By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Chivalric romances and values appealed, and were conveyed, to audiences far beyond the courts; they were discussed in the public spheres of Europe’s burgeoning towns, mentioned in sermons, and sung in streets. Ideas of chivalry were thereby conveyed to classes of people who could never hope to live a chivalrous lifestyle.
Tournaments: Fiction and Reality
The cultivation of a chivalric identity has always been a performative one, but any heartfelt or continued performance has the capacity to enact real changes in the performer. In the second half of the 13th century, Count Robert II of Artois, considered the pattern of chivalry in his day, hosted and participated in lavish tournaments in which combatants dressed as Arthurian knights or other heroes of romance. Robert himself was always Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, with the device of a lion on his shield and personal seal.
Many of these tournaments would be recorded in elaborate tournament books, and often a poet would be commissioned to compose an ode in praise of the victors. The lines between chivalric fiction and reality could be very blurry. Even though secular and ecclesiastical rulers attempted to outlaw tournaments by the end of the 13th century—there was real violence, and real death—they were impossible to eradicate altogether.
Chivalric Status in Hunting
An alternative to the tournament was the hunt, which required many of the same skills and involved the same lavish displays. And because more and more land was now under cultivation or devoted to raising sheep and cattle, many species of wild animals (notably wolves, bears, and boar) had become extinct. This means that hunting became ever more artificial and costly, and even more a symbol of chivalric status.
Not only did it require a good horse, a pack of trained dogs and servants, and an array of weapons, it also required elites to enclose certain areas of protected land to be stocked with game. These protected spaces were called forests—regardless of whether or not they were wooded—and they were governed by a law of the forest, which stipulated that only the lord who owned or controlled the forest could hunt or allow others to hunt there.
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Hunting Parks and Impact on Environment
Chivalry had an impact on the environment, too. Warriors returning from crusades in western Asia and northern Africa had been deeply impressed and inspired by the elegance and elaborate engineering of the gardens and parks they saw in the Islamicate world. Many returning European aristocrats accordingly embarked on major projects designed to turn their own forests into hunting parks, and also to create habitats friendly to new species of birds and animals.
Fallow deer (the species Dama), which were native to Anatolia and had been brought to the Mediterranean by the Romans, were now being introduced in England and France, where they were bred for hunting. Rabbits, originally native to North Africa, were also newcomers in northern Europe, and they had an unexpectedly devastating effect on native plants and quickly became invasive pests.
Chivalric Identity: Controlling Environment
Herons, native to northern Europe, were now aggressively cultivated and bred to stock heronries, which meant that many low-lying arable lands were artificially flooded to provide the proper habitat and sources of food—such as carp, imported from southeastern Europe and Anatolia. Herons, in turn, fed the new aristocratic mania for hunting with birds of prey. These large, graceful birds would be forced to fly from their nests while trained hawks, falcons, and peregrines were loosed to catch and kill them.
The Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, having grown up in Sicily at the heart of the multicultural Mediterranean, drew on Arabic sources for an important treatise on falconry, De arte venandi cum avibus, ‘the art of hunting with birds’. He also maintained a menagerie of exotic animals. For him, as for his peers, demonstrating control over the environment became a new source of chivalric identity.
Mounted Combats
Meanwhile, the most essential aspect of chivalry, mounted combat—whether on the battlefield, in tournaments, or in the hunt—would remain the defining pastime of the aristocracy until the end of the First World War. Today, expensive equestrian sports like steeplechase racing and polo are still markers of wealth and pretensions to elevated social status.
Chivalry is as malleable as many other aspects of the medieval legacy, but it still has tremendous imaginative power, for better and for worse. It informed, and still informs, ideals of obligation to dependents and charity for those less fortunate that reach far beyond any notion of feudalism.
It is also, in an age of feminism, gender diversity, and political upheaval, a problematic refuge for those who would prefer the more clear-cut social order of a halcyon time when ‘men were men’ and ‘women knew their place’.
Common Questions about Cultivation of Chivalric Identity and Its Impact
In the second half of the 13th century, Count Robert II of Artois, considered the pattern of chivalry in his day, hosted and participated in lavish tournaments in which combatants dressed as Arthurian knights or other heroes of romance. Robert himself was always Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, with the device of a lion on his shield and personal seal.
Hunting grew as an alternative to tournaments; it required many of the same skills and involved the same lavish displays. As more and more land was under cultivation or devoted to raising sheep and cattle, many species of wild animals (notably wolves, bears, and boar) had become extinct. This means that hunting became ever more artificial and costly, and even more a symbol of chivalric status.
Hunting required a good horse, a pack of trained dogs and servants, and an array of weapons. It also required elites to enclose certain areas of protected land to be stocked with game. These protected spaces were called forests, and only the lord who owned or controlled the forest could hunt or allow others to hunt there.
