Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary by Terry Jones

Abstract

REVIEWS allegory with a dreamer called Drede, but this is to ignore more peaceful poems such as The Pastime ofPleasure, which may well be later than The Isle ofLadies, or the serene Court ofSapience, which may be earlier. The 'breakdown' ofmedieval allegory seems to be more complex, influenced as much by personal style as by inexorabletrend. It is very useful indeed to have a new edition of The Isle ofLadies, but it is not really necessary to make inflated claims for its literary importance. E. RUTH HARVEY University of Toronto TERRY JONES, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Pp. xiv, 319.$20.00. This book by the very talented and admirably humane English satirist Terry Jones falls into two main parts, a detailed study ofthe Knight in Chaucer's General Prologue and a commentary on The Knight's Tale. It concludes with a brief chapter on The Monk's Tale and the Knight's interruption, and an appendix on the meaning of 'chivalrie,' 'trouthe,' 'honour,' 'freedom,' and 'curteisie.' The argument is that, "In the Prologue he [Chaucer] describes a typical mercenary of his day, whose career has been one of bloodshed and oppression... . In The Knight's Tale, he presents a chivalric romance, seen through the eyes ofa mercen­ ary captain, which consequently turns into a hymn oftyranny-just as the mercenaries themselves had become the mainstay of the modern tyrant.In The Monk's Tale, he (apparently both Chaucer and Monk) 'quits' the Knight's authoritarian and materialistic view ofthe world by illustrating the debasement of modern chivalry and by asserting the right of the people to bring down tyrants.At the same time the Monk asserts the Boethian view of the folly of seeking human happiness in worldly power and glory" (p. 222). Dissatisfied with conventional academic commentaries on the Knight in the General Prologue, Jones tries to recover the nuances that the descriptionwould have communicated to his "first audience" (p. xi). He concentrates on late medieval militarycampaigns against non-Christian 169 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER peoples; 'crusading' against Christians; tournaments and 'lists'; ideas concerning the status, duties, and appropriate dress of a knight; and especially he works on late medieval discussions and depictions of the professional soldiers, the European, Christian mercenaries, forerunners of wealthy companies and militarists in our own 'free' world currently making grotesque profits out oftrade in weapons ofmass slaughter, and even now preparing to initiate a nuclear holocaust in Europe with the appalling new American 'counter-force' or 'first strike' strategy. Jones hascollectedmaterials on latemedievalculture and societywhich should be of real interest to readers of Chaucer and his contemporaries. He establishes that it is wrong "to assume that all Chaucer's contemporaries shared the unbounded enthusiasm ofmodern commentators for knights who went off to kill Arabs, Turks, and Lithuanians in the name of Christ" (p. 35: to his evidence one should add the fine, late thirteenth­ century tract by the friar William of Tripoli, De statu saracenorum). 'Crusading' had become a topic for debate, on which Chaucer's friend Gower had strong views, and there is no a priori or historical reason to assume Chaucer must have shared in a violent, militaristic crusading ideology which was such a horrible betrayal of the pacifism of the New Testament and the early Christian churches (consult Roland Bainton, Christian attitudes toward war andpeace, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961). Jones also illustrates how the competing popes' readiness "to preach crusades against their fellow-Christians was one ofthe scandals of the age" (p. 39). Having done this, he uses modern historians and late medieval chroniclers and poets to establish both the realities of the campaigns in which Chaucer tells us the Knight performed and a range of late medieval assessments of them. Contrary to received academic wisdom, Jones shows that some of the campaigns Chaucer names were infamous and much criticized by contemporaries (e.g., pp. 42-49, 68-73); some were recorded bychroniclers as "lawless pillagingraids" of Christian mercenaries and brigands against Christians (pp. 55-59); while through some Chaucer unequivocally presents the Knight in the service of 'heathen' fighting 'heathen' (pp. 64-67, 86--88). Jones...