The passion for war and for a military life which had kept Europe in a state of constant disturbance during the Middle Ages, which had brought about the Hundred Years’ struggle between England and France, and which had found its worst issue in the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century, had, in the sixteenth century largely spent its force.  The pomp and luxury of chivalry had lessened the activity of military feelings.  The expense entailed by chivalric pageantry had diminished the power of the nobles over their dependents.  Many feudal barons were obliged to sell liberty and privileges to part of their bondsmen to obtain the wherewithal to maintain the remainder.  The gradual growth of the towns and of trade produced a class which, having all to lose and nothing to gain by war, threw its influence against disorder.  The advance in the study and practice of law diminished habits of violence by furnishing legal redress.  But the most powerful agent in destroying the old warlike taste was the invention of gunpowder.  In the Middle Ages the whole male population had been soldiers in spirit and in fact.  But the application of gunpowder to the art of war made it necessary that men should be especially trained for the military profession.  A limited number were therefore separated from the main body of the people, who occupied themselves exclusively with military affairs, while the remainder were left to pursue the hitherto neglected arts of peace.  The love of war and the indifference to human suffering so long nourished by feudalism could only be thoroughly extinguished by centuries of gradual progress.  The heads of queens and ministers of state falling from the block attest the strength of these feelings in Henry the Eighth’s time.  They were, however, fast losing ground before the new growth of learning.  Their decline is illustrated by the fiction of the sixteenth century, as their full power was depicted in the early romances of chivalry.

In the sixteenth century, chivalry as an institution, and even as an influential ideal had entirely passed away.  The specimens of romantic fiction which were read during the reigns of Henry the Eighth and of Elizabeth could no longer appeal to an entirely warlike and superstitious class.  They were modified to meet new tastes, and in the process became superior in literary merit, but inferior in force and interest.  This is especially true of the romances translated from the Spanish.  Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of England show merits of narrative sequence and elegance of expression which did not belong to the earlier romances, of which the “Morte d’Arthur” formed a compendium.  But the chivalry of Amadis and Palmerin was polished, refined and exaggerated till it became entirely fanciful and lost the old fire and spirit.  In the so-called tales of chivalry produced or adapted by English writers during this century there is no trace of the poetry and interest of chivalric sentiments.  In “Tom-a-Lincoln,” the Red Rose Knight, the noble King Arthur is represented as an old dotard, surrounded by knights who bear no resemblance in person or in the nature of their adventures to their prototypes of romantic fiction.[27]