To browse Academia. The coherence of this class of knighthood was predicated on a distinction between nobility and servility, a distinction threatened by the upward mobility of an emerging common-born mercantile class in the twelfth century. The defeat of these common-born antagonists by knightly protagonists offered noble audiences a cathartic release through the affirmation of the social distinctiveness of knighthood. According to this excerpt, the knighthood is a craft similar to all others-a combination of techniques, tools and shared knowledge in order to achieve a specific result-in this case a definitive victory over an identically armed and trained enemy.
Despite the remarkable popularity of the knightly topic over the last few hundred years, studies of this aspect of the knighthood are rare.
On one hand, its practical parameters as a whole remain overshadowed by the extensive studies of the ethical and moral imperatives of the knightly behavior. On the other hand, military historians tend to focus on the techniques and military tools used, without paying enough attention to the mental attitude of the knight in battle. The main purpose of the this study is to describe the knight's craft in its fullness, using as a main source the works of the most popular author of the chivalric romance at the end of the twelfth century.
This was a time when the knight was a dominant figure in the Western European armies. Our aim is to try as much as possible to reconstruct the external appearance and the attitude of the knight entering a battle.
The specificity of the sources allows tracing our hero to an individual level, something rarely possible when we use narratives of actual battles where the common pictures prevail. Unlike the unrealistic and fantastic story line, these descriptions perfectly matched the military practice at the end of the XIIth century in Western Europe.
