But we have as yet considered only one side of chivalry. While blushing, like Gibbon, to unite such discordant names, let us yet remember that the knight was "the champion of God _and the ladies_," and may therefore fairly claim to be judged in this latter capacity also.
Even here, however, we find him in practice just as far below either his avowed ideal or the too favourable pictures of later romance. The feudal system, with which knighthood was in fact bound up, precluded chivalry to women in its full modern sense. Land was necessarily held by personal service; therefore the woman, useless in war, must necessarily be given with her land to some man able to defend it and her. As even Gautier admits, the woman was too often a mere appendage of the fief; and he quotes from a _chanson de geste_, in which the emperor says to a favoured knight--
"Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs; Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner, Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez." [femme
Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time went on, the compulsion was rather less barefaced than this, he is still compelled sadly to acknowledge of the average medieval match in high life that "after all, whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of a truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly Christian one." From this initial defect two others followed almost as a matter of course: the extreme haste with which marriages were concluded, and the indecently early age at which children were bound for life to partners whom they had very likely never seen. Gautier quotes from another _chanson de geste_, where a heroine, within a month of her first husband's death, remarries again on the very day on which her second bridegroom is proposed and introduced to her for the first time; and the poet adds, "Great was the joy and laughter that day!" The extreme promptitude with which the Wife of Bath provided herself with a new husband--or, for the matter of that, Chaucer's own mother--is characteristically medieval.
[Illustration: BRASS OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK
(For the lady's cote-hardie and buttons, see p. 27, note 2. Her dress is here embroidered with her own arms and Sir John's.)]