I thought I'd add these exerts out of a couple of my books as they seem to fit with also involving differences between certain types of knights.
Johnson, Ruth A, All things Medieval~An Encyclopedia of the Medieval World.
Chivalry also required a knight to be loyal to his lord and to his fellow knights. Loyalty was not always simple, since the same man could be a vassal of different kings for different estates he held. A knight was not supposed to seek individual glory at the expense of his fellow band of knights. A knight without ties of loyalty was called a knight errant—a wandering knight.
Kaeuper, Richard W. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe.
MEN who possessed and exercised the right to fight and who enjoyed the blessing of God on their hard way of life easily came to believe that they were, or deserved to join, the social elite; they readily demanded recognition of their rising status. Assertion of a right to social dominance thus provides another crucial component for the fusion that made chivalry and gave it such power in medieval society. Over time, knights rose in status and even the nobility decided to wear the chivalric mantle.
The knights initially had to separate themselves from anything suggesting cultivation of the soil and the smell of manure, for many of those who became the knights were at first not fully and not always differentiated from villagers, tillers of the soil, even the unfree. At the opening of our period, when a fighting man was termed miles (plural milites)—the word which will come to designate knight—the meaning often carried a distinct sense of subservience and could be used of warriors of rather low social status.
Many owned no land and few could have claimed to be possessors of political power. In fact, the term miles in this early period had no clear connotation of status and referred simply to function. Yet over time knighthood fused with nobility as a result of common military function, the decline of effective royal power over much of continental Europe, the increasing valorization of knighthood via ecclesiastical efforts for peace and crusade, and the influence of romance literature.
Though the process was far from uniform, in most regions of France knighthood and noble status began to fuse in the course of the twelfth century; knighthood became the ‘common denominator of the aristocracy’. The rise of knights was slower in German lands and took a different turn in England, where a distinct legal nobility never emerged; in Italy it gradually accommodated with swiftly reviving urbanism.
But everywhere the right to commit warlike violence whenever honour was at stake became a sign of superior status; in time, it hardened into noble right over much of Europe. By the early thirteenth century, The Romance of the Wings, a popular vernacular manual for knights (c. 1210), says ‘their name, rightly speaking, is the true name of nobility’. This century, as Maurice Keen notes, shifted emphasis away from entry into knighthood via the ceremony of dubbing towards eligibility via noble lineage.
As knighthood continued its social rise, the term knight even took on a more restrictive meaning than the term noble. Knighthood, in the close sense of those who had actually been dubbed and become active, strenuous knights, became a minority, a subset, even among the nobility.
The case is clear from England. The number of men called knights in the England of William the Conqueror stood at about 6,000; by the mid-thirteenth century actual or potential knights numbered only about 3,000, with about 1,250 actually having been dubbed. Perhaps three-quarters of a typical fourteenth-century English army was composed of men below the rank of knight.
The cost of the ceremony of dubbing, of horses, and more elaborate armour restricted the group. Obligations to participate in local activities of royal governance supply another reason, adding to the economic costs of taking up knighthood the investment of time and the sheer bother of serving on the judicial and administrative inquests so characteristic a feature of medieval England.
In France, also, as the cost of active participation in chivalric life rose, so the number of dubbed knights fell accordingly; knighthood as a specific status ceased to encompass all those who were recognized as noble. Fewer than half the French nobles had actually been dubbed in the early fourteenth century.
To read any documents relating to this nobility is to encounter many esquires (damoiseaux) alongside the knights and great lords. Strenuous knights were only a core of the medieval French nobility, as they were only a core of a medieval French army. Such an army meant a small body of belted knights accompanied by a much larger company of men-at-arms.
Does this trend mean a waning of the influence of chivalric ideas? On the contrary, the chivalric ethos in fact generalized to all who lived by arms, whether of noble family or not; chivalry served as a source of inspiration even beyond the ranks of lords and active, strenuous knights; it touched all men-at-arms.
In theory, chivalry might best be exemplified in the conduct of those formally noble or the practising milites, but several social rings beyond this inner circle aspired to the status and benefits it conferred.
Christine de Pisan wanted the ideal of chivalry extended to all warriors. Geoffroi de Charny endorsed the aspirations of those below the social level of knights; the key to the honoured and honourable life inherent in chivalry, he thought, ought to guide all who lived by the honest practice of arms.
