![]() ![]() There was never a firm consensus on what it meant to be a good knight. “What develops as you get into the late 11th, 12th century is a sense that knights have to have a professional code if they’re going to be respected and respectable.” “In the early Middle Ages, church councils were praying to be delivered from knights,” Wollock says. These warriors were commanded by warlords and rewarded with land, or with license to plunder the villages where they did battle, looting, raping and burning as they went. READ MORE: Weapons of the Middle Ages Knights Were Heavily Armed and Prone to Violence “He’s a hired thug,” says Jennifer Goodman Wollock, a professor of medieval studies at Texas A&M University who has written two books about chivalry. In the middle of the 11th century, the knight was not a particularly honorable figure. The word chivalry itself comes from the Medieval Latin caballarius, meaning horseman. The development of chivalry went hand-in-hand with the rise of knights-heavily armored, mounted warriors from elite backgrounds-starting around the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. While these rules sometimes dictated generous treatment of the less-fortunate and less-powerful, they were focused mainly on protecting the interests of elites. ![]() But during the Middle Ages, the code was established for much grittier reasons.Īt a time of routine military violence with massive civilian casualties, chivalry was an effort to set ground rules for knightly behavior. In the 21st century, the word chivalry evokes a kind of old-fashioned male respect for women.
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