Goldwin Smith Quotes
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
Smith, Goldwin. "An Address to the Oxford School of Science and Art." Lectures and Essays, Hunter, Rose & Co., 1881, p. 87.
Chivalry was a set of rules that regulated the behavior of knights especially as to their behavior in battle. It was the Medieval equivalent of the Geneva Convention. At the time knights fought against knights and peasants fought against peasants. After time the fighting was mixed. Previously, if a knight was subdued by other knights, he would surrender and promise to fight any more and that would be honored. But when a small group of peasants brought down a knight in armor, he could not surrender. He had probably killed other lightly armored peasants who were friends, and the peasants did not trust the knights. So typically, the peasants just killed the fallen knight. Social class determined the concepts of honor, fairness, trust, and chivalry came to an end.
This required much of the population to maintain and bear arms. Another part of the law required the arms-bearers to be at the service of the king and as such was the king's militia.
Goldwin Smith was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States.
