Such perfect obedience and self-restraint even in the middle of a bloody battle
was part of the premise of “chivalry.” The word, deriving from the French cheval
(“horse”), emphasized above all that the knight was a horseman, a warrior of the
most prestigious sort. Perched high in the saddle, his heavy lance couched in his right
arm, the knight was an imposing and menacing figure. Chivalry made him gentle,
gave his battles a higher meaning, whether for love of a lady or of God. The chivalric
hero was constrained by courtesy, fair play, piety, and devotion to an ideal. Did real
knights live up to these ideals? They knew perfectly well that they could not and that
it would be absurd if they tried to do so in every particular. But they loved playing
with the idea. They were the poets’ audience, and they liked to think of themselves
as fitting into the tales. When William the Marshal, advisor of English kings, died in
1219, his biographer wrote of him as a model knight, courteous with the ladies, brave
on the battlefield.
URBAN GUILDS INCORPORATED
Courtly “codes” were poetic and playful. City codes were drier but no less
compelling. In the early thirteenth century, guilds drew up statutes to determine dues,
regulate working hours, fix wages, and set standards for materials and products.
Sometimes they came into conflict with town government; this happened, for
example, to some bread-bakers’ guilds in Italy, where communes considered bread
too important a commodity to be left to its producers. At other times, the communes
supported guild efforts to control wages, reinforcing guild regulations with statutes of
their own. When great lords rather than communes governed a city, they too tried to
control and protect the guilds. King Henry II of England, for example, eagerly gave
some guilds in his Norman duchy special privileges so that they would depend on
him.
There was nothing democratic about guilds. To make cloth, the merchant guild
that imported the raw wool was generally the overseer of the other related guilds—
the shearers, weavers, fullers (the workers who beat the cloth to shrink it and make it
heavier), and dyers. In Florence, professional guilds of notaries and judges ranked in
prestige and power above craft guilds. Within each guild was another kind of
hierarchy. Apprentices were at the bottom, journeymen and -women in the middle,
and masters at the top. Young boys and occasionally girls were the apprentices; they
worked for a master for room and board, learning a trade. An apprenticeship in the
felt-hat trade in Paris, for example, lasted seven years. After their apprenticeship,
men and women often worked many years as day laborers, hired by a master when
