3 - Gentles: chivalry and the courtly world

Summary

If the attributes of Chaucer's Knight are conventional and old-fashioned, his chivalric values nonetheless provided a standard that was constantly invoked in the later fourteenth century. The workings of royal power were being scrutinized by an increasingly self-assertive Commons, but the essentially personal and apolitical ideals of chivalry still provided a model of kingship: Edward III won fame as a soldier in the French campaigns of the 1340s, and his foundation of the Order of the Garter defined the loyalty of worthy knights by linking it to an institution of soldiers with the King at its head, established as the highest embodiment of chivalric values. Chivalry also had a domestic side, as the Squire's portrait reminds us. Courtesy, and especially the courtesy of lovers, was part of the definition of the perfect knight. But the relationship of love and war is one-sided: honoring his lady confirms the knight's courtesy, but it is most of all an excuse for the self-centered enterprise of demonstrating prowess. In practice, warfare remains the true test of chivalry, and courtesy is largely the stuff of courtly poetry.

The lack of correspondence between the values proper to active chivalry and those of courtly society in its domestic aspect is a central concern in those of the Canterbury Tales that deal with the aristocratic world. The Knight's tale is intended to affirm the ordering power of chivalry, but as it proceeds chivalry comes to seem an unwieldy means of regulating human life, its laws and rituals all too easily undermined by the martial force that is its ultimate raison d'être.