With Largesse seemingly likely play a part in the new system I thought I'd post something about it for those not sure what it actually meant.
Apologies in advance for it's length.
The Role of Largesse
Even as the knights soared far beyond any fear of identification with mere rustics, they still had to close ranks and watch another flank as well. Significant social and economic change, as always, created problems with an existing hierarchy: noble or knightly rank did not always equate with wealth.
Given the commercial and urban boom that so marked the High Middle Ages, knights became more keenly aware of the need to establish distance between themselves and the elite townsmen. For the bourgeois were most anxious to join them on the social summits and would take on identifying characteristics of chivalry as swiftly as they were able. It proved impossible to keep them from holding tournaments of their own, from showing coats of arms, from marriage alliances with proud but impecunious knights. What could prevent them from reading chivalric literature and imitating fine manners?
Perhaps it was all the more necessary to stress chivalric distance from such folk, as knights actually broke the code themselves, mingled with the middling classes, relied on their loans, their commercial expertise and management, and married their daughters.
The great chivalric exemplar William Marshal worked at profitable urban development on his estates and was no stranger to London moneylenders. The family of Ramon Llull, author of the most popular vernacular treatise on chivalry—which emphasized the link between nobility and chivalry—was only a few decades away from bourgeois origins in Barcelona.
Of course the knights raised as many barriers as they could. The distance between their exclusive, chivalrous life and the lives of the sub-chivalric bourgeoisie could be clearly established by a quality tirelessly praised in all chivalric literature: only they could truly display the magnificent, great-hearted generosity known as largesse.
This great virtue could then, especially in France, appear in sharpest contrast to the mean-spirited acquisitiveness of the merchants. On this line, moreover, chevalerie and clergie could join forces. Images of the bourgeoisie tainted by disgusting avarice and sinful usury appear frequently in medieval art, as Lester Little has shown. All those with noble bloodlines could agree, whether clerics or knights: Avarice looks like a merchant; he counts and hoards his coins (when he is not depicted defecating them); he has assuredly not learned to broadcast his wealth to the deserving with grand gesture, confident that valour can always replenish the supply.
The southern French poet Bertran de Born sings the praises of largesse and links it with prowess and love. All these traits necessarily connect; they all separate the one who possesses them in his eternal youthfulness from ordinary folk:
Young is a man who pawns his property, and he’s young when he’s really poor. He stays young while hospitality costs him a lot, and he’s young when he makes extravagant gifts. He stays young when he burns his chest and coffer, and holds combats and tourneys and ambushes. He stays young when he likes to flirt, and he’s young when minstrels like him well.
No miserly merchant need apply. In fact, townsmen are often pictured in chivalric literature as fair game for the knightly lions, who will put the booty to nobler use. The biography of the great William Marshal passes over his father’s career as a robber baron, it is true, and paints no scene of William looting merchants in glad war; but it does picture him taking money from a priest who is running off with a lady of good family. The money which the priest intended to put to usury William spends more nobly, as his biographer proudly tells us, on a feast for a circle of knightly friends. His friends’ only dissatisfaction with William is that he failed to take the horses as well.
Largesse pointedly reinforces high social status in the early life of Lancelot. Out of innate nobility he gives his own horse to a young man of noble birth who has been ambushed, his horse incapacitated: without Lancelot’s gift he would miss a chance to confront a traitor in court. Lancelot’s generosity preserves him from shame.
Meeting an aged vavasour shortly after, Lancelot politely offers him some of the meat of a roebuck he has shot. The man, who has had poorer luck in his own hunting, had been trying to put food on the wedding table of his daughter. Lancelot, learning that he is talking to a knight, tells him that the meat ‘could not [be] put to better use than to let it be eaten at the wedding of a knight’s daughter’. He graciously accepts the gift of one of the vavasour’s greyhounds in return. But Lancelot’s tutor—one of the sub-knightly, insensible to such fine points of generosity—refuses to believe Lancelot’s truthful account; he slaps the lad, and whips the greyhound. In a rage, Lancelot drives off the man (and his three subordinates), promising to kill him, if he can catch him outside the household of his patroness, the Lady of the Lake.
The young Arthur gives another case in point. As claimant to the throne (having pulled the sword from the stone), Arthur is shown ‘all kingly things and things that a man might lust after or love, to test whether his heart was greedy or grasping’. But he treats all these things nobly, giving them all away appropriately. His actions win him regard and support: ‘They all whispered behind their hands that he was surely of high birth, for they found no greed in him: as soon as anything of worth came his way, he put it to good uses, and all his gifts were fair according to what each one deserved.’
Clearly, this virtue sets men like Arthur apart from the grasping, retentive, bourgeois, or—God forbid—from any among the nobles who might stoop to such base behaviour. It is interesting to note that the scruffy townsmen and their money appear only faintly and in the background in this literature, almost as part of the scenery. They now and then put up knights for a tournament or house the overflow crowd gathered for a colourful royal occasions; they are called forth by the author to cheer when a hero frees a town from some evil custom through his magnificent prowess.
Of course largesse not only keeps the ambitious townsmen out of the club, in the hands of a great lord or king it becomes a crucial buttress to dominance, a tool of governance. Repeatedly in The Story of Merlin Arthur’s largesse to poor, young knights secures their loyalty and provides him with armed force.
Early in his career, ‘[h]e sought out fighting men everywhere he knew them to be and bestowed on them clothing, money, and horses, and the poor knights throughout the country took him in such love that they swore never to fail him even in the face of death.’ After his forces have been joined by those of King Ban and King Bors, ‘King Arthur bestowed gifts of great worth on those in the two kings’ households according to their rank, and he gave them warhorses, saddle horses, and beautiful, costly arms . . . and they swore that never, ever in their lives, would they let him down.
Ideally, it was warfare, not simply the income from one’s own vast estates, that produced the wherewithal for such lavish generosity. After a great battle with the Saxons, Arthur hands out all of the wealth garnered from them, and he let it be known throughout the army that if there were any young knights who wanted to win booty and would go with him wherever he would lead them, he would give them so much when they came back that they would never be poor another day in their lives. And so many of them came forward from here and there that it was nothing short of a wonder, for many wished always to be in his company because of his open-handedness.
In his great encounter with Galehaut, an alarmed Arthur finds his knights deserting him. The Wise Man explains the causes of this crisis and presents a list of reforms which features a return to generosity: Arthur is to ride a splendid horse up to the poor knight and ‘give him the horse in consideration of his prowess and the money so that he may spend freely’; the social hierarchy must be reaffirmed by a downward flow of largesse producing an upward flow of loyalty; the queen and her ladies and maidens must likewise cheerfully show largesse; all are to remember that ‘none was ever destroyed by generosity, but many have been destroyed by avarice. Always give generously and you will always have enough.’
This advice in romance reappeared in a bold motto on the wall of the Painted Chamber in Westminster Hall during the reign of Henry III: ‘He who does not give what he has will not get what he wants.’
In romance the goods were given out according to two scales, which, we are not surprised to find, always smoothly merged: high status and exemplary prowess. Asked to distribute the loot taken from the Saxons at one point in The Story of Merlin, Gawain defers to Doon of Carduel, explaining that ‘he can divide it up and distribute it better than I can, for he knows better than I do who the leading men are and the worthiest’.
Sometimes the pious fiction of funding knighthood with booty snatched from the unworthy hands of pagans slips a bit. In the Lancelot do Lac Claudas’s son Dorin looks remarkably like one of the disruptive ‘youths’ whose role in French society Georges Duby analysed so tellingly. Like these young men, Dorin admits no check on his vigour and will, and spends with even less restraint:
The only child [Claudas] had was a very handsome, fair boy almost fifteen years old, named Dorin. He was so arrogant and strong that his father did not yet dare make him a knight, lest he rebel against him as soon as he was able; and the boy spent so freely that no one would fail to rally to him.
Claudas, moreover, learns from his own brother by what means Dorin has acquired the wealth he dispenses so grandly: ‘Dorin had caused great harm in the land, damaging towns, seizing livestock, and killing and wounding men.’ Yet Claudas plays the great chivalric lord even more than the indulgent father in his response: ‘I am not troubled by all that. . . . He has the right, for a king’s son must not be prevented from being as generous as he may like, and royalty cannot allow itself to be impoverished by giving.’
The attitude was, of course, not limited to royalty, as many villagers and merchants in many centuries of medieval European history could testify. Knightly prowess and largesse went hand in hand throughout the countryside. Some feud, skirmish, or war could regularly be counted on to provide opportunity for despoiling the wealth available in fields or villages, or hoarded in merchants’ town houses.
One of the five villages attacked in a private war by Gilles de Busigny in 1298 lost (Robert Fossier estimated) the equivalent of 40,000 man hours of work by a labourer such as a mason, roofer, or harvester. Loot from such raids could be distributed grandly, and according to well-established rules, as Maurice Keen has shown.
Thus the great virtue of largesse is enabled by the great virtue of prowess. Knights know how to get money and how to spend it. ‘Lords, pawn your castles and towns and cities before you stop making war!’ Bertran de Born cries out in one of his poems. Largesse falls like ripe fruit from the tree of prowess into the strong hands of the worthy.
Might these two great chivalric qualities prove rivals? Competition usually turns thin and unconvincing on close inspection. Largesse wins high formal praise, for example, early in Chrétien’s Cligés where it appears as the queen of virtues enhancing all others; largesse by itself can make a man worthy, the old Emperor of Constantinople tells the young hero Alexander, though nothing else can (rank, courtesy, knowledge, strength, chivalry, valour, lordship).
Yet in this romance, as in so many others, the glittering prizes are won by prowess. Not by largesse does Alexander win the battle outside Windsor, seize the castle itself, and earn the love of Soredamor; nor does his son Cligés by largesse defeat the nephew of the Duke of Saxony (and kill him in a later encounter), unhorse and behead the Duke’s most vigorous knight, foil the Saxon ambush of the Greeks, rescue Fenice from her captors, defeat the Duke of Saxony in single combat, carry off the prize in King Arthur’s great four-day tournament (fighting even Gawain to a draw), and range all over Britain doing feats of chivalry, before returning to the Eastern Empire and a final triumph.
In the reception that Arthur’s knights give Cligés after he has won the great tournament at Oxford, near the end of the story, they crowd around him in great joy, telling him how much they value him, declaring that his prowess outshines theirs as the sun outshines little stars.
