of England to the Nine Worthies.

129. See, for example, the heroic, self-sacrificing death of old Sir Roger in the Middle English romance Sir Tryamour; his body is found to be uncorrupted in its grave: Hudson, Four Middle English Romances, 194.

130. The line of thought based on a succession of tables is not merely a literary conceit. The famous Round Table that still hangs in the hall of Winchester Castle may now be painted with a Tudor rose, but carbon 14 dating and dendrochronology show it was made by the mid-thirteenth century.

131. These might be thought of as “fourth tables” just as great knights were considered the “tenth worthy.”

132. The arrangement God makes with Joseph is that no shame or loss will come to the people so long as the sacrament is carried out. See Bryant, Merlin and the Grail, 40.

133. Ibid., 92–93. The tradition continued into Middle English: Conlee, Prose Merlin, 52–53.

134. Bryant, Merlin and the Grail, 113.

135. For what follows, see ibid., 113, 118–20. He threatens to leave Arthur's service if his desire is denied.

136. Ibid., 120.

137. Ibid., 143.

138. Matarasso, Quest, 120; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 72: “Car puis que vous en si haut degree estes montes vostre cuers me doit baissierpor paor ne por peril terrien. car cuers de cheualier doit ester si durs et si serres contra lanemi son signor que nule riens ne le puet flechir et sil est menes iusca paor il nest pas des urais cheualiers qui se laissent ochire en champains que la querele lor signor ne fust desraisnie bien et loiaument.”

139. This close relationship is noted by Eileen Power in her introduction to Bland's translation of Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin, and by Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 163. Particular localizations of her cult, such as that at Chartres, can yield stories of her favors to knights. See Jean Le Marchant, Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres, 41, 162–69. Of course, the Blessed Virgin had at times to restrain her vigorous chivalric friends, saving them from their worst excesses. In an attempted rape, the victim named Mary calls out to her namesake. At once the knight's strength fails him, his spirit withers, and the girl is saved: Herolt, Miracles, 45; also in Caesarius. In another revealing story, a rich and powerful knight fell into poverty through excessive largesse; he made a deal with the devil, exchanging his wife for wealth. As she is taken to be given over to the devil, his wife stops at a church to invoke the Virgin's aid. She falls asleep in prayer and the Virgin takes her place, confronting the devil. All turns out well: Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories, 31–33.

140. Gautier de Coincy, Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, 491–99: She leads the knight in this story to use loot to found a monastery, which he joins. When he dies before confession, the devils claim him as their own, but the Virgin secures help from her son and the knight is saved, to the great disgust of the demons.

141. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 109–10: he bows to her seven times daily and also says seven Paternosters. Cf. Herolt, Miracles, 96.

142. BL Harley 2851 f. 71; Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 370–72.

143. BL Additional 19909 f. 244 col. 2; BL Arimde 406 f. 23 col. 2 (although in this case the Blessed Virgin must be threatened by the knight's mother); Ward, Miracles, 163. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells one of many such tales and claims that the very chains, devoted to his monastic church, were still on view (Dialogue of Miracles, 1: 495–97; Dialogus, 2: 37–38).

144. Quoted in Power, introduction to Herolt, Miracles.

145. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue of Miracles, 1: 542; Dialogus, 2: 76.

146. Bonum Universale, bk. 2, 18: 246–47. A broadly similar story appears in BL Burney 361 f. 154b.

147. BL Additional 15833 f. 148b, from a fourteenth-century collection of religious tales. Later printed by Wynkyn de Worde, who piously increased the daily Aves to 150. Whiteford, The Myracles of Oure Lady, 47.

148. BL Additional 15833 f. 125.

149. BL Additional 15723 f. 78 from a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century collection of stories of miracles of the virgin. Cf. BL Additional 32248 f. 4, and BL Arundel 506 f. 3 col. 2, first half of the fourteenth century. Wynkyn de Worde prints this, with some changes: Whiteford, Myracles of Oure Lady, 46–47.

150. BL Additional 18929 f. 83, BL Additional 32248 f. 5b.

151. BL Royal 20B f. 170 col. 2. Many similar stories could be cited.

152. Shaw, Joinville, 314; Wailly, Histoire, 328, where the three French passages read: “c'est li premiers autels qui onques fust fais en l'onnour de la Mere Dieu sur terre”; “Nostre Dame n'est ci, ainçois est en Egypte, pour aidier au roy de France et aus crestiens qui aujourd'ui ariveront en la terre, il à pié, contra la paennime à cheval”; and “Et soiés certeins qu'elle nous aida; et nous eust plus aidié se nous ne l'eussiens couroucie, et le et son Fil.”

153. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 510–12. Dialogus, 2: 49–57. Caesarius tries to edge around the thorny issue of the Blessed Virgin engaging in tournament, prohibited by church authority, by adding that knights commit double sin in the sport: showing both pride and disobedience. Jesus the Jouster in Langland's Piers Plowman is here joined by Saint Mary the Jouster. For retellings of the story, see BL Arundel 406 f. 23, BL Additional 33956 f. 75b col. 2, BL Additional 32248 f. 3, BL Additional 11284 f. 35. Sometimes the heavenly aid comes from God. See Map, De Nugis Curialum, 58–63. And we might recall the poem in which all three Persons of the Trinity are recognized as knights, any of which could be challenged to a joust by the devil.

154. See Power's comment in introduction to Herolt, Miracles, where she comments on the Virgin's help to very ordinary, sinful monks, nuns, and clerics.

155. Examples in Gautier de Coincy, Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, BL Additional 18364 f. 52; and Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 456–57.

156. There is a series of stories favoring knights and vilifying usurers in, for example, the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, nos. 173, 175. Occasionally a miracle story even suggests an active hostility between the Virgin and merchants. Jacques de Vitry says the relatives of an insane man—he applies the story to usurers—drag him before a statue of the Virgin and pray for his recovery. The attempt at healing quickly degenerates into a raucous family argument as the deranged man shouts at the image that he is saner than his relatives. Under pressure to adore the Virgin, he can only say, “I may adore thee, but I shall never love thee!” Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 205.

157. BL Arundel 506 f. 27 col. 2.

158. Jacques de Vitry. Exempla, 206.

159. BL Harley 268 f. 29: “Tria sunt genera hominun que fecit deus: clericos, milites, et laborantes et quartus genus excogitavit diabolus, s[cilicet] burgenses et usurarios, qui non clerici quia nescierunt litteras, non sunt milites quia nesciunt arma portare, non sunt laborantes quia in labore humanum non sunt et diabolus eos laborabat. Item burgenses sunt inter hominess sicut busones inter apes qui nec mellificant nec frucaferant set apibus nocent. Similiter burgenses clericos opprimunt, milites exornant, laborantes excutiunt et quia die nullo serviunt otium tolunt et pluribus nocent. Propterea dicit salamon otiositas parit omne malum.”

160. The council of 1179 had prohibited communion and burial in sacred ground for manifest usurers. Alms from them were to be refused. See Buckley, Teachings on Usury, 174.

161. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, Merchants, 296–311.

162. See his “Sermones vulgares,” 344–442, cited in Constable, Three Studies, 330.

163. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 76, 206–7.

164. Quoted in Maier, Crusade Propaganda, 147–49. The Latin reads, “immo intendunt ad exheredandum eos qui vadunt” and “dominium semper remanebit penes nobiles, velint nolint feneratores qui eos devorarent.”

165. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 124.

166. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 21, 156; BL Arundel 506 f. 41b; BL Harley 268 f. 43; BL Additional 18347 f. 116b.

167. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 73–74.

168. Ibid., 91, 221–22. There are many variants of this tale. See BL Harley 3244 for a knight who is exonerated for striking a blaspheming burgher. Sometimes the burger becomes a Jew, adding a new layer of prejudice: BL Additional 18929 f. 82b col. 2; in this case, the avenging knight has only one eye and fears he will be identified in court by this feature, but the Blessed Virgin restores his eye just in time.

169. BL Sloane 3102 f. 81b. Also in Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 60.

170. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 203. These stories from Vitry come from a large store of antiusury stories he tells.

171. BL Additional 16589 f. 93b col. 2. For more stories told against usurers, see, e.g., those in BL Royal 7D1 ff. 124–26.

172. BL Additional 33956 f. 41. In a later version the heart is even found to be quartered and bleeding; it bears an inscription in gold: “Jesus est amor meus.” BL Harley 2391 f. 234.

173. Shirley, Song of the Cathar Wars, 100; Martin-Chabot, Chanson de la croisade albigeoise, 2: 168.

174. Benson, King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, 100. The scene comes in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, by means of a vision appearing to Arthur in a dream.

CHAPTER 8. KNIGHTHOOD AND THE NEW LAY THEOLOGY: CONFESSION AND PENANCE

1. See discussions in Cowdrey, “Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion and the Penitential Ordinance Following the Battle of Hasting.” Cowdrey provides the text. Cf. Verkamp, The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors; and Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War, 102–4.

2. Hamilton, Practice of Penance, 900–1060, 190–96. David Bachrach discusses Carolingian ecclesiastical legislation and war in Religion and the Conduct of War, 32–64. Cf. Erdmann, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, 17–18. For an example of a forty-day fast for killing imposed “at the order of a legitimate prince,” see Burchard of Worms in PL 140, 770D–771A, cited by Constable in “The Place of the Crusader in Medieval Society,” 379. Burchard, however, imposed seven years of fasting for those who killed lacking this legitimacy.

3. Discussed in Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War, 103–4.

4. Ibid., 105.

5. Ibid., 103.

6. Jean-Charles Payen points out that in the eleventh century, penitence was not a recognized sacrament. “La Pénitence dans le contexte culturel des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” 401.

7. Recent work reviewing the field and arguing for changes appears in Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners; Hamilton, The Practice of Penance; and the essays in Cooper and Gregory, Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation, especially Hamilton, “Penance in the Age of Gregorian Reform.” Classic older work appears in Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences; Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation”; Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation; Vogel, Pécheur et pénitence au Moyen Âge and Les “Libri paenitentales”; Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance; and Murray, “Confession Before 1215.”

8. The canons are printed in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 227–71.

9. Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge, 9–11. Cf. Boyle, “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology,” in Heffernan, The Popular Literature of Medieval England. Boyle says, 31, “It is not too much to say that it was at the Fourth Lateran Council that the cura animarum came into its own for the first time ever.” He sees a first wave of writing after the council aimed at educating priests, with a second wave in about 1260 directed more toward the penitents themselves and often written in the vernacular. One of these, written by Guillaume Peyraut, is in the BL Harley 3244 manuscript, where it is introduced by the illustration used to open the present book. In this same modern volume of essays edited by Heffernan, see Shaw, “The Influence of Canonical and Episcopal Reform on Popular Books of Instruction.” On the council itself and the events leading to it, see Foreville, Latran I, II, III et Latran IV: Histoire des conciles oecuméniques, 6: 237–320. David Bachrach notes Carolingian precedents for the High Medieval steps in Religion and the Conduct of War, 52.

10. Quoted in Lawrence, The Friars, 125.

11. St. Bernard had, for example, asserted that “priests, as ministers of the Word, must remain carefully solicitous toward erring hearts, using such moderation in the administering of the word of contrition and fear as will not frighten them away from the word of confession. They should open hearts in a way that does not close mouths”; In Praise of the New Knighthood, 78; Latin text in Sancti Bernardi Opera, 3: 237. The idea was, of course, much older still.

12. Studies of the history of penance are too numerous and contentious to be fully listed here. A good recent survey of the early period with many citations appears in Richard Price, “Informal Penance in Early Medieval Christendom,” in Cooper and Gregory, Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation. Many issues await scholarly resolution: the local effectiveness of clerical legislation (perhaps especially that before the Lateran Council of 1215), the persistence of regional variations, the exact relationship of Carolingian ideals and practice to High Medieval legislation and social realities, even the relationship of High Medieval confessional measures to sweeping notions of individuality as a supposed key to modernity. A good survey of Carolingian penance appears in Rubellin, “Vision de la sociéte chrétienne à travers la confession et la penitence au IXe siècle.” On continuities and discontinuities between Carolingian and High Medieval practice, for example, see Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England; Meens, “The Frequency and Nature of Confession in the Early Middle Ages”; and Hamilton, Practice of Penance, 22–24. Berndt Hamm provides thoughtful comments on the transition between later medieval and early modern ideas in The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm.

13. Some called penance a “laborious baptism.” O'Loughlin, “Penitence and Pastoral Care,” 95.

14. Löseth, Robert le Diable; Laskaya and Salisbury, The Middle English Breton Lays (for Sir Gowther); and Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick.

15. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation, 14.

16. PL 1 1243, 1244, quoted and discussed in Hopkins, Sinful Knights, 36.

17. Gerald of Wales, Jewel of the Church, 150.

18. Quoted in Faire croire: modalités de la diffusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle, 145.

19. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. Cf. Graham Robert Edwards, “Purgatory: ‘Birth' or Evolution?”

20. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 30.

21. Robert Sweetman, “Thomas of Cantimpré, Mulieres Religiosae, and Purgatorial Piety,” 610–11.

22. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 4–5.

23. Ibid., 50; general discussion 5–56.

24. Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 35. Another Middle English telling of the story in Furnival, Handlyng Synne, 57–56, specified that the dead knight's terrible pains result from his having stolen a cloth from a poor man. In the otherworld he is nearly crushed by its weight and is constantly burned by it: “Hyl ne mounteyne, erþe ne stone. / Vndyr heuene so heuy ys none. / No so hote fere ys yn no land / As hyt ys aboute me brennand,” lines 2269–73. The dead man hopes to be freed by masses. But he rejects almost all priests named by his friend since they are “nat of clene lyffe.” The text tells its tale, but explains that this attitude is not good theology.

25. Shinners and Dohar, Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, 137.

26. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 43.

27. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 52–53.

28. Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 270–71. Cf. BL Additional 11284 f. 446, in which a monk refuses to pray for a knight who is ill; BL Additional 27909B f. 6; BL Harley 3244 f. 82b, where a monk prays for a knight's continuing illness; and a similar story about a saint in BL Royal 7D f. 90.

29. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles,1:278–79: Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 244–45.

30. BL Royal 7D i, f. 77.

31. BL Additional 33956 f. 47.

32. Cf. BL Additional 18364 f. 17b. BL Royal 7d i f. 82 presents a more uplifting case in which a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is imposed. Here the robber knight, obediently setting out, falls and breaks his neck outside the hermit's cell, but is forgiven by an understanding God.

33. BL Additional 6716 f. 39 col. 2. The writer says the story was told to canons at Kenilworth by the knight himself during the siege of the castle in the reign of Henry III.

34. Robert of Flamborough, Liber Poenitentialis, 201: “Frater, in fine vitae tuae omnia debes exonmere.”

35. It is likewise of interest that the sharply anticlerical “Dialogus inter militem et clericum” (evidently an early fourteenth-century Latin text translated by John Trevisa later in that century) contains a willing knightly admission of the clerical power of confession and penance: see Perry, Dialogus Inter Militem et Clericum, 11.

36. Crouch, “The Troubled Deathbeds of Henry I's Servants: Death, Confession, and Secular Conduct in the Twelfth Century,” 27–29.

37. Baldwin, “From the Ordeal to Confession.”

38. Later works could, of course, be cited. In the Middle English Prose Merlin, written in the mid-fifteenth century, the great knights Ban and Bors are said to have learned to confess and commune every eight days: Conlee, Prose Merlin, 219–20.

39. Baldwin, “From the Ordeal to Confession.”

40. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” 50.

41. William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, 70–73.

42. Wenzel, Fasciculus Morum (a fourteenth-century text), 489.

43. Bitterling, Of Shrift and Penance (last decade of fourteenth century), 120.

44. In Berrtage, The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, 87–93, 91: “the turnement of penaunce wherthurugh we mow come to euerlastyng joy.”

45. Numerous manuscript collections from the British Library which tell this story attribute the truce-making ploy to St. Bernard: BL Additional 1579 f. 118, BL Additional 18351 f. 11, BL Additional 27336 f. 60 b, BL Burney 361 f. 146b col. 2.

46. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles,1: 150–51; Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 134–35. Even so learned a cleric as Jacques de Vitry could urge confession with a risky story of its quasimagical powers. A squire in adultery with his lord's wife was being taken to the local demon who could reveal even secret sins. In desperation the lad popped into a local church en route; after the squire had confessed, the demon was blocked from telling all (divertit ab itinere ad villam promimam, ibique plene confessus est, et acepta a sacerdote penitentia et disciplina aspera valde). Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories, 33–41.

47. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 3: 190. Micha, ed., Lancelot, 4: 322–23.

48. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 64–67; Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 58–61.

49. Mirk, Mirk's Festial, 2: “trauayle his body yn good werkes, and gete his lyfe wyth swynke, and put away all ydylnes and slewth. For he þat will not trauayle here wyth men, as Seynt Barnard sayth, he schall trauavly ay wyth þe fende of hell.…For ryght as a knyght scheweth þe wondys þat he haþe yn batayle, yn moche comendyng to hym; ryght so all þe synnes þat a man hath schryuen him of, and taken hys penans for, schull be þer yschewet yn moch honowre to hym, and moche confucyon to þe fende.”

50. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 233; Paris and Ulrich, Merlin: Roman en prose, 2:95–98.

51. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 61; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 138: “diex biaz dols peres ihesu crist en qui seruice ie mestoie mis ne mie si dignement comme ie deusse aies merci de moi. Et absolues moi en tel manniere que ceste dolors que mes cors souffera ia pour bien faire que ce soit penitence et assouagemens a lame de moi si uoirement comme ie por bien et por aumosne le fis.”

52. Malory, Works, 535

53. Lancelot apparently does not consider his considerable knightly labors to have counted as penance; they were all, of course, done to win the love of the queen, rather than the grateful forgiveness of God.

54. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 5: 46; Sommer, Die Abenteur Gawains Ywains und Le Marholts mit den drei Jungfrauen, 121.

55. A good description with illustrations is given in Nichols, “The Etiquette of Pre-Reformation Confession in East Anglia.” Andrew Harris alerted me to other images he found within the Roman de la Rose. The online search engine ArtStore can be used to locate such images.

56. The circle of Peter the Chanter stressed the importance of shame. See John Baldwin, “From the Ordeal to Confession”; Baldwin (204) quotes Gerbert's Continuation of Chrétien's Perceval to the effect that “Shame is the penance.” Cf. the comment in Bériou, “Autour de latran IV (1215): la naissance de la confession moderne et sa diffusion.” Andrew Jotischky notes that Jacques de Vitry insisted that this blushing with shame and sense of embarrassing humility were “the most important part of penance”: “Penance and Reconciliation in the Crusader States,” 75–77.

57. Thomas of Cantimpré and Caesar of Heisterbach, for example, casually mention stories told to them by fellow friars.

58. BL Additional 27336 f. 73b. The ruler is specified as Enzzelina da Romano, who died in 1259. The idea of a seal on the confessor's lips was as old as the mid-twelfth century. Discussed in Murray, “Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century,” 281–86.

59. That such a practice may have happened is at least suggested by a late medieval synod (from Breslau in 1446) ordering priests to confess folk as they entered and not to prefer the rich. See Duggan, “Fear and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation,” 163. He notes further that many at this time were not confessing to local parish priests, especially for serious sins, 165–67. William Dohar, on the other hand, thinks most lay folk thought confession could be made only to their priest and were much troubled by the depletion of their ranks after the Black Death: “‘Since the Pestilential Time.’ Pastoral Care in the Later Middle Ages,” 181. Social differences might well produce a difference in attitude, of course.

60. Questions are drawn from the Liber Poenitentialis of Robert of Flamborough (1208–13), 134, 185, 226–27; Summa Poenitentia of Raymond de Peñaforte (1224–26), quoted in Peter Biller's introduction to Biller and Minnis, Handling Sin, 17; and from the mid-fourteenth century Memoriale Presbitorum, in Michael Haren, Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England: A Study of the Memoriale Presbitorum, 119–24.

61. BL Birney 361 f. 150b. C. H. Lawrence notes the benefit of confessing at least to a friar, rather than to a local parish priest: “the ministry of a friar offered a welcome channel of escape from the embarrassment and discouragement of having to confess to his local parish priest, who knew too much about him and who might be personally hostile or perhaps simply uneducated and ignorant.” The Friars, 125.

62. “Quant aux simples chapellenies, établies dans l'église paroissiale ou dans le château du seigneur, elles sont innombrables.” He adds that “l'on trouve des Cordeliers, des Jacobins, des carmes, des augustins dans l'entourage de maints nobles don't ils peuplaient les hôtels comme chapelains, aumôniers ou confesseurs.” Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France de Philippe le Bel à Louis XII, 257–58.

63. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century.” In an article on English nobility and religion, J. A. F. Pollard notes that some English knights suspected of Lollardy were willing to seek papal license for private confessors and portable altars: “Knightly Piety and the Margins of Lollardy,” 106.

64. Chansons de geste, written before private chapels were frequent, picture confession only to fellow knights (and then only when dying of grievous wounds) or to ecclesiastics of high status. The hero Vivien makes his confession to Guillaume d'Orange in the Song of Aliscans, laisses 28, 29. Vivien recounts all the sins he can remember. Yet he worries most that he has broken a chivalric vow never to give ground to pagans in a fight. Lacking priests before a major fight, knights are often pictured taking a sort of self-administered lay communion with three blades of grass. A good case appears in laisse 120 of Kay, Raoul de Cambrai.

65. The hero of the Middle English romance Bevis of Hampton confesses to the patriarch in Constantinople: see Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury, Four Romances of England, 253.

66. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 95, Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 86–87.

67. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 5: 177; Bogdanow, Version post-Vulgate 2: 302.

68. John, Abbot of Ford, Vita Wulfrici Haselbergiae. It is worth remembering that the Latin noun lorica can denote either a hauberk or the robe of a penitent. Each hero fights in his own way.

69. Zupitza, The Romance of Guy of Warwick. Good discussions in Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights, 20–31, 70–118, and Crane, Insular Romance, passim.

70. The advice strikingly parallels that of the bishop to the knight Owen in Saint Patrick's Purgatory, discussed in Chapter 7. In that tale, too, heroic penance is chosen instead.

71. Guy of Warwick 404, reading the version in the Auchinleck MS: “Þat ich haue wiþ mi bodi wrout / Wiþ mi bodi it schal bea brout / To bote me of þat bale” (literally, to remedy me of that disaster).

72. Quoted in Andrea Hopkins, Sinful Knights, 124: “turnement of penaunce, wherthurugh we mow come to euerlastyng joy.”

73. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 5:159; Bogdanow, Version post-Vulgate, 2: 227: “E ben sabede dom Boorz, que se vos fosedes o milhor cavaleiro que nunca no mundo ouve, a vosa cavallaria nom vos faria senam mal, ataa que fosedes bem menfestado e que ouvessedes reccebudo o Corpus Domini.”

74. BL Arundel 506 f. 27 col. 2.

75. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 5: 310–11; for the original, which has been recovered from the Portuguese, see Piel, A Demando do Santo Graal, 471–72.

76. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 1: 145; Eugene Hucher, Le Saint Graal, 3: 226.

77. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 10.

78. Ibid., 5: 174; Bogdanow, Version post-Vulgate, 2: 280–93. The romances of the entire cycle are replete with assertions of the need for knightly confession, the perils of dying without confession, and sometimes even a requirement of true (or good or full) confession. For example, a worried Arthur, under severe attack by Galehaut, is advised by a wise man (who combines political sense with good theology) to gather his noblest men and wisest clerics in his chapel and confess his sins to them, carefully according his heart and his tongue in the process, “for the confession is no good if the heart does not repent what the tongue confesses (car la confessions n'est preus, se le cuers n'est repentans de chou que la langue regehist).” Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 2: 120; Micha, Lancelot, 8: 14. Cf. Kennedy, Lancelot do Lac, 284. The History of the Holy Grail declares that confession is the whitest and highest thing that exists: Lancelot-Grail, 1: 27; Hucher, Le Saint Graal, 2: 191.

79. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail 2: 276; Micha, Lancelot, 1: 156: “Ha, Diex, confession. Kar ore est mestier!”

80. Benson, King Arthur's Death, lines 4312–15: “Do call me a confessor with Crist in his armes; / I will be houseld in haste what hap so betides.”

81. Malory, Works, 553. The hair shirt had figured in thirteenth-century French sources; see Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 42, and Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 92–93; Lancelot-Grail 5: 177, and Bogdanow, Version post-Vulgate, 302–6.

82. His willing acceptance of a beating appears in Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 42; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 92–93.

83. Lacy, Lancelot-Grail, 4: 53, 58; Sommer, Vulgate Version, 6: 18–20, 130.

84. Livre de seyntz medicines, 169: “la satisfaction faire de corps et de biens solonc la disposicione de mon prestre.”

85. What follows draws on Robert de Boron: Bryant, Merlin and the Grail, 129–31.

86. Ibid., 130–32.

87. Ibid., 146–56.

88. Ibid., 153–54.

89. An impression confirmed by electronic search of scanned text.

90. E.g., Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 68, 143–44: “quidam miles fagiciosus…nollet facere penitenciam aliquam.” This very phrase is picked up in collections of moral tales: see BL Additional 15833 148b–150.

91. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 68. In a retelling, the cleric is simply a bishop; but the knight again insists he will do no penance. See BL Royal 7d i., f. 63. The gift of a ring with admonition to think on death appears as a theme in several exempla. Only through his wife's influence is another knight brought to confess his homicides to a bishop. Though he refuses to go to Rome on pilgrimage, as the bishop has ordered, he does maintain an all-night vigil in the church although demons trouble him greatly, falsely appearing in the form of those he knows to try to dissuade him: Anecdotes historiques, 46–49. Another version appears in BL Additional 27336 f. 37b; this is printed in Jubinal, Contes, 1: 352.

92. Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 143–44.

93. Entering without hindrance, he still went mad within the church, but was healed three days later at the spot where an injured statue of the child Jesus had bled copiously. Gerald of Wales, Jewel of the Church, 80–81.

94. Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, 2: 279; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 306–7.

95. Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 35–36; Dialogus Miraculorum, 1: 32–34.

96. BL Additional 27336 f. 57b.

97. Bryant, The High Book of the Grail: Perlesvaus, 144, 147.

98. Dialogue of Miracles, 2:258; Dialogus Miraculorum, 2: 289–90.

99. BL Additional 18347 f. 131.

100. Peter of les Vaux-deCernay, History of the Albigensian Crusade, passim.

101. BL Royal 5A viii f. 149. The story appears also in Étienne de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, 104, printed there from a sermon story of Étienne de Bourbon. In this case it is told as a historical incident that supposedly took place in 1225.

102. BL Royal 20B xiv f. 170 col. 2.

103. Gautier de Coincy, Les Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, 494–99. In another extreme case the heavenly court recognizes that no time for confession existed: Pitiless enemies give one knight no time for confession, chopping him mercilessly to pieces, despite his pleas; he has been formally devoted to Christ and the Virgin, however, and despite his own wickedness and over bitter complaints of the demons claiming him, he is saved; upon the heart of his dead body is found the inscription, “animam meam commendo virginis filio (I commend my soul to the Virgin's son).” The inscription tells all. BL Arundel 406 f. 26b.

104. See BL Additional 18364 f. 60b.

105. Map, De Nugis Curialium, 314–41, 319.

106. BL Additional 18347 f. 116b. A similar story appears in BL Additional 27336 f. 37b.

107. Map, Master Walter Map's Book, 85.

108. Lecoy, Le Chevalier au barissel. The tale had a large readership or audience: Lecoy consulted four texts in Paris and a fragment in Oxford; five short versions of this story condensed into exempla are preserved in manuscript books collecting such stories, now in the British Library, though they differ in details. These BL mss. are cited in ibid., xviii. Cf. Payen, “Structures et sens du ‘Chevalier au Barisel',” and Madeleine Le Merrer-False, “Contribution à une étude du'Chevalier au Barisel.”

109. Lecoy, line 101: “Plorer? fait il, est ce gabois?”

110. The French is “vous plourés et je rirai, / ke ja certes n'i plouerai.”

111. Ibid., line 113: “Confesser, fait il, cent diable.”

112. See Branch 7 of the Roman de Reynard, e.g., Roques, Roman de Renart. Cf. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 125: falsely confessing and then hurrying back to one's sin is called Reynard's confession in France: “peccata confituntur, sed statim capilli crescere incipiunt, quia statim ad peccata redeunt, et ita sacerdotibus illudunt. Hec est confession vulpis, que solet in Francia appellari confessio renardi.”

113. Lecoy, Le Chevalier au barissel, line 136: “Tels confesse chiet a un soufflé,” My thanks to Helen Swift who saved me from a more crude rendering of this vigorous expression.

114. Ibid., lines 161–62: “plus irous / ke ciens dervés ne leus warrous.”

115. Ibid., lines 169–70: “Por coi, li prïerai, / quant je por lui riens ne ferai?”

116. Taking him by the hand may parallel seizing the reins of a knight's horse in combat as a formal gesture of capture. We have already noted the parallel in exempla in which a priest, or sometimes St. Bernard himself, convinces a knight to make successively more binding forms of truce and peace with God.

117. Ibid., lines 284–85: “Pres va que je ne vous ochi, / s'en seroit le siecles delivers.”

118. His oath is of the style in romance, or parody: he will not rest day or night, nor wash his face, nor shave, nor trim his nails, and he will travel without money or bread or dough on his person until he has succeeded; see line 468 and the following discussion.

119. Ibid., line 501: “Por Dieu, voir, ne le faic jou mie”

120. Ibid., line 544.

121. Ibid., line 560.

122. Ibid., lines 780–81: “Te penitence riens ne set, / car tu l'as fait sans repentance / et sains amour et sains pitance.”

123. Ibid., line 888.

124. Could the author imagine his returning to his castle and carrying on a knightly life?

CHAPTER 9. WRITING THE DEATH CERTIFICATE FOR CHIVALRIC IDEOLOGY

1. As repeatedly argued in this book, a lay framework does not imply rigid secularity or irreligion; that chivalric ideas borrowed heavily from religious themes, terminology, and practice is fundamental to the arguments presented here.

2. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe. Even cannon that could be brought onto the battlefield long failed to cause change on any remarkable scale. Siege artillery probably had more effect for a relatively short time, yet defense quickly recovered by adapting new forms of fortification. Ironically, by bringing sieges of towns and castles much more swiftly to a successful conclusion, the larger guns capable of turning a gatehouse into rubble or reducing a traditional stout stone wall helped to bring about a golden age of open field encounters in which traditional heavy cavalry could flourish.

3. From the later fifteenth century into the early decades of the sixteenth century, French men-at-arms must have happily believed that they were still carrying out roles that Geoffroi de Charny would have understood and approved. Such is surely the attitude of the sixteenth-century French knights whose careers are examined below.

4. For studies and comment by medievalists, see Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience, especially 334–46; DeVries, Guns and Men in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500, chaps. 8–18; Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War.” On military professionalism, see the essays collected by Trim, The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism; on Renaissance France, see Potter, “Chivalry and Professionalism in the French Armies of the Renaissance,” in the volume edited by Trim. Potter notes (152) that heavily armored cavalrymen were in fact losing out to lighter cavalry and pistol-firing reiters but also comments on the revival of chivalric values in the Italian wars (154). Classic contributions to the general debate include Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560–1660”; Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century; Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution' 1550–1660—A Myth?”; idem, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800; Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550–1800; idem, European Warfare, 1660–1815; Parrot, “Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years' War: The ‘Military Revolution'.”; Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715; idem, “The Trace Italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case”; Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change in Early Modern Europe; Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War”; Hall and DeVries, “Essay Review: The ‘Military Revolution' Revisited.”

5. The notion of a long series of significant military changes from the fourteenth century into the eighteenth century has gained many distinguished supporters. Rogers, “Military Revolutions,” 241–78; Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle, 4–5; Prestwich, Armies and Warfare, 334–46; Black, Military Revolution? 94. Clifford Rogers has proposed what he terms “punctuated equilibrium” in the broad course of military history (borrowing the term from biological science). The process implies a centuries-long series of occasional and sudden changes within a given field; cumulative change over time effects what a single cause could not. Changes in institutional culture and mentalité may have developed full force only in the seventeenth century rather than the sixteenth, let alone the later fifteenth. If these arguments stand, the major changes under debate made their effects felt after chivalry was surely dead (except for surface continuations and later revivals of the corpse in quite different form); not even stoutly entrenched medievalists would extend the active life of chivalry so far. Yet more cautionary is scholarly debate about the very direction of causation in the linkage of chivalry and the state. An undoubted increase in the size of armies, some scholars argue, may have resulted from state growth as much as it caused that growth. If this argument is accepted, military changes per se obviously loom less large as independent forces in analysis of broad change at the end of the Middle Ages. And some scholars even argue that finding the leadership for large armies need not have edged out the chivalrous. Michael Mallet has perceptively questioned whether a decline of chivalry is a necessary precursor or accompaniment to increasing military professionalism; Trim likewise concludes that chivalry and military professionalism “are not necessarily dichotomous,” at least before the seventeenth century. See Mallet, “Condottieri and Captains in Renaissance Italy,” in Trim, Chivalric Ethos. Trim's comment appears ibid., 3, 28–29. The broad issue of state-building and military change is debated in Parker, Military Revolution; Roberts, “Military Revolution”; Lynn, “Recalculating French Army Growth”; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States; Downing, Military Revolution and Political Change; and Rasler and Thompson, War and State Making. If, as Arthur Ferguson claims, “it is fortunately no longer necessary to protest the once greatly exaggerated accounts of chivalry's death,” he has done much toward securing that good end. Of course, he is referring to elements of chivalry that persist up to the present in our culture. See his Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England, 11. Philippe Contamine provides interesting comments on continuity in his introduction to a collection of essays he edited, War and Competition Between States.

6. Ferguson, for example, states that “humanism…presented the English ruling classes for the first time with an alternative source of secular values”: Chivalric Tradition 13. Cf. his interesting chapter on Tudor humanism, ibid., 55–65.

7. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 22; Baker-Smith, “‘Inglorious Glory’: 1513 and the Humanist Attack on Chivalry”; Anglo, The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, vol. 1, introduction. On the issue of “pacifism,” see Musto, “Just Wars and Evil Empires: Erasmus and the Turks.”

8. As in Anglo, Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, membrane 36. For the Greenwich armories, see ibid., 14–15; for martial feats, 4–5. James IV of Scotland kept a similarly chivalric court: ibid., 9–11.

9. See Gunn, “The French Wars of Henry VIII,” and “Chivalry and the Politics of the Early Tudor Court.”

10. Vergil, The Anglica Historia [of Polydore Vergil], ed. Hay, 197, quoted in Baker-Smith, “Inglorious Glory,” 137.

11. Baker-Smith, “Inglorious Glory,” 136.

12. Dominic Baker-Smith notes that Erasmus thought of chivalry as “a cultural system devised to promote war and to disguise its true consequences under a veneer of glory.” “Inglorious Glory,” 131. The quotation from Erasmus appears in Phillips, The “Adages” of Erasmus, 313, cited in Baker-Smith, 139.

13. See Musto “Just Wars and Evil Empires: Erasmus and the Turks.”

14. Baker-Smith, “Inglorious Glory,” 136.

15. Phillips, “Adages,” 307, cited and discussed in Baker-Smith 134, 139.

16. Phillips, “Adages,” 318, 321, Baker-Smith, 139.

17. Phillips, “Adages,” 348–49, cited and quoted in Baker-Smith, 140. The famous verdict of Roger Asham (in The Schoolmaster, 1570)—would say of Malory's Morte Darthur “the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye.”

18. Himelick, The Enchiridion of Erasmus. His caustic attacks on mere prowess, worldly honor, and reciprocal vengeance in the name of honor appear at 41, 136–37, 140–42, 149–51, 193.

19. Phillips, “Adages,” 336.

20. Baker-Smith, “Inglorious Glory,” 140–41.

21. More, Utopia, 118.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 120.

24. Ibid., 121.

25. About this same time, the humanist John Colet chose Good Friday as the timely day on which to preach a staunchly antiwar sermon. Ibid., 136–37. He sharply condemned those who would spoil the “mystical unity of the body of Christ by burying their swords in other Christian hearts.” In the audience sat Henry VIII, whose response is not recorded. The three humanist thinkers form something of a group. Erasmus and More were in close contact and we know Colet's sermon only from Erasmus's later account of it.

26. The withering scorn all three humanists poured over the heroic ideal would certainly have won enthusiastic praise from that highly unusual knight of late fourteenth-century England, Sir John Clanvowe, discussed below. Yet he was essentially unusual.

27. The trend was evident in that early humanist John of Salisbury in the twelfth century.

28. Vale, War and Chivalry, and The Princely Court; Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness; Ferguson, Indian Summer of English Chivalry.

29. See Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1200–1536. The Turkish enemy would prove useful, as the Saracens earlier had, as an evil to which enemies could be compared. See, e.g., Musto, “Just Wars and Evil Empires: Erasmus and the Turks.”

30. chapters 6, 7, and 8 above take this process within medieval centuries as their focus.

31. Humanist writers, as we will see, could stress that sixteenth-century French knights were loyally serving the respublica, and its chief, the king, with their swords.

32. As can be seen by reading through volumes of the Statutes of the Realm for England or the Actes du Parlement for France.

33. The term reflects Elyot's desire to give no license to the mere plebs or commoners by using the term commonwealth.

34. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor. All medievalists will insist, of course, that there are again precedents for classical virtues and sovereign power from several centuries earlier. The “new men” chosen as royal agents from modest social ranks were often decried in the twelfth century.

35. Potter, History of France, 1460–1560, 209.

36. As Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond say in their introduction to Lollards and Reformers, x, “we have learnt to see more clearly the dangers of our categories, to become more aware of the hazards of definition. The fourteenth century combined wideranging speculative criticism with lack of clarity about where orthodoxy ended and heresy began; the doubtful shared doubts with the devout.” Cf. Larsen, “Are All Lollards Lollards?”

37. Cluniacs, Cistercians, and the several orders of mendicant friars in turn voiced their gratitude for patronage flowing from the chivalric at various social levels. Knightly families took a positive view of each new intercessor between sinful humanity and God. Though the proliferation of new orders ceased with a decision for closure taken at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the newly lionized Carthusians and Minims of fifteenth-century France and England had sound reasons for gratitude to knightly donors.

38. Berndt Hamm makes the interesting suggestion that the “innovatory thrust of the Reformation consists above all in the fact that it breaks with the tensions and contradictions in the pluralism of the medieval Church.” Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, 269.

39. Diarmaid Macculloch notes the launching of this major theme of Reformation history after the Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1526. The Reformation, 159–60, 266, 346. This principle is not suddenly new in the sixteenth century. Henry V was effective head of English church, as Jeremy Catto notes: “In all but name, more than a century before the title could be used, Henry V had begun to act as the supreme governor of the Church of England.” “Religious Change Under Henry V,” 115.

40. Printed in Scattergood, The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, 57–80. K. B. McFarlane complained that it is “dreary cant” but granted that its significance lies in its revelation of common Lollard ideas: Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, 201–6, at 201.

41. McFarlane notes that if written by a monk or recluse, the work would excite little interest. But its author is a knight. Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, 204.

42. “Byfore God alle virtue is worsshipe and alle synne is shame. And in þis world it is euene þe revers, ffor þe world holt hem worshipful þat been greete werreyours and fiteres and þat distroyen and wynned manye loondis, and waasten and euen muche good to hem þat haan ynou, and þat dispended oultrageously in mete, in dyrnke, in clooþing, in buyldyng and in lyuyng in eese, slouþe, and many ooþer synnes. And also þe world worsshipeþ hem muchel þat woln bee venged proudly and dispitously of euery wrong þat is seid or doon to hem. And of swyche folke men maken bookes and soonges and reeden and syngen of hem for to hoolde þe mynde of here deedes þe lengere here vpon earth, ffor þat is a þing þat worldely men desiren greetly þat here name myghte laste loonge after hem here vpon earth.” Scattergood, Works of Sir John Clanvowe, 69.

43. Ibid., 70: “is alle synne shame and vnworsshipe. And also swiche folk that wolden fayne liven meekeliche in þis world and ben out offe swich forseid riot, noise, and stryf, and lyuen symplely, and vsen to eten and drynken in mesure, and to clooþen hem meekely, and suffren paciently wroonges þat ooþere folke doon and seyn to hem, and hoolden hem apayed with lytel good of þis world, and desiren noo greet name of þis world, ne no pris ther of, swiche folke þe world scoorneth and hooldeþ them lolleris and loselis, foolis and shameful wrecches. But, sikerly, God holdeth hem moost wise and most worshipful.”

44. Ibid.: “And alle þat he suffrede paciently. And Seynt Poul seith þat Crist suffrede for vs leeuynge vs ensaumple þat we schulden so doo folewynge hise traces. And, there-fore, folewe we hise traces and suffer we paciently þe scoornes of þe world as he dede, and þanne wole he euen vs grace to comen in by þe narrugh wey to the worsshipfulle blisse that he regneth inne.”

45. Catto suggests this tract may be Clanvowe's confession, written just before his last crusade. “Religion and English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” 53–54. Cf. his analysis in “Sir William Beauchamp Between Chivalry and Lollardy.”

46. Scattergood, Works of Sir John Clanvowe, 9. Cf. Catto, “Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif”: “we paciently þe scoornes of þe world as he dede, and þanne wole he euen vs grace to comen in by þe narrugh wey to the worsshipfulle blisse that he regneth inne.”

Catto suggests this tract may be Clanvowe's confession, written just before his last crusade. “Religion and English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century,” 53–54. Cf. his analysis in “Sir William Beauchamp Between Chivalry and Lollardy.”

wers of Wyclif.”

47. Catto, “Religion and English Nobility,” 53.

48. Wyclif seems, however, to have looked to the knights as agents of reform. Various scholars make this point; see the comment of Christina von Nolcken, “Richard Wyche, a Certain Knight, and the Beginning of the End,” 136.

49. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights.

50. These differing points of view appear in Hudson, The Premature Reformation; Rex, The Lollards; Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society Under the Tudors; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; and Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People.

51. See the views of Aston, “Were the Lollards a Sect?”; Ann Hudson, Premature Reformation, 168–73; Catto, “Fellows and Helpers”; and Rex, The Lollards, vii–viii and, on Lollard knights and gentry (whose importance he minimizes), 62–63, 71.

52. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, 220–26. He notes the early ecclesiastical toleration (prior to the Oldcastle rising) and suggests some complicity of view among higher churchmen.

53. J. A. F. Pollard points out that in his will Sir Brian Stapelton used the phrase “mon chautiffe corps,” the very term found in Henry of Lancaster and, slightly different, in Geoffroi de Charny. See “Knightly Piety and the Margins of Lollardy,” 99. Catto suggests this “penitential rhetoric” was to be found in wills by Henry V and Archbishop Arundel and thus “cannot be a peculiarity of the small circle of Lollard knights.” “Religion and the English Nobility,” 51.

54. Catto, “Religion and the English Nobility,” 54.

55. Aston terms proposed seizure of church lands “the richest bait to hook or hold a Lollard knight” in “Lollardy and Sedition,” in Aston and Richmond, Lollards and Reformers, 21. Cf. the insightful introduction by Aston and Richmond to the volume of essays, Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, 1–27, and in ibid., J. A. F. Thompson, “Knightly Piety and the Margins of Lollardy.”

56. Hudson, Selections, 24, 28: “þe tende conclusion is þat manslaute be batayle or pretense lawe of rythwysnesse for temporal cause or spiritual withouten special reuelaciun is expres contrarious to þe newe testament, þeqwiche is a lawe of grace and ful of mercy. Þis conclusion is opinly prouid be exsample of Cristis preching here in erthe, þe qwiche most taute for to loue and to haue mercyon his enemys and nout for to slen hem. Þe reason is of þis for the more partye þere men fythte, aftir e firste strok, charite is ibroke' and quose deyth out of charite goth þe heye weye to helle. And ouer þis we knowe wel þat no clerk can fynde be scripture or be resun lawful punschement of deth for on dedly synne and nout for anoþer. But þe lawe of mercy þat is þe newe testament, forbad al mannisslaute: in evangelio dictum est antiquis, Non occides. Þe correlary is: it is an holy robbing of þe pore puple qwanne lordis purchase indulgencis a pena et a culpa to hem þat helpith to his oste, and gaderith to slen þe cristene men in fer londis for gode temperel, as we haue seen. And geten miche maugre of þe King of Pes; for be mekenesse and suffraunce oure beleue was multiplied, and fythteres and mansleeris Iesu Cryst hatith and manasit. Qui gladio percutit, gladio peribit.”

57. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, quoted in Wilks, “Wyclif and the Great Persecution,”62.

58. See especially the account of Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 141–67, and McFarlane, John Wyclif, 171–97. Paul Strohm argues that the revolt was stage-managed by the crown for its own purposes in England's Empty Throne. Cf. Rex, Lollards, 84–87. Jeremy Catto terms the actual fight that defeated Oldcastle's men “a pathetic skirmish.” “Religious Change Under Henry V,” 97

59. Pollard, “Knightly Piety and the Margins of Lollardy,” 109.

60. Emphasized in Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 166–67.

61. The phrase “wir hier ritterlich ringen” appears in a 1524 text from Luther used repeatedly by J. S. Bach: for example, in the closing chorale from his cantata “Wer mich liebet” (BWV 59) and the motet “Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf” (226).

62. Richard II's first wife was Anne of Bohemia. Cf. Catto, “Sir William Beauchamp Between Chivalry and Lollardy,” 42: Bohemian scholars visit manors of Sir William Beauchamp in 1407 and 1408 in search of Wycliffite texts.

63. Excellent discussion of the conflicts that emerged appear in Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536.

64. Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, passim, especially 263.

65. As emphasized by David Bagghi, “Luther and the Sacramentality of Penance.”

66. Denis Crouzet, however, has written that Luther's ideas directly contradicted those of the model chevalier Bayard. See his Symphorien Champier. La vie du preulx Chevalier Bayard, 68–72.

67. Luther, Christian Liberty (Lambert/Grimm), 21.

68. Ibid., 16

69. Ibid., 30.

70. See, e.g., Hill, The Loci Communes of Philip Melanchthon.

71. Any scholar who has worked in the Public Records Office in London (with its tons of surviving parchment records) or the substantial manuscript collections of the Archives National in Paris, has a personal recognition of the results of this process. J. R. Strayer wrote a classic, concise history of state formation, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. The seven-volume series edited by William Blockmans and Jean-Philippe Genet, The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, analyzes the emergence of the state from the late medieval through the early modern era thematically. Many of the scholars writing in these volumes show considerable interest in twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments. Note also, for example, the conclusion of Antonio Padoa-Schioppa in his edited collection, Legislation and Justice, 338, stressing the long duration of European state-formation, and the chapter by Hilde de Ridder-Sy-moens, “Training and Professionalization,” in Reinhard, Power Elites and Statebuilding. See also Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990; and Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan.

72. James Campbell has demonstrated this point with special force: see his Anglo-Saxon State.

73. If, as D. J. B. Trim has wisely cautioned, there is no single timeline or inevitable pattern for these changes across Europe (Chivalric Ethos, 24–26, 24 n. 93), the shifting pattern in France retains much interest. He notes that by the mid-seventeenth century, the nobles were, in fact, serving as members of an officer corps to the great benefit of state power. See the essays in that volume for a range of case studies.

74. Printed in Petitot, Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l' histoire de France, 14: 323–556.

75. Ibid., 349–50. David Potter notes that these opening pages show a fusion of chivalric romance with classical myth: “Chivalry and Professionalism,” 157.

76. As a Burgundian, young Louis would be useful to the king, Louis XI.

77. Petitot, Collection, 356: “la court du Roy, où est l'escolle de toute honnesteté, et où se tiennent les gens de bien soubz lesquelz on aprend â civillement vivre, et la forme d'acquerir non seulement les mondaines richesses, mais les incorruptibles tresors de honneur.” By contrast, Charny had simply urged his aspiring knights to find good men at arms wherever there was military action: Kaeuper and Kennedy, Livre de chevalerie, 90–93. The centrality of the monarch within the growing state is stressed by the contributors to Allan Ellenius, Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation.

78. Petitot, Collection, 352–63.

79. Ibid., 385–92.

80. Ibid., 393–99.

81. Interesting contrasts appear when this text is set alongside the story of Guillaume d'Orange told in the twelfth-century Couronnement de Louis. Both heroes serve their king. But Louis La Tremouille draws honor from his sovereign in a text filled with speeches about honor linked to royalty. William props up a feeble king by his own valor, lovingly detailed.

82. Petitot, Collection, 402–3: “de sa hardiesse, prudence, diligence et bonne conduicte, et de plusieurs beaulx faiz d'arjmes par luy faiz es rencontres et saillies qu'on avoit fait au siege de Nantes et aussi es sieges et assaulx de plusierurs villes, chasteaux et fortes places de Bretraigne.”

83. Ibid., 403: “pour le prouffit du Roy et du royaume, et acquerir honneur en sa charge.”

84. Ibid., 405–6.

85. Ibid., 407: “Trop mieulx nous vault mourir en juste bataille, guerre premise, et au service du Roy, qui est le lict d'honneur que vivre en reproche.”

86. This event and its consequences occupy pages 499–524.

87. Ibid., 499: “de mourir au service du Roy et de la chose publique.”

88. Ibid., 501: the first statement reads, “au lict d'honneur decedé en vostre compaignée, à vostre service et en juste querelle”; the second reads, “et il commanceoit acquerir honneur et vostre grace.”

89. Ibid., 506–7: “la plus honneste mort que mourut onc prince ou seigneur; c'est au lict d'honneru, en bataille premise pour juste querelle, non en fuyant, mais en bataillant, et navré de soixante deux playes, en la compaignée et au service du Roy, bien exxtime de toute la gendarmerie, et en la grace de Dieu, car luy bien confessé est decedé vray crestien.”

90. Ibid., 509.

91. Ibid., 511–13.

92. Ibid., 551–53, quotation at 553: “disoit souvent ne vouloir mourir aillerus que au lict d'honneur, c'est à dire au service du Roy en juste guerre.”

93. Ibid., 554: Les honneurs qu'on acciystyné faire en obseques de contes, princes, chevaliers et chiefz de guerre, luy furent baillz, comme bien le meritant, tant pour son honorable et droicte vie que pour ses nobles faictz et gestes.”

94. Ibid., 555: “Il despendoit non seulement ses gages et pensions, mais aussi tout son revenue, au serviced du Roy et de la chose publique, et non ailleurs.”

95. Ibid.

96. Champier, Les gestes ensemble la vie du preulx Chevalier Bayard, ed. Denis Crouzet.

97. Bayard was admired long after the sixteenth century, of course. Frederick the Great even founded an honorific order named for this remarkable “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.” See Schieder, Friedrich der Grosse, 51. My thanks to Dorinda Outram for this reference.

98. Champier, Les gestes ensemble, 108.

99. Ibid., passim. Charny had regularly called out his family name as war cry: Kaeuper and Kennedy, The Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny, 4, 198.

100. Champier, Les gestes ensemble, 129–32. The early career of William Marshal comes to mind.

101. Ibid., 233.

102. Ibid., 136: “Sa hardiesse n'estoit de home ançoys de lyon.…Il prenoist grant plaisir au combast.”

103. Ibid., 137: “lequel il occist par la volunté de dieu.” Crouzet discusses this fight at 22–30 in Champier, Les gestes ensemble.

104. This might reflect the poet of the Song of Roland who emphasizes the unimpressive size of the champion Thierry who will overcome the massive but evil Pinabel, judicial champion of the traitor Ganelon.

105. Champier, Les gestes ensemble, 142: “à ceste cause, comme deffendeur et saulvant mon honneur, et pour donner example à tous chrestien ne imposer crime sur son frere chrestien…comme chrestien chevalier de vérité.”

106. Ibid., 143–44.

107. Ibid.: see Crouzet's Introduction and 144.

108. Ibid., 145–49. Crouzet discusses this fight at 31–33.

109. Ibid., 146: “contre tout honneur de chevalerie et de la guerre.”

110. Ibid., 148: “car toute victoyre vient du ciel et non des homes.” The second quotation reads, “je vous exhorte comme freres chrestiens de recongnoistre vostre peché et la faulte d'avoir tués ces beaulx chevaulx qui ne vous avoient riens offence.…Il eust esté meilleur les vendre et donner l'argent aulx pouvres de dieu.”

111. Ibid., 149–54. Crouzet's discussion of this combat comes at 33.

112. Ibid., 153.

113. Ibid., 154: “que dieu garde tousjours les gens de bien et leur honneur, et que ce eust esté dommaige s'il eust esté prisonnier, pour ce qu'il a le bruyt d'estre chevalier sans reproche et bien le demonstra au combat du seigneur Alonce.”

114. We may likewise question who is actually speaking when Bayard later announces how hard it is for a warrior within Christian law to follow arms and die rich, and who says a man must follow God and make do with simply enough: “c'est moult difficile en la loy chrestienne suyvir les armes et mourir riche: c'est assés vivre selon Dieu et avoir souffisance.” Ibid., 170.

115. Crouzet emphasizes the religious system of the text above any other ideological lines of thought.

116. Champier, Les gestes ensemble, 211–34.

117. Ibid., 156: “à la necessité on ne doibt laisser pour aulcune chose son prince, et mieulx aimeroys mourir avecques luy que de mourir ycy à honte.”

118. Ibid., 172.

119. Ibid., 181–83.

120. Ibid., 195: “Sire, celluy qu'est courroné, sacréé et oing de l'uyle envoyé de ciel, et est roy d'ung si noble reaulme, le premier filz de l'esglise, est chevalier sur tous aultres chevaliers.”

121. Ibid., 196.

122. Ibid., 201.

123. The battle took place around the Sesia River at the end of April, 1524. See Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 180.

124. He was apparently shot at short range by a hacquebutier, a man firing a largebore “hacquebut a croc,” a gun heavy enough to require a rest to steady its barrel. Bert Hall describes this weapon as “the ‘elephant gun' of sixteenth century shoulder arms.” See Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 176–77.

125. Crouzet stresses that the tree beneath which Champier's hero is laid represents the cross of Christ, an image both of sorrow and triumph. In fact, Crouzet finds much Christological symbolism in Champier's biography. In the eschatological fears of the early sixteenth century, Champier sees Bayard's triumphs as victories over mere mortals elevated into dread collective enemies: see Crouzet's discussion, Les gestes ensemble, 17–22, 63.

126. Ibid., 209: “n'ay aulcune desplaisance ny regret à mourir, fors que je ne puis faire service aulcum pour l'advenir au roy mon souverain et qu'il le me fault delaisser à ses grandz affaires, don't je suys trèsdolent et desplaisant. Je prie dieu le souverain que, après mon trespass, il ave telz serviteurs que je vouldroye ester.”

127. Ibid., 210.

128. Ibid., 167.

129. Ferguson provides useful information and analysis in Chivalric Tradition, 45–55.

130. Quoted in McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 51.

131. See McCoy's comments on the Essex knightings, Rites of Knighthood, 87, 96, and quoting Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, 12.

132. Quoted in McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 76.

133. Daniel, The Civil Wars, 240; cf. McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 12, 115.

134. McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 108, 122–24.

135. Thurley, Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History, 99–105. “The style was about creating, or possibly in Henry's mind recreating, a chivalric setting for the human magnificence of the Tudor court” (99). If its origins lay in the Burgundian court, Thurley thinks the Tudors made their architecture national. By the 1580s, the style was being copied by non-royal great builders in an age of chivalric resurgence—“a society obsessed by the idea of chivalry”—and national pride (103). Self-conscious chivalric elements in the architecture include asymmetrical façades and backward-looking great halls with roof louvers for escape of smoke from the central hearth. I owe this reference to Dale Hoak.

136. As only one of many possible examples, we could consider the elaborate chivalric symbolism in Sir Philip Sidney's unfinished “New Arcadia.” Clare R. Kinney argues that Sidney's words “do not so much celebrate chivalric rituals as place them within a larger design that invites their demystification.” See her “Chivalry Unmasked: Courtly Spectacle and the Abuses of Romance in Sidney's ‘New Arcadia'.” Ferguson comments in Chivalric Tradition on Sidney, 113–18 and on Spencer, 118–23.

137. Daniel, Civil Wars. Daniel, McCoy argues, cannot find the proper balance between heroic prowess and stable state power in an age of repeated civil wars. Rites of Knighthood, 103. It is interesting that Sidney's “New Arcadia” likewise remained unfinished. See McCoy's comments, 136–37.

138. Daniel, Civil Wars, 228.

139. Ibid., 213–19.

140. Ibid., 163.

141. Ibid., 166–67.

142. Ibid., 148.

143. Ibid., 144–45.

144. Even his muchadmired Henry V does not escape Daniel's ambivalence. See 178–79, 181. Much as he loves prowess, shades of doubt fall even on this virtue. See stanzas 37–40, p. 187.

145. Ibid., 266–67. Such a civil strife is “A Warre that doth the face of Warre deforme,” 235. Yet the bright side is that “These Lords who thus against their Kings draw swords, / Taught Kings to come how to be more than Lords,” 240.

146. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood, 103

147. Furnivale, Queene Elizabethes Achademy, 1–13. The estimated costs (3,000 pounds annually) may have deterred the queen. Gilbert's assertion that his plan would make young nobles “for some what” who are at present “god for nothinge” cannot have won him copious aristocratic support.

148. Ibid., 1.

149. Ibid., 10–11.

150. Ibid., 13.

151. Ibid., 11. This is to avoid their being “corrupted with papistrie.”

152. See the argument of Mervyn James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642,” in his collected essays, Society, Politics, and Culture, 332–74. Steven Gunn comments on the contrasting situation in Germany and provides sources in “Chivalry and the Politics of the Early Tudor Court,” 124–25.

153. As noted by Anglo in The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, 81.

154. Milles, Catalogue of Honour, 74. Cf. his peroration on the Order of the Garter as the great combination of chivalry, religion, and royal court at 89–90.

155. To use an image I developed in Chivalry and Violence, in the complex cooperation and conflict among royauté, clergie, and chevalerie, the forces associated with kingship (or souverainité) have triumphed with the support of clergie both in the sense of the clerical caste and of learning in general.

156. The difference registers even if we think of crusaders and the church.

157. See, for example, the clear and concise analysis of David Potter, A History of France 1460–1560, 219–31. Cf. the attempt to reform “l'Église gallicane toute entière” in meetings at Tours in 1493: Godet, “Consultation de Tours pour la réforme de l'église de France, 175–96. Jeremy Catto says that “In all but name, more than a century before the title could be used, Henry V had begun to act as supreme governor of the Church of England.” “Religious Change Under Henry V,” 115.

158. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages and The Tudor Law of Treason; Cutler, The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France.