A social gulf nevertheless continued to exist between noble and nonnoble knights in
most regions before ca. 1180, when the two social strata began to merge into a single
noble estate. By that date, the great majority of simple knights in France were provided
with fiefs and resembled nobles in being landlords, if only of a fraction of a village. The
knightly class also benefited from the development of social ideologies that assigned a
high function to the status of knight. The first of these, developed between 1025 and 1160
by clerical theorists, tended toward the identification of the body of knights with the
second of the three “orders” into which God had divided Christian society, and to assign
to knights as such both the military and the governmental functions originally assigned to
this theoretical order of “fighters,” an order previously identified with the nobility alone.
Thus was created the idea of a sacred “order of knighthood” transmitted by knights, and
the simple ceremony of adoubement was gradually altered under its influence into an
elaborate rite of ordination. Between 1170 and 1200, an alternative but not incompatible
ideology was developed in the new genre of the romance, in which knighthood was
associated with the virtues of the courtly noble whose principal goal was to win honor for
himself.
Inspired by these exalted ideas of their profession, in the half-century or so after 1180
the simple knights of France gradually usurped the distinctive attributes of their noble
lords, including a dynastic surname and coat of arms, a seal, the personal prefix “lord”
(Lat. dominus, OFr. sire or messire), and a fortified residence. By 1270, the king forbade
his knightly subjects to dub anyone not of knightly ancestry and declared null the effects
of such actions performed by anyone other than himself. The knights and their
descendants thus came to form, with the descendants of the princes and castellans, a new
and much larger noble estate, so closely identified with knighthood that it was more often
called the chevalerie than the noblesse.
A surprising result of this development was a steady decline, especially after 1250, in
the proportion of the male members of this knightly nobility who actually assumed the
status and burdens of knighthood. The growing cost both of armor and of the ceremony
of adoubement placed impossible strains on the finances of the sons of many petty
knights, and as their social status was now securely based on descent more and more
minor nobles decided to postpone indefinitely their admission to knighthood and
remained esquires for most or all of their lives. The absolute number of knights in France
declined from a high of perhaps 40,000 in 1180 to between 10,000 and 5,000 in 1300,
between 5,000 and 3,000 in 1350, and about 1,000 in 1470, and the proportion of the
royal army composed of knights fell from 16 percent in 1340 to 11 percent in 1382 and 3
percent in 1461.
The tradition of receiving knighthood on coming of age around twenty-one was
preserved in the middle and especially the upper nobility down to ca. 1500, with the odd
result that a status that before 1180 had been associated primarily with petty warriors in
the service of nobles was associated between 1300 and 1500 primarily with the heirs of
those same nobles. Knights continued to serve in battle with the latest armor, the price of
which continued to escalate, down to 1500, and knight banneret and knight bachelor
continued to be recognized as pay grades in the royal army down to 1438, but after 1400
knighthood came to be seen less as a professional than as an honorific status.
D’A.Jonathan D.Boulton
[See also: CHIVALRY; NOBILITY; SEIGNEUR/SEIGNEURIE; WARFARE]
The Encyclopedia 969