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meatcleaver -> RE: Chivalry is not dead (4/28/2006 7:43:08 AM)
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Chivalry was as much about keeping people in their place as a code of conduct, as for chivalry of medieval knights, it barely existed in practice, assasination being a far more effective way of deciding disputes. What we think of as medieval chivalry is largely a Victorian invention anyway and their yearning for idylic myth in the chaos of the industrial revolution.
When it came to the crunch, in battle the serfs would slug it out and kill each other while the knights had a bit of sport trying to capture each other. A dead knight was worthless but a captured one you could hold for ransome money. Unfortunately at the Battle of Agincourt the French boo-booed with their tactics and with a mixture of picking a bad terrain to fight on, bad weather and the deadly humble English Longbowman, their knights were slaughtered. Probably because they were in such a rush at wanting to capture Henry V for ransome, that they never considered they might get killed.
If King Arthur did exist, he certainly wouldn't have had the chivalric code we hear in stories, that was Victorian invention. However, the saying 'Heroes die once, cowards die twice.' comes from the Anglo-Saxons which would have been Arthur's foe. The Anglo-Saxons in their warrior code had the idea of a good death, which was about keeping their good name because their name was all they could leave in the world. Their ancestors would have poets write poems about the great deeds of the family heroes from which they descended. Life was short and brutal, as one Anglo-Saxon king was renowned to have said.'Life is a bird that flies into the beer hall, circles the fire and returns to the knight. Christianity pretty much destroyed the Anglo-Saxon warrior code so we know little of it.
Chivalry is dead? It barely existed in the first place.
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