Among the Romans a blow on the ear gave the slave freedom. Did the blow on the shoulder given to a knight make a free-servant of him? Something of the sort seems to have been intended. The title was doubtless mainly but not exclusively military. To dub, from the Saxon word dubban, was either to gird or put on, “don,” or was to strike, and perhaps both may be meant, for the knight was girt with spurs, as well as stricken, or geschlagen as the German term has it.
There was striking, too, at the unmaking of a knight. His heels were then degraded of their spurs, the latter being beaten or chopped away. “His heels deserved it,” says Bertram of the cowardly Parolles, “his heels deserved it for usurping of his spurs so long.” The sword, too, on such occasions, was broken.
Fuller justly says that “the plainer the coat is, the more ancient and honorable.” He adds, that “two colors are necessary and most highly honorable: three are very highly honorable; four commendable; five excusable; more disgraceful.” He must have been a gastronomic King-at-Arms, who so loaded a “coat” with fish, flesh, and fowl, that an observer remarked, “it was well victualled enough to stand a siege.” Or is the richest coloring, but, as Fuller again says, “Herbs vert, being natural, are better than Or.” He describes a “Bend as the best ordinary, being a belt athwart,” but a coat bruised with a bar sinister is hardly a distinction to be proud of. If the heralds of George the Second’s time looked upon that monarch as the son of Count Königsmark, as Jacobite-minded heralds may have been malignant enough to do, they no doubt mentally drew the degrading bar across the royal arms, and tacitly denied the knighthood conferred by what they, in such foolish case, would have deemed an illegitimate hand.
Alluding to reasons for some bearings, Fuller tells us that, “whereas the Earls of Oxford anciently gave their ‘coats’ plain, quarterly gules and or, they took afterward in the first a mullet or star-argent, because the chief of the house had a falling-star, as it was said, alighting on his shield as he was fighting in the Holy Land.”
It is to be observed that when treating of precedency, Fuller places knights, or “soldiers” with seamen, civilians, and physicians, and after saints, confessors, prelates, statesmen, and judges. Knights and physicians he seems to have considered as equally terrible to life; but in his order of placing he was led by no particular principle, for among the lowest he places “learned writers,” and “benefactors to the public.” He has, indeed, one principle, as may be seen, wherein he says, “I place first princes, good manners obliging all other persons to follow them, as religion obliges me to follow God’s example by a royal recognition of that original precedency, which he has granted to his vicegerents.”
The Romans are said to have established the earliest known order of knighthood; and the members at one time wore rings, as a mark of distinction, as in later times knights wore spurs. The knights of the Holy Roman Empire were members of a modern order, whose sovereigns are not, what they would have themselves considered, descendants of the Cæsars. If we only knew what our own Round Table was, and where it stood, we should be enabled to speak more decisively upon the question of the chevaliers who sat around it. But it is undecided whether the table was not really a house. At it, or in it, the knights met during the season of Pentecost, but whether the assembly was collected at Winchester or Windsor no one seems able to determine; and he would impart no particularly valuable knowledge even if he could.
Knighthood was a sort of nobility worth having, for it testified to the merit of the wearer. An inherited title should, indeed, compel him who succeeds to it, to do nothing to disgrace it: but preserving the lustre is not half so meritorious as creating it. Knights bachelors were so called because the distinction was conferred for some act of personal courage, to reward for which the offspring of the knight could make no claim. He was, in this respect, to them as though he had been never married. The knight bachelor was a truly proud man. The word knecht simply implied a servant, sworn to continue good service in honor of the sovereign, and of God and St. George. “I remain your sworn servant” is a form of epistolary valediction which crept into the letters of other orders in later times. The manner of making was more theatrical than at the present time; and we should now smile if we were to see, on a lofty scaffold in St. Paul’s, a city gentleman seated in a chair of silver adorned with green silk, undergoing exhortation from the bishop, and carried up between two lords, to be dubbed under the sovereign’s hand, a good knight, by the help of Heaven and his patron saint.
In old days belted earls could create knights. In modern times, the only subject who is legally entitled to confer the honor of chivalry is the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; and some of his “subjects” consider it the most terrible of his privileges. The attempt to dispute the right arose, perhaps, from those who dreaded the exercise of it on themselves. However this may be, it is certain that the vexata questio was finally set at rest in 1823, when the judges declared that the power in question undoubtedly resided in the Lords Lieutenant, since the Union, as it did in the viceroys who reigned vicariously previous to that period. According to the etiquette of heraldry, the distinctive appellation “Sir” should never be omitted even when the knight is a noble of the first hereditary rank. “The Right Honorable Sir Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland,” would have been the proper heraldic defining of his grace when he became Knight of the Garter, for it is a rule that “the greater dignity doth never drown the lesser, but both stand together in one person.”
A knight never surrendered his sword but to a knight. “Are you knight and gentleman?” asked Suffolk, when, four hundred years ago, he yielded to Regnault: “I am a gentleman,” said Regnault, “but I am not yet a knight.” Whereupon Suffolk bade him kneel, dubbed him knight, received the accustomed oaths, and then gave up his old sword to the new chevalier.
Clark considered that the order was degraded from its exclusively military character, when membership was conferred upon gownsmen, physician, burghers, and artists. He considered that civil merit, so distinguished, was a loss of reputation to military knights. The logic by which he arrives at such a conclusion is rather of the loosest. It may be admitted, however, that the matter has been specially abused in Germany. Monsieur About, that clever gentleman, who wrote “Tolla” out of somebody else’s book, very pertinently remarks in his review of the fine-art department of the Paris Exhibition, that the difference between English and German artists is, that the former are well-paid, but that very few of them are knights, while the latter are ill-paid and consequently ill-clothed; but, for lack of clothes, have abundance of ribands.