GOLDEN FLEECE
. The most successful lay order of knighthood founded in France and the principal model
for all later orders of its type, the Order of the Golden Fleece (Fr. Toison d’or) was
proclaimed in Bruges by Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, on January 7, 1430.
Endowed with statutes composed by Jehan Germain on the occasion of its first meeting in
Lille on November 30, 1431, it functioned under those statutes, as amended from time to
time, until its last meeting in 1559. The order was the first of the fully neo-Arthurian
monarchical type to be founded anywhere for half a century, and its statutes were based
on those of the two earlier orders still surviving in 1430: the Garter of England (1344/49)
and the Collar of Savoy (1364). The order thus took the form of a cooptative corporate
society of nobly born lay knights, or “companions” (at first twenty-five, in 1433 raised to
thirty), including a hereditary “Chief and Sovereign” (the duke of Burgundy), four
corporate officers (chancellor, treasurer, registrar, and king of arms), a corporate seal, a
corporate chapel (in the ducal palace at Dijon) in which each companion had his own
stall marked with his arms, and a college of canons (initially equal in number to the
companions), whose principal function was to offer up prayers and Masses on the
companions’ behalf. The companions of the order had obligations both to their sovereign
and to one another, in life and after death, and the whole order met in occasional (until
1445, annual) “assemblies,” which consisted of a business meeting, or “chapter,” a
banquet, and religious services. The companions wore at all times a collar composed of
metallic representations of the ducal badge of a B-shaped fusil, or firesteel, and a flint
spewing flames, from which depended an effigy of the golden fleece captured by Jason
and the Argonauts.
Like its English model, the Order of the Golden Fleece was founded partly to reward
and promote chivalrous behavior among its sovereign’s noble subjects (especially loyalty
to the crown) and partly to increase the prestige of its sovereigns themselves by
portraying them in the image of Arthur or Jason at the head of a company of highborn
heroes. It was also intended, however, to secure the active service of its companions and
to unite the leading members of the separate and formerly antagonistic nobilities of the
various Burgundian principalities in the bonds of fraternity.
D’A.Jonathan D.Boulton
[See also: CHIVALRY; LAY ORDERS OF CHIVALRY; PHILIP THE GOOD]
Boulton, D’A.J.D. The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later
Medieval Europe, 1325–1520. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987.
Hommel, Luc. L’histoire du noble ordre de la Toison d’or. Brussels: Éditions Universitaires, 1947.
Kervyn de Lettenhove, H. La Toison d’or. 2nd ed. Brussels: van Oest, 1907.
Reiffenberg, Baron de. Histoire de l’ordre de la Toison d’or. Brussels: Fonderie et Imprimerie
Normale, 1830.
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