King Arthur and the Birth of Chivalry

It is the glory of kings to seek a matter out.

In the second installment to his tetralogy The Once and Future King, T.H. White pens the inception point of King Arthur’s famous order of chivalry.

Arthur’s army had just won the day, at the expense of significant dead, strewn throughout the countryside. Still being under the tutelage of Merlyn, Arthur receives a brief oral history of such wars — how the people with superior weaponry become the aggressor to peoples of lesser might and ultimately displace them from their lands. But of greater significance, Merlyn goes much further, teaching the young king how those now displaced peoples were once the aggressors themselves to another long-forgotten people; iron against bronze, bronze against stone and so on and so on, in an endless cycle all the way back to Cain and Abel. Arthur learns that it is the poor who suffer most from war, while the nobility enjoy its spoils.

Being presently caught up within a wheel of such aggressions, the goodly king philosophizes on how best to break this wretched circle. Reflecting upon the fallen nature of mankind, Arthur asks himself the right question: does might equal right?

“Might is not Right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it.

It is as if people were half horrible and half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves they run wild. You get the average baron that we see nowadays, people like Sir Bruce Sans Pitie, who simply go clod-hopping round the country dressed in steel, and doing exactly what they please, for sport.

It is our Norman idea about the upper classes having a monopoly of power, without reference to justice. Then the horrible side gets upper-most, and there is thieving and rape and plunder and torture.”

"Now what I have thought," said Arthur, "is this. Why can't you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can't just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it. You can't cut it out, but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad."

The audience was interested. They leaned forward to listen, except Merlyn.

“My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chiv-alry. I will not punish the bad knights, or hang Lot, but I will try to get them into our Order. We shall have to make it a great honour, you see, and make it fashionable and all that. Everybody must want to be in. And then I shall make the oath of the order that Might is only to be used for Right. Do you follow? The knights in my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in steel and whacking away with their swords-that will give an outlet for wanting to whack, you understand, an outlet for what Merlyn calls the foxhunting spirit- but they will be bound to strike only on behalf of what is good, to defend virgins against Sir Bruce and to restore what has been done wrong in the past and to help the oppressed and so forth. Do you see the idea? It will be using the Might instead of fighting against it, and turning a bad thing into a good. There, Merlyn, that is all I can think of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual. But I did think I can't do any better.”

— King Arthur, in The Queen of Air and Darkness.

Of course, you might point out, the fatal flaw in the young king’s thinking is that the one deciding right from wrong must be himself virtuous. It is absolutely so. Such is the age old dilemma of the human condition. Neither monarchies nor democracies are inoculated against our basic need for godly men at the helm. As it says in the proverbs. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” So, may God grant His people good government wherever they are scattered.

In the meantime we pray that His kingdom come.

By the way, have you read Frog of Arcadia? Its chock-full of Arthurian themes.