Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

emony (principally the Knights of the Bath of England and those of St.
Mark of Venice); peregrine pseudo-orders, whose members were knighted
at a place of pilgrimage (principally the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, of
St. Catherine of Mount Sinai, and of the Golden Spur of the Lateran
Palace); and cliental pseudo-orders, whose members were bound by ties of
clientship to the prince who admitted them (notably the Order of the
Broom-Pod of Charles VI of France and the Order of the Porcupine of his
brother Duke Louis of Orléans and his heirs).
All other secular military and noble associations—the great majority—were
true societies endowed with some sort of corporate constitution.
The earliest known were founded in the twelfth century, before knighthood
had come to be bound to nobility, and probably took the constitutional
form of the lay devotional confraternity. Certainly that was the most common
form taken by the later societies whose statutes are known to us, but
not all such societies took a fully or even a partly confraternal form. As the
non-confraternal societies conformed to no single alternative model, all
military and noble societies may usefully be classified as either confraternal
or non-confraternal in their organization.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, confraternities—still numerous in some
parts of the Catholic world—were in effect lay equivalents to religious orders,
and included among them the various “third orders” attached to the
greater religious orders of the age, including the Hospitallers of St. John.
Confraternities (usually bearing a title equivalent to the Latin societas [society,
company] or fraternitas [fraternity, brotherhood]) were so common
throughout Latin Christendom from the late twelfth to the eighteenth centuries
that it is thought that by the late fourteenth century almost every
adult belonged to at least one. Societies of this sort were used to organize
people of all ranks and orders of society to carry out any of a variety of social
functions, from providing insurance for funerals, supporting widows
and orphans, and ransoming of captives to regulating the standards of a
craft, profession, or trade. The most important of them were the merchant
guilds that from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries dominated both the
economic and the political life of the majority of towns in much of Latin
Christendom. However, the category included thousands of lesser guilds,
including many made up of archers, crossbowmen, and other types of soldiers
attached to a particular city or princely household.
Despite their varied purposes, however, such societies shared a common
set of seven basic characteristics. These included a set of written
statutes formally adopted by the founding members and modified from
time to time by some process of amendment; dedication to a patron saint
associated with the principal activity of the society or the place in which it
was based; the establishment of a chapel dedicated to the saint and staffed
Orders of Knighthood, Secular 387