Among its contemporaries, chivalry won high praise as one of the very pillars of medieval civilization, indeed, of all civilization. At the same time the practitioners of its great virtue, prowess, inspired fear in the hearts of those committed to certain ideals of order. As they worried about the problem of order in their developing civilization, thoughtful medieval people argued that chivalry (reformed to their standards) was the great hope, even as they sensed that unreformed chivalry was somehow the great cause for fear. How chivalry could be praised to the heavens at the same time it could be so feared as a dark and sinister force with flaming weaponry makes a topic worth investigating.

In one obvious sense Chivalry is not confined to the Middle Ages, for many human beings are happily so inclined. If we study it in this period, the reason lies in the fact that people had begun to systematize their ideas about their fellow-men, to gain some notion of the value of individual personality and to react strongly against the wastage and brutality which disturbed life in the period of the great invasions. These appreciations and feelings did not remain isolated in individual thinkers, as had been the tendency in classical times, but were organized and generalized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. Medieval Chivalry became an institution as well as an ideal. An institution, it was the unwritten convention of a noble or military class, whose members could only reach and maintain their status in it through proper observance of its ceremonies and duties. An ideal, it supplied the rudiments of morality, and served as a means whereby the Church sought to educate the high-spirited and predatory, and to sublimate the acquisitive instincts. It was not law, though it had no small effect upon customary codes. It was not feudalism, had no essential connection with tenure and vassalage, although it gave the tenurial system some of its coherence and strengthened many of its sanctions. In its earliest stages it is best described as the Christian form of the military life; for then, while it was pervaded by strong religious influences, it represents the compromise of the Church with pagan violence. In its later developments it lost its moral aspect and passed into aestheticism, became un-muscular and largely decorative, much as robust Victorianism gave place to the 'nineties. Yet its best examples in any period are an inspiration of right conduct in their embodiment of valor and gentleness; and it is one of the gifts of the Middle Ages that such a union is still prized, even where its occurrence confronts us with the dilemma of having to choose between an Oliver and a Roland.

It began as a system of education, the moral and physical training of the future warrior. Its early history is closely connected with that of the bodyguard or school of personal retainers. The word "scholar" in the Roman Empire at the time of Constantine meant a member of the imperial bodyguard, a man disciplined in the service of the Palace. By analogy, each general might have his schola or family of retainers, consisting generally of barbarian mercenaries, not aristocrats or Greeks of free social standing. Between late Roman and early barbarian practice there is, however, this distinction to be drawn, that under the Visigoths and, later, the Merovingian Franks the "school" is recruited from free men taken at an earlier age. . .