One way for a knight to sustain himself was to chance his arm: battle offered the opportunity to seize plunder, equipment, and prisoners for ransom. But this was a precarious way to fund a career. A more reliable route was to find a patron and eventually become a landowner. Thus, from around the ninth century onward, across the west, men who fought on horseback were awarded hundreds of acres of farmable land, which they held in exchange for making themselves available to fight for the person—a higher lord or king—who had granted it to them.
