Every Baron had his banner, and a feudal array of knights, men-at-arms, and others, was numbered by its banners. The banneret and the baron were therefore soldiers of equal authority. The banneret, too, like the baron, had his words of courage, his cry of arms, which he shouted before a battle, in order to animate his soldiers to the charge, and whose sound, heard in the moment of direst peril, rallied the scattered troops by the recollection of the glories of their commander's house, and their own former achievements. The war-cry was also the underwritten ornament of the armorial shield, and worked on the surcoat and banner, and was carved on the tomb both of the knight-banneret and the baron. Each of these representatives of chivalry and nobility had his square escutcheon. The wife of a banneret was styled _une dame bannerette_, and the general title of his family was a _hostel bannière_. * * * * * [Sidenote: The Knight.] The second and most numerous class of chivalric heroes consisted of Knights, who were originally called Bas-Chevaliers, in contradiction to the first class, but in the course of time the word bachelor designated rather the esquire, the candidate for chivalry, than the cavalier himself. These knights of the second class were in Spain called _Cavalleros_, in distinction from the _riccos hombres_, or knights-banneret; and in France, the illiberal and degrading title of _pauvres hommes_ was sometimes applied to them, to mark their inferiority to the bannerets. [Sidenote: Qualifications for knighthood.]