Episode 260: Knighthood & Chivalry

In this week's episode, we take a look at how the meaning of words can shift and evolve over time, and the challenges and opportunities that can create for writers.

This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store:

MALISONJULY25

The coupon code is valid through August 12, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 19, 2025, and today we are reflecting on how the meaning of words changes over time. We will also have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and Question of the Week.

So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store, and that is MALISONJULY25. And as always, both the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through August the 12th, 2025. So if you need a new series of ebooks to read for this summer, we have got you covered.

Now for an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, the final book in the Stealth and Spells trilogy, is now out and you get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. People have read it, have liked it, so I'm pleased that people are enjoying the ending to the trilogy.

Now that that is out, my next major project will be Ghost in the Siege, the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series. I am 32,000 words into the rough draft, and I think it's going to be about 100,000 words, give or take. I am also 2,000 words into Blade of Flames, which will be the first book in my new epic fantasy Blades of Ruin series, which will be set in the realm of Owyllain about a hundred years after the end of The Shield War. So listen for more updates on that coming later as I work on it.

In audiobook news, both Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) actually came out on the same day, so as of right now, you can get them at Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and my Payhip store. There's usually a few more stores in the mix, but I've been having trouble with Findaway Audio and I'm looking into different audiobook distributors. So hopefully we will have some progress on that soon. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects.

00:02:07 Question of the Week

Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question, do you get food delivery? Do you ever have pizzas delivered or perhaps a sandwich from a place that does delivery, or do you use some of the various delivery services that have sprung up in the last 10 years like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats? No wrong answers obviously, since everyone's circumstances are different.

The inspiration for this question was a massive online discussion I saw about the etiquette of tipping DoorDash drivers, and since I had never used DoorDash or a similar service, I realized it was yet another massive technological and cultural shift that I had that happened to miss me out. So I was curious about what people thought about it, and as you expect, we had a range of answers.

Perry says: No, and we haven't for years. We live too far away to make it worthwhile, even if we wanted to.

Sarah says: I do very rarely get cooked food delivery, and then almost always pizza for the kids when I feel really sick. However, as a Walmart Plus member, I routinely get grocery delivery. I'm pregnant and homeschool three of my four kids (the littlest is too young for formal schooling). It saves me so much time to only have to bring it in the house. The time savings is about 90 minutes on an average week. I sometimes do grocery pickup, which my husband grabs on the way home for an hour time savings, since it is on his way home, but since he works awful hours, it's simpler for me to get the groceries than for him to grab them after a twelve hour day. Of course, feeding six mouths (and usually my dad too for a seventh), we have multiple short runs to Walmart throughout the week for stuff we run out of or general merchandise needs for home maintenance, so we managed to hit lots of in-store time and sales that we would otherwise miss too.

Mary says: No, even for Chinese takeout, we would call in the order and pick it up, and I haven't done that for years.

Justin says: No food delivery for me, thanks. It's not available where I am, but even living in a college town, I always picked it up.

Norma says: I do have Italian food delivered because they have delivery in-house. Have never used a delivery company, but I just heard from my grandson that he's working for one while at university.

David says: Maybe once or twice a year I'll get delivery for pizza. Everything else is pickup or eaten at the restaurant. I'm not pressed for time, so having it delivered doesn't make sense.

Tracy says: I get pizza delivered from Papa John's.

John says: When I lived in Houston, I rarely got anything delivered since it was as fast to just go out and get it myself. Now I live way out in the woods. Nobody delivers that far out, so I usually have to go get it for myself. I usually prefer to cook for myself.

Michael says: Alas, I am far too fond of such services (as reflected by my Winnie the Pooh body shape). I live in the middle of the most densely urbanized city in the country, with the result that there are at least 40 takeaways and restaurants within a mile or so radius of my home. While I usually go out if getting takeaway, sometimes an Uber Eats or a Deliveroo is too tempting!

For myself, as you might've guessed when I said that I missed out on DoorDash and Uber Eats, the answer is no, I don't get food delivery. I think it might've been over 25 years since I last had a pizza delivery. I did occasionally when I was a teenager and in college. When I moved out into the adult world, I never did. The reasons were one, I was extremely broke, and two, at the time I lived near a university campus with all the attendant fast food places that surrounded it. So if I wanted fast food, I'd get a bunch of stuff within walking distance. If I wanted fast food on a workday, all I had to do is just go through the drive-through on my way home.

Anyway, as I got older, the habit of never ordering delivery solidified, which is probably just as well because services like DoorDash and Uber Eats look massively expensive, even before the social etiquette question of tipping arises. These days, if I want fast food or a pizza, I would go get it myself (or more likely persuade myself that I’d really be better off to stay at home and eat vegetables and lean protein).

Though it is interesting given the range of the responses, it's a good reminder that people's circumstances can vary wildly and something that would be a waste of time or money for one person might actually be very advantageous for another.

00:05:51 Word Meanings and Chivalry

And now onto our main topic. It is interesting to reflect how the meaning of words shifts over time and how a word can sometimes long outlast its original purpose and meaning. “Mile” is a good example, since it's originally derived from the distance covered by a Roman soldier marching a thousand steps. Nowadays, the usage of miles has nothing to do with marching Romans, and most of the world uses kilometers anyway, but the name remains, having long outlived its original meaning.

“Chivalry” is another good example. Nowadays, chivalry or chivalrous typically means a man acting in a deferential way to a woman- holding the door, pulling out a chair for her, taking her coat, standing when she approaches the table, et cetera that an individual woman will either find charming, annoying, patronizing, or perhaps some combination of the three depending on her particular disposition and her opinion of the man in question.

But that definition of the word chivalry is only a ghostly relic of what it used to mean.

Chivalry comes originally from the French word “chevalier”, which means “mounted warrior on horseback”, which was a French term for the medieval knight In the Middle Ages, the term chivalry both referred to the expected conduct of a knight and in a larger sense knighthood as an institution or perhaps the proper behavior expected of the knightly warrior class as a whole.

Medieval knighthood originated from essentially three sources. First, the practice of barbarian kings and chieftains, gathering a “comtitatus” around them, a group of chosen warriors who lived with him and were expected to die with him if necessary.

Two, the influence of the medieval Catholic church and three, how a combination of the stirrup, the lance, and heavy armor meant that cavalry dominated the battlefield for most of the Middle Ages. Number three meant that knighthood was usually available only to the wealthy. The knight fought on horseback and fighting on foot was for lesser men, peasants, serfs, and churls. Horse mounted combat was the knight's defining trait.

Horses were (and still are) very expensive and suitable armor and weapons were likewise expensive. Additionally, learning to ride a horse in battle while effectively wielding melee weapons was a difficult endeavor, which meant that the boys and men who did needed to make a full-time profession of it, which again, limited knighthood to those able to afford it.

A lot of what we think of as chivalric behavior evolved out of the medieval churches efforts to control and regulate knighthood.

Early medieval knights were essentially armed thugs employed by local warlords. The early history of feudalism in post-Roman Western Europe tends to boil down to “local warlordism” based around holding land, with centralized states only slowly developing. In the late 800s-900s A.D., the church advocated movements like the Peace of God, which tried to instruct knights and nobles not to kill or rob women, children, the elderly monks, nuns, priests, and other non-combatants and the Truce of God, which tried to unsuccessfully ban fighting on holy days and any possible holidays. The fact that the church felt the need to be that specific shows just how widespread that kind of local warfare was.

While many knights adopted the external forms of piety, movements like the Peace of God and the Truce of God did little to dissuade them from practical business of looting and seizing as much land as they could hold.

Evidence of this is found in the First Crusade and the subsequent crusades. One of the motivations for the First Crusade was to drain off a lot of the belligerent young knights out of Western Europe and send them off to fight “infidels” in the Holy Land instead of making trouble at home.

“Chivalry” as a code of conduct developed out of the combination of the fact that it was expensive to be a knight and the church's attempts to regulate it. That meant that knighthood saw itself as a distinct social class with standards of expected behavior. A knight was supposed to be pious. He should show no fear and charge to meet the enemy without hesitation. A knight fought on horseback (fighting on foot was for lesser men). A knight should be reverent towards the church and obey his lord unquestionably.

He also should show courtesy to women of noble rank. This did not apply to peasants and townswomen. He also should develop romantic love for an unattainable married woman (since marriage between nobles was usually for reasons of power and not love) and should use that unrequited love to spur him on to feats of valor. A knight should also be generous and open-handed to the poor and to his fellows.

Now, all of this sounds good, but in practice a lot of these virtues twisted around into vices. Fearlessness in battle turned into arrogance and delusions of invincibility. One of the reasons France did so badly for much of the Hundred Years’ War was because the French knights insisted on charging into battle at once to demonstrate their knightly valor and prowess, which let them get slaughtered en masse by English longbowmen. Additionally, readiness to fight evolved into fighting for any excuse at all, which frequently led to wars both ruinous and utterly pointless.

Knighthood’s class awareness often cause nobles to treat warfare as a chivalric adventure, which was not conducive to sound strategy leading to victory. Generally, the most successful medieval monarchs were those like Henry II of England, Edward I of England, Charles V of France, and Philip II Augustus of France, who did not allow knightly virtues to get in the way of hardheaded practical policy. Generosity turned into extravagant displays of public magnificence, which in turn meant attempting to squeeze more tax money out of the peasants and merchants. A knight's respect towards the church often meant giving large donations to have Masses set in perpetuity for his soul after a lifetime of plunder. And of course, knight might have unrequited Lancelot-style love for an unattainable, married noblewoman. But in practice, many knights had many, many illegitimate children, sometimes with their “unattainable” married noblewomen.

Moralistic writers in every century of the Middle Ages bemoan the laziness, greed, and luxurious living of their contemporary knights and frequently exhorted them to return to the heartier, more virtuous knights of the past years. Even the Middle Ages had the Nostalgia Filter.

As is so often the case with institutions that have outlived their useful utility, knighthood was never really reformed, but eventually became obsolete. By the end of the Hundred Years’ War, the French King maintained a professional standing army, which is far more useful than giving land to nobles and attempting to get knights out of them through feudal obligations. Other nations soon follow suit. Longbows and Crossbows heralded the weakness of armor, and then gave way to trained infantry soldiers equipped with firearms.

Horsemen remained an important part of warfare for centuries, since they were vital for scouting and attacking unprepared infantry formations. The American Civil War was the first truly industrial war, and yet the Civil War still had numerous significant cavalry battles, but the armored knights’ days as master of the battlefield were over, and while knights remained part of the upper class, knighthood gradually became a ceremonial honor that had nothing to do with its original purpose of mounted warfare. Recently, filmmaker Christopher Nolan became Sir Christopher Nolan, Knight Bachelor of the United Kingdom, for reasons entirely unrelated to wielding a lance on horseback while wearing heavy armor.

So as we can see, the word “chivalry” has a long, long history. So it is amusing to see how the last remnant of its original meaning in the modern era is to hold the door open for women.

It occurred to me as I wrote this out that the reason I’m a fantasy novelist and not a historian is that I thought “hmm, there’s the ideas for like twelve different books in all of this.” Which, I suppose, is perhaps the point. Chivalric knighthood was something of a myth even in its own time, but the myth inspired some great stories over the centuries.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I a reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.