itself came he stood on his native earth to receive the onslaught
of her enemies.”[1] In this perhaps we may behold one of the
most ancient of British insular prejudices, for on the Continent
the importance of cavalry in warfare was already abundantly
understood. It was by means of their horsemen that the
Austrasian Franks established their superiority over their neighbours,
and in time created the Western Empire anew, while from
the word caballarius, which occurs in the Capitularies in the reign
of Charlemagne, came the words for knight in all the Romance
languages.[2] In Germany the chevalier was called Ritter, but
neither rider nor chevalier prevailed against knight in England.
And it was long after knighthood had acquired its present meaning
with us that chivalry was incorporated into our language. It
may be remarked too in passing that in official Latin, not only
in England but all over Europe, the word miles held its own
against both eques and caballarius.
Concerning the origin of knighthood or chivalry as it existed in the middle ages—implying as it did a formal assumption of and initiation into the profession of arms—nothing beyond more or less probable conjecture is possible. Origin of Medieval Knighthood. The medieval knights had nothing to do in the way of derivation with the “equites” of Rome, the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, or the Paladins of Charlemagne. But there are grounds for believing that some of the rudiments of chivalry are to be detected in early Teutonic customs, and that they may have made some advance among the Franks of Gaul. We know from Tacitus that the German tribes in his day were wont to celebrate the admission of their young men into the ranks of their warriors with much circumstance and ceremony. The people of the district to which the candidate belonged were called together; his qualifications for the privileges about to be conferred upon him were inquired into; and, if he were deemed fitted and worthy to receive them, his chief, his father, or one of his near kinsmen presented him with a shield and a lance. Again, among the Franks we find Charlemagne girding his son Louis the Pious, and Louis the Pious girding his son Charles the Bald with the sword, when they arrived at manhood.[3] It seems certain here that some ceremony was observed which was deemed worthy of record not for its novelty, but as a thing of recognized importance. It does not follow that a similar ceremony extended to personages less exalted than the sons of kings and emperors. But if it did we must naturally suppose that it applied in the first instance to the mounted warriors who formed the most formidable portion of the warlike array of the Franks. It was among the Franks indeed, and possibly through their experiences in war with the Saracens, that cavalry first acquired the pre-eminent place which it long maintained in every European country. In early society, where the army is not a paid force but the armed nation, the cavalry must necessarily consist of the noble and wealthy, and cavalry and chivalry, as Freeman observes,[4] will be the same. Since then we discover in the Capitularies of Charlemagne actual mention of “caballarii” as a class of warriors, it may reasonably be concluded that formal investiture with arms applied to the “caballarii” if it was a usage extending beyond the sovereign and his heir-apparent. “But,” as Hallam says, “he who fought on horseback and had been invested with peculiar arms in a solemn manner wanted nothing more to render him a knight;” and so he concludes, in view of the verbal identity of “chevalier” and “caballarius,” that “we may refer chivalry in a general sense to the age of Charlemagne.”[5] Yet, if the “caballarii” of the Capitularies are really the precursors of the later knights, it remains a difficulty that the Latin name for a knight is “miles,” although “caballarius” became in various forms the vernacular designation.
Before it was known that the chronicle ascribed to Ingulf of Croyland is really a fiction of the 13th or 14th century, the knighting of Heward or Hereward by Brand, abbot of Burgh (now Peterborough), was accepted from Selden to Hallam as Knighthood in England. an historical fact, and knighthood was supposed, not only to have been known among the Anglo-Saxons, but to have had a distinctively religious character which was contemned by the Norman invaders. The genuine evidence at our command altogether fails to support this view. When William of Malmesbury describes the knighting of Athelstan by his grandfather Alfred the Great, that is, his investiture “with a purple garment set with gems and a Saxon sword with a golden sheath,” there is no hint of any religious observance. In spite of the silence of our records, Dr Stubbs thinks that kings so well acquainted with foreign usages as Ethelred, Canute and Edward the Confessor could hardly have failed to introduce into England the institution of chivalry then springing up in every country of Europe; and he is supported in this opinion by the circumstance that it is nowhere mentioned as a Norman innovation. Yet the fact that Harold received knighthood from William of Normandy makes it clear either that Harold was not yet a knight, which in the case of so tried a warrior would imply that “dubbing to knighthood” was not yet known in England even under Edward the Confessor, or, as Freeman thinks, that in the middle of the 11th century the custom had grown in Normandy into “something of a more special meaning” than it bore in England.
Regarded as a method of military organization, the feudal system of tenures was always far better adapted to the purposes of defensive than of offensive warfare. Against invasion it furnished a permanent provision both in men-at-arms and strongholds; nor was it unsuited for the campaigns of neighbouring counts and barons which lasted for only a few weeks, and extended over only a few leagues. But when kings and kingdoms were in conflict, and distant and prolonged expeditions became necessary, it was speedily discovered that the unassisted resources of feudalism were altogether inadequate. It became therefore the manifest interest of both parties that personal services should be commuted into pecuniary payments. Then there grew up all over Europe a system of fining the knights who failed to respond to the sovereign’s call or to stay their full time in the field; and in England this fine developed, from the reign of Henry II. to that of Edward II., into a regular war-tax called escuage or scutage (q.v.). In this way funds for war were placed at the free disposal of sovereigns, and, although the feudatories and their retainers still formed the most considerable portion of their armies, the conditions under which they served were altogether changed. Their military service was now far more the result of special agreement. In the reign of Edward I., whose warlike enterprises after he was king were confined within the four seas, this alteration does not seem to have proceeded very far, and Scotland and Wales were subjugated by what was in the main, if not exclusively, a feudal militia raised as of old by writ to the earls and barons and the sheriffs.[6] But the armies of Edward III., Henry V. and Henry VI. during the century of intermittent warfare between England and France were recruited and sustained to a very great extent on the principle of contract.[7] On the Continent the systematic employment of mercenaries was both an early and a common practice.
Besides consideration for the mutual convenience of sovereigns and their feudatories, there were other causes which materially contributed towards bringing about those changes in the military system of Europe which were finally The Crusades. accomplished in the 13th and 14th centuries. During the Crusades vast armies were set on foot in which feudal rights
- ↑ Comparative Politics, p. 74.
- ↑ Baluze, Capitularia Regum Francorum, ii. 794, 1069.
- ↑ Du Cange, Gloss., s.v. “Arma.”
- ↑ Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 73.
- ↑ Hallam, Middle Ages, iii. 392.
- ↑ Stubbs, Const. Hist. ii. 278; also compare Grosse, Military Antiquities, i. 65 seq.
- ↑ There has been a general tendency to ignore the extent to which the armies of Edward III. were raised by compulsory levies even after the system of raising troops by free contract had begun. Luce (ch. vi.) points out how much England relied at this time on what would now be called conscription: and his remarks are entirely borne out by the Norwich documents published by Mr W. Hudson (Norf, and Norwich Archaeological Soc. xiv. 263 sqq.), by a Lynn corporation document of 18th Edw. III. (Hist. MSS. Commission Report XI. Appendix pt. iii. p. 189), and by Smyth’s Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 312, 319, 320.
