Black knight
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The black knight is a literary stock character, contrasting with the white knight.
Historical significance
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A black knight is a soldier or knight who either is not bound to a specific liege or does not want his liege, or himself, to be identified and so does not bear any heraldic standards or has blackened them out.
Since heraldic standards were carefully regulated by one official body or other (such as the British College of Arms), a fighting man who had not obtained a standard (through inheritance or endowment by a liege) would have no colors or devices to represent him. These would-be knights were often freelance soldiers. Because they usually lacked a squire or page to care for their armor, they would paint it black to prevent rust. An experienced and equipped soldier without a specific fealty was a wild card and an organized force of them could be troublesome to kings or other feudal overlords. This sort of freelance situation with no feudal lord to which these knights owed fealty and/or homage ran contrary to some of the tenets of feudalism and this condition was looked upon with disfavor. They were also viewed with contempt by enfeoffed knights, who were those knights of the time that held land, a fief, by tenure by military service to a feudal lord. The medieval view of landless and mercenary knights was somewhat contrary to how they have been romantically portrayed in stories and how modern reading and viewing audiences may see them. This unfavorable view of such knights, originally medieval, contributes to the sometimes pejorative usage of the term.
The more commonly used, and negative inference, is that of a soldier or knight who has purposely hidden their standard, as their identifying colors or device, to remain anonymous on the battlefield and elsewhere. Knights involved in risky political intrigues or activities unbecoming of a man of station would blacken their shields so as to not be easily identified.
Literary use
Sir Walter Scott has Richard the Lionhearted posing as a black knight to avoid detection while in England in his novel Ivanhoe.
Sega's Sonic Team transforms King Arthur into "The Black Knight" as a result of corruption from his immortality inducing scabbard of Excalibur given by the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian influenced Sonic and the Black Knight.
Marvel Comics has had several characters called the Black Knight who are descended from a Knight of the Round Table. The current Black Knight is Dane Whitman, a superhero who carries an enchanted sword, the Ebony Blade.
Raymond Chandler in his first novel The Big Sleep(1939) lets his private eye Philip Marlowe describe and comment on "... a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. ... "
See also
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