lords and lordship in the british isles in the late middle ages
LOR D S A N D LO R D S H I P I N T H E B R I T I S H I S L E S
I N T H E L AT E M I D D L E AG E S
This page intentionally left blank Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages
E d i t e d b y
B R E N D A N S M I T H
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Davies, R. R.
Lords and lordship in the British Isles in the late Middle Ages / R.R. Davies; edited by Brendan Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8 (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—To 1485.
Great Britain—History—To 1485. I. Smith, Brendan, 1963– II. Title.
DA175.D337 2009
305.5’2209410902—dc22 2008055133
Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the UK
on acid-free paper by
MPG Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
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Adam Usk, Adam Usk, Chronicle Chronicle, 1377–1421, ed.
C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997)
Age of Chivalry Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England,
1200–1400, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski(London, 1987)
BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
BL The British Library, London
Cal. Anc. Corr. Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning
Wales, ed. J. G. Edwards (Cardiff, 1935)Cal. Anc. Pets. Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales,
ed. W. Rees (Cardiff, 1975)
CCR Calendar of Close Rolls (London, 1892–)
CIM Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1219–
1485, 7 vols. (London and Woodbridge,1916–2003)
CIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 23 vols.
(London, 1904–2004)CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1891–)
Davies, R. R. Davies,
Lordship and Society Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978)
DNB Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols., ed.
L. Stephens and S. Lee (London, 1885–1901; reprinted with corrections, 22 vols., London, 1908–9)
Dugdale, W. Dugdale,
Monasticon Monasticon Anglicanum: A His- tory of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hos- pitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with their Dependencies, in England
Abbreviations
and Wales, 6 vols. in 8 (2nd edn., London,1817–30) Duncan, Scotland
A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the
Kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975) Econ. HR Economic History Review EHR English Historical Review
Frame, R. Frame,
Ireland and Britain Ireland and Britain 1170–1450
(London, 1998)
GEC The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland,
Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom,ed. G. E. Cockayne
et al., 12 vols. in 13
(London, 1910–59) Holmes,
G. Holmes,
Estates The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge,
1957)
Household Accounts Household Accounts from Medieval England, ed.
C. M. Woolgar, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993) Knighton, Chron. Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995)
McFarlane, Nobility K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medi-
eval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford, 1973)
Moray Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. C. Innes
(Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1833)
Mort. Reg. Registrum Honoris de Morton, ed. T. Thomson,
A. Macdonald and C. Innes, 2 vols. (Ban- natyne Club, Edinburgh, 1853) Nichols,
Wills A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known to Be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of Eng- land, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and every Branch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign of William the Conqueror, to that of Henry the Seventh Exclusive: With Explanatory Notes and a Glossary, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1780)
Abbreviations
NLW National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From
the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H. C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004)
‘Private Indentures’ ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278–1476’, ed. M. Jones and S. Walker,
Camden Miscellany, 32 (London,
1994)
PROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England,
1275–1504, ed. C. Given-Wilson [GeneralEditor]
et al.,16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005)
Reg. BP Register of Edward the Black Prince, 4 vols.
(London,1930–3)
Reg. Chichele Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Can-
terbury 1414–43, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols.(Oxford, 1938–47)
Reg. JG I John of Gaunt’s Register, 1372–76, ed.
S. Armitage-Smith, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series, xx–xxi (London, 1911)
Reg. JG II John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379–83, ed. E. C.
Lodge and R. Somerville, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series, lvi–lvii (London, 1937)
Rot. Parl. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey et al.
7 vols. (London, [1783], 1832)
SHR Scottish Historical Review
Smyth, J. Smyth,
Lives of the Berkeleys The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and . . .
, ed. J. MacLean, 3 vols.
Manor of Berkeley
(Gloucester, 1883–5)
Test. Vet. Testamenta Vetusta: Being Illustrations from
Wills, of Manners, Customs, &c. as Well as of the Descents and Possessions of many Distin- guished Families: From the Reign of Henry the Second to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed.N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1826)
Abbreviations
TNA The National Archives: Public Record Office, London
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
VCH
H. A. Doubleday, W. Page, L. F. Salzmann, and R. B. Pugh (eds.), Victoria History of the
Counties of England (1900–)
Professor Davies worked on
Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages (henceforward Lords and Lordship) until shortly before his death
on 16 May 2005. His last intervention was to make handwritten additions to a typescript of the first several chapters, including the insertion of references to work published as recently as 2005, and to write another chapter which had yet to be typed when he died. He had been compiling material for the project throughout the course of his career, but composition of Lords and Lordship seems to have begun in or around the year 2000. It was planned as a book of two parts, the first entitled ‘Lords’, the second ‘Lordship’. Work on the first part, at least as a first draft, appears to have been at an advanced stage by May 2005, and much of the second part had also been written, though at least one more chapter was in genesis bearing the working title ‘The Context of Aristocratic Lordship’.
The editorial intervention required to make a substantial but unfinished piece of work suitable for publication involved the abandonment of the two-part structure on account of the brevity of the second part in comparison with the first. It is hoped, however, that the essence of the division envisaged by the author—that the book should move from what lordship
was to what it did —is
still discernible. Both parts had introductory chapters, and these have been amalgamated to form the ‘Apologia’—the title of the original introduction to Part 1. The chapter ‘The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory’ now also embraces a short chapter called ‘The Individual Lord’, while the chapter ‘The Lord at Home’ now incorporates another short chapter entitled ‘Household, Supplies, and Credit’. Apart from the consolidation of material across different chapters, the removal of occasional repetition, and the standardization of footnotes, the text is unaltered. Where new editions of works cited have appeared since Professor Davies ceased to write I have included them in the footnotes in closed brackets after the original citation: two examples are PROME and W. Childs’ edition of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi. I have appended an ‘Additional Bibliography’ to each
chapter, and the works thus cited appear in consolidated form at the end of the volume. With a handful of exceptions these additions date from 2000 and after, with the majority having been published within the last five years. The intention has not been to provide a complete bibliography on lordship in the late medieval British Isles, but rather to draw attention to some of the recent work from across the region which relates to the theme of the book.
Inevitable tension exists between the decision to keep interference with the original text to a minimum and the reasonable assumption that the author would have altered at least some of what is now published had he lived. Such alterations
Editor’s Introduction
might have been particularly marked in final versions of the ‘Apologia’ and the chapter ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’. Professor Davies’s argument in the former that the concept of lordship has been neglected in the historiography of late medieval England is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and quality of work published on the subject—much of which he cites in the course of the book—especially for the fifteenth century. It can be noted that he uses the phrase ‘late Middle Ages’ to signify the chosen period of his analysis (1272–1422), and that the historiography of the reign of Henry VI, upon which he draws only occasionally, is particularly sensitive to issues of lordship. It can also be offered that his book is about the British Isles, not England, and that for Scotland and Ireland a ‘long fourteenth century’ as opposed to a ‘late Middle Ages’ perspective is historiographically meaningless. It remains the case, however, that historians of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England will demur from the suggestion that they have paid insufficient attention to aristocratic lordship in their analysis of English society and politics. Had Professor Davies decided to leave the ‘Apologia’ substantially as it now stands—and he had re-read it without making alterations to the text shortly before his death—then one must assume that he believed that something important remained to be said about the subject; one may hazard a guess that this was that while lordship as an expression of political power in particular circumstances had been thoroughly discussed since McFarlane, analysis of the institution of lordship as a concept and in more general practice lagged behind, not least because the failure to view it in a British Isles as opposed to an English setting had obscured and distorted its true essence.
The final chapter, ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’, is problematic for some of the same reasons. It had not been typed by May 2005, and although fully footnoted by Professor Davies, was obviously in a less finalized state than the rest of the material. Historians of fifteenth-century England in particular will be puzzled at its suggestion that suspicion of ‘maintenance’ is misplaced, since they abandoned such suspicion long ago, while thanks in particular to the work of Christine Carpenter and Edward Powell, legal records have supplanted indentures as the preferred source for the study of aristocratic behaviour within the locality, across wider political society, and with the crown and its officers. The decision to include the chapter was made on the basis of what it contained and also because of the pointers it gave to what was still to come. While historians of late medieval England will find little in it that is original, it breaks new ground by opening up the issues indicated by its title to embrace the British Isles
in toto
and thus is absolutely true to the aim of the project as a whole. It also contains some indications as to the themes to be addressed in the chapter or chapters yet to be written: the role of aristocratic retainers in their own communities; the changing nature of lordship in a world in which it operated as only one of many bonds between superior and inferior; the demands placed upon lordship by its requirement to be ‘good’—in short, the crucial issue of the limitations of lordship in the rapidly changing British Isles of the late Middle Ages. It seems
Editor’s Introduction
highly likely that the proposed chapter ‘The Context of Aristocratic Lordship’ would have had this issue at its heart.
A full account of Professor Davies’s career and an assessment of his importance as a historian can be found in Professor Huw Pryce’s memoir ‘Robert Rees Davies 1938–2005’, to be published in a forthcoming volume of Proceedings of
the British Academy. This is not the place to offer a critical assessment of Lords and
Lordship, but it seems appropriate to note some moments in the development
of the ideas expounded therein. The interest in lordship in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of course, stretches back to Professor Davies’s doctoral studies under the supervision of K. B. McFarlane, which commenced in 1959. (Professor Davies’s review of McFarlane’s
Nobility, in Welsh History Review, 7 (1974–5)
is instructive.) His first monograph,
Lordship and Society in the March of Wales,
1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978), both expanded upon the subject-matter of his thesis
and identified some of the key themes which are revisited and expanded upon in the present book. Professor Davies’s willingness to broaden the geographical area in which he examined the phenomenon of lordship beyond the Welsh March and England to include Ireland was first signalled in print in his essay ‘Lordship or Colony?’, in
The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin,
1984)—notably, the first work cited by Professor Davies in this book—and again in ‘Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented Societies: Ireland and Wales’, in
Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (Oxford, 1989). The
argument for seeing the British Isles as a whole as a suitable arena for investigation of lordship and other themes was put forward in his ‘In Praise of British History’, in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R. Davies (Edinburgh, 1988). While the British Isles remained the focus of most of his publications in the years thereafter, his chronological centre of gravity tended to shift to a period which ended in the early fourteenth century, and the theme of lordship receded somewhat as issues such as ‘identity’, the rise of English power, and the idea of the medieval ‘state’ came more to the fore.
Lords and Lordship
therefore, represents to some extent a return to concerns that had informed a lifetime of scholarship but which had yet to be tackled at full, monograph, length. Professor Davies’s early death precluded completion of that project, but enough survives to be published in a book that should meet his goals of encouraging debate and inspiring new questions about a crucial and fascinating historical subject.
I would like to thank Professor Robert Evans and Dr John Watts of Oxford University for inviting me to edit
Lords and Lordship, Dr Watts and Professor
Christine Carpenter for invaluable criticism of both the original text and my approach to editing it, and Mrs Stephanie Jenkins who typed the original text and at a later stage the final chapter. I would also like to thank Lady Davies, who kindly made available additional important material relating to the book.
Brendan Smith Bristol
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This is a book about aristocratic power or lordship in the British Isles in the later Middle Ages. ‘Lordship’ as a concept is currently not a common term in English parlance, even in the writings of British medieval historians. This is surprising in at least two respects. First, ‘lordship’,
dominium, was a key word in
the political, social, and indeed academic vocabulary of medieval Europe. It was a ubiquitous and fundamental term, be it (for example) the lordship of God or of the lord king (
dominus rex), the lordship of the abbot over his monks, or the
legal power that a husband (
seigneur) had over his wife. It was an elastic, protean
word. It could refer to the area over which a lord exercised his dominion—be it a manor, a duchy, or even a kingdom; but it could also be used to characterize conceptually the nature of that authority. Contemporaries could likewise refer to ‘the law of lordship’ ( ius dominii) as shorthand for the relationship between lord and dependant.¹ Theologians and philosophers argued learnedly about the justification and credentials of secular lordship ( de civili dominio). In short, it was an infinitely adaptable concept (and word) in the medieval construction of the ordering of human relationships and in the justification of the exercise of power at all levels of society. But it is not a term which has been much favoured in recent British medieval historiography.
It is different elsewhere. This brings us to the second element of surprise about the low profile of the word ‘lordship’ in British medieval historiography. On the continent, notably in France and Germany, ‘
seigneurie’ and ‘Herrschaft’ are central terms in historical explanations of the evolution of European society.
Thus Marc Bloch in his pioneering chapter in
The Cambridge Economic History of
Europe vol. 1 (1941) asserted that ‘for more than a thousand years the seigneurie
was one of the dominant institutions of western civilization.’² More recently another distinguished French medieval historian, Robert Fossier, is, if anything, even more assertive: ‘the ¹ seigneurie’, he declares, was ‘the primary organism of
‘ jure dominii’ quoted in R. R. Davies, ‘Lordship or Colony?’ in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin, 1984), 142–60, at p. 143. ²
M. Bloch, ‘The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seigniorial Institutions’, in The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, vol. I, ed. M. M. Postan, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1966), 235–90, at
p. 236. Two English historians who have placed ‘lordship’ at the centre of their discussions recently
are R. H. Britnell,The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993) and, seminally, R. Faith,
Lords and Lordship
everyday life between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries’.³ Were we to ask for a definition of seigneurie yet another French historian (and a pupil of Bloch), Robert Boutruche, provides a categorical and serviceable answer: ‘ Seigneurie is a power of command, constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power.’⁴ Now it may well be objected that the term ‘lordship’ is a feeble and inadequate translation of the French seigneurie and the German Herrschaft. It also needs to be acknowledged that American historians—notably Frederic Cheyette and Thomas Bisson—have waged a campaign to move the concept of ‘lordship’ nearer to the centre of Anglophone historical discussions of the Middle Ages.⁵ But the relatively low profile of the term, and the concept, in British historiography calls for a short explanation, if only because it may serve to reveal some of the unspoken assumptions and priorities which underpin historical discourse in Britain. Three reasons at the very least suggest themselves.
First, it may well be that in the profile of the distribution of power, there was a real difference between Britain, or rather England, and its continental neighbours in the high and later Middles Ages. England, and to a much lesser degree Scotland, was a king-centred polity; the influence and power of the king penetrated into the crevices of social and political life, directly or indirectly, throughout the country. There were, of course, other nodal points of power; but they were ultimately construed, especially by royal lawyers and apologists, as dependent and contingent upon regal authority and permission. In such a world the language—at least the legal language—is not that of
seigneurie or
of haute justice but of quo warranto, liberties, franchises, even palatinates, in other words of a king-centred hierarchy of authority. Any analysis of power (and of its mediators and agents) in such a world starts, and not infrequently ends, with royal lordship. Such an approach works less successfully in Scotland (in spite of a tendency in some Scottish historiography to imitate the English ‘paradigm’). It is even less appropriate, indeed misleading, as a set of assumptions for understanding the nature of power in medieval Wales and Ireland, including those areas under English control.
A second, associated reason for the scant attention paid to lordship in British medieval historiography may well rest in the nature of the sources. Historians are much more in thrall to their sources than they often realize. Indeed, their dependence grows as the volume of surviving written sources increases, as it does in particular from the late twelfth century. No country has been blessed with such an exceptionally rich and unbroken series of archives as England. Many of those archives are ecclesiastical; others are seigniorial or urban. But far and away the richest collections of records are those of the king and his servants; ³
R. Fossier, ‘Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age’, in e Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age (Actes de 117 congr`es des soci´et´es savant) (Paris, 1995), 9–20, at p. 9. ⁴ R. Boutruche, ⁵
Seigneurie et Feodalit´e 2 vols. (Paris, 1959–1970), II, 83.
Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings (Hunting- don, New York,1968); T. M. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’,
Apologia
they are unparalleled in their volume and detail and many of them have been conveniently calendared or edited for historians. They are normally the most natural and rewarding point of entry for historical research, be it at national, regional, or local level. It is a situation without parallel in most continental countries; it bespeaks the power and penetration of kingship. But it is as well to remember that even in England such documents present a view of power and society as seen through royal spectacles. No one would deny the importance of that view; but in any balanced and rounded appreciation of the exercise of power in medieval society, it falls very far short of the whole truth. It is a partial view; its partiality can occasionally appear all the more disturbing since there is in general a huge imbalance in the quantity and even quality of royal and non-royal sources for the study of the exercise of power in medieval Britain. It is the royal sources which are best placed to set the agenda and shape the assumptions.
But there is at least one other reason why an analysis of lordship has not on the whole figured prominently in British academic historiography, especially in comparison with the way that the nature of
seigneurie often dominates the serried
ranks of great French provincial studies from at least the time of Georges Duby’s epoch-making study of the Maconnais (1953), or with the degree to which long- term analysis of the nature and manifestations of
Herrschaft has been a leading
preoccupation of medieval historians in Germany.⁶ The writings of historians are shaped not only, or indeed not mainly, by the sources on which they draw but by the organizing principles, metaphors, and explanatory frameworks which inform and structure their accounts. Such principles, metaphors, and frameworks are part of their inherited intellectual and indeed professional agenda. They may add to or even challenge part of such an agenda; but the agenda shapes the questions asked and the answers given to a far greater extent than is normally recognized. It is difficult to suppress the suspicion that English historiography has given priority to issues other than lordship, such as state- and nation-formation, constitutional and institutional development, political structures and friction, crown–magnate relationships, and so forth. The importance of these issues is not, of course, open to question; but it is at least arguable that a more nuanced understanding of the distribution of power in medieval society in the British Isles needs to pay more attention to the role of non-royal power alongside the undoubted strength and penetration of kingship. That is part of the aim of this book.
Power, of course, is exercised by a whole host of agents at every level of society. Next to the king, it was the greater lay aristocracy which was the ⁶ e e
La Soci´et´e aux xi et xii si`ecles dans la Region Mˆaconnaise (Paris, 1953); O. Brunner,
Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia, 1984) in English
translation with introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton. For comment
see inter alia James Van Horn Melton, ‘From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner
(1898–1982) and the Radical Conservative Roots of German Social History’, inPaths of Continuity:
Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. H. Lehmann and J. Van Horn
Melton (Cambridge, 1994), 263–97.
Lords and Lordship
major wielder of power, lordship, in medieval society, as indeed in the
ancien
regime world generally. Indeed one historian has shrewdly observed that medieval
England—that prototype of strong national monarchy in the textbooks—can best be characterized as ‘an aristocracy which was kingship-focussed’.⁷ If that is indeed the case—as I believe it to be—then characterizing the nature of the lordship of this aristocracy may help to give us a more rounded understanding of the distribution and exercise of power—‘the power of command, constraint and exploitation’, in Boutruche’s phrase—in medieval society.
The aristocracy has often received a poor press from historians. This may be in part because, at least in Britain, its power was still so dominant socially and politically until the early twentieth century that it called for no explanation or analysis. Familiarity turned to contempt as the aristocracy came to be identified as privileged bulwarks standing in the way of political and social progress. They came to be branded historiographically and politically as ‘feudal reactionaries’; their opposition and privileges inhibited the development of strong kingship and centralized, unitary state power, so often characterized by historians as the beneficent goals of true political and social progress. It was little wonder that K. B. McFarlane in his epoch-making Ford Lectures in 1953 uttered his famous jibe that English historians had been ‘King’s Friends’ and, by implication, enemies or at least detractors of the aristocracy.⁸ He set out to redress the balance (building in part on the work of other scholars such as F. M. Stenton and Noel Denholm-Young for the pre-1300 period) and did so triumphantly. It is given to few scholars to transform the landscape of our understanding of a past society; Bruce McFarlane did so with regard to the later Middle Ages in England, specifically the role of the lay aristocracy in its society and polity.
Since McFarlane’s seminal work, the late medieval aristocracy of the British Isles can no longer claim to suffer from historiographical neglect. On the contrary it has been the subject of a great deal of high-quality work from a variety of angles—be they detailed studies of individual magnates such as Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), or Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), or collective studies of great aristocratic families, such as the Staffords and the Percies.⁹ Detailed studies of various aspects of aristocratic life and power have proliferated, exploring such issues as the organization of aristocratic estates and households, the character and ⁷
TRHS, 5th ser., vol. 23 (1973), 1–25 at p. 1. ⁸ McFarlane, ⁹ Nobility, 2. The following studies, cited in chronological order of appearance, may serve as examples: J. M. W. Bean,
The Estates of the Percy Family 1416–1537 (Oxford, 1958); K. A. Fowler,
The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310–1361 (London, 1969);
J. R. Maddicott,Thomas of Lancaster 1307–22: A Study in the Reign of Edward II (Oxford, 1970); J. R. S. Phillips,
Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324: Baronial Politics in the Reign of
Edward II (Oxford, 1972); C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords: Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham
Apologia
composition of aristocratic affinities and their role in the phenomenon known unhelpfully as ‘bastard feudalism’, the elaboration of legal devices to control the descent of aristocratic estates, and the role of aristocratic women, especially widows and heiresses. The power of the greater magnates in English local society has been brought under the searchlight of numerous county studies, which reveal its extent and limitations by locating it within a wide social context of the county community and by bringing into clearer focus the standing and connections of the ‘greater county gentry’.¹⁰ All in all, our understanding and knowledge of the later medieval aristocracy is much more thorough, complex, and nuanced than it once was. This is particularly true of later medieval England and is reflected in several notable recent attempts to provide a sophisticated overview of aristocratic power based on these detailed studies.¹¹ Elsewhere in the British Isles, where the materials for such detailed studies are less ample, significant strides have also been made in studying the nature of aristocratic power in the March of Wales, Scotland, and English Ireland.¹²
This book builds on this remarkable historiographical achievement, as it does on an older antiquarian tradition of assembling details of the personal and family histories of the aristocracy—from the time of William Dugdale’s pioneering
The
Baronage of England (1675–6) to the invaluable The Complete Peerage of England,
Scotland, Ireland etc. (1910–59) and, most recently, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). But its focus is, in some respects, different. It does
not attend at length to many of the issues which have, very properly, commanded the attention of historians, especially English historians, of late—issues such as the nature of ‘bastard feudal’ relationships, the role of the aristocracy in ‘county’ society, the definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage, or crown–magnate relationships. It will no doubt touch on many of these issues; but its primary aim is to try to characterize and analyse the nature of aristocratic power generally. In short, it is an essay on the sociology of aristocratic lordship. Its approach is thematic and analytical. There is, of course, a price to be paid for such an approach (as for all historical approaches), especially in terms of overlooking the particular circumstances and contexts of individual aristocratic families and of ¹⁰
Notable examples, from a long list, are: N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire
Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); S. J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian
England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford, 1991); C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity:
A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society c.1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992). ¹¹ There is an excellent recent overview, with exemplary bibliography, in C. Carpenter, ‘England: The Nobility and the Gentry’, inA Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby (Oxford, 2003), 261–92. ¹² Among recent studies are:
The Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 1415–1536: Select Documents, ed. T. B. Pugh (Cardiff, 1963); Davies,
Lordship and Society; K. J. Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon
1152–1219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1985); Essays on the Nobility of Medieval
Scotland, ed. K. J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985); J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of
Manrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985); M. H. Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship
in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East Linton, 1998); R. Frame, English Lordship in Ireland
Lords and Lordship
underestimating the possible changes in the character of aristocratic lordship over time. But this—so it seems to me—is a price worth paying in trying to take the subject forward at this particular historiographical juncture.
The word ‘lordship’, dominium, was still ubiquitous in the social and conceptu- al vocabulary of later medieval Europe. Its very imprecision was in this respect its strength. It may well be that its relative unpopularity in current British medieval historiography is explained in part by its elasticity and vagueness, indeed its ambi- guity, as a term. But at least it helps us to construe medieval society in some degree on its own terms and through its own lenses. Reconstructing the assumptions and language of that thought-world may help the historian to avoid some of the traps that beset him when he uses the terminology, analogies, and metaphors of the modern world—including the burgeoning of uniform state institutions and notions of sovereignty, accountability, and delegation of power—to characterize a medieval world which was, arguably, much more plural and disordered in its assumptions about power. As Karl Leyser once shrewdly observed of medieval Germany; ‘there was a teeming welter of developing princely and aristocratic . . . lordships, lay and clerical, a bewildering variety of substructures; they did not possess any common underlying grid or shared development and relative uniformities.’¹³ That may not correspond to the situation in England (though the cultivated uniformity of English power structures is itself a historical mirage); but it may be a more appropriate point of departure for the characterization of lordship in the British Isles as a whole. Not the least of the advantages of the recent attempt to promote a comparative study of the medieval British Isles is that it serves to draw attention to the distinctiveness of medieval England, rather than regarding it as necessarily a norm or prototype.¹⁴
Lordship, so we quoted Robert Boutruche above, ‘is a power of command, constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power’.¹⁵ But the ways in which power manifests itself and exercises its command are not in the least uniform. They are as variable as are the whole host of chronological, geographical, economic, and social matrices in which they operate. They range from the kind of intensive lordship that a lord exercised over his household or a manorial
seigneur over his serfs to what has been called the extensive, tributary lordship which bound lords and communities in large swathes of upland Britain.
Thus the kind of precise, intrusive and richly documented lordship which the bishop of Winchester exercised on his great manor of Taunton (Somerset) is very different in kind and intensity from the lordship of the Campbell lords of ¹³
K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity’, Viator, 19 (1988), 153–76, quote at p. 157. ¹⁴
Superb examples of reading ‘behind’ the official government records to the realities of power on the ground are provided in Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain 1170–1450 (London, 1998) esp. the chapter ‘Power and society in the Lordship of Ireland, 1272–1377’, originally published in
Past and Present, 76 (1977), 3–33. ¹⁵ Above, p. 2.
Apologia
the western Highlands of Scotland or of the lords of the March over much of upland Wales. Yet our analysis of lordship needs to encompass the whole range of ways in which lordship, notably aristocratic lordship, manifested itself. We must not necessarily privilege the lowland, manorial lordship of southern and midland England simply because of its rich documentary detritus.
A sensitivity to the chronological and geographical varieties of lordship within the British Isles should also help us to focus on some of the long-term features of lordship as a way of structuring power in medieval society. We must not be constrained unduly or myopically by the confines of the late medieval documentary evidence. The roots of lordship lay deep in medieval society. In late medieval England many of those roots had been overlain (though not necessarily totally hidden) by the development of royal, governmental, and communal institutions; but their importance for a rounded understanding of the reach and texture of medieval lordship remains. Lordship, including non-royal lordship, was ultimately founded on the personal control of men, on a psychology of dependence and beholdenness which applied throughout medieval society. That is why the first act of lordship was to demand a visual oath of fealty (possibly accompanied by an act of homage) from those who entered into dependence. Personal dependence was primary. That is why the strength of lordship in much of highland Britain was measured in the number of men it could command—say 2,000—rather than in rent income or landed estate;¹⁶ that is why again the first act of a lord was to go on a ‘progress’ through his ‘country’ and to exact homage ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’ from his dependants.¹⁷ That is why they were, and were called, his ‘subjects’, not simply his ‘tenants’.¹⁸ That is why when the bond of manrent emerged as part of the contractual world of fifteenth-century Scotland it was the bond between man and lord which was at its kernel.¹⁹ It is a reminder to us that there were features about the character and assumptions of lordship which lie beyond the shallows of the documentary evidence, and beyond the world-view of royal sources.
The chronological bookends of the study are the years 1272 and 1422. The choice of period needs a word of explanation. Apart from the pleasing symmetry of a period of a century and a half, there are—it has to be admitted—very personal, even selfish, reasons for the choice. First, it is the period with which I am most familiar since my earliest studies over forty years ago (under the direction of K. B. McFarlane) of the lordship of the Bohun and Lancaster families in the March of Wales. The study of aristocratic lordship has by no means been my main ¹⁶
Thus when Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon (ed. D. E. R. Watt, et al. 9 vols. (Aberdeen,
1987–97), VIII, 260–1) compiled a list of Highland chiefs for 1429 he appended an estimate of
their followers in this manner: Kenneth Mor, ‘ ¹⁷ dux duorum millium’.See Davies, ¹⁸ Lordship and Society, 132–3 and sources cited. Thus the duke of Buckingham referred to ‘nos tenauntz et subgetz de nostre seigneurie de Brekenoc en Gales’, NLW, Peniarth MS. 280D, p. 15. ¹⁹
See Wormald’s outstanding and wide-ranging study,