Chivalry -- Past and Present

Author: CL5 Robert Griffith
Department:COMM/Publishign

Earlier this month, I was asked to write an article about chivalry. The first thing that entered my mind were pictures of old Hollywood films, the male lead giving everything he had for a lady. It was the simple things; putting a coat down in a mud puddle, opening a door, and pushing a chair in, that men did for women in the past as signs of a cultural awareness for all things polite and honorable. Culture, as it has become today, no longer idolizes the glamorous dinner suits and dresses of formal dating, and hardly takes notice to the small, simple things that made an evening on the town seem so worthwhile. Chivalry, for what I had always thought it to be, was the polite, innate actions a man took for a woman that made the culture of the forties and fifties so "cultured" as it were.

As I kept thinking, seeing dancing Clark Gable's and Audrey Hepburn's in my eyes, I wondered if that was the true meaning of chivalry. I knew it had a root in the medieval times as the brave and honorable actions taken during war, romance, and empirical rule. When I paused to look up chivalry in the dictionary, I came up with the following, "The Age of Chivalry was also the age of the horse. Bedecked in elaborate armor and other trappings, horses were certainly well dressed, although they might have wished for lighter loads. That the horse should be featured so prominently during the Age of Chivalry is etymologically appropriate, because chivalry goes back to the Latin word caballus, "horse, especially a riding horse or packhorse." Borrowed from French, as were so many other important words having to do with medieval English culture, the English word chivalry is first recorded in works composed around the beginning of the 14th century and is found in several senses, including "a body of armored mounted warriors serving a lord" and "knighthood as a ceremonially conferred rank in the social system." Our modern sense, "the medieval system of knighthood," could not exist until the passage of several centuries had allowed the perspective for such a conceptualization, with this sense being recorded first in 1765."

So chivalry was indeed a major part of the past, rife with tradition, honor, duty, trust, loyalty, bravery. It was the cut of the sword, the gleam of the armor, the battle cries of the unafraid; chivalry was our past. It was more than being those things I mentioned, for those things were life, not asked for, but given from birth. The life and times of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, their actions not taken for pure self, but taken for the better good. The art of war, the honorable actions taken by men not meant to punish, but to learn their enemies of right and wrong. These were the days before blood was spilled for want of world power, but for the want of peace in the lands of their lords and nobles. Back then, the bravery of men was not mussed by the bravado of cowards.

Chivalry changed through the centuries. Wars became bloodier than could have been imagined when the only weapons were a man's sword and shield. In a fashion, culture grew up, to outlive the almost pleasurable feel left by the conquer of one's foes. Each society developed their own distaste for conflict, and chivalry quickly became the gentlemanly qualities sought after by young maidens searching for their knights in shining armor. Instead of swords bringing quick death, roses brought quick love to all who demonstrated their careful attentions to the aristocracy of romance. The glorious days of the real knights in shining armor have disappeared, and their replacements have, have what -- have given us equality of affection, sharing of a bill, the stubborn refusal of a hand up; it's not like it once was.

Still, chivalry, at least as it was known in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, has changed into a tender love for all things of the past. We admire from afar the tradition and attention our ancestors afforded to their loves. It's a warm, comfy thought, which we mimic with our own dates. Most men still treat women with a degree of care that can make any woman go weak at the knees. Women still have their own charms that make men go wild with passion. It's a culture that is not glorified any more, yet still practiced in a quiet, intimate scene. The armor of our suits has tarnished and rusted in places, yet it has never been punctured. Every now and then, a few wise men, and a few damsels in distress, come along to put a gleam in our polish, to renew that fire of yesteryear that gave us our best romances.

Camelot doesn't have to end if we only continue to dream of the past, and treat the future with care...


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