CHIVALRY AND VIOLENCE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE ddddddddddddddddddddddddddd CHIVALRY AND VIOLENCE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE ddddddddddddddddddddddddddd RICHARD W. KAEUPER 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Richard W. Kaeuper 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organisation. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0–19–820730–1 13579108642 Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn to Seth, Geoffrey, and John acknowledgements ddd Essential support for launching this project came from awards granted by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in 1989–91. Their generous financial and moral support is gratefully acknowledged. The University of Rochester gave me one-semester academic leaves in 1991, 1993, and 1997, for which I am likewise grateful. Warm thanks go to the anonymous Clarendon Press readers, and to William Calin, John Maddicott, Jeffrey Ravel, and Roberta Krueger, who read large parts of the book manuscript and gave helpful critiques. Tony Morris encour- aged the project and saw the book through the contract stage at the Press with much appreciated skill and enthusiasm. Ruth Parr, Anna Illingworth, and Dorothy McLean directed the crucial process by which a large manuscript became a book. Sarah Dancy did the truly heroic work of copy-editing. The staff in Reference and Interlibrary Loan, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, obtained even the most obscure French sources. The index was skilfully prepared by Nicholas Waddy. Responding to my ideas as I formulated them was one gift from my wife Margaret. Even more important was her splendidly sound advice as I shaped the book and her unfailing capacity to ask the hard questions. This book is dedicated to my sons, Seth, Geoffrey, and John, with love and pride. Richard W. Kaeuper University of Rochester contents ddd Acknowledgements vii Prologue 1 PART 1. ISSUES AND APPROACHES 5 1. The Problem of Public Order and the Knights 11 The High Middle Ages and Order 11 Three Witnesses 12 Context: Socio-Economic and Institutional Change 19 Evidence from Chivalric Literature 22 Conclusion 28 2. Evidence on Chivalry and its Interpretation 30 Did Knights Read Romance? 30 Is Chivalric Literature Hopelessly Romantic? 33 The Framework of Institutions and Ideas 36 PART II. THE LINK WITH CLERGIE 41 3. Knights and Piety 45 Lay Piety, Lay Independence 45 Chivalric Mythology 53 Knights and Hermits 57 4. Clergie, Chevalerie, and Reform 63 Clerical Praise for Knightly Militia 64 Clerical Strictures on Knightly Malitia 73 The Church and Governing Power 81 The Force of Ideas 84 PART III. THE LINK WITH ROYAUTÉ 89 5. Chevalerie and Royauté 93 Royal Stance on War and Violence 93 x Contents Capetian Kingship and Chivalry 98 The Balance Sheet 102 6. English Kingship, Chivalry, and Literature 107 Royal Ideology and Enforcement 107 The Evidence of Literature 111 PART IV. THE AMBIVALENT FORCE OF CHIVALRY 121 7. The Privileged Practice of Violence: Worship of the Demi-god Prowess 129 Identification of Chivalry with Prowess 135 Competition 149 Conclusion 155 8. Knighthood in Action 161 A Delight in War and Tournament 161 The Fact of Fear? Voices for Peace? 165 Conduct of War 169 Looting and Destruction 176 Loyalty 185 9. Social Dominance of Knights 189 Chivalry and Nobility 189 The Role of Largesse 193 The Role of Chivalric Mythology (Revisited) 199 The Role of Formal Manners 205 10. Knights, Ladies, and Love 209 The Variety of Voices 210 Male Bonding 215 The Link with Prowess 219 Sexual Violence 225 11. Chanson de Geste and Reform 231 The Song of Aspremont 232 The Crowning of Louis 237 Raoul de Cambrai 244 12. Quest and Questioning in Romance 253 The Quest of the Holy Grail 253 The Death of King Arthur 261 Contents xi Robert the Devil/Sir Gowther 265 13. Chivalric Self-Criticism and Reform 273 The Romance of the Wings 273 The Book of the Order of Chivalry 275 L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal 280 Geoffroi de Charny, Livre de chevalerie 284 Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur 288 EPILOGUE 298 The Essex Rebellion and the Bouteville Affair 299 Dissolving the Fusion of Chivalric Elements 302 Prowess and Honour 304 Prowess and Piety 307 Prowess and Status 308 BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 INDEX 331 PROLOGUE ddd ARK TWAIN’S Connecticut Yankee, finding himself suddenly M transported across centuries into the strange world of Camelot, man- ages, despite the shock of time travel, to preserve his acute sense of observa- tion. From the start he views the Arthurian court ambivalently, feeling horror at its failure to anticipate the democratic and technological glories of his own nineteenth century, mixed with a somewhat reluctant dash of romantic admi- ration for its very otherness, exhibited with such vigour and colour, especially in the quaint richness of its verbal expression. If the Yankee thus drops substantial weights onto the pans swinging on each side of the scales of judgement, the balance arm tips heavily toward the nega- tive. His early conclusion is that Camelot must be an insane asylum, its denizens virtual savages who can be dismissed as ‘white Indians’. Listening to the talk in court for the first time, he reports: As a rule the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and courtly; and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners when anybody was telling anything— I mean in a dogfightless interval. And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot; telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else’s lie, and believe it, too. It was hard to asso- ciate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suf- fering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.1 This passage, of course, shows us much that we try to avoid as historians. Here the Yankee shares the prejudices of his age and wears the racial blinkers of his creator; he also reveals the sour suspicion of all things venerably European that periodically appeared in Twain’s books.2 Yet we can more easily read on past the prejudices and culturally smug com- ments about childlike natives when we observe that the passage and the book, whatever their obvious failures in cultural relativism, present a thoroughly 1 A Connecticut Yankee, 13. Twain would have appreciated Clausewitz telling his wife that it would be years before he could recall the scenes of Napoleon’s Russian campaign ‘without a shud- dering horror’. Quoted in Keegan, A History of Warfare, 8. 2 The complex, shifting, even contradictory relationship between Twain and European culture is noted in Kaplan’s fascinating study, Mr Clemens and Mark Twain. 2 Prologue salutary admonition to us as modern analysers of the medieval phenomenon of chivalry. For the great danger in the study of chivalry is to view this impor- tant phenomenon through the rose-tinted lenses of romanticism, to read chivalry in terms of what we want it to be rather than what it was. However glorious and refined its literature, however elevated its ideals, however endur- ing its link with Western ideas of gentlemanliness—and whatever we think of that—we must not forget that knighthood was nourished on aggressive impulses, that it existed to use its shining armour and sharp-edged weaponry in acts of showy and bloody violence. As Twain reminds us succinctly, we must not forget to shudder. To avoid romanticism should enable analysis, of course, not prevent it. An occasional, salutary shudder does not mean we must judge chivalry—as Twain does here—by modern liberal standards, nor indeed that we must judge it at all, but simply that we should take care not to be blinded by the light reflected off shining armour; we should try instead to look at the social effects of chivalry as dispassionately as possible, and now and then manage to write of chivalry in a tone other than the reverential. Such efforts in no way diminish an appreciation of the vast investment in chivalry by medieval people or of the vast importance attributed to chivalry by modern analyses that may go well beyond the particularly medieval range of vision. In fact, the most compelling reason to avoid romanticizing chivalry is that taking a view through rose- tinted lenses distorts and finally trivializes this extraordinarily powerful force in early European history.