Knighthood

Knighthood is a rank and honour given to warriors who perform exemplery service for a lord, the Faith or the King on the Iron Throne. Its members are known as knights and use the title Ser.

Pursuing a knighthood is one of the few ways for a member of the smallfolk to achieve rank and standing amongst the nobility. However, such a task usually involves the expenditure of significant sums of money on armour and weaponry which puts it out of the reach of most commoners.

Knights have to be devout followers of the Faith of the Seven. As such, non-followers of the Faith, such as most of the inhabitants of the North (who follow the old gods of the forest instead) and the Iron Islands (who follow a deity called the Drowned God) cannot become knights.

In the books
In the Song of Ice and Fire novels, knighthood is an institution that came with the Andals when they invaded Westeros some six thousand years ago. Knights wore armour (derived from iron) and rode horses into battle, using massed-formation charges and lances to shatter enemy formations. The devastating effectiveness of this tactic permitted the Andals to conquer most of Westeros. This tactic was later adopted by others, so the cavalry of the North uses much the same weapons, armour and tactics as knights, but are not called knights due to their devotion to another god. In practice, there is little difference between knights and Northern heavy cavalry.

There are several types of knight:


 * Hedge knights are typically commoners who have risen to knighthood. They have no fixed abode and wander the Seven Kingdoms looking for a cause to fight for.
 * Sworn swords are knights sworn to a particular lord. Sometimes this is permanant, but mainly it is temporary, with hedge knights joining a lord for a particular purpose and then being released afterwards.
 * Landed knights are knights who have been rewarded for leal service by a lord with land, typically a smallholding, large farm or small manor with servants. Successful landed knights who expand their holdings or continue to perform exemplery service for their liege may be raised to the rank of lord in time.

Most knights pass through three stages to achieve the rank. They start as pages, young boys who perform menial tasks for their lieges. Pages are not expected to fight in battle, but some do regardless. They are given lessons in riding and weapons in return. Upon reach adolescence, pages become squires. Their training intensifies and they are taught the full comportment and responsbilities of knights. Squires are expected to fight in battle and carry themselves as knights at all times, even though they have not achieved the rank yet. They finally become full knights after they have proven themselves. Any knight can make another knight.

Becoming a knight requires the applicant to swear an oath of allegience and fealty to the Seven and to stand vigil in a sept for a night (these not be performed consecutively: it is not uncommon in times of war for a newly-made knight to not stand his vigil for weeks or months).

There is no formal bar to women becoming knights, only that it is simply not done. Whilst rare, female warriors have served as pages and squires.