of etiquette and morals which was grafted upon feudalism in the eleventh
and succeeding centuries. The practical influence of chivalry has been
exaggerated. Chivalrous ethics were in great measure the natural product
of a militarist age. Bravery and patriotism, loyalty and truthfulness,
liberality and courtesy and magnanimity--these are qualities which the
soldier, even in a semi-civilised society, discovers for himself. The
higher demands of chivalric morality were as habitually disregarded as
the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith. The chivalric statesmen
of the Middle Ages, from Godfrey of Bouillon to Edward III and the Black
Prince, appear, under the searchlight of historical criticism, not less
calculating than Renaissance despots or the disciples of Frederic the
Great of Prussia. But something less than justice has been rendered to
the chivalric ideal. The ethics which it embodied were arbitrary and
one-sided; but they represent a genuine endeavour to construct, if only
for one class, a practicable code of conduct at a time when religion too
often gloried in demanding the impossible. Chivalry degenerated into
extravagance and conventional hyperbole; but at the worst it had the
merit of investing human relationships and human occupations with an
ideal significance. In particular it gave to women a more honourable
position than they had occupied in any social system of antiquity. It
rediscovered one half of human nature. But for chivalry the Beatrice of
Dante, the Laura of Petrarch, Shakespeare's Miranda and Goethe's
Marguerite, could not have been created, much less comprehended.

Chivalry in the oldest discoverable form was the invention of the
Church. The religious service by which the neophyte was initiated as a
knight has been traced back to the time of Otto III, when it appears in
the liturgy of the Roman churches. But the ceremony was not in general
use, outside Italy, before the age of the Crusades. It was Urban II who
inspired the knighthood of northern Europe with the belief that they