Old English cniht meant boy-servant before it meant armour
Knighthood began as a title for mounted warriors and petty nobles, later an honorific granted by sovereigns or popes. The English word tracks Old English cniht—boy or servant—cousin to German Knecht, long before Maximilian I earned the nickname last knight.
Ancient hippeis and Roman equites offered distant models. High Medieval Europe treated knights as a military minor nobility; Late Medieval gunpowder weapons such as the culverin made full armour less decisive, yet titles persisted. Orders still thrive in Christian traditions and successor states—from Malta and Saint John to the Garter—while dame names the modern female counterpart.
The word travelled slowly. Cniht first meant a boy, then a household retainer; Ælfric's homily on St Swithun applies it to a mounted retainer, yet Anglo-Saxon cnihtas show up more often as servants than as fighters. By about 1100 the sense had narrowed to a military follower of a king or lord, and the image of a heavy cavalryman arrived only with the Hundred Years' War. Medieval Latin never reused the Roman eques for this figure; it chose miles, a plain classical word for soldier, while vulgar Latin caballus gave the Romance tongues their relatives of cavalier.
In the early medieval period any well-armed rider could be called a knight, and the first ones appear under Charlemagne in the 8th century. By the 10th century the institution was firmly rooted, binding vassals to lords through grants of land as fiefs. During the 12th century knighthood hardened into a social rank that separated non-noble horsemen, milites gregarii, from true knights, milites nobiles. Not everyone approved: churchmen such as Bernard of Clairvaux condemned knights for abusing women and civilians and thought many were serving Satan. The crusades steered that energy into military orders, starting with the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and the Hospitallers soon after 1099, then the Templars in 1118 and the Order of Santiago in 1170.
Source: Knight
