and Order of the Young Male Falcon, founded between 1377 and 1385 by
the viscount of Thouars and seventeen minor barons in Poitou; the Order
of the Golden Apple, founded in 1394 by fourteen knights and squires in
Auvergne; and the Alliance and Company of the Hound, founded in 1416
for a period of five years by forty-four knights and squires of the Barrois.
In Germany, where they were particularly numerous, the earliest known is
the Company of the Pale Horse of the Lower Rhineland (1349). Its succes-
sors included the Company of the Star of Brunswick (1372), the Company
of the Old Love (ca. 1375–ca. 1378) in Hesse, the Company with the Lion
(1379) in Wetterau and Swabia generally, the Company of the Fool (1381)
in Cleves, and the Company of the Sickle (1391) in southern Saxony and
Franconia. Most of these were founded for precise periods of two to twelve
years, though the last was to endure for as long as its founding members
still lived. Like societies with a fully confraternal form of constitution, they
were intended to serve as military-political leagues promoting the interests
of their members and had no higher goals.
The latter set of temporary bodies (which usually had a fixed limit for
their existence of between one and five years) should be called votal soci-
eties, as they were based on a vow (votumin Latin) undertaken by their
members to achieve a set of feats of arms comparable to those of the
knights of the Arthurian romances. Contemporaries commonly knew them
by a name meaning “enterprise” (emprinse, impresa) and transmitted that
name both to profoundly different types of knightly societies and to the
badge or figural sign that represented the undertaking. Such societies ap-
peared around 1390 (when new forms of tactics were emerging that re-
quired practice of the type actually provided by these societies) and seem
to have flourished only for a few decades after that date, primarily in
France. Their number included the Enterprise of the White Lady with
Green Shield, undertaken in 1399 for a period of five years by the heroic
marshal of France, Jehan le Meingre de Boucicaut, and twelve other
knights; the Enterprise of the Prisoner’s Iron, undertaken in 1415 for two
years by Jehan, duke of Bourbon, and sixteen other knights; and the En-
terprise of the Dragon, undertaken at about the same time, probably by Je-
han de Grailly, count of Foix, and “a certain number of ladies, damsels,
knights, and squires.”
The line of cleavage separating the perpetual and the limited-term so-
cieties within the non-confraternal category coincided with another line
that ran across both the confraternal and non-confraternal categories: that
between societies that were endowed with a democratic or oligarchic con-
stitution (the normal types in confraternities) and those that were endowed
with constitutions of a monarchical nature, which attached the presidential
office on a permanent and hereditary basis to the throne or, in one case, the
Orders of Knighthood, Secular 389