Bastard Feudalism1

The Past and Present Society

Bastard Feudalism RevisedAuthor(s): David Crouch and D. A. CarpenterReviewed work(s):Source: Past & Present, No. 131 (May, 1991), pp. 165-189Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650873 .Accessed: 23/01/2012 19:39

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DEBATE BASTARD FEUDALISM REVISED

It is not just local historians who have to take into account W. G. Hoskins's dictum that everything is older than it looks. Peter Coss has said much the same for the benefit of late medieval- ists. Since K. B. McFarlane (who brought the idea to life), they have all worked on the assumption that the form of society known as "bastard feudalism" arose out of the circumstances of the late thirteenth century.1 For most of them that is a working assumption of no moment, for the origin of bastard feudalism is hardly the concern of a late medievalist working in his own period, and happy with a model of society that fits his needs. There is more to say against McFarlane on this level, however, for he did set himself to deal with the question of its origins. Coss works hard, and in my view successfully, to persuade the reader that the social order described by the term "bastard feudalism" could be dated back to the early thirteenth century. Like other historians of the thirteenth century, Coss sees retained justices, long-term inden- tured retainers, waged soldiers and maintenance already in place in the early years of Henry III: so what indeed is left that is new about aristocratic society in Edward I's reign?

Coss's arguments are finely drawn and ruminative. His article, indeed, has to be read with care, so as to tease out and savour its

* I would like to thank both Nigel Saul and David Carpenter for reading early drafts of this Comment and for their many useful observations upon it. The material for the reply is drawn from the Medieval Aristocracy Project based at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, from 1986 to 1989, and funded by the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust.

1 J. M. W. Bean, formerly of McFarlane's persuasion, has recently restated his views about the origins of bastard feudalism (too recently for Coss to have been able to take his views into account) in J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1989), pp. 121-53. Like me, he is dubious of the value of the term "bastard feudalism", sees the later practice of retaining and livery as originating in the household maintenance of earlier days, and quite cheerfully would trace it back as far as early Anglo-Saxon times. He does not, however, consider (as I do here) the earlier manifestations of political affinities depending on other than landed ties; an integral part of the idea of bastard feudal society.

166 NUMBER 131 PAST AND PRESENT

meanings. There is much in it to discuss and to question, and that indeed is Coss's intention. He hopes and expects to set a thirteenth-century cat among the late medieval pigeons. But I as a creature of the twelfth century would first like to tread on its tail. A lot revolves around definitions in Coss's argument. He is careful to define "bastard feudalism" for us. By his definition bastard feudalism "occurs when a highly feudalized society is subjected to a growth in publicly exercised authority . . . by means of private and privatized agents".2 He evidently regards both it and "feudalism" as useful constructs still, but knows, as E. A. R. Brown has pointed out in a famous article, that the variety of definitions on offer for the construct "feudalism" make it of dubious value: the curse of Babel is on the word.3 I fear that his willingness to use feudalism and its bastard in argument regardless has only spawned yet more confusion.

When we use the word "feudalism" we can mean it to be taken many ways. The meaning of "bastard feudalism" carries less historical and philosophical baggage, but is still disputed, and sometimes now the phrase is avoided. But "feudalism" remains the main obstacle to intelligent argument. A recent study has listed ten perceptions of "feudalism" current among historians (some of which are not relevant to the medievalist's study of his period).4 For this reason alone I would avoid the word, but Coss has stuck with the idea of feudalism none the less. He has done so because he adopts McFarlane's line that "feudal" society was "essentially different while superficially similar" to that which succeeded it. Feudalism remains for Coss "a useful tool both to signify a particular type of social formation and as a vehicle for comparative history", and for him twelfth-century society was "a highly feudalized society under almost any definition".5 He gives no direct statement of his own understanding of twelfth- century society, although he regrets McFarlane's reliance on 2 p. R. Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", Past and Present, no. 125 (Nov. 1989), p. 63. 3E. A. R. Brown, "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe", Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxix (1974), pp. 1063-88. 4 J. O. Ward, "Feudalism: Interpretative Category or Framework of Life in the Medieval West?", in Edmund Leach et al. (eds.), Feudalism: Comparative Studies (Sydney, 1985), pp. 40-9, lists ten common perceptions (he calls them foci) of "feudalism" among historians. He none the less thinks that the term is usable, providing the terms of reference are made clear. 5 Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", pp. 30, 39, 40.

BASTARD FEUDALISM REVISED 167

J. H. Round's and Sir Frank Stenton's "narrow" model.6 How- ever, we have strong hints as to what is in Coss's mind. Twelfth- century (aristocratic) society was for him (as indeed it was for Stenton!) one of honours; communities of followers attached by hereditary tenurial obligations to a great lord. However, it was also a society in which public authority, whether stemming from the king or the concerns of the local community, underlay, or existed side-by-side with, such aristocratic groupings. It is in what he sees as the tense relationship between private, honorial jurisdiction and exterior authority (particularly that inaugurated by the Angevin legal reforms) that Coss sees the beginnings of bastard feudalism. The waning of honours led the magnates to devise a new vehicle of local domination: that is, the contracted retinue that was the core of the bastard feudal affinity.

How valid is this model of the life and death of twelfth-century honorial society? I have written elsewhere in support of Stenton's "honorial" view of Anglo-Norman society, and I think still that the evidence for the importance of the honour is strong. Stenton wrote from the sources, and the twelfth-century sources, both charters and chronicles, leave little doubt concerning the way aristocratic power was often exercised and expressed through the honour and honorial court. But by contrasting twelfth-century "honour" with fourteenth-century "affinity", we are in my view allowing words to dupe us into believing that two radically different societies lie behind them. Unlike Stenton (and Coss too), I do not see the honour as ever having been the sole means of the exercise of magnate power in the twelfth century, but merely as a part of its armoury.

Honours did ossify and become redundant as expressions of aristocratic power: in this Coss is correct. They were institutions brought about by perpetual grants of (usually) land in exchange for which one man (for himself and his successors) conceded rights of jurisdiction to another (and his successors). Sooner or later any institution must become irrelevant as circumstances change, and this happened to the honour. The honour and its court lingered on into the fourteenth century as a fiscal survival, but never as more than a fossil shell of a once-living community. Coss's dating of the accelerating decay of the honour between 1180 and 1230 is also, I feel, correct.7 But since magnate power

6 Ibid., pp. 31, 39. 7Ibid., pp.44.


showed no sign of declining along with the honour we must conclude that the honour could not have been more than inci- dental to it. Why was that? Here is the nub of my doubts about Coss's piece. He suggests that a new vehicle of magnate power was devised to replace the faltering honour. I wollld suggest no more than that the tyres were changed on the old model.

I think that Coss is right to look for the existence of something along the lines of the later medieval affinity (at a much earlier date than has previously been allowed) to explain the fact that magnates continued to exert local dominion after 1180. But here Coss and I part company. He opposes "honour" to "affinity", "feudal" to "bastard feudal". Coss's is a cautious article, but here where he throws caution aside he is most unconvincing. He wants a crisis at the point of fracture between his two models of society, but to me there was no such fracture. Instead, there was continuity. It has been said (with the intention of being patroniz- ing) that twelfth-century society displayed the antecedents- of a bastard feudal order. What nonsense. It is not being merely reductionist to see the political ground-rules of later medieval society in place in England in the twelfth century: what changes there were between 1100 and 1300 were matters of degree and cosmetic.

It is symptomatic of the continuity I see in forms of magnate power between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Coss's reasoning is frequently drawn back beyond 1200 to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. First there is the question of paid, contracted soldiers. Following Marjorie Chibnall and J. O. Prestwich, we can take it as established that the paid, contracted knight (even if the contract was no more than a tally stick) was a prominent feature of the royal armies of England from at least the time of Henry I. It may indeed be older than that.8

This line of argument makes ideas about England being a "highly feudalized" country after the Norman Conquest rather shaky. "Narrow" military feudalism was not the sole support of aristocratic power in England. It was in fact already a land where armies were levied by a variety of means. According to the chronicle of Abingdon abbey, the retinue maintained for a time after the Conquest by its abbot was paid (by donativam, as it was

8 M. Chibnall, "Mercenaries and the familia regis under Henry I", History, lx (1977), pp. 15-23; J. O. Prestwich, "The Military Household of the Norman Kings", Eng. Hist. Rev., xcvi (1981), pp. 1-35.

169 BASTARD FEUDALISM REVISED

said).9 Thereafter the means of support of the retinue was shifted to reserved rents from nominated lands: yet still not to simple enfeoffments with land. What applied to abbots can be proved to apply just as much to less well-documented earls and counts. As early as 1102 the earl of Shrewsbury raised paid knights to aug- ment his landed levies. The count of Meulan on several occasions raised companies of knights by contract; the earl of Warenne garrisoned Rouen with his stipendarfi in 1144 and Cardiff was bustling with the earl of Gloucester's stipendarii in 1158, when a Welsh commando force sneaked into his castle and kidnapped him.l? Going so far as to enfeoff knights with land was no more than one among a number of alternative ways of contracting or sub-contracting for a military retinue. As Sally Harvey has proved, Domesday Book mentions nearly five hundred such men, mostly in modest circumstances.1l It was therefore a popular option in England for a while, as it was later to be in the Holy Lands and in Ireland. But such a surplus of lands for redistribution was only temporary in all three cases. The Cartae baronum of 1166 demonstrate how the boom was already over by 1135: enfeoffments in land after Henry I's death were far fewer than before, and small in quantity ( judging by the amounts of service demanded).12 Enfeoffments in land after the time of Henry I were a token of favour from a magnate to a dependant or ally, precious in their rarity.l3 Even at the height of the boom in enfeoffments, 9 "Eisdem donativis prius retentis": Chronicon monasterii de Abingdon, ed. J. Steven- son, 2 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1859), ii, pp. 3-4. Other examples from Peterborough, Westminster, Worcester and Ely are collected in H. M. Chew, The English Ecclesiastical Tenants-in-Chief and Knight Service (Oxford, 1932), pp. 114-15. 10 For the earl of Shrewsbury, see The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. M. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969-80)) vi, pp. 26-8; for Meulan, see D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in England (Cambridge, 1986), p. 132; for Warenne, see Robert de Torigny, Chronica, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, etc., ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1884-9), iv, pp. 148-9; for Gloucester, see Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera, ed. J. F. Dimock, 8 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1861-91), vi, p. 63. 11 S. Harvey, "The Knight and the Knight's Fee in England", Past and Present, no. 49 (Nov. 1970), p. 15.

12 J. C. Holt went so far as to call the Cartae no more than "an archaeological deposit left by the tenurial history of the previous century", in J. C. Holt, "The Introduction of Knight-Service in England", in R. Allen Brown (ed.), Anglo-Norman Studies, vi (Woodbridge, 1983), p. 105. 13 The return of the bishopric of Worcester is a remarkable (but perhaps untypical) example of this. It listed enfeoffments by episcopate: 37.5 knights were enfeoffed before Bishop Samson (that is, before 1096), four knights during Samson's episcopate (1096-1112), and four knights during Bishop Theulf's tenure of the see (1113-23). None were recorded for Bishop Simon (1125-50) or his three successors before 1166:


England, let alone France, was never a wholly "feudalized" country in military terms. Soldiers were raised by a mixture of means, and enfeoffment was a temporary, passing expedient, convenient only while there was a surplus of land for redistribution.

Moving from the military to the civil dimension of honorial "feudalism", I cannot believe that England (even without an allodial tradition) was a "highly feudalized" country in the twelfth century, except in comparison with a "lightly feudalized" country, like France. But in some ways England was even less feudalized than France (as Coss himself points out). Too much emphasis is placed on the honour court: especially if the intention is to contrast private with public authority. One clause of Magna Carta apart (which J. C. Holt depreciatesl4), there is little evidence to suggest that contemporaries saw any ideological confrontation between the two jurisdictions. Nor, for that matter, was the influence wielded by the lords who presided over honorial society quite so monolithic in the localities as Stenton implies. There were powerful magnates who based their influence on a pool of men who were their tenants for one or multiple knights' tenancies. Being powerful men, their tenants were eager to attend on them.l5 But I do not believe what applied to the great earl of Leicester- justiciar of England, uncle of the king of Scotland, and close cousin of the king of France would equally well apply to a lesser lord, or an earl as poor as the earl of Oxford (an earl who in fact toadied to the earl of Essex, a greater man, in the mid- twelfth century). What is more, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there were as early as Domesday Book a significant number of men who held their lands of several lords, not one.l6 Honorial integrity was never absolute in England, as Holt long ago pointed out in his Northerners, and as a variety of studies have since confirmed.l7

(n. O cont.)

see The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, 3 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1896), i, p. 300.

14 J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 225-6. 15 Crouch, Beaumont Twins, pp. 101-38, 155-62. 16 Ibid -) pp. 127-31. 17 J. C. Holt, The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King 3rohn (Oxford, 1961),

pp. 36-7. See, for an earlier period, R. Mortimer, "Land and Service: The Tenants of the Honour of Clare", in R. Allen Brown (ed.), Anglo-Norman Studies, viii (Wood- bridge, 1986), pp. 177-97. Richard Mortimer's analysis of the "powerful" Clare honour finds knight service in the twelfth century to be no more than a token of lordship, and the honour an artificial construct weakened by external forces of neighbourhood communities and diffuse political allegiance.


Public authority in England was never submerged by the private authority of usurping counts and castellans in the way it was in large parts of France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A writ of Henry I dating to 1108 assumes a level of uniform public authority quite unknown in the France of Louis VI. When the men of two different lords disagreed, Henry ordained that the county court was the forum where they ought to be recon- ciled.18 In the Leges Henrici Primi, a tract of the same time or but a few years later, all the king's greater subjects are expected to attend the county or hundred courts.19 On occasion the same king's writs, and those of his successor, address the bishops and earls of the counties which they concern. When we do have some indications of the attendance at the county courts of Henry I's reign, as in the county court of Shropshire in the 1120s, there seems to have been a significant level of attendance by the magnates of a county.2? The problem in 1108, according to the Leges, was not the fading away of county courts, but the burden of the rising numbers of sessions.21 Public authority was assertive even in the heyday of the honour, as the appearance of the eyre in England, and even west Wales, in Henry I's reign demonstrates.22

Looking at twelfth-century society in this light makes the

18 Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. H. W. C. Davis et al., 4 vols. (Oxford, 1913-69), ii, no. 892, text taken from Select Charters, ed. W. Stubbs, 9th edn. (Oxford, 1913), p. 122: "if there is a plea between tenants of an honour of any of my barons, then it should be pleaded in their lord's court; if between tenants of different lords, then in the county court" ("et si est inter vavasores alicuius baronis mei honoris, tractetur placitum in curia domini eorum, et si est inter vavasores duorum dominorum tractetur in comitatu"). See commentary in J. A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 110-11. In France such causes would have had to be decided before the king or prince himself.

19 Leges Henrici Primi, ed. L. J. Downer (Oxford, 1972), c. 7, 2. The county court is to be attended by bishops, earls, sheriffs (vicedomini), vicarEi, centenarii, aldermen, prefecti, prepositi, barons, vavasours and others. Some of the names of the attendant personages evoke Anglo-Saxon terminology, but the appearance of vicedomini, barons and vavasours in the list must be a contemporary insertion intended to make the statement relevant to Henry I's England. In other words, the author is not indulging in legal antiquarianism by citing an Anglo-Saxon exemplar.

20 The Cartulary of Shrewsbury Abbey, ed. U. Rees, 2 vols. (Cardiff, 1980), ii, p. 318, has the county court in the mid-1120s full of the barones of the shire, although precisely what the writer meant by barones is perhaps debatable. None the less a case from late in Stephen's reign heard in a joint comitatus of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk had two bishops, two abbots and several barones provincie present, and the meaning of "magnates" here is inescapable: H. Cam, "An East Anglian Shire Moot, 1148-53", Eng. Hist. Rev., xxxix (1924), p. 569.

21 Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. Davis et al., ii, no. 892. 22 Green, Government of England under Henry I, pp. 108-11.


question of bastard feudalism more complicated. It certalnly makes Coss's definition of a bastard feudal society less sound. There is no doubt that Henry II's reign saw increased royal assertiveness in the shires, and the forging of new links between the king and lesser landowners in the county court. But it is not proved that it was simply this assertiveness which caused the break-up of honorial communities, as S. F. C. Milsom once suggested. The honour certainly lost its political importance at the end of the twelfth century as compared with the early part of the century.23 But the drying up of sources of land for distribu- tion would have meant that the honour was losing importance anyway: without land the honour could not be renewed or aug- mented as an aristocratic community. The reliance on less immediately attractive douceurs could have allowed the king to compete at the county level on more equal terms with the magnates, deploying (as Scott L. Waugh points out) a whole armoury of wardships and offices that magnates could not match.24 Coss's suggested model of bastard feudalism would founder on this model of Angevin kingship. He sees a fading aristocracy grappling with the new problem of royal power by devising new methods: suborning royal agents and interposing themselves as mediators between the king and localities. I am suggesting something different: the magnates from the time of the Conquest exercising power by a variety of methods, but with a temporary edge in the patronage of land which quite soon evaporated, causing them to resort more frequently to other, established, alternatives. There is no need in that case to see the changes of 1180x1230 as symptomatic of a crisis in the aristocracy, defined by the cata- strophic decay of honours. Far from it: the great magnates were simply adjusting their position, shifting the weight from one leg to another.

Elsewhere I have already described one classic "bastard feudal" affinity existing at an early date: that of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. It can be proved to have been a force in the early ll90s. It was recruited from knights and lesser magnates of Gloucestershire, North Wiltshire and the upper Thames valley. Few of its members originally had any tenurial connection with

23 I will be exploring this phenomenon in a book, Power and the English Aristocracy in the High Middle Ages (Yale, forthcoming).

24 S. L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217-1327 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 273-6.


the Marshal, although some small land grants were bestowed on a number of them (mostly in Ireland where there was more undistributed land). The principal inducements to join the Mar- shal's affinity were awards of office (shrievalties, under-shrievalties and stewardships) and his influence with the king to secure favour and advancement for his followers; grants of land played little part in it.25

Such an affinity is uncomfortably early for Coss's chronology, and makes one wonder if such a form of affinity-raising could not have been long known and practised. And there is evidence that it was. One further and even earlier example will suffice for the argument here. In the late 1140s Earl Roger of Hereford (1143-55) succeeded Earl llobert of Gloucester (died 1147) as the chief of the magnates supporting the Angevin side in the civil war of Stephen's reign. Earl Roger attracted a number of lesser magnates of the southern March and West Midlands into his entourage: the lords of Clifford, Ewyas and Monmouth, William de Beauchamp, sheriff of Worcester (and his brother Walter), Robert de Candos, Richard de Cormeilles (and his brother Alex- ander), Oliver de Merlimont and William de Briouze.26 A further useful auxiliary was the king of Glamorgan, Morgan ab Owain- probably the main source of Welsh mercenaries for the Angevin party, and previously a close associate of Robert of Gloucester.27 The result was a political connection which dominated the area between the Usk and Severn valleys, and had nothing much to do with the struggle between royalist and Angevin. It was the

25 D. Crouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, c. 1147-1219 (London, 1990), pp. 157-68.

26 This reconstruction is based on the fifty-four charters of the earl (thirty-three with witness lists) known to me, as printed or calendared in "Charters of the Earldom of Hereford, 1095-1201", ed. D. Walker, in Camden Misc., xxii (Camden Soc., 4th ser., i, London, 1964), pp. 13-37, conflated with other charters to be found in Berkeley Castle Muniments, Cartulary of Bristol Abbey, fo. 30r-V) (three acts); Antony House, Cornwall, MSS. of Sir John Carew Pole, Bt., "Pole's Charters", no. 3707; The Cartulary of Worcester Cathedral Priory, ed. R. R. Darlington (Pipe Roll Soc., new ser., xxxviii, London, 1968), p. 29; Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, Illus- trative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. J. H. Round (London, 1899), pp. 410-11. The Monmouth, Ewyas, Candos and Cormeilles honours were together the four chief lay baronies of Herefordshire after the deprivation of the Lacy family Earl Roger's main enemies in the shire: see Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. Hall, i, pp. 278-87.

2'D. Crouch, "The Slow Death of Kingship in Glamorgan, 1067-1158") Mor- gannwg, xxix (1985), pp. 33-5.


earl's response to his own problems and a means to further his local ambitions.

Earl Roger was not linked to any of the men of his affinity by land grants. His father had a grant of the county of Hereford from Empress Mathilda, and this had included the technical overlordship of Candos and Cormeilles (but not the others). Candos and Cormeilles were not beholden to the earl for any known grants of land or privilege, however. Earl Roger married his sister to Briouze to secure their bond, and he made Robert of Ewyas his constable. Oliver de Merlimont joined the earl from the service of the Shropshire baron Hugh de Mortemer, whose steward he had previously been, hopping from lord to lord to increase his advantages under the most effective protector (is this conventional feudal and honorial behaviour?).28 The only known land grant in the earl's circle was his endowment of Baderon of Monmouth with part of the lordship of Lydney, Glos., which the earl had filched from the earl of Warwick (a grant later annulled by the settlement of 1153). The link between Earl Roger and William de Briouze was actually expressed in a written indenture, which survives. Indeed another indenture survives between Earl Roger and Earl William of Gloucester defining their relations, and a further one between Earl Roger and the earl of Leicester is known from that same indenture.29 How exceptional was this sort of arrangement in the mid-twelfth century? It is known that certain greater earls in Stephen's England had lesser, client earls: thus Derby danced attendance on Chester, Northampton on Leicester.30

Central Normandy too provides an instance of what could be called an early affinity. Around 1138 Count Waleran of Meulan gathered under his leadership most of the lesser magnates of the region. At least one indenture survives by which he recorded a relationship between himself and an inferior. Waleran seems also to have had a similar political connection in the area of the Seine

28 Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. Davis et al., iii, no. 393; Wigmore Abbey Chronicle, in William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis and B. Bandinel, 6 vols. (London, 1817-30D, vi.l, pp. 344-5.

29 Z. N. and C. N. L. Brooke, "Hereford Cathedral Dignitaries", Cambridge Hist. T1., viii (1944-6), p. 185; R. H. C. Davis, "Treaty between William Earl of Gloucester and Roger Earl of Hereford", in Patricia M. Barnes and C. F. Slade (eds.), A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton (Pipe Roll Soc., new ser., xxxvi, London, 1960), pp. 139-46.

30 For the Chester-Derby and Leicester-Northampton links, see R. H. C. Davis, King Stephen, 3rd edn. (London, 1990), p. 109.


valley below Marly-le-Roi. It is a suggestion worth pursuing that what English historians call "affinities" were the normal structures of power in northern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries where magnates bullied or seduced allodial landowners into their ban.3l If this is so, as Nigel Saul has pointed out to me, then Coss's idea that bastard feudalism was a response to strong monarchy might well be the opposite of the truth: it was a convenient way to exploit weak kingship. Who were the strong kings during his period of evolution in any case? The absentee Richard, ready to sell any privilege, the querulous and distracted John and the boy-king Henry III: all to a greater or lesser degree in conflict with, or in the power of, their aristocracies for significant periods of their reigns. Henry II was a strong king, and more in control of his aristocracy than any other twelfth-century king of England, but honours still flourished in his reign. It should be a priority for historians to discover precisely the relationship between Henry and his aristocracy, and how that aristocracy exercised power, especially considering what we know of the dramatic doings and ingenuity of Stephen's and Mathilda's magnates.

The circumstances of Stephen's reign, involving the relaxation of central power in England and Normandy, may well have encouraged affinities with their apparatus of indentures, more visible to us because great magnates were able to spread their wings and embrace larger areas and bigger men under their shadow. But we should not doubt that the imperatives of power and security were likely to lead magnates to reach beyond the formal links of land tenure at any time. How feudal, in any case, were "feudal" links based on knight service? The chief purpose of a land grant in return for knight service (itself an act only common in England) was to retain a follower and provide for him. But there were variant cases when a magnate (particularly an ecclesiastical magnate) sought to make alliances with other magnates by territorial concessions, and took homage and knight

31 Crouch, Beaumont Twins, pp. 35-7, 53, 58-63. See G. Duby, La societe aux xie et xiie siecles dans la region maconnaise (Paris, 1982 edn.), pp. 261-2, for a summary of such a model. R. Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu'a la fin du xiiie siecle, 2 vols. (Louvain, 1968), ii, pp. 483-4, describing the expansion of the power of the Candavene dynasty around St Pol in the eleventh century, has the counts winning over existing landowners to their banner, not enfeoffing new supporters.


service as a form of recognizance or acknowledgement.32 Or there was the case when an influential curialis took land grants in return for an alliance with a magnate at court, or in return for his favour to a suppliant. In this way in the 1120s Geoffrey de Clinton amassed considerable lands from men as great as the earls of Warwick and Gloucester, and the lords of Tutbury and Stafford. What might be a typical instance of enfeoffment for political purposes was a grant of a Northamptonshire estate Geoffrey received from a Bedfordshire castellan who was experiencing the king's malivolentia for killing one of his dogs: presumably Geoffrey was to engineer his return to grace. Such grants were supposed to be in perpetuity, but none the less after 1133, when Geoffrey died, the earl of Gloucester successfully recovered his five fees from Geoffrey's son, and the earl of Warwick attempted to deprive the boy of the seventeen fees extorted from him back in 1124.33

Looked at this way, "feudal" links involving land and knight service were only one form of "bastard feudal" contract: one other way of expressing dependence between a greater and lesser man. This granted, what exactly was bastardized about bastard feudalism? Was it not a normal form of relationship between men great and small: using grants and favours of whatever sort to secure allegiance and support? One construct (bastard feudalism) cannot be said to have evolved from another (feudal) one, as Coss assumes. The variety of relationships which these phrases describe lived happily alongside one another in what he calls the "feudal" twelfth century.

J. M. W. Bean has in fact come to much the same conclusion, but by a different route. He considers the idea of the evolution of the affinity out of the maintained household of the twelfth

32 Domesday Book is full of such examples, so full that there is no need to cite individual instances. A good and later example of the process is the surrender of Mountsorrel and Charnwood by the earl of Chester to the earl of Leicester, described in E. King, "Mountsorrel and its Region in the Reign of Stephen", Huntington Lib. Quart., xSiv (1980), pp. 1-10.

33 The Clinton fees are analysed by Green, Government of England under Henry I, pp. 241-2. For the attempted deprivation of Geoffrey II of the Warwick fees, see D. Crouch, '4Geoffrey de Clinton and Roger Earl of Warwick", Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, lv (1982), pp. 119-23. For the involvement with Robert, castellan of Meppershall, see British Lib., London, MS. 4714, fo. lr, the twelfth-century foundation chronicle of Biddlesden, printed in Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. Caley, Ellis and Bandinel, v, pp. 366-7. Another such aggregation of lands by a royal justice from a variety of magnates, was that attracted by Stephen of Seagrave around 1200, the deeds recording which are to be found in I. H. Jeayes, A Catalogue of the Muniments of Berkeley Castle (Bristol, 1892), passim.


century or earlier.34 However, the idea of the origins of bastard feudalism that he offers is unsubtle. To derive the later social and military system of the fourteenth century from the maintenance offered to twelfth-century retainers in baronial households is to miss the point and play the "antecedents game". The structure of political lordship which the term "bastard feudalism" embraces was also present then. Offering maintenance and livery, or annuit- ies, to retained knights was but one level of patronage open to the magnate. There was, as I have already said, the inducement of office in magnate administrations, and more besides. The 1130 pipe roll reveals that lords were already offering their mediation at court to secure royal favours for their men (in this case exemptions from geld). There was also, as Roger of Hereford demonstrates for us, a quite informal and generally unstated menace by which the twelfth-century magnate could doniinate his country. But the menace was none the less there, and was on occasion stated. A bishop of Llandaff in 1156, in pursuit of witnesses to assist Gloucester abbey's claim to a church in his diocese, could write that "there are these men and others, men of the earl of Gloucester and of other sort, who avoid the truth fearing to incur the earl's ill-will, but who could be forced to speak up if it was necessary for the abbot and if it suited the archbishop".35 The words could as well have come from a bishop of two centuries later. North Riding College, Scarborough David Crouch

34 Bean, From Lord to Patron, pp. 121-53. 35 Historia et cartularium monasterii sancti Petri Gloucestriae, ed. W. Hart, 3 vols.

(Rolls ser., London, 1863-7), ii, p. 57. Emphasis added.

II

"The latent threat to magnate power lies primarily within the more direct relationship between free subject and the crown which is generally seen as developing out of the Angevin legal reforms". In suggesting that the transition from feudalism to bastard feudalism was caused by a magnate reaction to this threat, a reaction which was already well advanced by the 1250s, Peter Coss has advanced a bold hypothesis, which leaves him open to attack from many sides.1 Historians specializing in the twelfth

1 p. R. Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", Past and Present, no. 125 (Nov. 1989), pp. 27-64; quotation at p. 41. For another recent discussion which focuses particularly

(cont. on p. 178)


century may well argue that there was little that was strictly "feudal" about England before the Angevins, and indeed that features of bastard feudalism were already in place. Historians of the later Middle Ages, on the other hand, may insist that the thirteenth century displays merely the antecedents of the fully- grown bastard feudal animal. This Comment aims both to support Coss's thesis and to suggest some modifications.

* * *

It is important to distinguish between different elements in the suggested transition from feudalism to bastard feudalism. At its heart was the way in which "the tenurial bond between lord and vassal [was] superseded as the primary social tie".2 Whereas great lords had once relied for service largely on their knightly tenants, they came instead to employ and retain men with whom they had no tenurial connection, and to reward them with money fees and other perquisites instead of simply with grants of land. In a broader sense, however, bastard feudalism also embraces the world in which these new personal ties operated. At times they simply provided lords with knights and administrators; but they could also help magnates exercise their rule in the counties of England, a rule enforced through the retaining of royal officials, the intimidation of juries, and the general corruption of the system of justice and administration.3 It is with the evolution of this bastard feudal web of control that Coss is primarily concerned. In thinking that it was closely linked with the development of royal government in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he is surely right. It was, after all, that systemj its law, its juries, its sheriffs, its judges which bastard feudalism sought to manipulate. Elements of that manipulation can already be discerned around the middle years of the thirteenth century: the propaganda of the years 1258-65

(n. 1 cont.)

on the origins of the annuity and the indenture of retinue, see J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1989), esp. ch. 4. 2 England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays of K. B. McFarlane, introd. G. L. Harriss (London, 1981), pp. 23-4; quoted by Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", p. 27. 3 For the web of bastard feudal control, see, for example, C. Carpenter, "The Beauchamp Affinity: A Study of Bastard Feudalism at Work", Eng. Hist. Rev., xcv (1980), pp. 524-30.


spoke of judges retained by great magnates, sheriffs who lacked the power or inclination to protect the weak from magnate oppression, and minores who were unable to obtain justice against the great.4 That the structure of government in the fourteenth century was significantly more susceptible to this type of distor- tion than that which developed in the reign of Henry III is far from clear. True, it could be argued that the king maintained a less powerful presence in the localities in the later period, since both the curial sheriff and the general eyre had disappeared, to be replaced by gentry acting as sheriffs and justices of the peace. Thus the shires were far more open to magnate and gentry control. But, in fact, the curial sheriff had virtually disappeared by the 1250s while, as early as the 1220s, seventy years before its final demise, aspects of the general eyre's jurisdiction had been hived off to local knights acting as justices of assize and gaol delivery.5 Conversely, in the fourteenth century, a royal presence was retained in the shires through the perambulations of the court coram rege and the appointment of professional judges to many types of judicial commission.6

Magnates had, of course, aspired to hold sway in the localities long before the thirteenth century, but to talk of a web of bastard feudal control much before then is misleading. The pattern of magnate rule in the twelfth century differed from that which developed in the thirteenth. First, it is likely that honours and honorial courts were more vital institutions.7 Secondly, magnates

4 Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 1258-1267, ed. R. F. Treharne and I. J. Sanders (Oxford, 1973), pp. 272-3; T. Rymer, Foedera, ed. J. Caley and F. Holbrooke, 3 vols. (Record Comm., London, 1816-30), i.l, pp. 408-9; see also D. A. Carpenter, "King, Magnates and Society: The Personal Rule of King Henry III", Speculum, lx (1985), pp. 47-9, 62-70; J. R. Maddicott, "Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth- Century England", Past and Present, supplement no. 4 (1978), pp. 4-13.

5 For fuller discussion, see below, pp. 182-3, and n. 17. In David Crook's view, a "case can . . . be made that by the last decade of the thirteenth century the general eyre was inessential to the functioning of legal administration in England". Its crown plea business and review of judicial administration were "functions more concerned with errors and omissions as formal grounds for penalties than with the repression of crime and the encouragement of just and efficient administration": D. Crook, "The Later Eyres", Eng. Hist. Rev., xcvii (1982), pp. 247-8.

6 R. B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 280-3; W. M. Ormrod, "Edward III and the Recovery of Royal Authority in England", History, lxxii (1987), pp. 11-13. For the activities of King's Bench in Gloucestershire, see N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), pp . 171 -2.

7 Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", pp. 43-4.


often tried to dominate the processes of royal government not merely by retaining and corrupting those who held office, but by holding office themselves.8 The sheriffdom held in hereditary right, the earldom bringing control over its shlre, and the conces- sion of the totus comitatus (the king's lands and rights within a county) were the objects of magnate ambition. On Henry II's accession, as W. L. Warren has remarked, "it was more than likely that the realm of England would, as Germany did after a civil war, disintegrate into principalities".9 The same danger reappeared as late as the minority of Henry III.10 This is not to deny that features of bastard feudal control can be discerned before 1154. Indeed juries, sheriffs and judges had presumably been corrupted by magnates since Anglo-Saxon times. But the scale on which this took place was transformed by the Angevin legal reforms since they hugely increased the amount of litigation going through the king's courts, in the process multiplying the use of the jury, adding to the workload of the sheriff, and creating a new array of judges and local officials.

* * *

Coss argues that bastard feudalism was a magnate reaction to these developments, and in particular to the relationship which the king was forging with his free subjects, especially the gentry. Here he is both right and wrong. He is right in believing that the Angevin legal reforms (followed by others in the thirteenth century) were potentially damaging to the magnates. He is wrong in suggesting that the employment of gentry as sheriffs, judges and so forth to run the new system of local government falls into the same category. The truth was exactly the opposite. It was precisely this employment which gave magnates the opportunity to pervert the whole system.

The legal procedures introduced by Henry II meant that all

8 Regesta regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. H. W. C. Davis et al., 4 vols. (Oxford, 1913-69), iii, nos. 68, 273-6; W. A. Morris, The Medieval English Sheriff to 1300 (Manchester 1927), pp. 50-2, 76-7; J. H. Round, "The Early Sheriffs of Norfolk", Eng. Hist. Rev., xxxv (1920), pp. 481-96; R. H. C. Davis, King Stephen (London, 1967), pp. 32-3, 129-45; P. Latimer, "Grants of 'Totus CoIIiitatus' in Twelfth- Century England: Their Origins and Meaning", Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, lix (1986), pp. 137-45.

9 W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), p. 362. 10 D. A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), pp. 108-27.

181 BASTARD BEUDALISM REVISED

free men could, in theory, bring swift actions, decided by impar- tial juries and judged by the king's judges, against magnates for njust disseisin and for denial of succession to land. In the next

century, the development of the action of trespass meant that small men could sue magnates for a whole series of minor injuries simply by alleging breach of the king's peace. They could sue them, moreover, thanks to the evolution of procedures by querela

(informal plaint) and bill, without the bother and expense of securing writs.ll In these circumstances the wonder is that magnates accepted the new measures as easily as they did. The reason was that they were able to anaesthetize their effects by inserting bastard feudal fingers into the system, corrupting the juries, retaining the judges and orchestrating the sheriffs who had to assemble the juries and execute the verdicts. This was all the easier because the king was increasingly employing members of the gentry as his local officials: the process Coss takes as signalling potential doom to the magnates was rather the means of their salvation.

Take the office of the sheriff. Here what magnates had to fear was not the local gentleman but the curialis.12 The latter enjoyed both intimacy with the king and abundant financial resources, for he usually retained the revenue that he raised above the county farm. The local gentleman, by contrast, enjoyed neither. He was frequently appointed simply by the exchequer, for he had no personal links with the king, and it was to the exchequer that he paid the surplus above the farm. The king's problem with the curial sheriff was that he was costly to employ and might be hard to control, but he could certainly stand up to the greatest men in his county as Geoffrey de Clinton did to Roger earl of Warwick in the reign of Henry I, and Philip Mark to the earl of Derby and Roger de Montbegon during the minority of Henry III.13 In

11 S. F. C. Milson, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge, 1976); A. Harding, "The Origins of Trespass, Tort and Misdemeanor", in The Roll of the Shropshire Eyre of 1256, ed. A. Harding (Selden Soc., xcvi, London, 1980), pp. xxxii- lviii. For useful general surveys, see A. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973); W. L. Wtarren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England, 1086-1272 (London, 1987).

12 For what follows, see D. A. Carpenter, "The Decline of the Curial Sheriff in England, 1194-1258", Eng. Hist. Rev., xci (1976), pp. 1-32.

13 D. Crouch, "Geoffrey de Clinton and Roger Earl of Warwick", Bull. Inst. Hist. Research, lv (1982), pp. 113-24; J. C. Holt, "Philip Mark and the Shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the Early Thirteenth Century", Trans. Thoroton soc.) lXvi (1952), pp. 8-24, esp. pp. 21-2.

182 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 131

the course of the minority four earls and three other magnates suffered from the shrieval exactions of Falkes de Breaute. How much better was the situation when the king dismissed Falkes as sheriff of Bedfordshire-Buckinghamshire and turned instead to a local gentleman to Walter of Pattishall, a "man and knight" of the baron William de Beauchamp of Bedford. It was not long before Walter proved extremely reluctant to execute royal orders against his master's interests.14

Although kings had frequently employed a mixed bag of men in the sheriffdoms, including magnates, knights and minor professional administrators, for long periods in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries there had always been a spread of curial sheriffs. Thus the years after 1236 when the latter disappeared from the shires marked a decisive change in the pattern of local government. In 1258 the king accepted the demand that the sheriff should be a substantial local knight, and, although the reforms of that year were soon overthrown, local gentlemen were the most typical holders of the office thereafter.15 The con- sequences svere perfectly clear from the start, and indeed were cogently analysed by Henry III in a letter of August 1261 which justified his brief reappointment of curial sheriffs; sheriffs, as he put it, "of greater power than before". The latter, he averred, were more expensive for the king to run, but would be able to provide the men of the counties "with justice and defence against the servitude and oppression which certain magnates place upon you whereas lesser men [that is the knightly sheriffs in office from 1258] were unable to do so . . . because [they] were placed in office by those who did you the foresaid injuries''.16 Here then is the earliest description of the web of bastard feudal control. It is certainly a consequence of the king employing knights in local office, but that employment gave the magnates an opportunity to be seized, not a danger to be mastered.

A development parallel to the gentrification of the shrieval office was the increasing employment of knights as justices of

14 Carpenter, Minority of Henry III, pp. 333-4, 353; Royal and Other Historical Letters Illustrative of the Reign of Henry III, ed. W. W. Shirley, 2 vols. (Rolls ser., London, 1862-8), ii, no. ccvi.

1s For Edward I's use of curial sheriffs early in his reign, and their replacement by local men in 1278, see J. R. Maddicott, "Edward I and the Lessons of Baronial Reform", in P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (eds.), Thirteenth-Century England, i (Wood- bridge, 1986), pp. 19-20, 27.

16 Rymer, Foedera, ed. Caley and Holbrooke, i.1, pp. 408-9.

183 BASTARD FEUDALISM REVISED assize, gaol delivery and oyer and terminer. Here again the magnates were presented with an opportunity rather than a threat. Indeed it was precisely to prevent corruption that the king, in both the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, struggled to main- tain the presence of professional judges on such commissions, not always with success.17

None of this is to claim that there was an identity of interest between magnates and gentry: there was not, as the tensions of the period 1258-9 make plain. The king, however, found such strains extraordinarily difficult to exploit since it was impossible to define exactly where the interests of the two groups diverged: the truth was that the point varied throughout the country depending on the activities of different lords and their affinities. If the king did attempt to divide gentry from magnates, it was not by employing the former to run local government. He knew full well that they could prove fallible agents susceptible to magnate influence. When, in 1220, he agreed that the carucage tax could be collected in each county by two knights elected in the county court, he immediately replaced an expression of thanks with a warning: if the knights failed in their task they would be subjected to a strict inquiry "by trusty men sent from our court". The king was right to be concerned, for the knights proved quite unable to collect the tax from numerous great men.18 The king none the less had good reasons for turning to the gentry to run local government. They were cheap, available and 17 From 1218 to 1241 numerous commissions were issued to four judges to hear individual petty assizes. These four were normally local knights, although they might sometimes include a professional judge with interests in the area. From 1241 to 1273 such commissions were more normally issued to single professional judges who then co-opted local knights as colleagues. In respect of gaol delivery the "four knight" system was in place from the 1220s down to 1292 when accusations of corrupt practice led to its abandonment. In 1330 a statute designed, in R. B. Pugh's words, to "prevent corrupt alliances between justices and local magnates" stipulated that justices of assize and gaol delivery should not be local men: Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, pp. 257, 265, 278-83; C. A. F. Meekings, Calendar of the General and Special Assize and General Gaol Delivery Commissions on the Dorses of the Patent Rolls, Richard II, 1377-99 (Nedeln, 1977), pp. i-iv. For commissions of oyer and terminer, see R. W. Kaeuper, "Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer", Speculum, liv (1979), pp. 752-3, 759. One problem with such commissions was that plaintiffs were able to name their own judges, and this may also have been the case with the commissions of assize and gaol delivery in the thirteenth century, hence the complaint in Documents of the Baronial Movement, ed. Treharne and Sanders, pp. 272-3.

18 Rotoli litterarum clausarum, 2 vols. (Record. Comm., London, 1833-4), i, p. 437; Carpenter, Minority of Henry III, p. 225.

184 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 131 fitted to the circumstances of post-Magna Carta kingship. After 1215 the king had less need for great curial sheriffs to disseise magnates of their land and distrain them to pay their debts since Magna Carta had both made arbitrary disseisin more difficult, and reduced magnate indebtedness to the crown. He had corres- pondingly more need to give way to demands for local men to be sheriffs and judges, for he thereby conciliated the counties and made it easier to obtain taxation from parliament. The local society which made such demands, however, cannot be divorced from lordship. The call for self-government in the shires was one in which both gentry and magnates could join; it was not necessar- ily the cry of autonomous gentry communities. A key feature in the demand, after all, was that officials should be elected in the county courts: in Magna Carta (1215) the four knights who were to sit with the king's judges in each county to hear petty assizes were to be elected in this way; so in 1259 were the four knights in each county from whom the exchequer was to choose the sheriff. But, as Coss himself has acknowledged, the most important suitors to the early thirteenth-century county court were frequently knights who were stewards of great magnates.19 In the Yorkshire county court in 1220 it was the stewards who resisted the king's attempt to levy the carucage in the county, claiming that their lords had not been consulted about it.20 The magnates therefore had little to fear from the king's employment of gentry in local affairs. Having failed to rule the shires through gaining sheriffdoms, earldoms and grants of the totus

comitatus, it gave them the chance to achieve comparable results in a different way. In practice those results, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, never amounted to uniform magnate rule in the shires. Structures of power were kaleidoscopic in their variety. In some areas the gentry were able to create their own order or chaos; in others there were competing magnate factions; in yet others a lord might exercise for a time a more or less stable rule.21 19 p. R. Coss, "Knighthood and the Early Thirteenth-Century County Court", in P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (eds.), Thirteenth-Century England, ii (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 45-7. However, in this article Coss introduces important qualifications to the arguments advanced in R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150-1350 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 56-138. 20 Royal and Other Historical Letters, ed. Shirley, i. no. cxxx. For the demands and grievances of local society in Henry III's reign, see J. R. Maddicott, "Magna Carta and the Local Community", Past and Present, no. 102 (Feb. 1984), pp. 25-65. 21 For discussion as to whether conflict or cohesion was the habitual condition of "bastard feudal" society, see England in the Fifteenth Century, introd. Harriss,


The losers in all this-the oppressed minores, and those van- quished in the factional struggles eventually raised the cry that there was too little royal government, not too much. But the cry was never loud enough to provoke effective royal action. The powerful and successful, gentry and magnate alike, were satisfied with the bastard feudal status quo.

* * *

This Comment has so far discussed the pattern of bastard feudal control which magnates spread in local affairs. But at the centre of the transition from feudalism to bastard feudalism was something narrower, namely the way that lords looked for servants outside the ring of their knightly tenants, and rewarded them not with land, but with money fees and other gifts. It is difficult to accept Coss's implication that this too was just a magnate reaction to the Angevin legal and administrative reforms. True those reforms sapped the authority of the honorial court and under- niined the lord's disciplinary jurisdiction. They also encouraged lords to look beyond their tenants and retain whichever gentry held local office. But longer-term factors were also working to dim the world of the cohesive and exclusive honour. Already in the reign of Henry I the Leges Henrici Primi recognized the difficulties which arose when men were tenants of several lords or held lands remote from the administrative centre of the honour.22 Faced with such problems, moreover, lords were far from devoting all their energies to shoring up the walls of the honour; in an important respect they themselves wished to breach them.23 The reason for this was simple: a lord wanted good service, and was unlikely to find it by relying exclusively on his inherited tenants. The sooner he broke out of the honorial strait-jacket the (n. O cont.)

pp. xv-xxiii; N. Saul, "Conflict and Consensus in English Local Society", in J. Taylor and W. Childs (eds.), Politics and Crisis in Fourteenth-Century England (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 38-58; Carpenter, "Beauchamp Affinity", pp. 530-1. 22 Leges Henrici Primi, ed. L. J. Downer (Oxford, 1972), pp. 172-3. For tenants of the honour of Clare in the twelfth century holding from several lords, see R. Mortimer, "Land and Service: The Tenants of the Honour of Clare", in R. Allen Brown (ed.), Anglo-Norman Studies, viii (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 194-6. 23 This is not to deny that from the point of view of revenue-that derived from wardships and the honorial court the lord had every reason for keeping control of his tenants, and made strenuous efforts to do so in the thirteenth century.


better. Having found new servants and allies, he might reward them with land. Indeed such rewards were the main reason why men came to hold land from several lords. But equally in the late twelfth century, as land became scarcer, hereditary tenure more established (thanks in part to the Angevin legal reforms) and slirect management of estates, in an era of inflation, more profit- able, there were clear disadvantages to enfeoffments which per- manently depleted a lord's patrimony. Thus while the latter certainly continued, lords often preferred to pay money fees and wages, or give land in the form of wardships and marriages.24

The incentive to break out of the honour would have been less compelling had English society existed in a kind of "steady state". In fact, of course, it was highly competitive, and the strongest competitor of all was frequently the king. A key passage for understanding the development of bastard feudalism comes in the Dialogus de Scaccario of 1176: "Scholar: 'I seem to gather from what you have said, that any knight or other sensible man may be appointed by the king as sheriff or bailiff, even though he holds nothing of him immediately'. Master: 'It is the king's prerogative as chief of the executive that any man in the kingdom, if the king need him, may be freely taken and assigned to the king's service, whose man soever he be, and whomsoever he serves in war or in peace'. Scholar: 'I see the poet's words are true: "Have you forgotten that the kings' arms are long?" X.25 The first and greatest bastard feudal lord, then, was the king. He both employed whom he wished in his service and as the chancery rolls for John's reign reveal for the first time in detail rewarded them with fees and wages as well as with land.

The king, moreover, was not the only competitor faced by established lords. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries men climbed into the ranks of the nobility usually through royal service, often piecing together landed estates from a multitude of acquisitions. Such men were largely emancipated from feudal ties and naturally fished for servants in the rapidly expanding pool of fighting knights and professional administrators who were on the

24 For the disadvantages of grants of land, the money fees and other types of reward often employed in their stead in the thirteenth century, and the contracts which laid down the terms, see S. L. Waugh, "Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England", Eng. Hist. Rev., ci (1986), pp. 811-39.

25 Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson (London, 1950), p. 84.


look-out for good lords.26 Take the case of Falkes de Breaute. During the minority of Henry III he recruited a remarkable body of knights and clerks to run his estates, castles and sheriffdoms. Most had already worked either for the king or for other great lords; after Falkes's fall they returned to royal or magnate service.27 Not surprisingly, Falkes's competitors, even when they held great honours, behaved in similar fashion. William Marshal, for example, had acquired the lordships of Leinster, Striguil and Crendon, yet he had no tenurial connection with twelve of the eighteen knights closest to him. The key to his recruitment was the tie of neighbourhood rather than of tenure, many of the knights coming from the area of his family's original estates in Wiltshire, Sussex and the Thames valley. Even lords competing less actively in high politics than Falkes and the Marshal behaved in a comparable way. Thus tenants, although important, made up but a third of both the "inner" and "outer" circles of the Marshal's contemporary, the rather staid Earl David of Hunting- don (1152-1219). Both the Marshal and Earl David, moreover, rarely rewarded their followers with significant grants of land. Indeed there are two examples of Earl David assigning money fiefs to his knights instead.28

The Marshal and Earl David recruited men from outside their honours because they wanted the best possible service: but there were other factors too which weakened the bonds between them and their tenants. The Marshal had acquired his lordships through marriage comparatively late in life; Earl David's family had not enjoyed continuous possession of the honour of Huntingdon. The

26 For the landed estate pieced together by William Brewer, see S. Painter, The Reign of 3tohn (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 73-8. For the professional administrator, see, for example, E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 265-9.

27 Carpenter, Minority of Henry III, p. 117. 28 D. Crouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire,

c. 1147-1219 (London, 1990), pp. 157-68; K. J. Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 164-73. I am grateful to David Crouch for allowing me to see a draft of the section of his book on the Marshal's affinity. In its mixture of tenants and non-tenants and in the importance of neighbourhood connections, the Marshal's affinity is comparable to that built up from the 1240s by Simon de Montfort: see D. A. Carpenter, "Simon de Montfort: The First Leader of a Political Movement in English History", History, lxxvi (1991), pp. 10-13. The affinity of Montfort's contemporary, Roger de Quincy earl of Winchester, who shared the honour of Leicester with Simon, was of a similar type: see G. Simpson, "The Familia of Roger de Quincy, Earl of Winchester and Constable of Scotland", in K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 102-29, esp. pp. 120-1.


traditional bonds of loyalty and service might remain stronger where honours passed in unbroken succession from fathers to sons, or where, as tended to be the case in the north, honours were geographically compact and multiple tenancies were limited. The affinities of some of the great northern barons may well have been more tenurially based than those of the Marshal and Earl David. Certainly in 1215 the Northerners were followed into rebellion by many of their tenants. Yet, even in the north, lords were looking for service outside the circle of their honours.29 Sooner or later, faced by competition from the king and rival magnates, no ambitious lord could afford to be left behind. If tenants could give good service, they might be employed. But few lords could hope to meet all their needs from that source. Even where the tenurial link persisted, it came to provide merely the opening for the relationship, not the bond which sustained it.

It was essential, therefore, for magnates, just as much as the king, to employ whomever they liked in their service. If the king's example was part of the "resurrection of public authority within feudal society and within the feudal state" which Coss, in general terms, sees as provoking bastard feudalism,30 it had certainly begun long before the Angevin legal reforms, as Henry I's promotion of "new men" demonstrates.31

* * *

Coss argues that it was the actions of lords which created bastard feudalism. He warns against the view that, in its origins, "magnates and gentry freely participated for mutual benefit".32 This perspective seems misconceived. Knights as much as lords could gain from the loosening of strict tenurial ties. No ambitious knight wished to be stuck with a lord who was unable to provide him with patronage and advancement. For this reason the honour broke up just as much from below as from above. One can see

29 J. C. Holt, The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King ffohn (Oxford, 1961), pp. 43-5. 30 Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", p. 54. 31 R. W. Southern, "King Henry I", in his Medieval Humanism and Other Studies

(Oxford, 1970), pp. 206-33. Implicit in what I say here is that there was a distinction between the king employing whomever he wanted in a curial capacity, which had serious implications for the magnates, and his merely employing non-curial knights to run local government, which did not.

32 Coss, "Bastard Feudalism Revised", p. 54.


this happening in Oxfordshire in the early thirteenth century, where the county's greatest baron, Henry de Oilly (c.1155-1232) was a mild, pious, incompetent man who could neither protect his men in their quarrels nor provide them with worthwhile rewards. As a result his knights entered the service of the curialis, Thomas Basset of Headington, and another local potentate, Walter de Grey, archbishop of York.33

There was nothing surprising in lordship thus lasting, in McFarlane's words, "only so long as it was found to be good lordship or until it was ousted by better".34 Many knights had long enjoyed a certain independence derived from holding land from more than one lord, as the Leges Henrici Primi recognized. Many were substantial landholders. In the thirteenth century the economic position of the class was arguably sound.35 Fundamen- tally, ambitious and successful magnates and gentry had a mutual interest in developing bastard feudalism; a mutual interest, that is, both in forging a free market in service, and in extending local control of local government.

The development of bastard feudalism, therefore, had no single cause. The competition for good service and good lordship must have worked to break up the honour as a self-sufficient unit almost from its inception. A multiplicity of factors, of which the Angevin legal reforms were one, meant that lords were increasingly reluctant, from the late twelfth century onwards, to reward servants with direct enfeoffments in land. Meanwhile lords rendered the Angevin revolution in government harmless by spinning a bastard feudal web over the system, the increasing employment of gentry in local administration making it all the easier for them to do so. These developments were to the mutual benefit of the strong, both lords and gentlemen. It was the minores who suffered.

King's College London D. A. Carpenter

33 For de Oilly, see D. A. Carpenter, "Sheriffs of Oxfordshire and their Subordin- ates, 1194-1236" (Univ. of Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1974), ch. 2.

34 England in the Fifteenth Century, introd. Harriss, p. xviii. 35 D. A. Carpenter, "Was There a Crisis of the Knightly Class in the Thirteenth

Century? The Oxfordshire Evidence", Eng. Hist. Rev., xcv (1980), pp. 721-52; but see P. R. Coss, "Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly Class in Thirteenth-Century England", Past and Present, no. 68 (Aug. 1975), pp. 3-37.