All That:

In 1348, the campaign in France having been triumphantly won (Crecy, and all that), Edward returned to the idea of founding a prestigious society of exemplary knights. While the chivalrous spirit was the same, the details were very different: instead of a tournament club of 300 members, it would be a close-knit fraternity of 26 companions (including the King); instead of a specially-constructed round hall, the members would have stalls in an existing chapel at Windsor Castle; and instead of being the Knights of the Round Table, they were to be called the Order of St. George, or the Society of the Garter.

The first meeting of the Order, and the induction of the first companions, took place at a tournament at Windsor on St. George's Day, April 23, 1349. (It is traditional in histories of the Garter to point out that this was the year the Black Death was ravaging England. Consider it pointed out.) The first companions were mostly participants in the Crecy campaign, with a few other prominent knights of great standing. Because the whole point was to celebrate the spirit of chivalry wherever it was found, from the beginning the Order very deliberately included knights of all social ranks, from the King of England down through peers, barons, bannerets, to simple knights bachelor; furthermore, the rules for filling vacancies in the Order (the companions were explicitly involved in the election of new members) made sure that spirit of social inclusiveness was maintained. Neither was it limited only to English knights: two French knights, allies of Edward's in the war, were among the first companions.

Why a garter? We all know the traditional legend: that Edward picked up a lady's fallen garter off the floor, and when some knights present mocked and pointed, he rebuked them by saying he would make that garter an object of respect and honor. The problem is, that story doesn't appear in any written source until more than a hundred years later (in the romance Tirant lo Blanc, ca. 1460), and not in England until 1534 (the historian Polydore Vergil). Besides, as D'Arcy Boulton puts it, "it is...difficult to believe that Edward -- who was very concerned with his public image both at home and abroad -- would have blithely invited the derision of his enemies...by adopting an item of [lady's] underclothing" as the badge for his society of the most chivalrous of knights. Put that way, I'm inclined to agree, and to go with Boulton that a garter was chosen because it was an article of male clothing which: a) was commonly recognized rather than outlandish, b) was not currently in fashion and therefore distinctive, and c) symbolized the binding together of the member knights (recalling the sash of the Spanish Order of the Band, which was almost certainly one of Edward's inspirations).

The Order of the Garter was a much longer lasting legacy than any of Edward's triumphs in war: by the time of his death, English possessions in France amounted to no more than little bits of coastline around Calais and Bourdeaux. In fact, not only was it the most enduring legacy of Edward III's reign in England, it also proved to be the longest-lasting of the royal orders of chivalry.

And what were these "orders of chivalry"? Where did that concept come from? Prior to 1100 (about halfway through our period, after all), if the phrase "Order of Knighthood" meant anything it referred to all knights collectively, as a social class. "Order" meaning a society or community bound together by the same ideals and abiding by the same rules, referred exclusively to religious, monastic orders -- the Benedictine, Cluniac, and Carthusian orders, etc.

Then in the wake of the First Crusade, in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, new orders of monks appeared, following the monastic rules of St. Benedict but armed and armored and with a new kind of mission: militantly to pursue the Church's war with the infidel. The Orders of the Temple, of the Hospital, and of the Teutonic Knights quickly became major international organizations, all the more prestigious among the aristocracy than the more traditional orders because their major activity was war, the profession of the upper classes. Inspired by these great international orders, smaller crusading orders arose in countries engaged in constant warfare with Saracen powers, such as the Knights of Alcantara and of Calatrava in Spain, the Knights of Avis in Portugal, the Order of the Dragon in Hungary.

The crusading orders gave outlet and inspiration to the social instinct, the longing for joining together in organization, among the warrior aristocracy. By the end of the 13th century, as the specifically crusading impulse waned and the romantic cult of chivalry grew, new kinds of associations flourished under the name of "orders of chivalry." The most important of these were the royal orders, formed by kings and princes to strengthen the loyalty of their ranking vassals and to magnify their own prestige. The Order of the Garter was one of the earliest of these, but every royal house in Europe eventually had its own.

But many other kinds of groups called themselves orders of chivalry, besides that of royal patron and his client knights: some were tournament clubs; some were social fraternities; some were personal alliances, or forms of blood-brotherhood; some weren't even exactly organizations, in that the members didn't really do anything together (any knight who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem became a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, for instance).

In the Current Middle Ages

Knighthood in the Current Middle Ages is in a strangely inverted situation, as compared to the First Middle Ages. Our orders of merit, peerage, etc., are clearly based on orders of chivalry (as they changed over the intervening centuries), but where originally orders like the Garter represented the elect of the whole class of knights, knights in the SCA make up just one of all the orders.

It was not always thus. During the first year or so of the Society, all fighters were assumed to be knights; those whose prowess on the field merited special advancement were made "Knights of the Laurel," in an intentional echo of period orders like the Garter. But the idea that everyone was an (ordinary) knight soon got forgotten, washed out probably by the vivid impression made by full-blown knighting ceremonies, and the disinction "of the Laurel" quickly disappeared -- fighters who had received the accolade in court were now the only Knights.

Some years later, the idea of a special, elevated order of exemplary knights came up again. In AS 8, King Henrik of the West created the Order of the Silver Molet as an order within the Chivalry, to distinguish the most chivalrous of knights from those who were just successful stickjocks. While usually I admire and advocate period solutions to period problems, it didn't work in this case: due perhaps to poor planning and poor PR work, too many people (especially other knights) saw it as divisive, as a way of excluding those belted fighters who weren't "really" Knights. While the OSM was never formally dissolved (I believe some members are still active in the West, and may still use those initials) it has long since been closed.

Also on the subject of comparing our practices with period orders, there was once upon a time a vague feeling that an award wasn't really an order if it didn't come from the Crown, that baronial and other local orders were somehow a little "iffy." But local orders created by and revolving around local nobility were certainly part of the First Middle Ages: for example, in A Distant Mirror, we read that Enguerrand de Coucy (himself an early member of the Garter) established his own Order of the Crown. On a different tangent, may medieval orders of chivalry were groups very like the SCA tournament companies, with the same goals and the same kind of organization.

Further Reading

The definitive work on orders of chilvalry in our period is Knights of the Crown: the monarchical orders of knighthood in later medieval Europe, 1325-1520, by D'Arcy J.D. Boulton (1987). Boulton covers only what he considers "true" orders, those which actually placed some obligations -- however minimal -- on their members; he has a chapter each on the Garter, the Golden Fleece, the Star, the Collar, and many others, bracketed by an introductory chapter which traces the antecedents of these orders and compares them with other kinds of orders, and a concluding chapter which analyzes their role within late medieval feudal society. If you're interested in the subject, you'll find this book indispensable.

On the Garter in particular, sources for the early history are scanty because the Order's early records were lost in a fire in 1416. One of the best works is Juliet Vale's Edward III and Chivalry: chivalric society and its context, 1270-1350 (1982), which I recommend both for the quality and depth of Vale's scholarship -- she does great work finding information in non-obvious sources and interprets it very soundly -- and for her emphasis on the culture of chivalry. A similarly good book that also covers the founding of the Garter is Richard Barber's Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine: a biography of the Black Prince (1978).

These are all solid, scholarly books, but they may be too dense for the casual reader. To those looking for something a little easier, I suggest The Reign of Chivalry (1980), also by Barber. It's not quite a coffee-table book in either size or ratio of pictures to text (although it comes close), but it's good and very readable.