Song of Chivalry

...and an article on Nashville Tuning

I recently wrote an article on “Nashville tuning” for guitar, for Simply Folk Music magazine. I will, of course, flag it here when it comes out, but this article concerns two songs of mine that I referred to in that article as demonstrations of the technique. Song of Chivalry uses a Nashville-strung Baby Taylor in DADGAD tuning as an accompanying instrument. Wrekin (see next article) uses the same guitar in standard tuning to play a second guitar part, in order to fill out the instrumental sound. I won’t talk further about the technicalities of Nashville tuning/string here: you’ll have to wait for the article (or buy the book referenced below!) Rather, I want to give more background to the songs, adapted from my book So Sound You Sleep..

Song of Chivalry has been published a number of times as a poem (originally in Vertical Images 2 (1987)), but I finally got around to writing the tune around 2017-18.

Lyric

When M’Lord returned to his sheets of silk
And his gentle lady of musk and milk
The minstrels sang in the gallery
Their songs of slaughter and chivalry

The rafters roared with laughter and boasting
Beakers were raised and drained in toasting
The heroes of Crécy and Azincourt
Or the madness of some holy war

The hawk is at rest on the gauntlet once more
Savage of eye, and bloody of claw
Famine and fever are all the yield
Of the burnt-out barns and wasted fields

The sun grins coldly through the trees
The children shiver, the widows grieve
And beg their bread at the monastery door
Tell me then: who won the war?

Recording (you don’t have to buy it to hear it, but I won’t complain if you do buy it!):

The instrumental that I used as an introduction on the original Tears of Morning album is usually associated with the ballad The Holy Well (Roud 1697. However, the version of Song of Chivalry used on the expanded album So Sound You Sleep - More Tears of Morning uses an improvised introduction, and the instrument used is a guitar in Nashville tuning. Strangely enough, it actually seems to have a more archaic feel than the other version, even though Nashville tuning is a relatively recent innovation. As you’ll know if you’ve read my book on the topic, hint, hint…

Ages of Chivalry

Of course, when I gave the song its title, I had in mind its elements of warrior ethos and knightly ideals, rather than the ideals of courtly love that have grown into the way we mostly think of the term chivalry today. In fact, the code of chivalry evolved by the late Middle Ages into three branches: behaviour in war, piety, and courtly manners and behaviour. However, the very word chivalry derives from the French ‘chevalerie’, a term denoting knights on horseback that evolved into a more general sense of knightly behaviour, influenced by later perceptions of the morality of the paladins of Charlemagne, the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, and the nobles who fought in the Holy Land. Up until the 19^th century, romanticized and/or fictionalized accounts of knights, lords and seigneurs were generally assumed to be historically valid.

Chivalry was essentially a poetic view of an (often brutal) system of feudalism, as the effective gap widened between nobles, knights, mounted men-at-arms who might be decidedly less aristocratic, and The Rest (PBI or Poor Bloody Infantry as British soldiers described themselves more recently), including the common archers who often played a decisive part in the Hundred Years War in battles such as Crécy in the heyday of the longbow.

Of course, aristocratic status was no guarantee of a triumphant return (or that you would get home at all), but life was probably going to be easier, win or lose, for the family in the castle than for the families of the footsloggers who never came home.

Musk (not Elon!)

The reference to ‘musk’ is possibly anachronistic. While its use in perfume was known many centuries before the Hundred Years War, even to Western civilizations, it tended to be out of favour between the early Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, not out of consideration for the plight of the musk deer slaughtered for its musk pod, but rather because such luxuries were considered extravagant. (Nowadays, it’s possible to extract the musk without killing the deer, though most parfumiers probably use a synthetic substitute.) Nevertheless, l decided not to change the line “his gentle lady of musk and milk” as I rather like the contrast of child-nursing and the status of a noblewoman able to wear an expensive fragrance. Though considering the association of the word Musk with the abominable Elon, I’m tempted to think again.

I'm not sure how likely it was that M'Lord slept on silk sheets, though silk was certainly proving very lucrative to Venetian merchants by then. In any case, it's a metaphor, not a history lesson. Well, the song is: I suppose this article is a history lesson of sorts.

The Crusades

I'm inclined to contend that any 'holy war' has more than a smidgen of madness, but the Crusades seem to have attracted wave after wave of lunatic. It's no wonder that Charles Mackay devoted a sizeable section of his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds to them.

Every age has its peculiar folly - some scheme, project, or phantasy into which plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined. Every one of these causes influenced the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary instance upon record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can be carried. History...informs us, that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays in her most glowing and impassioned hues their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honour they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity.

…Other swarms, under nameless leaders, issued from German and France, more brutal and more frantic than any that had preceded them. In bands…they traversed the country in all directions, bent upon plunder and massacre. They wore the symbol of the Crusade upon their shoulders, but inveighed against the folly of proceeding to the Holy Land to destroy the Turks, while they left behind them so many Jews, the still more inveterate enemies of Christ. They swore fierce vengeance against this unhappy race, and murdered all the Hebrews they could lay their hands on, first subjecting them to the most horrible mutilation … they lived among each other in the most shameless profligacy, and their vice was only exceeded by their superstition. Whenever they were in search of Jews, they were preceded by a goose and goat, which they believed to be holy, and animated with divine power to discover the retreats of the unbelievers. In Germany alone they slaughtered more than a thousand Jews, notwithstanding all the efforts of the clergy to save them. So dreadful was the cruelty of their tormentors, that great numbers of Jews committed self-destruction to avoid falling into their hands.

Strangely, given that Volume 1 was first published in 1841, I’ve often had occasion to quote Extraordinary Popular Delusions in my writings on IT security. I suppose that reflects the fact that I was always more interested in the psychosocial aspects of security than in bits and bytes.

War and Plague

I know that it’s rather unlikely that M’Lord fought both at Crécy (1346) and Azincourt (1415) –I suppose I should call it by the anglicized name Agincourt now we’re divorced from Europe – let alone the Crusades. While the Black Death subsided in England from about 1350, outbreaks continued beyond the first half of the 15^thcentury.