4 - Knights Banneret, Military Recruitment and Social Status, c. 1270–c. 1420: A View from the Reign of Edward I

Summary

The emergence of the knight banneret as a distinctive rank within the English and French socio-military hierarchies can be traced to around the year 1180 when, for both status and practical considerations, the need was felt to delineate clearly between those knights who had the wealth and wherewithal to lead a troop of knights into battle and those, on the other hand, who did not. Two hundred and fifty years later, however, the term banneret was rapidly declining in usage and significance, both in its social and military contexts (as so often, these two dimensions and stimuli of hierarchical change, the social and the military, are difficult to disentangle, for good reason). Socially, by the early years of the reign of Henry VI the former distinction between those summoned to parliament as barons and those summoned as knights banneret had disappeared, so that ‘by around 1425, they were all just “peers”’. Militarily, meanwhile, the rank of knight banneret was becoming nothing more than a remnant of a bygone age, a largely residual and redundant marker of status which even those who possessed the honour seem scarcely to have acknowledged or to have demanded acknowledgement of. Although Sir John Fastolf was promoted to the rank of banneret before the battle of Verneuil in 1424, he was seldom recorded as such in subsequent musters; indeed, during the final, Henrician stage of the Hundred Years’ War, only four individuals were recorded on the muster rolls as bannerets. What accounts for this demise?

As all historians and good students of history know, there is never simply one explanation: multi-causality is a necessary and unavoidable reflection of the complexity of human relations, a complexity which only increases as the time-period under the historical microscope expands. As E. H. Carr once wrote, ‘The historian deals in a multiplicity of causes’ (though he did go on to point out the historian's need and urge to create a ‘hierarchy of causes’ leading to ‘the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes’, something which we can return to in the conclusion).