Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

398 Orders of Knighthood, Secular
tinctive color and increasingly distinctive shape made of textile and applied
as a plaque to the left breast of the mantle, and later to the surcoat as well.
Two other orders dedicated to St. George (the Hungarian confraternal Order
of St. George and the Order of the Garter) used a textile shield of the
arms of their patron as a badge, though in neither case the primary one.
The other founders all adopted badges of markedly different forms
and materials. Some of these badges resembled the badges common among
pilgrims, confraternities, and bodies of retainers in taking the form of a
jewel worn as a brooch or suspended from a simple chain about the neck,
while others took the more distinctive form of a band or belt worn
wrapped around some part of the body, including the neck (the Collar).
Still others resembled the badge of the Collar in being worn around the
neck but took the very distinct form of a linked collar with or without a
pendant jewel in the fashion of most of the pseudo-orders from the 1390s.
The type of insignia that ultimately prevailed was the collar made up of
links in the form of distinct badges or symbols and having a pendant jewel
that was either the principal badge of the order or a symbol or effigy of the
order’s patron saint, or both. The latter type of insignia was finally combined
with the eight-pointed cross of the Order of St. John in the badge of
the Holy Spirit of France in 1578, and that served as the model for all
badges from 1693.
The most important models for the monarchical orders after the devotional
confraternities, however, were the fictional companies of knights
described in the Arthurian cycle of romances: principally the Round Table
Company of King Arthur himself; the Company of the Frank Palace (Franc
Palais) of his pre-Christian ancestor, Perceforest; and the company of
knights established by Joseph of Arimathea to guard the Holy Grail. To
these were later added (by the Valois dukes of Burgundy) the mythical company
of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason on his quest for the Golden
Fleece of Colchis, and (by Louis XI of France) the company of loyal angels
who fought with the Archangel Michael to drive Lucifer and his rebel angels
from Heaven.
Of these, the company of the Round Table was surely the most important,
especially as the two other Arthurian companies were merely literary
doublets of it. Indeed, like Charlemagne himself and Godefroi de
Bouillon, hero of the First Crusade and baron of the Holy Sepulchre, only
Arthur was regarded throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as
one of the three Christian members of that glorious company of preeminent
heroes referred to as the Nine Worthies (Neuf Preux in French). Although
only Edward III of England (who claimed to be Arthur’s heir, and identified
his castle of Windsor with the legendary Camelot) explicitly evoked the
Round Table when he proclaimed his intention of establishing a knightly