by two of the main objects of many founders: to bind the leaders of the no-
bility of their domain to themselves and their dynasty and to establish
unity, harmony, and peace among them. Nevertheless, the essential charac-
teristic of the fictional societies of the Round Table and Frank Palace was
selectivity, and this implied a limitation. The limits suggested in the ro-
mances were actually fairly high—between 50 and 300 knights. A number
of founders initially sought to achieve similar or larger memberships.
These figures proved impossible to achieve, and while we have no pre-
cise numbers for most orders, it is unlikely that the number of companions
in any order ever surpassed 100 before the middle of the sixteenth century.
Aside from the difficulty of finding several hundred knights worthy both of
the honor and of the trust involved in admission to such an order, provid-
ing chapels and halls large enough for meetings would have been difficult.
No doubt recognizing these problems, most founders chose to set much
lower limits on the size of the membership in each of the order’s classes.
Edward III of England once again led the way by setting the limit at 26, the
number that could sit in the uppermost stalls of the choir of his chapel in
Windsor Castle. Thereafter, the number of companions in most later orders
(beginning with the Order of the Collar of Savoy in 1364) would be closely
comparable to this: between a low of 15 (the Collar of Savoy) and a high
of 36 (St. Michael of France).
Although most orders were made up largely of knights politically sub-
ject to their president, like the fictional orders on which they were partly
modeled, virtually all included a number of distinguished foreign knights. In
theory, all of the companions in the more thoroughly neo-Arthurian orders
were chosen primarily or exclusively on the basis of the knightly qualities,
and differences in lordly rank among them were either ignored or made the
basis of differential burdens in the matter of paying for purgatorial masses.
In practice, however, the desire to use the order as an instrument to secure
the loyalty and reward the services of barons and princes gave rise to a
marked tendency to prefer knights of high lordly rank. By the end of the pe-
riod the majority of the companions of the greater orders (the Garter and
the Golden Fleece) were men of high birth and lordly rank, including a num-
ber of foreign princes and even kings. The membership of the latter in the
orders was largely passive, but it served to increase considerably the prestige
of the order, to the point where foreign kings felt honored by “election” to
the order. (The statutes of most orders set forth a process by which the ex-
isting companions were to elect new members when places became vacant
by death, resignation, or expulsion; in practice, the prince-president of every
order was usually able to secure the election of anyone he wished.)
As these developments suggest, in addition to being the institutional
embodiments of the ideals of chivalry within their prince-president’s do-400 Orders of Knighthood, Secular