Privacy and the ideology of chivalry in the oaths of medieval heralds and Malory’s Morte Darthur

Abstract In this paper, I argue that the late medieval chivalric culture of England and France encompassed a developing notion of privacy, one which was imaginatively probed in chivalric romances and embedded in the oaths sworn by the secular officers of chivalry, the heralds. I begin by establishing that, on either side of the Channel, medieval heraldic oaths were centred on the same untenable promise to serve both a particular lord and the nobility at large on equal terms. While heralds vowed to report treason to their masters, they concomitantly swore to serve as confessors of arms to the nobility as a whole and to never repeat a noble person’s dishonourable words or deeds without their permission. Within heralds’ oaths thus lay a conspicuous, though convoluted, conceptualization of privacy demarcating a realm of autonomous action within which noble individuals need not be accountable to their community. I then turn to explore how a similar imperative of privacy undergirds the vision of chivalric honour in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, particularly in Malory’s treatment of Aggravayne and Mordred’s ruinous public revelation of Guenevere and Launcelot’s union. In both heralds’ oaths and Malory’s Morte Darthur, privacy offered medieval nobles increasing license to eschew the obligations of honour which ostensibly justified their pre-eminence and significantly undercut the moral claims made for chivalry.