Education Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Knighthood, in Bulfinch's telling, isn’t a birthright glittering on a family crest; it’s a credential earned through grind. The phrase “preparatory education” is pointedly unromantic. It drags the reader away from tournament-pageantry and into something closer to a curriculum: training, discipline, supervised maturation. “Long and arduous” does more than describe difficulty; it signals a moral technology. The hardship is the mechanism by which violence gets laundered into virtue and social authority gets presented as deserved.

Bulfinch was a 19th-century popularizer of myth and medieval romance, writing for a literate middle-class audience that loved chivalric glamour but also believed, very Americanly, in self-improvement and merit. Framing knighthood as education makes the medieval past legible to that audience: knights become not merely feudal muscle but cultivated men, formed by institutions and expectations. It’s a subtle act of translation from aristocratic inheritance to bourgeois respectability.

The subtext is also defensive. If knighthood requires a punishing apprenticeship, then its privileges can be justified as the payoff of character-building labor. That justification matters in an era when old hierarchies were being questioned and “gentlemanliness” was being remade as a code of conduct rather than a bloodline. Bulfinch’s line sells chivalry as an early version of professionalization: a narrative where power is acceptable because it has been trained, tested, and disciplined into something that looks like responsibility.