Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

knight’s personal-lineal arms, and the latter might also be displayed in
some fashion on his surcoat, which was now usually brightly colored
rather than white. The arms were normally displayed on the knight’s lanceflag
and on the trappings of his horse, making him a much more splendid
figure than ever before. The noble appearance of the knight was eventually
topped off by the crest set atop the helm over a protective cloth later called
a mantling or lambrequin, but crests were rare outside of Germany before
the following phase.
This subphase also saw the first steps in the direction of the replacement
of the traditional mail armor with an armor of curved plates. Around
the beginning of the phase, continental knights began to wear a poncholike
“coat-of-plates” over their mail hauberk, and knights everywhere began
to cover their thighs with quilted tubes and slightly later to protect
their knees with small round plates called poleyns. These and other forms
of reinforcement, made either of iron or of such materials as whalebone
and boiled leather, no doubt contributed to a rise in the cost of knightly
equipment, as did the introduction of armor for the horse around 1250.
This splendid new form of knighthood was highly valued by contemporary
rulers and nobles, and admission to it came to be generally restricted
(by 1250 and 1300) to the descendants of knights. In the same period,
all surviving knights came to be accepted as noblemen, and legitimate
descent in the male line from knights came in most regions to constitute the
effective definition of nobility.
At the same time, the growing cost of the ceremony and the armor required
for knighthood discouraged a growing proportion of the sons of
knights from assuming knighthood themselves. Thus, by the end of the
phase the great majority of lay noblemen remained undubbed for life and
set after their names in place of a title equivalent to knight one equivalent
to squire, a title indicative of a rank just below knight. The more fortunate
among the professional squires of nonknightly birth were simultaneously incorporated
into the new noble squirage thus created, which for a century
constituted the lowest substratum of the nobility. Many squires continued
to serve in the traditional fashion as heavy cavalrymen and seem to have
been distinguished from knights in the line of battle primarily by the relative
poverty and dearth of their equipment. They thus stood between the knights
and the sergeants-at-arms in the military as well as in the social hierarchy.
A formal distinction simultaneously emerged among those nobles who
did undertake knighthood: the distinction between a higher grade called
knights banneret (in French, chevalier banneret; in German, banerhêrre),
who were rich enough to lead a troop of lesser nobles under their square
armorial banner as if they were barons, and a lower grade of simple knights
bachelor (in French, chevalier bachelier), who were not rich enough to have
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