The Birth of Nobility

Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300

David Crouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317878261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

For 300 years separate and mutually uncomprehending English and French historiographies have confused the history of medieval aristocracy. Unpicking the basic assumptions behind both national traditions, this book explains them, reconciles them and offers entirely new ways to take the study of aristocracy forward in both England and France.

The Birth of Nobility analyses the enormous international field of publications on the subject of medieval aristocracy, breaking it down into four key debates: noble conduct, noble lineage, noble class and noble power. Each issue is subjected to a thorough review by comparing current scholarship with what a vast range of historical source material actually says. It identifies the points of divergence in the national traditions of each of these debates and highlights where they have been mutually incomprehensible.

For students studying medieval Europe.

PART ONE

NOBLE CONDUCT

CHAPTER 1

Reconstructing Chivalry

There was once a thing called chivalry. Unlike ‘feudalism’, for instance, it is not an invention of scholars; men once knew it, felt it, explained it to each other and practised it, after their fashion. When they did so, and what it was that they practised, are proper questions for historians. And the historical debate on chivalry is an ancient one. It could be said that it stretches back to the time of chivalry itself, for, as an ideal, it was a long time dying. Many Elizabethan gentlemen and Caroline courtiers wanted to be considered chivalric in their conduct and aspirations. Because it is an idea with this sort of continuity behind it, the debate on chivalry is a curious one. It became historically ‘scientific’ in Voltaire’s France, at a time when reason alone was thought pure, and noble conduct and hypocrisy were regarded as one and the same thing. In the 1730s and 1740s antiquarian scholars began to investigate chivalry as a cultural phenomenon which was thought at the time to be dead and gone. But these first autopsies on a past system of values were made difficult by the refusal of the corpse to lie down. In England and France alike, other eighteenth-century people developed a curious nostalgia for the pastoral and heroic, especially what was heroic in the medieval past. Its simple and manly ideals were admired in days which people regarded as effete and corrupt. In England, the conscious concept of the ‘gentleman’ complicated things further, for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘gentleman’ regarded himself as the living lineal representative of the Plantagenet knight and the Stuart cavalier.

The result of this was that many early writers on medieval chivalry cannot be entirely trusted as historians. They sometimes have a polemical purpose which colours their prose. In this chapter, I have broadly divided the study of chivalry into two periods. The first, which lasted into the twentieth century, was a time of didactic writing on the subject. Even the most rigorous of early writers, such as Charles Mills, might have a teaching purpose in mind as they wrote. For Mills, it was to demonstrate that the Regency gentleman was the ethical heir of a great moral estate, and to provide an inventory of its treasures. The extreme examples are those of the ultramontane Catholic writers Kenelm Henry Digby and Léon Gautier. For them chivalry was a means to transform their corrupt and secular worlds. Gautier constructed his massive analysis of medieval chivalry on purpose to expose the moral bankruptcy of the secular Third Republic, and to provide the ammunition for a moral revolution in France.

The age of polemical and didactic writing on chivalry ended, as much else, with the Great War. Chivalry lost ground as a living concept and polemicists went elsewhere in search of ideas to reform society. It was only after this that sober academic historians gingerly approached the corpse. The great medievalists of the nineteenth century had ignored chivalry as being a light subject, tainted by amateurs and romantics. It took several decades for the subject to attract serious historians, and it is no exaggeration to say that the academic study of chivalry did not really come alive as a debate until the 1980s. Historiographers will hardly be surprised that – just as the debate began – the idea of chivalry itself began to undergo deconstruction. What was the basic impulse that created noble conduct? ‘Chivalry’ was certainly a self-conscious medieval concept, but not until the first quarter of the thirteenth century.

What was noble about conduct before then? A sub-group of historians have now set up the secularised concept of ‘courtliness’ or ‘cortoisie’ as a more accurate tool to analyse distinctive noble conduct. It seems entirely appropriate that the study of chivalry might well fall beneath the swords of its critics, in the moment when it has triumphantly raised its bright banner above the ivory towers of Academe.

Preaching Chivalry

Nineteenth-century English gentlemen were quite conscious of how savage were their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. They had an explanation for how that savagery had been tamed so as to produce their urbane world: it had been by the discipline of feudalism and the inspiration of its good angel, chivalry. The idea of chivalry as a code of conduct to be admired or ridiculed was already deeply embedded in English literary culture by the nineteenth century. The tendency to admire or to ridicule chivalry was there as early as the seventeenth century, depending on whether you took Sir Philip Sidney or Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (first published in English in 1620) as your hero. The eighteenth century, in its patrician and Augustan way, was inclined to admire it, rather than ridicule it.

The founding father of reasoned eighteenth-century views on chivalric culture was Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697–1781), whose studies first appeared in print in the 1740s, and whose great work, Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie was published in 1759–60.¹ Sainte-Palaye was by no means the first serious writer on chivalry, but he stands at the head of the lineage of analytical historians who looked at it as a historical phenomenon to be explained.² He drew on later medieval sources (particularly his beloved Froissart) to offer his readers an interpretation of chivalry as a pageant of heraldry, jousting and deeds of heroism; following a generic knight from childhood to the grave. Sainte-Palaye was not all that concerned to give the origins of chivalry a full historical treatment, although he had a vague belief that it came from the Teutonic forests of the days of Tacitus and eventually fell into ultimate decadence. But he did regard chivalry as having ‘laws’ and as being a self-conscious code. His book is at the root of all subsequent French and English scholarship on the subject, and is one reason why much of it is so very florid.

As it rose, the great literary wave of romanticism carried the idea of chivalry foaming on its crest, and picked it up very early. Many take the Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) of the literary critic, Bishop Richard Hurd (1720–1808), as the romantic movement’s first conscious stirrings, and a mild sort of nostalgia for ‘the Gothic chivalry’ was a notable theme in the earliest of Hurd’s twelve letters, although it was Spenser (‘the great master of Chivalry himself’) and Elizabethan court culture that he truly admired. Hurd’s views were formed under French influence: he had read Montesquieu who convinced him that eleventh-century ‘feudal government’ was warlike and unstable, and so Hurd deduced that chivalry arose out of the courts of feudal princes who were imposing order on their world. He had gratefully read Sainte-Palaye, so he believed that chivalry was an improving moral code and that knights were brought up in it from their childhood. It was the nostalgia of Bishop Hurd that was behind Edmund Burke’s declaration that the ‘age of chivalry was dead’ in 1791 when he condemned the revolutionaries’ treatment of Marie Antoinette; but poets and playwrights of the 1790s were also obsessed with the morality and language of the lost ‘days’ or ‘age’ of chivalry. By the time that Walter Scott rode the wave with the publication of Ivanhoe (1819), ‘chivalry’ had long been historicised; that is, it was understood to be a social movement with origins and a historical line of development.

It was in 1825, partly in response to Scott’s loose way with evidence, that the young lawyer Charles Mills (1788–1826) offered a first historical account in English of how ‘feudalism’ and its guardian angel, ‘chivalry’, had taken the ancestors of the gentlemen of his day out of the ‘rudeness and gloom’ of the Teutonic forests, in his bestseller, The History of Chivalry, published just before his premature death.³ Mills charmed his public (and indeed Sir Walter Scott himself) by making a direct – and not entirely inaccurate – connection between the chivalry of the age of Froissart and Caxton and the living civilized virtues of the Georgian gentleman (who read Froissart in Sainte-Palaye’s edition). Mills drew a line to connect Sir John Chandos with Mr Darcy and Mr Knightley. He was not particularly original in his thinking. He had – and acknowledged – predecessors, notably Sainte-Palaye. But he was not entirely happy with Sainte-Palaye’s work. He was irritated by the Frenchman’s failure to tell the full story and his airy belief that knighthood ‘had been the ornament merely of his own country’ (he was by no means the last English-speaking historian to feel that particular cause of irritation with the French).

A new impulse behind Mills’s work was his concern to draw a historian’s distinction between the ‘chivalric character’ of the middle ages and the literary extravagance that informed most people’s understanding of it. A thick and increasingly turgid stream of pseudo-medieval verse and fiction had been clogging English minds since the publication of the ancient ballads collected by Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and Thomas Warton the younger (1728–90). Where Charles Mills did a great service to medieval studies was in setting up a clear historical model of the development of chivalry in English. He declared that chivalry was a social, not a military phenomenon, and he tried to identify its key features: generosity, fidelity, liberality and indeed courtesy. His influence had a long-term impact.⁴ When the English historian J.E.A. Jolliffe wrote about his understanding of what defined a twelfth-century feudal baron in Angevin Kingship (1955), he consciously echoed Sainte-Palaye and Mills in seeing the baron as a relic of the Teutonic forest, still possessed by a generic Northern saevitas, or savagery, at odds with the emerging concept of the monarchical state. For Jolliffe, like Mills, the twelfth century was ‘a raw, ingenuous age, as yet imperfectly Christian and political’. Jolliffe’s book was reissued in 1963 and still features on university reading lists (including my own).⁵

Studying chivalry with historical detachment was not always enough for some people. Many writers contemporary with Mills were all too keen to take chivalry as a moral and religious programme to counter the social problems of their own age. From the 1760s till the 1940s there were writers who believed that chivalry had a lot to teach their own day, whether it was in civic virtue, private manners, attitudes to the female sex or religion. Sir Walter Scott and Mills were historians in their approach, and although they both admired the ideal of chivalry from a distance they thought its relics had been long transformed into the modern gentleman. But others, like the romantic baronet, Sir Kenelm Henry Digby (1800–1880), in his influential and inspirational work, The Broad Stone of Honour (1822) made chivalry the basis of a passionate and unsubtle critique of their own England of Utilitarianism, satanic mills and the Reform Act. Digby’s reception into the Catholic church in 1825 led to his book’s reissue in an even more rarified and spiritualised form. This idealism reached perhaps its greatest absurdity when the concept of chivalry was absorbed into the romanticised, conservative politics of Disraeli’s Young England movement.⁶ The tendency by authors to preach chivalry at their own age lasted well into the twentieth century, and inspired and confused several generations of British youth. But the sublimity of Digby and his like had another impact. It made chivalry a subject beneath, or above, the consideration of the sober empiricism of the history school at Oxford in the 1860s and 1870s. History dons tended to ignore chivalry as being a subject for the lightweight and romantic student of the middle ages. The romanticism which infected the idea of chivalry quarantined it academically till as late as the inter-war years. There long remained a belief that the selflessness of chivalry should still be held up for admiration, and might be experienced on the playing fields of the greater English public schools or in the ranks of the Boy Scouts, in the air with Bigglesworth of the Royal Flying Corps and the Red Baron, or in the mythical Scotland of John Buchan.

The climax of chivalric rhetoric within the historical profession came at the end of the nineteenth century in France with the work of the right-wing Catholic archivist and historian, Léon Gautier (1832–97). In one sense, Gautier’s La Chevalerie (1884) is simply a more focussed and extensive essay on the lines of Sainte-Palaye, whom he quotes extensively and whose basic structure he borrowed for his own work. It is the richness of its trawl of the literary and historical sources that makes Gautier’s work still so valuable, as well as its focus on the formative years of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (he rarely trespassed beyond 1223 and the death of Philip Augustus). Despite his trenchant francocentric approach, his basic evolutionary outlook and his reconstruction of chivalry was little different to that of Mills, who had defined chivalry’s full appearance as the point when knighthood took the Church under its protection. Gautier said much the same, if in a more ultramontane way: knighthood emerged from the Teutonic forests and was tutored into civilisation and chivalry by the Catholic Church, of which Gautier was such a partisan.

The principal difference between the reactionary Gautier and (say) his contemporary, the reactionary English historian Edward Augustus Freeman, was the extent to which Gautier was prepared to enthuse about Christian chivalry as a living social force. He seems not to have known anything of Kenelm Henry Digby: if he did, he ignored his fellow enthusiast as a trespasser in what was a French field. However, Gautier preached much the same social sermon on his chivalric gospel: both men saw their own time as a corrupt and effete one, and the revival of a religious and idealistic chivalry was the cure for its ills. Readers know where they are with Gautier from the start. The title page of his massive quarto work is adorned with an armed knight with downcast eye...