recreant

adj

1. (archaic, poetic)Having admitted defeat and surrendered; defeated.

   “Soothly, he that despeireth hym is lyk The coward champious recreant, that seith, Creant withoute nede, allas! akkas! bedekes us He 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.]”

   “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.”

2. (literary, poetic)Unfaithful to someone, or to one's duties or honour; disloyal, false.

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

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

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

   “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.”

   “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.”

noun

1. Somebody who is recreant, who yields in combat; a coward or traitor.

   “[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.”

   “If Scholz believed he could dodge a reckoning after his party was beaten into a humiliating third place by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, he, like most recreants, is likely mistaken.”