Knightly Orders
Breton society is famous for its knightly orders, with notable examples including Daggerfall's Knights of the Dragon, the Knights of the Rose of Wayrest, the Knights of the Flame of Anticlere, and Dwynnen's Order of the Raven. Breton Folk-tales, and religious liturgy alike abound with knightly tales of chivalric romance and noble pursuits. Up until recently, the archetype of the knight was anachronistically applied to the ancient history of High Rock, well before more modern scholarship indicates that such social orders would have actually been a historical reality. In truth - the origins of High Rock’s Knightly Orders trace back only as far as the militant bands that plagued the Interregnum. In the centuries of lawlessness and darkness that descended on Tamriel between the Reman and Septim Empires, every lord with a sufficiently sized fortress surrounded themselves with men-at-arms. These were no Knights in the modern romanticized sense, being little more than thugs and up jumped highway men - raised to the position for their military prowess and skill with a blade. Of course these militant bands were barely more legitimate than your run-of-the mill protection racket. But with the return of the stability of the Third Empire - and the subsequent outlawing of private militaries, these men-at-arms were dissolved, with only house-guards and a basic retinue permitted for all but the Emperor himself.
The modern Knightly Orders as we understand them emerged out of the centuries of peace that followed, often tracing their lineage back to individual men-at-arms bands of old. This was part of a Breton renaissance, feverishly romanticizing the period of pre-imperial rule, when Bretons ruled Bretons without outside interference and any man who found a new hill could ‘Become a New King’. In the last century in particular, the number of such Knightly Societies has tripled - each of course claiming a long and unbroken history with some past band of ‘merry-knights’.
For most of their long histories, even the most prestigious of these orders rarely served a more martial role than that of Royal-Guard for some wealthy aristocratic family. But this situation radically changed during the Simulacrum. The collapse of Imperial Power over the course of that decade resulted in many of the local elites coopting these orders for their own security. Previously almost exclusively, aristocratic societies, their numbers swelled, and in some cases they have become private militaries in all but name - a direct violation of Imperial Law. This situation has persisted since, and even though we are twenty-odd years from the Restoration - the regional rulers of High Rock have been reluctant to wholly disarm.
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