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

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Lady Davies 2009

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Davies, R. R. Lords and lordship in the British Isles in the late Middle Ages / R.R. Davies; edited by Brendan Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8 (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—To 1485. 2. Nobility—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 3. Feudalism—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 4. Power (Social sciences)—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 5. Great Britain—History—Medieval period, 1066–1485. 6. Great Britain—History—To 1485. I. Smith, Brendan, 1963– II. Title. DA175.D337 2009 305.5’2209410902—dc22 2008055133 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the UK on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents 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

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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

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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

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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).

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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.

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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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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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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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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).

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acknowledged in contemporary terminology—be it in titles (for example, duke, earl), forms of address, and clearly differentiated rates of pay for military service. However much the various ranks of domini were united by a common code of chivalry, knighthood, and gentility, they were under no illusions about the profound divisions in their ranks in terms of wealth, status, and political weight. Magna Carta c.14 in 1215 had acknowledged as much by its differentiation between those lords who were given the privilege of an individual summons to meet the king in ‘common council’ from those who had to make do with a general summons through the sheriff of their county. Already by the 1230s and the 1240s the notion of a ‘peerage’, an elite group of lords, was in circulation, and some of the earliest Rolls of Arms likewise identified the most prestigious families, about one hundred in number.²⁶ This process of the definition of an elite of higher aristocrats—what K. B. McFarlane termed the ‘stratification of the nobility’²⁷—gathered institutional pace in our period. Its most obvious expression was the growing definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage. Whereas in the late thirteenth century the numbers of magnates who were summoned individually to parliament was still fluid and somewhat unpredictable, this increasingly ceased to be so as the fourteenth century progressed. Already by Edward II’s reign the number of earls and barons receiving individual writs of summons to the English parliament was beginning to settle down at about sixty. No property qualification was laid down for the group—though a thousand marks of landed income was coming to be regarded as the territorial competence for an earl—but we would not be far wrong to suggest, with Barbara Harvey, that landed income of c.£400 per annum was the threshold.²⁸ This, therefore, was the cr`eme de la cr`eme of the nobility; and they were aware, increasingly so, that they stood apart. Stand apart, head and shoulders above the rest of gentle society, they most certainly did. That is why Rodney Hilton’s analogy of them as skyscrapers standing out from the plain of the other lords, local and regional, remains apposite. The figures that can be culled from the 1436 income tax returns make evident the huge economic gulf between the peerage and the gentry.²⁹ Nor was it merely or even mainly a matter of income and statistics. The greater lords enjoyed a range of privileges to which few ordinary lords could aspire—such as ²⁶ D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London, 1992), esp. 22–5, 105. ²⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 122–5. ²⁸ B. Harvey, ‘The Aristocratic Consumer in England in the Long Thirteenth Century’, in Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell, and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 1997), 17–37. ²⁹ R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (London, 1967). Hilton’s metaphor is an exact echo of that used by John Stafford, archbishop of Canterbury 1443–51, who likened the nobility to mountains towering above the hills and plains of the lower classes—as quoted in G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), 93. T. B. Pugh, ‘The Magnates, Knights and Gentry’, in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester, 1972), 86–128.

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the right to license markets and fairs in their own boroughs, the right to free warren on their demesnes, licences to empark their lands, and often extensive jurisdictional franchises. But it was perhaps above all their lifestyle and social circles which proclaimed their superiority and the distance between them and other wielders of lordship. They operated on a national, sometimes indeed an international, stage; they were the companions of kings and captains of their armies; the size and splendour of their households put them in a league apart, as did the size of their affinities and the tentacles of their influence and power; their marriage alliances to their social peers further promoted their apartness, while the wide distribution of their estates and residences—not infrequently extending into England, Wales, and Ireland—reaffirmed their national, as well as their local or even regional, standing. Those who were not members of this magic circle fully recognized the superiority of the group and the due deference that was owed to it. Thus when Sir Hugh Hastings commissioned a brass in the late 1340s for his greater glory in the church of Elsing in Norfolk it was the king and great lords whom he had served who were commemorated—Edward III, the earls of Warwick and Pembroke, the Lords Stafford and Despenser among them.³⁰ This was not mere flattery; rather was it a recognition that this was how the world of power was, and should be, constructed with lesser lords turning in the orbit of the greater ones and basking in their patronage. Much the same point is made even more vividly manifest in the famous, and highly revealing, set of windows at Etchingham in Sussex. The king and members of the royal family are given pride of place in the east window of the nave; they are flanked by the earls of England, probably all twelve of them; Sir William Etchingham relegated his knightly neighbours to the nave.³¹ Contemporaries, in short, would not have been surprised by the prominence we give to the great lords; it reflects their view of the world. In this analysis of lordship there is a further reason for concentrating on the greater lords—indeed on a handful of them. It is quite simply that, on the whole, it is only for this group of lords that we have a range of documentary evidence on which to build a nuanced understanding of the exercise of lordship in the long fourteenth century. This is surely no accident. Rather it is that the sheer extent and complexity of their estates and households required them from a fairly early date to use written records to supervise and control their affairs.³² The historian is the beneficiary of this triumph of the written word in the seigniorial world, notably in the appearance of annual accounts. In fact such records as survive are only the ³⁰ Discussed in Age of Chivalry, no. 678. See also M. Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England, c.1300–c.1500 (Stroud, 2002), 52–4. ³¹ Fully discussed in Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, ch. 5. ³² There are excellent introductions to seigniorial household and manorial accounts respectively in Household Accounts and P. D. A. Harvey, Manorial Records (revised edn., London, 1999).

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tips of a much larger iceberg of lost documents. That is why the analysis in the chapters which follow relies heavily on a few relatively well-documented English aristocratic families—notably the Beauchamps, Bohuns, Fitzalans, Lancasters, Mortimers, and Staffords, supplemented occasionally from the archives of other families.³³ The search of such records could no doubt have been greatly extended and deepened; but the sample is—it is hoped—sufficiently broad to allow us to characterize the main lineaments of aristocratic lordship in the fourteenth century. Of the six major English families mentioned above, all held extensive lands in the March of Wales as well as in England; the Mortimers also had very extensive interests in Ireland. This directs us to another feature of this book which calls for explanation and defence, namely its ambition to draw on evidence for the study of aristocratic lordship from different parts of the British Isles. First, a disclaimer. The book has no pretensions whatsoever to make an original contribution to the study of aristocratic power in Scotland or English Ireland nor, frankly, are the surviving records—especially household and estate accounts—for these regions to be compared with those for England or even the March of Wales. Nor have I attempted to characterize the nature of noble power in the native ‘Celtic’ societies of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Some excellent studies have been undertaken of late in this area; but these will only be drawn upon here to characterize how ‘English-style’ aristocratic lordship sought to adjust to the social landscape of ‘Celtic’ societies.³⁴ In other respects the patterns and dynamics of power, compounded by the very different and very inadequate range of sources, do not lend themselves to meaningful comparison with ‘English-style’ aristocratic lordship or its terminology. Nevertheless there are good reasons (other than the pursuit of current historiographical fashion) for extending the scope of this study beyond the confines of England. We should observe, first, that the great lords of England, the March of Wales, and English Ireland were, in many respects, members of a single club, bound by ties of marriage, sociability, territorial ambition, and service.³⁵ A handful of illustrative examples may drive home the point. Territorially, the landed interests of William de Valence (d. 1296), half-brother of King Henry III, are indicative: he held Goodrich Castle (Herefordshire), estates in twelve English counties (especially in southern England), a share of the lordship of Pembroke ³³ I have also had the advantage of consulting K. B. McFarlane’s transcripts of seigniorial documents in Magdalen College, Oxford. Where I cite from these transcripts the reference is preceded by an asterisk ∗ . ³⁴ A notable study is K. Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987). ³⁵ R. Frame, ‘Aristocracies and the Political Configuration of the British Isles’ in his, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450, ch. IX.

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in west Wales, and the lordship of Wexford in south-east Ireland. The marriage alliances of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), whom we will meet below, likewise illustrate the ecumenical links of these great magnates. Of five of his daughters, he married one to an English earl, another to a Scottish earl, and a further three to major Anglo-Irish earls. Earl Richard’s military career likewise underlines the fact that the stage on which these leading families conducted their public careers was a British or even a European one: he was summoned to take troops to Wales, Scotland, and Gascony just as his contemporary, John fitz Thomas, served in Flanders and Scotland.³⁶ Ultimately the focal point of the world of these men—where their fortunes were made and unmade—was the court of the king of England. It was he who could even instruct them whom to marry and it was from the ranks of leading English magnates that they chose their sureties when faced with political disaster. Whatever the differences in the landscape of power, there was a continuum in their aristocratic world which our historical analysis should serve to respect. Scotland was different: the pattern of its great provincial earldoms and lordships was, in many respects, quite distinct from that of England and the evolution of notions of peerage did not march in step with the English story.³⁷ More important, Scottish aristocracy had its own focal point—socially, militarily, and institutionally—in the court and power of the king of Scots. It was a much smaller and much less tightly textured circle of power than that of the English, Marcher, and Anglo-Irish world; but it was at least a separate orbit. Yet the Scottish experience should not lie altogether outwith the scope of this analysis. Recent studies (especially by Keith Stringer) have emphasized that a not inconsiderable number of Scottish lords held estates in England or in Ulster, at least until the breach inaugurated by the Wars of Independence in 1296. The continuum and contrasts in the exercise of lordship across national boundaries—as was vividly shown in Stringer’s analysis of the lordship of Earl David of Huntingdon in the English east Midlands and Garioch (Scotland)—in themselves provide a valuable insight into the varying character of aristocratic power.³⁸ This is, indeed, ultimately the defence for casting our net widely in the British Isles in pursuit of our characterization of aristocratic lordship. There is, of course, no doubt that the quality and quantity of historical evidence for the study of aristocratic power 1272–1422 is infinitely superior for England than for any other part of the British Isles. But it is evidence of a particular kind—mainly ³⁶ ODNB, sub ‘Burgh, Richard de’; ‘Fitzgerald, John fitz Thomas’. ³⁷ Alexander Grant has published a series of fundamental studies of the later medieval Scottish aristocracy, including ‘Earls and Earldoms in Late Medieval Scotland, c.1310–1460’, in Essays Presented to Michael Roberts, ed. J. Bossy and P. Jupp (Belfast, 1976), 24–40; ‘The Development of the Scottish Peerage’, SHR, 57 (1978), 1–27. ³⁸ See in general the excellent maps in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, ed. P. G. B. McNeill and H. L. MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1996). For Stringer’s studies see above, n. 12.

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of lowland, manor-centred lordship, an aristocratic power already substantially fossilized in its forms and, crucially, operating within a framework of strong and intrusive royal control and within complex societies in terms of the distribution of social, jurisdictional, and political power. It is an image of aristocratic lordship which is reflected likewise in other parts, especially anglicized parts, of the lowland British Isles—be it in the lowlands of Glamorgan, Gwent, and Pembroke in Wales, in the rich valleys of south-east Ireland or of Meath, and in tracts of lowland southern and eastern Scotland. But it is an image which needs to be supplemented by considering the character of lordship in upland regions of the British Isles, including much of the north of England, and in areas where non-English societies preserved the forms and organization of native lordship, and where powers of direct royal intervention and control were limited. Not only does this alternative image help to give geographical nuance to our portrait of aristocratic lordship in the British Isles, it also extends greatly our understanding of the range and character of lordship itself. It helps us to recognize what a protean and flexible institution aristocratic lordship was. It is the nature of the power exercised by this elite group which is primarily the subject of this current study. Lordship, particularly that of great lords, was ultimately more than exploitation or power, even if it was most certainly that also. Its legitimacy derived from its claim that it afforded maintenance and protection, ‘good lordship’ as it would be known in later medieval centuries. It was a reminder that there was a mutuality at the heart of lordship and a set of social obligations which both parties were expected to observe. We may cite an example of such mutuality, and of its limits, from the north-east March of Wales. Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), the most powerful aristocratic lord of his day, sent a letter to the men of the lordship of Bromfield and Yale around 1318 promising to be ‘a good lord to them’; but, with his usual gruffness, there was a sting in the tail of his offer: ‘he has sworn that he will have them one way or another.’ The community sized up the threat realistically. They calculated, rightly, that their current lord, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey (d. 1347), was no match for Lancaster in ‘power’; but they also added, revealingly, that they would ‘be ready with their bodies to maintain his honour, if they but have a leader who might defend them’.³⁹ They were fully apprised of the dynamics and duties of lordship and dependence alike. Glanvill in his treatise on the laws of England was eloquent on that score c.1180: ‘What the man owes to the lord because of his homage is also owed by the lord to his man because of lordship, except for deference alone.’⁴⁰ Much of this mutuality may have been ironed out in England, especially lowland England, by the institutionalization and territorialization of ³⁹ Cal. Anc. Pets., no. 8829. ⁴⁰ Glanvill, Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie, ed. G. D. G. Hall (London, 1993), 107 (9.4) [Prof. Davies’s translation].

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the obligations of dependence and by the common wash of royal institutions and claims; but elsewhere in the British Isles the patriarchal, personal, and protection features were still evident and operative. We need to try to capture some of these features as we seek to trace the varying contours and practice of lordship across the face of the late medieval British Isles. We are so used to assessing power and its effectiveness in governmental, bureaucratic, economic, and narrowly political terms that we are in danger of overlooking—or underestimating—the range of attributes and claims which lay at the heart of medieval lordship. These attributes and claims are not itemized in the charters, accounts, and registers of lordship even in the later Middle Ages; but they form the foundations on which the whole edifice of lordship—including ultimately royal lordship—was founded. Three of them in particular may be briefly identified. Lordship was part of the natural order of the universe. The lordship of men on earth corresponded to that of the Lord God. Its legitimacy was not normally open to doubt. English kings, and historians, may have made a great deal of the phrase ‘by the grace of God’ in their formal titles; but since all the powers that be are ultimately ordained by God, that same grace was the source likewise of aristocratic lordship, indeed of all lordship (as theologians such as John Wycliff never tired of declaring). This was not merely a matter of schoolmen’s talk. Rather was it the way in which the proper ordering of the world and society was interpreted. The values of this world were manifested—in a fashion which it is very difficult for the modern mind to grasp—in the exalted position accorded to those who, literally and metaphorically, lorded over it. What great lords expected ultimately was nothing less than worship, precisely what the believer owed to the Lord God. The hugely inflated formulae of address—both of letters issued by them and petitions addressed to them—open a window onto this world. ‘Ryght high and mighty prynce and my right good lord’ is how the earl of Oxford addressed the powerful duke of Norfolk; more modestly Edward Despenser, lord of Glamorgan, was ‘illustrious and magnificent lord’.⁴¹ The habit had also caught on in Scotland, as the letters to the members of the Douglas family amply illustrate: ‘most excellent and most dread lord, James earl of Douglas’ is one example of the fashion.⁴² We can dismiss such hyperbolic formulae as part of the inevitable inflation of language; but we would be wrong to do so. Not only do the formulae reflect the self-image of the aristocrats themselves (or their chancery clerks); they also remind us that the world of lordship was founded on a defiantly hierarchical world order. Lordship was not only a matter of power, land, and income; it was also based on a particular view of the social and political order. ⁴¹ The Paston Letters, 1422–1509, ed. J. Gairdner, 3 vols. (London, 1910), I, 143; ‘Private Indentures’, no. 57. ⁴² For this and other examples see Mort. Reg., II, nos. 109, 129, 180, 220.

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The other side of the coin to ‘worship’ was ‘deference’. The vocabulary of subordination echoes throughout the documents: ‘honour’, ‘reverence’, ‘right’, ‘obedience’, ‘humility’.⁴³ So does the vocabulary of obedience, even at the higher echelons of social dependence. ‘I will do in all and singular’, said an Irish chieftain as he submitted in 1394, ‘that which a good and faithful liegeman ought to do and is bound to do to his natural liege lord’.⁴⁴ Again we can dismiss such phraseology as conventional flattery. But not only does it pervade medieval sources—from feudal charters to manorial formulae and indentures of retinue—it also opens a window on the, often unspoken, set of assumptions which shaped all relationships of dependence. The return on ‘worship’ was ‘good lordship’, ‘bone seigneurie’, ‘la meilleure seigneurie et bienveillaunce’.⁴⁵ And, as the duke of Norfolk said in a famous letter, the goodness or ‘power’ of the lordship he exercised in his ‘schir’ operated ‘at all tymes . . . thowh our persone be not dayly her’.⁴⁶ This was the framework within which all lordship ultimately brought its authority to bear on society. We must not lose sight of this framework as we attend to the particularities and details of aristocratic lordship in action. Finally the term ‘lordship’ reminds us of the open-ended and multifaceted nature of the exercise of power in the Middle Ages. Historians have divided their current analysis of power into compartments—social, political, economic, and so forth; they have drawn a sharp division between so-called ‘public’ and ‘private’ power; they have arranged their scheme of power within clear-cut institutional and governmental frameworks. In so far as the concept of ‘lordship’ has survived this assault, it has been largely reduced to a rent-collecting lordship, stripped of its social, judicial, or political overtones. Such was not medieval lordship. The great F. W. Maitland knew as much: ‘Personal, tenurial, justiciary threads are woven into a web that bewilders us.’⁴⁷ Some of those threads became disentangled in the central–later Middle Ages as kingdoms and states began to appropriate them to themselves. But for the most part ‘lordship’—including nonroyal lordship (so consistently underrated by English medieval historians)—still operated across large swathes of the lives of those who lived—as individuals and communities—under its authority. ‘Medieval terminology’, so asserted Otto Brunner, ‘. . . made no distinction between public and private lordship, but knew only diverse kinds of lordship, rulership, justice and authority’.⁴⁸ ⁴³ For an outstanding exposition of the language of dependence, service, and lordship in the fifteenth century, see R. Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 1. ⁴⁴ E. Curtis, Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5 (Oxford, 1927), 151. ⁴⁵ Such phraseology abounds in the letters and petitions assembled in Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, ed. M. D. Legge (Oxford, 1941). ⁴⁶ Gairdner (ed.), Paston Letters, I, 230. ⁴⁷ F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England, foreword by J. C. Holt (Cambridge, 1987), 339. ⁴⁸ Brunner, Land and Lordship, 202.

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Such a claim—based as it was on German and Austrian evidence—may seem exaggerated; but when we recall that at least the Marcher lords of Wales talked of themselves as ‘royal lords’ enjoying ‘royal lordship’ or when a shrewd Tudor commentator referred to them as the ‘soveraigne governors of their tenantes and people’, we are at least reminded that our danger is to underrate the ambit and manifold activities of medieval lordship.⁴⁹ It is the intention of the chapters which follow to try to capture some of the whole variety of ways in which aristocratic lordship impinged on society in the British Isles in the later Middle Ages.

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For secular lordship in the medieval West, S. Reynolds, ‘Secular Power and Authority in the Middle Ages’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007), 11–22. A study of its ‘golden age’ is D. Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (Harlow, 2005). For lordship in late medieval France (and Burgundy), P. Contamine, La Noblesse au Royaume de France de Philippe le Bel a` Louis XII. Essai de Synth`ese (Paris, 1997). C. Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool, 2000) contains relevant essays by K. Daly, ‘ ‘‘Centre’’, ‘‘Power’’ and ‘‘Periphery’’ in Late Medieval France’, G. Small, ‘Centre and Periphery in Late Medieval France: Tournai, 1384–1477’, and G. Prosser, ‘ ‘‘Decayed Feudalism’’ and ‘‘Royal Clienteles’’: Royal Office and Magnate Service in the Fifteenth Century’. In D. Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002) see G. Small, ‘The Crown and the Provinces in the Fifteenth Century’ and G. Prosser, ‘The Later Medieval French Noblesse’. For a British Isles perspective on lordship, P. Morgan, ‘Ranks of Society’, in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. R. Griffiths (Oxford, 2003) and B. Smith, ‘Lordship in the British Isles c.1320–c.1360: The Ebb Tide of the English Empire?’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages. Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007). For England, S. Walker, Political Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006), especially the essays in part 1, ‘Lordship and Service’; C. Dyer, ‘The Ineffectiveness of Lordship in England, 1200–1400’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes, ed. C. Dyer, P. Coss, and C. Wickham. Past and Present Supplement 2 (Oxford, 2007). For the exercise of lordship on the lands of the bishopric of Winchester, The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English ⁴⁹ Quotations and sources in Davies, Lordship and Society, 217, 222.

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Society, ed. R. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2003). For the lordship of the Campbells, S. Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh, 2006). Important essay collections for Scotland and Ireland are The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin, 2003) and Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008).

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1 The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory The higher aristocracy is not an easily defined group. Peerage lawyers and genealogists have expended a great deal of effort and ingenuity in attempting to formulate, and then to apply, such definitions; but the untidiness and fluidity of human categorizations and the shifting character of status vocabulary more often than not undermine the tidiness of such definitions. Nor, frankly, is this a matter of undue concern for the argument of this book, since its theme is to investigate the character of lordship rather than to try to define the membership of the club of higher aristocrats in a schematic and formulaic manner. Nevertheless it is as well at the outset to have some broad notion of the dimensions of the group. So let us start with some bald figures, none of which is to be regarded as more than indicative. It is simplest to start with England. There had always been in effect, if not institutionally, an elite group within the medieval nobility in England. They might be defined—for those anxious to have definitions—as corresponding to the 180 or so tenants-in-chief or, more plausibly, to those greater magnates who, according to the terms of Magna Carta in 1215, were to receive an individual summons from the king when he wished to discuss raising an aid as a tax. Their eminence would have been readily recognized by contemporaries in terms of titles, wealth, status, political standing, size of following, and increasingly in the acceptance of the notion of ‘peers’. But the membership of this group was neither fixed nor static; it fluctuated, partly in response to the fortunes and misfortunes of families and partly according to whom the king decided to summon to his councils and parliaments. It was during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that the membership of the group came finally to be formally defined and its membership converted into a hereditary, parliamentary peerage. This was a process which K. B. McFarlane famously characterized as one of ‘exclusion, definition and stratification’.¹ The chronology of this process has now been amply outlined in various historical studies; it need not be repeated here. It was part of a wider process of tightening and refining the vocabulary and terminology of the status distinction of ‘gentle’ society which is a feature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So it was that a clear and differentiated tariff of wages was established for military service to the king, or that sumptuary legislation laid down the clothes appropriate to ¹ McFarlane, Nobility, 269.

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each legally defined social group, or that the legislation regulating the giving of liveries (from Richard II’s reign onwards) specifically exempted ‘dukes, earls, barons and bannerets’. These and similar developments indicated that a defined and quasi-hereditary elite had now ensconced itself legally and institutionally at the apex of English society. This may serve as our working definition of the higher aristocracy. How large a group was it? We would not be far wrong were we to indicate that by the early fifteenth century it included at most sixty families. These families—or the senior representative of them—claimed a rank and privileges which set them apart from the rest of gentle society, notably the virtually hereditary right to receive individual summonses to parliament. There was, of course, much that was contingent and accidental in the composition of the group at any given point in time—as families failed (naturally or artificially) and as new members were promoted by royal favour. But the size of the group remained broadly unchanging. Furthermore the income tax returns for 1436 indicate that though this elite was not formally defined in terms of its income, it did nevertheless stand out from the rest of landed society in terms of its wealth.² Within this higher aristocracy—generally termed ‘barons’—there was a further refinement. The cr`eme de la cr`eme of the group flaunted titles—normally earl, but later also duke (from 1337) and marquis (from 1385, but rare)—which further differentiated them and, in a society increasingly obsessed with the etiquette of precedence and ceremony, set them further apart. Their numbers varied: they stood at ten in 1280, at seventeen in 1400.³ So did their wealth vary widely, but it had come to be accepted that a landed income of one thousand marks (£666 13s. 4d.) per annum was a minimum territorial qualification for an earl. This comital–ducal group—the premier league of the higher aristocracy, as it were—is of particular interest to us since it is its documentary evidence (or such of it as survives) which underpins the analysis of lords and lordship in this book. When we turn to Scotland and English Ireland in search of a higher aristocracy, we find ourselves in even more difficulties, not least because of the inadequacies of the surviving evidence. It is not surprising that in certain directions the evolution of the Scottish higher aristocracy seemed to echo developments in England. After all, the links between the English and Scottish royal courts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were often close; and many of the premier Scottish comital families were of Anglo-Norman stock (Bruce, Stewart, and Comyn among them) and often continued to retain territorial and other interests in England. Even as late as 1398 the Scots could borrow a leaf from recent English practice by adopting the title of ‘duke’ for their greatest noblemen. But ² H. L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in England in 1436’, EHR, 49 (1934), 607–39; T. B. Pugh and C. D. Ross, ‘The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436’, BIHR, 26 (1953), 1–28. ³ See the basic list in the Appendix to this chapter.

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these similarities and imitations should not mislead us. There were substantial and substantive differences between late medieval England and Scotland both in the chronology and in the terminology of their higher aristocracies. Thus the terms ‘barons’ and ‘free barony’ had very different connotations in Scotland from those of English usage, and no Scottish peerage can be said to have appeared until the fifteenth century. Likewise in terms of wealth and the nature of their lordship, the differences between the higher Scottish aristocracy and their English counterparts were often more striking than the similarities. These differences are more than surface variations; they reflect profound differences in the character and distribution of aristocratic (as indeed of royal) power as between Scotland and England.⁴ None of this can be gainsaid; yet a higher aristocracy is clearly identifiable in Scotland. It numbered about fifty; in other words it was considerably larger in relation to the overall size of the population than was the English parliamentary peerage. These were the men who really counted, the heavyweights, in Scottish political society. Forty-eight of them were named in the declaration of Arbroath in 1320; fifty-six did personal homage to King Robert II at his coronation in 1371. As in England, a group of earldoms stood at the head of this elite community. In the 1280s (as in 1329 at the end of Robert I’s reign) they numbered thirteen—five (Angus, Buchan, Carrick, Menteith, Sutherland) in the hands of families of continental origins but now fully Scotticized (Umfraville, Comyn, Bruce, Stewart, and the descendants of Freskin the Fleming); the remaining eight (Atholl, Dunbar, Caithness, Fife, Lennox, Mar, Ross, and Strathearn) held by native families often, as at Strathearn, with all the powers and traditions of Celtic mormaorship.⁵ In addition to earldoms, Scotland had a category of aristocratic power-bases unknown to English terminology or historiography, the ‘provincial lordships’. There were around twenty of them at the beginning of our period.⁶ They were often as extensive territorially and jurisdictionally as some of the earldoms but lacked the title; they were broadly coextensive with the historic provinces or regions of the kingdom. Between them the earldoms and the ‘provincial lordships’ covered close on two-thirds of the surface area of modern Scotland. This suggests that the configuration of power, specifically of aristocratic lordship, was, or could be, very different from that familiar from much of the English evidence. It is a point to which we will need to return. What of English Ireland? Viewed from one angle—that of the English government in Westminster and Dublin—English Ireland mimicked the institutions, practices, and laws of England to a remarkable degree. Aristocratic lordship in Ireland therefore had to a considerable extent to operate within this framework. ⁴ See in general Duncan, Scotland ; A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469 (Edinburgh, 1984). ⁵ Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 122; G. W. S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford, 1980), 157–8. ⁶ McNeill and MacQueen (eds.), Atlas of Scottish History, 184–6, 206.

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But such a statement is at best a half-truth. Aristocratic lordship in English Ireland was bound to be different from that experienced in contemporary England for at least three reasons. First, English Ireland was a land of extensive aristocratic liberties where lordship could operate in all its amplitude. As Robin Frame has pointed out, ‘something over half the territorial extent of English Ireland was . . . outside the area of shire ground.’ Secondly, much of Ireland was, in the contemporary phrase, ‘a land of war’, not necessarily recurrently but sufficiently menacingly to give a distinctly military flavour to any lordship which intended to operate at all effectively there. Thirdly, and related to this, English-controlled Ireland—itself a shifting and unstable category—was a collection of localized and hybrid societies where the only effective lordship was one which worked with the grain of local situations and practices. The world of the resident lords of most of English Ireland was a very far cry indeed from that of the great magnates of midland and southern England.⁷ Can we hazard a guess as to the number of these English lords in Ireland whom we might venture to designate as ‘higher aristocrats’? A figure of twenty/thirty would probably err on the high side. A series of important royal commands to the most important Anglo-Irish lords issued 1322–37 ranged in number from thirteen in 1331 to twenty-eight in 1335; these seem to identify those who might be regarded as the leaders of the English community in Ireland.⁸ These figures are paralleled by those for men known to have been summoned to the Irish parliament: twenty-seven in 1333, twenty-eight in 1378, but falling steadily to no more than twelve at the end of the Middle Ages.⁹ The numbers, in other words, were modest as compared with those for England and Scotland; and no defined conception of peerage had yet been established. The numbers of Anglo-Irish earldoms (as opposed to English earldoms such as Gloucester, Norfolk, or later March which held large estates in Ireland) was also very modest: only one (the de Burgh earldom of Ulster) in 1280 rising to four in 1380 (the Geraldine earldoms of Desmond and Kildare, the Butler earldom of Ormond, and the earldom of Ulster now in the hands of the Mortimer earls of March). We can conclude from this sketchy and tentative review that there was in England, Scotland, and English Ireland a group of greater magnates whom we—and indeed contemporaries—would have recognized as a higher aristocracy. Its membership was by no means unambiguously defined; it was in England with its concept of a quasi-hereditary parliamentary peerage, meeting apart from the commons, that this process had gone farthest. Within this higher aristocracy, the title of earl (to which duke and marquis were later, though sparingly, added) created a further demarcation in terms of status and precedence. It cannot be denied that there were wide variations in wealth and standing within this group ⁷ Frame, Ireland and Britain, passim. ⁸ Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 16–18. ⁹ H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1952), 130–4.

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(between, say, an immensely rich royal duke such as John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) and Fulk Fitzwarin (d. 1374) whose landed fortunes were relatively modest and who served in the military retinue of Gaunt); nor is it in doubt that there was an overlap, in income and status, between some of the lesser parliamentary barons and some of the knights of the shire. Nevertheless there is every reason to characterize this higher aristocracy as the ruling elite in England, Scotland, and English Ireland in our period, with the earldoms (normally twenty-five/thirty for all three areas) as a further top tier within this elite. It is this group in particular which we will have within our historical sights. The overall size and importance of the group did not alter radically within our period, 1272–1422. But such apparent continuity and stability conceals the rapid turnover in the composition of the group from one generation to the next. Political miscalculation and forfeiture have often been identified as the major reason for such a turnover. Occasional bloodlettings (such as those of the reigns of Edward II and Richard II in England) could certainly leave their mark; but what is remarkable is the way that so many noble families, laid low in one generation, could recover their fortunes and standing in the next. Arundel, Despenser, Mortimer are instances which immediately spring to mind in England. It is in other directions in particular that we should look for the explanation for the rapid turnover in the ranks of the higher aristocracy. The primary reasons, it is now acknowledged, were the failure of families in the direct male line and the transfer of their estates and often their titles either to collaterals or, through marriage, to other families. McFarlane’s famous statistic that on average across the two centuries 1300–1500 a quarter of noble families became extinct in the direct male line (according to his definition of extinction) every twenty-five years is broadly confirmed by similar statistics for Scotland.¹⁰ Thus in England the following comital families failed in the direct legitimate male line of the body (in chronological order) in the fourteenth century: Edmund of Cornwall 1300, Bigod 1306, Lacy 1311, Clare 1314, Valence 1324, Warenne 1347, Bohun 1361, Lancaster 1361, Bohun (of Northampton) 1373, Ufford 1382, Hastings 1389. Only two families—Vere and Beauchamp—lasted the century, with two others (Courtenay and Fitzalan) as runners-up. Such a drastic and regular thinning out of the ranks of the nobility—a phenomenon which seems to have been common to ‘gentle’ (and no doubt peasant) society generally and one of which contemporaries were all too painfully and morbidly aware—had to be counterbalanced by regular recruitment of ‘new’ men to take their place. Recruitment was generally a matter of service (military, political, diplomatic) and/or royal reward. So it was that Edward III, ¹⁰ McFarlane, Nobility, 146. For a critique and revised figures see the key contribution by S. J. Payling ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’, Econ. HR, 45 (1992), 51–73. For Scottish figures see the articles by Alexander Grant cited above, p. 14.

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in a spectacular act of generosity, rewarded six of the men who had helped him to overthrow Roger Mortimer and install his own regime by promoting them all to be earls on the same day in March 1337. David II of Scotland likewise signalled his indebtedness and that of his father to the devotion and prowess of the Douglas family by conferring the new title of earl of Douglas on William Douglas in 1358. Kings were not usually over-lavish in the bestowal of new comital titles: the Scottish kings only created two entirely new earldoms (Douglas and Crawford) during the whole of the fourteenth century; in England only twenty-four new earldoms (including the six created by Edward III in 1337) were created outside the immediate royal family between 1307 and 1397. The phrase ‘outside the immediate royal family’ is significant, since it identifies the other important source of recruitment of new individuals, and thereby families, into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was a pool of recruits where kings showed little restraint. All five of the surviving sons of Edward III were promoted to comital and eventually ducal rank (or indeed to that of prince in the case of Edward); and secured, often by royally provided and well-calculated marriages, a territorial endowment commensurate with their status. Even more remarkable was what happened in Scotland where the profile of the higher aristocracy was transformed and ‘stewartized’ during the second half of the fourteenth century.¹¹ By 1377 seven out of sixteen Scottish earldoms were in the hands of the king or his sons, and through marriage many of the other earls were related to him. It is not the least of the reasons why aristocratic power and royal power are so inextricably intertwined in both countries. The dominance of the higher aristocracy remained unchallenged throughout our period; but its composition changed, occasionally dramatically, from generation to generation, indeed decade to decade. Beyond this process of perpetual flux there are two other long-term changes within the ranks of this top nobility which we should note at this juncture. The first was a tendency for comital titles and estates to be aggregated into the hands of fewer major families generally as a consequence (intended or not) of the marriage of heiresses. Thus Thomas earl of Lancaster (d. 1322) held the earldoms of Lancaster and Leicester by inheritance, and those of Lincoln and Salisbury iure uxoris through his (estranged) wife, Alice, daughter of the last Lacy earl of Lincoln (d. 1311). Likewise when Humphrey de Bohun died in 1373 he held the earldom of Northampton (created in 1337) from his father and the much older earldoms of Hereford and Essex as the heir of his unmarried uncle. Scotland could produce many similar instances though few perhaps to match the clutch of one dukedom (Albany) and three earldoms (Atholl, Fife, and Menteith) which Robert Stewart (d. 1420) had cornered at different stages in his life. These accumulations of title explain why the number of earls is often considerably less than the number of earldoms; it also illustrates the universal truth that to those who have much, more is often given. ¹¹ R. Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), 187, 232.

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The second long-term change has, perhaps, been less noticed and is of particular significance for the theme of this book. In 1272 it was not at all unusual for some major comital families to own and exploit rich lordships in England, the March of Wales, and Ireland. Likewise a considerable number of major Scottish families held estates and other appurtenances in England; the large east midlands earldom of Huntingdon, centred on Fotheringay, held by members of the Scottish royal family, was only the most outstanding example. The significance of these pan-British connections in the ranks of the higher aristocracy is obvious. They were the basis of territorial, social, cultural, economic, and marital links across the face of the British Isles, at least in the lowlands. They encouraged the transfer of personnel, institutions, and laws from one part of the British Isles to another, overwhelmingly from lowland England to the northern and western outliers. These bonds made for an increasing community of interests and habits within higher aristocratic society throughout the British Isles. Thus Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester (d. 1295) was one of the premier earls of England and son-in-law of Edward; but the sphere of his travels and interests also took him to Glamorgan in Wales and Kilkenny and Dublin in Ireland. Had these pan-British links and connections been fostered and developed it is not inconceivable that a single British higher aristocracy might eventually have emerged. But it was not to be. The door on such a prospect was in effect slammed shut in the late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries, specifically between 1296 and 1333. In the former year the onset of the Scottish Wars of Independence inaugurated a prolonged period of bitter tension between England and Scotland and with it the severance of any remaining bonds and connections between the two higher aristocracies. In 1333 the last de Burgh earl of Ulster was murdered. Of itself the repercussions of his death were far-reaching, but more profoundly it manifested and confirmed the growing gulf between the ‘resident lords’ (as they have been called) of Ireland (notably the earls of Desmond, Kildare, and Ormond) and their absentee England-based colleagues. The bonds which had tied the aristocratic communities of England and English Ireland became increasingly attenuated and frayed, even if they did not cease to exist altogether. It is little wonder that Goddard Orpen chose to conclude his great Ireland under the Normans (1911–20) in 1333. Orpen may have been unduly optimistic in his view of the pax Normanica which English rule and settlement had brought to Ireland; but he was surely correct to suggest that after 1333 English Ireland was no longer normally part of the mental map, physical circuit, and political ambitions of the higher aristocracy of England. The aristocracies of England and English Ireland would henceforth largely go their own ways. There was to be no single British Isles aristocracy. The only part of the British Isles beyond England which remained firmly part of the orbit of the English higher aristocracy was the March of Wales. The March of Wales, indeed, occupies a paradoxical position in the study of aristocratic lordship in the British Isles in our period. At any given point in the

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thirteenth or fourteenth centuries a good proportion of English earls held one or more Marcher lordships in Wales (five out of ten in 1280; nine out of seventeen in 1380). There they exercised more ample and unfettered powers of lordship than anywhere else in Britain (including Ireland). It is therefore a particularly significant region for the study of the character and potential of aristocratic power. But there was no Marcher higher aristocracy as such. Rather was there an English aristocracy which exercised lordship, very ample lordship, in the March of Wales as an annex to its English power base. So far we have tried to identify the group which is at the heart of this study, the higher aristocracy (especially earls and dukes) of England, Scotland, and English Ireland. From one angle it was, as we have seen, a group in constant flux as families failed, or were extinguished, in the male line and new members were recruited through the twin routes of service and royal favour. Such a rapid turnover notwithstanding, one of the obsessive concerns of the group centred on its identity and continuity through time. Heritage and inheritance were key concepts in its vocabulary; so was concern about the honour of the family and an emphasis on the depth and continuity of the family ‘name’. These were the warrantors of the antiquity and status of the family: they must be upheld and defended at all costs. The issue was particularly vexatious for families which faced the prospect of extinction in the direct, legitimate male line. No one spent more sleepless nights over many years worrying about the problem than John de Warenne, earl of Surrey (d. 1347). He was one of the few leading magnates of his day who could genuinely show that he was descended from one of the companions of the Conqueror. The antiquity and continuity of his family was beyond reproach. It derived its name from Varenne near Dieppe; it had held its earldom (alternatively termed Warenne or Surrey) since 1088; John himself was the eighth descendant of the family to carry the title. John’s career as earl (1306–47) was remarkably long; to have survived the turmoil of Edward II’s reign was no mean achievement. But in every other respect Earl John’s career was a disappointment, indeed a family disaster. He was estranged from his wife, Joan of Bar (granddaughter of Edward I) at an early date; but lacked the political clout to secure a divorce and the right to remarry. He had mistresses aplenty and fathered children by them. But he lacked a legitimate heir of his body and there can be no doubt that his nephew and putative heir, the powerful Richard Fitz Alan earl of Arundel (d. 1376), had successfully lobbied the king to ensure that no deal was done to his (Richard’s) disadvantage. But Earl John even in old age had not abandoned all hope of salvaging what was to him the most important ambition of his life: the continuation, as he put it, of ‘the name, honour and arms of Warenne’. So in his sixtieth year he struck a desperate bargain with Edward III and one which must have appealed almost as much to the king as to the earl. Should the old earl beget an heir by his wife, Isabel Holland—she was in fact his mistress but the

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earl still fondly believed that he might secure a divorce, in spite of his repeated failures on that quest in the past—then this heir should marry a member of the royal family (John of Gaunt or Edmund of Langley, young as they were, were possibilities on the male side), taking with him/her the Warenne lands (or such as remained) and, crucially, ‘the name and arms of Warenne’. Should the ultimate catastrophe occur—namely that the earl should die without a legitimate heir of his body—then Edward III should have all the earl’s lands in Wales, Surrey, and Sussex (by then the remaining bulk of the Warenne estates) to be granted to one of the king’s sons and his heirs provided ‘the name, honour and arms of Warenne’ were retained. Many considerations no doubt pressed in on the earl as he made this desperate offer—making an honest woman of his long-time mistress and securing a royal match for his offspring (a temptation which has enticed the aristocracy down the centuries). But overriding these considerations was an anxiety which his fellow magnates (most of whom seem to have had a low view of the earl of Surrey) shared and appreciated—that of perpetuating the name and arms of the ancient family. This was a deep-seated instinct in all families.¹² John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d. 1375) shared that instinct to the full. It was made all the more pressing in his case since he was still in 1372 (aged twenty-five) without an heir of his body and was about to set out on what indeed proved to be a militarily hazardous expedition. He clearly discussed his plans with Edward III, and, though the king was ageing, he struck a shrewd bargain with the earl, as he had done with the earl of Surrey in 1346. As the price of sanctioning the arrangements which Hastings made, Edward III secured the reversion of the county of Pembroke and the lordships of Tenby, Cilgerran, and Ystlwyf—in other words a very substantial slice of south-west Wales—in the event of the failure of the male Hastings line. If Hastings died without issue, all his other lands were to be offered to his cousin, Sir William Beauchamp (the son of Hastings’s maternal aunt), on condition that ‘he shall bear the whole arms of the said earl’ and that he should do his best to persuade the king to allow him and his heirs to carry the title of ‘earl of Pembroke’. Should Beauchamp decline these conditions then the lands were to revert to another of Hastings’s friends who was not even a kinsman, Sir William Clinton. In other words Hastings was willing to undo the claims of the heir general (Reginald, Lord Grey of Ruthin) and to favour a maternal cousin and a friend in pursuit of his overriding family ambition—to protect the integrity of the family’s coat of arms and, if at all possible, its comital title.¹³ Dying without surviving male heir of the body was the nightmare which haunted gentle society generally. That is most graphically illustrated in the ¹² The biography in E. R. Fairbank, ‘The Last Earl of Warenne and Surrey’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 19 (1907), 193–266, is still serviceable. ¹³ R. I. Jack, ‘Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance’, BIHR, 38 (1965), 1–19.

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window (no longer extant) which Sir Thomas Erpingham had constructed in the church of the Austin Friars at Norwich in 1419 ‘in remembrance of all the lords (seigneurs), barons, bannerets and knights who had died without male issue in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk since the coronation of the noble Edward the Third’. His tally ran to eighty-seven families.¹⁴ Taking out an insurance policy against the consequence of that failure was high on any nobleman’s agenda. Ralph Basset of Drayton (d. 1390) was highly aware of that. He had had a long and distinguished career: a fine and profitable record in the wars in France since 1356; two marriages into two of England’s comital families; and regular individual summonses to parliament 1357–89. But heirs of his body he had none. So in his will he transferred his lands successively to four men in tail male with the proviso in each case that each of them should carry the surname of Basset and his arms.¹⁵ The family and its arms were to survive regardless of the failure of direct male heirs of the body. Nor was this a peculiarly English phenomenon. When the powerful James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith, married his second daughter to John Hamilton in 1388 he stipulated that if his daughter, through the death of her brothers, became his heir then she and her husband would be bound to ‘accept and enjoy the surname of Douglas’ and the arms of James Douglas.¹⁶ Many families were willing to pay such a price. The example of one baronial family will serve. Already in 1323, on the death of his own son and heir, Robert Fitz Pain had anticipated that he might not beget another male heir of his body. And so it turned out to be, even though he survived for another thirty years or so. When he eventually died in 1354 the reversionary interest which he had agreed in 1323 came into effect. His inheritance in Somerset and Dorset was acquired by his nephew, Robert son of Richard Grey of Codnor and of Joan Fitz Pain. Robert Grey promptly changed his name to Robert Fitz Pain, thereby publicly acknowledging the source of his good fortune in his new surname. He was certainly not unique in this respect. It was a good bargain: he had secured an inheritance and his uncle could rest assured that the family name had survived after all.¹⁷ Individual cases such as those of Warenne, Hastings, Basset, and Fitz Pain do not necessarily constitute a general rule; but they do lay bare the anxieties of magnate families and the devices they adopted to deal with them. The solution adopted by Ralph Basset is particularly interesting, since the descent of his estates, surname, and arms to four designated heirs in turn was restricted to them and their heirs in tail male. Succession in tail male—a legal device to which we will return later—had many aspects to it; but primary among them was an anxiety to keep the family inheritance intact and with it the family name, honour, and arms in the male line. It sought to perpetuate the family’s status and continuity through time. ¹⁴ McFarlane, Nobility, 145–6. ¹⁶ Mort. Reg., II, nos. 184, 196.

¹⁵ GEC sub nomine; CIPM, XXI, no. 63. ¹⁷ GEC sub nomine; CIPM, X, nos. 175, 292.

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This sense of identity through time was likewise manifested in visual and tactile ways. Family mementoes and heirlooms were physical examples of the depth of family memory. Two examples from the annals of the Mortimer family spring to mind. Among the effects of Roger Mortimer at his execution in 1330 was ‘one brass horn which, with a certain falchion (a broad curved sword with a convex edge) which is, it is said, the charter of the land of Wigmore’.¹⁸ Roger had only very recently been created earl of March; but his family could indeed claim that it had held ‘the land of Wigmore’ since the morrow of the Norman conquest. The horn was quite likely ‘the great golden horn’ which his great-grandson, Edmund Mortimer earl of March (d. 1381), bequeathed to his son and heir in his will, along with another family heirloom, ‘our sword decorated with gold which belonged to good king Edward’.¹⁹ Similarly Lord Poynings left his heir ‘a ruby ring which is the charter of my inheritance of Poynings’.²⁰ Not all such heirlooms were necessarily title deeds to property or status, but they often were redolent of a family’s strong sense of history and of its continuity through time. So it was that the earl of Warwick (d. 1369) left to his son ‘the coat of mail belonging to the famous Guy of Warwick’ or that the earl of Arundel (d. 1376) bequeathed to his son and heir his best coronet with a reminder that it should be transferred thereafter from heir to heir, lords of Arundel.²¹ Nothing affirmed gentle society’s identity and lineage more publicly than the heraldic emblems which it displayed as signs of its power, prestige, and apartness. The period 1250–1400 has a good claim to be regarded as the decisive period in the making of the English heraldic tradition and in establishing heraldic coats of arms as the signifier par excellence of noble identity and lineage.²² The young nobleman was now expected to be able to read and distinguish between various heraldic representations. It was, along with the technical jargon of hunting, what John of Salisbury had very appropriately termed ‘the scholarship of the aristocracy’. Nothing demarcates an elite more clearly than its mastery of a private technical vocabulary. Soon Rolls of Arms, the gazetteers of the new fashionable cult of heraldry, were in preparation: the earliest surviving English example dates from the mid thirteenth century; at least eighteen are still extant from the reign of Edward I. Heralds, the high priests of heraldic lore, came into their own, especially at tournaments and other high feasts of the aristocratic and chivalric year. By the fourteenth century all the leading aristocratic families had their own highly rewarded heralds—Mortimer,²³ Beauchamp, and Mowbray among them. ¹⁸ For an example of a falchion as a title-deed see Age of Chivalry, no. 165. ¹⁹ Nichols, Wills, 112. ²⁰ Test. Vet., 73. ²¹ W. Dugdale, The Baronage of England, 2 vols.(London, 1675–6), I, 233. For the will of Richard Fitzalan (d.1376), I have made use of a full transcript, provided to me by Michael Burtscher, from Lambeth Palace Library, Archbishop Sudbury’s Register, f.92v–f.94v. ²² See, most recently, Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge, 2003) and Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman. ²³ Mortimer herald: CPR 1381–5, 156; BL Egerton Charters 8734.

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John of Gaunt regularly gave gifts to his own and to visiting heralds, especially when they attended the jousts arranged by him.²⁴ Armorial bearings became increasingly elaborate as the fourteenth century progressed. In particular the practice of quartering provided an opportunity for displaying alliances by marriage and dependence. Heraldic emblems were now the visual means which declared immediately and proudly to the world the status, identity, interrelatedness, and antiquity of noble families. They swamped aristocratic England in a rash of heraldic blazons—not only on shields and seals but on almost every item of property—domestic plate, ecclesiastical vestments, liturgical vessels, caskets and chests, tiled pavements, furniture, glass windows, and even the most prized illuminated books. No elite has more obsessively and profusely paraded the hereditary badges of its identity. So it was, to quote a few examples, that the countess of Pembroke commissioned two tapestries adorned with her husband’s arms (Valence); or that Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381) bequeathed in his will ‘a great bed of black satin embroidered with white lions with escutcheons of the arms of Mortimer and Ulster’ (his paternal and maternal forbears); or that the earl of Norfolk in 1415 commissioned the Mowbray arms to be painted on the seven windows of the hall of his London house and the hatchment of his arms to be added to those of other lords of England in the hall of the bishop of Durham.²⁵ In Scotland in a similar fashion the house of Douglas celebrated its remarkable rise to pre-eminence in aristocratic society by making great play of the role of its effective founder, Sir James Douglas, who had died on crusade in Spain carrying King Robert I’s heart. ‘The Bludy Heart’ was now the proud identifying badge of the family. It was flaunted on their standard in battle, stamped on their wooden bowls, and carved on their buildings and religious foundations.²⁶ Such arms and emblems declared the family’s identity and upheld its honour. To challenge the authenticity and the exclusivity of a family’s coat of arms was, therefore, to impugn its honour in the most fundamental fashion. It could lead to prolonged litigation in the Court of Chivalry, of which the famous and bitter Scrope–Grosvenor dispute of the 1380s is the classic and best-documented instance. Alongside heraldic devices we should mention badges and collars, which became an increasingly common means of expressing aristocratic (and royal) associations of service and lordship from the mid fourteenth century. The significance of badges and collars—such as the ragged staff of the Beauchamps, the SS collar of the house of Lancaster (from Gaunt’s time), or the heraldic knot of the Staffords—from our point of view is that they hugely extended ²⁴ For example Reg. JG, II, nos. 327, 556 (p. 180), 803 (p. 259). ²⁵ For Mary of St Pol’s will see H. Jenkinson, ‘Mary de Sancto Paulo, Foundress of Pembroke College, Cambridge’, Archaeologia, 66 (1914), 401–46; the will of Edmund Mortimer as cited above n. 19; *Berkeley Muniments (account of Receiver General 1414–15). ²⁶ Brown, Black Douglases, 122–5; idem, ‘ ‘‘Rejoice to hear of Douglas’’: The House of Douglas and the Presentation of Magnate Power in Late Medieval Scotland’, SHR, 76 (1997), 161–84.

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the opportunities for an aristocratic family to display the extent of its circle of power and affinity. The distribution of livery (often in the family’s colours) was yet another way in which the aristocracy could manifest visually its capacity to command dependence, particularly from members of gentle society. It was part of the semiotics of aristocratic power and a vivid display of the depth of dependence and support it could command. Even the earl of Devon, one of the lesser English earls, listed at least 130 persons—ranging from seven knights to four minstrels and six pages—who were in receipt of his livery in 1384–5.²⁷ So aristocratic lordship displayed itself and its solidarity in the person and dress of its dependants. Paradoxically, the outcry against badges and liveries in the later fourteenth century only served to emphasize that such a display of power and dependence was perfectly acceptable among the higher aristocracy (defined in the statute of 1390 as dukes, earls, barons, and bannerets) but prohibited to those (knights and others) below this rank. This was a further acknowledgement—alongside the definition of a quasi-hereditary parliamentary peerage in England—that the higher aristocracy stood clearly apart from, and above, the rest of ‘gentle’ society. A great lord must have his ‘worship’; distributing his livery, badge, and collar was a necessary part of cultivating such ‘worship’. For such a status-conscious elite, cultivating its past was a matter of necessity as well as of sentiment and piety. The past, after all, was the validating charter of its identity and power. It could well be a legendary past; but in a society besotted with Arthurian tales, classical romances, and feudal epics that was no deterrent. The Beauchamp family provides an instructive example. It milked the stories about its legendary founder—Earl Guy of Warwick, the man who was claimed to have saved England from the Danes—to maximum effect.²⁸ His image slaying a dragon was vividly represented on the famous Beauchamp mazer; a tower named after him was constructed in Warwick castle in 1394; and a tapestry illustrating the legend was hung in the castle itself.²⁹ The Beauchamps were singularly fortunate in the fifteenth century in that they were able to supplement the legends of the mythical Earl Guy by the prowess of a contemporary earl, the great Earl Richard of Warwick (d. 1439). His cult was as vigorously promoted as that of his predecessor—be it in his magnificent effigy (the most striking surviving monument to an English earl) in the Beauchamp chapel in the collegiate church at Warwick, or in the pictorial biography of his ‘noble actes’ in the fifty-three pen-and-ink drawings of The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, or in the illustrated ²⁷ M. Cherry, ‘The Courtney Earls of Devon: the Formation and Disintegration of a Late Medieval Aristocratic Affinity’, Southern History, 1 (1979), 71–97. ²⁸ E. Mason, ‘Legends of the Beauchamps’ Ancestors: The Use of Baronial Propaganda in Medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History, 10 (1984), 25–40. ²⁹ Age of Chivalry, no. 155; Test. Vet., I, 52–4, 79–80, 153–5; R. K. Morris, ‘The Architecture of the Earls of Warwick in the Fourteenth Century’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), 161–74.

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roll-chronicles (one in Latin, the other in English) which John Rous prepared to recount the history and the achievements of the family from its legendary beginnings onwards.³⁰ John Rous was a chantry priest. That helps to identify a group or institution which had a vested interest in cultivating and perpetuating the historical memory of noble families—the churches and monasteries which had been endowed by them. Their own standing and endowment were grounded in past noble benefactions and their prospects for the future were likewise tied to the generosity of the same families or their descendants. So it was that they cultivated the history of those families in their annals, histories, and cartularies. Tewkesbury abbey was even more innovative. In the 1340s it commissioned representations of the aristocratic patrons of the abbey to be placed in the two westernmost windows of the choir clerestory. Starting with Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) they outlined the descent of the lords of the honour of Tewkesbury down to Eleanor de Clare (d. 1337) and her two husbands.³¹ It was a visual title-deed, as it were, and no doubt pleasing to abbey and lord alike. Within churches and monasteries, the continuity of noble families through time was further demonstrated in the serried ranks of family tombs such as the magnificent series of Fitzalan tombs at Arundel. Even more impressive—though they have not survived—were the Mortimer tombs at Wigmore abbey. Hugh Mortimer (d. 1185) had founded the abbey in 1179 and clearly intended it to be a family mausoleum. He was not to be disappointed in that respect. Every head of the Mortimer family thereafter until 1398 was laid to rest in the abbey and so were several other members of the family. We know the details of the Mortimer burials because they are carefully recorded in what is perhaps the most remarkable fourteenth-century aristocratic chronicle, the account of the Mortimer family from the Norman conquest embedded in the Wigmore abbey chronicle. The chronicle (University of Chicago MS. 224) is a composite volume and has not yet received the detailed analysis it deserves.³² Its provenance is immediately revealed in its opening Anglo-Norman account of the early, tumultuous years of Wigmore abbey. But its focus was far from being exclusively local. It also contains a potted historical topography of Britain ³⁰ Gothic: Art for England, 1400–1547, ed. R. Marks and P. Williamson (London, 2003), nos. 85, 87, 96. ³¹ Age of Chivalry, no. 742. ³² My comments on the Wigmore chronicle are based on a microfilm copy of the Chicago MS. in the Bodleian Library. For a detailed, though not fully accurate, description of the ms., see M. E. Griffin, ‘A Wigmore Manuscript at the University of Chicago’, National Library of Wales Journal, 7 (1951–2), 316–25. The Anglo-Norman account of the foundation of the abbey is published in J. Dickinson and P. T. Ricketts, ‘The Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey’, Transactions of the Woolhope Field Club, 39 (1969), 413–46. The Brut section of the chronicle has never been published. The Mortimer chronicle is published in extenso in Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, i, 348–55; but this edition has some puzzling omissions and cannot begin to convey the visual character of the chronicle and its genealogies.

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based on the Brut chronicle, but also displaying an unusual knowledge of, and interest in, the borderlands and dynasties of central Wales, the focus of so much of the military prowess and territorial claims of the Mortimer family. But what is of particular interest for the current argument are the twelve folios devoted to the history of the Mortimers. This takes the form of heraldic genealogy of the family displayed in the arms of the head of the family and those of each of their wives. The genealogy is accompanied by a historical narrative concentrating on the prowess of members of the family, their marital alliances, their benefactions to the abbey and a remarkably fulsome and detailed characterization of Earl Edmund (d. 1381) and his son Earl Roger (d. 1398). In spite of some inaccuracies and confusions, the account is impressive both in its attempt to construct a coherent history of the family and, above all, in its glimpses of detailed local knowledge—such as the precise account of the landed endowment which Earl Roger (d. 1330) gave to his daughter Matilda on her marriage to John Charlton or the description of Earl Edmund (d. 1381) transporting timber from his lordship of Usk in south-east Wales to build a fortified bridge across the river Bann at Coleraine in the Mortimer lordship of Ulster. The Mortimer chronicle was almost certainly written in the late fourteenth century, though with periodic additions (including an account of the battle of Shrewsbury, 1403) thereafter. A reference to Earl Roger (d. 1398) as dominus meus suggests as much; so does the intimate knowledge of his career and that of his father. Family continuity through time was its theme; but it had also a more ambitious, even sinister agenda—to proclaim the genealogical pretensions of the Mortimer family to be descended from the royal dynasties of England and Wales and even to locate such pretensions in the fantasy world of the Brut legend. It is easy to appreciate how such notions could have been nourished in the family’s monastery at Wigmore and among the Mortimer clerical adherents. Adam Usk—born in a Mortimer lordship, educated at the expense of Earl Edmund, a man steeped in Welsh genealogical lore and prophecy and a character of floating political loyalties—is a possible candidate.³³ Be that as it may, what the Mortimer chronicle shows—especially when placed side by side with the magnificent Mortimer cartulary of the same period³⁴—is how assiduously noble families, and their clerical and monastic supporters, cultivated their histories. It was an affirmation of the antiquity and continuity of their status. The Mortimer family was not alone in this respect; indeed one suspects that it was the norm, even if the celebration of a family’s past achievements took a variety of forms. When the Douglas family wanted to celebrate the remarkable dominance it had come to enjoy in fifteenth-century Scotland, it steered clear of a prosaic Latin chronicle. Instead the Buke of the Howlat (the book of the owl) was a long poetic allegory; but its central message was a sustained paean of praise for the Douglas ³³ For Adam Usk see Adam Usk, Chronicle.

³⁴ See below p. 38.

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family in the form of a celebration of its prowess, its status, its heraldic arms, its loyalty to the crown, and its title to its lands.³⁵ Genealogies, chronicles, and allegorical poems served to express and confirm the depth of the aristocracy’s historical memory; archives and muniments were the records of its title to land and wealth and of its exploitative management of that wealth. Surviving aristocratic records are disappointing and misleading in this respect. They only represent a minute tithe of what once existed. Many of them survive only as the result of political accident—be it the forfeiture of a family (which, for example, brought huge caches of documents and lists of archives from the houses of Lancaster and Mortimer into the exchequer in 1322) or its accession to the throne (as happened to the house of Lancaster in 1398). Aristocratic houses doubtless kept copies of their title deeds to lands and franchises from the twelfth century; but it was from about the mid thirteenth century that their record-keeping activities began to become more systematic.³⁶ It is from about that period that evidence begins to survive of annual household and financial accounts (both central and manorial), court rolls and, later, auditorial reports and valors. By the fourteenth century major figures such as the Black Prince and John of Gaunt were keeping registers of all their official correspondence, as the English chancery had done since 1200.³⁷ There is no reason to believe that they were unique in this respect. Some of the records so produced might only be kept for a few years, for purposes of audit and cross-referencing. Some were stored locally; others were sent to a central treasury, either automatically or on request. Thus in 1372 a command was issued that all the accounts of John of Gaunt’s receivers-general, treasurers of war, and treasurers of the household and all other officers should be deposited in the treasury at the Savoy (where they were to be destroyed during the Great Revolt of 1381).³⁸ But equally, much more local records could be called in for scrutiny: thus in 1384 the court rolls of the Mortimer lordship of Radnor were to be taken to the treasury (in effect the muniment room) at Ludlow.³⁹ Much of this record-depositing was no doubt part of the routine process of the audit and interrogation of officials, local and central. Thus when the muniments of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore (among other Contrariants) were deposited in the Tower of London in 1322 they included ‘in an old pouch of canvas, the rolls of the bailiffs and reeves of Roger for various manors, rolls of household expense of said Roger, and divers letters sent to Roger and members of his household . . . and also the account rolls of Caerleon, Tintern, Edeligion and ³⁵ Longer Scottish Poems: 1. 1365–1650, ed. P. Bawcutt and F. Riddy (Edinburgh, 1987), 43–84. Also Brown, Black Douglases, 10–12, 62–3, 277–8. ³⁶ For lists of Lancaster archives, see Holmes, Estates, 66–9, 70–3; R. Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster. Vol 1: 1265–1603 (London, 1953), 116–17; 194. ³⁷ For a reference to an early (non-surviving) register of John of Gaunt, Reg. JG, I, no. 748. ³⁸ Reg. JG, I, no. 1126. ³⁹ NLW, Radnor account (unnumbered).

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Usk and other manors in the parts of Wales’.⁴⁰ All these were dismissed by the royal clerks as ‘of no value’ (qui non sunt alicuius valoris). The problems of record management and selective archive retention were already vexing issues. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that for aristocratic families the safe custody and arrangement of their muniments were a high priority. These were, after all, literally and metaphorically the title-deeds for their wealth and thereby for their status and standing. So it was, for example, that the Black Prince put in an order for a ‘great chest fastened with three locks and keys for the rolls of the Prince, to be kept in the treasury which was in turn to be locked with three locks’.⁴¹ Likewise the earl of Warwick bought thirty-six chests at Worcester in 1402 in which ‘to deposit the muniments and charters’ for the earl. Later in the fifteenth century the dukes of Buckingham were to construct a specially built muniment room at Thornbury castle, where estate accounts and papers were to be deposed in padlocked iron-bound chests.⁴² The most valuable documents kept in these chests were the title-deeds to property. These were not items of antiquarian interest; they were cardinal documents in upholding title to property. So it was, for example, that the earl of Warwick in 1397 ordered muniments relating to the manor of Berkeley to be brought from Warwick to London, no doubt to help the case which his legal advisers were mounting.⁴³ Such archives were carefully arranged for quick reference and often had considerable chronological depth to them. Thus the Lancaster archives seized at Pontefract in 1322 contained not only recent Lancaster material but also collections relating to the families of Montfort, Ferrers, and Lacy (earls of Leicester, Derby, and Lincoln respectively) which had now been subsumed in the Lancaster empire. Even more revealing of the degree to which archival organization had developed in baronial estates are the careful lists prepared of the Mortimer muniments in 1322.⁴⁴ The muniments were systematically arranged in chests, coffers, pouches of canvas, and bags of white hide, each identified by a reference letter—for instance in quodam coffino ligneo ad hanc litteram Q. They were arranged partly chronologically—starting with documents dating to the period of Ralph Mortimer (d. 1246)—and partly according to subject matter—recognizances, loans, and the like. This was clearly a ‘working’ archive; it was the documentary underpinning of the power and pretensions of one of the fast-rising baronial (soon to be comital) families of later medieval England. The coping-stone on the Mortimer family’s cultivation of its archival, and thereby its institutional, identity across time was the compilation of a cartulary. It was not, of course, alone in this. Every major church and monastery, every major aristocratic family did the same. Among aristocratic families we can certainly ⁴⁰ BL Egerton Charters 8723. ⁴¹ Reg. BP, I, 150–1. ⁴² BL Egerton Charters 8770; Rawcliffe, The Staffords, 2. ⁴³ BL Egerton Charters 8769. ⁴⁴ BL Egerton Charters 8723, and for the Badlesmere archive BL Egerton 8724.

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number Beauchamp, Courtenay, Percy, Stafford, and Vere and of course the magnificent two-volume Coucher Book (as it is called) of the house of Lancaster. In Scotland the Registrum Honoris de Morton is the register of the Douglases of Dalkeith and probably the oldest cartulary of a lay estate in Scotland. The Mortimer cartulary, the Liber Niger de Wigmore (BL Harleian MS. 240) is particularly interesting, since it reveals the filing system in the Mortimer archives which lay behind the enrolments of the deeds in the cartulary. It was a cross-referencing system of which no modern cataloguer would be ashamed. The rationale of the calendar of the cartulary was as follows: 1. Each manor or lordship was itemized alphabetically. Forty-four such units are itemized. 2. This was followed by the title of the muniment chest in which the deed or deeds relating to it would be found, e.g. ‘Aderleye (re. Arley co. Warwick) souz cest title Badlesmere’. 3. A brief description of the deed would be given. (This enables the lacunae in the cartulary to be made good from a second copy of the calendar, BL Add. MS. 6041.) 4. This is followed by the endorsed number of the deed to be found on the original version in the muniment chest, e.g. xij. 5. The folio reference to the copy of the deed in the cartulary is then provided, e.g. xlj fo. 6. A final finding-aid is added to the calendar. This indicates on which folio of the cartulary the copies of deeds relating to contiguous or associated manors are to be found, e.g. Bridgwater, Odcombe, and Milverton (all in Somerset)—folio xvj. The Mortimer cartulary (and its calendar) was assembled in the late fourteenth century, quite probably under the direction of the consortium (whose executive head was Sir Thomas Mortimer) which took over the running of the Mortimer estates during the prolonged minority which followed the premature death of Earl Edmund in 1381. From the point of view of our argument the significance of the cartulary—compiled during a minority, one of the most vulnerable periods in a family’s history—is that it affirmed and expressed the territorial, historical, and geographical foundations of the family’s wealth and power. It was the written declaration of those foundations and thereby of the family’s institutional memory in time. And so were all cartularies. Cartularies, family chronicles and legends, genealogies, heraldic devices, funerary monuments were all part of the paraphernalia of a family’s cult of its continuity through time. They were essential elements in the exercise of self-validation and self-promotion in a world in which the authority of the past was the charter for present status. This was also a highly visual world in which the icons of power

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were regularly on public display. There was nothing that was specifically and exclusively aristocratic (in the narrow sense of the word) about these monuments of memories. After all, coats of arms, genealogies, and funerary monuments were likewise part of the world of knights and esquires, while the use of seals as the signifier of identity and authenticity had now extended to the lower orders of society. But in the landscape and hierarchy of power in the late medieval British Isles, no one could be in any doubt that the greater magnates stood out in wealth and status. Their buildings, their parks, their retinues of servants, their armies, their sports, their dress, the ‘reverence’ and the ‘worship’ which they commanded—all of them proclaimed that, alongside kings—and indeed as their companions—the great magnates were the elite. We have described this elite so far in group terms, even if we have had to acknowledge that its composition changed from generation to generation. Such a collective approach is well justified by the fact that its members did indeed see themselves as a distinct and, to a considerable degree, exclusive group. It is true that they shared many of their concerns and priorities—about issues such as the descent of estates, provision for daughters and younger children, a fascination with heraldry and chivalry, their intense sense of status and etiquette, their self-image as a warrior caste, and their conviction that they were the natural governors of society just as they were the ‘natural counsellors’ of the king—with ‘gentle’ society generally. But there was also a real sense in which they stood apart from the rest of ‘gentle’ society, in wealth, status, and in self-perception as in the perception of others. They had, particularly in England, begun to call themselves ‘peers’, to claim certain jurisdictional and other privileges, and to meet apart at national assemblies. Their group identity and group consciousness was strong. But ultimately the quality of a group is considerably determined by the character and individuality of the members who compose it. The great aristocracy has suffered in this respect, especially as compared with kings. We are conscious, of course, that kingship can be described in institutional and general terms. We also recognize that the behaviour and policies of kings are shaped and constrained by the conventions, practices, and habits of the office they hold. But we are also intensely aware that the personality, character, and policies of a king can shape and even transform the fortunes and reputation of a reign. Thus, whatever the mould of common problems, powers, and constraints within which they operated, no one would confuse Edward I with his son Edward II or underrate the degree to which their very different personalities set the tone of their respective reigns. But we rarely extend these considerations of individuality to the greater aristocracy, other than in composing individual biographies of them. It is, of course, in part a problem (as so often with the higher aristocracy) of manageability and sources. How can one present the characters of two-to-three dozen major aristocrats, especially when contemporary insights into their personalities are so generally wanting? With that limitation we must learn to live; but at least we

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need to be aware of the danger of packaging their personalities and behaviour under a blanket of bland generalizations about the aristocracy.⁴⁵ In the first place we must recognize that a great, or indeed not so great, earl could play a crucially directive role in shaping the character of his lordship. He (or sometimes she) was the lord; his was often the first and last word in the making and enforcing of decisions about his lordship. So it was also with kingship. In the case of both kingship and lordship, the surviving historical sources may, paradoxically, serve us ill in this respect. They are primarily the documents of bureaucracy, control, and accountability. They convey the priorities and habits of the world of officialdom and are a remarkably impressive record of how well and systematically lords (like kings) were served by their officers. But they rarely take us to the heart of decision-making and even less so to the intensely personal world in which lords, like kings, operated. They are to that extent depersonalized. Secondly, in so far as the careers of great aristocrats impinge on contemporary narrative sources, it is their public activities—their military exploits, their diplomatic forays, or their political ambitions—which catch the eye, and which can also be documented from the superb royal archives. Public careers were crucially important for most (though not all) magnates; ‘public’ service was part of the cursus of a nobleman’s life and the route to fortune and favour (and sometimes misfortune). None of this is to be gainsaid; but not at the expense of overlooking the intense personal interest that most great lords took in the affairs of their own lordships. To put it in the unlovely contemporary phrase, much aristocratic lordship was ‘hands-on’ lordship, as ultimately was kingship. The lord’s personality and direction were at the heart of lordship. Paradoxically nowhere is this better displayed than in the correspondence of the greatest of the English lords of the period, Edward, earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall and prince of Wales (from 1343) and of Aquitaine (from 1362). The surviving corpus of his letters is in this respect much more revealing than that of his younger brother, John of Gaunt. The Prince is best remembered as a great military warrior, the flower of chivalry and largesse; but he was also consumed by meticulous oversight of the most minute affairs of his lordships in England and Wales. Decisions were regularly made ‘by the command of the Prince himself’, ‘by record of the Prince’, ‘by bill sealed with the Prince’s secret seal’, or because ‘the Prince had [the issue] at heart’. The recommendations of his officers in Cheshire were repeated to him and he kept a copy of them to hand ‘to refresh his memory’ and warned that no judgment should be delivered ‘without consulting’ him. His officials lived in fear of his hawk eye and severe reprimand: he ‘marvelled’ at their decision and they were charged to send him transcripts of all the evidence regarding their decision.⁴⁶ ⁴⁵ The brief biographies in this chapter are culled from a wide range of historical sources. They also draw on the invaluable biographies in GEC, DNB, and (since the chapter was originally composed) ODNB. ⁴⁶ Reg. BP, II, 37, 46, 47, 49, 50, 61, 65 etc.; III, 10, 20, 98, 113, etc.

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The Prince may have been an unusually brusque and hard taskmaster; but there is no reason to believe that his degree of direction, scrutiny, and intervention was unusual among the higher aristocracy. Another busy warrior, Earl Richard Beauchamp of Warwick (d. 1439), was kept in regular touch with the affairs of his lordship when he was on campaign in France and could issue orders to be carried out ‘by the lord’s command’, just as Sir Peter de la Mare was given oral instructions by his lord, the earl of March.⁴⁷ Court roll evidence makes it clear that proclamation might be made in court by the lord, pardons issued by him ‘in propria persona’,⁴⁸ petitions thrust into his hand ‘as he walked in the cloisters between the chamber and the hall after breakfast’;⁴⁹ warrants were drafted at his personal authorization; and decisions regularly deferred until he had been consulted.⁵⁰ Most intimidating of all would have been the lord’s personal presence at the annual audit of the accounts of officials. Doubtless in many cases the business was left to the lord’s auditors and members of his council. But the lord’s physical presence was certainly not unknown. Isabella de Fortibus is known to have been present several times at the audit of her officers 1263–90; the earl of Salisbury in 1368 himself examined and approved the payments made by his treasurer; and when a valor of the estates of Anne, countess of Stafford (d. 1438) was compiled in 1436, it was supplemented by two copies of the roll of arrears, one specifically for ‘the personal scrutiny of the lady herself ’ (devers ma dame pur sa conusance demesne).⁵¹ These examples are no doubt no more than the tips of an iceberg of seigniorial intervention. The lord’s will—be it his benevolence or his spleen—was a cardinal factor in shaping policy. The reputation of lords was a matter of public knowledge, for good or ill. The younger Despenser (d. 1326) was known as ‘the greediest of men’, a reputation fully borne out by his actions and his surviving correspondence; ‘the Welshmen hated the rule of Hugh’ was the tart comment of a well-informed contemporary chronicler on him.⁵² The reputation of the Grey lords of Dyffryn Clwyd (north Wales)/Ruthin was not much better. When the Grey lands were temporarily taken into royal custody in 1322–3, the men of Dyffryn Clwyd were so anxious to avoid the prospect of a further spell of Grey lordship (seigneurie) that they offered the king 600 ⁴⁷ Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 371; NLW, Radnor account (oretenus facto Petro de la Mare). ⁴⁸ As a selection of phrases from the court rolls of the Greys of Ruthin illustrates: ‘proclamacio facta in curia in presencia domini per dominum’; relief respited until ‘habeat colloquium cum domino’; ‘condonatur per dominum in propria persona’: TNA SC 2/220/1 m.171;/10 m.2;/12 m.32. ⁴⁹ S. Walker, ‘Lordship and Lawlessness in the Palatinate of Chester, 1370–1400’, Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), 325–48, at 329. ⁵⁰ A. Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Harlow, 1992), 312–13. ⁵¹ N. Denholm-Young, Seigniorial Administration in England (Oxford, 1937), 142; Household Accounts, I, 47. ⁵² The phrase is that of the Lanercost chronicle quoted in Davies, Lordship and Society, 279. For the exceptionally revealing correspondence see ibid., 280 n. 17.

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marks to be rid of it.⁵³ The reputation of a lord for hard-nosed niggardliness and extortion could live in popular memory for generations: so it was that the memory of the pious Humphrey earl of Hereford (d. 1361) in Brecon was as ‘a cross, peevish Old Batchelor’ and ‘a most miserable Covetous grinding man’.⁵⁴ Powerful ladies could also leave behind them a fearsome reputation; none more so that Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435). She survived her husband, Sir William Beauchamp (d. 1411), a cadet member of the Warwick earls, by twenty-four years and ruled her estates with a rod of iron. She was after all a daughter of the Fitzalan family, the most successfully entrepreneurial comital family of fourteenth-century England. Hard-headed and hard-hearted businesswoman she might have been,⁵⁵ but the reputation that she left was an unpleasantly fearsome one. Adam Usk might have had his own personal reasons for describing her, memorably, as ‘a second Jezebel’; but others shared his view. The collector of taxes in Worcestershire claimed, no doubt with some exaggeration, that because of the ill will in which she held him, he dared not collect the taxes for fear of death!⁵⁶ Men like Adam Usk and the tax collector were under no illusions: lordship, like kingship, was ultimately intensely personal. Thus when Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, remitted ‘all his rancour and indignation’ against one of his officials we catch a glimpse of how the lord’s emotions⁵⁷—like the ira and malevolentia of Angevin kingship—were key elements in the exercise of power. We can hear it likewise in the threatening bluster of the letters of the duke of Buckingham (d. 1521) to his recalcitrant Welsh tenants.⁵⁸ But as with kingship, so with lordship wilful power could easily destroy itself. That is why Bruce McFarlane rightly identified ‘affability, however rough’ as a crucial quality of good and effective lordship.⁵⁹ It could operate in a variety of ways: indulging the selfimportance of local power-brokers, showing the largesse which was at the heart of good lordship, working with the grain of local society and its anxieties, and making timely grants and concessions to local communities. In that sense again, the acts of lordship largely replicated the acts of kingship. Two examples from the March of Wales may serve to illustrate sensitive lordship at work. In the mid 1290s, when relationships between Edward I and several leading earls were ⁵³ Cal. Anc. Pets., 168–9. ⁵⁴ Quoted in R. R. Davies, ‘Brecon’, Boroughs of Medieval Wales, ed. R. A. Griffiths (Cardiff, 1978), 46–70 at p. 54. ⁵⁵ The value of her Welsh estates in 1421 is published in J. A. Bradney, A History of Monmouthshire from the Coming of the Normans into Wales Down to the Present Time 12 vols. (1904–33), II, 4 and that of her English estates in 1426 is in TNA SC 11/25. ⁵⁶ Adam Usk, Chronicle, 130, 132; TNA E 28/37/15. ⁵⁷ Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, ed. H. S. Sweetman, 5 vols. (London, 1875–86), II, no. 1875. ⁵⁸ The letters are in NLW, Peniarth MS 280 (‘The Red Booke of Caures Castle’). ⁵⁹ K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays with an Introduction by G. L. Harriss (London, 1981), 253.

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very strained, the king deliberately set out to try to destabilize the power and support of Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1299) in his great lordship of Brecon. But the king was outwitted by the earl who summoned the men of Brecon before his officials, confirmed their laws and usages, made further concessions on forest rights, and used local Welshmen to curry support. The earl won this propaganda battle hands down: as the royal official was forced to acknowledge, ‘they were all at one with their lord.’⁶⁰ This was good lordship at work. And it was at work from one generation to the next, as the men of Brecon stood solidly behind the Bohun earls in the various political crises of the next decades. Just as Earl Humphrey displayed his skill in the arts of good lordship in the 1290s, so did Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398) in the 1390s. Roger Mortimer was but a young man, but he assiduously and successfully cultivated his support and ties with the men of his extensive estates in Wales and the March—employing them in his service, enlisting them in his armies, and dispensing ecclesiastical and academic patronage to them. When he was summoned by the deeply suspicious Richard II to appear before the Shrewsbury parliament in January 1398, he was rapturously received by his followers and accompanied by a retinue wearing hoods in his colours of red and green.⁶¹ The circumstances were, it is true, unusual; but lordship worked through charisma, display, and reward as well as through bluster and hard-nosed audit. In short, it was at one level intensely personal and intensely individual. Given that lordship was personal and that the character of the problems and opportunities which faced it varied so widely, we might better grasp the individuality of lord and lordship by brief thumbnail sketches of three of these great lords. They are not among the best-known magnates of the period, though their role is well acknowledged within the historiography of their respective countries. What interests us about them is less the details of their biographies (those are amply chronicled in The Complete Peerage and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) than the light they may cast on the varying nature and very different challenges of lordship in different parts of the British Isles in the fourteenth century. Our first choice is the remarkably long-lived Richard Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326).⁶² He was the descendant of an East Anglian family which had, through its own prowess and royal support, found fortune and fame in Ireland in the thirteenth century. He was the second of the family to enjoy the title ‘earl of Ulster’, the only comital title in English Ireland in the late thirteenth century. In many respects Earl Richard would have been at home in the circle of his fellow earls in England. He had been nurtured as a lad at Edward I’s court and was ⁶⁰ Cal. Anc. Corr., 101 (re-dated in Davies, Lordship and Society, 269). ⁶¹ Davies, Lordship and Society, 61; Adam Usk, Chronicle, 38; Wigmore Chronicle in Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, i, 354. ⁶² For Richard de Burgh I have also drawn heavily on G. H. Orpen’s series of articles on the earldom of Ulster in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 43–51 (1913–21).

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referred to affectionately as ‘the king’s groom’ and served in person by the king’s side in the 1280s and 1290s. He enjoyed the cult of chivalry, holding great feasts and conferring the belt of knighthood. He played his part in English politics at least occasionally, including standing as one of the guarantors of the treaty of Leake in 1318. His marriage alliances for his six daughters established links with some of the premier families of the day—including the earls of Gloucester (Clare) and Carrick (Bruce). On the lowland manors of the Ulster coast and in Munster he exercised an economic and manorial lordship very similar to that of the generality of English magnates. Like them, he was a great castle builder and like them he was expected to make, and normally did make, a major contribution to the armies of Edward I in Wales, Gascony, and Scotland. In short, Earl Richard could have hobnobbed comfortably with Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) or Earl Guy of Warwick (d. 1315). But there were dimensions to his career and to his lordship which set him and his like clearly apart from them. He belonged also to the world of Ireland in general and of English Ireland in particular. By the second half of his career about half of Ireland lay, formally at least, under his rule. His lordship in much of it was very different from that familiar in most of England (with the possible exception of the far north). He parleyed with Irish chieftains; deposed Irish kings; collected huge tributes in cattle from Irish lineages; went regularly on punitive raids, pillaging and taking hostages. This was a world of war and raids; he who exercised lordship here did so as a warlord. Earl Richard was almost certainly an Irish speaker and a patron of Irish bards. He was also the leading magnate in the world of English Ireland. This was a world which was increasingly different in its political culture and behaviour from that of aristocratic and royal England. It was a world of querulous warlords and their retinues (lineages or ‘surnames’ as they were called). Navigating survival, let alone mastery, in this world demanded exceptional skills. Earl Richard used marriage as one of those skills, marrying three of his daughters to the earls (as they later became) of Louth, Kildare, and Desmond. But marriages could not defuse all the tensions: Earl Richard found himself in prison twice, once (1294–5) in the custody of an arch rival, John Fitz Thomas, and a second time (1317) because his loyalty was called in question during the invasion of Edward Bruce (1315–18), the brother of King Robert I of Scotland. In short, the powers that Richard Burgh exercised and the very varied contexts in which he had to operate were a far cry from the world of aristocratic lordship in England, especially lowland England. There were, of course, continuities from the one world to the others; but the differences and the complexities were even greater. The successful exercise of lordship, especially the lordship of the premier magnates, was proportionately much more critical to the political and social health of much of Ireland (at least outside the limited, anglicized enclaves) than it was in England, for Ireland was (in Robin Frame’s phrase) ‘a patchwork of lordships’. When Earl Richard died in 1326 he was complimented by an Irish annalist as ‘the best of the Galls (i.e. English) in Ireland’; but what truly alarmed

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contemporaries was the vacuum of lordship that was created by his death. That alarm turned into reality in 1333 when Earl Richard’s grandson and heir was murdered and left no male heir.⁶³ The effects were catastrophic; it was a crisis of lordship and therefore of power and order. English Ireland in many respects never recovered from the blow; that is a measure of how critical to social and political order was the personality of the lord and the continuity of credible lordship. That is also the message of the career of the second great aristocrat, Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381), earl of March (through the male line) and earl of Ulster (in respect of his marriage), under consideration here. Whereas Richard Burgh had lived to a ripe old age (by medieval standards), Earl Edmund was dead by the age of 29. Yet in his short life Edmund demonstrated the interplay of ‘private’ wealth and ‘public’ service (albeit that the current ‘private’/‘public’ dichotomy has limited applicability in a medieval context) in aristocratic society. By the mid 1370s Earl Edmund was possibly the third- or fourth-richest earl in terms of territorial wealth in the British Isles—outstripped only by the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, and possibly the earl of Arundel. Though his mother (who was to outlive him) retained one-third of the Mortimer lands, he still lorded it over a huge complex of estates in the March of Wales, the English border shires, several counties in southern England, and the lordships of Trim and Meath in Ireland. This inheritance was hugely augmented when he acquired in 1368–9 through his wife, Philippa (one of the ultimate heiresses of Earl Richard Burgh and only child of Lionel, duke of Clarence), vast estates in England and Ireland—including the great honour of Clare in East Anglia, manors throughout almost all the counties of southern England, and the lordships of Ulster and Connacht in Ireland.⁶⁴ Earl Edmund doubtless took an interest in the governance and future of these estates, as is suggested by the record of the oral instructions he gave to his chief steward, Sir Peter de la Mare, and the detailed arrangements he made with trustees regarding the estates in 1374.⁶⁵ Much of the detailed running of the estates was of course left to his council, his strong team of major officers and his talented bevy of legal advisers.⁶⁶ The remarkable dossier of documents which survives from the minority of his son shows how minute and effective such supervision could be. Even so, the lord no doubt had the last word and the whole administrative and financial machine was geared to provide him with the wherewithal to display his lordship in the ‘public’ sphere. ⁶³ The alarmist letter of Thomas Chedworth is published in Documents on the Affairs of Ireland before the King’s Council, ed. G. O. Sayles (Dublin, 1979), no. 155 and re-dated in Frame, English Lordship, 35–6. ⁶⁴ For lists of his estates see Holmes, Estates, 10–18. The account of his receiver general for 1375 in BL Egerton Roll 8727 gives a conspectus of the English estates in his actual possession at that date. ⁶⁵ Cited above n. 47; Holmes, Estates, 51; Davies, Lordship and Society, 41, n. 25. ⁶⁶ Their names can be assembled from BL Egerton Roll 8727.

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After all, a great and rich aristocrat was expected to play a leading role on the national stage, unless he was debarred from doing so by illness or some personal inadequacy. Earl Edmund played his role to the full in the few short years given to him. He led a military expedition to Brittany in 1375, raising troops for the purpose from his Welsh estates. His diplomatic skills were honed in embassies to France and in negotiating with the Scots. His greatest military triumphs came in Ireland where he served as royal lieutenant from October 1379 and where he met his death. At last the vacuum of lordship which had so catastrophically followed the death of Earl Richard de Burgh’s grandson in 1333 was now filled by an active, resident lord. It is no surprise that the Wigmore chronicler (in effect the family annalist) waxed ecstatic about his achievements; but other chronicles in Ireland and England confirm that he ‘brought almost all that land to peace and governed it very nobly and wisely’.⁶⁷ Even if we take such compliments with a pinch of salt, they remain as a reminder how crucial vigorous personal lordship could be, not least in Ireland. Nor did Earl Edmund ignore—young as he was—the heavy responsibilities which came his way as a premier English earl and the son-in-law of the late duke of Clarence. He has been credited by historians as being, quite possibly, the moving spirit behind the political showdown of the Good Parliament in 1376, possibly operating in liaison with his steward, Sir Peter de la Mare, the Speaker of the Commons. He was clearly highly regarded by his contemporaries (impressed possibly both by his wealth and his vigour) as he was appointed a member of the council created to advise the young Richard II in 1377. The short career of Earl Edmund reflects the very diverse range of activities which composed the life of the higher aristocracy, especially in England. He was head of a dynasty and a household; he ruled a vast landed inheritance stretching from East Anglia through the Welsh March and to the far west of Ireland; he hired a retinue of key administrators and judges to advise him; he was at the centre of a powerful network of friends (the bishops of London and Hereford and the earl of Northumberland were among his executors and retainers); he raised armies and led campaigns; he served on diplomatic missions; and he did not fight shy of the treacherous politics of the senility of Edward III and the minority of Richard II. There were few lessons in the exercise of lordship and leadership that Earl Edmund had escaped in his short life. What sort of personal qualities did he have? The official documents and financial accounts (including a list of his creditors)⁶⁸ do not help us greatly in this respect. We have to rely instead on his will and stray comments by contemporaries. His will shows him to be a devoted family man, making very generous provision ⁶⁷ The encomium in the Wigmore family chronicle (at f. 57v. of the ms.; see above n. 32) is omitted in the printed edition in Dugdale’s Monasticon. For other tributes see Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (London, 1863–4), II, 49; Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert, 2 vols. (London, 1884–6), II, 285. ⁶⁸ BL Egerton Charters 8751.

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for his younger son and two daughters.⁶⁹ The Wigmore chronicle had good reason to praise his devoutness, since he had been spectacularly generous to it in land and ecclesiastical gifts and had personally laid the foundation stone of the new church there. His piety is borne out by his will—in his insistence on a lack of ostentation at his funeral, his munificence to over thirty monasteries and friaries, and his pride in his collection of relics (including the bone of St Richard Wych (of Chichester) and the finger of St Thomas Cantilupe). He was an educational benefactor: Adam Usk, the chronicler, was one of his prot´eg´es. His achievements in Ireland in the last years of his life won unstinting praise from all quarters. All of this was fairly conventional; but the exceptionally warm tribute paid to him by the normally restrained Monk of Westminster in his chronicle suggests that he did indeed stand out for his personal qualities: ‘He was a man of accomplished manner and easy address, loyal to his kingdom and sustained in his conduct of affairs by outstanding wisdom [summa prudencia].’⁷⁰ In short a lord sans pareil. The reputation of our third great aristocrat, Archibald third earl of Douglas (d. 1400) was rather different as his various soubriquets—‘the Terrible’, ‘the Grim’, ‘the Black’—suggest.⁷¹ He belonged to a family which had risen with astonishing speed to the very top ranks of the Scottish nobility and as such presents the remarkable transformation of the higher Scottish aristocracy in the fourteenth century. The founder of the family’s fortune was Archibald’s father, Sir James Douglas (d. 1330), Robert Bruce’s companion and the hero of John Barbour’s epic poem The Bruce, written c.1375. But, as in the histories of all great families, each new lord had to put the stamp of his own talent on the family’s fortunes if its momentum of success was to be sustained. It was all the more necessary for Archibald to do so because he was born with the taint of illegitimacy. Two paths in particular suggested themselves as fast-track routes to success (as in all aristocratic societies). The first was service to the king and the rich rewards it could reap. Archibald secured several such rewards but the most crucial and easily the most substantial was the grant of Galloway 1369–72. He now had an independent regional power base and took the title ‘lord of Galloway’. He could not control or foresee the second route to success—the death of the senior Douglas line without a direct male heir of the body. But that is precisely what happened, totally unexpectedly, in 1388, when James, the second earl of Douglas, was killed in battle. Archibald now claimed to be the heir to the Douglas earldom and estates (on the basis of an entail made in 1342) and used his political clout to ensure that he succeeded. Exploiting all opportunities to the full and doing so ruthlessly was a necessary ingredient of successful lordship. ⁶⁹ His will is published in Nichols, Wills, 104–17. ⁷⁰ The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. L. C. Hector and B. F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), 23. ⁷¹ Brown, Black Douglases, passim. See also A. Grant, ‘Acts of Lordship: The Records of Archibald, Fourth Earl of Douglas’, in Freedom and Authority: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson, ed. T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (East Linton, 2000), 235–74.

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The relative poverty of late medieval Scottish documentation does not allow us to characterize the nature of Archibald the Grim’s lordship in any detail. We have none of the detailed financial accounts so common in England, though we can extrapolate in some measure from the sole surviving rental of another branch of the Douglas family (that of Dalkeith) for 1376–7.⁷² What we do know is that by 1400 the Douglas estates were the largest territorial agglomeration in Scotland south of the Forth.⁷³ On many of those estates Earl Archibald exercised a range of powers—through the grants of regalities by the Scottish kings—such as virtually no great aristocrat in England could contemplate. In Galloway in particular he was not merely landlord and tribute-collector; he was to all intents and purposes regional governor. It is little wonder that Richard II of England in 1393 opened negotiations with him directly and spoke of his ‘lands, lordships and subjects’.⁷⁴ He enjoyed what contemporaries called ‘the leadership of all the men of his lands’. English lords occasionally referred to their estates as their ‘country’, but rarely, except possibly in the far north, did lordship have as untrammelled a remit as it did in the great regional lordship of western and northern Scotland. The ultimate basis and justification of such ample lordship was its capacity to provide military leadership and protection. This was the source of Archibald Douglas’s remarkable power, as it was his explanation of the epithets which were attached to his name. Like Earl Richard of Ulster, he operated in a land of war. He was warden of the west march of Scotland for over thirty years; border raids were his speciality; and he moved around his region with a large military following and coordinated the military activities of local lairds and their retinues. In short he was a warlord. The great castle he built at Threave on an island on the Dee, with its seventy-foot high tower, proclaimed to all and sundry, and most immediately the men of Galloway, that might, military might, lay at the heart of lordship. Lords saw themselves—and indeed justified their power—as a warrior caste, the bellatores. Archibald the Grim met that criterion handsomely. ‘In worldly prudence, courage and boldness’, said Walter Bower of him, ‘he excelled the other Scots of his day.’⁷⁵ Archibald operated in a Scottish context and the nature of his lordship and leadership was grounded in that context. Lordship always takes on the colour of the social and geographical landscape in which it operates. But Archibald the Grim—like Richard Burgh and Edmund Mortimer—belonged to a wider, aristocratic, chivalric world and was proud of it. He had fought at Poitiers; he had gone on diplomatic missions to France and a pilgrimage to St Denys; he knew the world of knightings and joustings as well as that of border raids; Jean Froissart himself may well have met him when he stayed with his cousin, the first earl of Douglas, at Dalkeith in the 1360s. His son was granted the title Duke of Touraine, Lieutenant-General of France. ⁷² Mort. Reg., I, pp. xlvii et seq. ⁷³ There is a helpful map of his landed interests in Brown, Black Douglases, 96–7. ⁷⁴ Quoted ibid., 87. ⁷⁵ Quoted in Nicholson, Scotland, 220.)

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Richard Burgh, Edmund Mortimer, Archibald Douglas were but three (chosen more or less at random) of the great lords of the British Isles in the fourteenth century. Despite the differences in their circumstances, they were members of a common aristocratic world. They shared, metaphorically and probably literally, its language; they moved in the same social circles and partook, broadly, of the same sets of values, anxieties, and ambitions; they cultivated the memories of their families in much the same way; they saw themselves as members of a warrior elite and most of them tried to play their part as such. Above all, from our point of view, they were all lords and exercised, and believed that they had the right to exercise, lordship. It is the many and very varied ways in which lordship was displayed and exercised which is the theme of the following chapters. A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the English nobility, J. S. Bothwell, Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune and the English Nobility, 1075–1455 (Manchester, 2008). For Edward III’s establishment of new earldoms in 1337, J. S. Bothwell, Edward III and the English Peerage: Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2004) and more generally M. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005), ch. 13. For the situation in Scotland, A. D. M. Barrell, Medieval Scotland (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 7; M. Penman, David II, 1329–71 (East Linton, 2004). For the end of pan-British landholding, B. Hartland, ‘Vancouleurs, Ludlow and Trim: The Role of Ireland in the Career of Geoffrey de Geneville (c.1226–1314)’, IHS, 32 (2001); B. Hartland, ‘Reasons for Leaving: The Effects of Conflict on English Landholding in Late Thirteenth-Century Leinster’, Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006); M. Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005), chs. 4 and 5; R. M. Blakely, The Brus Family in England and Scotland, 1100–1295 (Woodbridge, 2005), ch. 5; A. J. Macdonald, ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier? The Earls of Dunbar or March, c.1070–1435’, in The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin, 2003). For heraldry in Scotland, B. McAndrew, Scotland’s Historic Heraldry (Woodbridge, 2006). For the role of noblewomen in propagating aristocratic identity, L. L. Gee, Women, Art and Patronage from Henry III to Edward III, 1216–1377 (Woodbridge, 2002). For the Hastings family and its monuments, P. Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Medieval Vision (Cardiff, 2003), ch. 2, and for the Despensers and Tewksbury abbey, M. Lawrence, ‘Secular Patronage and Religious Devotion: The Despensers and St Mary’s Abbey, Tewksbury’, in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008). For the Wigmore abbey

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chronicle, C. Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c.1250–1450’, in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Eales and S. Tyas (Donington, 2003), and for English family chronicles more generally, C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004), ch. 4. For continued aristocratic patronage of monasteries, K. St¨ober, Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–1540 (Woodbridge, 2007), and for the nobility and the church in general, R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004). For the Buke of the Howlat, N. Royan, ‘ ‘‘Mark your Meroure be Me’’: Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (Woodbridge, 2006). For the keeping of records by the aristocracy see Catalogue of Medieval Muniments at Berkeley Castle, ed. B. Wells-Furby. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society vols. 17 and 18 (Bristol, 2004); N. Ramsay, ‘Archive Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume II, 1100–1400, ed. N. Morgan and R. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008). For the phenomenon in Gaelic Scotland, S. Boardman, ‘The Campbells and Charter Lordship in Medieval Argyll’, in The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin, 2003). For Brittany, M. Jones, ‘Memory, Invention and the Breton State: The First Inventory of the Ducal Archives (1395) and the Beginnings of Montfort Historiography’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007). For Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, R. Frame, ‘Historians, Aristocrats and Plantagenet Ireland, 1200–1360’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. GivenWilson, A. Kettle, and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008). For Edmund Mortimer, A. Dunn, ‘Richard II and the Mortimer Inheritance’, in Fourteenth Century England II, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2002). For the earls of Arundel, M. Burtscher, The Fitzalans: Earls of Arundel and Surrey, Lords of the Welsh Marches (1267–1415) (Logaston, 2008). For contemporary criticism of lordship in Ireland, B. Smith, Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 6.

APPENDIX

The Comital and Ducal Families of England, Scotland, and Ireland These tables have the very limited purpose of indicating the survival, extinction in the direct male line of the body, succession through females or by males not of the direct line of the body, and the recruitment of members of the royal family among the ranks of comital and ducal families in England, Scotland, and English Ireland 1280–1420. Multiple comital and/or ducal titles held by individuals are also indicated wherever possible. The following caveats in particular need to be borne in mind: 1. The choice of twenty-year intervals is arbitrary and can conceal important changes between those intervals. 2. Minorities, widowhoods, and succession through females are often not fully or adequately represented in the tables. 3. For reasons of space, shorthand entries (e.g. Bohun, Stewart, Fitz Gerald) may well conceal several different members of the same family over several generations. 4. Several complex or contested successions (especially for Scottish earldoms) have had to be simplified or overlooked. Others are uncertain. Full details and corrections are available in The Complete Peerage and other standard works of reference. The following abbreviations are used: Numbers in brackets after a name indicate multiple titles held by individuals, e.g. sub England, Bohun (12,15) = the earls of Hereford also held the title of earl of Essex • Date (where known) of the ‘extinction’ of a family in the direct, male line of the body (or by resignation of the current title-holder) † Succession through collateral male relative of title-holder, e.g. brother, nephew, uncle ∗ Succession through female  First-generation member of royal family

Table 1. England Comital/Ducal Title

1280

1. Arundel 2. Aumale

1300

1320

1340

1360

1380

1400

Fitzalan

Fitzalan

Fitzalan

Fitzalan

Fitzalan (35)

Fitzalan

3. Bedford 4. Buckingham

5. Cambridge 6. Chester

(king)

(king)

 Edward s. of Edward II

Wm of Juliers

Wm of Juliers

 Ed. Black Prince (8)

 Black Prince (8)

 Black Prince (6)

 Lionel •1368  Black Prince (6)

7. Clarence 8. Cornwall

Edmund of Cornwall

Edmund of Cornwall

9. Derby

Henry of Lancaster (19,20–22)

10. Devon 11. Dorset

Courtenay

12. Essex 13. Exeter

Bohun (15)

Bohun (15)

Bohun (15)

Henry of Lancaster •1361 (19,20–22) Courtenay

 Thomas of Woodstock (14,11)  Edmund of Langley (39) (king)

(king)

Edward of York •1415  Henry of Monmouth (8)  Henry of Monmouth (6)

1420

 Thomas of Lancaster (7)  John, d. of (29)

(king)

Thomas of Lancaster (2) (king)

Henry Bolingbroke

Courtenay

Courtenay

Courtenay Beaufort •1420

Bohun (15) †1361 Beaufort

14. Gloucester

Clare (16)

∗ [Montherner]

15. Hereford

Bohun (12)

Bohun (12)

16. Hertford 17. Huntingdon 18. Kent

Clare (14)

∗ [Monthermer]

Thomas of Lancaster (20)

20. Leicester

 Edmund Crouchback (20) Edmund (19)

21. Lincoln

Lacy

Lacy •1311

19. Lancaster

Thomas (19)

Bohun (12) •1336

Thomas of Lancaster (20,21) Thomas (19,21)

•1347 † Bohun (12)

Clinton •1354 John of Woodstock •1352 † Henry of Lancaster (20,21) Henry (19)

Thos. of Lancaster (19,20)

22. March 23. Norfolk

(custody) Bigod

24. Northampton 25. Northumberland 26. Nottingham 27. Oxford Vere

Bigod •1306

 Thos. of Brotherton •1334

∗ Margaret

Vere

his

Bohun (12) •1361 Holland ∗ Holland ∗ Black

† Vere

Holland

Holland

Holland

Prince

 ∗ John of Gaunt (9,20,21)  ∗ John of Gaunt (9,19 21) ∗ Henry of John of Grosmont Gaunt (19,20) •1361 (9,19,20) Mortimer Mortimer

(minority)

∗ Margaret

∗ Margaret

∗ Mowbray

Percy

Percy

Mowbray •1383 Vere

Mowbray (26) Mowbray (26)

Henry of Grosmont (20,21) •1361 Henry •1361 (19,21)

daughter Bohun jr

Vere

 Humphrey, duke (28)

∗ Audley

•1399

Mortimer •1425

•1405 (26)

Bohun jr •1360

Vere

† Vere

Percy

Vere

Table 1. continued Comital/Ducal Title

1280

1300

1320

1340

1360

1380

28. Pembroke

?Valence

?Valence

Valence •1324

† Hastings

Hastings

Hastings •1387

29. Richmond

John of Brittany

John of Brittany

John of Brittany •1334

† John of Brittany •1334

John of Gaunt J. de Montfort •1399

30. Rutland 31. Salisbury 32. Somerset 33. Stafford 34. Suffolk 35. Surrey

36. Warwick 37. Westmoreland 38. Worcester 39. York

Montague

Warenne

Warenne

Warenne

Ufford Warenne •1347

Beauchamp

Beauchamp

(Beauchamp)

Beauchamp

Montague

Montague •1397

Stafford Ufford

Stafford Ufford •1382 ∗ Fitzalan (1)

Beauchamp

Beauchamp

1400

1420

Humphrey d. of Gloucester (14)  John duke of Bedford (29) Edward of York •1415 † Montague Beaufort † Stafford de la Pole Holland Fitzalan (1) •1415 Beauchamp Neville Percy jnr •1403  Edmund of Langley (5)

Montague •1428 ( ) Stafford † de la Pole

Beauchamp Neville

Table 2. Scotland Comital/Ducal 1280 Title

1300

1320

1340

1360

Umfraville

(Umfraville)


(Umfraville) Stewart

(Umfraville) Stewart

Strathbogie

(Strathbogie)


(Strathbogie) Douglas

(Strathbogie) •1369

1380

1. Albany 2. Angus

Umfraville

3. Atholl 4. Buchan

Comyn

Comyn •1308

∗

5. Caithness

†John

Magnus

6. Carrick

Magnus •1284 Bruce

Bruce

7. Crawford 8. Douglas 9. Dunbar

Dunbar

Dunbar

?

?

10. Fife

Duncan

?

Duncan

Duncan

11. Lennox 12. Mar 13. March 14. Menteith

Malcolm William See Dunbar

Malcolm Donald

Malcolm Donald

?

Donald Thomas

∗ Alexander

†Murdoch

(∗ Mary?)

(∗ Margaret)

(Beaumont)

 (Umfraville)   •1403 ∗ Margaret    Stewart  Stewart  Stewart (19) •  Stewart

Douglas Dunbar •1368 ∗ ?Isabella

Douglas •1388 †Dunbar

1400

1420

 Stewart (4,10,14) ∗ Douglas

 Stewart (10,14) Douglas

Stewart 6, 18 • 1402

Stewart

∗

Stewart (17) •1424  Stewart

Euphemia Stewart Stewart (3,18) •1402 Crawford Crawford †Douglas Douglas Dunbar Dunbar

 Stewart (1,14) ∗ Margaret (∗ Douglas)

Stewart ∗ (Isabel)

∗ Stewart

 Stewart (1,14)

Stewart

Stewart

∗ Duncan

Stewart Duncan

Table 2. continued Comital/Ducal 1280 Title

1300

15. Moray 16. Orkney

1320

1340

1360

1380

1400

1420

Randolph

†Randolph •1346

∗ Dunbar

†Dunbar

Dunbar

Dunbar

∗ Sinclair

Sinclair

Sinclair •1424

(∗ Euphemia)

∗ Leslie

Stewart •1424

•1368

Held jointly with Caithness until c.1350 William

17. Ross

William

William

William •1372

18. Rothesay 19. Strathearn

Malise

Malise

Malise

( )

Stewart

 Stewart (5)

20. Sutherland 21. Wigtown

William

William

William

† William

William Fleming

Douglas

•1402

Stewart (3,6) •1402 (∗ Euphemia Stewart)

∗ Graham

Table 3. English Ireland Comital Title 1. Desmond (created 1329) 2. Kildare (created 1316) 3. Louth (created 1319) 4. Ormond (created 1328) 5. Ulster (created 1205)

1280

1300

1320

Fitz Gerald

1340

1360

1380

1400

1420

Fitz Gerald

(

†Fitz Gerald

Fitz Gerald

Fitz Gerald

( )

†Fitz Gerald

Fitz Gerald

Fitz Gerald

Fitz Gerald •1432

( )

Butler

Butler

Butler

Butler

(∗ Elizabeth)

 ∗ Lionel of Clarence

∗ Mortimer

(Mortimer)

Mortimer •1425

)

Bermingham •1329

de Burgh

de Burgh

de Burgh

2 Display and Magnificence The medieval aristocracy lived a life of ostentatious display. From the moment of their birth to the day of their interment—and indeed even beyond that point, since commemorative rituals were part of the cult of perpetuating their memories—nobles participated in, and were at the centre of, a theatrical round of display and celebration. Their residences and lifestyle set them apart; so did their troupes of servants, retainers, and guests. Conspicuous display and conspicuous expenditure were not optional extras; they were at the very heart of contemporary notions of lordship. If a lord was to earn the ‘worship’ of followers and dependants he must do so recurrently by displaying his pre-eminence and by parading his largesse, and by doing so publicly. That is why social commentators in the later Middle Ages deplored the growing tendency of the nobility to withdraw into their chambers rather than conduct their domestic lives in public. More comfortable and intimate such private living might have been; but it weakened the necessary visibility and public impressiveness of lordship. Robert Grosseteste had put the point forcefully in his famous advice to nobles in the mid thirteenth century: ‘you yourself be seated at all times in the middle of the high table, so that your presence as lord and lady be made manifest to all.’ It was in that fashion, he added, and by having a well-drilled staff of servants, that the lord would earn ‘great fear and reverence’.¹ ‘Fear’, ‘reverence’, ‘worship’ were central concepts in the cult or lordship; they were inculcated and sustained by a constant and visible emphasis on the superiority and apartness of lordship. Greater lords needed to be set apart from the generality of lords (domini) in a variety of ways. One was by the bestowal or appropriation of exclusive titles. By the fifteenth century the higher echelons of the aristocracy had developed a suite of honorific titles—baron, earl, marquis, viscount, duke—which declared terminologically the distance between them and the rest of knightly and gentle society. It was part of the process of stratification (to borrow McFarlane’s phrase) and increasing social exclusivity which characterizes the later Middle Ages. Of these labels of superiority, ‘earl’ was much the oldest. It was in origin no more than a term for a man of high birth; but in the limited fashion it was employed and conferred in England after the Norman conquest it became, and remained, ¹ Walter of Henley and other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting, ed. D. M. Oschinsky (Oxford, 1971), 403.

Display and Magnificence

59

a very restricted and singular honour.² At no time between 1100 and 1300 was the title borne by more than twenty-five men at any given time. In fact such figures were rarely achieved. The number of earls dwindled steadily across the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries; by 1300 the title was reserved for eleven men (albeit several of them holding more than one earldom). Earls were the cr`eme de la cr`eme of the higher aristocracy, their honorific titles setting them clearly apart from, and above, the rest of the aristocracy. The other honorific title—‘baron’—had undergone a rather similar evolution. Originally in the Norman period it was a term used to refer simply and generically to the leading vassals and followers of great lords. During the thirteenth century, however, it began to acquire connotations of social exclusivity and superiority and shed its feudal connections.³ Ambitious lords adopted and flaunted the term ‘baron’—for example ‘the baron of Stafford’—to indicate the social and status distance between themselves and lesser lords. Combined as it was—or frequently came to be—with an individual summons to parliament, the baronage became in effect a titled nobility, a grade within the peerage. Richard II acknowledged the transformation in 1387 when he raised his confidant, John Beauchamp, and the male heirs of his body to ‘the status and title of lord of Beauchamp and baron of Kidderminster’ by letters patent. ‘Earl’ and ‘baron’ were at least old terms, albeit that they had now become more exclusive in their usage. But the search for an exclusive social terminology for the higher aristocracy—‘illustrious personages’ as Edward III termed them when he created a batch of six new earls in 1337—was not satisfied by these two well-established labels. In that very year 1337 the title of duke was conferred for the first time, on the king’s eldest son, Edward. It was a title largely reserved for members of the royal family; but already in 1351 it was bestowed on a non-royal peer when Henry, earl of Lancaster, was promoted to be duke of the same county. The title of duke remained a rare privilege: only forty-five dukes were created 1337–1500 and even the extravagant Richard II limited ducal creations during his reign to nine (including promoting Margaret Marshal from countess to duchess of Norfolk). Typically it was Richard II who also introduced a novel rank in the English peerage when in 1385 he created his favourite, Robert de Vere, marquis of Dublin. But it was not to be a rank or title which found favour in England. Indeed in 1399 John Beaufort declined to resume the title of marquis of Dorset because, in his own words, ‘the title of marquess was a strange title in this realm.’⁴ The same fate was to befall the final title of honour—viscount—which was first bestowed in 1440. What this proliferation and refinement of titles indicates is the growing habit of the higher aristocracy to demarcate itself terminologically from the rest of noble society and, then, to introduce a hierarchy of titles even within its own restricted ranks. Disputes about ² Crouch, Image of the Aristocracy, 41–83. ³ Ibid., 107–10. ⁴ Rot. Parl. III, 488. [See now, PROME VIII, 164–5.]

60

Lords and Lordship

precedence—on such issues as seating arrangements—were bound to follow. What could not now be doubted was that England had a graduated peerage, demarcated institutionally and terminologically from the rest of noble society. This was part of the cult of apartness of the higher aristocracy. Titles were for the king to bestow, and withhold; that was a reminder that aristocratic society, especially in England and English Ireland, was kingshipfocussed and kingship-dominated. The general, though not universal, custom in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that the title of earl could not be assumed (even where the hereditary descent was clear) without a formal process of investiture with sword and belt by the king. This was to remain clearly the practice with regard to new creations in the later Middle Ages.⁵ Thus on 6 April 1385, Richard II created Michael de la Pole earl of Suffolk and girded him with the sword. Creations could be conditional: thus when Thomas Beaufort was promoted from earl of Dorset to be duke of Exeter in November 1416, it was specifically stated that the latter dignity was to be his for life only. Royal largesse could bestow, but royal spleen—or niggardliness—could also withhold. Hugh Courtenay knew that all too well. He had succeeded his father in 1292; in the following year he became technically the heir of the countess of Devon and Aumale. But Edward I’s ambitions thwarted any expectations he may have entertained, and he had to wait over forty years, until 1335, before he was eventually accorded the title of earl of Devon. The royal will could make, and unmake, the titled nobility; it did so regularly. But even the royal will had to operate within a framework within which the recognition of aristocratic power and the assumption of heritability of honours as well as of land were well-established norms. So it was that the presumption that honorific titles—such as earl or baron—were hereditary in character increasingly established itself, much in the same way (as we have seen) that individual summonses to parliament became increasingly hereditary within families. The practice with regard to succession to earldoms is particularly revealing in this respect. For most of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the heir to an earldom did not succeed to the dignity of earl until he had been ceremoniously girded with the sword of the county. The ceremony was a reminder that earldoms were royal creations and that indeed they had an official responsibility, at least historically, for the administration of the county with which their names were associated. The last known occasion when the heir to an earldom was girded with the sword of the county was in 1272, when Edward I invested his cousin, Edmund of Almaine, with the earldom of Cornwall. Earldoms in England can be said to be from that date formally hereditary. It is a reminder that the nexus of power in later medieval monarchies (including England and Scotland) was composed of a delicate and nuanced balance between royal will and aristocratic ambition. ⁵ GEC IV, Appendix H.

Display and Magnificence

61

Earldoms may have become hereditary; but the scope for royal creation and intervention, and therewith for lavish ceremonies to display the royal munificence to all the world, was still ample. Kings could and did decide regularly on disputed or ambiguous succession; they could show favour to the non-comital husband of a comital or ducal heiress; they could create a batch of new titles (as Edward III did in 1337 or Richard II in 1397); they could promote men from one rank to another within the peerage. All these were occasions when king and magnates could display their love of pomp and ceremony to the full. No one excelled Edward III as the master of such ceremonies. When he created his second and third sons dukes of Lancaster and Clarence respectively on 13 November 1362 he did so in the full publicity of parliament, girding them with a sword and conferring fur-trimmed caps and coronets on them. The Scottish kings soon picked up the title and the ceremony as means of entrenching the house of Stewart visually and honorifically at the apex of aristocratic society. King Robert III chose the monastery of Scone as the venue in April 1398 for elevating his son and brother to be dukes of Rothesay and Albany. He decorated them and bestowed fur mantles on them solemnly along ‘with other insignia appropriate only for dukes’.⁶ Medieval society exulted in the visual; nothing demonstrated better its love of display and its cult of calibrated social and honorific hierarchies than the ceremonies which set the titled nobility apart from the rest of society, including gentle society. This cult of exclusivity was also paraded in the formal titles and addresses of the aristocracy. As titles aggregated in fewer hands, their style became a roll call of the multiple sources of their power. So it was that Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361) flaunted the title ‘duke of Lancaster, earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester, steward of England, and lord of Bergerac and Beaufort’. Even more striking were the epithets of power and superiority which came to characterize their correspondence. Thus ‘noble’, ‘powerful’, and ‘valiant’ (strenuus) were the adjectives which the countess of Pembroke in 1368 deployed to describe her husband, John Hastings. Similar terms of flattery and respect were used to address Scottish earls: ‘noble and powerful lord’, ‘most revered prince’, ‘noble and powerful and dread lord’. Addresses outbid each other in the grovelling formulae they used: ‘To the magnificent, noble and powerful lord, Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan, lord of Ross and Badenoch, lieutenant of the lord our king and justiciar in the land north of the river Forth’.⁷ There seems to be an undoubted inflation in the language of deference across our period and the greater aristocracy were its prime beneficiaries. So it was, for example, in 1422 that a Wiltshire man in making a grant felt obliged to have it confirmed ⁶ Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. C. Innes (Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh 1833), no. 303. ⁷ For the will of Agnes Hastings, 1368, see Registrum Simonis de Langham Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, ed. A. C. Wood (CYS, Oxford, 1956), 344–5. For Lancaster, Nichols, Wills, 83; Mort. Reg., II, nos. 109, 129, 162, 180; Moray Reg., 167–8.

62

Lords and Lordship

by ‘the seals of my most dread lords (metuendissimorum dominorum meorum), the earls of March, Devon and Salisbury’.⁸ This inflation of terms of deference continued to soar, as the higher nobility were greeted as ‘right high and mighty prince’. As the usage of the word ‘prince’ suggests, one of the consequences of the inflation of the language of deference was the need to calibrate further the gradations of power and honour within the elite itself. Princes of the royal blood were in particular anxious to stress that they belonged to a superleague even within the higher aristocracy. So it was that John of Gaunt, as duke of Lancaster and the surviving eldest son of Edward III, exacted the most demeaning submission from Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, in November 1381. Percy was required to acknowledge Gaunt as ‘the greatest lord and highest person of the realm’.⁹ We might dismiss such flattering references as formulaic and hyperbolic; but that would be to miss their point. They were part of the terminology of exclusivity and superiority; they proclaimed to the world the reputation and eminence of their bearers. Thus when Alexander Stewart earl of Mar (by marriage) died in 1435 he was appropriately memorialized as ‘a man of great wealth and lavish expenditure, holder of a celebrated name, the object of much talk in distant places’.¹⁰ Nobility had to be seen, acknowledged, and paraded. Great wealth lavishly and proudly displayed was one of the hallmarks of lordship. Consumption, expenditure, largesse were essential manifestations of a hierarchy of status. Nothing less was expected. It is true that, at life’s end or in moments of spiritual introspection, doubts might creep in as to the propriety of such practices. Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361) in his spiritual selfexamination, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, aired his conscience on the matter. The pious bachelor Earl Humphrey of Hereford (d. 1361) went further. In his will he instructed that ‘all those jewels which we have delighted to look at during our lifetime’ should be ‘sold and the money so raised used for alms’. Earl Humphrey’s conscience was particularly tender for he instructed his executors to spend a further ten thousand marks (£6,666 13s. 4d .), by the advice of friars, in chantries and works of charity.¹¹ The nobility was extravagant in all that it did: in alms-giving and bequests as much as in lifestyle. But extravagance of remorse could not conceal or undo the fact that extravagance of display lay at the heart of lordship. It manifested itself in a whole variety of ways, which will only be touched upon cursorily here and to some of which we will return later. Fine and expensive ⁸ Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, ed. L. C. Lloyd and D. M. Stenton (Oxford, 1950), no. 31. ⁹ Reg. JG, II, no. 1243. ¹⁰ Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, VIII, 293. ¹¹ Nichols, Wills. Most of the wills cited in this chapter are to be found in published form in either Nichols, Wills or, very abbreviated, in Test. Vet. Individual citations are not normally given below unless the will in question is quoted from another source.

Display and Magnificence

63

dress was a striking way of setting the aristocracy apart.¹² The quality of the various cloth, silks, and fine linens from which their clothes were cut was of the finest and made even finer for the eye by being studded with brocade, jewels, and gold and silver embroidery. Henry Bolingbroke as earl of Derby kept his tailor employed for 244 days on end in October 1387–June 1388 in the lord’s wardrobe at London preparing the earl’s clothes. A single outfit might cost a substantial sum: £13 6s. was spent on one outfit (including gold cloth and lined with fur) for the young earl of March (d. 1398) in 1393 and a further £9 for gold cloth decorated with golden lions for the earl and George Felbrigg, one of his confidants. Figures of this order are in no way exceptional. And as the example of Felbrigg suggests, the lord’s extravagance in dress extended to encompass his servants, retainers, and followers, dressed in his own livery. The strain that such sartorial display placed on seigniorial finances is amply illustrated in household accounts. The account of the clerk of the great wardrobe of Henry Bolingbroke for 1395–6 may serve as an illustration: of total expenditure (exclusive of the costs of Henry’s children) of £791, drapery accounted for £73, mercery £219, furs and pelts £146, and goldsmith work £70. At the end of the account is a list of the rich London merchants who profited from Henry’s extravagance. The wealth and commerce of London underpinned the ability of aristocratic lordship to display its power and largesse.¹³ Aristocratic wealth was, of course, displayed in many other forms. Their residences and parks were a manifestation of their apartness; so were their lifestyles and leisure activities. To these we will return. For those admitted to their halls and houses, their tapestries and hangings, their coffers and beds, their rich ecclesiastical vestments and items of their chapels all proclaimed their wealth and apartness. The care with which individual items were described in their wills or listed in their inventories or catalogued by royal commissioners (as happened to the personal effects of Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397) at his house in London and residence at Pleshy in Essex) reveal the delight they took in their household goods, especially those with strong family associations.¹⁴ Roger Mortimer, first earl of March (d. 1330) was the proud owner of a white bed of buckram powdered with butterflies (butterflies seem to have been a favourite motif in the decor of his home); Elizabeth de Burgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360) and one of the co-heiresses of the earldom of Gloucester, drew up a detailed list of her cutlery, plates, saucers, pots, and so forth in 1332, noting which were ¹² See most recently F. Lachaud, ‘Dress and Social Status in England before the Sumptuary Laws’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge, 2003), 105–23. ¹³ TNA DL 28/1/2 f.17v (Henry Bolingbroke); BL Egerton Rolls 8740 (Mortimer); W. P. Baildon, ‘A Wardrobe Account of 16–17 Richard II, 1393–4’, Archaeologia, 62 (1911), 497–514, at p. 508 (Mortimer, but wrongly ascribed to Richard II); TNA DL 28/1/5 (Bolingbroke’s great wardrobe account). ¹⁴ CIM 1392–9, no. 372; Viscount Dillon and W. J. St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods . . . of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester’, Archaeological Journal, 54 (1897), 275–311.

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marked with her arms; while Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381) took the trouble to describe a salt cellar in the shape of a lion and another in the shape of a dog in his will.¹⁵ (Salts were high-prestige objects and were placed at the lord’s right hand on the table.) Examples such as these abound; they reflect the delight in the visual and in items of opulence. A delight in sumptuous clothes, rich furnishings, and valuable household goods was not, of course, confined to the higher aristocracy; but in a strictly hierarchical society there was, and was expected to be, a correlation between opulence, wealth, and status. It was for that very reason that contemporaries believed that an earl, for example, should have sufficient income in lands and wealth—a ‘competence’ as they termed it—to sustain his status and lifestyle. Hence they set the minimum yearly competence for an earl at a thousand marks (£666 13s. 4d .). But there were also insignia which set the greater aristocracy apart. Coronets increasingly figure in the historical evidence in the fourteenth century and not only for royal dukes: the earl of Arundel in his will in 1376 left his best coronet (which suggests that he had several) to his son, and the earl of March in 1381 left a particularly splendid coronet adorned with jewellery and pearls to his daughter, and referred to another coronet with roses. On what occasions such coronets might with propriety be worn is not altogether clear; but their very existence is another indication of the inflation of splendour and apartness in the ranks of the greater nobility. So likewise were the banners which had long since been one of the signs of aristocratic status: the Mowbray earl of Norfolk (d. 1432) commissioned a painter to prepare nine pennons and twenty standards of worsted of the arms of Mowbray in 1415 as well as a trapper for the earl’s horse displaying the arms of Marshal, Segrave, Mowbray, and Braose (all of them families from whom John Mowbray could claim descent). He also spent £10 on eight tunics for his herald of arms.¹⁶ Heralds—along with henchmen, pursuivants, and sword-bearers—were among the personnel who helped to proclaim the distinctiveness and splendour of the aristocratic m´enage to the world as it progressed across the county and attended jousts and tournaments. Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381) rewarded his herald of arms, ‘naming him March’, with the not inconsiderable fee of ten marks annually. John of Gaunt was regularly attended by a troupe of heralds, especially on major social occasions such as the feast of Epiphany or at jousts.¹⁷ Aristocratic power and apartness were not only displayed in sumptuousness of dress and lifestyle but also in the power of command their holder could exercise over his followers. This is a topic already alluded to above and to which we will ¹⁵ GEC, IX, 284, n. (f.); J. Ward, English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages (Harlow, 1992), 81; will of Edmund Mortimer in Nichols, Wills. ¹⁶ *Berkeley Castle MSS., account of Receiver-General of the Earl Marshal 1414–15. ¹⁷ CPR 1381–5, 156; BL Egerton Roll 8734; Reg. JG, II, nos. 327, 556 (p. 180), 803 (p. 259).

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return below. A lord’s standing was measured not only in wealth and estates but in the depth and extent of the numbers whom he attracted, directly or indirectly, into his service and following, be it as servants, dependants, clients, or retainers. Both parties wished this relationship to be celebrated publicly so that all the world could take note of it, and there was no better way of doing so than by the distribution of livery, collars and badges bearing the lord’s colours or insignia. The evidence is abundant. Thus when Sir Adam Swillington entered the service of Thomas earl of Lancaster (d. 1322) in 1317 with ten men, of whom three were to be knights, it was stipulated that when Swillington came at the earl’s beck to parliament or other assemblies, his knights should be dressed in the earl’s robes.¹⁸ Wearing the lord’s livery was a sure indication of personal commitment, as the supporters of the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundel and Warwick in autumn 1397 found to their cost when Richard II staged his coup against them.¹⁹ Livery badges and collars—such as the famous Lancastrian linked S—were increasingly popular ways of displaying the bond between lord and follower; they were at once badges of honour and badges of service. And at moments of high political drama a lord might distribute a distinctive uniform even more generally to followers who were not tied to him by any formal or permanent bond. When Earl Roger of March (d. 1398) returned from Ireland to the highly charged political atmosphere in England in early 1398, a vast crowd of supporters, wearing hoods in his colours of red and green, went out to meet him.²⁰ Robes, liveries, badges and collars have, of course, long figured prominently in the historiography of the later medieval aristocracy; but perhaps they have too often been packaged as part of the analysis of ‘bastard feudalism’ and marshalled in arguments about the loyalty (or otherwise) of dependants and retainers. These are clearly valid and rewarding approaches; but it could be that academic historians—who lead lives of cloistered routine and studied understatement—underestimate the calculated dazzle, the visual theatre, and the semiotics of material wealth and display which were at the heart of aristocratic, as of royal, power. Nobles strove to impress in a whole host of ways. It was not without reason that the public venue of the lord’s living was known as the domus magnificencie, the household of magnificence (as opposed to the domus providencie, the household below stairs). Great magnates, like kings, held courts splendidly, especially at the high religious festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, and doubtless invited large numbers of guests to attend. Richard earl of Gloucester (d. 1262) held court in a particularly splendid manner near Gloucester in 1248; while the earls of Warwick, according to tradition, celebrated the high feasts successively at Warwick castle, their hunting lodge at Sutton Coldfield, and ¹⁸ ‘Private Indentures’, no. 24; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 41. ¹⁹ CPR 1396–9, 137–8; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 94–6. ²⁰ Adam Usk, Chronicle, 38–9; Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, i, 354.

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Claverdon and Tamworth in Arden.²¹ The Anglo-Irish magnates followed suit especially when they came to Dublin: in 1329 the city was overwhelmed with high living as the earl of Desmond gave a great feast in St Patrick’s cathedral, the earl of Ulster in the castle, and the justiciar at Kilmainham.²² These were acts of gastronomic propaganda—displaying largesse and winning hearts and minds through social flattery. The numbers involved could be very large: it was calculated that even a second-rank lord, Thomas Berkeley (d. 1361), fed at least 300 persons each day at his table. Nor was it merely a matter of numbers; it also involved sensitive calculations as to who was invited to sit where and what number of dishes they were, or were not, served. Thus when Philip Darcy agreed to serve Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345) in 1327, it was stipulated that he and his men of arms would eat in the lord’s hall (mangerount en sale).²³ What is striking about these various aristocratic activities is the calculated care and strict etiquette which governed them. Much of it was no doubt formal but all of it, consciously or otherwise, was meant to redound to the lord’s honour and reputation and to affirm, and confirm, the social hierarchy over which he ruled. Events were conducted with calculated publicity. Thus when Sir Adam Swillington (see above) swore to be a good and loyal retainer of Earl Thomas of Lancaster in 1317, he took his oath on the Gospels ‘in the presence of the said earl and of bannerets and other bachelors’. The context of the ceremony on 28 February 1377 in the chapel of the Savoy palace was rather different, but the emphasis on publicity was the same. There, surrounded by members of his council and household, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) solemnly appointed Thomas Thelwall to be chancellor of the duchy and county of Lancaster.²⁴ Lordship was conducted in the public gaze; it was display and publicity which manifested its power. Its largesse was likewise publicly and regularly displayed, extending its network of obligation and gratitude over a wide social and geographical spectrum. Thus a few entries from the register of the Black Prince showed how he lived up to his self-proclaimed reputation that he was so great a lord that he could make all those who served him rich. Jewels, horses, oaks, venison, and other items were showered on beneficiaries, great and small; more than twenty recipients shared twenty-seven pipes of wine through his munificence; Lady Isabel de Trokesford was granted a small gold ring when she dined with the Prince; and a lucky minstrel who was present at a tournament at Bury came away with a horse. And to this regular distribution of individual gifts should be added the annual round of New Year gifts.²⁵ ²¹ Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols. (London, 1872–83), V, 47; CIPM, VII, no. 417. ²² Gilbert (ed.), Chartularies of St. Mary’s, Dublin, II, 369. ²³ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, I, 309 (Berkeley); ‘Private Indentures’, no. 32. See also the discussion in Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland, 98–9. ²⁴ ‘Private Indentures’, no. 24; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 57. ²⁵ Reg. BP, IV, 53–71.

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The aristocracy lived, therefore, a life of calculated and ostentatious display. But—as with all orders of society—there were occasions and rites of passage when such public display was particularly carefully choreographed for maximum effect. Birth and baptism were one such occasion. Baptism normally followed within a few days of the birth (though it might be delayed by the late arrival of a distinguished ecclesiastic or godparent). In the case of the four children of Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381), for which we have unusually full records, the gap ranged from four to nine days. A local bishop or prior performed the christening, and the godparents were chosen from leading ecclesiastics and lay men and women. Thus Earl Edmund’s fourth son, another Edmund, was born at Ludlow on 9 November 1376 and baptized there by the abbot of the Mortimer monastery of Wigmore nine days later. The abbot of Evesham and Lady Audley served as godparents, the bishop of Bangor arriving too late for the ceremony. The news of the birth would be broadcast far and wide, not only to close members of the family but to tenants and dependants. In 1372 the tenants of Richard’s Castle took the trouble to record the birth of the son and heir of John Talbot in the missal of the local church ‘because they intended the said heir in the future to be their lord’. It is a reminder that a private event was in the world of lordship an occasion of public significance and was recognized as such.²⁶ It was also an occasion for family solidarity and lavish gift-giving. Seigniorial accounts regularly record the handsome gifts which were given to messengers bringing news of a family birth. But such gifts were only the beginning of a splurge of largesse. One example (albeit at the highest level of the scale of munificence) will serve as an example. When John of Gaunt heard the news that the wife of his brother, Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham (d. 1397), had given birth to a daughter Anne (the future countess of Stafford) in September 1382 he opened the sluice gates of his generosity to the full. His baptismal gifts to his infant niece included a pair of silver bowls, gilded and engraved on their borders with collars and swans and fountains with escutcheons with the arms of ‘our brother of Buckingham’ (£47); one silver ewer (£5), a great ‘triper’ and a hanap with a lid of silver (£44). It was not only the young baby who benefited from the ducal munificence: money gifts totalling £18 6s. 8d. were distributed to two of the ladies-in-waiting of the baby’s mother, nurse, midwife, valet and page, the messenger who brought the glad tidings to the duke, and to the rocker (‘rokestare’) of the baby on behalf of the duke and his son the earl of Derby. All in all, the round of presents had cost the duke about £115, equivalent to a very comfortable annual income for a substantial knight. Great lords clearly did not stint in gift-giving.²⁷ ²⁶ Wigmore chronicle in Dugdale, Monasticon VI, 1, 354; L. B. Smith, ‘Proofs of Age in Medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 38 (1991), 134–44, at p. 142. ²⁷ Reg. JG, II, no. 803.

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The next rite of passage in which the young aristocrat was involved was the ritual of knighting. It was the solemn entry into the order of chivalry and as such was an inevitable occasion for sumptuous display and magnificence, often accompanied by jousts, feasts, and round tables. Families treasured the memories of such occasions: the Mortimer chronicle, for example, recorded the knighting ceremonies of Edmund (d. 1304), Roger (d. 1330) and Edmund (d. 1331) in some detail. The knighting of Roger was particularly memorable, for it was part of the remarkable Feast of the Swans held at Westminster at Whitsuntide (22 May) 1306. This was the hugely theatrical occasion when Edward I knighted his eldest son Edward, alongside almost 300 other aspirant knights.²⁸ This was a grand political act, a calculated act of involving the chivalrous class—now a much more selective and exclusive group than it had been a century earlier—in Edward I’s commitment to take vengeance on the treacherous Scots. To be knighted by the king in person was no doubt the aspiration of all great noblemen and their sons. But the aristocracy also used the ceremony of dubbing new knights as a way of publishing its social superiority. So it is that we hear, for example, of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), holding a great feast at Pentecost 1308 at Trim where he knighted Walter and Hugh Lacy. Edmund Butler (d. 1321), the ancestor of the earls of Ormond, was more ambitious, creating thirty knights at a feast in Dublin in 1313.²⁹ Chivalrous practices had also long since entrenched themselves in Scottish aristocratic culture, so it comes as no surprise to learn that Alexander Stewart, earl of Mar (d. 1435), knighted five of his kinsmen and supporters on the eve of a continental campaign.³⁰ Most aristocratic knightings were probably done individually and as such are rarely recorded. But the conferment of knighthood was a further bond between a lord and his dependants; it was a visual act of aristocratic bonding. So it is that we hear that Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381), knighted his brother Thomas—the man who was in effect to manage the Mortimer estates after Edmund’s death—and granted him a life annuity to maintain his status; the same Earl Edmund likewise gave the order of knighthood to one of his close followers, Sir Henry Conway.³¹ Indeed lords might jealously guard the privilege of granting the arms of knighthood to their followers. When the Anglo-Irish lord James Butler, earl of Ormond (d. 1382), retained the services of Oliver Howell in 1356, Oliver agreed that he would receive the arms of knighthood from the earl rather than from other lords, provided the earl behaved towards Oliver ‘as any lord ought to do so to the person who received military arms from him’.³² Conferring the arms of knighthood was not only an initiation ceremony into the order of chivalry and all that was associated with it, it was also an occasion ²⁸ C. Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff, 1978). ²⁹ Gilbert (ed.), Chartularies of St. Mary’s Dublin, II, 338. ³⁰ M. H. Brown, ‘Regional Lordship in North-East Scotland: The Badenoch Stewarts II. Alexander Stewart Earl of Mar’, Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), 31–54. ³¹ Holmes, Estates, 61; ‘Private Indentures’, no. 70. ³² ‘Private Indentures’, no. 43.

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for a great lord such as the earl of Ormond or the earl of March to display publicly the ceremonial powers he controlled and his role as master of chivalry. For knightings were occasions for expressing aristocratic wealth and pageantry to maximum effect. Thus Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke (d. 1307) assembled a crowd of 250 to celebrate the knighting of Sir John de Tany at Moreton Valence on 18 August 1297.³³ Marriage was the next rite of passage in which aristocratic largesse and munificence were at a premium. Indeed betrothal might long pre-date knighting, for the children of the aristocracy (as of kings) were often betrothed as infants—subject, of course, to the requirement that betrothal could only be converted into a marriage when the partners were of an age to give their consent freely and to consummate the marriage. So it was that Edward III’s second son, Lionel, was betrothed at the age of three to the rich heiress, Elizabeth de Burgh, five years his senior. The ceremony took place at the Tower of London and was followed by a lavish tournament attended by many of the leading earls of the realm.³⁴ When marriage (as contrasted with betrothal) eventually took place the celebrations were even more prolonged and opulent. We catch their character in the description of the Monk of Westminster of the wedding ceremony at Arundel castle in July 1384 when Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, married the earl of Arundel’s daughter. It was clearly the wedding of the season; and the exceptionally wealthy earl of Arundel saw to it that no expense was spared. The festivities lasted for a week or more, and all who wished to enter or leave were free to come and go. The wedding was attended by the king and queen with their entire household; all received a smiling welcome from the earl, who gave each of them a present according to his rank.³⁵

Celebrations took a variety of forms and could extend over several weeks. Here, as in all festivities and pageants, no one could, or should, outdo the king. The summer of 1290 was particularly spectacular in that respect. Edward I married two of his daughters: the one, the eighteen-year-old Joan of Acre, to the elderly earl of Gloucester (d. 1295), the other, Margaret, to John son of the duke of Brabant. The marriages were part of a grand family and diplomatic strategy, as Edward settled the descent of the kingdom at a particularly critical juncture—in the wake of the death of his wife and three of his four sons. Hard bargaining about the terms of the marriages had been in train for months and indeed years, bargaining in which the king clearly had the whip hand and exercised it to his maximum advantage. But once the terms had been settled, no expense was spared in giving the maximum publicity to the nuptials. We can guess the scale of the festivities when we recall that the king’s harper distributed £100 to ³³ C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 1999), 103–4. ³⁴ J. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge, 1982), 64. ³⁵ Hector and Harvey (eds.), The Westminster Chronicle, 88.

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426 minstrels ‘as well English as others’ at the marriage of Margaret. Nor did the celebrations end with the royally sponsored wedding. Two months after his marriage to Joan in May 1290, the earl of Gloucester laid on a great banquet at Clerkenwell in honour of his youthful bride.³⁶ Festivities often included a celebratory tournament such as the one held at Leicester in 1344 on the occasion of the marriage of Ralph Stafford (the future first earl of Stafford) to the daughter of Henry of Grosmont, earl of Lancaster, or a round table such as the one which was held in the presence of the king, earls, and barons at Waltham abbey on the marriage of the young earl of Gloucester (d. 1314) to the daughter of the earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh (d. 1326). And as at baptism, so at marriage an obligatory ritual of gift-giving—precisely calibrated in value according to the status of donor and donee—followed. Thus John of Gaunt gave a silver ewer and other valuables worth £9 to Lady Ferrers as a gift on the day of her marriage, but was understandably much more lavish in the presents he gave to his son, Henry Bolingbroke, on his marriage to Mary, co-heiress of the Bohun earldom of Hereford—including rewards to the ten minstrels sent by the king and four by Edmund of Langley to liven up the occasion.³⁷ Weddings and betrothals and the rituals and pageantry which characterized them were great social and celebratory occasions at all levels of society; but aristocratic weddings were a particular and public occasion for affirming the bonds and common ethos of aristocratic society (whatever private animosities lay behind the veneer of sustained jollity) and for displaying the wealth and opulence of the most exclusive club in the land. Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester (d. 1295) had married his adolescent bride—and in effect disowned his children by a previous marriage—on 30 April 1290. By 7 December 1295—having in the meantime fathered four children—he was dead. And so we come to the last of the rites of passage in which the aristocracy, like other orders of society, could manifest its status: death. Short of death itself, there might be occasions of leave-taking during lifetime which were converted into occasions for proclaiming the lord’s standing and the depth of the loyalty he commanded. Departure on crusade, on campaign, on pilgrimage, or to a tournament (as in the famous representation of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell leaving for the jousts shows vividly), or to parliament could all be occasions in which a lord’s servants and followers might assemble, some of them to accompany the lord (in what was called his travelling or forinsec household) and some simply to bid him a tearful farewell. And when the lord returned from his travels, he could expect an impressive reception party to meet him. Thus when Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), returned to England in 1409 his chief officials, a bevy of squires and many valets, travelled to London ³⁶ Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. H. Turner (Roxburgh Club, London, 1841), lxix–lxx. ³⁷ Reg. JG, I, no. 1659; II, no. 556.

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to await his arrival.³⁸ Short of death itself, the enforced political exile of the lord could provide an occasion to demonstrate the support and affection which good lordship could command. 1397–8 was, in the words of one of the officers of the earl of Warwick, such ‘an year of tribulation’. One of its victims was Thomas Mowbray, recently promoted duke of Norfolk (d. 1399). Now a victim of Richard II’s spleen, he was driven into exile. He took the sensible step of appointing eight of his confidants—including his brother-in-law (Sir Thomas Guy of Heton), two other knights, and two clerks—to be his ‘entire and continuous council’ during his absence. But it is what happened on a quayside in Suffolk on 19 October 1398 which most vividly illustrates the drawing power of lordship. The duke boarded ship with thirty attendants, bound for exile. On the quayside a crowd of over a thousand—including some of his closest associates (Lord Wells, Sir William Elmham, Sir John Calveley, Sir Nicholas Langford) and eighty squires and gentlemen—bade him farewell.³⁹ Stage-managed the occasion might have been; but it was also—as with the crowds which turned up to welcome the young Roger Mortimer, earl of March, on his return from Ireland in spring 1398—a demonstration that personal lordship had the capacity to attract fierce and public support even in the most dangerous political times. If departure for exile was so publicly choreographed, funerals were even more carefully planned and staged. Magnates often left very precise and detailed arrangements for their interment in their wills. There was often a substantial delay between death and interment, when the body would be embalmed and all the other arrangements—including clothing the household servants in black—were put in place. The Black Prince died on 8 June 1376, but his interment at Canterbury did not take place until 29 September. John of Gaunt specifically stipulated that he should not be buried until forty days after his death.⁴⁰ The deceased often chose their place of burial in advance: the earl of Hereford (d. 1361) wanted to be buried before the high altar in the choir of the church of the Austin friars in London; John, the last Warenne earl of Surrey (d. 1347), stipulated that he was to be buried at the church of St Pancras, Lewes, in ‘an arch near the high altar beside a window which he had caused to be built’. The choice of the place of burial was determined not only by family affection and personal choice but also by a deep sense of loyalty and indebtedness. The case of Sir William Beauchamp (d. 1411) is particularly striking in this respect. He chose not to be buried with his own family but in the Dominican church at Hereford ‘next and beneath the tomb of John de Hastings, earl of Pembroke’.⁴¹ ³⁸ BL Egerton Roll 8772 (account of the receiver general of the earl of Warwick, 1408–9). ³⁹ BL Egerton Roll 8769 (‘year of tribulation’ in the account of the receiver of the earl of Warwick 1396–7); Rot. Parl. III, 384. [See now, PROME VII, 424–6.] ⁴⁰ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 100: J. B. Post, ‘The Obsequies of John of Gaunt’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 5 (1981), 1–12. ⁴¹ Testamenta Eboracensia. Part I. (Surtees Society, London, 1836), 41–5, at p. 42; *Reg. Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, f.158r.

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The explanation is not far to seek: when the last Hastings earl of Pembroke died in a sporting accident in 1389, William Beauchamp succeeded to many of his lands (including the large Marcher lordship of Abergavenny, hence his title ‘of Bergavenny’) by the terms of an enfeoffment made by Hastings’s father. Now by choosing to be buried next to Hastings, William Beauchamp—a fourth son, an Oxford graduate, and a former canon of Salisbury—was acknowledging in death whence his landed fortunes were derived. Widows might likewise use the choice of burial place to indicate in death where their true affections lay, whatever may have been their conventional obligations in life. So it was, for example, that Philippa, countess of March (d. 1382), opted out of the Mortimer family mausoleum at Wigmore abbey and asked to be buried, instead, ‘in the second arch of the altar of St Anne’s’ at Bisham abbey, opposite her father the earl of Salisbury (d. 1344). Countess Philippa could assert her independence since she had outlived her husband by over twenty years. Had she predeceased him, then she might well find that her husband’s wishes—prompted no doubt by genuine affection—reached beyond her grave. So it was that Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), left instructions that the body of his first wife (Elizabeth, daughter of William Bohun, earl of Northampton) should be conveyed from her present tomb to his own burial spot in Lewes priory, to be united in death as they had once been in life.⁴² Funerals were, by definition, expensive affairs. They were, after all, occasions not only to express sorrow but also to display power and status—in the alms distributed, the troupes of professional weepers, the expenditure on candles, tapers, and cloth, and in the obligatory feasts. Humphrey, earl of Hereford (d. 1322), set aside a thousand marks (£666 13s. 4d .) for the general expenses of his funeral and commanded that the tombs of his father, mother, and wife be hung with cloth as rich as his own.⁴³ John of Gaunt—admittedly far and away the richest magnate in England—spent £600 on the burial costs of his second wife, Duchess Constance.⁴⁴ In the case of the funeral of Thomas, duke of Clarence, who was killed at the battle of Baug´e on 22 March 1421, we are privileged to have a detailed account of the expenses. They amounted to £136, including livery for eighty men carrying torches around his body; and doubtless there are other expenses which are not included.⁴⁵ Funerals were an occasion to parade noble status and opulence to maximum effect. The Black Prince certainly meant his funeral to be of the grandest. We will that at the time that our body is brought through the town of Canterbury as far as the priory, two war horses covered with our arms and two men bearing our arms and ⁴² Nichols, Wills, 98; Test. Vet., 129. ⁴³ The will of Humphrey, earl of Hereford (d.1322) is published in full in H. T. Turner, ‘The Will of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, with Extracts from the Inventory of his Effects, A.D. 1319–1322’, Archaeological Journal, 2 (1846), 339–49. ⁴⁴ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 94. ⁴⁵ Household Accounts, II, 679–82.

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helms shall ride before our body, that is to say one for war bearing our quartered arms, and the other for peace bearing our badges of ostrich plumes, with four banners of the same design, and that each of those who carries the said banners shall have on his head a hat bearing our arms.

And so he continues in the same vein. As it happens, many of the Prince’s accoutrements—his ‘achievements’ as they were called—which were carried into the cathedral are still extant—including his helm, crest, shield, gauntlets, and coat armour or gipon. These were the mementoes by which he wished to be remembered in death.⁴⁶ Not all magnates paraded their status and prowess so ostentatiously as did the Black Prince. Yet no one would have doubted that this was a proper way of displaying his status in society. The earl of Surrey/Warenne (d. 1347) had likewise commanded that four of his great horses dressed with his arms should be led before his body on the day of his interment. Perhaps more surprising is it to note that among the stoutest defenders of grand funerals for the aristocracy were some of the longest-lived and hard-headed widows of medieval England. The thrice-widowed Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), who had outlived her third and final husband by almost forty years, did not stint on her funeral expenses, which included 200 pounds of wax for lights round her body and £200 for disbursements on the eve and day of burial. Equally impressive must have been the funeral rites of Elizabeth, countess of Salisbury (d. 1415): the costs are not itemized (beyond a long list of charitable bequests) but the spectacle of twenty-four poor men in gowns and hoods of russet carrying torches as the body was borne into Bisham priory on a ‘herse’ covered with black cloth and five great candles (each weighing twenty pounds) must have been impressive. Unsurprisingly, perhaps the greatest stickler for appropriate recognition to be made of her elevated social status comes in the statement made by the formidable Joan Beauchamp (d. 1435), daughter of the earl of Arundel and widow of the lord of Abergavenny. She made it unambiguously clear that she was ‘to be carried to the place of my burying . . . with all the worship that ought to be done to a woman of my estate’ (my italics). A thousand marks was set aside for the costs of the interment; a further hundred marks for the poor attending the ceremony, and three hundred marks for priests to say masses for Joan’s nearest and dearest. It must have been a grand and crowded occasion.⁴⁷ But proud and status-conscious as Joan was, her will also demonstrated the deep doubts that entered into the aristocratic mentality in the fourteenth century about the pomp and expense of funeral ceremonies. In an age of the increasing internalization of religious devotion and of personal religious practices and self-analysis, an extravagant display of social standing in lavish funerals seemed out of place—and not only among radical religious groups. Even the haughty ⁴⁶ Nichols, Wills, 68; Age of Chivalry, nos. 626–33.

⁴⁷ Reg. Chichele, II, 14–18, 534–9.

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Joan Beauchamp prefaced her will with a preamble which spoke of her simple and wretched body and of this wretched and unstable life on earth. Others went far beyond the pious words of preambles. None more so than the retiring, priest-dominated, bachelor earl of Hereford, Humphrey de Bohun (d. 1361). His list of prohibitions is eloquent: no distribution of goods to poor people, no invitation to great men, no ‘herse’ over his body which was to be taken to London secretly (tout privement), no meal to be prepared on the day of the funeral except for a bishop, friars, and his household servants (mesnie). Secular extravagance was banned; but this was counterbalanced by spiritual welfare for the soul of the deceased: fifty friars were to pray for his soul for a year. Earl Humphrey was exceptional in his self-proclaimed abstinence; but the practice of avoiding grand interments and of making protestations about the vanity of worldly glory became fashionable among the later medieval aristocracy.⁴⁸ There was no greater warrior than Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361) and no greater lover of the delights of the sporting and military life (as his analogies in his Le Livre de Seyntz Medecines vividly show); but he specifically commanded that there should be no extravagance—such as men-at-arms or caparisoned horses—at his funeral. Many other noblemen—including Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), whose executors were commanded not to make ‘great and outrageous costs’ at his interment; or Earl Richard Fitzalan of Arundel (d. 1397), who prohibited men-at-arms, horses, or any extravagance at his funeral and capped the funeral expenses at a thousand marks; or John of Gaunt (d. 1399) who likewise stipulated that no solemnity or feast should be associated with his burial—followed suit. The tension between the appropriate display of status and the spiritual introspection which begat self-abasement is a recurrent feature of the mental world of the late medieval aristocracy. Funeral costs were not, of course, confined to interment rituals; they would be greatly augmented by the construction of a monument or effigy to the deceased. Wills generally stipulated the church in which the deceased should be buried and often the precise spot within the church; they might also indicate the kind of memorial to be erected. Family traditions were often so strong that the individual had very little choice in the matter.⁴⁹ At least fourteen members of the Mortimer family—and doubtless their spouses also—were buried at Wigmore abbey 1185–1398 (even if, as in the case of Roger Mortimer the first earl of March (d. 1330), they had initially been buried elsewhere). Likewise the de Vere family—earls of Oxford and one of the most exceptionally long-surviving comital families of medieval–early modern England—favoured Colne priory ⁴⁸ See in general J. Catto, ‘Religion and The English Nobility in the Later Fourteenth Century’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (London, 1981), 43–55. ⁴⁹ See in general B. and M. Gittos, ‘Motivation and Choice: The Selection of Medieval Secular Effigies’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge, 2003), 143–69.

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(Essex) where fourteen of its effigies were extant. Where a family tradition did not exist, it could be created so that the family’s continuity through time could be made manifest in its effigies. So it was that Hugh Despenser (d. 1349) set about to reshape the eastern arm of the abbey church at Tewkesbury with a grand mausoleum for his family. Individual magnates not infrequently gave directions as to the kind of monument which should be erected in their memory. John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d. 1375) instructed that his tomb ‘be made as like as possible to the tomb of Elizabeth de Burgh who lies in the Minories, London’ and left £140 for the purpose. In a similar fashion, Sir Walter Mauny (the second husband of Margaret, the Countess Marshal), commissioned ‘an alabaster tomb like the one for Sir John Beauchamp in St Paul’s’. Other nobles avoided the path of emulation and instead gave precise instructions regarding their funerary monuments. Sir John Montagu, the brother of the earl of Salisbury, directed that his tomb should have an image of a knight bearing the arms of Montagu, with a helmet beneath his head. More remarkable was the very precise description which Isabel, countess of Warwick (d. 1439) prepared of ‘my statue . . . all naked, with my hair cast backwards, according to the design and model which Thomas Porchalion has for that purpose’.⁵⁰ Such monuments did not come cheap; they were an extra charge which heirs and executors had to bear in mind. John of Gaunt may have been in a super-league in terms of wealth; but the costs he incurred in erecting a worthy tomb for his first wife, Duchess Blanche, may indicate the scale of the outlay. Six carts were commandeered to carry alabaster to London for a new tomb at St Paul’s: Henry Yevele, the great master mason who designed some of the most lavish tombs and buildings for English kings and aristocrats in the late fourteenth century, was paid £486 for the construction of the tomb itself.⁵¹ Sometimes the tomb was topped with a brass memorial, indicating how the taste for brasses—so favoured by the English knightly and mercantile classes in the period—had also captured the imagination of the aristocracy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the splendid brass on the Purbeck marble tomb of Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester (d. 1399), at Westminster abbey. Monumental sculpture for the English aristocracy was to reach its apogee in the resplendent gilt-bronze effigy which was constructed in memory of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), some years after his death.⁵² The Beauchamp monument was housed in a specially designed new chapel constructed for the purpose at St Mary’s church, Warwick. This is a reminder to us that the munificence and largesse of the aristocracy was posthumously and ⁵⁰ Nichols, Wills, 92–5 (Hastings); Registrum Simonis de Sudbiria Diocesis Londoniensis, 1362–75, ed. R. C. Fowler, C. Jenkins, and S. Radcliff, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1927–38), I, 1–4; Register of William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, f.236 ( John Montagu); Test. Vet. 39 (countess of Warwick). ⁵¹ Reg. JG, I, nos. 1394, 1659. ⁵² Age of Chivalry, no. 697; Marks and Williamson (eds.), Gothic: Art for England, no. 87.

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recurrently manifested in acts which commemorated their lives and their wishes. Anniversaries were scrupulously and lavishly celebrated. Thus John of Gaunt held a great feast on the anniversary of Duchess Blanche’s death, attended by magnates and the chapter of St Paul’s. Twenty-four poor tenants perambulated round her tomb holding a burning torch each, and alms were distributed to the canons of St Paul’s, the poor and the prisoners of Newgate, Ludgate, and the Fleet.⁵³ Nor were these arrangements in any way exceptional. The distribution of alms in accordance with the testator’s will was a primary call on executors. The bequests made by the redoubtable Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny, may stand for scores of similar examples: one hundred marks for the poor attending her funeral; two hundred marks to be divided among poor tenants; £100 for clothing, bedding, horses, oxen, and other necessaries within six months of her death to be given to bedridden and poor men ‘dwelling in the lordships I have’; £100 for marriage of poor maidens in the same lordships; £100 for feeble bridges and foul ways; and £40 for the deliverance of poor prisoners. The grand total of Lady Joan’s bequests of this kind amounted to £520. It was not a punitive sum given that the landed valuation of her English estates amounted to more than £2,000 annually to which should be added £500 or so for the Marcher lordship of Abergavenny. But she no doubt regarded it as charitable giving at death commensurate with her status (of which she was inordinately proud) in life.⁵⁴ Lady Joan’s bequests were a non-recurrent charge on her assets. Ultimately a much more substantial and long-term drain on noble finances were the various religious bequests which the aristocracy made to ease their passage into the next world.⁵⁵ Prayers for the dead (and sometimes for members of his or her family) headed the list. The pious earl of Hereford (d. 1361) was perhaps on the extravagant side in instructing fifty friars to pray for his soul for a year after his death; but others—such as the countess of Salisbury (d. 1415)—who inter alia left a bequest for three thousand masses to be sung after her death ‘in all haste’—were not far behind.⁵⁶ At least these were time-limited bequests. Ultimately much more draining of a family’s assets over time were the religious bequests which were, as it were, sine die. Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, could afford to be particularly prodigal given his immense personal wealth. So it was that he instructed that two monks of Lewes priory should celebrate two masses perpetually. He also established a college of six priests and three choristers to celebrate divine service annually in the chapel of Arundel castle. Religious houses and churches on the lord’s estates were showered with donations: Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), bequeathed money and gifts to almost forty ⁵³ Reg. JG, I, no. 1585; TNA DL 28/3/5 f.10. ⁵⁴ Reg. Chichele, II, 534–9. ⁵⁵ J. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (London, 1972). ⁵⁶ Reg. Chichele, II, 14–15.

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religious houses with which he and his family were associated, ranging from £1,000 for new building at Wigmore priory down to twenty marks each for some minor houses. If to such bequests we add the costs of the foundation and maintenance of chantries and colleges (of which perhaps the most remarkable was the college and hospital of St Mary Newarke at Leicester, founded by Duke Henry of Lancaster), the distribution of alms, the arrangements for anniversaries, we begin to realize what a huge drain death and the hereafter were on aristocratic finances. And also on aristocratic consciences: Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), was clearly haunted by the conviction that he had not fully observed the terms of his father’s will and that his own son in turn might be likewise cavalier in observing his own testament. The detailed care and attention that the aristocracy gave to the composition and terms of their wills—often the nearest we get to a personal insight into their characters—make it clear that proper preparation and down-payments for the hereafter were not only genuine acts of personal piety but were also the obligatory discharge of the social expectations of their exalted position in life. There is little in the essence of aristocratic testamentary directions which distinguishes them from the wills of ordinary believers; but the scale of largesse and calculated transfer of wealth which they incorporate indicate that in commemoration and memorialization, as in all other respects, the greater aristocracy stood apart. Most of the acts and rituals of display and magnificence outlined above were self-referential, in that their purpose was to display and confirm the exalted status of the greater aristocracy. They were part of the self-affirmation of its social pre-eminence. But ultimately in the social theory and assumptions of the period the justification of lordship lay in the role it played in relation to the social fabric and to the orders of society in general. Lordship was in the final analysis—like kingship—more than power, more than exploitation, albeit that these are the facets of it which were often brutally to the fore and which can be documented in terms amenable to modern economic and social analysis. Lordship was also a ministerium, an office. That is why contemporaries talked frequently of ‘good lordship’, which could clearly be distinguished from the mere exercise of power, just as kingship could be distinguished from tyranny. To such issues we will return.⁵⁷ We touch upon them here because it was the duty of good lordship to display itself not only to its peers but also to those who were within the orbit of its dependence and social responsibility. We have already seen that, though the primary calls on the lord’s conscience as death approached was to ease his own passage in the hereafter, and thereafter to discharge his debts and to reward his servants and followers, high priority was also given to the distribution of alms to the poor and distressed. Moreover, as the ⁵⁷ Prof. Davies’s original text reads ‘To such issues we will return in the second part of this book.’

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alms-giving of Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny, cited above makes clear, such alms were specifically targeted on men and women in need ‘dwelling in the lordships I have’. This was the visible discharge of the obligations of lordship on the lord’s own lands and to his own tenants and dependants. It is a reminder to us that medieval lordship was ultimately personal and patriarchal. So it was that William Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d. 1397), in a will made ten years before his death, made bequests to poor tenants of twenty-one of his English manors and ‘all tenants, English and Welsh, of my lordship of Mold’.⁵⁸ Nor should we be necessarily unduly cynical about such gifts: there was a mutuality about the relationship of lord and tenant which, at its best, was recognized by both parties in terms of the social order. Thus the charity that the earl of Salisbury showed to his tenants was to be matched by the prayers they should proffer for his soul. Tenants and dependants should share in the acts of commemoration. That is why Alice, duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475) gave money to build a new bell-tower at the church of Eye so that ‘there should be a perpetual memorial among the tenants of the lord (inter tenentes domini) for the soul of their most beloved lord, William, late duke of Suffolk’.⁵⁹ Since the bond of lordship was irreducibly, if largely formally for many purposes, a personal bond, the public affirmation of that bond should be the initial act of lordship. Such affirmation was the purpose of the twin acts of homage and fealty, the one a physical obeisance to the lord, the other a pledge on oath to accept him as lord and all that followed from such acceptance. The formulae for both ceremonies were solemnly copied into seigniorial archives, and the lord’s officers sought to ensure that tenants and dependants did not overlook their obligation to perform them. By the fourteenth century both homage and fealty had largely become formal adjuncts of tenure, performed at the moment of entry into a tenement or holding. But lords did not overlook the theatricality of the occasion as a way of expressing their rights as lord. So it was that the Black Prince ordered all who were bound to do homage and fealty to him to come to London to do so; the gentry of Cornwall turned up at Restormel castle to discharge their homage and fealty; others did so ‘in the chamber within his palace’ at Exeter. Likewise, at a much more modest social level, the abbot of Ramsey insisted that all tenants in arrears with their homage and fealty should be distrained.⁶⁰ No doubt considerations of control and profit—such as fines for the non-performance of suit of court—dictated such exercises; but we should not underestimate the emphasis on the personal and physical acknowledgement of lordship which, ultimately, lay at their root. ⁵⁸ Register of Thomas Arundel, f.159–159v. ⁵⁹ *BL Egerton Roll 8779 (account of receiver of duchess of Suffolk, 1453–4). ⁶⁰ Reg. BP, II, 23, 62–3, 67–8; cf. Reg. JG, II, no. 457; Court Rolls of the Abbey of Ramsey and of the Honor of Clare, ed. W.O. Ault (New Haven, 1928), 82.

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This becomes abundantly clear if we take note of the great collective acts of acknowledgement of lordship, especially new lordship, which figure in the records. They are yet another reminder to us how close the parallels were between kingship and lordship in this, as in many other respects. Just as a new king had to be acclaimed popularly at his inauguration or just as Edward I had insisted that hundreds of Scots swear fealty to him—and such fealties were recorded in the thirty-five membranes of parchment in the Ragman Rolls—in 1296, so lords inaugurated their lordship by securing massive declarations of fealty, either in person or by proxy. So it was—to cite only a couple of instances—that in 1284 twenty-nine leading men of the lordship of Bromfield and Yale (north-east Wales) did homage to the son of the earl of Surrey (the new lord of the lordship), followed by a communal act of homage by the rest of the tenants ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’; and so it was in December 1404 outside the walls of Kildrummy castle that the free tenants of the earldom of Mar accepted Alexander Stewart as their new earl.⁶¹ Whenever a lordship changed hands—through death, transfer, or political forfeiture—it was imperative that the authority of the new lord be publicly acknowledged. Two thousand Welshmen were said to have attended such a ceremony in Brecon in 1302, and likewise when Roger Mortimer of Wigmore seized the Fitzalan lordship of Clun in 1321 he immediately took the fealty and homage of its men.⁶² Such ceremonies had practical consequences: men who had sworn fealty were justiciable by him and answerable to him—as the words of the formula expressed it—‘in life and members and earthly honour’. But above all they remind us that there was a patriarchal and personal dimension to medieval lordship—especially in areas outside the claustrophobic reach of royal power—which we ignore at our peril. Since lordship was personal it was important that it be personally displayed, especially at its inauguration. Medieval aristocrats spent most of their own time attending to their own pleasures and responsibilities; but few of them overlooked their obligation to show themselves to their tenants and dependants, especially on their first entry into the lordship. The young Roger Mortimer (d. 1398) was given seisin of his lands in 1393 and proceeded at once to visit his manors in East Anglia and then undertook a forty-day progress through his estates in Wales and the March.⁶³ He was in effect showing himself to his subjects; they for their part were expected to ‘acknowledge his lordship over them’ (in the contemporary phrase) and to show their delight by granting him handsome gifts or subsidies. Such progresses could be repeated at intervals: Henry Bolingbroke and his retinue mounted on forty horses rode to Brecon in ⁶¹ Davies, Lordship and Society, 132–3; Brown, ‘Regional Lordship in North-East Scotland’, 31. ⁶² CIM 1219–1307, no. 1870; Davies, Lordship and Society, 132–3 (and the instances cited there). ⁶³ BL Egerton Rolls 8736, 8740–1 (accounts of Roger Mortimer, 1390s).

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1397 to remind its people who their lord was and that he had recently been promoted to be duke of Hereford. It was a costly honour for the men of Brecon, as they were required to give the duke a massive gift of two thousand marks (£1333 6s. 8d .).⁶⁴ The carefully stage-managed visit of Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford to his lordship of Brecon in 1397 epitomizes the twin faces of aristocratic lordship—patriarchal and acquisitive, ostentatious and extortionate. Keeping some degree of acceptable balance between these twin faces was one of the most delicate demands of lordship. It was so at all times, but the balance was particularly difficult in the harsh economic and social conditions of the later Middle Ages, as population fell catastrophically and as many of the mechanisms of seigniorial control and exploitation were challenged or bypassed. For the most part the centrality of lordship—be it that of the lord of the manor or that of the great lay and ecclesiastical magnate—as a cornerstone, for good or ill, of the social order was not effectively called in question. And so long as lordship was central, so would also be the display and magnificence which were the visual demonstration of its status, power, and apartness. In a profoundly hierarchical social order, it could hardly be otherwise.

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the role of the crown in aristocratic display, H. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2000). For increasingly florid modes of address, P. Coss, ‘An Age of Deference’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006). For an example from fifteenth-century Ireland, K. Simms, ‘The Archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 1347–1471’, IHS, 19 (1974), 53. For expensive attire, W. Childs, ‘Cloth of Gold and Gold Thread: Luxury Imports to England in the Fourteenth Century’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. GivenWilson, A. Kettle, and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008). For aristocratic diet, C. M. Woolgar, ‘Fast and Feast: Conspicuous Consumption and the Diet of the Nobility in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed. M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001), and the contributions to Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D, Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford, 2006). For the splendour of the court, M. Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture ⁶⁴ TNA JUST I. 1/1152 (‘pro recognicione domini sui super eis habito’); for gifts on lord’s visit: *Staffordshire Record Office D 641/1/2/4 (first visit of the earl of Stafford to Thornbury, 1390–1); Reg. JG, I, no. 1052; Davies, Lordship and Society, 59–60 (Bolingbroke’s Brecon visit).

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in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford, 2001), and C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 2006), chs. 10 and 11. For aristocratic display in death, D. M. Hadley, Death in Medieval England: An Archaeology (Stroud, 2001), chs. 3 and 5. For the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, P. Coss, The Lady in Medieval England, 1000–1500 (Stroud, 1998), ch. 3. For Scotland, R. Fawcett, Scottish Medieval Churches: Architecture and Furnishings (Stroud, 2002), ch. 4. For funerary monuments in English Ireland, S. Fry, Burial in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500 (Dublin, 1999), ch. 5 and R. Moss, ‘Permanent Expressions of Piety: The Secular and the Sacred in Later Medieval Stone Sculpture’, in Art and Devotion in Late Medieval ´ Clabaigh, and S. Ryan (Dublin, 2006). For Ireland, ed. R. Moss, C. O representations of Gaelic lordship, F. Verstraten, ‘Images of Gaelic Lordship in Ireland, c.1200–c.1400’, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008).

3 The Lord at Home The northern European nobility was, for the most part, a country-dwelling elite. The great lords of the British Isles were no exception. The countryside, after all, was the major source of their regular wealth and power—in manors, demesnes, tenants, rents, services, tributes, and the control of the men and the natural resources (including forest, pastureland, waste, and waters) of their estates. They were domini terrae. The countryside likewise was the venue for their pastimes and leisure, notably for the hunting and the falconry to which they were almost all addicted. It is true, of course, that active and able-bodied male lords would spend a great deal of time away from their landed estate—on military campaigns and diplomatic missions, on a social round of tournaments and celebrations, or attending court, council, or parliament. But it was to their residences in the countryside that they regularly returned; and it was on these residences that they lavished much of their wealth. This was their natural habitat. They were spoilt for choice, or at least potentially so. The landed fortunes of the greater aristocracy were often very widely dispersed geographically; particularly was this true of the greater English aristocracy. This meant that the residences of the aristocracy—be they castles, manor-houses, hunting lodges, country mansions, or (particularly in late medieval Scotland and Ireland) towerhouses—were also widely dispersed. Thus Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), could select his residence from a list of at least twenty-three castles in England and Wales.¹ Not all castles and manor-houses were kept in an adequate state of repair or comfort to offer acceptable accommodation to a great lord and his m´enage. Even so, since it was one of the expectations of effective lordship that the lord should show himself periodically in his ‘country’, a goodly number of the lord’s residences had to be kept in at least a minimum state of good repair in anticipation of a seigniorial visit. John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399), had a greater stock of possible residences to choose from than any other English lord. He was particularly fond, when in England, of extended stays at his palace of Savoy near London or his castle of Hertford (which was greatly upgraded for his personal comfort); a man of his eminence, after all, needed to be within earshot of the royal court and its pulsating social and political life. But he did not ignore his midland and northern residences: Higham Ferrers, Leicester, ¹ Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 172.

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Kenilworth, Tutbury, Tickhill, Knaresborough, Pontefract, and Pickering were all castles which he visited with some regularity.² In spite of being spoilt for choice, there were compelling reasons why great lords concentrated their extended stays at a few favoured residences. Individual preferences and circumstances no doubt played their part. The reason why Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) spent most of the period 1317–22 based at Pontefract was doubtless explained by his growing political disenchantment and his anxiety to establish a regional power base for himself in dangerous times.³ His nephew, Duke Henry (d. 1361), lived in politically much calmer times and, when he was not busy on military or diplomatic business on the continent, chose Leicester castle at the heart of the midlands as his favourite residence. It was there appropriately that he refounded a great collegiate church to pray for the Lancastrian dynasty; but it may well be that the prime attraction of the area for him lay in the proximity of excellent hunting in nearby Leicester forest. His spiritual memoirs make it abundantly clear that rural sports were an abiding passion for him.⁴ A family’s favoured residence might indeed change over time as it acquired new estates through marriage and inheritance. Wigmore (Herefordshire) had been the base for the Mortimers since they arrived in England soon after the Norman conquest; but by the early fourteenth century its days of glory were already past and it was dismissed in a survey as a place ‘more of honour than of profit’.⁵ The Mortimers waxed rich as they acquired first the Geneville inheritance and then the vast estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360). Two of the premier castles of these two acquisitions—Ludlow and Usk respectively—now became favourite residences of the Mortimers, as is suggested by the recorded birthplaces of their children;⁶ both were extensively refurbished in the fourteenth century to make them comfortable seigniorial homes. Seigniorial residences were much more complex buildings than the gaunt ruins of most medieval castles would suggest today. Two of the very contrasting residences occasionally used by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk (d. 1306), may serve to make the point. In spring 1273 Earl Roger and his wife spent nine weeks in the manor-house at Forncett (Norfolk). They would have found the accommodation there more than adequate, ‘almost palatial’. The central hall—where public entertainment would be staged—was flanked by up to twelve chambers (including the earl’s chamber and the knights’ chamber). There were a range of domestic quarters (kitchen, buttery, larder, bakehouse, dairy), three stables and barns, an orchard and vineyard. Forncett was a working demesne ² Reg. JG, II, xvii–xviii; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 302–4. ³ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 10. ⁴ Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 187–93, 215; also L. Fox and P. Russell, Leicester Forest (Leicester, 1948). ⁵ Quoted in a survey of 1328 in B. P. Evans, ‘The Family of Mortimer’ (University of Wales Ph.D. thesis, 1934), 398. ⁶ The birth places are recorded in the Wigmore chronicle in Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, i.

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manor with a full-time labour force of eight or nine servants. It was a convenient stopping place on the travels of the servants, knights, officials, and huntsmen of the earl.⁷ Forncett may have been adequate; but it paled in grandeur compared with some of Earl Roger’s other residences. The late thirteenth century was a great age for highly ambitious seigniorial building; Earl Roger of Norfolk was one of its great exponents. He made extensive alterations and extensions at his two Suffolk castles at Framlingham and Bungay; constructed splendid manor-houses at Walton (Suffolk) and Hamstead Marshall (Berkshire); and erected a hunting lodge at Cas Troggy in Wentwood Forest (in the lordship of Strigoil/Chepstow). He was also the principal benefactor of the rebuilding of the great new Gothic church at Tintern abbey in the Wye valley. But his most sumptuous, and for us most significant, achievement was the redesigning and rebuilding of the lower bailey of Chepstow castle.⁸ The work appears to have been undertaken under the direction of a London master mason, Ralph Gogan. The refurbished castle redounded to the greater glory and comfort of Earl Roger. A splendid suite of private apartments—housing a hall, cellar, earl’s chamber, kitchen, and service rooms—was constructed overlooking the river Wye; a new, lavishly appointed and self-contained set of apartments was built in the new (or Marten’s) tower in the south-east corner; and the great tower (whose origins date back to a few years after the Norman conquest) was extended and embellished. The imperative behind this extravagant building enterprise was not strictly military (since the Welsh had ceased to be a threat in this extreme south-east corner of Wales); rather was it display and magnificence. Chepstow was almost certainly Earl Roger’s favourite residence; here he could flex his seigniorial muscles to their full extent since Chepstow lay, at least administratively and judicially, beyond the reach of the machinery of English royal government but within the social and economic orbit of English seigniorial life. Earl Roger sank a large fortune into the rebuilding and redesigning of Chepstow. He was not unusual in this respect. The primary call on the seigniorial budget was money to feed and clothe the lord and his household; that was a recurrent and major item of expenditure.⁹ But once those costs were met, the upkeep and refurbishment of buildings (primarily in this context the lord’s castles) were a major charge. Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) spent almost £2,000 (some 17 per cent of his income) on his castles in 1313–14; John of Gaunt likewise spared no expense in making his major castles more impressive ⁷ F. G. Davenport, The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor, 1086–1565 (Cambridge, 1906), 20–24. ⁸ The excellent revised version of the CADW Welsh Historic Monuments guide to Chepstow is R. Turner, Chepstow Castle (Cardiff, 2002). ⁹ C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 55–70. John of Gaunt’s household expenses in the 1390s averaged £6,500– £7,000 annually; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 19.

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and comfortable. Kenilworth was a particular favourite of his. He assigned at least 400 marks annually in the 1380s to construct ‘a new palace complex’ there whose centrepiece was a magnificent unaisled great hall, 90 × 45 feet in dimensions, and covered with a huge hammer-beam roof. The outer buildings of the castle could accommodate up to 200 servants and retainers.¹⁰ Here Gaunt could hold court in a style worthy of a man who was titular king of Castile as well as duke of Lancaster. Other earls followed suit, albeit on a more modest scale. The Beauchamp earls of Warwick spent regularly and lavishly especially on Warwick castle; the Fitzalan earls of Arundel did the same at the castles of Shrawardine and Arundel, the headquarters respectively of their Shropshire and Sussex estates; so did Thomas, duke of Gloucester, on Pleshey (Essex) and Caldicot on the Severn estuary which came to him as part of his wife’s inheritance.¹¹ Nor did the greatest of the Scottish magnates lag far behind, though the idiom of building and the function of the castle were in some respects different in a Scottish context. It was the first earl of Douglas (d. 1384) who was probably responsible for rebuilding the splendid castle of Tantallon (East Lothian) with its curtain walls and towers perched high above the sea. The third earl, Archibald the Grim (d. 1400) chose a very different design when he opted for a free-standing, massive, rectangular tower-house as his new headquarters at Threave in Galloway. As new families entered the higher ranks of the aristocracy through marriage, service, and patronage, one of their first acts of self-advertisement was to build an up-to-date castle or to refurbish an existing one to announce their arrival. So it was that Ralph, created earl of Stafford in 1351, paraded his new-found wealth and status by building castles at Stafford and Madeley (Gloucestershire).¹² Equally striking are the building enterprises of the two northern families, Percy and Neville, who both climbed into the comital league in the later fourteenth century (in 1377 and 1397 respectively). Warkworth castle had come into the hands of the Percy family in 1332 but it was in the closing decades of the fourteenth century that the first Percy earl of Northumberland (d. 1408) redesigned it into the remarkable edifice whose splendid outline still survives today. Its interlocking site of over twenty rooms, its semi-polygonal projecting towers, and the splendid symmetry of the whole design proclaimed to the world that the Percies had arrived—indeed the family’s lion rampant on the walls of its northern salient made that point visually—and that they could build as grandly and innovatively as any of their peers in midland and southern England.¹³ Henry Percy had even planned a collegiate church within the precincts of his refurbished castle—echoing the royal example at Windsor or the practice of some of the ¹⁰ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 25; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 305–6; Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 96–8. ¹¹ A History of the County of Warwick. Volume VIII: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick, ed. W. B. Stephens (VCH, Oxford, 1969), 456–7 (Warwick); Davies, Lordship and Society, 56 n. 71 (Shrawardine); 75 n. 32 (Caldicot). ¹² McFarlane, Nobility, 203. ¹³ Age of Chivalry, 247–8.

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grandest English families, such as the houses of Lancaster and Arundel. Nor were the Nevilles, the neighbours and rivals of the Percies in the north, to be outdone. John Neville (d. 1388) substantially rebuilt Raby castle (Co. Durham) and was given a licence to crenellate another Neville castle at Sheriff Hutton (Yorkshire). His son, Ralph Neville, the first earl of Westmorland (d. 1425), followed suit—doubling the entrance gateway at Raby and rebuilding Sheriff Hutton so that, in John Leland’s words, ‘no house in the north [was] so like a princely lodging.’¹⁴ Many other families of baronial and comital rank followed suit, for the castle was still in the later Middle Ages the status symbol par excellence of aristocratic standing and prestige. Not the least of the attractions of the castle was its multi-purpose character. Its military role was far from being redundant, self-evidently so in the north of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Even in lowland England the castle could still play its role in an act of military defiance: so it was that the earl of Arundel fortified Reigate castle (Surrey) when he faced arrest at the hands of Richard II in the tense autumn months of 1387.¹⁵ In more normal conditions the castle continued to perform both a psychological and practical role as the visual expression of seigniorial domination and power. Psychologically it expressed the awesomeness of lordship. That is why, for example, John of Gaunt built a massive new gatehouse at Kidwelly in south-west Wales in the late-fourteenth century. Kidwelly was not one of Gaunt’s regular residences nor was there, at that stage, any suggestion that it had any longer a military role to play; but the castle was a visible reminder of who was lord of the district. It was, in the words of a near contemporary Welsh poem about another Welsh castle, ‘the tower of the bold conqueror’. Practically Kidwelly—in common with many other castles—was the fulcrum of the lord’s authority and governance of the district. It was the seat of the lord’s major local officials, his steward and receiver; his auditors and other officials visited it regularly on their investigative circuits; it was to its treasury that the tenantry and local officials of an extensive area paid their dues; and it was there that the lord’s justice was meted out in his courts.¹⁶ But the prime reason for extending and upgrading a castle in the later Middle Ages was to provide acceptable accommodation for the lord and his retinue on their extended visits. The emphasis was increasingly on domestic comfort and privacy. Hence the addition of withdrawing rooms and private apartments, glazed windows and chimneyed hearths. Castles such as Kenilworth—which now boasted a room called ‘le parlour’—increasingly resembled the country house of the future rather than the military fortress of the past. Nor should we underestimate the role of seigniorial wives and dowagers in promoting ¹⁴ The territorial fortunes and activities of the Percy and Neville families are discussed, and mapped, in C. Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (London, 1987). ¹⁵ A. Goodman, The Loyal Conspiracy: The Lords Appellant under Richard II (London, 1971), 23. ¹⁶ R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr ˆ (Oxford, 1995), 15–16, 269–72.

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such changes. Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), renamed Shrawardine castle (Shropshire) Castle Philippa in honour of his wife, Philippa Mortimer, and doubtless transformed it to suit her tastes and needs. Earl Richard’s uxoriousness was more than matched by that of his close colleague, Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397). He spent lavishly on the castle at Caldicot on the Severn estuary, including installing a chamber called ‘the Dressinghouse’ and inserting stone blocks with his own name and that of Eleanor, his wife (through whom he had inherited the castle and estate) into the masonry of the new tower. Even hardbitten dowagers had to keep up with the latest fashion: Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435) had a minstrels’ gallery, a green chamber, and a parlour installed in her residence at Rochford (Essex) and commissioned a painter from London to paint the wooden buttresses of her great hall ‘in the colour of marble’.¹⁷ Lady Joan’s home at Rochford boasted at least two named gardens—the great garden and the west garden. In this respect also she was following seigniorial fashion: John of Gaunt certainly had a garden at Kenilworth (one of his favourite country residences) and at his palace at Savoy; the earl of Warwick had a garden and a vineyard at Warwick.¹⁸ Castles—or at least those that were regularly favoured as residences and accordingly refurbished and upgraded—were becoming relatively comfortable and well-appointed residences rather than the gaunt and bare ruins that are normally all that survives of them today. Some of the leading architects, master masons and master carpenters were hired to reconstruct and repair them—including Henry Yevele and William of Wintringham in the service of John of Gaunt. Such experienced professionals set their stamp on some of the best aristocratic building of the period: John Lewyn, for example, appears to have had a key role in a remarkable campaign of aristocratic castle building (John of Gaunt, the Nevilles, the Percies, and the Scropes were among his clients) in northern England in the late fourteenth century. But the impetus, and even occasionally the exact specifications, came from the lord himself or from his council. John of Gaunt gave clear instructions to John Lewyn for the work he was to undertake on the great tower at Dunstanburgh and, even more precisely, directed that the great chamber at Hertford (one of his favourite castles) should be moved from one spot to another ‘where we have decided it should be sited’. Such detailed personal attention to the planning and execution of castle refurbishment should not surprise us.¹⁹ The great lords lived in the countryside, but they had to come to town regularly. Particularly was this true of the English higher aristocracy; the rhythms and demands of their social, political, and economic life meant that they needed ¹⁷ Ibid., 13 (Caldicot); ∗ BL Egerton 8347 (account of clerk of works at Rochford, 1430–2). ¹⁸ Reg. JG, I, no. 1566 (Gaunt); BL Egerton 8769–70 (Beauchamp receiver general’s accounts, 1397, 1403); see also Dyer, Standards of Living, 64. ¹⁹ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 100 n. 2; Reg. JG, II, nos. 723, 815, 922.

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a foothold—be it a permanent residence or a rented inn or hostel or lodgings at a religious house—in London.²⁰ Westminster was now the focal point of the country’s political and governmental life; it was there that councils and parliaments met, and that the kingdom’s judicial, secretarial, and financial services were concentrated. In a king-centred polity such as England, no magnate could afford not to have a periodic presence—either in person or through his officers or attorneys—at Westminster. But London was inescapable for other reasons also. It being the richest and most populous city in England its leading merchants were in a league of their own in providing the goods, especially the luxury goods—the silverware, jewels, furs, expensive cloths—which were the hallmarks of aristocratic life. The great lay lords must have ranked among the most valuable customers of London merchant oligarchs. Even the most country-dwelling magnate needed a base—be it only a wardrobe—in London where purchased goods could be deposited before onward transit to the lord’s household. That is why the great wardrobe—the reserve stockroom in effect—of most aristocrats was located in London, to be close to its suppliers. The nexus of relationships which bound the greater aristocracy to the merchant oligarchy of London was complex and mutual, extending to credit facilities as well as to the provision of luxury items. The outstanding debts of Henry Bolingbroke, by then duke of Hereford, in 1397–8 illustrate the point; they included £115 owed to John Clee, draper, £217 to John Wodecock, mercer, and £203 to Robert Makeley, skinner. Bolingbroke owed his creditors on this account alone £825.²¹ He was living beyond his means and his debts would have been significant were he not regularly allocated subsidies by his father, John of Gaunt. So it comes as no surprise that almost all of the English magnates for whom we have records had a London address. This was even true of a northern family such as the Percies: they kept a tenement in the parish of St Agnes within Aldersgate ‘as an inn for themselves and their servants’ (and, incidentally, a similar inn at York).²² Many other noble families—including Valence, Mortimer, Mowbray, Fitzalan, and Stafford—followed suit. So did dowagers and heirs: Elizabeth de Burgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360), spent £172 in 1352 on building a London house for herself in the precinct of the abbey of the Minoresses outside Aldgate; the young Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son and heir, had his London lodgings at Bishopsgate.²³ Other magnates preferred to rent accommodation in the city from religious houses: Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), stayed at the house of the Minoresses outside Aldgate and it was there that his wife died in 1400. Nor was such rented accommodation spartan or temporary, as the list of Gloucester’s effects in London which were seized ²⁰ See in general C. Barron, ‘Centres of Conspicuous Consumption: The Aristocratic Town House in London, 1200–1500’, London Journal, 20/1 (1995), 1–17. ²¹ TNA DL 28/1/6 f.40v. ²² CIPM, XII, no. 242, p. 221. ²³ Ward, English Noblewomen, 84 (de Burgh); TNA DL 28/1/6 f.31v (Bolingbroke, account of clerk of the wardrobe 1395–6).

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on his arrest in July 1397—including splendid tapestries, sumptuous beds and testers, cushions and curtains, plates, saucers, and cutlery bearing the duke’s arms, an organ, a chess set, and two chariots—vividly demonstrates.²⁴ Thomas of Woodstock lived well in London; but his lodgings did not compare in size and sumptuousness with the London base of his brother, John of Gaunt. This was the palace of Savoy, which Gaunt’s father-in-law, Henry duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), had built at vast expense—the sum of £35,000 was the contemporary estimate—from 1349 onwards, allegedly out of the profits of his military campaigns in Aquitaine. Contemporary chroniclers were awestruck by its opulence: ‘no prince in Christendom had a finer wardrobe and scarcely any could even match it. . . . There were such quantities of vessels and silver plate . . . that five carts could hardly suffice to carry them.’²⁵ It is no wonder that such brazen opulence became the target of the rebels’ destructive fury in June 1381. So devastated was Gaunt by the destruction of the Savoy and the pillaging of its contents that he did not rebuild it; hereafter he preferred to lease the bishop of Ely’s house in Holborn or made use of Westminster abbey’s manor of La Neyte when he stayed in London. Toing and froing between their country residences and their London lodgings was but one aspect—albeit possibly the most important—of the itinerating habits of the greater aristocracy. It may well be (as several historians have claimed) that the aristocracy was less restlessly itinerant by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than it had been previously; it is certainly true that lay magnates were far less itinerant in their habits than were many ecclesiastics for whom we have records (such as Richard Swinfield bishop of Hereford 1283–1317 and Walter de Wenlok, abbot of Westminster 1283–1307).²⁶ In general it appears that magnates stayed for much longer periods at a few selected residences (as John of Gaunt did at the Savoy, Hertford, and Kenilworth), paying only short visits to their other outposts. None of this should surprise us. The standards of domestic comfort and privacy expected by greater magnates were rising steadily and could only be adequately met by a few of their residences. Furthermore the logistical problems of moving a lord and his retinue of servants and followers from place to place were formidable: the main furnishings of hall, chapel, chamber, and service rooms had to be transported; stabling and fodder for a hundred or more horses and palfreys had to be arranged; supplies of food and drink had either to be carried in carts or bought in advance by agents at local markets and from local merchants; boats had to be commandeered for river or estuary crossings (though the greatest lords, such as John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke, had their own barges and teams of bargemen, dressed in their lord’s livery); and guides had to be hired to select the easiest routes in difficult country.²⁷ ²⁴ CIM, VI, no. 377; BL Add. Roll 40859A (account of his treasurer of war, 1392). ²⁵ Knighton, Chron., 214. ²⁶ Harvey, ‘Aristocratic Consumer’, 25. ²⁷ Woolgar, Great Household, chap. 9.

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The disincentives to travel were indeed very substantial and are very vividly illustrated for us by the complexity and cumbersomeness of some of the aristocratic journeys for which we have detailed accounts. Such was the journey undertaken by Edward, duke of York (d. 1415), from Cardiff castle to Hanley (Worcestershire) in October 1409: it entailed travel both by land (through Newport, Monmouth, Ross-on-Wye, and Ledbury) and by water (via Bristol and Gloucester); an escort of more than twenty men for the lord and his household; the purchase of cattle to meet the needs of the party en route and to stock the larder at Hanley; and the transport of 33 loads of material from the banks of the Severn to Hanley castle itself.²⁸ It was a complex operation; but it was part of the cursus of the life of a great lord. The imperatives for itineration still remained pressing. Sometimes it was public service which was the incentive: to attend parliament or the court, to prepare for a military operation, or to travel on a diplomatic errand (as did the earl of March in May–June 1378 as he travelled across England to conduct negotiations with the Scots at the border).²⁹ The social round of the aristocratic calendar was also an incentive to travel, be it to a christening, a wedding, or a funeral, on a hunting party or to a tournament or on a pilgrimage. But travel was a necessity as well as a luxury for a lord. It was imperative that the lord visited his lordships from time to time, on a formal progress through his estates. So it was that Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), went on a grand tour of his English and Welsh estates when he took formal control of them in 1393; so likewise Henry Bolingbroke, recently created duke of Hereford, went on a progress through his great lordships in the March of Wales in 1397 and followed it with a great circular tour of his father’s estates in summer 1398.³⁰ Such progresses were meant to impress and they assuredly did so. Noble households on the move must have been a familiar sight, especially in midland and southern England. When Elizabeth de Burgh travelled from Usk (in southeast Wales) to Clare (Suffolk) in 1350 her caravan was composed of 130 horses, twenty-eight hackneys, twenty-two oxen, two esquires, sixty grooms, and nineteen pages. The duchess of Clarence was a grander person and was on a more important journey (to join her husband in France) in 1419, so it comes as no surprise that her retinue totalled over 140 (including a dean and twenty-four chaplains).³¹ Such retinues trundled their way across the countryside, averaging twelve–twenty miles per day (though greater distances could be covered if necessary). The carts and sumpter horses of the household offices often proceeded first, preparing lodgings and stabling in advance; the coaches (such as that famously depicted in a miniature in the Luttrell Psalter) and horses of the lord, lady, and major ²⁸ ∗ Northamptonshire Record Office, Westmorland (Apethorpe) Collection, 4.xx.6. ²⁹ The expense account of his journey is published in Household Accounts, I, 246–61. ³⁰ For Mortimer’s grand tour see BL Egerton 8736, 8740–1; for Bolingbroke’s progress: TNA DL 28/1/10 f.7v–f.9; S. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 204 n.132. ³¹ Ward, English Noblewomen, 89; Household Accounts, II, 651–6.

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guests followed at a distance. Abbeys and towns might be forewarned of the impending arrival of the travelling party and might well prepare a grand dinner and entertainment of minstrels and jesters. If the destination of the journey was one of the lord’s own lordships, his officers in the locality would be expected to assemble crowds of tenants to greet him—and then to award him a gift (donum) as a recognition of his lordship. Seigniorial progresses had many functions but not the least of their purposes was to parade lordship visually to all and sundry, particularly to its own dependants. Within their residences the greater magnates lived, by contemporary standards, a life of ostentatious luxury and comfort which put them in the league of kings, princes, and greater ecclesiastics and far removed from that of county knights.³² Little of the visual splendour of their domestic surroundings and personal style has survived until today. We can perhaps best recapture some of its sumptuousness from idealized iconographic representations (most famously in the calendar of the months in the ‘Tres Riches Heures’ of John, duke of Berry (d. 1416), and, much more prosaically, from inventories of the contents of their residences). Two sets of such inventories—compiled within weeks of each other in the wake of a single act of political revenge—will be drawn upon here to try to recapture the domestic ambience of aristocratic living. One is the inventory of the confiscated goods of Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), at Shrawardine castle, his favoured residence in Shropshire. (We need to recall that, though his Shropshire and Marcher estates constituted an immensely important power block for Fitzalan, his most important residence and, therefore, the most sumptuously furnished home was Arundel castle.) The other inventory is that of the effects of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), at Pleshey castle (Essex) which was part of the Bohun lands which came into the duke’s control through his marriage to Eleanor Bohun. Pleshey was clearly a very important residence for Duke Thomas, though he had also a very well-appointed house in London and other residences throughout England and the southern March of Wales.³³ The Pleshey inventory opened with an itemized list of tapestries and hangings, the most immediately striking emblems of aristocratic opulence. They accounted for 20 per cent of the total value of the duke’s effects at Pleshey, two of them alone being estimated as worth £49 and £45 each. The motifs of the tapestries reflect some of the most popular themes of court literature, secular and sacred—including the history of Charlemagne, the capture of Jerusalem, Gamelyn and Lancelot, the legend of St George, and the Nativity of Christ. The tapestries and hangings at Shrawardine are not itemized and in any case could not compare in number or luxuriousness with those at Pleshey. Where the ³² Dyer, Standards of Living, 76–7. ³³ The inventories are to be found, respectively, in CIM., VI no. 237 and Dillon and St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods’, 275–311.

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Shrawardine list excels is in itemizing the mundane furniture which was essential in any aristocratic hall—including two tables for high days, two for yeomen, eight hall tables, and at least seventeen pairs of trestles. For much of the time the halls at Pleshey and Shrawardine must have been cavernously empty, the wooden furniture stacked, and the wall-hangings unhung and folded away, or even taken with the lord and his lady as they made their way to their London house or elsewhere. But, clearly, at fairly short notice both halls could be prepared to display lordship in all its colourful magnificence and munificence. Duke Thomas may have been inordinately proud of his collection of tapestries; but the most valuable item at Pleshey (£182) was a great bed of gold, with a coverlet, a canopy, a valance of fine blue satin decorated with garters of gold, three curtains of ‘tartaryn’ beaten to match, and two long and four square pillows. There were a further fifteen beds of gold or silk embroidered with motifs. Nor are these figures in any way unusual. At Shrawardine likewise there were at least sixteen beds, several of them of blue or red silk, as well as an ample stock of cushions, curtains, bolsters, mattresses, and blankets. Beds were highly prized items of aristocratic property; that is why they figure so prominently in aristocratic wills. Earl Richard Fitzalan (d. 1397) bequeathed five carefully described beds in his will to his wife, two of his sons, and two daughters.³⁴ They were indeed so prized that they were transported from place to place with the lord: hence Earl Richard referred to one of the beds he bequeathed as being ‘normally at Reigate’ and another ‘usually at London’. After all, the bed was often the only truly comfortable item of furniture in a seigniorial household: it was used not only for sleeping but as the major seating in the day in the lord’s chamber. Alongside the hall and the chamber, the third major room in any aristocratic residence was the chapel. The chapel at Shrawardine was fully equipped with an altar of silk, a table with an alabaster crucifix, an alabaster image of Our Lady, three portable altars, seven lecterns, and other ecclesiastical equipment. But it was plain and restrained compared with Thomas of Woodstock’s lavishly furnished chapel at Pleshey. The inventory listed seventy-five items in the chapel there, including a cope ‘of blue worsted with divers beasts and birds . . . with garters inscribed Hony soit qui mal y pense’ (valued at £60) and another cope of ‘gold of Cyprus worked all over with . . . stories of imagery of the Passion’ (valued at £67). Furthermore there was a collection of over forty Bibles, massbooks, antiphonaries, legends, psalters and two pontificals in the chapel, several described as ‘well written’ or ‘well illuminated’. Many of these books had doubtless come into Duke Thomas’s possession through his marriage to Eleanor Bohun, for the Bohun family is known as the owners and sponsors of the most important collection of English illuminated manuscripts of the second half of the fourteenth century. Beyond the major rooms—hall, chamber, chapel—every seigniorial residence would have a suite of service rooms where stores were kept, food prepared, and ³⁴ Test. Vet., II, 130–1.

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cutlery and napery kept. At Shrawardine there was a pantry, buttery, and cellar; among their listed contents were large numbers of silver spoons and dishes, ewers, vases, leather and earthen pots, tablecloths and a variety of linen towels. Reserve stocks for large banquets were kept in a storehouse, where 448 dishes and platters of wood are recorded in the inventory, as are torches and tapers. The kitchen was likewise well provided with buckets, frying pans, gridirons, various spits and knives, salt, a mustard quern, and four salted fallow deer. There was also a bakehouse and an ample load of charcoal and thirty cart-loads of brushwood to meet the heating requirements of the castle. Shrawardine was a modest residence (especially when compared with Pleshey, Arundel, Kenilworth, or Hertford); but it had the wherewithal for the earl of Arundel to live comfortably there on his occasional visits and to hold grand feasts when he wished to entertain neighbours and dependants and impress on them the power and opulence of his lordship. Opulence was, of course, manifested in dress as well as in food and furnishings. Towards the end of the Pleshey inventory there is a list of robes and gowns, including a ‘long gown of red velvet and a cloak of the same edged with minever’ and valued at over £13. Forty-five such robes in all are individually listed. In the duke’s London house there was another very valuable collection—twenty-four gowns in all—which belonged to the Duchess Eleanor. These were the kind of prized robes which also frequently appear in aristocratic wills. They helped to distinguish the greater aristocracy sartorially from the rest of gentle society, notably in their use of silk, linen, and superior woollens and in being lined with fur and embroidered with jewellery. Display and fashion were of the essence of such ‘power-dressing’. In 1393–4 the dashing young Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), ordered one gown to be made for himself for the feast of St George and another for a tournament at Christmas. He also commissioned nine green hunting gowns to be cut for nine of his close friends. But he reserved his most extravagant expenditure for a dancing doublet and hanselin (jacket) in white satin and embroidered with whelks, mussels, cockles, and a hundred orange trees. The overall cost of this one item was £24, equivalent to a respectable annual income for a member of the country gentry.³⁵ Inventories and inquisitions help us to get some impression of the furnishings of aristocratic residences and the sumptuousness of their dress. The growing proliferation of a variety of household accounts, which survive in increasing numbers from about the mid–late thirteenth century, likewise allows us to measure accurately the consumption of food in itemized detail and the proportions of different cloths, materials, and utensils purchased for the aristocratic household.³⁶ From the mid fifteenth century there also survive household ordinances ³⁵ Baildon, ‘Wardrobe Account, 16–17 Richard II’, 510. ³⁶ The accounts printed in Woolgar’s Household Accounts are exceptionally helpful in this respect, as is his detailed discussion in Great Household.

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and regulations which stipulate, at least formally, the pattern of the day in an aristocratic court, including the periods assigned to religious services, meals, and the opening and closing of the gates of the household.³⁷ All this adds texture to our understanding of the rhythms of aristocratic life; but stops short of telling us how great magnates passed their time. Paradoxically, we may well be better informed on this score when they were on ‘public’ duty—serving in the army or acting as envoys for the king. At home they are much more anonymous. It is rare indeed for us to be able to capture the flavour and preferences of a nobleman’s domestic life. One such rare glimpse comes to us, indirectly and unintentionally, in the volume of spiritual self-examination which Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361) wrote under the title Le Livre de Seyntz Medecines.³⁸ What comes across in the work is the duke’s delight in the sensuous luxuries of aristocratic life—his fine rings, his garters, his ability as a dancer, his love of rich food, well-spiced and served with strong sauces, and his passion for wine, ‘for it is a good feeling to be merry’. Duke Henry was one of the richest men of his day, and one of the great captains and envoys of Edward III’s reign; but his sensitivities were also well attuned to the domestic delights of life in his many castles and to the thrill of the chase in his favourite forest at Leicester. Individual magnates no doubt had their individual tastes; but they also shared a common set of values and outlook. They were bonded into a common aristocratic culture from an early age, often being reared at the house of a great earl or dowager and being initiated early into the habits and pastimes of chivalric society.³⁹ Duke Henry himself took young knights into his household ‘to be doctrined, learned and brought up in his noble court in school of arms and for to see noblesse, courtesy and worship’. These latter virtues were at the very heart of aristocratic culture since at least the twelfth century—whether in the guise of the Latin term mansuetudo or its Anglo-French equivalent gentilesse. They certainly involved a broad-based education by the fourteenth century. Duke Henry specifically referred to the ‘school of arms’, and rightly so, since horsemanship and a training in arms were essential features of the young aristocratic male’s education from an early age. But these practical skills were complemented by a solid grounding in grammar, reading, and increasingly writing.⁴⁰ After all, in later life these young aristocrats would be the heads of complex business organizations and would expect, and be expected, to keep an overall eye on estate affairs, however much they delegated day-to-day business to their councils and officials. Their tutors were often priests or members of religious orders and would attend closely to their ³⁷ Woolgar, Great Household, ch. 5. ³⁸ Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster, ed. E. J. Arnould (Oxford, 1940). ³⁹ N. Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London, 1984). ⁴⁰ The classic discussion is McFarlane, Nobility, 228–47.

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religious and moral instruction. Beyond their formal education, they would also be initiated directly or indirectly in the behavioural conventions of aristocratic life—the arts of ‘courtesy’—which would henceforth form the framework of their daily behaviour. They were being shaped from an early age into ‘parfit, gentil knights’. One of the primary diversions of such knights was the hunt. It had been so for centuries, both in England and on the continent. ‘Greatly did his hounds love him’ was the revealing compliment paid to one early noble devotee of the chase.⁴¹ When they were not represented in full military splendour—as was the norm on aristocratic seals and effigies—it was in the guise of hunters that the magnates might choose to be portrayed—as was Earl Simon de Montfort (d.1265) of Leicester, shown on his seal riding through a wood blowing a horn, wearing hunting garb, and with a dog at his side. Likewise we catch a glimpse, in a legal source, of Earl Simon’s contemporary, Earl Richard de Clare of Gloucester (d. 1262), walking after dinner with some of his companions and their dogs in the earl’s chase at Michelwood. The words which were applied to Thomas, lord of Berkeley (Gloucestershire) (d. 1321) could have been the epitaph of so many magnates: ‘hawkes, hounds and other doggs which all his life had solaced him’.⁴² Among them would be Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), whose spiritual meditations have just been cited. His metaphors and images are often borrowed from the world of the hunt and from the joys of nature—the digging and smoking out of foxes, the barking of hounds, the song of the nightingale, and the smell of roses and violets. Duke Henry was the epitome of the country-loving gentleman as well as a great soldier and diplomat. So was his even more famous son-in-law, John of Gaunt. Indeed so personally interested in the chase was Gaunt that he gave personal instructions when he stayed at Pontefract as to where precisely a trench should be dug to best advantage in the park.⁴³ Hunting and talk of hunting must have filled many an hour in the aristocrat’s life. After all, in chivalric literature knowledge of the art and vocabulary of venery was a sign of high birth. Gaunt’s nephew, Edward, duke of York (d. 1415), even went to the trouble of translating the treatise of Gaston Ph´ebus, count of Bearn, on the chase into English, under the title The Master of Game.⁴⁴ Such devotees of the chase spent lavishly on their sport. They kept large packs of greyhounds, spaniels, mastiffs, and hounds, and spared no expense—as the wardrobe account of Roger, earl of March (d. 1398), makes clear—in the purchase of expensive collars for the lord’s hounds and hunting equipment ⁴¹ Quoted in M. Bloch, Feudal Society (English translation, London, 1961), 304. ⁴² Crouch, Image of the Aristocracy, 305 (Montfort); Select Pleas of the Forest, 1209–1334, ed. G. J. Turner (Selden Society, 1901), 34, 98–9 (Clare); Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, I, 188. ⁴³ Goodman, John of Gaunt, 358–60. ⁴⁴ The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting, ed. W. A. and F. Baillie-Grohman (London, 1909).

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for the lord himself. John of Gaunt had a master of game and rewarded him handsomely.⁴⁵ Parks were carefully laid out, their fences and palisades regularly repaired, and a phalanx of officials paid to police them and to protect the lord’s game jealously. The earl of Norfolk’s parks at Framlingham and Saxtead eventually covered more than a thousand acres and at their peak were home for 1,600 deer.⁴⁶ Alongside hunting, falconry was a favourite aristocratic sport. John of Gaunt was particularly addicted to it: he bought falcons and hawks at great expense; treasured presents of falcons from foreign dignitaries such as the duke of Milan and the grand master of the Teutonic Order; and paid his falconers handsomely.⁴⁷ Gaunt’s purchases and presents may have been exceptional because of his wealth; but his tastes were those of most of his fellow aristocrats. They shared their enthusiasm together in great hunting parties, such as the one lasting five days which John of Gaunt arranged in July–August 1390 attended by the king, the queen, the archbishop of York, the dukes of York and Gloucester, the earls of Arundel and Huntingdon, ‘with other bishops and a great many lords and ladies’.⁴⁸ Hunting and falconry were physically demanding activities, confined to daytime. Much less demanding of energy were a variety of games to which the aristocracy were partial. The more cerebral of them played chess: Duke Thomas of Gloucester (d. 1397) had a chessboard with its pieces among his effects in his London lodgings.⁴⁹ Much more common were a variety of dice and card games which were a daily indulgence for many aristocrats, just as the lure of the casino would be irresistible for their successors. Some magnates were inveterate gamblers and playboys. Edmund, the last Mortimer earl of March (d. 1425), has a reputation as one such, largely because an account of his gaming losses has survived.⁵⁰ In the month 13 September–13 October 1413 alone, his losses on a whole variety of games—cards, ‘tolman’, raffle, chance, ‘devant’ among them—almost totalled £70. Edmund Mortimer’s gaming addiction was, perhaps, unusual; but dice games were a favourite diversion for most magnates—including Edmund’s father, Earl Roger, the Black Prince, and John of Gaunt. They helped to relieve the tedium of court life and travel. So also did the music, revels, banquets, and exchange of visits which were part of the life of the aristocratic court. Music-making and dancing were particularly favoured activities. Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) was a talented musician and so probably was his wife, Mary Bohun. They gave their children a musical education. Bolingbroke was also much given to be entertained by minstrels, trumpeters, clarioners, and other instrumentalists, both his own and ⁴⁵ Baildon, ‘Wardrobe Account of 16–17 Richard II’, 506–7; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 359. ⁴⁶ Medieval Framlingham: Selected Documents, 1270–1524, ed. J. Ridgard (Suffolk Record Society, Woodbridge, 1985). ⁴⁷ Reg. JG, I, no. 1659; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 359. ⁴⁸ Knighton, Chron., 534–6. ⁴⁹ CIM, VI, no. 317; Age of Chivalry, no. 146. ⁵⁰ Household Accounts, II, 592–603; BL Egerton Roll 8747.

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his visiting ones.⁵¹ On his crusading expedition to Prussia in 1392–3 he was regularly serenaded in his chamber by minstrels and choristers. Bolingbroke’s musical tastes may have been particularly refined and well-informed; but in other respects he shared the habits of his fellow magnates, including those of his father (John of Gaunt) who employed a large number of musicians wearing his livery, and charged ‘the king of minstrels’ of the honour of Tutbury to ensure that all local minstrels were present to perform at the annual feast of the assumption of the Virgin Mary.⁵² Aristocratic courts must have resounded to the sound of music and the joys of dancing and revels, especially on high feasts. Jesters provided further entertainment, and plays, ‘disguisings’, and ‘subtleties’ were laid on especially around Christmas and the New Year. We hear, for example, of ‘divers disguisings’ being staged for the countess of Warwick, with six players coming from Slimbridge and four from Wooton as well as two minstrels on secondment from the entourage of Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny.⁵³ Public eating was, of course, a regular and time-consuming feature of the aristocratic timetable. As well as the lord and his immediate family, a large number of guests were frequently entertained—friends, relatives, fellow aristocrats, and local ecclesiastics but also officials, neighbours, pilgrims, burgesses, and even the occasional tenant. Thus the surviving household account of Elizabeth, countess of Warwick (d. 1422), for 1420–1 reveals a constant flow of visitors of all ranks of society to dine at her table.⁵⁴ Some thirty to thirty-five lunched or dined regularly with her, the figure rising to 100 in March 1421 when her husband joined her from his military enterprises. Similar, indeed considerably larger, numbers were commonly fed in most aristocratic households. At the great festivals of the Christian year or on special occasions—such as the meetings of parliament in Westminster—even more lavish banquets would be prepared. Henry Bolingbroke, earl (and soon to be duke) of Hereford, laid on a magnificent dinner for the king, the queen, and his fellow magnates at the house of the Carmelites in London in 1397. Trestles, tables, and dressers were assembled for the occasion. A professional painter was commissioned to paint curlews, pigeons, and popinjays in gold, silver, and other colours for the occasions, and a team of men were set to work to prepare ‘subtleties’ in paste and wood.⁵⁵ Grand banquets were only part of a whole network of contacts which kept the aristocracy regularly in touch with each other. Hunting parties, jousts, ⁵¹ TNA DL 28/1/2 f.6v (for purchase of strings and tuning fork); 1/3 f.21, 16 f.7 (for visiting musicians); K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), 22. ⁵² Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land Made by Henry Earl of Derby, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (Camden Series, London, 1894), 107–9; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 318. ⁵³ ∗ Marquess of Bath, Longleat House MS. Misc. IX (household book of earl of Warwick, 1420–1), f.56v.–f.57. Ward, English Noblewomen, 74–5. ⁵⁴ C. D. Ross, ‘The Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley, Countess of Warwick, 1420–1’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 70 (1951), 81–105. ⁵⁵ TNA DL 28/1/9 f.17v.; f.19 (journal of keeper of household).

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tournaments, weddings, and christening gatherings were regular features of the active aristocrat’s calendar. So, indirectly, was the exchange of news and gossip through messengers. As a great magnate toured his estates he would expect to be entertained en route and to reciprocate in kind. When Henry Bolingbroke travelled to Devonshire in 1395 he was entertained by Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon (d. 1419), and the visit was completed by the exchange of gifts by members of both households. Gift exchange was indeed a highly ritualized feature of aristocratic life, reaching its peak in the exchange of New Year gifts. The list of such gifts given by Henry Bolingbroke in January 1395 may again serve as an example. They were carefully graded in hierarchy according to the status of the recipient. The thirteen gifts he distributed—including gifts for the king, the queen, the duchess of Gloucester (sister of Bolingbroke’s wife), and the countess of Hereford (his mother-in-law)—cost him £53.⁵⁶ Ritualized gift-giving was an aspect of the public sociability which encompassed the life of the aristocracy. The opportunities for sustained privacy and for cultivating one’s personal tastes were severely restricted for them. Books might have provided private solace for some of them. There can no longer be any doubt that the great majority of the aristocracy were literate—not only in the sense that they could read but also in the sense that they could construe Latin and French, the languages par excellence of the written word until the late fourteenth century. Some were considerable book collectors: Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1315), was described as ‘bene literatus’ by a contemporary chronicler, and his grandson bequeathed thirty-nine manuscripts to Bordesley abbey (Worcestershire); and at the other end of the century Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), had a library of at least eightythree books.⁵⁷ Nor were aristocratic women wanting in literary tastes; Margaret, countess of Devon, had a Tristam, a book called Arthur of Brittany, and another called Merlin, while Eleanor (the wife of Thomas of Woodstock) possessed a French chronicle, a history of the Order of the Swan, and a French Bible among other books. Books, especially romances, were also borrowed from the stock kept in the royal privy wardrobe; Roger Mortimer (d. 1330) borrowed twenty-three such volumes.⁵⁸ The majority of books cited in aristocratic wills and inventories were devotional and liturgical in character; but there was also a fair selection of romances, chivalric literature, histories, and even legal works. Literary tastes were probably broadly similar in Scotland and English Ireland (where we know that Anglo-Norman was still in use in courts of law). Around ⁵⁶ TNA DL 28/3/4 f.33v. (account of receiver-general 1392–3); DL 28/1/4 f.19 (account of the clerk of the wardrobe, 1394–5). ⁵⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 234–5 (Guy of Warwick); Dillon and St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of the Goods’, 275–308 ( Thomas of Woodstock). See also V. J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Court Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1982), 29–44, esp. 34–5. ⁵⁸ Test. Vet., I, 127–8, 146–9; Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 49–50.

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1390 James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith (Midlothian), made a bequest of all his books ‘both of the statutes of the realm of Scotland as of romance’.⁵⁹ This juxtaposition of utilitarian (legal texts) and imaginative literature (romances) is a timely reminder of the multiplicity of worlds from which great aristocrats constructed the universe of their intellectual experience. Some of them even went a step further and composed their own works—such as the treatise on jousting by Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), or the translation of the manual on hunting by his nephew, Edward duke of York (d. 1415). John Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d. 1400), composed some poems, even though they no longer survive. Such instances should remind us that we should not underestimate the literary ambitions and sensitivities of the later medieval magnate. Nor should we overlook his religious sensibilities. The aristocratic household was a religious as well as a social centre. The focal point of the nobleman’s devotion was his private chapel, lavishly equipped—as was that of Thomas of Woodstock at Pleshey—with several altars, rich ecclesiastical vestments and plate, and an ample supply of missals, antiphons, and psalters. The lord or lady would have his or her own personal confessor, often a friar; but there would also be a body of clerks or chaplains. Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke (d. 1307) had at least nine clerks and one friar in her household.⁶⁰ Some of the greatest magnates set their personal ecclesiastical sights even higher: none more so than Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361). In 1353 he converted the hospital at Leicester which his father had founded in 1331 into a college of secular canons to be served by a dean, twelve canons, thirteen vicars, and three other clerks and a verger. It was also to accommodate 100 poor folk and ten women attendants. It was as has been appropriately observed, ‘a domestic, ducal version of the Sainte Chapelle’.⁶¹ Thomas of Woodstock likewise in 1394 set aside properties for a similar college at Pleshey. When the lord travelled, his clerical entourage might well accompany him: when Margaret, duchess of Clarence, travelled to Normandy to meet her husband in November 1419 she was accompanied by the dean, at least ten chaplains and clerks (out of a complement of twenty-four), and four choristers from the duke’s household. A college of chanting priests and choristers, financed from a landed endowment, became by the late fourteenth century the preferred form of aristocratic religious benefaction. Whether travelling or at home, the lord would normally be expected to attend some of the religious services—matins, mass, and evensong—which punctuated the daily timetable of every well-run noble household.⁶² Nor did this in any way exhaust the religious duties of the least pious nobleman. Alms-giving was a regular call on his resources. John of Gaunt distributed 12s.6d . in alms every Friday and 10s. on Saturday. Even the extravagant rake Edmund ⁵⁹ Mort. Reg., I, no. 193. ⁶⁰ Household Accounts, II, 651–6. ⁶¹ Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 188–93; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 97. ⁶² Household Accounts, II, 651–6.

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Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1425), gave alms regularly—his normal donation was 3s.4d . each time—as he travelled round the country in 1415. He also distributed food worth 48s. to the poor on 28 March and 20s. to a recently baptized infant on 6 April.⁶³ But such sums were paltry compared with his gaming losses, and they pale into insignificance when set beside the dinner for 800 paupers which Eleanor, countess of Leicester (d. 1275) arranged on 14 April 1265. Alms were but one aspect of the religiously inspired charity which was an obligatory claim on the nobleman’s coffers. He could also be expected to contribute handsomely to building bridges and repairing churches. John of Gaunt would have hardly noticed the 100 marks which he gave for the repair of the church of St Mary at Leicester; more generous was the sum of 350 marks which the remarkably long-lived and rich Margaret Brotherton, countess (and later duchess) of Norfolk (d. 1399), donated towards the making of a new choir stall in the church of Greyfriars.⁶⁴ Others directed their charity to educational purposes, none more so than some of the wealthy dowager ladies of the fourteenth century. So it is that Pembroke and Clare colleges in Cambridge still testify to the generosity of their founding ladies—Mary of St Pol, countess of Pembroke (d. 1377) and Elizabeth de Burgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360).⁶⁵ Founding a college (or, more correctly, a hall) required a huge investment, long-term planning, and persistence. But there were less demanding and more short-term forms of educational charity: such as establishing an endowment-chest at Oxford on which poor students could draw (as did the countess of Warwick in 1293) or sponsoring the talented son of a local tenant in his studies (as happened to an ever-grateful Adam Usk at the hands of Roger Mortimer, earl of March and lord of Usk (d. 1398)), or patronizing the studies of one’s own clerks (as Elizabeth de Burgh did, sending four of them to seek a legal education in London and another two to study under a master in Oxford).⁶⁶ Nor could the aristocracy overlook their inherited family obligations, notably as patrons of monasteries founded by their ancestors. These long-established monasteries continued to press for support, all the more so, arguably, as they noticed how the religious munificence of the aristocracy was being increasingly drained into hospitals, schools, chantries, collegiate churches, and the more austere orders (notably the Carthusians). Their lobbying did not go unheeded. Three examples may serve to show how aristocratic wealth was still being lavishly channelled in certain instances to the older religious houses. It was the wealth of the last Bigod earl of Norfolk (d. 1306) which alone almost certainly provided the means for the Cistercians to build a magnificent new church for themselves as Tintern abbey. St Albans was one of the oldest and best endowed of Benedictine ⁶³ Reg. JG, I, no. 932; BL Egerton Roll 8747. ⁶⁴ Woolgar, Great Household, 64; Reg. JG, II, no. 145; R. E. Archer, ‘The Estates and Finances of Margaret of Brotherton, c.1320–1399’, BIHR, 60 (1987), 264–80 at 276. ⁶⁵ Ward, English Noblewomen, 158–9. ⁶⁶ Adam Usk, Chronicle, 158; CPR 1381–5, 115; Ward, English Noblewomen, 157–8.

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houses in England but it remained grateful for the support it received from the countess of Norfolk and entered her name in its book of benefactors. Another munificent patron of monasteries was Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381): he financed the rebuilding of the church of Wigmore abbey and endowed it handsomely with lands, liberties, churches, and stock but he also left gifts to more than thirty other religious houses—many of them closely associated with his own estates—in his will.⁶⁷ The religious sensibilities of Earl Edmund were conventional, even conservative; they would not have been out of place two centuries earlier. By the mid–late fourteenth century, religious sensibility was becoming more introspective and individual, less corporate in its manifestations. This did not lead to any direct challenge to existing forms of worship; rather was it a search for a more private and personal outlet for individual piety. The aristocracy with its ready access to books and confessors and its high level of literacy was particularly well placed to swim with this religious tide. Henry of Grosmont’s Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, which has already been cited several times, is perhaps the most remarkable example of the genre of self-examining penitential works which sought to bridge the chasm between the active and the contemplative lives. Likewise the fact that Duke Thomas of Gloucester (d. 1397) owned an English Bible in the Lollard translation suggests that here was a great nobleman whose exploration of religion extended into the rather suspect world of vernacular translations of the Bible. There is no need to suspect Duke Thomas of heresy (though his brother, John of Gaunt, had earlier given partisan support to John Wycliff for political reasons). It is in the late fourteenth century that books of hours became common among the upper classes, allowing them to pursue their search for a more personal religion in the privacy of their own chambers rather than, or perhaps as well as, in the public liturgical chanting of the psalter in their presence. None availed themselves of these opportunities more avidly than the two daughters and heirs of Humphrey, the last Bohun earl of Hereford (d. 1373). One daughter, Eleanor, married Thomas of Woodstock and noted in her will how she had ‘much used a book of psalms, primes and other devotions’. Her sister, Mary, married Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV): she inherited her father’s psalter and added to it some personal prayers with the intention of inspiring ‘the heart with an intense sweetness’.⁶⁸ These episodes give us some insight into the spiritual lives and practices of the higher aristocracy and their womenfolk. We must not, of course, generalize from a few examples; piety, as with all other aspects of life, was a matter of individual taste and priority. But the greater danger surely is that our historical analyses do less than justice to the range of activities and sensitivities which could ⁶⁷ See above, pp. 46–7, 84 (Wigmore); Archer, ‘Estates and Finances’, 276 (Norfolk); Monasticon, VI, I, 353 (Mortimer). ⁶⁸ Catto, ‘Religion and the English Nobility’, 49.

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characterize the life of the higher aristocracy in the later Middle Ages. We see them pre-eminently at two levels: one at the level of their ‘public’ careers as military leaders, courtiers, and leading participants (often confrontationally so) in ‘political’ life; the other—through their household and estate accounts—as the heads of large business enterprises. Our historical sympathies need to take note of other aspects of their lives—in the hunt, at tournaments, at their gaming tables, in their devotions, and in their acts of charity, to name but a few. It is only by attempting to see their careers and concerns in the round, and on their own terms, that we can begin to do justice to their role and their power, all the more so given the centralist and royalist bias of so much modern academic historiography. Great aristocrats lived their lives in the public gaze. Wherever they went, they were surrounded by a bevy of dependants, retainers, guests, and servants. A lord’s standing was measured in good part by the magnificence and efficiency of his household. It was there that his authority and power was displayed on a daily and immediate basis; it was the resources and effectiveness of his rule of his household that enabled him, literally and metaphorically, to live like a lord.⁶⁹ His success as a lord could in many respects be judged at once by the way he exercised his authority and expressed his personality in his household, the domestic centre as it were of his whole world. The shrewd Burgundian commentator Georges Chastellain had no doubt on that score: ‘After the deeds and exploits of war, which are claims to glory’, so he remarked, ‘the household is the first thing which strikes the eye, and that which it is, therefore, most necessary to conduct and arrange well.’⁷⁰ The noble household varied in its character and size according to the personality, needs, and career of the individual lord. At its core would be a resident and largely permanent staff of menial servants, professional, salaried officers, and a group of knights, squires, and yeomen. But this core would be augmented frequently by the arrival of guests, retainers, and visitors of all kinds. We can see this most dramatically, and probably uncharacteristically, in the household account of Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) at Pontefract in 1318–19: the number of horses stabled at the earl’s expense, and thereby charged on his household book (liber hospicii) daily, ranged from 186 to 1,237.⁷¹ Earl Thomas’s household, as we shall see, was of an extravagant size and the huge figures of horses stabled reflect extraordinary calls on the earl’s resources (for a meeting of a parliament ⁶⁹ For many of the issues touched on in this section, reference may be made to the following general studies. Given-Wilson, English Nobility, ch. 4; C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven, 1986); K. Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford, 1988); Woolgar, Great Household. ⁷⁰ Quoted in Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 259. ⁷¹ TNA DL 28/1/14 (the household book of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, 1318).

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at York and for a muster for a proposed Scottish campaign). To that extent, the figures are not at all representative. But it is amply clear from other household accounts that the size of the household varied from day to day and certainly from week to week—as the lord’s servants left the court (extra curiam) on official or personal business, as high feasts were celebrated, as knights and gentlemen (who would normally reside on their own estates) came with their attendants to spend a period at the lord’s table (bouche de court), and as the lord’s business took him away (on campaign, to parliament, on visits, to tournaments). On these latter occasions the household might be formally divided into two—an inner or intrinsic household which remained resident at the lord’s principal residence and a ‘riding’ or ‘foreign’ household which accompanied him on his travels.⁷² The household was overwhelmingly a male establishment. Dowagers, of course, had their own households and only slightly smaller than those of the average magnate. Thus the household of Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke (d. 1307), at Goodrich castle (Herefordshire) in 1296–7 numbered 135 and a further twelve grooms. Aristocratic wives might also have their own households during their husbands’ lives,⁷³ though they were often modest in size and subsidized by an allowance from the lord’s coffers. But even female establishments were mainly staffed by men, supplemented by a few attendant gentlewomen, female servants of the chamber, nursemaids, and laundresses. The household was a strictly stratified and hierarchical institution, reflected in seating arrangements in hall, the number of dishes (ferculae) allotted per meal, the allowance and quality of cloth given as livery, shoe allowance, and the daily wages for those living in the household (infra curiam) and those away from the court (extra curiam). In the household of Henry Bolingbroke in 1397–8 there was a tariff of resident household wages—at 2d., 4d., 7 1/2d., and 12d . per day, with the highest rate reserved for a handful of the earl’s confidants, such as Hugh Waterton, his devoted chamberlain.⁷⁴ It is obvious that there would be a difference in size and character between the household of a retiring dowager and that of an active military lord; but the difference would not be so great as might perhaps be expected, because all lords, men and women, were expected to have a household commensurate with their social status. We have just observed that Joan de Valence in 1296 had a household of 135; that of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, stood at 150 or so in 1390 (though that figure may err on the low side).⁷⁵ Such figures are modest compared with those for the royal household (that of Edward III stood at 400 ⁷² For examples McFarlane, Nobility, 110; Rawcliffe, Staffords, 68–9. ⁷³ Woolgar, Great Household, 53. For an excellent discussion of the households of aristocratic women, see Ward, English Noblewomen, ch. 3. ⁷⁴ TNA DL 28/1/9–10 (accounts of the household expenditure of Henry Bolingbroke, 1396–8). ⁷⁵ Woolgar, Great Household, 53; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 10–13 (since this figure is based on checker rolls and stable accounts, it may underestimate the number of grooms, valets, and pages). For a useful table of household size, see Woolgar, Great Household, 12–13.

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at least, rising to almost 600 by the later years of Richard II) and with those for some contemporary French ducal courts (280 for the duke of Berry, 350 for the duke of Burgundy). On such a scale English noble households were certainly large but not extravagant. What extravagance could mean is well illustrated in the case of Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322). In the two years for which we have accounts (1313–14 and 1318–19), his household expenses reached a staggering £7,500 (not very far short of the crown’s household budget), of which £3,000–£4,000 was spent on daily expenses of food and drink, £700–£1,100 on livery of robes, and £500–£600 on fees of servants and retainers. The total size of the household in 1318–19 stood close to 700.⁷⁶ These were extraordinary figures for an extraordinary earl in extraordinary times, all the more so since Earl Thomas’s resources, impressive as they were, did not compare with the totality of income at the disposal of John of Gaunt. They are a reminder to us that the size and character of a noble household was ultimately determined by the personality and ambitions of the lord himself. The household was the nodal point of lordship and as such it served at least two distinct, though not unrelated, purposes. At one level its purpose was to provide a venue where the lord’s authority and power were displayed, where he could consort with advisers, officers, followers, and guests, and where he would pass much of his time when he was resident at home. This was the domus magnificencie, the household above stairs in the parlance of a later age. It would be formally staffed by a cadre of officers, normally drawn from his confidants and generally more or less permanently resident at his court.⁷⁷ It was headed by a steward, normally a layman of good birth; a treasurer, generally a cleric and often rewarded with one of the lord’s livings; and, in some households, a chamberlain and/or wardrober. These were generally the key officials in most noble households, and it is their daily and aggregated audited accounts which are the best surviving guides to the business of the household. Beneath them was a further group of departmental officers—such as the marshal (in charge of the crucial business of stabling the lord’s horses and those of his guests), the butler, the clerk of the kitchen, the chief clerk of the chapel, and others. Each had his own clearly defined sphere of responsibility. There might also be a great wardrobe under its clerk: this was the lord’s storehouse of arms, cloths, and equipment; it might often—as in the case of Gaunt’s great wardrobe and that of his son, Henry Bolingbroke—be based in London, away from the lord’s normal residence but in easy reach of its major suppliers, the leading metropolitan merchants. In some households there could be other specialized officers—such as Thomas of Woodstock’s secretary or Gaunt’s keeper of jewels. The second—and more populous—level of the household was the domus providencie, the household below stairs. It was composed of a range of domestic ⁷⁶ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 27–8. ⁷⁷ For example, Simon Bache, treasurer of the household of Henry Bolingbroke, spent 334 days infra curiam in the year 1 October 1397–30 September 1398: TNA DL 28/1/10.

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departments including kitchen, pantry, buttery, chamber, larder, wash house, and stable. As the names of the departments suggest, its primary function was to buy and prepare the food and the drink and to arrange the stabling for the lord and his household—no mean task when we consider that the average number to be fed at the lord’s table might range from 50 to 100 daily. These household departments were staffed by a huge body of valets, pages, and grooms, often rewarded at differential and hierarchical rates. Thus John Mowbray, earl (and later duke) of Norfolk (d. 1432), had six valets of the chamber, twenty-five valets of the lord, and thirty others on his books as well as a further eleven pages on his travels (pro viagio) in 1422–3.⁷⁸ Recruiting, organizing, and controlling such large numbers of servants could not have been easy, all the more so as a good number of them were expected to travel with the lord. Their role was essentially domestic and menial; but since they lived under the lord’s roof and served him at his table, they were often—within the bounds of convention—familiar with him. Most noble wills give a high priority to paying outstanding wages to long-standing servants and discharging them honourably on the lord’s death. Others, touchingly, went further, naming favoured servants individually and leaving them small bequests: Earl Humphrey of Hereford (d. 1361) rewarded thirty-eight of his household servants; Thomas, duke of Exeter (d. 1426), left bequests to sixty-one of his esquires and servants.⁷⁹ Satisfying the demands of large seigniorial households, especially given the problems of transport and the market, posed formidable problems. Grain had to be transported from local manors and markets; fuel and fodder in large quantities had to be secured; wines would have to be shipped up ever-obstructed rivers; fish would need to be purchased in abundance for the weekly abstinence from meat on three days and for Lent; ample stores would have to be laid up days or even weeks in advance, and forward parties would have to be despatched in advance to prepare stables, rooms, and supplies for the lord’s itinerary. The list of food and wine—incomplete as it is⁸⁰—consumed by the household of the rich and twice-endowed Margaret, countess of Norfolk (d. 1399), in 1385–6 gives an indication of the voracious consumption demands of such a household. It included 60,121 loaves made from 235 quarters of wheat, 28,962 gallons (lagenae) of ale and 4,377 of wine, 698 sheep, 151 pigs, 140 oxen and steers, 616 rabbits, 520 pigeons, 491 partridges, 49 cygnets, 196 capons, 31 pheasants, 122 bucks and does. The list is by no means complete; it would no doubt have been exceeded by the demands of the household of an active male lord.⁸¹ Household expenditure regularly stood at 40–70 per cent of a major lord’s overall disbursements. John of Gaunt was, of course, exceptionally rich with a ⁷⁸ ∗ BL Add. Roll 17209. ⁷⁹ Nichols, Wills, 44–56; Reg. Chichele, II, 358. ⁸⁰ Such lists would exclude items bought on a daily basis, as opposed to bulk purchases. ⁸¹ BL Add. Roll 17208, now published in Ridgard (ed.), Medieval Framlingham, 86–128. Similar figures can be calculated from the household account of Elizabeth countess of Warwick for 1420–1; Ross, ‘Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley’, 81–105.

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disposable landed income in the 1390s not far short of £11,000 annually; but the proportion of that vast income he earmarked annually for recurrent household expenses—£5,000 for the treasurer of his household, £1,333 6s. 8d . for his great wardrobe, and a further £666 13s. 4d. for his duchess’s chamber—was not out of line with what can be calculated for other magnates.⁸² Of these large sums, normally at least half was accounted for by the costs of food and wine. So it was that Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke, spent two-thirds of her domestic outgoings in 1296–7 on food and drink, while a quarter of Earl Thomas of Lancaster’s budget was spent on food alone.⁸³ It is in fact often very difficult to calculate accurately the total food and wine budget, because household accounting procedures often excluded both victuals consumed from the lord’s own produce or stock and also small, daily purchases. Two items do, however, regularly stand out—fish and wine. Fish, especially herrings and white fish, were consumed in huge quantities and had often to be transported over long distances, thereby adding to the costs. Countess Joan de Valence purchased 24,000 herrings in Southampton in February 1297 and had them transported by cart to Gloucester and thence to her kitchen at Goodrich castle (Herefordshire), while her supplies of dried cod were simultaneously shipped from Pembroke to Chepstow via Bristol and thence taken by packhorse to Goodrich.⁸⁴ Wine had, of course, to travel even further. It was very much the status drink of the lord and his immediate company and was often given as a present by magnates. Countess Margaret of Norfolk—whose household account for 1385–6 has just been cited—shipped most of her wine through Ipswich and then had it transported overland to Framlingham castle. She purchased mainly red Gascon wine, supplemented by white Rhenish and St Emilion wine. Her wine bill for that year alone stood at £137—and that at a time when £40–£60 would be a handsome annual income for a modest county knight. The consumption demands of a great household would obviously play an important role in the economy and marketing practices of the country, all the more so when we recall the number of such households and the way the tentacles of their activities reached throughout the country. How then were those consumption demands met? In early centuries magnates may literally have eaten their way around their estates—partly no doubt because itineration (as we have seen) was a way of manifesting lordship personally, and partly because the mechanisms of the market were insufficiently developed to cater effectively for the needs of a large seigniorial household. Such practices certainly continued ⁸² TNA DL 28/3/2 (account of receiver-general, 1392–3). He also allocated a thousand marks to his son’s household annually. ⁸³ Woolgar, Great Household, 111–13; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 27. ⁸⁴ Woolgar, Great Household, 119. The cash, corn, and stock account of the household of the twelfth earl of Oxford for 1431–2, published in Household Accounts, II, no. 20, illustrates admirably the scale and character of a magnate’s food purchases.

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in a measure even among lay aristocrats in the later Middle Ages, though more often than not in the form of transporting the produce of the lord’s estates to one of his favoured residences. Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), when he was resident in London, still secured supplies from his manor of Aldbourne (Wiltshire), wheat from Higham Ferrers (Northamptonshire), and venison from Needwood (Staffordshire), all of them his own estates.⁸⁵ In the case of the longlived Elizabeth de Burgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360), the wealth of the surviving documentation has allowed Jennifer Ward to tabulate the cost of her household supplies, indicating that at least a quarter of those supplies were derived from her own manors. The demands of Lady Elizabeth’s household were certainly not regularly on the same scale as those of Earl Thomas; but when we recall that in 1343 she distributed liveries of cloth and fur to almost 260 persons—including 15 knights, 93 esquires, 21 clerks, and 108 household and estate servants—we recognize that even a thrice-widowed and relatively retiring dowager lady had to maintain and occasionally feed a m´enage commensurate with her status and social expectations.⁸⁶ Even when the lord’s household no longer relied on the lord’s demesne manors for its regular supplies, especially of cereals, it could still turn to them for specialized items. Salmon and lampreys were favoured fish dishes on the noble table, helping to relieve the tedium of seemingly endless servings of herrings and stockfish. It was well worthwhile travelling a long way to secure high-quality supplies of salmon and lampreys, and where could be a more reliable source than the lord’s own estates? So it was that Elizabeth de Burgh was partial to the salmon of her estates at Usk, John of Gaunt to the lampreys of his manor of Rodley (Gloucestershire) on the Severn estuary, and Margaret, countess of Norfolk (d. 1399), to the salmon and lampreys of Chepstow (south-east Wales) and cod from distant Pembroke in south-west Wales, both of them parts of her widely scattered inheritance and at a great distance from her normal residence at Framlingham (Suffolk).⁸⁷ And so the pattern was repeated with other supplies: Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln (d. 1311), had cheese transported from his Welsh border lordship of Clifford to his table at Aldbourne (Wiltshire), while John of Gaunt regularly ordered dozens of rabbits—often on a weekly basis—from the extensive seigniorial warrens at Aldbourne when it came into his possession.⁸⁸ But perhaps the most remarkable example of the way in which the widely scattered estates of a great lord could constitute their own self-contained economic network to meet the needs of the lord’s household was in the herds of animals which were driven across country to the lord’s larder. The households of the earls of Lincoln at Altofts (Yorkshire), of Elizabeth de Burgh at Bardfield (Essex), and the Black ⁸⁵ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸

Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 96. Ward, English Noblewomen, 67–8; Holmes, Estates, 58–9. Davies, Lordship and Society, 110–11 and the sources cited there. TNA DL 29/1/2 m.2 (Lacy); Reg. JG, I, no. 1126, II, no. 739.

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Prince in his hostel at London were regularly dependent on cattle supplies from Wales, Chester, and elsewhere in England.⁸⁹ Perhaps one vignette can serve to show how this preference for the produce of the lord’s own estates (be it demesne produce or tenant renders) created economic bonds to be set side by side with the commercial marketing network. In 1349 twenty drovers drove over 400 head of cattle—mainly part of the biennial render given to the earl of Hereford as lord of Brecon from the Welshmen of the area—from Brecon across country to the Bohun household in Essex, to be followed in 1350 by similar herds being driven to Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire)—some 130 miles at least from Brecon—and Oaksey (Wiltshire).⁹⁰ Doubtless many similar journeys were undertaken within England itself—such as the bullocks driven from the ranch in Barnard Castle (Co. Durham) all the way to the Beauchamp household in Warwickshire and in the London area, or the flock of 500 sheep driven from the Stafford manor of Maxtock (Warwickshire) to another Stafford residence at Writtle (Essex).⁹¹ Economic historians in their anxiety to trace the development of a money and market economy have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to such evidence. It is a reminder to us that the great aristocratic inheritance could be a functioning economic network as well as a source of financial, social, and political power. Nevertheless it was inevitable that the supplies of noble households should mainly, and increasingly so over time, be met from the market rather than from demesne resources. The sheer volume of the household’s needs, the complexity of its itineration patterns, and the rising demands in terms of comfort and quality of domestic living reinforced such a development. We have seen that in the case of Elizabeth de Burgh—who was more stationary in her residential habits than most of her lay peers—75 per cent of the supplies for her household were purchased on the market. Such was likewise the proportion with other lords. Supplies were bought from a whole variety of sources—wholesale merchants, specialist dealers (especially in London for exotic goods such as spices), in local markets, by dispatching agents to scour the countryside, and by the virtual commandeering of goods from any source that lay to hand, especially when the lord was on a journey. The household account of Margaret, countess of Norfolk, for 1385–6 (already cited above) reveals that though she drew heavily on the produce of her own demesne lands and the rents of her tenants she also purchased corn and meat from merchants and at local markets in places such as Bungay (Suffolk) and Diss (Norfolk), while her agents had to travel to London for items such as rice and almond. Countess Margaret was resident for the year at Framlingham and so was well-placed to arrange her purchases in advance. Other lords had to do so, literally and metaphorically, on the hoof. When Edward, duke ⁸⁹ TNA DL 29/1/2 m.2 (Lacy); TNA SC 11/799 (de Burgh); Reg. BP., I, 18, 78, 87, 103 etc. ⁹⁰ Cited from the accounts of the receiver of Brecon in Davies, Lordship and Society, 116. ⁹¹ McFarlane, Nobility, 194; ∗ BL Egerton Roll 2209 (account of treasure of great household of duke of Buckingham 1454–5).

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of York (d. 1415), moved his household from Cardiff to Hanley (Worcestershire) in autumn 1409 and began to plan his Christmas sojourn, he sent his servants to surrounding towns and markets—Worcester, Ledbury, and Tewkesbury among them—to purchase supplies; secured his wine from Bristol and Chepstow; and hired a force of 184 men to fell and trim wood and to make it into faggots to keep out the winter cold.⁹² Duke Edward’s provision arrangements were rather ad hoc in character; other lords had to be more systematic in their purchasing policies. John of Gaunt, for example, appointed professional buyers to purchase the large stocks of meat, poultry, and fish which his household required, especially when he was in or near London.⁹³ Great lords dealt in large sums of money, and needed to understand and manage their finances. The debts of Henry Bolingbroke have been mentioned above, but Bolingbroke was no spendthrift. Rather was he—in common with most of his fellow magnates—often short of ready cash and therefore borrowed it against the security of his anticipated income. Some magnates, it is true, seem to have been profligate. We have already cited the betting extravagances of Edmund, the last Mortimer earl of March (d. 1425).⁹⁴ Even more obviously reckless was Thomas Mowbray, earl of Norfolk (d. 1405). He was, to be fair, very unlucky in his inherited circumstances: his great-grandmother, Margaret Brotherton, countess and later duchess of Norfolk in her own right, had clung tenaciously to her lands (both by inheritance and jointure) until her death at a great old age in 1399; in the meantime, Earl Thomas’s father, another Thomas, fell foul of Richard II’s spleen and died in exile. Such misfortunes should have persuaded young Earl Thomas to act with great circumspection in all matters, financial and political. He failed to do so. He borrowed recklessly from any source—from Roger Blickling of Norwich (£332), from his own men of Framlingham (£10), from the abbot of Fountains (£27), and from Richard Nevill of London (£459) among others. His creditors took advantage of his penury: Richard Nevill charged a brokerage fee of £5 and interest at 15 per cent (£39 3s. 2d .). The earl’s officials were driven to desperate measures: some of them travelled to London to discuss the rescheduling of his debts (pending the receipt of money owed him by the exchequer); other members of his council journeyed to Norfolk and Suffolk ‘to raise loans for the lord’. It is little wonder that another servant was sent to check out stories that William Mason was able to make silver from lead!⁹⁵ Earl Thomas might eventually have recovered from his financial troubles; but nothing could save him from the consequences of his political folly. It may indeed be that his financial difficulties made him politically adventurous. Be that as it may, he was caught in one of the ⁹² ∗ Northamptonshire Record Office, Westmorland (Apethorpe) Collection, 4.xx.4. ⁹³ Reg. JG, II, no. 811; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 320–1. ⁹⁴ See above, pp. 96, 100. ⁹⁵ BL Add. Roll 16556 (account of receiver of Earl Marshal 1402–3).

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many political plots which shook England in the early years of Henry IV and suffered the ultimate penalty, being executed on 8 June 1405, when he was not yet twenty. But we must not generalize from the sad tale of Earl Thomas’s brief career. What the late medieval nobility suffered from was not so much heavy indebtedness as chronic cash-flow problems. It was a situation compounded by the absence of an effective native banking system, by the difficulties of getting cash levies promptly from their scattered estates, and by the regular failure of the royal exchequer to pay their war wages at all promptly. In particular as they travelled abroad or prepared to serve the king on a military expedition, they were driven—as indeed was the king himself—to make desperate pleas for immediate cash. Such pleas figure regularly in the correspondence of John of Gaunt, the wealthiest aristocratic lord of his day.⁹⁶ When John Mowbray, earl of Norfolk (d. 1432) agreed to serve Henry V in France in 1415—thereby helping to delete the taint of treason which his brother’s plotting had drawn upon the family in 1405—he was forced to borrow 1,000 marks from the earl of Arundel and lesser sums from others, such as the prior of Thetford and the rector of Framlingham.⁹⁷ Magnates borrowed from a whole range of creditor: Italian bankers, rich bishops and abbeys, cathedral chapters, London merchants, borough corporations, individual townsmen, and even their own tenants.⁹⁸ The evidence for such borrowing is abundant; but we must take care not to jump to the conclusion (often hinted at by historians) that the later medieval magnates were, therefore, living beyond their means and doing so to sustain bloated households and personal magnificence at a time of declining incomes for many of them. Such a conclusion is often based on a misreading of the evidence and on a misunderstanding of the totality of sources at the disposal of the aristocracy. Most of the loans that were contracted were temporary or short-term, generally repaid within the year. More often than not they were the result of immediate cash-flow problems rather than of chronic indebtedness. A temporarily cash-strapped earl knew that later in the financial year he could expect treasure-carts laden with monies to arrive at his household from his distant estates⁹⁹ or that he would be given preferential tallies for the sums long owed to him by the royal exchequer. In the longer term his advisers might also remind him that he could expect a windfall when his dowager mother or grandmother at last died or when he succeeded to his father’s inheritance. ⁹⁶ For example Reg. JG, I, nos. 940, 1761, 1790. ⁹⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 221; ∗ Berkeley Castle muniments, account of the earl’s receiver-general, 1414–15. ⁹⁸ For examples of seigniorial loans, TNA DL 29/1/2 m.15 (Lacy from Italian bankers); Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 37–8; BL Egerton Roll 8727 (list of Edmund Mortimer’s creditors, 1375); BL Egerton 8769 (Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick). ⁹⁹ For example, BL Egerton Roll 8730—for a treasure convoy carrying £1,400 from Wigmore to London in 1387, escorted by eleven archers.

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Some magnates did not have to wait that long: Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376) was fabulously rich in his own lifetime. At his death his coffers in Arundel, in Holt and Clun in the March of Wales, and at St Paul’s, London (under the care of John Philipot), held a staggering £60,000 in cash (at a time when the standard lay tax for the whole kingdom was estimated at c.£38,000). With such vast sums of cash at his disposal he became the premier source of lending in England, especially in the later years of his life. The king, the Black Prince, and at least half a dozen dukes and earls borrowed large sums from him; but so did leading London merchants such as John Philpot and John Peche and a host of other figures.¹⁰⁰ One of his creditors was none other than John of Gaunt. But Gaunt’s credit operations remind us again how easy it is to jump to false conclusions from the evidence of borrowing. The survival of the register of his correspondence for the years 1372–6 allows us to see how extensively he cast the net of his borrowing, no doubt in part to finance his expeditions to France.¹⁰¹ In 1372–4 alone he borrowed 11,000 marks from the earl of Arundel. But Gaunt was, of course, in terms of landed income the richest lay magnate in England in his day, and if to this regular income we add the windfalls of his war profits and the settlement of his claim to be king of Castile, we cannot be in doubt that he could have comfortably weathered any temporary financial storm. Indeed when we next catch up with his finances in detail in 1392–3 we find him not as a debtor but as a large-scale creditor. Among his clients were his brother Thomas of Woodstock and his (Gaunt’s) son, Henry Bolingbroke (2,000 marks each) and William Venour and other leading Londoners (almost £2,000).¹⁰² Individual magnates could, of course, fall on hard times financially—sometimes as a result of an extravagant lifestyle, especially when their estates were encumbered with the dower- and jointure-claims of widows, indeed successive widows; more often, perhaps, by the misfortunes of war and politics—such as a crippling ransom or confiscation in the wake of a political misjudgement. But there is no reason to believe that there was as yet a ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ in financial terms by the late-fourteenth–early-fifteenth centuries. The seismic economic and social changes that came in the wake of the recurrent outbreaks of plague from 1348–9 certainly had an impact on seigniorial policy and, to some degree, income and authority; but the consensus of historical opinion has broadly confirmed the short- and medium-term resilience of the governing classes (including especially the great lay and ecclesiastical magnates) in the face of this challenge and the remarkable degree to which their incomes from recurrent sources stood up under pressure. Indeed recent scholarship has underlined the remarkable managerial resilience, even aggressive toughness, of the nobility in the ¹⁰⁰ C. Given-Wilson, ‘Wealth and Credit, Public and Private: The Earls of Arundel, 1303–1397’, EHR, 106 (1991), 1–26. ¹⁰¹ Reg. JG, I, nos 1240–1, 1276, 1320, 1330, 1351, 1400–1, 1659 etc. ¹⁰² TNA DL 28/3/2 f.5.

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face of such challenges. We are also more aware that reliance solely on the landed income of magnates gives us a partial and very incomplete view of noble wealth and power. A narrowly budgetary approach to noble income and expenditure threatens to obscure the social role and expectations of aristocratic lordship. Parsimony was not necessarily a virtue in such a world; rather were largesse, munificence, and display the keynotes. Lords were expected to live like lords. We have tried to capture in this chapter some of the leading aspects of what we may call the domestic life of the greater aristocracy. These are aspects which often lie beyond the reach, or at least the direct reach, of the conventional historical documentation—be it the comments of chronicles, the cut-and-thrust of political and military narratives, and even the detailed minutiae of estate and household accounts. We have tried, as it were, to catch the aristocracy ‘off-duty’ politically, at leisure and in their homes. How, and how much, they spent their time in these activities would inevitably vary from individual to individual and indeed from place to place. But beyond such undeniable individualism, the aristocracy shared a corporate identity, notably a set of conventions of behaviour, lifestyle, and manners into which they were born and on which they were reared. It is aspects of this collective ethos and priorities which we have sought to capture. But it is on a personal note that we should end. Lordship, like kingship, was ultimately personal, in tone and direction. This was so at least at two levels. First, however much of the day-to-day routine of business and supervision was delegated to the lord’s council and to his senior professional officers (especially when he was away on military service), it was the lord himself who often took the ultimate decisions. Few magnates can have been as busy as was John of Gaunt; but his direct control of, and interest in, the affairs of his inheritance shine out from the documents. ‘My lord’, so announces one of the warrants issued in his name, ‘ordered me in his own words in the presence of . . . his chancellor to make out a warrant’.¹⁰³ The duke issued pardons and directions by word of mouth and declared in his will that he always kept his signet with him, so that he could issue commands wherever he was. He could declare his will orally to his servants and require them to report back directly to him. His officials had good reason to know that he was not a man to be crossed lightly: the receiver of Tutbury was told in no uncertain terms that his excuses were feeble and that the duke was much displeased with him; another who had offended him was warned not ‘to approach our court or our presence’.¹⁰⁴ Gaunt was not unusual in this respect; it is simply that evidence about his directive role is more abundant. A second sense in which lordship was irreducibly personal lay in the fact that the personality, abilities, and interests of the individual lord shaped the character ¹⁰³ Quoted in Goodman, John of Gaunt, 313. ¹⁰⁴ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 120; Reg. JG., I, no. 65; II, nos. 303, 310; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 165–6.

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of his lordship. The territorial, political, or military ambitions of a lord could clearly impinge, directly or indirectly, on the lives and fortunes of his dependants and tenants, opening doors of opportunity of service and favours but also posing risks if the wheel of fortune turned adversely. Even at the intensely personal level the temper and temperament of the lord could set the tone for his lordship and reputation. It was not without good reason that Henry Stafford, the second duke of Buckingham (d. 1483), was remembered as ‘a sore and hard-dealing man’, a reputation inherited by (and fully documented for) his son.¹⁰⁵ No one who had known these men or had experienced their rule could doubt that their lordship was personal. And the women were no less masterful and arbitrary: it was the decision of Joan Beauchamp, the formidable lady of Abergavenny, to order the execution of three thieves on Ascension day 1401 which prompted an uprising in which her steward, Sir William Lucy, was killed and she and her husband were besieged in Abergavenny castle.¹⁰⁶ Paradoxically the point is illustrated with even greater force by the hiatus of power which followed the death of a lord. This was particularly true in Scotland, English Ireland, or the March of Wales, lands of great regional lordship where the death of a lord could create a vacuum of authority and unleash tensions hitherto kept under control. It was such a vacuum that Thomas Chedworth feared in 1326–7 on the death of the earl of Ulster. It was imperative, he commented, that his heir should put in an early appearance so that his lands could be exploited and his kinsmen and tenants governed.¹⁰⁷ In much the same vein in 1282, one of Edward I’s officers in mid Wales was concerned about the hiatus of power following the death of Roger Mortimer. He reported that ‘he found the inhabitants very fickle and haughty, . . . because they have no definite lord: . . . they will . . . not long remain in peace if their liege lord does not come to them.’¹⁰⁸ Such a comment helps to explain why complaints about absentee lords were such a central contemporary explanation of the crisis of lordship and the frailty of power in fourteenth-century Ireland. That was proportionately more true in Ireland, Scotland, and the March of Wales than it was in England where there was a supplementary, even alternative, structure of power in the form of royal institutions. But even in England, the personality and role of the lords were key features in the equation of power and governance. Lordship was central; it was also personal. A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y Recent literature on castles in the late medieval British Isles abounds. A useful review is C. Platt, ‘Revisionism in Castle Studies: A Caution’, Medieval ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁷ ¹⁰⁸

Rawcliffe, Staffords, 164–80; McFarlane, Nobility, 50–3, 223–7. Adam Usk, Chronicle, 130–2. Sayles (ed.), Documents on the Affairs of Ireland, no. 155. Cal. Anc. Corr., 131.

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Archaeology, 51 (2007). See also, O. H. Creighton, Castles and Landscapes (London, 2002), chs. 4 and 5; C. Coulson, Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003); A. Wheatley, The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (York, 2004); R. Liddiard, Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066 to 1500 (Macclesfield, 2005); A. Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500. 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1996–2006); The Medieval Castle in Ireland and Wales, ed. J. R. Kenyon and K. O’Conor (Dublin, 2003); A. Pettifer, Welsh Castles: A Guide by Counties (Woodbridge, 2000). For individual castles mentioned in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, M. Johnson, Behind the Castle Gates: From Medieval to Renaissance (London, 2002) [Kenilworth]; M. Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005) [Forncett and Chepstow]; J. R. Kenyon, ‘Masonry Castles and Castle-Building’ in The Gwent County History. Volume 2. The Age of the Marcher Lords, c.1070–1536, ed. R. Griffiths, T. Hopkins, and R. Howell (Cardiff, 2008) [Chepstow and Raglan]; M. Morris, Castle: A History of Buildings (Oxford, 2003) [Threave]; M. Potterton, Medieval Trim: History and Archaeology (Dublin, 2005). For the north of England, A. King, ‘Fortresses and Fashion Statements: Gentry Castles in Fourteenth-Century Northumberland’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007). For ‘aristocratic landscapes’, R. Liddiard (ed.), The Medieval Park: New Perspectives (Manchester, 2007). For examples from the west of Ireland, J. Malcolm, ‘Castles and Landscape in Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe, c.1235–c.1400’, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008). For the education of aristocratic children a recent case study is A. Marshall, ‘The Childhood and Household of Edward II’s Half-Brothers, Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. G. Dodd and A. Musson (Woodbridge, 2006). This article also deals with the peripatetic nature of the nobility, for which see also W. Childs, ‘Moving Around’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006). Their reading habits are discussed in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume II, 1100–1400, ed. N Morgan and R Thomson (Cambridge, 2008). For the economic fortunes of the aristocracy see C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), ch. 3. For the reliance of the Butler earls of Ormond on the produce of their demesne manors, M. Hennessy, ‘Manorial Agriculture and Settlement in Early FourteenthCentury County Tipperary’, in Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, ed. H. B. Clarke, J. Prunty, and M. Hennessy (Dublin, 2004). For an English lord using the resources of demesne land in Ireland for personal use and to pay debts, M. Murphy, ‘The Profits of Lordship: Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and the Lordship of Carlow, 1270–1306’, in

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Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008). For noble dealings with merchants in general see P. Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London, 2002), ch. 2. The dealings of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century earls of Ormond with London merchants can be followed in ‘Calendar of Documents Relating to Medieval Ireland in the Series of Ancient Deeds in the National Archives of the United Kingdom’, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith, Analecta Hibernica, 39 (2006).

4 The Lord at War In so far as the medieval aristocracy can be said to have had a profession, it was the profession of arms. In medieval social theory, and very considerably in practice also, all free men were potential combatants and could be summoned for military service; but it was the nobility who were the warrior class par excellence. They were the bellatores, the warrior protectors of society and its natural leaders in war. This was the self-image which they proclaimed to the world on their insignia. On their seals they presented themselves as warrior knights astride their warhorses; their effigies and monuments in death likewise perpetuated, and elaborated, their image as warriors in full military dress. Arms were among their most prized possessions and heirlooms, and as such were often individually itemized in their wills and their provenance indicated. The will of Edward, duke of York (d. 1415) may serve as an illustration: it itemized inter alia ‘the hauberk . . . which the late earl of Huntingdon gave me; my new brigandines covered with red velvet . . . , my basinet and my best horse, my little coat of mail, a piece of plate which the Prince gave me . . . and my iron helmet’.¹ From an early age the young aristocrat was inculcated in the ethos, conventions, and practices of military life. The advice of The Boke of Noblesse was clear on that score: ‘those that are descended of noble blood . . . (should be) drawn forth, nourished and exercised in the disciplines, doctrines and usage of school of arms, as in using jousts, run with speed, handle with axe’.² Even the leisure activities of the aristocracy, notably tournaments and hunting, were little more than peacetime subsets of this culture of military prowess. Fame and honour in this aristocratic world sprang pre-eminently from deeds of arms. The conduct of war, it is true, was governed at aristocratic level by a host of laws and conventions (on issues such as ransoms and the treatment of prisoners of good birth) which greatly mitigated the brutality of the experience for the nobility; but in the melee of battle not even these conventions could save a man from capture and imprisonment (as happened to the earl of Pembroke in 1372), or indeed from death (as was the fate of Edward, duke of York, whose will has just been quoted, at Agincourt in 1415). In the rougher and bloodier worlds of warfare in Scotland ¹ Reg. Chichele, II, 63–6. ² William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse, ed. J. Gough Nichols (Roxburgh Club, London, 1860), 76.

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and Ireland, the chances of death in battle or in an ambush were even greater. Nor was this greater risk necessarily a feature to be deplored. On the contrary, a valorous death in battle could further enhance the prestige of a noble family. ‘God be praised’, such are the words ascribed to James, second earl of Douglas, killed at Otterburn in 1388, ‘not many of my ancestors have died in their beds.’ In this military world, the camaraderie born from campaigning together was one of the strongest bonds in aristocratic and knightly society. Such was often the theme of their tombs and commemorative windows. Thus when Reginald, Lord Cobham (d. 1361), had a tomb constructed in his memory in Lingfield church (Surrey), he had it decorated with coats of arms around the sides—including those of leading aristocrats (such as the earls of March, Oxford, and Northampton) in whose company he had fought in Edward III’s French wars, and especially at Cr´ecy.³ This was the companionship of the officers’ mess; on the roll of honour of the mess the earls, the great aristocrats, occupied pride of place. They were the natural and acknowledged military leaders of a militarized elite. The world of memories of this aristocracy was structured by vivid recollections of their campaigns and of their companions on such campaigns. The depositions made by the witnesses in the famous Scrope–Grosvenor dispute in 1386 as to which of the two families had the better claim to a particular coat of arms—azur a bend or —make this point vividly. One deponent recalled how he had seen the arms worn by Scrope on a banner ‘in the company of the earl of Northampton, when he rode by torchlight from Lochmaben as far as Peebles’; another swore that he had seen Scrope bearing those arms when ‘King Edward . . . was before Paris . . . and since then in all the expeditions undertaken by my Lord of Lancaster and our Lord the king’.⁴ Chivalry, heraldry, and acts of military prowess were central concerns for these men, both in life and in the imagination. They peopled the past with knightly heroes and habits which validated their own behaviour and self-image in the present. Nor indeed was the present short of heroes and episodes to be added to an already established repertoire of classical and medieval paragons. Within ten years of his death in 1376, the Black Prince was confirmed as a member of the pantheon of the immortals in the verse life of him composed by the herald of Sir John Chandos in 1386, quite possibly at John of Gaunt’s instigation.⁵ The wars with France and even occasionally campaigns and battles in Scotland and Spain provided an ample stock of deeds of arms which chroniclers, heralds, and minstrels sought to immortalize. So it was, for example, that the battle of Otterburn (1388) was commemorated in a variety of ballads as well as in the pages of Froissart as ‘the best fought and severest of all battles’.⁶ Heroes were not lacking in this world and, more often than not, they were aristocratic ³ Brown, Black Douglases, 128; Saul, Death, Art and Memory, 152–60. See above, p. 12, for the windows at Etchingham. ⁴ The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, 1385–90, ed. N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1832). ⁵ J. J. N. Palmer, ‘Froissart et le h´erant Chandos’, Le Moyen Age, 88 (1982), 271–92. ⁶ War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Tuck and A. Goodman (London, 1992).

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heroes. After all, the pin-up hero of the fifteenth century was none other than Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), a man whose ‘notable actes of chevalry and knyghtly demenaunce’ were vividly and pictorially recalled several decades after his death.⁷ There is, of course, much that is idealized and conventionalized in the image of the aristocrat at war as it is presented in the literature, biographies, and monuments of the age. But the gap between image and reality was not as wide as it is sometimes supposed. Young aristocrats began their military careers at an early age. Roger Mortimer, second earl of March (d. 1360), redeemed the fortunes of his family and won the affection of Edward III by his exemplary military prowess. Already at the age of 15 he had distinguished himself—alongside some of the senior earls of the day—in a great tournament at Hereford in September 1344. Within less than two years he had crossed to France, been knighted by the Black Prince, and fought alongside Edward III at Cr´ecy (26 August 1346). Much of the rest of his short career was preoccupied with further military enterprises—both in France and in Scotland. He raised large forces of troops from his own estates especially in Wales; and so impressed was Edward III with his qualities that he appointed him constable of the great army which he led to France in 1359–60. It was near Avallon that Earl Roger died in February 1360 at the age of 31. His short but dazzling military career underlined once more the claim of the greater aristocracy to be the natural military leaders of the country; it also demonstrated that there was no quicker route to re-establish an aristocratic family’s fortune or to win the trust of the king. Earl Roger’s career of military service was by no means unusual, except possibly in its brevity. Whilst it was unusual for county knights to serve on more than three or four campaigns during their active careers,⁸ the service of dukes and earls sometimes extended over decades. Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361) was outstanding in this respect. Between 1334 and 1360 he served on fifteen military expeditions; on six of them he occupied the top command position. Nor does this exhaust his military record: he also took part in the siege of Algeciras in 1343 and on crusade to Prussia in 1351–2. Even when he was not on campaign he was an active participant in tournaments and jousts. Much as he loved the delights of his country estates, especially hunting in the forest near his favourite castle of Leicester, most of his career was in fact consumed by what one might term ‘public service’, both military and diplomatic (he headed six major diplomatic missions abroad and participated in twelve truce conferences). Henry of Grosmont was, perhaps, exceptional in both the length and frequency of his record of military service; but his career was certainly not unique. It could ⁷ Pageant of the Birth, Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, K.G. 1389–1439, ed. Viscount Dillon and W. H. St John Hope (London,1914). ⁸ Saul, Knights and Esquires, 36–59. The military careers of Mortimer and the other lords mentioned below are detailed in the relevant entries in ODNB.

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be readily paralleled by that of his close contemporary, Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369). His military career was even longer, stretching chronologically from 1334 until his death, and geographically from Scotland, through France, to Alexandria and Prussia. Because of the nature of the warfare, these military careers were, it is true, frequently spasmodic and interrupted by long periods of truce. Yet such was the military appetite of these men that such truces were often only an occasion to divert their martial ambitions elsewhere (such as the Iberian peninsula) or to indulge in a spot of crusading either in Prussia or in the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed towards the end of our period, Henry V’s war of conquest and settlement in northern France after 1417 transformed the character of English war-service and specifically that of its aristocratic leaders. The short-term expedition and seasonal chevauch´ee were now replaced by prolonged periods of service in the occupied lands in northern France. It has been pointed out that between 1417 and 1422 a substantial proportion of the English higher nobility was on extended service in France; this was reflected in the fact that only four dukes or earls and thirteen lords attended parliament.⁹ Such prolonged absence, it has to be conceded, was not the norm in the period as a whole; but even in its unusualness it is a reminder to us that war and participation in war filled the horizons of these men, much more so proportionately than it did the rest of contemporary society. Their pre-eminence, socially and militarily, was reflected in the differential rates of pay which they commanded in the king’s service. Whereas a mere footarcher was paid at the rate of 2d. or 3d., a mounted archer 6d ., a man-at-arms 1s., and a knight 2s. a day, a duke’s wage in the mid fourteenth century was fixed at 13s. 4d . a day and that of an earl at 6s. 8d .–8s. a day. Whilst the king might call on help from some of the quasi-professional war captains of the day—such as Sir Walter Mauny or Sir Thomas Dagworth in Edward III’s heyday—as his recruiting officers, his natural first and major port of call in terms both of recruitment and of active leadership was the higher aristocracy. Indeed they would have been offended had he acted otherwise. They were, and regarded themselves as, his ‘natural’ war captains, just as they proclaimed themselves to be his ‘natural counsellors’ in respect of major political decisions. Thus when Richard II decided to inaugurate his military career by an expedition to Scotland in 1385, almost two-thirds of the total projected force (of 4,590 men at arms and 9,064 archers) was contributed by one duke (Gaunt) and ten English earls.¹⁰ Nor was the situation essentially different in Scotland and Ireland. Indeed in Scotland the earls were regarded as the natural leaders of provincial armies (such ⁹ G. L. Harriss, ‘The King and his Magnates’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1984), 31–52, esp. 43–4. ¹⁰ S. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, King of Castile and Leon, Duke of Aquitaine and Lancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester, Seneschal of England (London, 1904), 437–9.

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as the ‘army of Moray’), be it in their own names or as part of the ‘common army’ or ‘Scottish army’ when it was summoned. Lordship in Scotland—as we shall see—was military lordship or it was no lordship at all. The dazzling rise of the Black Douglas family to pre-eminence, and the ways it wielded that pre-eminence, demonstrated that truism amply enough. The same was true of English Ireland. It was men such as the earls of Ulster and Desmond who led the large Irish contingents to Scotland in support of the English campaigns, and it was on their shoulders and those of a handful of other resident lords that the responsibility of upholding the English dispensation in Ireland relied. Throughout the British Isles, therefore, aristocratic power and military leadership went hand in hand.¹¹ Given that this was so, it is pertinent to ask how, and how far, the military preoccupations and aspirations of the greater aristocracy affected their lordship, and the lives of their dependants, in general. One thing is clear: since military activity and military leadership were among the premier tests of aristocratic status and standing, the capacity to raise an army was a high priority for every leading magnate. He could fulfil that obligation in several ways. He could first turn to his own household, specifically to its military members. In Norman England and in much of contemporary Scotland and Ireland, the military household of the great lord was the fulcrum of the lord’s power—defending his person and family, imposing his will, escorting him on his travels, and forming the core of any expeditionary force that he assembled, either in his own service or that of the king. That is why the military retinue has been rightly regarded as ‘one of the basic social organisms of medieval Europe’.¹² In the Highlands of Scotland and in the militarized and deeply unstable frontiers of medieval Ireland, such military households—living at the lord’s table, stabling their horses in his stables, and always militarily at the ready—were still a feature of aristocratic life. In England, on the other hand, where the making of war was a royal monopoly, such a world was already a distant memory. But this did not mean that the capacity to raise an effective military force did not remain a primary aristocratic obligation. It could be, and was, discharged in a variety of ways. Except possibly on the borderlands of Wales and Scotland, it was no longer for the most part a case of a military household living at the lord’s table. Rather was it that a set of concentric circles of obligation were, formally or informally, formed which allowed a great lord to assemble a military force when it was needed. The innermost circle was composed of those who were formally retained to serve the lord for life in peace and war. These formal indentures of service—which begin to survive in considerable numbers from the late thirteenth century onwards—specify the ¹¹ Brown, Black Douglases; Frame, Ireland and Britain, esp. chs. XII and XV. ¹² R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London, 1994), 45.

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obligations and responsibilities of lord and retainer in considerable detail. They were contractually and legally enforceable and often specify the supporting forces which a retainer should bring to the service of his lord, the terms (including board and lodging) on which they should serve, compensation for horses lost on campaign, and associated issues. These indentured retainers have attracted a great deal of attention in historical writing because historians feel most comfortable about affiliations and obligations of service when they are formally documented.¹³ But the lord’s retinue (broadly defined) extended far beyond the ranks of those for whom a formal indenture of retinue survives. It should normally be extended to include, at least potentially, those who drew an annuity or received his livery or badge. Such men must have regarded themselves as beholden to him, and one obvious way of discharging their duty was to respond to his military summons. Beyond this second group lay a further, much less distinct, group of men who had no formal link with the lord nor necessarily received any regular reward from him but who nevertheless moved in the orbit of his power and were thereby amenable to his summons. This latter group included the tenants and inhabitants of his estates. In England the king, theoretically, had access to the military services of all able-bodied men in the realm and he could, and did, exercise that claim through commissions of array, shire levies, and other recruitment procedures. But in the northern borderlands and in areas such as the palatinates of Chester and Lancaster or in the duchy of Cornwall, great lords took an almost proprietorial view of their own estates as their personal recruiting grounds. It was on this basis, for example, that the Black Prince in the 1340s and 1350s regularly mustered large numbers of troops from the county of Cheshire. The Prince served on the basis of a commission from the king, his father; but the recruitment lay in his own hands and that of his officials. Thus he ordered the deputy-justice of Chester (the head of the county palatine’s administration) to test and array 200 archers from all the hundreds of the county ‘in whosoever’s lordship they be’ and, in addition, to array 100 of the best archers that could be found.¹⁴ On this and other occasions the Prince also raised large squadrons of foot archers from his lands in Wales. Both the Principality shires of north and west Wales and the Marcher lordships were indeed among the major recruiting sources for the great aristocratic armies of the fourteenth century. It was the lord’s officers who summoned, arrayed, and equipped the troops so recruited and any attempt on the part of the king to recruit directly in these areas was fiercely resisted. Normally such aristocratic armies were ultimately in the pay of the king and served on his campaigns; but they ¹³ There is an excellent collection of such indentures, with a fine introduction, in ‘Private Indentures’. See also Holmes, Estates, chap. 3; J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1989). ¹⁴ Reg. BP, I, 52, 55–6; III, 199; P. Morgan, War and Society in Late Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403 (Manchester, 1989), 107–8.

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could also be deployed for more sinister purposes. During the turbulent politics of Edward II’s reign, for example, such privately recruited forces furthered the ambitions of men such as the earls of Lancaster and Hereford and, most notably of all, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the first earl of March (d. 1330). Even a great prince such as John of Gaunt valued the security which his own ‘private’ force could provide for him in dangerous days. When he realized that his life was in danger from rampaging peasants in July 1381, he ordered a force of over 500 men to be assembled to escort him from Berwick to Knaresborough. The armies of fourteenth-century England were more aristocratic in recruitment and character than we sometimes concede. That they served in the name of the king, ultimately at his pay and generally in furtherance of his ambitions and policies, should not be allowed to conceal their significance as sources and manifestations of aristocratic power.¹⁵ What was true of England was a fortiori even more true of Scotland and Ireland. Both of them were, in different degrees, lands of war in as much as periodic forays and campaigns to assert authority and quell enemies could regularly be part of the cursus of a great aristocrat’s life. They were also societies in which leadership on campaign was a regular, and regularly tested, feature of a nobleman’s effectiveness. In Scotland the earls were the natural leaders of regional armies, and their position as such was sometimes formally recognized in charters. Thus when King Robert I (d. 1329) gave Thomas Randolph the most ample powers in Moray in 1312 he required the men of the region to perform their common army service to Thomas and his heirs, as should those who ‘used to follow the banner of Moray in times past’.¹⁶ What King Robert was doing was no more than recognizing the role of the aristocracy in raising and leading the military forces of regional Scotland. Lordship was measured in men, pre-eminently in military men. That explains the famous riposte of the Highlander when asked to assess the value of his lordship: ‘Five hundred men’ was the brisk answer.¹⁷ It was an answer which had greater applicability in northern and western Scotland or in Ireland or in the March of Wales than it did in England. But even in England the capacity to raise an army and to draw on a pool of military supporters were crucial facets of the arts of lordship. When Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), set out on a military–diplomatic mission to the Scottish frontier in 1378, one of his first actions was to dispatch a messenger with a letter of summons to the lord’s retinue (pro retinencia sua munienda).¹⁸ It is a reminder that the retinue was not just a paper army; it could be called on to serve and ¹⁵ Davies, Lordship and Society, 81–4 (and sources cited); Goodman, John of Gaunt, 83. ¹⁶ Regestra Regum Scottorum V: The Acts of Robert I, King of Scots, 1306–1329, ed. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1988), no. 389 (pp. 633–5). ¹⁷ M. Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (English Translation, London, 1966), 72. ¹⁸ Household Accounts, I, 246.

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to do so at short notice. When Earl Edmund’s son Roger (d. 1398) assembled an army to accompany Richard II on his campaign in Ireland in 1394–5 his force was gathered at speed and led by knights and bachelors (such as Sir Hugh Cheyney, Sir John Pauncefoot, and Leonard Hakeluyt) who were in receipt of retaining annuities from him.¹⁹ Likewise when the earl of Warwick faced a critical situation in Wales in 1403 his immediate response was to summon his retinue (ad muniendum diversos de retinencia domini) to assemble at Warwick.²⁰ But it is from the ample official correspondence of John of Gaunt that we can catch the best-documented glimpse of recruiting military lordship in action. He certainly cast the net of his retinue widely. When he was assembling a large army for his great chevauch´ee in France in 1373 he ordered 650 men at arms ‘of our retinue’ (de nostre retenue) to be enlisted. Or, to take another example, in August 1383 he sent individual letters, via the local receiver, to his bachelors and squires in Lancashire and Cheshire to get themselves ready for military duty. He also appended twenty-four unendorsed letters in a similar vein to be dispatched by the receiver to those whom he (the receiver) thought were fit and sufficient to serve him.²¹ All in all, the life of a great aristocrat, at least during his years of active service, must have revolved considerably around the need to raise and lead an army. Campaigns themselves were generally seasonal and short; but the logistical problems of recruiting men, finding horses, assembling arms and uniforms, and arranging supplies took months of preparation. So did the outstanding claims—for unpaid wages, compensation for horses lost, reimbursement of goods commandeered, and the settlement of ransom demands—that came in the wake of every campaign. The whole exercise placed considerable strains on the stamina and administrative expertise of the aristocrat and his officials. An administrative cadre basically and normally geared to maximize income from estates and tenants and to provide the wherewithal for the lord’s luxurious lifestyle had to be transformed into a military commissariat. This was one of the major challenges of aristocratic lordship, a challenge which has been frequently overlooked, or underestimated, because of the nature of the surviving documentation and its overwhelming royal and royal exchequer orientation. How, in short, did men such as Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361), Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381), or Richard Beauchamp (d. 1439) cope with the demands of exercising military lordship? The short answer is that they became military entrepreneurs, raising men and supplies where they could. They would certainly call—as we have seen—on the services of those who were beholden to them through a formal indenture of service or the receipt of a regular annuity or an undocumented but very ¹⁹ CPR 1391–6, 451 et seq.; Holmes, Estates, 62–3, 80. ²⁰ BL Egerton Roll 8770 (account of receiver-general). ²¹ Reg. JG, I, nos. 1216, 1218; II, no. 909.

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real sense of obligation and service. This was the lord’s ‘retinue’ in the full and quasi-permanent sense of the word. But it was very rare, particularly in England, for even the greatest lord to have sufficient men in these categories to enable him to raise a credible expeditionary force. Instead, or rather as well, he had to rely on an intensive campaign of ad hoc recruitment for a specific campaign. The contract which the councillors of Roger, earl of March (d. 1398), concluded with Walter Fitz Walter on 15 May 1398 illustrates this kind of recruitment arrangement well.²² It specified service in a particular theatre of war—Ireland—and for a clearly delimited period—six months. It stipulated in detail the body of troops—six esquires and twenty mounted archers—which Walter was to provide and entered carefully into details of services—on issues such as shipping, gains of war, and entitlement to sustenance (bouche de court) by the earl—and into other contingencies that might arise. There were many men like Walter Fitz Walter in fourteenth-century England—military free-floaters who in effect offered their services as major military subcontractors to the greater aristocracy. Their commitment lasted no longer than the term of their contracts; they might then move into the service of another lord. They generally in turn recruited the men whom they had pledged to provide by entering into sub-sub-contracts (in effect) with a pool of local military recruits, often contributing no more than a man-at-arms or an archer apiece. This process of grass-roots recruitment is normally hidden from documentary view because it was not of direct relevance to exchequer accounting processes; but in at least two cases—the subcontracts of Sir John Strother in preparation for the earl of March’s expedition to Brittany in 1374 and of Sir Hugh Hastings for Thomas of Woodstock’s expedition thither in 1380—these subcontracts have fortuitously survived. They reveal to us how deeply into the fabric of local society the military recruitment policies of the aristocracy reached, albeit indirectly.²³ Assembling an expeditionary force posed daunting problems of negotiation and organization at all levels. The lord himself might bargain very hard with the king on the terms on which he would serve. Nowhere is this more vividly revealed than in a letter which Edward I dispatched, probably in April 1301, to Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), in an attempt to persuade the earl to contribute a substantial force to the king’s army in Scotland.²⁴ The mixture of cajolery, flattery, promise of remission of debt, commitment to the speedy payment of wages, and an almost desperate appeal to the earl’s sense of duty and honour reveals that there was far more to the process of recruitment than might at first appear in bland exchequer documents. Military expeditions were truly joint-stock enterprises between the king and his great magnates and by ²² CPR 1396–9, 338; printed in full in Holmes, Estates, 130–1. ²³ A. Goodman, ‘The Military Sub-Contracts of Sir Hugh Hastings, 1380’, EHR, 95 (1980), 114–20.; S. Walker, ‘Profit and Loss in the Hundred Years War: The Subcontracts of Sir John Strother, 1374’, BIHR, 58 (1985), 100–6; Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 150–64. ²⁴ Sweetman (ed.), Calendar of Documents Relating to Ireland, IV, no. 849; ibid., V, no. 1302.

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no means all the trump cards were in the king’s hand. The arts of negotiation and enticement had to be practised all the way down the line, even to the level of recruiting foot archers. Advance payment of wages could be made to archers to ensure that they set out in good time and arrive promptly at the port of embarkation; more important personnel were to be enticed by offers of two oaks from the local forest if they enlisted; ‘but if not, not’.²⁵ Where blandishment did not work, strong-arm tactics could be pursued. The local tenantry might be assembled at the castle gate and those who were unwilling to serve might find their animals seized and their purses emptied by a compulsory war subsidy.²⁶ These various recruitment strategies must have put a considerable strain on the lord’s officers, central and local. Nor did their problems end there. Selecting the captains for the local contingents and arranging a timetable and an itinerary for them likewise posed daunting problems. So did the commandeering of horses, so essential for the army’s success. Baggage horses were also essential: so it was that the Black Prince ordered thirty of the best and strongest baggage horses to be commandeered to meet his needs overseas.²⁷ Even more impressive were the measures taken by John of Gaunt to ensure that he had sufficient horses for his great chevauch´ee in France in 1373. It was to his own estates that he turned in the first instance—buying horses at Pontefract fair, making pointed requests to men such as the abbot of Furness and Whalley to volunteer gifts of horses, and setting quotas of horses to be assembled from his various estates—twenty from Tutbury, thirty from Higham Ferrers, a further thirty from Norfolk and Suffolk, forty from Lincolnshire, and so forth.²⁸ Arms likewise had to be bought in large quantities: when Thomas of Woodstock made preparations for his proposed expedition to Ireland in 1392 (to which we will return below) he spent £226 in advance on arms, including 700 bows and 1,900 arrows—for a very modest force.²⁹ The provisioning of the army, both prior to its departure and subsequently, posed huge commissariat problems. The men of Devon, for example, had no option but to grant 2,000 quarter of oats to feed the horses of the Black Prince’s army; while the wardrobe account of the duke of Clarence (d. 1421) reveals that £1,030 was spent in purchasing victuals and provisions in England for dispatch to the lord’s household overseas.³⁰ War engines had to be got ready; special craftsmen such as carpenters, masons, and iron-workers had to be recruited; and uniforms had sometimes to be bought so that the lord’s army could be distinctive and cultivate its own esprit de corps.³¹ Last, but by no means least, if the expedition was overseas, the securing of adequate shipping was a major headache. The ²⁵ Reg. JG, I, nos. 1222, 1226–7, 1232 etc. ²⁶ Davies, Lordship and Society, 82–3. ²⁷ Reg. BP, II, 94. ²⁸ Reg. JG, I, nos. 1194–5, 1200, 1208, 1210, 1223–4, 1228, 1230. ²⁹ BL Add. Roll 40859A (account of Thomas of Woodstock’s treasurer of war). ³⁰ Reg. B.P, II, 94; Household Accounts, II, 670. ³¹ See, for example, Reg. JG, I, nos. 1243–8; for examples of uniforms for lord’s archers, see Davies, Lordship and Society, 81, 84.

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responsibility of finding and assembling the ships might have lain, in England, with the king and his officials; but the task of provisioning them and getting them ready for the voyage fell to the lord and his officers, as the account of the Earl Marshal’s expedition of 1422–3 demonstrates.³² This list by no means exhausts the multiple problems which confronted any great aristocrat anxious to discharge his duty of military leadership in the Middle Ages. The tendency of historians has been to underrate their complexity, concentrating largely on the size and composition of the aristocratic contract armies (where the exchequer accounts are an invaluable source of information), but underestimating the associated problems involved for lords in recruiting an army and preparing it for service, especially overseas. It was a task which taxed the administrative skills of the lord and his cadre of officials to the utmost. The lord’s household was put on a war footing. In the event of an expedition he would leave a skeletal administration, often under the control of his wife, at home while taking most of his key household officials and confidants with him in what was termed ‘the foreign household’. The two households would be kept in frequent contact with each other by the regular dispatch of messengers and messages. The fact that war altered the priorities and habits of aristocratic lords was also reflected in the fact that a special treasurer of war, with his own account, was sometimes established—as, for example, by Duke Thomas of Gloucester in 1392—to deal with the complex financial issues involved in major military enterprise. Such enterprises taxed the resources and skills of lordship to their very limits. Ready cash to pay for supplies and to reward disaffected troops was always in desperately short supply. It took a messenger and two valets 147 days—admittedly an exceptionally slow journey—to take 1,500 marks to John of Gaunt in Gascony in 1372.³³ The slowness of travel was more than matched by the slow payment habits of the English exchequer. Indeed delay in receiving full payment of war wages was a constant irritant in crown–magnate relations. It contributed mightily, so at least the Percies claimed, to the catastrophic breakdown in relations between Henry IV and the Percy family in 1403. The cash-strapped John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk (d. 1432), was kept waiting for eight years for the war wages due to him.³⁴ Others were fobbed off with uncashable tallies. In these circumstances it is little wonder that greasing the palms of well-placed officials was a necessary art for war commanders anxious to recover their wages and to solve their cash-flow problems. John Mowbray certainly felt that it was essential for him to pay a ‘regard’ to the clerks of the royal exchequer and to lay on a meal in a tavern for the deputy treasurer and other crown officers ‘in order to win their ³² J. L. Kirby, ‘An Account of Robert Southwell, Receiver-General of John Mowbrary, Earl Marshal, 1422–3’, BIHR, 27 (1954), 192–8. ³³ Reg. JG, I, no. 1038 (presumably the expense account is for the round journey). ³⁴ J. M. W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History, 44 (1959), 212–27; Kirby ‘Account of Robert Southwell’, 197.

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good will’ (pro eorum benevolencia sua).³⁵ In the event, these various ploys did him little good; but they are a reminder that for a militarily active great magnate, the demands of military lordship—from the moment of the initial summons to recruit for a campaign to the long-drawn-out efforts to recoup war wages and to settle claims to ransoms and the compensation for horses lost—must have cast very long shadows across his career. We see greater aristocrats primarily on their estates, in the turmoil of high politics, parading in their magnificence in parliament, in tournaments, and in the chase; we are also presented with their idealized self-images in accounts of their deeds of arms and in their splendid effigies, but we should not underestimate the degree to which preparation for, and participation in, war and campaigns consumed much of their time and energy, especially in the period from 1290 onwards. Furthermore warfare was, more especially in England, an activity where private prowess and ambition and public duty met. Successful war was one of the best ways of forging an effective relationship between crown and magnates; nowhere did the interests of both parties more closely coincide. War was, literally and metaphorically, a noble enterprise. It was, at least in theory, the ultimate raison d’ˆetre of the aristocracy as a status group and it also provided a theatre in which their feats of arms could redound across Europe and down the generations. Distaste for war and its consequences was not a sentiment which the aristocracy understood. On the contrary, they had developed a whole host of conventions and practices which immunized them—but not ordinary troops nor civilians—to a considerable degree from its worst effects. More than that, they approached campaigning not only in a spirit of adventure but also very considerably in a spirit of profit-making. There were certainly fortunes to be made in war and, given the position of the magnates as war leaders, the greatest profits came their way. Contemporaries realized as much. The shrewd Sir John Fortescue observed that ‘the lords make profits, often very large, out of their contracts with the government, and enrich themselves with profit and plunder.’³⁶ Modern scholarship, especially the seminal writings of K. B. McFarlane, have confirmed and elaborated such a claim. Money could certainly be made out of military contracts, as Fortescue claimed. The profit that William Heron, Lord Say (d. 1404) had made from overcharging on his war wages troubled his conscience sufficiently for him to instruct his executors to repay 120 marks!³⁷ Ransoms and the prospect of ransom feature regularly in indentures of service and must have made the mouth of many a would-be warrior water in anticipation.³⁸ So did the stories of the fortunes made by Henry of ³⁵ ∗ BL Add. Roll 17209 (accounts of bailiffs of Earl Marshal, 1422–3). ³⁶ Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England: Otherwise Called the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1885). ³⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, esp. chs. 7–9, republished in his collected essays, England in the Fifteenth Century; Test. Vet., I, 163. ³⁸ See, for example, ‘Private Indentures’, no. 62.

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Grosmont from the sacking of Bergerac in 1345,³⁹ and similar tales of how the residences of English aristocrats were rebuilt and modernized from the fortunes of war in France. Neither in Scotland nor in Ireland were similar fortunes to be made; but the proceeds of booty, pillage, and ransom must likewise have enhanced the reputation and drawing power of men such as the earls of Douglas and Desmond. Nowadays the appeal of war and the profits that could be made from war—especially in the century after 1330—is not likely to go by default as an argument, especially in respect of the aristocracy. Indeed the danger, paradoxically, is that the historiographical pendulum may have swung too far. War did involve risks, as well as profit, for the aristocracy. Fortescue notwithstanding, not all of them made a killing from charging extortionate pay for war service. As usual it was the least fortunate who lost out. The Earl Marshal tried to redeem his family’s reputation by spending, it has been estimated, c.£2,500 on the Agincourt campaign in 1415; but he appears to have recouped only £1,450 in wages. Nor was this a unique case: Sir Hugh Despenser (d. 1349), another member of a d´eclass´e family, was still owed £2,770 in wages from the exchequer at his death. Ransoms could indeed be a major windfall; but equally to be ransomed could destroy a family’s resources. Walter Fitz Walter (d. 1406) knew that to his cost: he had to mortgage his castle of Egremont and all his lands in England to meet the cost of his ransom.⁴⁰ Even a rich family like the Percies could be embarrassed by the misfortunes of war: when the young Hotspur (d. 1403) was in danger of being ruined by the enormous ransom exacted from him after his capture at the battle of Otterburn (1388), it required a royal subsidy and virtually a national subscription campaign to help him out of his predicament.⁴¹ Even before the tide of the war began to turn in France, the price that some of the magnates had to pay escalated. The duke of York, the earl of Arundel and two de la Pole brothers were killed in 1415, Clarence in 1422; and Huntingdon and Somerset were captured the same year. It would not make sense to attempt to draw up a balance account of the profits and losses of war on aristocratic fortunes and careers. The story would vary from family to family, from generation to generation, and even within the lifespan of an individual magnate. In general, the English aristocracy enjoyed what may be termed a favourable ‘balance of war’ in its prolonged, if spasmodic, warfare with the French in the period 1337–1429. They fought their campaigns for the most part on French territory, scored some notable victories, and enjoyed the profits, plunders, ransoms, and landed gains of successful war. But even in France, let alone in Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, and elsewhere, the sustained impact of campaigning, raising troops, border raids, and the levying of heavy ³⁹ Knighton, Chron., 57. ⁴⁰ Harriss, ‘King and his Magnates’, 41–2; GEC sub Despenser; ODNB sub Fitzwalter family. ⁴¹ Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 29 n. 90.

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taxation should be taken into account. In truth the aristocracy made no such calculations. Leadership in war—whether it be in the king’s campaigns or on individual forays—was their duty and their m´etier; it was also of course an opportunity to perform—or at least to claim to perform—those ‘deeds of arms’ and prowess which were of the very essence of the nobility which they flaunted. They were simultaneously lords of war and peace. We normally see how English magnates discharged their military obligations through the formal contracts, indentures, and payment vouchers of the royal exchequer. But very occasionally we have evidence from the magnates themselves of how an army was raised and, thereby, what was involved in mounting an expedition. Such was the army that Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), assembled at Plymouth in the autumn of 1374 but which did not set out for Brittany until late spring 1375.⁴² Earl Edmund had good reason to be suspicious of the timetable and firmness of intention of the operation. In 1372 he had led an earlier ill-fated expedition to Brittany which had been called off after fifty-four days. This time Mortimer insisted that a substantial portion of the wages of his retinue be paid in advance; indeed the exchequer records make it clear that over £9,106 had been so paid even before the army left Plymouth.⁴³ It was doubtless by such advance payment alone that the army could be kept intact in the Plymouth area during the winter of 1374–5 and, in any case, actual wages in hard cash were a far more reliable enticement than the promise of exchequer tallies for the future. Behind the bland accounting formulae of the exchequer lay concealed a great deal of negotiation and cajoling. In the event, the Mortimer expedition of 1375 was no more successful than the one of 1372. The fault probably did not lie with Mortimer or with his fellow commanders. They had initially agreed to serve for one year in Brittany, being paid wages for six months only and recouping their expenses thereafter from ransoms, booty, and the other ‘profits of war’—in itself an eloquent comment on the English government’s view of how the costs of war were to be met. But the military campaign of 1375 ran parallel with peace negotiations at Bruges: they were twin aspects of a single policy of bringing the French king and his allies to the negotiating table. And when the time was right for such negotiations Edmund Mortimer and his fellow commanders found that any prospect of military glory and profits which they may have entertained was snatched from them. On 20 July 1375—less than three months after he and his army had landed in Brittany—Edmund Mortimer was peremptorily ordered to return with his retinue to England.⁴⁴ His sense of disillusion with the handling of the whole enterprise may well have contributed to Mortimer’s role in the political ⁴² For details of this campaign see G. Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975), 39–45, 150–2. ⁴³ The contract for the 1372 expedition is published in Lloyd and Stenton (eds.), Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals,, 162; that for the 1375 expedition is in TNA E 101/34/6. ⁴⁴ Holmes, Good Parliament, 45.

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crisis of 1376, when his steward (Sir Peter de la Mare) acted as Speaker at the Good Parliament. But perhaps even more interesting from our point of view are the shafts of light that the 1375 expedition throws on the question of how aristocratic armies were assembled. A document in the Mortimer archives shows that Earl Edmund raised his army in part from the ranks of his own retainers and tenants.⁴⁵ Several of his leading Herefordshire tenants and retainers (now or prospective) turned out to serve him—including Sir John de la Bere, Sir John Bromwich, Sir Ralph Lingen, Sir Robert Tresgoz, and John Joce. Equally interesting is the way in which Mortimer scoured his own estates in Wales and the March for foot soldiers—eleven from Ludlow, eleven from Ewyas, six from Pembridge and Kingstone, twelve from Dinas, fourteen from Cedewain, three from Montgomery, and twenty-seven from Usk, each of them a Mortimer estate. But even a great lord such as Earl Edmund Mortimer could not assemble an expeditionary force from his own resources. He relied on other lords to raise contingents to swell the ranks of his army. One of these was Thomas Berkeley, who brought with him ‘many of his principal gentlemen, his neighbours’. But he also cast his recruiting net much further afield. One of the recruiting agents to whom Earl Edmund turned was Sir John Strother, whose fascinating subcontracts have been cited above. Strother was not a Mortimer tenant or retainer, nor did he move in Mortimer’s geographical orbit (he came from Northumberland). But he was a well-known military recruiting agent who offered his services and his men to any magnate seeking to assemble an army.⁴⁶ Assembling, coordinating, and leading an army composed of such motley groups, and then over-wintering them in Plymouth for months, posed huge problems; but they were the sort of problems which medieval magnates regularly faced. Another glimpse of the way an aristocratic expeditionary force was assembled is provided by the unusual survival of the account of the treasurer of war of Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), for his proposed Irish expedition of 1392.⁴⁷ Once more what we glimpse beyond the formal contract is the hard bargaining, led on Gloucester’s side by members of his council and especially Sir Thomas Mortimer (who in effect headed the administration of the great Mortimer estates during the minority of Earl Roger (d. 1398)).⁴⁸ Gloucester secured the payment of a bonus or ‘regard’ of 600 marks, payable in advance of the dates formally specified in the indenture of retinue, and 10,000 marks for ⁴⁵ BL Egerton Rolls 8751. For details of Mortimer’s retainers, Holmes, Estates, esp. 61. ⁴⁶ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, II, 7; Walker, ‘Profit and Loss in the Hundred Years War’, 100–6. ⁴⁷ BL Add. Roll 40859A. Royal documentation on the expedition may be found in J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913), 498, 503 and TNA E 101/74/1–3. ⁴⁸ For Thomas Mortimer see the entry by R. R. Davies for Roger Mortimer, fourth earl of March, in ODNB 39, 403–4.

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the actual period of service. He also extorted a stipulation that the number of troops to be taken on the expedition should be left to his discretion and that he was discharged of responsibility for any deterioration in the situation in Ireland pending his arrival. This was hard-headed bargaining, born of long experience. It paid off. The full sum promised was handed over and much of it was diverted to purposes not directly related to the proposed expedition. Equally interesting is the list of squadron commanders to whom the duke turned to provide him with an army.⁴⁹ He could obviously call on those who had in effect a professional, long-term link with his service—such as Sir Walter Clopton, a life retainer, or Sir John Clifton, who was in receipt of a regular annuity. Others were men who had already served under Gloucester in earlier campaigns—Lord Darcy in Brittany in 1381, Sir John Clifton in expeditions in 1377 and 1380, or Robert Turk in the aborted Prussian expedition of 1391. Some were quasi-professional war captains, always ready for adventure and for the windfalls of war. Such a one was Sir John Mascy of Puddington (Cheshire) who provided the largest contingent for Gloucester’s force. Many of them had seen service in many theatres of war and in the pay of different magnates—Clifton in Brittany and Lithuania, Darcy in Brittany and Scotland, Robert Turk with de la Pole and Arundel, Roger Drury with de Vere in Ireland and Arundel at sea. These men, therefore, were not regulars in Gloucester’s service but they could draw on a wide range of experience. The problem would be converting them into an effective and cohesive fighting force, especially in the challenging conditions which they would face in Ireland with its fragmented polities, difficult terrain, and faction-ridden English and Gaelic societies. In the event Gloucester’s modest Irish expedition of 1392 was aborted; but the documentary detritus it has left opens a welcome window on the recruitment practices of an aristocratic world. Had the duke of Gloucester actually crossed to Ireland in 1392 he would have soon encountered a society where the experience of warfare was very different from the world he was familiar with in lowland and southern England. He would also have witnessed a military lordship which was a far cry from the routines and civilities of southern England. This chapter, indeed this whole book, is overwhelmingly based on that English experience. From this fact there is no escape: there is no documentary evidence remotely comparable for Scotland or Ireland with that available from the (overwhelmingly royal) archives for England. This is particularly ironic and regrettable with regard to military lordship, since there can be little doubt that society was more militarized and militaristic—and ⁴⁹ I have assembled the information about the individuals discussed here from a variety of sources including Holmes, Estates; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity; Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire; and especially The House of Commons, 1386–1421, ed. J. S. Roskell, L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe, 4 vols. (Stroud, 1992).

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thereby so also was lordship—in the outer zones of the British Isles than it was in the heartlands of England. So we should at the very least indicate, very roughly and inadequately, in what ways military lordship and the experience of war differed from one part of the British Isles to another. Even within England itself there were zones—broadly speaking on the frontiers of the kingdom—where the military aspect of lordship and power was to the fore in a way which would have distressed the peoples of midland and southern England. The border counties of northern England were one such area. Here for much of our period raids and counter-raids, cattle rustling, booty taking, and the building of tower-houses indicate a society in recurrent preparation for campaign, if not for war. Cheshire was another area notorious for its militarism and for the disproportionate contribution it made to the recruitment of English armies. So, of course, were the March and Principality of Wales. The March of Wales was the most densely encastellated region of the British Isles, while Wales as a whole contributed huge forces (in proportion to is population) to English armies in Scotland and on the continent—such as the contingent of 6,200 for the Scottish campaign of 1322. Lordship and power in all of these areas lay considerably in the leadership of men and the assembling of armies.⁵⁰ The same was even more true of much of Ireland and Scotland. Medieval Ireland, it has been said, was a society where warfare was ‘a routine part of life’.⁵¹ That was a reality to which the English lords and settlers in Ireland had to adjust; they did so quickly. They could, it is true, contribute contingents of troops to the king of England’s campaigns (especially in Scotland) and they could also provide the escort for the justiciar as he toured the country in order to impose a modicum of authority on it.⁵² But equally, and indeed more regularly, English lords and Gaelic chiefs alike used their troops to pursue their own ambitions and to further their quarrels. In the essentially decentralized and localized collection of societies that was medieval Ireland, the powers of military lordship and the resources of military might were of the essence of aristocratic power. The standing of men such as Maurice Fitz Thomas, earl of Desmond (d. 1356), or of the Butler earls of Ormond rested on a variety of sources, but far more obviously and regularly than in England did it rest on active military leadership, on the raising of troops (‘Macthomas’s rout’, as the earl of Desmond’s retainers were called) especially the kerne from among their dependants, and on the billeting and feeding of these troops. However much these great magnates turned in the outer circles of English court culture, the landscape of their lives and lordship was dominated by forces and circumstances far removed from those of aristocratic lordship in most of England. ⁵⁰ For Cheshire see esp. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire and for the March of Wales, Davies, Lordship and Society, ch. 3. ⁵¹ Frame, Ireland and Britain, 222. ⁵² Note the tables in Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 40, 79.

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The same was true of much of Highland and western Scotland. Indeed power and military leadership in most of Scotland was organized on regional and provincial lines in a way that was alien to the centralized, royal, tradition of the control of war and peace in England. In Scotland the earls retained their control of at least the mustering of the ‘common army’, the servicum Scoticanum.⁵³ The imperatives of local warfare and competition were too immediate to be able to wait on coordinated royal direction. ‘Whereas,’ admitted Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick (d. 1304), ‘I have often vexed the abbey’s tenants . . . by leading them all over the country in my (my italics) army, although there was no summons of the common army of the realm.’⁵⁴ The truth was that in the highly competitive and militarized societies of upland Scotland the proprieties of constitutional power were regularly overtaken by the actual exercise of military power, especially in the world of ‘the highly militarized clan-lordships’ of the Highlands and the west.⁵⁵ This was a world in which Gaelic lords hired the galloglass of Argyll and the Hebrides to reinforce their own kerne. Rival earls and local leaders hired their own mercenary bands of kerne (‘caterans’ as they were called), and deployed them ruthlessly in the pursuit of their ambitions. None more so than Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan (d. 1405), the notorious ‘Wolf of Badenoch’, whose rumbustious flaunting of his power included the burning of Elgin cathedral by his caterans in 1390 and a massive raid by the same caterans into Angus in 1392. His ruthlessness could be paralleled by that of other regional magnates such as that of his son Alexander, earl of Mar (d. 1435), who waged ‘semi-permanent local warfare’ to extend the area of his authority in north-eastern Scotland, or the lordship of the Campbells in Argyll.⁵⁶ Such an active and aggressive military lordship could only in exercised—in Scotland as in Ireland—by quartering these bands of hired followers on the countryside. It was a very different kind of lordship from that familiar to most English magnates and thereby to most English historians. ‘By the close of the fourteenth century’, so it has been argued, ‘it was clear that a substantial military following, which lifted its supplies and wages directly from tributary populations and estates, had become an essential element in the successful exercise of power across much of Gaelic Scotland.’⁵⁷ Nor should we too readily dismiss such a phenomenon as one peculiar to backward, chieftain-dominated Highland societies. Scotland, especially from the ⁵³ Duncan, Scotland, 167–8, 381; Barrow, Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History, 161. ⁵⁴ Quoted in G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (3rd edn., Edinburgh, 1988), 124. ⁵⁵ S. Boardman, ‘Lordship in the North-East: The Badenoch Stewarts I, Alexander Earl of Buchan’, Northern Scotland 16 (1996), 1–30, at 3. ⁵⁶ A. Grant, ‘The Wolf of Badenoch’, in Moray: Province and People, ed. W. D. H. Sellar (Edinburgh, 1993), 143–62; Brown, ‘Regional Lordship in North-East Scotland’. ⁵⁷ Boardman, ‘Lordship in the North-East’, 7.

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1290s, was a society habituated to war and invasion. In such a society power, including political power, naturally gravitated towards those who excelled in the arts of military leadership. Nowhere is this more self-evident than in the case of the Black Douglas family, the most powerful parvenu aristocratic family in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Scotland. It is not the details of the family’s astonishing rise to this premier position which interests us here. This has been amply analysed in Michael Brown’s book, and we have already very briefly characterized the nature of one of its architects, Archibald Douglas ‘the Grim’ (d. 1400).⁵⁸ Rather what is particularly relevant is the way that a record of military leadership (duly mythologized by the family) laid the foundations for astonishing royal liberality, both in lands and in extensive judicial and fiscal liberties. The family’s lordship, especially in the Marches, was founded very considerably on war-leadership rather than on landed status and resources, though the latter might follow where the former had been asserted. ‘Alliances and submissions based on the tide of war’, it has been pointed out, ‘turned into more lasting bonds of lordship and landholding’. It is an observation which applies not only to the Douglas family or indeed to Scotland; it is a window to the way that the powers of lordship were often assembled in medieval society generally. We catch a glimpse of the process at work in the charter of 1354 to William, Lord Douglas, granting to him ‘the leadership of the men (my italics) of the sheriffdoms of Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles’. Such leadership had to be regularly and effectively exercised if it was to be converted into sustained lordship. It was a task at which Archibald the Grim excelled, especially in eastern Galloway. There, in the terms of the royal charter of 1369, he pacified the district and asserted his authority ‘forcefully in person’.⁵⁹ The great tower which he built at Threave in the heart of the lordship stood as a visual and forbidding expression of the military power which lay at the root of his standing. Military power was the original foundation and ultimate sanction of all lordship in medieval society. But the format and prominence of such power varied greatly from place to place and from period to period; so did the context within which it operated and/or was allowed to operate. This truism is brought home by even a cursory consideration of military lordship in different parts of the British Isles. It is from England with its exceptional archives of service in royally commissioned armies that far and away the best evidence survives. Paradoxically the very richness of that evidence may distort our picture of military lordship generally. From a broader perspective it is the unusualness of the English experience which is perhaps most striking. England enjoyed the luxury in our period of fighting its wars in other peoples’ backyards. It was a society where the making of war was clearly an exclusive royal right and where aristocratic armies were raised on an ad hoc basis, by royal command and paid by ‘national’ wages. To move from this relatively well-ordered and closely regulated society to the ⁵⁸ Brown, Black Douglases; see above, pp. 47–8.

⁵⁹ Brown, Black Douglases, 48, 49, 63.

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much rougher, unregulated, and fragmented worlds of much of Ireland and of parts of Scotland was to encounter a very different world. It was a world of raids and counter-raids, pillage, ‘private’ truces, groups of quasi-professional warriors (kerne/caterans, idlemen are some of the contemporary phrases), and billeting of such troops on the local population. Here lordship was military lordship or it was no lordship at all. Not the least of the attractions of attempting to study the nature of lordship across the face of the British Isles is that it serves to remind us of how lordship had to follow the contours of power, geography, and custom.⁶⁰ A social elite which was trained from childhood for the prospect of war and whose imaginations were fed on a diet of ‘feats of arms’ and tales of prowess lived in dread of the tedium of peace. Particularly was such tedium profound in a country such as England. One solution to the tedium which became increasingly popular from the thirteenth century was to stage a joust (a combat between two mounted knights armed with lances) or a tournament (a contest between two teams using sharp weapons in a melee). Such occasion allowed the chivalric classes to let off steam, to socialize with their friends and peers, and to keep their military skills in good order. The tournament became so much part of the cursus of the aristocratic year that attendance at it was not infrequently mentioned as an obligation in indentures of retinue.⁶¹ There was clearly an agreed timetable of known tournaments and of venues—Blyth, Hereford, Coventry, Exeter, Bristol, Guildford, Kenilworth, Hertford, Kennington, and Dunstable among them. Nor were English magnates unwilling to travel abroad, especially to Calais, to indulge their passion for the sport. Jousts and tournaments could certainly be risky occasions: at least three members of the Mortimer family are recorded in the Wigmore chronicle as being killed in tournaments, while the death of the seventeen-year-old heir of the earldom of Pembroke in a tournament in 1389 extinguished the male line of the Hastings family. But in spite of such tragedies, tournaments and round tables were superb displays of aristocratic theatre. They bonded the aristocracy in a common cult of chivalry and prowess and became high festivals of aristocratic sociability. The most lavish of such occasions became part of the collective memory of the nobility. Such, for example, according to contemporary chronicles, was the lavish three-day tournament held at Kenilworth in 1279 by Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Edward I’s confidant. It was attended, so we are told, by 100 knights and as many ladies.⁶² The leading lady was none other than the queen of Navarre, Earl Edmund of Lancaster’s wife. Even ⁶⁰ Cf. R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), 90–2. ⁶¹ For example ‘Private Indentures’, nos. 7, 11, 14–16, 28 etc. ⁶² Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 5 vols. (London, 1864–9), IV, 281–2; Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, I, 349–50.

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more impressive, though also politically sinister, was the famous tournament held at Dunstable in June 1309 at which 235 participants are recorded as being present, including six premier earls with their retinues.⁶³ Tournaments were often held as part of the wedding festivities of the aristocracy: Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361), one of the great patrons of tournaments and, appropriately, a founder member of the Order of the Garter, held a splendid tournament at his castle at Leicester in 1344 to celebrate the marriage of his daughter, Maud, to Ralph, Lord Stafford.⁶⁴ The lives of many young aristocrats must have been filled with talks of jousts and preparations for tournaments. The household accounts of the young Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) for 1391–2, for example, show him attending tournaments at Waltham, Hertford, Kennington, and elsewhere. He had by then an established reputation as one of the most gallant knights in Christendom in the wake of his performance at the magnificent and prolonged tournament held at St Inglevert in the marches of Calais in 1390.⁶⁵ Bolingbroke would have been reared from childhood in these chivalric enterprises: his grandfather, the famous Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361), had left a reputation as a great jouster and as the captain for life of a group of knights who secured a licence to hold a yearly joust at Lincoln;⁶⁶ Bolingbroke’s uncle was Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), who composed a standard manual for devotees of the tournament—‘Ordinaunces and Fourme of fighting within Listes’. A whole service industry of followers and attendants, heralds and minstrels was engaged for the occasion. London merchants made a killing, supplying arms, tents, pavilions, banners, expensive liveries and collars and all the accoutrements of ‘power-dressing’ and ostentatious display. Theatrical performances would be staged to titillate the audience such as the procession of masked knights and esquires to the church of St Paul’s in London on the eve of the four-day tournament held at Stepney in 1331 or the company of knights, dressed as the pope and twelve cardinals, who took on all comers at the jousts at Smithfield in 1343. Such occasions were certainly a drain on noble incomes. Thomas, lord Berkeley (d. 1361), knew as much from experience: in 1327 he spent at least £53 on three tournaments, while in the following year his expense account on at least three further tournaments cost him at least £86 and a further £8 for armour for his body.⁶⁷ Expenditure on this scale and with this regularity suggests that tournaments and jousts were not marginal or even optional activities for ambitious young aristocrats. Rather were they a key feature of their promotion of their self-image as a warrior elite and of their habits of sociability. ⁶³ A. Tomkinson, ‘Retinues at the Tournament of Dunstable’, EHR, 74 (1959), 70–89; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 95–101. ⁶⁴ Knighton, Chron., 50–1. See in general J. Barker, The Tournament in England 1100–1400 (Woodbridge, 1986); Vale, Edward III and Chivalry. ⁶⁵ TNA DL 28/1/3, ff. 12, 15, 16, 18v; McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, 37–8. ⁶⁶ Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 144–5. ⁶⁷ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, I, 325.

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Should the nobility feel that tournaments were too much like playing war games without incurring the real risks of war, they could opt instead to participate in a crusade.⁶⁸ It was an opportunity for them to bring their military pretensions and their Christian convictions into practical alignment. The crusading enterprises of Henry Bolingbroke are a case in point; they also show the continuum from the world of the tournament through to that of the grand tour to participation in a crusade.⁶⁹ In 1390 Henry was twenty-four years old and had already established a reputation for himself as one of the most formidable jousters in Europe. He had returned from the international competition at St Inglevert covered in glory, and he now searched for new worlds in which to boost his renown further. In this he was probably encouraged, and certainly financed, by his father, quite possibly to be out of England at a politically fraught time. Be that as it may, on 20 July 1390 he set out with a company of 150–200 for Prussia on ‘crusade’, returning to England in April 1391. But his wanderlust had not been satisfied. Three months later he set out again for Prussia from King’s Lynn. His proposed crusade had to be aborted; but Bolingbroke was not to be denied his chance to see the world and to enhance his reputation. He set out via Vienna and Prague for Venice and then travelled to Rhodes, Jerusalem, and Cyprus before heading back for England. He could hardly claim that he had covered himself with military glory; but he could join the long roster of English aristocrats who had extended the range of their military activities to include the lands of the infidels. Bolingbroke’s grandfather had distinguished himself at the siege of Algeciras in 1343 and went to Prussia in 1351–2 with the intention of leading a campaign against the Turks. His near contemporary Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1373), campaigned in Prussia in 1363 and with Pierre de Lusignan in the Middle East in 1365, and the three sons of the earl of Devon campaigned in Prussia in 1368. And so the list could be easily lengthened. Indeed the prospect of being called upon to accompany one’s lord on a crusade was such an anticipated contingency that it could be formally stipulated as an obligation of service in an indenture of retinue.⁷⁰ As we saw in the case of Henry Bolingbroke, it was not easy—nor indeed is it sensible—to draw a clear distinction between tournaments, crusades, pilgrimages, and travel in the cursus of the young aristocrat. They were activities which merged easily and naturally into one another. They were an occasion for these privileged young men and their entourages to see the world, to flaunt their power and wealth, to extend their horizons and contacts, to hone their military skills, and to do so in the name of faith. In short they were truly and distinctively ⁶⁸ For general discussion of this theme see M. H. Keen, ‘Chaucer’s Knight: The English Aristocracy and the Crusade’, in Scattergood and Sherborne (eds.), English Court Culture, 45–61. ⁶⁹ Toulmin Smith (ed.), Expeditions to Prussia; F. R. H. Du Boulay, ‘Henry of Derby’s Expeditions to Prussia in 1390–1 and 1392’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), 153–73. ⁷⁰ ‘Private Indentures’, nos. 14, 93.

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the enterprises of a noble, military elite. We can perhaps best capture their character through the pictorial representation of the career of one of the great aristocratic military heroes of the early fifteenth century, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439). Earl Richard inaugurated his distinguished military career at the age of twenty in an unpromising theatre—in the wars in Wales. By 1408 the threat from Owain Glyn Dwr ˆ had largely ebbed away. So Earl Richard felt free to travel abroad for two years, performing notable feats of arms at Verona and elsewhere, visiting Rome and the Holy Land, Russia and Poland. ‘And in this Jurney,’ comments his later biographer, ‘Earl Richard gate hym greet worschip at many turnaments and other faites of warre.’⁷¹ He returned, no doubt, with his horizons extended and his reputation enhanced. He had completed his military apprenticeship; ahead of him would lie exemplary years of service for Henry V and Henry VI in France. The career of Earl Richard was more rounded and more successful than that of most great aristocrats; but in the centrality that military prowess and activity—in the tournament, on campaign, on crusade, in his castle building, in his travels—he was at one with most of the noblemen of his day.⁷²

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the commemoration of a particular warrior, D. Green, Edward the Black Prince: Power in Medieval Europe (Harlow, 2007), ch. 4. For individual battles and campaigns, C. J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–60 (Woodbridge, 2000); D. Green, The Battle of Poitiers, 1356 (Stroud, 2002); A. Ayton and Sir P. Preston, Bart., The Battle of Cr´ecy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005); A. Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud, 2005). The retinue roll of Lionel of Antwerp, earl of Ulster, for his Irish expedition of 1361–4 [TNA E 101/28/18] is published in Appendix 2 of Handbook and Select Calendar of Sources for Medieval Ireland in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith (Dublin, 2005). For the earl of Arundel’s recruitment of troops in the reign of Richard II, A. R. Bell, War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004). For the English aristocracy and warfare more generally, M. Prestwich, ‘The Enterprise of War’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), and D. Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge, 2008). For the militarism of Cheshire, T. Thornton, ‘Cheshire: The Inner Citadel of Richard II’s Kingdom?’, in The Reign of Richard II, ed. G. Dodd (Stroud, 2000). ⁷¹ Dillon and St John Hope (eds.), Pageant of the Birth, Life etc. of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, 44. ⁷² ODNB sub ‘Beauchamp, Richard’.

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For chivalry in the context of the Anglo-Scottish wars, A. King, ‘War and Peace: A Knight’s Tale. The Ethics of War in Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008); A. J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369–1403 (Edinburgh, 2000). For Scotland more generally, K. Stevenson, ‘ ‘‘Thai War Callit Knychtis and Bere the Name and the Honour of that Hye Ordre’’: Scottish Knighthood in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth Century VI: Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2006), and K. Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (Woodbridge, 2006). For Gaelic Irish ideas of conduct in warfare, K. Simms, ‘Images of Warfare in Bardic Poetry’, Celtica, 21 (1990). For the galloglass, the essays in The World of the Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600, ed. S. Duffy (Dublin, 2007), esp. K. Nicholls, ‘Scottish Mercenary Kindreds in Ireland, 1250–1600’. For the tournament, D. Crouch, Tournament (London, 2005). For crusading, E. Matthew, ‘Henry V and the Proposal for an Irish Crusade’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009).

5 Land, Family, and Marriage Family and land were two of the central features around which concepts of standing, status, and power were built in medieval rural societies. This was arguably true of all orders of society above the ranks of the landless, labourers, and vagrants. Peasant society, it is now widely acknowledged, was in many respects an assemblage of family units. It was the family which was often the primary social and economic organism. It was the unit of production, consumption, and seigniorial obligation. Its customs of inheritance, and the conventions which determined claims to its land and chattels between widows and children, formed the framework for the distribution and inheritance of property, especially at death. Land was also the means to, and the guarantor of, status. It was in terms of the amount of land that he held that the medieval peasant was often identified—virgater, half-yardlander, bovate-holder, and so forth. Ownership of land also made him a fully fledged member of the village community with all the rights and duties—including a share in communal agriculture, use of common meadow and pasture, access to woods, forest, and turbary—that this could entail. The hierarchies of landed wealth and the accumulation, transmission, and inheritance of land were paramount features of peasant status and life cycles. What was true of peasant society applied equally, if not more so, to the other orders of society. Particularly did it apply to the greater aristocracy. We will misunderstand their priorities and concerns if we overlook the degree to which their policies were regularly preoccupied by the issues of land and family. Furthermore many of the documents which they carefully preserved in their archives, copied into their cartularies, and bequeathed to their descendants were concerned with these very issues. For the historian this is both a strength and a weakness. From these documents it is often possible to glimpse the strategies which families deployed to protect and enhance their landed fortunes and family interests. Most of these documents were carefully drafted by lawyers. They are precise and technical, and grow steadily more so across the period studied in this book. They have been the subject of excellent detailed studies, notably on issues such as entails, jointures, marriage contracts, settlements in tail male, and enfeoffments to use—all of them devices developed to extend the family’s control over its lands and its transmission from one generation to

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the next.¹ It is not the aim of the present chapter to summarize this vast and technical body of historiographical comment except in so far as a brief review, accompanied by some selected examples, can help us to identify the approach of the aristocracy to issues of land and family. It is precisely in that area that we become aware of the limitations of the evidence. Abundant it may be, but it is also deliberately technical and formulaic. It is very rare indeed—at least until we enter the much better-documented world of private correspondence in the fifteenth century—that we are given a glimpse of the personal considerations and passions which shaped the decisions which underlie the bloodless language of the legal documents. Nor is it always easy to separate social reality from legal fiction in many of these documents. But even when we have conceded as much, it is abundantly clear that land and family lay at the heart of the aristocracy’s ambitions. In England at least—less so arguably in Scotland and Ireland—land and aristocracy went hand in hand, especially at the higher echelons of the titled nobility. An adequate ‘competence’ (as it was called) in land was as essential for a great magnate, as were jewels for a lady or the tools of agriculture (wainage) for the peasant. This is vividly demonstrated in the territorial provision that Edward III made when he created six new earls in 1337. Thus in elevating William Clinton to be earl of Huntingdon in that year, the king gave him land and rent worth one thousand marks annually so that ‘he could more properly continue and better sustain the status and honour of earl’.² Honours and titles were all very well, but the medieval period took a down-to-earth view of both. Only the possession of land and rents and the control of people gave a meaningful content to aristocratic lordship. Land, therefore, was the source of wealth and power; it was also the focus of family tradition and family ambition. It is true that a common distinction was drawn between inherited land (an estate which had descended to an individual through his/her place in the family tree and whose transmission to the next generation was largely determined by convention and custom) and acquired land (an estate which an individual had secured—or ‘purchased’ in the contemporary phrase—by purchase, marriage, or exchange and was his, therefore, theoretically to dispose of as he wished). But even this distinction, in so far as it was applied in practice, could only last for one generation, since the ‘acquired’ land of one generation became the ‘inherited’ land of the next. Land was in effect held in trust by an individual on behalf of his/her family, past, present, and future. Just ¹ A full bibliography is not called for here, but the following (cited in order of publication) have been particularly useful: Holmes, Estates, ch. 2; J. M. W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism, 1215–1540 (Manchester, 1968); McFarlane, Nobility, esp. chs. 3–4; Given-Wilson, English Nobility, esp. chs. 5–6; Bean, ‘Landlords’, 526–86; Carpenter, Locality and Polity; Payling, ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change and Landed Society’, 51–73; idem, ‘The Politics of Families: Late Medieval Marriage Contracts’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), 21–49; idem, ‘The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England. The Marriage of Heiresses’, Econ. HR, 54 (2001), 413–29. ² Holmes, Estates, 4 n.1.

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as the family’s coat of arms and its profound attachment to its ‘name’ and lineage expressed its anxiety to display, confirm and, if necessary, invent and embellish its continuity through time,³ so the descent of the family’s estates in the (preferably) main family line helped to assert and display the family’s antiquity and standing. So it was, for example, that the Mortimer family was inordinately proud of the brass horn which, so it was claimed, was their charter for the land of Wigmore. Whether the horn was authentic or not, the Mortimers had good reason for their pride since they can be shown, from independent historical evidence, to have been lords of Wigmore since the days of William the Conqueror. Titular horns, family legends (again amply provided in the case of the Mortimers by a full family chronicle), genealogies, and carefully assembled collections of title deeds all of them proclaimed the emphasis on the continuity of great families.⁴ In fact few of the really great aristocratic families showed a somnolent continuity over time. Some families—the Courtenay earls of Devon are a wellknown example—showed a remarkable stability over several generations; but that was more a comment on their lack of enterprise, character, and success. More commonly—and much more so among great magnate families rather than county gentry—the territorial fortunes of families fluctuated, sometimes wildly, from one generation or even one decade to the next. A fortunate marriage or a handsome royal gift or the windfalls of an unexpected failure of heirs in a family or even the investment of the gains of war could all transform a family’s chances dramatically and unexpectedly. But so, in reverse, could a major political blunder or the sudden extinction of direct male heirs of the male line. In this, as in other respects, the swings of fortune and misfortune were more dramatic in their impact for the greater aristocracy than for other orders of society. We will, once more, choose the Mortimers of Wigmore to illustrate the truism, largely because the scale and pace of change in the family’s fortunes across the fourteenth century are unusually vivid and partly because the survival of a family cartulary and chronicle and scattered family muniments help to illuminate the story.⁵ In 1272 the Mortimers could look back on almost two centuries as lords of Wigmore (Herefordshire) and nearby Welsh lordships. They were a rumbustious lot and had been ruthless frontier barons but on the whole they looked as if they would have to be content with their long-accustomed role as Herefordshire and Marcher barons, and no more. Over the next century this situation was to be dramatically transformed and they were catapulted into the very front rank of the English aristocracy. The routes to success were many, but two in particular can be selected for attention here. The first was royal patronage, in return, of course, for service to the king. The family’s rise to pre-eminence was built on successive ³ See above, pp. 28–33. ⁴ See above, pp. 34–9. ⁵ For the Mortimers see Holmes, Estates, 10–19; Davies, Lordship and Society, 53–66. For maps of Mortimer lands in Wales see R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987, 2000), 396, 407.

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bouts of royal munificence—first by Edward I to Roger Mortimer (d. 1282); then by Edward II to Roger’s junior son, Roger of Chirk, and to his grandson, Roger of Wigmore, in the years 1307–21; then in an orgy of shameless grants to the latter Roger, now flaunting the newly invented title earl of March, in the minority years of Edward III (1327–30); and finally by the extraordinarily generous, if high-handed, acts of Edward III in rebuilding the Mortimer fortunes almost completely in the 1350s for the next Earl Roger (d. 1360). The second route to the transformation of the family’s fortunes and standing lay through the spoils of marriage. Indeed the two routes were linked in as much as royal consent, and even direct royal intervention, were essential pre-requisites for success in the major marriage stakes. We may again select two examples from the annals of the family to illustrate the point. The first was the betrothal in 1301 of the young Roger Mortimer, at the age of fourteen and during his father’s lifetime, to Joan Geneville (or Joinville), only daughter and heir of Peter and Joan de Geneville. Intense negotiations and calculations of possible consequences no doubt preceded the contract. Over the next few years, the fruits of the marriage fell into the lap of the Mortimers: they included a major accession to the family’s standing in the Welsh March (the lordship of Ewyas Lacy and a moiety of Ludlow) and a totally new stake in the English colony in Ireland (the lordships of Trim and Meath). Even more spectacular in its import, and this time involving direct royal intervention, was the marriage of Earl Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381) in 1368 to Philippa, daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence, and granddaughter of Edward III. Earl Edmund’s marriage had originally been promised to the earl of Arundel’s daughter; but when the king stepped in with his offer, the promise to Arundel was cancelled on due payment of compensation.⁶ Few families could resist the flattering offer of a royal marriage alliance. But flattery apart, the 1368 marriage quickly brought very tangible rewards for the Mortimers. Philippa was the heiress of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360) and so brought to her new husband a goodly part of the vast former Clare inheritance, including great lordships in south-east Wales, East Anglia, and Ireland. From being in 1301 a baronial family of sound but modest regional standing the Mortimers had become within three generations possibly the second richest aristocratic family in England, with estates stretching from East Anglia through southern England, a predominant position in the March of Wales, and a towering position in the ranks of English magnates in Ireland. Presented in this fashion the story of the Mortimers from 1272 to 1398 would appear to be one of remorseless advance and consolidation. It was, of course, nothing of the sort. Rather was it a series of episodic successes and disastrous setbacks. No one could predict from one generation—or indeed one decade—to the next what the consequences might be of a political disaster, a childless marriage, the failure of male heirs, or the demands of successive widows—to ⁶ CCR 1354–60, 92–94; McFarlane, Nobility, 86 n. 3.

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name but some of the most obvious contingencies. Such disasters could destroy a family irretrievably, as happened to the cadet branch of the Mortimers of Chirk after the death of Roger in 1326.⁷ But other families—including our Mortimers of Wigmore—recovered from their failures and disasters, partly because they relearnt the art of climbing the greasy pole of political success in each generation and—which is much the same thing—mastered the arts of winning the support and patronage of the king. For the Mortimers the fourteenth century was a roller coaster of a century, punctuated by disaster, minorities galore, and widowhoods. But there was no doubt, if one takes the long view, that the trajectory of their fortunes was very much upwards. As was true of most aristocratic families, wealth and fortune seemed to attract more wealth and fortune. The Mortimers had built up their territorial fortune through the enterprise of individual members of the family and the luck of a series of key marriages. Their task now was to secure the integrity of the inheritance and to prevent it being dissipated by alienation and fragmentation. The assumptions of English land law helped them in this respect. Its inbuilt prejudice in favour of the eldest male heir of the body as the rightful expectant owner of his father’s lands was a powerful force in keeping the estate integral. So, at least formally, was the absence of means by which land (outside boroughs) could be devised by will. We will, in fact, see that there were various ways in which these limitations could be, and were regularly, circumvented. But in the vast majority of cases the rights of the eldest surviving son to succeed to the family estates, or at least the greater bulk of them, were respected. Sometimes, indeed, the integrity of the estate was formally protected against the indigence or extravagance of the father in the interests of the son. Thus when in May 1316 the powerful Bartholomew de Badlesmere struck a marriage agreement with Robert Fitz Pain, he insisted that the latter should have no power to alienate any of his land (beyond £200 worth) without Bartholomew’s consent. Bartholomew was thereby protecting the interests of his daughter (who was betrothed to Robert’s son) but he was also ensuring that his future son-in-law should enter into his family inheritance more or less intact.⁸ Aristocratic families were obsessed with the fear that a family inheritance built up over the generations might be dissipated and fragmented by often totally unforeseen events, both natural and man-made. They had good reason to be very apprehensive about the issue. In a famous calculation—which broadly stands in spite of subsequent reservations and qualifications—K. B. McFarlane estimated that a quarter of his sample baronial families became extinct in the direct male line every twenty-five years during the period 1300–1500.⁹ It is little wonder that the best lawyers in the land were busy preparing legal devices for coping as ⁷ For the virtual dispossession of the Mortimers of Chirk see Davies, Lordship and Society, 46–7. ⁸ GEC, sub Robert Fitz Pain. For another comparable example see Thomas de Multon as cited in Holmes, Estates, 43. ⁹ McFarlane, Nobility, 146 and ch. 2 passim. See also Payling, ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society’, 54.

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best they could with such a contingency. Indeed it was but one of a galaxy of concerns which disturbed the sleep of any self-respecting aristocrat. How could the consequences of a long minority and the depredations which often came in the wake of a royal custody be mitigated, if not altogether avoided? What about the claims of widows, cadets, and collaterals? When should the affection one naturally felt for daughters who happened to be heirs make way for the superior claim of maintaining the integrity of the family inheritance? How could one do any sort of justice between children from a first and a second marriage? There were no universal answers to these and many other similar questions. Each family would have to work out its own, sometimes highly individual, solutions. But those solutions drew increasingly on a body of accepted practices and legal devices on which the whole aristocracy could, in principle draw. Much the same sets of practices and devices also prevailed in much of lowland Scotland and in English Ireland, in other words in areas which were, albeit at one remove and often with their own distinctive technical vocabulary (e.g. tailzie for an estate in tail in Scotland),¹⁰ within the orbit of the English common law tradition. The main thrust of these various legal devices was to determine, in so far as possible, the descent of the family inheritance at the death of the owner and to do so in a way which both preserved the integrity of the estates and respected the owner’s wishes in so far as they had been expressed and specified. The entail was perhaps the most fundamental of these devices. Stated baldly, an entail altered the legal status of the land and gave a much greater say to the wishes of its current lord in determining its descent. It was no longer held in fee simple with its exclusive emphasis that it was a tenancy held in fee (and thereby subject at the death of its holder to crown rights of custody and wardship) and that the right of the primogenitary heir determined succession. The landholder—provided he had secured a royal licence—could use the entail to determine the descent of his inheritance in accordance with his wishes. There were many possibilities—including specifying a sequence of remainders (i.e. indicating to which member of a family the land should descend in the event of the failure of the designated heir(s) or his direct descendants), preferring male collaterals to daughters or claimants through the female line, or excluding collaterals as prospective heirs at the time of a marriage contract (as happened when Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), took the daughter and heir of the earl of Lincoln (d. 1311) as his wife in October 1294).¹¹ Since family circumstances and the wishes of individual magnates varied widely there is no general pattern to these arrangements, even though they drew on the same body of legal principles. The best we can do, therefore, is to select a few well-known instances to illustrate how these arrangements shaped the fortunes and descent of noble ¹⁰ For Scotland see esp. H. L. MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1993), esp. 180–1. ¹¹ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 3–4; McFarlane, Nobility, 263.

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families. Perhaps the best known and most comprehensive such settlement was that made by Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369) in 1344–5 when he devised the bulk of his estates to himself and to his eldest son jointly, with remainders to younger sons and provisions for his daughters’ dowries.¹² The provisions had to be revised several times to take account of deaths (including that of his eldest son) and other changes in family circumstances. Thomas Beauchamp’s entail arrangements were even-handed as between his children, those of other magnates less so. Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376) was a shrewd and ruthless operator. Having ditched his first wife since he regarded her now as a political embarrassment, he made three separate entails of different portions of his estate—at the time of his second marriage in 1345 to the daughter of the earl of Lancaster, then in 1347 when this marriage produced a son, and finally in 1366 to lock in the Warenne inheritance (which had descended to him) with the Arundel fortunes. Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d. 1425), was to follow much the same route in his family settlements and to show the same degree of ruthlessness.¹³ Shrewd family calculations informed all such settlements. Keeping the inheritance—or at least the main part of it—intact was a basic desideratum, and preferably in the direct male line. The Beauchamp family once more provided two highly instructive instances. Earl Thomas (d. 1369), as we have seen, engineered a series of arrangements to determine the descent of the family lands and to give a good start in life to all his children. But he had not bargained for the ruses of the Great Reaper. Three of his five sons predeceased him. But Earl Thomas was not to be thwarted. A fourth son, William (d. 1411), was already marked out for an ecclesiastical career, no doubt eventually a bishopric; he was already canon of Salisbury. But the continuity of the family took precedence over ecclesiastical convictions and scruples. He was retrained as a soldier and a valuable portion of the Beauchamp inheritance was given to him and his heirs male. It was a calculated insurance policy—that of establishing a credible cadet branch of the family against the possibility that the remaining Beauchamp heir Thomas (d. 1401) might, like his three other brothers, die prematurely and without a male heir of the body. In the event, the reverse happened: it was Richard Beauchamp son of William Beauchamp (recently created earl of Worcester) who died in 1422 without a son. The Beauchamp instinct for reintegrating the family inheritance now swung remorselessly, and probably uncanonically, into action. The widow of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1422) was married to his namesake and cousin, Richard Beauchamp earl of Warwick (d. 1439) in November 1423. What for us is instructive is the shaft of light that a whole series of marriages, deaths, and settlements casts on the shaping and reshaping of aristocratic fortunes. Entails ¹² CPR 1343–5, 251–2; Holmes, Estates, 48–9. ¹³ CPR 1343–5, 487–8; CPR 1345–8, 328–9; CPR 1364–7, 198, 237–9; GEC sub Westmorland.

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and settlements could have totally unforeseen long-term consequences; families worked out strategies which maximized the opportunities of all its members but never lost sight of the overriding priority of family solidarity (where it could be achieved) and the continuity of the family inheritance; the cadet branch could easily become the senior residuary legatee of family plans in one generation only to find the boot on the other foot in the next. The bias of these settlements—and increasingly so as our period progresses—was in favour of male heirs, preferably of the body. Medieval aristocratic England was not an agnatic society, in the sense that medieval Wales was, excluding formally all claims to landed property by females or through the female line. The prominent role played by widows, dowagers, daughters, and other female heiresses makes that evident enough.¹⁴ Nevertheless the advantages of unilineal male descent were obvious in a society anxious to preserve the family name and the integrity of the inheritance. Interestingly, perhaps some of the most forthright statements of this credo come from Scotland and Ireland. These were societies where clan or family leadership in peace and war-captaincy in regions of frequent warfare reinforced the preference for male inheritance. The charter of entail for the barony and castle of Dalkeith did not mince its words on this score. The barony was to be entailed to male heirs; failing such heirs it was to pass to the next male heirs bearing the surname Dalkeith. And in case the point was not sufficiently explicit it was decreed that no descent to a female heir was to be permitted unless male heirs were totally lacking.¹⁵ It was an attitude that would have been fully understood in English Ireland. In 1299 the barony of Skeathy (Co. Kildare) was to pass, in the absence of male heirs, to ‘the most noble, worthy, strong and praiseworthy of the pure blood and name of Rochfordeyn . . . to whom the whole barony . . . shall remain indivisible, so that the inheritance shall never pass to daughters’. That statement enunciated a set of principles in an uncompromising form which any English or indeed Scottish magnate family would have understood.¹⁶ Another device which greatly extended a landowner’s control of the descent of his lands—and helped him avoid feudal inheritance law—lay in the trust or enfeoffment to use. It may well have been developed among gentry landowners in the late thirteenth century, but it was in the period after 1350 that it seems to have been widely practised among leading aristocratic landowners. It is possibly best illustrated by a concrete example rather than by a theoretical exposition of its legal possibilities. The history of the Mortimer estates serves us well once more. In 1359, on the eve of his departure for a campaign in France, Earl Roger ¹⁴ R. Archer, ‘Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Later Medieval Dowagers’, in Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. A. Pollard (Stroud, 1984), 15–35. ¹⁵ Mort. Reg., I, no. 97. ¹⁶ Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls . . . of Ireland, ed. J. Mills et al. 3 vols. (Dublin, 1905–56), I, 326, quoted in A. J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968), 106–7. Other examples are cited in Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 23–4.

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(d. 1360) demised a goodly proportion of his estates to a group of friends and councillors headed by the bishop of Winchester, William Wykeham.¹⁷ The grant meant that the title to the estates was now vested formally not in the earl but in the feoffees as they were called, provided they observed the conditions on which the grant was made—often involving paying an annual fee farm to the feoffor. On his death—and in the case of Earl Roger death followed within one year of the enfeoffment—the feoffees would run the estate in accordance with the feoffor’s (or late magnate’s) wishes as expressed in the enfeoffment and/or his will. Side by side with the entail, the enfeoffment to use was a crucial device in shaping the descent and status of a magnate’s estate after his death. There were doubtless a variety of complex motives behind the adoption of uses, both negative (to avoid the consequences of a prolonged period of royal custody) and positive (to ensure that the owner’s wishes were indeed observed after his death). Perhaps one of the most explicit statements of what those wishes might involve are those specified in the will of Hugh, earl of Stafford who died on pilgrimage to Rhodes in 1386: to guarantee the lands and rents given to his servants for their lives; to provide a dowry for his daughter; and to provide an annuity for each of his younger sons.¹⁸ In short it was as much a means of upholding a family settlement as it was a way of avoiding the ‘death duties’ of feudal tenure. Entails and enfeoffments to use were parts of the legal paraphernalia that were developed, especially in the fourteenth century, to cope with the wish of aristocratic landowners to exercise as much control as possible over the descent and transmission of the family inheritance. Preserving the name of the family, retaining the integrity of the inheritance, preferring generally the established claims of the eldest surviving male heir and ensuring, in so far as possible, that the wishes of the owner continued to shape decisions after his death were certainly among the primary considerations. But they were by no means the only ones, since the magnate was the head of a family as well as the heir of an estate, and he needed to balance these considerations against one another. Working out that equation amicably and effectively was a major challenge to his talent and ingenuity. Top of the list of claims on the magnate’s generosity was the need to make provision for his wife, especially in anticipation that he would predecease her and she would survive him as a widow for years. Conventional practice stipulated that a widow had a claim to a third of her husband’s property at his death. This had been supplemented by the practice of his nominating specified lands to her on the marriage as a maritagium, further consolidating her claim; but this practice had largely been replaced by the grant of a marriage portion to the bride’s father, a practice to which we will return. The really important development was the growing fashion in the fourteenth century of creating a joint tenancy ¹⁷ CPR 1358–61, 266; Holmes, Estates, 45.

¹⁸ CPR 1377–81, 219; CPR 1385–9, 344.

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in survivorship for a landholder and his wife, stipulating which lands should be held by joint title and which therefore would be held by whichever party lived the longer. Sometimes only a few manors were included in a jointure arrangement but occasionally the terms were extended to the greater part of an inheritance. The impact of dower portions and jointure settlements could have a major impact on the land available to the heir and thereby on his standing, wealth, and political prospects. Particularly so was this the case when multiple dowager ladies put in their claims more or less simultaneously. Earl Roger of March (d. 1360) had his work cut out to salvage as much as he could of the Mortimer lands forfeited by his grandfather and namesake (d. 1330); but his task was made all the more frustrating by the fact that three Mortimer widows—his great-grandmother, his grandmother, and his mother—all had legitimate claims to dower.¹⁹ It was not until 1358—two years before his own death—that he was able to reassemble the whole of his fragmented inheritance. Jointure settlements further complicated these contingencies. The example par excellence is of course that of Margaret, countess (and briefly at the end of her life duchess) of Norfolk (d. 1399). Granted jointure rights in most of the lands of her first husband, John, Lord Segrave (d. 1353), she survived him for forty-six years, keeping her male descendants out of the inheritance for the better part of sixty years. The vagaries of the law of dower and the practice of jointure were not merely matters of antiquarian legal interest; they profoundly affected the map of the distribution of landed wealth, and with it power, in medieval society. Nor was this a retiring group of ladies. On the contrary, what we know of them—of Joan of Bar, the estranged wife of the earl of Surrey, the thrice-widowed and immensely rich and shrewd Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), or Mary of St Pol countess of Pembroke (d. 1377) or the formidable Joan countess of Hereford (d. 1419) and the even more formidable Joan Beauchamp lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435)—proves the reverse to be the truth.²⁰ They managed their affairs and presided over their families with authority. They were hard-headed if not necessarily hard-hearted: when another Mortimer dowager, Philippa (d. 1378) left her son £500 in her will it was on the firm condition that he disclaimed any right to her property, goods, and outstanding debts and on the understanding that he would not impede the activities of her executors.²¹ Maternal affection was not to cloud her insistence on her rights in these matters. Family responsibility did not, of course, end with the claims of the wife or the widow. Other members also had strong claims on the family’s affections and thereby on its fortunes. Younger brothers might be well provided for. Roger ¹⁹ Davies, Lordship and Society, 42. ²⁰ See generally Ward, English Noblewomen. Among older studies Jenkinson, ‘Mary de Sancto Paulo’ is rewarding. The latest attempt to provide an account of the life of Elizabeth de Burgh (far and away the best documented heiress of the fourteenth century) is F. A. Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York, 1999). ²¹ Nicholls, Wills, 98.

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Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), was notably generous in this respect. During the years 1394–8—that is on reaching his majority—he granted manors worth at least £160 to his young brother, Edmund, to which he later added the lordship of Narberth. He also awarded his brother-in-law, Henry Hotspur, land worth 100 marks.²² This was largesse indeed but not out of line with the practice of the Mortimers, and many other families, of looking after the interests of the family in general. This could be achieved by grants—often in tail male—of lands and rents; but other members of the family had to be content with a rich ecclesiastical plum in the lord’s gift. Edmund Mortimer (d. 1304) did not have the wherewithal to provide land for his large family. Instead he nominated three of them to Mortimer family livings and placed a daughter in a nunnery.²³ Daughters were indeed both a problem and an opportunity. Even if they were consigned to nunneries as was Joanna Mortimer they were no doubt expected to bring an endowment with them. If they were to be placed on the marriage market, the costs would be much higher and the negotiations often complex. But no self-respecting magnate could afford to opt out of his responsibilities in this respect. We will return in a moment to the question of marriage settlements and marriage strategies. Here we will be content to give a couple of examples of how great aristocrats discharged their responsibilities in this respect. Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1361), was hardly a representative example of the English higher aristocracy. He was a retiring, sickly bachelor; but he also felt his responsibilities to his female kin, leaving bequests to his sisters and nieces in his will. His near contemporary Richard earl of Arundel (d. 1376) was easily the richest magnate in England and could afford to shower his largesse liberally among family members—including bequests totalling 14,000 marks in cash to his sons and daughters; a further 2,500 marks to four grandchildren; and 1,400 marks to his nephews and nieces. Earl Richard could well afford to be hugely magnanimous; but the circle of his family beneficiaries indicated the orbit of family affection and obligation among the aristocracy generally.²⁴ It is not only their complicated legal landed agreements which open a window on to their world of obligation and duty; so do their bequests and gift-giving. They were family patriarchs as well as the heads of landed inheritances. Given the close intertwining of land and family in all sorts of directions, the successful arrangement of the marriage of offspring, male and female, constituted one of the most delicate and critical acts of lordship. It was an opportunity to forge alliances with other families, to use such alliances as a bargaining counter, and to arrange the future descent of the family estates. Magnates must have kept an eye on the prospects of the marriage market as any stockbroker does on the ²² CPR 1396–9, 428, 457; BL Egerton Charters 8783. ²³ Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, part 1, 351. ²⁴ Test. Vet., I, 94–6 and more fully in Lambeth Palace Library, Archbishop Sudbury’s Register, f.92v–f.94v.

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fortunes of the stock exchange, and since both activities had a strong risk, both of spectacular profit or devastating loss, attached to them, they inevitably dabbled in futures. John of Gaunt was, of course, in a particularly strong position in the bidding stakes. Like many other magnates he had calculated that the wardship and marriage of young John Mowbray could be a very rich picking indeed, since he had an ultimate claim to the Mowbray and Brotherton inheritances, frustrated only by the exceptional longevity of Mowbray’s grandmother, Margaret countess of Norfolk. It was a long-term prospect but a very enticing one. So Gaunt purchased young John’s marriage from his grandmother in 1379 and simultaneously the wardship from the earl of Northumberland. The young John was now brought up in the duke’s household and there was every prospect that he might be married to one of Gaunt’s daughters, relatives, or retainers.²⁵ It must have been judged a shrewd move by Gaunt’s contemporaries; but the gamble did not pay off this time, since young John died early in 1383 still a minor. But for gambling men, occasional failures of this kind were not a deterrent. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. On the contrary, the competition for eligible partners for sons and daughters was a consuming passion of most aristocratic families. Catching them young was one way of settling the issue, even though betrothal between children was not canonically secure until the parties were of an age to consummate the marriage. Two examples from the annals of the de Burgh earldom of Ulster may illustrate the point. Elizabeth, suo jure countess of Ulster (d. 1363), was betrothed to the four-year-old Lionel of Clarence at the Tower of London on 9 September 1342 when she was ten; their daughter Philippa (d. 1378) was betrothed at the age of thirteen to Edmund Mortimer, then aged eight, in 1368. These were, as it were, pre-emptive acts to settle the minds of the young parties and to warn off alternative bidders. The king was, of course, particularly well placed to control such marriages to suit his tastes and policies. Edmund Mortimer was indeed the victim of such a royal intervention. His hand had been intended, and indeed pledged, to the daughter of the earl of Arundel until Edward III stepped into the process. Short of taking over an heir, a royal nod and a wink could accelerate the completion of a marriage contract, so valuable was royal consent. So it was that the king ‘ordained’ the marriage pact between the daughter of the earl of Ormond and the son of the earl of Desmond in 1359.²⁶ The problem with child marriages is that they could be challenged until the parties were fully of contractual age in the eyes of the church. The Cliffords had good cause to know that. They thought that they had secured the hand of the rich heiress of Multon of Gilsland; but they were to be gazumped when Ralph Dacre came along citing a pre-existing contract between Thomas Multon and William Dacre.²⁷ ²⁵ Reg. JG, II, no. 88; S. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 17–8; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 280. ²⁶ CCR 1354–60, 576. ²⁷ GEC, sub Dacre, quoting the chronicle of Lanercost priory.

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As the word ‘contract’ suggests, marriages or betrothals were only concluded after long and detailed negotiations between the two families in question. They were no doubt drawn up after careful legal scrutiny and hard-headed business discussions. Thus the proposed marriage of the sister of the earl of Stafford in 1391–2 involved the earl’s council in frequent journeys—including to Nottingham, the New Forest, Bristol, and Newport in Wales—to discuss the matter among themselves and then with the council of the prospective husband, the earl of Kent.²⁸ One can imagine that great family conclaves would be assembled, sometimes fraught with tension. In 1435/6 the earl of Warwick, his countess, and his household rode to Abergavenny (the home of Aunt Joan Beauchamp) to conclude the marriage of Anne, the earl’s sister, with Lord Despenser.²⁹ It was the formidable and hugely experienced Margaret, countess of Norfolk, who led the negotiations for the marriage of her grandson, John Hastings, heir to the earldom of Pembroke, to Philippa, daughter of the late earl of March (who was represented by the earl’s executors).³⁰ We sometimes catch a glimpse of the complicated issues which called for discussion and see the way in which a marriage alliance might be deployed to defuse an old problem. The Mortimer family provides us once again with a telling example. In 1354 it was, with active royal support, reassembling the great territorial fortune assembled by the first earl of March but lost in the debacle of his downfall in 1330. Many of the families who had benefited from that debacle were now peremptorily deprived of their gains by royal fiat;³¹ but Richard Fitzalan, the great earl of Arundel (d. 1376), was too powerful—if only in respect of his credit operations—to be treated in such a way. He bargained to hang on to what he held and used marriage as a tool. He was allowed to retain the lordship of Chirk, which lay conveniently next to two existing Fitzalan Marcher lordships of Oswestry and Bromfield and Yale, even though Chirk had been of the inheritance of a cadet branch and subsequently of the senior branch of the Mortimers. An inter-family deal was struck whereby Edmund, the two-year-old Mortimer heir, was betrothed to Alice, the daughter of the earl of Arundel.³² In the event the marriage did not take place; but this in no way reduces the interest of the case in demonstrating the way marriages were deployed to bury family feuds. Occasionally the bond of marriage was extended to include a life retainership. When Hugh Despenser married his daughter to Sir Peter Ovedale, Sir Peter agreed to be retained simultaneously in peace and war.³³ Marriage was, as we shall see, an expensive business for both parties. K. B. McFarlane’s illustration of the costs of marrying three of the daughters of the ²⁸ *Marquess of Bath MS. Longleat House Misc. VIII f.21v–f.22. ²⁹ BL Egerton Charters 8775. ³⁰ CCR 1385–9, 472–3. ³¹ Holmes, Estates, 15–17. ³² CCR 1354–60, 93; A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office (6 vols., London, 1890–1915), III, no. 4882. ³³ Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, IV, no. 8019.

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earl of Stafford 1343–50 is particularly telling: the father was required to find £466 13s. 4d . in portions and annual rents and lands totalling at least £2,800.³⁴ It was a sum which would make a huge dent in any family’s income, and remains so even if we make allowances for the jointures the daughters received from their husbands or in-laws. One way of limiting the costs and of solidifying the alliances formed by marriage was to arrange a bilateral agreement, whereby the son of one family married the daughter of another family and vice versa. A striking example was the Clare–de Burgh marriage axis in the early fourteenth century, with its possibly wide-ranging implications for aristocratic territorial fortunes in England, Wales, and Ireland. On 29 September 1308 Maud, one of the daughters of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), was betrothed to Gilbert de Clare, the young and powerful earl of Gloucester (d. 1314); on the next day at Waltham abbey and in the king’s presence John, at that date the surviving eldest son of the earl of Ulster, was married in the king’s presence to Elizabeth, young Gilbert de Clare’s youngest sister and, eventually, heiress of much of both the de Burgh and de Clare inheritances. It is but one of several examples that could be cited. In 1343 John lord Mowbray married his eldest son to the daughter of the earl of Salisbury and, as part of the arrangement, Salisbury’s eldest son took Mowbray’s daughter to be his wife. The earls of Arundel and Northampton made a similar contract for their respective children in 1359.³⁵ In this latter case no portion was paid. We touch here on what was for the family and its fortunes a central aspect of all marriages—the size of portions and jointure settlements. Stated baldly, the portion was the sum, normally in cash and often payable in instalments, paid by the groom’s father or kinsman to the bride’s father or guardian. Parallel with the grant of the portion, a jointure in rent income or land would be settled on the wife by the husband with reversion to him and his heirs, or on the new husband and wife jointly by the husband’s father with similar reversion. Such complicated bilateral contracts were preceded by extensive and no doubt occasionally very tense negotiations. The size of the portion does not seem to have been determined by any rigid formula but rather by the relative power of the two families and by their anxiety to conclude an agreement. A very rich earl could display his wealth in the size of the portion he gave with his daughter: Richard Fitzalan (d. 1376) offered a portion of 4,000 marks (£2,667) to his daughter Alice on her marriage to Thomas Holland in 1364.³⁶ In English Ireland, portions might be paid in cattle: so it was that when Theobald, the son of Walter de Burgh, took the daughter of the earl of Ormond as his wife the portion was calculated as 240 cows and 20 stud horses.³⁷ It is ³⁴ McFarlane, Nobility, 86 n. 2. ³⁵ Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments in the Possession of the R. Hon. Lord FitzHardinge at Berkeley Castle, ed. I. H. Jeayes (Bristol, 1892), no. 511; McFarlane, Nobility, 86 n. 2. ³⁶ Reg. BP, III, 480. ³⁷ Calendar of Ormond Deeds, 1172–1350, ed. E. Curtis, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1932–43), II, no. 353.

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a reminder that a marriage contract was an occasion for the redistribution of wealth, be it in cash, landed resources, or moveable goods. Marriage was also an occasion for momentous decisions with regard to a whole dynasty’s wealth. Family conclaves were no doubt assembled and bargains struck. The affairs of the Mortimer family of Wigmore once again provide illustrative material. Towards midsummer 1316 Roger Mortimer (d. 1330) took time out from a busy military and political career to arrange the marriage of Edmund, his eldest son, and to arrange the descent of his estates. On 9 May at his manor of Earnwood in Shropshire he struck an accord with Bartholomew Badlesmere, another powerful and rich baron and a key figure in the turbulent politics of Edward II’s reign. It was a contract for the marriage of young Edmund to Elizabeth, Badlesmere’s daughter. Badlesmere paid the handsome sum of £2,000 for the marriage, which is a measure of his assessment of Mortimer’s standing and prospects. In return, Mortimer endowed the young bride with five valuable manors for life and the reversion of other lands. Such was the marriage deal. More or less simultaneously Mortimer agreed to re-enfeoff nearly all of his possessions in fee and reversion, with remainder to his right heirs—who would be Edmund, Elizabeth, and their descendants, if they survived. Roger Mortimer and Bartholomew Badlesmere had taken the best legal advice possible and were doing all in their power to ensure the future descent and integrity of the estate.³⁸ Mortimer and Badlesmere were more or less a match for each other in wealth and standing, but this was by no means always the case. In that event the contract showed the disparity of power. A week before concluding the Mortimer marriage agreement Bartholomew Badlesmere extracted much tougher conditions when he married another daughter, Maud, to Robert the son of Robert Fitz Pain. Badlesmere—‘dominus dives’, as he was appropriately described in the Mortimer family chronicle—gave the groom’s father a grant of 1,200 marks (£800) and ensured that the daughter would have independent means by giving her land worth 200 marks (£167) per annum. He also arranged that after his death 200 marks’ worth of her land should be bestowed on his son-in-law. Badlesmere was clearly wielding his wealth to ensure a sound future for his daughter and son-in-law. But what perhaps showed best that he was in the driving seat was that Robert Fitz Pain the father was now debarred from alienating any of his own land without Badlesmere’s permission and was required to convey three named manors and the revenue thereof to Maud Badlesmere and her new husband. This was more a calculated takeover than a contract of equals.³⁹ Bartholomew Badlesmere had concluded the marriage contracts for his daughters within a week of each other. It is a reminder to us that marriage policy was often dynastic and coordinated, not least because it involved a huge outlay ³⁸ The contract is published in Holmes, Estates, 121–2 and the other aspects of the agreement are discussed therein at 43–4. ³⁹ GEC, sub Fitz Pain.

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of liquid wealth and landed assets and, often, a carefully considered plan for the future of the family estates. Sometimes—as in the Badlesmere case—the plan was coordinated at a single point in time; more often, and of necessity, it was put into operation piecemeal, as opportunities arose and children reached marriageable age. But whatever the tempo, marriage was a critical occasion in all aristocratic families for working out the relationships between land, family obligation, political and personal alliances, and calculations of the family’s future direction. In this respect daughters could occupy an important role in a family’s marital strategy. Too often details of the marriage of daughters is difficult to uncover. Here again the Mortimer family chronicle in its amplitude enables us to see how the tentacles of a family spread through marriage. The first earl of March (d. 1330) had eleven recorded children, an unusually large brood. Of the four boys, one was killed in a tournament, two seem to have been established in Ireland where a good part of the family’s fortunes were now based, and the eldest, Edmund, was, as we have seen, married in 1316 to Elizabeth Badlesmere. Four of the daughters married into the ranks of the higher English aristocracy—choosing the future earl of Pembroke, the earl of Warwick, Lord Audley, and the son of Thomas of Brotherton earl of Norfolk as their husbands. The remaining three girls were deployed to consolidate Mortimer alliances and relationships in western England and the Welsh March, the base of Mortimer power. One was married to Thomas Berkeley, another to Sir Piers Grandison of Ashperton (Herefordshire), and the third to John Charlton of Powys.⁴⁰ There is every reason to believe that these marriages were carefully assessed for their dynastic and, possibly, political impact. Aristocratic history is the story of great noble dynasties. To do any kind of justice to a family’s ambitions we need to bear in mind not only the descent of the main and the cadet branches but also the web of links forged by marriage contact both by and into the family. But it is here that in general we are frustrated by the evidence, or rather lack of it, for the fourteenth century. What we have for the most part are the facts of marriage and, much less frequently, the formal legal contract. What we do not have, as we have for the age of the Pastons and the Stonors, are the letters which reveal the negotiations, pressure, and cross currents which must have been a recurrent feature of marriage diplomacy in all ages. Legal documents maximize the assumption that marriages were carefully calculated business arrangements in which the views of the couple to be married are subsidiary to family policy and ambition. That may have been true in many cases; and in other cases the two considerations were brought into some sort of rough alignment, whether under duress or persuasion. But not always. Personality and will were also elements in the equation. The awesome Edward I learnt that to his cost when his headstrong daughter, Joan of Acre, in effect eloped with a landless young courtier, Ralph Monthermer. Joan’s first marriage in 1290 to the earl of Gloucester (almost ⁴⁰ Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, I, 352.

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thirty years her senior) had been a classic example of using a young daughter as a bargaining chip in Edward I’s dynastic schemes.⁴¹ She was not to be fobbed off with a greybeard the second time and so confronted her father with a fait accompli by marrying Ralph Monthermer. It must have been the talk of the town, indeed of the kingdom. Edward was beside himself with fury; but there was little he could do except explode. He had been trumped. He was not the only father to be trumped by a determined child. Almost a century later the great John of Gaunt was taught a similar lesson. He and his close confidant, Sir Richard Burley, had secured custody of the lands of the widow of the earl of Pembroke (d. 1375). More important, the son of the heir to the earldom was pledged to marry Gaunt’s daughter, Elizabeth. It was a neat arrangement: Gaunt could claim that he was ‘next friend’ to the young heir and had ‘great tenderness for the inheritance’. But fair words are no match for a lady’s will. As the record puts it, ‘Elizabeth has now disagreed to the marriage and is married elsewhere, so that the alliance is terminated.’ And that was that.⁴² Daughters could be awkward; so no doubt could fathers and other members of the family. Their awkwardness sometimes exploded into the records and reminds us that passion as well as calculation were elements in the marital equation. Let us return briefly to the family of the earl of Pembroke (d. 1375). When John Hastings left on a continental venture in 1372 he had no heir of his body. What personal bitterness and/or affection at that time persuaded him to disinherit his heir general (Reginald Grey of Ruthin) and to divert his landed fortunes to Sir William Beauchamp, his cousin on the distaff side (their mothers were sisters)?⁴³ And there are other examples where the right heirs by law were done out of an estate by the whims of a family patriarch. Indeed the Greys of Ruthin were the beneficiaries of such a family quarrel. On the death of Sir John Grey in 1323 the extensive Grey inheritance would normally have devolved to his elder son Henry. But there seems to have been a mighty falling-out between father and son because in 1311 the father granted a large part of the estates (including the lordship of Ruthin and thirty-one manors) to the younger son Roger, thereby inaugurating the line of the Greys of Ruthin. The elder brother did not take this brutal disinheritance lying down; he harassed his brother, and laid siege to Ruthin castle. But by 1328 he decided that he had better accept his father’s decision. Henry Grey was by no means the only victim of paternal spleen. Equally striking was the disinheritance of Sir William Cantelou of Ravensthorpe (Yorkshire). Sir William’s father, Nicholas, married twice and it may well be that it was the ambitious nature of the second wife which prompted the explosive family settlement in 1354. Nicholas in effect settled his estate on himself and on his second wife with remainders not to William (his heir by his first wife) but to the heirs of the body of the second marriage and, failing that, to Nicholas’s two ⁴¹ M. Prestwich, Edward I (London,1988), 128. ⁴² Cal. Anc. Pets., no. 11176, p. 375. ⁴³ Jack, ‘Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance’, 1–19.

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grandsons. In short it was a set of arrangements which deliberately disinherited the eldest son, short at least of the failure of all other claimants. In the event William had the last laugh. The second marriage did not produce an heir; both grandsons predeceased their father and left no heirs. But what is of interest to us here is the shaft of light which cases such as these—and a similar family storm among the Brians of Tor Brian (Co. Devon)—shed on the highly personal sentiments which often lie beneath the bloodless veneer of the legal documents.⁴⁴

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the acquisition of land by Roger Mortimer, first earl of March, I. Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ist Earl of March, Ruler of England, 1327–30 (London, 2003); P. Dryburgh, ‘Roger Mortimer and the Governance of Ireland, 1317–20’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009). For entails, J. Biancalana, The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001); M. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005), ch. 15. For female inheritance in Ireland, G. Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Women in Ireland c.1170–1540 (Dublin, 2007), ch. 2. For revealing case studies of, respectively, Margaret de Lacy (d. 1266), and Isabel de Mortimer, widow of John Fitzalan III (d. 1272), including their role as estate managers, L. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 1, and E. Cavell, ‘Aristocratic Widows and the Medieval Welsh Frontier: The Shropshire Evidence’, TRHS 6th ser., 17 (2007). For more general treatment, P. Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2001) and for a slightly later period, B. J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage, Family, Property, and Careers (Oxford, 2002). ⁴⁴ See entries sub the respective families in GEC.

6 The Sinews of Aristocratic Power By the time we reach the chronological focus of this study (1272–1422) many of the powers of lordship—like those of kingship—had been regularized and routinized. As contractual relationships were increasingly defined in writing, so the loose uncoordinated powers of an earlier period were replaced by a much more closely defined range of powers. Furthermore the richness of seigniorial documentation from c.1250 now allows us to see lordship in action routinely and regularly. The aim of the present chapter is to try to capture, in very broad terms, the scope and penetration of lordship as reflected in that documentation. Two preliminary observations should be made. First, lordship was hugely variable in its range and impact. It operated within the geographical, economic, and social context in which it found itself. In much of lowland British Isles—including parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—it functioned at a small-scale and often intensive manorial level; at the other end of the scale in many parts of upland Britain it was little more than a loose, occasional superioritas. Thus in the lordship of Glamorgan the contrast between the intensive lordship of the lowland manors (both those held directly by the lord, such as Roath, and those subinfeudated to his followers, such as Sully) and the loose tributary, lordship claimed over the patriae (as they were significantly termed) or commotes of the upland was sharp.¹ It is a contrast which can be replicated in almost every part of the British Isles.² Part of our intention is to try to encompass this whole range of lordship within our analysis. The second prefatory comment relates to the term lordship. All those who exercised a measure of control over others practised lordship. They called themselves ‘lords’ and often added the term as a status designation to their names. The lord of Sully was in that sense as much a lord as Gilbert de Clare, his overlord, earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan. As such there was a ¹ See Glamorgan County History, III: The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh (Cardiff, 1971), esp. ch. 1; J. B. Smith, ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 9 (1965), 9–38; Davies, Lordship and Society, 86–89. ² The studies of Adrian Empey of the nature of English lordship in lowland Ireland are particularly illuminating in this respect. See esp. ‘The Norman Period, 1185–1500’, in Tipperary: History and Society, ed. W. Nolan (Dublin, 1985) and ‘Conquest and Settlement: Patterns of Anglo-Norman Settlement in North Munster and South Leinster’, Irish Economic and Social History, 13 (1986), 5–31. For an excellent short introduction, R. Frame, Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (Dublin, 1981), esp. 79–83.

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continuum in the nature of lordship from that of the single-manor squire to that of one of the great magnates of the land. But it is with aristocratic lordship, rather than lordship tout court, that this book is concerned. It is partly a matter of scale, of course: Edmund, earl of Lancaster (d. 1296), was lord of 632 separate units of property and of 49 demesne manors.³ He would not have been personally or directly involved in the exercise of lordship at the local level in these units. He operated on an altogether grander scale of power and lordship, even if ultimately his ability to do so was grounded in the control that his agents exercised over the local units of lordship. It is also—as we have frequently insisted—partly a matter of documentation. Whatever its deficiencies, the range and variety of available documentation from c.1250 allows us to glimpse the scale and multifaceted character of aristocratic lordship in a way which is not possible for earlier periods or lesser lords. Finally, whatever the common features of all lordship, aristocratic lordship was in a league of its own in the powers that it could aggregate, in the role that it could and did play at national, regional, and county level, and in its capacity to shape the dynamics of power in medieval society. It may be a pardonable exaggeration to claim that ‘the great magnates ruled the England of their day’; but their role as a group needs to be analysed in all its complexity and range.⁴ Aristocratic power in late medieval society was normally measured in terms of landed wealth and income and in the range of powers that lords exercised over those who lived on the land. But in an overview of lordship in the British Isles in the medieval period, it is not with land that our analysis should begin. Rather should it attend first to the tributes, renders, and dues which were, or had been, payable to lords in respect of their control and authority over their men.⁵ At the taproot of lordship lay rule over men rather than control of land; so it was also with royal lordship. If we are to look for the origins of seigniorial power in European society we will find them not in the ownership of land but in charismatic and military leadership, in village or kin chieftainship, and in the protection that the powerful (potentes) could extend to the unprotected (pauperes). Likewise if we are to trace the history of what dependants owed to lords we will find them not in rents or leases but in hospitality dues and renders. It is true that over time many of these dues became territorialized and the landed aspect of the powers of lordship came increasingly to the fore. But in any rounded discussion of late medieval lordship in Britain we cannot afford to overlook the elements of its prehistory which had shaped its character. This is so for at least two reasons. First, late medieval lordship was always more, much more, than land-lordship. The danger of modern historiography has ³ W. E. Rhodes, ‘Edmund, Earl of Lancaster’, EHR, 10 (1895), 19–40, 209–37. ⁴ Holmes, Estates, 1. ⁵ For a recent seminal discussion of these issues see Faith, English Peasantry.

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been to reduce it to the latter and to measure its impact and range in financial and territorial terms. In fact lordship remained the lordship of men (however much some of its powers had been appropriated by royal and state authorities). It was the power of command, jurisdiction, control; it involved the leadership of men at all social levels; it exercised rights of discipline, grace, protection, and favour which have been appropriated by state authorities and declared to be ‘public’ rights in modern society. These powers were grounded in the history of lordship as an ancient institution; they still coloured its character—albeit more anaemically at least in southern and midland England—in the later Middle Ages. It is the range of these powers which we will attempt to capture in the subsequent discussion. The second reason for opening the discussion with what we may term by way of shorthand ‘tributary lordship’ is that the evidence for such lordship even in fourteenth-century Britain is far more extensive than is normally acknowledged by historians. Historiographical discussion of central and late medieval lordship has drawn overwhelmingly on detailed English regional, county, and manorial studies. But if we cast our nets more widely geographically—to include much of upland northern England, most of inland Wales, the west and Highlands of Scotland, and most even of English Ireland outside the islands of manorial lordship—we encounter a very different image of the contours and character of lordship. Bringing these areas into the field of discussion is not merely a matter of rectifying the balance geographically within the British Isles; it also, crucially, allows us to chart some of the critical developments in the evolution of lordship over the centuries. In other words, history and geography connive to encourage us to take a broad view of the character of lordship in the British Isles in the medieval period. What then were the features of ‘tributary lordship’ and what traces did it leave in the late medieval evidence? Let us take the evidence of the detailed survey of the great lordship of Denbigh (valued at more than £1,000 per annum, that is, the notional value of a sizeable English earldom) compiled in 1334.⁶ It opens a window on to a seigniorial world which had long since vanished in much of lowland England and even Scotland but which reveals to us vividly the character of early lordship in much of the British Isles. What we find in essence is a massive purveyance network in which kings and lords—the distinction between the two is easily overdrawn—were sustained by renders from their dependants. Many of these renders were biennial or triennial communal grants of livestock, normally in cows (the common economic coin of a pastoral society). In this respect the commorth Calan Mai (the cattle subsidy of 1 May) of Wales corresponded closely to the cornage, horngeld, nontgeld, and other dues so common in the four northern counties of England and in north Lancashire, the cain which was to be found throughout Celtic Scotland and ‘was paid to the king (or lord) in virtue of ⁶ Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. P. Vinogradoff and F. Morgan (London, 1914).

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his lordship’, or the collective levies of cattle which are such a feature of power relationships in Gaelic and English Ireland.⁷ Alongside these communal tributes were a host of other renders and dues which were also tributary, rather than landed, in character. Such were the hospitality rent, or conveth as it was known in Scotland and wayting in Lothian—the right of a lord, his officers, and his retinue to hospitality and lodging from his men and dependants. Such also were the food rents, often payable once or twice a year, collected from free and unfree dependants alike according to different formulae. All these are fully itemized in the Denbigh Survey of 1334 and in other comparable surveys. As Edmund Spenser was to observe of Ireland in the late sixteenth century, they constituted the right of the lords ‘to have a common spending on their tenants’.⁸ There were huge local variations in these tributary renders and by the later Middle Ages there was an air of the archaic about them where they survived. But they are assuredly significant in an understanding of the origins and scope of medieval lordship. They were communal and personal, not territorial, in character. They were collected from individuals, kin-groups, and communities rather than being rent on land. As a shrewd early Stuart observer of the Welsh borderlands noted, they were not ‘properely rent issueinge out of land but only a some of money annexed as a Royaltie to my Lordes person’.⁹ The comment has a three-fold significance for us. First, it draws no fundamental distinction between so-called royal and non-royal lordship; both were lordships, both were personal and, at one level, both were ‘royal’. Secondly, the observer’s astonishment registers his awareness that the perception and practice of lordship ran the whole gamut from the personal and tributary to the territorial. Thirdly, it is in the context of tributary lordship that we can best understand the range of judicial, disciplinary, protection, and command powers which still characterize late medieval lordship and distinguish it sharply from the mere territorial power of the rent-collecting landlord. The roots of medieval lordship lie deep in the folds of its past. But equally there can be little doubt that over the passage of the centuries the powers of lordship became increasingly territorialized. It was in the control of land and income from estates and in the exploitation of those who lived on those estates that the powers of lordship were, literally and metaphorically, grounded. Land for the aristocracy was the source of wealth, power, and status. Nulle terre sans seigneur, no land without a lord, declared the contemporary tag; but it was a tag which also worked in reverse: no lord without land. ⁷ Key studies include J. E. A. Joliffe, ‘Northumbrian Institutions’, EHR, 41 (1926), 1–43; G. W. S. Barrow, ‘Northern English Society in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Northern History, 4 (1969), 1–28; Duncan, Scotland, quotation from p. 154; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford, 1993). ⁸ Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (London, 1934), 141–2. ⁹ For echoes of this tag in Welsh legal lore see Davies, Lordship and Society, 134.

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The twinning of land and lordship comes as no surprise. Landed wealth was the asset par excellence in medieval society; it was—for peasants and lords alike—the source of status as well as of income. The later medieval aristocracy was preeminently a landed aristocracy. Noble titles could not be conferred without an appropriate landed endowment, with 1000 marks’ worth of land being regarded as the minimum ‘competence’ for an earl. It was on their landed estates, in their parks and forests, and in their rural residences, as we have seen,¹⁰ that the higher nobility levied and displayed their apartness. Wealth acquired from war, trade, or other means was immediately invested in land, for landed wealth was the socially acceptable measure of status. ‘By the size of his patrimony’, as a contemporary observed, ‘you may assess his power’ (my italics).¹¹ The descent of the patrimonial estates and the establishment of appropriate landed endowments for daughters, cadets, and dependants was—as we have seen—an abiding preoccupation of the aristocracy.¹² Given the equation between land, lordship and power it was inevitable that the aristocracy took a keen interest in the land market. It was the most obvious way of enhancing their status and power, in other words their lordship. Of many of them could it have been said as of Thomas Berkeley (d. 1361) that he was ‘this great rich lord and landmonger’.¹³ Among such land-mongers we should include the immensely rich Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376), who spent at least £4,000 on purchasing manors in Sussex in the period 1350–70; the highly successful war captain, William Bohun, earl of Northampton (d. 1360) who embarked on a systematic land-purchase policy in both Wales and Essex from his war winnings; the Beauchamps; and perhaps most spectacularly a series of northern families—including Percy, Neville, and Scrope—who transformed the configuration of landed power in northern England during the fourteenth century.¹⁴ There is no single chronological or strategic pattern to such examples of land purchase. They were dictated by individual circumstances and opportunities. Some aristocrats—such as Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln (d. 1311), or William Bohun of Northampton (d. 1360)—snapped up Cistercian lands as part of their investment in the wool trade; others, such as the earl of Arundel, bought aggressively—both in Sussex and Shropshire—in order to broaden the basis of their standing in their own ‘country’; others seized on an opportunity to purchase lands to build up an endowment for a second family, as did John of Gaunt for John Beaufort at the expense of the heirless earl of Salisbury. Whatever the compunction, all shared the conviction that investing in land was the surest ¹⁰ See above, pp. 82–93. ¹¹ Vita Edwardi Secundi. The Life of Edward II by the so-called Monk of Malmesbury, ed. N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957), 29. [See now Vita Edwardi Secundi: The Life of Edward II, ed. W. R. Childs (Oxford, 2005), 51.] ¹² See above, pp. 149–57. ¹³ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, I, 331. ¹⁴ For brief introduction and references see Given-Wilson, English Nobility, 126–8, 132–5; Holmes, Estates, 7–8, 113–14; McFarlane, Nobility, 195–6.

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way of enhancing their status, power, and standing. They followed the market shrewdly and calculated their moves carefully. Even the great John of Gaunt moved with circumspection: when contemplating the purchase of land in Dorset in 1372 he ordered his steward to find out the value of the land, to identify any jointure or entailed interest in it, and in the meantime to be favourable and gracious to the owner.¹⁵ As the source of their wealth and status, the aristocracy had to exercise eternal vigilance in defending their title to their lands, especially recently acquired or inherited land. The accounts of the officers of the English aristocracy—Mortimer, Bohun, Stafford, Beauchamp, Lancaster among them—are eloquent and detailed on this score. Fees were paid to lawyers, attorneys, and justices; records (often dating back more than a century) were transcribed; local juries and supporters were ‘laboured’ and so were royal officials; food and drink were distributed and so were gifts; money was spent to buy off counter-claims; seigniorial councils met for days at a time to work out compromise settlements. The costs could be substantial, even for a man of John of Gaunt’s standing: on one occasion he spent £46 on four serjeants; attorneys in all the major royal courts and departments; clerks, ushers, and scribes and the preparation of writs.¹⁶ But these were the sorts of costs which could not be avoided. The aristocracy was recurrently haunted by two spectres in respect of its landed title: the first was the vagaries of royal policy and whim which could so easily undo a family, especially in periods of political turbulence; the other were the loopholes which clever lawyers could so easily exploit in a family’s titles. That is why for example the extraordinarily hard-headed business woman, Joan Beauchamp (d. 1435), lady of Abergavenny, left £500 in her will to her executors for the defence of her lands ‘in case they be challenged and impugned wrongfully’.¹⁷ For us the significance of these disbursements—recurrent as they are—is how central the acquisition and defence of its landed title was to the aristocracy. Its glory may have come from birth, noblesse, and military prowess; but its power was increasingly rooted in land and in the control of those who lived on it. Title to land was, of course, only the first stage in lordship; the next question was how that land was to be exploited to the maximum advantage of the lord. Part of it, known to historians as bond-land or demesne, might be worked directly for the lord, exploiting the labour dues of tenants attached to the demesne. In earlier centuries demesne production had been a crucial source of food supply for the lord, his household, and his entourage. Indeed, as we saw above,¹⁸ on the estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360) the produce of her manors—she was one of the most substantial demesne farmers of her generation—continued ¹⁵ Reg. JG, I, no. 1129. ¹⁶ Reg. JG, II, no. 1245. For an illuminating list of the legal and associated costs of the duke of Clarence 1418–21 see Household Accounts, II, 648–50. See also N. Ramsay, ‘Retained Legal Counsel, c.1275–c.1475’, TRHS, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 95–113. ¹⁷ Reg. Chichele, II, 534–8. ¹⁸ See above, pp. 107–8.

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to make an important contribution to her household needs. But the glory days of high demesne farming were coming to a close in the fourteenth century: the mechanisms of the market undermined its appeal; so did the increasingly acute problems of the labour market and what John Smyth memorably referred to as ‘the soure and irksomenes of toile and hind servants’.¹⁹ Historians have established that on most seigniorial estates in England and Wales, arable demesne farming had gone into terminal decline c.1380–c.1420. It had become, in the words of John of Gaunt’s auditors, ‘a dead loss’ (grande perte).²⁰ In fact, as we can see from the full accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh’s estates for the 1330s, arable demesne faming—what contemporaries called ‘profit de la garnerie’—had never constituted a major source of income on aristocratic estates.²¹ Even so, the demise of arable demesne exploitation was an important stage in the evolution of medieval lordship. The lord and his officials were no longer directly involved in the agricultural life of their estates, even of those few which were classified as demesne; that was bound to change the nature of his relationship with those who lived on his estates. But the aristocracy had not opted out of direct exploitation of their estates altogether. Rather did they shift the focus of their attention from arable agriculture—with all its attendant problems of management, labour, supervision, and marketing—to large-scale, pastoral, agriculture. Here the management and marketing opportunities were much more favourable. The wool and cloth industries were remarkably profitable for most of the long fourteenth century; labour problems were at a minimum; the advantages of coordinated and integrated policies for the purchase and sale of livestock were self-evident. Lordship was shifting from the intricacies of small-scale manorial production of cereals, embedded as it was in local circumstances and restrictions, to the advantages of large-scale capitalist stock-farming on a national and even international scale. A few figures will indicate how the aristocracy had adjusted to the new opportunities and how in the process the nature of demesne lordship was changing. Sheep farming (and, to a lesser extent, cattle breeding) was big business for many aristocrats. Elizabeth de Burgh had almost 5,000 sheep on her estates in 1337; Thomas, earl of Lancaster, 5,500 sheep and lambs on his Peak estates; but neither could compete with the earl of Arundel who had almost 15,430 sheep on his Sussex lands alone in 1397.²² Furthermore these figures did not necessarily decline over the passage of time: John of Gaunt was still purchasing large flocks for his southern English manors in the 1390s and so was the ¹⁹ Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, II, 6. ²⁰ The phrase is taken from the valor for 1394–5: TNA DL 29/728/11982. See also the auditors’ report for 1388 published in Holmes, Estates, 126–8. ²¹ See summary tables in Holmes, Estates, 143–57. ²² Holmes, Estates, 11; Ward, English Noblewomen, 118; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 29–30; Given-Wilson, ‘Wealth and Credit’, 19. For this whole topic see now B. M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000).

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duke of York in 1411–12.²³ The whole business was organized on capitalist lines and extricated from the control of local officials. The earl of Salisbury, for example, had ‘a surveyor of husbandry and livestock’; as had Isabella de Fortibus a century earlier.²⁴ Marketing was likewise organized on metropolitan or international lines: the wool of the Mortimer, Bohun, and Fitzalan flocks was sent in bulk to major London merchants; so were the more than 6,000 fleeces of Elizabeth de Burgh from her Clare estates, and the 136 sacks of wool which Hugh Audley exported via the port of London.²⁵ Such policies—which can certainly be paralleled from other English aristocratic estates—were by no means altogether new; but they do show clearly that aristocratic demesne farming was now fully adjusted to the demands of an international and national market and to the practices of capitalist agriculture. It was leaving behind it the world of manorial lordship, local arable production for household and associated needs, and the exploitation of the manorial and associated labour force. It is an important stage in the evolution of late medieval aristocratic lordship. Important as was demesne exploitation, it was in reality but a relatively small component of the income and power that the aristocracy derived from its control of land. Rarely on lay estates did it exceed 20 per cent of the lord’s annual income; often it was far less. The major source of income was rent, broadly defined—including fixed rents (established by custom and normally non-negotiable), sale and commutation of labour services (now virtually a form of rent), and leases of, for example, individual parcels of land and mills (‘farms’ as they were generically known). This was already so on the estates of Edmund, earl of Cornwall (d. 1300), in the late thirteenth century or those of Elizabeth de Burgh in the 1330s, however enterprising she was in exploiting both the arable and pastoral resources of the manors.²⁶ Even clearer is the outstanding evidence from the comprehensive list of the valors for the huge estates of John of Gaunt in the 1390s: they reveal that on average at least 80 per cent of the landed revenue of the duke of Lancaster came from rents and leases, broadly defined.²⁷ Nor does the situation seem to have been very different in those parts of lowland Scotland for which some fragmentary scraps of evidence survive. The bulk of the income of the earl of Fife in 1294–5 came from fermes of tenants ²³ Goodman, John of Gaunt, 337; BL Egerton Roll 8780. ²⁴ Holmes, Estates, 65; Denholm-Young, Seigniorial Administration in England, 53–66. ²⁵ Davies, Lordship and Society, 119 (and sources cited); Holmes, Estates, 90, n. 1; Reg. BP, I, 146. ²⁶ Ministers’ Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall, 1296–7, ed. L. M. Midgley (Camden Soc., London, 1942–5); Holmes, Estates, 112. I have also drawn upon the exceptional valor of 1338–9: TNA SC 11/801. For comparable figures for the estates of Anne, countess of Stafford, in 1435–6 see Ward, English Noblewomen, 122–3 (rents and farms accounted for almost 90% of her revenue). ²⁷ TNA DL 29/787/11975–87. For discussion see Bean, ‘Landlords’, 569–71, and R. R. Davies, ‘Baronial Accounts, Incomes and Arrears in the Later Middle Ages’, Econ. HR, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), 211–29.

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and likewise the rental of James Douglas of Dalkeith for 1376–7 reveals the predominance of rent.²⁸ When we look more closely at the evidence we will find significant regional and local variations in the composition of seigniorial income; we will also find that there was perhaps more to ‘rent’ than meets the eye. Yet it is still difficult to dissent from George Holmes’s conclusion that on lay estates—great ecclesiastical and particularly monastic complexes may have been different—‘rent dominated the economy . . . at all times in the fourteenth century.’²⁹ In that sense the aristocratic lords of England were now primarily land -lords in terms of their regular income and the source of their lordship and power. It was a far cry from the tributary lordship of earlier centuries and of the outlying parts of the British Isles. Yet we would be mistaken to conclude that the role of the lord has been largely confined to that of a rent collector, whose impact on his estates was little more than that of revenue-raising. When we peer beneath the externalities of the financial accounts, we find that the exploitative and disciplinary powers of lordship continued to penetrate deeply into the lives of the communities of their estates. One area in which they notably did so was in what may be collectively classified as communal, non-arable resources—notably forest, woodland, pasture, waste, and fisheries. Throughout Europe the struggle over the control of these resources reverberated down the centuries, with an aggressive and predatory lordship pitched against conservative and defensive rural communities.³⁰ There was much at stake for both parties. For the local communities these resources were not peripheral extras; they were central to the economic and ecological balance of their subsistence. Particularly was this so for the upland communities of the north and west of the British Isles. They relied on woodland and pasture for their fuel and building materials, for pannage for their pigs, for the fruits of the forest, for extra land to be taken into temporary cultivation, and for much else. It is no wonder that it was said of the area of Hopedale in north-east Wales that ‘the greater part of their sustenance is derived from the woods.’³¹ It was a comment which could have been echoed across much of the northern and western British Isles. It drew its force not only from arguments of economic necessity but also from deep-rooted communal convictions that these resources were indeed the God-given fruits of nature and rightfully belonged to the community as a whole. That is why access to forest, pasture, waste, and river figure prominently in tussles between lords and communities across Europe and were often codified in charters of liberties when the community had the whip hand; that is also why the first act of defiance of the community was to destroy the palisades and fences round the lord’s woods, to hunt in his forest, and in general to challenge his recently appropriated rights (as it saw it). ²⁸ Duncan, Scotland, 426–7; Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 132. ²⁹ Holmes, Estates, 112. ³⁰ Bloch, French Rural History, 180–9. ³¹ Cal. Anc. Pets., no. 2598, p. 74.

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But equally lords were determined to consolidate and extend their power over forest, pasture, and waste; and indeed there is no doubt that they did so successfully. They had many reasons for doing so. It was a growth point of their lordship. The vast majority of revenue from rents and services was fixed, customary and inflexible in character. Revenue from forest and pasture, on the other hand, was open to negotiation, often on an annual basis, so anxious was the community to have access to these resources. Furthermore, it was access which was carefully policed and enforced by the lord’s officer. At a time when manorial lordship and seigniorial demesne exploitation were, in many respects, in decline, control of these assets was an important manifestation of the continuing power of lordship. That is why keepers, foresters, parkers, and associated officials continue to figure prominently in late-medieval seigniorial accounts and court rolls. In the small Grey lordship of Ruthin (Dyffryn Clwyd) in the fourteenth century there were at least ten foresters and seven parkers in charge of eleven forests and twenty-seven acres of reserved woodland.³² Very similar examples could doubtless be cited elsewhere, especially for upland Britain. Even in the market-oriented economy of lowland England, control of access to forest, waste, and water remained among the touchstones of lordly power and community resentment into the late fourteenth century and beyond. We can see as much in the demands that the rebels made during the Great Revolt of 1381.³³ Control of these assets was critical to seigniorial authority but it was also an important source of aristocratic revenue. Sale of wood and charcoal could be very significant items of income. Elizabeth de Burgh exploited the timber resources of her southern Welsh estates to maximum effect: they yielded almost 20 per cent of the income of the lordship of Usk in 1329–30.³⁴ There was certainly big money in timber for great lords: the Black Prince, ever short of cash and always ruthless in laying his hands on it, sold all the wood (except the great oaks) in Peckforton Park (Cheshire) in 1354 to a consortium for £533.³⁵ Ultimately more significant than once-off clearance sales such as this was the seigniorial campaign to defend and extend rights over forest and pasture at every turn. So it was, for example, that Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) allegedly enclosed 800 acres of wood in Kenilworth ‘par son seigneurie et son grant poiar’. So it was likewise, on a much more modest scale, that the auditors of the earl of Salisbury calculated that if he let 366 acres of woodland at a minimum of two pence an acre (rather than at a fixed farm of 6s. 8d.) he would increase his profit more ³² R. I. Jack, ‘Welsh and English in the Medieval Lordship of Ruthin’, Transactions of the Denbighshire Historical Society, 18 (1969), 23–49. ³³ See for example the demands of the rebels at St Albans, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. B. Dobson, 2nd edn. (London, 1983), 269–77. ³⁴ TNA SC 11/799; Holmes, Estates, 107 n. 6, 143. ³⁵ P. H. W. Booth, The Financial Administration of the Lordship and County of Chester, 1272–1377 (Chetham Society, Manchester, 1981), 131.

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than eightfold.³⁶ And increase forest and waste revenue often did, as seigniorial income from arable and associated sources fell: the farm of the Great Forest of Brecon, one of the largest tracts of upland in Wales, increased from £47 in 1340 to £110 in 1400.³⁷ Nor does the story seem to have been different elsewhere: by the mid fifteenth century Ettrick Forest yielded rents of £520, outstripping the revenue of earldoms such as Mar or Strathearn.³⁸ Individual examples do not necessarily form the sound basis for a general claim; but it is not difficult to see why historians have concluded that control of multure, forest, and turbary was an increasingly important aspect of lordship and one which may well have been underestimated.³⁹ It was particularly important for aristocratic lordship, for it was great lords who (alongside the king) controlled the large tracts of forest and pasture and had the jurisdictional rights and officialdom to exploit them to the full. Alongside forests, waste, and pasture we should certainly add other sources of seigniorial revenue and control, notably mills and fisheries. Continental historians have long since argued that some of the most momentous developments in the entrenchment and elaboration of seigneurie from the eleventh century onwards took the form of the extension of the powers of the ban, as they term it—that is, the claims of lords to economic and associated monopolies over the peasantry—such as the use of seigniorial mills, ovens, vine presses; the right to control brewing and baking, and the seigniorial tallage. These powers of the ban do not figure so prominently in the English evidence or the English historiography (partly because of the pre-eminence of royal power and royal documentation); on a broader British basis we may well underestimate their importance. Throughout Europe, the struggle over the control of milling rights—so crucial to a cereal-based economy—formed one of the most critical chapters in the history of the advance of lordship and of community resistance. Long accustomed to the use of hand-mills, querns, and their own mills, the local communities found themselves the target of seigniorial ambition. The lord alone often had the capital to buy the equipment and hire the expertise to build watermills; to this he added the crucial claims that his tenants were required to grind their corn at his mills (either for a fixed fee or for a proportion of the corn ground) and to repair the mill and transport the millstones. Manorial and other rolls show that these obligations were often zealously exacted, even when other aspects of the powers of lordship were in decline. Particularly, again, were they important in upland communities, where rent rolls were often skeletal but where mills stood as patent symbols of seigniorial authority and profiteering. Such, for example, is the clear evidence for the March of Wales; so likewise mills and ³⁶ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 32; Vinogradoff and Morgan (eds.), Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, 11–12. ³⁷ Davies, Lordship and Society, 122. ³⁸ Brown, Black Douglases, 166–7. ³⁹ Duncan, Scotland, 351–60.

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fisheries figure prominently in the revenue of the earls of Ulster, as do fisheries in Moray.⁴⁰ If we are to understand the nature of medieval lordship, especially aristocratic lordship, aright, we need to bring these items within the purview of our analysis. But we must go further. Landlordship in medieval society was much more than a matter of rent collection; it often entailed close control over the sale, exchange, transmission, and disposal of peasant land and often over those who lived on that land. The roll call of opportunities for the lord to exercise his power, and increase his profits, in this respect were almost limitless, as close study of seigniorial court rolls quickly reveals. Land sales had to be registered in the lord’s court and due payment made; tenants had to swear oaths of fealty and pay entry fines; exchanges of land had to be sanctioned—for a price; appropriation from the waste or forest had to be licensed; when there was a total failure of heirs the lord claimed that the land reverted to him; and in upland districts, such as Wales, the lord’s title to ‘escheated land’ (that is, land to which he claimed that the title had lapsed) was vigorously and profitably pursued and even as vigorously resisted by the community. The story of this tightening seigniorial control of tenant land and the efforts that seigniorial officers, increasingly armed with written evidence and title, made to promote it is one of the key chapters in the history of lordship in the British Isles from the twelfth century onwards. It was still in full swing in the fourteenth century, as other aspects of seigniorial exploitation were faltering. It was clearly at its most aggressive and effective where the tenants were unfree since there the scope for seigniorial control was proportionately the greater. What has struck historians time and time again was the remarkable tenacity, bordering on the vindictive, with which great lay and ecclesiastical lords defended and exploited their rights over serfs and their lands, even when the heart had gone out of demesne farming and an active manorial lordship, especially in the later fourteenth century. The Mortimers, for example, were ruthless in this respect: their council decreed in 1391 that bond tenements were not to be transferred to a freeman ‘so long as a serf of blood can be found’ and no male or female bond person was allowed to leave the manor of Odcombe (Somerset). It was a policy which was followed by many other lords.⁴¹ But ultimately more important than the spectacular sums occasionally raised from fugitive serfs is the evidence of the way, year in year out, that lords exploited their power over land and those who lived on it to the end of our period; and none more effectively than some of the great lay lords. The power of lordship over land, so we have argued, did not necessarily lie solely or even primarily in demesne exploitation or rent collection. It often operated ⁴⁰ Davis, Lordship and Society, 128–9 (and sources cited); Orpen, ‘Earldom of Ulster’. ⁴¹ Holmes, Estates, 128–9; see also for the policy of the Mowbrays, McFarlane, Nobility, 221. In general R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1969) remains basic.

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more aggressively, and made greater profits, by pressing its claims to forest, woodland, fisheries, waste, and pasture; by exploiting its economic monopolies, such as those over mills; and by maximizing its power over the lands and lives of its tenants. The instrument par excellence for this latter power was the lord’s court. Lordship and the dispensing of justice went hand in hand in medieval society, in a fashion which it is difficult for the modern mind to appreciate. In modern society justice is the preserve of the state and of ‘public’ authority; it has become detached from economic and social power. But in the medieval world it was quite otherwise. Those who claimed lordship expected to exercise powers of justice over those whom they controlled, and over their lands. The paradigm of all lordship was, after all, the lordship of God: His was a judicial lordship as He presided at the Last Judgment. Such was also the lordship of the king: he was the fountain, and lion, of justice; his crown existed, as the theorists put it, to do judgment and justice and to give peace. What was true of God and the king was true also of lords in general, great and small—from the one-manor lord to the greatest duke or earl. ‘By common law’, as a lawyer put it in the early fourteenth century, ‘every free man ought to have a court for his tenants.’⁴² The right to hold a court was a sine qua non of lordship: when the bishop of Moray gave the lordship of certain lands and of the men who lived on them to the earl of Fife, he also gave the earl and his heirs the right to hold a ‘full court’ (plena curia).⁴³ This was the point that Gilbert Hay made as a generalization and with admirable clarity: ‘A man is not a lord suppose he have never so much of worldly goods, but he is a lord that has seignory and jurisdiction over other men, to govern them, and hold law and justice upon them when they trespass.’⁴⁴ As this quotation suggests, a court was much more than a judicial tribunal. Civil and criminal cases between the lord’s tenants and between the lord and his tenants certainly formed a good deal of the business of seigniorial courts; but they by no means represented the totality of their activity. Rather could the court be characterized as the forum where the lord brought his power of lordship to bear on his tenants and dependants and coerced them to accept and obey his authority across many aspects of their lives. The obligation to appear at the lord’s court—suit of court—was a minimum obligation on all those who accepted the lord’s authority. It was particularly important in upland and western Britain where other seigniorial powers—for example, over land—were relatively skeletal; but even in lowland, manorialized England, where royal justice was pervasive and royal records have been allowed to dominate the historical argument, the seigniorial courts were, in Rodney Hilton’s words, ‘a formidable element of control’.⁴⁵ ⁴² Quoted from Year Book 17 Edward II in Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigniorial Courts, I: Reigns of Henry III and Edward I, ed. F. W. Maitland (Selden Society, London, 1889), xli. ⁴³ Moray Reg., no. 16. ⁴⁴ Quoted in J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), 65, n. 270. ⁴⁵ R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the end of the Thirteenth Century (London, 1967), 240.

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There can be little doubt that the control exercised in and by seigniorial courts grew apace from the twelfth century, and is particularly evident when local court rolls survive in some numbers from the mid thirteenth century onwards. It was at this stage, so Ros Faith has argued, that the era of ‘truly seigniorialized justice’ arrived in England and that manorial justice became ‘the very lifeblood of the agrarian and economic system’.⁴⁶ The articulation and exercise of the lord’s judicial power was a momentous chapter in the history of lordship. Much of that power had to do not with law and justice narrowly conceived but with disciplinary and coercive power over tenants and dependants—controlling their land transactions and titles, supervising and enforcing their tenurial and associated obligations, issuing ordinances and statutes, and so forth. It may well be that historians, especially historians of medieval England, have underestimated the pervasiveness and effectiveness of seigniorial justice in this respect. It is partly that in much of England the powers of ‘high’ criminal and even civil justice were reserved for the king and his courts; it is also undoubtedly the case that the richness of royal and associated court records has served to focus attention on the activities of the king and his officers and away from lords and their officials and courts. Be that as it may, it is clear that there was a network of seigniorial courts— alongside royal, communal, and ecclesiastical courts—which brought the justice of lords to bear on the lives of their tenants and dependants in much of the British Isles. Some of them had no more than a modest manorial jurisdiction; but elsewhere, especially on the estates of the great magnates, extensive powers had been appropriated by, or confirmed to, local lords. These courts met on a regular, often three-weekly, basis, though some of the major investigative courts (such as the tourn) would only assemble twice yearly. In many respects they were the instruments par excellence of lordship. It has been calculated, for example, that in the lordship of Ruthin in north-east Wales 136 court sessions were held in the year 1322–3 alone.⁴⁷ Some of them were no doubt merely formal sessions; in other cases there was much overlap and confusion of jurisdiction. But what cannot be doubted is the way that lordship, through its courts, shaped the lives of those who lived under its authority. Lordship and justice went hand in hand at all levels of society; but what is of particular interest to us is the effectiveness and range of lordly justice at the levels of the higher aristocracy. Here again the perspective gained by bringing the whole of the British Isles within the purview of our analysis helps to redress the imbalance induced by concentrating on the southern and midland English evidence. It is true, of course, that the lords of the great palatinates of England (such as Chester and Lancaster) and of its extensive ecclesiastical liberties (such as Durham, Ely, Bury St Edmunds) claimed and exercised a range ⁴⁶ Faith, English Peasantry, 116; Maitland (ed.), Select Please in Manorial Courts, lx. ⁴⁷ Jack, ‘Welsh and English’, 27.

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of jurisdictional powers which were a very far cry from the modest powers of manorial lords. But it is when we leave the much-governed and royally dominated world of England that we catch a glimpse of the full possibilities of the range of seigniorial jurisdiction. It is a world of power structures very different from the neatly reticulated and hierarchical pattern of royal and communal justice so characteristic of royal England. Such is the world that we come across in the March of Wales, where each lordship was truly a sovereign jurisdictional unit, where the king’s writ was not served by his officers, and where (in a near contemporary phrase) the lords were ‘the soveraigne governors of their subjects’. English Ireland was in some respects different—not least because the constitutions of English law and administration had been consciously imported into the country and because the king of England had reserved to himself the four major pleas of the crown and jurisdiction in error. But in truth—whatever the veneer of institutional forms—much of the reality of governance and justice in English Ireland lay in the hands of local magnates, their followers, and officers. It could hardly be otherwise, particularly in the major liberties—Ulster, Trim, Kildare, Kilkenny, Wexford, Tipperary, and Thomond—which lay outside the area of shire ground and accounted for over half of the territorial extent of English Ireland.⁴⁸ Turning to Scotland, it is the hybrid character of its power structures which has increasingly struck historians. English-type institutions—notably the shire, the justiciarship, and the formulae of English writs—took deep root in the country, especially in the south and the east. They have been understandably privileged by historians, partly because the future belonged to them and partly because royal documentation provided one of the few points of entry into the world of medieval Scottish justice. But in any overview of Scotland as a whole it is what have been called ‘regionalized power structures’ and the role of the aristocracy—and, crucially, the local community in its various forms—which have attracted attention. Indeed in some respects, with the definition of what were the rights of free baronies and the wide powers conferred in ‘regalities’, the aristocratic flavour of governance and justice in later medieval Scotland was further confirmed.⁴⁹ It is little wonder that a recent historian of Scotland has concluded that ‘in localities under the rule of a great magnate’—and such localities were extensive in much of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—‘aristocratic justice was the norm.’⁵⁰ The significance of this claim stands even if we concede—as we surely must—that much, probably most, justice was dispensed in medieval society in and by the community through arbitration and extra-curially. ⁴⁸ Frame, English Lordship, 12, 25. ⁴⁹ For regalities and baronies see Duncan (ed.), Regesta Regum Scottorum, V, 39–43 and the excellent series of maps and discussions by Alexander Grant in McNeill and MacQueen (eds.), Atlas of Scottish History, 201–7. ⁵⁰ M. Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371 (Edinburgh, 2004), 106; MacQueen, Common Law and Feudal Society, 50–54.

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But what is perhaps of most interest for the present analysis is that the nonEnglish evidence allows us to glimpse a world in which great lords dominated the jurisdictional horizon. It was a world which had been overlaid in England by the institutions and mechanisms of royal government and by the common wash of a common law, common legal practices, and an increasingly professional legal cadre. Elsewhere in the British Isles we come across a seigniorial world much more redolent of the practices of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The central or honour courts of the great Welsh Marcher lordships—such as Glamorgan, Pembroke, Brecon, Gower—continued to meet as ‘feudal’ assemblies, presided over by the lord’s steward and attended by his vassals (fideles). Within these lordships their jurisdiction was complete and unchallenged in matters civil, territorial, and criminal.⁵¹ It is a world which is replicated in the honorial courts of the great Irish liberties such as Trim, Meath, Kildare, and Carlow.⁵² The situation was probably similar in much of aristocratic Scotland—as in his honorial courts which Earl David of Huntingdon (d. 1219) held in his lordship of Garioch or ‘the plenary court of the lord Maleis’, earl of Strathearn.⁵³ That the court of Strathearn should be referred to by the name of its lord is a reminder to us that, however much the forms and practices of aristocratic justices had been formalized and institutionalized, the lord’s personality and power lay at its origin. The court after all was not only a judicial assembly; it was a forum in which the lord displayed his authority and through which he exercised his power. That is why it was often held in the most majestic and authoritative of venues. The court of the great Warenne/Fitzalan lordship of Bromfield and Yale in north-east Wales was held in the bailey of the castle of Holt. It was the least convenient venue in the lordship but the sheer scale of the castle which towered over it was a reminder of the power of lordship.⁵⁴ These occasions were all the more impressive when the lord attended in person, either in his own right or as the representative of the keep. We hear graphically of Alexander Stewart (d. 1405), the Wolf of Badenoch as he was unflatteringly called, holding his court ‘at the standing stone of ‘‘Ester Kyngncy’’ in Badenoch’ and ‘sitting there as a lord among his vassals and subjects (vassallos et subditos) to give judgements (ad jura reddenda)’, or of the earl of Morton’s justiciar holding his court at the outer gate of the castle of Dalkeith.⁵⁵ ⁵¹ For details Davies, Lordship and Society, 156–7. ⁵² For example, Calendar of the Gormanston Register, c.1175–1397, ed. J. Mills and M. J. McEnery (Dublin, 1916), nos. 161, 169, 182; Curtis (ed.), Calendar of Ormond Deeds II, no. 49, pp. 40–51. For a discussion of the liberty court of Tipperary, see Frame, English Lordship, 26–7. ⁵³ Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon, 103; Moray Reg., no. 14. For the history of the earldom of Strathearn see the various studies by Cynthia Neville, including ‘A Celtic Enclave in Norman Scotland: Earl Gilbert of Strathearn, 1171–1223’, in Freedom and Authority: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson, ed. T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (East Linton, 2000), 75–92. ⁵⁴ Davies, Lordship and Society, 75, n. 33. ⁵⁵ Moray Reg., no. 159 (1380); Mort. Reg., II, no. 229 (1476).

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Nor are these examples simply Scottish exceptions. Few lords could resist the temptation to preside at their courts when they visited their lordships on tour. Henry Bolingbroke, recently promoted to be duke of Hereford, did so at Brecon on 6 November 1397; Reginald Grey did so on his frequent visits to Ruthin in north Wales. Even when he was not personally present, the lord’s wishes were a source of final, and often first, resort in quite minor judicial and quasi-judicial matters—issuing pardons, cancelling penalties, laying down procedures, and vehemently defending the honour of the court and its authority.⁵⁶ And if the lord did not appear to sit at his court, he could reinforce the authority of his local judicial officials by sending members of his council on quasi-judicial visits to the localities and, in Wales and Cheshire, by holding sessions in eyre when local courts were suspended and the lord’s justices—much like the royal justices in eyre in England in the thirteenth century—exercised the most ample judicial powers in his name.⁵⁷ The wider we cast our historical nets in the British Isles, the more impressive and multifaceted does the range of aristocratic jurisdictional power strike us. It was more far-reaching than the evidence for much of lowland England—where so many of the powers and profits of high justice had been reserved for the king—would suggest. This is reflected in the profits that aristocratic lords derived from judicial revenue. In much of lowland England it was rarely more than 10 per cent of seigniorial revenue: the court yields of Elizabeth de Burgh for her Dorset and East Anglian manors were, for example, paltry. But once we move outside this area the figures can be truly impressive. The Black Prince made huge judicial profits from his judicial powers in the palatinate of Chester; so did the dukes of Lancaster from the county of Lancaster, especially after they were granted palatinate powers there in 1351 (limited only by the royal prerogative of pardon and the crown’s right to correct errors of justice).⁵⁸ In 1395–6, for example, the county courts, tourns, wapentakes, and various other officers of the county of Lancaster yielded £514—a very handsome annual income for a baron.⁵⁹ But it is when we move into the March of Wales—we do not seem to have comparable figures for Scotland and Ireland⁶⁰—that court yields become a truly impressive source of seigniorial revenue. There were, of course, local variations and in particular between the Welsh upland districts and the lowland manorialized regions, but in general terms court issues brought in between 25 and 30 per cent of the lord’s income. If to this we add the fines for ‘redeeming’ ⁵⁶ See examples quoted in Davies, Lordship and Society, 142–3. They could be readily paralleled from the English evidence: see, for example, Ault (ed.), Court Rolls of Abbey of Ramsey, 83, 94–5. ⁵⁷ Pugh (ed.), Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 3–141; and for earlier evidence, Davies, Lordship and Society, 167–9. ⁵⁸ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 142–4; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 41–5. ⁵⁹ TNA DL 29/728/11984 (valor of north parts of the Duchy of Lancaster estates). ⁶⁰ Though we do know that the liberty court of Tipperary yielded £180 in three months in 1339: Frame, English Lordship, 26.

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(that is, buying off ) the visit of justices in eyre, the figure stood as high as 50 per cent or more.⁶¹ It made good the modest income from land and rents; it is also a reminder of the amplitude and significance of judicial lordship in the world of the aristocracy. Nor was that lordship confined to regular meetings of seigniorial courts. The concept of justice and judicial authority was much more ample in medieval parlance and practice that it is in modern terminology. The distinctions between law, arbitration, administration, grace, and favour were blurred in a fashion which modern categories find puzzling. The open-ended character of royal justice—dispensing equity, grace, and mercy as well as operating along institutionalized curial lines—was replicated in aristocratic justice. Much of it—as has of late been fully appreciated by historians⁶²—operated through arbitration, both between the magnate’s own retainers and in private cases. Such arbitration was an acknowledgement that it was the duty of great lords, such as John of Gaunt,⁶³ as much as of the king to defuse social tensions and to do so extra-curially as well as in pursuit of their judicial power. Indeed the world of aristocratic lordship—like that of royal lordship—operated through patronage, grace, and favour as well as through court procedures. We do not do justice to its character and range if we overlook this truism. The lord’s protection, support, and pardon regularly lubricated relationships and eased tensions. The lord himself, his major officials, and his council were in receipt of an endless flow of petitions and requests, oral and written.⁶⁴ Sifting and assessing such requests was one of the most delicate acts of lordship, whether done in person or by proxy. If lordship was not to become an engine of oppression and not to cross the line into the extortionate, it was vital that this channel of dialogue be kept open and regularly used. No doubt lords acted arbitrarily and high-handedly from time to time; but when we have a substantial body of evidence of the petitionary process at work—as we have amply in the correspondence of John of Gaunt—what is generally impressive is the way that the duke of Lancaster insists on due process of investigation, proper inquiry, and respect for established custom. To take one case, when John Batter sent a bill of complaint to the duke, the duke’s steward was ordered to scrutinize the bill and the record and process to which it referred, to correct any errors if there should be such, and ‘do right as well for our profit and of the parts, according to the laws and customs of the region’.⁶⁵ ⁶¹ Fully documented in Davies, Lordship and Society, 179–94. ⁶² E. Powell, ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the Later Middle Ages’, TRHS 5th ser. 33 (1983), 49–67; M. T. Clanchy, ‘Law and Love in the Middle Ages’, in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. J. Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), 47–67; L. B. Smith, ‘Disputes and Settlements in Medieval Wales; The Role of Arbitration’, EHR, 106 (1991), 835–60. ⁶³ For an example of Gaunt acting as arbitrator: Reg. JG, II, no. 1204. ⁶⁴ For examples Reg. BP, I, 67, 73, 126–7; Holmes, Estates, 129. ⁶⁵ Reg. JG, I, no. 1552.

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What we have tried to capture in this chapter is some of the ways in which aristocratic lordship exercised its power over medieval society in the British Isles. There was, of course, no single such agenda: the character of lordship varied from region to region and period to period; its powers and effectiveness had to adjust to the social and economic contours of its various worlds. Lordship was founded on custom; it took the world as it found it—though this did not mean that it could not exploit and innovate (as we saw with forests, wastes, and mills). By and large the rationale of its authority was taken as given; it was part of the ‘natural order’ and ultimately divinely sanctioned. If there were doubts, it was about the exercise of lordship (and particularly the novelty of its claims), not about lordship itself. Beyond the abstractions of the schoolmen about dominium, there is no evidence that a defence or analysis of lordship was called for. Auditors could certainly submit insightful reports on the state of the lord’s finances and fascinating memoranda could be submitted to the lord’s council on improving the conduct of estate management;⁶⁶ but it required the cataclysm of a social revolt, the Peasants’ Rising of 1381, to raise the fundamental questions about the justification and propriety of lordship and even to insist that there was no lordship other than that of the king. The lordship which we have tried to bring into view in this broad-brush sketch is in many respects—as we insisted at the outset—a universal lordship. Royal lordship partook of it and shared many of its functions and powers. But royal lordship, especially in England and to a rather lesser extent in Scotland, had become increasingly distinctive in the public character of its claims and justification, in the way its authority penetrated into the interstices of local life and governance, and in the exclusiveness of its claim in crucial matters such as law, taxation, coinage, custom dues, and military service. We have insisted that if we take the British Isles as a whole as our historical agenda, the distinction between royal and aristocratic lordship has arguably been exaggerated, especially from an English perspective; but this is in no way to deny that a chasm now existed and that it was becoming more pronounced. At the other end of the spectrum of power, many of the features described above—tributes, rents, control of land and tenants, jurisdiction among them—would figure among the rights exercised by very modest manorial lords. Where, therefore does such a vague formulation leave aristocratic lordship? Was it more than ‘ordinary’ lordship writ large and multiplied manifold by the breadth of its territorial base? In parts of Ireland and Wales it approximated (or could do so) more closely to royal lordship than we sometimes care to acknowledge. The lords of the Welsh March raised their own armies, launched their own ‘wars’, flaunted their own ‘law of the March’, and were exempt from the king’s fiscal demands. But in general—even in the palatinates of England, ⁶⁶ For the former see, for example, Holmes, Estates, 126–8; for the latter the fascinating memorandum submitted to the Mortimer council in BL Egerton Roll 8718 (1395–7).

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the great liberties of English Ireland, and the regalities of fifteenth-century Scotland—aristocratic lordship fell well short of such ambitions. Yet aristocratic lordship was more than the sum of the individual components of its parts. Even the sum was important: the sheer size of aristocratic inheritances, extended over several shires and even countries, set them apart, and so did the status of their lords. So did the stages—national and even international as well as local and regional—on which these lords moved. So did the scale of their income, the influence they wielded, and the deference they almost automatically commanded. As the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi had put it, it was by the size of his patrimony that one could assess a great magnate’s power.⁶⁷ It is the roots of that power that we have reviewed above; but lordship was manifested in the way it was exercised. That is the theme of the following chapters.

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For tributary lordship in Ireland, K. Simms, ‘Guesting and Feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 100 (1978–9). For the balance between tributary and land-lordship in the south-west of the country, A. McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin, 2005). For the situation in Scotland, C. Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140–1365 (Dublin, 2005), ch. 3; S. Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh, 2006), chs. 4 and 11. For aristocratic interest in the land market, C. Dyer, ‘Seigniorial Profits on the Land Market in Late Medieval England’, in Le Marché de la Terre au Moyen Âge, ed. L. Feller and C. Wickham (Rome, 2005). For the balance between arable and pastoral farming, and the significance of demesne farming in early fourteenthcentury England, B. M. S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300–49 (Manchester, 2006), and B. M. S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Past and Present, 188 (2005). For the late Middle Ages more generally, B. M. S. Campbell, ‘The Land’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006). For the king as landlord, D. Crook, ‘King and Lord: The Monarch and his Demesne Tenants in Central Nottinghamshire, 1163–1363’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. A. Jobson (Woodbridge, 2004). For the decline of demesne farming, a case study from East Anglia is presented in D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005). The same area in a slightly later period is studied in ⁶⁷ Quoted above, p. 162.

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J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000). For the use of forest resources, S. A. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009); G. Foard, ‘Medieval Woodland, Agriculture and Industry in Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire’, Medieval Archaeology, 45 (2001). Records relating to the forest are published in Oxfordshire Forests, 1246–1609, ed. B. Schumer, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 64 (Oxford, 2004). For sheep-farming, A. R. Bell, C. Brooks, and P. R. Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, c.1230–1327 (Cambridge, 2007). For mills, J. Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–1540 (Oxford, 2004). For the manor, its court, and associated records, M. Bailey, The English Manor c.1200-c.1500 (Manchester, 2002); Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Z. Razi and R. Smith (Oxford, 1996); R. Evans, ‘Whose was the Manorial Court?’ in Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston, ed. R. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004). For control of peasant land and legal transactions, C. Biggs, ‘Seigniorial Control of Villagers’ Litigation Beyond the Manor in Later Medieval England’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 399–422; P. Schofield, ‘Manorial Court Rolls and the Peasant Land Market in Eastern England, c.1250 − c.1350’ and M. Müller, ‘Seigniorial Control and the Peasant Land Market in the Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Approach’, both in Feller and Wickham (eds.), Le Marché de la Terre au Moyen Âge. Recent publications of court rolls are The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows, 1305–50 and 1351–99, ed. R. Lock. 2 vols. Suffolk Record Society, vols. 41 and 45 (Woodbridge, 1998, 2002) and The Court Rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347–1564, ed. R. K. Field, Worcestershire Historical Society, vol. 20 (Worcester, 2004). For court rolls from fifteenthcentury Ireland see Handbook and Select Calendar of Sources for Medieval Ireland in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith (Dublin, 2005), section 3.

7 The Agencies and Agents of Lordship ‘There is a fine and great lordship there, which if it were well managed would be worth not less than two thousand marks a year.’ Such was the excited report that a royal commissioner submitted to Edward I in 1302, commenting on the potential of the Bohun lordship of Brecon in the March of Wales. It was a report to make the mouth of the cash-strapped king water, particularly as he had Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and lord of Brecon, in a tight corner at the time.¹ But it was a report with a sting in its tail: the potential of the lordship was dependent on sound management. This was, of course, a basic truism for all lordship, from the level of the household and the manor upwards. But it had a particular relevance to the great aristocratic lordships which are the subject of this book. This was in good part because of the size and the distribution of such lordships. A distinctive feature of aristocratic power in England before, and even more so after, the Norman Conquest was the way it was widely fragmented geographically. Such fragmentation was frequently compounded in each generation as estates were divided, temporarily or permanently, in family settlements or as the windfalls of marriage and inheritance added new estates which needed to be absorbed into the family’s power orbit. Similar fragmentation was certainly not unknown in other parts of the British Isles, not least because the norms of English common law and inheritance practices had come to dominate the aristocratic world in much of lowland Scotland, Marcher Wales, and English Ireland. Nevertheless in broad terms it may be suggested that in these areas aristocratic power was more consolidated in territorial blocs—be it in the provincial earldoms and regional lordships (as they have been termed) of Scotland, the great Marcher lordship of Wales (several of which such as Glamorgan or Brecon were close to the size of a small English county), or the extensive liberties of English Ireland.² It was otherwise in England, as extensive aristocratic estates sprawled over vast swathes of the country. A couple of examples may serve to make the point briefly. By far the largest aristocratic lordship in the mid and late fourteenth century was the duchy of Lancaster.³ It had been assembled largely by royal munificence and well-calculated marriages, from the late thirteenth century ¹ CIM, I, no. 1870. For the context of the report, McFarlane, Nobility, 261. ² See below, pp. 189–90. ³ The most helpful map of the Lancaster estates remains that in Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt.

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onwards, to cadet members of the English royal family and their descendants. By the time of John of Gaunt (d. 1399), its estates extended into almost all the counties of England and into south Wales. Not all these estates were, of course, equal in value and importance. Rather were they composed of groups of estates—often still termed ‘honors’—where the duke’s power was dominant, pervasive, and extensive; these were, in the contemporary phrase, the lord’s ‘country’ where his castles and parks dominated the countryside and where he expected his authority—alongside that of the king—to be openly acknowledged and taken for granted. John of Gaunt had several such ‘countries’: in Lancashire (centred on Lancaster, where palatinate rights had further reinforced the duke’s standing from 1351 and again from 1377), Yorkshire (centred on the honour of Pontefract), in a batch of major honors—including Bolingbroke, Tutbury, and Leicester—across the north Midlands, and to a rather lesser degree in Norfolk, Suffolk, and south Wales. Over and above these major concentrations, there was a substantial scattering of castles, lordships, and manors across the face of England from Dunstanburgh in Northumberland to Aldbourne in Wiltshire and Pevensey in Sussex.⁴ Individually these outliers were not in the front rank of Lancaster property; but in their localities they were nodal points of the duke’s authority and influence. The Lancastrian inheritance as a whole gave Gaunt an immense income and was clearly one of the foundations—though not necessarily the most important one—of his power as a national and indeed international figure. It also posed hugely challenging problems for him. So likewise did the complex of lands which Gaunt’s much younger contemporary, Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), had come to control. The yield of his estates in the year he died was probably around £4,000, that is, about a third of that of John of Gaunt’s vast inheritance. Even so, such an income certainly placed Earl Roger in the ranks of the top four richest earls of his day. But what is of interest to us in the present context is that though the Mortimer lands were not, within England, by any means so geographically widespread as the duchy of Lancaster, they were still geographically extensive and, thereby, managerially daunting.⁵ Initially they had been concentrated not far from the Mortimer caput at Wigmore and, later, Ludlow—in the western counties of England and across into a large clutch of upland lordships in the Welsh March. This western bias was further emphasized by the acquisition of two other great Marcher lordships (worth close on £1,000 each in annual income) of Denbigh and Usk/Caerleon in 1354 and 1368 respectively. But the Mortimers also had valuable individual manors and boroughs (such as Bridgewater and Cranbourne in Dorset) in southern England and, after 1368, a major foothold—and a ⁴ See Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, ch. 5 for an outstanding analysis of Gaunt’s power in Sussex. ⁵ The growth of the Mortimer estates across the fourteenth century is briefly but conveniently sketched in Holmes, Estates, 10–19. For maps of the Mortimer estates in Wales see Davies, Age of Conquest, 396, 406–7; and for the manors of the bailiwick of Clare, Holmes, Estates, 87. Details on the valuation of the Mortimer estates in Davies, Lordship and Society, 188–9.

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favourite residence—in a group of manors centred around Clare in East Anglia. Nor did that exhaust the span of their lands: through two marriages they had also secured the title to major lordships in Ireland (Trim, Meath, Connacht, and the earldom of Ulster) and were to spend much of their time and energy in the reigns of Edward II and Richard II discharging their responsibilities and enforcing their lordship there. The fragmented and geographically dispersed nature of great aristocratic inheritances, such as those of Lancaster and Mortimer, posed daunting managerial problems for their lords. ‘Management’ is not a word which we readily associate with great aristocratic lords. Terms such as honour, largesse, prowess, display, and magnificence seem more appropriate. Yet these qualities were hardly unmatched by a shrewd and often ruthless business sense. It is written large in the valuations on the folios of Domesday Book or in the famous entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on William I’s auction of assets to the highest bidder. Where kings led, the great magnates would assuredly follow. Their lordship, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, became a ruthlessly exploitative lordship—ad maximum detrimentum possidentium (to the maximum disadvantage of tenants), as the earl of Gloucester put it in a devastating aside.⁶ In the process they put in place the mechanisms for transforming lordship into a routinized, micro-managing mechanism and recruited the personnel to staff it. It is an achievement which has been consistently underrated; it is ultimately an important chapter in the history of lordship and governance in medieval England. It is well worth asking briefly why it has not warranted more attention. The governance of medieval England—and to a lesser but still considerable extent of Scotland and English Ireland—has been constructed and described in primarily royalist, king-centred, terms. This is inevitable given the ubiquitousness of royal power, law, and jurisdiction; a fairly uniform and streamlined pattern of offices and officers, appointable by and answerable to a central authority; and the institutions of common taxation, coinage, and assembly. None of that is, of course, to be gainsaid especially in England, even if we need to add that most of the work of royal and communal government in the localities was discharged by magnates and county gentry and that much of the hundredal organization, though formally in ‘public’ control, was in ‘private’ hands. But what qualifies the picture particularly for us is that alongside this complex framework of royalcommunal governance was, often, a puzzlingly complex network of non-royal governance. The sheriff of Yorkshire operated cheek by jowl with the steward of Pontefract, the receiver of the manor of Leicester with the escheator of the county. Such non-royal governance ranged from the modest powers of the local manorial lord (sometimes fortified by specific franchises such as the assize of ale) to the extensive powers of great ecclesiastical corporations and monasteries. The power network operated and controlled by the great lay lords of the British Isles ⁶ Hilton, Medieval Society, 132.

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was an essential part of the portfolio of governance and lordship in medieval society. It alone eventually enabled the duke of Lancaster and the earl of March to ‘manage’ their widely scattered inheritances efficiently and to exercise their lordship to best effect. It is not difficult to explain why the importance and achievement of this pattern of seigniorial governance has been frequently overlooked, or at least underestimated, by historians. It is, as usual, partly a matter of documentation. Royal financial records survive regularly from the 1150s; royal secretarial records from c.1200. It is not until c.1250—though earlier on ecclesiastical estates—that the financial and court records of the lay nobility begin to survive and even then very patchily, and hardly at all in an unbroken series. Then again such records as survive are the archives of individual families, each with their own format (especially at the central level) and often pattern of officers. They do not form the basis of easy generalizations about the nature of seigniorial governance. Furthermore, the very widespread nature of so many large aristocratic estates meant that the administrative arrangements which were put in place to govern and exploit them partook of the nature of a spider’s web rather than the solid blocs of governance familiar in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—or for that matter much of France. Seigniorial stewards and receivers often held authority over widely dispersed manors and lordships, their sphere of activity criss-crossing in a confusing plethora of patterns with those of other lords’ offices (lay and ecclesiastical) and those of the king. That is why it has proved impossible to represent such patterns cartographically.⁷ But this should not be allowed to conceal the fact that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in particular the pattern of seigniorial governance changed so profoundly that it affected the nature of lordship itself and brought the power of such lordship to bear more intensively and regularly on those who lived under its authority. This change needs to be placed in the context of a broad cultural transformation. Lordship continued to base its authority on custom and was not afraid of wielding its coercive power; but economic exploitation, profitability, and the opportunities of the market now became some of the watchwords of seigniorial policy. They were inculcated in treatises on estate management. They were accompanied by, and expressed in, a growing emphasis on regular record-keeping and accountability. This was part of the triumph of what has been called ‘pragmatic literacy’. On seigniorial estates in England—and soon by imitation in English-controlled or -influenced parts of the British Isles—the key ‘take-off period’ seems to be the late thirteenth century. Manorial and household accounts, court rolls, and enrolled series of ministers’ accounts begin to survive and by the mid fourteenth century had acquired a largely standardized form which they were to retain for generations. Such a transformation could only be ⁷ For a recent excellent introduction to the documentation see R. H. Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford, 2004), chs. 13 and 23.

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effectively serviced by the training and recruitment of a cadre of officials who could employ their skills in the world of the triumph of the written word and the audited account. The impact on the effectiveness and reach of lordship was enormous: central control, close local supervision, regular reporting and auditing, and a nexus of close relationships between the scattered parts of a large seigniorial inheritance were now possible, indeed normal. It was these long-term cultural changes which made late medieval lordship truly ‘manageable’ and it is to the nature of that ‘management’ that we now turn. There is no single formula which will describe adequately the mechanisms and arrangements which came to constitute the pattern of seigniorial governance in medieval Britain. Variety was the keynote, as was to be expected in a world of plurality of lordships and challenges. In the late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries in particular, there is as yet little indication of the establishment of a unified, streamlined administrative framework which would weld the lord’s inheritance into an effective unit. The inheritance appears to be, administratively, little more than the sum of its component estates.⁸ The extensive lands of Edmund, earl of Cornwall (d. 1300), were simply composed of nine local receipts each under its local steward; likewise, there were three–four receiverships, rather than a single financial office, for the far-flung estates of Gilbert earl of Gloucester (d. 1298) and Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk (d. 1306). Even such annual accounts as survive—such as the rich Bigod local accounts for the late thirteenth century or the large composite counter-rolls for the Lacy and Lancaster estates 1295–6, 1304–5, and 1313–14—still reveal officials and scribes fumbling rather uncertainly towards a coherent pattern of accounts and answerability. Uniformity never became the hallmark of seigniorial governance and its records; but by the mid to late fourteenth century (partly no doubt due to the spread of good practice, especially in the ranks of the professional managerial class) a broad pattern of the character and operational practices of seigniorial governance had clearly emerged. It is that broad pattern—not its particularities or individual specificities—which we will now try to capture as part of our understanding of the nature of lordship. Evidence will be drawn from a variety of sources, but two in particular have been privileged—the archives of the duchy of Lancaster in the later years of John of Gaunt because they are, far and away, the richest and most integrated set of seigniorial records; and, secondly, the muniments of the Mortimer family, earls of March, the distinction of which lies not in their quality and quantity but in the fact that they include a good deal of draft memoranda and expense accounts which take us behind the bland formulae of the final accounts. ⁸ I readily acknowledge my debt on this topic to K. B. McFarlane’s unpublished 1954 course of lectures, English Seigniorial Administration and its Records 1290–1536 (Magdalen College, Oxford, GPD/26/II/36).

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Ultimately the character of seigniorial governance depended on the person of the lord; so it was with lordship as it was with kingship. It was he who set the tone. When a report sought to explain the discrepancy between the potential of a lordship and what was actually collected, its comment was brutally frank: ‘the earl was lax’.⁹ There is abundant evidence—some of which has been quoted above¹⁰—of the close attention that great aristocrats could pay to the minutiae of estate affairs and of the way that petitions and requests were regularly deferred for their personal attention. One has only to turn the pages of the Register of Edward the Black Prince to hear the strident tones of his officials and tenants: that was ‘hands-on’, hard-nosed lordship. And it worked at a distance: a steady flow of messengers and letters (such as those between Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), from France and his council in England) kept lords regularly briefed on their officers. Even when the bureaucratic and administrative machine of a great inheritance had become complex and routinized, the lord’s personal wishes were often still the final word. So it is, to take a late example, that we catch a glimpse of Duke Edward of Buckingham (d. 1521), ‘syttynge in his councell’, putting to his councillors his reasons for going to Wales.¹¹ Since the lord was the central figure, it was natural that his household should form the basis of such centralized control and accountability as began to develop. That, after all, had been likewise the case with royal governance: it grew out of the personal, household offices of the king, the curia regis, until it reached the point of sophistication and complexity when the officers and the offices began (in the phrase of historians) ‘to go out of court’. So it was with seigniorial administration. After all, the prime purpose of the lord’s estates was to provide the financial wherewithal to meet the needs of his household. So it was that in early days the steward of the household often doubled up as steward of the estates. Above all, it was to the household’s financial officers—the chamberlain and the wardrober—that estate revenues were transferred. This remained the practice on the estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), lady of Clare, which have a strong case to be regarded as the most professionally run (and well-documented) noble inheritance of the mid fourteenth century, or of the Bohun estates of the earls of Hereford. In neither was there as yet a separate financial office or officer; moneys were paid directly by local accountants into the household coffers of the lord. But it was inevitable that such a skeletal, informal household framework should gradually be supplemented by a dedicated set of central estate offices, institutions and officers. To that degree household and estate administration—though, of course, still interdependent in many respects—became separate. It was an inevitable development on all major aristocratic estates. The need for continuity and supervision during periods of minority and custody was one imperative; ⁹ CIM, I, no. 1870.

¹⁰ See above, pp. 161–9.

¹¹ Rawcliffe, The Staffords, 15.

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others were the growing professionalization of the lord’s administrative cadre, the regular production of sets of annual, interrelated accounts, and the need to coordinate policies and decisions. The head of the lord’s central staff was often known as the chief steward or occasionally as the surveyor of the lord’s lands. These descriptions indicated that he had a supervisory authority over subsidiary local stewards and was in overall charge of policy decisions on the lord’s estates. He no doubt presided over the lord’s council in his absence; dealt with many of the petitions that were forwarded to him by the lord; went on inspection tours of the lord’s estates either under his own authority (as on the tour of the Stafford estates in 1386) or as head of a conciliar delegation. So vast was the range of lands under the rule of the Lancaster duchy that the responsibilities of the chief steward were divided into two and occasionally three areas of jurisdiction—north and south of the Trent and a more restricted southern circuit. These men worked, and rode, hard: the chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster in the north parts went on tour through Nottingham, Leicester, and Pontefract in February–March 1397, spent nineteen days supervising the lord’s household at Hereford, followed by a further thirty-two days in London with other members of the duke’s council. It was by such dedication and itineration that the lordship of the duke of Lancaster was kept in good heart.¹² The men who held such a responsible position were almost invariably persons of some standing in their own localities as well as in the estimation of their lords. Such, for example, was Sir Peter de la Mare, the first known Speaker of the House of Commons (1376), M.P. for Herefordshire and steward of Edmund Mortimer earl of March; or Sir Thomas Mortimer, a junior member of the Mortimer dynasty who in effect headed the council which ran the Mortimer estates 1381–93; or Sir Thomas Hungerford, Gaunt’s chief steward in the south parts of the duchy of Lancaster (1375–93), MP and Speaker (1377) and a man so highly regarded that he was retained in the services of at least five other lords; or John Throckmorton, a Worcestershire esquire, the key person in the council of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and his trusted confidant.¹³ These men could not be expected to give full-time service to their lords or to eat at his table day-in, day-out. They had their own estates and careers to attend to and they played a leading role in county and, occasionally, in national society. But they were men of standing and weight; most of them, no doubt, had a good smattering of legal knowledge and were conversant with the problems and challenges which all landowners faced. They were precisely the sort of men who could bring the lord’s authority to bear on local society but who could also be relied upon to address the broad issues involved in governing a large aristocratic inheritance. ¹² TNA DL 28/3/5 f.8. ¹³ For their biographies see Roskell et al. (eds.), House of Commons 1386–1421.

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The steward or chief steward provided authority and policy direction, especially when the lord was a minor, on campaign, or otherwise preoccupied. But in terms of the routine supervision and integration of the administration it might well be that two other sets of officials were more central—the chief financial officer and the auditor. We cannot expect consistency and uniformity here any more than in any other sphere of seigniorial administration; but on an increasing number of estates a single financial official—often bearing the title receivergeneral—becomes the chief accounting and supervising officer for the estate revenue (but often not for other sources of income) of the lord, thereby separating clearly household and estate responsibilities. It would appear that it was from about the mid fourteenth century that the practice becomes common. The Black Prince had a receiver-general by 1346 (and it is noteworthy that the king’s son should follow the practice and terminology of the seigniorial world rather than that of the royal exchequer); the dukes of Lancaster certainly had such a post by 1362 (even though the earliest account to survive is for 1376–7) and probably considerably earlier; there was certainly such an officer in charge of Beauchamp finances by the late fourteenth century. The men who held the post were different, professionally and vocationally, from the stewards. They were what we would call professional accountants, well-versed in the accounting treatises of the period. They were normally clerics and would expect their reward in a benefice or even a canonry. The demands on their services were much more full-time than those of the steward. When they were not in attendance at the lord’s court and council, they were regularly on tour inspecting the finances and affairs of the lord’s local estates. Walter Brugge, the receiver-general of the Mortimer estates in the 1380s and 1390s, travelled ceaselessly (as we know from his crabbed expenses accounts) from one end of England to the other, throughout Wales, and regularly to Ireland.¹⁴ He earned his rewards—including the archdeaconry of Meath and a canonry of York—but he had little time to enjoy them or to discharge the duties attached to them. What is not in doubt is that his hard work was critical to ensuring the profitability and good running of the Mortimer inheritance during a long and difficult minority. Walter’s career could be paralleled by that of many of his fellow senior seigniorial accountants—such as John Leventhorp, the financial confidant of Henry Bolingbroke, who was promoted to be receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster when his master seized the throne in 1399.¹⁵ The receiver-general was frequently accompanied on his tours by the auditor. Audit was the central ritual of efficient lordship and it was conducted with astonishing thoroughness. Local officials were ruthlessly cross-examined; their indentures and tallies were rigorously scrutinized; pleas for allowances were monitored and often reduced or disallowed; arrears were listed and instalment ¹⁴ Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr, ˆ 42–3. ¹⁵ For Leventhorp (and his journeys), Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 132, 156–8.

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arrangements for their payment put in place; rentals were reviewed and composed; and major decisions on local policy—for example, on repairing mills or continuing demesne farming—were taken. Written and no doubt oral reports were compiled and submitted to the lord’s senior officers and council, with requests for a final decision.¹⁶ We can guess the rigour of the exercise if we recall that the half-yearly audit (visus compote) of three Mortimer estates (Clare, Bardfield, and Sudbury) lasted for eighteen days in 1389.¹⁷ The men who undertook such exercises were professionals to their fingertips. The auditor in 1389 was Thomas Hildeburgh: he had moved up from local service (he was clerk of accounts for the bailiwick of Clare in 1366–7) into central duties and from the service of Lionel, duke of Clarence (d. 1368), to that of Clarence’s son-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381). There were many like him: Philip Melreth was receiver-general of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1373), but with the death of his master without male heirs of his body he looked for new openings and became one of John of Gaunt’s auditors.¹⁸ It was this handful of top officials—often supplemented by others, such as the chancellor who headed the secretariat of John of Gaunt or the secretariat who looked after the officers of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397)—who formed the kernel of the lord’s professional advisers (much as the chancellor, treasurer and keeper of the privy seal performed a like function for the king). They would no doubt keep in close touch with the lord’s household officers—including the chamberlain, keeper of the great wardrobe, treasurer of war—and would draw on the service of a body of clerks. It was this group which gave coherence and direction to the policies which integrated the inheritance of the lord into an effective administrative unit. They would be members of his council.¹⁹ In all that we know about aristocratic—as indeed of royal—councils, we would do well to steer clear of over-definition and institutional clarity. The lord (when he was of age) took counsel from whomsoever it pleased him and on an ad hoc basis; so were many of his momentous decisions shaped. Yet it was inevitable that as central aristocratic governance habits became more sophisticated and regular, the role and power of the lord’s habitual advisers—whether formally called a council or not—should come into sharper focus (especially in the archives of the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, the Mortimers, the Beauchamps, ¹⁶ Holmes, Estates, 126–8 publishes the reports of the duchy of Lancaster auditors for some of the southern estates in 1388. Equally revealing, with marginal notes, are the memoranda submitted to the keepers of the estates of the earl of March, e.g. BL Egerton Rolls 8718, 8757. ¹⁷ TNA SC 6/1112/2. ¹⁸ Hildeburgh: TNA SC 6/1111/11; SC 6/986, 27; Melreth: Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 369. ¹⁹ For seigniorial councils see C. Rawcliffe, ‘Baronial Councils in the Later Middle Ages’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. C. D. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), 87–108; for the council on the Lancaster estates, Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 80–84, 121–30.

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and the Mowbrays). As with the king’s privy council, so it was with the aristocracy: a small group of his professional servants (whose duties we have outlined above) would meet on a regular basis to deal with the plethora of administrative and financial problems and petitions which had to be attended to on a weekly basis. We catch a glimpse, for example, of three men—Sir George Felbrigg (a Mortimer retainer and county knight), William Forde (a trusted clerk), and Walter Brugge (the receiver-general)—at the earl of March’s council in 1393.²⁰ Such a small, workaday council would be reinforced for the discussion of more weighty and legal matters by a group of local retainers and gentlemen and by hired legal advisers. Such meetings might be held over a number of days, as happened during the long-drawn-out and bitter negotiations in the 1390s between the duke of Gloucester and the earl of Hereford over the partition of the Bohun inheritance.²¹ These reinforced meetings were often referred to—certainly in the documents of the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Roger Mortimer, the Beauchamps, and the Mowbrays—as ‘the great council of the lord’ or ‘the entire and continuous council’.²² The business which the council could and did attend to was almost limitless: it regularly received petitions and acted as an appellate body: tricky local issues and policy decisions were referred to it; local officers and tenants were summoned to testify before it. It often met at the lord’s headquarters (frequently his London residence); but equally it could travel around his estates, dealing with issues locally. What we have found in this outline description of the central agencies of aristocratic lordship is that in general terms the agents and agencies which coordinated the activities of aristocratic governance corresponded, on a smaller scale, to those we find in the king’s administration of his realm. So did the procedures that were followed, the regular and integrated sets of household, central, and local documents that were produced, the reliance on written commands, vouchers, and evidence, the processes of audit and the personnel (increasingly professionally trained clerical bureaucrats complemented by literate and capable retainers and laymen of standing). To that extent there was a continuum of experience and habits across the field of governance, royal, aristocratic, and ecclesiastic. Given that this was so, there could be a transfer of personnel, and a sharing of responsibilities, between one sphere and another. William de Manton served as wardrober and later clerk of the chamber for that outstanding businesswoman, Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360); migrated on her ²⁰ BL Egerton Roll 8739. ²¹ The expenses incurred are listed in TNA DL 28/3/3 no. 5 and TNA DL 29/3/4 no. 12, no. 39v. During another legal dispute, Derby’s council met at the wardrobe of John of Gaunt in London to discuss the issue. ²² BL Egerton Roll 8715 (1395–7); SC 6/1112/3 (1391) (Mortimer); CPR 1396–9, 422 (Mowbray); BL Egerton Roll 8769 (Beauchamp, 1397); Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 129 (Lancaster); M. Sharp, ‘The Household of the Black Prince’, in T. F. Tout, Chapters in Medieval Administrative History, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33), V, 382.

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death to the service of the king’s son, Lionel of Clarence, and then rose to be Edward III’s keeper of the wardrobe 1361–6. There were, one suspects, very few tricks of the administrator’s trade that William needed to learn in royal service; indeed, given the remarkable precociousness of the de Burgh administration, the transfer of skills may well have been the other way. There must have been many like him, especially as aristocratic estates—and thereby the personnel of their administration—passed, temporarily or otherwise, under royal control. And inevitably in a small and intimate world posts were shared: the description of Roger Cheney as ‘steward of the earl of Arundel and at that time (1316) sheriff of Shropshire’ is merely a single example.²³ The significance of this is at least twofold. First, it reminds us that the quality, effectiveness, and importance of aristocratic governance has been regularly underestimated in historical writing—partly because of the plurality of lords (as opposed to the singularity of royal administration) and the quality of the surviving evidence, partly because of an unfounded assumption that seigniorial governance was necessarily inferior or derivative. Second in a balanced and rounded view of the governance of medieval society, the agencies and agents of aristocratic lordship should figure alongside those of kings, bishops, ecclesiastical corporations, and others. These were the men who governed—and never doubted their right to govern—society; the distinction in status and in the niceties of their relationships was less important than the common factor that they exercised lordship. It was at the central level that seigniorial governance was probably most innovative and challenging in its practices. But the lord’s inheritance was composed of scores and indeed often hundreds of lordships and manors often scattered across large swathes of Britain. Here the lord’s authority was enmeshed in local traditions and power structures and relied overwhelmingly on the services of local men. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there is little that is uniform and streamlined about seigniorial governance in the localities. If we are to witness the scale and ambitiousness of aristocratic power in the locality we will find it not in England (with the exception of the palatinates) but in the great liberties of Ireland, the Marcher lordships of Wales, and the provincial earldoms of Scotland. What we see here—especially in the first two, for the evidence for Scotland appears scanty—is how lords could in effect produce little kingdoms in miniature on their estates. The great advantage of the Irish liberties and Welsh lordships was that they were large, consolidated estates where the lord’s power—financially, jurisdictionally, and otherwise—was close to exclusive. A range of offices and officers were put in place to run them, normally from a central castle, as selfcontained units: a shire, liberty, or great court, a chancery, an exchequer, a

²³ Ward, English Noblewomen, 57; R. W. Eyton, The Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols. in 6 (London, 1854–60), X, 159.

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lordship-specific seal, a register of writs among them. Officers might include a steward, sheriff, constable, chancellor, receiver, and escheator.²⁴ Elsewhere the pattern of local seigniorial governance was much more ad hoc; and it is not easy to detect a general pattern. On some inheritances—those of Bohun, Mowbray, Mortimer, and Beauchamp among them—the individual manors and units were directly answerable to central officers and accountants, presumably because the estates were too geographically compact to warrant the establishment of an intermediate tier of administration. But on other inheritances—the vast duchy of Lancaster is the prime example—local units were gathered into regional receiverships/stewardships. The headquarters of each receivership was normally a local castle: there courts were held, the officers had their chambers, and moneys were collected. Each unit was headed by a steward, a receiver, and sometimes a constable. The steward was normally a man of gentry status from the locality or from the cadre of the lord’s retainers. On some of the great estates he increasingly discharged his duties by deputy and his post became—especially in the duchy of Lancaster—part of the lord’s patronage portfolio. Thus Sir Richard Burley was appointed steward of Monmouth by Gaunt in 1379, but he can have spent little time on his official duties there, since he was one of the lord’s confidants and retainers and died on campaign with Gaunt in Spain in 1386. Much more crucial in the day-to-day local governance of the lordship was the receiver (often doubling up as deputy-steward). He was often a local cleric or burgess and needed to have a basic mastery of accounting and audit procedures. It was he who kept the local machinery of lordship in working order and was the recipient of an avalanche of correspondence and visits from the lord’s central officers. Answerable to the receiver were a whole host of local officials—bailiff, reeves, parkers, beadles, foresters, and others. They were—and had to be—local men, often the leaders of their own local communities. It was on their conduct and honesty that the reputation of lordship at the local level often depended. That is why the correspondence of the lord’s officials is brimful of threats and periodic purges; that is also why the terms of reference of officials were sometimes closely specified and why they were bound over in large recognizances to discharge the duties of their offices properly. But this was not, of course, a problem unique to aristocratic service. Medieval governance was based on the one hand on a small cadre of professional officials and on the other on a very large pool of amateur leaders of local society who alone had the knowledge, ties, and status to command the obedience of that society. If in the process they lined their own pockets and boosted their own prestige, that was an inevitable price that had to be paid. And it was a price paid by all lords—king, magnates, and bishops—alike. When the commissioners tried to explain why the yield of Brecon in 1302 did not match its target, ²⁴ For Marcher lordships, Davies, Lordship and Society, 200–1; for Irish liberties, A. J. OtwayRuthven, A History of Medieval Ireland, 183–8; Frame, English Lordship, 24–7.

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his explanation was simple: ‘there have been bad and disloyal stewards and bailiffs.’ Integrating the activities of widely dispersed inheritances and coordinating the policies and supervision of an assemblage of officials posed daunting administrative problems. Communications were poor and sanctions often ineffective as they came up against the inertia and vested interests of local power structures. But if lordship was to be ‘fair’ and effective it was imperative that central control and supervision of local governance be regular and directive. It could operate broadly along two channels—those of the written command and of the personal visit. The effectiveness and reach of lordship, so we have insisted, were transformed by the triumph of the written word in governance.²⁵ The aristocratic world of late medieval England was bound together by a network of correspondence and oral messages entrusted to confidential messengers to a degree which can hardly be guessed at from the tiny proportion that survives.²⁶ Gossip and greetings were exchanged between lords and ladies, laymen and ecclesiastics; ears were kept close to the ground for political rumour; favours were requested and petitions forwarded; good lordship was sought and mutual promises made. Such correspondence kept lords in touch with each other as they retired to their estates. Much of it was composed for them, but some of it was penned in the lord’s own hand, such as the letter Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397) wrote ‘de ma mayn’.²⁷ This was private correspondence; but letters were equally crucial if the lord was to keep in touch with his retainers and followers and to weld them into an effective corps of supporters. The accounts of Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) are particularly eloquent in this respect. On 17 April 1319 alone, seventy-two letters were despatched to members of his affinity, including twenty-three knights, and on 9 May a further seventy-six letters were addressed to named abbots and priors. These were, it is true, totally exceptional figures in exceptional circumstances; four-to-six letters per day would probably be more normal. Even in more placid times the travel network of the earl’s couriers and messengers was impressive, as they fanned out from Pontefract to Spalding, Thoresby, Halton, Lancaster, or Denbigh and as one of them set out on an eighteen-day journey to Lord Courtenay in Devon.²⁸ Correspondence kept lords and their followers in regular touch with each other; but, from the point of view of the current discussion, it is the role of the written word in integrating the lord’s inheritance into an effective administrative and governmental unit which is crucial. Just as the chancery and exchequer of ²⁵ See above, pp. 182–3. ²⁶ I have drawn in particular on the splendid, and underused, collection in Legge (ed.), Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, and on references in account rolls. ²⁷ Legge (ed.), Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, no. 30. ²⁸ TNA DL 28/1/13.

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the king of England sent a regular stream of directives to the sheriffs and officers of the localities, so did the great aristocratic lords to their stewards, receivers, and local ministers. Very little such correspondence survives; if it does at all, it would be as files of warrants and vouchers which an accounting officer would produce to justify his allowances and expenditure when he appeared before the lord’s auditors. One such file in the Mortimer archives (admittedly mainly receipts rather than letters) for one year runs to almost a hundred items.²⁹ It was, as far as we know, only from the mid fourteenth century that copies of such seigniorial administrative correspondence were made and kept in registers. Such registers survive from the estates of the Black Prince and of John of Gaunt (certainly on Gaunt’s estates by 1367, though the earliest surviving register only begins a decade later). They cover a vast range of business: many of them are directives from the lord, his council, or his major officers; others are responses to local petitions and pleas; many are acts of pardon and largesse; quite a few are reactions to visits and recommendations made by the lord’s central officers (especially his auditors) on their visits to the localities. In the case of John of Gaunt we know that c.300–400 such letters were sent annually and copied into the registers. It may well be that the sheer size of the estates of the Black Prince and John of Gaunt meant that the degree of seigniorial supervision and direction of local affairs was more intense and sophisticated than a smaller inheritance; but all that we know of other aristocratic estates—such as those of Fitzalan, Mortimer, and Stafford—suggests otherwise. Written directions were underpinned by frequent personal visits from the lord’s central officials—coming on a regular basis (as did the auditors normally twice yearly) or on individual visits, be it singly or in small groups or, occasionally, as the lord’s council. Whatever the format of the visit, it brought the full authority of central investigation and direction to bear on local affairs. The sequence of visits paid by the officials of Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), in 1386–7 to his border lordship of Clun and his contiguous estates in western Shropshire may serve as an illustration.³⁰ Some of the visits were for a specific purpose: a group of officials spent three days sorting and weighing the wool from the large Fitzalan flocks in the lordship (a task which was clearly too important to be left to local officials); the auditor took eight days and in May a further four days to audit the accounts there (again suggesting a degree of thoroughness). Even more impressive are the references to the extended visits of the lord’s council to this rather remote, upland lordship. Members of the council (so-called) were there in December, staying at the abbey of Haughmond and ²⁹ TNA SC 6/1293/4.

³⁰ Shropshire Record Office. Shrewsbury 552/1A/8.

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visiting the Arundel castle at Shrawardine (both in Shropshire) en route; another batch of councillors paid a visit in August and dined together at Shrewsbury. But the most impressive visit was one which lasted in total for nine days. It was headed by Sir David Hanmer, chief justice of the King’s Bench and a man retained for his legal expertise by Arundel,³¹ Sir Stephen Dauntsey, and others. They were met by an assemblage of local officers who were no doubt closely cross-examined. The scribe’s description of the terms of reference of this extended visit indicates how comprehensive and thorough it was: ‘to supervise and determine divers items of the lord’s affairs and the business of the lord’s lordships of Clemsland and Shropshire and to make arrangements for the healthy governance (salubre gubernatione) and fortune of those lordships’. After this extended visit, the local regime in Clun could not have been under any illusion that its every move and action was subject to close central scrutiny. These regular local official visits were supplemented occasionally by overview visitations of all, or a goodly portion, of the lord’s inheritance. Such visitations were often headed by the chief steward, the receiver-general, and other key officers and might be called a tourn. Few records of such tourns have survived; but one undertaken on the estates of the earl of Stafford in 1386—quite possibly to inaugurate the rule of a new earl—shows how comprehensive they could be.³² It began in the lordship of Newport in south-east Wales on 11 May and proceeded, on a full weekly timetable, via Caw (Shropshire), Stafford, Thornbury (Gloucestershire) and so across the Stafford manors of England to Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and East Anglia. At each venue officers and tenants submitted petitions, decisions were endorsed on bills, pleas for the remission of arrears were considered, and the state of buildings was reviewed. It was investigative, administrative lordship in itinerant action. The regular high point of this interaction between central direction and local accountability was the twice-yearly audit (corresponding closely to the timetable followed by the royal exchequer). Sometimes (as on the Lancaster estates) such audits were conducted regionally; elsewhere (as on the Lacy inheritance) the auditors themselves went on circuit. Thoroughness was the keynote: officers (including the lord’s central officers) were required to submit their accounts well in advance; court rolls were also submitted; and local accounts were then sealed prior to further inspection by the chief steward.³³ The basic purpose of the audit was to check on the honesty and competence of the accountant, not to calculate the yield or profitability of the unit he controlled. That is why historians have so frequently misread the nature of these accounts. But this did not mean that ³¹ For Hanmer’s career see Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr ˆ (he was Owain’s father-in-law), passim. ³² ∗ Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, D 641/1/2/3. ³³ For example Reg. JG, I, no. 1629.

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auditors confined themselves to this basic task. On the contrary, the audit could be a platform from which the lord could be provided with a range of shrewd financial advice on the running of his estates. One critical issue was that of the profitability of the estates in general and of demesne farming in particular. The audited account was not designed to yield such information; but from the late thirteenth century onwards, on some lay (Bigod, Clare) as well as monastic estates calculations of profit were being made.³⁴ How such calculations were made remains far from clear, since the notes of profit are cryptic in the extreme. Nevertheless they represent an important departure in seigniorial policy, indicating as they do a shift from mere accountability to calculations of profit. Furthermore, from the 1330s the most advanced aristocratic administrations—those of Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345), Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376)³⁵—consolidated the individual valuations of estates into a general valuation of the lord’s inheritance, the valor. By the late fourteenth–early fifteenth century such valors became increasingly common on aristocratic estates, including those of Stafford and Beauchamp. We must, it is true, not overestimate them. They are consolidated statements of estimated yield in a particular year, based on the details of the local accounts; they are not strictly a valuation of the lord’s income, let alone an estimate of his profits. But they do represent a significant attempt—not least as compared with the documents of the royal exchequer—to provide an overview of the lord’s potential assets in any particular year and even (on the Clare estates) a comparison of yield as between accounting years. Another document which bespeaks growing financial enterprise was the consolidated arrears account. Arrears were a perennial problem for medieval auditors; they represented the gap between potential and actual revenue. By no means all arrears were, to use the medieval term, ‘desperate’, that is, uncollectible; many were due to be paid in future instalments on agreed terms.³⁶ Nevertheless, if the issue of arrears was not to get out of hand, it was crucial that the lord’s auditors keep an overview of them and arrange tight schedules for prompt repayment. The consolidated arrears accounts did precisely that. They are often immensely detailed and on the Lancaster estates (and probably elsewhere) were compiled annually. They are another indication of the thoroughness of seigniorial financial administration. ³⁴ E. Stone, ‘Profit-and-Loss Accountancy at Norwich Cathedral Priory’, TRHS, 5th ser., 12 (1962), 25–48. For full references to the primary and secondary sources on that topic see Davies, ‘Baronial Accounts’, 211–29. ³⁵ The valors in question are TNA DL 40/1/11 fos. 43–55 (Lancaster); TNA SC 11/799, 801 (de Burgh, tabulated in Holmes, Estates, 143–7); Shropshire Record Office 552/1A/1 (Arundel). ³⁶ For arrears accounts and their interpretation see Davies, ‘Baronial Accounts’, 218–29.

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The significance of valors, arrears accounts, and the other documents which have been discussed in this chapter extends far beyond a diplomatic study in the financial archives of the medieval baronage. They represent one of the few ways we have of measuring the effectiveness, enterprise, and methods of seigniorial governance. The documentation that survives is but a tithe compared with that of royal financial records and even from that tithe we have made a limited selection, while admitting that variety rather than uniformity is the keynote of baronial archives. But, on balance, there remains little doubt that the quality and effectiveness of seigniorial administration—when due allowance has been made for its scale and problems—bears ready comparison with the best of royal and ecclesiastic administration. There was little that the officials of Edward III could have taught the remarkably enterprising cadre of servants who ran the estates of Elizabeth de Burgh, or those of Richard II, the regiment of officers who administered the vast duchy of Lancaster for John of Gaunt. If we aggregate the great aristocratic estates of the late medieval period, there can be little doubt that they made a very considerable—and regularly underrated—contribution to the governance of the British Isles. Their role needs to be recognized.

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the records of a household office unique to one lordship, The Havener’s Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287–1356, ed. M. Kowalski. Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, vol. 44 (Exeter, 2001). For the employment of the same individuals in seigniorial and royal service, P. Brand, ‘Stewards, Bailiffs and the Emerging Legal Profession in Later ThirteenthCentury England’, in Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston, ed. R. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004), and P. Brand, ‘A Versatile Legal Administrator and More: The Career of John of Fressingfield in England, Ireland and Beyond’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009). For the administration of particular lordships, M. Potterton, Medieval Trim: History and Archaeology (Dublin, 2005), ch. 3; M. Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005); A. McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin, 2005), ch. 2; R. Blakely, The Brus Family in England and Scotland, 1100–1295 (Woodbridge, 2005), ch. 7; C. Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140–1365 (Dublin, 2005), ch. 2. For John of Gaunt’s household, E. Will, ‘John of Gaunt’s

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Household: Attendance Rolls in the Glynde Archive, MS 3469’, in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008). For liberties in the British Isles see the essays in Liberties and Identities in Later Medieval Britain, ed. M. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 2008). For Irish liberties and Welsh Marcher lordships, R. Frame, ‘Lordship and Liberties in Ireland and Wales c.1170–c.1360’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007).

8 Dependence, Service, and Reward Dependence, service, and reward were fundamental concepts in medieval society, to a degree which our allegedly egalitarian and democratic mindsets find difficult to grasp. They operated at every social level and, formally or informally, bound together the different ‘orders’ of society in a complex web of relationships—king and subjects, lords and followers, tenants (including unfree tenants) and their manorial masters. But there are problems for the historian in trying to characterize the nature and scope of these relationships. Two in particular may be cited at this prefatory stage. Dependence is a vague, elastic concept; it lacks the specificity and ‘hard’ content which makes it amenable to historical analysis and measurement. This alone becomes possible when what we may call the ‘documents of dependence’ begin to survive—such as the feudal charters of the twelfth century onwards which stipulate the tenurial obligations of vassals to lords or, from the later thirteenth century in particular, the indentures of retinue which specify the terms on which retainers entered formally into the service of a lord.¹ The appearance of such documents is itself a matter of historical importance. It marks part of the triumph of the written word (ius scriptum) in the definition of human relationships and obligations. It is little wonder that historians have paid such attention to these documents—witness the intensive study of indentures of retinue in late medieval English historiography; they provide a secure documentary foothold in what is otherwise a sea of vague abstractions. With this, however, comes the danger that we mistake novelty of documentation for novelty of institutions and relationship. The second reservation we need to bear in mind is that documentation, especially formal documentation, constructs the world of relationships on its own terms and in furtherance of its own agenda. Historians can become its prisoners as well as its beneficiaries. This, as has been frequently pointed out, can apply, for example, to the centrality given to bonds of feudal tenure. It is not that they are necessarily important; but they were kept alive in the documentation often for reasons of intense legal conservatism.² Perhaps, above ¹ For the latter development see S. L. Waugh, ‘Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England’, EHR, 101 (1986), 811–39. ² A. A. M. Duncan has some characteristically trenchant and shrewd comments on the ‘tired’ vocabulary of feudal terminology in Scotland in his Scotland, chs. 7–8.

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all, concentration on particular genres of documentation can direct analysis to restricted interpretations of the complexity and variety of ties of dependence: those that can be documented, measured, and itemized. Lordship was built around the concepts of dependence and service. Beyond the specific obligations and rewards that it brought for both parties (lord and dependant) lay a whole set of expectations within which it was structured and interpreted. At its heart, as we have noticed, was an essentially personal relationship. The acceptance of lordship was inaugurated, often formally and ceremonially, by the proclamation of this personal relationship of dependence. The feudal vassal did so by doing homage and swearing fealty to his lord. By the later Middle Ages such ceremonies may appear increasingly formal and routine; but when we note the vigour with which men such as the Black Prince and John of Gaunt assembled their feudal tenants to perform homage to them publicly we must surely recognize that this was a relationship which still had life and meaning to it. Such life may have been primarily fiscal—the exaction of feudal incidents such as custody, wardship, and marriage; but it was also assuredly a visual display of the dependence and control which were at the heart of lordship. Nor was this insistence on the choreography of personal lordship confined to the knightly, feudal classes. It applied equally in a modified form down the social scale. When a tenant came into the manor court to be invested with a tenement, he was expected to swear an oath of fealty to the lord’s steward in full court.³ Other obligations—including the payment of an entry fine—were normally part of the contract; but in a society where the aural and visual were so crucial in establishing the formality and publicity of relationships, the oath of fealty was certainly not without significance. It was regularly copied into formulary books both in England and in Scotland.⁴ It had legal consequence: the tenant was now in a real sense the lord’s ‘man’: he was subjected to obligations on the one hand, and was entitled to receive protection on the other. That the bond was essentially personal, not territorial, was particularly clear in a category of dependants which is well known in Wales and Ireland, and probably likewise in much of upland Britain. In Wales they were known as advowry men: they did not hold land directly of the lord nor were they members of the kindred and lineage groups from whom the lord collected tributes and renders. But they had acknowledged the lord’s personal authority over them, paying him a token annual sum in recognition of the relationship. To use the term familiar to students of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval lordship, they had commended themselves to him. Nor were their numbers trivial: in the lordship of Bromfield and Yale (north-east Wales) in 1391 they numbered 857. They held no land as ³ F. Pollock & F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols., reissued with an introduction by S. F. C. Milsom (Cambridge, 1968), I, 296–307. ⁴ For Scottish example see Moray Reg., nos. 299–300.

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such from the lord nor did they pay him rent; but they were certainly within the orbit of his lordship and ultimately justiciable by him.⁵ They were among his dependants. It is perhaps from an unexpected quarter—late medieval Scotland—that we are reminded yet again how fundamental was this personal bond of lordship and dependence, and how its significance did not necessarily decline over time. Some eight hundred ‘bonds of manrent’, as they are termed, have survived from late medieval and early modern Scotland. Their significance extends far beyond Scotland (though they have been little noticed beyond it) because they open a window on to the personal bond of lordship and away from tenurial obligations. The essence of the bond was that the dependant gave the bond to the lord (not vice versa) and in return secured maintenance and protection—with the bond often extending to the dependant’s kin, men, and friends as well as to himself. It involved no land nor an annuity or pension as such. It corresponded closely to the homage of the feudal oath and as such dwelt in the world of ‘the intangible, the personal relationships between lords and their men’,⁶ the baseline of all lordship and dependency. Such a relationship operated at a collective and communal, as well as at a personal and individual, level. When a new lord visited his lordship—whether it came to him by inheritance or by royal grant—he inaugurated his arrival by insisting on a public acknowledgement of his lordship (just as the king did so by the ceremony of acclamation at his coronation). Three examples may be cited; they are all from Wales but there is no reason to think that in their essence and format they were not replicated elsewhere in the British Isles. The first took place at Wrexham (lordship of Bromfield and Yale in north-east Wales) in 1284 when the heir of the earl of Surrey took formal possession of the lordship—and with it the service of its inhabitants—from his father. Twenty-nine leading men of the lordship did homage to their new lord individually, followed by a communal act of homage by the rest of the tenants ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’.⁷ This splendid spectacle was repeated in another great and valuable lordship, Brecon, in 1302, when royal commissioners formally took seisin of the lordship on behalf of the king (in a deal he had made with the earl of Hereford) and took the fealty of two thousand Welshman through an interpreter. Even more impressive was the way that Edward, the Black Prince, inaugurated his rule in north Wales—and doubtless through the rest of his principality lands in 1343. His commissioners travelled around each district, assembling the leading men and requiring an oath of fealty from them (reminiscent of the Ragman Roll of 1296 which recorded individually the names of 1,600 individuals in Scotland ⁵ Davies, Lordship and Society, 139. ⁶ The quotation is from p. 2 of J. Wormald’s outstanding Lords and Men in Scotland. ⁷ CIPM, II, no. 633 (but inadequately calendared); CIM 1219–1317, no. 1870.

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who had submitted to Edward I).⁸ Likewise when the relationship between the lord and his dependants was fractured, it had to be formally and visually repaired in a great public act of contrition and reaffirmation. So it was, to take another Welsh example, that in March 1414 a series of assemblies was held in north Wales—there were said to be 600 men present at the one at Bala—in which the local community apologized for its rebellion and renewed its personal submission to its lord, the king.⁹ What was basically entered into in such a relationship was a set of abstract commitments (to which specific obligations could, of course, be added). As with friendship, so with dependence it was a human bond and obligation which was at its heart. It came as no surprise that it borrowed the vague terminology of an earlier age. To be faithful (fidelis) was the prime obligation, and what that entailed was the giving of aid (auxilium) and advice (consilium), two of the oldest and vaguest words in the lexicon of medieval dependence.¹⁰ There was talk of the lord’s ‘honour’ and ‘right’ and the need to uphold and defend them and of ‘taking the lord’s part in all his actions’. There was even an echo of the language of family sentiments and the ethic of friendship—of the need for the dependant to show ‘good cousinship and total benevolence’ (bonecousinage et entiere naturesse).¹¹ The relationship between lord and dependant varied hugely, of course, according to the relative status and powers of the two parties. Between near equals it was close to an alliance; between lord and tenant it was very much de haut en bas —‘humble and obedient in body and chattels’ as a serf might be described. But even the serf was the serf of the lord, nativus domini; and there was an element of mutuality in the relationship. Lordship and dependence were constructed around this expectation of mutuality. Protection was the baseline obligation due from the lord. As a German legal handbook put it directly: ‘we should serve our lords for they protect us; if they do not protect us, justice does not oblige us to serve them.’¹² Nor was such a promise of protection merely an idle boast. The letters of the Black Prince, for example, are full of the bluster and threats which he directed at those—including the archdeacon of Cornwall—who dared to extort money from his tenants or did not pay for their goods.¹³ At all levels of society, protection—whether open or kept under wraps—was one of the most treasured facets of lordship. We should not underestimate its significance because it does not correspond to our notions of public order and governance. ⁸ The fealty roll of 1343 for Wales is published in Archaeologia Cambrensis: Original Documents Printed as a Supplement to the Journal. Vol 1, (London, 1877), cxlviii–clxxv. ⁹ See Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr, ˆ 2 and sources cited there. ¹⁰ See, for example, ‘Private Indentures’, no. 1 (1278). ¹¹ ‘Private Indentures’, no. 77 (1389); no. 90 (1397). ¹² Quoted from Schwabenspiegel c. 308 in Brunner, Land and Lordship, 200. ¹³ Reg. BP, II, 7, 32; IV, 59.

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To have a lord—whether he was called such or not—was the expectation. One danger is to limit the circuit of dependence to those for whom we have formal documentation of its existence. Of course, the reach of lordship extended much further than those who, according to the late medieval evidence, were in receipt of annuities or formally retained by a lord. Sometimes lords could blurt out the scope of their influence, even among the knightly classes. There was hardly a knight, so the earl of Leicester boasted, whom he could not overthrow if he refused the earl aid.¹⁴ It is a comment which could have been echoed down the centuries and across the British Isles. The format of the dependence varied and so did the ceremony which might inaugurate it. In much of Gaelic Ireland, for example, dependence was announced by ‘entering the house’ of the superior, being entertained by him and receiving his gifts. The ceremonies corresponded to those of homage and investiture, but the end result was the same.¹⁵ The Beauchamp affinity, it has been observed, ‘can best be described as a series of concentric circles with the earl at the centre’.¹⁶ This definition can serve as a general point of introduction to the range and scope of aristocratic dependence. Historians have, on the whole, compartmentalized their discussions of the operation of lordship within self-contained segments—from, for example, the groups of retainers (knights, gentry, and esquires by and large) who composed the lord’s indentured retinue, to the large groups of tenants and their families who lived on his manors/lordship and were financially and judicially answerable to him and his officials. Clearly the distinction between these groups of dependants—and the other groups between the two polarities—was huge and so, therefore, was the nature of lordship exercised over them. But equally we would be mistaken not to take note of the continuum that was involved in lordship at all social and economic levels. Just as our understanding of royal lordship should bring within its embrace the whole way in which a king’s authority and power (especially in England) impinged on all his subjects as well as his relationship with his magnates, so our interpretation of aristocratic lordship should be ecumenical. French historians have even tried to estimate the actual numbers of men who contributed to the resources of a seigneurie —1,800 being justiciable and 1,040 persons owing rent on one such seigneurie in Champagne.¹⁷ It is with this broad-based aspect of dependence that we begin. Lordship over men, as we have insisted, was the primary form of lordship, as was the collection ¹⁴ Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle, ed. R. C. Johnston (Oxford, 1981), 70. ¹⁵ For excellent discussions of the rituals of submission in Gaelic Ireland see Simms, From Kings to Warlords and M. T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford, 1989). ¹⁶ C. Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp Affinity: A Study of Bastard Feudalism at Work’, EHR, 95 (1980), 514–32 at p. 515. ¹⁷ P. Verdier, ‘La Construction d’une Seigneurie dans la Champagne du XIIIe siècle: Renier Acorre, seigneur de Gouaix (1257–1289)’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1995), 99–110.

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of tributary dues, food renders, and entertainment obligations.¹⁸ This pattern may have been substantially overlaid, especially in the lowlands, by other claims and relationships, notably dues from land and all that came in their wake. But if we take the British Isles as a whole what is striking (especially in the west and uplands) is the centrality of the leadership of men as a feature of lordship. Thus when King David II of Scotland transferred three named sheriffdoms to William, Lord Douglas, he bestowed upon him—in a significant phrase—‘the leading of the men’ of these sheriffdoms, and likewise in 1370 James Douglas was granted ‘leadership of all the men of his lands’.¹⁹ Some of these men were ‘tenants’ in that they held land tenurially of the lord, but most were not: it was simply that they lived within the orbit of the lord’s power and were thereby beholden, directly or indirectly, to him—at least when he made demands of them. Their relationship with the lord was often at one or indeed several removes: they might belong to lineage groups which acknowledged the lord’s ultimate superiority or they might be the dependants of gentry or lairds who were in turn in the lord’s orbit. The nature and even the terminology of dependence varied from place to place: lordship had to adjust to the landscape of existing social institutions and practices. Even so, the language of the dependent groups and their leaders is revealing: we hear of ‘people and liegemen’, ‘affinity’, ‘lynages’, ‘adherence’, ‘retanance’, and ‘nation’ (in the restricted sense of kinsmen); as for the lords themselves, we hear of ‘captain of the nation’, ‘principal of his nation’, ‘tam de natione quam de familia’. Some of these terms were restricted to the western British Isles; but others were not. And at the root of many of them lies an echo of the vocabulary of family and kin leadership, some of the oldest features of lordship itself. The ‘leadership of men’ dimension of lordship has tended to be underestimated by historians, partly because it was not tied to specific obligations but rather to a broad pool of contingency support and partly, no doubt, because in England in particular it operated within a framework of royal lordship and control. But it never lay far below the surface of the power structure of medieval society. When a lord wished to raise an army to display his power (and possibly to serve the king) it was to this pool of men that he turned. So, for example, did Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), whose military recruitment for the 1375 Breton expedition has been cited above.²⁰ So even more obviously were the forces which the earls and great lords of Scotland and Ireland assembled in what were in effect ‘lands of war’. Even in ‘lands of peace’ (as England certainly was in comparison) a lord could bare the teeth of his power, in periods of political turbulence, by drawing upon the service and loyalty of the men of his ‘country’. Such, for example, was much of the key to the success of Henry Bolingbroke’s coup in summer 1399. The surviving local Lancastrian accounts show vividly how he deployed the resources and contents of his estates (those of his late father ¹⁸ See above, pp. 159–61. ²⁰ See above, pp. 129–30.

¹⁹ Brown, Black Douglases, 49.

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and of his wife) to coordinate the downfall of Richard II.²¹ Similarly over a century earlier, when Edward I had tried to destabilize the power of Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, his agents had to report that his efforts were a failure, for the men of Earl Humphrey had stood solidly with their lord. Earl Humphrey had won them over in part by confirming their charters of liberties: he had recognized that the loyal commitment of his men—even in the wake of royal bluster and bribes—was the return on good lordship.²² Even short of such dangerous confrontations, a powerful aristocratic lord could deploy his pool of supporters to promote his interests in a ruthless fashion. When the Percies and the Cliffords were preparing for their showdown with Henry IV in 1403–4, the constable of Bamburgh reported how their knights had ‘procured to themselves a great multitude of your men and given them livery of the crescents [the Percy livery] and have sworn to keep the castles against you and all others’.²³ The Percies were, of course, involved in full-scale rebellion; but even in much more local disputes the ‘support of the lord’s men’ could prove truly menacing. Thomas Herbert must have been relieved when a force of forty-five men and horses rode from Lichfield, Maxtoke, and Atherston to threaten his enemies. By the mid 1440s the situation was even more volatile: the duke of Buckingham summoned various knights, esquires, gentlemen, and others from Kent and Surrey to come to meet him and another group of at least sixty-six persons to ride in support of his cause from Kent to Essex.²⁴ Examples such as these are legion, especially by the time we reach the more abundant documentary sources of the fifteenth century. They are, very properly, cited in discussions of the onset of civil war and the perversion of the normal processes of justice. But they also, from the present perspective, cast light on the sources and assumptions of aristocratic power and on the way that great lords could manipulate the resources of dependent lordship to further their power and ambitions. Nor would the magnates have been in the least embarrassed by proclaiming as much; theirs was a social, even governmental, superiority which was part of the natural order and, within limits, deserved recognition and respect. The point was made most diplomatically by Bishop Russell in his draft sermon in 1483 when he declared that ‘the polityk rule of every region wele ordeigned stondithe in the nobles.’ The duke of Norfolk, in a passage already cited, was a good deal more forthright: ‘We lete yow wete [know] that nexst the kynge our soverayn lord, be his good grace and lycence, we woll have the princypall rewle ²¹ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 136–8; N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1997), 407–8; Davies, Lordship and Society, 85. ²² Cal. Anc. Corr., 101 (wrongly dated); CPR 1292–1301, 293. ²³ Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, King of England and of France, and Lord of Ireland, ed., F. C. Hingeston, 2 vols. (London, 1860–1965), I, 206–7. ²⁴ *Staffordshire Record Office, D 641/1/2/15; McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century, 234–5.

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and governance throwh all this schir.’²⁵ He had doffed his cap to the king’s ultimate authority; but in every other respect what he was claiming was nothing less (to borrow the Scottish phrase) than ‘the leadership of the men of his lands’. It was a claim which most of his fellow magnates would at least have understood. We opened this brief review of the orbit of aristocratic dependence at the very outer limits of such an orbit—simply those who were, directly or indirectly, within the range of the lord’s power and appeal. The link of this group was at best spasmodic and open-ended; it was not based on written or even real contract, but simply on the magnetic appeal and expectation which a lord exercised on his own country. Dependence in the minor orbit of the lord’s authority was a very different matter. It was often a matter of daily or weekly service, of regular obligations and regular rewards. These were the troupes of servants and menials—valets, pages, grooms, nursemaids, and others—who provided the basic services of the ‘household below stairs’ and attended to the multifarious domestic needs of the household.²⁶ They often numbered somewhere between 80 and 100 per noble household. The vast majority were nameless, living in the household and travelling with it; but the bequests in aristocratic wills show that occasionally, and not unsurprisingly, a bond of affection grew up between them and the lord. Higher up the echelon of service, and sometimes bound by official indentures, came a group of followers who recommended themselves for their professional skills as cooks, masons, clarioners, trumpeters, bargemen, and so forth. It was in this spirit, no doubt, that Master William Holme, king’s physician, was retained for life receiving £10 per annum, robes with fur, and other allowances.²⁷ Such men were not resident at the lord’s household on a regular basis, but within reason were at his beck and call when their services were required; they wore his livery, especially when on his service, and often drew a regular annuity or reward. Alongside them we should place key estate and household officials, some of whom, as we have seen, were more or less full-time professionals, some key local officials, and the lord’s councillors. The livery roll of the earl of Devon for 1384–5 included eighty-two names, ranging from seven knights to three ladies in waiting and six pages. And we need to recall that the earl of Devon was among the poorer earls and his power was largely localized.²⁸ Among those who were in receipt of his livery were fourteen lawyers. It is a group which is represented on the payroll of all major aristocrats.²⁹ Many of the king’s leading judges and serjeants-at-law were paid a retaining fee; so were apprentices at law and attorneys at the central courts; in addition, ²⁵ Quoted in S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936), 172; Gairdner (ed.), Paston Letters, I, 230. ²⁶ See above, pp. 102–6. ²⁷ CPR 1374–7, 392. ²⁸ Cherry, ‘Courtney earls of Devon’, 71–97. ²⁹ The classic studies of this topic are, especially, J. R. Maddicott, Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England (Past and Present Supplement no. 4, 1978) and Ramsay, ‘Retained Legal Counsel’.

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many minor administrative and legal officials, including doorkeepers and clerks, were paid regular, if normally modest, fees in the hope, no doubt, that they would expedite the lord’s business. When we learn, to take a single example from many, that in 1384 among the lawyers who were feed (admittedly modestly) by the earl of Stafford were some of the leading legal luminaries of the day—including Sir Robert Belknap, Sir Robert Plessington, Sir David Hanmer, Robert Charleton—as well as a clerk of the bench, we realize how entrenched and extensive was the habit of protecting the aristocracy’s legal flank in advance of litigation.³⁰ It is a practice which attracted—especially in respect of royal judges—a great deal of contemporary criticism and was substantially curtailed—at least as far as judges were concerned—by the end of the fourteenth century. Historians have, understandably, been equally suspicious: retaining royal judges and other feed lawyers seems a particularly reprehensible example of the corruption of the judicial system. It is a topic to which we will return below, pp. 211 and 213–15, when we discuss the charge of ‘maintenance’ (the claim that justice was perverted by the abuse of aristocratic influence). But in the present context it is worth making two observations. The first is the self-evident truth that in a world where disputes were generally settled by litigation and where the title to land was regularly under challenge, the need to have ready access to professional advice inevitably entailed the retaining of a corps of legal advisers. Such advice, and the payment which went with it, did not guarantee success; but it was an insurance policy which no lord could afford to overlook. Secondly, most leading judges and lawyers were retained simultaneously by several lords (and doubtless religious corporations). Their loyalties were rarely exclusively committed. That did not necessarily guarantee their neutrality; but it needs to be set alongside the assumption that these men were in the pocket of a particular lord. The case of Sir David Hanmer, chief justice of the King’s Bench in the 1380s, illustrated the point: his portfolio of fees included retainers from John of Gaunt, the earl of Stafford, the Charltons of Powys, and Lestranges of Knockin; he was also a member of the councils of the earls of Arundel and March. Sir David was certainly ecumenical in the way he dispensed his legal expertise and collected his rewards.³¹ The various groups which we have hitherto classified under the vague formula of the lord’s dependants did indeed form ‘a series of concentric circles’ which ranged from those who were daily and menial employees, through those whose professional services as lawyers, masons, or officers made their assistance desirable, and on to the crowds of supporters from the lord’s ‘country’ who answered his beck and call as the occasion arose. But there was another group of dependants which has a much higher and distinctive profile in the historiography of the ³⁰ *Staffordshire Record Office D. 641/1/2/2. ³¹ For references to the sources for his fees, see Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr, 357 n.18.

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subject. This group is often known as the lord’s affinity. It consisted for the most part of client gentry, men of independent means and standing in their own localities and counties, but bound by ties of dependence to a lord, or to more than one lord. It is not difficult to understand why the lord’s affinity has been the focus of such close historiographical attention, especially for late medieval England. Substantively, it represents the obvious point of entry into the world of dependent aristocratic bonds, the complex links which connected the various ‘orders’ of gentle society, and thereby into the whole vexed issue conjured by the phrase ‘bastard feudalism’ and with it the social and political dynamics of late medieval society. This is why the issue has occupied centre stage especially since the appearance of K. B. McFarlane’s classic study of 1945, followed by a host of individual and general studies.³² Compiling lists of members of the affinity, and thereafter tracing their careers and the web of their connections, gives a texture to our understanding of the character of political society at county and regional level, which is impossible for earlier periods; the survival from the late thirteenth century of a genre of document which specifies in detailed written form the obligations of lord and the members of the affinity in a precise and unprecedented fashion is clearly hugely significant. The document in question is, of course, the private indenture for life service in peace and war. More than 150 of these indentures survive in England and Ireland for the two centuries 1278–1476 and have been gathered together in an exemplary edition. They are a cardinal source for the study of late medieval lordship. Paradoxically their very existence may do the historian a measure of disservice. As with any novel genre of document, we may exaggerate their novelty. As Simon Walker shrewdly pointed out,³³ ‘an indenture of retinue merely formalized and recorded, for a specific occasion, the unwritten rules by which they (those retained by formal written indenture) always lived.’ Nor need we assume that the formal indenture was by any means unusual in its usage. Apart from the usual problem of rates of survival of such private documents, we need to recall that it may not have been favoured by all aristocratic families or in all areas—though the survival of a considerable number of examples, and early ones, from parts of English Ireland is a timely reminder that this area (so often overlooked by English historians) was within the same social-cultural aristocratic world as England itself and borrowed its habits quickly and readily. Above all, perhaps, we need to recall that the range of aristocratic dependence extended far beyond the small numbers of those for whom formal indentures happen to survive. There were many dependants who were not formally retained but were in receipt of annuities and occasional gifts. ³² K. B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, BIHR, 20 (1945), 161–80. Among a plethora of other studies two general overviews may be cited: Bean, From Lord to Patron, and M. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995). An exceptional book about an exceptional affinity is Walker, Lancastrian Affinity. ³³ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 9.

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To take a late example, it has been pointed out that only 31 out of 141 known annuitants of the duke of Buckingham (d. 1460) had their tenure of service regulated by indenture of retinue.³⁴ In spite of these caveats and others which may be added to them, the indentures of retinue do provide a valuable list of what were increasingly considered, on legal advice, as the basic terms and conditions of service between lord and dependant. Especially was this so by the second half of the fourteenth century as such indentures became increasingly, though by no means totally, uniform and were no doubt copied into seigniorial formularies. They were bilateral contracts for life service in peace and in war as opposed to short-term contracts for a specified period or to raise troops for a specific expedition; they laid down the obligations of the retainer, in peace and war: they specified the rewards due to the retainer, typically an annuity or rent in land, and the rights of lodging and food he and some of his followers could claim when he attended the lord’s household (bouche de court); they often entered into detail on how the losses (for instance, of horses) or gains (for example, ransoms) of the retainers were to be compensated or shared. They were formally validated contracts and as such enforceable at law. Beneath these broad terms there were, of course, variations in the conditions: on issues such as the obligations of the retainer, which might include attendance in parliament, tournaments, or crusades, and in rates of reward. The latter—as with so much else in gentle society—became increasingly tied to rank: often £20 or 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) for a knight and £10 for a squire, with a proviso that the higher rate might be paid if the status of the retainer changed. Beneath the neat formulae of the indentures, there was—one suspects—rather more negotiation than meets the documentary eye. We catch a fascinating glimpse, for example, of a would-be retainer petitioning for a contract; but having to be told that the lord had a waiting list of such requests and that there was in effect a freeze on such grants for two years.³⁵ Retainers might also lay down limitations on their terms of service: in 1317 (no. 15)³⁶ John Darcy, in concluding an agreement with Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), reserved the right to serve with whichever lord he wished at tournaments, and added that if the earl wished for his service on such an occasion he was obliged to offer Darcy as much as he could gain from any other lord. Likewise Sir John Russel on entering into an indenture with the earl of Warwick in 1383 (no. 71) limited his obligation to serve the earl in war to those occasions on which the earl himself served in person. Clearly there was hard bargaining at work. So much so that occasionally a lord was prompted to fire a shot across the bows ³⁴ Rawcliffe, The Staffords, 232–40. ³⁵ Legge (ed.), Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, no. 186. ³⁶ References in brackets in the text—e.g. (no. 12)—refer to the edition of the indentures by Michael Jones and Simon Walker, ‘Private Indentures’.

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of a petulant petitioner. In a famous letter of 1478 Lord Strange spelt out the position unambiguously to Sir William Stonor: ‘I woll not be ovirmastred with none of my feedmen . . . yf ye dele as ye owght I vrolbe your goode lorde, and eke I dare better displese yow than ye me.’³⁷ Occasionally, indentures of service were part of a broader set of agreements: so it was that when Hugh Despenser retained Sir Peter Ovedale, the deal also involved the marriage of Sir Peter to Hugh’s sister (no. 22). The opportunities and benefits of indentures served the interest of both parties. The lord secured a definitive statement of the retainer’s obligations. His ability to attract men of good local standing displayed his pulling power in the local community; they were his eyes, ears, and supporters within it. The retainers could be expected, even required, to attend the lord on great public occasions—parliament or a tournament or ‘other assemblies’, again in a visual reminder of the lord’s appeal. When he assembled an expeditionary force, at the core would be retainers permanently bound to him to serve; they in turn could, and did, serve as his recruiting officers, so as Bean has emphasized, ‘a great household was composed, in part, of some smaller households absorbed within the greater one where their lords attended their lords.’³⁸ It is at the domestic level that the role of such retainers is arguably most elusive. We must not assume that their rights to board and lodging at the lord’s household were mere formalities. They no doubt turned up there on the high feasts of the lord’s social calendar and whenever they were summoned. They acted, alongside others, as his ‘natural councillors’. It is striking, for example, how often some of the retainers of the house of Mortimer witness the key transactions of the family—endowing a monastery or arranging a marriage deal. None of these obligations was peculiar to indentured retainers but they formed an obvious group on whose services he could contractually rely. For the retainer the advantages were even more self-evident. He was no longer a ‘floater’, needing to make an introduction and a request to a lord on each occasion. He could expect to have rights of access, directly or indirectly, to his lord’s patronage and support, and not only for himself but in turn also for his own dependants and even their dependants.³⁹ He was in receipt of the lord’s livery or badge—a visual expression of his attachment and a reminder to all of the patronage he enjoyed. He would normally be in receipt of an annuity, which could often be a substantial addition to his income. He could offer his military support in return for the prospect that his lord would open the sluice gate of ³⁷ The Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (London, 1919), II, no. 230; Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483, ed. C. Carpenter (Cambridge, 1996), no. 230. ³⁸ Bean, From Lord to Patron, 40. ³⁹ The whole web of patronage in this respect—including cajolery, threat, wheedling, bargains, etc.—is vividly illustrated at an early date in The Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1304–5, ed. H. Johnstone (Roxburghe Club, London, 1931).

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royal patronage in his favour.⁴⁰ In addition the dependant could tap into the fund of favours that a great lord—or his friends—had at their disposal—offices, ecclesiastical livings, pensions, pardons, legal protection, wardships, marriages, gifts of timber and venison, leases of estates. Above such individual awards, and ultimately more central, was simply basking in the favour of a powerful patron. Men who were important enough to be the subject of a life contract were already people of standing in their own local societies or in their own careers or professions. Detailed studies of some of the best-documented noble affinities of the period—among them those of Thomas of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, the earl of Devon, Elizabeth de Burgh, and the Beauchamps—have established the broad character and recruitment base of such affinities. It is not in the least surprising that many of them were bound together by family ties and had served the lord and his descendants over two or three generations. At least seventeen of the identifiable annuitants of Duke Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361) passed into the service of John of Gaunt, and John of Gaunt in turn built upon affinity for his son, Henry Bolingbroke, in part from the ranks of his own knights and esquires. A good number of others were drawn from the lord’s estates and even from the broader ‘country’ which was his sphere of influence. This was a natural catchment area and helped to shape the geographical character of the affinity: the Courtenays, for example, concentrated their recruitment in Devon and the Percies in Northumberland; but a really great lord such as Gaunt spread his recruiting net much further, concentrating, it is true, initially in Lancashire and Yorkshire, but expanding over the decades into the midlands, East Anglia, and beyond. Between 1370 and 1378—when the evidence is particularly rich—his retainers were drawn from twenty-two different counties.⁴¹ Recruitment was not confined by history or geography. Ambitious young men were in search of good lords and vice versa. A letter of recommendation from an existing member of the affinity might do the trick; so would talks of military prowess or the recommendation of a powerful patron. Both parties had to work at the relationship—to establish it and to keep it in good heart. Lords had to prove their worship as much as retainers their service. If a retainer wished to offer his services to another, additional lord, there was an etiquette to be observed. ‘Please do not be displeased,’ said one lord writing in a revealing letter to another, ‘that we have retained E. de C. with us, before he came along to you to get your permission. . . . Rather grant him your good lordship (bone seigneurie) as he very much wishes to have it.’⁴² This was the world of the formation of the aristocratic affinity. ⁴⁰ See, for example, the interesting letter published in Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 355. ⁴¹ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 26–36. ⁴² Legge (ed.), Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, no. 230.

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The aristocratic affinity and the indenture of life service have been at the centre of much of the historical discussion of late medieval lordship and in particular of what has been characterized, generally pejoratively, as ‘bastard feudalism’. They have been seen as part of the cancer in the body politic, as a manifestation of the disruptive influence of so-called over-mighty magnates in the local, regional, and national life of late medieval society, especially in England. We are not called upon here to enter into these debates, but in the light of our broad-brush discussion of the nature and dynamics of aristocratic dependence, some of the issues deserve an airing from such a perspective, rather than from that of the historical pathology of late medieval English political society. Perhaps the oldest charge against the aristocratic affinity is that it represented the distortion, the bastardization, of the healthy relationship between lord and man which had been at the heart of the original, pristine, ‘feudal’ bond. The reward of land was replaced by that of money; exclusive loyalty to one lord by cynically multiple commitments to several. These charges—both of which have substance in terms of money-rewards and multiple service—have long been shown to be based on a false and idealized contrast between ‘feudal’ and ‘bastard feudal’ relationships. Men of the status of indentured retainers were not Pavlovian dogs, responding unilaterally and exclusively to the command of a lord. A valued retainer would not find it difficult to secure contracts of service, annuities, and rewards from more than one lord; likewise an ambitious lord would not be inhibited from seeking the service of a valued prospective retainer even though he had an existing link with another lord. Nor—contrary to common opinion—would such multiple loyalties have put a strain on the retainer’s choice of loyalties, at least in normal circumstances. In relatively stable political societies—such as late medieval England was for the most part—and in a world where the nodal points of a lord’s power were geographically dispersed, multiple loyalties reinforced the complexity of ties of loyalty and service. England, in particular, was not a collection of zones of exclusive aristocratic power where a single lord enjoyed a monopoly of control; multiple service was a reflection of the kaleidoscopic and fragmented character of aristocratic lordship. There is one other point which should be made on this issue.⁴³ It is tempting to interpret the careers and behaviour of indentured retainers mainly or even exclusively in terms of their vertical relationships with their lord, as members of an affinity. This, after all, is how we come across them in the documents. Yet this is, of course, a simplification, even a distortion. The retainers were men of standing and power in their own communities and often on a wider stage. Normally they would spend only a small proportion of their time in the service of their lord. Much of their time would be devoted to their own estates and affairs, dealing with neighbours and tenants, pursuing their family ambitions and strategies, discharging their duties in the governance of the localities, serving on ⁴³ Prof. Davies’s text at this point reads ‘even if we return to it more fully in a later chapter’.

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campaigns, and answering the commands of the king. It was within this broad context that their lives were conducted and their decisions made, not in a oneeyed, automatic, knee-jerk obedience to their obligations, however important, to their lord. Men such as Sir Peter de la Mare, steward and retainer of the earl of March, or Sir Andrew Sackville, likewise household steward of an earlier earl of March, or Sir George Felbrigg who is to be found, sometimes simultaneously, in the service of the duke of Gloucester, the duke of Norfolk, and the earl of March, had busy, varied careers militarily and governmentally.⁴⁴ Their obligations to their indentured lords were only one of the many strands which went into the making of their careers and decisions. For the most part—and except possibly at times of high political drama—neither they nor their lords found it difficult to balance these various claims to their satisfaction. In the lexicon of the late medieval period, again especially in England, two other terms have come to be part of the shorthand for the malaise of aristocratic lordship—livery and maintenance. Both are topics which need not command our attention in detail, since they have been the subject of excellent historical discussions.⁴⁵ Attention will be confined to what these two contemporary explosive issues reveal about perceptions of aristocratic lordship and changing views of its code of conduct in late medieval society. Livery, the granting out of cloth by a lord in his distinctive colours and at his expense to his dependants, was an unexceptional and long-standing feature of what may be called displayed dependence. As such it was no different from other gifts and rewards that any lord expected to give and a retainer to receive. Bishop Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) of Lincoln was no worshipper at the altar of secular worldly conventions but he had no doubt of the importance of livery. ‘Order your knights and your gentlemen who wear your livery (vos robes) that they ought to wear that same livery every day, and especially at your table and in your presence to uphold your honour.’⁴⁶ The distribution of livery, once or twice a year normally, was one of the key visual rituals of lordship. The quality of the cloth and its length were strictly regulated by status and reinforced the hierarchical distinctions between the lord’s dependants. The lord’s top officials—including his legal advisers and members of his council—were dressed in his livery; but so also, for example, were his craftsmen, oarsmen, and musicians.⁴⁷ For the lord, the distribution of livery—increasingly to be supplemented and replaced by ⁴⁴ For de la Mare, see above pp. 41, 45, 46, 130, 185; for Sackville, Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, 49–81; for Felbrigg, Roskell et al. (eds.), House of Commons. ⁴⁵ Bean, From Lord to Patron, 17–22 provides a good starting point on livery; so does the introduction by G. L. Harriss to McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth century. I have also benefited from reading McFarlane’s unpublished lectures—his last set of lectures in Trinity term 1966, in Magdalen College Oxford archives—on lords and retainers. ⁴⁶ Walter of Henley’s Husbandry: Together with an Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie, and Robert Grosseteste’s Rules, ed. E. Lamond with an introduction by W. Cunningham (London, 1890), 85. ⁴⁷ See, for example, Household Accounts, II, 658 (duke of Clarence); Reg. BP, I, 12.

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collars, badges, caps, and hoods in the later fourteenth century—represented a considerable investment in the politics of display. The two surviving livery rolls for our period are for a lord and lady who were not key figures in the power politics of their day; even so the list of those in receipt of Elizabeth de Burgh’s livery in 1340 extended to 272 persons, that of Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, to 135 persons. These were paltry numbers as compared to extravagant numbers of livery distributed by Earl Thomas of Lancaster: he spent £1,080 under this heading in 1313–14 and £687 in 1318–19. His officers purchased the cloth from London merchants and had it transported to Pontefract to be tailored into liveries. Earl Thomas was spending inordinately in unusual circumstances; so was Bolingbroke’s receiver-general in the summer of 1399 when he distributed 192 gilt collars.⁴⁸ It is not difficult to envisage how a group of liveried followers posed an intimidating threat. Gangs of such followers hid behind the skirts of their lord’s protection and readily abused their status. It is no wonder that Gaunt’s followers thought that their badges would give them the earth and the sky—however much Gaunt himself may have sought to curb their boasts and activities. Gaunt at least was the premier lord in the land; but others of lesser status followed suit. Part of the resentment that built up against Sir Simon Burley, one of Richard II’s leading chamber knights, in the 1380s was centred on the claim that he issued 220 robes every Christmas—when he was not a great lord with a great income. Likewise in parliament in January 1404 the earl of Northumberland admitted to ‘the gederying of power, and yevyng of liverees’ in his recent conflict with the king.⁴⁹ By the mid–late fourteenth century the indiscriminate distribution of livery had come to be seen, among the new aristocratic gentle classes, as the unacceptable and oppressive face of irresponsible lordship and as a root cause of disorder. A vigorous campaign was mounted in the Commons to limit the practice severely, leading to the ordinance of 1390 and statutes of 1399–1401. It was not so much an attempt to prohibit the distribution of livery as to define who was able to grant it (magnates) and who to receive and wear it (knights and esquires retained by life indenture and resident household servants).⁵⁰ What is of interest to us in the present context is what these debates and arguments reveal about the fracturing of views about the nature and exercise of aristocratic lordship. The attitude of the great magnates was brusquely summed up in 1384 in John of Gaunt’s dismissive comment that he was well able to control and discipline his own men; it was echoed again in 1388 when the lords resisted a campaign for the abolition of all ⁴⁸ Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 26–7; TNA DL 28/1/13 m.4; TNA DL 28/4/1 f.18v. ⁴⁹ Thomas Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, 1322–1388, ed. E. M. Thompson (R.S., 1874), 125; Knighton, Chron., 500. [PROME, VIII, 231, item 11.] ⁵⁰ R. L. Storey, ‘Liveries and Commissions of the Peace, 1388–90’, in The Reign of Richard II, ed. F. R. H. du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), 131–52; N. Saul, ‘The Commons and the Abolition of Badges’, Parliamentary History, 9 (1990), 302–15.

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liveries given by badges and hoods. But the Commons and their allies were not to be browbeaten so easily. They persisted in their campaign and it bore a measure of legislative fruit. What we catch here is a glimpse of the cross-currents which inevitably flowed in a complex body politic. Both parties respected, and did not challenge, the power of the vertical claims of aristocratic lordship, properly exercised, especially on those who were in a menial, contractual, and/or long-term dependence on a lord. That after all was, as it had been for centuries, part of the cement of a hierarchical society. But such dependence had to operate both within a framework of (changing) conventions of behaviour and in a society which was, at the level of gentry/lairds and above, sophisticated and multi-textured and far more complex than merely one of aristocratic power and dependence. This was ever more so with the passage of time, in the wake of far-reaching social, economic, and political changes. Lordship did not stand still, nor did those who played the games of power on its stage.⁵¹ The other word which regularly featured in any analysis of the malaise of late medieval lordship was ‘maintenance’. It referred to the improper and excessive support which a lord could give to a client or dependant in the pursuit of his case, legal or otherwise. Here again our interest is centred on what the issue can reveal about perceptions of late-medieval aristocratic lordship and the framework of conventions within which it had to operate. Historians have done a great deal to show that some of the crude claims about the nature and vicissitudes of ‘maintenance’ have been taken too much at their face value rather than being seen as part of contemporary polemic and explored within the context of other contemporary practices. After all, at one level ‘maintenance’ was the residuary legatee of an age-old expectation that the lord would, indeed should, further his client’s quarrel—through distraint, force, pillage, even feud if necessary—and should do so as an obligation of honour, especially in a society very considerably grounded on self-help and help by lord, family, and ‘friends’. Then again it is recognized that the mechanisms of ‘maintenance’ worked alongside the normal processes of litigation and court procedure, seeking no doubt to accelerate and influence them, but not working directly against them or challenging their authority. In spite of the assumptions of the modern outlook, ‘maintenance’ was not necessarily regarded as a covert, reprehensible activity. Conducted within the rules, it was an obligation of good lordship and good clientship. So it was, for example, that the earl of Ormond in 1356 pledged to ‘help favour, aid and maintain (juvare, fovere et mauntenere) Sir Richard de Burgh in all his just quarrels, as a lord ought to help, aid and maintain his knight or his vassal’.⁵² So likewise in Scotland what men wanted was ‘supple help mantenans and defence’ ⁵¹ Prof. Davies’s text at this point reads ‘It is a topic to which we will need to return in order to try to get aristocratic lordship in perspective.’ ⁵² ‘Private Indentures’, no. 44.

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and in return to take the lord’s part in all his actions. So it was that ‘good lordship’ could be translated simply as ‘maintenance’.⁵³ The evidence of how such ‘maintenance’ was deployed to support a client is amply documented both from private correspondence (especially in the fifteenth century) and from seigniorial account rolls. No attempt is made to conceal it. Bribes, threats, and cajolery were regular parts of the armoury; so was an occasional display of physical force as a lord or his officers or even his council led a troop of his tenants to ‘attend’ a local court. More common were rather less intimidating ploys: ‘labouring’ juries, and officials such as sheriff, distributing gifts including robes, wine, and food, identifying would-be supporters and possible opponents. These games were played by all and sundry: cities, such as Norwich and King’s Lynn, were as willing to pay handsomely in gifts and entertainment to win the ‘friendship’ of a great lord as he was anxious to have their support. Such practices were endemic in a society which lacked a substantial professional bureaucracy, local and central, and where seeking ‘preference’ was an acknowledged way of speeding up procedures and oiling the wheels of a sclerotic machine—be it in the payment of exchequer debts or in moving along a becalmed judicial process. So long as all parties ‘played the system’—though, of course, the dice were as always loaded in favour of the more powerful—then it might even be said to be, at least in theory, self-cancelling with one litigant’s ‘bribe’ being trumped by that of his opponent. Contemporaries were certainly fully apprised of how the system was ‘played’: Denholm-Young many years ago published a fascinating list of the kind of objections which could be used to challenge jurors—such as affinity, taking robes, godparenthood, ‘being of the counsel’ of one of the parties, among others.⁵⁴ Modern sensibilities may be offended at the practices employed, sometimes from outrage at what is seen as blatant ‘old corruption’; but such charges often isolate ‘maintenance’ from the legal and social context in which it operated, including a context in which arbitration (especially by great aristocrats) was often a better guarantee of the restoration of social peace and a modicum of good order than the interminable tergiversations and contrived delays of strict judicial process. Furthermore, as with livery, so with ‘maintenance’ there was a recognition that the system could be abused. ‘Misrule’ was dangerous to ‘good lordship’; it undermined its reputation. When the lord promised to ‘maintain’ his client he always did so scrupulously in his just causes. Thus when the fourth earl of Douglas gave an annuity in 1407 to Herbert Maxwell he promised ‘to supowelle and defende [him] in all his ryghtwys cause, als we awe to our man and our kosyn’.⁵⁵ Great lords were jealous of their reputations and could be fastidious about the observance of due procedure and neutrality. The Black Prince’s officers ⁵³ Wormald, Bonds of Manrent, 23, 66–9, 73, 102. ⁵⁴ Denholm-Young, Seigniorial Administration, 117–18. ⁵⁵ Grant, ‘Acts of Lordship’, no. 12.

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noted how a justice excused himself from a case because one of the parties was staying with him, that juries should be empanelled from men who were not allied to either party, and that since the plaintiff’s father was the sheriff, other officers ought to be appointed for the occasion.⁵⁶ Indeed, if a client abused the lord’s maintenance the consequences could be dire: when John of Gaunt found that his feodary for Lancashire was guilty of maintenance, he fined him £200 and banned him from Gaunt’s court and presence for life.⁵⁷ Much late medieval English historical scholarship on the aristocracy has concentrated on the affinity; on its composition, size, role in local and national affairs, and its responsiveness to the lord’s policies and demands. Arguably, it has received too much attention. Most aristocratic affinities—in the sense of men under indentured contract for life—were not large. That of John of Gaunt, about which we are exceptionally well informed, was totally unusual in standing in 1387 at 173, of whom 7 were bannerets, 70 knights, and 96 esquires. This was the affinity of a prince and titular king. Even Thomas of Lancaster—extravagant in so many respects in his retaining—was not in the same league. Earl Thomas of Warwick (d. 1401) paid fees only to six knights and thirty-three others. Nor should we be misled by figures, since the standing of the retained was as important a measure as were numbers. Equally indicative is the fact that in general—Gaunt again being the outstanding exception in spending £4,000 by the 1390s on the cost of his retinue—most magnates spent 10 per cent or less of their income on the grant of annuities and associated costs to their affinity. That suggests that we should keep a sense of proportion in our discussions of the affinity as a feature of aristocratic lordship.⁵⁸ Nor would we expect the affinity to have, or demonstrate, a clear corporate identity. It consisted of a group of individuals recruited into the lord’s service at different points in time. Beyond this commitment to him, their lives and careers had their own trajectories and priorities. But they were drawn from the same social and geographical orbits, often cooperated as neighbours, kinsmen, and in local magistracy, and no doubt shared a pride in serving the same lord. The claims that the affinity made on a dependant’s time and service would be determined by individual circumstances—his personal standing, his personal and military ambitions, the openings afforded to him. Our tendency, perhaps, is to underrate these claims and the element of real personal affection and devotion which could underpin them. When Sir Richard Barley, the marshal of John of Gaunt’s army in Castile, asked to be buried in a tomb opposite that of his lord in (Old) St Paul’s church, or when Robert Swillington left Gaunt his best harness of gold and silver and his best horse, or when the widow of Sir Edward St John ⁵⁶ Reg. BP, II, 93–4. ⁵⁷ Gaunt’s letter dates from 1380. Reg. J.G. II, no. 302. ⁵⁸ The evidence is admirably summarized, as with so many other topics discussed here, in Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 189–93.

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bequeathed a great gilt-covered cup embellished with her father’s arms to the earl of Arundel and a matins book to his eldest son, we catch a glimpse of the world which lies beyond the aridities of the formal indentures of retinue.⁵⁹ Furthermore, though the affinity was for much of the time a loose body of followers, it did enjoy moments when it operated corporately. It would do so, no doubt, on grand social occasions of the Christian calendar when the lord would summon his dependants to dine and lodge with him, or when he set out for a tournament, parliament, a wedding or a funeral. More menacingly, the onset of political trouble or a military expedition might prompt the retinue to be summoned to display the lord’s standing. In 1378 Earl Edmund of March gave fourteen days’ notice to his retinue (pro retinencia suo munienda) before he set out for Scotland; in the stressful circumstances of the early years of Henry IV’s reign, the earl of Stafford summoned his retinue to come to help him to suppress Thomas Holland’s revolt and then to contribute to campaigns in Scotland and Wales; or, to cite a final example, in 1436 the earl of Warwick travelled from Abergavenny ‘to have discussions for twelve days with his retinue (cum retinencia sua) prior to his journey to Flanders’.⁶⁰ Failure to respond to such summonses could lead to the cancellation of the contract and the annuity: some of the Black Prince’s dependants found that to their cost and so did those who failed to turn up to support the king at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403.⁶¹ All in all, we should perhaps not underestimate the significance of the affinity as a window into the world of aristocratic dependence. It does at least provide a fairly secure documentary foothold in a world of suggestive guesses. But one needs to recognize that what the affinity represents is the tip of an iceberg of extensive formal and informal circles of dependence, reward, and service which were a central feature of late medieval lordship, both aristocratic and royal. If those circles were effectively and sensitively managed by the lord and his ménage, and if tensions between individuals and groups within and across the lord’s affinity (broadly described) were addressed, then both the interest of the lord and general social and political harmony would be promoted. That was indeed a very tall order. Lordship, good lordship, was, like kingship, a hugely demanding ideal.⁶² A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A PH Y For the Black Prince and his clients, D. Green, ‘Political Service with Edward the Black Prince’, in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell (Woodbridge, 2001) and ⁵⁹ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 102; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy, 115. ⁶⁰ Household Accounts I, 246; *Staffordshire Record Office D 641/12/36; BL Egerton Roll 8775. ⁶¹ Reg. BP, II, 9–10; TNA DL 42/15–16 passim. ⁶² Prof. Davies’s text concludes with the words ‘It is to a cursory examination of some of those demands that we now finally turn.’

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D. Green, ‘Edward the Black Prince and East Anglia: An Unlikely Association’, in Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004). For an earlier comparison, A. Marshall, ‘An Early Fourteenth Century Affinity: The Earl of Norfolk and his Followers’, in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008). For the crown as retaining lord, H. Castor, The King, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power, 1399–1461 (Oxford, 2000); A. Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales 1389–1413 (Oxford, 2003); A. Grundy, ‘The Earl of Warwick and the Royal Affinity in the Politics of the West Midlands, 1389–1399’, in The Fifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed. M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001). For gentry attitudes, P. Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge, 2003) and Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Radulescu and A. Truelove (Manchester, 2005). For the participation of towns in the system of maintenance, C. Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge, 2005). For ‘corruption’ as part of the legal system, S. Walker, ‘Order and Law’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006); D. Biggs, ‘Henry IV and his JP’s [sic]: The Lancastrianisation of Justice, 1399–1413’, in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. D. Biggs, S. D. Michelove and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden, 2002). For lord–man relations in Scotland, A. Grant, ‘Service and Tenure in Late Medieval Scotland, 1314–1475’, in The Fifteenth Century I: Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew (Woodbridge, 2000). For dependence in Gaelic society, S. Kingston, Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim (Dublin, 2004); H. L. MacQueen, ‘Survival and Success: The Kennedys of Dunure’, in The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin, 2003). For Ireland, P. Crooks, ‘Factions, Feuds and Noble Power in the Lordship of Ireland c.1356–1494’, IHS, 35 (2006–7); K. Waters, ‘The Earls of Desmond and the Irish of South-Western Munster’, Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006); B. Hartland, ‘English Lords in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Ireland: Roger Bigod and the de Clare Lords of Thomond’, EHR, 122 (2007), 318–48. For ‘captain of his nation’, C. Maginn, ‘English Marcher Lordships in South Dublin in the Late Middle Ages’, IHS, 34 (2004–5).

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Additional Bibliography P R I N T E D WOR K S ‘Calendar of Documents Relating to Medieval Ireland in the Series of Ancient Deeds in the National Archives of the United Kingdom’, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith, Analecta Hibernica, 39 (2006), 1–61. Catalogue of Medieval Muniments at Berkeley Castle, ed. B. Wells-Furby. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, vols. 17 and 18 (Bristol, 2004). The Court Rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347–1564, ed. R. K. Field. Worcestershire Historical Society, vol. 20 (Worcester, 2004). The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows, 1305–50 and 1351–99, ed. R. Lock. 2 vols. Suffolk Record Society, vols. 41 and 45 (Woodbridge, 1998, 2002). Handbook and Select Calendar of Sources for Medieval Ireland in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith (Dublin, 2005). The Havener’s Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287–1356, ed. M. Kowalski. Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, vol. 44 (Exeter, 2001). Oxfordshire Forests, 1246–1609, ed. B. Schumer. Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 64 (Oxford, 2004). The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, ed. C. Given-Wilson [General Editor] et al., 16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005). Vita Edwardi Secundi: The Life of Edward II, ed. W. R. Childs (Oxford, 2005). Secondary Works Allmand, C. (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool, 2000). Ayton, A. and Preston, Sir P., Bart., The Battle of Cr´ecy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005). Bailey, M., The English Manor c.1200 –c.1500 (Manchester, 2002). Barrell, A. D. M., Medieval Scotland (Cambridge, 2000). Bawcutt, P. and Hadley Williams, J. (eds.), A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry (Woodbridge, 2006). Bell, A. R., War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004). Brooks, C. and Dryburgh, P., The English Wool Market, c.1230–1327 (Cambridge, 2007). Biancalana, J., The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001). Biggs, C., ‘Seigniorial Control of Villagers’ Litigation Beyond the Manor in Later Medieval England’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 399–422. Biggs, D., ‘Henry IV and his JP’s [sic]: The Lancastrianisation of Justice, 1399–1413’, in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. D. Biggs, S. D. Michelove and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden, 2002), 59–79. Michelove, S. D. and Compton Reeves, A. (eds.), Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England (Leiden, 2002). Blakely, R. M., The Brus Family in England and Scotland, 1100–1295 (Woodbridge, 2005).

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Index Abergavenny (Mon.) castle and town of 113, 152, 216; lordship of 72, 76; see also Beauchamp acclamation 199 advowry men 198 affinity 33, 191, 201; see also retinue Agincourt 116, 128 Agnes Hastings 61 n. 7 Albany, duke of, see Stewart Aldbourne (Wilts.) 107, 180 Aldersgate (London) 88 Aldgate (London) 88 Alexandria 119 Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475) 78 Alice Fitzalan, countess of Kent (d. 1415) 152, 153 Alice Lacy, countess of Lancaster (d. 1348) 26 Algeciras 118, 137 Altofts (Yorks.) 107 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 181 Angus, earldom of 23, 55, 133 Anne Beauchamp, Lady Despenser 152 Anne of Woodstock, countess of Stafford (d. 1438) 41, 67, 165 n. 26 annuity 68, 148; as reward for supporters 199, 201, 204–10, 214–16; role in recruitment of armies 121, 123, 131 Aquitaine 89; prince of, see Edward the Black Prince Arbroath, declaration of 23 Arden (Warw.) 66 Argyll, 133; see also Campbell Arundel (Fitzalan), Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury (1396–7 and 1399–1414) 9 Arundel (Sussex), castle and town 34 69, 76, 85, 91, 93, 111, 193; earls and earldom of 25, 85, 93, 189, 216; see also, Fitzalan Ashperton (Heref.) 155 Atherston (Warw.) 203 Atholl, earldom of 23, 26, 55 attorneys 88, 163, 205; see also lawyers audit, auditorial reports 36, 43, 104, 183, 186–8, 192–4; auditors 41, 86, 164, 167, 176 Audley, Hugh, earl of Gloucester (d. 1347) 53, 155, 165; Lady Audley 67 Austria 18 Avallon 118

Bache, Simon 104 n. 77 Badenoch (Highland) 173; lord of, see Stewart, Alexander badges and collars 32–3, 65, 73, 121, 208, 212–13 Badlesmere, Sir Bartholomew (d. 1322) 37, 38, 144, 154–5 Bala (Gwynedd) 200 Bamburgh (Northumberland) 203 Bangor, bishop of 67 Bann, river 35 banquets, feasts 44, 66, 68, 70, 76, 93, 96, 97 baptism, christening 67, 70, 90, 98 Bardfield (Essex) 107, 187 Barley, Sir Richard 215 Barnard Castle (co. Durham) 108 Basset, Ralph (d. 1390) 30 ‘bastard feudalism’ 5, 65, 206, 210 Batter, John 175 Bean, J. M. W. 10, 208 Beauchamp, Joan, see Joan Fitzalan; John, lord of Beauchamp and baron of Kidderminster (d. 1388) 59, 75; Richard, earl of Worcester (d. 1422) 146; Sir William, lord of Abergavenny (d. 1411) 29, 42, 71, 72, 146, 156 Beauchamp, earls of Warwick: Guy (d. 1315) 44, 98 Richard (d. 1439) 41, 75, 81, 110 n. 98, 146, 216; approach to management 70, 184, 185; as military commander 118, 123, 138 Thomas (d. 1369) 31, 119, 146 Thomas (d. 1401) 65, 71, 146; see also Warwick Beauchamp, family of 13, 25, 38, 85, 108; administration of estates 162, 163, 186, 187, 188, 190, 194; affinity 201, 209; cultivation of image and history 31, 32, 33, 75, 146 Beaufort, John, earl of Somerset, marquis of Dorset (d. 1410) 59, 162; John, duke of Somerset (d. 1444) 128; Thomas, earl of Dorset, duke of Exeter (d. 1426) 60, 105 Beaufort, family of 52, 54, 61 beds 32, 63, 89, 92 Belknap, Sir Robert (d. 1401) 205 bequests, see wills

242

Index

Bere, Sir John de la 130 Bergerac 61, 128 Berkeley (Glocs.), 37 Berkeley, Thomas, Lord (d. 1321) 95, 155; Thomas, Lord (d. 1361) 66, 136, 162; Thomas, Lord (d. 1417) 130 Bermingham, John, earl of Louth (d. 1329) 57 Berwick-upon-Tweed 122 Bigod, Roger, earl of Norfolk (d. 1306) 25, 42, 53, 83, 84, 100, 183, 194 Bisham abbey (Berks.) 72, 73 Bishopsgate (London) 88 Bisson, Thomas 2 Black Prince, see Edward, the Black Prince Blanche, duchess of Lancaster (d. 1368) 75, 76 Blickling, Roger 109 Bloch, Marc 1, 2 Blyth (Notts.) 135 Bohun, earls of Hereford: Humphrey (d. 1299) 43, 203; Humphrey (d. 1322) 72; Humphrey (d. 1361) 74, 150; Humphrey, earl of Hereford, Northampton, and Essex (d. 1373) 26, 101, 137, 187 Bohun, William, earl of Northampton (d. 1360) 72, 162 Bohun, family of 7, 13, 25, 91, 92, 108, 188; estate management 163, 165, 179, 184, 190 The Boke of Noblesse 116 Bolingbroke (Lincs.) 180 Bolingbroke, Henry, see Henry IV bond-land, see demesne Bordesley abbey (Worcs.) 98 Boutruche, Robert 2, 4, 6 Bower, Walter (d. 1449) 7 n. 16, 48 Braose, family of 64 Brecon (Powys) 42, 79, 80, 174, 199; lord of, see Bohun; men of, loyalty to Bohun 43, 179; use of resources from 108, 168, 173, 190 Breton expedition (1375) 46, 124, 129, 202 Brian, family of 157 Bridgewater (Dorset) 180 Bridgwater (Somerset) 38 Bristol 90, 106, 109, 135, 152 Brittany, 131; see also Breton expedition Bromfield and Yale, lordship of (Salop) 15, 79, 152, 173, 198, 200 Bromwich, Sir John 130 Brotherton, see Thomas of Brotherton Brown, Michael 134 The Bruce 47 Bruce, family of 22, 23 Bruce, Edward, earl of Carrick, ‘king of Ireland’ (d. 1318) 44; Robert, earl of

Carrick (d. 1304) 133; Robert, king of Scotland, see Robert I Bruges 129 Brugge, Walter, archdeacon of Meath, canon of York 186, 188 Brunner, Otto 17 Brut chronicle and legend 34 n. 32, 35 Buchan, earl of, see Stewart Buckingham, duke of, see Stafford; earl of, see Thomas of Woodstock Buke of the Howlat 35 Bungay (Suffolk) 84, 108 Burgh, family of 24, 151, 153, 189 Burgh, earls of Ulster: Richard (d. 1326) 14, 46, 48, 49, 68, 113, 124; biography 43–5; marriage strategies 70, 153; William (d. 1333), 27, 46, 66; see also Ulster Burgh, Elizabeth, see Elizabeth Burgh; John (d. 1313) 153; Maud, see Maud Burgh; Sir Richard 214; Theobald 153; Walter 153 Burley, Sir Simon (d. 1388) 156, 190, 212 Burtscher, Michael 31 n. 21 Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) 66, 171 Butler, family of 132 Butler, Edmund, earl of Carrick (d. 1321) 68 Butler, James, earl of Ormond (d. 1382) 68, 214; see also Ormond Caerleon (Mon.) 37, 180 cain 160 Caithness, earldom of 23 Calais 135, 136 Caldicot (Gwent) 85, 87 Calveley, Sir John 71 Campbell, family of, lords of Argyll 6, 133 Cantelou, Nicholas (d. 1355) 156; Sir William, 146 Canterbury (Kent) 71, 72 Canterbury, archbishops of, see Arundel, Courtenay, Stafford ‘captain of the nation’ 202 Cardiff 90, 109 card games 96 Carlow 173 Carmelites, house of, London 97 Carpenter, Christine xi, xii Carrick (Scotland), earldom of 23, 44, see also Bruce Carthusians 100 Cas Troggy (Gwent) 84 Castile 215 castles 33, 76, 190, 203; administrative centres 37, 189, 190; construction and domestic arrangement of 44, 48,

Index 82–113, 138; focal points of lordship 78, 79, 118, 125, 173, 180 venues for feasts, tournaments 65, 66, 69, 136 Castle Philippa, see Shrawardine cattle 44, 90, 108, 132, 153, 160, 161, 163, see also commorth Caw (Salop) 193 Cedewain (Powys) 130 chamberlain 103, 104, 184, 187 Champagne 201 chancellor 66, 112, 187, 190 Chandos, Sir John (d. 1370), herald of 117 Charlemagne, 91 Charleton, Robert 205 Charlton, family of, 205 Charlton, John, of Powys (d. 1360) 35, 155, charters, 16, 17, 33, 37, 122, 134, 147, 166, 203; as source for study of lordship before c.1250 8, 9, 31, 142, 197 Chastellain, Georges 102 Chedworth, Thomas 46 n. 63, 113 Cheney, Roger 189 Chepstow 84, 106, 107, 109; see also Strigoil chess 89, 96 Chester 53, 108, 121, 171, 174; earl of, see Edward chevauch´ee 119, 123, 125, Cheyette, Frederic 2 Cheyney, Sir Hugh 123 Chichester (Sussex) 47 Chirk, lordship of (Salop) 144, 152; see also Mortimer chivalry 11, 31, 39, 40, 44, 48, 94; literary aspects 95, 98; military aspects 68–9, 117, 135, 136; see also Court of Chivalry Cilgerran (Cardigan) 29 Cistercians 100, 162 Clare (Suffolk) 45, 90, 165, 180 n. 5, 181 Clare College Cambridge 100 Clare, family of 25, 44, 143, 153, 187, 194 Clare, earls of Gloucester: Gilbert (d. 1295) 27, 70; Gilbert (d. 1314) 153, 158; Richard (d. 1262) 92 Clare, Elizabeth, see Elizabeth, lady of Clare Claverdon (Warw.) 66 Clee, John 88 Clemsland (Cornwall) 193 Clerkenwell (London) 70 Clifford family 151, 203 Clifford, lordship of (Wales) 107 Clifton, Sir John 131 Clinton, William, earl of Huntingdon (d. 1354) 141; Sir William 29 Clopton, Sir Walter (d. 1400) 131 Clowne, William, abbot of Leicester (d. 1378) 9 Clun, lordship of (Salop) 79, 111, 192–3

243

Cobham, Reginald, Lord (d. 1361) 117 Coleraine (Derry) 35 Colne priory (Lancs.) 74 commendation 198 commorth 160 ‘competence’ (in land) 11, 64, 141, 162 Comyn, family of 22, 23, 55 Connacht 45, 181 Constance of Castile, duchess of Lancaster (d. 1394) 72 ‘Contrariants’ 36 conveth 161 Conway, Sir Henry 68 cornage 160 Cornwall 78, 121; archdeacon of, 200; earl, duke of, see Edmund, Edward coronation 23, 30, 199 Coucher Book 38 council, 45, 71, 87, 94, 109, 112, 148, 152; membership 204, 205, 208, 211, 214; military aspects; 124, 130; presence of lord at 41, 66, 184, 192–3; role of in administering estates 163, 169, 174–6, 184–8; royal 11, 21, 46, 82, 88 187, 188 Courtenay, earls of Devon 25, 33, 38, 142, 191, 209: Edward (d. 1419) 98, 212; Hugh (d. 1377), 60; see also Devon Courtenay, William, archbishop of Canterbury (1381–96) 9 courts: bouche de court 124, 207; manorial 198; seigniorial 41, 65, 85, 86, 91, 94, 97, 103, 104, 112, 169–75, 184, 186, 189, 213–15; royal 14, 22, 43, 82, 90, 96, 132, 163; suit of court 78 court rolls 9, 36, 41, 167, 169, 171, 182, 193 Court of Chivalry 32 Coventry (Warw.) 135 Cranbourne (Dorset) 180 Crawford, earldom of 26 Cr´ecy 118 Crouch, David 8 crown xi, 80, 104, 127, 174, 217 crusade 32, 70, 97, 118–9, 137–8, 207 Cyprus, 92, 137 Dacre, Ralph 151; William 151 Dagworth, Sir Thomas (d. 1350) 119 Dalkeith (Midlothian) 147, 173; lord of, see Douglas Darcy, Sir John (d. 1347) 207; Philip (d. 1333) 66; Philip, Lord Darcy (d. 1399) 131 Dauntsey, Sir Stephen 193 David II, king of Scotland (1329–71) 26, 202 David, earl of Huntingdon (d. 1219) 14, 173 Dee, river (Scotland) 48

244

Index

demesne 12, 82, 159, 170; demesne farming 83, 107–8, 163–5, 167, 169, 187, 194 Denbigh, lordship of 160–1, 180, 191 Denholm-Young, N. 4, 214 Desmond, earls of, see Geraldines Despenser, family of 25, 152; Edward, lord of Glamorgan (d. 1375) 16; Hugh the younger (d. 1326) 41; Sir Hugh (d. 1349) 12, 75, 128, 152, 208 Devon, 98, 125, 157, 191; earls, countesses of, 33, 60, 62, 137, 204, 209, see also Courtenay dice, games of 96 Dieppe 28 Dinas (Dyfed) 130 Diss (Norfolk) 108 Domesday Book 181 Dorset 30, 163, 174, 180; duke, earl of, see Beaufort Douglas, family of 16, 26, 38, 48, 120, 128, 134, 214; cultivation of image and history 32, 35 Douglas, earls of: Archibald, ‘the Grim’ (d. 1400) 47, 48, 49, 134; James (d. 1388) 16, 47, 117, 202; William (d. 1384) 26, 85, 134, 202 Douglas, Sir James (d. 1330) 32, 47; James, lord of Dalkeith (d. 1420) 30, 99, 166 dower 111, 149; see also jointures Drayton (Warw.) 30 Drury, Roger 131 Dublin 23, 27, 66, 68; marquis of, see Vere Duby, Georges 3 Dugdale, William 5 Dunbar, earls, earldom of 23, 55, 56 Duncan MacDuff, earl of Fife (d. 1353) 55, 165, 170 Dunstable (Beds.) 135, 136 Dunstanburgh (Northumberland) 87, 180 Durham, bishop of 32; liberty of 172 Dyffryn Clwyd, see Ruthin Earl Marshal, see Mowbray, John Earnwood (Salop) 154 East Anglia 43, 45, 46, 79, 143, 174, 181, 193, 209 Edeligion (Mon.) 36 Edmund of Almaine, earl of Cornwall (d. 1300) 25, 60, 165, 183 Edmund, earl of Lancaster (d. 1296) 135, 159 Edmund of Langley, earl of Cambridge, duke of York (d. 1402) 29, 52, 70 education, educational bequests 35, 47, 94–5, 96, 100

Edward I, king of England (1272–1307) 27, 28, 31, 39, 79, 113, 135, 200; promotion of relatives 60, 68, 144 ; relationship with nobles 42, 43, 44, 69, 124, 143, 179, 203 Edward II, king of England (1307–27) 11, 25, 28, 39, 68, 122, 143, 154, 181 Edward III, king of England (1327–77) 46, 62, 103, 189, 195; promotion of relatives 26, 29, 69, 151; relationship with nobles 12, 25–6, 28, 30, 59, 61, 94, 141, 143; wars of 117–18, 119 Edward, the Black Prince, earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall, prince of Wales, prince of Aquitaine (d. 1376) 26, 45, 59, 96, 111, 199; funeral of 71–3; management of estates 36–7, 40, 66, 167, 174, 184, 186–8, 192, 198–200, 214; as warlord 117, 118, 121, 125 Edward, duke of York (d. 1415) 90, 95, 99, 108–9, 116, 128, 165 Eleanor, countess of Leicester (d. 1275) 100 Eleanor Bohun, duchess of Gloucester (d. 1400) 75, 87, 91, 92, 93, 98 101 Eleanor Clare (d. 1337) 34 Elgin cathedral 133 Elizabeth Badlesmere, countess of Northampton (d. 1356) 154, 155 Elizabeth Berkeley, countess of Warwick (d. 1422) 97 Elizabeth Bohun, countess of Arundel (d. 1385) 72 Elizabeth Burgh, countess of Ulster (d. 1363), wife of Lionel of Clarence 57, 69, 151 Elizabeth [lady of] Clare (widow of John Burgh) (d. 1360), 100, 149; affinity of 209, 212; domestic arrangements and estate management of 63, 88, 90, 107, 108, 163–5, 167, 174, 184, 188, 194, 195; funeral of 73, 75; marriages and descendants of 83, 143, 153 Elizabeth of Lancaster (d. 1425), daughter of John of Gaunt 156 Elizabeth Mohun, countess of Salisbury (d. 1415) 73 Elmham, Sir William 71 Elsing (Norfolk) 12 Ely (Cambs.), bishop of 89; liberty of 171 enfeoffments to use 72, 140, 147–8 England, English: composition and size of nobility in 11, 22, 142–4; crown-noble relations 59–60, 126; dispersed nature of estates of nobility 13, 27–8, 82, 179–80; economic exploitation and value of lordship in 40, 163–72; military aspects of lordship in 127–9; noble self-image

Index and tastes in 30, 45–7, 74–6, 92–3, 95, 98; sources relating to lordship in 13, 31, 33–8, 163; study of lordship in 1–6, 8, 14, 17, 133, 140–1, 160, 197, 215; warfare in the British Isles and with France 119–20, 131–2, 134–5 English, Barbara 8 entails 47, 140, 145–8, 163 entry fine, 169, 198 Erpingham, Sir Thomas (d. 1428) 30 esquires 39, 124, 136; as members of affinities 201, 203, 209, 212, 215; in noble council and households 90, 105, 107, 185 Essex 108, 162, 203; earl and earldom of, 26; see also Bohun Etchingham (Sussex) 12 Etchingham, Sir William 12 Ettrick Forest (Borders) 168 Evesham, abbot of 67 Ewyas Lacy, lordship of (Heref.) 130, 143 Exeter (Devon) 78, 135; dukes, earls of, see Beaufort Eye, church of (Suffolk) 78 Faith, Rosamund 171 falconry 82, 96 fealty, oath of 7, 78–9, 169, 198–200 Feast of the Swans, (1306) 68 feasts, see banquets Felbrigg, Sir George 63, 188, 211 Ferrers, family 37; Lady Ferrers, see Margaret Percy Fife, earl, earldom of, see Duncan Fish, fisheries 105–7, 109, 166, 168–70 Fitzalan, family of 13, 25, 42, 79, 85, 88, 152, 165, 173, 192 Fitzalan, earls of Arundel: Richard (d. 1376): marriage dealings 28, 146, 151, 152, 153; wealth 45, 76, 111, 162, 194; will 31, 64, 150 Richard (d. 1397) 69, 73, 131; conflict with Richard II 65, 86, 91, 96; management of estates 87, 164, 191, 192–3, 205; will 72, 74, 77, 92 Thomas (d. 1415) 110, 128 Fitz Pain, Robert 30, 144, 154 Fitz Thomas, John, earl of Kildare, see Geraldines of Offaly Fitz Walter, Walter, (d. 1406) 124, 128 Fitzwarin, Fulk (d. 1374) 25 Flanders 14, 128, 216 Fleet, prison (London) 76 Forde, William 188 forest, rights of tenants in 43, 140; seigniorial exploitation of 82, 125, 162, 166–70, 176; foresters 167, 190; see also hunting

245

formulary books 198, 207 Forncett (Norfolk) 83–4 Fortescue, Sir John (d. 1479) 127, 128 Fossier, Robert 1 Fotheringay (Northants.) 27 Fountains (Yorks.), abbot of 109 Frame, Robin 24, 44 Framlingham (Suffolk) 84, 96, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 France, French, 104, 184; study of lordship in 1, 2, 3, 201; language of lordship 94, 98; negotiations with 46, 48 129; war with 30, 41, 90, 110, 111, 117–18, 119, 138, 147, 184; war profits 128 see also Agincourt; chevauch´ee; Cr´ecy franchises 2, 12, 36, 181 Freskin the Fleming 23 Froissart, Jean (d. 1404) 48, 117 funerals 47, 71–4, 76, 90, 216 Furness and Whalley (Lancs.), abbot of 125 furnishings, furniture 32, 64, 89, 92–3; see also beds; tapestries Gaelic society 131–3, 161, 201 galloglass 133 Galloway 47, 48 Gamelyn 91 gardens 87 Garioch (Scotland) 14, 173 Gascony 14, 44, 126; see also wine Geneville (Joinville), family 83; Peter 143 gentry 5, 10, 11, 78, 93, 142, 147; relations with lords 181, 190, 201, 202, 206, 213 George, St 91, 93 Geraldines of Desmond 24, 27, 44, 56, 120, 128, 151; Maurice Fitz Thomas, earl of Desmond (d. 1356) 66, 132 Geraldines of Offaly, 24, 27, 44, 56; John Fitz Thomas, earl of Kildare (d. 1316) 14, 44 Germany 1, 2, 3, 6, 18, 200 Gilsland (Cumbria) 151 Glamorgan 15, 27, 158, 173, 179; lord of, see Clare; Despenser ‘Glanvill’ 15 Gloucester 24, 44, 65, 90, 106; dukes, earls of, see Audley; Clare; Thomas of Woodstock Glyn Dwr, ˆ Owain (d. c.1416) 138 Gogan, Ralph 84 Good Parliament (1376) 46, 130 Goodrich (Heref.) 13, 103, 106 Gower 173 gowns, robes 65, 73, 93, 104, 204, 212, 214; see also, livery Grandison, Sir Piers 155 Great Revolt (1381) 36, 89, 122, 167, 176

246

Index

Green, Judith 8 Greenway, Diana 8 Grey, family of 41, 156, 167; Henry 156; Sir John (d. 1323) 156; Reginald, lord of Ruthin (d. 1388) 29, 156, 174; Robert son of Richard of Codnor, 30; see also Fitz Pain, Robert Greyfriars, London 100 Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253) 58, 211 Guildford (Surrey) 135 Guy, Sir Thomas 71 ‘Guy of Warwick’ 31, 33 Gwent 15 Hakeluyt, Leonard 123 Halton (Cheshire) 191 Hamilton, John 30 Hamstead Marshall (Berks.) 84 Hanley (Worcs.) 90, 109 Hanmer, Sir David, chief justice of the King’s Bench (d. 1388) 193, 205 Harvey, Barbara 11 Hastings, family of 25, 30, 135; earls of Pembroke: John (d. 1375) 29, 61, 72, 75, 116, 156; John (d. 1389) 71, 72, 135, 152 Hastings, Sir Hugh (d. 1347) 12, 124 Haughmond abbey (Salop) 192 Hay, Gilbert (d. c.1465) 170 Hebrides 133 Henry III, king of England (1216–72) 13 Henry IV, (Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford), king of England (1399–1413); lifestyle and interests, 63, 88, 96–7, 98, 109, 111; marriage 70, 101; participation in crusades and tournaments 136–7; retinue and lordship 79, 80, 89, 90, 103, 104, 174 186, 202, 209, 212; as king 110, 126, 203, 216 Henry V, king of England (1413–22) 110, 119, 138 Henry VI, king of England (1422–61) 138 Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345) 52, 66, 194 Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361) 4, 59, 61, 209; management of estates and retinue; 82, 89, 209 marriage alliances 70, 136; military career 118, 123, 127–8 religious interests 62, 74, 77, 83, 94, 95, 99 101 Henry of Huntingdon 8 heralds, heraldry 31–2, 35, 36, 38, 39, 64, 117, 136 Herbert, Thomas 203 Hereford 70, 118, 130, 135, 142, 185; bishop of 46; countess of, see Joan; duke, earls of 71, 188, 199; see also Bohun; Henry IV

Heron, William, Lord Say (d. 1404) 127 Herrschaft 1, 2, 3 Hertford 82, 87, 89, 93, 135, 136 Higham Ferrers (Northants.) 82, 107, 125 Highlands, Scottish, 7, 120, 122, 133, 160 Hildeburgh, Thomas 187 Hilton, Rodney 11, 170 Holborn (London) 89 Holland, earls of Huntingdon and dukes of Exeter: John (d. 1400) 96, 116; John (d. 1447), 128 Holland, earls of Kent: Thomas (d. 1397), 153; Thomas (also duke of Surrey) (d. 1400) 216 Holland, Isabel, mistress of John of Warenne, earl of Surrey (d. 1347) 28 Holme, Master William, king’s physician 204 Holmes, George 166 Holt (Norfolk) 111, 173 Holy Land 138 homage, act of 7, 15, 23, 78–9, 198–9, 201 Hopedale (Flintshire) 166 horngeld 160 Hotspur, see Percy House of Commons 185 household 4, 6, 12, 13, 46, 151; accounts 9, 13, 36, 63, 136, 183, 184; constitution and support 82–113, 163–5, 185–8, 208, 211; military aspect 120, 125, 126 servants 65, 71, 74, 204, 212; travelling 70, 152 Howell, Oliver 68 Hungerford, Sir Thomas, M.P., Speaker of the House of Commons (d. 1397) 185 hunting, chase 31, 82–4, 90, 93, 94 95–7, 99, 102, 116, 118, 166; lodge 65, 84 Huntingdon, earl of, see Clinton, David, Holland indentures of retinue xi, 123, 129, 186, 197–216; nature and use of documents 9, 17 120–1; specifications of service 127, 130, 135, 137 investiture 60, 201 Ireland, Irish xi, xii, 2, 5, 10, 60, 98, 155, 206; aristocratic estates in 12, 13, 14, 27, 143, 145, 147, 153, 179; castles and their modification in 82, 86; economic exploitation and value of estates in 158, 174; Gaelic (‘Celtic’) society in 13, 17, 161, 201; nature and reputation of lordship in 15, 24, 28, 113, 141, 160, 172, 176–7, 181–2, 189, 198; size and composition of resident nobility; 22–4, 25, 43–7; visits to and military campaigns in 65, 71, 117, 120, 122–5, 128, 131–3, 135, 186, 202

Index Isabel Despenser, countess of Warwick (d. 1439) 75 Isabella Fortibus, countess of Devon and countess of Aumale (d. 1293) 41, 165 Jerusalem 91, 137 jesters 91, 97 Joan of Acre, countess of Gloucester (d. 1307) 69, 70, 155 Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey (d. 1361) 28, 149 Joan Bohun, countess of Hereford (d. 1419) 149 Joan Fitzalan, lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435) 78, 163; lifestyle 87, 97; management of estates 42, 113, 149; provisions of will 73–4, 76, 78, 163 Joan Fitz Pain 30 Joan Geneville, countess of March (d. 1356) 143 Joan de Munchensi, countess of Pembroke (d. 1307) 69, 99, 103, 106 Joce, John 130 John, duke of Berry (d. 1416) 91 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) 10, 32, 45, 111, 117, 175, 180, 198, 205, 212; lifestyle 64, 66, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 95–7; management of estates and household 36 40, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112, 163, 164, 165, 183, 187, 188, 192, 195; marriage alliances and provision for family 67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 88, 151, 156, 162, 209; as member of royal family 25, 29, 62; provisions of will 71, 74; religious concerns 99–100, 101; as warlord 122, 123, 125, 126, 215 John Fitz Thomas, see Geraldines of Offaly John son of the duke of Brabant 69 John of Salisbury 31 jointures 109, 111, 140, 149, 153, 163 Joinville, see Geneville joust 32, 48, 64, 68, 70, 97, 99, 116, 118, 135–7; see also tournament judges 46, 204–5 Kenilworth (Warw.) 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 135, 167 Kenneth Mor 7 n. 16 Kennington (Surrey) 135, 136 Kent, 203; earl and earldom of 152; see also Holland kerne, ‘caterans’ 132–3, 135 Kidderminster, baron of, see Beauchamp Kidwelly (Dyfed) 86 Kildare, earls, earldom, liberty of 24, 27, 44, 172, 173; see also Geraldines of Offaly Kildrummy (Aberdeenshire) 79

247

Kilkenny 27, 172 Kilmainham (Dublin) 66 Kimbolton (Cambs.) 108 kindred, lineage groups 44, 198, 202 King’s Bench 193, 205 King’s Lynn (Norfolk) 137, 214 Kingstone (Heref.) 130 Knaresborough (Yorks.) 83, 122 knights, 30, 67, 83, 95, 198; ceremony of knighting 44, 48, 68–9; position relative to nobles 10, 11, 12, 25, 39, 58, 91, 106, 201; profession of arms 116–19, 123, 135–6; as retainers 33, 65, 71, 75, 84, 94, 102, 103, 107, 188, 191, 203–4, 207, 209, 211–12, 213, 215 labour service 165, 167 Lacy, family of 25, 37, 53, 183, 193; Henry, earl of Lincoln (d. 1311) 26, 107, 162; Sir Hugh 68; Sir Walter 68 lairds 10, 48, 202, 213 Lancashire 123, 160, 180, 209, 215 Lancaster 121, 171, 174, 180, 191; dukes, earls of see Edmund; Henry; Henry of Grosmont; John of Gaunt; Thomas Lancelot 91 ‘lands of peace’ 202, ‘lands of war’ 24, 48, 122, 202 Lanercost priory (Cumbria), chronicle of 41 n. 52, 151 n. 27 Langford, Sir Nicholas 71 lawyers 2, 21, 140, 144, 163, 170, 204–5 Leake, treaty of 44 Ledbury (Heref.) 90, 109 Leicester, 9, 70, 77, 82, 83, 94, 99, 100, 118, 136, 180, 181, 185; earldom of 201; see also Montfort Leland, John (d. 1552) 86 Lennox, earldom of 23, 55 Lestrange, family, of Knockin 205 Leventhorp, John 186 Lewyn, John 87 Leyser, Karl 6 Liber Niger de Wigmore 38 liberties, 2, 24, 101, 134, 166, 171–7, 179, 189, 203; see also franchises Lincoln, earl of, see Lacy Lincolnshire 125, 193 lineage 31, 142; lineage groups, see kindred Lingen, Sir Ralph 130 Lingfield (Surrey) 117 Lionel of Antwerp, earl of Ulster and duke of Clarence (d. 1368) 45, 57, 69, 143, 151, 187, 189 Lithuania 131 livery 33, 63, 65, 72, 89, 97, 103, 121, 203; cost of 104, 204, 208; criticism of

248

Index

livery (cont.) distribution of, 22, 212–3, 214; livery rolls, 204, 212 Livre de Seyntz Medecines 62, 74, 94, 101 Lochmaben (Dumfries and Galloway) 117 London 37, 70, 78, 84, 100, 212; bishop of, 46; nobles residences in 32, 63, 82, 88–9, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 107–9, 185, 188; merchants 63, 104, 110–11, 136, 165, 212; as place of burial 71, 74, 75; see also Tower of London Lothian 161 Louth, earl of, see Bermingham Lucy, Sir William 113 Ludgate, prison (London) 76 Ludlow (Salop) 36, 67, 83, 130, 143, 180 Lusignan, Pierre, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem (1358–69) 137 Luttrell, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1345) 70 Luttrell Psalter 90 McFarlane, K. B. xi, xii, 4, 7, 11, 21, 25, 42, 58, 127, 144, 152, 183 n. 8, 206 Maconnais, 3 ‘Macthomas’s rout’ 132 Madeley (Glocs.) 85 Malise, earl of Strathearn (d. 1317) 56, 173 Magna Carta 11, 21 maintenance xi, 15, 199–215 Maitland, F. W. 17 Makeley, Robert 88 manrent, bond of 7, 199 Manton, William 188 Mar, earl and earldom of 23, 168; see also Stewart March, earls and earldom of 24, 41, 62, 64, 69, 90, 117, 152, 182, 205, 211; see also Mortimer March, law of 176 March of Wales xii, 5, 7, 53, 79, 155, 179; estates of nobility in 13, 27–8, 45, 46, 91, 111, 143, 180; use of men and resources from 122, 130, 132, 168, 174, 176; dealings with tenants in 15, 42–3, 90, 113, 172 Mare, Sir Peter de la (d. 1387) 41, 45, 46, 130, 185, 211; Thomas de la, abbot of St Albans (d. 1396) 9 Margaret, daughter of King Edward I, wife of John son of the duke of Brabant 69, 70 Margaret Bohun, countess of Devon (d. 1391) 98 Margaret Brotherton, the countess Marshal, countess and duchess of Norfolk (d. 1399) 59, 75, 109, 149, 151, 152;

lifestyle and tastes 100, 105, 106, 107, 108 Margaret Holland, duchess of Clarence (d. 1439) 99 Margaret Percy, Lady Ferrers (d. 1375) 70 market 12, 89, 105, 106, 108–9, 164–5, 167, 182 marriage 12, 13, 25, 26, 30, 32, 35, 44–5, 62, 76, 92, 140–57, 180, 181, 198, 208–9; ceremony and celebration 69–70, 136; role of crown in 14, 26, 29, 91, 101, 143; social advancement by 83, 85, 179; unhappy or rejected 28, 155–6 Mary Bohun, countess of Derby (d. 1394), wife of Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) 70, 96, 101 Mary of St Pol, countess of Pembroke (d. 1377) 32, 100, 149 Mascy, Sir John 131 Mason, William 110 The Master of Game 95 Maud Badlesmere, wife of Robert Fitz Pain 154 Maud Burgh, countess of Gloucester (d. 1320) 153 Maud, Lady Stafford, duchess of Bavaria (d. 1362) 136 Mauny, Sir Walter (d. 1372) 75, 119 Maxtock (Warw.) 108 Maxtoke (Warw.) 203 Maxwell, Herbert (d. 1453) 214 Meath 15, 45, 143, 173, 181; archdeacon of, see Brugge Mediterranean 119 Melreth, Philip 187 Menteith, earldom of 23, 26 Michelwood (Glocs.) 95 Middle East 137 Milan, duke of 96 mills 165, 168, 170, 176, 187 Milsom, S. F. C. 8 Milverton (Somerset) 38 ministerium 77 ministers’ accounts 182, 192 Minoresses 88 minstrels, see music, musicians Mold, lordship of (Clwyd) 78 Monk of Westminster 47, 69 Monmouth 90, 190 Montagu, earls of Salisbury: John (d. 1400) 99, 162; William (d. 1344) 72, 153; William (d. 1397) 41, 78 Montagu, Sir John 75 Montfort, Simon, earl of Leicester (d. 1265) 95 Monthermer, Ralph (d. 1325) 155, 156

Index Moray 120, 122, 169, 170 Moreton Valence (Glocs.) 69 Mortimer, family and estates of 13, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, 72, 74, 83, 88, 144, 147, 149, 163, 165, 169, 183, 186, 190, 208; cartulary, muniments of 35, 37, 38, 192; chronicle of, ‘Wigmore chronicle’ 35, 68, 135, 142, 154, 155; Edmund (d. 1304) 150; Edmund (d. 1331) 154; Edmund (d. 1408/9) 150; Hugh (d. 1185) 34; Joanna 150; Matilda 35; Ralph (d. 1246) 37; Roger, of Chirk (d. 1326) 143; Roger, of Wigmore (d. 1282) 113, 136, 143; Sir Thomas 38, 130, 185 Mortimer, earls of March: Edmund (d. 1381) 48, 49, 143, 151, 152, 185, 187; career and reputation 45–7; military leader 122, 123, 129–30, 202, 216; will 31, 64, 74, 76 Edmund (d. 1425) 96, 100, 109, 110 n. 98; Roger (d. 1330) 26, 31, 36, 63, 74, 79, 98, 143, 149; marriage alliances 35, 154; retaining by 102, 104, 122 Roger (d. 1360) 118, 149 Roger (d. 1398) 43, 71, 93, 100, 150, 180, 180, 188; visits to his estates 79, 90 Morton, earl of 173 Mowbray, family of 31, 32, 64, 88, 151, 169 n. 41, 188, 190; John, Lord Mowbray (d. 1361) 153 Mowbray, earls of Nottingham, earls and dukes of Norfolk: John, earl Marshal (d. 1432) 64, 105, 110, 126, 128, 151; Thomas, earl of Norfolk (d. 1405) 109; Thomas, earl of Nottingham and duke of Norfolk (d. 1399) 69, 71; see also Norfolk Multon, Thomas (d. 1313) 144 n. 8, 151 music, musicians, minstrels 33, 66, 70, 87, 91, 96–7, 117, 136, 211 Narberth, lordship of (Dyfed) 150 Navarre 135 Needwood (Staffs.) 107 Nevill, Richard, of London, money-lender 109 Neville, family of 85, 86, 87, 162; John, lord of Raby (d. 1388) 86; Ralph earl of Westmorland (d. 1425) 86, 146 New Forest (Hants.) 152 Newgate, prison (London) 76 Newport (Gwent) 90, 152, 193 Neyte, La, manor of Westminster abbey 89 nontgeld 160 Norfolk 12, 30, 109, 180; countess of, see Margaret; dukes, earls of 16, 17, 24, 32,

249

203, 211; see also Bigod; Thomas of Brotherton; Mowbray Norman Conquest 31, 34, 58, 83, 84 Normandy 99 Northampton, countess of, see Elizabeth Badlesmere; earls of 117, 153; see also Bohun Northamptonshire 193 Northumberland 130, 180, 209; earls of 46, 151, 212; see also Percy Norwich (Norfolk) 30, 109, 214 Nottingham 152, 185; earl of, see Mowbray Oaksey (Wilts.) 108 Odcombe (Somerset) 38, 169 Order of the Garter 136 Ormond, earls and earldom of 24, 27, 69, 151, 153; see also Butler Orpen, [Henry] Goddard 27 Oswestry, lordship of (Salop) 152 Otterburn (Northumberland), battle of (1388) 117, 128 Oxford 72, 100; earl of 16, 106 n. 84, 117; see also Vere Ovedale, Sir Peter 152, 208 The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp 33 Painter, Sydney 8 palatinates 2, 121, 171, 174, 176, 180, 189 pannage 166 parliament 5, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 33, 43, 59, 60; attendance by nobles at 61, 70, 82, 88, 90, 97, 102–3, 119, 127; presence of retainers at 65, 207, 208, 212, 216; see also Good Parliament Pauncefoot, Sir John 123 Peak (Derbs.) 164 Peasants’ Revolt, see Great Revolt Peche, John 111 Peckforton Park (Cheshire) 167 Peebles (Borders) 117, 134 Pembridge (Heref.) 130 Pembroke 15, 29, 106, 107; countess of, see Mary of St Pol; earl and earldom of 12, 13, 155, 173; see also Hastings; Valence Pembroke College Cambridge 100 pension 199, 209; see also annuity Percy, family of 4, 38, 87, 88, 126, 162, 203, 209; castle building by 85–6; Henry, earl of Northumberland (d. 1408) 62, 85; Henry ‘Hotspur’ (d. 1403), 128; see also Northumberland petitions, petitioners 16, 41, 175, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193, 207–8 Pevensey (Sussex) 180

250

Index

Ph´ebus, Gaston count of Bearn (d. 1391) 95 Philipot, John 111 Philippa Montagu, countess of March (d. 1382), wife of Earl Roger Mortimer (d. 1360) 72 Philippa Mortimer, countess of Pembroke and Arundel (d. 1400) 87, 152 Philippa Plantagenet, countess of March (d. 1378), wife of Earl Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381) 45, 143, 149, 151 Pickering (Yorks.) 83 pigs 105, 166; see also pannage Pleshey (Essex) 85, 91–3, 99 Plessington, Sir Robert (d. 1393) 205 Plymouth (Devon) 129, 130 Poer, family 10 Poitiers 48 Poland 138 Pole, de la, family 128, 131; Michael, earl of Suffolk (d. 1388) 60; William, duke of Suffolk (d. 1450) 78 Pontefract (Yorks.) 37, 83, 95, 102, 125, 180, 181, 185, 191, 212 Porchalion, Thomas 75 Powell, Edward xi Poynings, Lord 31 Prague 137 Principality of Wales 132 protection 15, 16, 48, 159–61, 175, 198–200, 209, 212 provincial lordships (Scotland) 23 Prussia 97, 118, 119, 131, 137 Pryce, Huw xii Puddington (Cheshire) 131 Quo warranto 2

retainers, retaining 46, 58, 65, 85, 102, 104, 130–2, 151, 175, 188, 190, 191; duties 66, 68, 120–1, 152, 193, 207, 208; expectations and rewards 123, 185, 201, 204; general discussion 197–215 Rhodes 137, 148 Richard II, king of England (1377–99) 22, 46, 48, 109, 119, 123, 181, 195; establishment of new titles and lords 59, 60, 61, 212; difficult relations with nobles 25, 43, 65, 71, 86, 109, 203 Richard Wych, St 47 Richard’s Castle (Heref.) 67 Roath (Cardiff) 158 Robert I, king of Scotland (1306–29) 23, 32 44, 47, 122 Robert II, king of Scotland (1371–90) 23 Robert III, king of Scotland (1390–1406) 61 Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) 34 robes, see gowns Roche, family 10 Rochford (Essex) 87 ‘Rochfordeyn’, family 147 Rodley (Glocs.) 107 Rolls of Arms 11, 31 Rome 138 Ross (Scotland) 23, 61 Ross-on-Wye (Heref.) 90 Rothesay, duke of, see Stewart Rous, John 34 Roxburgh (Borders) 134 Russel, Sir John (d. 1405) 207 Russell, John, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1494) 203 Russia 138 Ruthin (Dyffryn Clwyd), lordship of 41, 156, 167, 171, 174; see also Grey

Raby (co. Durham) 86 Radnor, lordship of (Powys) 36 Ragman Roll 79, 200 Ramsey, abbot of 78 Randolph, Thomas, earl of Moray (d. 1332) 122 ransom 111, 116, 123, 127–8, 129, 207 Ravensthorpe (Yorks.) 156 receiver-general 186–8, 193, 212 ‘regalities’ (Scotland) 48, 172 registers 9, 16, 36, 38, 66, 111, 190, 192; Register of Edward the Black Prince 184; Registrum Honoris de Morton 38 Reigate (Surrey) 86, 92 religious sentiment 47, 73, 75–7, 92, 94–5, 99–102; see also crusade renders, see tributes and renders Restormel (Cornwall) 78

Sackville, Sir Andrew 211 St Agnes, London 88 St Albans, abbey and abbot of (Herts.) 9, 100 Sainte Chapelle St Denys, Paris 48 St Emilion, see wine St Inglevert 136, 137 St John, Sir Edward 216 St Mary Newarke, Leicester 77 St Mary’s, Leicester 9, 100 St Mary’s, Warwick 75 St Pancras, Lewes 71 St Paul’s, London 75, 76, 111, 136, 216 Salisbury, cathedral of 72, 146; countess of, see Elizabeth; earl and earldom of 26, 62, 75, 78, 153, 165, 167; see also Montagu Saul, Nigel 10 Savoy palace (London) 36, 66, 82, 87, 89

Index Saxtead (Suffolk) 96 Say, Lord, see Heron Scone (Perthshire) 61 Scotland, Scots xi, 147, 177; composition of nobility 22–3, 24, 25, 26–7, 28; crown-noble relations 2, 14, 60, 176, 202; economic exploitation and value of lordship in 38, 160–1, 165–6, 173, 174; military aspects of lordship in 82, 85, 86, 119–20, 122, 128, 133–5; nature and reputation of lordship in 7, 15, 16, 47–8, 113, 141, 145, 158, 179, 182, 189, 199, 204, 213–4; noble self-image and tastes in 32, 35, 61, 98 9, 198; study of lordship in 5, 8, 10, 172, 181; warfare with England and in France 44, 46, 68, 79, 90, 103, 116–7, 118, 124, 131, 132, 216 Scrope, family 87, 162 Scrope-Grosvenor dispute (1386) 32, 117 Seals, signets 32, 39, 40, 62, 95, 112, 116, 187, 190, 193 Seigneurie 1, 2, 3, 17, 41, 167, 168, 201, 209 Segrave, family arms of 64; John, Lord Segrave (d. 1353) 149 Selkirk (Borders) 134 serf, serfdom 6, 161 169, 197, 200 serjeants-at-law 163, 204; see also lawyers Severn, estuary, river 85, 87, 90, 107 Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) 86 Shrawardine (Salop) 85, 87, 91–3, 193 Shrewsbury (Salop) 35, 43, 193, 216 Simpson, Grant 8 Skeathy (Kildare) 147 Slimbridge (Glocs.) 97 Smithfield (London) 136 Smyth, John 164 Somerset 30, 38; duke, earl of, see Beaufort Southampton (Hants.) 106 Spain 32, 117, 190 Spalding (Lincs.) 191 Spenser, Edmund 161 Stafford 85, 193 Stafford, family of 4, 12, 33, 59, 88, 108, 185, 216; documents relating to lordship of 13, 38, 163, 192, 193, 194; Anne, countess of, see Anne; Edward, duke of Buckingham (d. 1521), 113, 184; Henry, duke of Buckingham (d. 1483) 113; Hugh, earl of Stafford (d. 1386) 148, 205; Ralph, Lord, later earl of Stafford (d. 1372) 12, 70, 85, 136, 153; Thomas, earl of Stafford, (d. 1392) 80 n. 64, 152, 193 Stafford, John, archbishop of Canterbury (1443–51) 11 n. 29 Stenton, F. M. 4, 8, Stepney (London) 136

251

steward 45, 46, 86, 104, 113, 130, 163, 173, 175, 181–6, 189–93, 198, 211 Stewart, family of 23, 61; Alexander, earl of Buchan (‘the Wolf of Badenoch’), (d. 1405) 61, 133, 173; Alexander, earl of Mar (d. 1435), 62, 68, 79, 133, 173; David, duke of Rothesay (d. 1402) 61; Robert, duke of Albany, earl of Atholl, Fife, and Menteith (d. 1420) 26, 61 Stonor, Sir William 155, 208 Strange, Lord 208 Strathearn, earl, earldom of 23, 168, 173; see also Malise Strigoil/Chepstow, lordship of 84, see also Chepstow Stringer, Keith 8, 14 Strother, Sir John (d. 1494) 124, 130 Sudbury (Suffolk) 187 Suffolk 30, 71, 84, 109, 125, 180; Alice, duchess of, see Alice; earls and earldom of, see Pole; Ufford Sully (Glamorgan) 158 Surrey 29, 203; earls of, see Warenne; duke of, see Holland Sussex 29, 85, 162, 164, 180 Sutherland, earldom of 23 Sutton Coldfield (Warw.) 65 Swillington, Sir Adam 65, 66; Robert 215 Swinfield, Richard, bishop of Hereford (1283–1317) 89 tail male 30, 140, 151 tailzie 145 Talbot, John, 67 tallage 168 Tamworth (Staffs.) 66 Tantallon (East Lothian) 85 Tany, Sir John 69 tapestries 32, 33, 63, 89, 91–2 Taunton (Somerset) 6 Tenby (Dyfed) 29 tenure, tenurial obligations 17, 78, 148, 171, 197, 199, 202, 207 Teutonic Order 96 Tewkesbury (Glocs.) 34, 75, 109 Thelwall, Thomas, chancellor of the duchy and county of Lancaster 66 Thetford, prior of 110 Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk (d. 1338) 155 Thomas Cantilupe, St 47 Thomas, duke of Clarence (d. 1421) 72 Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322) 4, 15, 44, 209; acquisition and management of estates 26, 102, 107, 145, 164, 167; lifestyle 83, 84, 104, 106; retinue 65, 66, 191, 212, 215

252

Index

Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397) 63, 65, 67, 104, 111,136, 187; lifestyle 63, 85, 88, 89, 91–2, 96, 98, 99; marriage alliances and family 67, 87, 101; military career 124, 125, 126, 130 Thomond 172 Thoresby (Notts.) 191 Thornbury (Glocs.) 37, 193 Threave (Galloway) 48, 85, 134 Throckmorton, John (d. 1445) 185 Tickhill (Yorks.) 83 Tintern abbey (Mons.) 36, 84, 100 Tipperary 172, 173, 174 titles 16, 21 25, 58–61, 141, 162; hierarchy of 11, 22, 23, 24, 26, 58–60; pride in 28, 29, 61 Tor Brian (Devon) 157 Touraine, duke of, see Douglas Tourn 171, 193 tournaments 66, 69–70, 93, 155, 207, 208, 216; as regular feature of aristocratic life 31, 64, 82, 90, 98, 103; as substitute for war 116, 118, 127, 135–8 Tower of London 36, 69, 151 Tower-house, 85, 132 Trent, river 185 Tres Riches Heures 91 Tresgoz, Sir Robert 130 tributes and renders 44, 47, 48, 82, 108 159–61, 176, 198, 202 Trim (Meath) 45, 68, 143, 172, 173, 181 Trokesford, Lady Isabel 66 Turk, Robert 131 Turks 137 Tutbury (Staffs.) 83, 97, 112, 125, 180 uchelwyr 10 Ufford, family of, earls of Suffolk 25 Ulster 14, 24, 44, 172; earls, earldom of 32, 35, 43, 45, 120, 151, 169, 181; see also Burgh; Lionel; Mortimer Umfraville, family of 23 unfree tenants, see serf, serfdom Usk/Caerleon, lordship of (Mon.) 35, 37, 83, 90, 100, 107, 130, 167, 181 Usk, Adam (d. 1430) 35, 42, 47, 100 Valence, family of 88; Aymer, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324) 4, 25, 32, 207; Joan, countess of Pembroke, see Joan de Munchensi; Sir William (d. 1296) 13 valor 9, 36, 41, 165, 194–5 Varenne 28 vassal, vassalage 59, 173, 197, 198, 213 Venice 137

Venour, William 111 Vere family, earls of Oxford 25, 38, 74; Robert, earl of Oxford, marquis of Dublin, duke of Ireland (d. 1392) 59, 131 Verona 138 Vienna 137 Wales, Welsh 2, 12, 37, 82, 86, 121; aristocratic estates in 27, 29, 143, 153, 162, 180, 182; economic exploitation and value of lordship in 107–8, 164, 166, 168; native (‘Celtic’) society in 10, 13, 35, 84, 123, 147, 160; nature and reputation of lordship in 7, 40, 41–2, 43, 113, 158, 169, 171, 172, 176, 198; recruitment of soldiers from 44, 118, 120, 121, 130, 132, 216; visits to and military campaigns in 14, 79, 90, 138, 152, 174, 184, 186, 193, 199–200; see also March; Principality; uchelwyr Waltham (Essex) 136; abbey 70, 153 Walton (Suffolk) 84 Ward, Jennifer 107 wardrobe, 63, 88, 89, 95, 98, 104, 106, 125, 187, 189; wardrober, 104, 184, 188 Warenne, John de, earl of Surrey (d. 1347) 15, 25, 28–9, 30, 71, 73, 146, 173 Warkworth (Northumberland) 85 Wars of Independence 14, 27 Warwick 33, 37, 85, 87, 108, 123; countess of, see Elizabeth; earls and earldom of 12, 37, 42, 65, 85, 123, 155, 207; see also Beauchamp; ‘Guy of Warwick’ Waterton, Hugh 103 wayting 161 Wells, Lord 71 Wenlok, Walter, abbot of Westminster (1283–1307) 89 Wentwood Forest (Mons.) 84 Westminster 24, 68, 88, 97; abbey 75, 89; see also Monk of Westminster Westmorland, earl of, see Neville Wexford (Ireland), lordship of 14, 172 Wigmore (Heref.) 31, 46, 47, 83, 110 n. 99, 142, 180; abbey 34, 35, 67, 72, 74, 77, 101, 135; see also Mortimer William I, king of England (the Conqueror) (1066–89) 28, 181 wills, bequests, 30, 31, 32, 46, 63–4, 101, 112, 148, 149, 150, 163; acts of charity 62, 73, 76–8, 105, 204; detailing funeral rites 47, 71–4, 76; listing prized possessions, 92, 93, 98, 116 Wiltshire 61, 180 Winchester, bishop of 6, see Wykeham

Index Windsor (Berks.) 86 wine, 66, 94, 105–6, 109, 214; St Emilion 106 Wintringham, William 87 Wodecock, John 88 Wooton (Oxon.) 97 Worcester 37, 42, 109, 185; earl of, see Beauchamp Wrexham (Denbyshire) 199 Writtle (Essex) 108

253

Wycliff, John (d. 1384) 16, 101 Wye, river 84 Wykeham, William, bishop of Winchester (1367–1404) 148 Yevele, Henry 75, 87 York, 88, 103, 186; archbishop of, 96; dukes of, see Edmund of Langley; Edward Yorkshire 180, 181, 209 Ystlwyf (Carmarthenshire) 29