The Hedge Knights
The landless knighthood of the Seven Kingdoms: men with a horse, a sword, and no lord, who sleep under hedges and sell their service tourney to tourney. The truest kind of knight, old Ser Arlan said — and the poorest.
The fuller tale
A hedge knight owns exactly what he can carry on his own horse and defends it with exactly the sword arm he was born with — no keep, no bannermen, no lord to answer to between one tourney and the next, which old knights in the trade like to call the truest form the vow ever takes and younger ones like to call a slow, itinerant kind of poverty. Both descriptions are accurate at once, most of the time.
The life runs on tourney purses, ransoms, and short-term service to whichever household will feed a spare sword for a season, slept out under actual hedges often enough that the name stopped being a metaphor generations ago. It is a hard way to eat and an honest way to fight, and Ser Duncan the Tall's own rise from Flea Bottom gutter child to knighted squire's heir is, structurally, just an unusually well-documented version of a path hundreds of men on the roads of Westeros were walking at the same time.
The tales populate that road generously: Ser Bennis of the Brown Shield, no cleaner in temperament than in armor; Ser Kyle the Cat, decent company on a long ride; Ser Uthor Underleaf, who treats the tourney circuit less as chivalry than as a trade with a ledger; and Ser Glendon Ball, carrying his dead father's fury and none of his fortune. Together they sketch the whole range the profession actually covers, from men who still mean the oath to men who have long since reduced it to a paycheck.
What the hedge knight's vantage point gives the entire saga is its real argument — that the songs' version of chivalry, sung about princes in high halls, was never actually invented by princes at all. It survives, when it survives, on the roads between castles, in the keeping of men with no hall to sing about them.
The page and the screen
The Hedge Knight season is built to foreground exactly this world, and reviewers of its first run singled out its unglamorous treatment of tourney life — the mismatched gear, the shared campfires, the transactional edges of the profession — as one of its more faithful inheritances from the source novella.