Knighthood in the 14th century

Today there are many differing mental visions of the Medieval knight, some wildly romanticised and others more realistic - if we only knew what that reality was. Perhaps it is never possible to strip away the intervening hundreds of years and view anything as it was or was felt to be in the 14th century.

For that reason I am basing this post on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with its portrait of a knight in the General Prologue. I am greatly indebted to Terry Jones and his disruptive book Chaucer's Knight for much of what follows. 

He argues that, by the time Chaucer wrote, the ideals of knighthood had become so tarnished that the concepts of chivalry and honour were no longer applicable. This allied with the rise of mercenaries, who, instead of being permanent, trusted members of a lordly household, were temporary, paid warriors, They may or may not have fulfilled their contracts and could be a scourge in peacetime, idly but violently roaming the countryside and causing havoc.  

At first reading, the knight seems to embody all the high ideals of "chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye". Many of those words had a much more powerful impact then then now, perhaps "trouthe" in particular, because it had a wider and more profound sense of the individual's vowing his entire self-hood to his own integrity.

Then Chaucer describes his modest, worn outfit and lists the many battles at which he was present. Until this book, all scholars had taken this to mean that he was a brave fighter but not flamboyant. Jones probes in forensic detail and finds that the clothing denotes a paid soldier, perhaps fallen on poor times, and that the battles were bloody massacres of innocent people. The line below, which had always been taken at face value, now seems pointedly and bitterly sardonic, particularly in the word "gentil" which encapsulated all possible goodly qualities, Jesus being the prime example:

     He was a verray, parfit, gentil knight.

This view means that the sarcastic portrait is of an unscrupulous mercenary and satirical in intention, like most of the other depictions in the General Prologue (excepting the parson and his brother, the ploughman). The satire is aimed less at the character than at the decline in his or her profession. Chaucer is lamenting the debasement of old standards.

I am convinced by this argument although it has recently been modified by scholars - yet never disproved. It was such a shake-up of the previous academic version that I, cynically, feel that embarrassment would prevent compliant agreement in the ivy-clad universities, who could not or would not believe that the co-director  of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, also director of Monty Python's Life of Brian, could teach them anything about history. Ball now in their court, say I. 

Another fact that moves me to accept the satirical interpretation is the presence of "doodles" in the margins of Medieval MSS which depict snails fighting knights and holding their own. Their antennae are as long as the swords and the purpose must be to cast knights as feeble and no better in derring-do than a humble snail. The name is a misnomer because the art works are detailed and beautifully drawn and painted. it's well worth a doodle Google.