At this point, he recalled, as two lanes merged into one, he let her go first, despite the honking horns behind him reproving the gentilesse.

The debate was an old one: 'does gentilesse proceed from birth', John Gower had asked a generation earlier in his Confessio amantis.

Not coarse sexuality, but a refined gentilesse is the ideal of these romances; the love of the courtier for his lady, usually another man's wife, has been interpreted as a secularization of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, a "feminization" of the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, in consideration of your youth and the ill nurture, devoid of all gentilesse and courtesy, which you have doubtless had in the land of slaves and tyrants, we are disposed to set you free, unharmed, on these conditions: first, that-" "Curse you for a barbarian dog!"

As to the connection of gentilesse with the official grant or recognition of coat-armour, that is a profitable fiction invented and upheld by the heralds; for coat-armour was the badge assumed by gentlemen to distinguish them in battle, and many gentlemen of long descent never had occasion to assume it and never did.