The Knight on Foot

by Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I, Chrétien, who have put this tale in order, did not find it in a book. I had it at Provins, at the May fair, from a Breton who told it for bread and wine and told it badly, because he gave the fight first, the fight being what men pay to hear, and the ford after, and the walking hardly at all, so that the end hung upon nothing and the beginning had been thrown away like the husk of a nut. I have put the pieces back where they lean on one another. The matter is his and his country's; the order is mine, and if the order is wrong, blame me and leave the Breton to his bread.

At Easter King Arthur held court at Carlion, and it was a full court, with forty knights at the high table and more below the salt than I could name if I sat here until vespers, and the queen beside him in a mantle of green samite furred with ermine. When the first meats had been carried round and the trenchers were soaking, a knight came into the hall in his hauberk with his helm under his arm, and he did not wait to be asked his name, but gave it to the whole hall at once: Brien of the High Heath, who held land on the far side of the forest, and who had come, he said, not to eat but to tell the king that there sat at his table a recreant, and to name him.

You will know, lords, that there is no worse thing to be called. A man may be called poor and live, and called ugly and marry; called recreant, he is a man who has refused, and the refusing is in him the way a crack is in a bell, so that whatever he strikes after rings false.

"Tanguy of Lanvalle," Brien said, and he pointed down the board with his gauntlet to where Tanguy sat with a cup halfway to his mouth, "who at the Ford of the Ash, on the Thursday before Lent, saw me ride at him with my lance couched and would not take the joust, but stood in the water holding his horse by the bridle like a groom at a horse-fair and said he would not, and I rode by him, and he let me."

The hall went quiet in the way a hall goes quiet, which is not silence; you could hear the dogs under the boards, and a squire who had dropped a knife, and the fire. And then Kay, who never in his life let a thing go by without putting his hand on it, said loudly enough to be heard at both ends, "Then let us call him the Knight on Foot, and save him a place at the trough."

Some laughed. More did not, and those who did not laugh looked at Tanguy, and that was worse.

Tanguy set the cup down. He was a knight of good pris, not the best of that court nor near it, but one who had been at the tournament under Tintagel and come away with two horses won, and men knew his shield, which was azure with a silver fish. He stood up and said that it was true he had been on foot at the Ford of the Ash, since his horse, which was called Liart, had taken a stone in the frog of the near forefoot a league before the water and was going lame on it, and he had got down to lead him, and that Brien had come at him from the far bank with his lance couched, and that he had said he would not run at a mounted man on foot, nor would he climb on a lame horse to do it, and—

"And so you did not," said Brien.

"And so I did not."

That was all he said. He did not say that the horse would have broken down under him in the middle of the water, nor that a knight who rides a lame horse into a joust kills it to save himself the walk, though both were true and every knight in that hall knew it. I tell you so that you may know he did not say it. The court had heard what it had heard, a knight on foot who refused, and the murmur went along the benches the way wind goes along barley, and it was a true measure of what had been seen. The queen said nothing. My lord Gauvain, who was always the first to find the courteous thing, said that words would not settle it and that the matter belonged to the body, and the king agreed, and set the day at Pentecost, at Carlion, after mass, the two of them to meet in the meadow below the walls and God to show which of them had told it straight.

Brien ate after all. Tanguy did not; he went out to the stables and stood a long while with his hand on Liart's neck, and the grooms, who had heard by then what everyone had heard, did not speak to him, and one of them, a boy, made a noise like a horse and was cuffed for it.

---

Now hear how the thing he needed was sent to meet him, because there was nothing of chance in it, whatever the Breton said, and anyone who tells you that a knight riding through that forest meets anything by chance has never ridden through it.

Fifty days Tanguy kept to his own house at Lanvalle, and the stone came out of Liart's foot and the foot healed, and Tanguy rode him every morning to harden him and did not ride him at all on the Thursday and Friday before Pentecost, so as to bring him to Carlion fresh. On the Saturday, the eve of the feast, he set out at prime with his hauberk on him and his helm and shield hung at the saddle-bow, meaning to ride the forest road and lie that night at the abbey of Saint-Melaine and come into Carlion rested, and the road took him, as roads will, where it had taken him before, down through the ashes to the ford.

There was a damsel sitting on a saddle by the water.

She had taken the saddle off her palfrey and set it on the grass and sat on it, because the palfrey was lying beside her with a lance-wound in its neck and could not be sat on any more. The flies had found it. She had pulled her wimple forward against them and against the sun, which by then was past none, and she had a little bundle tied in a cloth at her feet and nothing else, and when she heard the horse in the water she stood up quickly with her hand on the bundle, as a person does who has been visited once already that day and did not like the visit.

Then she saw the shield with the silver fish and sat down again.

"I know your horse," she said, before he had asked her anything. "I knew him lame. I am Aiglente; my father keeps the house above the ford, and I was at the door the Thursday before Lent, and I saw what I saw. I was going to Carlion to say it."

Tanguy asked who had killed her palfrey, though he knew.

"Brien came by at tierce," she said. "He asked me where I was going. I told him." She looked at the palfrey, which was a little bay mare with a white snip on the nose and had been, you could see, well kept, and she did not weep, though her mouth had a set to it that meant she had wept earlier and was done. "He said it was a long road for a damsel on foot and that he would not like me to tire myself. Then he did that. Then he rode on toward Carlion, quickly."

Lords, you will want me to tell you what Tanguy weighed then, standing in the shallows with the water running over Liart's fetlocks. Here it is, as plainly as I can set it out, and then I will tell you what he did, which is the only part the tale cares for: on the one side, Carlion was a long day's ride and a night's walk, and if he gave her his horse he would come into the meadow at Pentecost on his own feet, as Brien had said he came to the ford, and all the court would see a knight on foot leading a horse, which was the very charge; on the other, a damsel had been set down in the forest by a knight's lance for no fault but that she had a true thing to say, and he was a knight, and there she sat. And he had said once already at that ford that he would not, and been called recreant for it.

He did not stand there long. I have heard of a knight who stood two steps' worth at a cart, and I will not tell you he stood even so long as that.

He got down into the water and led Liart up the bank, and he put the damsel's saddle over his own arm and then thought better of it and left it, because a destrier will not carry a palfrey's saddle and there was no sense in the weight; he set her up sideways on his own saddle, high as it was, and showed her where to hold, and took his helm off the bow and put it on his own head, since he would rather carry it there than have it bang at the horse's shoulder, and hung his shield on his back by the guige, and took the bridle, and went.

She said, when they had gone perhaps a quarter of a league, that the horse could surely carry them both, and that he should get up behind her.

"He could," Tanguy said, "and tomorrow he would be good for nothing, and I have to run against a man tomorrow on him."

That was all the reason he gave her, and it was a true one, and it was a knight's reason and not a groom's, though from the roadside you could not have told the one from the other.

---

What shall I tell you of that night? That a hauberk weighs more at the fourth league than at the first, and more again when the dew is in it, and that the links work through the gambeson at the shoulders and the hips until the skin there is raw as a scraped hide. That a knight's shoes are made to sit in stirrups and not to walk the forest road, and that by the hour of compline Tanguy's were coming apart at the toe and he tied them up with a strip torn from the damsel's bundle-cloth. That they did not lie at Saint-Melaine, because there was no time, but stopped there only long enough for the porter to give them bread and a pot of ale through the wicket and to look at the knight with the helm on his head and the lady on the warhorse, and to cross himself, though for what reason I do not know and nor did he. That the moon was a day past full and gave light enough to see the road by and not enough to see the roots on it. That Liart, who had been trained for war and not for this, tossed his head at every owl and once stood up on his hind legs at a hare, and Tanguy hung on the reins and talked to him, and the damsel held on to the saddle-bow with both hands and did not scream, which I set down to her credit.

She walked a while, toward morning, to rest the horse and herself; he let her, because her legs were stiff from the saddle, and she walked beside him with her skirts kilted up and the dew soaking them to the knee, and neither said much. Once she asked him whether he was not afraid of what the court would say.

"They will say it," Tanguy said.

---

At Carlion the bells had rung for mass and the mass was sung and the whole court had come down to the meadow under the walls, where the lists were pegged and the king's seat set up under a canopy of red cloth, and Brien was there already, armed, on his black horse, riding up and down before the queen's stand; and it was well past tierce, and men were beginning to say to one another that a knight who had refused once at the ford would refuse again at the meadow, and that it was a pity, because Tanguy had been well liked.

Then they saw him come down the Lanvalle road.

He came on foot, in his hauberk, with the helm on his head and the shield on his back and the dust of nine leagues on him to the knee, and his shoes tied up with rag, leading his grey horse by the bridle; and on the horse, sideways, sat a damsel in a wimple with her skirts wet to the knee, and no palfrey anywhere.

And the court laughed. I will not tell you it did not. The laugh began among the squires and went up through the benches, and Kay stood up in his place and called out, "Damsel, has he made you his squire, or himself your groom?" and the laugh grew, because it was a good word and Kay was good at them, and a man may be laughed at for a true thing and the laughter be a true measure all the same.

Aiglente did not answer Kay. She looked across the meadow to where Brien sat his black horse, and she said, loud enough, "Ask Brien of the High Heath where my palfrey is."

Brien did not answer her.

That was all the witness she ever gave, and she had ridden all night to give it, and it was not needed, because the whole court had turned and was looking at Brien, and Brien was looking at his reins. A silence will measure as well as a murmur, if the court is listening.

Tanguy lifted her down and gave her into the queen's keeping, and he asked leave of the king to sit down for as long as it takes to say a paternoster, which was granted, and he sat on the grass with his back to the lists and drank a cup of wine and a cup of water and had a squire of the queen's cut the rags and the shoes off his feet and bind them in clean linen, so that he could at least get them into the stirrups. Then he got up onto Liart, who had gone nine leagues at a man's pace with nothing heavier than a damsel on his back and was a good deal fresher than a horse that has gone nine leagues has any right to be, and took his shield on his arm, and took a lance, and rode to his end of the lists.

Brien's horse was not fresh. He had ridden it hard from the ford to Carlion the day before, at a pace that was not the pace of a man with nothing on his mind, and it had stood since in a strange stable among a hundred others and eaten badly. I tell you this only because it is so. The tale does not say whose doing it was; the tale says it was the case.

They ran three courses. In the first both lances broke and neither man moved in the saddle. In the second Tanguy's lance took Brien's shield high, by the boss, and Brien went back over his horse's crupper and lay on the ground with his feet still in the air for as long as you might count three; the black horse, when he tried to remount, stood blowing with its head down, and the marshals had to bring him another, and the court saw that too. In the third Brien's lance went wide by the length of an arm, because a man unhorsed in front of a court rides his next course with his anger and not with his eye, and Tanguy's lance struck him full and carried him clean out of the saddle and laid him on the grass, and he did not get up, but lay there and asked mercy through his ventail before Tanguy had even turned his horse.

Tanguy rode back to him and got down. I have heard men say he ought to have made him get up and go on with swords, and that he would have had more pris for it. I say he got down because a knight on his horse over a knight on the ground is not a thing a good knight leaves standing for long, and because Brien had asked, and mercy asked is mercy owed. He took Brien's surrender, and named the terms, and they were these: that Brien should give the damsel Aiglente his black horse, saddle and bridle and all, in place of the palfrey he had killed, and should go home to the High Heath the way she had been set to go to Carlion, which was on his own feet.

The king said it was rightly judged, and the queen nodded, and Kay said nothing, which was rarer than a fish in a tree.

---

So Brien of the High Heath went out of Carlion that afternoon on foot, in his hauberk, by the Lanvalle road, with his helm in his hand, and no squire went with him, and the children of the town ran after him to the gate calling the name that Kay had made for Tanguy at Easter, which children will do with a good name, not caring whom it was made for.

And from that Pentecost Tanguy was called, in that court and after it, the Knight on Foot, and he bore the name in hall and in tournament, and men who heard it said it the way you say the name of a knight who has done a thing, and not the way Kay had said it. The name was the same name. Whether the court had changed its measure or Tanguy had changed what was there to be measured, I do not know, and the Breton did not know, and I have turned it over as many ways as I can and it shows me the same face from each side. Some will tell you he found a way between the saddle and the road. I say he walked the road and then he rode the saddle, one after the other, and that a knight who could have both at once has not yet come to my hearing.

The morning after the feast, before prime, he led Liart down to the trough below the stables to water him, on foot, as he had done at the ford; and the grooms who were there before him moved aside and made room.

---

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christiānō Trecēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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