with one or more priests paid to say masses for the benefit of the members,
living and dead; and the holding of an annual general meeting (commonly
called the “chapter general”) at or near that chapel, beginning or centered
on the feast day of the patron saint and normally including a solemn mass
and banquet in his or her honor, and often a vespers and memorial mass
for deceased members. In addition, during the course of the meeting there
was often a session devoted to the praise and criticism of the behavior of
members relative to the goals and standards of the society. The statutes of
such societies normally imposed a number of obligations on their members,
most of which were related to the particular purpose of the society, but
some of which were fraternal in nature, requiring mutual support or aid.
Finally, the statutes of confraternities of all kinds normally entrusted the
running of the society to one or more officers, who in the great majority of
cases were subject to annual election by the members of the dominant class.
The confraternal societies of knights and nobles, like those of ignoble sol-
diers of various types, seem generally to have adhered quite closely to this
general model, though the most important subclasses modified the usual
provisions for governance in a number of ways.
Confraternal societies were normally intended to be perpetual associ-
ations, but this was not true of a number of the non-confraternal military
societies founded at this time. Military and noble societies may therefore be
divided into perpetual and temporary subclasses. The former subclass in-
cluded almost all of the fully confraternal societies and most of the non-
confraternal ones founded to perform comparable political and military
functions. The temporary subclass, by contrast, was made up of societies
that were founded either to cement alliances among a number of lords or
princes during some sort of political crisis or military campaign, or to serve
as the vehicle for the collective achievement of some chivalrous enterprise.
The former set of temporary bodies (which had either an open-ended
or fixed time limit, usually of between one and twenty years) were “frater-
nal societies,” as they were based on the institution of fraternity or broth-
erhood-in-arms. By the fourteenth century, brotherhoods of two or more
members were commonly created among knights and men-at-arms by vows
of mutual support throughout a campaign and of the equal partition of the
spoils (and possibly the losses) of war. The fraternal military societies were
essentially institutionalized networks of this sort that borrowed various
features from contemporary confraternities to give them a corporate char-
acter. They seem to have originated in the Holy Roman Empire around
1350, and to have flourished in the kingdoms of Burgundy, Germany, and
France between that time and about 1430. In the Francophone kingdoms,
the best known are the Company of the Black Swan, founded in 1350 by
Count Amé VI of Savoy, two other princes, and eleven knights; the Corps388 Orders of Knighthood, Secular