Le Morte Darthur
shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode
horse; and thou were the truest lover, of a sinful man, that ever loved
woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and
thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights; and
thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among
ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever
put spear in the rest.’
Let me compare with this Chaucer’s description of the knight of his
times:—
‘A knight there was, and that a worthy[41] man,
That from the timé that he first began
To riden out, he loved chivalry,
Truth and honóur, freedom and courtesy.
Full worthy was he in his lordés war,
And thereto had he ridden, no man farre,
As well in Christendom as in Heatheness,
And ever honoured for his worthiness.
At Alisandre he was when it was won:
Full oftentime he had the board begun
Aboven allé natións in Prusse[42]:
In Lethowe had he reyséd[43], and in Russe,
No Christian man so oft, of his degree:
In Gernade at the siege eke had he be
Of Algesir, and ridden in Belmarie:
At Leyés was he, and at Satalie,
When they were won; and in the Greaté Sea
At many a noble army had he be.
At mortal battles had he been fifteen,
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene
In listés thriés, and aye slain his foe.
This ilké worthy knight had been also
Sometimé with the lord of Palathie
Against another heathen in Turkey;
And evermore he had a sovereign prise[44],
And though that he was worthy he was wise,
And of his port as meek as is a maid.
He never yet no villainy ne said
In all his life unto no manner wight:
He was a very perfect gentle knight.’
In an age when all men, not of the clergy, were divided between the two
classes of freemen or gentlemen, and serfs or villains, and the
villains were in habits and in human culture little better than the
domestic animals of which they shared the labours, the knight almost
inevitably belonged to the class of free, or gentle, birth. Still, in
theory always, and to a great extent in practice, it was not his birth,
but his personal merit, which qualified him for knighthood. The
personal merit would oftener exist, and still oftener come to light,
where it had the advantages and aids of education and general social
culture. But if it was recognised in the villain, or man of no rights
of birth, he might be, and often was, knighted, and was thereby
immediately enfranchised, and accounted a gentleman, in law no less
than in name. Thus Froissart tells us of Sir Robert Sale, the governor
of Norwich, that ‘he was no gentleman born, but he had the grace to be
reputed sage and valiant in arms, and for his valiantness King Edward
made him knight.’ He was governor during the popular insurrection of
which Wat Tyler and Jack Straw were the London leaders; and he was
invited to put himself at the head of one of the risings by men who
urged upon him—‘Sir Robert, ye are a knight and a man greatly beloved
in this country, and renowned a valiant man; and though ye be thus, yet
we know you well: ye be no gentleman born, but son to a villain, such
as we be: therefore come you with us, and be our master, and we shall
make you so great a lord that one quarter of England shall be under
your obeisance.’ He refused, and they killed him. The same king also
knighted the man-at-arms, son of a tanner, who was afterwards famous as
Sir John Hawkwood. And the courtly as well as knightly Chaucer, who
must more or less have reflected the feeling of the royal and noble
personages among whom he lived, goes farther, and asserts that not only
does virtue make the gentleman, but also baseness of mind the villain
or churl:—
‘But understand in thine intent,
That this is not mine intendement,
To clepen no wight in no age
Only gentle for his lineage;
But whoso that is virtuous,
And in his port nought outrageous,
Though he be not gentle born,
Thou may’st well see this in soth,
That he is gentle because he doth
As longeth to a gentleman;
Of them none other deem I can:
For certainly, withouten drede,
A churl is deemed by his deed,
Of high or low, as you may see,
Or of what kindred that he be.’
Akin to this recognition of gentleness of mind and manners, as that
which made a gentleman, was the sense of brotherhood among knights and
gentlemen, which led them to trust in each other’s honour, even when
they were fighting under the banners of hostile kings. The chronicles
are full of the instances of such consideration of the English and
French knights for each other in the wars between the two nations; and
it is not without probability that to these and suchlike manifestations
of the spirit of chivalry have been traced the courtesy and humanity
which characterise modern warfare in a degree unknown to the ancients.
Much indeed of barbarism and cruelty there was in the usages of war in
the best times of chivalry, even of the knights among themselves, and
still more when they came, with passions infuriated by resistance, upon
the people of lower rank than themselves. Edward III of England, and
the knights whom he gathered round him, are held alike by contemporary
historians and romance writers, and by those of modern times, to have
best exhibited the characteristics of chivalry in its day of greatest
refinement as well as splendour; yet no one can read the chronicles of
even the admiring Froissart without seeing how much savage passion and
cruelty was often mingled with their better dispositions: though we do
see also that the cruelty was not because, but in spite of their
chivalry. Froissart laments bitterly the iniquity of the massacre by
the Black Prince of the people of Limoges, men, women, and children,
more than three thousand. And when Edward III, before him, intended, as
would seem, to have treated the town of Calais in like manner, not only
did the French knights who had offered to surrender declare that they
would ‘endure as much pain as knights ever did, rather than the poorest
lad in the town should have any more evil than the greatest of us
all’—showing that they made no selfish distinction between the noble
and the villain—but the English knights, headed by Sir Walter of
Manny, that flower of knighthood, protested to the utmost against their
king’s purpose. And when he had yielded so far to their urgency as to
say that he would be content with the lives of the six chief burgesses,
Sir Walter of Manny again remonstrated, saying, ‘Ah, noble king, for
God’s sake refrain your courage: ye have the name of sovereign
noblesse: therefore now do not a thing that should blemish your renown,
nor to give cause to some to speak of you villainy [to charge you with
conduct unworthy of a knight and gentleman]; every man will say it is a
great cruelty to put to death such honest persons, who by their own
wills put themselves into your grace to save their company. Then the
king wryed away from him, and commanded to send for the hangman, and
said, “They of Calais had caused many of my men to be slain, wherefore
these shall die in likewise.”’
It needed a stronger influence than that of Sir Walter of Manny to save
their lives: and this brings me to speak of the LADY of the mediæval
times; the LADY, who was the counterpart of the KNIGHT, and without
whom he could never have existed. Here, indeed, I meet a difficulty
which reminds me of what Coleridge says of the female characters of
Shakspeare, that their truth to nature, and therefore their beauty,
consists in the absence of strongly marked features. It is impossible
to read the poems, romances, or chronicles of the mediæval times,
without feeling all through how important a part the lady plays
everywhere; and yet it is far from easy to draw her from her retirement
and bring distinctly before ourselves what she did, and get a picture
of her as definite as we can do of the knight. Still I must try to
trace the outlines of such a picture of one lady:—Philippa, queen of
Edward III, whom Froissart calls ‘the most gentle queen, most liberal,
and most courteous that ever was queen in her days;’ and who was the
very type and representative of the lady, in the highest and best
sense, in an age in which the ladies—such as the princess Blanche, the
good queen Ann, the countess of Salisbury, Jane de Montfort, and the
wife of Charles de Blois—were renowned for their gentle or their
heroic characters.
When Isabel, queen of Edward II, visited Hainault with her son,
afterwards Edward III, we are told that William, earl of Hainault, ‘had
four fair daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Jane, and Isabel: among whom
the young Edward set most his love and company on Philippa; and also
the young lady in all honour was more conversant with him than any of
her sisters.’ Queen Isabel had come to ask for aid against her enemies,
and Froissart gives an account of the discussion between the earl and
his council, who objected on prudential grounds to interfering with the
quarrels of the English, and the earl’s brother, Sir John Hainault, who
maintained that ‘all knights ought to aid to their powers all ladies
and damsels chased out of their own countries, being without counsel or
comfort.’ The earl finally yielded, saying, ‘My fair brother, God
forbid that your good purpose should be broken or let. Therefore, in
the name of God, I give you leave; and kissed him, straining him by the
hand in sign of great love.’ The whole passage is too long to quote,
but thus much gives a lively picture of the temper of the home and
court in which the young Philippa was brought up.
Her marriage with Edward, then only fifteen years old, was agreed on,
and sanctioned by the Pope. I am sorry to say that the chronicler gives
no account of the lady’s bridal outfit[45], except in the general
terms, that ‘there was devised and purveyed for their apparel, and for
all things honourable that belonged to such a lady, who should be queen
of England.’ They were married, and she arrived in England and was
crowned, ‘with great justs, tourneys, dancing, carolling, and great
feasts, the which endured the space of three weeks.’ And then ‘this
young queen Philippa abode still in England, with small company of any
persons of her own country, saving one who was named Walter of Manny,
who was her carver, and after did so many great prowesses in divers
places, that it were hard to make mention of them.’ If we couple this
statement, that she retained hardly any of her own people, with that
which Froissart makes in reviewing her whole life, that ‘she loved
always her own nation where she was born,’ we have pleasing thoughts
suggested of the cheerful acceptance of new duties in a foreign land by
the young wife; while, if I had space to describe in detail the noble
life of Sir Walter of Manny, the reader would agree with me that his
habitual presence in the English court must have done much to make both
Edward and the Black Prince, as well as the rest of the princes and
nobles, what they were, as knights and gentlemen.
The next glimpse we get of the queen is when she appears, accompanied
with three hundred ladies and damsels ‘of noble lineage, and apparelled