d, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All
Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets,
battlements, crypts, and dungeons--and all in ruins. Indeed, the
Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of
the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make
any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our
minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the
Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and
content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic
movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous,
that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love
to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.

What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study
the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were
really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to
us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some
qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost,
but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very
much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the
figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the
mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a
romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his
lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he
was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of
military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin
form (_miles_), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and
distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in
absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In
virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself
for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which
he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly
wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small
landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He
was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs,
than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant,
often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready f