Chivalry has been much misunderstood in modern times. We probably see Chaucer’s “varry parfit gentil knight” as poets and idealists would have us see him and not as he really was. There was no sentimentality about your knight. “Gentle” did not mean “kind”; it meant really “son of a landowner.” A knight had to do things in the manner considered fashionable by his class; he had to call things precisely by the names taught him by some older knight--his tutor and university combined; the slightest slip and he would be considered as the mediæval equivalent of our “bounder”; he had to wear the proper clothes at the proper time, and to obey certain arbitrary--often quite artificial--“manners and rules of good society,” or he would be considered lacking in “good form”; he must recognize the rights of the rich as against the poor, but it did not follow that he should recognize any rights of the poor as against the rich. Even Bayard, knight _sans peur et sans reproche_, would probably have seemed a most offensive fellow to a twentieth-century gentleman if he, with his modern ideas, could have met the Chevalier; and the sensation caused by the kindly conduct of Sir Philip Sidney in handing his drink of water to a wounded soldier at Zutphen shows how rare such a thing must have been. It was done a thousand times in the late war, and nobody thought anything about it. To the extent of the sensation of Zutphen Chivalry had debased mankind; the evil that it did lived after it. It did good in teaching the world manners and a certain standard of honourable conduct; it did not teach morality, or real religion, or real kindness. These things were left for the poor to teach the rich.