Many aspects of the mediæval way of thinking are suddenly opened up to us once we have the understanding that mediæval battles went to the side that was best at holding formation, because maintaining formation is not merely a test of martial prowess, but is a good proxy for morality itself. It is the categorical imperative made manifest, in that one holds formation because it works only if everyone does it. If a few people litter the streets, we will have messy streets; if a few desert the formation, the entire army fails at its objective. On the other hand, if a peasant were placed in the middle of a battlefield, he'd probably run away because he had no military experience & didn't know what was going on. A routing soldier could be genuinely scared & not know what to do, or he could be a coward. There is no discrete line between the two on the mediæval battlefield.

And it is from this blurring of the boundary between the martial & the moral that we get the idea that the nobility, the people who fight, are morally superior to the people who work, because they wouldn't rout in a battle. We have also created an objective test for nobility: noble is the soldier who doesn't rout. British officers don't duck.

I have thought about what if this community were to create a magazine that was a mock historical magazine from 500 years in the future writing about today, something like "Turn of the Millennium Monthly".