Fount of honour

The fount of honour (Latin: fons honorum) refers to a person, who, by virtue of his or her official position, has the exclusive right of conferring legitimate titles of nobility and orders of chivalry on other persons.

During the High Middle Ages, European knights were essentially armoured, mounted warriors; by virtue of its defining characteristic of subinfeudation, in feudalism it was common practice for knights commander to confer knighthoods upon their finest soldiers, who in turn had the right to confer knighthood on others upon attaining command. For most of the Middle Ages, it was possible for private individuals to form orders of chivalry. The oldest existing order of chivalry, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, was formed as a private organization which later received official sanction from church and state.

The 13th century witnessed the trend of monarchs, beginning with Emperor Frederick II (as King of Sicily) in 1231, retaining the right of fons honorum as a royal prerogative, gradually abrogating the right of knights to elevate their esquires to knighthood. After the end of feudalism and the rise of the nation-state, orders and knighthoods, along with titles of nobility (in the case of monarchies), became the domain of the monarchs (heads of state) to reward their loyal subjects (citizens) – in other words, the heads of state became their nations' "fountains of honour".

Many of the old-style military knights resented what they considered to be a royal on their independence. The late British social anthropologist, Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, noted that "while the sovereign is the 'fount of honour' in one sense, he is also the enemy of honour in another, since he claims to arbitrate in regard to it." By the early thirteenth century, when an unknown author composed L'Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal), (a verse biography of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, often regarded as the greatest medieval English knight Richard W. Kaeuper notes that "the author bemoans the fact that, in his day, the spirit of chivalry has been imprisoned; the life of the knight errant, he charges, has been reduced to that of the litigant in courts."

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