Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

278 Knights
their own troop and fought under the banner of a banneret. Simple knights
bachelor wore the same gold spurs as bannerets, but displayed their personal
arms on their lances on a triangular pennon; squires came to be distinguished
by silver spurs, and by the display of their arms on a smaller triangular
flag called a pennoncelle. By 1300, a distinct chivalric hierarchy of
three ranks emerged; a fourth (“gentleman,” whose members were of noble
birth but too poor to fight in a knightly fashion) was added around
1400. The greatest knights—the kings and princes whom the bannerets
themselves served—effectively formed a higher rank of super-bannerets. Although
all such men now conferred knighthood on all of their sons in particularly
splendid ceremonies, they and their sons rarely used the knightly
title themselves before the fifteenth century, when they employed it as
members of distinct orders of knights.
High Classic Knighthood (1250/1300–1430/50)
As its name suggests, in the high classic phase of knighthood the status possessed
all of its classic characteristics—including restriction to men of noble
rank—and remained at the height of its cultural, if not its military, importance.
A number of different forms of infantry weapon—the halberd,
pike, and longbow—were introduced that proved capable of stopping the
massed charge of armored knights, thus challenging their long-established
dominance of the battlefield. Neither these weapons, however, nor the potentially
more dangerous ones based on the gunpowder introduced into
Latin society around 1330 were in wide enough use to be a real threat to
knighthood until the next phase, beginning around 1430. High classic
knights therefore continued to be thought of as elite mounted warriors, and
knights continued throughout the period to fight as such, not only in tournaments
or jousts but in battles, and to enjoy a distinctive pay scale in most
armies. Finally, until the end of the phase it is likely that the traditional
knighting ritual continued to be used on particularly formal occasions.
Knights themselves reacted to the threat of the new offensive weapons
that grew steadily in this phase by adopting ever more effective forms of armor.
Consequently, the high classic phase saw the complete transformation
of the armor required for knighthood from the type in which the body was
protected by iron mail and the head alone by a helmet of iron plates, to a
harness of fully articulated steel plates covering head and body alike. This
transformation, begun around 1225, was completed around 1410. The development
of plate armor also required a series of modifications in the
knightly sword, which from 950 to 1270 had retained the long, flat blade
of its Viking predecessor (Oakeshott Type X), with parallel edges designed
primarily for slashing (Oakeshott Types XI–XIII), but between that date
and about 1290 was given a blade of an increasingly tapered outline