Great question, this is the subject of fairly intense debate. Mind if I enquire as to which MS (or modern editions) you've been reading the better to gauge your knowledge and interests?

I will say that I think it is well, foolish, to attempt to compare ethics between modernity and the past. It's a fallacy that users here are warned to be wary of when posting. The easiest example is the treatment of prisoners captured in war. Compared to modern ethics the execution of non-noble prisoners is highly unethical, to medieval knights acceptable and ethical, under certain conditions. Can we call knights who spared and ransomed one another, but killed the non-noble unethical? Not really, not according to the contemporary codes of ethics (if one can call them 'codes', it's not like everyone signed the medieval equivalent of the Geneva Convention when they were dubbed a knight or went to war). Can we call knights unethical because they did not presage how military ethics would develop over the next 800 years? It's a tad ridiculous and I hope the historical issues that can arise from trying to mould the past are obvious.

Of course, this does not mean that we from our moral ivory towers cannot say someone in the past acted unethically, but that we must measure that against contemporary ethics and not our own. With chivalric ethics this becomes especially difficult because the ethic was not homogenous or stable at any point. It was subject to constant debate, revision, and full of tensions and occasional contradictions. At its heart chivalry was a mishmash of social and cultural bonds underwritten by riding a horse and hitting things with swords, but other bonds could create different ethical scenarios. Vengeance, for example, was ethical in a certain context.

So I won't answer your question from that viewpoint, but I'm very happy to discuss the historiographical and popular reception of chivalric ethics, and if you let me know what period your interested in (in medieval terms) I'd be happy to discuss the ethics at play, although I don't go much past the 1480s.

You've actually identified fairly well the public discourse on views of the Middle Ages and chivalry. In the 1700s and 1800s public and historical reception of chivalry oscillated between lauding and trivialising the subject. It was either Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe or an elaborate ruse.

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century this cynical attitude towards knighthood and chivalric culture hardened among the academic community, especially due to the influence of two key texts (Johan Huizinga's The Waning [or Autumn] of the Middle Ages and R.L. Kilgour's The Decline of Chivalry, both published in the inter-war period). Although some, such as Sidney Painter, were highly critical, especially of Kilgour. For historians, the legacy of the early twentieth-century resulted in two narratives emerging: the first was that Christianity and courtesy ‘tamed’ the violent warrior impulses of the martial class. The second was that chivalry entered a decline in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries, as evidenced in the contemporary literature. The first narrative was deconstructed by Maurice Keen and Jean Flori in the 1980s who demonstrated the secular origins of chivalry – emerging in the twelfth-century. While David Crouch has argued that chivalry was the conscious form of the unconscious code known as the ‘noble habitus’. The ‘decline’ narrative was also addressed by Keen but is still popular among military historians – Lawrence Marvin in his military account of the Albigensian Crusade refers to knighthood and chivalric values once, in his introduction, and discards the entire ethos as unimportant due to the nature of the war (sieges and raids). Recently Richard Kaeuper and Craig Taylor have demonstrated that the literary basis for this narrative is flawed. It does not account for the fact that knights and writers had always complained about declining standards and looking back to either the Romans or mythologised figures such as King Arthur for a ‘golden age’ of chivalry.

Then there is the issue of medieval lordship (which some call government). Here I am on less firm ground now for popular conceptions but historiographically there is essentially a divide over quite how rapacious or litigious the knightly and aristocratic classes were in extracting the value of the lands they possessed. In the wake of two World Wars the world some were wearying of idealising warrior culture, others taking refuge behind the concept when facing a rather brutal reality. The Monty Python peasant sketch in Quest is actually quite apt for gauging public attitudes to lordship. Marxism was not overwhelmingly favourable and the ideas about the Middle Ages found a great deal of traction. However, in the later twentieth-century depictions of bad lordship, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John, we're countered by a still Romanticised view of knights: Robin Hood is now Sir Robin of Loxley. Post-Tolkien fantasy treaded water for a few decades, enabled by D&D, and a wonderfully generic slew of copy-cats (with some notable exceptions), and Hollywood was even less inclined to invert the tropes.

Then came George R.R. Martin's ASOIAF and Peter Jackson's LOTR: the renewed popular interest in fantasy and the medieval coincided with the saturation of generic black and white pulp and a more critical eye on the Middle Ages. Martin's knighthood, or his concept of knighthood, is, I assume, mostly informed by the c.1890-pre-1984 historiography and popular conception of knighthood. I have discussed Martin's treatment of knighthood and chivalry in some more detail, here.

Unsurprisingly the popular image is somewhat lagging behind the current academic consensus of the mid-80s let alone the present debates. Martin's listed sources on his website demonstrate a very old school set of influences. These combined with his own stated ambitions, to show the full horror of war, have combined to create a type of medievalism which is desirable and intriguing to a modern audience, as they can both denigrate the world and emphasise with the characters.

So that's a brief potted history and historiography, certain areas are still a bit too raw to be handled with due historical care, and there will be aspects I've missed entirely.

Now, I should go to bed. I will correct the inevitable typos and broad, unjustifiable claims tomorrow.

1 Introduction and Context

1.1. Preamble

There can be no doubt that knights and men-at-arms^1 lived lives which were violent, abusive, and on the teetering edge of contemporary moralities. As this question is rather immense I shall use this first post to sketch out the relevant context and offer a short summary of what will be covered in more topic-specific and detailed posts.

Any discussion of ‘chivalric’ ethics inherently creates an anachronistic categorisation. Chivalry intertwined with ‘competing’ categories courtesy, lordship, Christianity and none of these categories are truly distinct. The permeable membrane which loosely defines inarticulate borders carried influence in each direction. Concepts of lordship and courtesy were affected by transformations of law, warfare, society, and culture. To propose an answer not only should I draw upon ‘traditional’ epistemological and normative sources (ie. documents and legal texts) but upon narratives (both historical, such as chronicles and annals, and literary or oral, such as romances and fin d’amors) and anthropological concepts.

The problem with this approach is that I am attempting to do so in a series of Reddit posts and not The Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought series. I am also keenly aware of the lacunae in my knowledge that makes the full scope of such a treatment impossible. That said, I think the question can be answered with a firm reservation of the non-fullness of the answer. Before I continue to answer the question at hand I’ll try and set the historiographical and historical context for a study focused on the late medieval period.

1.2. Historiographical and Historical Context

Maurice Keen’s first monographical publication was based on his Oxford Ph.D. thesis in 1965 as The Laws of War in the Middle Ages. The title at first glances seems something of a misnomer. Keen’s chief focus was the later Middle Ages, and his thesis reflected that. However, what becomes apparent upon a detailed study of the ‘laws of war’ is that there was almost no medieval conception of such prior to the thirteenth-century. It is true that customs, habits, and conduct guiding critiques had appeared before then, but there was no normative approach which provided a guide to the conduct of soldiers in war and deeds of arms in bellum. In reality the codes of conduct which appeared in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries were not ones which gave an ethical concern to the treatment of others not of noble status. As an example, ransom money was not to be seized but, as Honore Bouvet put it in his influential fourteenth-century treatise The Tree of Battles, ‘If on both sides war is decided upon by the councils of two kings the soldiery may take spoil from the [opposing] kingdom, and make war freely’. If any traveller were taking goods to the enemy (with the exception of ransom money) they became fair game. Even if one captain had offered a safe-conduct, if the traveller encountered a soldier under the command of a different captain they were not bound to warrant it unless the first captain higher in what might be anachronistically called the ‘chain-of-command’ (ie. a direct superior). Although a neutral merchant could sue with good hope of receiving ‘rough’ compensation. It is topics such as these (which come under the division of the spoils of war) that dominate texts the ‘law of arms’ which Keen is so focused on. This is not to say that consideration is not given to the poor workers of the fields, churches and Churchmen, pilgrims, preachers, and hermits were completely omitted, they were supposed to be protected, but in the prosecution of a just war this remained an ideal rather than a reality.

The Christian martial ethics, as they were, evolved from Classical and Platonic origins and fused with Biblical traditions. These did not focus on the conduct of warriors in bellum but the right to war (ius ad bellum). After a long gestation following the creation of the term ‘just war’ by St. Augustine (who stated that war was just if it avenged injury) in the early fifth-century, the Peace of God movement emerged in modern day southern France in the early eleventh-century. This movement was aimed at limiting the damage done to Church property during the violent private wars of the southern aristocracy. The Church was forced to accept the damages of knights as part-and-parcel of life. One medieval conception laid out three orders of society: ‘laboratores, pugnatores/bellatores, and oratores’ (‘workers, fighters/warriors, prayers’, discussed in Georges Duby’s Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme, 1978) the secular warriors were responsible for the implementation of punishment and justice. They were God’s chosen for the duties of lordship and the practice of lordship and justice was inherently violent in Middle Ages.

Thus the aim was to protect the lands of the Church (or church land as the case may be, these were locally rather than centrally organised efforts). The key word here is limiting as the Peace of God, at its earliest stage, did not deny the right to wage war. In the twelfth-century (a period known as a ‘renaissance’ in terms of learning, the development of legal codes, and administrative institutions) at the University of Bologna the jurist Johannes Gratian compiled his opus of Canon law Decretum Gratiani Gratian’s decretals and the subsequent glosses added by the decretists examined in close context who possessed the right to initiate and conflict and on what grounds. The decretists, in general, reserved the right to initiate a conflict to a belonged to a ‘legitimate authority’, thus a ‘private’ war initiated with regard to retaking possession of property must also be accompanied by a judicial sentence in order to be considered valid. During the Hundred Years War the French crown banned all private warfare (although it could not stamp it out entirely) and private warfare lost some of its attractiveness when – even if victorious – one might be punished by the secular authority.

The theological emphasis on who was permitted to initiate war meant that most commentators elided the issue of conduct in actu bellum. In war almost any action could be excused with the proviso that the war was a just one, except perhaps cowardice. The damages done to the peasantry were viewed as an inevitable part of warfare, and thus efforts were made to restrict who had the right to wage war (sovereign princes) and why war was permissible. While this came to dominate the discussion (and remember this is a discussion of discussions) the clergy remained virulently hostile towards the damages of knights (a frequent pun used by ecclesiastical commentators was that of malicia/militia). The most ardent critics of the damages of warfare and pillaging placed the burden of ceasing this practice at the prince’s door (more accurately his purse), they insisted that should soldiers be fairly recompensed then they would have no need to pillage and plunder. This was an ideal which more pragmatic decretists did not attempt to resolve, Ralph of Ardennes even stipulated four types of legitimate rapine in a just war.

Even knights and chivalric authors acknowledged the damage knights and lords could do. Ramon Llull, a knight-turned-evangelist, and father of Catalan literature, wrote a chivalric ‘handbook’ which drew upon Romantic (most obviously those laid out in the Burgundian Lancelot du Lac and Christian ideals which in turn lauded knights who performed their judicial and military duties but castigated those who acted ‘falsely’. The text, * Llibre de l’orde de Cavalleria* (The Book of the Order of Chivalry, c.1275) was massively popular in the later Middle Ages, with extant translations from the original Catalan into French, Scots, and English (with sufficient evidence that there was also a Latin translation). Richard Kaeuper argued that Llull was being pragmatic, offering a sugar pill to the reforms and castigations that lay at the heart of the text. Elsewhere, in his Book of Contemplation Llull stated the situation much more baldly, ‘Who in the world does as much harm as knights?’.

Thus far we have not truly dealt with ‘chivalric ethics’ but ethics which touched upon the chief purposes of the knight in the Middle Ages: war and lordship. There were other concerns of which I am probably only capable of discussing one: marriage, adultery, and love (courtly or not). I shall leave the commentary on the chivalric sources and their usefulness to Craig Taylor:

The most difficult challenge facing historians of chivalry is to assess the impact of texts upon their aristocratic audiences. Given that chivalric authors were not offering simple mirrors to the values and ideals of knights and men-at-arms, it would be dangerous to assume that romances, chronicles, biographies or didactic works provide clear insight into the attitudes, values and beliefs of their lay audiences. There is no doubt that the two were intimately related, just as the surviving texts of medieval sermons and lives of saints provide a window into the religious beliefs of the laity. They are not synonymous, however, despite the commonplace modern, romantic assumption that chivalric romances in particular were direct reflections of the values and practices of the medieval aristocracy. The most difficult challenge facing historians of chivalry is to assess the impact of texts upon their aristocratic audiences.

Craig Taylor, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood During the Hundred Years War, (Cambridge, 2013), 12.

As a general, and final, comment before I continue is that it may well be impossible to state definitively whether or not knights acted ethically or not as a rule. There are clear examples where individuals attempted to adhere to their ideals at cost to themselves, while others clearly flouted class and religious conventions for personal gain. All of these different ethics I have discussed thus far were rooted in debates and consideration of contemporary culture. The chivalric debates of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries, combined with particular events, were perceived by historians (around the cusp of the twentieth-century) as evidence of the decline of chivalric ethics. War, love, and knighthood had become the shiny facade which disguised a violent and brutal warrior culture. What these historians failed to recognise was that chivalry was a debate about contemporary culture which always took a critical eye, looking back to a perceived ‘Golden Age’. Thus actions and the ethics which informed them are intrinsic to the individual (that’s probably the least profound statement I’ve ever made) this also means we require a critique of an individual’s actions and to discern the moral code which informed that critique. This is a difficult thing to do, and part of why it’s taken me so long to put this post together (I’ve been pouring over my sources and checking my schedule to see if I can actually do this).

That said, I think we can continue to my first case-study, which aims to demonstrate how chivalric ethics developed in relation to clerical expectations.

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^1 It should be noted that knighthood became more socially exclusive in the mid thirteenth- through fifteenth-centuries, but due to space I shall use knights as an umbrella term for those who formed the social and martial group to whom the ideals of knighthood pertained.