its influence dominant in Western Europe. The "chivalry" so familiar to us
in the pages of Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of
heroism, love, and courtesy before which all depth and reality of nobleness
disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest
caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially
of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward's nature from which the
baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety,
save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere,
while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence
of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of
his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable
chivalry of his day. His frame was that of a born soldier--tall,
deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action, and he
shared to the full his people's love of venture and hard fighting. When he
encountered Adam Gurdon after Evesham he forced him single-handed to beg
for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting
in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself
to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. His fame as a general
seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. At
his "Round Table of Kenilworth" a hundred lords and ladies, "clad all in
silk," renewed the faded glories of Arthur's Court. The false air of
romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into
outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when
rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on
Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal
influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its
exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight
without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the
burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common
robber.