What happened if the king called his knights for war and a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
What happened if the king called his knights for war and a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
What happened if the king called his knights for war and a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
yeah
brutal proto-bottling
The Knight probably would rebel if he wasn't being paid enough then.
He would be a poor fucking knight - but it would still be expected of him to perform his duty. But he probably would have some amount of inherited gear, so it wouldn't be as all too bad.
Landed nobles were responsible for their own income generation. That's why they are landed in the first place.
Especially in the early modern period many lesser knights mismanaged their estates so badly that they became practically insolvent.
Why the fuck would a king/duke/lord etc. allow their knights to plunder their own villages?
And villages seldom had their own militas - those were reserved for cities in most cases.
>The Knight probably would rebel if he wasn't being paid enough then.
in feudal kingdom he would not be paid - he will get piece of land that he could profit from - if he was too poor to equip it would be his own fault
trick question, knights by default had to have gear
knights by the definition of the word, were not poor
not very wealthy most of the times, but not poor fucking either
>What happened if the king called his knights for war and a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
you stupid?
knight asked king to rape and rob villages on the way to war and came nice equipped to join kings shit feast.
why do you think villages had own defense forces and hidden roads with hide outs for?
Many knights would just get tithes from local peasantry that they would use to barter for weapons and armor with blacksmiths and armorers.
What this person said. After the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destruction of the largest central government in regional history, the concept of 'regular salaries' in a lot of areas went by the wayside. With the rise of Feudalism in the declining Roman Empire, landlords were basically required to take the place of the middle-class landowners in the Roman Republic, being required to show up when their liege yells at them, and regardless of how poor they are they'd have to turn up with whatever equipment they could scrape together. While affording shiny fancy armor with silken tabards and glorious plumes and the like might not be in reach of an impoverished feudal lord, as long as he HAS land he can at least sell or rent some off to afford something like thickly padded armor painted in his house colors, or a set of lower quality maille. He'd still have decent protection from thick cloth and a little bit of metal. While high quality armor was extremely expensive, lower quality stuff wasn't impossible to afford given the profusion of smiths in every single village in Europe.
He'd probably be able to turn up in crappy armor with at least some clothing in his own colors and a wooden shield so he's highly visible on the battlefield. If he weren't, his lord would probably be in their rights to ask them how the hell they have managed to become more poor than a random serf.
A sworn man who did not answer his lord's summons was courting potential death.
>A sworn man who did not answer his lord's summons was courting potential death.
most retarded answer ever..
It's a fact. If your liege lord called on you and you did not honor your oath, you would potentially face retaliation up to and including death. It's more likely your property would be seized and given to someone actually loyal. But it varied a lot on how strong a king was and how biddable his more powerful lords were. Common men weren't to be ignored, either. It's too late an example for what OP is thinking, but in the English Civil War a lot of common men fought for Charles I despite him being a retard because they saw him as in the right and the Parliamentarians as usurpers.
Breaking an oath in medieval times was really, really bad. That kind of stink would make you a pariah for the rest of your life and even ruin your children's prospects by association. Death was preferable to oathbreaking.
He can just not show up
call in sick
Tithes are tribues/taxes pal. The peasants wouldn't get robbed by the local knight because they would pay the local knight and his retainers to protect them from bandits.
It didn't mean raping and pillaging local villages that were related to local lords you dumbass poojeet
If the knight was that poor, then he couldn't have been landed. So he'd ask the land lord for gear, perhaps in exchange for % of loot.
Another option was to borrow from a israelite. On return, it'd be paid back with loot, or the israelite would get whipped and exiled, it could go different ways depending on the circumstances.
>angry little vatnik came to defend the motherland in a non-russia related thread, just because the topic is poverty
el-mao
He couldn't even help himself from not talking about rape and seething over Ukraine for one thread.
>knights for war and a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
First of all knights got plot of land big enough to but all the stuff for war.
But in extreme cases of mismanagement of his plot he could be striped by his senior from his land and another guy apointed instead of him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight's_fee
you show up with what you have and hope the others dont laugh too hard
The king would be obliged to provide him with armaments and the things the knight needed to do battle or he'd probably be down one knight by the end of it.
It's a complex answer, as it's like asking "What does someone owe in taxes in the West" - what period? What place? What exceptions? Off the top of my head:
>Osprey's book on Carolingian cavalry (so circa 700-800 AD) mentioned that failure to properly equip your retinue would result in death.
>Wargaming books well documented about the medieval period cite the Assize of arms. Google it Assize of Arms 1181, assize of arms 1252 or 1258. These stipulated what arms you must bring for what level of wealth, and included non knights down to the villager level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms
For example, "Item, the justices shall have proclamation made in the counties through which they are to go that, concerning those who do not have such arms as have been specified above, the lord king will take vengeance, not merely on their lands or chattels, but their limbs."
>An academic essay I forget the name of that I found pertained to Spanish communes and military service. Namely, that if you had the wealth to be a caballeros villanos (non noble cavalry) you were required to own a horse. If you did not, then the state/town seized enough of your wealth to buy a horse, bought a horse, then gave you the horse.
>hate horses
>but you make some money so the governor asks you to buy a horse
>you don't because you don't like horses
>they take a load of your shit and force you to take the horse they bought with it
>Fucking hate that horse but you have to look after it and ride it
>An academic essay I forget the name of that I found pertained to Spanish communes and military service. Namely, that if you had the wealth to be a caballeros villanos (non noble cavalry) you were required to own a horse. If you did not, then the state/town seized enough of your wealth to buy a horse, bought a horse, then gave you the horse.
The original "home owners association says your grass is too tall and if you don't fix it they will hire a landscaper and send you the bill"
if the dumbass managed to bankrupt themself so they could not meet their obligations they were about as inventive as modern debt defaulters are. Some went on the run as bandits/mercenaries, others were imprisoned, one even became the first recorded serial killer in european history
Gilles de Rais blowed through his families wallet. In desperation turned to alchemy and satanism with child sacrifices to try and turn his fortunes around
Go to the local dungeon, kill some monsters, loot their stuff, level up and then go.
As a general rule, a King would provide weapons and armor or at least the money and means to buy them. If a Knight managed to squander all that money or loose his weapons and armor the knight was looking at dismissal, corporal punishment, and public humiliation depending on how mad the king was at the moment. The King could even have that knight killed but that's because the king could have anybody killed for any reason. He's king, after all.
>knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war?
Impossible. It's a knight, the guy who lives to fight wars. He always must have some set of armour and weapons.
If knight has no land of his own, off which he could live by exploiting serfs or tenants (like a ministerial knight), he would most likely be on his senior's payroll.
Or he could get a loan.
Or join the mercenary company, since lots of the mercenary captains were poor noblemen
Being a knight, you have to had at least a horse, armor apropiate for the era, lance and sword/hand weapon and a squire (and probably a few more sods for the infantery and maintain maximilian the destrier and bobo the ass).
So, the expectation would be that they'd sort it out.
They'd borrow money in some cases - sometimes from their own peasants. IIRC they could ask even demand that the peasants under their charge would pay a lump sum - but usually there were protections in place so the knight or lord would have to pay them back, often through reduced regular taxes.
Often, he would take out loans--sometimes, enough loans to later bankrupt him--in order to make sure that he did not lose face among his peers by showing up looking like a peasant.
Face was... not *everything*, but close. Your reputation amongst your peers was incredibly important. Very few people managed to "move somewhere else and start over". If you weren't respected, or at least tolerated, it was difficult to operate in the feudal economy--and life was hard enough as it was.
Depends. Is the knight a retainer of a greater lord, is he a knight whose direct overlord is the king, or is he a knight who is a retainer of the king? Is he a household knight, or a landed knight?
A lord was obliged to equip his household knights-so that wouldnt be a problem, a landed knight should have enough money to afford his equipment, but if not then he would probably either extort his tenants in order to get the money to do so, or beg and borrow what he needed from his direct lord (baron, count, duke, king) if he didnt have it. What you really needed was armour, a helmet, a sword, a shield, spurs, and a lance, oh and a hourse, but ideally five different horses. You were typically gifted some, or all of the above on becoming a knight, particularly the spurs and sword. The shield and lance are inexpensive and easily provided for, armour+swords are more expensive, but theres a big variation in coverage, quality and cost such that spare shitty ones would likely be able to be found, the biggest expense was really the warhorse, sometimes a knight would lose or not be able to get an adequate warhorse, in which case he'd be forced to make do with a shittier horse.
If he truly couldnt afford any of the above, and somehow couldnt borrow or beg or get a loan, then he'd probably either offer his services as a squire or knight to a different lord, join a mercenary company, start a life of banditry (at times largely indistinguishable from being a mercenary), or retire to a monastery and avoid this shit.
He went without the stuff he needed and probably got killed unless the king released them from their obligation to fight.
That'd be one of those "we'll figure it out if it happens" sort of things however.
>a knight was too poor
His land will be forfeit back to the King for squandering the rents on whores and cards
Polish / PLC perspective, which is more renaissance or even early modern, but feudalism of sorts was still in full swing there at the time:
I've read about some Polish musters where commanders weren't happy about the quality of horses some of the nobles called up to fight were using, so the commanders got them new horses, which delayed stuff a bit and cost the commanders some money (and presumably the nobles in question some prestige). Prestige being often more important to the average nobleman than money since that how you got appointed to various posts, land holdings, and jobs.
Knights are generally wealthy and their commanders are very wealthy. A big part of feudalism is that they are fully expected to paper over any fiscal problems with their own wealth.
Also, knights were not usually called individually but as whole units from some area, who would often be relatives, so they could help each other out if they lacked in anything.
A knight was required to equip himself under the terms of his land tenure. Failure to do so would mean his lord could strip him of his fief.
That's why knights were given fiefs. A knight's fee was the amount of land required for a knight to support himself. If someone owned multiple fees, they were required to provide the appropriate number of trained, equipped knights when called upon. This included cases where multiple people split ownership of a fee, where they had to collectively supply a knight or give an equivalent amount of money to their lord.
poor knights would have to horseshare
>a knight was too poor to buy all the stuff he needs for war
Considering the stipend paid for those knights was for the sole purpose of getting fucking equipped for the needs of the war, I assume the king would be all kinds of pissed and ask some sharp questions about where all the money went.