Knights professionals? or members of a warrior caste?

[Benjamin Parker]

I've heard that knigths were professionals and that they were just warrior members of a militaristic caste. Can anyone tell me which one of these views are true?

[Gene Tausk]

I've heard that knigths were professionals and that they were just warrior members of a militaristic caste. Can anyone tell me which one of these views are true?

Benjamin - professional WHAT? Lawyers, doctors, psychologists? Specify what you are asking. If you are asking if knights were professional warriors, that is to say they earned their living through the practice of war, then in the period of knighthood when the great military orders of knighthood flourished (Templars, Hospitalliers, Teutonic) the answer is clearly "yes," they were professional warriors.

As for the second part of your question, "they were warrior members of a militaristic caste," I have no idea what you are asking. What "militaristic caste?" Are you talking about the societies referred to above? These were not "castes; " these were military/religious orders that were open to qualified individuals.

[Martin Wallgren]

This depends on Where and in what time you ar asking about.

The easy answer is yes on both. A knight was a professional warrior from a caste or groupe in society. Very seldom you could become a knight if you wheren´t born into the class of nobles.

This of course differs from diffrent areas of Europe. In scandinavia the borders between the classes where not as rigid as in france for example.

On the battle field there was also different types of warriors that modern viewers would define as a "knight". In most cases the term knight is a title and many nobles did not acheive it, but still where a part of the heavy cavallery of the battlefield.

I hope this didn´t made you too confused.

[s_taillebois]

As M. Wallgren noted knights could be of different social castes. As far as being professional fighters to a degree insofar as part of their status was contingent on their skills in martial arts. Whether as part of the obligation to a liege for fighting, to gain recognition at the tourneys or to maintain credibility as leaders.

However they were not professionals in the sense of a modern military context. First for much of the medieval the context of such as national armies did not exist, much of the seasonal fighting was done by nobles under bond obligati0n, mercenaries or in cases such as England yeoman levees.

Because of the economic nature of feudalism it wasn't possible for these men to be full time battlefield professionals, the logistical systems to support such things were very limited. That's one of the reasons winter campaigns were often disasterous for most involved.

If we're discussing landed knights they spent quite a bit of time managing estates, serving the local courts, scheming around the interests of reeves, millers, townsmen and the other members of the rising middle classes, and scheming into various politically advantageous marriages. And dealing with the various counter schemes of the peasantry (For example the knights often called peasants 'magpies' for their tendency to be duplicitous, thieving and quarrelsome) And keeping such as grazing rights and crop rotations in order.

Members of the landed nobility (knights) who did not keep up with the social and economic needs did tend to fail quickly. For example the line of Phillip the Bold of Burgundy was note for its stylish court life and extravagant wars. But because they ignored the economic aspects these same stylish courts and stylish wars spent them out of existence within 3 generations.

And regarding the weapons this forum studies, those had a clear link to estate management and economic stability. One of the reasons the landed nobility kept restrictions on forests, mines and water access was all of these were needed for the production of the weapons of the period. Problems in these areas could mean that a fief could not meet required musters or had to buy high numbers weapons (such as arrowheads, pikes and etc) from distant or unreliable sources. The English for example had no reliable source of yew, and eventually resorted to requiring incoming ships from the south bring in a certain number of stave's if they were going to be allowed to unload the rest of their cargo.

[LafayetteCCurtis]

I'd add a voice of agreement to the barrage of answers saying that the "knights" were both military "professionals" and members of an elite social class. Two things are worth noting, however. On one hand, if we're discussing the "knights" strictly or mostly as a military force, it's usually more accurate to use the more general term "men-at-arms" since--as others have pointed out--"knightly" formations in actual wars often included men of less-than-knightly social classes. FYI, the use of "men-at-arms" to describe all and sundry kinds and soldiers is just a modern bad habit--serious scholarship on medieval warfare tends to use the term as it was historically used, which was to refer to the "knightly" role in warfare.

Another is the distinction between "knights" and "nobles." I may be getting a little pedantic, but a knight (or a squire, or a banneret) without any other titles was technically a member of the gentry, which was part of the aristocracy all right but not always considered part of the higher order of "nobility." Whether all nobles were knights or not is a pretty complicated matter--back in the early Middle Ages, for example, nobles didn't want to be knights because it was seen to be demeaning, while in the Late Middle Ages it wasn't uncommon for every nobleman (above the mere "knightly" income bracket) to be knighted as soon as they were old enough and had enough military experience.

As you probably would have figured out by now, questions like what you've posed usually have no simple, easy answers. That's why medieval European history is a whole sub-discipline unto itself.

[Jay Vail]

I've heard that knigths were professionals and that they were just warrior members of a militaristic caste. Can anyone tell me which one of these views are true?

Also, what time period and what country are you talking about. What "knighthood" meant as a status varied considerable over time and area.