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

LORDS AND LORDSHIP IN THE BRITISH ISLES
IN T H E L AT E M IDDLE AG ES


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Lords and Lordship in the
British Isles in the Late
Middle Ages
R. R. DAVIES
Edited by

BRENDAN SMITH

1


1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6
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 Lady Davies 2009

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Davies, R. R.
Lords and lordship in the British Isles in the late Middle Ages / R.R. Davies; edited by Brendan Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8 (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—To 1485.
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
Abbreviations
Editor’s Introduction
Apologia

vii
xi
1

1. The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory

21

2. Display and Magnificence

58

3. 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
Additional Bibliography
Index

219
233
241

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Abbreviations
Adam Usk, Chronicle
Age of Chivalry

Adam Usk, Chronicle, 1377–1421, ed.
C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997)
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England,
1200–1400, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski
(London, 1987)

BIHR
BL

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
The British Library, London

Cal. Anc. Corr.

Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning
Wales, ed. J. G. Edwards (Cardiff, 1935)
Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales,
ed. W. Rees (Cardiff, 1975)
Calendar of Close Rolls (London, 1892–)
Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1219–
1485, 7 vols. (London and Woodbridge,

1916–2003)
Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 23 vols.
(London, 1904–2004)
Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1891–)

Cal. Anc. Pets.
CCR
CIM

CIPM
CPR
Davies, Lordship and Society
DNB

Dugdale, Monasticon

R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March
of Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978)
Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols., ed.
L. Stephens and S. Lee (London, 1885–1901;
reprinted with corrections, 22 vols., London,
1908–9)
W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: A History of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hospitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and Collegiate
Churches, with their Dependencies, in England


viii

Duncan, Scotland

Abbreviations
and Wales, 6 vols. in 8 (2nd edn., London,
1817–30)
A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the
Kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975)

Econ. HR
EHR

Economic History Review
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 from Medieval England, ed.

C. M. Woolgar, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993)

Household Accounts
Knighton, Chron.

Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G. H.
Martin (Oxford, 1995)

McFarlane, Nobility

K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and
Related Studies (Oxford, 1973)
Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. C. Innes
(Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1833)
Registrum Honoris de Morton, ed. T. Thomson,
A. Macdonald and C. Innes, 2 vols. (Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1853)

Moray Reg.
Mort. Reg.

Nichols, Wills

A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known to
Be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and every
Branch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign of
William the Conqueror, to that of Henry the
Seventh Exclusive: With Explanatory Notes and
a Glossary, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1780)

Abbreviations

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. 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)
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England,
1275–1504, ed. C. Given-Wilson [General
Editor] et al.,16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005)

PROME

Reg. BP
Reg. Chichele

Reg. JG I

Reg. JG II

Rot. Parl.

Register of Edward the Black Prince, 4 vols.
(London,1930–3)
Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury 1414–43, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols.
(Oxford, 1938–47)
John of Gaunt’s Register, 1372–76, ed.
S. Armitage-Smith, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series,
xx–xxi (London, 1911)
John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379–83, ed. E. C.
Lodge and R. Somerville, 2 vols., Camden 3rd
series, lvi–lvii (London, 1937)
Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey et al.
7 vols. (London, [1783], 1832)

SHR
Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys

Scottish Historical Review
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 Distinguished Families: From the Reign of Henry the
Second to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed.
N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1826)


x

Abbreviations

TNA

The National Archives: Public Record Office,
London
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

TRHS
VCH

H. A. Doubleday, W. Page, L. F. Salzmann,
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 to

work published as recently as 2005, and to write another chapter which had
yet to be typed when he died. He had been compiling material for the project
throughout the course of his career, but composition of Lords and Lordship seems
to have begun in or around the year 2000. It was planned as a book of two
parts, the first entitled ‘Lords’, the second ‘Lordship’. Work on the first part, at
least as a first draft, appears to have been at an advanced stage by May 2005,
and much of the second part had also been written, though at least one more
chapter was in genesis bearing the working title ‘The Context of Aristocratic
Lordship’.
The editorial intervention required to make a substantial but unfinished piece
of work suitable for publication involved the abandonment of the two-part
structure on account of the brevity of the second part in comparison with the
first. It is hoped, however, that the essence of the division envisaged by the
author—that the book should move from what lordship was to what it did —is
still discernible. Both parts had introductory chapters, and these have been
amalgamated to form the ‘Apologia’—the title of the original introduction to
Part 1. The chapter ‘The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory’ now also
embraces a short chapter called ‘The Individual Lord’, while the chapter ‘The Lord
at Home’ now incorporates another short chapter entitled ‘Household, Supplies,
and Credit’. Apart from the consolidation of material across different chapters,
the removal of occasional repetition, and the standardization of footnotes, the
text is unaltered. Where new editions of works cited have appeared since Professor
Davies ceased to write I have included them in the footnotes in closed brackets
after the original citation: two examples are PROME and W. Childs’ edition of
the Vita Edwardi Secundi. I have appended an ‘Additional Bibliography’ to each
chapter, and the works thus cited appear in consolidated form at the end of the
volume. With a handful of exceptions these additions date from 2000 and after,
with the majority having been published within the last five years. The intention
has not been to provide a complete bibliography on lordship in the late medieval
British Isles, but rather to draw attention to some of the recent work from across

the region which relates to the theme of the book.
Inevitable tension exists between the decision to keep interference with the
original text to a minimum and the reasonable assumption that the author would
have altered at least some of what is now published had he lived. Such alterations


xii

Editor’s Introduction

might have been particularly marked in final versions of the ‘Apologia’ and the
chapter ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’. Professor Davies’s argument in the
former that the concept of lordship has been neglected in the historiography of
late medieval England is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and quality of
work published on the subject—much of which he cites in the course of the
book—especially for the fifteenth century. It can be noted that he uses the phrase
‘late Middle Ages’ to signify the chosen period of his analysis (1272–1422), and
that the historiography of the reign of Henry VI, upon which he draws only
occasionally, is particularly sensitive to issues of lordship. It can also be offered
that his book is about the British Isles, not England, and that for Scotland
and Ireland a ‘long fourteenth century’ as opposed to a ‘late Middle Ages’
perspective is historiographically meaningless. It remains the case, however, that
historians of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England will demur from
the suggestion that they have paid insufficient attention to aristocratic lordship
in their analysis of English society and politics. Had Professor Davies decided
to leave the ‘Apologia’ substantially as it now stands—and he had re-read it
without making alterations to the text shortly before his death—then one must
assume that he believed that something important remained to be said about the
subject; one may hazard a guess that this was that while lordship as an expression
of political power in particular circumstances had been thoroughly discussed

since McFarlane, analysis of the institution of lordship as a concept and in more
general practice lagged behind, not least because the failure to view it in a British
Isles as opposed to an English setting had obscured and distorted its true essence.
The final chapter, ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’, is problematic for
some of the same reasons. It had not been typed by May 2005, and although
fully footnoted by Professor Davies, was obviously in a less finalized state than
the rest of the material. Historians of fifteenth-century England in particular
will be puzzled at its suggestion that suspicion of ‘maintenance’ is misplaced,
since they abandoned such suspicion long ago, while thanks in particular to the
work of Christine Carpenter and Edward Powell, legal records have supplanted
indentures as the preferred source for the study of aristocratic behaviour within
the locality, across wider political society, and with the crown and its officers.
The decision to include the chapter was made on the basis of what it contained
and also because of the pointers it gave to what was still to come. While historians
of late medieval England will find little in it that is original, it breaks new ground
by opening up the issues indicated by its title to embrace the British Isles in toto
and thus is absolutely true to the aim of the project as a whole. It also contains
some indications as to the themes to be addressed in the chapter or chapters
yet to be written: the role of aristocratic retainers in their own communities;
the changing nature of lordship in a world in which it operated as only one of
many bonds between superior and inferior; the demands placed upon lordship
by its requirement to be ‘good’—in short, the crucial issue of the limitations of
lordship in the rapidly changing British Isles of the late Middle Ages. It seems


Editor’s Introduction

xiii

highly likely that the proposed chapter ‘The Context of Aristocratic Lordship’

would have had this issue at its heart.
A full account of Professor Davies’s career and an assessment of his importance
as a historian can be found in Professor Huw Pryce’s memoir ‘Robert Rees
Davies 1938–2005’, to be published in a forthcoming volume of Proceedings of
the British Academy. This is not the place to offer a critical assessment of Lords and
Lordship, but it seems appropriate to note some moments in the development
of the ideas expounded therein. The interest in lordship in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, of course, stretches back to Professor Davies’s doctoral studies
under the supervision of K. B. McFarlane, which commenced in 1959. (Professor
Davies’s review of McFarlane’s Nobility, in Welsh History Review, 7 (1974–5)
is instructive.) His first monograph, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales,
1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978), both expanded upon the subject-matter of his thesis
and identified some of the key themes which are revisited and expanded upon in
the present book. Professor Davies’s willingness to broaden the geographical area
in which he examined the phenomenon of lordship beyond the Welsh March
and England to include Ireland was first signalled in print in his essay ‘Lordship
or Colony?’, in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin,
1984)—notably, the first work cited by Professor Davies in this book—and
again in ‘Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented Societies: Ireland and Wales’, in
Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (Oxford, 1989). The
argument for seeing the British Isles as a whole as a suitable arena for investigation
of lordship and other themes was put forward in his ‘In Praise of British History’,
in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R.
Davies (Edinburgh, 1988). While the British Isles remained the focus of most of
his publications in the years thereafter, his chronological centre of gravity tended
to shift to a period which ended in the early fourteenth century, and the theme of
lordship receded somewhat as issues such as ‘identity’, the rise of English power,
and the idea of the medieval ‘state’ came more to the fore. Lords and Lordship,
therefore, represents to some extent a return to concerns that had informed a
lifetime of scholarship but which had yet to be tackled at full, monograph, length.

Professor Davies’s early death precluded completion of that project, but enough
survives to be published in a book that should meet his goals of encouraging debate
and inspiring new questions about a crucial and fascinating historical subject.
I would like to thank Professor Robert Evans and Dr John Watts of Oxford
University for inviting me to edit Lords and Lordship, Dr Watts and Professor
Christine Carpenter for invaluable criticism of both the original text and my
approach to editing it, and Mrs Stephanie Jenkins who typed the original text
and at a later stage the final chapter. I would also like to thank Lady Davies, who
kindly made available additional important material relating to the book.
Brendan Smith
Bristol


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Apologia
This is a book about aristocratic power or lordship in the British Isles in the
later Middle Ages. ‘Lordship’ as a concept is currently not a common term in
English parlance, even in the writings of British medieval historians. This is
surprising in at least two respects. First, ‘lordship’, dominium, was a key word in
the political, social, and indeed academic vocabulary of medieval Europe. It was
a ubiquitous and fundamental term, be it (for example) the lordship of God or
of the lord king (dominus rex), the lordship of the abbot over his monks, or the
legal power that a husband (seigneur) had over his wife. It was an elastic, protean
word. It could refer to the area over which a lord exercised his dominion—be it
a manor, a duchy, or even a kingdom; but it could also be used to characterize
conceptually the nature of that authority. Contemporaries could likewise refer
to ‘the law of lordship’ (ius dominii) as shorthand for the relationship between
lord and dependant.¹ Theologians and philosophers argued learnedly about the

justification and credentials of secular lordship (de civili dominio). In short, it
was an infinitely adaptable concept (and word) in the medieval construction of
the ordering of human relationships and in the justification of the exercise of
power at all levels of society. But it is not a term which has been much favoured
in recent British medieval historiography.
It is different elsewhere. This brings us to the second element of surprise
about the low profile of the word ‘lordship’ in British medieval historiography.
On the continent, notably in France and Germany, ‘seigneurie’ and ‘Herrschaft’
are central terms in historical explanations of the evolution of European society.
Thus Marc Bloch in his pioneering chapter in The Cambridge Economic History of
Europe vol. 1 (1941) asserted that ‘for more than a thousand years the seigneurie
was one of the dominant institutions of western civilization.’² More recently
another distinguished French medieval historian, Robert Fossier, is, if anything,
even more assertive: ‘the 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 exercise
such power.’⁴ Now it may well be objected that the term ‘lordship’ is a feeble
and inadequate translation of the French seigneurie and the German Herrschaft.
It also needs to be acknowledged that American historians—notably Frederic
Cheyette and Thomas Bisson—have waged a campaign to move the concept of
‘lordship’ nearer to the centre of Anglophone historical discussions of the Middle
Ages.⁵ But the relatively low profile of the term, and the concept, in British
historiography calls for a short explanation, if only because it may serve to reveal
some of the unspoken assumptions and priorities which underpin historical
discourse in Britain. Three reasons at the very least suggest themselves.
First, it may well be that in the profile of the distribution of power, there
was a real difference between Britain, or rather England, and its continental
neighbours in the high and later Middles Ages. England, and to a much lesser
degree Scotland, was a king-centred polity; the influence and power of the king
penetrated into the crevices of social and political life, directly or indirectly,
throughout the country. There were, of course, other nodal points of power;
but they were ultimately construed, especially by royal lawyers and apologists,
as dependent and contingent upon regal authority and permission. In such a
world the language—at least the legal language—is not that of seigneurie or
of haute justice but of quo warranto, liberties, franchises, even palatinates, in
other words of a king-centred hierarchy of authority. Any analysis of power
(and of its mediators and agents) in such a world starts, and not infrequently
ends, with royal lordship. Such an approach works less successfully in Scotland
(in spite of a tendency in some Scottish historiography to imitate the English
‘paradigm’). It is even less appropriate, indeed misleading, as a set of assumptions
for understanding the nature of power in medieval Wales and Ireland, including
those areas under English control.
A second, associated reason for the scant attention paid to lordship in British
medieval historiography may well rest in the nature of the sources. Historians
are much more in thrall to their sources than they often realize. Indeed, their

dependence grows as the volume of surviving written sources increases, as it does
in particular from the late twelfth century. No country has been blessed with
such an exceptionally rich and unbroken series of archives as England. Many
of those archives are ecclesiastical; others are seigniorial or urban. But far and
away the richest collections of records are those of the king and his servants;
³ R. Fossier, ‘Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age
(Actes de 117e 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 (Huntingdon, New York,1968); T. M. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 743–59.


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they are unparalleled in their volume and detail and many of them have been
conveniently calendared or edited for historians. They are normally the most
natural and rewarding point of entry for historical research, be it at national,
regional, or local level. It is a situation without parallel in most continental
countries; it bespeaks the power and penetration of kingship. But it is as well to
remember that even in England such documents present a view of power and
society as seen through royal spectacles. No one would deny the importance of
that view; but in any balanced and rounded appreciation of the exercise of power
in medieval society, it falls very far short of the whole truth. It is a partial view; its
partiality can occasionally appear all the more disturbing since there is in general
a huge imbalance in the quantity and even quality of royal and non-royal sources
for the study of the exercise of power in medieval Britain. It is the royal sources
which are best placed to set the agenda and shape the assumptions.
But there is at least one other reason why an analysis of lordship has not on
the whole figured prominently in British academic historiography, especially in

comparison with the way that the nature of seigneurie often dominates the serried
ranks of great French provincial studies from at least the time of Georges Duby’s
epoch-making study of the Maconnais (1953), or with the degree to which longterm analysis of the nature and manifestations of Herrschaft has been a leading
preoccupation of medieval historians in Germany.⁶ The writings of historians are
shaped not only, or indeed not mainly, by the sources on which they draw but by
the organizing principles, metaphors, and explanatory frameworks which inform
and structure their accounts. Such principles, metaphors, and frameworks are
part of their inherited intellectual and indeed professional agenda. They may add
to or even challenge part of such an agenda; but the agenda shapes the questions
asked and the answers given to a far greater extent than is normally recognized. It
is difficult to suppress the suspicion that English historiography has given priority
to issues other than lordship, such as state- and nation-formation, constitutional
and institutional development, political structures and friction, crown–magnate
relationships, and so forth. The importance of these issues is not, of course, open
to question; but it is at least arguable that a more nuanced understanding of the
distribution of power in medieval society in the British Isles needs to pay more
attention to the role of non-royal power alongside the undoubted strength and
penetration of kingship. That is part of the aim of this book.
Power, of course, is exercised by a whole host of agents at every level of
society. Next to the king, it was the greater lay aristocracy which was the
⁶ G. Duby, La Soci´et´e aux xie et xiie 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—can
best be characterized as ‘an aristocracy which was kingship-focussed’.⁷ If that is
indeed the case—as I believe it to be—then characterizing the nature of the
lordship of this aristocracy may help to give us a more rounded understanding
of the distribution and exercise of power—‘the power of command, constraint
and exploitation’, in Boutruche’s phrase—in medieval society.
The aristocracy has often received a poor press from historians. This may be
in part because, at least in Britain, its power was still so dominant socially and
politically until the early twentieth century that it called for no explanation or
analysis. Familiarity turned to contempt as the aristocracy came to be identified
as privileged bulwarks standing in the way of political and social progress. They
came to be branded historiographically and politically as ‘feudal reactionaries’;
their opposition and privileges inhibited the development of strong kingship
and centralized, unitary state power, so often characterized by historians as
the beneficent goals of true political and social progress. It was little wonder
that K. B. McFarlane in his epoch-making Ford Lectures in 1953 uttered his
famous jibe that English historians had been ‘King’s Friends’ and, by implication,
enemies or at least detractors of the aristocracy.⁸ He set out to redress the balance
(building in part on the work of other scholars such as F. M. Stenton and
Noel Denholm-Young for the pre-1300 period) and did so triumphantly. It is
given to few scholars to transform the landscape of our understanding of a past
society; Bruce McFarlane did so with regard to the later Middle Ages in England,
specifically the role of the lay aristocracy in its society and polity.
Since McFarlane’s seminal work, the late medieval aristocracy of the British
Isles can no longer claim to suffer from historiographical neglect. On the contrary

it has been the subject of a great deal of high-quality work from a variety of
angles—be they detailed studies of individual magnates such as Aymer de
Valence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), or
Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), or collective studies of great
aristocratic families, such as the Staffords and the Percies.⁹ Detailed studies of
various aspects of aristocratic life and power have proliferated, exploring such
issues as the organization of aristocratic estates and households, the character and
⁷ 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).


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composition of aristocratic affinities and their role in the phenomenon known
unhelpfully as ‘bastard feudalism’, the elaboration of legal devices to control
the descent of aristocratic estates, and the role of aristocratic women, especially
widows and heiresses. The power of the greater magnates in English local society
has been brought under the searchlight of numerous county studies, which reveal
its extent and limitations by locating it within a wide social context of the county
community and by bringing into clearer focus the standing and connections of

the ‘greater county gentry’.¹⁰ All in all, our understanding and knowledge of the
later medieval aristocracy is much more thorough, complex, and nuanced than
it once was. This is particularly true of later medieval England and is reflected in
several notable recent attempts to provide a sophisticated overview of aristocratic
power based on these detailed studies.¹¹ Elsewhere in the British Isles, where
the materials for such detailed studies are less ample, significant strides have also
been made in studying the nature of aristocratic power in the March of Wales,
Scotland, and English Ireland.¹²
This book builds on this remarkable historiographical achievement, as it does
on an older antiquarian tradition of assembling details of the personal and family
histories of the aristocracy—from the time of William Dugdale’s pioneering The
Baronage of England (1675–6) to the invaluable The Complete Peerage of England,
Scotland, Ireland etc. (1910–59) and, most recently, The Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (2004). But its focus is, in some respects, different. It does
not attend at length to many of the issues which have, very properly, commanded
the attention of historians, especially English historians, of late—issues such as
the nature of ‘bastard feudal’ relationships, the role of the aristocracy in ‘county’
society, the definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage, or crown–magnate
relationships. It will no doubt touch on many of these issues; but its primary aim
is to try to characterize and analyse the nature of aristocratic power generally.
In short, it is an essay on the sociology of aristocratic lordship. Its approach
is thematic and analytical. There is, of course, a price to be paid for such an
approach (as for all historical approaches), especially in terms of overlooking the
particular circumstances and contexts of individual aristocratic families and of
¹⁰ Notable examples, from a long list, are: N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire
Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); S. J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian
England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford, 1991); C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity:
A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society c.1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992).
¹¹ There is an excellent recent overview, with exemplary bibliography, in C. Carpenter, ‘England:
The Nobility and the Gentry’, 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).


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Lords and Lordship

underestimating the possible changes in the character of aristocratic lordship over
time. But this—so it seems to me—is a price worth paying in trying to take the
subject forward at this particular historiographical juncture.
The word ‘lordship’, dominium, was still ubiquitous in the social and conceptual vocabulary of later medieval Europe. Its very imprecision was in this respect its
strength. It may well be that its relative unpopularity in current British medieval
historiography is explained in part by its elasticity and vagueness, indeed its ambiguity, as a term. But at least it helps us to construe medieval society in some degree
on its own terms and through its own lenses. Reconstructing the assumptions
and language of that thought-world may help the historian to avoid some of the
traps that beset him when he uses the terminology, analogies, and metaphors of
the modern world—including the burgeoning of uniform state institutions and
notions of sovereignty, accountability, and delegation of power—to characterize
a medieval world which was, arguably, much more plural and disordered in its
assumptions about power. As Karl Leyser once shrewdly observed of medieval
Germany; ‘there was a teeming welter of developing princely and aristocratic
lordships, lay and clerical, a bewildering variety of substructures; . . . they did
not possess any common underlying grid or shared development and relative

uniformities.’¹³ That may not correspond to the situation in England (though
the cultivated uniformity of English power structures is itself a historical mirage);
but it may be a more appropriate point of departure for the characterization of
lordship in the British Isles as a whole. Not the least of the advantages of the
recent attempt to promote a comparative study of the medieval British Isles is
that it serves to draw attention to the distinctiveness of medieval England, rather
than regarding it as necessarily a norm or prototype.¹⁴
Lordship, so we quoted Robert Boutruche above, ‘is a power of command,
constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power’.¹⁵ But
the ways in which power manifests itself and exercises its command are not in
the least uniform. They are as variable as are the whole host of chronological,
geographical, economic, and social matrices in which they operate. They range
from the kind of intensive lordship that a lord exercised over his household or a
manorial seigneur over his serfs to what has been called the extensive, tributary
lordship which bound lords and communities in large swathes of upland Britain.
Thus the kind of precise, intrusive and richly documented lordship which the
bishop of Winchester exercised on his great manor of Taunton (Somerset) is
very different in kind and intensity from the lordship of the Campbell lords of
¹³ K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity’, Viator, 19 (1988), 153–76,
quote at p. 157.
¹⁴ Superb examples of reading ‘behind’ the official government records to the realities of power
on the ground are provided in Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain 1170–1450 (London, 1998) esp.
the chapter ‘Power and society in the Lordship of Ireland, 1272–1377’, originally published in Past
and Present, 76 (1977), 3–33.
¹⁵ Above, p. 2.


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the western Highlands of Scotland or of the lords of the March over much of
upland Wales. Yet our analysis of lordship needs to encompass the whole range
of ways in which lordship, notably aristocratic lordship, manifested itself. We
must not necessarily privilege the lowland, manorial lordship of southern and
midland England simply because of its rich documentary detritus.
A sensitivity to the chronological and geographical varieties of lordship within
the British Isles should also help us to focus on some of the long-term features
of lordship as a way of structuring power in medieval society. We must not
be constrained unduly or myopically by the confines of the late medieval
documentary evidence. The roots of lordship lay deep in medieval society. In late
medieval England many of those roots had been overlain (though not necessarily
totally hidden) by the development of royal, governmental, and communal
institutions; but their importance for a rounded understanding of the reach and
texture of medieval lordship remains. Lordship, including non-royal lordship,
was ultimately founded on the personal control of men, on a psychology of
dependence and beholdenness which applied throughout medieval society. That
is why the first act of lordship was to demand a visual oath of fealty (possibly
accompanied by an act of homage) from those who entered into dependence.
Personal dependence was primary. That is why the strength of lordship in much
of highland Britain was measured in the number of men it could command—say
2,000—rather than in rent income or landed estate;¹⁶ that is why again the
first act of a lord was to go on a ‘progress’ through his ‘country’ and to exact
homage ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’ from his dependants.¹⁷ That
is why they were, and were called, his ‘subjects’, not simply his ‘tenants’.¹⁸ That
is why when the bond of manrent emerged as part of the contractual world of
fifteenth-century Scotland it was the bond between man and lord which was at
its kernel.¹⁹ It is a reminder to us that there were features about the character
and assumptions of lordship which lie beyond the shallows of the documentary
evidence, and beyond the world-view of royal sources.

The chronological bookends of the study are the years 1272 and 1422. The
choice of period needs a word of explanation. Apart from the pleasing symmetry
of a period of a century and a half, there are—it has to be admitted—very
personal, even selfish, reasons for the choice. First, it is the period with which I am
most familiar since my earliest studies over forty years ago (under the direction
of K. B. McFarlane) of the lordship of the Bohun and Lancaster families in the
March of Wales. The study of aristocratic lordship has by no means been my main
¹⁶ Thus when Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon (ed. D. E. R. Watt, et al. 9 vols. (Aberdeen,
1987–97), VIII, 260–1) compiled a list of Highland chiefs for 1429 he appended an estimate of
their followers in this manner: Kenneth Mor, ‘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.


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Lords and Lordship

scholarly preoccupation during my academic lifetime; but it has been an abiding
interest, 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 construct
a single storyline around one king at a time. Twelfth-century historians had
recognized how much of a boon this was: so it was that Henry of Huntingdon
heaved a huge sigh of historiographical relief when the day arrived when England
was under a single king.²⁰ Historical construction was thereby greatly simplified.
The historian of the medieval aristocracy enjoys no such luxury. Rather is he
confronted by the dilemmas of multiplicity of dealing (to take England’s case

only) 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 detailed
monographic study of a single magnate or an aristocratic family. The alternative
is a broad-brush characterization of the aristocracy as a group, thereby permitting
broad generalizations, sometimes garnished with individual examples. My own
approach in the current work lies between these polarities. Its starting point is
the careers, interests, and documents of individual magnates and their families,
but its declared purpose is to distil this information to try to characterize the
nature of aristocratic lordship generally. Such an exercise in characterization can
only be attempted by a rather ruthless process of selection and organization; that
alone makes the subject manageable.
There is a third, less selfish reason for choosing the period 1272–1422 as
the focus of study. It is truly the first age of detailed documentation for the
study of the medieval aristocracy, especially in England. It is neither the heroic
nor the really formative age in the shaping of aristocratic power. That accolade
must surely go—as continental historians have so rightly insisted—to the period
1000–1250.²¹ Pioneering studies of lordship in England in this period have been
undertaken 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 have
likewise shown what rich insights into aristocratic power and affinities in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries can be secured through the detailed analysis
of the careers and charters of individual magnates. We appear to be presented
with 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 more
dominated 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 117e 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).


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institutions, a growing distinction between the sphere of ‘the public’ and ‘the
private’, 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 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 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 have
overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, viewed their subject. In this respect
there is a quantum leap, especially in England, in the range and character of
documentary 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, indentures
of personal service, and muster lists now survive in considerable numbers. Their
survival is indeed very patchy, especially as compared with royal archives, and
very uneven as between the major aristocratic families. But they allow us to
study lordship in detail and in action in a fashion that is not at all possible for
earlier periods. This rich cache of sources continues after 1422; but some of
them become increasingly stilted, even uninformative and new genres of evidence
begin 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 for
analysis. One deliberate omission is the great ecclesiastical lords. There is, of
course, no doubt that they were often drawn from the same social stock as their
lay colleagues and exercised a range of powers of lordship which were very similar.
Thus William Courtenay and Thomas Arundel, two successive archbishops of
Canterbury 1381–96, 1396–7, and 1399–1414, were younger sons of notable
comital families and fully familiar with the habits and priorities of the lay
aristocracy. 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 in
the chronicles of their abbeys—have felt in any way ill at ease in the company
and conversation of earls and barons. There were around 1300 some fifteen
bishops and thirty abbots and priors who had the same order of wealth and much
the same powers of lordship as the major secular lords of England. None of this
can be gainsaid; yet—issues of manageability apart—the differences between the
ecclesiastical and lay aristocracy were profound, especially in terms of the themes
of this book—be it in family policy and priorities, the institutional context in
which they operated, their role in local and national politics, their social and
military contacts, and so forth.
Even when the ecclesiastical lords have been excluded, there is the vexing
question of how we define the lay aristocracy. ‘Aristocracy’ and ‘nobility’ are—at
least in Britain—ill-defined and elastic terms; qualifying them as ‘greater’ or
‘higher’ still falls short of providing clarity of definition. ‘Nobility’ in particular


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Lords and Lordship

can be extended as a term to include arguably all members of ‘gentle’ society, at
least those who adopted the style of ‘knight’ and family coats of arms. Arguably

even more important is the undoubted fact that the powers of lordship exercised
by lords, great and small, were broadly similar in character. Particularly is this
true of the dozen or so elite gentry families so characteristic of many English
shires and composing an intermediate group between the greater barons on the
one 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 the
greatest earl to the two- or three-manor county knight—which is one of the
most 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 rather
than the great earls and barons who dominated the landscape of local society. The
English evidence is particularly striking in this respect. J. M. W. Bean has pointed
out that, of the seventeen counties for which comparison can be made based on
the 1412 tax returns, in only four did the proportion of the landed values held by
the peerage or higher aristocracy exceed 25 per cent; in none did it reach 30 per
cent.²³ Or to put it more positively, the great majority of gentle landowners held
land with an annual return of £20–£39. Side by side with these bold statistical
claims, we can place the series of country and family studies—of which those of
Nigel Saul have been outstanding examples²⁴—which have greatly enhanced our
understanding 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 lowland
Scotland, the second-rank families of English Ireland such as the Le Poers or the
Roches, 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 to
show that even great magnates such as John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, found
their power in the localities severely constrained by the existing distribution and
ambitions of local lordship and families.²⁵
All this is readily conceded; lordship spans the whole of the ruling class or

classes of medieval society. It may have been displayed in all its finery and
sophistication in the world of earls and barons; but in its fustian form it served
equally well to describe the power of the countless lesser lords of the British
Isles. 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
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).