Free The Knight in History by Frances Gies

 
     
     
    O F ALL THE many types of soldier that have appeared on the military stage in the course of time, from the Greek hoplite, the Roman legionary, and the Ottoman janissary to members of the specialized branches of modern armed forces, none has had a longer career than the knight of the European Middle Ages, and none has had an equal impact on history, social and cultural as well as political. 1 Knights fought on the battlefields of Europe for six hundred to eight hundred years, some scholars dating their emergence as early as the eighth century, some as late as the tenth. They were still prominent, though increasingly obsolescent, in the sixteenth century, long after the introduction of firearms and the advent of the national state.
    Originally a personality of mediocre status raised above the peasant by his possession of expensive horse and armor, the knight slowly improved his position in society until he became part of the nobility. Although knights remained the lowest rank of the upper class, knighthood acquired a unique cachet that made knighting an honor prized by the great nobility and even by royalty. This cachet was primarily the product of the Church’s policy of Christianizing knighthood by sanctifying the ceremony of knighting and by sponsoring a code of behavior known as chivalry, a code perhaps violated more often than honored, but exercising incontestable influence on the thought and conduct of posterity.
    The institution of knighthood summons up in the mind of every literate person the image of an armor-plated warrior on horseback, with the title “Sir,” whose house was a castle, and who divided his time between the pageantry of the tournament and the lonely adventures of knight-errantry. The image has the defect of being static, and it represents a concept that belongs more to legend and literature than to real life. Yet the real historical figure of the knight is not totally at odds with the popular image. He did indeed wear plate armor, but plate superseded mail only late in his long career. The “Sir”—“Messire” in French—also came late and in England still exists as a title of honor or of minor nobility. A knight sometimes lived in a castle, but the castle was rarely his own. He participated in tournaments, but the tournament’s character as pageant developed only in its decadence. He was certainly prone to adventure in his often short life, but nearly always in company and in search of income rather than romance.
    In England and America the popular image of the knight is pre-ponderantly English, thanks to the overpowering appeal of the King Arthur story. Real knights, however, originated in France and were unknown in England until the Norman Conquest. The French-Welsh-English creators of the Arthur literature, who grafted onto a grain of historical fact a mass of legend about a sixth-century British chieftain, ended by creating a bizarre time warp in which knights in gleaming plate armor galloped anachronistically through the primitive political countryside of post-Roman Britain.
     
    Though change was continuous, one may usefully divide the knight’s long history into three stages: first, the emergence of the armored, mounted soldier in the turmoil-filled ninth and tenth centuries; second, the development of the mature institution of knighthood in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the age of the architects of the King Arthur legend; and third, the decay of the institution as a consequence of the rise of new social forces in the late Middle Ages and early modern times.
    The knight may be defined from three different standpoints, each of them important: the military, the economic, and the social.
    He was first and foremost a soldier, as identified by the Latin term for him, miles , and the Anglo-Saxon cniht , cognate of “knight.” He was invariably mounted; in most languages the medieval vernacular word that replaced miles denoted horseman: French, chevalier ;