Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/544

522 class fails with respect to its own ideals. The special shortcomings are most apparent with those classes whose ideals are most definitely formulated.

Among the laity the gap between the ideal and the actual may best be observed in the warrior class whose ideals accorded with the feudal situation and tended to express themselves in chivalry. Not that knights and ladies were better or worse than other mediaeval men and women. But literature contains clearer statements of their ideals. The knightly virtues range before us as distinctly as the monastic; and harsh is the contrast between the character they outline and the feudal actuality of cruelty and greed and lust. Feudalism itself presents everywhere a state of contrast between its principles of mutual fidelity and protection, and its actuality of oppression, revolt, and private war. The feudal system was a sprawling conglomerate fact. The actual usages of chivalry (the term is loose and must be allowed gradually to define itself) were one expression of it, and varied with the period and country. But chivalry had its home also in the imagination, and its most interesting media are legend and romantic fiction. Still, much that was romantic in it sprang from the aggregate of law, custom, and sentiment, which held feudal society together. Chivalry was the fine flower of honour growing from this soil, embosomed in an abundant leafage of imagination.

The feudal system was founded on relations and sentiments arising from a state of turbulence where every man needed the protection of a lord: it could not fail to foster sentiments of fealty. The fief itself, the feudal unit of land held on condition of homage and service, symbolized the principle of mutual troth between lord and vassal. The land was part of mother earth; the troth, the elemental personal tie, existed from of yore. In this instance it came from the German forests. But the feudal system of land tenure also stretched its roots back into the rural institutions of the disintegrating Roman Empire. In the fifth century, for example, when what was left of the imperial rule could no longer enforce order, and provincial governments were decaying with the decay of the central power from which