Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

270 Knights
adopt those hereditary shield designs called (heraldic) arms that later became
the chief insignia of noble status. These emblems did not descend to
lower substrata of the nobility before the end of the phase and were not associated
with knighthood. Thus, there continued to be two distinct knightages
in this phase: the old ignoble knightage, some of whose members began
to distinguish themselves and take on the characteristics of their noble
lords, and the new noble knightage, whose members still regarded their
knighthood as only one of their several statuses, and by no means the most
important of them.
In the military sphere, this subphase was primarily marked by the generalization
of the tactics developed in the previous phase and the simultaneous
generalization of the tournament, which seems to have become a
sport (comparable to the hunt) that maintained knightly skills between formal
wars. In both the tournament and war, most knights now fought much
more as members of disciplined units, whose members could charge, wheel,
or retreat on command, but this discipline was probably fairly loose by
modern standards. The new tactics seem to have proved themselves in the
First Crusade, which made the use of knights increasingly attractive to
kings and princes outside northern France and its cultural colonies. Nevertheless,
it should be emphasized that most warfare in the period consisted
of long sieges and combats in terrain ill-suited to cavalry tactics; therefore,
knights were obliged to be just as adept at the tactics of heavy infantry as
they were at those of heavy cavalry.
Knights became common in Germany and known in the Latin Christian
lands to the north and east of it. In these regions, knights remained essentially
soldiers, and most of those in Germany were maintained in
princely and episcopal households as servants and recruited from among
those unfree servants called in Latin ministeriales, who were hereditarily attached
to those households. In Spain, the militias of the cities organized
companies of caballeros villanos, or “town knights,” whose social status
was higher than that of the ministeriales, but far from noble. Elsewhere,
professional knights were freemen who lived mainly in rural settings, including
in some cases their own manor houses. In fact, the number of enfeoffed
(and therefore landed) knights rose steadily in this subphase, and a
few of them were given fiefs in the form of a whole manor: a form of agricultural
estate whose lordship was formerly held only by nobles. This allowed
these knights to see themselves as territorial lords, encouraging them
to adopt the fine manners and clothing previously peculiar to nobles.
It seems to have become customary for those whose fathers wished
them to be trained as knights to be sent between the ages of 10 and 14 to
the court of a lord of higher status, where they spent about seven years as
apprentices, studying with a group of youths of roughly their own age. By