Chivalry: The Ideal Knight

The medieval time period was a time of knight brotherhood. All knights had a job, to be the best knight there ever was. Knights attempted to conquered this feat by demonstrating acts of bravery, dignity, and overall portraying traits of a perfect man. All knights showed acts of Chivalry towards one another and everyone that crossed their paths. A perfect knight was hard to come by, but some reached this feat. To be a perfect knight, the knights had to follow a “ Knight’s Code”. During this time period knights were considered to be a leader, and they had the honor for guarding their king as well as protecting their country. First, Knighthood was about proving that one had dignity. In the novel that S.D Church wrote The Household Knights …show more content…
In a newspaper article titled “ Knights Joust, Falcons Soar “ by Karen Goff says that, “ The knights and horses compete in tests of strength, agility, endurance and bravery”. Knights are well tested and prepared to battle. Only the bravest knights will serve their king as well as guard their country. Another newspaper article, “ Knights to remember,” by Juliet Baker describes “Its focus is the knight-errant who, to prove his love and win his lady, displays his bravery and skill at arms by risking his life in chance encounters”. Not only did knights have the honor to defend their king and country, bravery also impressed the women of the mediaeval period. When most people would flee opportunities of risking their lives, Knights grasped it and made the most of it. In the novel Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry by Richard W. Kaeuper, he writes about a knight that shows bravery, “A knight from the diocese of Utrecht, Caesarius of Heisterbach tells, “having vigorously served in war for the Saviour a whole year,” was ready to return home when in a vision he saw his squire, who had been killed before his very eyes in combat with Saracens, entering heaven in the form of a dove. Reflecting that on returning home he would only fall into old sins, the knight returns to the fighting with even greater bravery. He falls in battle and is decapitated, the head carried about in triumph by the …show more content…
In the novel, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor by Curits Brown Watson, he states, “THE best definition of the Renaissance concept of honor, as it affected the individual, comes from Rabelais. In speaking of the order of free will in his Thelemite monastery, he describes the simplicity of its rules of virtuous behavior” Rabelais talks about knights having high honor that affects other people as a whole for the better being. Knights could change people for the better. Also in Robert E. Weir’s novel, Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor , he states that “Such notions cannot be divorced from the idea of Universal Brotherhood that infused the Order's rituals. Those same rituals shaped the Order's rhetorical style, peppering it with terms such as "honor," "manhood," and "nobility". A group called the KOL have a convention in 1881 where the rituals only focused on positive fraternal like qualities. These men want to impact the world in a positive way. The idea of having honor, manhood, and nobility meant that these knights would never argue and respect others with high virtue. The novel The Household Knights of King John by S.D Church talks about how, “The household knights, too, were expected to turn their hands to any task to which the king wished to assign them. Versatility was the key attribute required of all royal servants in the middle ages, and the household