THE ENGLISH NOBILITYIN THE

LATE MIDDLE AGES

BY THE SAME AUTHORThe Royal Bastards of Medieval EnglandMedieval Monasteries of Great Britain

The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity:Service, Politics, and Finance in England 13601413

Chris Given-Wilson

THE ENGLISH NOBILITYIN THE

LATE MIDDLE AGES

The Fourteenth-CenturyPolitical Community

London and New York

For ALICE, with love and gratitude

First published in 1987 byRoutledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

First published in paperback in 1996 byRoutledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Chris Given-Wilson 1987, 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or reproducedor utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or othermeans, now known, or hereafter invented including photocopying andrecording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book has been requested.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication DataGiven-Wilson, Chris.

The English nobility in the late Middle Ages.Bibliography: p.Includes index.1. EnglandNobilityHistory. 2. England

GentryHistory. 3. Social historyMedieval,5001500. 4. EnglandHistoryMedieval period,10661485. I. Title.HT653.G7G58 1987 305.52230942 8633862

ISBN 0-203-44126-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-74950-2 (Adobe eReader Format)ISBN 0-415-14883-9 (Print Edition)

[ v ]

Contents

Illustrations vi

Preface vii

Preface to the paperback edition xi

Maps xii

Introduction 1

Part I The ranks of the nobility

1 Kings and the titled nobility 29

2 The peerage 55

3 The gentry 69

Part II Servants, lands, and the family

4 Households and councils 87

5 Estates in land 104

6 Property, the family, and money 124

CONCLUSION: Political society in fourteenth-centuryEngland 160

Abbreviations 180

Notes 181

Bibliography 209

Index 216

[ vi ]

Illustrations

Maps

1 Yorkshire and Durham, principal holdings of the Nevillsand Mauleys xii

2 The Berkeleys, Courtenays, Montagues, and Beauforts,principal holdings in the south-west xiv

3 The Beauchamp earls of Warwick, manors inWarwickshire and Worcestershire xvii

4 Principal holdings of the Fitzalans and Mowbrays in Sussexxviii5 Manors of the Percys and the Cliffords in Northumberland,

Cumberland, and Westmorland xx

Tables

1 Partition and descent of the Clare inheritance in thefourteenth century 41

2 The earldom of Warwick, 1369 593 The Berkeley inheritance in 1417 1444 The Courtenays, 13401419 164

[ vii ]

Preface

The reason for dissension among the northern lords wasthis: all were gentlemen and nobles [generosi et nobiles],though one might be called an earl [comes], another abaron [baro], and others lords [domini], but when it cameto taking money, they claimed to be equal; this beingrefused to them, they departed to their homes.1

I use the word nobility in quite a broad sense in this book, todescribe not just those individuals or families, numbering a hundredor less in late medieval England, who were distinguished by theirreceipt of individual summonses to parliament (that is, the peerage),but also those whom modern and late medieval historians morecommonly refer to as the gentry. What made a man or a familynoble in fourteenth-century England is difficult to define precisely.Good birth, inherited land and lordship, and membership of theofficer ranks in battle were probably the most impor tantdeterminants of status. Title, legal privilege, a substantial degree ofwealth, and the trappings of the noble lifestyle provided the visibleevidence of that status. Ultimately, though, what mattered most wasthe extent to which a mans standing in society was accepted bythose whom he regarded as his social equals.

The essence of social class is the way a man is treated by hisfellows (and, reciprocally, the way he treats them), not thequalities or the possessions which cause that treatment. It wouldbe possible, and perhaps useful, to group people simply in termsof their attributes, without asking how those attributes affectedtheir social relations, but the result would be a study of socialtypes, not of social classes.2

PREFACE

[ viii ]

This is what makes social categorisation so tricky, especially atsix hundred years remove. Seen from this point of view, we areentitled to wonder whether it is at all possible to get to theessence of social class in the Middle Ages, or whether we mustsimply be content with describing social types. Nevertheless,there are indicators, and the attempt has to be made: not onlybecause it is an interesting subject per se, but also because in theMiddle Ages social status was closely related to political authority,and it is impossible to understand the English polity withoutreference to the classes in which society was ordered. That is whymuch of the first part of this book is devoted to the problem ofsocial stratification.

On the whole, this book is an attempt to synthesise recentresearch rather than to present a substantial body of new evidence.In the thirty years and more since K.B.McFarlane inspired a newgeneration of scholars to take a fresh look at the medieval Englishnobility, there has been a great deal of research on the subjectsome on individuals, some on families, some on regional societies,and some on more general problems. In certain important respects,the thrust of this recent research has changed direction. WhereasMcFarlane was for the most part concerned with the peerage, andwith national politics, the emphasis during the last fifteen or soyears has shifted more towards the study of the lesser ranks of thenobility (that is, the gentry, broadly speaking), and of local ratherthan national politicsor at least the interplay of local and national.This is a shift which I have tried to reflect. I have drawn heavily onthis growing body of research (much of it unpublished), and, as isevident from the Bibliography, my first and greatest debt is to thosehistorians upon whose work I have relied.

My second major debt is to my students. This book grew out ofa special subject on the English nobility in the reign of Edward IIIwhich I taught for several years at the University of St Andrews. Itis often said that students little realise how much their lecturerslearn from teaching them, but that makes it no less true, and I amgrateful to them for their patience, their hard work, and thefrequent inspiration which they provided. I am also grateful toAndrew Wheatcroft, who first suggested that I might write thisbook; to Elaine Donaldson of Routledge & Kegan Paul, for hermeticulous and well-informed work on the typescript; to Nick

PREFACE

[ ix ]

Hooper now of Westminster School, who read par ts of thetypescript and corrected several errors; and to Bridget Harvey, fromwhom I have learned much about the Berkeleys in the fourteenthcentury. My special thanks, as ever, go to Alice, who makes mostthings possible.

Chris Given-WilsonSt Andrews

[ x ]

Preface to the paperbackedition

During the eight years since this book was first published, the studyof the late medieval English nobility has both continued in thedirections outlined above, i.e. with the emphasis by and large uponlocal society and upon the gentry (now, according to Mark Ormrod,regarded in much modern historical writing as the real heart of latemedieval political society),1 and expanded into different areas. Someof the latter were already quite well established in the mid-1980s, andhad I been more percipient I would have said more about them then.I should certainly have said more about medieval noblewomen, whofeature rather sparingly here; fortunately, a good overview of thesubject is now available.2 Of the religious beliefs and practices of thenobilitya subject which has taken on a new lease of life in the latetwentieth centuryI should also have said more,3 as indeed I shouldhave on the relationship between the gentry and the urbanbourgeoisie.

Of the books to appear since 1987 which are specifically devotedto the fourteenth-century nobility, perhaps the most influential hasbeen Simon Walkers study of the retinue of John of Gaunt,4 one ofthe chief conclusions of which was to emphasise the capacity of thegentry to act independently of magnate controlto the point,indeed, where it seemed at times as if their affinities could be apositive embarrassment to the lords in whose names they claimed toact. Meanwhile the debate on bastard feudalism continues: J.M.W.Bean has argued that the origins of retaining should be sought not somuch in feudal vassalage as in the noble household, while MichaelHicks has succinctly summarised the discussion.5 Simultaneously, amajor boost has been given to our knowledge of the upper levels of

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

[ xi ]

county and urban society in the late Middle Ages by thepublicationof detailed biographies of all those who were elected toparliament between 1386 and 1421.6 Of the numerous other regionaland thematic studies to have appeared during the last decade, specialmention should also be made of Nigel Sauls fine study of theEtchingham, Sackville and Waleys families in fourteenth-centurySussex,7 which, although it was actually published in 1986, appearedafter my own book had gone to press.

All of these works, and many others, have in their own wayadvanced the study of the late medieval nobility; each of them,therefore, has meant that had this book been written in 1996 ratherthan 1986, it would have been in certain respects a different book.Nevertheless, my intention, were I writing it now, would remainunchanged, namely, to provide a brief and relatively broad-rangingsynthesis of late twentieth-century scholarship on the late medievalEnglish nobility.

Maps

MAP 1 Yorkshire and Durham, principal holdings of the Nevills and Mauleys

[ xiii ]

(a) Nevill (b) Mauley lands1 Raby 101 Mulgrave2 Brancepeth 102 Lythe3 Cockfield 103 Mickelby4 Staindrop 104 Ellerby5 Middleham 105 Seaton-by-Hinderwell6 East Witton 106 Sandsend7 Coverham 107 Egton8 Carlton 108 Scarborough9 West Witton 109 Cukewald10 Newbiggin 110 ? Bransholme11 Thoralby 111 Nessingwike12 Aysgarth 112 Berg-by-Watton13 Bainbridge 113 Atwick14 Askrigg 114 Bainton15 Nappay 115 Kilnwick16 Thornton 116 Lockington17 Crakehall 117 Etton18 Snape 118 Sutton-in-Holderness19 Welle 119 Cliff20 Kettlewell-in-Craven 120 Hunmanby21 Conistone 121 Doncaster22 Sheriff Hutton 122 Hexthorpe23 Sutton-in-Galtres 123 Balby24 Raskelf 124 Rossington25 Skirpenbeck 125 Wheteley26 Stamford Bridge 126 Sandal27 Elvington 127 Hooton28 Sutton-on-Derwent 128 Skinthrope29 Wilton-in-Cleveland 129 Bramham30 Hemelyngton 130 Heelaugh31 Stokesley 131 Reeth

MAP 2 The Berkeleys, Courtenays,Montagues, and Beauforts, principal holdingsin the south-west

MAP 3 The Beauchamp earls of Warwick,manors in Warwickshire and Worcestershire

MAP 4 Principal holdings of the Fitzalans and Mowbrays in Sussex

MAP 5 Manors of the Percys and the Cliffords in Northumberland, Cumberland,and Westmorland

[ 1 ]

Introduction

By the second half of the fourteenth century the English peerage,those sixty to seventy lords each of whom was entitled to anindividual summons to parliament, had emerged as a distinct andprivileged group at the top of English lay society. Their social andpolitical pre-eminence stemmed firstly from their role as the chiefmilitary commanders and advisers of the king, and secondly from thelordship of land and men which they exercised in their localitiesor,as they sometimes described them, their countries. In a sense,England was a federation of lordly spheres of influence. It was largelyfor their local authority that the king valued his peers. It was for thesame local authority that the gentry, without whose consent and co-operation it could hardly be exercised, valued them.

A picture of England as a jigsaw of lordly spheres of influence is,however, prone to oversimplification, and it is advisable to beginwith some caveats. What the peers enjoyed in their countries wasleadership and influence, it was not control. Dependent as it wason the consent of both the king and the local gentry, it could neverbe that. Nor were their spheres of influence clearly demarcated.Sometimes peers were entrusted with specific rights within quiteclearly defined areas (a county, for example), but for the most partlordship was not so much a consolidated territorial power-block asa bundle of rights and a series of connections, overlapping andintermingling with a number of other sources of author ity.Moreover, there was nothing immutable about them. They werecontinually expanding and contracting, and frequently changinghands. Local leadership was a question of degree, of individualability, often of luck.

INTRODUCTION

[ 2 ]

Lords and their countries are discussed more fully in the laterstages of this book. First, however, it is important to understand thesocial and political hierarchy which underlay the exercise of power. Itis thus with the question of social stratification, and its implicationsfor political society, that the first part of this book is concerned.Before even that process can be attempted, however, something needsto be said of the origins of the fourteenth-century English nobility,and of the ethos, lifestyle, and common assumptions which underlaytheir behaviour.

The noble ethos was essentially chivalricwhich is as much as tosay that it was militaristic, elitist, and ostentatious. To the theorists, thedefence of the community was the raison dtre of the nobility.Through his participation in warfare, the noble justified hisprivileged position in societyand in the great majority of cases thetheorists were right. It is rare to find a member of the nobility whodid not take up arms at some time in his life. Although good birthwas always important, for the cult of chivalry placed a strongemphasis on hereditary nobility, the elitism of the nobility was amatter of worth as much as...lineage.1 In other words, while a manmight be born into noble society, he must continue to justify hisplace within it by leading a lifestyle worthy of his station. Yet thenobility was not just a fighting class, it was also a ruling class.Participation in warfare and in government (whether local ornational) were duties, and it was the performance of these dutieswhich justified nobility itself.

Almost from birth, the child who was born into the nobility wasprepared for his eventual fulfilment of the nobles traditional role.According to contemporaries, the care of boys from their earliestyears should be arranged with warlike ends in mind.2 Formal,bookish education was by no means neglected, but it was given amuch less prominent place than it is nowadays. Two points about theeducation and upbringing of medieval nobles need especial emphasis.Firstly, it was done almost as much subconsciously as consciously.Education was not regarded as a separate element in a childsupbr ing ing, divorced, through the medium of professionalschoolmasters, formal classes, and so forth, from the other growing-upprocesses. It was an integral part of life, a process which flowedimperceptibly into adulthood rather than a demarcated stage in achilds development. Secondly, and this is particularly true of the

INTRODUCTION

[ 3 ]

nobility, education was not normally acquired in formal institutionssuch as grammar schools, universities, or (for lawyers) the Inns ofCourt. All these existed in fourteenth-century England, butapartfrom those sons of the nobility intended by their parents for thechurch, who would often be sent to universitythe nobility hardlyused them. The educational forum of the noble child was the noblehousehold, and the noble household was of course much more thanan educational institution.

While there were no rules governing the upbringing of noblechildren, there were nevertheless conventions. For the first five or sixyears of their lives children were normally kept at home, often in alargely female environment. After this it was common either to sendthem away to other (preferably greater) households, or to introducemale tutors to the familial home. These men were not professionalschoolmasters, even though in the later Middle Ages it did becomeincreasingly frequent to hire professionals in noble households.3 Infact the tutors who had charge of boys in noble households werefrequently knights, or sometimes clerks, and their job was notbookish education but the inculcation of noble qualities andaccomplishments.4 Naturally, there was considerable emphasis onphysical training. This might include athletics and ball-games, butmuch more important was training in horsemanship, the wielding ofarms, hunting and archery. Archery was more of a sport than atraining for war, since it was the ranks, not the officer class, who usedthe bow in battle, but hunting was regarded as much more than asport. It taught courage, the use of weapons, orientation, and above allhorsemanship. Good horsemanship took a great deal of practice, andthe nobility, who fought as cavalry, had to learn not only how to ridea horse well, but to do so in formation, while encased in armour,while using heavy and unwieldy weapons (as well as shields), andwhile keeping a constant eye out for potential assailants. A strongemphasis on horsemanship was thus not misplaced.

In addition to their military training, boys were also brought upto indulge in the traditional noble pastimes. Music, for example, wasa courtly activity par excellence. In an age which distinguishedmuch less between the professional and the amateur musician, to beskil led in sing ing and/or playing was widely regarded ascharacteristic of the nobility. Dancing was a common skill, andfrequently taught in noble households.5 Chess, which was regarded

INTRODUCTION

[ 4 ]

as educational as well as enjoyable, was also a common pastime, andmuch time and money were spent on dicing and other forms ofgambling such as backgammonthough to be excessively fond ofgaming was not to be encouraged. Of the gentler outdoor pursuits,the most popular was falconry, less physically demanding and lessclosely related to warfare than hunting. It was generally a wintersport, the summers being reserved for the chase. Unlike hunting, itwas also a sport in which women participated fully. Nor, of course,were reading and grammar neglected. Despite Professor Galbraithsmuch-quoted verdict on the medieval English nobility as consistingmainly of men of,arrested intellectual development, it is nowwidely accepted that by the middle of the thirteenth century, at thelatest, the ability to read was pretty general among lay as well ascler ical nobles, and by the fourteenth century it is far fromuncommon to find noble authors. In the mid-twelfth century, it isdoubtful whether this had been the case, but the increasing use ofthe written word as a means of government and communicationhad by now made it a necessary skill.6

Sir John Fortescue (later fifteenth century) described the royalhousehold as the supreme academy for the nobles of the realm, anda school of physical activity [strenuitas], behaviour [probitas], andmanners [mores], by which the realm gains honour, flourishes, and issecured against invaders. And it was said of Henry of Grosmont,duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), that he took young knights into hishousehold to be doctrined, learned and brought up in his noblecourt in school of arms and for to see noblesse, courtesy andworship.7 The emphasis on military training is unsurprising, butwhat is also important to note is that in each case it was notacademic but social skills which were regarded as the naturalaccompaniments of the born soldier. Manners, behaviour andcourtesy were the desiderata, in other words, the noble way of life.Formal education could be gained in many places. From thefourteenth century onwards, there is increasing evidence that somemembers of the gentry were turning to the schools and the Inns ofCourt in an attempt to improve their childrens career prospects,but the reason why the greater nobility continued (until thesixteenth century, for the most part) to shun them was that theupbr inging which could be had in the noble household wassomething that could not be had anywhere else. It was here,

INTRODUCTION

[ 5 ]

surrounded by servants and the trappings of wealth, mixing withother young men of their own status, accustoming themselves to theconstant passage of the great, that they learned what it was to be anoble. What the twentieth century defines as education wouldhave seemed to them litt le more than a nar row clerkishrespectability.

It was usually during his late teens that the young noble began toslip the reins of tutelage and strike out on his own. In few cases didthis actually involve the choice of a career. For the most part, noblescareers were mapped out for them from an early age, either by theirparents or simply by custom. Those who were intended for thechurch (usually younger sons) would generally have been set on thispath by about the age of twelve, probably by being given a beneficein the familys gift, and might well proceed to university. The same istrue for those among the lesser nobility who had been marked outfor some specific form of service such as the law, and who wouldhave been sent to one of the Inns of Court. For the rest, youthfulservice in a noble household would probably just evolve into a morepermanent sort of attachment until the time came to take up theirinheritances. And even then, there was often no real break with thepast. Although there is plenty of evidence to show that nobles caredgreatly about the profitability of their estates and the generalmanagement of their business concerns, there were few who wishedto confine themselves wholly, or even principally, to these tasks.Service to ones betters remained the norm throughout the ranks ofthe nobility, partly for the financial benefits it conferred, and partlyfor the opportunities for advancement and involvement in highmatters which it opened up. Some retained their positions as knightsor esquires in the households of the baronage or the king; others tookposts as estate administrators or councillors to the great, or involvedthemselves in politics at either the local or the national level. Here, ofcourse, there might well be decisions to be made, but even so theywere often quite limited in scope. Patterns of service were quite wellestablished by custom in late medieval England. The traditions offamily and locality were both strong. Again and again, generations offathers and sons, cousins and nephews, are found in the service of thesame great family, usually one of the dominant landholding familiesof their neighbourhood. It was through such ties, reinforced just asmuch by tradition as by tenurial or other such formal ties, that the

INTRODUCTION

[ 6 ]

affinities of the great, the most powerful components of the politicalnation, were built up and maintained.

But service of this sort was not, of course, at the expense of ayoung nobles military career. The first sign that he had comethrough his per iod of training would probably have been hisparticipation in a tournament, perhaps around the age of sixteen.Tournaments were great social and ceremonial occasions. Men wentto them to acquire fame, to mingle with the elite, and to impresswomen.8 But they were also vital military training, and there wasnothing soft about them. Even if by the fourteenth century they wereless violent affairs than they had been in the twelfth, there were stillplenty of fatalities as well as lesser accidents. The extinction of theHastings earls of Pembroke, for example, was brought about by thedeath in a tournament of John, the seventeen-year-old heir to theearldom, in 1389. For many a young noble, a tournament must haveprovided a nerve-tingling initiation into the world of the warrior.But inevitably, perhaps, once he had a few tournaments behind him,his thoughts would begin to turn more to the real thing.

Crusading was one alternative: despite the decline of the crusadein the later Middle Ages, a surprisingly large number of fourteenth-century English nobles still joined the war against the Infidel at sometime during their lives, be it in the Levant, in southern Spain, or inPrussia and Poland, the fringes of the Christian world.9 Mercenaryactivity was another, thought not usually for those who had inheritedany substantial amount of land. Nevertheless there were plenty ofyoung English bloods among the gangs of routiers, or FreeCompanies, which terrorised France during the middle decades ofthe fourteenth century, and the bands of condottieri employed to fighttheir wars for them by the Italian communesmost notable of whichwas the infamous Company of St George commanded by Sir JohnHawkwood. For most young nobles bent on a military career,however, opportunities were closer at hand. It was in the near-continuous French and Scottish wars of the fourteenth century thatthey could normally expect to play out their military careers, in thepaid service of either the king himself or one of his high-borndeputies.

As the greatest of the nobility, it was the king above all uponwhom fell the duty to uphold the honour of the warrior nobilitythrough the prosecution of war. It was through his initiative, and

INTRODUCTION

[ 7 ]

under his leadership, that the nobility looked for the opportunities tofulfil their own (as they saw them) God-ordained role in societyand, of course, to enrich themselves into the bargain. And by hissuccess or failure they judged him. The often-quoted remark of theduke of Gloucester in 1391, that he opposed Richard IIs projectedpeace with France because the livelihood of the poor knights andesquires of England depended upon the continuation of the war, is areminder that military service was a career in more ways than one forthe nobility.10 Naturally, the royal success-rate var ied. Of thefourteenth-century English kings, Edward II and Richard II wonlittle credit on the battlefield, while Edward III was, for most of hisreign at any rate, a conspicuously successful war-captain. But of allthe kings of medieval England, none provided opportunities for theadvancement and enrichment of his nobles on a scale even remotelycomparable with William the Conqueror. The Norman Conquest of1066 heralded many changes in English society, but the principal andmost enduring one was the establishment in England of an alien andalmost entirely new ruling class. As the companions of William, and ashis comrades in arms and conquest, the barons and knights ofeleventh-century Normandy (who themselves were descended fromthe Viking Northmen who had wrested what came to be known asthe duchy of Normandy from the French kings in the early tenthcentury) implanted their families and followers on English soil on ascale that amounted, within a few years, to the almost completetransference of landlordship in England. It was from these men,almost to a man, that the nobility of medieval England descended. Itis from them, therefore, that the origins of the late medieval Englishnobility are to be traced.

William the Conqueror did not, as a policy, simply dispossess theAnglo-Saxon nobility wholesale. Yet within twenty years of the battleof Hastings, Domesday Book shows that what may not have beenintended as a policy had become reality. From the information givenin Domesday Book, it has proved possible to compile figures whichshow clearly the distribution of English land during the twenty yearsfollowing the Conquest. By 1086, there were, at the top of Englishlay society, about 170 great tenants-in-chiefthose who held landdirectly from the king, and who held sufficient land from him tojustify the description of barons. Just two of these were Englishmen,

INTRODUCTION

[ 8 ]

the rest Normans.11 As far as the landholding class was concerned,therefore, the Conquest had drawn a line beneath what had gonebefore. Between them, these 170 were enjoying almost exactly 50 percent of the land of England. A further 17 per cent was kept by theConqueror as his own demesne land, a quarter was granted to thechurch, and the remaining 8 per cent was divided between minorroyal officials and lesser tenants-in-chief. To say, however, that 170tenants-in-chief shared out half of England is to gloss over theimmense differences in wealth and status between different membersof this group. At the top of the scale, for example, came Robert,count of Mortain and earl of Cornwall, the new kings half-brother,with a total of 797 manors said to be worth 2,500 a year. At thebottom end came men like Robert of Aumle, with fifteen manors inDevon worth just 26.12 Tenurially, Robert of Mortain and Robertof Aumle may have been on an equal footing, but when the landedincome of the former exceeded that of the latter by a factor of ahundred, the gulf between them, in some senses at least, must havebeen enormous. In fact about a quarter of England was concentratedin the hands of a small group of only ten very great barons: Robert ofMortain and Odo of Bayeux (also the kings half-brother), WilliamFitzOsbern, Roger of Montgomery, William of Warenne, Hugh ofAvranches, Eustace of Boulogne, Richard of Clare, Geoffrey ofCoutances, and Geoffrey of Mandeville.13 The other 160 split theremaining quarter in varying proportions.

The continental origins of these men are readily apparent frommost of their names. Indeed, for the first 150 or so years after theConquest it is more appropriate to talk of an Anglo-Norman nobilitythan of an English one, for the fact that they had been granted landsin England (and frequently married English heiresses) did not ofcourse mean that they relinquished the lands which they held on theother side of the Channel. Like the Norman and Angevin kings ofEngland, they divided their time between England and the continent,and were involved as much in French politics and warfare as inEnglish.14 Between 1202 and 1224, however, Kings John and HenryIII lost most of their continental empire to Philip Augustus and LouisVIII of France, and from this time onwards a more truly Englishnobility developed. Even so, the process of anglicisation took a longtime. A recent study of the 300 or so leading families among thethirteenth-century English nobility shows that even by this time only

INTRODUCTION

[ 9 ]

about a third of them had adopted the names of their English ratherthan their continental lordships.15 The language they employed alsomarked them off from the great mass of the people whom they ruled.For about three hundred years after the Conquest, French (or, morecorrectly, Anglo-Norman, a language which despite its name owedmuch more to French than to English) was the language of thenobility, while English was the language of the peasantry. Not until1362 was English declared in parliament to be the proper languagefor legal proceedings, and it is only in the early fifteenth century thatit is at last clear that English is once again the normal spoken andwritten language of the nobility. The survival over three centuries oftwo languages side by side is remarkable testimony to the exclusivityof Englands ruling class.

The English nobility, then, was truly a class apart. Yet one of thesurprising features of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy of the twelfthcentury is the failure of any really great families to emerge, familiesthat might vie in wealth and status with, for example, the great peers ofFrance, or the dukes and margraves of Germany. On a European scale,as Professor Barlow has pointed out, the social position of the Anglo-Norman nobility would seem to be among the lowest.16 There wereprobably two main reasons for this. The first is that English royal cadetsfailed to found dynasties which endured. Not until the middle of thethirteenth century did the younger son of an English king receive alanded endowment which was to remain out of the kings hands formore than two generations. This was Edmund Crouchback, secondson of Henry III and younger brother to Edward I, who became earl ofLancaster, Leicester and Derby, thus laying the foundations for the greatLancastrian duchy of the later fourteenth century, the most significantterritorial agglomeration on the English map since the break-up of theAnglo-Saxon earldoms. The earls, and later dukes, of Lancaster couldcertainly compare with the great peers of France, as was recognised bythe pope in 1254 when he offered the crown of Sicily to Edmund,even though the scheme never came to anything. Richard of Cornwall,Henry IIIs younger brother, was equally eminent in his day, and waseven elected to the German imperial throne in 1257 (though hiselection was disputed by King Alfonso of Castile), but his landsreverted to the crown at the death without issue of his son, anotherEdmund, in 1300.

The second reason for the English nobilitys failure to throw up

INTRODUCTION

[ 10 ]

any enduringly outstanding families for two centuries after theConquest was the geographical distribution of land at that time.Even the greatest Anglo-Norman landholders found that the fiefswhich they received from William were spread over a number ofcounties, thus reducing their ability to establish the sort ofconsolidated territorial power-block which was more typical of thegreat French peers and German pr inces. This may have beendeliberate policy on the Conquerors part, though since he had noteffected a wholesale dispossession of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, andsince therefore much of the land which passed into Norman handscame in bits and pieces (as men died or rebelled), the process ofredistribution was necessarily somewhat piecemeal. Even so, therewere significant exceptions to the rule: in Cornwall, for example,where he gave nearly the whole of the county to Robert ofMortain, in Sussex, along the March of Wales, and in many parts ofthe north.17 In general, though, a patchwork of often widelyscattered holdings remained the norm for the English aristocracy ofthe twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Once established, moreover,the pattern was virtually impossible to alter. Inheritance customstended to encourage it, for although pr imogeniture meantinheritance by the eldest son should there be one, it also meantpartibility among daughters in the absence of any sons, and sinceover the course of the centuries the great majority of families failedon at least one occasion to continue the male line, this process ofdivision and subdivision was continually being repeated. At thesame time, there was naturally a constant process of acquisition andunification. This might be by purchase, or it might be by forfeitureor escheat to the king and consequent re-grant by him to anotherlord, but the most common way in which substantial areas of landchanged hands in the Middle Ages was through marriage, in theform either of dowries or the inher itances of heiresses, andnaturally there was an element of haphazardness involved in eitherof these processes. While a landholder might try to arrange hisheirs marriage so that the family acquired new property in thevicinity of its existing holdings, and thus consolidated its territorialpower, it was just as likely that the bride would bring with her afew scattered manors from some distant part of the country.Moreover, the accidents of bir th and death al l too oftenundermined such ar rangements. For most medieval English

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landholders, territorial consolidation was probably to be desired,but was in practice difficult to achieve, and even when it wasachieved, it was often only temporary.

It remains true, however, that every great landholder in medievalEngland had his caput honoris, and the inalienability of the caput,together with the lands and rights which surrounded it and whichconstituted the barony, was almost a cardinal rule of the nobility.The caput honorisliterally, the head of the honourwas the lordsprincipal residence and administrative centre. Here he would buildhis castle, the symbol of his lordship (and initially, after the Conquest,of occupation), and nearby would be the chief religious housepatronised by the family, often indeed founded by it, where successivegenerations of lords and their families would be buried. Around thesetwin symbols of authority was usually a group of home manorswhose produce was used to supply the lords household. Assumingthe family survived in the male line, then as the years passed, thetombs multiplied, the original wooden motte and bailey gave way tosomething grander and more permanent in stone, and the homefarms were augmented, the sense of local identification can only havegrown stronger. Traditions of service and loyalty were at the heart ofmedieval lordship. They both enhanced and justified authority. Whatis more difficult to be sure of, however, is the levels at which suchauthority was exercised.

Social stratification is a hazardous business, but also an important one.It is important for two reasons: firstly because it helps to explain whatmedieval people meant when they used the word nobility, andsecondly because in the Middle Ages social strata were closely linkedto layers of political authority and thus help to analyse the workingsof political society. So who, in medieval England, was considered tobe noble? And by what criteria were some considered to be morenoble than others?

It is abundantly clear that the number of persons considered to beof the nobility in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England should benumbered in thousands rather than in hundreds, but it is easier tostart by looking at the top end of the scale. As already seen,Domesday Book reveals the existence of about 170 great tenants-in-chief in 1086, roughly corresponding to what contemporar iesdescribed as the baronage. To hold ones lands by barony from the

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king did to a certain extent put one in a class apart from thosewhoheld by knight service. In clause 2 of Magna Carta (1215), forexample, it was said that heirs of earls or barons should pay a relief of100 to enter into their inheritances, whereas those who held byknight service should pay 5 at most. These sums were said tocorrespond in each case to the ancient relief, and while there hadoften been disagreement over the size of reliefs demanded by theking, they do at least indicate a substantial gulf between earls orbarons and knights. These reliefs, however, were for a whole baronyor a whole knightss fee.18 In fact, of the 210 English baroniesrecorded between 1086 and 1327, less than forty remained in thesame male line for more than two centuries.19 Of the remainder,some were transferred wholesale to other families, but most weredivided into fractions of varying size (usually as a result of partibleinheritance by heiresses), and redistributed accordingly. There arefrequent references in the exchequer rolls of the twelfth andthirteenth centuries to reliefs payable on halves, quarters, andsometimes even thirty-sixths of baronies.

A simple list of tenants by barony (which could include the holderof one thirty-sixth of a barony) is thus clearly inadequate for anyserious attempt at social stratification. Yet the idea of the baronage asa recognisable group in English society persists, reinforced from timeto time by references to the greater barons. In clause 14 of MagnaCarta, for example, King John declared that for the purpose ofgranting an aid we will have archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls andgreater barons [maiores barones] summoned individually by our lettersto a council. The Dialogus de Scaccario, a commentary on the operationof the royal exchequer written about 1178, also made the distinctionbetween the holders of greater and lesser baronies. Again it was thepayment of reliefs which was under discussion, and the distinctionseems to be between the holders of more or less whole honours, orbaronies (the maiores barons), and the holders of lesser estates such asknights fees.20 By the greater barons, therefore, what is meantappears to be what modern historians more commonly term thebaronage, while the term lesser barons is closer to what is nowfrequently referred to as the knightly class. In reality it is, of course,quite impossible to make such clear-cut categorisations, for betweenthe one group and the other there was no neat cut-off point.

By what criteria, then, might it be possible to distinguish an elite

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group of landholders at the top of English lay society, correspondingroughly to what contemporaries described as the greater baronage? Ithas recently been said that, around 1200, at the top of the heap therewere the barons, about 160 of them, who had an average income ofaround 200.21 On the face of it, this compares nicely with the 170great tenants-in-chief of Domesday Book. For any such figure to bemeaningful in social as well as tenurial terms, however, it is clearlynecessary to consider further types of evidence. A recent study of thethirteenth-century nobility has concentrated on three main types ofevidence: military summonses, conciliar and parliamentarysummonses (mainly from the second half of the century), and tenureby barony (in cases where at least half a barony was held). Byanalysing these sources, Mr Wells concluded that there were about300 families in thirteenth-century England who at one time oranother during the century seem to have been considered to be ofthe greater baronage. Allowing for the constant process of extinctionand recruitment, the number at any one time was more like 200 to220. Perhaps the most significant aspect of these findings, suggestingthat they are meaningful in social and political as well as tenurialterms, is the high degree of overlap between the different types ofevidence. In other words, as Mr Wells points out,

the three main criteria employed do not provide us with threeseparate listsbut, in effect, one main list, the names on whichusually derive from two, and sometimes three, of the differenttypes of sources used, with a few additional names drawn fromonly one type of record. This strongly reinforces the view thatthere was in reality an upper stratum to the landholding class inthirteenth-century England, numbering in the region of 300families, who may not have been marked off from the lessernobility by clearly definable ranks or privileges, but whonevertheless did enjoy higher status and usually greater wealththan their fellows.22

There is no denying, of course, that the baronage of thirteenth-century England was considerably more fluid than the peerage oflate fourteenth-century England was to become. There were no veryclear barriers between them and the rest of the landholding class.Social stratification, however, is more a question of contemporary

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social perceptions than of legal or tenurial definition, and given thisevidence the conclusion is probably justified that during the twelfthand thirteenth centuries there was in England a group of between150 and 250 greater landholders at any one time, who formed areasonably distinct (to their contemporaries) upper stratum of noblesociety, namely the layer that came immediately below the king inthe social and political hierarchy. The actual personnel of the groupwas of course constantly changing. As with most nobilities, the mostfrequent cause of derogation was a simple failure of male heirs, whilethe usual routes to recruitment were through royal service andmarriage. What distinguished these men from the rest of the nobilitywas their direct dependence on and access to the king and the size oftheir estates, leading to greater wealth, a more extensive type oflordship, and hence status. In other words, the differences were indegree rather than in kind: that is why they are, in a technical sense,undefinable.

Those who came below the baronage and made up the rest ofthe English nobility are commonly and conveniently referred to asthe knightly class or, among later medieval and modern historians,as the gentry. The development of this group through the twelfthand thirteenth centuries is far from clear. It is impossible to say howmany knights there were in twelfth-century England. It is onlypossible to say that eleventh-century arrangements seem to envisagebetween 4,000 and 5,000 knights, but owing to the commonpractice by great landholders of granting less than one knights feeto many knights, there may in practice have been rather more thanthis. Equally, there is evidence from the reign of Henry II (115489) that there should have been about 6,500 knights in England, butin fact the number was probably not so great.23 By the latethirteenth century we seem to be on firmer ground. There is nowfairly general agreement that around 1300 the knightly or gentryclass consisted of between 2,500 and 3,000 landholders, roughly halfof whom were real (that is, dubbed) knights, while the other half(generally styled esquires) were men who for various reasons haddecided not to assume actual knighthood, but who were of roughlyequivalent status and wealth to the dubbed knights.24 Thus what thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries saw was in essence a crystallisationof the lesser ranks of the nobility. In the eleventh century,according to Professor Barlow, milites and their servants, armigeri,

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squires, seem in most literary contexts to be little more thancommon soldiers; knighthood conferred as yet no social distinction;and the emergence of knights as a distinct and honourable class didnot get under way before Henry Is reign.25 Many of thosedescribed as knights in England at this time seem to have held nomore than about one and a half hides of land.26 On the other hand,it is dangerous to assess social status in terms of wealth alone. Whilemany of them may have held little land, they nevertheless fought asthe companions of their lords, may well have received maintenance(and quite possibly expensive military equipment as well) in a lordshousehold, and engaged in the honourable pursuits of the warriorclass. Moreover, some of them clearly held a great deal more thanone and a half hides of land.

Even so, there is little doubt that the 3,000 or so of the latethir teenth-century knightly class enjoyedas a groupconsiderably higher social status and landed wealth than theireleventh- and twelfth-century namesakes, and this transformation inthe fortunes of the lesser nobility was due to a number of factors.One of these was military. It has recently been argued that the lateeleventh and twelfth centuries were a key period in the developmentof a new method of cavalry warfare, during which western knightscame to perfect the art of the controlled mass cavalry charge as aneffective weapon of warfare. But in order to be effective, cavalrywarfare of this type required a higher degree of training, as well as agreater investment in equipment: a heavier lance, better armour, andgood horses, as well as the servants necessary to care for the mountsand equipment. These developments, Dr Keen argues, did not onlyfoster a sense of identity among those who, by one means or another,could manage to fit themselves out as mounted warriors, but alsostrengthened the aristocratic bias of recruitment into knighthood,and sharpened in its ranks the awareness of a common bond, calledchivalry, uniting all who could aspire to r ide to wars andtournaments.27 In other words, for the man who would fulfil hismartial role in society in the way that was expected of him, both wealthand lineage were becoming increasingly important. The word miles(knight) now comes to signify not just any soldier, but a trainedmounted warrior, and as such it becomes an increasingly exclusiveterm. By the thirteenth century, it has come to indicate not just aspecific type of martial activity, but also social status. Those who are

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still knights are more substantial men than their antecedents. Andinevitably, therefore, they are fewer.

Economic forces seem, in the long term, to have been working inthe same direction. The initial parcelling out of land following theConquest, during which the barons and other great landholders (suchas the great ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief) subinfeudated their land totheir followers, gradually underwent a process of rationalisation bywhich estates became consolidated in fewer hands. As extinction orpolitical misfortune carried off some families, those who were luckyenough to survive picked up the crumbs and built on what they hadinherited. Obviously, this was by no means a one-way process. Everynew reign or political vicissitude brought its clutch of parvenus. Atthe same time, though, this process of consolidation may have beenencouraged by the so-called crisis of the knightly class of thethirteenth century, a time when, it is argued by some historians,economic circumstances (and more especially the severe inflationwhich afflicted England in the years circa 11801220) resulted insubstantial numbers of the lesser nobility slipping down the socialscale and out of reach of nobility.28 Over the period 11001300 as awhole, there also appears to have been a more widespread shift ofland out of the hands of the king and baronage, and into the hands ofthe church and the knightly class,29 which, taken together with thecorresponding and simultaneous concentration of a higher percentageof knightly estates in fewer hands, reinforces the view that themedian income of the 3,000 in 1300 must have been substantiallyhigher than that of the twelfth-century knights.

The third factor contributing to the crystallisation of the knightlyclass through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to be found intheir developing administrative and political role. The 3,000 or soknights and esquires who, together with the baronage, comprised thenobility of late thirteenth-century England were not just soldiers,they were also the political communities of their localities, the so-called busones of the shires, serving both king and baronage in avariety of offices, and representing the aspirations and grievances ofthose who lived within their spheres of administration.30 At theinstance of the monarchy, they had come to be regularly involved inthe judicial and financial administration of their shires, meeting everyforty days in the county court, serving as jurors, tax assessors, militaryarrayers, escheators, coroners and sheriffs. For the magnates, they

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served as stewards and councillors. They formed the vital link (inboth directions) not only between the king and the shirecommunities, but also between the great lords and the reeves andbailiffs who ran the manorial administration at grass-roots level. AsMr Denholm-Young once remarked, if every baron was a politician,it may be added that most knights were administrators.31 Andadministrative activity led almost inevitably to political activitymost notably, for example, in the demands for reform of localgovernment which characterised the opposition to royal governmentin the years 12589.32 It was also, of course, during the thirteenthcentury that representatives from the shires began to be summoned tothe kings parliaments, which was both a recognition of their growingimportance in local government and an opportunity for them tomake their views known on a wider political stage. Initially, it is true,the weight they carried in the kings parliaments was quite limited.By the second half of the fourteenth century, though, it was to be adifferent story.

It was a common maxim of medieval writers that royal serviceennobles. For those further down the social scale, baronial or evenknightly service might also ennoble. Service to ones social bettershad always been one of the principal paths to advancement for thenobility, but there is no doubt that as the Middle Ages progressed theknights and esquires became ever more involved, not just in politicsand justice, but also in the more routine aspects of royal and nobleadministrationpartly, of course, because the spread of lay literacygradually broke down the barriers demarcating the work of laymenfrom the work of clerics. Does this mean, then, that the classicfunction of the nobility, martial activity, was becoming diluted?Although the majority of dubbed knights were still active (i.e.fighting) knights, there seems to have been a growing minority whowere not. This was partly because there were some who simplypreferred different kinds of service, political or administrative, to themilitary kind, but it was also because knighthood itself was becomingincreasingly a question of lineage. Lineage, of course, had always beenan important element of knighthood, but what seems to havehappened is that it became even more important just at the timewhen the escalating cost of knightly equipment and of the ceremonyof dubbing (which became ever more lavish and costly) was deterringa greater number of potential knights from assuming the honour.

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Thus a lesser knightly class, generally known to historians as thesquirarchy, rose to take its place alongside the knights. The squirarchywas, in the words of Dr Keen, a kind of diminutive of chivalry.33

Esquires, or at least some of them, were clearly considered to be ofthe nobility. They were not, however, of the knighthood. Knighthood,therefore, had lost its role as a binding force for the chivalric class,and came instead to mean one of two things: the dubbed knight waseither a man whose ancestors had traditionally taken knighthood, andwho could still afford it, or he was a man who had earned the honourby service (preferably to his prince) on the battlefield or in thecouncil chamber, and, again, who could afford it (though in this caseit would probably be up to his king or other lord to make available tohim the means by which he could afford it).

Yet despite the social cachet attached to late medieval knighthood,the gap in status between the knights and at least some of the esquireswas a fairly narrow one. Esquires could go to tournaments or joinnoble Orders, and by the mid-fourteenth century they werepermitted to bear coats of arms. The wealthier esquires, therefore,were clearly of the nobility. As a social group, they can becharacterised as a nobility of blood marked out by the capacity toreceive knighthood.34As an economic group, they were roughlythose who held between 20 and 40 worth per annum of land(though a few certainly held more). They were precisely that groupwhom successive thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings ofEngland attempted to distrain to knighthood.35 As such, though notof the knighthood, they were potential knights, and thus of theknightly class. The knightly class was, therefore, the nobility.

To summarise, the concept of the nobility had undergone a subtlethough significant change between the twelfth century and the latethirteenth. At the top of English lay society there was still thebaronage, numbering around 200 families at any one time. This muchprobably had not changed to any significant degree. Below thebaronage came the gentry, or knightly class, an economically diversegroup of some 3,000 landholders almost all of whom held land worthat least 20 per annum, roughly evenly divided between actualknights and potential knights. The hallmark of this group was still itswarrior ethos, but an even greater degree of importance than earlierwas now placed on two other aspects of nobility: lineage, and serviceof a non-martial character. The growing importance of lineage was,

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to some extent, a defensive reaction to the dilution of the nobilitysmartial role in society. It was also a defence against the growingwealth of the merchant class. The growing importance of non-martialservice was a consequence of the spread of lay literacy, of the generalgrowth in the size of royal and noble administrative machines, and ofthe way in which self-government at the kings command, as theAngevin approach to local government has aptly been termed, led tothe formation of the busones class in the shires. The fall in the numberof knights can best be explained in terms of the increasing cost ofknighthood, together with the long-term process of rationalisationwhich is perceptible among the estates of lesser landholders,aggravated perhaps by the thirteenth-century crisis of the knightlyclass. Together, these factors had combined to produce in England anobility which effectively dominated the military, economic, politicaland social life of the country.

It was the land, and the labour of men far humbler than themselves,which provided the nobility with the wealth to maintain thatdominance. Lordship of land and men was the birthright of the noble.It was both a system of social control and a means of keeping thenations wealth in the hands of the elite. It had various aspects, moraland customary as well as judicial and financial. Usually, though, landwas at the heart of it. The evolution of feudalism in eighth- andninth-century France, whence it had spread throughout most ofwestern Europe, including England, had brought with it a fusion oflordship over land and over men, so that in general the latter nowfollowed from, and was a natural concomitant to, the former.36 Tohold land was not merely to enjoy the profits of it, it was also toexercise certain rights over those who worked on it.

In its details, the effect of the Norman Conquest on the extentand quality of the lordship exercised by Englands landholders variedfrom place to place. In general, though, it seems likely both that itsextent was widened and its hand strengthened. It is true that slavery,which had not been uncommon in pre-Conquest England,disappeared fairly rapidly after 1066, but in its place there came thereduction of a greater number of men to the state of serfdom. In pre-Conquest England there had been great variation in the status of thepeasantry, ranging from the entirely free to the entirely unfree (theslaves). Anglo-Norman lordship tended to blur these distinctions.

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Naturally it did not do so entirely: there were still many free peasantsafter the Conquest, especially in the north of the country. Yet a fargreater number of men now found themselves subjected to both thestigma and the unwelcome demands of servility. The differencesbetween the free man and the unfree man (or serf, or bondman)were, in theory at least, many. The unfree man had no standing in law,no access to courts other than his lords court. He had to performunpaid labour services for his lord on a (theoretically) regular basis,whereas if a lord wished a free man to work for him he had to payhim wages. The unfree man was also liable to a number of financialexactions on the part of the lord, some of which could be heavy. Hecould not buy or sell land, or leave the manor without the lordspermission. He had to pay a fine for marrying off his daughter(merchet), or if his daughter was found to be a fornicator (leyrwite), orif he wished to send his son to school, or put him into the church. Athis death, his lord took his best beast as a heriot. He was also subjectto tallage, a theoretically arbitrary financial exaction which the lordcould demand at any time from his unfree tenants. In practice, someof these rights were often waived or ignored by landlords. Nor,indeed, was the distinction between free and unfree men nearly assimple as it might sound. Some men were in effect half-free, and inboth theory and practice the demands which lords made upon theirserfs varied considerably from region to region, even from manor tomanor. In a sense, though, these variations may well have increasedthe sense of injustice, for it was above all the arbitrariness of thelords demands which created resentment. It would be futile not torecognise the disabilities of serfdom: for most of the peasantry, theNorman Conquest was a misfortune.37

Allied to the widespread imposition of serfdom after the Conquestwas the development of feudal courts. Private courts were not ofcourse new to post-Conquest England, but they do seem to havebecome both more diffuse and more powerful. They were essentiallyof two types: honorial courts and manorial courts. Honorial courtswere the prerogative of the greater lords, and impinged little on thepeasants life, but the same was not true of manorial courts. Eachmanor had its court, a partly judicial, partly administrative gathering,where the business of the community was transacted and transgressorswere brought to justice. Naturally, the profits of the justice meted outin the manorial court went into the lords pocket. At the same time,

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many hundreds fell into private hands, so that the local court alsobecame the lords court, and contributed further to the swelling ofhis coffers.38 Technically, a private hundred was a franchise (orliberty), a royal right, according to the kings lawyers, which couldonly be held by an individual following a specific act of delegation bythe king, but in practice it seems that many franchises were more orless assumed by lords over the years.39 They were undoubtedly sourcesof considerable profit, as indeed they were intended to be. Theyincluded, for example, the right to license (and draw profit from)weekly markets and annual fairs in specified towns, or to exact tollson bridges, or ferries, or certain sections of road. Some lords alsoexercised the much-prized franchise of return of writs within givenareas, that is, the right to implement royal writs through their ownagents rather than allowing them to be implemented by the kingsagents. It was, in general, a consequence of the more rigid feudallordship introduced by the Normans to England that judicial rightsbecame both more fragmented and more privatised, not merely inorder to wrest more money from the peasantry but also to ensure thatat each level tenurial obligations were accompanied by the meansnecessary to enforce them. For many peasants, this meant even moredirect dependence on their lords. In some areas, notably the March ofWales, the ramifications of lordship spread further than this,amounting to the almost total dependence of the peasantry on thelord.40 But while Marcher lordship was exceptionally strong, it wouldbe dangerous to think that lordship throughout the rest of thecountry was weak.

As to the land itself , there was no doubting that it existedprimarily in order to provide wealth for the lordunless, of course,he wished to subinfeudate it in return for service. Given an estate inland, there were essentially two ways in which a landlord couldextract money from it: either he could rent it out in return for anannual sum, or he could manage it directly, through his own agentsand workforce. The advantages of renting were that the lord receiveda guaranteed income from his land, and that he didnt have toconcern himself with organising its cultivation. On the other hand,there was a strong customary element in rents, which could thus fallfar behind, for example, rises in prices. Given the right circumstances,however, direct cultivation (or demesne-farming) was potentiallymore profitable than renting. The balance between renting and

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demesne-farming is important not only in its economic implications,but also in its social ramifications, for it was largely on the lordsdemesne that serfs were required to work, and it follows thereforethat significant fluctuations in the amount of land held in demesneled to significant fluctuations in the incidence of serfdom in medievalEngland. It follows too that a landlords decision to rent or managedirectly was in large part governed by economic circumstances.

In outline, there is a reasonable level of agreement about long-term economic trends in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.41

For at least two centuries after the Conquest, the population ofEngland rose steadily and continuously, probably from around twomillion in 1086 to around five million by 1300. For much of thisperiod the rise in population was accompanied by a continuousprocess of land reclamation which, in the absence of any seriousimprovements in agricultural techniques, provided the principalmeans by which this expanding population could be fed, but by themiddle of the thirteenth century the land available for colonisationwas beginning to run out, so that the ratio between land and peoplewas becoming unbalanced. Peasant holdings gradually became smaller,and intensive cultivation probably led to soil exhaustion, especially onmarginal land. At the same time, England suffered from quite severeinflationary pressures. The sharpest inflation occurred during theyears circa 1180 to 1220, during which time many prices tripled or atleast doubled. After this, inflation slowed down, but even betweencirca 1220 and 1300 there was roughly a doubling of prices. As priceinflation tailed off, however, rent inflation accelerated. The mostmarked r ises in rents occurred during the second half of thethirteenth century, as the land-hunger became more intense, and asthe customary element in rents, which had helped to protect tenantsfrom at least some of the effects of inflation before about 1250, beganto lose its restraining power.

Squeezed between the declining size of their holdings and theneed to pay more both for the right to work what land they had andto buy whatever they were unable to produce, many peasants lookedto employment to make up the shortfall in their incomes, but heretoo there was little comfort to be found. The pressure on jobs wasjust as intense as the pressure on land, and real wages droppedaccordinglypossibly by as much as 50 per cent over the century asa whole. The thirteenth century may have been an age of urban

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expansion, but it is clear that the towns were unable to take up theslack in the agrarian economy. In every way, then, life was becomingharder for much of the peasantry as the thir teenth centuryprogressed, and at the end of the century even worse was to come,for it was from the 1290s that the military activity of the Englishkings in France and Scotland became near-continuous, bringing withit constant and often heavy demands for monetary taxation,purveyance (supplies in kind for the royal armies), and militaryservice.42

For the landlords, however, the thirteenth century was on thewhole a time of prosperity. They had what everyone wanted: land.Rising rents brought more into their coffers, price inflation meantthat (at least as far as agricultural prices were concerned) they gotmore for the produce of their estates (and the growth of towns, mostmarked in the century from 1150 to 1250, also made it easier todispose of), and low wages meant that they had to pay out less tothose who worked for them. In addition, the deprivations of thethirteenth century forced many tenants to take lands which were heldby servile tenure, thus providing lords with another source of cheaplabour, their serfs. Not surprisingly, with prices high and labourcheap, many landlords turned to large-scale direct cultivation of theirestates for the market. During the twelfth century, most of them hadpreferred either to farm (i.e. lease) out whole manors, usually tolesser landholders such as knights or esquires, or, on those manorswhich they did not farm out, to rent out substantial portions of theland to tenants. Now, when it was possible, they reclaimed their landsand exploited them for the market; hence the thirteenth century issometimes described as the era of demesne-farming. Whether thelesser landholding class benefited as much from these developments asthe baronial class, or the great ecclesiastical landlords, is a much-debated point. The so-called crisis of the knightly class, it has beensuggested, was not merely the consequence of the increasing expenseneeded to maintain a knightly way of life, but also of the fact that,with their smaller endowments, and the strong restraining force ofcustomary rents, many of them were unable to take advantage of theprevailing economic trends and thus found themselves slipping downthe social scale.43Yet while there is certainly evidence of somemiddling landlords being forced to sell out to greater ones, it is by nomeans clear that the group as a whole was in difficulty, and such

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examples might just as easily be viewed as part of that constantprocess by which families rose and fell.

The trend towards demesne-farming continued until roughly themiddle of the thirteenth century. It was accompanied by renewedinterest in both the theory and practice of estate management, and bya substantial growth in the number of men employed by lords in theadministration of their estates.44 Yet it is a trend which needs to bekept in perspective. Even at the height of the demesne-farming era,which probably coincided with the third quarter of the thirteenthcentury, the majority of landlords still drew most of their incomefrom rents, and from this time onwards, due principally it seems tothe late thirteenth-century explosion in rents and entry fines, it isclear that the trend had reversed itself and that most landlords hadbegun to rent out demesne land again.45 This brings us back to animportant general truth: throughout the Middle Ages, nearly alllandlords were basically rentiers. And while the demesne-farming eraof the thirteenth century was a significant one, it needs to be seenwithin this context.

The significance of the move towards larger demesnes was notsimply that it provided very substantial profits for many landlords; italso led to much reimposition of servile labour obligations, in orderto provide the labour with which demesnes were worked. Equally,one of the major consequences of the renewed process of demesne-leasing was that serfdom during the late thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies gradually declined. This too, however, is a trend that mustbe seen in perspective. The decline of serfdom at this time did notnormally entail its abolition but its commutation, and whatcommutation consisted of was, in effect, the selling back to the serf ofhis customary obligations, often on an annual basis. It did not meanthat the serf ceased to be a serf; there was always the possibility that atsome future date his obligations would be reimposed, and in theevent, although in much-changed economic circumstances, this maywell be what happened during the third quarter of the fourteenthcentury.46 Thus while the process of demesne-leasing was to remain afairly constant one through the fourteenth century, serfdom, as thedemands of the rebels of 1381 make clear, was still alive and well inlate fourteenth-century England. Not until late in the fifteenthcentury could it truly be said that serfdom had more or less vanishedfrom the English countryside.47

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Lordship bore hard on the peasantry of medieval England. Itsweight varied from one region to another, from one period toanother, and from one landlord to another, but essentially it achievedwhat it was designed to do: to transfer wealth into the pockets oflords, and to place in their hands effective machinery for the controlof the mass of the population. And as society evolved, so did lordship.As towns grew, and the wealth of the country diversified throughtrade and industry, so lords found ways either of gearing their owneconomies to participation in such enterprises, or simply of creamingoff the merchants and producers profits. The attempts by thirteenth-and fourteenth-century monarchs to tax the English wool trade, forexample, are merely symptomatic, at the highest level, of what manylords were doing on a lesser scale in towns and industries throughoutEngland, using rights such as tolls, private courts, fairs and markets,and tallage. Lordship in the Middle Ages was much more thanlandlordship. The yield of the soil and the labour of the peasantcombined with the skill and enterprise of the artisan or merchant,just as the theorists said that they should, to provide the noble withthe means to sustain his lifestyle. They built his castle, equipped himfor war, funded his travels, paid for his leisure and his hospitality,salaried his servants, and underwrote his largesse. There was plenty ofidle pleasure in the noble lifestyle: they drank their good winesfreely, and all the talk was of arms and of love, or hounds and hawksand of tournaments.48 In other words, in their everyday lives theybehaved much as elites always did. But beyond the idle pleasure andthe militaristic ethos, there were three principal preoccupations ofthe medieval noble: politics (both local and national), the lands, andthe family. It is with these themes that this book is concerned.

PART I

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CHAPTER 1

Kings and the titlednobility

Before 1337, the only heritable title in England apart from the kingswas that of earl, and for the most part English kings had beenextremely cautious about creating earldoms. At the end of theConquerors reign there were probably nine English earls. By 1307, atthe death of Edward I, there were eleven. Only once during theintervening centuries had the title been in serious danger of becomingcheapened: this was during Stephens reign (113554), when the kingand his rival, the Empress Matilda, both created a number of earldomsin an attempt to outbid each other for the support of the leadingbarons, so that at various times during the reign there were thirty ormore men who could claim the title. By the time Henry II died in1189 the number had dropped to twelve again.

Thus those men who held earldoms were an extremely selectgroup at the top of English lay society, and their exclusivity wasmatched by their wealth, status, and political influence. Many of themwere closely related to the king. Indeed, some kings seem to havetaken the view that new earldoms should normally only be createdfor members of the royal family. During the fourteenth century,however, the English kings were prepared to be rather more generousthan this. Between 1307 and 1397, twenty-four new earldoms werecreated outside the immediate royal familythree by Edward II,eleven by Edward III, and ten by Richard II. These creations wereboth personal and political acts on behalf of the king. Frequently, it isclear that those who received titles were personal fr iends (orfavourites, to use a more loaded term) of the monarch. Politically,there were both dangers to be faced and benefits to be gained from

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new creations. The chief danger was likely to be a feeling that theking was promoting the wrong sort of men, or, among those whoalready held titles, that their exclusivity was being threatened. Thechief benefit was that by his patronage the king created a powerfulfund of support among the leading men of his kingdom. Thus kingswere well advised to tread warily in this matter. Relations betweenthe king and the titled nobility were a crucial factor in the politics ofany reign, and, despite the greater willingness of fourteenth-centurykings to bestow titles on their greatest subjects, the earls remained avery select group. At no time during the fourteenth century did theirnumber rise higher than twenty. They were the men with thestanding and resources to make life either easy or difficult for theking. When danger threatened the crown, it was usually because oneor more of them had been alienated.

In 1307, the year that Edward II came to the throne, there werenine English earls and a further two whose principal lands lay outsideEngland but who also held substantial lands within the kingdom.These latter two were John, duke of Brittany, who held the Englishearldom of Richmond, and Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, neitherof whom played any significant part in English affairs.1 Henry deLacy, earl of Lincoln, was aged fifty-six, and Robert de Vere, earl ofOxford, was forty-nine, but the remaining seven English earls were allyounger men, ranging in age between sixteen and thirty-five, andthus of much the same generation as Edward himself, who wastwenty-three when he came to the throne.2 Moreover, none of themhad been an earl for more than nine years. The greatest of them wasthe kings cousin Thomas, earl of Lancaster, who, as well as that ofLancaster, held the earldoms of Leicester, Derby, and (after Lacysdeath in 1311) Lincoln, and whose annual income by the time of hisdeath was around 11,000 gross or 8,700 net.3 The otheroutstanding member of the group in terms of wealth was the newearl of Gloucester, Gilbert de Clare, whose gross annual income wasin the region of 6,000. None of the other English earls could matchthese two for wealth, but they came mostly from long-establishedcomital families. Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, Humphrey deBohun, earl of Hereford and Essex, and John de Warenne, earl ofSurrey, could all trace their earldoms back to the twelfth century orearlier, while the Lacy family had held the earldom of Lincoln since1232. The relative newcomers to the groupalthough in each case

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the earldom had already been in the family for a generationwereGuy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, Aymer de Valence, earl ofPembroke, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, whose fathers hadreceived their titles in 1268, 1275, and 1291 respectively.

As far as the leading members of the nobility were concerned,therefore, the portents were good. Around the king there gathered anew generation of young men from old families, men with thestanding and resources to play their part in the kings designs, andwith the natural sympathy and shared expectations which arosefrom being, like Edward himself, on the threshold of their careers,yet who had not been personally involved in the politicalopposition to Edward I which had erupted in the 1290s.Unfortunately, Edward II lost no time in antagonising them. Fivenew men were promoted to earldoms during the reign. Two ofthese were quite unexceptionable in any terms: Thomas andEdmund, the sons of Edward I by his second wife, Margaret ofFrance, and thus half-brothers to the king, were granted theearldoms of Norfolk and Kent, in 1312 and 1321 respectively. Aseveryone recognised, they were simply taking their natural place, towhich they had been born, among the great men of the kingdom.Edwards remaining three creations were a different matteraltogether. It would of course be quite wrong to suggest that thekings favouritism was the sole cause of his eventual downfall. Hisdisastrous dealings with the Scots (and especially the humiliation atBannockburn in 1314), his woeful inability to handle his magnatesin general, and his vindictive treatment during the last four years ofhis reign of those who had opposed him in 13212, all contributedto turn his rule of England into one long crisis from which hisdeposition in 13267 must have seemed a merciful release. Yet itwould also be foolish to underestimate the political consequences ofhis favouritism, and this was never more lamentably apparent thanduring the first five years of the reign.

Within a month of his accession Edward committed his first majorblunder by conferring the earldom of Cornwall on his friend PiersGaveston. Gaveston was apparently witty, personable, and a creditablesoldier, but he was hardly a suitable candidate for an earldom. The sonof a Gascon knight, and thus both a commoner and a foreigner, hehad become intimate with Edward during the last years of the oldkings reign (in fact the relationship between the two men was

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probably homosexual), and so unsuitable a friend for his son didEdward I consider Gaveston to be that in early 1307 he had exiledhim from the kingdom. His immediate recall, in July 1307, wasominous enough. His elevation to an earldom was, as was plain to all,simply a consequence of his personal favour with the king. Duringthe next five years, at the insistence of the magnates, he was twicemore exiled, only to return. Eventually, despairing of keeping himaway from the king by any other means, the earls of Lancaster,Hereford, Arundel and Warwick kidnapped him from the custody ofthe earl of Pembroke and had him summarily beheaded on BlacklowHill, near Warwick, on 19 June 1312.

Edwards remaining two comital creations were the direct resultof his victor y over Thomas of Lancaster at the batt le ofBoroughbridge on 16 March 1322. Since 1312, the opposition toEdward had come increasingly to crystallise around Lancaster, andthe rise of another favourite, in the person of Hugh Despenser theyounger, was to prove the catalyst which turned Lancasters hatredof the king into armed opposition. The younger Despenser was amuch more violent and unpleasant character than Gaveston. Hisruthless land-grabbing policy in South Wales, which Edward notonly connived at but actively supported, provoked the civil war of13212, which resulted in complete victory for the king andDespenser. Six days a f ter Boroughbr idge, Lancaster wascondemned as a traitor and beheaded outside his own castle ofPontefract. His ally Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford andEssex, had died in the batt le, but he too was convictedposthumously of treason. In their place the king promoted twonew earls. Andrew Harcla, the victor of Boroughbridge, was madeearl of Carlisle. Within a year, however, he had been executed forcomplicity with the Scots on the northern border, and his earldomwas suppressed, never to be revived. Edwards second new earldomwas longer-last ing, though not by much. The elder HughDespenser, father of the kings new favourite, was made earl ofWinchester in May 1322. The younger Hugh was not made anearl, but there can be little doubt that it was intended that heshould in the course of time succeed to his fathers title.

That the younger Hughs succession never came about was dueto the revolution of 13267. For four years after BoroughbridgeEdward and the Despensers ruled England as they pleased, brooking

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no opposition, growing fat on the proceeds of confiscated lands anddisinherited heirs. The younger Hugh had by 1326 acquired notonly enormous sums in cash, but also a landed estate worth over7,000 per annum, while his fathers was worth nearly 4,000.4 Butin September 1326 an invading army led by Edwards own queen,Isabella of France, and her lover Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmorein Hereford, captured the king and rid the country of his cronies.Both the Despensers were executed, as was Edmund, earl ofArundel, by now a thoroughgoing royalist and the only earl apartfrom the elder Despenser who stuck with the king to the last. InJanuary 1327 the queen and her supporters completed their task bydeposing her husband and choosing his son Edward as king. By theend of September Edward II was dead, murdered at Berkeley castle.

Unfortunately the blood-letting was to continue for a while yet.Edward III was only fourteen in January 1327, and for the first fewyears of his reign the country was effectively governed by RogerMortimer, under whose sway Isabella seems to have acted. Mortimerproved to be little better than the men he had supplanted. Certainlyhe did not lack for personal ambition, even prevailing upon the kingto confer the title of earl of March on him in 1328a title derivedfrom the siting of his chief seat of power at Wigmore in the WelshMarch. Gradually, opposition to the new regime built up. In January1329 Mortimer had to put down a rebellion led by Henry ofLancaster (the brother of Thomas, he had been allowed to inherit theLancastrian lands in 1327), and in March 1330 the unfortunateEdmund, earl of Kent, the new kings uncle, was caught plottingagainst the regime and executed at Winchester. This was done at thebehest of Mortimer, apparently without the kings knowledge, andfor Edward it seems to have been the last straw. He now determinedto rid himself of Mortimer, and in a carefully planned and daringcoup at Nottingham castle in October 1330 he managed to effect thearrest of both his mother and her lover. Mortimer was taken toLondon, tried, and executed for treason on 29 November. Isabella,although forced to give up much of the wealth she had acquired overthe previous four years, was granted a generous allowance of 3,000a year and spent the remaining twenty-eight years of her life incomfortable retirement at her favourite residence of Castle Rising inNorfolk.

Thus at the end of the year 1330, having just turned eighteen,

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Edward III entered upon his personal rule, at the outset of a reignwhich was to see English armies achieve undreamed-of feats abroad,and a lasting period of political harmony at home. To have foreseensuch achievements at the time, however, would have demandedpowers bordering on the supernatural. Between 1322 and 1330 noless than seven English earls had lost their lives as a result of eitherrebellion or conspiracy: Lancaster and Hereford in 1322, Carlisle in1323, Arundel and Winchester in 1326, Kent and March in 1330. Notone of the newly-created earls outside the royal family between 1307and 1330 had clung to his title for more than five years: all four ofthem had ended by being beheaded for treason. Partly as a result ofthese misfortunes, the number of English earls had fallen to eight.5

What is more, few of them were men after the young Edwards ownheart. Oxford was seventy-two and had been retired from public lifefor many years. Henry of Lancaster, although only restored to hisinheritance in 1327, was already forty-nine and going blind. John deWarenne, earl of Surrey, was forty-four and not much of a force to bereckoned with in the new reign,6 while Thomas of Brotherton, earlof Norfolk, although active militarily during the early years of thereign, was apparently an unpopular figure and there is nothing tosuggest that Edward greatly lamented his death in 1338.7

The remaining four were younger men, of much the samegeneration as the king. Edwards younger brother, John of Eltham,aged only twelve when granted the earldom of Cornwall in 1328,was apparently a noted soldier, but unfortunately he was to dieduring the siege of Perth in 1336. John de Bohun, earl of Herefordand Essex, who like Henry of Lancaster had been restored to hisinheritance following the revolution of 1326, was also to die in 1336,aged thirty, though in his case death was probably brought on bysome lingering incapacity which had in any case prevented him fromplaying much of a role in public life. The exceptions in this somewhatunpromising scenar io were Warwick and Arundel. ThomasBeauchamp, who had come into his fathers inheritance as earl ofWarwick in 1329, and Richard Fitzalan, who was restored to hisfathers earldom of Arundel in the same parliament whichcondemned Mortimer, were both exactly the same age as Edward,and both were to become firm friends and supporters of the kinguntil their deaths in 1369 and 1376 respectively. They were joined in1331 by John de Vere, the new earl of Oxford, when his aged uncle

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eventually died. He too was exactly the same age as Edward, and wasto be one of the kings supporters until his death in 1360. Butotherwise the early and mid-1330s saw a reduction rather than anincrease in the already depleted ranks of the active magnates.Humphrey de Bohun succeeded his brother as earl of Hereford andEssex in 1336, but although aged only twenty-seven at the time hetoo seems to have been afflicted with some chronic illness whichlargely incapacitated him and left him, like his brother, childless. By1337 the situation was becoming critical. England was at war withScotland, and it was clear that the outbreak of hostilities with Francecould not be delayed much longer. Edward needed young, energeticand like-minded men around him, imbued with the authority to lendweight to his cause both at home and abroad. Yet the only two newearldoms since 1330 had gone to his eldest son, the Black Prince,who was made earl of Chester in 1333 at the age of three, and toHugh Courtenay, the sexagenarian earl of Devon who had beendeprived of his earldom by a piece of sharp practice on the part ofEdward I in 1293, but restored to his rightful title by a moresympathetic monarch i