regularly on horseback;[1] and thus, apparently, the term miles began to signify primarily one of these tried and well-armed riders.[2] Such were the very ones who would regularly be invested with their arms on reaching manhood. Many of them had inherited the sentiments of fealty to a chief, and probably were vassals of some lord from whom they had received lands to be held on military tenure. They were not all noble (an utterly loose term with reference to these early confused centuries) nor were they necessarily free (another inappropriate term with respect to these incipiently mediaeval social conditions).[3] But their mainly military duties would naturally develop into a retainer's relationship of fealty.
The ninth century passes into the tenth, the tenth into the eleventh, the eleventh into the twelfth. Classes and orders of society become more distinct. The old warrior groups have become lords and vassals, and compose the feudal class whose members upon maturity are formally girt with the arms of manhood, and thereupon become knights. The ceremony of their investiture has been gradually made more impressive; it has also been imbued with religious sentiment and elaborated with religious rite. It now constitutes the initiation to a universally recognized fighting Order which has its knightly code of honour, if not its knightly duties. In a word, along with the clearer determination of its membership, and the elaboration of the ceremonies of entry or "adoubement," knighthood has become a distinct conception and has attained existence as
- ↑ Cf. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, ii. 202-216.
- ↑ The way that miles came to mean knight has its analogy in the etymological history of the word "knight" itself. In German and French the words "Ritter" and "chevalier" indicate one who fought on horseback. Not so with the English word "knight," which in its original Anglo-Saxon and Old-German forms (see Murray's Dictionary) as cniht and kneht might mean any armed follower. It lost its servile sense slowly. "In 1086 we read that the Conqueror dubbade his sunn Henric to ridere; this … is the next year Englished by cniht" (Kington-Oliphant, Old and Middle English, p. 130; Macmillan, 1878).
- ↑ We naturally use the term "free" with reference to modern conditions, where law and its sanctions emanate, in fact as well as theory, from a stable government. But in these early feudal periods where a man's life and property were in fact and theory protected by the power of his immediate lord, to whom he was bound by the strongest ties then recognized, to be "free" might be very close to being an unprotected outlaw.
