Honor and the Right

There’s a scene in Malory where Launcelot has been caught in Guenevere’s bedroom by his enemies, Aggravayne and Mordred, and in the ensuing altercation Launcelot kills 14 knights, all but Mordred, who is wounded. Summoned to appear before Arthur, Launcelot still protests his innocence:

“Those who told you such tales were liars, which was proved by their deaths: for it is hardly probable that I could have prevailed against fourteen knights, armed and prepared to fight while I was unarmed and unprepared to fight, unless the power of God had been on my side. For I was summoned into the presence of my lady, your Queen, I don’t know for what reason, but I was no sooner inside her chamber door than I heard Sir Aggravayne and Sir Mordred outside calling me a traitor and treacherous, cowardly knight.” When Gawayne says they were correct, Launcelot replies: “in their challenge to me they were not able to prove themselves the stronger, nor in the right.”

Bowman comments on this: “Launcelot is thus openly, and with no apparent sense of the contradiction involved, appealing to his honor as the guarantee of the truth of a statement that he (and everyone else) knows to be false. To him, the public avowal of the queen’s innocence, established by what to us seems the irrelevant fact that he can defeat in single combat anyone who chooses to deny it, takes precedence over anyone’s private knowledge of her guilt . . . . . Clearly, to Launcelot, proving oneself best – that is, victorious – in a ‘quarrel’ is tantamount to proving oneself ‘in the right’ in the quarrel, which therefore necessarily entails the fight and is susceptible of no other resolution apart from it.”