Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Strangely, however, this did not dim the allure of knighthood. Far from it. For as knights became relatively less critical on the battlefield, their standing in society was rising. From the mid-thirteenth century English knights began to be summoned to parliaments, where they sat in what became the Commons—the second (but today the most important) of the two English parliamentary cameras. This development was mirrored in the Spanish kingdoms (where caballeros had a right to be summoned to the parliamentary bodies known as Cortes), and in France (where Louis IX summoned nineteen knights to his first parlement). And as knightliness took on new social functions outside wartime, so knighthood became the badge of a much broader-based social class—known as the gentry.58 Noblemen would still be knighted as a matter of course—for knighthood was still linked to the martial spirit of the baronial caste and its tropes of masculinity. But it also extended down to the families who were wealthy but not rich, who controlled estates but not regions, who fought in wars but did not command divisions, and whose jobs in peacetime included serving as members of Parliament, judges, sheriffs, coroners, and tax collectors. By and by, these