Thinking Medieval with a Twist: Knights are younger in Scarterra

For the purpose of this article, a "knight" is a warrior of high status serving a feudal lord as an elite warrior, battlefield commander and enforcer of the peace.   The basic prospect of transforming a boy into a knight is mostly the same between real Earth Medieval history and throughout most of Scarterra. This difference is that Scarterrans accelerate this.   There were exceptions, but for most of the medieval era, boys of the social class enabling them to be knights started as pages at age seven or eight, and they became squires around age fourteen. A squire is going to learn how to clean and maintain weapons long before he begins actual combat training. Most knights received their spurs at twenty or twenty-one, maybe a little later.   On average, Scarterran pages get promoted to squire around twelve and most knights get their spurs around age eighteen. Some young Scarterran men take their knightly oaths at sixteen.  

There are three main reasons why Scarterran knights start young.

  First is the prevalence of magic. Magic can make mock combat safer and push martial arts farther by letting Scarterran train longer and harder. This also means they can start younger.  

by Eron12 with Heroforge

-Sir Casmir, Grand Marshal of Fumaya

 

"In a real battle, both sides are trying to use magic to augment their offense and defense, assuming magic users are available.   During training exercises, we only use the defensive magic and skip the offensive magic. This means that the soldiers can spar using real battlefield with very little chance of causing a serious injury. There are even specific magics that were specifically created to make sparring matches safer. And if there is an accident, Healing can prevent someone from being killed or permanently maimed.

  That doesn't mean we never have deaths during training, but we lose far more squires due to riding mishaps or tavern brawls that go too far gone wrong than we do from casualties during mock combat drills."

Knights are the most elite soldiers, and knights are mostly drawn from the upper classes. The upper classes have more access to spell-casters and potions. Common rank-and-file soldiers usually have to make due with little or no magic during training, so they have to rely on more real-world training methods. Militia and men-at-arms don't usually start their weapons training until they are a fair bit older.     The second reason that children start knightly training in Scarterra at a young age is because Scarterra has a bunch of terrifying supernatural creatures inhabiting it. Most of which have have no compunction about attacking young people, so a drawn out childhood is a luxury most families, even highborn families cannot often often afford. Plus, all the same factors that drove medieval wars on Earth still exist in Scarterra, so human lords have to deal with monster attacks and warring nations and tribes.   The third (and bleakest) reason is that with fewer children dying of disease, Scarterran noble families don't have to struggle as much to get their "heir and a spare". If you noble has an heir and three or four spares, he can theoretically afford his children into battle and lose one or two, rest assured that the remainder will come out of their struggles stronger, and the ones that die will still uphold their family's honor.