The ideals of chivalry are inextricably linked to the medieval period, and even today, it is an ideal that we still pay lip service to. Many historians wonder, however, whether the knights and nobility of the time took this issue more seriously than we do. Johan Huizinga described it as "a cloak hiding a whole world of violence and self-interest", a "social illusion [that] clashed with the reality of things" and, in our rather cynical times, it is probably the predominant opinion of the Middle Ages. However, this view is not uncontested by more recent historians, and even Huizinga concedes that for the nobility, chivalry constituted "an incredible self-deception", an ideal that resonated with many young nobles who wanted believe in it, despite all its impracticalities. However, in order to answer the question of whether chivalry was actually given any credit, we must establish what chivalry meant. Modern conceptions of chivalry are very different from those of knights who saw no contradiction between chivalrous behavior and the tactics of riding, burning and ravaging the enemy's countryside. As Keen wrote, chivalry "is a word that has been used...with different meanings and shades of meaning by different writers and in different contexts." It could simply refer to a "collective of knights", or to a social class "whose martial function... was to defend the homeland and the Church", or to a set of values, "an ethos in which martial , the aristocratic and Christian elements merged.” It is this latter form of chivalry, as a personal code of conduct guiding the decisions of knights and nobility, that has attracted the interest of historians. Natural...... middle of paper ......The Decline of the Middle Ages, Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, New York, 1954Kaeuper, Richard W. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991Kaeuper , Richard W. and Kennedy, Elspeth. The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1996Keen, M. Chivalry, Yale University Press, London, 1984Keen, MH “Chivalry, Nobility, and the Man-at-Arms” in War, Literature, and Politics at the end of the Middle Ages, CT Allmand (ed.), Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1976Llull, Ramon. The Book of Chivalry, Sam Houston State University Press, Huntsville, Texas, 1991 Strickland, Matthew. War and chivalry; conduct and perception of war in England and Normandy, 1066-1217, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996Vale, Malcolm. War and Chivalry, Duckworth, London, 1981