Teenage boys who were in training to become knights crossed into adulthood with the ceremony of dubbing. There were squires who never became full knights, or who remained squires well through their 20s. This would be the case if their families were poor and they never distinguished themselves in battle. But for the majority of young men, knighthood arrived somewhere in what we’d call their college years.
At this point, they had been in battle training for years. They could climb ladders and ropes in full armor, and also jump onto a horse with its weight. (Full armor was not the shining suit of sheet metal you know from the early Renaissance; it was chain mail or a few plates, for most of the period.) They could hunt deer and boar, play chess and talk about battle tactics. They had participated in melees, the dangerous group battles held at tournaments, and they could joust (a battle skill). As squires, they had formed close relationships with important knights and lords in many regions. A knight had to be from a noble family; his father or another close relative had a title and the family owned some land. Usually, they were reasonably affluent.
The dubbing ceremony was at first just a matter of giving good weapons to a new fighter and commissioning his sword as part of the feudal defense of his lord. An established knight gave the new knight a sword and spurs, with a kiss and a declaration that he was a knight. The greatest honor was to be dubbed a knight right on the battlefield where a squire had shown bravery.
But by the 13th and 14th centuries, there was a religious ritual. A group of squires being knighted together went to Mass in the evening, then each had a long bath and pondered his sins, leaving them behind in the bath. Then a group of knights came to dress each in a new white shirt and red tunic, with black hose, a white girdle and a red cloak, all symbolic of purity, willingness to defend the weak, chastity, etc. The knights then led the young men to church, where they prayed for hours and generally kept vigil overnight. In the morning, another Mass.
At the dubbing ceremony after Mass, the presiding knight (the lord who had sponsored their training) gave each a pair of golden spurs with a warning to trample the world’s riches underfoot; these were buckled on by attending knights. Then he kissed the candidate (if one was of high rank, he was singled out to be knighted first, then knighted his pals) and tapped his shoulder with a sword; sometimes he slapped his face. He declared publicly that the man was a knight. When all were knighted, it was time for the feast.
The Magna Carta restricted the king’s power to levy extra taxes unless it was to pay for his first daughter’s wedding or his first son’s knighthood. This gives us a measure of just how seriously the knighted class took its knighthood feasts. Just as there are couples today who live together for years “because we can’t afford a wedding,” some squires lingered in service because their families couldn’t afford the requisite feast. You can see why being knighted on the battlefield was best.