it appears to me to be vastly more ‘courtier/official’ than ‘bloke on horse with big sword’ by the end of Henry VIII – the senior magnates were still responsible for the big military campaigns, but it looks to me that knighthood had very much become the pathway to a senior Court/Government role, rather a senior military role.

this may well be entirely natural – for the previous 400 years any senior role, even Archbishops, meant command of or involvement in, military force because we were always either fighting ourselves or the French, or the Scots, or the Welsh. by the middle of the Tudor period we’d stopped, broadly, fighting ourselves, and our expeditions against the French were much reduced both in scale and duration.