# Faraday rejected knighthood- Why?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 30, 2000, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140 "2000-09-30T14:46:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [September 30, 2000, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/1 "2000-09-30T14:46:21Z")
The below referenced site has a short bio on Michael Faraday, an early electrical pioneer, and says he rejected a knighthood from the Queen. I assume this is one of the highest honors that England can bestow. Why did he reject it? The bio doesn’t say.
[http://www.ece.umd.edu/~taylor/frame4.htm](http://www.ece.umd.edu/~taylor/frame4.htm)
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was born in a village near London. His father was a migrant blacksmith often ill and incapable of providing for his four children. Faraday’s great opportunity came when he was offered a ticket to attend chemical lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy in London. Faraday went and sent a bound copy of his notes to Davy asking for employment. Faraday began as Davy’s laboratory assistant. It has been said that Faraday was Davy’s greatest discovery. Faraday became the greatest experimentalist in electricity and magnetism of the 19th century. He produced an apparatus that was the first electric motor and in 1831 he succeeded in showing that a magnet could induce electricity. Queen Victoria rewarded his lifetime of achievement by granting him the use of a house at Hampton Court and a knighthood. Faraday accepted the cottage but rejected the knighthood
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### Author:  [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)
#### Post date: [September 30, 2000, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/2 "2000-09-30T22:43:44Z")
Prior to this century a knight was legally responsible for supplying the Crown with an armed man on horseback with retainers if the Crown should request it. Or the funds needed to support such a fighter.
Being a knight was a very expensive position, and not just an honorary title. They were taxed at a higher rate than commoners. Let me find out when it became legal for a man to decline knighthood. That used to be a popular ploy when the Crown needed some more mad money…
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### Author:  [@Zenster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zenster)
#### Post date: [September 30, 2000, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/3 "2000-09-30T23:02:09Z")
I guess he rejected the offer because he didn’t get much of a _charge_ out of it.
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### Author:  [@omni-not](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/omni-not)
#### Post date: [September 30, 2000, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/4 "2000-09-30T23:59:07Z")
> [@](#):
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> More and more, Faraday began to sink into senility. Queen Victoria rewarded his lifetime of devotion to science by granting him the use of a house at Hampton Court and even offered him the honour of a knighthood. Faraday gratefully accepted the cottage but rejected the knighthood; he would, he said, remain plain Mr. Faraday to the end. He died in 1867 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, leaving as his monument a new conception of physical reality.
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2000, 11:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/5 "2000-10-02T11:24:00Z")
By the nineteenth century there was no financial disadvantage in being a knight. The feudal method of raising armies had been abandoned centuries before. The last time that fines had been imposed on those gentlemen who had failed to apply for a knighthood had been in the 1630s. By Victoria’s reign a knighthood had become what is remains, a title awarded as a honour for public service.
I suspect that Faraday’s religious beliefs are a more likely explanation. He was devout member of the Sandemanians, a Protestant sect with particularly strict beliefs. Those beliefs may well have included a refusal to recognise worldly titles.
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### Author:  [@radan2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/radan2)
#### Post date: [October 2, 2000, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/6 "2000-10-02T22:18:37Z")
One is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s reply to Lord Chesterfield, “(Your patronage), had it been timely, would have been welcome.” By the time the knighthood was offered, any benefit Faraday might have received from it was unnecessary, as he already was world famous. In effect, he would add luster to the order, not it to him.
One is reminded also of the Nobel Prize for Peace. It often seems, when you look at the winners, as if those who have worked the hardest for the solution of specific international problems that might lead to war have been deliberately left off.
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### Author:  [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2000, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/7 "2000-10-03T01:23:34Z")
_Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology_ seems to support the religious theory. Although Asimov does not specifically say that he rejected the knighthood for religious reasons, he does say that “Faraday was an extremely religious man who, after his marriage in 1821, joined his wife’s church, the splinter sect of Sandemanians, a sect that no longer exists. This sect eschewed worldly vanity, and Faraday accepted the dozens and dozens of honors, medals, degrees, and miscellaneous embroidery with polite distaste.” Of the knighthood, Asimov reports “he declined an offer of knighthood. He was intent on being plain Michael Faraday and on loving only science.” He also reports of an incident in which Faraday was invited to a Sunday dinner with Queen Victoria; after “an agonizing period of uncertainity” he decided it was his duty to obey the queen, for which his congregation excommunicated him until he repented and underwent “considerable penance”.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2000, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/8 "2000-10-03T02:40:05Z")
I believe the feudal obligations of knights were abolished by an act of Parliament in the Restoration perior (around 1660-1670). Don’t have the cite here at home - will check at work tomorrow to see if I can nail it down.
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2000, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/9 "2000-10-03T16:23:11Z")
The date you want is 1660, but what you’re thinking of is the abolition of feudal tenures, which is not quite the same thing.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2000, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/10 "2000-10-04T02:31:22Z")
APB, but wasn’t the abolition of tenures, specifically knight-tenure, what eliminated any obligations from the title of knight? I thought that once the knight tenure was converted to socage, there was no longer any feudal obligation on the knight, and the title became purely an honour?
At any event, here’s one summary of the act in question:
> [@](#):
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> The _Statute of Tenures,_ 12 Chas. II (1660), c. 24, completed the remodelling of English land law at the end of the feudal era by formally abolishing the doctrine of tenures. Its enactment when the Monarchy was restored after the Civil War ensured the gentry that the incidents of tenure would not be revived once again by the Crown. Simpson [_An Introduction to the History of Land Law,_ Oxford: 1961, pp. 22-23] describes the statute in these terms:
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> > This ill-drafted and obscure Act seems to have been intended to convert all tenures by knight service, sergeanty, and frankalmoign into free and common socage - that is to say, socage which was subject to no services and which was free from customary peculiarities.
(Source: Law Reform Commission of Saskatchewan, “The Status of English Statute Law in Saskatchewan,” 1990, at p. 62)
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### Author:  [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2000, 8:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/faraday-rejected-knighthood-why/35140/11 "2000-10-06T08:52:32Z")
The tenures which were abolished were ones which had originally been related to knighthood, but by the seventeenth century they had long become simply another form of land ownership.