The Season of the Witch was on TV last night. In it one of the knights, Behman, played by Nicolas Cage, knights the squire, Kay, in the presence of another knight, Felson, and a priest, Debelzaq. Unfortunately Behman, Felson, and Debelzaq die soon thereafter but Kay survives. In the Middle Ages, how would Kay assert his knighthood to the outside world? Would his superiors or knightly order hear his tale and accept his word, or would he be re-squired to another knight?
So many puns to make here.
I know little about the formalities of chivalry etc., but without a written proclamation or testimonial, and with no witness, it seems unlikely that the knighting would be believed by any peer or superior. Showing up at one’s own court, or any court, and declaring oneself a knight would at best be questionable and could end up in a series of challenge duels to prove the claim.
I’d say he’s pretty much bound to another squireship.
Are knights even allowed to make field promotions? Generally, I thought there was a whole ceremony involved, usually performed by the liege lord.
I think originally, you could be knighted by another knight, but over time, I think it became more of a social rank rather than a recognition of military status. So being “Sir Knucklehead” meant that you were effectively a minor noble and had some degree of lands and wealth, or at least controlled it in the name of some other lord.
I have no idea what the actual knightly credentials were though.
I’m not a medievalist but I’m married to one.
We live in a very “credentialed” age. We have drivers licenses and birth certificates and diplomas and lots of institutional machinery that enforces the significance of these credentials.
In the middle ages certification was a function of relationships. You weren’t a knight because you had a piece of paper saying you were a knight. You were a knight because everyone around you knew you were a knight. If there was a ceremony it was to show people that you were a knight now so they knew to start treating you like one. If you went someplace where they didn’t know you, you brought with letters of introduction to certify you were who you said you were.
Chivalrous orders operated a lot like organized crime syndicates. You’re a gangster because all your buddies are gangsters and you all know each other. There’s a hierarchy of higher level gangsters that everyone follows. If a young gangster is ruthless and effective maybe he’ll find a high-level patron who’ll help him rise. Or maybe he won’t. It’s all informal soft power relationships.
In the scenario you describe where all of Kay’s friends are killed he certainly won’t be accepted as a knight anywhere. He probably won’t even be taken on as a squire.
If it’s clearly well known he was a squire, then it could well be accepted his Knight dubbed him.
Unable to prove his knighthood, he will remain in his day job.
Wasn’t this an age of chivalry and honor? So wouldn’t they assume that the squire wouldn’t be lying?
If a knight falls in the forest and nobody else hears it, does he make a sound?
Actually, I thought a knight had to be made by some very higher up mucky-mucks. if a really important knight like Nicholas Cage is wandering around with only Friar Tuck for a witness, well then there’s not much credibility to his actions when he promotes the squire.
As Hamster King essentially says, if there’s no society around to witness it, then it didn’t happen. Chivalry AFAIK is a construct of late medieval poets. King John steals the crown from Richard while he’s dicking the men in the Holy Land, then tries to steal his ransom, and eventually pissed of his barons so much they ganged up on him to create the Magna Carta; they both learned from the best, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Richard III kills his nephews. Knights are skewered wholesale at Agincourt, Edward Ii was deposed by his wife and his son, then killed supposedly in an interesting way. William the Bastard became William the Conqueror by disputing the inheritance of the English crown.
Basically, nastiness, treachery, deceit, and greed were the hallmarks of that time like every other time. Someone wandering in off the battlefield after their master and any witness(es) were conveniently dead would probably be better off not trying to claim that they had been knighted.
Besides, Richard II for example met with Wat Tyler under truce during the rebellion and killed him, on the excuse that he was under no obligation to keep his word to a commoner. I think any suggestion that a word meant something only applied to recognized nobility.
Good points. It’s natural, I think, to look back and think that ranks and titles worked similarly to the way they do today, in that there are organized bodies with relatively clear procedures on how one obtains (or loses) a title, and there are formal ways to appeal rulings that you think are wrong. Yes, there are allegations sometimes that those boards are not 100% unbiased - but it’s not a pure popularity contest where the DMV gives you a driver’s license, the Board of Medicine grants you a medical license, or the Department of the Navy promotes you to Captain if and only if the people on the board personally approve of you.
Also remember that there weren’t really any “background checks” available back then, at least in any way remotely resembling what you can get now. You could escape from prison, rob a rich traveler, and set yourself up as a banker in a new town and stand a good chance of getting away with it for a long time.
It goes both ways, though. Someone who had the accoutrements of a knight, who acted as if they were a knight, and who could successfully assert the privileges of a knight, was a knight for all intents and purposes. Not necessarily an easy path, but many a noble house began with a local thug who managed to brute-force others to accept them as they wished to be seen.
Exactly.
If you step up and say, “I’m a knight”, what matters is if the other knights around you agree to act as if you are a knight. If one of them says, “No you’re not”, then the two of you are going to have to come to an agreement, one way or another. If he tells you that you’re not a knight, and nobody backs you up, and you’re not prepared to knock his teeth in, then you’re not a knight. If everyone tells him to shut up, then you are. If everyone looks at each other, and you step up and bash his teeth in, and ask him if he thinks you’re a knight now, and now he says yes, then you are.
This is a very minor plot point in one of A Song of Ice and Fire books. A former mercenary claims he was knighted by a minor knight that nobody’s heard about and is now conveniently dead. He might’ve made it up but ultimately it is accepted at face value because he has a use.
However, this is relatively misleading. In England, for example, the number of actual noble families was quite small - I seem to recall the number was about 50. In the days before literacy was common, a lot of detail was simply memorized. People knew and remembered details because they had no choice. No time traveller is going to pop up and claim to be the fourth son of some random noble family - odds are there is someone who knows the details of that family.
Modern society, where anonymity is only a door away, nobody knows who lives in the next apartment, and you don’t recognize 90% of the inhabitants of your building, five blocks from home nobody knows who you are or where you came from? We have a warped idea of privacy and anonymity. The good old days don’t work like that.
So if GoT is trying to emulate medieval society, it should not be miss this point. Noble society in medieval times was more like a small town, where everyone knew everyone and their business. Even if you came from the neighbouring kingdom, there’s a good chance someone would have heard of you. Certainly, someone travelling in from a neighbour kingdom would be newsworthy. Even a minor knight must have come to the attention of other lesser nobles during his presence, and likely would not be there without a patron or someone to vouch for him.
The idea you could show up, wave a knight license and say “I’m a knight from Podunk” is not realistic.
Small point, but it should be stressed that there was no single body of systems or customs when it came to knights, feudalism, chivalric orders and peerages. The practices in Germany differ immensely from those in France and Britain, for example.
Not so much. A lot of that chivalry was added long after the fact; Europeans of the time were a lot like those of modern times, except that the nobles (including knights) had a lot fewer checks and balances. Even if these stories were true, though, people wouldn’t have been stupid; they would have wanted proof that the squire didn’t kill his knight to get a knighthood or something.
(Granted, in the case of a television show, none of this particularly applies, but somehow I don’t think the OP was asking the plausibility of the plot.)
If I read Pleonast’s post correctly, his statement only applies if you can convince others to give you the privileges of a knight. Your point does not apply to his situation; it’s roughly akin to pointing out, in a theoretical physics question where an explanation involves an implicitly frictionless surface, that there would be friction.
If I read lurkinghorror’s post correctly, the alleged knight was only recognized because it was in the interest of the recognizers to do so (ie, they knew what he was full of, but ignored it).