Questions of Medieval Chivalry

To express the proliferation of the chivalrous culture in medieval Europe, the historian Howell Chickering says of chivalry that “the code itself can no more be separated from European aristocratic ways of thinking than the idea of a knight can be separated from his armour or his horse”.[1] The eminent historian of chivalry, Maurice Keen, states that it was “an ethos in which martial, aristocratic, and Christian elements were fused together”.[2] From this fusion, people of the time distinguished between different aspects of chivalry as parts of a general ideal. In a passage from the late thirteenth-century Romance, Dumart le Galois, Dumart addresses twenty squires on the qualities of a knight:

A knight must be hardy, courteous, generous, loyal and fair of speech: ferocious to his foe, frank and debonair to his friend. And lest anyone tell you that he who has not borne his shield or struck his blow in battle or tournament is not by rights a knight, see to it that you conduct yourselves that you have a right to the name. He has a right to the title of knighthood who has proved himself in arms and won the praise of men. Seek therefore this day to do deeds that will deserve to be remembered, for every new knight should make a good beginning.

The medieval historian J. Huizinga once wrote, “nearly all paid homage to the chivalrous bias, and it remains to consider to what extent this bias modified the course of events”.[5] This article will pose questions related to how chivalry influenced behaviour during the Scottish Wars of Independence in the fourteenth-century. It will present chivalric concepts as contemporaries saw and used them. The task is to determine how much chivalric ideals actually affected behaviour at a time of great stress on a nation and its people during warfare, a period that would understandably encourage non-ideal behaviour. The intention here is to bring together the various ideas and theories to illustrate how chivalry worked in this Scottish context during the first phase of the Scottish Wars of Independence.

We tend to think of chivalry and knights as representative of martial ideals believed and practiced in a variety of romantic ways. Rather than focus on these ideals, this work concerns itself with a class of people with inherited bounds that were supposed to identify them as a group and were meant to set them apart from the rest of their own society. It is also concerned with how their actual behaviour was affected as a result. One of the primary difficulties for modern scholarship is distinguishing between a professed ideal and that ideal as a foundation for action. For example, when considering the definition of “honour”, “two systems of ideas of ‘honour’ existed, or coexisted; one generally accepted, deriving from religious, philosophical and legal principles, the other deriving from factual situations within the same social structure”.[6] Our inherited definitions of chivalry are similarly complicated, and the language of chivalry contains many traps for the modern scholar. ‘Chivalry’ and ‘chivalrous’ were terms ripe for use in propaganda. The pitfalls of this for the modern writer are many and to avoid writing another romance one must be diligent in the careful use of these terms and in interpreting how and why medieval writers used them.

In the case of chivalry, two forces encouraged and stimulated the development of the concept of chivalry: the church’s influence with the motive of mitigating the cruelty and violence, and the nobility’s influence with the motive of establishing an elite ruling culture within society, exercising their powers exclusively and without interference. Concurrently, however, it was the credo of the individual martial man, and was shaped by his actions and self-interest. During our period these influences resulted in an unsettled balance between the interests of the individual, as expressed in terms of martial prowess and other individual virtues, and the interests of the group and collective effort, as expressed in terms of loyalty. For individual knights, chivalry represented an individualistic world view, guided by self-interest and a vision of one’s own power. Martial prowess, then, was one of the principal virtues to express this idea of individual power.

There are a number of key questions surrounding the seemingly opposing forces of individualism and loyalty and how these virtues played out in reality as well as in theory:

• Were the individual ideals of personal valour and honour distinct from loyalty at the beginning of the Scottish Wars of Independence? 
• Were definitions of chivalric behaviour as firmly defined as they would become later in the century? 
• Was it war that created common interest and limited the expression of self-interest through the acceptable virtue of loyalty?  
• Did the chaotic period of civil war create a catalyst for the redefinition of chivalric behaviour as an act of loyalty for a common purpose, though still guided by self-interest and individual ability?

This distinction between individual and group action may help to explain the many apparent contradictions between the ideals of chivalry and the actions of their individual practitioners. As the anthropologist Pitt-Rivers wrote, “a system of values is never a homogenous code of abstract principles obeyed by all the participants in a given culture and able to be extracted from an informant with the aid of a set of hypothetical questions, but a collection of concepts which are related to one another and applied differentially by the different status groups... in the different social... contexts in which they find their meanings”.[7] 

An application of a similar approach to historical study can be used to describe the place of chivalry in early fourteenth-century Scotland and allow for any of the contradictions inherent in its application.

According to the professed ideals within chivalric literature of the period, one might reasonably expect that conflicts were decided by single combat, that armies always hesitated to attack a weary opponent or use this to their advantage, and that knights regularly allowed their opponents to take a refreshing nap before resuming a fight. Historical examples and not purely literary of most of these are rare, if not improbable. There were however, cases recorded “of humanitarian generosity, [and] examples of heroic self-sacrifice”.[8] Likewise, we can expect some inconsistencies between ideal and practiced definitions of loyalty, prowess, and honour during the medieval period. How contemporaries utilised these concepts was bound to be inconsistent depending on what they were trying to achieve, when, and with whom. Rather than focus on these inconsistencies, examination of chivalry in a specific context such as the Scottish Wars of Independence is useful if it can be shown, as Nicholson says about the war, that “the pattern was unique. It showed some features that were common throughout Western Europe, together with others that were indigenous”.[9] In other words, it may provide a unique if not homogeneous picture of what it meant to be chivalrous. Care would have to be taken in looking at patterns of chivalrous behaviour, accepting inconsistencies and contradictions in behaviour and contemporary ideas. The warning will be taken here that “comparing and conflating a number of different literary works only results in a single picture if one begins with the determination to find such a picture”.[10] Through analysis, the sources must be allowed to ‘speak for themselves’, to paint their own portrait and to show the broad pattern revealing the Scottish microcosm through the lens of modern historiography.

The availability and quality of sources presents additional challenges. As Bruce Webster wrote, “However we may come to understand the significance of Scotland’s lack of government records, it is still a handicap that more do not exist, and it is a particular blow that so much of what once existed should have perished”.[11] As a result, the majority of the contemporary sources available are English, such as the Lanercost Chronicle, Sir Thomas Gray's Scalacronica, and other English monastic sources. The other sources include John of Trokelowe's Annals of Edward II (or the Vita Edwardi Secundi, composed no later than 1325, contemporary with Robert I’s reign); and the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, only slightly later.

Apart from the natural bias in English sources, there are additional problems associated with using literary sources to pinpoint the origins of cultural concepts. As Boardman and Lynch state in their essay in Freedom and Authority, “Often cultural developments may belong to the reign before that to which they are usually ascribed”.[12] The tales of the court of David II (or at least the later chronicle evidence of Wyntoun and Bower) are full of chivalrous stories and glosses on earlier events. Chivalry was likely an active cultural ideal in the mentality of knights and knight aspirants earlier in the century and these tales are valuable as an explanation for many of their choices and actual actions. Broun has demonstrated that “some of Fordun’s work can be regarded as part of a tradition stretching back to c. 1250”.[13] The later chivalrous propaganda by Bower and Barbour, and even its use by David II, would not have been possible if the chivalrous literature had not developed earlier. At the same time, David II used the idea of “the loyalty of this group [of knights] to the figure of the king (both secular and sacred) and chivalric spectacles centred on the monarch” to emulate the English example of creating a household of knights centred around his court that formed the core of his royal army.[14] Boardman and Lynch demonstrated this to be an active process in the contemporary English court.

Another issue surrounds the reliability of source material. John Barbour’s The Bruce was composed about sixty years after the events he described and has for long been used as the definitive source for these events centring on Robert’s reign. When comparing Barbour with the more contemporary English sources mentioned above, The Bruce appears inaccurate. For example, Barbour’s description of Bannockburn includes apparent inconsistencies about the use of Scottish cavalry, and contradictions with earlier sources about the number of Scottish schiltroms employed. The intent is not to settle this long-standing historiographical argument, but to use Barbour as a reflection of impressions and reactions of chivalrous and knightly behaviour. These impressions could still be relevant near the end of the same century, whether intensified or diminished. We need not assume that an event occurred exactly as he described it, but that the impression that he wished to create or relate was likely to be commonly understood by his audience. In this way, Barbour can be considered an accurate reporter of the contemporary attitudes towards chivalry.

The secondary sources on the culture and history of chivalry raise similar problems. Due to the lack of historical records for Scotland during this period, the only way to really understand what was going on in Scotland in the fourteenth-century and put it into its proper context is to compare behaviour and methods of warfare with the pattern in other areas at the same time. Unfortunately, when activity in Scotland is touched upon by historians of chivalry, it is often done with an English approach, discounting the continental influence, which may lead to misinterpretation and omissions of fact. An example of this is in Keen’s illustration of the trial of Walter de Selby of 1346.[15] He is represented as an English subject being tried for treason by the Scottish king, David II, when he was actually technically a Scot and was holding Liddell against King David. The problem depicted here is that historians of chivalry, many of whom are English, too often show their unfamiliarity with Scotland and the Scottish aspect of chivalry. This justifies a more thorough study to determine what kind of influence chivalry had on behaviour in Scotland in the fourteenth-century. Standard Scottish secondary sources Barrow, Duncan, and Grant should be consulted. For the theoretical aspects of chivalry, Keen, Kaueper, and various other credible historians of chivalry should be consulted.

Despite the limitations and bias associated with the available source material, we can be grateful that there is a great deal of material associated with the conflict.

As Professor Barrow wrote, “from a selfish point of view the historian has reason to be grateful for war, for it has been a prodigious generator of record and stimulator of commentary and chronicle”.[16] In recent years, Scottish historical scholarship has enjoyed “unprecedented vitality and fertility”.[17] The basic trend in Scottish medieval research, as stated by K. J. Stringer, is that “the history of late medieval Scotland has emerged as a serious academic pursuit…[and] now we are invited to adopt more sober balanced views”.[18] While working delicately with the few direct sources on the Wars, scholars also have used the romance literature of the period to explain contemporary attitudes and behaviours.

It is often taken as a given that the values reflected in literature mirror the values that were held by knights in reality, albeit imperfectly. However, a related issue that repeatedly arises, the question of literacy in the knightly ranks needs to be examined here before going further. This discussion is essential for understanding how knights could be influenced by the literature that was produced up until the period of the Wars of Independence. This discussion begins with ideas about the potential level of literacy in knightly culture, and then continues with how much literature was a part of real life. Chickering states without equivocation that by the fourteenth-century, “some knights even modelled their public personalities and activities directly upon earlier chivalric literature”.[19] For literature to have this much of an effect it would have helped if many of the knights were literate. Clanchy aptly demonstrates the literacy of knights from a judicial case in 1297 in Norfolk to end the wardship and prove the coming of age of Robert de Tony. Of thirteen jurors of his peers, knights and freemen, ten are shown to have a working knowledge and ability to read Latin, an average of seventy-seven percent from a random sample case.[20] The will of James Douglas of Dalkeith, who died in 1420, more than fifty years after his duel with Thomas Erskine, directed “to return books which had been borrowed to their owners”.[21] This is not necessarily proof of Douglas’s literacy but it does presume some interest in literacy, and a means for the transmission of chivalrous ideals. That “chivalric literature was highly reluctant to recognize such direct royal jurisdiction over major issues of justice and even more reluctant to recognize a working royal monopoly over licit violence”,[22] shows circumstantially that the main audience for this literature was the knights who would have the greatest sympathy for this concept. This is because they competed for this jurisdiction and were slowly having it taken away. This is the case more so in France and the resistance against this control was stronger in England and Scotland, but the point about the literature is no less relevant.

The Bruce’s account of King Robert’s use of great chivalrous stories to boost his men’s morale indicates how much impact these stories had begun to influence audiences at the time. This contention demonstrates how far conventional acquaintance with chivalrous literature had developed. Benson describes how the first chivalrous literature accurately described what the writers saw in real life tournaments. The only difference was that what was exceptional in real life was shown in the literature to be commonplace and some of the more chaotic and bloody elements that were commonplace in reality were sometimes removed. This was then read by the nobles who had an interest in stories that they could relate to, and after a generation had passed, these stories were believed and copied in real life practices “by directly imitating romance”.[23] By the time that William Marshal’s biography was composed in 1226, only seven years after his death, its author “drew on romance for the details that authenticated his biography, that lent plausibility to the claim that his hero was a true model of chivalry”.[24] Life influenced art, and then the art influenced life, which continued at an accelerating pace as a function of ‘authenticating realism’. This is a process, as has been said, that works both ways, since “details from everyday life… lend a narrative an air of plausibility and that allows an audience to accept, or at least suspend its disbelief in the improbabilities of the fiction”.[25] In addition, the “discrepancy between theory and practice, between literature and life, did not of course mean that the ideals were immediately altered to fit the facts. On the contrary, the ideals of the learned cleric and the valorous knight became reinforced as fantasies… in literary and academic treatises”.[26] Later, Edward I was to become the first sponsor of an expressly Arthurian style of tournament, showing how far this process had gone. Though one cannot take many of the scenes in The Bruce as being in most ways factual, they do represent a sentiment that existed in general chivalrous literature as well as in the Scottish consciousness that explains its presence in a distinctively Scottish work. “When the aim, the standard, or the ideal is weighed against the practice and achievement, in other words against reality, both the actuality and the ideal become clearer”.[27] These literary works were taken so seriously that Edward I consulted and used Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain in his letter to the pope in 1301, to support his Scottish overlordship. The Scots in their reply did not deny the myths cited, just the king’s interpretation of them.[28]

Cretien de Troye’s writing is described as shaping “the future development of chivalry as a vocation”.[29] The proliferation of manuals of chivalry and contemporary biographies disclose an “interest in the practical as well as ethical aspects of the knightly life and reveal the subtle interplay between life and literature”.[30] To win honour and fame, one’s conduct must have conformed to the chivalrous ideals as depicted in the romances. This became a somewhat oppressive system, but it does reveal how familiar these knights were with the written literature. However, as chivalrous and noble as chronicle descriptions may sound, it is not safe to apply sentiments expressed by Bower, such as “these men… who wholeheartedly pitied the common people… chose rather to die than watch the misfortune of their people”.[31] This repeats the chivalrous dogma of knights protecting the weak, and was quoted by Bower at least eighty-five years after the event described. The descriptions must only be taken seriously when the described actions clearly reflect the sentiment. As Watson says, “heroic, chivalric, glorious - this war was none of these things”.[32] As she also states, military reputations could be made or broken on these wars and campaigns; presumably, not only on how successful they were but also how they behaved chivalrously. This suggests possible reasons for certain behaviour.

Literature composed early in the medieval era had a lasting influence. The romance of Tristan and Isolde was so popular that it was rewritten various times, including, in a thirteenth-century Scottish version. One of the most influential works was Ramon Llull’s, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, also reprinted and rewritten countless times, also including a later Scottish version. Because a work was written in the twelfth-century or earlier, does not mean it was not in the consciousness of the average knight. One need only reflect on how much the work of an English playwright four hundred years ago has pervaded the consciousness of the world to this day. Any assumption that knights as a class were generally illiterate must be disposed of. Despite this, it is clear that they were aware of the content of the literature and much of the literature reflects common themes shared by knights a priori.

There is a counter-point to this raised by Duncan. In his findings about the language used by English supporters of Edward I in Scotland and by his Scottish supporters, Duncan has concluded that the common language of the English lords was Anglo-Norman, of which Gray’s, Scalachronica is the best known example. For the Scots, “the language of record and correspondence was Latin, and of speech Scots or Gaelic”.[33] Duncan concludes that these linguistic differences were responsible for a cultural gap, which “distanced the Scots from the literature of chivalry and the Arthurian ‘history’ found there”,[34] and turned them to more native themes and history. Duncan’s point has some validity, but has problems in that the productions of Tristan and Isolde and Fergus of Galloway display a definite interest and knowledge in Arthurian tales of chivalry. Indeed, Duncan almost contradicts himself when stating that at least in lowland Scotland and despite a poorer economy, the Scots there expressed “the same ideas and ideals in related forms of the English language. There was no iron curtain at the Tweed, and Scotland was not in any sense isolated”.[35] What his point mostly shows is that the Scots as a distinct society and culture shared ideas with their closest neighbour, and French and English chivalrous ideas were subsumed in a uniquely Scottish way.

Another of the problems in this research is the nature of contemporary propaganda, which must be dealt with sensitively. In the case of the Wars of Independence, the struggle over who the Bruce-Stewart side defeated was as much against the powerful and influential Comyn-Balliol faction or families as it was over the English. The Comyns and their extensive family connections throughout the land were a powerful and formidable force, almost more so than the English. When telling a story of the winners, the losers inevitably and naturally receive something of a ‘black eye’, whether deserved or not. Therefore, invariably there exists for the historian the problem of politically loaded chronicles. Unfortunately, the events of this period cause almost a complete reliance on sources that illustrate the political war of words between rival dynasties.

Amongst the most extreme of these is Walter Bower’s, Scotichronicon, which strongly favours the Stewarts. Although a moralising tract, it is also primarily, as argued by Michael Brown, a partisan political tract, “which employed the reading of recent history as a weapon in the political debate of the present”.[36] While reliance on this chronicle may be dangerous, Bower’s work is consulted here because of the accessibility that Watt has given it with his excellent translation, and also because of Bower’s reliance on a variety of sources, thereby effectively presenting at least two sources at once. Bower’s work is, in the words of Richard Oram, “focussed more heavily on the strategems of war and chivalric exploits”, although the analysis that Oram makes, that “the emphasis is on individual prowess rather than national survival”[37] may be disputed. Additional care is required for the fact that Bower derived part of his narrative not only from a variety of sources, some pro-Bruce and Stewart, but from another source known as the ‘anonymous chronicle’, which was also decidedly pro-Stewart. The Scotichronicon should be consulted for its attitudes regarding and descriptions of various chivalrous episodes, particularly concerning the choices a knight in this period had to make regarding matters of allegiance and the reasons why these choices were made.

[1] H Chickering, “Introduction”, in The Study of Chivalry, H Chickering and T H Seiler, eds. (Kalamazoo 1988) p.4.

[2] M Keen, Chivalry (Yale 1984) p.16.

[3] E Stengel, Li Romans de Durmart le Galois (Stuttgart 1873) ll.12125ff.; M Keen, Chivalry (Yale 1984) p.80.

[4] R W Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford 1999) p.139.

[5] J Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London 1924) p.82.

[6] J C Baroja, “Honour and Shame: A Historical Account of Several Conflicts”, in Honour and Shame, R Johnson, tr., J G Peristiany, ed. (London 1965) p.96.

[7] J Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status”, in Honour and Shame, J G Peristiany, ed. (London 1965) p.39.

[8] Gist, Love and War, p.196.

[9] R Nicholson, Scotland: the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh 1974) p.1.

[10] C B Bouchard, “Strong of Body, Brave and Noble” Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithica 1998) p.136.

[11] B Webster, Scotland from the eleventh-century to 1603: studies in the use of historical evidence (London 1975) p.151.

[12] S Boardman and M Lynch, “The State of Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish History”, in Freedom and Authority, Scotland c.1050-c.1650 eds. Brotherstone and Ditchburn, (East Linton 2000) p.56.

[13] D Broun, “A New Look at Gestia Annalia Attributed to John of Fordun” in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, B E Crawford, ed. (Edinburgh 1999) p.21.

[14] Boardman and Lynch, “The State of Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish History”, p.55.

[15] M Keen, The Laws of War, (London 1965) pp.45-46.

[16] G S W Barrow, 'The Aftermath of War: Scotland and England in the late fourteenth and early fourteenth-centuries', in Royal Historical Society Transactions, 5:28 (1978) p.103.

[17] J H Burns, 'Stands Scotland Where it Did?' in History, lxx (1985) p.49.

[18] K J Stringer, 'David II and James III' in Scotia, 9 (1985) p.51.

[19] Chickering, “Introduction”, p.10.

[20] M T Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Oxford 1993) p.224-26.