When Chivalry Died

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11/1/2024 — Nathan Davies

When Chivalry Died

“Chivalry is dead.”

It is a common phrase that we have all heard at one time or another. Like so many maxims, it goes unchallenged, and unthought about.

In keeping with the title of this new web log, Words Mean Things, I thought it would be good to sit down and give some serious consideration to this one, as it weighs on my heart heavily.

Is chivalry dead? If it is, when did it die? Even more essentially, what exactly died?

I recently asked some people if they thought chivalry was dead, and they almost universally mentioned the same thing: opening doors for women. I found this curious, perhaps because of the type of reading I am attracted to or maybe due to the way I was raised.

I never considered opening a door for a woman to be chivalrous, I just thought it was polite. “But wait!” I can hear you protest. “Isn’t chivalry and men having good manners basically the same thing?”

Well, that, my dear Watson, is the first high quality question that needs to be addressed before we can truly decide that the thing is dead. First, we need to know what chivalry truly is.

What Is Chivalry?

Here at Words Mean Things we believe that words mean things, and they don’t mean anything. That is to say, they mean some-thing, where that some-thing is a discrete, definable thing.

So let us begin our search with one of the authorities on thing names, Oxford Languages. Oxford defines chivalry as:

“the medieval knightly system with its religious, moral, and social code.”

Whew. That word means a lot of things. Let’s break it down into its component parts.

Medieval Knightly System

I’ve been working a lot, so we’re going to assume some good faith on the various authors of some Wikipedia articles for exact dates. Feel free to correct anything you find incorrect in the comments.

The knighthood has its origins in the Early Middle Ages in Europe, but the religious, moral, and social code part did not fully take hold until the Late Middle Ages (ca. 1170).

They served in the employ of nobles of various levels as landlords, being granted estates to govern and protect, as warriors and as bodyguards. Some knights gained enough lands and influence to become nobles in their own right. During feudal times, the knight would be the most local governmental authority to the commoners. The knight also served as a form of local protection, being charged with keeping law and order in his fief.

Religious

Europe at this time was Catholic, and the Catholic faith had a very large impact on the development of chivalry. Christian doctrine introduced the concept of an ultimate authority which sits outside of man.

Previous to the Christianization of Europe, it was common for the ruler of any given country to claim godship to themselves as a way to strengthen their claim to power. Christianity was the first faith to widely displace this practice and replace it with the concept that every person, including the king or queen, was subject to the authority of God.

Moral

Traditional Judeo-Christian values were widespread during this time period. Values like “loving your neighbor,” and “let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no” were basic aspirations that were seen as essential to living a holy life.

Religion had yet to be supplanted by humanistic materialism. That would not happen until nearly 400 years later. At this time people still looked to God for instruction as to what was right and wrong.

Social

This time period also represents a social and cultural explosion in music, literature and art. Legends were being written during this period and being consumed and told in various venues by the population. The literary cycles known as the Matter of France and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have their origins in this time period.

Knights became associated with the highest aim of manhood and manners. They served as the example of the “perfect courtly Christian warrior.” (Wikipedia)

It is important to make sure we also understand the word courtly correctly. Courtly manners were an essential trait of a Knight. Courtly manners continue to influence the world today, in ways many may not realise. These manners centered around the organization of court life and operation, but also in a very essential way they were meant to prevent offense to others, to bestow honor to one’s betters (a very foreign concept these days unfortunately), and to elevate oneself from impulsive and crude behavior. They added a level of refinement, dignity and honor to court life, and enabled people from various social classes to interact more smoothly and with less risk of offering offense.

The concept of courtly love is also important in understanding this era. Courtly love has been described as:

“a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent." (Newman)

Courtly love had these basic stages:

  1. Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance
  2. Worship of the lady from afar
  3. Declaration of passionate devotion
  4. Virtuous rejection by the lady
  5. Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty
  6. Moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire (and other physical manifestations of lovesickness)
  7. Heroic deeds of valor which win the lady's heart
  8. Consummation of the secret love
  9. Endless adventures and subterfuges avoiding detection (Wikipedia)

Of interest here is the fact that while certainly not the Christian ideal of wooing, the lady herself is set up as an object worthy of worship and heroics to earn. It is this author’s opinion that these ideals may have had a great influence on the treatment of women in the centuries that followed. Women were something to be admired, looked up to, and earned – not something to be taken and had, and certainly not disposable and replaceable.

Code

Knights lived by a code of conduct, again heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. They were to stand for the best of Christian conduct. They even had their own 10 Commandments:

  1. Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches and thou shalt observe all its directions.
  2. Thou shalt defend the Church.
  3. Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
  4. Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast born.
  5. Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy.
  6. Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.
  7. Thou shalt perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
  8. Thou shalt never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
  9. Thou shalt be generous and give largesse to everyone.
  10. Thou shalt be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil (Wikipedia)

This is potentially the most fruitful of our insights into what chivalry meant to the people who lived under it. A chivalrous man defended the Church, the weak, and his country. He was not a coward and was to fight evil. He was not to be lazy in his duties, he was to be generous, and to give relief to those who needed it. Most importantly, his first allegiance was to God and His Right, not to the nobility or ruler.

Is Chivalry Dead?

At this point there can be no serious doubt that it most certainly is dead, at least as a social norm. So many of the things that chivalry stood for are in complete opposition to the current common wisdom.

Today men are expected to be sensitive and non-threatening. We are told nationalism is a bad thing, that God is not real, and that women are just as strong and capable as men. Indeed, we are even told that man and woman is not a legitimate distinction.

A knight brought forward through time, if he were a true knight, would be lost in our world today – and I seriously doubt that his disorientation would have much to do with our technology as many would assume. I have little doubt that he would be appalled at the way men and women carry themselves today and would likely end up in jail brought up on murder charges for challenging someone before the first day was through.

I seriously doubt he would offer to open anyone’s car door.

When Did Chivalry Die?

It would be nice if a date or event could be pointed to. It would tie up this article with a nice neat bow, and I would be able to point at it and say, “There it is. That’s what did it.”

Unfortunately, as anyone who has known me for a while is already aware, one of my maxims is that a simple answer is always untrue at best, and a lie at worst.

Chivalry did not die a sudden death. It died by a thousand cuts. It died over hundreds of years, as each one of the core tenants upon which it was built were eroded away.

God was the first to die, as Nietzsche put so poignantly. With God firmly in the graveyard, next died right and wrong. There was no absolute moral right to stand up for and defend anymore. Before long, man concluded that life was not precious (since it was an accident, and no special creation at all) so not even your fellow man was really all that important to protect.

Then died men. Men were told their desire to serve, protect and provide was toxic, patronizing, and a sign of an oppressive patriarchy. Some day I will write an entire paper devoted to this foolishness, but for now I will simply say that this flies in the face of sociology, biology, and simple statistical math. Men have served an essential role in our species from the beginning until today, and nobody is filling that role now as men have given up en masse.

The whole point of chivalry was to make a man a man, but a good one. With no man, there can be no good man, and there can be no chivalry.

The last to die was women. I know this is a hot button topic today, but transgender ideology is destroying the very fabric of that it means to be a man or a woman. I believe women came last because men instinctively knew there is something precious, unique, and miraculous there that is worth defending.

Without women, men would neither exist, nor would they survive even should they spontaneously burst into existence asexually. There is not a man alive today who did not need his mother. First, we denigrated motherhood in the 60’s. Now, we denigrate womanhood itself. Robbed of it's awesome life-giving power, the title had nothing with which to defend itself. We make of it a cliché, a caricature that any semi-sane person can see is nothingness.

Consequences

Words mean things, and things have consequences. When a man or woman says “Chivalry is dead,” they unknowingly speak of the death of an entire way of life – the way that gave us everything that we enjoy today. They speak of the death of our God, our morals, and essentially our culture.

The fact of the matter is chivalry is dead because nobody wanted the chivalrous.

Chivalry wasn’t easy. Those who lived its highest ideals exposed the moral failures of those who didn’t. They called other men to live up to the difficult standard of being good men. They gave women hope of finding men who would value them that way.

Standards are based on hopes like these. Standards are the enemy of our new “liberated” culture.

A man opening the door for a woman is not chivalrous. A man opens the door because he is chivalrous. Truth is often spoken when not intended. One has only to look beneath the surface.

Words Mean Things.

Nathan

Bibliography

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