Editing Chivalry (section)

===The Crisis of Courtliness and Rise of Chivalry===
Courtliness remained a recognised form of superior conduct in medieval European society throughout the middle ages.  Courtly behaviour was expected of all aristocrats and its norms were integrated into chivalric literature.  But as Crouch demonstrated courtliness (unlike chivalry) was not confined to noble society.  There are examples of servants, merchants, clergy and free peasants being commended for their 'courtly' behaviour in medieval literature.<ref>Crouch, 2005, 56-7</ref> His explanation for the appearance of chivalry as a recognisable and prescriptive code of behaviour is tied into the more exclusive definition of nobility that appears in the late 12th century.  This had a particular impact on the professional horse warrior, the knight.  Retained knights were a prominent feature of the households of barons, counts and princes, and were thought to be proper associates of their lords.  As such knights adopted the fashions and behaviours of their lords.  In many cases knights were often drawn from the younger sons of noble families so they would regard themselves as being noble too, if less noble than their lords.  Crouch locates the tipping point of the nobilising of the knight as in the households of the sons of King Henry II of England, and in particular his eldest son, the [[Henry the Young King]] (died 1183).  Young Henry lived a lavish lifestyle of unprecedented expense focussed on the great northern French tourneying society of the 1170s and 1180s.  Since Young Henry had no domains to rule, his father was willing to fund the itinerant playboy lifestyle of his son to distract him from meddling in his realms, and also to stake a claim to the cultural high ground over the other European princes of the day.<ref>Crouch (2019), 122-9, 303-4</ref>  Young Henry was nonetheless heavily criticised for his wasteful and hedonistic life, and Crouch finds it significant that the first known work which used the knight as a moral exemplar and as a definitive nobleman, the ''De Re Militari'' of [[Ralph Niger]] (c. 1187) was written by the young man's former chaplain, in part as a moral defence of the knightly lifestyle.<ref>Crouch, (2019), 291-3</ref>

Crouch suggests another reason why chivalry coalesced as a noble code in the late 12th century in his analysis of conduct literature.  He suggests that the courtly habitus underwent a crisis as its moral failure became obvious to writers, particularly in the materialism that motivated courtly society.  Crouch sees the ''Roman des Eles'' of the poet-knight [[Raoul de Houdenc]], as a critique of courtliness and its failures.  Raoul's solution is to focus moral eminence on the figure of the knight, who is to be the avatar of a new moral nobility, set above all other males.  A knight was to eschew materialism (''envie'') and to embrace noble generosity (''largesce'').