The years between 1180 and 1220 witnessed an even greater change in the structure
and more particularly the size of the nobility of France. The much larger class of simple
knights that had emerged between 950 and 1050 and had recruited most of its members
from ignoble free-men rather than the lesser nobility, succeeded in usurping most of the
privileges and attributes usurped in the previous century by the castellans, in closing itself
to persons not descended from knights, preferably in the male line, and in being
recognized as the lowest stratum of the emerging noble “estate.” By 1180, most knights
had become petty landlords of the manors they had received in fief from their noble lords,
and the members of the old nobility, who had always thought of themselves as warriors
as well as rulers, had come to identify with the newly developed ideology of knightliness,
or “chivalry,” and had adopted the custom of receiving adoubement to knighthood on
coming of full age. The rise of the knights increased the number of noble persons in
France from perhaps 5,000–10,000 in 1180 to perhaps 200,000 in 1220 (about 2 percent
of the total population) and converted the nobility into a status group defined on the basis
of descent from knights of any rank. In consequence, from ca. 1220 to ca. 1500 the
nobility was more often referred to as the cheva-lerie, or “knightage,” than the noblesse,
The period between ca. 1220 and ca. 1370 saw the emergence of the legal definition,
distinctive tenurial obligations, fiscal privileges, and representative institutions that
together converted the newly expanded nobility into a juridical “estate” of society. At
first, membership in the new nobility was acquired immediately by any nonnoble or
roturier who secured for himself either the status of knight or possession of a noble fief;
but provincial courts, dominated by nobles, came to deny noble status and most of its
attendant privileges not merely to those roturiers who themselves acquired noble fiefs by
purchase or marriage but to their heirs unto the third generation. Louis IX ruled, contrary
to long-established usage, that only the king had the right to confer knighthood on a man
not descended from knights. This decision led logically to the conferral of the right to
receive knighthood, along with the other rights currently characteristic of noble status, by
formal letters of ennoblement (lettres d’anoblissement), a practice initiated by Philip IV
ca. 1290. The average number of such letters of ennoblement issued annually rose from
1.5 in 1308–14 to ten in 1316–22, and fluctuated between five and nearly forty between
1322 and 1350, in response to the pressures of the war with England. Thereafter, it tended
to grow as long as the war continued, and from 1372 whole categories of people—
typically the mayor, échevins, and councilors of a town—were simultaneously ennobled
to secure or reward their loyalty to the crown. In the 14th century, nobility came to be
sought by rich bourgeois and civil servants both for the honor and for the growing
number of privileges it entailed—though in the same century the liabilities of noble status
were also increased. In the majority of provincial customary laws, growing numbers of
which were committed to writing from ca. 1200, all those who were recognized as noble
either by birth or by royal ennoblement were subjected to special rules regarding
succession to property (movable and immovable), wardship, payment of debts, and
eventually taxes.
Although all nobles in late-medieval France had certain rights and obligations in
common, the nobility remained a stratified estate. From ca. 1200, juridical distinctions
were drawn on four distinct bases: (1) the extent of the judicial power or “justice” a noble
exercised over his nonnoble subjects; (2) the nature and standing of the most important
dominion a noble held; (3) the level of the newly crystallized feudal hierarchy on which
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