From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia A knight-errant is
a figure of medieval chivalric romance literature. The adjective
errant (meaning "wandering, roving") indicates how the knight-
errant would wander the land in search of adventures to prove
his chivalric virtues, either in knightly duels (pas d'armes) or
in some other pursuit of courtly love. A Knight-errant is not a
knight but a knight in waiting, a servant/messenger role in
liege to a full knight or Prince. The template of the knight-
errant are the heroes of the Round Table of the Arthurian cycle
such as Gawain, Lancelot and Percival. The quest par excellance
in pursuit of which these knights wander the lands is that of
the Holy Grail, such as in Perceval, the Story of the Grail
written by Chrétien de Troyes in the 1180s. Although the
character is part of the romance genre as it developed during
the late 12th century, the term "knight-errant" itself is
younger, for the first time recorded (as knygt erraunt) in the
14th-century poem Sir Gawain a