The Queste del Saint Graal is a remarkable feat of the imagination. It is a deeply religious story, yet it has little basis in the received history and teachings of the Church, and is embedded as an integral part in a series of romances which have quite other, secular values. Despite the unofficial nature of its material, the theology it contains is complex and subtle; yet at the same time it succeeded in appealing to the courtly audience for whom the romances were created.We may well wonder how these disparate themes of chivalry, mysticism and apocryphal stories of the Crucifixion were welded into one.

Chivalry itself was of course a primarily secular movement. The rise of the knightly class in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the emergence of a specific ethos attached to the concept of knighthood, is a vast and difficult theme in itself. Who or what a knight was depended on the language you spoke: the Latin miles means soldier, the German Ritter and the French chevalier a horseman, the English knicht a man who serves a lord. Only in English can we distinguish between chivalry and knighthood.

What we can say is that the knights were key players in the evolving feudal world of this period, and that somehow, from the newly developed arms and tactics of the period, an esprit de corps emerged which came to transcend immediate social rank. It can be seen in the conduct of war and in the introduction of restrictions aimed at mitigating the risks of war for the knightly classes. There is evidence for organized training in the use of knightly weapons on horseback – spear, shield and sword – developing from the early eleventh century onwards into a violent form of sport, mock fights where war to the death was prevented by a series of rules and restraints. This in turn developed in the mid-twelfth century into a spectator sport, with distinguishing badges and commentators: heralds and heraldry were needed to make it possible for the onlookers to make out what was going on, and the emblems of opposing sides in war became individual coats of arms marking the prowess of the single knight.