Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

396 Orders of Knighthood, Secular
side-chapel or chantry in the local parish church and a single priest to officiate
there on their behalf, and merely rented a hall for their annual festivities.
The greater guilds, by contrast, and especially those of the merchants,
often established a major chapel in a major church marked with memorials
to their presidents and other leading members, and built their own hall
on a grand scale, often facing on the principal square of their town or city.
The religious orders of knighthood provided themselves with similar facilities
at their convent or seat on an even grander scale. The Arthurian tradition,
for its part, placed a great emphasis on knightly fellowships gathering
in a hall of the royal palace at a great round table, around which were
set the names and heraldic arms of their current members.
The founders of the monarchical orders drew upon these three traditions
with varying degrees of emphasis, but the great majority outside Germany
declared their intention to establish for their order at least one major
church and at least one major hall with attendant buildings, both to be set
close together in a rural palace belonging to the founder and situated within
about a day’s ride of the capital city of his principal dominion. In addition,
they declared that they would staff the principal church of the order with a
whole college of priests, commonly equal in number to the knights, whose
professional lives were to be devoted entirely to the service of the lay members
of the order, living and dead. Thus, the requirements of the confraternal
form were to be realized in the buildings and clerical membership of the
monarchical orders on a grandiose scale not otherwise approached or even
imagined except in the religious orders. Furthermore, most founders of
monarchical orders declared that at least the shield of arms, and often the
crested helmet and banner of the current companions, would be set up in
their functional or their standard iconic form, either in the hall (in the fashion
of the Arthurian knights) or, more commonly (following the example of
the Order of the Garter), over their stalls in the chapel choir, where the companions
were assigned seats in the collegiate churches.
In effect, the companions of most orders were treated as lay canons,
and in a number of orders (including all four of those that survived) they
were paired with clerical canons attached to the order who might sit in the
stalls of the choir just below their own. During the religious services that
formed an important part of their annual convocation, the companions sat
in their stalls wearing their mantles and presented an appearance not very
different from that of the monk-knights of the religious orders during one
of the regular services in which they were bound to participate. Either during
their lifetime or after their death, the companions also were required to
make an heraldic memorial to themselves to set in their stall, rather the way
the leading members of the greater confraternities set their names or arms
on the walls or in the windows of the humbler chapels attached to their so-