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The ideal of chivalry is an important one for many of us, part of what draws us to the SCA and what we value most about being in it, and in our pursuit of that ideal we look to exemplars from the past, to paragons of chivalry like William Marshal, or Bayard "le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche." So too the people of the High Middle Ages looked to exemplars of chivalry from the past and - moved by the same spirit that made the Hellenistic Greeks compile Seven Wonders of the World, and David Letterman his Top Ten lists - they came up with the Nine Worthies (or sometimes translated as Nine Heroes, or Nine Nobles - neuf preux, in the original French).
Why nine? Because that's three sets of three, a triad of triads, and that's just inherently cool. There were three pagan worthies: Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three Jewish worthies: Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; and three Christian worthies: Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. To our modern mundane minds, that's quite a disparate collection: two with the barest hint of actual historical existence, two that are outright fiction (or legend), and only one who lived in the actual Age of Chivalry, as a set spanning 2,500 years. Who did the medievals think these guys were? To answer very briefly, by triad: Hector was the Prince of Troy, of course, and Troy in the Middle Ages was famously the homeland of the heroic founders of Rome (Aeneas) and Britain (Brut); Snorri Sturluson in his Edda even traced the pagan Norse gods back to the royal house of Troy. Alexander the Great was known as a world conqueror, but even more so as a hero of fantastic romance: as "King Alisaunder" he harnessed griffins to his flying chariot, journeyed to the bottom of the sea in a crystal diving bell, met fire-breathing dog-headed men in India, and had many other adventures completely unconnected with the historical Alexander. Julius Caesar was remembered as another world conqueror, and as the founder of the Roman Empire (still going strong as the Holy Roman Empire) and of the Tower of London. In contrast to the many romances about the pagan and Christian worthies, the Jewish triad were the least detailed, the least individualized: Joshua was idealized as a general, David as a king, and Judas Maccabeus as a fighter for the Church, but there's less "story" about them. In part this may reflect meager general knowledge of Old Testament stories, in an age before the translation of the Bible or the flourishing of the mystery plays in the 15th century; in part it may reflect some awkwardness in praising specifically Jewish heroes. They were called heroes "of the Old Law," i.e., of the Old Testament, and hence part of the general Christian tradition (which is how Judas Maccabeus can be a crusader for the Church), not Jewish heroes as such. Both Arthur and Charlemagne were and remain incredibly well-known as heroes of romances (the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France, respectively) - Arthur more so to us these days, but Charlemagne's corpus started first. Unlike Alexander, whose stories feature his own fantastic adventures, they were kings famous for their knights: Arthur and Charlemagne mostly stay at home, it's the Knights of the Round Table and the Twelve Peers who go out and have the adventures. If those famous knights were paragons of chivalry, the reasoning went, then the noble kings who commanded their loyalty must have been the ideal. Godfrey of Bouillon seems almost prosaic by comparison: historically, he was only one of several leaders of the First Crusade, and not the most dashing leader at that; as first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, he reigned for less than a year. But within a century of his death, he had become a hero of romances almost on a par with Arthur and Charlemagne. More to the point, however, besides how they were seen as individuals, how were they treated as a set? Not just who were the Nine Worthies, but what was "The Nine Worthies"? The earliest appearance of the collection we know of was in a poem by Jean (or Jacques?) de Longuyon, Les Voeux du Paon, ca. 1310. The hero of the poem is described as being more courageous than the nine great heroes of history, who are then enumerated in a (typical) lengthy digression. De Longuyon's assemblage obviously resonated with something in the collective subconscious, because the Nine Worthies were soon appearing in a multitude of arts: in poetry, romance, sculpture, stained glass windows, tapestries, woodcuts, et cetera. To mention just a few instances, there is the great 14th-century set of tapestries in the Cloisters in New York, a work made for Jean, Duc de Berry (he of the Tres Riches Heures fame). There is the anonymous poem of the late 1300s, The Parlement of the Three Ages, the major English-language literary appearance of the Nine. One of the very few French woodcuts known from before 1480 is a depiction of the Worthies. They show up on the painted ceiling of a bedroom in Crathes Castle, Scotland, built in the second half of the 16th century. They're everywhere you want to be. The Nine Worthies was a theme that admitted of variations. Sometimes individual names on the list varied: Hector, Judas Maccabeus, and Godfrey were the ones most likely to be bumped to make room for a non-standard addition. Sometimes the list was expanded: the French tried to add Du Guesclin, their hero of the Hundred Years' War, as a Tenth Worthy, but he didn't catch on internationally. There were attempts to establish a parallel list of Neuf Preuses, Nine Female Worthies, but it never stabilized to a standard, canonical set the way the men did. |
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In the Current Middle Ages The main application the Nine Worthies have for us in the SCA is obviously as a window into the medieval view of chivalry. In descriptions of these paragons we note a lot of emphasis on martial prowess, loyalty, largesse, service to crown and to Church as key elements of the virtue of chivalry; there is less emphasis on protection of the defenceless, courtesy, humility, and other elements, many of which are later developments of the theme. The Nine Worthies also show us something of the medieval view of History. I have complained elsewhere about the modern tendency, driven by the Myth of Progress, to see the people of the Middle Ages as fundamentally different from us, to think that they were moved by motivations completely foreign to us; and I have urged that part of our whole re-creation experience should be a quest for connection, to feel the same human feelings if we can put ourselves in the same situation. On the hand, I think that in the Middle Ages they may have gone too far: if they could see Julius Caesar, Joshua, and Judas Maccabeus as paragons of chivalry then they didn't have enough understanding of how cultures change over time. In medieval romances, no matter how far the hero travels, all the lands he visits are still part of the same Western European chivalrous society (something we re-create pretty well across our Society, I might add); the stories of the Nine Worthies show they felt much the same about history: "The past is like a foreign country: they do things just the same there." And to speak more specifically of the Nine Worthies in the Current Middle Ages: there was a pageant at the Twenty Year Celebration in Ansteorra, where nine peers from across the Known World portrayed the Worthies, each speaking a brief piece on the chivalrous virtues. Some of the Tournament Societies have more recently used the theme of the Worthies in their tourneys. But we can apply the theme aptly to much more than pageantry. Besides all the arts I listed earlier (tapestries, woodcuts, stained glass, etc.), what about illumination, wood carving, embroidery, marzipan sculpture, storytelling? Many artists find a good theme can inspire a great project; if anyone out there is looking for such a theme, I highly recommend the Nine Worthies. (Helpful hint: you can find blazons of the Worthies' arms here.) |
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Further Reading There's not a lot of books out there on the Nine Worthies as such; mostly you come across a mention of them while reading about period tapestries, or woodcuts, or Scottish castles. There is an excellent article by Mistress Deirdre O'Siodhachain in The Oak (the Atlantian A&S newsletter) no. 8. It's exactly what I had intended to write here, but she did it first and she did it better than I could have, so go read hers. (You can find it on the web here.) The Parlement of the Three Ages, the major English-language poetic treatment of the Nine Worthies, was published in 1959 as no. 146 of the Early English Text Society series. There's also a 1992 edition, edited by Warren Ginsberg. And for that matter, if you can possibly get to New York City, every medievalist ought to try to visit the Cloisters at least once. Go there, and see five of the Nine in one of their most visually impressive settings. (Sadly, the set is incomplete: they have Joshua and David, Hector, Julius Caesar, and Arthur, plus other unconnected fragments.) |
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| text copyright 2001 by Caleb Hanson (e-mail) |
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