HERBARZ-L Archives

Archiver > HERBARZ > 2003-08 > 1059822326


From: "Nikolai v. Pock" <>
Subject: Re: Noble, Commoner. Misconception
Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2003 13:05:26 +0200 (CEST)


REF: Nobility


It seems to me that there may be a slight
misconception underlying the argument here. As I
understand it, matters are as follows:
Noblemen can be defined as those people enjoying a
certain preferred legal status. You were either born
into that class or you had been personally ennobled to
become a member of it.
Knighthood, on the other hand, represents a certain
special status as a warrior. In German, e.g., a noble
(!) warrior in the middle ages would be called
"Knecht" [this word has also a quite different meaning
when applied to a commoner] while the knights
("Ritter") would form only a small subset of the noble
warriors, viz. those who had been knighted.
So "knight" and "nobleman" do not refer to the same
question and are therefore no general synonyms!
This general idea applies still to present-day
Britain, where you can be noble but no knight ("Sir")
and also to the rest of Europe, where persons of noble
birth can also become knights by joining e.g. the
Maltese Order, but are no knights by virtue of their
birth alone.
"In Poland, a knight and a nobleman were the same
thing." (David Zincavage, 31 Jul 2003 17:15) -- I do
not know, it may have been the case, though I doubt
it, and it is definitely untrue in Germany and the
rest of western Europe!

Nikolai von Pock

=====
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.geocities.com/pokrzywnickiana/
---------------------------------------------------------------
site dedicated to the von Pokrzywnicki (von Bock 1775) family in East Prussia 1650-1945

__________________________________________________________________

Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
Logos und Klingeltöne fürs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de

This thread: