The Battle at Black Cross, the climax of a brutal civil war between the surviving Orders of the Kingdom, saw the Black Order's rise from a conglomeration of hedge knights and impoverished knights-errant to a military and political entity in charge of its own princedom in the northern forests of the former Kingdom. Due to the nature of the Black Order's homesteads - found usually within forests and upon mountainous terrain - many of the Order's knights eschewed the use of mounts in those early days, preferring to fight on foot with the Order infantry and peasant levies.
After Black Cross, and during the wars which followed, the Order's knights retained an ethos of flexibility; all knights were expected to spend several rotations serving alongside the infantry, learning the virtues of the common man and shouldering his burden, thereby establishing a deeper bond with the peasants and serfs to whom they were overlords.
