The Paradoxical Nature of Medieval Warriors

Focus on Chaucer's Knight

" . . . chivalric values are never entirely consistent with each other. Where does personal bravery give way to the needs of the group? . . . Can one be both a full-hearted lover and a loyal warrior? And can the same people perform both the deeds of war and those of civilization?" - Introduction, The Formation of a Western Literature, p. 1623

Christ leading the crusaders
– Link 1

Holy Wars

Warrior heroes play central roles in the literature of the medieval period, in the Islamic and Japanese traditions as in Western Europe. In the service of essentially abstract notions of religious belief and group identity, fighting men vied with each other first to lay claim to physical territory and then to exercise cultural control over their terrain. Many of the artifacts that have survived from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, the period with which we are concerned here, testify to the centrality of war. Violence was endemic. Literary and historical documents describe the sheer brutality of combat. Reporting to the Pope, for example, a Christian warrior wrote of the battle for Jerusalem during the first Crusade:

Some Saracens, Arabs, and Ethiopians took refuge in the tower of David, others fled to the temples of the Lord and of Solomon. A great fight took place in the court and porch of the temples, where they were unable to escape from our gladiators. Many fled to the roof of the temple of Solomon, and were shot with arrows, so that they fell to the ground dead. In this temple almost ten thousand were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared. - From the Gesta Francorum (see Web Resources)

This statement provides terrible evidence of a kind of non sequitur: The crusades were holy campaigns that sanctioned unholy carnage. Chaucer's strategy in the General Prologue is to avoid any examination of the context and consequences of the Knight's military prowess. Let us now consider what the poet omits and what he emphasizes in portraying the Knight as an exemplary figure.

The Knight's portrait in the Ellesmere manuscript.
– Link 2

The balance between spiritual and secular realms

Like the long opening sentence of the General Prologue (in the original Middle English, quoted on page 2050 of Volume B, the sentence runs for a full 18 lines), the Knight strikes a delicate balance between apparent opposites. The first 11 lines of the Prologue celebrate the burgeoning of new life as sexuality pervades the landscape. Where and how does Chaucer prepare us for the assertion in line 12 that in April people long to go on pilgrimages when the first 11 lines have been concentrating on the birds and the bees? By the end of the sentence, however, when we read that the pilgrims set out to thank the saint for healing them when they were sick, we come to understand that in God's world, the material expresses the spiritual. As surely as April showers bring forth flowers from the earth, the Easter season embodies resurrection, and a man of war exemplifies a desire for peace.

"And though that he were worthy, he was wys." (Middle English original, line 68)

Estates satire—the genre of the General Prologue—which looks at society through typical representatives of the nobility, the clergy, and the worker, usually began with portraits of churchmen. Chaucer begins instead with the Knight, but one who exudes spiritual devotion. Writing as feudal culture was about to dwindle into obsolescence as a new class of merchants and professionals were about to transform social relations, Chaucer introduces us to a knight who has fought in a number of historically significant battles; so many, in fact, that critics have long questioned whether any single person could actually have survived to engage in a list of battles that stretches from 1352 to 1371 and still be making the pilgrimage to Canterbury somewhere around 1390. Scholars usually conclude that the Knight and the Squire should be understood not as idiosyncratic individuals but as ideal figures. The Knight has fought in wars against the infidel, many of which were partial and brutal victories; yet in The Canterbury Tales, he stands out for his gentleness and piety. At the end of The Pardoner's Tale, for example, he makes peace between the livid Pardoner and the angry Host and keeps the pilgrimage from collapsing into bitter disarray.

"His hors were gode, but he was nat gay." (Middle English original, line 74)

Chaucer's portraits, like the opening 18 lines, concern themselves with the material manifestations of inner truths. The pilgrim narrator likes nothing better than to tell us what his companions wore. While he clearly appreciates good tailoring and finely textured clothes, the poet often turns the pilgrim Chaucer's artless compliment to satiric purpose. The physical accoutrements of the Prioress, the Monk, and the Friar increasingly betray a gap between their official roles and their actual behavior. With the Knight, however, the same gap exists, but in the opposite way. Although the expectation was that a knight would be brilliantly dressed, he wears a rust-stained tunic, presumably having been so eager to set out on pilgrimage that he didn't even stop to change upon returning home from his last campaign. As he does with his other paired portraits (it is important to notice that the pilgrims who travel together—including the Parson and the Plowman, as well as the Summoner and the Pardoner—complement and comment on each other), Chaucer completes his introduction to the chivalric world with the Knight's companion and son, the Squire. If the father fights in far-flung battles, the son engages in political conflicts closer to home; if the father ignores his appearance, the son glories in his. Thus by linking father and son, Chaucer allows us to focus on the complexity and self-contradiction inherent in the knightly ideal. Together, the pious crusading father and the courtly elegant son bring to life the ambiguities broached by the opening lines of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in particular and the paradoxical nature of the warrior in medieval literature in general.

The month of May, to which the Squire is compared, as illustrated in The Très RichesHeures of the Duc de Berry.
– Link 3