Definition of "recreant"

Soothly, he that despeireth hym is lykThe coward champious recreant, that seith,Creant withoute nede, allas! akkas! bedekes usHe recreant and nedelees despeired.[Translation by Larry D. Benson from Riverside Chaucer: Truly, he that despairs himself is like the cowardly defeated champion, who says "I surrender" without need. Alas, alas, needless is he defeated and needless in despair.]

1387, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Part 3: "The Parson's Tale"

For, from the day that he thus did it leave, / Amongst all Knights he blotted was with blame, / And counted but a recreant Knight with endles shame.

1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, V.11

[V]ictory is obtained if either champion proves recreant, that is, yields, and pronounces the horrible word of craven; a word of disgrace and obloquy rather than of any determinate meaning. But a horrible word it indeed is to the vanquished champion; since, as a punishment to him for forfeiting the land of his principal by pronouncing that shameful word, he is condemned as a recreant amittere liberam legem, that is, to become infamous, and not to be accounted liber et legalis homo; being supposed by the event to be proved forsworn, and therefore never to be put upon a jury or admitted as a witness in any cause.

1759, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 3, Chapter 22, concerning trials by battle

Who, for ſo many benefits receiv'd, / Turn'd recreant to God, ingrate and falſe, / And ſo of all true good himſelf deſpoil'd, […]

1671, John Milton, “The Third Book”, in Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is Added, Samson Agonistes, London: […] J. M[acock] for John Starkey […], page 61

And let the recreant traitors seek / My tourney court […] .

1793, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel

But, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest.

1854, Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts

I charge it to the recreant sons of the men who carried on the American revolutionary war, and who come together every fourth of July to boast of what their fathers did, while they, their sons, have become associated with bloodhounds, to be put at any moment on the track of the fugitive slave.

1855, William Wells Brown, chapter 27, in Sketches of Places and People Abroad

Gabriel did not attack him however. He brought in only blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the mystic voice—it was really a remarkable case of second sight—which had whispered to him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town.

1890, Henry James, The Tragic Muse

[I]n the Choephoroe of Aeschylus Orestes pursues the same idea saying that unless he avenges his father, a stern duty which has devolved upon him, he will be punished in turn by the avengers of his father's wrongs. It may be remarked that in Maina to-day no recourse must be had to law for such cases, nor must the injured person satisfy himself by calling upon the aid of the police. To do this were incredibly base, the subterfuge of a recreant and a craven.

1928, Montague Summers, chapter 3, in The Vampire, His Kith and Kin