lords and lordship in the british isles in the late middle ages

Lords and lordship in the British Isles in the late Middle Ages / R.R.. Editor’s IntroductionProfessor Davies worked on Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages he

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

IN T H E L AT E M IDDL E AG ES

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Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Late

1Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6

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Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer 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.

2 Nobility—Great Britain—History—To 1500 3 Feudalism—Great Britain—History—To 1500 4 Power (Social sciences)—Great Britain—History—To 1500 5 Great Britain—History—Medieval period, 1066–1485 6.

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, Chronicle Adam Usk, 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

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, Lordship and Society R R Davies, 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, Monasticon W Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: A

His-tory of the Abbies and other Monasteries, pitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with their Dependencies, in England

Econ HR Economic History Review

EHR English Historical Review

Frame, Ireland and Britain R Frame, 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, Estates G Holmes, 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 natyne Club, Edinburgh, 1853)

(Ban-Nichols, Wills A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known to

Be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of 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

Eng-a GlossEng-ary, ed J Nichols (London, 1780)

Abbreviations ix

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 [General

Editor] 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 3rdseries, lvi–lvii (London, 1937)

Rot Parl Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed J Strachey et al.

7 vols (London, [1783], 1832)

SHR Scottish Historical Review

Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys J Smyth, The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Lives

of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and Manor of Berkeley , ed J MacLean, 3 vols.

(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 guished Families: From the Reign of Henry the Second to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed.

Distin-N H Nicolas, 2 vols (London, 1826)

x Abbreviations

London

TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

and R B Pugh (eds.), Victoria History of the

Counties of England (1900–)

Editor’s Introduction

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 towork 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 of Lords and Lordship seems

to 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 piece

of 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 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 beenamalgamated to form the ‘Apologia’—the 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 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, 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 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 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

xii Editor’s Introduction

might have been particularly marked in final versions of the ‘Apologia’ and thechapter ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’ Professor Davies’s argument in theformer that the concept of lordship has been neglected in the historiography oflate medieval England is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and quality ofwork published on the subject—much of which he cites in the course of thebook—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), 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 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 itwithout making alterations to the text shortly before his death—then 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 expression

of 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 particularwill 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 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 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 lordship

by its requirement to be ‘good’—in short, the crucial issue of the limitations oflordship in the rapidly changing British Isles of the late Middle Ages It seems

Editor’s Introduction xiiihighly 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 andfifteenth centuries, of course, stretches back to Professor Davies’s doctoral studiesunder 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 inthe present book Professor Davies’s willingness to broaden the geographical area

in which he examined the phenomenon of lordship beyond the Welsh Marchand 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—andagain 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 ofhis 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 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 Davies’s 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 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 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 Smith

Bristol

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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 inEnglish 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 characterizeconceptually 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 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 favoured

in recent British medieval historiography

It is different elsewhere This brings us to the second element of surpriseabout 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 recentlyanother distinguished French medieval historian, Robert Fossier, is, if anything,

even more assertive: ‘the seigneurie’, he declares, was ‘the primary organism of

¹ ‘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, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester, 1997).

2 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 exercisesuch 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 FredericCheyette and Thomas Bisson—have waged a campaign to move the concept of

‘lordship’ nearer to the centre of Anglophone historical discussions of the MiddleAges.⁵ 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 revealsome 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, therewas 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 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 infrequentlyends, 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 assumptionsfor 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 does

in 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;

³ R Fossier, ‘Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age

(Actes de 117 e congr`es des soci´et´es savant) (Paris, 1995), 9–20, at p 9.

⁴ R Boutruche, Seigneurie et Feodalit´e 2 vols (Paris, 1959–1970), II, 83.

⁵ F L Cheyette (ed.), Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings don, New York,1968); T M Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 743–59.

(Hunting-Apologia 3they 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 power

in 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 general

a huge imbalance in the quantity and even quality of royal and non-royal sourcesfor 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 onthe 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’sepoch-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 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 add

to 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 It

is difficult to suppress the suspicion that English historiography has given priority

to issues other than lordship, such as state- and nation-formation, constitutionaland institutional development, political structures and friction, crown–magnaterelationships, 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 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

⁶ G Duby, La Soci´et´e aux xi e et xii e 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’, in Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed H Lehmann and J Van Horn

Melton (Cambridge, 1994), 263–97.

4 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—canbest be characterized as ‘an aristocracy which was kingship-focussed’.⁷ If that isindeed the case—as I believe it to be—then characterizing the nature of thelordship of this aristocracy may help to give us a more rounded understanding

of the distribution and exercise of power—‘the power of command, constraintand 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 andpolitically until the early twentieth century that it called for no explanation oranalysis Familiarity turned to contempt as the aristocracy came to be identified

as 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 ‘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 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 McFarlane’s seminal work, the late medieval aristocracy of the BritishIsles 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 ofangles—be 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.⁹ Detailed studies ofvarious aspects of aristocratic life and power have proliferated, exploring suchissues as the organization of aristocratic estates and households, the character and

⁷ D A L Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, TRHS, 5th ser., vol 23

(1973), 1–25 at p 1.

⁸ McFarlane, Nobility, 2.

⁹ 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 1394–1521 (Cambridge, 1978).

Apologia 5composition 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, especiallywidows 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’.¹⁰ All in all, our understanding and knowledge of thelater medieval aristocracy is much more thorough, complex, and nuanced than

it once was This is particularly true of later medieval England and is reflected inseveral notable recent attempts to provide a sophisticated overview of aristocraticpower based on these detailed studies.¹¹ 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.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, commandedthe attention of historians, especially English historians, of late—issues such asthe nature of ‘bastard feudal’ relationships, the role of the aristocracy in ‘county’society, the definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage, or crown–magnaterelationships 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 anapproach (as for all historical approaches), especially in terms of overlooking theparticular 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’, in A 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 1318–61 (Oxford, 1981).

6 Lords and Lordship

underestimating the possible changes in the character of aristocratic lordship overtime But this—so it seems to me—is 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 medievconceptu-al 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 degree

on 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 ofthe modern world—including the burgeoning of uniform state institutions andnotions of sovereignty, accountability, and delegation of power—to characterize

a 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 aristocratic

lordships, lay and clerical, a bewildering variety of substructures; they did

not possess any common underlying grid or shared development and relativeuniformities.’¹³ 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.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 Butthe ways in which power manifests itself and exercises its command are not inthe 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 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 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

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 7the 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 range

of ways in which lordship, notably aristocratic lordship, manifested itself Wemust 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 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 medievaldocumentary evidence The roots of lordship lay deep in medieval society In latemedieval England many of those roots had been overlain (though not necessarilytotally 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 That

is 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 much

of highland Britain was measured in the number of men it could command—say2,000—rather than in rent income or landed estate;¹⁶ 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.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 offifteenth-century Scotland it was the bond between man and lord which was atits kernel.¹⁹ It is a reminder to us that there were features about the characterand assumptions of lordship which lie beyond the shallows of the documentaryevidence, and beyond the world-view of royal sources

The chronological bookends of the study are the years 1272 and 1422 Thechoice 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—verypersonal, 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 direction

of 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

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, ‘dux duorum millium’.

¹⁷ See Davies, Lordship and Society, 132–3 and sources cited.

¹⁸ 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, Lords and Men in Scotland.

8 Lords and Lordship

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 ofthe appeal of king-centred English (or Scottish) history is that one can construct

a 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 Englandwas under a single king.²⁰ 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 England’s 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 alternative

is 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 1272–1422 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 go—as continental historians have so rightly insisted—to the period1000–1250.²¹ 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 analysis

of the careers and charters of individual magnates We appear to be presentedwith a paradox: in England, at least, the seigniorial world—if such it was—of

F M Stenton’s First Century of English Feudalism or S F C Milsom’s legal

world²² seems to give way in the thirteenth century to a world much moredominated by monarchical structures, national identities, unitary governmental

²⁰ Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed and trans D Greenway (Oxford, 1996), 264 (cum jam ad monarchiam Anglie pervenimus).

²¹ See especially the essays by Fossier and Contamine in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age

(Actes de 117 e congr`es des soci´et´es savant) (Paris, 1995).

²² 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).

Apologia 9institutions, 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 term—lordship—which was apparently becomingincreasingly outmoded?

A large part of the answer lies in the undoubted fact that the quality andquantity of documentation for the study of lordship in action grows by leaps

and bounds after c.1250 Up to that point it is through charters—documents

mainly concerned with the title to, and transfer of, land—that 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 latethirteenth century onwards Manorial accounts and surveys, household accounts,receivers’ accounts and valors, court rolls, registers of correspondence, indentures

of 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, it

is 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 1381–96, 1396–7, and 1399–1414, were younger sons of notablecomital families and fully familiar with the habits and priorities of the layaristocracy Nor would Abbot Clowne of St Mary’s, Leicester, or Abbot Thomas

de la Mare of St Albans—both of whom have been memorably characterized inthe chronicles of their abbeys—have 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 apart—the differences between theecclesiastical and lay aristocracy were profound, especially in terms of the themes

of this book—be 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’ are—atleast in Britain—ill-defined and elastic terms; qualifying them as ‘greater’ or

‘higher’ still falls short of providing clarity of definition ‘Nobility’ in particular

10 Lords and Lordship

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 it

is the continuum in the exercise and character of lordship—from that of thegreatest earl to the two- or three-manor county knight—which is one of themost distinctive features of medieval and early modern society They were all

lords, 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.²³ Or to put it more positively, the great majority of gentle landowners heldland with an annual return of £20–£39 Side by side with these bold statisticalclaims, we can place the series of country and family studies—of which those ofNigel Saul have been outstanding examples²⁴—which have greatly enhanced ourunderstanding of the role of the greater gentry in the social and power structures

of 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 the

uchelwyr of Wales These men were no pawns; their power and standing were

part of the matrix within which lordship, both aristocratic and royal, had to learn

to operate Not the least of the achievements of recent scholarship has been toshow 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.²⁵

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 truethat lordship was stratified in a clearly recognized hierarchical form This was

²³ J M W Bean, ‘Landlords’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500,

ed E Miller (Cambridge, 1991), 526–86, at p 530.

²⁴ 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, 1300–1500 (Oxford, 1990).

²⁵ S K Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–99 (Oxford, 1990).

Apologia 11acknowledged in contemporary terminology—be it in titles (for example, duke,earl), forms of address, and clearly differentiated rates of pay for military service.

However much the various ranks of domini 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 differentiation

between 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 prestigiousfamilies, about one hundred in number.²⁶

This process of the definition of an elite of higher aristocrats—what K B.McFarlane termed the ‘stratification of the nobility’²⁷—gathered institutionalpace in our period Its most obvious expression was the growing definition

of 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 II’s reign the number of earlsand barons receiving individual writs of summons to the English parliamentwas beginning to settle down at about sixty No property qualification was laiddown for the group—though a thousand marks of landed income was coming

to be regarded as the territorial competence for an earl—but we would not be

far wrong to suggest, with Barbara Harvey, that landed income of c.£400 per

annum was the threshold.²⁸ This, therefore, was the cr`eme de la cr`eme 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 Hilton’s analogy of them as skyscrapersstanding 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.²⁹ Nor was

it merely or even mainly a matter of income and statistics The greater lordsenjoyed a range of privileges to which few ordinary lords could aspire—such as

²⁶ D Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London, 1992), esp 22–5, 105.

²⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 122–5.

²⁸ B Harvey, ‘The Aristocratic Consumer in England in the Long Thirteenth Century’, in

Thirteenth Century England VI, ed M Prestwich, R Britnell, and R Frame (Woodbridge, 1997),

17–37.

²⁹ R H Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century

(London, 1967) Hilton’s metaphor is an exact echo of that used by John Stafford, archbishop

of Canterbury 1443–51, who likened the nobility to mountains towering above the hills and

plains of the lower classes—as quoted in G L Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), 93 T B Pugh, ‘The Magnates, Knights and Gentry’, in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509, ed S B Chrimes, C D Ross and R A Griffiths (Manchester, 1972), 86–128.

12 Lords and Lordship

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 socialcircles 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 residences—not infrequently extendinginto England, Wales, and Ireland—reaffirmed their national, as well as theirlocal 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 glory

in the church of Elsing in Norfolk it was the king and great lords whom hehad served who were commemorated—Edward III, the earls of Warwick andPembroke, the Lords Stafford and Despenser among them.³⁰ 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 neighbours

to the nave.³¹ 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 thegreater lords—indeed 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 onwhich 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 date

to use written records to supervise and control their affairs.³² The historian is thebeneficiary of this triumph of the written word in the seigniorial world, notably

in the appearance of annual accounts In fact such records as survive are only the

³⁰ Discussed in Age of Chivalry, no 678 See also M Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England, c.1300–c.1500 (Stroud, 2002), 52–4.

³¹ Fully discussed in Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, ch 5.

³² There are excellent introductions to seigniorial household and manorial accounts respectively

in Household Accounts and P D A Harvey, Manorial Records (revised edn., London, 1999).

Apologia 13tips 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 families—notably the Beauchamps, Bohuns, Fitzalans, Lancasters,Mortimers, and Staffords, supplemented occasionally from the archives of otherfamilies.³³ The search of such records could no doubt have been greatly extendedand deepened; but the sample is—it is hoped—sufficiently broad to allow us

to 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 forexplanation and defence, namely its ambition to draw on evidence for the study

of 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 records—especially household and estate accounts—for these regions

to 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’ societies

of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland Some excellent studies have been undertaken

of late in this area; but these will only be drawn upon here to characterizehow ‘English-style’ aristocratic lordship sought to adjust to the social landscape

of ‘Celtic’ societies.³⁴ 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 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

histori-of Wales, and English Ireland were, in many respects, members histori-of a singleclub, bound by ties of marriage, sociability, territorial ambition, and service.³⁵

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

³³ I have also had the advantage of consulting K B McFarlane’s transcripts of seigniorial documents in Magdalen College, Oxford Where I cite from these transcripts the reference is preceded by an asterisk∗.

³⁴ A notable study is K Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Structure of Gaelic Ireland

in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987).

³⁵ R Frame, ‘Aristocracies and the Political Configuration of the British Isles’ in his, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450, ch IX.

14 Lords and Lordship

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 ofhis daughters, he married one to an English earl, another to a Scottish earl, and

a further three to major Anglo-Irish earls Earl Richard’s 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.³⁶ Ultimately the focal point of theworld of these men—where their fortunes were made and unmade—was thecourt of the king of England It was he who could even instruct them whom tomarry 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 evolution

of notions of peerage did not march in step with the English story.³⁷ Moreimportant, Scottish aristocracy had its own focal point—socially, militarily,and institutionally—in 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 that

a not inconsiderable number of Scottish lords held estates in England or inUlster, at least until the breach inaugurated by the Wars of Independence in

1296 The continuum and contrasts in the exercise of lordship across nationalboundaries—as was vividly shown in Stringer’s analysis of the lordship of EarlDavid of Huntingdon in the English east Midlands and Garioch (Scotland)—inthemselves provide a valuable insight into the varying character of aristocraticpower.³⁸

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 1272–1422 is infinitely superior for England than for anyother part of the British Isles But it is evidence of a particular kind—mainly

³⁶ ODNB, sub ‘Burgh, Richard de’; ‘Fitzgerald, John fitz Thomas’.

³⁷ Alexander Grant has published a series of fundamental studies of the later medieval Scottish

aristocracy, including ‘Earls and Earldoms in Late Medieval Scotland, c.1310–1460’, in Essays Presented to Michael Roberts, ed J Bossy and P Jupp (Belfast, 1976), 24–40; ‘The Development of the Scottish Peerage’, SHR, 57 (1978), 1–27.

³⁸ See in general the excellent maps in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, ed P G B McNeill and

H L MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1996) For Stringer’s studies see above, n 12.

Apologia 15

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 Isles—be it in the lowlands of Glamorgan, Gwent, and Pembroke inWales, 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 understanding

of 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 set

of social obligations which both parties were expected to observe We may cite

an example of such mutuality, and of its limits, from the north-east March ofWales 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 around

1318 promising to be ‘a good lord to them’; but, with his usual gruffness, therewas a sting in the tail of his offer: ‘he has sworn that he will have them one way

or 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 would

‘be ready with their bodies to maintain his honour, if they but have a leader whomight defend them’.³⁹ 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 score c.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.’⁴⁰ Much of this mutuality may have been ironed out in England,especially lowland England, by the institutionalization and territorialization of

³⁹ Cal Anc Pets., no 8829.

⁴⁰ Glanvill, Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie, ed G D G Hall (London,

1993), 107 (9.4) [Prof Davies’s translation].

16 Lords and Lordship

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 thesefeatures 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 overlooking—or underestimating—the 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 lordship—including ultimately royal lordship—was founded Three

of them in particular may be briefly identified

Lordship was part of the natural order of the universe The lordship of men

on 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 that

be are ultimately ordained by God, that same grace was the source likewise of

aristocratic lordship, indeed of all lordship (as theologians such as John Wycliff

never tired of declaring) This was not merely a matter of schoolmen’s talk.Rather was it the way in which the proper ordering of the world and society wasinterpreted The values of this world were manifested—in a fashion which it isvery difficult for the modern mind to grasp—in 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 address—both of letters issued bythem and petitions addressed to them—open 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’.⁴¹ 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 Douglas’

is one example of the fashion.⁴² 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

⁴¹ The Paston Letters, 1422–1509, ed J Gairdner, 3 vols (London, 1910), I, 143; ‘Private

Indentures’, no 57.

⁴² For this and other examples see Mort Reg., II, nos 109, 129, 180, 220.

Apologia 17The other side of the coin to ‘worship’ was ‘deference’ The vocabulary ofsubordination echoes throughout the documents: ‘honour’, ‘reverence’, ‘right’,

‘obedience’, ‘humility’.⁴³ So does the vocabulary of obedience, even at the higherechelons 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’.⁴⁴ Again we candismiss such phraseology as conventional flattery But not only does it pervademedieval sources—from feudal charters to manorial formulae and indentures ofretinue—it also opens a window on the, often unspoken, set of assumptionswhich shaped all relationships of dependence The return on ‘worship’ was ‘good

lordship’, ‘bone seigneurie’, ‘la meilleure seigneurie et bienveillaunce’.⁴⁵ And, as the

duke of Norfolk said in a famous letter, the goodness or ‘power’ of the lordship he

exercised in his ‘schir’ operated ‘at all tymes thowh our persone be not dayly

her’.⁴⁶ 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 compartments—social, political, economic,and so forth; they have drawn a sharp division between so-called ‘public’ and

‘private’ power; they have arranged their scheme of power within clear-cutinstitutional and governmental frameworks In so far as the concept of ‘lordship’has 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.’⁴⁷ Some of those threads becamedisentangled in the central–later 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 lived—as individualsand communities—under its authority ‘Medieval terminology’, so asserted

Otto Brunner, ‘ made no distinction between public and private lordship,

but knew only diverse kinds of lordship, rulership, justice and authority’.⁴⁸

⁴³ For an outstanding exposition of the language of dependence, service, and lordship in the

fifteenth century, see R Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989), ch 1.

⁴⁴ E Curtis, Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5 (Oxford, 1927), 151.

⁴⁵ Such phraseology abounds in the letters and petitions assembled in Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, ed M D Legge (Oxford, 1941).

⁴⁶ Gairdner (ed.), Paston Letters, I, 230.

⁴⁷ F W Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England,

foreword by J C Holt (Cambridge, 1987), 339.

⁴⁸ Brunner, Land and Lordship, 202.

18 Lords and Lordship

Such a claim—based as it was on German and Austrian evidence—may seemexaggerated; but when we recall that at least the Marcher lords of Wales talked

of themselves as ‘royal lords’ enjoying ‘royal lordship’ or when a shrewd Tudorcommentator 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.⁴⁹ 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

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH YFor secular lordship in the medieval West, S Reynolds, ‘Secular Power and

Authority in the Middle Ages’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays

in Memory of Rees Davies, ed H Pryce and J Watts (Oxford, 2007), 11–22.

A study of its ‘golden age’ is D Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing

Aristocracy 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 Bel `a Louis XII Essai de Synth`ese (Paris,

1997) C Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France

(Liverpool, 2000) contains relevant essays by K Daly, ‘ ‘‘Centre’’, ‘‘Power’’ and

‘‘Periphery’’ in Late Medieval France’, G Small, ‘Centre and Periphery in LateMedieval France: Tournai, 1384–1477’, and G Prosser, ‘ ‘‘Decayed Feudalism’’and ‘‘Royal Clienteles’’: Royal Office and Magnate Service in the Fifteenth

Century’ 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 French Noblesse’.

For a British Isles perspective on lordship, P Morgan, ‘Ranks of Society’, in

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed R Griffiths (Oxford, 2003) and

B Smith, ‘Lordship in the British Isles c.1320–c.1360: The Ebb Tide of the English Empire?’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages Essays in Memory of

Rees Davies, ed H Pryce and J Watts (Oxford, 2007) For England, S Walker, Political Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006), especially the

essays in part 1, ‘Lordship and Service’; C Dyer, ‘The Ineffectiveness of Lordship

in England, 1200–1400’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration of

Historical Themes, ed C Dyer, P Coss, and C Wickham Past and Present

Supplement 2 (Oxford, 2007) For the exercise of lordship on the lands of

the bishopric of Winchester, The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English

⁴⁹ Quotations and sources in Davies, Lordship and Society, 217, 222.

Apologia 19

Society, ed R Britnell (Woodbridge, 2003) For the lordship of the Campbells,

S Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh, 2006) Important essay collections for Scotland and Ireland are The Exercise of Power in Medieval

Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed S Boardman and A Ross (Dublin, 2003) and Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed L Doran and J Lyttleton

(Dublin, 2008)

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The 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 toformulate, 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 matter

of 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 club

of higher aristocrats in a schematic and formulaic manner Nevertheless it is aswell 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 asmore than indicative It is simplest to start with England There had alwaysbeen in effect, if not institutionally, an elite group within the medieval nobility

in England They might be defined—for those anxious to have definitions—ascorresponding to the 180 or so tenants-in-chief or, more plausibly, to thosegreater magnates who, according to the terms of Magna Carta in 1215, were

to receive an individual summons from the king when he wished to discussraising an aid as a tax Their eminence would have been readily recognized

by contemporaries in terms of titles, wealth, status, political standing, size offollowing, and increasingly in the acceptance of the notion of ‘peers’ But themembership of this group was neither fixed nor static; it fluctuated, partly inresponse to the fortunes and misfortunes of families and partly according towhom 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 into

a hereditary, parliamentary peerage This was a process which K B McFarlanefamously characterized as one of ‘exclusion, definition and stratification’.¹ Thechronology of this process has now been amply outlined in various historicalstudies; 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 ‘gentle’society which is a feature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries So it wasthat a clear and differentiated tariff of wages was established for military service

to the king, or that sumptuary legislation laid down the clothes appropriate to

¹ McFarlane, Nobility, 269.

22 Lords and Lordship

each legally defined social group, or that the legislation regulating the giving

of liveries (from Richard II’s reign onwards) specifically exempted ‘dukes, earls,barons and bannerets’ These and similar developments indicated that a definedand quasi-hereditary elite had now ensconced itself legally and institutionally

at 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 Thesefamilies—or the senior representative of them—claimed a rank and privilegeswhich set them apart from the rest of gentle society, notably the virtuallyhereditary right to receive individual summonses to parliament There was, ofcourse, much that was contingent and accidental in the composition of thegroup at any given point in time—as 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.²Within this higher aristocracy—generally termed ‘barons’—there was afurther refinement The cr`eme de la cr`eme of the group flaunted titles—normallyearl, 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 1400.³ So did their wealth varywidely, but it had come to be accepted that a landed income of one thousand

marks (£666 13s 4d.) per annum was a minimum territorial qualification for an

earl This comital–ducal group—the premier league of the higher aristocracy,

as it were—is 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 inthis 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 inadequacies

of 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, andComyn among them) and often continued to retain territorial and other interests

in 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

² H L Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in England in 1436’, EHR, 49 (1934), 607–39; T B Pugh and C D Ross, ‘The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436’, BIHR, 26 (1953), 1–28.

³ See the basic list in the Appendix to this chapter.

The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory 23these 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 theterms ‘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.⁴

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 I’s reign) they numberedthirteen—five (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) held

by native families often, as at Strathearn, with all the powers and traditions

of Celtic mormaorship.⁵ In addition to earldoms, Scotland had a category ofaristocratic power-bases unknown to English terminology or historiography, the

‘provincial lordships’ There were around twenty of them at the beginning ofour period.⁶ They were often as extensive territorially and jurisdictionally assome 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 angle—that of the English govern-ment in Westminster and Dublin—English 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

⁴ See in general Duncan, Scotland; A Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469

24 Lords and Lordship

But such a statement is at best a half-truth Aristocratic lordship in English Irelandwas bound to be different from that experienced in contemporary England for

at least three reasons First, English Ireland was a land of extensive aristocraticliberties where lordship could operate in all its amplitude As Robin Framehas pointed out, ‘something over half the territorial extent of English Ireland

was outside the area of shire ground.’ Secondly, much of Ireland was, in the

contemporary phrase, ‘a land of war’, not necessarily recurrently but sufficientlymenacingly to give a distinctly military flavour to any lordship which intended

to operate at all effectively there Thirdly, and related to this, English-controlledIreland—itself a shifting and unstable category—was a collection of localizedand hybrid societies where the only effective lordship was one which workedwith the grain of local situations and practices The world of the resident lords ofmost of English Ireland was a very far cry indeed from that of the great magnates

of midland and southern England.⁷

Can we hazard a guess as to the number of these English lords in Ireland whom

we might venture to designate as ‘higher aristocrats’? A figure of twenty/thirtywould probably err on the high side A series of important royal commands tothe most important Anglo-Irish lords issued 1322–37 ranged in number fromthirteen in 1331 to twenty-eight in 1335; these seem to identify those who might

be regarded as the leaders of the English community in Ireland.⁸ These figuresare paralleled by those for men known to have been summoned to the Irishparliament: twenty-seven in 1333, twenty-eight in 1378, but falling steadily to nomore than twelve at the end of the Middle Ages.⁹ The numbers, in other words,were modest as compared with those for England and Scotland; and no definedconception of peerage had yet been established The numbers of Anglo-Irishearldoms (as opposed to English earldoms such as Gloucester, Norfolk, or laterMarch which held large estates in Ireland) was also very modest: only one (the deBurgh earldom of Ulster) in 1280 rising to four in 1380 (the Geraldine earldoms

of Desmond and Kildare, the Butler earldom of Ormond, and the earldom ofUlster now in the hands of the Mortimer earls of March)

We can conclude from this sketchy and tentative review that there was

in England, Scotland, and English Ireland a group of greater magnates whomwe—and indeed contemporaries—would have recognized as a higher aristocracy.Its membership was by no means unambiguously defined; it was in England withits concept of a quasi-hereditary parliamentary peerage, meeting apart from thecommons, that this process had gone farthest Within this higher aristocracy,the title of earl (to which duke and marquis were later, though sparingly, added)created a further demarcation in terms of status and precedence It cannot bedenied that there were wide variations in wealth and standing within this group

⁷ Frame, Ireland and Britain, passim ⁸ Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 16–18.

⁹ H G Richardson and G O Sayles, The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia,

1952), 130–4.

The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory 25(between, say, an immensely rich royal duke such as John of Gaunt, duke ofLancaster (d 1399) and Fulk Fitzwarin (d 1374) whose landed fortunes wererelatively modest and who served in the military retinue of Gaunt); nor is it indoubt that there was an overlap, in income and status, between some of thelesser parliamentary barons and some of the knights of the shire Neverthelessthere is every reason to characterize this higher aristocracy as the ruling elite

in England, Scotland, and English Ireland in our period, with the earldoms(normally twenty-five/thirty for all three areas) as a further top tier within thiselite It is this group in particular which we will have within our historical sights.The overall size and importance of the group did not alter radically withinour period, 1272–1422 But such apparent continuity and stability conceals therapid turnover in the composition of the group from one generation to the next.Political miscalculation and forfeiture have often been identified as the majorreason for such a turnover Occasional bloodlettings (such as those of the reigns ofEdward II and Richard II in England) could certainly leave their mark; but what

is remarkable is the way that so many noble families, laid low in one generation,could recover their fortunes and standing in the next Arundel, Despenser,Mortimer are instances which immediately spring to mind in England It is inother directions in particular that we should look for the explanation for therapid turnover in the ranks of the higher aristocracy The primary reasons, it

is now acknowledged, were the failure of families in the direct male line andthe transfer of their estates and often their titles either to collaterals or, throughmarriage, to other families McFarlane’s famous statistic that on average acrossthe two centuries 1300–1500 a quarter of noble families became extinct in thedirect male line (according to his definition of extinction) every twenty-five years

is broadly confirmed by similar statistics for Scotland.¹⁰ Thus in England thefollowing comital families failed in the direct legitimate male line of the body(in chronological order) in the fourteenth century: Edmund of Cornwall 1300,Bigod 1306, Lacy 1311, Clare 1314, Valence 1324, Warenne 1347, Bohun

1361, Lancaster 1361, Bohun (of Northampton) 1373, Ufford 1382, Hastings

1389 Only two families—Vere and Beauchamp—lasted the century, with twoothers (Courtenay and Fitzalan) as runners-up

Such a drastic and regular thinning out of the ranks of the nobility—aphenomenon which seems to have been common to ‘gentle’ (and no doubtpeasant) society generally and one of which contemporaries were all too painfullyand morbidly aware—had to be counterbalanced by regular recruitment of

‘new’ men to take their place Recruitment was generally a matter of service(military, political, diplomatic) and/or royal reward So it was that Edward III,

¹⁰ McFarlane, Nobility, 146 For a critique and revised figures see the key contribution by S J.

Payling ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’,

Econ HR, 45 (1992), 51–73 For Scottish figures see the articles by Alexander Grant cited above,

p 14.