Now, of Chivalry it may be said, that at the moment of its becoming
conscious it tends to become corrupt. There had overtaken it a change such
as is exemplified in the characters of the Knight and the Squire, in Chaucer's
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Of the Knight, he says:--

"he lovede chyvalrie
"Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.
"Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
"And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre
"As wel in Christendom as in hethenesse,
"And evere honoured for his worthinesse."

while of the Squire, he says:--

"And he hadde ben somtyme in chivachye,
"In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,
"And born him well, as of so litel space,
"In hope to stonden in his lady grace."

The beginnings of Chivalry, as a standard of knightly conduct, are in the
great Military Orders, such as the Templars, the Knights of S. John, and the
Knights of the Teutonic Order. Its impulse was wholly religious. The change
comes about when the inspiration is the hope 'to stonden in his lady grace.'
Already, in the late Twelfth Century, this tendency is discernible in Provence,
where it provoked the condign punishment of the Church, in the ghastly
Albigensian Crusade. There is a vivid and, probably, by no means exaggerated
picture of what it could become, in Lion Feuchtwanger brilliant novel,
"The Ugly Duchess," which is concerned with Froissart's period: Margaret
Maultasch, indeed, was the aunt by marriage of Richard's queen, Anne of
Bohemia.

It is impossible, within the compass of this introduction, to give an account
of Chivalry as an institution, in its most highly developed form, or of its courts,
its ceremonies and its codes. In its decline it was romantic, extravagant and
ostentatious, and contained the possibilities of an immense corruption. It
replaced the older and severer understanding of the term, the ideal which
animated Chaucer's Knight, and it identified itself, consciously, with the
legends which surrounded the names of Arthur and Charlemagne.

The transition from the Middle Ages represents, not so much the change
from one system to another, as the shifting of an emphasis. The important
characteristics of the Middle Ages are not of the same kind as those of the
Renaissance. The Middle Ages represent a re-birth of the conception of the
Roman mould of Christendom, knit together by a network of Feudal loyalties,
where the Roman Empire was very dissimilarly knit by a highly organised and
centralised administrative system. In the Renaissance, on the other hand, the
fruitful impulse is cultural, rather than political. There coincided with the
breakdown of the Medieval political theory and with the establishment of

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