As They Go Riding By

What kind of men do we think the mediaeval knights really were? I have
always seen them in a romantic light, finer than human. Tennyson gave me
that apple, and I confess I did eat, and I have lived on the wrong diet
ever since. Malory was almost as misleading. My net impression was that
there were a few wicked, villainous knights, who committed crimes such
as not trusting other knights or saying mean things, but that even they
were subject to shame when found out and rebuked, and that all the rest
were a fine, earnest Y. M. C. A. crowd, with the noblest ideals.

But only the poets hold this view of knights, not the scholars. Here,
for example, is a cold-hearted scholar, Monsieur Albert Guerard. He has
been digging into the old mediaeval records with an unromantic eye, hang
him; and he has emerged with his hands full of facts which prove the
knights were quite different. They did have some good qualities. When
invaders came around the knights fought them off as nobly as possible;
and they often went away and fought Saracens or ogres or such, and when
thus engaged they gave little trouble to the good folk at home. But in
between wars, not being educated, they couldn't sit still and be quiet.
It was dull in the house. They liked action. So they rode around the
streets in a pugnacious, wild-western manner, despising anyone who could
read and often knocking him down; and making free with the personal
property of merchants and peasants, who they thought had no special
right to property or even to life. Knights who felt rough behaved as
such, and the injuries they inflicted were often fatal.

They must have been terrors. Think of being a merchant or cleric without
any armor, and meeting a gang of ironclads, with the nearest police
court centuries off! Why, they might do anything, and whatever they did
to a merchant, they thought was a joke. Whenever they weren't beating
you up they fought with one another like demons--I don't mean just in
tournaments, which were for practice, but in small, private wars. And to
every war, public or private, citizens had to contribute; and instead of
being thanked for it, they were treated with the utmost contempt.

Suppose a handsome young citizen, seeing this and feeling ambitious,
tried to join the gang and become a knight himself. Would they let him?
No! At first, if he were a powerful fighter, he did have a small chance,
but as time went on and the knights got to