Comments by "Crazy Eyes" (@CrizzyEyes) on "10 Reasons Knights Were Horrible Warriors" video.

Exactly, thank you. Feudal society was incredibly different from what we know today. It was very confederated in the sense that each lord was in fact, lord of his own domain, and had a treaty with the king that said he'd send men to help him in military campaigns. But lords were usually quite keen to keep their power for themselves. Imagine for example if the governors of states here in the US would explicitly threaten both each other and the president with violence over perceived slights or not respecting ones' borders. Private wars were often legal between lords in the same kingdom, especially in the HRE/Germany, hence the term "feudal." To earn the respect of being a lord with a title or a landed knight, one was expected to provide for oneself using the land given to him or if he had no land, through mercenary work or some other means. The traditional obligation of a noble was to fight and to raise men for fighting -- completely on his own, not because the king gave him a bunch of money to buy all his groceries. There are always exceptions but that is the rule. Giving money to a knight so he can buy his own gear before going on campaign might very well been taken as an insult; or at the least, he'd have to consider whether taking the money would be worth the less tangible but still significant cost of being laughed at by his peers for being too poor.
74
"Chivalry made knights terrible." Medieval women : Lord in Heaven, I suppose I'll just go back to being sexually assaulted then.
3
@dark_fire_ice No it isn't. Feudalism is a product of its time and of traditions that are mostly rooted in pre-Roman "barbarian" values. The idea is that the noble class is obliged to protect the serf, who is in turn obliged to provide food for everyone, and that each of these are defined by bloodline. It's very hierarchical and very rigid. In a libertarian/an-cap society, positions are very fluid and mostly determined by how much money you have. Going to war is, to most businesses, a giant sunken cost that they would prefer to avoid; not every business is a defense contractor. The paradigm also became completely outdated when common people became capable of defending themselves. Self-defense was no longer gated behind years of training with weapons that were in most cases illegal for them to even possess. Instead you could just buy a gun, train for a few weeks and have just as much a chance as killing someone as anyone else.
2