r.r. davies - lords and lordship in the british isles in the late middle ages

7/25/2019 R.R. Davies - Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages

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LOR DS AND LOR DSH IP IN T H E BR IT ISH ISLES

IN T H E LAT E MIDDLE AGES


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Lords and Lordship in the

British Isles in the LateMiddle Ages

R. R. DAVIES

E d i t e d b y

B R E N D A N S M I T H

1


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1Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6

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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 BritainPolitics and governmentTo 1485.2. Nobility Great Britain History To 1500. 3. FeudalismGreat Britain History To 1500. 4. Power

(Social sciences) Great Britain History To 1500. 5. Great BritainHistory Medieval period, 1066 1485. 6.Great Britain History To 1485. I. Smith, Brendan, 1963 II. Title.

DA175.D337 2009305.52209410902dc22 2008055133

Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, IndiaPrinted and bound in the UK

on acid-free paper byMPG Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 9780199542918

1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2


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Contents

Abbreviations viiEditors Introduction xi

Apologia 1

1. The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory 21

2. Display and Magnificence 583. The Lord at Home 82

4. The Lord at War 116

5. Land, Family, and Marriage 140

6. The Sinews of Aristocratic Power 158

7. The Agencies and Agents of Lordship 179

8. Dependence, Service, and Reward 197

Bibliography 219Additional Bibliography 233Index 241


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Abbreviations

Adam Usk,Chronicle Adam Usk, Chronicle, 1377 1421, ed.C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997)

Age of Chivalry Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England,12001400, 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 ConcerningWales, 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,19162003)

CIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 23 vols.(London, 19042004)

CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1891 )

Davies,Lordship and Society R. R. Davies,Lordship and Society in the Marchof Wales, 12821400(Oxford, 1978)

DNB Dictionary of National Biography , 66 vols., ed.L. Stephens and S. Lee (London, 18851901;reprinted with corrections, 22 vols., London,19089)

Dugdale,Monasticon W. Dugdale,Monasticon Anglicanum: A His-tory of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hos-

pitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and CollegiateChurches, with their Dependencies, in England


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viii Abbreviations

and Wales, 6 vols. in 8 (2nd edn., London,181730)

Duncan,Scotland A. A. M. Duncan,Scotland: The Making of theKingdom(Edinburgh, 1975)

Econ. HR Economic History Review

EHR English Historical Review

Frame,Ireland and Britain R. Frame, Ireland and Britain 11701450(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, 191059)

Holmes,Estates G. Holmes,The Estates of the Higher Nobilityin Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge,1957)

Household Accounts Household Accounts from Medieval England,ed.C. M. Woolgar, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993)

Knighton,Chron. Knightons 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 toBe Extant, of the Kings and Queens of Eng-land, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and everyBranch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign of William the Conqueror, to that of Henry theSeventh Exclusive: With Explanatory Notes anda Glossary, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1780)


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Abbreviations ix

NLW National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From

the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H. C.G.MatthewandB.Harrison,60vols.(Oxford,2004)

Private Indentures Private Indentures for Life Service in Peaceand War 1278 1476, ed. M. Jones andS. Walker, Camden Miscellany, 32 (London,1994)

PROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England,12751504, ed. C. Given-Wilson [GeneralEditor]et al.,16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005)

Reg. BP Register of Edward the Black Prince , 4 vols.(London,19303)

Reg. Chichele Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Can-terbury 141443, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols.

(Oxford, 193847)Reg. JGI John of Gaunts Register, 1372 76, ed.

S. Armitage-Smith, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series,xxxxi (London, 1911)

Reg. JGII John of Gaunts Register, 137983, ed. E. C.Lodge and R. Somerville, 2 vols., Camden 3rdseries, lvilvii (London, 1937)

Rot. Parl. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Stracheyet al.7 vols. (London, [1783], 1832)

SHR Scottish Historical Review

Smyth,Lives of the Berkeleys J. Smyth,The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Livesof the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and

Manor of Berkeley. . ., ed. J. MacLean, 3 vols.(Gloucester, 18835)

Test. Vet. Testamenta Vetusta: Being Illustrations fromWills, of Manners, Customs, &c. as Well asof the Descents and Possessions of many Distin-

guished Families: From the Reign of Henry theSecond to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed.N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1826)


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x 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 theCounties of England (1900)


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Editors Introduction

Professor Davies worked on Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the LateMiddle Ages (henceforward Lords and Lordship) until shortly before his deathon 16 May 2005. His last intervention was to make handwritten additions toa typescript of the first several chapters, including the insertion of references to

work published as recently as 2005, and to write another chapter which hadyet to be typed when he died. He had been compiling material for the project

throughout the course of his career, but composition ofLords and Lordshipseemsto have begun in or around the year 2000. It was planned as a book of twoparts, the first entitled Lords, the second Lordship. Work on the first part, atleast 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 morechapter was in genesis bearing the working title The Context of AristocraticLordship.

The editorial intervention required to make a substantial but unfinished pieceof work suitable for publication involved the abandonment of the two-partstructure on account of the brevity of the second part in comparison with thefirst. It is hoped, however, that the essence of the division envisaged by theauthorthat the book should move from what lordshipwasto what itdidisstill discernible. Both parts had introductory chapters, and these have beenamalgamated to form the Apologiathe title of the original introduction toPart 1. The chapter The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory now alsoembraces a short chapter called The Individual Lord, while the chapter The Lordat 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, thetext is unaltered. Where new editions of works cited have appeared since ProfessorDavies ceased to write I have included them in the footnotes in closed bracketsafter the original citation: two examples are PROMEand W. Childs edition oftheVita Edwardi Secundi. I have appended an Additional Bibliography to eachchapter, and the works thus cited appear in consolidated form at the end of thevolume. With a handful of exceptions these additions date from 2000 and after,

with the majority having been published within the last five years. The intentionhas not been to provide a complete bibliography on lordship in the late medievalBritish Isles, but rather to draw attention to some of the recent work from acrossthe region which relates to the theme of the book.

Inevitable tension exists between the decision to keep interference with theoriginal text to a minimum and the reasonable assumption that the author wouldhave altered at least some of what is now published had he lived. Such alterations


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xii Editors Introduction

might have been particularly marked in final versions of the Apologia and thechapter Dependence, Service, and Reward. Professor Daviess argument in theformer that the concept of lordship has been neglected in the historiography of

late medieval England is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and quality ofwork published on the subjectmuch of which he cites in the course of thebookespecially for the fifteenth century. It can be noted that he uses the phraselate Middle Ages to signify the chosen period of his analysis (12721422), andthat the historiography of the reign of Henry VI, upon which he draws onlyoccasionally, is particularly sensitive to issues of lordship. It can also be offeredthat his book is about the British Isles, not England, and that for Scotlandand Ireland a long fourteenth century as opposed to a late Middle Ages

perspective is historiographically meaningless. It remains the case, however, thathistorians of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England will demur fromthe suggestion that they have paid insufficient attention to aristocratic lordshipin their analysis of English society and politics. Had Professor Davies decidedto leave the Apologia substantially as it now standsand he had re-read it

without making alterations to the text shortly before his deaththen one mustassume that he believed that something important remained to be said about thesubject; one may hazard a guess that this was that while lordship as an expressionof political power in particular circumstances had been thoroughly discussedsince McFarlane, analysis of the institution of lordship as a concept and in moregeneral practice lagged behind, not least because the failure to view it in a BritishIsles as opposed to an English setting had obscured and distorted its true essence.

The final chapter, Dependence, Service, and Reward, is problematic forsome of the same reasons. It had not been typed by May 2005, and althoughfully footnoted by Professor Davies, was obviously in a less finalized state thanthe 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 thework of Christine Carpenter and Edward Powell, legal records have supplantedindentures as the preferred source for the study of aristocratic behaviour withinthe 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 containedand also because of the pointers it gave to what was still to come. While historiansof late medieval England will find little in it that is original, it breaks new groundby 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 containssome indications as to the themes to be addressed in the chapter or chaptersyet 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 ofmany bonds between superior and inferior; the demands placed upon lordshipby its requirement to be goodin short, the crucial issue of the limitations oflordship in the rapidly changing British Isles of the late Middle Ages. It seems


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Editors Introduction xiii

highly likely that the proposed chapter The Context of Aristocratic Lordshipwould have had this issue at its heart.

A full account of Professor Daviess career and an assessment of his importance

as a historian can be found in Professor Huw Pryces memoir Robert ReesDavies 19382005, to be published in a forthcoming volume ofProceedings ofthe British Academy. This is not the place to offer a critical assessment ofLords andLordship, but it seems appropriate to note some moments in the developmentof the ideas expounded therein. The interest in lordship in the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, of course, stretches back to Professor Daviess doctoral studiesunder the supervision of K. B. McFarlane, which commenced in 1959. (ProfessorDaviess review of McFarlanesNobility, inWelsh History Review, 7 (19745)

is instructive.) His first monograph,Lordship and Society in the March of Wales,12821400(Oxford, 1978), both expanded upon the subject-matter of his thesisand identified some of the key themes which are revisited and expanded upon inthe present book. Professor Daviess willingness to broaden the geographical areain which he examined the phenomenon of lordship beyond the Welsh Marchand England to include Ireland was first signalled in print in his essay Lordshipor Colony?, in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin,1984)notably, the first work cited by Professor Davies in this bookandagain in Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented Societies: Ireland and Wales, in

Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (Oxford, 1989). Theargument for seeing the British Isles as a whole as a suitable arena for investigationof lordship and other themes was put forward in his In Praise of British History,inThe British Isles 1100 1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R.Davies (Edinburgh, 1988). While the British Isles remained the focus of most ofhis publications in the years thereafter, his chronological centre of gravity tendedto shift to a period which ended in the early fourteenth century, and the theme oflordship 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 alifetime of scholarship but which had yet to be tackled at full, monograph, length.Professor Daviess early death precluded completion of that project, but enoughsurvives to be published in a book that should meet his goals of encouraging debateand inspiring new questions about a crucial and fascinating historical subject.

I would like to thank Professor Robert Evans and Dr John Watts of OxfordUniversity for inviting me to edit Lords and Lordship, Dr Watts and Professor

Christine Carpenter for invaluable criticism of both the original text and myapproach to editing it, and Mrs Stephanie Jenkins who typed the original textand at a later stage the final chapter. I would also like to thank Lady Davies, whokindly made available additional important material relating to the book.

Brendan SmithBristol


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Apologia

This is a book about aristocratic power or lordship in the British Isles in thelater Middle Ages. Lordship as a concept is currently not a common term in

English parlance, even in the writings of British medieval historians. This issurprising in at least two respects. First, lordship,dominium, was a key word inthe political, social, and indeed academic vocabulary of medieval Europe. It wasa ubiquitous and fundamental term, be it (for example) the lordship of God orof the lord king (dominus rex), the lordship of the abbot over his monks, or thelegal 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 ita manor, a duchy, or even a kingdom; but it could also be used to characterizeconceptually the nature of that authority. Contemporaries could likewise referto the law of lordship (ius dominii) as shorthand for the relationship betweenlord and dependant.Theologians and philosophers argued learnedly about the

justification and credentials of secular lordship (de civili dominio). In short, itwas an infinitely adaptable concept (and word) in the medieval construction ofthe ordering of human relationships and in the justification of the exercise ofpower at all levels of society. But it is not a term which has been much favouredin 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 Herrschaftare central terms in historical explanations of the evolution of European society.Thus Marc Bloch in his pioneering chapter in The Cambridge Economic History ofEuropevol. 1 (1941) asserted that for more than a thousand years theseigneurie

was one of the dominant institutions of western civilization. More recentlyanother distinguished French medieval historian, Robert Fossier, is, if anything,even more assertive: theseigneurie, 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), 14260, at p. 143.

M. Bloch, The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seigniorial Institutions, inThe CambridgeEconomic History of Europe, vol. I, ed. M. M. Postan, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1966), 23590, atp. 236. Two English historians who have placed lordship at the centre of their discussions recentlyare R. H. Britnell,The Commercialisation of English Society, 10001500(Cambridge, 1993) and,seminally, R. Faith,The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester, 1997).


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2 Lords and Lordship

everyday life between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries.Were we to askfor a definition ofseigneurieyet another French historian (and a pupil of Bloch),Robert Boutruche, provides a categorical and serviceable answer: Seigneurieis a

power of command, constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercisesuch power. Now it may well be objected that the term lordship is a feebleand inadequate translation of the Frenchseigneurieand the GermanHerrschaft.It also needs to be acknowledged that American historiansnotably FredericCheyette and Thomas Bissonhave waged a campaign to move the concept oflordship nearer to the centre of Anglophone historical discussions of the Middle

Ages. But the relatively low profile of the term, and the concept, in Britishhistoriography calls for a short explanation, if only because it may serve to reveal

some of the unspoken assumptions and priorities which underpin historicaldiscourse 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 continentalneighbours in the high and later Middles Ages. England, and to a much lesserdegree Scotland, was a king-centred polity; the influence and power of the kingpenetrated 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 languageat least the legal languageis not that ofseigneurie orofhaute justice but ofquo warranto, liberties, franchises, even palatinates, inother 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 infrequentlyends, with royal lordship. Such an approach works less successfully in Scotland(in spite of a tendency in some Scottish historiography to imitate the Englishparadigm). It is even less appropriate, indeed misleading, as a set of assumptions

for understanding the nature of power in medieval Wales and Ireland, includingthose areas under English control.

A second, associated reason for the scant attention paid to lordship in Britishmedieval historiography may well rest in the nature of the sources. Historiansare much more in thrall to their sources than they often realize. Indeed, theirdependence grows as the volume of surviving written sources increases, as it doesin particular from the late twelfth century. No country has been blessed withsuch an exceptionally rich and unbroken series of archives as England. Many

of those archives are ecclesiastical; others are seigniorial or urban. But far andaway the richest collections of records are those of the king and his servants;

R. Fossier, Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age, inSeigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age(Actes de 117e congres des societes savant) (Paris, 1995), 920, at p. 9.

R. Boutruche,Seigneurie et Feodalite2 vols. (Paris, 19591970), II, 83. F. L. Cheyette (ed.),Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings(Hunting-

don, New York,1968); T. M. Bisson, Medieval Lordship,Speculum, 70 (1995), 743 59.


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Apologia 3

they are unparalleled in their volume and detail and many of them have beenconveniently calendared or edited for historians. They are normally the mostnatural and rewarding point of entry for historical research, be it at national,

regional, or local level. It is a situation without parallel in most continentalcountries; it bespeaks the power and penetration of kingship. But it is as well toremember that even in England such documents present a view of power andsociety as seen through royal spectacles. No one would deny the importance ofthat view; but in any balanced and rounded appreciation of the exercise of powerin medieval society, it falls very far short of the whole truth. It is a partial view; itspartiality can occasionally appear all the more disturbing since there is in generala 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 sourceswhich 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 incomparison with the way that the nature ofseigneurieoften dominates the serriedranks of great French provincial studies from at least the time of Georges Dubysepoch-making study of the Maconnais (1953), or with the degree to which long-term analysis of the nature and manifestations ofHerrschafthas been a leadingpreoccupation of medieval historians in Germany.The writings of historians areshaped not only, or indeed not mainly, by the sources on which they draw but bythe organizing principles, metaphors, and explanatory frameworks which informand structure their accounts. Such principles, metaphors, and frameworks arepart of their inherited intellectual and indeed professional agenda. They may addto or even challenge part of such an agenda; but the agenda shapes the questionsasked and the answers given to a far greater extent than is normally recognized. Itis difficult to suppress the suspicion that English historiography has given priorityto issues other than lordship, such as state- and nation-formation, constitutional

and institutional development, political structures and friction, crownmagnaterelationships, and so forth. The importance of these issues is not, of course, opento question; but it is at least arguable that a more nuanced understanding of thedistribution of power in medieval society in the British Isles needs to pay moreattention to the role of non-royal power alongside the undoubted strength andpenetration 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 ofsociety. Next to the king, it was the greater lay aristocracy which was the

G. Duby,La Societe aux xie et xiie siecles dans la Region M aconnaise(Paris, 1953); O. Brunner,Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria(Philadelphia, 1984) in Englishtranslation with introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton. For commentsee inter alia James Van Horn Melton, From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner(18981982) and the Radical Conservative Roots of German Social History, in Paths of Continuity:Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. H. Lehmann and J. Van HornMelton (Cambridge, 1994), 26397.


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major wielder of power, lordship, in medieval society, as indeed in the ancienregimeworld generally. Indeed one historian has shrewdly observed that medievalEnglandthat prototype of strong national monarchy in the textbookscan

best be characterized as an aristocracy which was kingship-focussed.If that isindeed the caseas I believe it to bethen characterizing the nature of thelordship of this aristocracy may help to give us a more rounded understandingof the distribution and exercise of powerthe power of command, constraintand exploitation, in Boutruches phrasein medieval society.

The aristocracy has often received a poor press from historians. This may bein part because, at least in Britain, its power was still so dominant socially andpolitically until the early twentieth century that it called for no explanation or

analysis. Familiarity turned to contempt as the aristocracy came to be identifiedas privileged bulwarks standing in the way of political and social progress. Theycame to be branded historiographically and politically as feudal reactionaries;their opposition and privileges inhibited the development of strong kingshipand centralized, unitary state power, so often characterized by historians asthe beneficent goals of true political and social progress. It was little wonderthat K. B. McFarlane in his epoch-making Ford Lectures in 1953 uttered hisfamous jibe that English historians had been Kings Friends and, by implication,enemies or at least detractors of the aristocracy.He set out to redress the balance(building in part on the work of other scholars such as F. M. Stenton andNoel Denholm-Young for the pre-1300 period) and did so triumphantly. It isgiven to few scholars to transform the landscape of our understanding of a pastsociety; 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 McFarlanes seminal work, the late medieval aristocracy of the BritishIsles can no longer claim to suffer from historiographical neglect. On the contraryit has been the subject of a great deal of high-quality work from a variety of

anglesbe they detailed studies of individual magnates such as Aymer deValence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), orHenry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), or collective studies of greataristocratic families, such as the Staffords and the Percies. Detailed studies ofvarious aspects of aristocratic life and power have proliferated, exploring suchissues as the organization of aristocratic estates and households, the character and

D. A. L. Morgan, The Kings Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England, TRHS, 5th ser., vol. 23

(1973), 1 25 at p. 1. McFarlane,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 14161537 (Oxford, 1958); K. A. Fowler,The Kings Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 13101361 (London, 1969);

J. R. Maddicott,Thomas of Lancaster 130722: A Study in the Reign of Edward II(Oxford, 1970);J. R. S. Phillips,Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 13071324: Baronial Politics in the Reign ofEdward II (Oxford, 1972); C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords: Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham13941521(Cambridge, 1978).


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Apologia 5

composition of aristocratic affinities and their role in the phenomenon knownunhelpfully as bastard feudalism, the elaboration of legal devices to controlthe descent of aristocratic estates, and the role of aristocratic women, especially

widows and heiresses. The power of the greater magnates in English local societyhas been brought under the searchlight of numerous county studies, which revealits extent and limitations by locating it within a wide social context of the countycommunity and by bringing into clearer focus the standing and connections ofthe greater county gentry.All in all, our understanding and knowledge of thelater medieval aristocracy is much more thorough, complex, and nuanced thanit once was. This is particularly true of later medieval England and is reflected inseveral notable recent attempts to provide a sophisticated overview of aristocratic

power based on these detailed studies.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, wherethe materials for such detailed studies are less ample, significant strides have alsobeen made in studying the nature of aristocratic power in the March of Wales,Scotland, and English Ireland.

This book builds on this remarkable historiographical achievement, as it doeson an older antiquarian tradition of assembling details of the personal and familyhistories of the aristocracyfrom the time of William Dugdales pioneeringTheBaronage of England(16756) to the invaluable The Complete Peerage of England,Scotland, Irelandetc. (191059) and, most recently,The Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography(2004). But its focus is, in some respects, different. It doesnot attend at length to many of the issues which have, very properly, commandedthe attention of historians, especially English historians, of lateissues such asthe nature of bastard feudal relationships, the role of the aristocracy in countysociety, the definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage, or crown magnaterelationships. It will no doubt touch on many of these issues; but its primary aimis 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 anapproach (as for all historical approaches), especially in terms of overlooking theparticular circumstances and contexts of individual aristocratic families and of

Notable examples, from a long list, are: N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The GloucestershireGentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); S. J. Payling, Political Society in LancastrianEngland: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire(Oxford, 1991); C. Carpenter,Locality and Polity:

A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society c.14011499(Cambridge, 1992). 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), 26192. Among recent studies are: The Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 1415 1536: SelectDocuments,

ed. T. B. Pugh (Cardiff, 1963); Davies, Lordship and Society; K. J. Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon11521219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History(Edinburgh, 1985);Essays on the Nobility of MedievalScotland, ed. K. J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985); J. Wormald,Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of

Manrent, 14421603 (Edinburgh, 1985); M. H. Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordshipin Late Medieval Scotland, 13001455(East Linton, 1998); R. Frame,English Lordship in Ireland131861(Oxford, 1981).


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underestimating the possible changes in the character of aristocratic lordship overtime. But thisso it seems to meis a price worth paying in trying to take thesubject 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 itsstrength. It may well be that its relative unpopularity in current British medievalhistoriography 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 degreeon its own terms and through its own lenses. Reconstructing the assumptionsand language of that thought-world may help the historian to avoid some of thetraps that beset him when he uses the terminology, analogies, and metaphors of

the modern worldincluding the burgeoning of uniform state institutions andnotions of sovereignty, accountability, and delegation of powerto characterizea medieval world which was, arguably, much more plural and disordered in itsassumptions about power. As Karl Leyser once shrewdly observed of medievalGermany; there was a teeming welter of developing princely and aristocraticlordships, lay and clerical, a bewildering variety of substructures; . . . they didnot possess any common underlying grid or shared development and relativeuniformities.That may not correspond to the situation in England (thoughthe cultivated uniformity of English power structures is itself a historical mirage);but it may be a more appropriate point of departure for the characterization oflordship in the British Isles as a whole. Not the least of the advantages of therecent attempt to promote a comparative study of the medieval British Isles isthat it serves to draw attention to the distinctiveness of medieval England, ratherthan regarding it as necessarily a norm or prototype.

Lordship, so we quoted Robert Boutruche above, is a power of command,constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power. Butthe 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 rangefrom the kind of intensive lordship that a lord exercised over his household or amanorialseigneurover his serfs to what has been called the extensive, tributarylordship which bound lords and communities in large swathes of upland Britain.Thus the kind of precise, intrusive and richly documented lordship which thebishop of Winchester exercised on his great manor of Taunton (Somerset) isvery different in kind and intensity from the lordship of the Campbell lords of

K. Leyser, Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity,Viator, 19 (1988), 15376,quote at p. 157.

Superb examples of reading behind the official government records to the realities of poweron 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, 12721377, originally published inPastand Present, 76 (1977), 333.

Above, p. 2.


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the western Highlands of Scotland or of the lords of the March over much ofupland Wales. Yet our analysis of lordship needs to encompass the whole rangeof ways in which lordship, notably aristocratic lordship, manifested itself. We

must not necessarily privilege the lowland, manorial lordship of southern andmidland England simply because of its rich documentary detritus.

A sensitivity to the chronological and geographical varieties of lordship withinthe British Isles should also help us to focus on some of the long-term featuresof lordship as a way of structuring power in medieval society. We must notbe constrained unduly or myopically by the confines of the late medievaldocumentary evidence. The roots of lordship lay deep in medieval society. In latemedieval England many of those roots had been overlain (though not necessarily

totally hidden) by the development of royal, governmental, and communalinstitutions; but their importance for a rounded understanding of the reach andtexture of medieval lordship remains. Lordship, including non-royal lordship,

was ultimately founded on the personal control of men, on a psychology ofdependence and beholdenness which applied throughout medieval society. Thatis why the first act of lordship was to demand a visual oath of fealty (possiblyaccompanied by an act of homage) from those who entered into dependence.Personal dependence was primary. That is why the strength of lordship in muchof highland Britain was measured in the number of men it could command say2,000rather than in rent income or landed estate; that is why again thefirst act of a lord was to go on a progress through his country and to exacthomage with hands raised and joined unanimously from his dependants. Thatis why they were, and were called, his subjects, not simply his tenants.Thatis why when the bond of manrent emerged as part of the contractual world offifteenth-century Scotland it was the bond between man and lord which was atits kernel. It is a reminder to us that there were features about the characterand 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 symmetryof a period of a century and a half, there areit has to be admittedverypersonal, even selfish, reasons for the choice. First, it is the period with which I ammost familiar since my earliest studies over forty years ago (under the directionof K. B. McFarlane) of the lordship of the Bohun and Lancaster families in theMarch of Wales. The study of aristocratic lordship has by no means been my main

Thus when Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon (ed. D. E. R. Watt,et al. 9 vols. (Aberdeen,198797), VIII, 2601) compiled a list of Highland chiefs for 1429 he appended an estimate oftheir followers in this manner: Kenneth Mor, dux duorum millium.

See Davies,Lordship and Society, 1323 and sources cited. Thus the duke of Buckingham referred to nos tenauntz et subgetzde nostre seigneurie de

Brekenoc en Gales, NLW, Peniarth MS. 280D, p. 15. See Wormalds outstanding and wide-ranging study,Lords and Men in Scotland.


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scholarly preoccupation during my academic lifetime; but it has been an abidinginterest, sufficiently so for me to consider trying to distil my understanding,imperfect as it is, of its nature. Second, there is the issue of manageability. Part of

the appeal of king-centred English (or Scottish) history is that one can constructa single storyline around one king at a time. Twelfth-century historians hadrecognized how much of a boon this was: so it was that Henry of Huntingdonheaved a huge sigh of historiographical relief when the day arrived when England

was under a single king.Historical construction was thereby greatly simplified.The historian of the medieval aristocracy enjoys no such luxury. Rather is heconfronted by the dilemmas of multiplicity of dealing (to take Englands caseonly) with some twenty earls and about sixty peerage families at any given time.

The most favoured solution to this dilemma has been to opt for the detailedmonographic study of a single magnate or an aristocratic family. The alternativeis a broad-brush characterization of the aristocracy as a group, thereby permittingbroad generalizations, sometimes garnished with individual examples. My ownapproach in the current work lies between these polarities. Its starting point isthe careers, interests, and documents of individual magnates and their families,but its declared purpose is to distil this information to try to characterize thenature of aristocratic lordship generally. Such an exercise in characterization canonly be attempted by a rather ruthless process of selection and organization; thatalone makes the subject manageable.

There is a third, less selfish reason for choosing the period 12721422 asthe focus of study. It is truly the first age of detailed documentation for thestudy of the medieval aristocracy, especially in England. It is neither the heroicnor the really formative age in the shaping of aristocratic power. That accolademust surely goas continental historians have so rightly insisted to the period10001250.Pioneering studies of lordship in England in this period have beenundertaken by a roll call of historians such as Sir Frank Stenton, S. F. C. Milsom,

Sydney Painter, David Crouch, Diana Greenway, Barbara English, Judith Green,and others. In Scotland scholars such as Grant Simpson and Keith Stringer havelikewise shown what rich insights into aristocratic power and affinities in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries can be secured through the detailed analysisof the careers and charters of individual magnates. We appear to be presented

with a paradox: in England, at least, the seigniorial worldif such it wasofF. M. StentonsFirst Century of English Feudalism or S. F. C. Milsoms legal

world seems to give way in the thirteenth century to a world much more

dominated by monarchical structures, national identities, unitary governmental

Henry of Huntingdon,Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), 264(cum jam ad monarchiam Anglie pervenimus).

See especially the essays by Fossier and Contamine in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age(Actes de 117e congres des societes savant) (Paris, 1995).

F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1961); S. F.C. Milsom,The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge, 1976).


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institutions, a growing distinction between the sphere of the public and theprivate, and what has been called the rise of the modern state. Why, therefore,deploy as a tool of analysis a termlordshipwhich was apparently becoming

increasingly outmoded?A large part of the answer lies in the undoubted fact that the quality and

quantity of documentation for the study of lordship in action grows by leapsand bounds afterc.1250. Up to that point it is through chartersdocumentsmainly concerned with the title to, and transfer of, landthat these studies haveoverwhelmingly, though not exclusively, viewed their subject. In this respectthere is a quantum leap, especially in England, in the range and character ofdocumentary sources for the study of aristocratic power from the mid to late

thirteenth century onwards. Manorial accounts and surveys, household accounts,receivers accounts and valors, court rolls, registers of correspondence, indenturesof personal service, and muster lists now survive in considerable numbers. Theirsurvival is indeed very patchy, especially as compared with royal archives, andvery uneven as between the major aristocratic families. But they allow us tostudy lordship in detail and in action in a fashion that is not at all possible forearlier periods. This rich cache of sources continues after 1422; but some ofthem become increasingly stilted, even uninformative and new genres of evidencebegin to accumulate.

Now that the chronological limitations of the book have been explained, itis equally important to note the selective group of lords who are chosen foranalysis. One deliberate omission is the great ecclesiastical lords. There is, ofcourse, no doubt that they were often drawn from the same social stock as theirlay colleagues and exercised a range of powers of lordship which were very similar.Thus William Courtenay and Thomas Arundel, two successive archbishops ofCanterbury 138196, 13967, and 13991414, were younger sons of notablecomital families and fully familiar with the habits and priorities of the lay

aristocracy. Nor would Abbot Clowne of St Marys, Leicester, or Abbot Thomasde la Mare of St Albansboth of whom have been memorably characterized inthe chronicles of their abbeyshave felt in any way ill at ease in the companyand conversation of earls and barons. There were around 1300 some fifteenbishops and thirty abbots and priors who had the same order of wealth and muchthe same powers of lordship as the major secular lords of England. None of thiscan be gainsaid; yet issues of manageability apartthe differences between theecclesiastical and lay aristocracy were profound, especially in terms of the themes

of this bookbe it in family policy and priorities, the institutional context inwhich they operated, their role in local and national politics, their social andmilitary contacts, and so forth.

Even when the ecclesiastical lords have been excluded, there is the vexingquestion of how we define the lay aristocracy. Aristocracy and nobility areatleast in Britainill-defined and elastic terms; qualifying them as greater orhigher still falls short of providing clarity of definition. Nobility in particular


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can be extended as a term to include arguably all members of gentle society, atleast those who adopted the style of knight and family coats of arms. Arguablyeven more important is the undoubted fact that the powers of lordship exercised

by lords, great and small, were broadly similar in character. Particularly is thistrue of the dozen or so elite gentry families so characteristic of many Englishshires and composing an intermediate group between the greater barons on theone hand and the manorial or parish gentry on the other. In certain respects itis the continuum in the exercise and character of lordshipfrom that of thegreatest earl to the two- or three-manor county knightwhich is one of themost distinctive features of medieval and early modern society. They were alllords,domini, seigneurs.

Indeed it can be argued that in aggregate terms it was the lesser lords ratherthan the great earls and barons who dominated the landscape of local society. TheEnglish evidence is particularly striking in this respect. J. M. W. Bean has pointedout that, of the seventeen counties for which comparison can be made based onthe 1412 tax returns, in only four did the proportion of the landed values held bythe peerage or higher aristocracy exceed 25 per cent; in none did it reach 30 percent.Or to put it more positively, the great majority of gentle landowners heldland with an annual return of 2039. Side by side with these bold statisticalclaims, we can place the series of country and family studiesof which those ofNigel Saul have been outstanding exampleswhich have greatly enhanced ourunderstanding of the role of the greater gentry in the social and power structuresof provincial England and, by extension, to some degree of the lairds of lowlandScotland, the second-rank families of English Ireland such as the Le Poers or theRoches, or even of the leaders of native society in highland Britain such as theuchelwyrof Wales. These men were no pawns; their power and standing werepart of the matrix within which lordship, both aristocratic and royal, had to learnto operate. Not the least of the achievements of recent scholarship has been to

show that even great magnates such as John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, foundtheir power in the localities severely constrained by the existing distribution andambitions of local lordship and families.

All this is readily conceded; lordship spans the whole of the ruling class orclasses of medieval society. It may have been displayed in all its finery andsophistication in the world of earls and barons; but in its fustian form it servedequally well to describe the power of the countless lesser lords of the BritishIsles. Yet that is but one half of the argument. It is equally undoubtedly true

that lordship was stratified in a clearly recognized hierarchical form. This was

J. M. W. Bean, Landlords, inThe Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 13481500,ed. E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991), 52686, at p. 530.

N. Saul,Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280 1400(Oxford, 1986);N. Saul,Death, Art, and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their Monuments,13001500(Oxford, 1990).

S. K. Walker,The Lancastrian Affinity, 136199(Oxford, 1990).


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acknowledged in contemporary terminologybe it in titles (for example, duke,earl), forms of address, and clearly differentiated rates of pay for military service.However much the various ranks ofdomini were united by a common code

of chivalry, knighthood, and gentility, they were under no illusions about theprofound divisions in their ranks in terms of wealth, status, and political weight.Magna Carta c.14 in 1215 had acknowledged as much by its differentiationbetween those lords who were given the privilege of an individual summons tomeet the king in common council from those who had to make do with ageneral summons through the sheriff of their county. Already by the 1230s andthe 1240s the notion of a peerage, an elite group of lords, was in circulation,and some of the earliest Rolls of Arms likewise identified the most prestigious

families, about one hundred in number.

This process of the definition of an elite of higher aristocratswhat K. B.McFarlane termed the stratification of the nobilitygathered institutionalpace in our period. Its most obvious expression was the growing definitionof a hereditary parliamentary peerage. Whereas in the late thirteenth centurythe numbers of magnates who were summoned individually to parliament wasstill fluid and somewhat unpredictable, this increasingly ceased to be so as thefourteenth century progressed. Already by Edward IIs reign the number of earlsand barons receiving individual writs of summons to the English parliament

was beginning to settle down at about sixty. No property qualification was laiddown for the groupthough a thousand marks of landed income was comingto be regarded as the territorial competence for an earlbut we would not befar wrong to suggest, with Barbara Harvey, that landed income ofc.400 perannum was the threshold. This, therefore, was the creme de la creme of thenobility; and they were aware, increasingly so, that they stood apart.

Stand apart, head and shoulders above the rest of gentle society, they mostcertainly did. That is why Rodney Hiltons analogy of them as skyscrapers

standing out from the plain of the other lords, local and regional, remainsapposite. The figures that can be culled from the 1436 income tax returns makeevident the huge economic gulf between the peerage and the gentry.Nor wasit merely or even mainly a matter of income and statistics. The greater lordsenjoyed a range of privileges to which few ordinary lords could aspiresuch as

D. Crouch,The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000 1300(London, 1992), esp. 225, 105. McFarlane,Nobility, 122 5.

B. Harvey, The Aristocratic Consumer in England in the Long Thirteenth Century, inThirteenth Century EnglandVI, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell, and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 1997),1737.

R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century(London, 1967). Hiltons metaphor is an exact echo of that used by John Stafford, archbishopof Canterbury 144351, who likened the nobility to mountains towering above the hills andplains of the lower classesas quoted in G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 13601461(Oxford, 2005), 93. T. B. Pugh, The Magnates, Knights and Gentry, inFifteenth-Century England,13991509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester, 1972), 86128.


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the right to license markets and fairs in their own boroughs, the right to freewarren on their demesnes, licences to empark their lands, and often extensivejurisdictional franchises. But it was perhaps above all their lifestyle and social

circles which proclaimed their superiority and the distance between them andother wielders of lordship. They operated on a national, sometimes indeed aninternational, stage; they were the companions of kings and captains of theirarmies; the size and splendour of their households put them in a league apart, asdid the size of their affinities and the tentacles of their influence and power; theirmarriage alliances to their social peers further promoted their apartness, whilethe wide distribution of their estates and residencesnot infrequently extendinginto England, Wales, and Irelandreaffirmed their national, as well as their

local or even regional, standing.Those who were not members of this magic circle fully recognized thesuperiority of the group and the due deference that was owed to it. Thus whenSir Hugh Hastings commissioned a brass in the late 1340s for his greater gloryin the church of Elsing in Norfolk it was the king and great lords whom hehad served who were commemoratedEdward III, the earls of Warwick andPembroke, the Lords Stafford and Despenser among them.This was not mereflattery; rather was it a recognition that this was how the world of power was, andshould be, constructed with lesser lords turning in the orbit of the greater onesand basking in their patronage. Much the same point is made even more vividlymanifest in the famous, and highly revealing, set of windows at Etchingham inSussex. The king and members of the royal family are given pride of place inthe east window of the nave; they are flanked by the earls of England, probablyall twelve of them; Sir William Etchingham relegated his knightly neighboursto the nave.Contemporaries, in short, would not have been surprised by theprominence we give to the great lords; it reflects their view of the world.

In this analysis of lordship there is a further reason for concentrating on the

greater lordsindeed on a handful of them. It is quite simply that, on the whole,it is only for this group of lords that we have a range of documentary evidence on

which to build a nuanced understanding of the exercise of lordship in the longfourteenth century. This is surely no accident. Rather it is that the sheer extent andcomplexity of their estates and households required them from a fairly early dateto use written records to supervise and control their affairs.The historian is thebeneficiary of this triumph of the written word in the seigniorial world, notablyin the appearance of annual accounts. In fact such records as survive are only the

Discussed inAge of Chivalry, no. 678. See also M. Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman:Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England, c.1300c.1500(Stroud, 2002), 524.

Fully discussed in Saul,Scenes from Provincial Life, ch. 5. There are excellent introductions to seigniorial household and manorial accounts respectively

inHousehold Accountsand P. D. A. Harvey,Manorial Records(revised edn., London, 1999).


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tips of a much larger iceberg of lost documents. That is why the analysis in thechapters which follow relies heavily on a few relatively well-documented Englisharistocratic familiesnotably the Beauchamps, Bohuns, Fitzalans, Lancasters,

Mortimers, and Staffords, supplemented occasionally from the archives of otherfamilies.The search of such records could no doubt have been greatly extendedand deepened; but the sample isit is hopedsufficiently broad to allow usto characterize the main lineaments of aristocratic lordship in the fourteenthcentury.

Of the six major English families mentioned above, all held extensive lands inthe March of Wales as well as in England; the Mortimers also had very extensiveinterests in Ireland. This directs us to another feature of this book which calls for

explanation and defence, namely its ambition to draw on evidence for the studyof aristocratic lordship from different parts of the British Isles. First, a disclaimer.The book has no pretensions whatsoever to make an original contribution to thestudy of aristocratic power in Scotland or English Ireland nor, frankly, are thesurviving recordsespecially household and estate accountsfor these regionsto be compared with those for England or even the March of Wales. Nor have Iattempted to characterize the nature of noble power in the native Celtic societiesof Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Some excellent studies have been undertakenof late in this area; but these will only be drawn upon here to characterizehow English-style aristocratic lordship sought to adjust to the social landscapeof Celtic societies. In other respects the patterns and dynamics of power,compounded by the very different and very inadequate range of sources, donot lend themselves to meaningful comparison with English-style aristocraticlordship or its terminology.

Nevertheless there are good reasons (other than the pursuit of current histori-ographical fashion) for extending the scope of this study beyond the confines ofEngland. We should observe, first, that the great lords of England, the March

of Wales, and English Ireland were, in many respects, members of a singleclub, bound by ties of marriage, sociability, territorial ambition, and service.

A handful of illustrative examples may drive home the point. Territorially, thelanded interests of William de Valence (d. 1296), half-brother of King Henry III,are indicative: he held Goodrich Castle (Herefordshire), estates in twelve Englishcounties (especially in southern England), a share of the lordship of Pembroke

I have also had the advantage of consulting K. B. McFarlanes transcripts of seigniorialdocuments in Magdalen College, Oxford. Where I cite from these transcripts the reference ispreceded by an asterisk .

A notable study is K. Simms,From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Structure of Gaelic Irelandin the Later Middle Ages(Woodbridge, 1987).

R. Frame, Aristocracies and the Political Configuration of the British Isles in his,Ireland andBritain, 11701450, ch. IX.


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in west Wales, and the lordship of Wexford in south-east Ireland. The marriagealliances of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), whom we will meetbelow, likewise illustrate the ecumenical links of these great magnates. Of five of

his daughters, he married one to an English earl, another to a Scottish earl, anda further three to major Anglo-Irish earls. Earl Richards military career likewiseunderlines the fact that the stage on which these leading families conductedtheir public careers was a British or even a European one: he was summoned totake troops to Wales, Scotland, and Gascony just as his contemporary, John fitzThomas, served in Flanders and Scotland. Ultimately the focal point of the

world of these menwhere their fortunes were made and unmadewas thecourt of the king of England. It was he who could even instruct them whom to

marry and it was from the ranks of leading English magnates that they chosetheir sureties when faced with political disaster. Whatever the differences in thelandscape of power, there was a continuum in their aristocratic world which ourhistorical analysis should serve to respect.

Scotland was different: the pattern of its great provincial earldoms and lordshipswas, in many respects, quite distinct from that of England and the evolutionof notions of peerage did not march in step with the English story. Moreimportant, Scottish aristocracy had its own focal pointsocially, militarily,and institutionallyin the court and power of the king of Scots. It was amuch smaller and much less tightly textured circle of power than that of theEnglish, Marcher, and Anglo-Irish world; but it was at least a separate orbit.

Yet the Scottish experience should not lie altogether outwith the scope of thisanalysis. Recent studies (especially by Keith Stringer) have emphasized thata not inconsiderable number of Scottish lords held estates in England or inUlster, at least until the breach inaugurated by the Wars of Independence in1296. The continuum and contrasts in the exercise of lordship across nationalboundariesas was vividly shown in Stringers analysis of the lordship of Earl

David of Huntingdon in the English east Midlands and Garioch (Scotland)inthemselves provide a valuable insight into the varying character of aristocraticpower.

This is, indeed, ultimately the defence for casting our net widely in the BritishIsles in pursuit of our characterization of aristocratic lordship. There is, of course,no doubt that the quality and quantity of historical evidence for the study ofaristocratic power 12721422 is infinitely superior for England than for anyother part of the British Isles. But it is evidence of a particular kindmainly

ODNB, subBurgh, Richard de; Fitzgerald, John fitz Thomas. Alexander Grant has published a series of fundamental studies of the later medieval Scottish

aristocracy, including Earls and Earldoms in Late Medieval Scotland, c.13101460, in EssaysPresented to Michael Roberts, ed. J. Bossy and P. Jupp (Belfast, 1976), 2440; The Development ofthe Scottish Peerage,SHR, 57 (1978), 127.

See in general the excellent maps inAtlas of Scottish History to 1707, ed. P. G. B. McNeill andH. L. MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1996). For Stringers studies see above, n. 12.


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of lowland, manor-centred lordship, an aristocratic power already substantiallyfossilized in its forms and, crucially, operating within a framework of strong andintrusive royal control and within complex societies in terms of the distribution

of social, jurisdictional, and political power. It is an image of aristocratic lordshipwhich is reflected likewise in other parts, especially anglicized parts, of the lowlandBritish Islesbe it in the lowlands of Glamorgan, Gwent, and Pembroke in

Wales, in the rich valleys of south-east Ireland or of Meath, and in tracts oflowland southern and eastern Scotland. But it is an image which needs to besupplemented by considering the character of lordship in upland regions ofthe British Isles, including much of the north of England, and in areas wherenon-English societies preserved the forms and organization of native lordship,

and where powers of direct royal intervention and control were limited. Not onlydoes this alternative image help to give geographical nuance to our portrait ofaristocratic lordship in the British Isles, it also extends greatly our understandingof the range and character of lordship itself. It helps us to recognize what aprotean and flexible institution aristocratic lordship was.

It is the nature of the power exercised by this elite group which is primarilythe subject of this current study. Lordship, particularly that of great lords, wasultimately more than exploitation or power, even if it was most certainly thatalso. Its legitimacy derived from its claim that it afforded maintenance andprotection, good lordship as it would be known in later medieval centuries.It was a reminder that there was a mutuality at the heart of lordship and a setof social obligations which both parties were expected to observe. We may citean example of such mutuality, and of its limits, from the north-east March of

Wales. Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), the most powerful aristocratic lord ofhis day, sent a letter to the men of the lordship of Bromfield and Yale around1318 promising to be a good lord to them; but, with his usual gruffness, there

was a sting in the tail of his offer: he has sworn that he will have them one wayor another. The community sized up the threat realistically. They calculated,rightly, that their current lord, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey (d. 1347), was nomatch for Lancaster in power; but they also added, revealingly, that they wouldbe ready with their bodies to maintain his honour, if they but have a leader whomight defend them.They were fully apprised of the dynamics and duties oflordship and dependence alike. Glanvill in his treatise on the laws of England

was eloquent on that scorec.1180: What the man owes to the lord because of

his homage is also owed by the lord to his man because of lordship, except fordeference alone. Much of this mutuality may have been ironed out in England,especially lowland England, by the institutionalization and territorialization of

Cal. Anc. Pets., no. 8829. Glanvill, Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie, ed. G. D. G. Hall (London,

1993), 107 (9.4) [Prof. Daviess translation].


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the obligations of dependence and by the common wash of royal institutions andclaims; but elsewhere in the British Isles the patriarchal, personal, and protectionfeatures were still evident and operative. We need to try to capture some of these

features as we seek to trace the varying contours and practice of lordship acrossthe face of the late medieval British Isles. We are so used to assessing power andits effectiveness in governmental, bureaucratic, economic, and narrowly politicalterms that we are in danger of overlookingor underestimatingthe range ofattributes and claims which lay at the heart of medieval lordship. These attributesand claims are not itemized in the charters, accounts, and registers of lordshipeven in the later Middle Ages; but they form the foundations on which the wholeedifice of lordshipincluding ultimately royal lordshipwas founded. Three

of them in particular may be briefly identified.Lordship was part of the natural order of the universe. The lordship of menon earth corresponded to that of the Lord God. Its legitimacy was not normallyopen to doubt. English kings, and historians, may have made a great deal of thephrase by the grace of God in their formal titles; but since all the powers thatbe are ultimately ordained by God, that same grace was the source likewise ofaristocratic lordship, indeed ofalllordship (as theologians such as John Wycliffnever tired of declaring). This was not merely a matter of schoolmens talk.Rather was it the way in which the proper ordering of the world and society wasinterpreted. The values of this world were manifestedin a fashion which it isvery difficult for the modern mind to graspin the exalted position accorded tothose who, literally and metaphorically, lorded over it. What great lords expectedultimately was nothing less than worship, precisely what the believer owed to theLord God. The hugely inflated formulae of addressboth of letters issued bythem and petitions addressed to themopen a window onto this world. Ryghthigh and mighty prynce and my right good lord is how the earl of Oxfordaddressed the powerful duke of Norfolk; more modestly Edward Despenser,

lord of Glamorgan, was illustrious and magnificent lord.The habit had alsocaught on in Scotland, as the letters to the members of the Douglas familyamply illustrate: most excellent and most dread lord, James earl of Douglasis one example of the fashion. We can dismiss such hyperbolic formulae aspart of the inevitable inflation of language; but we would be wrong to do so.Not only do the formulae reflect the self-image of the aristocrats themselves(or their chancery clerks); they also remind us that the world of lordship wasfounded on a defiantly hierarchical world order. Lordship was not only a matter

of power, land, and income; it was also based on a particular view of the socialand political order.

The Paston Letters, 14221509, ed. J. Gairdner, 3 vols. (London, 1910), I, 143; PrivateIndentures, no. 57.

For this and other examples seeMort. Reg., II, nos. 109, 129, 180, 220.


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Apologia 17

The other side of the coin to worship was deference. The vocabulary ofsubordination echoes throughout the documents: honour, reverence, right,obedience, humility.So does the vocabulary of obedience, even at the higher

echelons of social dependence. I will do in all and singular, said an Irishchieftain as he submitted in 1394, that which a good and faithful liegemanought to do and is bound to do to his natural liege lord. Again we candismiss such phraseology as conventional flattery. But not only does it pervademedieval sourcesfrom feudal charters to manorial formulae and indentures ofretinueit also opens a window on the, often unspoken, set of assumptions

which shaped all relationships of dependence. The return on worship was goodlordship, bone seigneurie, la meilleure seigneurie et bienveillaunce.And, as the

duke of Norfolk said in a famous letter, the goodness or power of the lordship heexercised inhisschir operated at all tymes . . . thowh our persone be not daylyher.This was the framework within which all lordship ultimately brought itsauthority to bear on society. We must not lose sight of this framework as weattend to the particularities and details of aristocratic lordship in action.

Finally the term lordship reminds us of the open-ended and multifacetednature of the exercise of power in the Middle Ages. Historians have dividedtheir current analysis of power into compartmentssocial, political, economic,and so forth; they have drawn a sharp division between so-called public andprivate power; they have arranged their scheme of power within clear-cutinstitutional and governmental frameworks. In so far as the concept of lordshiphas survived this assault, it has been largely reduced to a rent-collecting lordship,stripped of its social, judicial, or political overtones. Such was not medievallordship. The great F. W. Maitland knew as much: Personal, tenurial, justiciarythreads are woven into a web that bewilders us.Some of those threads becamedisentangled in the centrallater Middle Ages as kingdoms and states began toappropriate them to themselves. But for the most part lordship including non-

royal lordship (so consistently underrated by English medieval historians)stilloperated across large swathes of the lives of those who livedas individualsand communitiesunder its authority. Medieval terminology, so assertedOtto Brunner, . . . made no distinction between public and private lordship,but knew only diverse kinds of lordship, rulership, justice and authority.

For an outstanding exposition of the language of dependence, service, and lordship in thefifteenth century, see R. Horrox,Richard III: A Study in Service(Cambridge, 1989), ch. 1.

E. Curtis,Richard II in Ireland, 13945(Oxford, 1927), 151. Such phraseology abounds in the letters and petitions assembled inAnglo-Norman Letters and

Petitions, ed. M. D. Legge (Oxford, 1941). Gairdner (ed.),Paston Letters, I, 230. F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England,

foreword by J. C. Holt (Cambridge, 1987), 339. Brunner,Land and Lordship, 202.


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Such a claimbased as it was on German and Austrian evidencemay seemexaggerated; but when we recall that at least the Marcher lords of Wales talkedof themselves as royal lords enjoying royal lordship or when a shrewd Tudor

commentator referred to them as the soveraigne governors of their tenantes andpeople, we are at least reminded that our danger is to underrate the ambit andmanifold activities of medieval lordship. It is the intention of the chapters whichfollow to try to capture some of the whole variety of ways in which aristocraticlordship impinged on society in the British Isles in the later Middle Ages.

ADDI T IO NA L BIB L IO GR A PHY

For secular lordship in the medieval West, S. Reynolds, Secular Power andAuthority in the Middle Ages, inPower and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essaysin Memory of Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007), 1122.

A study of its golden age is D. Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: ConstructingAristocracy in England and France, 900 1300(Harlow, 2005).

For lordship in late medieval France (and Burgundy), P. Contamine,La Noblesse

au Royaume de France de Philippe le Bela Louis XII. Essai de Synthese (Paris,1997). C. Allmand (ed.),War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France(Liverpool, 2000) contains relevant essays by K. Daly, Centre, Power andPeriphery in Late Medieval France, G. Small, Centre and Periphery in LateMedieval France: Tournai, 13841477, and G. Prosser, Decayed Feudalismand Royal Clienteles: Royal Office and Magnate Service in the FifteenthCentury. In D. Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002)see G. Small, The Crown and the Provinces in the Fifteenth Century and

G. Prosser, The Later Medieval FrenchNoblesse.For a British Isles perspective on lordship, P. Morgan, Ranks of Society, inThe Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. R. Griffiths (Oxford, 2003) andB. Smith, Lordship in the British Isles c.1320c.1360: The Ebb Tide of theEnglish Empire?, inPower and Authority in the Middle Ages. Essays in Memory ofRees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007). For England, S. Walker,Political Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006), especially theessays in part 1, Lordship and Service; C. Dyer, The Ineffectiveness of Lordship

in England, 12001400, in Rodney Hiltons Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes, ed. C. Dyer, P. Coss, and C. Wickham. Past and PresentSupplement 2 (Oxford, 2007). For the exercise of lordship on the lands ofthe bishopric of Winchester, The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English

Quotations and sources in Davies,Lordship and Society, 217, 222.


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Apologia 19

Society, ed. R. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2003). For the lordship of the Campbells,S. Boardman,The Campbells, 12501513(Edinburgh, 2006). Important essaycollections for Scotland and Ireland are The Exercise of Power in Medieval

Scotland, c.12001500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin, 2003) andLordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton(Dublin, 2008).


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1The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory

The higher aristocracy is not an easily defined group. Peerage lawyers andgenealogists have expended a great deal of effort and ingenuity in attempting to

formulate, and then to apply, such definitions; but the untidiness and fluidity ofhuman categorizations and the shifting character of status vocabulary more oftenthan not undermine the tidiness of such definitions. Nor, frankly, is this a matterof undue concern for the argument of this book, since its theme is to investigatethe character of lordship rather than to try to define the membership of the clubof higher aristocrats in a schematic and formulaic manner. Nevertheless it is as

well at the outset to have some broad notion of the dimensions of the group.So let us start with some bald figures, none of which is to be regarded as

more than indicative. It is simplest to start with England. There had alwaysbeen in effect, if not institutionally, an elite group within the medieval nobilityin England. They might be definedfor those anxious to have definitionsascorresponding to the 180 or so tenants-in-chief or, more plausibly, to thosegreater magnates who, according to the terms of Magna Carta in 1215, wereto receive an individual summons from the king when he wished to discussraising an aid as a tax. Their eminence would have been readily recognizedby contemporaries in terms of titles, wealth, status, political standing, size offollowing, and increasingly in the acceptance of the notion of peers. But the

membership of this group was neither fixed nor static; it fluctuated, partly inresponse to the fortunes and misfortunes of families and partly according to

whom the king decided to summon to his councils and parliaments. It wasduring the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that the membership of thegroup came finally to be formally defined and its membership converted intoa hereditary, parliamentary peerage. This was a process which K. B. McFarlanefamously characterized as one of exclusion, definition and stratification.Thechronology of this process has now been amply outlined in various historical

studies; it need not be repeated here. It was part of a wider process of tighteningand refining the vocabulary and terminology of the status distinction of gentlesociety which is a feature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So it wasthat a clear and differentiated tariff of wages was established for military serviceto the king, or that sumptuary legislation laid down the clothes appropriate to

McFarlane,Nobility, 269.


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each legally defined social group, or that the legislation regulating the givingof liveries (from Richard IIs reign onwards) specifically exempted dukes, earls,barons and bannerets. These and similar developments indicated that a defined

and quasi-hereditary elite had now ensconced itself legally and institutionallyat the apex of English society. This may serve as our working definition of thehigher aristocracy.

How large a group was it? We would not be far wrong were we to indicatethat by the early fifteenth century it included at most sixty families. Thesefamiliesor the senior representative of themclaimed a rank and privileges

which set them apart from the rest of gentle society, notably the virtuallyhereditary right to receive individual summonses to parliament. There was, of

course, much that was contingent and accidental in the composition of thegroup at any given point in timeas families failed (naturally or artificially)and as new members were promoted by royal favour. But the size of the groupremained broadly unchanging. Furthermore the income tax returns for 1436indicate that though this elite was not formally defined in terms of its income, itdid nevertheless stand out from the rest of landed society in terms of its wealth.

Within this higher aristocracygenerally termed baronsthere was afurther refinement. The cremedelacreme of the group flaunted titlesnormallyearl, but later also duke (from 1337) and marquis (from 1385, but rare)whichfurther differentiated them and, in a society increasingly obsessed with theetiquette of precedence and ceremony, set them further apart. Their numbersvaried: they stood at ten in 1280, at seventeen in 1400.So did their wealth vary

widely, but it had come to be accepted that a landed income of one thousandmarks (666 13s. 4d.) per annum was a minimum territorial qualification for anearl. This comitalducal groupthe premier league of the higher aristocracy,as it wereis of particular interest to us since it is its documentary evidence(or such of it as survives) which underpins the analysis of lords and lordship in

this book.When we turn to Scotland and English Ireland in search of a higher aristocracy,

we find ourselves in even more difficulties, not least because of the inadequaciesof the surviving evidence. It is not surprising that in certain directions theevolution of the Scottish higher aristocracy seemed to echo developments inEngland. After all, the links between the English and Scottish royal courts inthe twelfth and thirteenth centuries were often close; and many of the premierScottish comital families were of Anglo-Norman stock (Bruce, Stewart, and

Comyn among them) and often continued to retain territorial and other interestsin England. Even as late as 1398 the Scots could borrow a leaf from recentEnglish practice by adopting the title of duke for their greatest noblemen. But

H. L. Gray, Incomes from Land in England in 1436,EHR, 49 (1934), 607 39; T. B. Pughand C. D. Ross, The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436,BIHR, 26 (1953), 128.

See the basic list in the Appendix to this chapter.


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The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory 23

these similarities and imitations should not mislead us. There were substantialand substantive differences between late medieval England and Scotland both inthe chronology and in the terminology of their higher aristocracies. Thus the

terms barons and free barony had very different connotations in Scotland fromthose of English usage, and no Scottish peerage can be said to have appeareduntil the fifteenth century. Likewise in terms of wealth and the nature of theirlordship, the differences between the higher Scottish aristocracy and their Englishcounterparts were often more striking than the similarities. These differences aremore than surface variations; they reflect profound differences in the characterand distribution of aristocratic (as indeed of royal) power as between Scotlandand England.

None of this can be gainsaid; yet a higher aristocracy is clearly identifiable inScotland. It numbered about fifty; in other words it was considerably larger inrelation to the overall size of the population than was the English parliamentarypeerage. These were the men who really counted, the heavyweights, in Scottishpolitical society. Forty-eight of them were named in the declaration of Arbroath in1320; fifty-six did personal homage to King Robert II at his coronation in 1371.

As in England, a group of earldoms stood at the head of this elite community.In the 1280s (as in 1329 at the end of Robert Is reign) they numberedthirteenfive (Angus, Buchan, Carrick, Menteith, Sutherland) in the hands offamilies of continental origins but now fully Scotticized (Umfraville, Comyn,Bruce, Stewart, and the descendants of Freskin the Fleming); the remainingeight (Atholl, Dunbar, Caithness, Fife, Lennox, Mar, Ross, and Strathearn) heldby native families often, as at Strathearn, with all the powers and traditionsof Celtic mormaorship. In addition to earldoms, Scotland had a category ofaristocratic power-bases unknown to English terminology or historiography, theprovincial lordships. There were around twenty of them at the beginning ofour period. They were often as extensive territorially and jurisdictionally as

some of the earldoms but lacked the title; they were broadly coextensive withthe historic provinces or regions of the kingdom. Between them the earldomsand the provincial lordships covered close on two-thirds of the surface area ofmodern Scotland. This suggests that the configuration of power, specifically ofaristocratic lordship, was, or could be, very different from that familiar frommuch of the English evidence. It is a point to which we will need to return.

What of English Ireland? Viewed from one anglethat of the English govern-ment in Westminster and DublinEnglish Ireland mimicked the institutions,

practices, and laws of England to a remarkable degree. Aristocratic lordship inIreland therefore had to a considerable extent to operate within this framework.

See in general D