The Knight in History (17 page)

In addition to the Christianization of knighthood and its enhanced social status, political changes took place that had dramatic impact. These took varying forms in the German Empire, France, and England but were roughly parallel.

In the Empire, the unfree ministerials, household knights of servile status, rose to become members of the lesser nobility. Serving the emperor or the Church, they had already absorbed some of the prestige of their masters. They were further elevated by deliberate policy, as the Hohenstaufen emperors, particularly Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI, employed their servile knights against the rebellious nobility. German ministerial knights fought for the Hohenstaufens in Italy, garrisoned their castles, accompanied Frederick Barbarossa on his Crusade, tutored the Hohenstaufen sons, governed their cities, and administered their domains. A ministerial, Markward of Anweiler, who had been Henry VI’s tutor, served as regent during the minority of Frederick II. Ministerials were largely responsible for the German literature of chivalry, explaining and justifying the consciousness of the class that they had joined. By the thirteenth century, most of the ministerials had eliminated their disabilities and established themselves as free, able to give and receive fiefs, to testify in court, and to marry as they pleased. In some regions they were called “noble” as early as the twelfth century.
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In France, the twelfth century witnessed the strengthening of the royal power alongside the growth of the great regional principalities, such as Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, Provence, and Savoy, whose counts and dukes, like the German emperors, looked for knightly support against the local lords, the castellans. Counts, dukes, and king exerted themselves to break up the close relationship between the local lord and his knights and to enlist the knights in their own service, making them direct vassals and encouraging the transfer of judicial and other local power from castellan to knight. Knights acquired the title “sire,” previously reserved for castellans, and assumed armorial bearings in imitation of the upper aristocracy. As the thirteenth century progressed, their life-style grew more expansive. They moved out of the villages where they had long lived in familiar intimacy with the peasants and built fortified manors, miniature castles with a tower or two, often surrounded by moats. These petty fortresses served more of a social than a military purpose. They were visual symbols of the change in the knight’s relationship with the peasants, from neighbor-protector to governor, with powers of police, justice, and taxes.
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Georges Duby’s study of the Mâcon region shows that knights had been forced to borrow money in the twelfth century, mainly from each other; early in the thirteenth century they had recourse to pledging part of their lands to the Church or to merchants. After about 1230 they began to sell their lands or to turn over their allodial lands to the Church or to a lay lord and take them back in fief, in return for cash. Thus the Hongre family, which had sent knights on the First Crusade, pledged and sold lands in the twelfth century to raise money to go on the Third Crusade, and in the thirteenth century borrowed against pledges, sold lands to the abbey of Cluny, and sold their homage for other allods to the abbey of St. Philibert in Tournus and to the duke of Burgundy.
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The result was that at least in central France, where feudalization had previously been only partial and feudal obligations had weighed lightly, the knights now had to submit to powerful lords, kings and counts and dukes, while the castellans sank in status to become scarcely distinguishable from the knights.
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In England, a partnership of royal power with feudal hierarchy had been founded by the Norman Conquest. Henry II’s expansion of the central government apparatus—justice, administration, and finance—brought about the enlistment of knights in a role unique to England. The knights who had originally come over with William the Conqueror had been granted land to support their service and had thereby become administrators of estates. Gradually they had acquired public responsibilities outside their feudal obligations, especially in the area of justice. Where in France many knights entered royal service and so became part of the bureaucracy that grew with the growth of royal power, in England the knights’ participation in government came by way of their local administrative function, leading to their important part in the foundation of Parliament.
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The institution that introduced the English knights to their new responsibilities was the “Grand Assize” set up by Henry II in 1179 to settle property disputes. The sheriff, administrator of the shire (county), appointed four knights who in turn elected twelve knights, “free and lawful men of the vicinity,” to form a “jury,” in the medieval sense, a court of inquiry of men acquainted with the case, who viewed the property in question, discussed the issue with appropriate parties (neighbors), paced the boundaries, and pronounced as to the “greater right.” When verdicts were questioned, four “knights of the shire” were commissioned to bring the court record to the king’s court and defend it.
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Out of this practice grew that of summoning a representation of knights to the king’s Great Council. In 1213, in a moment of crisis, King John called four knights from each shire “to speak with us about the affairs of the kingdom” later the king from time to time asked the shire courts to send two, three, or four knights, sometimes elected by local knights, sometimes appointed by the sheriff, as representatives to discuss taxes, report on local affairs, or bring the political support of the shires to his aid.
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In this role the English knights were used against the English barons as the Hohenstaufen emperors had used their ministerials against their nobles or the French king and magnates had used knights against the castellans.

English knights served in other functions in the shire, aiding and advising the sheriff and serving in local office, as sheriffs themselves, as coroners, and as forest officials.
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These duties heightened the knights’ pretensions; early in Henry II’s reign, his justiciar, Richard de Lucy, himself from a family of knights, was moved to remark, “It was not the custom in the old days for every petty knight to have a seal.”
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Another change introduced by Henry II that worked a major transformation in the situation of English knights was the increasing substitution of paid service for service based on feudal tenure. Mercenary soldiers had been employed long before the twelfth century (see Chapter 3), but an important innovation, the beginning of a new way of organizing a war economy, was “scutage” (shield tax, from
scutum
, shield), the imposition of a tax as a substitute for unreliable and short-term feudal service, with the revenue used to hire mercenaries. This device was particularly necessary in Henry II’s wars to defend his extensive continental empire. In 1166 he required his tenants-in-chief, his major vassals, to inform him of the names of all their vassals who held land by military service. The king’s purpose was to use the list as the basis for a tax to be levied in lieu of such service. At first collected from the barons, this tax was eventually collected directly from the knights.
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A treatise on the English Exchequer (treasury office), written about 1179, explained scutage in benevolent terms:

Occasionally, when enemies threaten or attack the kingdom, the king orders that a certain sum be paid from each knight’s fee such as one mark or one pound to provide wages or bonuses for soldiers. For the king prefers to expose mercenaries rather than his own people to the chances of war. This payment, because it is reckoned according to the number of shields, is called shield-money.
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Scutage enabled vassals to avoid burdensome military duties while providing the king with an army of experienced soldiers prepared to undertake a long campaign. Along with later tax measures for war finance, it made possible the development of the professional army.

Scutage was an aspect of two fundamental historic trends in twelfth-century Europe that profoundly affected the knights. The first was the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few kings and great princes that gradually professionalized warfare. The second was the economic upturn from the depressed state of the ninth and tenth centuries to the Commercial Revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that raised living standards and inflated prices. A knightly life-style now demanded luxuries. William Marshal’s biographers, writing in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, apologized for the modest size of William’s retinue when he set out for France in the 1150s. “The time was not then so proud as in our days; a king’s son would ride with his cape trussed up, without any other baggage; now there is hardly a squire who does not want to have a pack horse.”
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The dubbing ceremony itself had come to include elaborate gifts and costly celebrations. The knights’ new duties in service to kings and great lords involved travel, suitable clothing, and often contributions in the form of “aids” to the lord on special occasions. The price of knightly equipment, too, had mounted to the point where the initial outlay might cost a knight a year’s income.
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The old round or conical helmet of the Bayeux Tapestry was replaced in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century by the larger helm, a flat-topped cylinder that gradually evolved into more rounded forms to better ward off blows. Mail gauntlets (mufflers) were added to extend the sleeves of the hauberk, under which a padded waistcoat called an acton or gambeson was worn to protect against bruises. The first pieces of plate armor appeared on elbows and knees.
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The heavier armor increased the premium on strong horses, whose price accordingly rose.

In England, as the cost of knighthood increased, some knights with small landholdings clubbed together to pay the expenses of the service of one of their number. Others actually abandoned knighthood, as evidenced by a clause in the 1217 reissue of Magna Carta forbidding the gift or sale of land equivalent to a knight’s fee and consequently owing the service of a knight. Those who remained knights, like their French counterparts, often had to pledge their lands and sometimes their armor to raise money.
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THIRTEENTH-CENTURY IVORY CHESS PIECE SHOWING FLAT-TOPPED HELM, SURCOAT, HAUBERK, AND STRAIGHT-TOPPED SHIELD.
(ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM)

William the Conqueror’s
servicium debitum
, the knight service of his tenants-in-chief, provided a theoretical total of about 5,000 knights. In the thirteenth century, King John and King Henry III could raise knightly armies of only 300 or 400 for service on the continent. In 1258 Henry’s barons complained that there were so few knights in some counties that it was impossible to assemble a Grand Assize of twelve; in 1295, Essex, one of the most highly feudalized of English counties, numbered only twenty-four active resident knights, plus eleven who were too old or ill for service.
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In both England and France the economic pressures of the thirteenth century gave birth to a new social category, the sons of knights who were entitled by birth to knighthood, but who now remained squires (in France
écuyers
or
damoiseaux
). From the middle of the century, squires multiplied until they were more numerous than knights. In one district of the Mâconnais, all eligible men were knights in 1230, but by 1270 there were four
damoiseaux
to one knight. Some men died as
damoiseaux
but transmitted their nobility to their sons, who might become knights or remain
damoiseaux
.
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Thus the thirteenth century, apogee of knighthood, actually saw the number of knights decreasing all over Europe. The phenomenon provoked a strange new legal action in England, “distraint of knighthood,” by which the royal authority enforced knighting on those deemed able to afford it—a radical extension of the principle of the 1217 Magna Carta. In 1224 Henry III, preparing for an expedition to Gascony, ordered every adult freeman who held land equivalent to a knight’s fee to take up arms and be knighted. In 1242 a knight’s fee was defined as land yielding a yearly income of twenty pounds, a level gradually raised by inflation to one hundred pounds. The measures raised revenues, but there is no evidence that they produced many knights.
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