. Since 1066, the English word “knight” has been used as the equivalent of the Latin miles and the French cheval(i)er. Miles had been used from before 500 to ca. 950 to designate a soldier or military retainer of any sort, but after 950, both miles and chevalier were used especially to designate a particular type of mounted warrior, the professional heavy cavalryman who fought with the expensive armor and weapons traditionally used by Frankish nobles—helm, mail coat, lance, sword—and normally served as a vassal in the retinue of a prince or lesser noble. This type of warrior had apparently arisen under the Carolingians, but it was not until the second half of the 10th century that the vassalic cavalrymen began to emerge as a distinct and increasingly hereditary social category in France, forming a stratum of rural society between the noble landlords and their peasant tenants. Unlike the former, most milites in 10th- and 11th-century France came from undistinguished lineages, held little or no land, and possessed no rights of jurisdiction, but unlike the peasants they retained their full rights as freemen, were not tied to the soil or subjected to the jurisdiction of manorial courts, and served their noble lords (in whose households most of them lived) in capacities that were regarded as relatively honorable.
The basic definition of the knight that emerged between 950 and 1000, that of a fully equipped professional heavy cavalryman of free condition, was to change little before 1500, but the status, the number of men who enjoyed it, and the ideology and honor associated with it were to change tremendously during those same five centuries. The 11th century, which saw the creation of a new regime based on the possession of castles and armed retinues, naturally saw a rapid expansion in the number of knights, who were now called upon to garrison castles. It also witnessed the general adoption of the stirrup and the long Byzantine shield and the development both of the massed charge with couched lance and of the form of mock war called a torneamentum, or tournament. Finally, in the second half of the century, growing numbers of the nobility, who thought of themselves as warriors and fought in precisely the same way as knights at the head of a company of their knightly vassals, adopted the title miles as the formal designation of their social condition. By 1220, virtually all adult members of the old nobility not destined for the clergy assumed the title “knight” when they came of full age and were given the equipment characteristic of knighthood in the rite of adoubement. Thus, formal knighthood (Lat. militia, OFr. chevalerie) united the whole military class.
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.
