Chivalry Tree in-depth discussion

There have been many attempts at creating Chivalry Trees in the SCA. All of them, to my knowledge, suffer from one or both of the following problems:

Being done by hand
Trying to do too much

The ones that are done by hand are generally very in-depth up to the point that the person doing the job is actually doing it. And then modern life or other SCA jobs interfere and the project goes stale. And the Crown keeps adding members to the Order of the Chivalry, so the list is incomplete.

The ones that try to do too much add things like biographical snippets of all of the Chivalry, specific instances where the King or Queen couldn't perform the ceremony due to various reasons and so on. These are fantastic, but an incredible amount of work! Once that inspired person stops being inspired about that particular project, it's difficult to catch up.

With those two issues in mind, I wrote the An Tir Chivalry Tree. To address the first issue, I wrote a program that generates the tree itself. The program culls the needed inforamtion from the OP database, finds the connections it needs, and writes the html file that is the tree. We click a button and it just happens.

The second issue is addressed by being very specific in what the tree means. It is exactly answering the question "who was King when each Knight or Master was elevated into the Chivalry?" It does not concern itself with situations in which an unbelted King had a Chivalry member hold the sword or anything about the Queen at the time. This does lead to a few loopholes in the system that have yet to be exposed, fortunately, but will have to be addressed at some point:

Chivalry loops
Sovereign Queens

A loop happens if an unbelted King elevates someone to the Chivalry who in turn elevates that King. A loop can be immediate, as in that example, or can form down the line. Currently there are no known loops for An Tirian Chivialry, but this hasn't been addressed in the software.

A Sovereign Queen would force the software to figure out who was Sovereign, rather than simply who was King at that time. To date there has only been one Sovereign Queen in the history of the SCA - Queen Rowan Beatrice von Kampfer of Ansteorra. According to the Ansteorran site http://www.ansteorra.org/orders/peerage/chivalry/generations/chivgen.html she did not elevated anyone during her reign, so this is a moot point at the moment.

So that's what this list is, a quick reference to who was King the moment that each An Tirian Member of the Chivalry was elevated. It does no more and no less than exactly that.

- Quentin Martel

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