«Here, in outline, was the basis of a complex but effective way to organize political society. And it was not limited to the lands of the Carolingian Franks. Outside the Frankish realms, feudal structures (or if we are to avoid the word “feudal”, the land-for-arms social compact) developed. They could be found, adapted to local custom and tradition, in Normandy, England, Scotland, Italy, the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula, the crusader states that were established in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century (see chapter 8), and eventually in the newly Christianised states of Hungary and Scandinavia.18 And by the same token, even when the western half of the Carolingian empire experienced a dearth in strong kingship following the deaths of Charlemagne and his immediate successors, the social mechanisms of lordship and military service continued. Indeed, they became all the more important as French kingship declined from its Carolingian high-water mark, and dukes, counts, and other lords—including high-ranking churchmen—began to tussle with one another for the security of their individual patches.

The long-term results of all this were threefold. In the first place, an ever-more complex set of laws and procedures emerged to define the relations between land givers and landholders: semisacred rituals of homage-bound people to serve and protect one another (in theory at least) and a whole raft of legally enforceable rights, obligations, payments, and taxes developed around the bonds of land grants. (If “feudalism” existed, then this is what it comprised: a complex nexus of interlocking personal relationships that, when taken as a whole, presented a haphazard but distinctive system of government.) In the second, the success of a system by which large numbers of warriors could be sustained contributed to a sense, part real and part imagined, that society in the west was becoming more violent and dangerous. And in the third, the fact that warriors were now endowed as a matter of course with estates that could support an aristocratic lifestyle helped create an upper-class consciousness that lauded—indeed, fetishized—supposedly knightly virtues. The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.

That, at least, is the theory. But theory is hard for us to visualize. In order to better understand what the “new” warrior of the early second millennium looked like, how he worked within the turbulent medieval world, what he might hope to achieve in life through sheer force of arms, and how he might come to be lionized by later generations, it is better that we move from generalities to particulars, and look at the career of one of the most famous characters of this early age of knighthood. The knight in question was called Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar. He was not a Frank, but a man of the Iberian Peninsula, where war was endemic and authority was fragmented but opportunities for advancement by the strength of one’s arm abounded. Those who knew him in life called him the Champion (El Campeador). But he is better remembered by a bastardized, Arab-Spanish colloquial nickname that was given to him by bards who sang of him after his death. They knew him as al-Sayyid, or El Cid.»

Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/996679ac-2bc4-4808-a725-cc596af57f8a

(Text embellishments mine. Couldn’t resist that 3rd paragraph.)

Wait! There’s more!

«The reality of going to war on horseback in the Middle Ages was objectively terrible. It was not only expensive, tiring, and frightening; it also hurt. A skeleton found in the 1990s in southern England, recently radiocarbon-dated to the time of the battle of Hastings, shows the dreadful physical degradation knighthood entailed. The bones of the wrists, shoulders, and spine bear the scars of painful, lifelong wear and tear: joints and vertebrae worn ragged by arduous days and months spent training, riding, and fighting in the saddle. The side and back of the skull bear six separate, severe wounds, administered with swords when the person was around the age of forty-five. These lethal blows were the reward for a life of toil.36 And they were entirely normal. The reality for medieval warriors was a hard life concluding in a nasty death, followed by the distinct possibility of hell as punishment for all the slaughtering and maiming they had done. Yet the impulse among medieval fighting men and the poets who wrote for them was not to report this godforsaken reality in plain prose, but to overwrite it with a heroic new literature that painted knights as lovers and questers whose ethical code perfumed the dubious reality of their deeds. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the twentieth century, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”»