(in the Middle Ages) the tenure of land by a knight on condition of performing military service.
Example sentencesExamples
- By the 13th cent. the arrangements were unravelling as lords increasingly paid scutage rather than perform knight service and vassals tried to commute their own obligations.
- His grandson, who appears in early thirteenth-century records as ‘John fitz Dermot’, was married to an Anglo-Norman woman, and held his lands by knight service.