![]() Budgets need to be drawn up and adhered to. Smiths and tradesmen need to be located and hired for the village arising around the manor. Adoption of three-field rotation over two-field is occurring at this time, and decisions on specific crops for each phase need to be made. He holds a manorial court, adjudicating cases that are not violations of the King's Peace (ie civil and non-felony cases). To finance his military service obligations our knight had to run a successful manor. Perhaps not all knights have this education, but the more successful ones are learning it. How many days march is it to London, Rouen, Paris and Jerusalem is useful knowledge for one's liege-lord, and makes one a more competent knight counselor. In exchange for their contributions, these members received education in the geometric underpinnings to the mason's art and science.Ĭampaign planning further requires a basic understanding of where one is in the world. While the founding of Free Masonry still lies several hundred years in the future, the origins of speculative masonry lies in the admission of, paying, honourary members to masons guilds, from the middle- and upper-class, at about this time. While the advanced study of that is part of the quadrivium (of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), a basic knowledge would have been immediately beneficial to our hypothetical knight and easily recognized as such. The twelfth century is the great age of both cathedral- and castle-building and the construction and besieging of such lies at the heart of todays Civil and Mechanical Engineering disciplines. ![]() Fulfilling the feudal obligation of providing counsel to his liege-lord would have required fluent knowledge of the court's language, making our successful knight at least marginally trilingual in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and the vulgar tongue(s) (be it an English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish dialect) of his own vassals. ![]() One can assume that, at a minimum, the knights with a tendency to survive in battle would be those with a solid (not necessarily fluent) knowledge of Latin vocabulary and grammar.įurther, the language of the Royal and baronial courts was still Anglo-Norman French in the twelfth century. Survival in warfare frequently being dependent on split-second reflexes and decisions, thinking in Latin sufficiently well to recognize arms never seen before from their heraldic description is a survival skill. Note that the art-work of a coat-of-arms is, to an extent, arbitrary provided that it satisfies the recorded description for the arms. The descriptions of arms was in Latin, as were their oft-associated mottos. In Medieval Europe this science was heraldry, and was conducted in Latin. Martial RequirementsĪn essential skill in warfare is identifying friend from foe. Certain assumptions are reasonable to make about the prerequisites of success in these multiple endeavours. This makes the twelfth century knight (when not also a baron) as much a member of the emerging middle-class as of the aristocracy. As such, by the twelfth century, a knight was a gentleman farmer, small businessman, and junior military leader all in one. This retinue would have included several horses (At least two full-grown war horses and a riding horse each for the knight himself, his sons if old enough, and perhaps for one or two senior men-at-arms.) and men-at-arms, squires, grooms for the horses, etc. First, let's remember that a knight is not just an armoured soldier on horseback he is a knight precisely because of being in receipt of a knight's fee under knight-Service, with military (and/or financial, see scutage) obligations to his lord in exchange for possession of land, a manor, deemed sufficient to support not only the knight and his family, but also his required retinue in war.
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