Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

274 Knights
acquire dominions and fiefs had been made hereditary within the nobility—though
knighthood itself could not be inherited. Indeed, as the expense
of arms and armor increased steadily, knighthood was increasingly
restricted to men who had inherited or been granted sufficient amounts of
manorial land that they could afford to serve with the equipment, mounts,
and military assistants deemed necessary for that increasingly exalted military
status. Youths of knightly birth who could not afford these necessities
were obliged to postpone dubbing until they had adequate income.
In the meantime, the landed ignoble knights who could afford to do
so for themselves and their eldest sons had sought to elevate themselves
fully into the nobility—whose poorest members were by this time poorer
than the former. From about 1100, ignoble knights who were lords of
manors adopted the attitudes and lifestyle of lesser nobles. Central to these
were a disdain both for manual labor and trade and for those who gained
their living from them; a high respect for distinguished ancestry, wealth,
and honor; and a belief that honorableness should be claimed at all times
by a conspicuous display of superior taste and wealth in housing, furnishings,
clothing, and servants, paid for with sums up to or even beyond the
limits of one’s income.
From about 1180, landed knights had further assumed, to the extent
feasible for them, the formal attributes of the classic lordly nobility—many
of which were crystallizing in the same period. Since noble knights had long
been in the habit of assuming after dubbing the title “knight” or its local
equivalent, the formal assimilation of the landed ignoble knights to the nobility
was complete, and “knight” was thereafter treated in social contexts
as a grade of the noble hierarchy below that of baron, castellan, or the
equivalent. At the same time, most noble and self-ennobling knights
adopted (though more slowly and less thoroughly) the ideology and mythology
that had come in the same period to be attached to nobility and more
particularly to noble knighthood. The romances of the Arthurian cycle—
created by the Champenois cleric Chrétien de Troyes between 1165 and
1190 from (1) Robert Wace’s pseudohistorical material (including such details
as the royal society of the Round Table), (2) the marvels of the Welsh
and Breton myths, (3) the form of the classical romance or adventure/love
story, and (4) the amorous ideology of fin’ amors (courtly love) of the
Provençal songs—laid out the complex new ideology for noble knights and
provided models for knightly behavior in various situations. In addition, the
romances of Arthur presented a new quasi-historical mythology whose
characters and stories would by 1225 join the legends of the Old Testament;
of Greek, Roman, and Germanic antiquity; and of the time of Charlemagne.
Although there was never complete agreement about the full set of attributes
of the chivalrous lay knight, the following were highly desirable.