History Commons^™

Becoming A Knight: The Social Transformation Of Common Mounted Soldiers Into Noble Warriors, Jared Dane Johns

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Between the years of 1066 and 1119 CE, knights and their families in Western Europe rose from the highest stratification of the common folk to be included as the lowest incarnation of the nobility. This occurred primarily due to an emerging collective warrior identity among the nobility, the Catholic Church’s attempts to contain and sanction violence, and the implementation of the Three Estates political philosophy. This timeline challenges the dominant historical narrative on when knighthood transformed from a military rank into a social rank of nobility, which is usually placed sometime around the end of the 13^th Century.

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