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

BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD: THE KNIGHT IN MEDIEVAL SOCIETY -•
In England the effect ol this fusion of nobility and knighthood was to reduce the
numbers of knights. Indeed so bad did the situation get that on several occasions in the
mid- to late 13th century the king felt it necessary to compel those who had sufficient
property, a 'knight's fee', to take up the rank of knight. Whether this was a purely
military necessity (these so-called 'distraints' of knighthood tended to occur during
preparations for campaign) or to provide sufficient knights for the administrative
functions they were expected to perform, or as a means of raising revenue (defaulters
were fined and many appear to have paid lor exemptions) is not entirely clear. Nor
are the causes of the shortage, which are still much debated, but it appears that the
increased cost of the dubbing ceremony and of maintaining the knightly lifestyle priced
out some of those at the lower end of the spectrum, whilst a sense of knighthood's
exclusivity may have deterred others not wholly sure that their own social origins were
illustrious enough. A final disincentive to the adoption of knighthood may have been
the weight of duties placed upon knights in terms of bureaucratic office and the
administering of justice in the local area.
Despite the distraints, and a reinvigoration of knighthood under Edward III that
was the result of his successful campaigns against the Scots and the French and his
promotion of chivalric culture, there were a substantial number of men who fell short
ol the condition of knighthood in some respect. Whilst the banneret came to have the
connotation of a man of greater standing than a knight but not as great as a baron,
there was no one similar title for those who were of greater standing than other
freeholders but were not knighted. As early as 1100 we find French sources
distinguishing chevaliers (knights) from jerjarw (sergeants) in a military context; the
sergeant was a mounted soldier more lightly equipped in terms of armour and riding a
lesser quality horse than a knight, but the term also seems to have had some technical
meaning too. Ecuyerj and armigeri (literally 'shield bearers' or 'arms bearers', squires)
referred to a knight's body servant and little more. At some point during the 12th
century, however, the term squire began to be used in reference to an apprentice knight.
The History of William Marshal states that he spent eight years as a squire before being
knighted. In the 13th century, however, France has names in the witness lists of charters
with the suffix 'armiger' or 'jcutifer' (literally 'shield bearer') and a man might be
accorded the honorific of domicelliu, a diminutive form of domituu), 'lord', the honorific
attached to the knight. In England the use of the term squire as a social rank appears
in about the 14th century, becoming the common term by the middle of that century.
Edward Ill's sumptuary law of 1363, which sought to limit the type, colour and quality
of clothing being worn by different ranks of society in order to make the distinctions
more clearly defined, has a clear distinction between the cost of cloth allowed the squire
and that permitted to the yeoman and other lesser freemen, an obvious sign that the
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