About Medieval Knight Culture

The legends of medieval knights are often exaggerated with romantic fantasies. Most of them come from our dissatisfaction with the status quo and imaginary: living in ancient castles, living a life of aristocratic affluence; defeating evil magicians and giants, protecting the good but ignorant peasants, and acting in the name of a noblewoman or a king.

The legends of medieval knights are often exaggerated with romantic fantasies. Most of them come from our dissatisfaction with the status quo and imaginary: living in ancient castles, living a life of aristocratic wealth; defeating evil magicians and giants, protecting the good but ignorant peasants, acting in the name of a noblewoman or a king. The ranger novels that turned Don Quixote upside down, or the improvisations of the Proven?al balladeers, fully explain the behavioral norms of the ideal knight. But even modern man can't always follow his conscience, and in the past, when force was the order of the day, knights often strayed from the beaten track.

First, let us define chivalry, which, by today's standards, is threefold: first, as a part of the feudal system; second, as a separate social class; and, third, as an individual's way of behaving, honor, and moral code.

Here we go back to the time when Europe was being redrawn on the ruins, when the glory of Rome was past, and the morning of the Renaissance had not yet come:

The earliest barbarian upheavals were over, and the Franks, Celts, and Vandals were establishing their own states. The Teutonic conquests swept across northwestern Europe, their warriors were almost exclusively foot soldiers, and from the writings of Tacitus, it can be found that the Germanic tribes of the time had very solemn rites of passage. All the men of the tribe came together, and the young men of the right age were given a spear and a shield by the chief of the tribe or by their fathers, and officially became warriors. Such ceremonies were common among the Gauls of the time. The Franks followed these traditions, and from Charlemagne, to Louis the Pious, to Charles the Bold, they were all presented with a sword at their bar mitzvah. We can assume that this was the predecessor of the knightly ordination ceremony.

It is well known that the Carolingian dynasty was the first to adopt the system of territories and cognacs. Charlemagne spent his life conquering the south and the north, but lacked sufficient funds to maintain a large army. So he divided the conquered lands into small parcels and, together with the peasants on them, bestowed them on his many followers. This was the feudal system, where those who owned estates also owned power. Of course, there was a contract between the king and the lords: the king offered protection to the lords, and in return the lords had to pay annual taxes and serve regularly. The land was still owned by the king, and the lords only had the right to use it. Charlemagne was powerful enough to intimidate, but his descendants failed to maintain the centripetal force, and Louis the Pious made a great mistake: he divided the country equally among his hostile descendants. So after his death, the huge empire failed to survive the bottleneck and was divided into three. So the fiefs of various sizes became relatively independent kingdoms, and the cognacs of the nobles became hereditary and inalienable.

At that time, Europe was frequently invaded by foreign peoples, Muslims in the south, Viking pirates in the north, and Magyars (the predecessor of the Hungarians) in the east constantly invaded the border. In the eleventh century, the children of the nobility, who were far away from the laborers between the Lore River and the Rhine River, had to be trained in fighting skills and horsemanship from an early age. There is no doubt that the earliest cavalrymen and knights were nobles and wealthy men. They were the only ones who could afford to buy expensive equipment: three or four rotating horses for themselves, each of which ate a lot of grain and was a great expense, especially at a time when agricultural production was not well developed; armor had to be tailored in blacksmiths' stores, and there was also the equipment for the retinue. Generally speaking, the military equipment of a single person cost about 20 bulls, i.e., at least 10 calves for plowing the fields of a farmer's family. Such an expense could not be borne by civilians. The warrior class on horseback was also the aristocracy, and the superiority of their birth was inevitably accompanied by contempt for the lower classes, who found **** the same hobby: war. Similar to the Roman era, the nobles of the Middle Ages formed the heavy cavalry, which became the mainstay of the armies of that era.

In the time of Philip VI, there was the saying, "In order to avoid the impending catastrophe, people divided themselves into three categories: the first were those who prayed to God; the second were those who did business and cultivated the land; and the third were the knights who arose to protect the first two categories from injustice and harm." This is a typical division of the Western social structure in the Middle Ages, and the word knight comes from Charlemagne's collection of decrees of the Capitularies, Caballarii, which originally meant jockeys.

In 1066, William the Conqueror set foot in Britain. The results of the Battle of Hastings, related to this article are three main points: to the British Isles brought a relatively advanced feudal system; Saltmutter-style small round shields were eliminated, the Norman soldiers will Kite Shield (Kite Shield on the rounded bottom of the point of the long shield) knotted together in a row, can be effective against bow and arrow fire, which makes the fraternity and mutual assistance became an important part of the eleventh century knight training; Norman independent cavalry units The Normans' independent cavalry units played a large role in the development of the English term Knight, which refers to a warrior mounted on a horse. By the middle of the eleventh century, the knightly class was officially formed.

As a system of military mobilization, the feudal system was more conducive to defense than offense, and nobles everywhere were obliged to be diligent at all times. To this end, various countries issued decrees to penalize knights who failed to respond to the call to arms in a timely manner. In England, from the time of Henry II, the term Escuage, or exemption from tax for military service, was introduced. The obligation of feudal lords also changed somewhat, as long as they paid the central tax, without having to personally wield the sword in the battlefield. In the years of Edward III, Henry V and VI, when wars were frequent, these payments were used to pay for the huge military expenditures. This reform proceeded slowly through the thirteenth and fourth centuries, when mercenaries began to make up an increasing proportion of the armies of the European nations, and the relative structure of the armies changed. Where once it was difficult to mix the influence of the king in the territory of the crusaders - they were led only by the Church - now the mercenaries fought hard for their lord, for money or to go to the East and become a new aristocracy. Naturally, veterans who joined the crusade and returned successfully could be paid better.

The Crusades marked the dawn of a golden age of chivalric culture, and the crusaders were considered the perfect knights. Retrieving the Holy Land from the infidels and protecting helpless pilgrims was seen as the highest vocation of a knight. In return, churches flocked to put the Knights under their protection, making them transnational organizations. They were promised ecclesiastical property and all sorts of religious privileges, and exempted crusading knights from penance. One-tenth of the income from church lands was used to pay the Knights for the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Land. In 1099, Jerusalem was captured, but the Holy Land and the Latin countries to the east were still surrounded by Arabs and Turks. The need for a standing army became more and more urgent, and special military regulations were laid down, which became the so-called Fourth Dogma of perpetual warfare against the infidels. Groups of crusaders were formed, and religion gilded the Templars and Knights of the Hospital with an aura of exaltation.

Like the canons, the rules of the Order were equally binding on each member. Beliefs and dogma unite knights of different origins and backgrounds in friendship and love for one another, sharing the same position and purpose. It also dictates their loyalty to their faith, respect for their lords, caution with their words, justice and tolerance on the battlefield, and adherence to the principles of honor and humility.

Thus the independence of chivalry from the feudal system also arose, and there are many similarities between the rules of the Order of the Crusaders and the canons. It was at this point that the Christian virtues of chivalry took shape. The Crusaders had in them both the piety of the monks and the grandeur of the nobility. Generally speaking, a broken nobleman who had lost his domain or the son of a lineage who had not gained the right to inheritance had only two suitable outlets: the clergy or the military, the latter obviously having a greater appeal. The fervor for the liberation of the Holy Land and the great benefits promised by the Church were irresistible, and many civilians sold their family assets to buy equipment just to go to the East. So these professional soldiers joined the guards of the great nobles and went to the East with the king or emperor, aspiring to the rich spoils of war, or to a good ransom.

These soldiers wore plain garments, lived a life of puritanical monasticism, were renamed after guardian saints, fought under the command of the great nobles, were bound by canon law, and were enriched by donations. Knights who voluntarily devoted themselves to this cause became perfect models, and so did Frederick I the Red Bearded, Richard I the Lion-Hearted and Philip II Augustus, the latter of whom was posthumously canonized as a saint after his death, although they all killed many of their followers while at home. These crusader groups were the precursors of the later English Knights of the Gard, the Knights of the Golden Fleece of Burgundy, the Knights of the Annuniziata of Savoy, the French Knights of St. Michael and the Knights of the Holy Spirit.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the armies of Europe were organized in much the same way, with the King being followed by the Master and Marshal, whose powers were sometimes independent and sometimes crossed. Below them was the Herald, who acted as adjutant, clerk, and staff officer, and, as the name suggests, was often sent to the other side's camps to give letters of war or ask for a truce, and was also responsible for counting his own casualties after the battle, which was an all-purpose position. The following combat units are divided into squadrons, led by nobles or knights. Generally speaking, knights are divided into two ranks, one is called Banneret, which is known as Knight, the name comes from their rectangular banner, and is the main force in battle. Apprentice Knights are called Bachelor, or apprentices, and follow the main body in smaller ranks, where they need to gain experience and acquire more combat skills. The banners of novice knights are also rectangular, but with a swallowtail at the end. When they had considerable merit, they could request a promotion from the commander. So the commander cut the swallowtail off their flag and upgraded them to knights.

All knights of both kinds were escorted by their squires, who carried long triangular spear banners on the tips of their lances. These flags are uniform in size and painted with the family's coat of arms. Accordingly, there were two classes of knights, and two classes of squires. Squire referred to the older squires, who participated in battles along with their masters, while Page was the equivalent of an orderly, mostly children trained as knights, and at that time, every castle was a knight's school. After completing their training as youths, these squires could become full-fledged knights-in-training after a bar mitzvah. Some could not afford the high cost of knighthood and spent their lives as squires, but of course, the sons of powerful princes and nobles were knights for life.

There were naturally promotions and demotions, but they were extremely rare. As of 1793, there had been three cases of demotion in the UK***. how serious was seen when Sir Francis Michell was stripped of his knighthood in 1621, held in Westminster Hall. His spurs were withdrawn, and his sword-belt cut, which was a singular disgrace.

In contrast to this, there are the knightly naming ceremonies, often of two kinds. The first was simpler and more common, and was held in times of war: the candidate knelt on one knee in front of the head of the army or a prestigious knight, and the officiant touched his shoulder three times with the back of his sword, giving a piece of advice and admonition, and the whole ceremony was completed. In this way a number of knights arose after every great battle from the 11th to the 16th centuries, and the simple form was more widely accepted, and widely practiced in all times of peace.

Of course, there were also more elaborate ceremonies, and in 15th-century England, knighthood had to be conferred by the lord: the master of ceremonies touched the back of the neck and shoulders with the back of the sword, and then swore an oath of fidelity and honor in the name of the patron saint (St. George for the English, St. Andrew for the Scots). The officiant then chants, "Avencez, Rise Sir so-and-so," generally the knight's Christian name." The whole ceremony is over. It is followed by different celebrations, such as the king's feast of bestowal, with the granting of cloak, armor, and spurs; or the ecclesiastical mode, in which each brother of the order blesses the newcomer, bestows the Scripture and the cross, and the newcomer himself expresses his intention of renouncing the honors and secular names of the world of men, and so on.

This latter ceremony of investiture was gradually combined with other great ceremonies, as, for instance, in England, where the investiture of knights was often accompanied by royal festivities. The so-called Knights of the Bath were those knights who were ennobled at the king's coronation, and this regulation began with Henry IV, and the Order of the Bath was only established at the coronation of Charles II; these knights were also called Knights of the Spurs, because they were given spurs of gold and silver.

The divine essence and quintessence of chivalry in general combines the aristocratic bearing of the time, Christian virtues, and respect for the lady. The ideal knight was not only powerful, but also absolutely loyal, generous, and forgiving. Like the heroes of the epics, he served the good people with his arm, and protected the pilgrims to the East with his chivalrous deeds in the name of the Church.

After the Crusades, chivalry gradually lost its religious overtones and came to represent the honor of the aristocracy. This spirit, passed down from generation to generation, was celebrated during the Hundred Years' War between Britain and France, where knights on both sides honored the ancient rituals. Occasional jousts and parades were interspersed with bloody battles, and in practice such occasions were rare. In England, the tournaments had been abolished since the death of Edward I, and in France there was a remarkable accident: on July 1, 1559, during a match between Henry II and the Earl of Montgomery, the sheath on the head of his spear suddenly fell off. As Nostradamus had predicted, the king was stabbed through the brain. The Church then issued a ban on all gunplay competitions for two centuries.

Regardless of the glorious achievements of the knights, war has always been an unfruitful blood-red flower. The collision of state apparatuses caused widespread economic decline, and it was only the lower classes of the common people who really suffered. Thus there were peasant revolts in both countries, especially in England and in Flanders, the epicenter of the war, where they had good reason to protest against tyranny and injustice, and where the nation's taxes and resources were spent on the war games and lavish pandering of the aristocracy. So Gautier insists that the golden age of chivalric culture was in the twelfth century; after all, fighting and killing heretics was more legendary to Europeans.

With the fall of Acre and the annihilation of the last Latin kingdom in the East, the Eight Crusades finally ended in failure. Regardless of the huge impact it had on future generations, chivalry lived on. The drive to serve the king was exhausted by the Hundred Years' War, and both sides, from the nobility to the poor, were tired of the repeated tug-of-war. So the bards of southern France wound up chivalry one last time - Romanticism.

The romance theme in Romantic literature made chivalry greatly deviate from its original purpose, influenced by the idea that the ideal knight should be loyal to the ideal woman. Note that the ideal woman, for whom he is y loved but unavailable. It doesn't matter that they may have only met once or never even spoken a word. Showing one's infatuation by falling in love in a purely spiritual way, the ideal lover is a saintly maiden to be worshipped rather than an object of profane play. The story of Don Quixote is not funny. Such an idol has to be referred to in reality, mostly as the wife of another knight. The greatest achievement of bending over backwards to take credit for the noblewoman was the establishment of monogamy in Europe. These times

Ideals are ideals, reality is reality. The actual situation is more or less biased, the feudal system is the soil of the roots of the culture of chivalry, greatly limiting all kinds of excessive demands on the knight, the following pick up two specific examples.

When it comes to respect for women, the rise of Christianity more or less raised the status of women, but, as Gautier says, the feudal system tied the land to the woman and sold her to her parents or guardians as part of the deal. Theoretically, knights had a duty and responsibility to protect lone widows and orphans. But that was all. In practice, this protection was sold like a commodity. Lesser lords often sold their daughters in marriage for greater gain. Such mercenary contracts are found everywhere, and while we are shocked at the explicitness of the language in them, we are even more shocked at the prevalence of the phenomenon. Such arranged marriages, or contract marriages, portend misfortune after marriage, and domestic violence is commonplace. It was not their wives to whom the knights owed their allegiance. Gautier's La Chevaleries tells the story of La Tour Landry, a knight of Champagne, who, after witnessing his friend beating his wife in the street, went home and concluded to his daughter, "Pride and insolence are not part of the marriage contract." This phenomenon was not only the result of the self-discipline that was demanded everywhere in those days, but also the evils of arranged marriages.

While upper-class noblewomen were punched and kicked, young children were also subjected to aberrant treatment, as John Symth documented in the history of an ancient family in Berkeley, where between 1288 and 1500 there were a total of five arranged marriages, with the average age of the couple being just 11 years old. Lord Thomas of that family was only 5 when he became a knight in 1476! The marriage took place at the age of 6. Viscount Mautice was only 7 when he became a knight in 1338, and these were due to the early death of the father, and there is no doubt that high fees would have been charged, and even territorial annexation, had the guardianship of a relative of the father's line been left to him. Becoming a knight then symbolized coming of age, but the rules of the time dictated that the legal age to become a knight was 21 at the earliest. Great nobles like the Berkeleys stole the honor to avoid orphan guardianship, but young children would have to take on the family business too early, which Symth mentions more than once as inhumane abuse of orphans.

At the same time, economic reasons caused a certain decline in the romantic component of chivalric culture. In the case of the Berkeley family, from the mid-13th century onwards, the knights were not only courtiers and warriors, but also plain country gentlemen who sold fruit from the castle gardens, while the housewives went round collecting the rent.

In addition, the Escuage, as we mentioned above, was exempt from taxes, and neither tenants nor nobles were exempt. So in the first half of the 13th century, many small lords joined the army to escape the high taxes, and by chivalric moral standards, they were supposed to be fighting for honor and to show loyalty. In any case, this provided the crown with a steady source of income and soldiers. Wealthy commoners and squires coveted the opportunity to improve their social status, so they purchased their own equipment and joined the ranks, and also had the opportunity to be promoted to knighthood because of their war service, thus reducing the aristocratic color of the knightly culture. Of course, these episodes were also adapted by the bards of Provence and became a good subject for romantic novels. The poor aristocrats who have fallen from grace can not become knights, so they can only helplessly complain that the door of honor is actually open to the newly rich, without the slightest consideration of their own ancestors are just professional illiterates.

So the military romanticism on the battlefield also gradually faded, there is no longer a duel in the hall, the knights shrink in the observation post to speculate on the opponent's strength, not like the predecessor in the front of the commando. The Hundred Years' War brought a new way of fighting, with archers dominating the battlefield and a proportion of knights reduced to mercenaries.

The exigencies of battle did away with the superfluous adornment of the cavalry and the pre-war mobilization, which was restricted to the nobility. Famous commanders on both sides, such as Robert Knolles of the British army, had ambiguous origins, being knighted but ennobled as Sir rather than hereditary Lord, and Du Guesclin, commander-in-chief of the French army, waited a long time for a knighthood because he came from a bankrupt, low-ranking family of nobility. Edward III not only provoked the war, but also completely banned the competition of horsemanship, while John of France vigorously advocated it, and the high and the low were soon divided. The French on the eve of the Battle of Crecy sent to the opponent full of chivalry letter of war (of course, in the knowledge of their own absolute superiority in the case of troops), while the British but the use of the armistice gap quietly out of the Jedi, worthy of their inheritance from the pirate forefathers of the true color. The Hundred Years' War was also the end of the age of chivalry.

The era of chivalry is so far away from modern people. That kind of reserve and arrogance, to the bumbling us, with a little excitement, a few points of magic. It is difficult to grasp the essence of chivalry because it is impossible to dissolve oneself into the past. Even in those great days it was inevitably limited by the social consciousness of the time. Just as the high prosperity of the Greco-Roman era was based on slavery, the loyalty and self-discipline promoted by the chivalric civilization has quietly faded as the development of modern civilization requires the constant breaking of restrictions. Indeed, the most important essences failed to reach their zenith even in the heyday of the Middle Ages; as a movement that combined religion with life, chivalry did not do so more successfully than the Puritans. But those noble qualities, humility, tolerance, honesty, justice, will survive as a spiritual heritage through the baptism of war, the rust of peace, and all the transient vagaries of human society.

There is no greatness in the Order ~ and there is no greatest in the Knights ~