Tag: squires

Fighting on horseback with lance, sword, and heavy armor did not necessarily make a knight out of a soldier, even during the early period. Other mounted and nonmounted soldiers coexisted in the immediate retinue of the knight (the “lance”) or as independent or semi-independent units of mounted sergeants, or routiers. The retinue of a knight changed with time and location. In 1100 [C.E.] Robert II, Count of Flanders, promised to provide 1,000 knights, each with three horses, to King Henry I of England, suggesting that the knights were accompanied by other men who may have fought with them besides taking care of the horses. The religious Order of the Knights Templar listed three horses for each member. In 1268, when Charles, Count of Anjou, moved into Italy to take the southern peninsula from the successors of the Normans, he ordered each knight to bring four horses, suitable armor and weapons, as well as a squire (armiger) and two other retainers (gardiones). Each member of the “lance” performed different functions on the battlefield. The squire, who was not necessarily a young man, acted as a light cavalryman, the others as footmen with bows or crossbows and spears. Later on, larger retinues became common.

Sergeants were also common in the armies of the middle period of medieval warfare. In 1187 the count of Hainault sent Philip Augustus 110 of his best knights together with eighty sergeants equipped like the knights. In 1194 the king of France could count on the recruitment of 240 sergeants from St-Denis, 300 from Sens, Laon, and Tournai, 500 from Beauvais, and 1,000 from Arras. Generally their wages were between three and four sous a day, well below the five to seven sous given to knights. When the loot taken at Constantinople in 1204 was divided, their share was double the share of foot sergeants but half that of knights. Mounted sergeants were not identical to squires but of mixed social origins. Some came from the lower ranks of nobility, holders of small fiefs who could boast neither prestige nor financial means. Others may have originated from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, or even the peasantry, who had training in arms, become supporters of a lord, and learned how to fight on horseback. Their role on the battlefield varied. At times they lined up with the knights; sometimes they fought as a separate unit; sometimes they were given instructions to carry out a specific mission. At the Battle of Bouvines [(1214)] they were grouped as a light cavalry to soften up the enemy for the knights. Toward the end of the battle, 3,000 were given the task of crushing any remaining resistance. However, by the second half of the thirteenth century sergeants on horseback disappeared from the French armies; the mounted men were usually divided between knights and squires. The term knight was replaced by the generic term man-at-arms.

The routiers fought from horseback but were different from knights and mounted sergeants. The term routiers, probably originating from the Latin rumpere and meaning “members of a detachment,” constituted groups of adventurers, men known for their wild behavior and not constrained by the ethical rules of knighthood….

— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, pp. 175-76

The culmination of selective breeding was the destrier, the “great horse” or warhorse which by the late Middle Ages could reach eighteen hands in size and astonishing prices. The warhorse was suited for combat and was the symbol of the aristocracy; its value and rarity meant that not too many soldiers could afford one. Most soldiers seem to have ridden more humble animals, or rounceys. The use of a different horse may have been dictated by other reasons. For instance, the favorite English horse in the chevauchées in France during the Hundred Years War was the courser, which combined stamina and mobility. In reality every heavy cavalryman would need several horses: the warhorse, which the knight’s squire would lead with his right hand, a more modest horse for the squire himself, and a horse to carry the knight’s armor to the battlefield. It was only when confrontation became inevitable that the knight would wear his armor and ride his warhorse into battle.

— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, p. 132

Emphasis mine.

Men-at-arms got a good deal of protein from cheese and a much wider variety of fish and meats than is common today (including, for example, crows and smaller wildfowl, cranes, larks, boars’ heads, eels and lampreys, squirrel, goat, mutton, rabbit, venison, and swans and peacocks for great feasts); this made them taller and stronger than the common folk, especially in Mediterranean regions, where the peasants had less dairy in their diets. Men-at-arms commonly drank wine, while lesser folk more often consumed ale or cider, which were much cheaper. In the household of the sober Sire Jean de Joinville (1225-1317), Seneschal of Champagne and boon companion of St. Louis ([King] Louis IX of France), young valets were given wine heavily diluted with water, squires got a stronger mixture, and knights had separate flagons of wine and water, to blend as they wished….

— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, p. 10

A samurai may…be more simply understood by his practice of bearing arms rather than any social status or aesthetic sensibilities. The word therefore becomes a generic term for any pre-modern Japanese fighting man, and there is something to be said for such a pragmatic view, because the official definition of the word samurai changed considerably over the centuries. For much of Japanese history (if contemporary writings are to be believed) everyone with something to defend—a landowner, a villager, a priest or a pirate—was armed to the teeth and was therefore a warrior (bushi or musha) of some sort at some time. Yet back in the tenth century [C.E.] no fighter of any reputation would have wished to be called a samurai, because that expression still had connotations of menial rather than military service. By the thirteenth century the word had acquired the exclusively military meaning it enjoys today, although to be a samurai still involved the notion of subservience to someone else. The samurai’s superiors were leaders called gokenin (‘honourable houseman’), whose elite status derived not only from their skills at warfare, but also from the ownership of the patches of land from which they took their surnames. Gokenin expected loyalty from the non-landowning samurai who followed them into battle. Their samurai followers (the European notion of a squire is a good parallel) were able to rise in society because of good service and the rewards that followed.

And rise they did, until the expression ‘samurai’ acquired an elite connotation that allowed it to encompass the entirety of Japan’s military aristocracy. The samurai’s upward social mobility found its greatest expression during the Sengoku Period, Japan’s ‘Age of War’, which is conventionally dated from 1467 to 1603. The long conflicts of the Sengoku Period sucked into their whirlpool a huge number of elite mounted warriors, lowly fighting samurai, armed monks, village communities and an intermediate class of jizamurai (‘local samurai’), who owned some land and were both farmers and fighters at the same time.

— The Lost Samurai, Chapter 1

Jean [de Carrouges]…held the rank of squire. Rather than the “gallant youth” this term often brings to mind, he was a battle-hardened veteran already in his forties, one of those “mature men of a rather heavy type—knights in all but name.”

By 1380 [C.E.], Jean…commanded his own troop of squires, numbering from four to as many as nine, in the campaigns to rid Normandy of the English. In war he sought to burnish his name and enrich himself by seizing booty and capturing prisoners to hold for ransom, a lucrative business in the fourteenth century. He may also have sought a knighthood, which would have doubled his pay on campaign…. [A] knight’s daily pay on campaign was one livre, while a squire received half that.

— The Last Duel, Chapter 1

Emphases mine.

A squire would not be knighted if he could not afford to maintain that higher station. Thus the drive for booty and ransom.