What is the difference between a noble and a knight

Generally Knights are part of the nobility and not the peasantry. The nobility system varied with location but Knights sit pretty low compared to counts, Dukes, lords etc. A knight serves the king but mostly they are elite soldiers and not generals.

In most feudal societies, knights were nobility, if usually minor nobility. No the knight did not need to have the permission of the king to marry. Most medieval marriages were arranged by the parents of the bride and groom and based on political advantage rather than love. The main reasons for this decline were weight and cost. In Flanders, there is a famous case of a family of servile i. In the course of the 12th century, a social and ethical dimension is added to this professional aspect.

The strong influence of Cluny monks, who try to give an ethos to savage warfare, leads to the definition of the true miles Christi , a soldier who follows a certain code of behavior, which we now call chivalric. Starting in the second half of the 12th century, literature gests and Arthurian romances also provides a model for the knightly community, as well as a means of glorifying it.

Thus, knights were not necessarily nobles, nor were nobles necessarily knights. The noble class and the knightly class slowly came to merge from the late 12th century onward. Nobles become knights with increasing frequency. The French prince future king Louis VI was knighted without the knowledge of his father who remains distrustful of a rather heterogeneous professional class, but thereafter every French king is knighted Favier Conversely, heredity enters the knightly class in the 13th century.

The son of a knight is automatically a squire, thus making him eligible for knighthood on the basis of his ancestry; at the same time, knighthood is more and more restricted to descendants of knights by various legal restrictions imposed over the course of the 13th century. In the late 13th century, a decision of the Parliament in Paris forbade the count of Artois from making unfree men into knights without the king's consent; interesting to note, the two men who had been so knighted were allowed to remain knights subject to the payment of a fine.

This marked both the closure of the knightly class as well as the beginnings of a new form of access, by purchase. In England, the evolution was different: those who held land in knight's fee but did not wish to take up the profession could pay a tax. Knighthood did not become a hereditary class in England, and instead the knightly class those eligible to be knights became the nucleus of the gentry. As a military institution, knighthood was on the wane from the late 13th century on.

The end of feudal society meant that sovereigns gained a monopoly on war-making, and the old form of military service owed to one's immediate lord became obsolete. Kings still summoned their knights for wars, but increasingly they turned to other sources of manpower, namely mercenaries whose use became common in the 14th century.

The war preparations of Henry V of England, which are well-documented, show how the king formed an army: he signed dozens of contracts or indentures with individuals who pledged to provide a specified number of men-at-arms and archers usually 3 archers for each man-at-arm at muster time.

The development of gunpowder and increasingly more powerful archery meant that the use of massive cavalry charges to break enemy lines and carry swift victory could not be relied upon, and the dominance of cavalry came to an end. If any battle summed up this change, it was the battle of Agincourt in The charging French knights, compressed by the terrain and the English arrows into a fragmented and ever constricted line of attack, reached the English line without any room to maneuver, and it only took a few fallen horses to prevent all other knights from moving in any direction.

Thus, in half-an-hour the battle was decided, and thousands of French knights lay prisoners. The fear of a second attack prompted the English to kill them on the spot, and the French nobility was horribly decimated in a single day.

The French learned their lesson; Charles VII, who finally expelled the English, formed the first standing, professional army in Europe. The chivalric ideals continued to live on, perhaps precisely because the reality of knighthood had disappeared, and a free rein was given to romanticizing.

The first technological change was the infamous stirrup. Riders had considerably more balance in the saddle with stirrups, control over their mounts, and freedom of their hands and hand movements.

Just as important as the stirrup, though, was something known as the high-backed saddle. If you charged into your opponent, without a high-backed saddle and with the lance tucked under your arm, your mount would continue without you.

You would be left, at best, hanging in the air, in a cartoon-like manner. More likely, you would be thrown off the back of your horse and killed.

The high-backed saddle rose up behind the posterior of the knight so he could withstand the shock of riding into someone while carrying a lance. Learn more about rough-hewn knights and their origins.

From to , the medieval nobility was a warrior class. The fact that this particular group could fight more effectively than anyone else is what separated nobles from the rest of society. Hardly stagnant, however, the nobility underwent two important, noteworthy changes between and By , it had become precise and much more exclusive than it had been prior. The second change dealt with the composition of nobility.

Knights had a lowly reputation. By , the situation had changed. Learn more about the feudalism that drove the High Middle Ages.

Around the year , however, the meaning of the word nobilis was vague. Furthermore, the title of nobilis conferred no specific benefits to the individual. Nothing accrued to you because you used the title of nobilis. The social definition of the world had shifted by If you were considered nobilis , you enjoyed certain specific, legal privileges that medieval nobility would continue to cling to through the Late Middle Ages.

This carried through even into the early modern period, long after the nobility had abandoned its military role in Europe. Learn more about how the rights peasants changed between the years and The privileges that were now attached to the term nobilis , which members of the nobility claimed for themselves and received, included the right to be beheaded. The right to be beheaded might seem like an odd right to request, but in fact, it was a cherished right, compared to the alternatives.

Execution by beheading was quick and honorable. It was better than burning, which was painful, and reserved for the worst sorts of criminals. Beheading was also preferable to hanging, which was slower, and humiliating, since a body would be displayed for mockery days or weeks afterward. More lucrative than the right to a quick and honorable death was the noble right to escape the payment of taxes.

By , nobles had claimed that they should have the right to avoid paying royal taxes, or municipal taxes if they happened to reside in a town.