Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

William, and St. George of the Pelican) were even limited to men. The remainder
were open noble societies admitting women as well as men, more
concerned with the promotion of Catholic piety and loyalty than of
chivalry among their members. Although most were provided with at least
a chapel, none was given a hall—presumably because only two of them (St.
George of the Pelican and St. Hubert) held annual meetings on their patronal
feast (or at any other time), and neither seems to have provided a
banquet on that occasion. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century,
most of the German orders were maintained for only one or two generations;
only one survived the first outburst of the Reformation in Germany
between 1517 and 1525, and the last of them—a branch of the Brandenburgish
Order—dissolved in 1539.
In the meantime, two more kings had founded orders that were probably
(in the first case) or certainly (in the second case) of the monarchical
type: Christian I von Oldenburg, king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden,
seems to have established the Confraternity of the Virgin Mary (or Order
of the Elephant) at his Swedish coronation in 1457, but it seems to have
been modeled on the German orders and was little more than an ordinary
confraternity of nobles attached to the Danish court. By contrast, when
King Ferrante of peninsular Sicily founded the Order of the Ermine (dedicated
to the archangel St. Michael) as the third such order in his kingdom
in 1465, he took the Garter and the Golden Fleece as his models, while
King Louis XI of France lifted most of the statutes of the Order of St.
Michael, which he founded in 1469, directly from those of the Order of the
Golden Fleece. Of these three, only the last survived past 1523, and thus
joined the English Order of the Garter, the Savoyard Order of the Collar
(renamed the Ordre de l’Annonciade [Annunciated One] after its patroness
the Virgin Mary in 1518), and the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece
as one of the four early monarchical orders destined to survive into the
modern era. By 1520, reforms in the Order of the Collar in 1518 and in the
Order of the Garter itself in 1519 had given all four orders similar constitutions
based on those of the Garter and the Golden Fleece.
The founders of the monarchical orders drew upon all of the institutional
models used by the founders of lay military associations generally,
but drew most heavily on the confraternity, the religious order, the contractual
retinue, and the fictional company. Inevitably, the characteristics of
each of these types had to be modified to combine them effectively. Among
the characteristics of the confraternity that underwent some modification
in the monarchical orders of this period were the maintenance of a chapel
and a chantry priest and the maintenance of some sort of hall to serve as
the headquarters, meeting place, and banqueting room for the members on
feast days. Most confraternities could afford nothing more than a small
Orders of Knighthood, Secular 395