God Speed and the Code of Chivalry

Image: Lancelot Brings Guenevere to Arthur, from The Book of Romance (1902)

One of the fascinating art pieces that I have hung up in my cubicle at the Collegium office is a print of Edmund Blair Leighton’s God Speed. The original piece was made with oil on canvas in 1900 and depicts a seemingly simple scene, a man departing for war and leaving his beloved behind. The lady ties a noticeable red sash on the man’s left arm as he and the other men prepare to go into battle. Both the man and the lady look as though they are assured to reunite once the fight is over.

In fact, the medieval custom for the lady to give to her lover at the time was bestowing some sort of favor on the knight before he carried out his knightly duties, generally in situations that involved life or death. The favor that the lady gifts is usually a priceless heirloom or her personal ribbon, scarf, or handkerchief. In the painting, the red sash was an indication that it was expensive to create since red dye was harder to procure than any other dye. Furthermore, as a physical symbol of reuniting, the gifts were most likely handmade by the lady herself, with her family’s emblem stitched on them.

Leighton’s painting serves as an example of the medieval tradition known as the chivalric code, an informal code that is associated with knighthood. As of the late Middle Ages, the chivalric code came to be seen as the idealization of a perfect knight and the ideals of courtly love. The knight in God Speed exemplifies one of the virtues of a chivalric knight – that is, fighting with valor. By leaving his lover (and presumably his family), he knows he must perform his duty as a knight and cannot be with his love in comfort, despite his temptations to do so.

I sometimes wonder how we should live out the chivalric code in spite of the chaos that surrounds us in modernity. We are not rescuing fair maidens from a tower nor are we slaying physical dragons. How do we perform our “knightly duties” in the 21st century? The answer: overcoming our spiritual warfare. While we are not engaging with a mighty fire-breathing wyrm, we are waging war with our inner dragons through temptations. Just as the knight promises to return to his fair lady, we must promise ourselves that we will return to our lover, our innocence.