KNIGHT, CHARLES (1791-1873), English publisher and author, the son of a bookseller and printer at Windsor, was born on the 15th of March 1791. He was apprenticed to his father, but on the completion of his indentures he took up journalism and interested himself in several newspaper speculations. In 1823, in conjunction with friends he had made as publisher (1820-1821) of The Etonian, he started Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, to which W. M. Praed, Derwent Coleridge and Macaulay contributed. The venture was brought to a close with its sixth number, but it initiated for Knight a career as publisher and author which extended over forty years. In 1827 Knight was compelled to give up his publishing business, and became the superintendent of the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for which he projected and edited The British Almanack and Companion, begun in 1828. In 1829 he resumed business on his own account with the publication of The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, writing several volumes of the series himself. In 1832 and 1833 he started The Penny Magazine and The Penny Cyclopaedia, both of which had a large circulation. The Penny Cyclopaedia, however, on account of the heavy excise duty, was only completed in 1844 at a great pecuniary sacrifice. Besides many illustrated editions of standard works, including in 1842 The Pictorial Shakespeare, which had appeared in parts (1838-1841), Knight published a variety of illustrated works, such as Old England and The Land we Live in. He also undertook the series known as Weekly Volumes. He himself contributed the first volume, a biography of William Caxton. Many famous books, Miss Martineau’s Tales, Mrs Jameson’s Early Italian Painters and G. H. Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy, appeared for the first time in this series. In 1853 he became editor of The English Cyclopaedia, which was practically only a revision of The Penny Cyclopaedia, and at about the same time he began his Popular History of England (8 vols., 1856-1862). In 1864 he withdrew from the business of publisher, but he continued to write nearly to the close of his long life, publishing The Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865), an autobiography under the title Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century (2 vols., 1864-1865), and an historical novel, Begg’d at Court (1867). He died at Addlestone, Surrey, on the 9th of March 1873.
See A. A. Clowes, Knight, a Sketch (1892); and F. Espinasse, in The Critic (May 1860).
KNIGHT, DANIEL RIDGWAY (1845- ), American artist, was born at Philadelphia, Penn., in 1845. He was a pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Gleyre, and later worked in the private studio of Meissonier. After 1872 he lived in France, having a house and studio at Poissy on the Seine. He painted peasant women out of doors with great popular success. He was awarded the silver medal and cross of the Legion of Honour, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889, and was made a knight of the Royal Order of St Michael of Bavaria, Munich, 1893, receiving the gold medal of honour from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1893. His son, Ashton Knight, is also known as a landscape painter.
KNIGHT, JOHN BUXTON (1843-1908), English landscape painter, was born at Sevenoaks, Kent; he started as a schoolmaster, but painting was his hobby, and he subsequently devoted himself to it. In 1861 he had his first picture hung at the Academy. He was essentially an open-air painter, constantly going on sketching tours in the most picturesque spots of England, and all his pictures were painted out of doors. He died at Dover on the 2nd of January 1908. The Chantrey trustees bought his “December’s Bareness Everywhere” for the nation in the following month. Most of his best pictures had passed into the collection of Mr Iceton of Putney (including “White Walls of Old England” and “Hereford Cathedral”), Mr Walter Briggs of Burley in Wharfedale (especially “Pinner”), and Mr S. M. Phillips of Wrotham (especially two water-colours of Richmond Bridge).
KNIGHTHOOD and CHIVALRY. These two words, which are nearly but not quite synonymous, designate a single subject of inquiry, which presents itself under three different although connected and in a measure intermingled aspects. It may be regarded in the first place as a mode or variety of feudal tenure, in the second place as a personal attribute or dignity, and in the third place as a scheme of manners or social arrangements. The first of these aspects is discussed under the headings [Feudalism] and [Knight Service]: we are concerned here only with the second and third. For the more important religious as distinguished from the military orders of knighthood or chivalry the reader is referred to the headings [St John of Jerusalem, Knights of]; [Teutonic Knights]; and [Templars].
“The growth of knighthood” (writes Stubbs) “is a subject on which the greatest obscurity prevails”: and, though J. H. Round has done much to explain the introduction of the system into England,[1] its actual origin on the continent of Europe is still obscure in many of its most important details.
The words knight and knighthood are merely the modern forms of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English cniht and cnihthád. Of these the primary signification of the first was a boy or youth, and of the second that period of life which intervenes between childhood and manhood. But some time before the middle of the 12th century they had acquired the meaning they still retain of the French chevalier and chevalerie. In a secondary sense cniht meant a servant or attendant answering to the German Knecht, and in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels a disciple is described as a leorning cniht. In a tertiary sense the word appears to have been occasionally employed as equivalent to the Latin miles—usually translated by thegn—which in the earlier middle ages was used as the designation of the domestic as well as of the martial officers or retainers of sovereigns and princes or great personages.[2] Sharon Turner suggests that cniht from meaning an attendant simply may have come to mean more especially a military attendant, and that in this sense it may have gradually superseded the word thegn.[3] But the word thegn itself, that is, when it was used as the description of an attendant of the king, appears to have meant more especially a military attendant. As Stubbs says “the thegn seems to be primarily the warrior gesith”—the gesithas forming the chosen band of companions (comites) of the German chiefs (principes) noticed by Tacitus—“he is probably the gesith who had a particular military duty in his master’s service”; and he adds that from the reign of Athelstan “the gesith is lost sight of except very occasionally, the more important class having become thegns, and the lesser sort sinking into the rank of mere servants of the king.”[4] It is pretty clear, therefore, that the word cniht could never have superseded the word thegn in the sense of a military attendant, at all events of the king. But besides the king, the ealdormen, bishops and king’s thegns themselves had their thegns, and to these it is more than probable that the name of cniht was applied.