Osprey - General Military - Knight - The Warrior and ... - Brego-weard

182
KNIGHT
The seal of Henry II of
England. The seal served
as a guarantee of the
authenticity of a
document, but it also
served as a vehicle for the
promotion of the owner's
self-image. (The Art
Archive)
banners, knights had pennons'. According to Froissart, Sir
Thomas Trivet, whilst on campaign with the Duke of
Buckingham in 1380, asked the duke, 'My lord if you
please I will this day display my banner; for, thanks
to God, I have a sufficient revenue to support the
state which a banner requires' and, as we saw
above (see p. 121), Sir John Chandos was able to
lead men beneath a knight's pennant before
choosing the auspicious occasion of the battle of
Najera to unfurl his banner and formally adopt
the dignity of banneret. In the fiscal terms of the
exchequer and royal clerks to be a banneret was to
be a superior sort of a knight, receiving a higher
rate of pay for one's martial service. By 1300 it is
clear that bannerets straddled the divide between the
magnates and the knights. Very few of them were
considered worthy ot their own individual summons to
Parliament, which was a honour reserved for the magnates, but
almost all were considered ineligible tor election to Parliament, which set
them above the knight of the shire. This position was to be relatively short lived. By the
15th century the term had disappeared; the upper echelons of the banneret group had
become barons whilst the lower sank back into the ranks of the ordinary knight.
The nobility were suspicious and resentful of the knights' taking on the trappings
and behaviours of their betters, and it may have been this that led to the increasingly
elitist nature ot chivalry, in particular the greater ceremony attached to the making ot
a knight and emphasis on manners and courtesy. The elaboration of knightly culture,
and an attendant rise in the cost of maintaining the social trappings of the rank, served
to re-draw the dividing line between those who were to be considered knightly by
dint of their wealth and social status and those who could fight in full armour and
with horse.
Again, the extent to and way in which such changes expressed themselves varied
from region to region. The unfree minuterialej, for example, remained a part of
German elite society well into the 13th century. In southern France the knight
remained a military retainer ot relatively low status, a professional soldier distinct from
the aristocracy. In urban Italy the noble knightly families were often indistinguishable
from the non-noble mercantile families whose wealth gave them a status equal to their
noble neighbours, in a manner similar to the top levels of the merchant classes in other
major cities of Europe.