This chapter should probably be entitled ‘The many ends of chivalry’. For centuries, writers, churchmen, soldiers, historians and moral commentators complained that chivalry and the ideals of knighthood were in decline, had been degraded to an idle or effeminate state, or were otherwise a hollow imitation of an authentic, perfected manifestation extant in the (usually unspecified) past. Witness the broad date–range of the sources quoted above. The complaint that chivalry has irretrievably declined, or indeed died, has been associated with numerous events and actual deaths from medieval and modern history, including the destruction of French knighthood at Agincourt; Richard III's death at Bosworth; the passing of Sir Philip Sidney or Elizabeth I or Prince Henry Stuart; the execution of Marie Antoinette and the end of the ancien régime; and the mechanisation of warfare in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejoinders and more nuanced considerations can be found for each claim, but the essential idea remains that chivalry's end can be temporally located. The present chapter adopts a different approach.