Only the clergy thought thus about the duties and the relations of mankind; and their influence was employed in directing towards the accomplishment of such duties, towards the integrity of such relations, the ideas and customs engendered by knighthood.

It had not been instituted with so pious and deep a design, for the protection of the weak, the maintenance of justice, and the reformation of morals; it had been, at its origin and in its earliest features, a natural consequence of feudal relations and warlike life, a confirmation of the bonds established and the sentiments aroused between different masters in the same country and comrades with the same destinies.

The clergy promptly saw what might be deduced from such a fact; and they made of it a means of establishing more peacefulness in society, and in the conduct of individuals a more rigid morality.

This was the general work they pursued; and, if it were convenient to study the matter more closely, we might see, in the canons of councils from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the Church exerting herself to develop more and more in this order of knight-hood, this institution of an essentially warlike origin, the moral and civilizing character of which a glimpse has just been caught in the documents of knighthood itself.
In proportion as knighthood appeared more and more in this simultaneously warlike, religious, and moral character, it more and more gained power over the imagination of men, and just as it had become closely interwoven with their creeds, it soon became the ideal of their thoughts, the source of their noblest pleasures.

Poetry, like religion, took hold of it.
From the eleventh century onwards, knighthood, its ceremonies, its duties, and its adventures, were the mine from which the poets drew in order to charm the people, in order to satisfy and excite at the same time that yearning of the soul, that need of events more varied and more captivating, and of emotions more exalted and more pure than real life could furnish.