The medieval view of lineage and nobility is thus one which focuses not simply on birth as the determinant of caste so much as on family traditions of honour and privileged position founded in past achievement, and offering an example to future generations. Get heirs, says Philip of Novara, ‘for by means of heirs who bear their father’s surname, his memory and that of his ancestors shall live longer in this world.’ That so much attention should focus on the family — the lineage — is perfectly natural. ‘The family was the most basic social unit that the age knew; its customary law was permeated with the idea of lineal inheritance; and the Bible with its long genealogies bore witness to the significance of lineage in the history of religion. To have sought to set the individual and his stock entirely apart would have seemed quite unnatural. Even Dante, that ardent champion of individual virtue, saw that the acts of the individual reflected upon the family: ‘the individual ennobles the stock’, he declares. The acts and habits of the individual members of a lineage were seen as forming those of the stock: ‘you come of a noble line, therefore you should seek the harder to grow in virtue,’ says Louis de Gavre’s mother in the romance of the Seigneurs de Gavre. Indeed this is the point of the distinction which the purists drew between nobility and gentility. For his own particular achievement a man might be ennobled, but gentility implied something more, the forming of a tradition and manner of life and conduct which had stood the test of time into a second generation.
Reprinted from Chivalry by Maurice Keen, Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 160-161
