Richard Kaeuper and others have demonstrated convincingly that ‘imaginative’ chivalric literature was an integral part of the development of the mentalité of the elite classes of medieval society and helped to shape and reflect their cultural norms and ideals. This literature, most especially the chansons de geste (the ‘songs of deeds’), helped to crystallize arguments and debates, and served to illuminate many of the discourses within elite society, especially surrounding how to gain or lose honor. These chansons, generally written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (though often deriving orally from earlier materials), were performed in the halls and courts of the wealthy and powerful, and their popularity speaks to the power of their cultural reception. They were not, of course, mirrors of medieval society but, rather, idealized exemplars of desired virtues and inherent tensions within that society. Thus, the heroes are overly strong, brave, and loyal, while the villains are archetypes of perfidy. In general terms, since imaginative literature was often written for the benefit and entertainment of knightly audiences, it often followed familiar tropes. Among these was a focus on the deeds of knights in warfare, and a preference by knights to see their ecclesiastical competitors negatively portrayed as greedy and worldly.

There were exceptions, of course, to this focus on the ‘traditional’ knights, since the clerics who showed the same virtues possessed by knights – prowess in battle, loyalty, and bravery – are usually praised along with the secular warriors. The most famous of these was Archbishop Turpin of Reims in the cycle of chansons de geste focused on Charlemagne. In these epics, Turpin not only matches most of the knightly combatants in warrior skill, he often exceeds all but the best (in fact, it is Turpin who is left alive with Roland after all of the other French knights have fallen). The portrayal and popularity of Turpin could show a desire among the lay elite for clerics to take an active a role in the protection of king and Christ, as demonstrated by Henry II’s quotation from 1185 discussed in chapter 2, though other examples from the literature can betray more reticence over the proper clerical roles in battle.