The Noble Knight

The knight was included within the origin myth of Nobility by 1210, which was an elevation that depended on defining knights by the hypermoral expectations of their Nobility of Mind. The knight had moral expectations laid on him already in the early twelfth century, but by the end of the century these were intensifying to include the same moral expectations laid on anyone claiming to be noble. This can be traced in the 1180s through the appearance of two grades of knighthood—that of banneret being the nobler, and the rise of the genre of chivalric tract—the origins of both being traceable to the courtly society dominated by Philip of Flanders and the sons of Henry II of England. Simultaneously, literature stigmatized mercenary knights and bourgeois knights as beyond the bounds of noble knighthood. The sacralization of the sword the knight bore was another tactic to raise the order.