century join in this chorus of pity for the people. Was it not the knight’s duty to protect the weak? The ideal of chivalry implied, after all, two ideas which might seem to concur in forbidding a haughty contempt for the small man; the ideas, namely, that true nobility is based on virtue, and that all men are equal.
We should be careful not to overrate the importance of these two ideas. They were equally stereotyped and theoretical. To acknowledge true chivalry a matter of the heart should not be considered a victory over the spirit of feudalism or an achievement of the Renaissance. This medieval notion of equality is by no means a manifestation of the spirit of revolt. It does not owe its origin to radical reformers. In quoting the text of John Ball, who preached the revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” one is inclined to fancy that the nobles must have trembled on hearing it. But, in fact, it was the nobility themselves who for a long time had been repeating this ancient theme.
The two ideas of the equality of men and of the nature of true nobility were commonplaces of courteous literature, just as they were in the salons of the “ancien régime.” Both derived from antiquity. The poetry of the troubadours had sung and popularized them. Every one applauded them.
“Dont vient a tous souveraine noblesse?
Du gentil cuer, paré de nobles mours.
… Nulz n’est villains se du cuer ne lui muet.”[1]
The notion of equality had been borrowed by the Fathers of the Church from Cicero and Seneca. Gregory the Great, the great initiator of the Middle Ages, had given a text for coming ages in his Omnes namque homines natura aequales eumus. It had been repeated in all keys, but an actual social purport was not attached to it. It was a moral sentence, nothing more; to the men of the Middle Ages it meant the approaching equality of death, and was far from holding out, as a consolation for the iniquities of this world, a deceptive prospect of equality on earth. The thought of equality in
- ↑ Whence comes to all sovereign nobility? From a gentle heart, adorned by noble morals…. No one is a villein unless it comes from his heart.
