Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/124

 112 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. !&amp;gt;ut 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 main lined 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 Mr Freeman observes, 1 will be the same. Since then we discover in the Capitularies of Charlemagne actual mention of &quot; caballarii &quot; as a class of warriors, it may reasonably be concluded that formal investiture with arms applied to the &quot;caballarii,&quot; if it was a usage extending beyond the sovereign and his heir ap parent. &quot; But,&quot; as Hallam says, &quot; he who fought on horseback and had been invested with peculiar arms in a solemn manner wanted nothing more to render him a knight ; &quot; and so he concludes, in view of the verbal identityof &quot;chevalier&quot; and &quot;caballarius,&quot;that &quot;we may refer chivalry in a general sense to the age of Charlemagne.&quot; 2 Yet, if the &quot; caballarii &quot; of the Capitularies are really the precursors of the later knights, it remains a difficulty that the Latin name for a knight is &quot;miles,&quot; although &quot; cabal- larius &quot; became in various forms the vernacular designation. Knight- Before it was known that the chronicle ascribed to Ingulf hood in O f Croyland is really a fiction of the 13th or 14th century, England. ^ knighting of He ward or Here ward by Brand, abbot of Burgh (now Peterborough), was accepted from Selden to Hallam as 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 Athel- stan by his grandfather Alfred the Great, that is, his investiture &quot; with a purple garment set with gems and a Saxon sword with a golden sheath,&quot; 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 3 makes it clear either that Harold was not yet a knight, which in the case of so tried a warrior would imply that &quot;dubbing to knighthood&quot; was not yet known in England even under Edward the Confessor, or, as Mr Freeman thinks, that in the middle of the llth century the custom had grown in Normandy into &quot; some thing of a more special meaning &quot; than it bore in England. William of Normandy was knighted by his overlord Henry I. of France, and of the Conqueror s sons he himself, as we have already seen, knighted Henry Beauclerc, 4 while William Rufus was knighted by Archbishop Lanfrauc. 5 1 Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 73. 2 Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. iii. p. 392. 8 Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 484. 4 The Saxon Chronicle so records. But Ordericus Vitalis says that he received his arms from Lanfranc, and Dr Stubbs seems to think that both statements may be true (Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 367). 6 William of Malmesbury is the authority for the knighting of William Eufus by Archbishop Lanfranc. &quot; Accessit etiam favori ejus maximum rerum momentum archiepiscopus Lanfrancus eo quod eum nutrierat et militem fecerat, quo auctore et annitente die Sanctorum Cosmse et Damiani coronatus.&quot; Oesta Reyutn Anglorum, lib. iv. It was under William Rufus, according to Mr Freeman, that the chivalrous and financial sides of feudalism sprang together into sudden prominence in England the first as represented by the Red King, and the second as represented by his minister Ranulf Flambard. 6 In one sense tenure in chivalry was practically co extensive with European feudalism, while in another sense it was strictly speaking peculiar to England after the Norman Conquest, and Ireland after the English Conquest. We have no earlier information of the details of the feudal organization of Normandy than we have of the feudal organization of England, and therefore it is impossible to say how far the second was copied from the first, or the first assimilated to the second. But at all periods there was apparently sufficient difference between the Norman &quot; fief de hauberc &quot; and the English knight s fee to prevent the one from being pronounced in the proper meaning of the term the counterpart of the other. Into Ireland, however, the English system of tenures was imported without change of conditions. 7 But the process of feudalization commenced in England under William I. was only completed under Henry II., and at the time of the subjugation of Ireland there was already established a distinction between the feudal arrangements which had been made before and after the death of Henry I., as the &quot;old&quot; and the &quot;new&quot; feoffuients. That Henry II. s method of dealing with the conquered lands of Ireland was an exact imitation of William I. B method of dealing with the conquered lands in England cannot therefore be assumed. But both kings Kn had at their disposal a large extent of territory which they fec - granted to their vassals on terms necessarily very similar. In the reign of Henry II. the knight s fee was what may be called the &quot; unit &quot; of the system of tenures which had grown up in England since the Norman Conquest. In the Modus Tenendi Parlfamenti, 8 for instance, a treatise which pretended to date from the llth and which really dates from the 14th century, it is laid down that an earldom consisted of twenty knights fees, and that a barony consisted of thirteen and a third knights fees, a statement which seems to have been accepted without misgiving until it was refuted by Selden. It is, how ever, beyond question that some, although not all, of the feudal services and obligations of the tenants of earl doms and baronies were determined by the number of the knights fees which they comprised. It was certainly not a fixed number, for it varied in every or nearly every recorded example. 10 But it was in each instance a specified number, by which the earl s or baron s military contribution to the king s army was settled and the amerciaments payable in the event of its being absent or incomplete were computed. 11 Hallam is inclined to attribute the invention of what he terms the &quot; reasonable and convenient &quot; principle of the knight s fee to the administrative genius of William the Conqueror. 12 But Domesday proves that at the time when the survey was made nothing approaching to a regular distribution of the country into knights fees had been attempted. On two occasions indeed the expression &quot;servitium unius militis,&quot; which was afterwards the techni cal designation of a knight s fee in legal phraseology, is sec. 305. Dr Stubbs notices, in this connexion, that abbots were forbidden to make knights in the Council of London in 1102. He adds that &quot;Thomas Becket knighted the count of Guisnes, and William, bishop of Ely, knighted Ralph Beauchamp as late as 1191 &quot; (Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 367). 6 Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 485. 7 Madox, Jlaronia Anglica, p. 29. 8 Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 502. 9 Titles of Honor, pp. 611, 612. 10 Madox, Baronia Anglica, p. 91 sq. ; and Selden, ut 11 Madox, lib. cit., p. 115 sq. 12 Hallam, Middle Aye-s, vol. i. p. 171.