Squires, a term which has taken on a very singular connotation (ie. a knight's understudy) in modern times had a wider one in the Middle Ages (going variously by armiger, scutiger, scutarius, or scutifer in Latin sources and as escuier or vaslet in Old and Anglo-Norman French), but then so did knight (Lat. militus or Fr. chevalier). When the role began it was a primarily servile one, with armigeri included among the servile staff expected to be part of a magnates household (for example the so-called 'Laws of Edward the Confessor', c.1136). They were, as the name implies, related to shields and armour but there was it appears little status in the title itself. There was no necessity for a squire to be advanced to the status of knight, even in the thirteenth-century and might remain squires for the entirety of their lives.

However, while it is unsurprising that these unromantic roots of the trade have been largely forgotten, it muddies the waters somewhat as the term was also then turned on the aristocratic iuvenes (youths) who would serve with lords while learning their military trade during the twelfth-century. They included chivalric luminaries such as William Marshal (who spent eight years as a squire - eskuers - under William de Tancarville) and were considered a distinct noble group through their lineage. By the late twelfth-century this usage of squire was becoming the dominant one and their role and position was not restricted to service or training in arms, to quote from a late twelfth-century ensenhamen (a type of conduct literature):

It is good to have escudiers bound to your service. Have two who are charming, good looking, discreet and accomplished. Whatever might be those of others, yours should be becoming, courtly, educated and well spoken. Such fellows have their uses in that they will gain you a good reputation. If you send them anywhere, one could not be ridiculed on their account, for it is said about such servants, "You can tell the lord by his household"'.

Quoted in David Crouch, The English Aristocracy: 1070-1272, A Social Transformation, (New Haven and London, 2010), 57.

But the social status of the squire took somewhat differing paths in England and France over the next century. While the title acquired practical noble aspects in both societies the English remained firmly against the acquisition of armorial (ie. taking up heraldic arms) well into the thirteenth-century - see Edward I forbidding such practice in 1292 - the French squires had been doing so 'unapologetically' since the 1250s. The French squirey were acquiring noble status in a manner very different to that of England. While the term might not have possess the same status, there were squires in both England and France who bore heraldic and military arms, held land, and acted as soldiers beyond their periods of tutelage in the households of knights or magnates. Indeed, the titles of armiger and esquiers become associated in the fourteenth-century with another catch-all and debated terms: men-at-arms. This group was doing the same martial job of a knight without much of the associated expense (both ceremonial and bureaucratic) that were associated with the title 'knight'. This is not to say that they did not aspire to, or retain much of inherent characteristics, of the warrior aristocracy from which they emerged in the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries but that the term and conception of the knight and squire as tutor and tutee is difficult to sustain much beyond the early thirteenth-century. The issue is further muddied, as recent research has demonstrated that the synonymity of esquire and men-at-arms declined as militarily active knights declined too (this is in the fifteenth-century). But that is another issue for another day.

To provide a loose chronological timeline (from England): from the eleventh-century it was likely that a squire would not be entitled to the emerging culture of ransom, and if captured would likely be treated as any other servile member of staff. In the late twelfth-century they might be offered some respite as sons or youths associated with aristocratic families. In the thirteenth-century this was still true and squires would begin to abrogate this status through taking up of heraldic arms. In the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries the status of the squire was essentially synonymous with that of men-at-arms and the role synonymous with the archetypal image of the knight. After this point, squires undertook a more distinct rarified social role and probably a more important role in the military structure of England.

So why is the noble status of squires important with regard to their treatment after the death of the knight or lord they served? Firstly, it somewhat breaks the image of the squire as purely in service to the knight and somewhat outside of the conflicts in which their lord partook. But even the idealised child-squires would be expected to fight: 'let the boy earn his spurs', as Edward III was to famously say of his own sixteen year old son, Edward the Black Prince, at the Battle of Crecy in 1346. Secondly, because it meant that they were subject to the somewhat ephemeral 'law of arms'. The long uncodified conduct between aristocratic and noble warriors which governed many aspects of their relationships both on and off the battlefield. A noble squire, as opposed to the servile, would expect the right to submit and then be, circumstances permitting, offered ransom and a reasonable degree of comfort during their imprisonment. They were young aristocrats even if they were not always defined as nobles and, if they did not have a particular value as hostages, they would likely be given the liberty to return to their homes and raise the ransoms required.

However, the issue of circumstance rears its ugly head. The practical niceties which ideally governed relations between the chivalric classes, to which squires through their nobility could claim membership, could not always be implemented. The increasingly brutal nature of warfare in during the Hundred Years War where, for example, the French crown repeatedly fought beneath the Oriflamme (signalling no quarter would be given), or where concerns regarding reinforcements might lead to the near wholesale slaughter of prisoners irrespective of rank (such as Agincourt, 1415); coupled with the increasingly politicised nature of the conflict which meant that capture might lead to execution for treason meant this was an increasingly dangerous period for aristocratic warfare. Finally, the cost of the ransoming might be so onerous that it could ruin an established knight or lord, who had a higher value placed upon their lives, but that a squire might not merit the same treatment for purely pragmatic reasons.

The ideal of ransoming which the noble status of squires permitted them access to was difficult to maintain not only during the Hundred Years War, but also in many other conflicts for purely pragmatic reasons. Their status and treatment was often dependent on the political and social connections they had (especially their lineage) but as such, they were like many counts, barons, earls, and even kings subject to the mercy of the person who caught them, the ability to raise a ransom, and, in later periods, the chain-of-command which might order their execution despite their surrender into the protection of a peer or social superior. They might return home with onerous payments, or be executed and buried in the grounds of a nearby church. If they had great political value they might be kept as a hostage against their kith and kin's behaviour, or they might be executed for treason depending on the nature of the conflict.