The Nastiness of Chivalry—Sex and Violence Mediaeval Style

“If we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals . . . we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory’s Morte D’arthur. ‘Thou wert the meekest man’, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. ‘Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’ Chivalry offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable . . .”—C. S. Lewis

Many people today, and I believe many Christians in particular, are often oblivious to the real nature of chivalry and the problems it posses from a Christian perspective and have a mistaken idea of the real conditions prevailing in the age chivalry and beyond, even defending feudalism at times as a Christian form of social order. The quotation above is from an essay that C. S. Lewis wrote in 1940 called “The Necessity of Chivalry.” Lewis’s essay is highly problematic. Its simplicity is naive and dangerous. How is the adulterer Lancelot to be any kind of example to us, except of course as a true model of chivalry, in other words as a true representative of its hypocritical immorality? This is not good morality, certainly not good Christianity and not even accurate history. It is schoolboy nonsense and only helps to perpetuate a mistaken idea of what was good in our history. C. S. Lewis can be very good, but he can also be very bad. This is the kind of stuff that leads young minds astray. I am afraid I found Lewis’s essay at the best thoroughly dubious. I fail to understand how it is that this sort of false history still gets promoted.

Quite possibly some may think this is an overreaction, but I am not convinced. I think this is highly problematic and certainly not the kind of thing we should be teaching our children. Generations of the ruling classes in Britain were brainwashed with this sort of ideology in the British public school system (i.e. expensive elite private schools for the children of the upper classes that ran the country) when they were children. It has been responsible in part for producing the mindset of the delinquent British ruling class and in part at least for the war-mongering and abusive class system that still exists here, and the terrible wars that have murdered millions, which are its product, but that part of it C. S. Lewis, a product of this system himself, left out, and appears not to have considered from a Christian point of view.

Lewis’s essay has now been turned into an illustrated video on the internet (it can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/GBT9LasyC3E). It is telling that the video ends with a quotation from Winston Churchill, another product of this lamentable system and one of Britain’s greatest war criminals, a man whose bellicose war-mongering was matched only by his gambling, alcoholism and actual disastrous military bungling, though the latter may possibly have been partly linked with the former. All he lacked was the philandering, and we should then have had the complete picture. But his friend, Lloyd-George, another “great Briton,” did enough of that for both of them, probably enough for the whole of the British empire, though it was the way of life of the aristocracy and ruling classes on the whole and has been for centuries, going back precisely to the age of chivalry, the ideology of which merely gave such delinquent behaviour a hypocritical veneer of respectability that those who promote this kind of social behaviour fail to recognise. The latest example of this is alarmingly current, namely aristocratic privilege that sees itself as above the law and able to treat those below their own class as rubbish to be used for their sexual pleasure,—men who are “too honourable” indeed! That is your chivalry, and that is all it ever was. The fact that my statement about Churchill will shock many people shows just how brainwashed our society is with this kind of thinking, just how indelibly ingrained this idolatry that is at the heart of our culture is.

While Christians peddle this kind of perverted “history” we shall not see the manifestation of the kingdom of God and his righteousness in the life of our communities and nations, but only more of the petty and murderous fiefdoms of men and their obscene perversions of justice, which have corrupted the course not only of pagan civilisations but also of Christendom, aided and abetted very often of course by the very institution, the Church, that should have condemned them.

The popular concept of chivalry unwittingly accepted by C. S. Lewis bears very little resemblance to reality. It is a product of romantic fiction, a retrospective viewed through rose-tinted Victorian spectacles, not reality. I’m afraid the Urban Dictionary gets much nearer the truth about chivalry than its deluded apologist C. S. Lewis could ever have imagined:

“Chivalry, for the most part, was the opposite of the Geneva Convention; it was all about making a profit on war . . . A real knight in shining armor was actually more like a trained assassin and the local rapist rolled into one . . .”

Courtly love was adultery and chivalry was originally horsemanship, but our developed concept of chivalry is both of these rolled together: adultery and war. And adultery and war just about sums up the traditional British ruling class attitude to life. When the permissive society became a thing in the 1960s in Britain all that happened was that the centuries old sexually immoral lifestyle of the aristocracy—the sexual mores of chivalry—was adopted by a greater part of the people of all classes.