Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

ut by a continuous decline in the use of knightly methods of fighting, in
the holding of tournaments at which those methods could be practiced and
displayed, in the use of body armor, and in the practice of dubbing the eldest
sons of barons and princes when they came of age. The last tournaments
in Britain were held at the end of the reign of James I around 1625,
but in some parts of Germany they continued to about 1715.
By about 1648, when the Thirty Years’ War came to an end and the
English Civil War was about to begin, knighthood had been detached entirely
from its military roots, and had been converted into a purely honorific
noble dignity. In most continental kingdoms, this dignity was assumed by
the sons of knights at their majority, while in the British Isles it was conferred
by the king alone as a form of honor granted in recognition of some
special services rendered to him or the state. In the British kingdoms, the
traditional status of knight bachelor has continued to be conferred by the
simplified rite of dubbing to the present day, but in all continental kingdoms
the rite was restricted by about 1600 to those who were admitted to one of
the royal orders of knighthood. These orders remained few, small, and elite
until 1693, when Louis XIV of France founded the first of the knightly orders
designed to reward large numbers of military officers for their services:
the Order of St. Louis. The eighteenth century saw the appearance of many
more orders of both military and civil merit, and the nineteenth century saw
the creation of at least one and often three or more such orders in virtually
every country in the world. Today, these orders are the principal bearers of
the traditions of knighthood, though it is only in the older monarchical orders
like the Garter, the Thistle, and the Golden Fleece that the traditions of
chivalry are maintained even in a vestigial form.
D’A. Jonathan D. Boulton
See also Chivalry; Europe; Heralds; Orders of Knighthood, Religious;
Orders of Knighthood, Secular; Religion and Spiritual Development:
Ancient Mediterranean and Medieval West; Swordsmanship, European
Medieval
References
Anglo, Sydney, ed. 1990. Chivalry in the Renaissance. Woodbridge, Suffolk,
UK: Boydell Press.
Barber, Richard. 1995. The Knight and Chivalry. 2d ed. Woodbridge,
Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press.
Coss, Peter. 1996. The Knight in Medieval England, 1000–1400.
Conshohocken, PA: Combined.
Flori, Jean. 1983. 1986. L’essor de la chevalerie, XIe–XIIe siècles (The Rise
of Chivalry, Eleventh to Twelfth Centuries). Geneva: Droz.
———. L’idéologie du glaive: préhistoire de la chevalerie (The Ideology of
the Sword: The Prehistory of Chivalry). Geneva: Droz.
Keen, Maurice. 1984. Chivalry. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scaglione, Aldo. 1991. Knights at Court. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
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