Cultured Knights

 There are two main stereotypes of medieval knights, one that they were crude and violent, the other that they were refined, with a delicate sensibility to the needs of the weak and of women.  Sometimes these two stereotypes are combined, portraying crude knights who hypocritically wanted to portray themselves as chivalrous and refined.

All these versions take as their starting assumption that one could not be both a violent fighter and a cultured person at the same time.  However, there is plenty of evidence that knights, for all their flaws and sinful behavior (including pride and avarice, as depicted below in a twelfth-century carving), were quite cultured in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that military training and sometimes violent behavior (even vicariously as in playing video games) can go together with education and concern for social issues.  Military veterans are found in positions of responsibility throughout our society, many vets go from the military to college, and even thoughtful, caring individuals may occasionally enjoy grabbing the game controller and shooting up the space invaders from Mars.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century knights were mostly literate, in that they could read even if not necessarily write—and read Latin at that, at least well enough to look over a charter and make sure it said what they intended it to say.  The Cistercian monk Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (depicted below), had not originally intended to go into the church, but he received a superb education in both reading and writing as a day student at a church school in Châtillon, and he was considered one of the great Latin stylists of the twelfth century.

Oaths that knights were expected to take, from the early eleventh century on, stressed protection of the weak, especially churchmen and the poor.  Anyone living at or visiting court (that is, either in the royal household or in the household of a great lord) was expected to be able to display courtly behavior, which stressed good manners, self-control, and proper dress.  By the second half of the twelfth century, the term chevalerie, which had originally just meant good battlefield skills for a mounted warrior, had come to include courtliness (courtoisie).

A late twelfth-century or thirteenth-century knight was also supposed to know how to approach women politely and courteously, even though they had not been defined as part of "the weak" back in the eleventh century.  Playing an instrument, dancing smoothly, composing elegant love-letters were all part of "courting" a lady (note that word again).  Someone who did not wear well-styled clothing or did not keep himself scrupulously clean and sweet-smelling was rejected by the ladies in the romances of the time.

A knight's house was also supposed to be fairly elegant, with tapestries on the walls and nice tablecloths.  Plates and drinking vessels couldn't have bits of yesterday's meal clinging to them.  When you think about how one was supposed to do all this without modern conveniences (for starters, running hot water) you'll realize that this was something knights had to work at deliberately.

And at the same time of course being a knight involved a whole lot of military training, to be able to fight on horseback with lance or sword (and not fall off or injure the horse), to be able to ride long distances and take proper care of one's mount.  Although there were few serious wars in the twelfth century (we aren't up to the Hundred Years' War yet), there were always plenty of local battles and skirmishes, and tournaments (mock battles) could turn violent.  Knights, full of touchy pride, were always turning on their friends in the epics in response to perceived insults.

In spite of all of this violence, the knights themselves, with serious nudges from the church and from the writers of epics and romances, actually wanted to be cultured.  They saw overcoming evil doers and helping the weak as worthy goals.  They did not merely try to fake a façade of refinement.  They wanted to be refined, even if most of the time they didn't measure up.  They would have thought the Man of La Mancha song "The Impossible Dream" was a swell song.

A good book on cultured knights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is by Martin Aurell, The Lettered Knight (Central European University Press, 2017).

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on knights and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other platforms, in ebook or paperback.

Families and Monasteries

 As I have discussed earlier, monasteries originally grew out of hermitages, places where men (and eventually women in their own nunneries) could live in uninterrupted silence, separate from the affairs of the world, engrossed in prayer and contemplation.'

But medieval families were very much involved in monasteries.  Even though a monk supposedly gave up his fleshly family for the family of brother-monks under the fatherly direction of the abbot (abba just means father), there were numerous ways that non-monastic members of a family could be involved with the monastery.

First and perhaps most important, for most monasteries the monks had all joined as boys.  The parents gave their child as what was called a "bloodless sacrifice," hoping to save his soul and theirs as well.  They might never see the boy again, or at least not for many years, and they were expected to make a sizeable gift when he was accepted as a novice.  Although the boy would not officially become a monk until he made his own decision to do so in his teens, in practice few left the cloister.

In making their son a novice monk, an "oblate" as he was called (the word means "offering"), the family was thus closely involved with the monastery.  In a number of cases virtual dynasties would be established, as a boy would be placed in the same monastery where his uncle was already a monk, someone for whom he might indeed be named (indicating, as other evidence also makes clear, that parents were not just waiting until they saw how many children they were going to have and then dumped the excess into a monastery).  When he grew up, he might welcome a nephew of his own into the cloister.

Even without having a family member in a monastery, family members might try to establish a connection with it over the generations, choosing a particular house to which to make repeated pious gifts over the years, to ensure that the monks would be praying for them.  These days tracing a family's history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries can often be accomplished by reading through the records of a particular monastery in which family members repeatedly appear, either making gifts or trying to reclaim the gifts made by the previous generation.

There are also instances in which a family committed what might be considered dynastic suicide, having everybody join the church, the males going into a monastery, the females into a nunnery.  This was the case with the family of Bernard of Clairvaux, the best known member of the twelfth-century Cistercian order.  He had been intended for a knightly life, but at a certain point, seized with religious fervor, he and a group of his friends all joined the monastery as young adults.

His family's initial reaction was shock, but soon all his brothers (with their wives), his sisters, his parents, and an uncle all joined the church (the uncle became Grandmaster of the Templars).  Originally the family members told the youngest son that he was going to stay a knight and carry on the family dynasty, but after a few years he announced he was not going to forgo Paradise just to carry on some lineage, and he too became a monk.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on families and the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

The Cistercians

 Earlier I posted about Cluny, the head of an important monastic order in Burgundy, founded at the beginning of the tenth century.  Today I want to discuss another important Burgundian monastic order, the Cistercians, founded two centuries later.  The Cistercians take their name from their first monastery, Cîteaux.  (I doubt that Cluny and Cîteaux both began with the letter C in order to confuse you.  Remember, the Carthusians also start with the letter C.  Try to keep them straight--they did.)

Cîteaux was founded in 1098, at a time when the economy had improved enough that poverty, rather than wealth, was considered holy.  Its founder was not a great duke but rather a monk.  Robert, the monk, had spent decades trying to find what he considered an austere enough monastery, moving from house to house.

Robert had eventually founded his own monastery, Molesme, in 1075, where he became abbot.  But even here he felt that many of the monks were not following a strict enough life, that they were too comfortable, not facing God’s commands starkly enough.  So in 1098 he and a handful of monks of Molesme who agreed with him headed off to an old hermitage, called Cîteaux (it was in a swampy area, the name is related to the word ‘cistern’).

The rest of the monks were distraught.  It was like waking up and discovering that Mom and Dad had run away from home because you had been so bad.  They sent a tear-drenched letter to the pope, who ordered Robert to return to Molesme, where his monks promised to be good.

But the monks at Cîteaux continued, electing a new abbot from among their number.  The house was from the beginning extremely austere, its church lacking any decoration, its way of life harsh, the monks originally doing their own agricultural work, rather than having peasant tenants, as did Cluny.  They did however soon adopt the practice of conversi, people from peasant backgrounds who wanted to be monks but lacked the educational background to become full choir monks.  The Cistercians seem to have gotten the idea for conversi from the Carthusians.

Neighboring aristocrats soon learned of these holy monks.  In 1113 Cîteaux’s success was assured when a whole band of knights arrived, fired with enthusiasm and ready to give up everything for Christ.

Quickly Cîteaux began founding daughter houses, because there were now too many monks to all fit.  One of the most influential of these new houses was Clairvaux, headed by Bernard, who had been the leader of the converting knights.  Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) became the best known member of the Cistercians, counseling kings and popes, accusing Peter Abelard of heresy, pointing out to Louis VII that he was too closely related to his wife, helping found the Templars, of which his uncle was first Grand Master, and preaching the Second Crusade.

He also criticized the Cluniacs for being too lenient, rather than (metaphorically) cracking the whip over monastic behavior, and for building such beautifully decorated churches, where he said the carvings would distract one from prayer.  He mocked them for protesting that they ate eggs rather than meat, saying, Yes, but boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, baked eggs ...  He said that all novices ought to undergo strict noviciate training, even the elderly, though at Cluny elderly converts could skip becoming novices.  Bernard even chided the Cluniacs for wearing black habits, because black wool was more expensive—the Cistercians wore habits of undyed white wool.  Toward the end of Bernard’s life, however, he and the abbot of Cluny became friends.

Cîteaux quickly became the head of an “order,” a group of monasteries that all followed the monastic rule in the same way.  The Cistercians were tightly organized and uniform, with the abbots of all daughter houses meeting together every year to maintain this uniformity.  All members of the monasteries were adult converts; the Cistercians took no child oblates ("offerings").  The order soon had daughter houses all over Europe; the Cistercians in Yorkshire had huge sheep flocks roaming the moors.

The Cistercians also became major pawn brokers.  Nobles who needed money, especially for Crusade, but didn't want to sell their land outright, would lease it to the monks for a lump sum substantially less than the property's actual value.  If they could repay within six years, they got it back.  No interest was charged, though the monks usually got the "usufruct" (that is, the produce and income from the land during those years), described as a gift for the layman's soul.  In practice, since few people returned rich from Crusade, these pawned properties generally became the monks'.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on monasticism and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Gargoyles

Everybody probably has a vision of a medieval gargoyle in their head, based on the one on top of a tower of Notre-Dame, with a "I hate Paris" expression on his face.

This gargoyle is however not medieval.  He was created in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of the restoration of the cathedral done by Viollet-le-Duc, who had no trouble adding things that looked like what he would have put there if only he'd lived in the twelfth century.

But grotesques were part of real medieval architectural decoration.  (A gargoyle is, strictly speaking, a stone carving of a grotesque form serving as a waterspout, but people tend to use the term more broadly.  Le Stryge, the official name of Viollet-le-Duc's gargoyle, was never intended as a water spout.)

Grotesques were intended as part of the church decoration that portrayed the whole existential universe, saints and sinners, demons and angels, the saved and the damned.  Demonic figures warned viewers about what would happen if they did not give up their sinful ways.  In addition, some grotesques were meant to represent peoples from other parts of the world, such as the upside-down people supposed to live at the South Pole, or the people with heads of dogs who everyone knew lived off in central Asia or somewhere.

Bernard of Clairvaux, revered abbot of the Cistercian monastic order in the first half of the twelfth century, wrote dismissively of grotesques, saying that they distracted from the contemplation of higher issues.  He said that even if they did not embarrass, one should at least think of the high cost.  Cistercian churches never had grotesques, but everyone else continued to do so.

In addition, on some churches the stone carvers created galleries of what certainly look like real people. One assumes these were the faces of the other workers on the church, preserved for posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more about church sculptures and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.