Knighthood Training

As I noted in an earlier post, when knights first appeared in the eleventh century, they were essentially henchmen on horseback.  But during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, knighthood and nobility gradually fused, as each group wanted to be more like the other.

We know relatively little about how service knights were trained, but we do know quite a bit about the training of noble knights.

Little boys would be taught simple reading and arithmetic by their mothers, along with their sisters, but around the age of six or eight, they would be sent away for knighthood training.  Generally boys were trained in groups, perhaps at the castle of their father's lord (say, a count), or perhaps with an uncle.  Maternal uncles were preferred to paternal uncles, because a paternal uncle was at least a potential rival to one's father, whereas a maternal uncle was not.

Starting with ponies and wooden weapons, they would be trained to ride and to fight.  They would learn to ride at an opponent while carrying a long lance, hoping to knock him off a horse; here they started by aiming a lance at a ring.  They would grow accustomed to wearing armor, such as in the image above.  This scene, from the abbey church of Vézelay, depicts the story of David and Goliath.  David is cutting off the giant's head, and the giant, in long chain mail tunic and helmet with nose-piece, is wearing twelfth-century armor.

At the same time as they were learning to fight, boys would be educated, in reading, some writing, and some theology.  They might practice writing love poems to the wife of the castle's lord.  She probably enjoyed the attention of such adolescents, as long as they kept their proper distance.

(Click here for more on chivalry.)

By their late teens, the boys had finished their training.  They would be formally "knighted" in an elaborate ceremony that involved a tournament and a party that might go on for days.  Religious elements were introduced into the knighting ceremony, in a desperate and not altogether successful effort to suggest that being a knight was fundamentally about something other than killing people.

Young men were often knighted as a group, with comrades who would be their best friends for life.  They were tough and superb fighters; even their enemies were agreed on that.  In the twelfth century, when you really were not supposed to ride around killing people, a lot of new knights headed off on Crusade, or else followed the tournament circuit, while waiting for their fathers to die so they could inherit.

Click here for more on knights' horses.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Medieval Knights

Knights, like castles, first appeared right around the year 1000 in western Europe (they were not found in England until after the 1066 Norman Conquest).

Basically a knight is someone who fights on horseback.  The original, eleventh-century knights were not aristocrats, but rather henchmen on horseback, men who fought on behalf of the lords of the castle.  (Click here for more on knights' horses.)

Fighting on horseback really only became a possibility with the development both of the stirrup, probably in the ninth century, and advances in iron-mining and metallurgy in the tenth century, to make horseshoes affordable.  Without stirrups, one will slide off a horse's back far too easily.  Without horseshoes, a horse's hooves will wear out unless it is kept strictly on grassy surfaces.

Hollywood now portrays all knights in plate armor.  But that kind of armor only developed at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, when warfare was carried out with cannons and pikemen on foot, not cavalry charges, and the heavy plate armor protected people in jousts, mock battles that no longer had anything to do with real warfare.

Twelfth-century knights wore chain mail, generally a long tunic made out of metal rings.  It was heavy and uncomfortable but would stop either a sword or a lance from penetrating.  Their helmets covered the top and sides of the head and had a long nosepiece.  Shields might be round or might be tall and kite-shaped, as in the image below.

These knights were carved on a church and were intended to represent the vices (if one looks closely one can see "…PERBIA" coming in from the left, the second half of the word superbia, meaning pride).  The register above them shows images representing virtues.

Knights of course were proud; the church architects were right.  And the service knights of the eleventh century desperately wanted to be like their aristocratic masters.  Meanwhile, the noble lords of castles admired knights--their ability to fight on horseback, how cool they looked galloping across a field with a lance held high and cape whipping in the wind.

During the course of the twelfth century, nobles began to define themselves militarily, as knights, not just as people marked by great wealth, power, and noble birth.  The knights, if they possibly could, married younger daughters of nobles, giving their children noble blood.  By the thirteenth century, knights and nobles had essentially fused into one group.

(For more on chivalry and knighthood training, click here and here.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more about horses, fighting, knights, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.