Chivalry has fuck all to do with women, and everything to do with horses

October 16, 2015 6:53 PM

"That’s all chivalry is: basic guidelines for how not to be a sack of shit. And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die." Myths Retold (previously) clears up a few errors about chivalry. It's a handy guide to privilege, human decency, history, and Arthurian legend ("It turns out you’re not even allowed to see the grail if you thought about a boob once").

"There are no prizes for being chivalrous, other than the prize of being a decent god damn human. This is because the people who chivalry was invented for were so fucking rich that prizes were totally meaningless to them. In addition to horses, knights also owned fancy armor, sick weapons, and huge tracts of land. They were powerful, exciting people relatively free of disease. They weren’t exactly hard up for sex opportunities, is what I’m trying to say. They didn’t need to invent a complex code of ethics to justify getting shit for free, because they already had all the shit. What do you get for the man who has everything? How about some fucking morals."

posted by babelfish (39 comments total)

Chivalry = recognizing your own privilege
posted by blue_beetle at 7:01 PM on October 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

"Endless sex disaster" would have been a handy phrase to describe some of my friends' dating lives when we were in school.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:05 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

Chivalry, the Men's Rights of the 14th century.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:05 PM on October 16, 2015

See, the word “chivalry” comes from the French word “chevalier,” which comes from “cheval,” which means “horse.”

English words that come from horses:

cavalry: people on horses.
chivalry: how to behave when on a horse.
cavalier: someone who's like "fuck this, I'm on a horse".
posted by a car full of lions at 7:09 PM on October 16, 2015 [155 favorites]

Ooh, ooh, is this a good point to drop my favorite Alice Duer Miller poem into the discussion?

Chivalry

It's treating a woman politely
As long as she isn't a fright:
It's guarding the girls who act rightly,
If you can be judge of what's right;
It's being--not just, but so pleasant;
It's tipping while wages are low;
It's making a beautiful present,
And failing to pay what you owe.

That one's more about chivalry-in-practice than chivalry-in-idealism, mind. This is hilarious--thanks for posting it! The retellings of myths are also gold--I totally recommend checking out the story of Percival, for example.
posted by sciatrix at 7:11 PM on October 16, 2015 [41 favorites]

This fellow certainly has a...pungent...writing style. Is his target audience drunk millennials? Precocious middle-schoolers? But he has a point. To paraphrase George Ives, "Don't pay too much attention to the words, for if you do, you may miss the writing."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:13 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you were to use a scroll of identify, I think you'd notice my fedora is +1, m'lady. Coincidentally, so is my reservation at Applebees tonight.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 7:15 PM on October 16, 2015 [52 favorites]

I feel people like me who grew up with Samuel L. Jackson movies being mainstream aren't bothered by the colourful language. In fact I quite enjoyed it.

So yes, you're right: drunk millennials.
posted by a car full of lions at 7:39 PM on October 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

okay, I have an optimized death machine between my legs

Compensate much?
posted by uosuaq at 7:40 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

A horse is an optimized death machine in the way that you can use it for war, and also an optimized death machine in the way that the smallest sub-optimal aspect of existence will cause it to instantly die.
posted by codacorolla at 7:51 PM on October 16, 2015 [31 favorites]

I am sean taylor and chivalry is for social justice horses.*

*the comments are....deliciously commenty...
posted by zenon at 8:00 PM on October 16, 2015

if you had a horse, you could absolutely kill anybody who didn’t have a horse and nobody was going to say a god damn thing.

Anybody except those who had a row of pointed sticks stuck in the ground.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:41 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

This article dispels several misconception about chivalry that I didn't even have!
posted by GuyZero at 8:53 PM on October 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

Anybody except those who had a row of pointed sticks stuck in the ground.

Shockingly not invented until well after the invention of horse riding.
posted by GuyZero at 8:54 PM on October 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

As a rule, you should never fact-check a humor piece. But some things bug me here...

The author is quite right to connect horses and power. At the same time, when the medieval legends were getting finalized, horses were already half-obsolete. Malory, for instance, wrote several generations after Agincourt; the same year he was published, the Royal Guard was issued harquebuses. That is, modern notions of chivalry come from stories post-medieval dudes wrote about medieval times. They weren't a guide to conduct any more than Batman is a manual on detective work.

Also, "fuck all to do with women"? The stories were told to women (among others), sometimes by women. They were entertainments for the court, along with love songs and the whole atmosphere of courtly love. Chivalric heroes behave deferentially to noblewomen because that's what their audience, especially noblewomen, liked to hear.

As for Galahad and seeing boob, that points to a weird dual ethics in Malory, at least. For a few chapters courtly love and the superhero knights are completely dropped in favor of monks, holy maidens, and relic-hunting. Only 3 of Arthur's 150 knights are found worthy to find the Grail, and having found it, there's nothing left for two of them but to crumple up and die. Then the plot is disposed of and the alternative religious ethics are forgotten.
posted by zompist at 9:12 PM on October 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

English words that come from horses:

According to Dinosaur Comics’ T-Rex, our words and idioms are pretty much all about horses.
posted by Rangi at 9:31 PM on October 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

There's a small Modern Chivalry movement.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:45 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Chivalry = recognizing your own privilege

Also putting a positive spin on it to help keep it going - see also: modern chivalry.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:39 PM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

The real problem with Chivalry (or, really, anything medieval) is that what we think of as the middle ages was really big (most of Europe for a couple hundred years) and anything you point to, I can pretty much point to something else that conflicts. Also, we don't think the way they did. The best example I can think of is the case involving the death of Bertrand du Guesclin, who, after negotiating terms of a siege (when the besieged would surrender unless relieves, what constituted relief, etc.) du Guesclin took ill and died. When the appointed hour came and the commander of the besieged forces learned of du Guesclin's passing, he insisted upon surrendering to the man's corpse. Makes perfect sense, right?

Getting into these guy's heads is not a trivial task, and trying to discuss the nature of chivalry and not bring up the implications of their social contract, the chivalric virtues (and deadly sins) and how their legends deviated from reality might make for a good humor essay, but isn't going to get you very far.

Don't even get me started on the made up from whole cloth Victorian stuff.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 12:11 AM on October 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

most of Europe for a couple hundred years

Really? Gosh, I think of it closer to a thousand than a couple of hundred - I believe it's generally understood to be end of the Roman Empire to Renaissance.
posted by smoke at 1:29 AM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

But what we think of as the Middle Ages are the High Middle Ages from about the 12th century on. Most anglophones are thinking about a period of British history after the Conquest. Which, given the etymology of chivalry, is not inappropriate in the context of this discussion.
posted by howfar at 1:37 AM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

That and a martial culture of honour, yes.
posted by acb at 3:01 AM on October 17, 2015

The period immediately after the fall of the western roman empire was the Dark Ages. The Middle Ages came after.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:03 AM on October 17, 2015

I don't think anybody who has anything to do professionally with history has used the term "Dark Ages" for a long time now.
posted by languagehat at 6:17 AM on October 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Dark Ages was the three years of Junior High School.
posted by Edward L at 6:56 AM on October 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

There are a lot of issues with this piece as it relates to history. Yes, the code of ethics known as chivalry is sort of a "how not to be a raging asshole" primer. But the reason it was established is because knights frequently WERE raging assholes. They lived with impunity above their peasant vassals and "protected" those of their lords. They also served as ad-hoc lawmen but, as you can imagine, that didn't always work out so well. Crusaders had the privilege of killing any Muslim man, woman, or child as they saw fit (as they were nonbelievers), and they visited horrible atrocities upon Middle Easterners for almost 200 years. Given that context, the papal state used chivalry as a device to make knights look religiously and morally heroic, so that the church's conquests could never be questioned. So, yes, the code of chivalry demanded that certain tenets of personal moral responsibility be upheld, but it was largely the duty of knights to police themselves on that, and they did a very shitty job of it.
The Arthurian ideal of courtly romantic knights is mostly at odds with the reality of early knights being essentially mercenaries.
Yeah, there's a lot more to untangle here than just, "chivalry means checking your privilege."
posted by Demogorgon at 7:15 AM on October 17, 2015 [20 favorites]

You don't really see any sort of code of Chivalry until late in the 12th century. There were some social norms in the fighting estate prior to that, but, well, the Chanson de Roland is 11th century even if Roncevaux happened in the 8th. By the end of the fifteenth century they were pretty much fixing to put feudalism in a box in the attic, and the idea of an army being a national force (as opposed to just the king and his droogies) was rapidly becoming a thing. I'd give it 600 years (900-1500) on the outside.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 7:20 AM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nobody who has ever had to deal with colic would describe a horse as "optimized."
posted by maxsparber at 7:28 AM on October 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

There needs to be a word -- one more generic than "asshole" -- for the general belief that the appropriate way to treat a woman is by following a recipe with no attention paid to her individual desires or preferences, such that if one fails to win over said woman one can simply blame her for not following the script. I had kind of hoped to re-appropriate "chivalry" to mean that -- because that's what the term is used for these days, more often than not -- but I think that muddies the waters.

There's a lot of overlap with "nice guy syndrome" or "neckbeards," but it's not limited to that. It also applies to Paul Harvey bullshit, or Mars/Venus bullshit. It even applies to perfectly normal behavior elevated to a mania. Maybe 95 percent of women in romantic relationships with men would love to get red roses on Valentine's Day, I don't know, but I've known women in the remaining five percent who make it clear that cut flowers and designated romantic holidays aren't their thing, and they've had to deal with guys who insist that that's the way it's done, don't show any interest in finding out what the women in question would prefer, and get mad when the women in question don't act the way they "should." Those men are being...whatever this word would be.
posted by lore at 8:37 AM on October 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

our words and idioms are pretty much all about horses.

And those comics don't even touch "free rein"!
posted by asperity at 8:47 AM on October 17, 2015

Louts?

12th-13th century Chivalry was a mutual appreciation society, and the fiction was escapist fantasy for rich nobles. Notice how we talk about "Arthurian" legends, but King Arthur does essentially nothing in the stories; it's all about the knights. But in reality, the knights were becoming less and less relevant, militarily and politically, thanks to the rise in power of the king, who was trying to curtail their privileges and to keep them from fighting (a good thing since a lot of medieval "war" was essentially raiding on other people's land, hurting them indirectly but hurting the peasants very directly).
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 8:48 AM on October 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

a lot of medieval "war" was essentially raiding on other people's land, hurting them indirectly but hurting the peasants very directly

Boy, I'm glad war isn't like that anymore!
posted by lore at 8:55 AM on October 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

lore, the word you're looking for is "jemble."
posted by babelfish at 9:49 AM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nobody who has ever had to deal with colic would describe a horse as "optimized."

Horses are mostly optimized for costing you a lot of time and money. Anything else is an occasional fringe benefit.
posted by thivaia at 12:13 PM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

12th-13th century Chivalry was a mutual appreciation society, and the fiction was escapist fantasy for rich nobles. Notice how we talk about "Arthurian" legends, but King Arthur does essentially nothing in the stories; it's all about the knights.

It also blew my mind when I discovered just how far removed from the actual time the legends of King Arthur were.

Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which is probably the best known mediaeval Arthurian telling was published in 1485 (post-printing press - which is why it's the best known as it was printed by William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England). If King Arthur existed at all it was sometime round 500-600 AD or approximately 900 years earlier. Even Geoffrey of Monmouth was only 1130 - or approximately 600 years after Arthur supposedly lived.

By comparison Robin Hood lived in about 1200 or 800 years ago. And neither Geoffrey of Monmouth nor Mallory are notably more accurate than any of the Hollywood renditions of Robin Hood (including the Mel Brooks version) - and they are about that far removed from the time Arthur supposedly lived as we are from Robin Hood.
posted by Francis at 1:43 PM on October 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have now read through the Better Myths Arthurian and BWAHAHAHAHAH.

Coincidentally, I attended a joust today (oh aren't we high and mighty) and the "bad knight" was doing all kinds of jerky shit (stabbing his own squire, tripping people, smacking people, etc.) and the announcer dude kept telling him, "We practice chivalry here." I see how well that's working, bro.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:56 PM on October 17, 2015

Thread much more interesting than FPP. Good work Metafilter. Go team!
posted by howfar at 12:37 AM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The SA forums on horses:

With horses, there is no such thing as a natural death at any point in existence: they’ve strictly only died from stupid shit. Saw water and passed away.

posted by Pope Guilty at 7:47 AM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't think anybody who has anything to do professionally with history has used the term "Dark Ages" for a long time now.

Unfortunately the British history podcast's Jaime uses the dark ages a lot and it drives me crazy.
posted by Carillon at 4:51 PM on October 18, 2015