expected to serve the state not only as warriors, but as officers of the civil
administration. In the strictly military sphere, knights were affected by the
first stages in a long process whereby their armor (and in consequence their
arms) were transformed from the forms largely inherited from the Romans
(and borrowed by them from the Germans and Celts) to new and more
elaborate forms peculiar to Latin Christendom, and particularly associated
with the classic stage of knighthood.
The majority of these developments occurred from 1150 to 1230 in the
core regions of Greater Francia, especially in the decades after 1180—which
corresponded in France to the reign of Philippe II “Augustus.” The principal
developments in armor in this period were the extension of mail over the
arms, legs, hands, and feet, and the rapid evolution of the old conical helmet
with a simple nasal into the cylindrical great helm that covered the whole
head and neck. The latter was particularly useful in tournaments, which
were finally accepted by the kings and greater princes of this period as use-
ful and, in any case, too popular to ban effectively. They were gradually con-
verted into festivals of chivalry so elaborate that only kings and great princes
could afford to hold them. Rules developed to prevent the death of the com-
batants and the general destruction of the countryside, to make them true
sports at which the best knights could win honors for their prowess, and to
allow princes to demonstrate their own courage and martial skills, or at least
their solidarity with and patronal support of the nobility culture.
The dubbing rite became the only accepted manner of making
knights, attaining its classic form by 1225. Its civil form was now com-
monly preceded by a vigil in a church with the sword laid on an altar, by a
ritual bath, and by the donning of a special habit symbolic of purity. The
traditional acts were also accompanied on such occasions by priestly bless-
ings, and the whole ritual was frequently performed in the sanctuary of a
church, as if it were a form of ordination.
The development of this ritual had repercussions in the world of real-
ity as well as that of high theory. First, the expenses it entailed effectively
excluded from knighthood most of the sons of the ignoble, professional
knights, who if they wished to follow the profession of arms were thence-
forth obliged to serve at the inferior rank of serviens,or “sergeant,” whose
inferior status was designated in Latin by the word serviens,“servant,” and
in French by its derivative serjeant,“servant/sergeant.” At the same time,
the right to undergo the ritual was increasingly restricted to the sons of
knights, noble or ignoble. This closed the knightage to upstarts from the
rising but socially inferior bourgeoisie (whose members often surpassed the
knights in wealth and sought to increase the rank of their sons or grand-
sons by marrying them to the daughters of knights). It also made the right
to train for knighthood hereditary in much the same way that the right to
Knights 273