Loyalty and the Early Fourteenth Century English Knight: Contemporary Sources and Perceptions

This thesis is a comprehensive study of approaches to and understanding of loyalty among English knights between 1300-1350. The original and distinctive contribution to knowledge and understanding of this thesis has been to create a robust account of both the significance and the variety of ways in which loyalty impacted and directed the lives of knights. To do so it has focused on interpretations of their reasoning and underlying mentalities, drawn from the development and application of a conceptual framework centring on loyalty. Integral and essential is the implicit understanding of a contemporary hierarchy of loyalties, in which all relationships have their place. Another important element of the conceptual framework was the impact that loyalty had on national identity, and how it was influenced by the knight’s loyalty to a particular king.The originality of this thesis also stems from the scale and wide-reaching nature of its primary research, drawing information from sources such as chronicles, calendar rolls, romantic literature, and didactic treatises. The main chapters of the thesis consider ideological loyalty (such as honour, libéralité, courtoise and piety), social loyalty (the knights as both lovers and husbands, and as parents and patriarchs, and their service in the community), and political loyalty (implicit and explicit structures within the concept and application of loyalty, how loyalty could be increased, what bonds were put in place to cement this loyalty, and what role loyalty played within the knights’ concept of national identity). Finally, this thesis addresses modes of disloyalty: a chapter concerning the nature and manifestations of treason. Each chapter considers driving principles, the modes through which loyalty was expressed, and the principal structures within which loyalty existed.