We must not, however, pursue the general subject further than we have done, in order to obtain some apprehension of the position in the body politic occupied by the class of persons with whom we are specially concerned. Of their social position we may perhaps briefly arrive at a correct estimate, if we call to mind that nearly all our rural parishes are divided into several manors, which date from the Middle Ages, some more, some less remotely; for as population increased and land increased in value, there was a tendency to the subdivision of old manors and the creation of new ones out of them. Each of these manors, in the times to which our researches are directed, maintained a family of gentle birth and knightly rank. The head of the family was usually a knight, and his sons were eligible for, and some of them aspirants to, the same rank in chivalry. So that the great body of the knightly order consisted of the country gentlemen--the country _squires_ we call them now, then they were the country _knights_--whose wealth and social importance gave them a claim to the rank; and to these we must add such of their younger brothers and grown-up sons as had ambitiously sought for and happily achieved the chivalric distinction by deeds of arms. The rest of the brothers and sons who had not entered the service of the Church as priest or canon, monk or friar, or into trade, continued in the lower chivalric and social rank of squires. When we come to look for authorities for the costume and manners of the knights of the Middle Ages, we find a great scarcity of them for the period between the Norman Conquest and the beginning of the Edwardian era. The literary authorities are not many; there are as yet few of the illuminated MSS., from which we derive such abundant material in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;[370] the sepulchral monuments are not numerous; the valuable series of monumental brasses has not begun; the Bayeux tapestry, which affords abundant material for the special time to which it relates, we have abstained from drawing upon; and there are few subjects in any other class of pictorial art to help us out.