What was Chivalry really???

A professor back in college explained chivalry like this.

During the middle ages, chivalry was a GAME that the military nobility made up to play with the noblewomen at court. It was never designed to be taken seriously, or literally.

First off, the whole chivalrous GAME had nothing to do with sex. An officer/nobleman had the ability (hell, even the right) to take sex from any lower class woman that he wanted, any time that he wanted. So, if he needed sex, he could get it. However, for an officer/nobleman to be caught screwing a noble woman could have disastrous (possibly career-ending or life-ending) consequences for both parties, as well as for their families. For all intents and purposes, the noble women at court were untouchable, unless the nobleman married them. And marriages at court were not done for love. They were more like corporate mergers between two noble houses.

So you have noblemen, who are getting their sexual needs met elsewhere, but who still have to be around and interact with these untouchable women on a daily basis (women who will one day be their wives). Then you have the noblewomen who, being women, still want to flirt with and get attention from the men around them. So the men created the GAME called chivalry. They started with the simple human mating game, where a male performs certain actions designed to garner the attention and favor of a female (for example: complementing some facet of her appearance, or performing a service for her), in order to obtain the reward of procreation. Then they would see who could draw out those favor-inducing actions to the farthest and most ridiculous degree, and also, who could do so for the smallest and most insignificant of rewards. So you have men writing incredibly long, flowery poems to women, where they wax on ad-nauseum about her great and wonderful beauty, all so that they can ask to be allowed to present her with a rose Or you have men performing complex tasks for some noblewoman all for the reward of being able to carry her favor (ie: her handkerchief). Chivalry was a GAME played by a group of bored men, designed to allow them to interact with a group of untouchable women in a way that would: (1) not get them killed or broken in rank, and (2) would not alienate or offend the very small group of women from whom their wife would eventually be chosen.

Interesting how things change and evolve......that something that people say is now dead may not have even originally been intended to be anything more then a game.