Order (of knighthood) has been loosely applied since the later fourteenth century to all forms of military, knightly, or more generally noble body bearing some resemblance (often of the most superficial kind) to the military religious orders, or religious orders of knighthood, founded from about 1130 onward to serve as the corps d’elite of the armies of the various regional crusades. The latter were made up of men who were bound by the religious or monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Although they normally included men from all three of the orders of society (clerics, lay nobles, and simples), by the end of the twelfth century they were all dominated by that class of their lay members who were also knights and who by about 1250 (when knighthood was restricted to men of knightly or noble birth) were nobles as well. Secular bodies of soldiers similarly dominated by knights were founded at about the same time as the earliest religious orders, but seem to have been unknown outside Spain and northern Italy before about 1325, and flourished primarily between that date and about 1525.
Although all such bodies are now commonly called “orders,” most did not use that title, and many were not even bodies corporate. Therefore, the more accurate name is “secular military associations.” Most were effectively restricted to laymen, and were thus “lay military associations,” but others included a dependent class of secular priests as well. All such bodies may also be sorted into nonnoble, seminoble, and strictly noble types, according to the dominant class of lay members, and each of these into various subtypes. The term order is reserved for certain of the more elaborate noble subtypes, by which the title was actually used. The qualification “of knighthood” is reserved for the small minority that actually restricted their principal class of membership to dubbed knights.
Unlike the religious orders on which they were partly modeled, the secular associations were extremely diverse because they drew upon a variety of models other than the religious or monastic order of knighthood both for their forms and attributes and for their goals and activities. The most important of these additional models were the fictional orders or military brotherhoods of both the Arthurian and (later) the Greek tradition (especially the companies of the Round Table, the Grail-Keepers, the Frank Palace, and the Argonauts); the professional guild or confraternity; the military brotherhood formed to share the prizes and losses of war; the military and political league established with growing frequency by the princes and barons of many regions of France, Germany, and Italy to counter political pressures felt by their members and promote collective advancement; and finally the bodies of retainers or clients who were increasingly maintained by kings and princes from the later fourteenth century onward to secure the loyalty and service of the more prominent members of their own nobility and of the lesser princes and barons of their region. Most of these emerged only during the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and therefore could not have influenced the earliest form of the religious orders.
Any particular association might include the characteristics of two or more of these six models, but there was actually no single characteristic or set of characteristics that can be attributed to all of them. Given this diversity, it is impossible to generalize about the secular associations in any meaningful way without sorting them into types sharing at least limited sets of characteristics. This can most readily be done on the basis of a series of dichotomies that ran in different directions through their ranks.
A medieval woodcut depicting King Arthur and his valiant Knights of the Round Table, who served as a model for secular orders.
One of the most important distinctions is between the associations that were endowed with statutes and a corporate organization, which can be called societies, and those that lacked them, called groups. Simple groups, whose members usually wore some sort of common badge, and in some cases undertook a vow of loyalty either to a prince or to one another, did not act together in a corporate way. A few of them—including those that represented true orders that had ceased to function (e.g., the Castilian Order of the Band after 1350 and the Breton Order of the Ermine after 1399)—were regarded as highly honorable, and referred to by the title “order,” but these must be distinguished from true orders (which were all societies) by the term pseudo-order. The pseudo-orders fell into three classes: ceremonial pseudo-orders, whose members were knighted in a special ceremony (principally the Knights of the Bath of England and those of St. Mark of Venice); peregrine pseudo-orders, whose members were knighted at a place of pilgrimage (principally the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, of St. Catherine of Mount Sinai, and of the Golden Spur of the Lateran Palace); and cliental pseudo-orders, whose members were bound by ties of clientship to the prince who admitted them (notably the Order of the Broom-Pod of Charles VI of France and the Order of the Porcupine of his brother Duke Louis of Orleans and his heirs).
All other secular military and noble associations—the great majority—were true societies endowed with some sort of corporate constitution. The earliest known were founded in the twelfth century, before knighthood had come to be bound to nobility, and probably took the constitutional form of the lay devotional confraternity. Certainly that was the most common form taken by the later societies whose statutes are known to us, but not all such societies took a fully or even a partly confraternal form. As the non-confraternal societies conformed to no single alternative model, all military and noble societies may usefully be classified as either confraternal or non-confraternal in their organization.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, confraternities—still numerous in some parts of the Catholic world—were in effect lay equivalents to religious orders, and included among them the various “third orders” attached to the greater religious orders of the age, including the Hospitallers of St. John. Confraternities (usually bearing a title equivalent to the Latin societas [society, company] or fraternitas [fraternity, brotherhood]) were so common throughout Latin Christendom from the late twelfth to the eighteenth centuries that it is thought that by the late fourteenth century almost every adult belonged to at least one. Societies of this sort were used to organize people of all ranks and orders of society to carry out any of a variety of social functions, from providing insurance for funerals, supporting widows and orphans, and ransoming of captives to regulating the standards of a craft, profession, or trade. The most important of them were the merchant guilds that from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries dominated both the economic and the political life of the majority of towns in much of Latin Christendom. However, the category included thousands of lesser guilds, including many made up of archers, crossbowmen, and other types of soldiers attached to a particular city or princely household.
Despite their varied purposes, however, such societies shared a common set of seven basic characteristics. These included a set of written statutes formally adopted by the founding members and modified from time to time by some process of amendment; dedication to a patron saint associated with the principal activity of the society or the place in which it was based; the establishment of a chapel dedicated to the saint and staffed with one or more priests paid to say masses for the benefit of the members, living and dead; and the holding of an annual general meeting (commonly called the “chapter general”) at or near that chapel, beginning or centered on the feast day of the patron saint and normally including a solemn mass and banquet in his or her honor, and often a vespers and memorial mass for deceased members. In addition, during the course of the meeting there was often a session devoted to the praise and criticism of the behavior of members relative to the goals and standards of the society. The statutes of such societies normally imposed a number of obligations on their members, most of which were related to the particular purpose of the society, but some of which were fraternal in nature, requiring mutual support or aid. Finally, the statutes of confraternities of all kinds normally entrusted the running of the society to one or more officers, who in the great majority of cases were subject to annual election by the members of the dominant class. The confraternal societies of knights and nobles, like those of ignoble soldiers of various types, seem generally to have adhered quite closely to this general model, though the most important subclasses modified the usual provisions for governance in a number of ways.
Confraternal societies were normally intended to be perpetual associations, but this was not true of a number of the non-confraternal military societies founded at this time. Military and noble societies may therefore be divided into perpetual and temporary subclasses. The former subclass included almost all of the fully confraternal societies and most of the non-confraternal ones founded to perform comparable political and military functions. The temporary subclass, by contrast, was made up of societies that were founded either to cement alliances among a number of lords or princes during some sort of political crisis or military campaign, or to serve as the vehicle for the collective achievement of some chivalrous enterprise.
The former set of temporary bodies (which had either an open-ended or fixed time limit, usually of between one and twenty years) were “fraternal societies,” as they were based on the institution of fraternity or broth-erhood-in-arms. By the fourteenth century, brotherhoods of two or more members were commonly created among knights and men-at-arms by vows of mutual support throughout a campaign and of the equal partition of the spoils (and possibly the losses) of war. The fraternal military societies were essentially institutionalized networks of this sort that borrowed various features from contemporary confraternities to give them a corporate character. They seem to have originated in the Holy Roman Empire around 1350, and to have flourished in the kingdoms of Burgundy, Germany, and France between that time and about 1430. In the Francophone kingdoms, the best known are the Company of the Black Swan, founded in 1350 by Count Ame VI of Savoy, two other princes, and eleven knights; the Corps and Order of the Young Male Falcon, founded between 1377 and 1385 by the viscount of Thouars and seventeen minor barons in Poitou; the Order of the Golden Apple, founded in 1394 by fourteen knights and squires in Auvergne; and the Alliance and Company of the Hound, founded in 1416 for a period of five years by forty-four knights and squires of the Barrois. In Germany, where they were particularly numerous, the earliest known is the Company of the Pale Horse of the Lower Rhineland (1349). Its successors included the Company of the Star of Brunswick (1372), the Company of the Old Love (ca. 1375-ca. 1378) in Hesse, the Company with the Lion (1379) in Wetterau and Swabia generally, the Company of the Fool (1381) in Cleves, and the Company of the Sickle (1391) in southern Saxony and Franconia. Most of these were founded for precise periods of two to twelve years, though the last was to endure for as long as its founding members still lived. Like societies with a fully confraternal form of constitution, they were intended to serve as military-political leagues promoting the interests of their members and had no higher goals.
The latter set of temporary bodies (which usually had a fixed limit for their existence of between one and five years) should be called votal societies, as they were based on a vow (votum in Latin) undertaken by their members to achieve a set of feats of arms comparable to those of the knights of the Arthurian romances. Contemporaries commonly knew them by a name meaning “enterprise” (emprinse, impresa) and transmitted that name both to profoundly different types of knightly societies and to the badge or figural sign that represented the undertaking. Such societies appeared around 1390 (when new forms of tactics were emerging that required practice of the type actually provided by these societies) and seem to have flourished only for a few decades after that date, primarily in France. Their number included the Enterprise of the White Lady with Shield, undertaken in 1399 for a period of five years by the heroic marshal of France, Jehan le Meingre de Boucicaut, and twelve other knights; the Enterprise of the Prisoner’s Iron, undertaken in 1415 for two years by Jehan, duke of Bourbon, and sixteen other knights; and the Enterprise of the Dragon, undertaken at about the same time, probably by Je-han de Grailly, count of Foix, and “a certain number of ladies, damsels, knights, and squires.”
The line of cleavage separating the perpetual and the limited-term societies within the non-confraternal category coincided with another line that ran across both the confraternal and non-confraternal categories: that between societies that were endowed with a democratic or oligarchic constitution (the normal types in confraternities) and those that were endowed with constitutions of a monarchical nature, which attached the presidential office on a permanent and hereditary basis to the throne or, in one case, the dynasty of the founder. These latter usually gave the president a leading, if not dominant, role in their activities. Monarchical societies were invariably founded by a king or an effectively sovereign prince and were intended above all to promote and reward loyalty to him. They were therefore instruments of the state, rather than mere private societies of nobles or soldiers like all of the others. The first known society of this type (the Castil-ian Order of the Band) was founded only in 1330, but most of the more important societies founded after that date were of the same type, so it is useful to sort all military and noble societies into monarchical and non-monarchical categories. In practice, the great majority of monarchical orders were also confraternal in nature, but at least two were not, and the two non-confraternal monarchical societies (the Castilian Order of the Band and the Hungarian Company of the Dragon) constituted the balance of the category of non-confraternal societies, after the temporary fraternal and votal types.
All of the remaining societies were therefore both confraternal and perpetual, and many of them were also monarchical. Societies that were not monarchical fell into two general categories: those founded by a prince but not annexed to his throne and those not founded by a prince. The former societies may be termed princely noble confraternities. Though not actually governed by their prince, they were always closely associated with his court or dynasty, and may be placed in a broader category of courtly or curial bodies. This category also includes all of the monarchical societies and most of the noble groups as well. Thus, the dichotomy curial/noncurial cuts across most of the other categories established.
The curial societies labeled princely noble confraternities were either sportive or political in their goals and activities. The former were dedicated largely to organizing tournaments, and they differed from the noncurial societies founded for the same ends only in enjoying princely patronage. The political curial societies (including the political princely confraternities and all of the monarchical societies), by contrast, were the only lay bodies that even approached the religious orders of knighthood in the extent of their endowment and organization and the high level of their goals. The generic designation “order” is restricted to them.
The only confraternal noble societies that did not fit into any of these classes were what may be called the normal noble confraternities, which were not in any way associated with a royal or princely court. Like their princely, curial analogues, these also fell into sportive and political-military subtypes, which were designed to fulfill many of the same purposes, but served the interests of regional nobilities rather than those of kings and princes. The middle of the fourteenth century to the second half of the fifteenth seems to have been their heyday. In Germany, the sportive subtypes took it upon themselves to promote the fellow feeling and exclusiveness of members of the old knightly nobility by insisting upon ever more stringent genealogical and practical qualifications for membership and by promoting the ideal of tournament-worthiness as the best indicator of noble status. They were also associated with the steadily growing variety of forms of combat that were included in tournaments in the fifteenth century and persisted well into the sixteenth. Those of the political-military type differed only in the details of their constitutions from the fraternal and curial societies founded to serve the same ends. Among the most important were the Company of the Buckle, founded in Franconia ca. 1392, and the Company of St. George’s Shield, founded in Swabia in 1406. All served to organize and bind together members of the middle to lower nobility of an extensive region, most of whom were probably already related to one another by blood or marriage, and therefore had similar sets of rivals and enemies.
There were also many nonnoble military confraternities, typically made up of ignoble soldiers of some particular type, such as crossbowmen, archers, halberdiers, or bombardiers. The soldiers in these confraternities were always professionals, and the confraternities were for them what the guilds were for members of other trades and professions—including the armorers, who made armor and weapons forged of metal; the bowyers, who made bows; and the fletchers, who made arrows. At the end of the period under consideration, two strictly military but seminoble confraternities, the Confraternity of St. George (1493) and the Distinguished and Laudable Company of St. George (1503), were founded by the emperor Frederick III and his son the emperor Maximilian I as lay auxiliaries to a new religious order established by the former to defend Latin Europe from the Turks: the Knightly Order of St. George (1469).
In fact, by the later fourteenth century, confraternities dedicated to appropriate patron saints probably united the members of virtually every group associated with warfare. The guilds of knights and soldiers, normally organized on a local basis, were usually dedicated to a saint who had been a soldier and could be seen as a knight; the most important were St. George of Lydda, St. Maurice of the Theban Legion, and St. Michael the archangel, captain of the hosts of Heaven. Guilds of bowyers and fletchers, by contrast, were commonly dedicated to St. Sebastian, who had been martyred by being shot through with arrows.
A handful of societies did not fit into any of the categories just described, being in effect hybrids of the older religious order with the lay confraternity of knights. These may be described as semireligious orders of knighthood, since they were made up of a body of monks and a body of knights who, though living in community with the monks, remained laymen and were even permitted to marry. There seem to be only two examples of this type: the Castilian Order of Santiago, founded in 1170 on the general model of the Order of the Temple, and the Bavarian Company of the Cloister of Ettal, founded by the emperor Ludwig IV in the 1330s and apparently dissolved shortly after his death in 1347. The latter, however, probably served as an inspiration for the more conventional princely-confraternal order of the Grail-Templars.
The curial orders were the most important military and noble societies restricted to laymen in the history of Latin Christendom, the only ones to survive the Reformation, and the only ones to exist in any numbers today.
The first society of the curial class as a whole to be founded was a princely confraternal order, the Hungarian Society of St. George, established in 1325 by King Karoly I. It was given most of the features typical of the contemporary confraternity and lacked only a formal presidential office to make it a true monarchical order as well. As it was the first order designed to bind lay knights or nobles to a royal or princely patron and put chivalry into the service of the state, it cannot be surprising that the Society of St. George was endowed with a number of features peculiar to it, in addition to the lack of a monarchical presidency. Several other orders of this type were founded by or under the influence of princes, the most notable of which were the Order of St. Catherine in the Dauphiny of Viennois (1330/40), the Company of St. George of the Grail-Templars in the Duchy of Austria (1337), the Order of the Hound in the Duchy of Bar (1422), the Company of Our Lady (of the Swan) in the Electoral Marquisate of Brandenburg (in its earliest form, 1440), and the Order of the Crescent in the Duchy of Anjou (1448). The last, in particular, differed from the existing monarchical orders outside Germany exclusively in lacking a monarchical presidency.
Although they too were confraternities, the earliest true monarchical orders drew their inspiration from the religious orders of knights and the lay orders depicted in the Arthurian cycle of romances. Indeed, only because the form of the religious order was inappropriate for their purposes and the fictional orders lacked any clearly described statutes, the founders of the earliest orders adopted the confraternal structures familiar to them from their own time and easily adaptable to their purposes. In fact, the inventor of the fully realized monarchical order, Alfonso XI of Castile and Leon, took from the confraternal model little more than the idea of an annual meeting, and his Order of the Band, proclaimed in 1330, was essentially a wholly lay equivalent of the military religious orders in which his kingdom abounded.
Edward III of England, who founded the second such order, may well have intended to follow Alfonso’s example in his initial plan to revive the Round Table Company announced in 1344 on the return of his cousin Henry “of Grosmont,” count of Lancaster, from a long sojourn at the
Castilian court. Before he could complete that project, however, he was distracted by the need to prosecute his claim to the French throne in the campaign that ended with the triumph of English arms at Crecy and Calais. In the meantime, he had almost certainly learned of the plans of his rival, Je-han, duke of Normandy (son of King Philippe VI), to found what was meant to be a confraternity of two hundred knights dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and St. George. The latter project, possibly modeled on the princely confraternal Order of St. Catherine recently founded in the Dauphiny of Viennois, served as the principal model for all of the later foundations. On his return to England, Edward founded, in place of the new Round Table that was to have been established there with three hundred knights, a more modest confraternity of twenty-six knights supporting twenty-six priests and (in theory) twenty-six poor veteran knights, dedicated to St. George alone—the traditional patron of English arms. Although its formal name, the Order of St. George, was taken in the traditional confraternal fashion from that of its patron saint, its secondary name, the Order, Society, or Company of the Garter, was taken from its badge, which probably represented the belt of knighthood and was probably inspired by the badge of the Order of the Band. Two years later Jehan of Normandy, having succeeded his father as King Jehan II of France, finally established his own projected confraternity. This took essentially the same form as its English rival, but was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin alone under the new title Our Lady of the Noble House. Like the Castilian and English orders, however, its name in ordinary usage, the Company of the Star, was taken from its badge. In the following year, Loysi (or Lodovico), king consort of peninsular Sicily or Naples, founded another order even more closely modeled on that of his French cousin, the Company (or Order) of the Holy Spirit of Right Desire, commonly called from its badge the Order of the Knot.
Thus, by 1352 the full confraternal model had become the norm for monarchical orders, although the identification of the order with its badge rather than its patron or its seat prevailed. By the same date, the monarchical order itself had become an adjunct of the courts of the leading mon-archs of Latin Christendom, though it remained exceptional among royal courts in general, and unknown in Germanophone lands. The practice of maintaining such an order was adopted in the royal court of Cyprus in 1359 (when Pierre I made the Order of the Sword he had founded earlier a royal order) and in that of the Aragonese domain at some time between 1370 and 1380 (when Pere “the Ceremonious” founded the rather obscure but apparently deviant Enterprise of St. George).
In the meantime, however, the practice had spread to the court of several princes of less than regal rank. Ame VI de Savoie, count of Savoy and duke of Chablais and Aosta in 1364, founded the Order of the Collar, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By the end of the year 1381, when the Order of the Ship (dedicated to the Holy Trinity) was founded by King Carlo III in Naples to replace the defunct Company of the Knot, five more princes had founded orders that were probably monarchical: Duke Louis II of Bourbon, the Order of the Golden Shield (1367); Duke Louis I of Anjou, the Order of the True Cross (1365/75); Enguerrand VII of Coucy, count of Soissons and titular duke of Austria, the Order of the Crown (1379); Duke Albrecht III “with the Tress” of Austria, the Order of the Tress around 1380; and (probably) Duke Wilhelm I of Austria, the Order of the Salamander around 1380.
Of the fourteen orders founded by 1381, however, the great majority were maintained for less than two decades, and only two or three of them were still maintained in their original condition by 1410: the Garter and the Collar and possibly the Salamander (which may have lasted to 1463). Furthermore, between 1381 and 1430, the foundation of fully realized neo-Arthurian orders ceased completely, and only two orders that were certainly monarchical are known to have been founded: the Order of the Jar of the Salutation or of the Stole and Jar in 1403 by Ferran, duke of Penafiel and future king of Aragon and Sicily (from 1412), and the Company of the Dragon in 1408 by Sigismund or Zsigmond von Luxemburg, king of Hungary and future king of Germany (1416) and Bohemia (1419) and Roman emperor (1453). The former remained a vestigial society down to 1458, when it was given new statutes by King Alfons “the Magnanimous” and lasted to 1516. The latter was at first no more than a military-political league, but was converted into a monarchical order for Sigismund’s several kingdoms under new statutes of 1433 and seems to have survived in that condition to 1490.
A second wave of foundations of true monarchical orders of knighthood seems to have been set off by the creation and lavish endowment of the Order of the Golden Fleece by Philippe “the Good,” duke of Burgundy, in 1430. Its statutes were based primarily on those of the Garter, but borrowed freely from those of the two other monarchical and knightly orders still surviving at the time of its foundation: those of the Collar and of the Stole and Jar. The foundation of a truly grand order by a prince of ducal rank whose lands lay mainly within the Holy Roman Empire seems to have encouraged other imperial princes to create monarchical orders of their own.
What appears to have been a monarchical order had been founded in virtually every imperial principality of the rank of duchy or electorate by 1468. Nevertheless, these orders bore only a general resemblance to the Order of the Golden Fleece. None of them was limited to knights, and only four of them (the orders of the Eagle, the Towel, St. George and St. William, and St. George of the Pelican) were even limited to men. The remainder were open noble societies admitting women as well as men, more concerned with the promotion of Catholic piety and loyalty than of chivalry among their members. Although most were provided with at least a chapel, none was given a hall—presumably because only two of them (St. George of the Pelican and St. Hubert) held annual meetings on their pa-tronal feast (or at any other time), and neither seems to have provided a banquet on that occasion. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, most of the German orders were maintained for only one or two generations; only one survived the first outburst of the Reformation in Germany between 1517 and 1525, and the last of them—a branch of the Branden-burgish Order—dissolved in 1539.
In the meantime, two more kings had founded orders that were probably (in the first case) or certainly (in the second case) of the monarchical type: Christian I von Oldenburg, king of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, seems to have established the Confraternity of the Virgin Mary (or Order of the Elephant) at his Swedish coronation in 1457, but it seems to have been modeled on the German orders and was little more than an ordinary confraternity of nobles attached to the Danish court. By contrast, when King Ferrante of peninsular Sicily founded the Order of the Ermine (dedicated to the archangel St. Michael) as the third such order in his kingdom in 1465, he took the Garter and the Golden Fleece as his models, while King Louis XI of France lifted most of the statutes of the Order of St. Michael, which he founded in 1469, directly from those of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Of these three, only the last survived past 1523, and thus joined the English Order of the Garter, the Savoyard Order of the Collar (renamed the Ordre de I’Annonciade [Annunciated One] after its patroness the Virgin Mary in 1518), and the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece as one of the four early monarchical orders destined to survive into the modern era. By 1520, reforms in the Order of the Collar in 1518 and in the Order of the Garter itself in 1519 had given all four orders similar constitutions based on those of the Garter and the Golden Fleece.
The founders of the monarchical orders drew upon all of the institutional models used by the founders of lay military associations generally, but drew most heavily on the confraternity, the religious order, the contractual retinue, and the fictional company. Inevitably, the characteristics of each of these types had to be modified to combine them effectively. Among the characteristics of the confraternity that underwent some modification in the monarchical orders of this period were the maintenance of a chapel and a chantry priest and the maintenance of some sort of hall to serve as the headquarters, meeting place, and banqueting room for the members on feast days. Most confraternities could afford nothing more than a small side-chapel or chantry in the local parish church and a single priest to officiate there on their behalf, and merely rented a hall for their annual festivities. The greater guilds, by contrast, and especially those of the merchants, often established a major chapel in a major church marked with memorials to their presidents and other leading members, and built their own hall on a grand scale, often facing on the principal square of their town or city. The religious orders of knighthood provided themselves with similar facilities at their convent or seat on an even grander scale. The Arthurian tradition, for its part, placed a great emphasis on knightly fellowships gathering in a hall of the royal palace at a great round table, around which were set the names and heraldic arms of their current members.
The founders of the monarchical orders drew upon these three traditions with varying degrees of emphasis, but the great majority outside Germany declared their intention to establish for their order at least one major church and at least one major hall with attendant buildings, both to be set close together in a rural palace belonging to the founder and situated within about a day’s ride of the capital city of his principal dominion. In addition, they declared that they would staff the principal church of the order with a whole college of priests, commonly equal in number to the knights, whose professional lives were to be devoted entirely to the service of the lay members of the order, living and dead. Thus, the requirements of the confrater-nal form were to be realized in the buildings and clerical membership of the monarchical orders on a grandiose scale not otherwise approached or even imagined except in the religious orders. Furthermore, most founders of monarchical orders declared that at least the shield of arms, and often the crested helmet and banner of the current companions, would be set up in their functional or their standard iconic form, either in the hall (in the fashion of the Arthurian knights) or, more commonly (following the example of the Order of the Garter), over their stalls in the chapel choir, where the companions were assigned seats in the collegiate churches.
In effect, the companions of most orders were treated as lay canons, and in a number of orders (including all four of those that survived) they were paired with clerical canons attached to the order who might sit in the stalls of the choir just below their own. During the religious services that formed an important part of their annual convocation, the companions sat in their stalls wearing their mantles and presented an appearance not very different from that of the monk-knights of the religious orders during one of the regular services in which they were bound to participate. Either during their lifetime or after their death, the companions also were required to make an heraldic memorial to themselves to set in their stall, rather the way the leading members of the greater confraternities set their names or arms on the walls or in the windows of the humbler chapels attached to their societies. One order—that of the Ship—actually promised to provide full-scale tombs for all of its companions.
The direct influence of the religious orders on the monarchical orders was more diffuse. Although by 1312, when the Order of the Temple was suppressed, the crusading movement had seen its best days, the Teutonic Knights still campaigned annually against the heathen Lithuanians, and the Knights of the Hospital of St. John still carried on an active war against the Muslims from their new base in Rhodes. In addition, many princes and nobles continued to dream of reconquering the Holy Land or driving the Turks back into inner Asia. This dream was reflected in the statutes of a number of the monarchical orders of the period. For example, the Order of the Sword, founded by Pierre I of Cyprus in 1359, had been intended to secure a force from Europe to retake the lost kingdoms of Jerusalem and Armenia, while Pierre’s erstwhile chancellor, Philippe de Mezieres, attempted to create a new form of order to accomplish the same end, the Order of the Passion of Our Lord. It was modeled more directly on the surviving religious orders, but was to be made up of laymen and led jointly by the kings of England and France. Among the other fourteenth-century foundations, the Orders of the Star of France, of the Knot and the Ship of peninsular Sicily, and of St. George of Aragon all included statutes that paid lip service to the crusading ideal. Although the Crusade of Nicopolis (which ended in disaster in 1396) was the last major campaign of its type actually launched, the goal of leading a crusade died slowly. Among the fifteenth-century orders, those of the Dragon of Hungary, the Golden Fleece of the Burgundian domain, the Ermine of Sicily, and St. Michael of France were all endowed with statutes concerned with crusading activities, though none of them can be taken too seriously. None of the orders other than the Sword was ever involved in anything like a real crusade against the enemies of Christendom.
More important borrowings from the religious orders of knighthood in the period before 1520 included the formal title “order” increasingly adopted by the monarchical orders and universal by the end of the period, the assignment of the title “brother knight” to those otherwise known as “companions” in most orders, and the assignment to the members of many of the orders of a mantle opening down the front like a cope and charged on the left breast with a badge. The mantle had been a distinctive mark of knightly status in a military order since the twelfth century, and its eventual adoption by all of the orders that survived to 1520 was the clearest sign that the founders or sovereigns of these orders identified with the traditions of the crusading orders before 1578.
Before the latter date, however, the founder of only one monarchical order (that of St. George of Aragon) chose to emulate both the form and the material of the badges worn by the religious knights: a cross of a distinctive color and increasingly distinctive shape made of textile and applied as a plaque to the left breast of the mantle, and later to the surcoat as well. Two other orders dedicated to St. George (the Hungarian confraternal Order of St. George and the Order of the Garter) used a textile shield of the arms of their patron as a badge, though in neither case the primary one.
The other founders all adopted badges of markedly different forms and materials. Some of these badges resembled the badges common among pilgrims, confraternities, and bodies of retainers in taking the form of a jewel worn as a brooch or suspended from a simple chain about the neck, while others took the more distinctive form of a band or belt worn wrapped around some part of the body, including the neck (the Collar). Still others resembled the badge of the Collar in being worn around the neck but took the very distinct form of a linked collar with or without a pendant jewel in the fashion of most of the pseudo-orders from the 1390s. The type of insignia that ultimately prevailed was the collar made up of links in the form of distinct badges or symbols and having a pendant jewel that was either the principal badge of the order or a symbol or effigy of the order’s patron saint, or both. The latter type of insignia was finally combined with the eight-pointed cross of the Order of St. John in the badge of the Holy Spirit of France in 1578, and that served as the model for all badges from 1693.
The most important models for the monarchical orders after the devotional confraternities, however, were the fictional companies of knights described in the Arthurian cycle of romances: principally the Round Table Company of King Arthur himself; the Company of the Frank Palace (Franc Palais) of his pre-Christian ancestor, Perceforest; and the company of knights established by Joseph of Arimathea to guard the Holy Grail. To these were later added (by the Valois dukes of Burgundy) the mythical company of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece of Colchis, and (by Louis XI of France) the company of loyal angels who fought with the Archangel Michael to drive Lucifer and his rebel angels from Heaven.
Of these, the company of the Round Table was surely the most important, especially as the two other Arthurian companies were merely literary doublets of it. Indeed, like Charlemagne himself and Godefroi de Bouillon, hero of the First Crusade and baron of the Holy Sepulchre, only Arthur was regarded throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as one of the three Christian members of that glorious company of preeminent heroes referred to as the Nine Worthies (Neuf Preux in French). Although only Edward III of England (who claimed to be Arthur’s heir, and identified his castle of Windsor with the legendary Camelot) explicitly evoked the Round Table when he proclaimed his intention of establishing a knightly order in 1344, there can be little doubt that the king from whom he certainly borrowed the idea (Alfonso XI of Castile) thought of his Order of the Band as a neo-Arthurian society that would convert him into a new Arthur surrounded by the best knights in the world. As all of the later orders were inspired either directly or indirectly by the Order of the Garter that Edward actually founded and all included Arthurian elements of one sort or another, the whole set of monarchical orders can be described as neo-Arthurian in character. In the orders most thoroughly modeled on the Band and the Garter (i.e., most of those outside Germany and Scandinavia), this meant not only that the members of the order were expected to practice the highest ideals of chivalry, but that the order itself was presented as an embodiment of those ideals. This made both patronage of and membership in such orders highly honorable, for just as it identified the prince-president with Arthur as a patron of chivalry, so it identified the companions of the order with the knights of the Round Table as paragons of chivalry.
The extent to which the founders of monarchical orders borrowed the other distinctive characteristics of the Round Table Society reported in the romances varied considerably. Alfonso of Castile was unique in requiring the knights of his order to challenge anyone they found wearing what looked like the band of the order to armed combat and to send back to the royal court any who acquitted themselves well in such a conflict. Alfonso was also more explicit than any later founder in insisting that the knights of his order live up to the highest standards of curialitas (Latin; courtliness) or courtoisie (French; source of English courtesy) and abjure the vices common to noblemen. Most later founders promoted the courtliness ideally associated by 1330 with knightliness in the same ways they promoted the military virtues of prowess, courage, and loyalty: by asking not only for annual reports of the sort that Arthurian knights commonly delivered on returning to the royal court after accomplishing some quest, but annual sessions of mutual criticism of the sort more common in professional confraternities. In three orders, however (the Company of the Star, the Company of the Knot, and its successor the Order of the Ship), the statutes actually provided a further reward for meritorious conduct in the form of a seat at a special table of honor (resembling the Round Table) at the annual banquet, and the last two of those added a series of honorific alterations to the badge of the order that in effect replaced the sorts of promotion in formal rank practiced in most modern multigrade orders of merit.
Another aspect of the fictional model that was borrowed by the great majority of the founders of monarchical orders was a fixed number of knights. Religious orders and confraternities sought to have as many members as possible. An unlimited (or at least large) number was also indicated by two of the main objects of many founders: to bind the leaders of the nobility of their domain to themselves and their dynasty and to establish unity, harmony, and peace among them. Nevertheless, the essential characteristic of the fictional societies of the Round Table and Frank Palace was selectivity, and this implied a limitation. The limits suggested in the romances were actually fairly high—between 50 and 300 knights. A number of founders initially sought to achieve similar or larger memberships.
These figures proved impossible to achieve, and while we have no precise numbers for most orders, it is unlikely that the number of companions in any order ever surpassed 100 before the middle of the sixteenth century. Aside from the difficulty of finding several hundred knights worthy both of the honor and of the trust involved in admission to such an order, providing chapels and halls large enough for meetings would have been difficult. No doubt recognizing these problems, most founders chose to set much lower limits on the size of the membership in each of the order’s classes. Edward III of England once again led the way by setting the limit at 26, the number that could sit in the uppermost stalls of the choir of his chapel in Windsor Castle. Thereafter, the number of companions in most later orders (beginning with the Order of the Collar of Savoy in 1364) would be closely comparable to this: between a low of 15 (the Collar of Savoy) and a high of 36 (St. Michael of France).
Although most orders were made up largely of knights politically subject to their president, like the fictional orders on which they were partly modeled, virtually all included a number of distinguished foreign knights. In theory, all of the companions in the more thoroughly neo-Arthurian orders were chosen primarily or exclusively on the basis of the knightly qualities, and differences in lordly rank among them were either ignored or made the basis of differential burdens in the matter of paying for purgatorial masses. In practice, however, the desire to use the order as an instrument to secure the loyalty and reward the services of barons and princes gave rise to a marked tendency to prefer knights of high lordly rank. By the end of the period the majority of the companions of the greater orders (the Garter and the Golden Fleece) were men of high birth and lordly rank, including a number of foreign princes and even kings. The membership of the latter in the orders was largely passive, but it served to increase considerably the prestige of the order, to the point where foreign kings felt honored by “election” to the order. (The statutes of most orders set forth a process by which the existing companions were to elect new members when places became vacant by death, resignation, or expulsion; in practice, the prince-president of every order was usually able to secure the election of anyone he wished.)
As these developments suggest, in addition to being the institutional embodiments of the ideals of chivalry within their prince-president’s do minion or domain, the monarchical orders and indeed the curial orders more generally were also the embodiments of the ideals of nobility within the same territories. To serve both ideals, many founders or later presidents of such societies attached to them the office of the chief herald of their lands: a role still played by Garter, Principal King of Arms of the English, to this day. In principle these ideals always included distinguished military service, and if the surviving orders have never admitted the most decorated soldiers from the ranks, they have usually included the most distinguished generals and admirals of their presidents’ lands, along with the most distinguished prime ministers, princes, and peers.
