Books in Brief: The Knight in History

The Knight in History, by Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 256 pp., $16.95)

The institution of chivalry has cast a long shadow down to our own times. The knightly traditions are still alive and well in such manifestations as the code of gentlemanly behavior; the Queen’s Honors List; the Knights of St. John (Hospitalers), whose record extends from the Crusades to management of a present-day ambulance service in England; and various fraternal organizations supporting the good cause of creative anachronism. Frances Gies, in The Knight in History, has taken a close look at the development of chivalry and come up with a short, sprightly, and scholarly study. In the manner of Barbara Tuchman, she has an eye for the revealing anecdote as she traces the evolution of European knighthood from a form of ironclad banditry to the idealistic overlays of the Crusades and Arthurian literature. But despite the book’s considerable merits, medievalists’ eyebrows will rise over her inability to appreciate the well-documented late-Roman origins of knights in the form of cataphracts, or armored horsemen: the sort of warriors who rode with Arthur against the Anglo-Saxon infantry. Miss Gies also makes the curious statement that the crossbow had tactical parity with the longbow, the latter, she says, having only the advantage of a more rapid rate of fire—which, however, won the key battles of Crécy and Agincourt. As time, gunpowder, professional armies, and nascent nationalism chased the international brotherhood of chivalry from the battlefield, Miss Gies gives us the curious reminder that terms like “Gothic” and “Middle Ages” were not coined until the eighteenth century. While Miss Gies is off by a couple of centuries, this does keep the unenlightened reader from imagining one knight confiding to another: “We are medieval men sallying forth on the First Crusade.”

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Lee Hopkins

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The Knight in History, by Frances Gies (Harper & Row, 256 pp., $16.95)

The institution of chivalry has cast a long shadow down to our own times. The knightly traditions are still alive and well in such manifestations as the code of gentlemanly behavior; the Queen’s Honors List; the Knights of St. John (Hospitalers), whose record extends from the Crusades to management of a present-day ambulance service in England; and various fraternal organizations supporting the good cause of creative anachronism. Frances Gies, in The Knight in History, has taken a close look at the development of chivalry and come up with a short, sprightly, and scholarly study. In the manner of Barbara Tuchman, she has an eye for the revealing anecdote as she traces the evolution of European knighthood from a form of ironclad banditry to the idealistic overlays of the Crusades and Arthurian literature. But despite the book’s considerable merits, medievalists’ eyebrows will rise over her inability to appreciate the well-documented late-Roman origins of knights in the form of cataphracts, or armored horsemen: the sort of warriors who rode with Arthur against the Anglo-Saxon infantry. Miss Gies also makes the curious statement that the crossbow had tactical parity with the longbow, the latter, she says, having only the advantage of a more rapid rate of fire—which, however, won the key battles of Crécy and Agincourt. As time, gunpowder, professional armies, and nascent nationalism chased the international brotherhood of chivalry from the battlefield, Miss Gies gives us the curious reminder that terms like “Gothic” and “Middle Ages” were not coined until the eighteenth century. While Miss Gies is off by a couple of centuries, this does keep the unenlightened reader from imagining one knight confiding to another: “We are medieval men sallying forth on the First Crusade.”