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What is Chivalry?

 

When you first think of this term we are reminded of medieval knights mounted on horses dueling with swords. They were honor driven, brave and gallant. A knight is defined as a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state, or their representative, for service to the monarch, the church, or the country - especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in Greek and Roman classical antiquity.

 

During the Middle Ages knighthood was primarily reserved for men only. However, there were many chivalric orders of knighthood that admitted women and female warriors who performed the role as well. Documented stories of primarily high-born women has proven that women donned armor and directed troop movement in times of war. Many women in ancient times were taught how to fight and defend their property and loved ones. Yes, so chivalry can be displayed by both men and women.

 

So how were these knights of old chosen and trained? According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, there was a formal process for entering knighthood. Qualified youths would start around the age of 7 serving their father as a page before joining the household of their father’s feudal lord. Then at the age of 12 they received advanced instruction in military subjects and the ways of the world. During apprenticeship these youths now called a valet would follow their patron on a campaign acting as a shield bearer, or as the weapons bearer. Once the youth was found to be proficient, and the money was available for the purchase of knightly equipment, they would be dubbed knight.

 

Our earlier emphasis in training our 7 - 12-year-old youths during the 19th and early 20th centuries involved highlighting examples of men and women from the Bible, or classical literature, that instilled bravery, honesty, politeness, etiquette, responsibility, generosity, compassion, and reverence for our creator God. These noble modern-day knights courted the ladies of their heart with skills. The ladies knew how they should be treated and courted. Both possessed knowledge of masculine and feminine subtleties.

Today, in this age of the Internet, social media, and television, noble young men and women quickly  disappearing and becoming a dying breed. Lessons were never passed on from the older generations concerning manners, integrity, hard work, and rules of etiquette or courtesy. Parents and influencers need to personally know and practice the skills their children must learn to become a modern-day knight.

 

Qualities of a Modern-Day Knight

 

What are the core qualities of a modern-day knight that we should teach our children and reinforce in society? A great place to start is with integrity. Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. The practice of this quality is missing in too many areas of our global society.

 

Integrity must be practiced and repeated in a disciplined, accurate and precise way. Accuracy and precision are defined as two measures of observational error. Accuracy is how close a given set of measurements are to their true value, while precision is how close the measurements are to each other. In other words, precision is a description of random errors, a measure of statistical variability.

You must know what the absolute true value is in order to achieve accuracy and precision in any area, including morality. Philosophy tries to find true value based upon logical reasoning rather than scientific fact, so it can’t be used to find true value. Unfortunately, some of the facts arrived at though studies concerning nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, are purely based on reasoning that isn’t logical, or backed by scientific evidence.

 

So, where do we get our true values from? Does an absolute true value exist? Truth cannot be relative or contradicting, and too often is rejected for emotional reasons alone. The Law of Non-Contradiction is one of the basic laws in classical logic. It states that something cannot be both true and not true at the same time when addressing the same context; so a true value cannot be based upon feelings or opinions.

 

If absolute true values and defined moral standards exist, who set these standards? The third anthropic argument supporting God’s existence states: If God does exist, then objective moral values and duties do exist and they can be observed. That feeling of guilt or outrage we experience after observing a violation of truth or morality is something built into us by God. The Bible has been used to establish laws and moral standards for centuries. Knights also used its precepts for measuring candidate worthiness.

The following list of standards are qualities our children should be taught from childhood, modeled by parents, and expected as common practice.

 

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