The easiest way to become a knight was to be the son of a noble. At age 7, the sons were taken to a different castle to be trained as a page. They spent their time becoming strong, riding horses, and mastering the use of weapons. They learned how to read, write and speak Latin and French. They also learned about dancing. At the age of 16, the page became a squire whose duty was to work for a knight. The squire’s job was to dress the knight, serve the knights meals, tend to their horses, and clean their weapons. They could practice wearing armor and using weapons. Once the squire turned the age of 20 and was considered worthy, they would have to go through a ceremony called ‘dubbing’. During the ceremony, the knight-to-be would kneel in front of a leading lord and be touched on each shoulder with a sword, and proclaimed a knight.
Chivalry was taken very seriously, and it was a very subjective thing. What chivalry was, was different depending on who you were. One lord would have a different version from another, and a knight would have a different version from a clergy. Chivalry is the qualities that essentially make a knight good at his job. What the individual felt made a knight good at his job was what chivalry meant to them. So that meant showing no mercy to the infidel or anyone that dared give them the slightest offense. But if that also meant always showing mercy and fair play and true righteous combat, that would be chivalry to someone else, and those two concepts directly contradict each other. So, people nowadays generally raise the more idyllic noble form of chivalry code because that was what was romanticized in literature. In literature, they didn’t describe chivalry; they described how knights felt knights should behave, not what knights were like. Knights in most cases, were pragmatists over idealists, and they did what their lord ordered and wanted them to do to find success.
Catapults were not common on the medieval battlefield, especially sieges. So many images show knights in war with catapults, but that’s wrong. Catapults were a very ineffective weapon to be used, especially in sieges.
When a siege happened, a parlay would take place between the besiegers and the defenders. The besiegers would generally say something like this, “Surrender right now and let us take over the castle and if you do, then we will spare everyone’s life, not a single life will be lost, and you will be free to go on your way”, or be taken into captivity one or the other generally. The defenders would have the option to surrender or try to defend, but then an ultimatum would be stated, and the besiegers would say something like, “If you do not surrender now, we are going to take over your castle, and when we do, we will kill every single one of you”. The problem is if you want that threat to have any weight at all for the next time you besiege someone, you need to follow through with it. If you don’t follow through with it, the defenders know that you’re not going to kill them, so they’re going to fight till the last man standing or until you take the castle, meaning they are going to kill as many of you as possible. So, when besiegers took a city or a castle, they killed and pillaged, but it was often seen on their side as a form of retaliation for the lives they were forced to lose because the others didn’t surrender. So, because of that taking over their castle was what they considered punishment for the lives they were going to lose. The next time they besiege a castle they have a lot more weight behind the statement, “If you don’t surrender, we are going to kill you”. Many sieges ended with the defenders just surrendering or winning, so besieging was a big gamble. There are cases where besieges stormed castles and then let the people go free or took them into captivity without slaughtering everyone.
The Stirrup and the Role of Knights
Many people believe the stirrup enabled mounted warriors to charge at the enemy effectively. But, it had very little effect in the development of impact warfare on mounted charges. People say a stirrup enables you to effectively brace your body weight on the horse to transfer more force. We know this isn’t true because when people are jousting, they get knocked back, their legs fly up, and the stirrup is not used to brace their weight or hold them in their saddle.
Another thing that debunks the stirrup misconception is that mounted charges can be done without stirrups very effectively. A guy named Richard Alvarez did a whole study on this and recreated it. He does full-blown mounted charges with the stirrup and even without a saddle. We even have the mounted horseman who existed before the medieval period and did mount charges with spears in hand, and they were called cataphract. Stirrups were really used for assisting in getting up the horse. Also, pushing yourself up on the saddle and keeping balance, not necessarily for mounted charges. Firearms and crossbows made knights obsolete. I was watching a YouTube video on knights, and the man said that the rise of firearms and crossbows made the role of knights more obsolete by the end of the 15th century. I thought this was interesting and decided to do further research on it. I found that that statement was wrong as knights were still around and employed during the time of crossbows for a very long period.
But I found that there was a weapon that had a larger effect on the decline of knights on the battlefield: the bow. It wasn’t really because of the effectiveness of the bow. It was the employment of a state-run military because these were more common soldiers being raised and run by King Henry V that could be so effective, and fielding a knight was a much more costly and complicated thing. They told common peasants to train with a bow once a week as a new rule in the kingdom. When war came, he would hire them as archers to join their army with no need to be a knight and no need to be paid more, but archers were paid a decent amount of money in the army. They joined an army and had a really effective fighting force, whereas fielding knights was complicated, costly, and way harder to get them to do exactly what you want and when you want. As a result of that, people started saying, “A more organized army weighed with common folk is pretty effective”.
The Enduring Legacy of Knights
Knights never disappeared from the scene of history. They still exist today and even more so when the states like kingdoms, nations, and whatever government systems they have are fielding their own armies generally, especially during the early Renaissance and even up to World War I, commanders or people running these armies were generally knighted so the knights were still there they just weren’t the common foot soldier, but that wasn’t really a military rank but of a side note they would be knighted because knighthood devolved.
Knighthood started off as a military thing. The original word for knight, chevalier, just meant horseman and if you’re a horseman, you’re basically a knight this other social element came in that was very important with it because it was the structure of the medieval period and the use of vassalage as a social system and then you have the second component which is a social kind of honorific that was attached to the military component which is where you get the classical knight but the military component left and the thing the knight originally was left and knighthood even to this day remained social honorific but it still certainly stayed around.
The classical medieval knighted soldier-warrior disappeared, but you can still kind of say it still existed all the way until about WW1, but the concept of knighthood and the social honorific, it evolved, it changed, and it’s still around to this day.