"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble"

Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

Constance Brittain Bouchard

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781501713293
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women.Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

CHAPTER ONE

Nobles and Knights

How to define the medieval nobility? This is an especially difficult task for modern scholars because the people of the High Middle Ages, the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, did not have a definition themselves. They did not talk about “the nobility” as a social unit, even though they might discuss “noble attributes” (nobilitas) at great length. Nobilis, the medieval Latin term usually translated as “nobleman,” was not, strictly speaking, a noun but an adjective. By the time criteria for nobility were finally established in the late thirteenth century, it was on bases that would have made no sense to nobles of earlier generations. And yet medieval nobles always knew who they were.

For a long time scholars tried to create simple, straightforward definitions of the medieval nobility. Nobles, some said, were exactly the same as free men. Others, remarking the existence throughout medieval history of free peasants, said instead that the nobility was a closed social caste composed of those descended from the noble senatorial class of Rome or (alternatively) from the noble Germanic warlords who had settled in the Roman Empire. Some maintained that nobility was determined only by the father’s noble blood; others that only the mother’s blood counted. Still other historians, noting that the nobles of the High Middle Ages themselves often pointed to upwardly mobile men in their ancestry, decided that the nobility of the eleventh and subsequent centuries was an entirely new group, perhaps to be equated with knights or with feudal vassals.

All these tidy definitions have recently been discarded. Instead, scholars have come to agree that many different elements went into making a medieval man or woman someone both they and their contemporaries would recognize as noble. There were continuities, certainly, from the time of the Roman Empire; yet there was also an evolution in noble status.1 All nobles of the High Middle Ages doubtless carried both the blood of upstarts and noble bloodlines that went back centuries, for in every generation the upwardly mobile sought to marry into noble ranks.

Part of the difficulty in defining the nobility derives from the lack of a single medieval word to designate members of the group. Theoretical discussions of social structures from the period (discussed more fully in Chapter 2) did not attempt to break society down into “nobles” and “non-nobles.” Of course both modern scholars and people of the time would consider noble someone designated as nobilis vir or nobilis femina in contemporary charters, or by such related adjectives as praeclarus, venerabilis, or illuster, but these terms were not applied universally. Indeed, the term nobilis itself was fairly unusual until the eleventh century, when it began to replace the previously more common term illuster.2 Someone designated as a count or duke in the documents—that is, someone who held an important office—or someone referred to as “lord,” domnus, would generally not also be called “noble.” The latter term may indeed have been reserved for those whose status was not immediately obvious from their titles.3

While it is certainly possible to discern the general attributes of members of the medieval nobility, it is therefore important to keep in mind that this nobility did not in the eleventh and twelfth centuries constitute a distinct or even clearly definable group. Calling someone “noble” meant only that he or she was distinguished and from a distinguished family, not that the person was a member of any “noble class.” Nobles were members of an aristocracy—that is, the small segment of a society which stands above the rest—and yet aristocracy and nobility are not strictly synonymous. When knights first appeared in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, for example, they were not considered noble, and yet they were certainly aristocratic, in that they were different from the great mass of society. The term “aristocracy” now implies a social class; yet nothing like modern consciousness of social class existed before the fourteenth century.4

Even without any easily stated set of criteria, medieval men and women could recognize nobles operationally. There is broad scholarly consensus that from at least the ninth century onward, nobles were characterized by a combination of wealth, power, and noble birth.5 In the eleventh century there was an enormous gap between the wealthy nobles and everybody else. Although by the thirteenth century some merchants in the rapidly growing towns had accumulated substantial fortunes, and some nobles had lost theirs, it was generally taken for granted that a nobleman would be rich. In the same way, nobles were assumed to have the power to command: they might hold an important office, such as that of duke or count, might control a castle or, at a minimum, have a group of followers, servants, and clients. But even more important than wealth and power was the possession of noble blood.6

Noble Blood

The chivalric romances that medieval French nobles enjoyed always stressed the importance of family. Noble birth, with its glorious attributes, always emerged in these stories no matter how much someone tried to hide it. Someone like the hero Perceval, a nobleman’s son brought up like a peasant because his mother wanted to save him from the dangers of a warrior’s life, nonetheless learned chivalric behavior and elaborate fighting skills virtually overnight once he was given a chance. Queen Guinevere was able to deduce that Galahad was Lancelot’s son after only a brief conversation with him; she recognized that he must be “descended on both sides from kings and queens and from the noblest lineage known to man.”7

In reality, of course, noble blood did not reveal itself quite so conveniently. And indeed there was always a tension between nobility of blood and nobility of spirit or soul, with the full awareness that the first did not necessarily imply the second. Bishop Adalbero of Laon wrote to the French king in the early eleventh century, “Noble birth is a source of high praise for kings and dukes, but enough has been said of beauty and strength: the strength of the soul is more important than that of the body.” The same sentiment was echoed nearly two and half centuries later by a secular author in the vulgate Lancelot cycle, when the hero tells the Lady of the Lake, “I don’t know on what grounds some are more noble than others, unless they gain nobility through prowess.”8 This topos was repeatedly invoked throughout the Middle Ages, but the nobles, like Adalbero’s king and, for that matter, most churchmen, continued to treat noble birth as deserving of “high praise.”

During the eleventh century, the first attempts were made to construct family histories, genealogiae as they were called, linking living nobles with their glorious dead ancestors, and this literary form became more common in the twelfth century.9 It was especially important for noble families to find a biological connection with early kings, who represented noble blood most unequivocally. Bishop Adalbero stated flatly, “Noble lineages descend from the blood of kings.”10 Indeed, although Charlemagne’s descendants had been multiplying for two hundred years, it was only in the eleventh century that people (other than the Carolingian kings themselves) consciously attempted to glorify themselves by means of their Carolingian blood (the Capetian kings of France had reigned too briefly in the early eleventh century to show up in anyone’s glorious and distant ancestry).11

But noble birth was crucial long before the eleventh century, and a glorious noble ancestor was still noble even if he was not actually a king. In practice, most nobles were descended from kings by the twelfth century, because of a long-standing pattern of intermarriage among the upper aristocracy, including the kings. In spite of Adalbero’s flattering remarks to his own king, it was not that nobility had to flow directly from kings but that a king was simply the most powerful and important noble. Although it is difficult to construct family trees from scanty evidence, modern scholars have been able to demonstrate convincingly that the nobles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were descended from the nobles of the ninth and tenth centuries, who were in turn descended from even earlier nobles.12 Long before noble families began commissioning genealogiae, then, descent from the gloriously born was a key element in noble status.

The nobility was not a closed caste, however, and an eleventh-century noble who was able to trace his ancestry, fairly plausibly, to a count of the ninth century would also have had plenty of non-noble ancestors. In France someone really needed only one demonstrably noble ancestor in order to claim noble birth, and nobility might come either through the mother’s or the father’s side. Perhaps ironically, at the same time as many nobles were claiming (or creating) biological links with earlier kings, others were pointing proudly to ancestors whose strength and virtue—though not their birth—had given them authority at a time when kings were weak. The twelfth-century legends of the origins of the county of Catalonia, founded three centuries earlier, tried to have it both ways, stressing both the legitimate appointment of the first count by the French king and Count Wifred the Hairy’s independence, recognized when he conquered the Saracens with no help from the king.13

In fact new men were constantly joining the nobility, marrying women of longer-established families and thus giving their children ancestors both among ancient kings and among parvenus. By the late eleventh century, as discussed more fully in Chapter 3, lords of castles sometimes tried to strengthen their ties to their non-noble followers by marrying their daughters to them. These men would not become noble themselves merely by marrying a noble girl, but their children would indubitably have noble birth. Scholars who have pointed to the new men in the ancestry of high medieval nobles as evidence that there was a turnover in the aristocracy, and scholars who have used the long-established nobles in this ancestry to argue that the aristocracy was unchanging, have both missed the point. The group of men and women who constituted the high medieval nobility had many ties to the aristocracy of centuries earlier and yet constantly took on new members as well. As much as the nobles themselves liked to stress their noble birth, the same noble ancestors might be found in the family trees of men of a variety of status.14 For all practical purposes, purity of blood, assuming there were at least some nobles in one’s ancestry, was less important than wealth and power.

Wealth and Power

Early medieval nobles had been enormously wealthy and enormously powerful—and also very few. Monasteries in the seventh and eighth centuries might be established by a single individual who had enough disposable wealth to endow a church at a single stroke with property scat...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE Nobles and Knights
• CHAPTER TWO Nobles and Society
• CHAPTER THREE Noble Families and Family Life
• CHAPTER FOUR Nobility and Chivalry
• CHAPTER FIVE Nobility and the Church
• Conclusions
• Bibliography