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both great and small
    Fall in the ditches and on the grass
    And see the dead transfixed by spear shafts!
    Lords, mortgage your domains, castles, cities,
    But never give up war!
    Dante pictured Bertrand in Hell, carrying his severed head before him as a lantern.
    From ownership of land and revenues the noble derived the right to exercise authority over all non-nobles of his territory except the clergy and except merchants who were citizens of a free town. The
grand seigneur’
s authority extended to “high justice,” meaning the power of life or death, while the lesser knight’s was limited to prison, flogging, and other punishments of “low justice.” Its basis and justification remained the duty to protect, as embodied in the lord’s oath to his vassals, which was as binding in theory as theirs to him—and theirs was binding “only so long as the lord keeps his oath.” Medieval political structure was ideally a contract exchanging service and loyalty in return for protection, justice, and order. As the peasant owed produce andlabor, the lord in turn owed ministerial service to his overlord or sovereign, and counsel in peace as well as military service in war. Land in all cases was the consideration, and the oath of homage, made and accepted, was the seal binding both sides, including kings.
    Not all nobles were
grands seigneurs
like the Coucys. A bachelor knight, possessor of one manor and a bony nag, shared the same cult but not the interests of a territorial lord. The total ranks of the nobility in France numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to 50,000 families who represented something over one percent of the population. They ranged from the great dukedoms with revenues of more than 10,000 livres, down through the lord of a minor castle with one or two knights as vassals and an income under 500 livres, to the poor knight at the bottom of the scale who was lord of no one except those of servile birth and whose only fief was a house and a few fields equivalent to a peasant’s holding. He might have an income from a few rents of 25 livres or less, which had to support family and servants and the knight’s equipment that was his livelihood. He lived by horse and arms, dependent for maintenance on his overlord or whoever needed his services.
    A squire belonged to the nobility by birth whether or not he obtained the belt and spurs of a knight, but legal process was often required to determine what other functions a gentleman might undertake without losing noble status. Could he sell wine from his vineyard, for instance?—a delicate question because the kings regularly sold theirs. In a case brought in 1393 to determine this question, a royal ordinance stated rather ambiguously, “It isnot proper for a noble to be an innkeeper.” According to another judgment, a noble could acquire license to trade without losing his status. Sons of noble fathers were known “who live and have long lived as merchants selling cloth, grain, wine and all other things of merchandise, or as tradesmen, furriers, shoemakers or tailors,” but such activities would doubtless have lost them the privileges of a noble.
    The rationale of the problem was made plain by Honoré Bonet, a 14th century cleric who made the brave attempt in his
Tree of Battles
to set forth existing codes of military conduct. The reason for the prohibition of commercial activity, he wrote, was to ensure that the knight “shall have no cause to leave the practice of arms for the desire of acquiring worldly riches.”
    Definition increasingly concerned the born nobles in proportion as their status was diluted by the ennoblement of outsiders. Like the grant of charters to towns, the grant of fiefs to commoners, who paid handsomely for the honor, was found by the crown to be a lucrative sourceof funds. The ennobled were men of fortune who procured the king’s needs, or they were lawyers and notaries who had started by assisting the king at various levels in the