‘Terry Jones’s brilliant work of literary and historical detection’ The Observer
Since it was first published in 1980, Terry Jones’s study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight has proved to be one of the most enduringly popular and controversial books ever to hit the world of Chaucer scholarship. In Chaucer’s Knight Jones questions the accepted view of the Knight as a paragon of Christian chivalry, and argues that he is in fact no more than a professional mercenary who has spent his life in the service of petty despots and tyrants around the world.
This edition includes a new introduction in which Jones argues that the character of the Knight was actually based on Sir John Hawkwood (d.1394) – a marauding English freebooter and mercenary who pillaged his way across northern Italy during the fourteenth century, running protection rackets on the Italian Dukes and creating a vast fortune in the process.
‘Jones’s analysis of Chaucer’s text is painstaking, his pursuit of the historical example is thorough, his conclusions appropriate’ Peter Ackroyd