Re: Avoidence of the issues Re: One manor per knight? A

On the phrase: "knightly class". From:
http://www.heraldica.org/topics/orders/knights.htm

"Knighthood and Nobility

Thus, knights were not necessarily nobles, nor were nobles necessarily
knights. The noble class and the ***knightly class*** slowly came to
merge from the late 12th century onward. Nobles become knights with
increasing frequency. The French prince (future king Louis VI) was
knighted without the knowledge of his father who remains distrustful of
a rather heterogeneous professional class, but thereafter every French
king is knighted (Favier 1993). Conversely, heredity enters the knightly
class in the 13th century. The son of a knight is automatically a
squire, thus making him eligible for knighthood on the basis of his
ancestry; at the same time, knighthood is more and more restricted to
descendants of knights by various legal restrictions imposed over the
course of the 13th century. In the late 13th century, a decision of the
Parliament in Paris forbade the count of Artois from making unfree men
into knights without the king's consent; interesting to note, the two
men who had been so knighted were allowed to remain knights subject to
the payment of a fine. This marked both the closure of the knightly
class as well as the beginnings of a new form of access, by purchase.

In England, the evolution was different: those who held land in
knight's fee but did not wish to take up the profession could pay a tax.
Knighthood did not become a hereditary class in England, and instead the
knightly class (those eligible to be knights) became the nucleus of the
gentry."

Tim Powys-Lybbe...

I don't believe there was a knightly class as knighthood had, and still
has, to be earned (if only by high level of donations to governments).

Further knights were not the nucleus of the gentry, the agricultural
landowners were the nucleus.