As Mark Girouard very effectively demonstrated in his Return to Camelot (1981) the meaning of the concept of chivalry is many-layered, much misunderstood, and liable to change from generation to generation of writers. When Maurice Keen published his magnificently comprehensive Chivalry (1984) he was most careful to acknowledge the diverse sources and social aspirations that lay behind the word as scholars use it. However, he was also able to define the concept of chivalry into some sort of working categorisation, which may be encapsulated as ‘a way of life in its own right’, a code or culture that was attached to a particular class or estate within medieval society. The past quarter century of scholarship has made things more complicated, as we will see. Most seriously, there has been a growing conceptual confusion as to how chivalry relates to another construct, that of ‘courtliness’. Courtliness – being a concept principally employed by literary scholars – has not benefited from the centuries of historical scholarship which lies behind Keen's work, and so is difficult to accommodate within the debate. Like chivalry it is perceived to be a self-conscious code, but no study as yet discusses in any convincing way how courtliness relates to chivalry.

It is perhaps time to return to the implication of Keen's categorisation of ‘chivalry’, for it is otherwise a word employed in an undisciplined and unconsidered way by scholars to cover a range of influences on medieval élite behaviour and apply it equally to the ‘courtly’ construct too. Once the extent of that confusion is appreciated, there is more of a chance to come to an understanding of what noble behaviour was, and how it came to be formulated. If not, then the historical construct of ‘chivalry’ will be in danger of going the same way as that of ‘feudalism’; which is meaningless simply because of its surplus of meanings.

Chivalry as Code

There are a number of complicating factors in the study of chivalry. The first and most basic is the question of when it is that we can talk about chivalry as a distinct and self-conscious code.